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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays of Travel, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#30 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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+
+Title: Essays of Travel
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: August, 1996  [EBook #627]
+[This file was first posted on July 3, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, ESSAYS OF TRAVEL ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+ESSAYS OF TRAVEL
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT:  FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
+   THE SECOND CABIN
+   EARLY IMPRESSION
+   STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS
+   STEERAGE TYPES
+   THE SICK MAN
+   THE STOWAWAYS
+   PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
+   NEW YORK
+COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK
+   COCKERMOUTH
+   AN EVANGELIST
+   ANOTHER
+   LAST OF SMETHURST
+AN AUTUMN EFFECT
+A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY
+FOREST NOTES -
+   ON THE PLAINS
+   IN THE SEASON
+   IDLE HOURS
+   A PLEASURE-PARTY
+   THE WOODS IN SPRING
+   MORALITY
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE
+RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM
+THE IDEAL HOUSE
+DAVOS IN WINTER
+HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
+ALPINE DIVERSION
+THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS
+ROADS
+ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
+
+
+
+THE SECOND CABIN
+
+
+I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in
+Glasgow.  Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but
+looking askance on each other as on possible enemies.  A few
+Scandinavians, who had already grown acquainted on the North Sea,
+were friendly and voluble over their long pipes; but among English
+speakers distance and suspicion reigned supreme.  The sun was soon
+overclouded, the wind freshened and grew sharp as we continued to
+descend the widening estuary; and with the falling temperature the
+gloom among the passengers increased.  Two of the women wept.  Any
+one who had come aboard might have supposed we were all absconding
+from the law.  There was scarce a word interchanged, and no common
+sentiment but that of cold united us, until at length, having
+touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and a rush to the starboard now
+announced that our ocean steamer was in sight.  There she lay in
+mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her sea-signal flying:  a wall
+of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses, an aspiring forest of
+spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as populous as many an
+incorporated town in the land to which she was to bear us.
+
+I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger.  Although anxious to see
+the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the
+voyage, and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I
+should have a table at command.  The advice was excellent; but to
+understand the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the
+internal disposition of the ship will first be necessary.  In her
+very nose is Steerage No. 1, down two pair of stairs.  A little
+abaft, another companion, labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives
+admission to three galleries, two running forward towards Steerage
+No. 1, and the third aft towards the engines.  The starboard
+forward gallery is the second cabin.  Away abaft the engines and
+below the officers' cabins, to complete our survey of the vessel,
+there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5.  The
+second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very heart
+of the steerages.  Through the thin partition you can hear the
+steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they
+sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying
+of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean
+flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.
+
+There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this
+strip.  He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but
+finds berths and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished.
+He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say,
+differs not only on different ships, but on the same ship according
+as her head is to the east or west.  In my own experience, the
+principal difference between our table and that of the true
+steerage passenger was the table itself, and the crockery plates
+from which we ate.  But lest I should show myself ungrateful, let
+me recapitulate every advantage.  At breakfast we had a choice
+between tea and coffee for beverage; a choice not easy to make, the
+two were so surprisingly alike.  I found that I could sleep after
+the coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof conclusive
+of some chemical disparity; and even by the palate I could
+distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour of
+boiling and dish-cloths in the second.  As a matter of fact, I have
+seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been
+supplied them.  In the way of eatables at the same meal we were
+gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common
+to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes
+rissoles.  The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk,
+and potatoes, was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and
+the second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes
+were of a superior brand; and twice a week, on pudding-days,
+instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag filled with currants under the
+name of a plum-pudding.  At tea we were served with some broken
+meat from the saloon; sometimes in the comparatively elegant form
+of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general thing mere chicken-
+bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold.  If these were not
+the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely; yet we were
+all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily.
+These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge
+which were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage;
+so that except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I
+might as well have been in the steerage outright.  Had they given
+me porridge again in the evening, I should have been perfectly
+contented with the fare.  As it was, with a few biscuits and some
+whisky and water before turning in, I kept my body going and my
+spirits up to the mark.
+
+The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably
+stands ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of
+sentiment.  In the steerage there are males and females; in the
+second cabin ladies and gentlemen.  For some time after I came
+aboard I thought I was only a male; but in the course of a voyage
+of discovery between decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned
+that I was still a gentleman.  Nobody knew it, of course.  I was
+lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to
+the same quarter of the deck.  Who could tell whether I housed on
+the port or starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3?  And it was
+only there that my superiority became practical; everywhere else I
+was incognito, moving among my inferiors with simplicity, not so
+much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after all, and
+had broken meat to tea.  Still, I was like one with a patent of
+nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits I
+could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.
+
+For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.  Six guineas is
+the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you
+remember that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and
+dishes, and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties
+with him, or privately pays the steward for extra rations, the
+difference in price becomes almost nominal.  Air comparatively fit
+to breathe, food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of
+being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had almost for the
+asking.  Two of my fellow-passengers in the second cabin had
+already made the passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was
+an experiment not to be repeated.  As I go on to tell about my
+steerage friends, the reader will perceive that they were not alone
+in their opinion.  Out of ten with whom I was more or less
+intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they returned, to
+travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind them
+assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence
+until they could afford to bring them by saloon.
+
+Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting
+on board.  Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will
+and character.  Yet it had some elements of curiosity.  There was a
+mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally
+known by the name of 'Johnny,' in spite of his own protests,
+greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak
+English, and became on the strength of that an universal favourite-
+-it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a
+popularity.  There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his
+favourite dish as 'Irish Stew,' three or four nondescript Scots, a
+fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve
+a special word of condemnation.  One of them was Scots; the other
+claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was
+born in England; and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
+nurtured, but ashamed to own his country.  He had a sister on
+board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout the voyage, though
+she was not only sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and
+cared for him in childhood.  In appearance he was like an imbecile
+Henry the Third of France.  The Scotsman, though perhaps as big an
+ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them
+together because they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves
+equally by their conduct at the table.
+
+Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married
+couple, devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they
+had first seen each other years ago at a preparatory school, and
+that very afternoon he had carried her books home for her.  I do
+not know if this story will be plain to southern readers; but to me
+it recalls many a school idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and
+nine confronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for
+to carry home a young lady's books was both a delicate attention
+and a privilege.
+
+Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as
+much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her
+husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself.  We
+had to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely
+contradicted by the testimony of her appearance.  Nature seemed to
+have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her
+hair was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought,
+should be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence.
+She was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty
+tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength
+of her endeavour was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow
+time till she should reach New York.  They had heard reports, her
+husband and she, of some unwarrantable disparity of hours between
+these two cities; and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
+seized on this occasion to put them to the proof.  It was a good
+thing for the old lady; for she passed much leisure time in
+studying the watch.  Once, when prostrated by sickness, she let it
+run down.  It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters of
+adamant that the hands of a watch must never be turned backwards;
+and so it behoved her to lie in wait for the exact moment ere she
+started it again.  When she imagined this was about due, she sought
+out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen, who was embarked on the
+same experiment as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful.
+She was in quest of two o'clock; and when she learned it was
+already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted up her voice and
+cried 'Gravy!'  I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was
+a young child; and I suppose it must have been the same with the
+other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed our fill.
+
+Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones.  It
+would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he
+mine, during the voyage.  Thus at table I carved, while he only
+scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the
+president who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger
+who ran his errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.  I
+knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him.  I thought him by
+his face to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me.  For as
+there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the moles and in the
+feluccas of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent
+among English-speaking men who follow the sea.  They catch a twang
+in a New England Port; from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman
+sometimes learns to drop an h; a word of a dialect is picked up
+from another band in the forecastle; until often the result is
+undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's place of birth.
+So it was with Mr. Jones.  I thought him a Scotsman who had been
+long to sea; and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of his
+life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few years in America and
+half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed to modify his speech
+into the common pattern.  By his own account he was both strong and
+skilful in his trade.  A few years back, he had been married and
+after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was dead and the money
+gone.  But his was the nature that looks forward, and goes on from
+one year to another and through all the extremities of fortune
+undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to
+see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
+things to rights.  He was always hovering round inventions like a
+bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents.  He had with
+him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he
+had bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and
+sold the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
+English apothecary.  It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies
+without exception; and I am bound to say that I partook of it
+myself with good results.  It is a character of the man that he was
+not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden Oil, but wherever
+there was a head aching or a finger cut, there would be Jones with
+his bottle.
+
+If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study
+character.  Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck
+dissecting our neighbours in a spirit that was too purely
+scientific to be called unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait
+slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me
+exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till
+we had exchanged notes and discussed the day's experience.  We were
+then like a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill.  But the fish
+we angled for were of a metaphysical species, and we angled as
+often as not in one another's baskets.  Once, in the midst of a
+serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon himself;
+I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection; but
+Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected
+laughter, and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
+of us indeed.
+
+
+EARLY IMPRESSIONS
+
+
+We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the
+Friday forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough
+Foyle, in Ireland, and said farewell to Europe.  The company was
+now complete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable
+magnetisms, upon the decks.  There were Scots and Irish in plenty,
+a few English, a few Americans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a
+German or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for ten days to
+one small iron country on the deep.
+
+As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers,
+thus curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the
+first time to understand the nature of emigration.  Day by day
+throughout the passage, and thenceforward across all the States,
+and on to the shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear
+and melancholy.  Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
+import, came to sound most dismally in my ear.  There is nothing
+more agreeable to picture and nothing more pathetic to behold.  The
+abstract idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventurous.  A
+young man, you fancy, scorning restraints and helpers, issues forth
+into life, that great battle, to fight for his own hand.  The most
+pleasant stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of
+ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great epic of self-
+help.  The epic is composed of individual heroisms; it stands to
+them as the victorious war which subdued an empire stands to the
+personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and was
+adequately rewarded with a medal.  For in emigration the young men
+enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
+continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
+hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of
+man.
+
+This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist
+mostly of embellishments.  The more I saw of my fellow-passengers,
+the less I was tempted to the lyric note.  Comparatively few of the
+men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with
+families; not a few were already up in years; and this itself was
+out of tune with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should
+certainly be young.  Again, I thought he should offer to the eye
+some bold type of humanity, with bluff or hawk-like features, and
+the stamp of an eager and pushing disposition.  Now those around me
+were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family
+men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place
+themselves in life, and people who had seen better days.  Mildness
+was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.  In a
+word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and conquering sally,
+such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like
+Marmion, 'in the lost battle, borne down by the flying.'
+
+Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great
+Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats.  I
+had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses
+standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed
+for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of
+Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless
+strikes, and starving girls.  But I had never taken them home to me
+or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.
+
+A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French
+retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively
+treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the morning papers.  We
+may struggle as we please, we are not born economists.  The
+individual is more affecting than the mass.  It is by the scenic
+accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the most part
+we grasp the significance of tragedies.  Thus it was only now, when
+I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
+sharp had been the battle.  We were a company of the rejected; the
+drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
+unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now
+fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still
+succeed, all had already failed.  We were a shipful of failures,
+the broken men of England.  Yet it must not be supposed that these
+people exhibited depression.  The scene, on the contrary, was
+cheerful.  Not a tear was shed on board the vessel.  All were full
+of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent
+gaiety.  Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape
+acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.
+
+The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the
+decks scraping acquaintance after their fashion also.  'What do you
+call your mither?' I heard one ask.  'Mawmaw,' was the reply,
+indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social scale.
+When people pass each other on the high seas of life at so early an
+age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like what we
+may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men; it is
+so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its
+communications and so devoid of deeper human qualities.  The
+children, I observed, were all in a band, and as thick as thieves
+at a fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously manoeuvring
+on the outskirts of acquaintance.  The sea, the ship, and the
+seamen were soon as familiar as home to these half-conscious little
+ones.  It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage, employ shore
+words to designate portions of the vessel.  'Go 'way doon to yon
+dyke,' I heard one say, probably meaning the bulwark.  I often had
+my heart in my mouth, watching them climb into the shrouds or on
+the rails, while the ship went swinging through the waves; and I
+admired and envied the courage of their mothers, who sat by in the
+sun and looked on with composure at these perilous feats.  'He'll
+maybe be a sailor,' I heard one remark; 'now's the time to learn.'
+I had been on the point of running forward to interfere, but stood
+back at that, reproved.  Very few in the more delicate classes have
+the nerve to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life
+of poorer folk, where necessity is so much more immediate and
+imperious, braces even a mother to this extreme of endurance.  And
+perhaps, after all, it is better that the lad should break his neck
+than that you should break his spirit.
+
+And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention
+one little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5,
+and who, wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the
+ship.  He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-
+white hair in a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but
+he ran to and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked
+himself up again with such grace and good-humour, that he might
+fairly be called beautiful when he was in motion.  To meet him,
+crowing with laughter and beating an accompaniment to his own mirth
+with a tin spoon upon a tin cup, was to meet a little triumph of
+the human species.  Even when his mother and the rest of his family
+lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright in their midst
+and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness of infancy.
+
+Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few
+advances.  We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we
+exchanged pieces of information, naming our trades, what we hoped
+to find in the new world, or what we were fleeing from in the old;
+and, above all, we condoled together over the food and the vileness
+of the steerage.  One or two had been so near famine that you may
+say they had run into the ship with the devil at their heels; and
+to these all seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers.
+But the majority were hugely contented.  Coming as they did from a
+country in so low a state as Great Britain, many of them from
+Glasgow, which commercially speaking was as good as dead, and many
+having long been out of work, I was surprised to find them so
+dainty in their notions.  I myself lived almost exclusively on
+bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to them,
+and found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient.  But these
+working men were loud in their outcries.  It was not 'food for
+human beings,' it was 'only fit for pigs,' it was 'a disgrace.'
+Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit, others on their
+own private supplies, and some paid extra for better rations from
+the ship.  This marvellously changed my notion of the degree of
+luxury habitual to the artisan.  I was prepared to hear him
+grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's pastime; but I was not
+prepared to find him turn away from a diet which was palatable to
+myself.  Words I should have disregarded, or taken with a liberal
+allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can be no
+question of the sincerity of his disgust.
+
+With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise.  A
+single night of the steerage had filled them with horror.  I had
+myself suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the
+lack of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I
+determined to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of
+their quarters to follow my example.  I dare say a dozen of others
+agreed to do so, and I thought we should have been quite a party.
+Yet, when I brought up my rug about seven bells, there was no one
+to be seen but the watch.  That chimerical terror of good night-
+air, which makes men close their windows, list their doors, and
+seal themselves up with their own poisonous exhalations, had sent
+all these healthy workmen down below.  One would think we had been
+brought up in a fever country; yet in England the most malarious
+districts are in the bedchambers.
+
+I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
+night so quietly to myself.  The wind had hauled a little ahead on
+the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly.  I found a shelter near
+the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.
+
+The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling
+movement.  The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her
+bowels occupied the mind, and prepared it for slumber.  From time
+to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to
+the obscure borders of consciousness; or I heard, as it were
+through a veil, the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the
+beautiful sea-cry, 'All's well!'  I know nothing, whether for
+poetry or music, that can surpass the effect of these two syllables
+in the darkness of a night at sea.
+
+The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
+pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
+nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea
+rose so high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the
+deck.  I have spoken of our concerts.  We were indeed a musical
+ship's company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
+accordion, and the songs of all nations.  Good, bad, or
+indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse,--
+the songs were received with generous applause.  Once or twice, a
+recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish accent,
+varied the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a
+quadrille, eight men of us together, to the music of the violin.
+The performers were all humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut
+capers in private life; but as soon as they were arranged for the
+dance, they conducted themselves like so many mutes at a funeral.
+I have never seen decorum pushed so far; and as this was not
+expected, the quadrille was soon whistled down, and the dancers
+departed under a cloud.  Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen
+from another rank of society, would have dared to make some fun for
+themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when sober,
+takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment.
+A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity.  He dares
+not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
+all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration.  I
+like his society under most circumstances, but let me never again
+join with him in public gambols.
+
+But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and
+even the inclemencies of sea and sky.  On this rough Saturday
+night, we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered
+from the wind and rain.  Some clinging to a ladder which led to the
+hurricane deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made
+a ring to support the women in the violent lurching of the ship;
+and when we were thus disposed, sang to our hearts' content.  Some
+of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the
+reverse.  Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 'Around her
+splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,' sounded bald, bleak, and
+pitifully silly.  'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we
+do,' was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with
+which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.  I observed a
+Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily
+to the general effect.  And perhaps the German mason is but a fair
+example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for
+nearly all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly
+opposed to war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and
+frequently their own taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand
+and Afghanistan.
+
+Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of
+our situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices
+that took up the burden how the sentiment came home to each, 'The
+Anchor's Weighed' was true for us.  We were indeed 'Rocked on the
+bosom of the stormy deep.'  How many of us could say with the
+singer, 'I'm lonely to-night, love, without you,' or, 'Go, some
+one, and tell them from me, to write me a letter from home'!  And
+when was there a more appropriate moment for 'Auld Lang Syne' than
+now, when the land, the friends, and the affections of that mingled
+but beloved time were fading and fleeing behind us in the vessel's
+wake?  It pointed forward to the hour when these labours should be
+overpast, to the return voyage, and to many a meeting in the sanded
+inn, when those who had parted in the spring of youth should again
+drink a cup of kindness in their age.  Had not Burns contemplated
+emigration, I scarce believe he would have found that note.
+
+All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were
+prostrated by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second
+cabin, and two of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an
+end.  The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority of the
+emigrants.  I heard an old woman express her surprise that 'the
+ship didna gae doon,' as she saw some one pass her with a chess-
+board on the holy day.  Some sang Scottish psalms.  Many went to
+service, and in true Scottish fashion came back ill pleased with
+their divine.  'I didna think he was an experienced preacher,' said
+one girl to me.
+
+Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells,
+although the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all
+wrecked and blown away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars
+came out thickly overhead.  I saw Venus burning as steadily and
+sweetly across this hurly-burly of the winds and waters as ever at
+home upon the summer woods.  The engine pounded, the screw tossed
+out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship from end to end;
+the bows battled with loud reports against the billows:  and as I
+stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up to where the funnel leaned
+out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and monstrous top-
+sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed
+as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and that just
+above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.
+
+
+STEERAGE SCENES
+
+
+Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort.  Down
+one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space,
+the centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for
+about twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the
+carpenter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more.  The
+canteen, or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the
+other, a no less attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable
+interpreter.
+
+I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a
+barrel, and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells,
+when the lights were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to
+roost.
+
+It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard,
+who lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday
+forenoon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something
+in Strathspey time.  A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to
+an audience of white-faced women.  It was as much as he could do to
+play, and some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had
+crawled from their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and
+found better than medicine in the music.  Some of the heaviest
+heads began to nod in time, and a degree of animation looked from
+some of the palest eyes.  Humanly speaking, it is a more important
+matter to play the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works
+upon recondite subjects.  What could Mr. Darwin have done for these
+sick women?  But this fellow scraped away; and the world was
+positively a better place for all who heard him.  We have yet to
+understand the economical value of these mere accomplishments.  I
+told the fiddler he was a happy man, carrying happiness about with
+him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.
+
+'It is a privilege,' I said.  He thought a while upon the word,
+turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with
+conviction, 'Yes, a privilege.'
+
+That night I was summoned by 'Merrily danced the Quake's wife' into
+the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5.  This was, properly
+speaking, but a strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern
+which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship.  Through the
+open slide-door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with patches
+of phosphorescent foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and
+the horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind.
+In the centre the companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an
+open pit.  Below, on the first landing, and lighted by another
+lamp, lads and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for
+lack of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes.  Above, on either
+side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide
+and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour.  In
+the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely
+group.  In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was
+convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent,
+imperturbable Scots face.  His brother, a dark man with a vehement,
+interested countenance, who made a god of the fiddler, sat by with
+open mouth, drinking in the general admiration and throwing out
+remarks to kindle it.
+
+'That's a bonny hornpipe now,' he would say, 'it's a great
+favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.'  And
+he expounded the sand dance.  Then suddenly, it would be a long,
+'Hush!' with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating eyes, 'he's
+going to play "Auld Robin Gray" on one string!'  And throughout
+this excruciating movement,--'On one string, that's on one string!'
+he kept crying.  I would have given something myself that it had
+been on none; but the hearers were much awed.  I called for a tune
+or two, and thus introduced myself to the notice of the brother,
+who directed his talk to me for some little while, keeping, I need
+hardly mention, true to his topic, like the seamen to the star.
+'He's grand of it,' he said confidentially.  'His master was a
+music-hall man.'  Indeed the music-hall man had left his mark, for
+our fiddler was ignorant of many of our best old airs; 'Logie o'
+Buchan,' for instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a
+set of quadrilles, and had never heard it called by name.  Perhaps,
+after all, the brother was the more interesting performer of the
+two.  I have spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him
+always the same quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but
+he never showed to such advantage as when he was thus squiring the
+fiddler into public note.  There is nothing more becoming than a
+genuine admiration; and it shares this with love, that it does not
+become contemptible although misplaced.
+
+The dancing was but feebly carried on.  The space was almost
+impracticably small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of
+bashfulness about this innocent display with a surprising impudence
+and roughness of address.  Most often, either the fiddle lifted up
+its voice unheeded, or only a couple of lads would be footing it
+and snapping fingers on the landing.  And such was the eagerness of
+the brother to display all the acquirements of his idol, and such
+the sleepy indifference of the performer, that the tune would as
+often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into a ballad
+before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles.
+
+In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and
+more numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round
+the top of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race
+moved some of the newcomers to close both the doors, so that the
+atmosphere grew insupportable.  It was a good place, as the saying
+is, to leave.
+
+The wind hauled ahead with a head sea.  By ten at night heavy
+sprays were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion
+of Steerage No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication
+through the second cabin thrown open.  Either from the convenience
+of the opportunity, or because we had already a number of
+acquaintances in that part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a
+late visit.  Steerage No. 1 is shaped like an isosceles triangle,
+the sides opposite the equal angles bulging outward with the
+contour of the ship.  It is lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks
+apiece, four bunks below and four above on either side.  At night
+the place is lit with two lanterns, one to each table.  As the
+steamer beat on her way among the rough billows, the light passed
+through violent phases of change, and was thrown to and fro and up
+and down with startling swiftness.  You were tempted to wonder, as
+you looked, how so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such
+solid blackness.  When Jones and I entered we found a little
+company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular
+foremost table.  A more forlorn party, in more dismal
+circumstances, it would be hard to imagine.  The motion here in the
+ship's nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often
+overpoweringly loud.  The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round
+and round and tossed the shadows in masses.  The air was hot, but
+it struck a chill from its foetor.
+
+From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the
+sick joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.  In the midst, these
+five friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in
+company.  Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and
+sensations.  One piped, in feeble tones, 'Oh why left I my hame?'
+which seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances.  Another,
+from the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the
+upper-shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give
+us several verses of the 'Death of Nelson'; and it was odd and
+eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark
+corners, and 'this day has done his dooty' rise and fall and be
+taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of
+plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray-showers
+overhead.
+
+All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had
+interrupted the activity of their minds; and except to sing they
+were tongue-tied.  There was present, however, one tall, powerful
+fellow of doubtful nationality, being neither quite Scotsman nor
+altogether Irish, but of surprising clearness of conviction on the
+highest problems.  He had gone nearly beside himself on the Sunday,
+because of a general backwardness to indorse his definition of mind
+as 'a living, thinking substance which cannot be felt, heard, or
+seen'--nor, I presume, although he failed to mention it, smelt.
+Now he came forward in a pause with another contribution to our
+culture.
+
+'Just by way of change,' said he, 'I'll ask you a Scripture riddle.
+There's profit in them too,' he added ungrammatically.
+
+This was the riddle-
+
+C and P
+Did agree
+To cut down C;
+But C and P
+Could not agree
+Without the leave of G;
+All the people cried to see
+The crueltie
+Of C and P.
+
+Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo!  We were
+a long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily
+wondering how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us
+out of suspense and divulged the fact that C and P stood for
+Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
+
+I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the
+motion and the close air likewise hurried our departure.  We had
+not been gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three
+out of the five fell sick.  We thought it little wonder on the
+whole, for the sea kept contrary all night.  I now made my bed upon
+the second cabin floor, where, although I ran the risk of being
+stepped upon, I had a free current of air, more or less vitiated
+indeed, and running only from steerage to steerage, but at least
+not stagnant; and from this couch, as well as the usual sounds of a
+rough night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching of the sick
+and the sobs of children, I heard a man run wild with terror
+beseeching his friend for encouragement.  'The ship 's going down!'
+he cried with a thrill of agony.  'The ship's going down!' he
+repeated, now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards
+a sob; and his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at
+him--all was in vain, and the old cry came back, 'The ship's going
+down!'  There was something panicky and catching in the emotion of
+his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and hideous
+tragedy was a disaster to an emigrant ship.  If this whole
+parishful of people came no more to land, into how many houses
+would the newspaper carry woe, and what a great part of the web of
+our corporate human life would be rent across for ever!
+
+The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed.
+The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through
+great dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam.  The
+horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun
+shone pleasantly on the long, heaving deck.
+
+We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time.  There was
+a single chess-board and a single pack of cards.  Sometimes as many
+as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love.  Feats of
+dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of
+the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
+were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as
+well as more conspicuously well done than the former.  We had a
+regular daily competition to guess the vessel's progress; and
+twelve o'clock, when the result was published in the wheel-house,
+came to be a moment of considerable interest.  But the interest was
+unmixed.  Not a bet was laid upon our guesses.  From the Clyde to
+Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or taken.  We had,
+besides, romps in plenty.  Puss in the Corner, which we had
+rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own
+favourite game; but there were many who preferred another, the
+humour of which was to box a person's ears until he found out who
+had cuffed him.
+
+This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of
+weather, and in the highest possible spirits.  We got in a cluster
+like bees, sitting between each other's feet under lee of the deck-
+houses.  Stories and laughter went around.  The children climbed
+about the shrouds.  White faces appeared for the first time, and
+began to take on colour from the wind.  I was kept hard at work
+making cigarettes for one amateur after another, and my less than
+moderate skill was heartily admired.  Lastly, down sat the fiddler
+in our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs, and
+ballads, with now and then a voice or two to take up the air and
+throw in the interest of human speech.
+
+Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin
+passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way
+with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful
+air about nothing, which galled me to the quick.  I have little of
+the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea
+that one person was as good as another.  But I began to be troubled
+by this episode.  It was astonishing what insults these people
+managed to convey by their presence.  They seemed to throw their
+clothes in our faces.  Their eyes searched us all over for tatters
+and incongruities.  A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were
+too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing.  Wait a bit, till
+they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they
+would depict the manners of the steerage.  We were in truth very
+innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged, and there was no
+shadow of excuse for the swaying elegant superiority with which
+these damsels passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish glances
+of their squire.  Not a word was said; only when they were gone
+Mackay sullenly damned their impudence under his breath; but we
+were all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break in the
+course of our enjoyment.
+
+
+STEERAGE TYPES
+
+
+We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like
+a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow's-
+feet round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his
+moustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages
+long ago; an alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without
+hyperbole, no buttons to his trousers.  Even in these rags and
+tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence like a piece of
+sham jewellery; and I have heard him offer a situation to one of
+his fellow-passengers with the air of a lord.  Nothing could
+overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success was written on his
+brow.  He was then in his ill days; but I can imagine him in
+Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder.  As we moved in
+the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society.  I do
+not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
+interesting; but there was entertainment in the man's demeanour.
+You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.
+
+Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.
+Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his
+antecedents.  Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
+down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand
+roubles, and whose father had now despatched him to America by way
+of penance.  Either tale might flourish in security; there was no
+contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke not one word of
+English.  I got on with him lumberingly enough in broken German,
+and learned from his own lips that he had been an apothecary.  He
+carried the photograph of his betrothed in a pocket-book, and
+remarked that it did not do her justice.  The cut of his head stood
+out from among the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
+The first natural instinct was to take him for a desperado; but
+although the features, to our Western eyes, had a barbaric and
+unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched.  It was large
+and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance, as if
+it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked on
+them without resolution.
+
+He cried out when I used the word. 'No, no,' he said, 'not
+resolution.'
+
+'The resolution to endure,' I explained.
+
+And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'Ach, ja,' with
+gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite
+pretensions.  Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow;
+and his life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety;
+so the legends of the steerage may have represented at least some
+shadow of the truth.  Once, and once only, he sang a song at our
+concerts; standing forth without embarrassment, his great stature
+somewhat humped, his long arms frequently extended, his Kalmuck
+head thrown backward.  It was a suitable piece of music, as deep as
+a cow's bellow and wild like the White Sea.  He was struck and
+charmed by the freedom and sociality of our manners.  At home, he
+said, no one on a journey would speak to him, but those with whom
+he would not care to speak; thus unconsciously involving himself in
+the condemnation of his countrymen.  But Russia was soon to be
+changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under the sun of
+civilisation; the new ideas, 'wie eine feine Violine,' were audible
+among the big empty drum notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked
+to see a great revival, though with a somewhat indistinct and
+childish hope.
+
+We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades.  It
+was the son who sang the 'Death of Nelson' under such contrarious
+circumstances.  He was by trade a shearer of ship plates; but he
+could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute and
+piccolo in a professional string band.  His repertory of songs was,
+besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best
+to the very worst within his reach.  Nor did he seem to make the
+least distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow
+up 'Tom Bowling' with 'Around her splendid form.'
+
+The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do
+everything connected with tinwork from one end of the process to
+the other, use almost every carpenter's tool, and make picture
+frames to boot.  'I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,' said
+he, 'and pictures on the wall.  I have made enough money to be
+rolling in my carriage.  But, sir,' looking at me unsteadily with
+his bright rheumy eyes, 'I was troubled with a drunken wife.'  He
+took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence.  'It's an old
+saying,' he remarked:  'God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em.'
+
+I think he was justified by his experience.  It was a dreary story.
+He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
+clothes would be in pawn.  Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up
+a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid
+jobs.  'A bad job was as good as a good job for me,' he said; 'it
+all went the same way.'  Once the wife showed signs of amendment;
+she kept steady for weeks on end; it was again worth while to
+labour and to do one's best.  The husband found a good situation
+some distance from home, and, to make a little upon every hand,
+started the wife in a cook-shop; the children were here and there,
+busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the bank, and the
+golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy family.  But
+one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through with his
+work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there
+was his wife to receive him reeling drunk.  He 'took and gave her a
+pair o' black eyes,' for which I pardon him, nailed up the cook-
+shop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself to a life of
+poverty, with the workhouse at the end.  As the children came to
+their full age they fled the house, and established themselves in
+other countries; some did well, some not so well; but the father
+remained at home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted
+pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived.
+
+Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the
+chain, and run from home like a schoolboy?  I could not discover
+which; but here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one
+of the bravest and most youthful men on board.
+
+'Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,' said he;
+'but I can do a turn yet.'
+
+And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to
+support him?
+
+'Oh yes,' he replied.  'But I'm never happy without a job on hand.
+And I'm stout; I can eat a'most anything.  You see no craze about
+me.'
+
+This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
+drunken father.  He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
+but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of
+sherry, and involved his sons along with him in ruin.  Now they
+were on board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.
+
+Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to
+the most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could
+have adduced many instances and arguments from among our ship's
+company.  I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman,
+running to fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste
+for poetry and a genial sense of fun.  I had asked him his hopes in
+emigrating.  They were like those of so many others, vague and
+unfounded; times were bad at home; they were said to have a turn
+for the better in the States; a man could get on anywhere, he
+thought.  That was precisely the weak point of his position; for if
+he could get on in America, why could he not do the same in
+Scotland?  But I never had the courage to use that argument, though
+it was often on the tip of my tongue, and instead I agreed with him
+heartily adding, with reckless originality, 'If the man stuck to
+his work, and kept away from drink.'
+
+'Ah!' said he slowly, 'the drink!  You see, that's just my
+trouble.'
+
+He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the
+same time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-
+ashamed, half-sorry, like a good child who knows he should be
+beaten.  You would have said he recognised a destiny to which he
+was born, and accepted the consequences mildly.  Like the merchant
+Abudah, he was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and
+carrying it along with him, the whole at an expense of six guineas.
+
+As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three
+great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first
+and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to
+me the silliest means of cure.  You cannot run away from a
+weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be
+so, why not now, and where you stand?  Coelum non animam.  Change
+Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.  A
+sea-voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap
+pleasure; emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel; an
+aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to
+be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
+
+Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
+than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul
+tragically ship-wrecked.  In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure
+is resorted to by way of anodyne.  The pleasure-seeker sets forth
+upon life with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly
+good and nobly happy, though at as little pains as possible to
+himself; and it is because all has failed in his celestial
+enterprise that you now behold him rolling in the garbage.  Hence
+the comparative success of the teetotal pledge; because to a man
+who had nothing it sets at least a negative aim in life.  Somewhat
+as prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the reformed
+drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining from intoxicating
+drinks, and may live for that negation.  There is something, at
+least, NOT TO BE DONE each day; and a cold triumph awaits him every
+evening.
+
+We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under
+the name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
+failure in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of
+the intelligence which here surrounded me.  Physically he was a
+small Scotsman, standing a little back as though he were already
+carrying the elements of a corporation, and his looks somewhat
+marred by the smallness of his eyes.  Mentally, he was endowed
+above the average.  There were but few subjects on which he could
+not converse with understanding and a dash of wit; delivering
+himself slowly and with gusto like a man who enjoyed his own
+sententiousness.  He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking
+with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch and
+emphasise an argument.  When he began a discussion, he could not
+bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone,
+without once relinquishing a point.  An engineer by trade, Mackay
+believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
+human machine.  The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound
+of carrion and perverse gases.  He had an appetite for disconnected
+facts which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads.  What
+is called information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not
+only delighted to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.
+
+With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer
+young, on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money,
+and but little hope.  He was almost tedious in the cynical
+disclosures of his despair.  'The ship may go down for me,' he
+would say, 'now or to-morrow.  I have nothing to lose and nothing
+to hope.'  And again:  'I am sick of the whole damned performance.'
+He was, like the kind little man, already quoted, another so-called
+victim of the bottle.  But Mackay was miles from publishing his
+weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt
+masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night
+overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
+not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade.  It was
+a treat to see him manage this:  the various jesters withered under
+his gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely
+force, and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.
+
+In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
+before for all good human purposes but conversation.  His eyes were
+sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism.  He could see nothing
+in the world but money and steam-engines.  He did not know what you
+meant by the word happiness.  He had forgotten the simple emotions
+of childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.
+He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it
+had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to
+liquor, was his god and guide.  One day he took me to task--novel
+cry to me--upon the over-payment of literature.  Literary men, he
+said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made
+threshing-machines and butter-churns, and the man of letters,
+except in the way of a few useful handbooks, made nothing worth the
+while.  He produced a mere fancy article.  Mackay's notion of a
+book was Hoppus's Measurer.  Now in my time I have possessed and
+even studied that work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan
+Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I should choose for my
+companion volume.
+
+I tried to fight the point with Mackay.  I made him own that he had
+taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view,
+insignificant; but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the
+admission.  It was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure
+ready-made and running from the spring, whereas his ploughs and
+butter-churns were but means and mechanisms to give men the
+necessary food and leisure before they start upon the search for
+pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such conclusions.  The thing
+was different, he declared, and nothing was serviceable but what
+had to do with food.  'Eat, eat, eat!' he cried; 'that's the bottom
+and the top.'  By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much
+interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
+unnoticed and had to go without his tea.  He had enough sense and
+humour, indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this
+himself in private; and even to me he referred to it with the
+shadow of a smile.
+
+Mackay was a hot bigot.  He would not hear of religion.  I have
+seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor
+human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he
+had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a
+matter as the riddler's definition of mind.  He snorted aloud with
+zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.  Anything, whatever
+it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued
+passionate production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a
+conspiracy against the people.  Thus, when I put in the plea for
+literature, that it was only in good books, or in the society of
+the good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he declared I
+was in a different world from him.  'Damn my conduct!' said he.  'I
+have given it up for a bad job.  My question is, "Can I drive a
+nail?"' And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
+seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and steam-
+engines.
+
+It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of
+culture; that a narrow and pinching way of life not only
+exaggerates to a man the importance of material conditions, but
+indirectly, by denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps
+his mind ignorant of larger thoughts; and that hence springs this
+overwhelming concern about diet, and hence the bald view of
+existence professed by Mackay.  Had this been an English peasant
+the conclusion would be tenable.  But Mackay had most of the
+elements of a liberal education.  He had skirted metaphysical and
+mathematical studies.  He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew,
+which would be exceptional among bankers.  He had been brought up
+in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with incongruous pride,
+the story of his own brother's deathbed ecstasies.  Yet he had
+somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead thing
+among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference or
+shaping aim.  And further, there seemed a tendency among many of
+his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions.  One
+thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the
+way to be happy.  Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps
+two-thirds of morality.  Can it be that the Puritan school, by
+divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and
+setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human
+activity and interest, leads at last directly to material greed?
+
+Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple
+pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an
+Irishman who based his claim to the widest and most affectionate
+popularity precisely upon these two qualities, that he was natural
+and happy.  He boasted a fresh colour, a tight little figure,
+unquenchable gaiety, and indefatigable goodwill.  His clothes
+puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once a
+private coachman, when they became eloquent and seemed a part of
+his biography.  His face contained the rest, and, I fear, a
+prophecy of the future; the hawk's nose above accorded so ill with
+the pink baby's mouth below.  His spirit and his pride belonged,
+you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness
+expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to
+situation, and at length on board the emigrant ship.  Barney ate,
+so to speak, nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs
+supported him throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might
+often find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery.  His was the
+first voice heard singing among all the passengers; he was the
+first who fell to dancing.  From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there
+was not a piece of fun undertaken but there was Barney in the
+midst.
+
+You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our
+concerts--his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet
+shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement-
+-and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and
+earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each
+song to a conclusion.  He was not only a great favourite among
+ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the saloon, who
+often leaned to hear him over the rails of the hurricane-deck.  He
+was somewhat pleased, but not at all abashed, by this attention;
+and one night, in the midst of his famous performance of 'Billy
+Keogh,' I saw him spin half round in a pirouette and throw an
+audacious wink to an old gentleman above.
+
+This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
+modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.
+
+He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the
+passage did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his
+innocent freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin
+where politeness must be natural to walk without a fall.  He was
+once seriously angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because
+they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious
+Catholic.  He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when,
+late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman
+struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately
+missing from the group.  His taste was for the society of
+gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack
+in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough
+and positive with a girlish shrinking.  Mackay, partly from his
+superior powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible,
+partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the
+Irishman.  I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror
+and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had
+been professing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical
+readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot.  These utterances hurt the
+little coachman's modesty like a bad word.
+
+
+THE SICK MAN
+
+
+One night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and myself were walking arm-
+in-arm and briskly up and down the deck.  Six bells had rung; a
+head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a
+sprinkle of rain, and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now
+divided time with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull,
+thrilling and intense like a mosquito.  Even the watch lay
+somewhere snugly out of sight.
+
+For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the
+scuppers, which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud.  We ran
+to the rails.  An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it
+was impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his
+belly in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread
+toes.  We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently,
+with a strange accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he
+had cramp in the stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen
+the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against fatigue till he
+was overmastered and had fallen where we found him.
+
+Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I hurried off to
+seek the doctor.  We knocked in vain at the doctor's cabin; there
+came no reply; nor could we find any one to guide us.  It was no
+time for delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping up
+a ladder and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed
+him as politely as I could -
+
+'I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp in
+the lee scuppers; and I can't find the doctor.'
+
+He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat
+harshly, 'Well, _I_ can't leave the bridge, my man,' said he.
+
+'No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,' I returned.
+
+'Is it one of the crew?' he asked.
+
+'I believe him to be a fireman,' I replied.
+
+I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist
+information from their freight of human creatures; but certainly,
+whether it was the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
+from something conciliatory in my address, the officer in question
+was immediately relieved and mollified; and speaking in a voice
+much freer from constraint, advised me to find a steward and
+despatch him in quest of the doctor, who would now be in the
+smoking-room over his pipe.
+
+One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour
+down our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room
+of a night.  Let me call him Blackwood.  O'Reilly and I rattled
+down the companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and
+perched across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found
+Blackwood; a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead
+of an eye and a rank twang in his speech.  I forget who was with
+him, but the pair were enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes.
+I dare say he was tired with his day's work, and eminently
+comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I did not stop to
+consider his feelings, but told my story in a breath.
+
+'Steward,' said I, 'there's a man lying bad with cramp, and I can't
+find the doctor.'
+
+He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that
+is the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -
+
+'That's none of my business,' said he.  'I don't care.'
+
+I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat.  The
+thought of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with
+indignation.  I glanced at O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and
+looked like assault and battery, every inch of him.  But we had a
+better card than violence.
+
+'You will have to make it your business,' said I, 'for I am sent to
+you by the officer on the bridge.'
+
+Blackwood was fairly tripped.  He made no answer, but put out his
+pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand
+strolling.  From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me
+in courtesy, as though he had repented his evil speech and were
+anxious to leave a better impression.
+
+When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
+two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering
+suggestions.  One proposed to give the patient water, which was
+promptly negatived.  Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed
+to be let lie; but as it was at least as well to keep him off the
+streaming decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between us.  It was
+only by main force that we did so, and neither an easy nor an
+agreeable duty; for he fought in his paroxysms like a frightened
+child, and moaned miserably when he resigned himself to our
+control.
+
+'O let me lie!' he pleaded.  'I'll no' get better anyway.'  And
+then, with a moan that went to my heart, 'O why did I come upon
+this miserable journey?'
+
+I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before
+in the close, tossing steerage:  'O why left I my hame?'
+
+Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to
+the galley, where we could see a light.  There he found a belated
+cook scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of
+these he sought to borrow.  The scullion was backward.  'Was it one
+of the crew?' he asked.  And when Jones, smitten with my theory,
+had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his
+scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the
+lanterns swinging from his finger.  The light, as it reached the
+spot, showed us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years;
+but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed from us the
+expression and even the design of his face.
+
+So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.
+
+'IT'S ONLY A PASSENGER!' said he; and turning about, made, lantern
+and all, for the galley.
+
+'He's a man anyway,' cried Jones in indignation.
+
+'Nobody said he was a woman,' said a gruff voice, which I
+recognised for that of the bo's'un.
+
+All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and
+now the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the
+hurricane-deck rails, if the doctor were not yet come.  We told him
+not.
+
+'No?' he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw him hurry
+aft in person.
+
+Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately
+enough and examined our patient with the lantern.  He made little
+of the case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him,
+and sent him forward to his bunk.  Two of his neighbours in the
+steerage had now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow
+that such 'a fine cheery body' should be sick; and these, claiming
+a sort of possession, took him entirely under their own care.  The
+drug had probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was
+led along plaintive and patient, but protesting.  His heart
+recoiled at the thought of the steerage.  'O let me lie down upon
+the bieldy side,' he cried; 'O dinna take me down!'  And again:  'O
+why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?'  And yet once
+more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word:
+'I had no CALL to come.'  But there he was; and by the doctor's
+orders and the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared down the
+companion of Steerage No.1 into the den allotted him.
+
+At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood,
+Jones and the bo's'un were now engaged in talk.  This last was a
+gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a
+century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy
+blond eyebrows, and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady
+and hard.  I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered
+also that he had helped us about the lantern; and now seeing him in
+conversation with Jones, and being choked with indignation, I
+proceeded to blow off my steam.
+
+'Well,' said I, 'I make you my compliments upon your steward,' and
+furiously narrated what had happened.
+
+'I've nothing to do with him,' replied the bo's'un.  'They're all
+alike.  They wouldn't mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon
+the top of another.'
+
+This was enough.  A very little humanity went a long way with me
+after the experience of the evening.  A sympathy grew up at once
+between the bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the next
+few days, I learned to appreciate him better.  He was a remarkable
+type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books.  He had
+been at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States
+ship, 'after the Alabama, and praying God we shouldn't find her.'
+He was a high Tory and a high Englishman.  No manufacturer could
+have held opinions more hostile to the working man and his strikes.
+'The workmen,' he said, 'think nothing of their country.  They
+think of nothing but themselves.  They're damned greedy, selfish
+fellows.'  He would not hear of the decadence of England.  'They
+say they send us beef from America,' he argued; 'but who pays for
+it?  All the money in the world's in England.'  The Royal Navy was
+the best of possible services, according to him.  'Anyway the
+officers are gentlemen,' said he; 'and you can't get hazed to death
+by a damned non-commissioned--as you can in the army.'  Among
+nations, England was the first; then came France.  He respected the
+French navy and liked the French people; and if he were forced to
+make a new choice in life, 'by God, he would try Frenchmen!'  For
+all his looks and rough, cold manners, I observed that children
+were never frightened by him; they divined him at once to be a
+friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and clothes, it
+was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling over his
+boyish monkey trick.
+
+In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man.  I was afraid
+I should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the
+lantern; and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots,
+English, or Irish.  He had certainly employed north-country words
+and elisions; but the accent and the pronunciation seemed
+unfamiliar and incongruous in my ear.
+
+To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an
+adventure that required some nerve.  The stench was atrocious; each
+respiration tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese;
+and the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by so many
+people worming themselves into their clothes in twilight of the
+bunks.  You may guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for
+myself also, when I heard that the sick man was better and had gone
+on deck.
+
+The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
+pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and
+intermittent; and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just
+beginning to wash down the decks.  But for a sick man this was
+heaven compared to the steerage.  I found him standing on the hot-
+water pipe, just forward of the saloon deck house.  He was smaller
+than I had fancied, and plain-looking; but his face was
+distinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid grey from a
+distance, but, when looked into, full of changing colours and
+grains of gold.  His manners were mild and uncompromisingly plain;
+and I soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk.  His
+accent and language had been formed in the most natural way, since
+he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the
+banks of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.  A fisherman in the
+season, he had fished the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby.
+When the season was over, and the great boats, which required extra
+hands, were once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked
+as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves
+unloading vessels.  In this comparatively humble way of life he had
+gathered a competence, and could speak of his comfortable house,
+his hayfield, and his garden.  On this ship, where so many
+accomplished artisans were fleeing from starvation, he was present
+on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in New York.
+
+Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the
+steerage and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a
+ham and tea and a spice loaf.  But he laughed to scorn such
+counsels.  'I'm not afraid,' he had told his adviser; 'I'll get on
+for ten days.  I've not been a fisherman for nothing.'  For it is
+no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps
+waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for miles
+on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with
+only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or a
+harbour impossible to enter with the wind that blows.  The life of
+a North Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work
+and insufficient fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak
+fisher port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been unlucky
+and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop
+will give him credit for a loaf of bread.  Yet the steerage of the
+emigrant ship had been too vile for the endurance of a man thus
+rudely trained.  He had scarce eaten since he came on board, until
+the day before, when his appetite was tempted by some excellent
+pea-soup.  We were all much of the same mind on board, and
+beginning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not wisely but too
+well; only with him the excess had been punished, perhaps because
+he was weakened by former abstinence, and his first meal had
+resulted in a cramp.  He had determined to live henceforth on
+biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return to England,
+to make the passage by saloon.  The second cabin, after due
+inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage.
+
+He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill.  'Ye see, I had no
+call to be here,' said he; 'and I thought it was by with me last
+night.  I've a good house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I
+had no real call to leave them.'  Speaking of the attentions he had
+received from his shipmates generally, 'they were all so kind,' he
+said, 'that there's none to mention.'  And except in so far as I
+might share in this, he troubled me with no reference to my
+services.
+
+But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of
+this day-labourer, paying a two months' pleasure visit to the
+States, and preparing to return in the saloon, and the new
+testimony rendered by his story, not so much to the horrors of the
+steerage as to the habitual comfort of the working classes.  One
+foggy, frosty December evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill,
+near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging homeward from the
+fields.  Our roads lay together, and it was natural that we should
+fall into talk.  He was covered with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant
+creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance
+of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I
+confess I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred
+pounds in the bank.  But this man had travelled over most of the
+world, and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American
+railroad, with two dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at
+night; whereas my fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and
+had made all that he possessed in that same accursed, down-falling
+England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and
+carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.
+
+Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and
+hard times.  Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
+in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and
+held strong opinions on the subject.  He spoke sharply of the
+masters, and, when I led him on, of the men also.  The masters had
+been selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-
+headed.  He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had
+been present, and the somewhat long discourse which he had there
+pronounced, calling into question the wisdom and even the good
+faith of the Union delegates; and although he had escaped himself
+through flush times and starvation times with a handsomely provided
+purse, he had so little faith in either man or master, and so
+profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs,
+that he could think of no hope for our country outside of a sudden
+and complete political subversion.  Down must go Lords and Church
+and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change hands
+from worse to better, or England stood condemned.  Such principles,
+he said, were growing 'like a seed.'
+
+From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually
+ominous and grave.  I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my
+workmen fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and
+fell discredited from the lips of unsuccessful men.  This man was
+calm; he had attained prosperity and ease; he disapproved the
+policy which had been pursued by labour in the past; and yet this
+was his panacea,--to rend the old country from end to end, and from
+top to bottom, and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with the
+hand of violence.
+
+
+THE STOWAWAYS
+
+
+On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our
+companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure.  He wore
+tweed clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain
+smoking-cap.  His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly
+enough designed; but though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly
+degeneration had already overtaken his features.  The fine nose had
+grown fleshy towards the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat.
+His hands were strong and elegant; his experience of life evidently
+varied; his speech full of pith and verve; his manners forward, but
+perfectly presentable.  The lad who helped in the second cabin told
+me, in answer to a question, that he did not know who he was, but
+thought, 'by his way of speaking, and because he was so polite,
+that he was some one from the saloon.'
+
+I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his
+air and bearing.  He might have been, I thought, the son of some
+good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from
+home.  But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk!  I
+wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories.  They were so
+swingingly set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated
+here and there by such luminous bits of acting, that they could
+only lose in any reproduction.  There were tales of the P. and O.
+Company, where he had been an officer; of the East Indies, where in
+former years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engineers, where
+he had served for a period; and of a dozen other sides of life,
+each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait.  He had the
+talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen.  The
+best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society;
+there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know
+Russian and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a
+frank, headlong power of style, and a broad, human choice of
+subject, that would have turned any circle in the world into a
+circle of hearers.  He was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, and
+cheerful; and the things and the people of which he spoke became
+readily and clearly present to the minds of those who heard him.
+This, with a certain added colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade,
+must have been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the ears of
+duchesses and hostlers.
+
+Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
+in his narration.  The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
+he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the
+sergeants; but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in
+particular, one among ten thousand.  It sounded so far exactly like
+an episode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had
+imagined.  But then there came incidents more doubtful, which
+showed an almost impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly
+impudent disregard for truth.  And then there was the tale of his
+departure.  He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine
+day, with a companion, slipped up to London for a spree.  I have a
+suspicion that spree was meant to be a long one; but God disposes
+all things; and one morning, near Westminster Bridge, whom should
+he come across but the very sergeant who had recruited him at
+first!  What followed?  He himself indicated cavalierly that he had
+then resigned.  Let us put it so.  But these resignations are
+sometimes very trying.
+
+At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself
+away from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he
+was.  'That?' said Mackay.  'Why, that's one of the stowaways.'
+
+'No man,' said the same authority, 'who has had anything to do with
+the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.'  I give the
+statement as Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted to
+believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add that the
+man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it may even
+pass for a fair representation of the facts.  We gentlemen of
+England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient
+ideas on the subject.  All the world over, people are stowing away
+in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea,
+appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck.  The career of
+these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous.  They may be
+poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of
+concealment; or when found they may be clapped at once and
+ignominiously into irons, thus to be carried to their promised
+land, the port of destination, and alas! brought back in the same
+way to that from which they started, and there delivered over to
+the magistrates and the seclusion of a county jail.  Since I
+crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was found in a dying
+state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and departed for a
+farther country than America.
+
+When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray
+for:  that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his
+forgiveness.  After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels
+himself as secure as if he had paid for his passage.  It is not
+altogether a bad thing for the company, who get more or less
+efficient hands for nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
+every now and again find themselves better paid than by a whole
+family of cabin passengers.  Not long ago, for instance, a packet
+was saved from nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a
+stowaway engineer.  As was no more than just, a handsome
+subscription rewarded him for his success:  but even without such
+exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and America,
+the stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure.
+Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the
+Circassia; and before two days after their arrival each of the four
+had found a comfortable berth.  This was the most hopeful tale of
+emigration that I heard from first to last; and as you see, the
+luck was for stowaways.
+
+My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next
+morning, as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to
+find the ex-Royal Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint
+of a deck house.  There was another fellow at work beside him, a
+lad not more than twenty, in the most miraculous tatters, his
+handsome face sown with grains of beauty and lighted up by
+expressive eyes.  Four stowaways had been found aboard our ship
+before she left the Clyde, but these two had alone escaped the
+ignominy of being put ashore.  Alick, my acquaintance of last
+night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer; the
+other was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast.
+Two people more unlike by training, character, and habits it would
+be hard to imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.
+
+Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many
+opportunities in life.  I have heard him end a story with these
+words:  'That was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.'
+Situation after situation failed him; then followed the depression
+of trade, and for months he had hung round with other idlers,
+playing marbles all day in the West Park, and going home at night
+to tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job.  I believe
+this kind of existence was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he
+might have long continued to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but
+he had a comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive.  This
+fellow was continually threatening to slip his cable for the
+States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow was left widowed of her
+Brown.  Some months afterwards, Alick met another old chum in
+Sauchiehall Street.
+
+'By the bye, Alick,' said he, 'I met a gentleman in New York who
+was asking for you.'
+
+'Who was that?' asked Alick.
+
+'The new second engineer on board the So-and-so,' was the reply.
+
+'Well, and who is he?'
+
+'Brown, to be sure.'
+
+For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the
+Circassia.  If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought
+it was high time to follow Brown's example.  He spent his last day,
+as he put it, 'reviewing the yeomanry,' and the next morning says
+he to his landlady, 'Mrs. X., I'll not take porridge to-day,
+please; I'll take some eggs.'
+
+'Why, have you found a job?' she asked, delighted.
+
+'Well, yes,' returned the perfidious Alick; 'I think I'll start to-
+day.'
+
+And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America.  I am
+afraid that landlady has seen the last of him.
+
+It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a
+vessel's departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No.
+1, flat in a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage
+from the Broomielaw to Greenock.  That night, the ship's yeoman
+pulled him out by the heels and had him before the mate.  Two other
+stowaways had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time
+darkness had fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary,
+and the last steamer had left them till the morning.
+
+'Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,' said the mate,
+'and see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow.'
+
+In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's rest, and
+breakfast; and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was
+over and the game up for good with that ship, when one of the
+sailors grumbled out an oath at him, with a 'What are you doing
+there?' and 'Do you call that hiding, anyway?'  There was need of
+no more; Alick was in another bunk before the day was older.
+Shortly before the passengers arrived, the ship was cursorily
+inspected.  He heard the round come down the companion and look
+into one pen after another, until they came within two of the one
+in which he lay concealed.  Into these last two they did not enter,
+but merely glanced from without; and Alick had no doubt that he was
+personally favoured in this escape.  It was the character of the
+man to attribute nothing to luck and but little to kindness;
+whatever happened to him he had earned in his own right amply;
+favours came to him from his singular attraction and adroitness,
+and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open.  Half an
+hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to fill
+with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick's troubles was
+at an end.  He was soon making himself popular, smoking other
+people's tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock
+delicacies, and when night came he retired to his bunk beside the
+others with composure.
+
+Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and
+only the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick
+appeared on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate.  As a matter
+of fact, he was known to several on board, and even intimate with
+one of the engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such
+occasions for the authorities to avow their information.  Every one
+professed surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led
+prison before the captain.
+
+'What have you got to say for yourself?' inquired the captain.
+
+'Not much,' said Alick; 'but when a man has been a long time out of
+a job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.'
+
+'Are you willing to work?'
+
+Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
+
+'And what can you do?' asked the captain.
+
+He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.
+
+'I think you will be better at engineering?' suggested the officer,
+with a shrewd look.
+
+'No, sir,' says Alick simply.--'There's few can beat me at a lie,'
+was his engaging commentary to me as he recounted the affair.
+
+'Have you been to sea?' again asked the captain.
+
+'I've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,' replied
+the unabashed Alick.
+
+'Well, we must try and find some work for you,' concluded the
+officer.
+
+And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily
+scraping paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet.  'You
+leave me alone,' was his deduction.  'When I get talking to a man,
+I can get round him.'
+
+The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian--it was
+noticeable that neither of them told his name--had both been
+brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way.  His father, a
+confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother.  His
+sisters had taken, I think, to dressmaking.  He himself had
+returned from sea about a year ago and gone to live with his
+brother, who kept the 'George Hotel'--'it was not quite a real
+hotel,' added the candid fellow--'and had a hired man to mind the
+horses.'  At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went
+on his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began
+to find himself one too many at the 'George Hotel.'  'I don't think
+brothers care much for you,' he said, as a general reflection upon
+life.  Hurt at this change, nearly penniless, and too proud to ask
+for more, he set off on foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth,
+living on the journey as he could.  He would have enlisted, but he
+was too small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought
+himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading dandy.
+Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy sprung a leak and went
+down; and though the crew were picked up and brought ashore by
+fishermen, they found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon
+their back.  His next engagement was scarcely better starred; for
+the ship proved so leaky, and frightened them all so heartily
+during a short passage through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew
+deserted and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.
+
+Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian.  He could find no
+berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a
+steamer.  She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday:  the Devonian
+had a bellyful that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to
+provide against the future, and set off along the quays to seek
+employment.  But he was now not only penniless, his clothes had
+begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have the look of a street
+Arab; and captains will have nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in
+that trade, as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man.
+You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but if you have a hole
+in your trousers, it is like a millstone round your neck.  The
+Devonian lost heart at so many refusals.  He had not the impudence
+to beg; although, as he said, 'when I had money of my own, I always
+gave it.'  It was only on Saturday morning, after three whole days
+of starvation, that he asked a scone from a milkwoman, who added of
+her own accord a glass of milk.  He had now made up his mind to
+stow away, not from any desire to see America, but merely to obtain
+the comfort of a place in the forecastle and a supply of familiar
+sea-fare.  He lived by begging, always from milkwomen, and always
+scones and milk, and was not once refused.  It was vile wet
+weather, and he could never have been dry.  By night he walked the
+streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green, and heard, in the
+intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of the spot clear
+up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the merits of the
+clergy.  He had not much instruction; he could 'read bills on the
+street,' but was 'main bad at writing'; yet these theologians seem
+to have impressed him with a genuine sense of amusement.  Why he
+did not go to the Sailors' House I know not; I presume there is in
+Glasgow one of these institutions, which are by far the happiest
+and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must stand
+to my author, as they say in old books, and relate the story as I
+heard it.  In the meantime, he had tried four times to stow away in
+different vessels, and four times had been discovered and handed
+back to starvation.  The fifth time was lucky; and you may judge if
+he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work, and with
+duff twice a week.  He was, said Alick, 'a devil for the duff.'  Or
+if devil was not the word, it was one if anything stronger.
+
+The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable.  The
+Devonian was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the
+first, pulled his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found
+work for himself when there was none to show him.  Alick, on the
+other hand, was not only a skulker in the brain, but took a
+humorous and fine gentlemanly view of the transaction.  He would
+speak to me by the hour in ostentatious idleness; and only if the
+bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly for just the necessary
+time till they were out of sight. 'I'm not breaking my heart with
+it,' he remarked.
+
+Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
+watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
+'Hullo,' said he,  'here's some real work coming--I'm off,' and he
+was gone that moment.  Again, calculating the six guinea passage-
+money, and the probable duration of the passage, he remarked
+pleasantly that he was getting six shillings a day for this job,
+'and it's pretty dear to the company at that.'  'They are making
+nothing by me,' was another of his observations; 'they're making
+something by that fellow.'  And he pointed to the Devonian, who was
+just then busy to the eyes.
+
+The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned
+to despise him.  His natural talents were of no use either to
+himself or others; for his character had degenerated like his face,
+and become pulpy and pretentious.  Even his power of persuasion,
+which was certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being
+lost or neutralised by over-confidence.  He lied in an aggressive,
+brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain
+of his own cleverness that he could not refrain from boasting, ten
+minutes after, of the very trick by which he had deceived you.
+'Why, now I have more money than when I came on board,' he said one
+night, exhibiting a sixpence, 'and yet I stood myself a bottle of
+beer before I went to bed yesterday.  And as for tobacco, I have
+fifteen sticks of it.'  That was fairly successful indeed; yet a
+man of his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might,
+who knows? have got the length of half a crown.  A man who prides
+himself upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of
+silence, above all as to his own misdeeds.  It is only in the farce
+and for dramatic purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar
+talents to the world at large.
+
+Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick;
+for at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense
+of humour that moved you to forgive him.  It was more than half a
+jest that he conducted his existence.  'Oh, man,' he said to me
+once with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, 'I
+would give up anything for a lark.'
+
+It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the
+best, or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature.
+'Mind you,' he said suddenly, changing his tone, 'mind you that's a
+good boy.  He wouldn't tell you a lie.  A lot of them think he is a
+scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn't; he's as good as
+gold.'  To hear him, you become aware that Alick himself had a
+taste for virtue.  He thought his own idleness and the other's
+industry equally becoming.  He was no more anxious to insure his
+own reputation as a liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his
+companion; and he seemed unaware of what was incongruous in his
+attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.
+
+It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the
+Devonian, for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder.
+Busy as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching
+officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might
+slip off and smoke a pipe in safety.  'Tom,' he once said to him,
+for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, 'if you don't
+like going to the galley, I'll go for you.  You ain't used to this
+kind of thing, you ain't.  But I'm a sailor; and I can understand
+the feelings of any fellow, I can.'  Again, he was hard up, and
+casting about for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in
+this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him
+the half of one of his fifteen sticks.  I think, for my part, he
+might have increased the offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of
+them, and not lived to regret his liberality.  But the Devonian
+refused.  'No,' he said, 'you're a stowaway like me; I won't take
+it from you, I'll take it from some one who's not down on his
+luck.'
+
+It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the
+influence of sex.  If a woman passed near where he was working, his
+eyes lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to
+other thoughts.  It was natural that he should exercise a
+fascination proportionally strong upon women.  He begged, you will
+remember, from women only, and was never refused.  Without wishing
+to explain away the charity of those who helped him, I cannot but
+fancy he may have owed a little to his handsome face, and to that
+quick, responsive nature, formed for love, which speaks eloquently
+through all disguises, and can stamp an impression in ten minutes'
+talk or an exchange of glances.  He was the more dangerous in that
+he was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of himself, and
+with a soft and pleading eye.  Ragged as he was, and many a
+scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably furnished, even on
+board he was not without some curious admirers.
+
+There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome,
+strapping Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick
+had dubbed Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness that
+defies analysis.  One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the
+upper stoke-hole, which stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy
+came past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.
+
+'Poor fellow,' she said, stopping, 'you haven't a vest.'
+
+'No,' he said; 'I wish I 'ad.'
+
+Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his
+embarrassment, for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he
+pulled out his pipe and began to fill it with tobacco.
+
+'Do you want a match?' she asked.  And before he had time to reply,
+she ran off and presently returned with more than one.
+
+That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is
+concerned, of what I will make bold to call this love-affair.
+There are many relations which go on to marriage and last during a
+lifetime, in which less human feeling is engaged than in this scene
+of five minutes at the stoke-hole.
+
+Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but
+in a larger sense of the word I have yet more to add.  Jones had
+discovered and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable
+among her fellows for a pleasing and interesting air.  She was
+poorly clad, to the verge, if not over the line, of
+disrespectability, with a ragged old jacket and a bit of a sealskin
+cap no bigger than your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression,
+and her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a true womanly
+nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion.  She had a look, too,
+of refinement, like one who might have been a better lady than
+most, had she been allowed the opportunity.  When alone she seemed
+preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was usually
+by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of
+speech and gesture--not from caution, but poverty of disposition; a
+man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and
+tended and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of
+Gaul.  It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this
+delicate, sad woman caring for him.  He seemed, from first to last,
+insensible of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed
+unconscious of his insensibility.  The Irish husband, who sang his
+wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her Orson, were the
+two bits of human nature that most appealed to me throughout the
+voyage.
+
+On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and
+soon a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her
+bit of sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed
+fingers.  She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she
+was on board with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom
+she travelled was the father of a family, who had left wife and
+children to be hers.  The ship's officers discouraged the story,
+which may therefore have been a story and no more; but it was
+believed in the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter many
+curious eyes from that day forth.
+
+
+PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW
+
+
+Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean
+combined both.  'Out of my country and myself I go,' sings the old
+poet:  and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude
+and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and
+consideration.  Part of the interest and a great deal of the
+amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel situation in the
+world.
+
+I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute
+success and verisimilitude.  I was taken for a steerage passenger;
+no one seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing
+but the brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been
+a gentleman.  In a former book, describing a former journey, I
+expressed some wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken
+for a pedlar, and explained the accident by the difference of
+language and manners between England and France.  I must now take a
+humbler view; for here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat
+roughly clad to be sure, but with every advantage of speech and
+manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed for nearly anything
+you please except an educated gentleman.  The sailors called me
+'mate,' the officers addressed me as 'my man,' my comrades accepted
+me without hesitation for a person of their own character and
+experience, but with some curious information.  One, a mason
+himself, believed I was a mason; several, and among these at least
+one of the seaman, judged me to be a petty officer in the American
+navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at
+last I had not the heart to deny it.  From all these guesses I drew
+one conclusion, which told against the insight of my companions.
+They might be close observers in their own way, and read the
+manners in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend
+their observation to the hands.
+
+To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch.
+It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter,
+there was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I
+sometimes courted it in silence.  All these, my inferiors and
+equals, took me, like the transformed monarch in the story, for a
+mere common, human man.  They gave me a hard, dead look, with the
+flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.
+
+With the women this surprised me less, as I had already
+experimented on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of
+London simply attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.  The result was
+curious.  I then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive
+process, how much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all
+male creatures of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each
+one who went by me caused me a certain shock of surprise and a
+sense of something wanting.  In my normal circumstances, it
+appeared every young lady must have paid me some tribute of a
+glance; and though I had often not detected it when it was given, I
+was well aware of its absence when it was withheld.  My height
+seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she passed
+me like a dog.  This is one of my grounds for supposing that what
+are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable
+impression in what are called the lower; and I wish some one would
+continue my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of
+toilette a man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.
+
+Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for,
+even with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the
+ladies for precisely the average man of the steerage.  It was one
+afternoon that I saw this demonstrated.  A very plainly dressed
+woman was taken ill on deck.  I think I had the luck to be present
+at every sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this
+occasion found myself in the place of importance, supporting the
+sufferer.  There was not only a large crowd immediately around us,
+but a considerable knot of saloon passengers leaning over our heads
+from the hurricane-deck.  One of these, an elderly managing woman,
+hailed me with counsels.  Of course I had to reply; and as the talk
+went on, I began to discover that the whole group took me for the
+husband.  I looked upon my new wife, poor creature, with mingled
+feelings; and I must own she had not even the appearance of the
+poorest class of city servant-maids, but looked more like a country
+wench who should have been employed at a roadside inn.  Now was the
+time for me to go and study the brass plate.
+
+To such of the officers as knew about me--the doctor, the purser,
+and the stewards--I appeared in the light of a broad joke.  The
+fact that I spent the better part of my day in writing had gone
+abroad over the ship and tickled them all prodigiously.  Whenever
+they met me they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity
+and breadth of humorous intention.  Their manner was well
+calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes.  You may be
+sincerely amused by the amateur literary efforts of a gentleman,
+but you scarce publish the feeling to his face. 'Well!' they would
+say:  'still writing?'  And the smile would widen into a laugh.
+The purser came one day into the cabin, and, touched to the heart
+by my misguided industry, offered me some other kind of writing,
+'for which,' he added pointedly, 'you will be paid.'  This was
+nothing else than to copy out the list of passengers.
+
+Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my
+choice of roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor.
+I was openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a
+considerable knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last
+dispositions for the night.  This was embarrassing, but I learned
+to support the trial with equanimity.
+
+Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly
+and naturally upon my spirits.  I accepted the consequences with
+readiness, and found them far from difficult to bear.  The steerage
+conquered me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place,
+not only in manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers
+and cabin passengers who looked down upon me, and day by day
+greedier for small delicacies.  Such was the result, as I fancy, of
+a diet of bread and butter, soup and porridge.  We think we have no
+sweet tooth as long as we are full to the brim of molasses; but a
+man must have sojourned in the workhouse before he boasts himself
+indifferent to dainties.  Every evening, for instance, I was more
+and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare at tea.  If it was
+delicate my heart was much lightened; if it was but broken fish I
+was proportionally downcast.  The offer of a little jelly from a
+fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused a marked
+elevation in my spirits.  And I would have gone to the ship's end
+and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.
+
+In other ways I was content with my position.  It seemed no
+disgrace to be confounded with my company; for I may as well
+declare at once I found their manners as gentle and becoming as
+those of any other class.  I do not mean that my friends could have
+sat down without embarrassment and laughable disaster at the table
+of a duke.  That does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
+difference of usage.  Thus I flatter myself that I conducted myself
+well among my fellow-passengers; yet my most ambitious hope is not
+to have avoided faults, but to have committed as few as possible.
+I know too well that my tact is not the same as their tact, and
+that my habit of a different society constituted, not only no
+qualification, but a positive disability to move easily and
+becomingly in this.  When Jones complimented me--because I 'managed
+to behave very pleasantly' to my fellow-passengers, was how he put
+it--I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
+to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency in English.  I
+dare say this praise was given me immediately on the back of some
+unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review my conduct as a
+whole.  We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman among lords; we
+should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen.  I
+have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I
+know, but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two
+was the better gentleman.  Some of our finest behaviour, though it
+looks well enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the
+gallery.  We boast too often manners that are parochial rather than
+universal; that, like a country wine, will not bear transportation
+for a hundred miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen.  To be a
+gentleman is to be one all the world over, and in every relation
+and grade of society.  It is a high calling, to which a man must
+first be born, and then devote himself for life.  And, unhappily,
+the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have a kind of
+currency, and meet with a certain external acceptation throughout
+all the others, and this tends to keep us well satisfied with
+slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique.
+But manners, like art, should be human and central.
+
+Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a
+relation of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen.  They were
+not rough, nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly,
+differed kindly; were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid.  The
+type of manners was plain, and even heavy; there was little to
+please the eye, but nothing to shock; and I thought gentleness lay
+more nearly at the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate and
+delicate societies.  I say delicate, where I cannot say refined; a
+thing may be fine, like ironwork, without being delicate, like
+lace.  There was here less delicacy; the skin supported more
+callously the natural surface of events, the mind received more
+bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I do not think that
+there was less effective refinement, less consideration for others,
+less polite suppression of self.  I speak of the best among my
+fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon,
+there is a mixture.  Those, then, with whom I found myself in
+sympathy, and of whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater
+measure of truth, were not only as good in their manners, but
+endowed with very much the same natural capacities, and about as
+wise in deduction, as the bankers and barristers of what is called
+society.  One and all were too much interested in disconnected
+facts, and loved information for its own sake with too rash a
+devotion; but people in all classes display the same appetite as
+they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous gossip of the
+newspaper.  Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make out, is often
+rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture.  I have myself
+palmed off yesterday's issue on a friend, and seen him re-peruse it
+for a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed and
+solemn.  Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they may
+be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing or
+careful thinkers.  Culture is not measured by the greatness of the
+field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with
+which we can perceive relations in that field, whether great or
+small.  Workmen, certainly those who were on board with me, I found
+wanting in this quality or habit of the mind.  They did not
+perceive relations, but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought
+the problem settled.  Thus the cause of everything in England was
+the form of government, and the cure for all evils was, by
+consequence, a revolution.  It is surprising how many of them said
+this, and that none should have had a definite thought in his head
+as he said it.  Some hated the Church because they disagreed with
+it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all
+hated the masters, possibly with reason.  But these failings were
+not at the root of the matter; the true reasoning of their souls
+ran thus--I have not got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a
+revolution I should get on.  How?  They had no idea.  Why?
+Because--because--well, look at America!
+
+To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you
+come to that.  At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one
+question in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes,
+and that is the question of money; and but one political remedy,
+that the people should grow wiser and better.  My workmen fellow-
+passengers were as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of
+these points as any member of Parliament; but they had some
+glimmerings of the first.  They would not hear of improvement on
+their part, but wished the world made over again in a crack, so
+that they might remain improvident and idle and debauched, and yet
+enjoy the comfort and respect that should accompany the opposite
+virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far as I could see,
+that many of them were now on their way to America.  But on the
+point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics, so far
+as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual
+income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a
+revolution, they did not know how, and which they were now about to
+settle for themselves, once more they knew not how, by crossing the
+Atlantic in a steamship of considerable tonnage.
+
+And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income
+question is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided,
+if there be no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change.  It is
+not by a man's purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor.
+Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let
+them go where they will, and wreck all the governments under
+heaven, they will be poor until they die.
+
+Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his
+surprising idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the
+failing.  It has to me been always something of a relief to find
+the poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with work.  I can
+in consequence enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better
+grace.  The other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
+frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from
+his childhood up.  He excused himself for his defective education
+on the ground that he had been overworked from first to last.  Even
+now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never the time to take up a
+book.  In consequence of this, I observed him closely; he was
+occupied for four or, at the extreme outside, for five hours out of
+the twenty-four, and then principally in walking; and the remainder
+of the day he passed in born idleness, either eating fruit or
+standing with his back against a door.  I have known men do hard
+literary work all morning, and then undergo quite as much physical
+fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful frontiersman
+for the day.  He, at least, like all the educated class, did so
+much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was industrious.
+But the average mechanic recognises his idleness with effrontery;
+he has even, as I am told, organised it.
+
+I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact.
+A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought
+into hospital with broken bones.  He was asked what was his trade,
+and replied that he was a TAPPER.  No one had ever heard of such a
+thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they
+besought an explanation.  It appeared that when a party of slaters
+were engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a
+fancy for the public-house.  Now a seamstress, for example, might
+slip away from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these
+fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus
+the neighbourhood be advertised of their defection.  Hence the
+career of the tapper.  He has to do the tapping and keep up an
+industrious bustle on the housetop during the absence of the
+slaters.  When he taps for only one or two the thing is child's-
+play, but when he has to represent a whole troop, it is then that
+he earns his money in the sweat of his brow.  Then must he bound
+from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexduplicate his single
+personality, and swell and hasten his blows., until he produce a
+perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of
+emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof the house.  It must
+be a strange sight from an upper window.
+
+I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
+stories told by my companions.  Skulking, shirking, malingering,
+were all established tactics, it appeared.  They could see no
+dishonesty where a man who is paid for an bones work gives half an
+hour's consistent idling in its place.  Thus the tapper would
+refuse to watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself
+a honest man.  It is not sufficiently recognised that our race
+detests to work.  If I thought that I should have to work every day
+of my life as hard as I am working now, I should be tempted to give
+up the struggle.  And the workman early begins on his career of
+toil.  He has never had his fill of holidays in the past, and his
+prospect of holidays in the future is both distant and uncertain.
+In the circumstances, it would require a high degree of virtue not
+to snatch alleviations for the moment.
+
+There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good
+talking of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working
+men.  Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of
+information will be given and received by word of mouth; and this
+tends to produce good talkers, and, what is no less needful for
+conversation, good listeners.  They could all tell a story with
+effect.  I am sometimes tempted to think that the less literary
+class show always better in narration; they have so much more
+patience with detail, are so much less hurried to reach the points,
+and preserve so much juster a proportion among the facts.  At the
+same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic ploddingly, have
+not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from unexpected
+quarters, and when the talk is over they often leave the matter
+where it was.  They mark time instead of marching.  They think only
+to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their reason rather
+as a weapon of offense than as a tool for self-improvement.  Hence
+the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result,
+because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little
+as possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to
+conquer or to die.
+
+But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that
+of a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of
+which the workman's life is built lie nearer to necessity and
+nature.  They are more immediate to human life.  An income
+calculated by the week is a far more human thing than one
+calculated by the year, and a small income, simply from its
+smallness, than a large one.  I never wearied listening to the
+details of a workman's economy, because every item stood for some
+real pleasure.  If he could afford pudding twice a week, you know
+that twice a week the man ate with genuine gusto and was physically
+happy; while if you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day,
+ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and the whole is but
+misspent money and a weariness to the flesh.
+
+The difference between England and America to a working man was
+thus most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger:  'In America,'
+said he, 'you get pies and puddings.'  I do not hear enough, in
+economy books, of pies and pudding.  A man lives in and for the
+delicacies, adornments, and accidental attributes of life, such as
+pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his
+leisure.  The bare terms of existence would be rejected with
+contempt by all.  If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup and
+porridge, his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.  And the
+workman dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight of those
+cheerless regions where life is more difficult to sustain than
+worth sustaining.  Every detail of our existence, where it is worth
+while to cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and
+enthralling by the presence of genuine desire; but it is all one to
+me whether Croesus has a hundred or a thousand thousands in the
+bank.  There is more adventure in the life of the working man who
+descends as a common solder into the battle of life, than in that
+of the millionaire who sits apart in an office, like Von Moltke,
+and only directs the manoeuvres by telegraph.  Give me to hear
+about the career of him who is in the thick of business; to whom
+one change of market means empty belly, and another a copious and
+savoury meal.  This is not the philosophical, but the human side of
+economics; it interests like a story; and the life all who are thus
+situated partakes in a small way the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for
+every step is critical and human life is presented to you naked and
+verging to its lowest terms.
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+
+As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then
+somewhat staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went
+the round.  You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal
+island.  You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not
+leave you till you were rooked and beaten.  You must enter a hotel
+with military precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was
+to awake next morning without money or baggage, or necessary
+raiment, a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst befell,
+you would instantly and mysteriously disappear from the ranks of
+mankind.
+
+I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum
+of fact.  Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns
+of the Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I
+reached Pradelles the warning was explained--it was but the far-
+away rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already
+half a century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the
+events.  So I was tempted to make light of these reports against
+America.  But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would
+not do to put aside.  He had come near these perils in the body; he
+had visited a robber inn.  The public has an old and well-grounded
+favour for this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the
+best of my power.
+
+My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M'Naughten, had come from
+New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work.  They were a pair
+of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station,
+passed the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until
+midnight struck.  Then they applied themselves to find a lodging,
+and walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of
+entertainment and being refused admittance, or themselves declining
+the terms.  By two the inspiration of their liquor had begun to
+wear off; they were weary and humble, and after a great circuit
+found themselves in the same street where they had begun their
+search, and in front of a French hotel where they had already
+sought accommodation.  Seeing the house still open, they returned
+to the charge.  A man in a white cap sat in an office by the door.
+He seemed to welcome them more warmly than when they had first
+presented themselves, and the charge for the night had somewhat
+unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter.  They thought him
+ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were shown upstairs
+to the top of the house.  There, in a small room, the man in the
+white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.
+
+It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences.  The
+door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was
+a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed,
+and the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may
+sometimes see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead,
+or works of art more than usually skittish in the subject.  It was
+perhaps in the hope of finding something of this last description
+that M'Naughten's comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first.
+He was startlingly disappointed.  There was no picture.  The frame
+surrounded, and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong
+aperture in the partition, through which they looked forth into the
+dark corridor.  A person standing without could easily take a purse
+from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed.
+M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Vasco's
+seamen, 'with a wild surmise'; and then the latter, catching up the
+lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain.  There
+he stood, petrified; and M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him
+by the wrist in terror.  They could see into another room, larger
+in size than that which they occupied, where three men sat
+crouching and silent in the dark.  For a second or so these five
+persons looked each other in the eyes, then the curtain was
+dropped, and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt of it out
+of the room and downstairs.  The man in the white cap said nothing
+as they passed him; and they were so pleased to be once more in the
+open night that they gave up all notion of a bed, and walked the
+streets of Boston till the morning.
+
+No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired
+after the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put
+myself under the conduct of Mr. Jones.  Before noon of the second
+Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the
+steerage passengers must remain on board to pass through Castle
+Garden on the following morning; but we of the second cabin made
+our escape along with the lords of the saloon; and by six o'clock
+Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the
+bottom of an open baggage-wagon.  It rained miraculously; and from
+that moment till on the following night I left New York, there was
+scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.  The roadways were
+flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled the air; the
+restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.
+
+It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of
+money, to be rattled along West Street to our destination:
+'Reunion House, No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle
+Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings,
+California Steamers and Liverpool Ships; Board and Lodging per day
+1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents;
+private rooms for families; no charge for storage or baggage;
+satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
+Proprietor.'  Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying, a
+humble hostelry.  You entered through a long bar-room, thence
+passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller
+kitchen.  The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung
+in the American taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
+
+Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes
+afterwards I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going
+on, in my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr.
+Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the situation.  He was
+offering to treat me, it appeared, whenever an American bar-keeper
+proposes anything, it must be borne in mind that he is offering to
+treat; and if I did not want a drink, I must at least take the
+cigar.  I took it bashfully, feeling I had begun my American career
+on the wrong foot.  I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have
+been from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often failing
+to please if you smoke three-quarters of it in a drenching rain.
+
+For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; 'westward
+the march of empire holds its way'; the race is for the moment to
+the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely
+know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.
+Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to
+generations the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
+endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new city of nations;
+England has already declined, since she has lost the States; and to
+these States, therefore, yet undeveloped, full of dark
+possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
+side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England turn
+naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age.  It will be
+hard for an American to understand the spirit.  But let him imagine
+a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle,
+following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh
+instincts, and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all
+about his own age, who keep house together by themselves and live
+far from restraint and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will
+have some imperfect notion of the sentiment with which spirited
+English youths turn to the thought of the American Republic.  It
+seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was still conducted
+in the open air, and on free barbaric terms; as if it had not yet
+been narrowed into parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
+unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise, costume forms of
+procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial.  Which of these two he
+prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will decide rightly
+for himself.  He would rather be houseless than denied a pass-key;
+rather go without food than partake of stalled ox in stiff,
+respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct his
+life according to the dictates of the world.
+
+He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
+the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
+country towns.  A few wild story-books which delighted his
+childhood form the imaginative basis of his picture of America.  In
+course of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating
+details--vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds,
+that have gone south in autumn, returning with the spring to find
+thousands camped upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and
+near along populous streets; forests that disappear like snow;
+countries larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one man
+running forth with his household gods before another, while the
+bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware of their approach; oil
+that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed or quarried in the
+brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle, courage,
+action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman has
+seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious
+verses.
+
+Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York
+streets, spying for things foreign.  The place had to me an air of
+Liverpool; but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would
+have looked inviting.  We were a party of four, under two
+umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads, recent immigrants, and
+not indisposed to welcome a compatriot.  They had been six weeks in
+New York, and neither of them had yet found a single job or earned
+a single halfpenny.  Up to the present they were exactly out of
+pocket by the amount of the fare.
+
+The lads soon left us.  Now I had sworn by all my gods to have such
+a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense at
+which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and I
+should dine like heathen emperors.  I set to work, asking after a
+restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-
+looking passers-by to ask from.  Yet, although I had told them I
+was willing to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to
+cheap, fixed-price houses, where I would not have eaten that night
+for the cost of twenty dinners.  I do not know if this were
+characteristic of New York, or whether it was only Jones and I who
+looked un-dinerly and discouraged enterprising suggestions.  But at
+length, by our own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
+there was a French waiter, some fair French cooking, some so-called
+French wine, and French coffee to conclude the whole.  I never
+entered into the feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
+tasted that coffee.
+
+I suppose we had one of the 'private rooms for families' at Reunion
+House.  It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
+clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the life of
+the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into the
+passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another
+apartment, where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of
+wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all night long.  It
+will be observed that this was almost exactly the disposition of
+the room in M'Naughten's story.  Jones had the bed; I pitched my
+camp upon the floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and I,
+for my part, never closed an eye.
+
+At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men
+in the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle
+over their toilettes.  The sound of their voices as they talked was
+low and like that of people watching by the sick.  Jones, who had
+at last begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then
+opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay.  I found myself
+growing eerier and eerier, for I dare say I was a little fevered by
+my restless night, and hurried to dress and get downstairs.
+
+You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and
+resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court.
+There were three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces
+of wet soap, white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a
+looking-glass and a pair of questionable combs.  Another Scots lad
+was here, scrubbing his face with a good will.  He had been three
+months in New York and had not yet found a single job nor earned a
+single halfpenny.  Up to the present, he also was exactly out of
+pocket by the amount of the fare.  I began to grow sick at heart
+for my fellow-emigrants.
+
+Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell.  I had a
+thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a
+journey across the continent before me in the evening.  It rained
+with patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for
+a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for
+under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside.
+I went to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants,
+publishers, booksellers, money-changers, and wherever I went a pool
+would gather about my feet, and those who were careful of their
+floors would look on with an unfriendly eye.  Wherever I went, too,
+the same traits struck me:  the people were all surprisingly rude
+and surprisingly kind.  The money-changer cross-questioned me like
+a French commissary, asking my age, my business, my average income,
+and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion, and
+receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he
+shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a
+quarter of a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.
+Again, in a very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a
+man, who seemed to be the manager, received me as I had certainly
+never before been received in any human shop, indicated squarely
+that he put no faith in my honesty, and refused to look up the
+names of books or give me the slightest help or information, on the
+ground, like the steward, that it was none of his business.  I lost
+my temper at last, said I was a stranger in America and not learned
+in their etiquette; but I would assure him, if he went to any
+bookseller in England, of more handsome usage.  The boast was
+perhaps exaggerated; but like many a long shot, it struck the gold.
+The manager passed at once from one extreme to the other; I may say
+that from that moment he loaded me with kindness; he gave me all
+sorts of good advice, wrote me down addresses, and came bareheaded
+into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where I might lunch,
+nor even then did he seem to think that he had done enough.  These
+are (it is as well to be bold in statement) the manners of America.
+It is this same opposition that has most struck me in people of
+almost all classes and from east to west.  By the time a man had
+about strung me up to be the death of him by his insulting
+behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting into
+confidence and serviceable attentions.  Yet I suspect, although I
+have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the
+character of some particular state or group of states, for in
+America, and this again in all classes, you will find some of the
+softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
+
+I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward the evening, that
+I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and
+leave them behind for the benefit of New York city.  No fire could
+have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their
+present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions.
+With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in
+the middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell's kitchen.  I
+wonder if they are dry by now.  Mitchell hired a man to carry my
+baggage to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me thither
+himself, and recommended me to the particular attention of the
+officials.  No one could have been kinder.  Those who are out of
+pocket may go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent
+meals and find an honest and obliging landlord.  I owed him this
+word of thanks, before I enter fairly on the second {1} and far
+less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK--A FRAGMENT--1871
+
+
+
+Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient
+unity may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and
+what he sees may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the
+same principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to
+intervene between any of my little journeyings and the attempt to
+chronicle them.  I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the
+moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before;
+I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from
+all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to
+choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural
+selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
+Survival of the Fittest.  If I make notes for future use, or if I
+am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
+excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again
+find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given
+in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile.  This
+process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am
+somewhat afraid that I have made this mistake with the present
+journey.  Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been
+entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and
+nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
+about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little
+patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an
+old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the
+cleaner.  I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon
+suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
+his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
+the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the
+first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
+congregation how he found himself situated:  'And now,' said he,
+'let us just begin where the rats have left off.'  I must follow
+the divine's example, and take up the thread of my discourse where
+it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.
+
+
+COCKERMOUTH
+
+
+I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth,
+and did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street.  When I
+did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening
+sunlight lit up English houses, English faces, an English
+conformation of street,--as it were, an English atmosphere blew
+against my face.  There is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one
+thing in sociology can ever really be more unaccountable than
+another) than the great gulf that is set between England and
+Scotland--a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so difficult to
+traverse.  Here are two people almost identical in blood; pent up
+together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one would
+have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
+cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a
+few years of quarrelsome isolation--a mere forenoon's tiff, as one
+may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles--has so
+separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual
+dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king's horses and
+all the king's men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.
+In the trituration of another century or so the corners may
+disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as
+much in a new country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St.
+Antoine at Antwerp.
+
+I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the
+change, and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my
+back, noting in a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how
+friendly, were the slopes of the gables and the colour of the
+tiles, and even the demeanour and voices of the gossips round about
+me.
+
+Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found
+myself following the course of the bright little river.  I passed
+first one and then another, then a third, several couples out love-
+making in the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of
+loneliness was beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam
+across the river, and a mill--a great, gaunt promontory of
+building,--half on dry ground and half arched over the stream.  The
+road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between the
+landward extremity of the mill and a little garden enclosure, with
+a small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge.  I was
+pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of
+a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society of
+parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens; but as I
+drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could read
+the name of Smethurst, and the designation of 'Canadian Felt Hat
+Manufacturers.'  There was no more hope of evening fellowship, and
+I could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees.  The
+water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with
+a little mist of flying insects.  There were some amorous ducks,
+also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a little
+farther down.  But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
+was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that
+had been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went
+back to the inn, and supper, and my bed.
+
+The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart
+waitress my intention of continuing down the coast and through
+Whitehaven to Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was
+instantly confronted by that last and most worrying form of
+interference, that chooses to introduce tradition and authority
+into the choice of a man's own pleasures.  I can excuse a person
+combating my religious or philosophical heresies, because them I
+have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present
+argument.  But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.  If I prefer
+tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and
+woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
+Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of
+one or two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very
+hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts,
+and do not seek to establish them as principles.  This is not the
+general rule, however, and accordingly the waitress was shocked, as
+one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that I had sketched out
+for myself.  Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it
+appeared, went on to Keswick.  It was in vain that I put up a
+little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I
+said I should prefer to go to Whitehaven.  I was told that there
+was 'nothing to see there'--that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood;
+and at last, as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I
+gave way, as men always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I
+was to leave for Keswick by a train in the early evening.
+
+
+AN EVANGELIST
+
+
+Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with
+'nothing to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a
+pleasant, vague picture of the town and all its surroundings.  I
+might have dodged happily enough all day about the main street and
+up to the castle and in and out of byways, but the curious
+attraction that leads a person in a strange place to follow, day
+after day, the same round, and to make set habits for himself in a
+week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the same, road that
+I had gone the evening before.  When I came up to the hat
+manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate.  He
+was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put
+to await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he
+looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man.  As I drew
+near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so
+curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared
+myself to apologise for some unwitting trespass.  His first
+question rather confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or
+not he had seen me going up this way last night; and after having
+answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm for the rest of
+my indictment.  But the good man's heart was full of peace; and he
+stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about fishing, and
+walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright shallow
+stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
+how.  As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
+aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
+commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
+disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
+Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while
+out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make
+out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of
+mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more
+friendly and at our ease with one another.  At last he made a
+little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
+words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the
+best writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only
+the sense, and that perhaps imperfectly.  He began by saying that
+he had little things in his past life that it gave him especial
+pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp
+impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be
+still quite lively and active.  Then he told me that he had a
+little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to
+lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after
+years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the
+recollection.  Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo
+present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
+sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there was
+something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
+found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or
+unselfish luxury can be imagined.  After he had unmoored his little
+embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran
+away back to his hats with the air of a man who had only just
+recollected that he had anything to do.
+
+I did not stay very long on the raft.  It ought to have been very
+nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
+moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I
+was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and
+cherish its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure
+into a duty.  Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon
+wearied and came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure
+to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so
+full of gusto and sympathy, than anything possibly connected with
+his crank, insecure embarkation.  In order to avoid seeing him, for
+I was not a little ashamed of myself for having failed to enjoy his
+treat sufficiently, I determined to continue up the river, and, at
+all prices, to find some other way back into the town in time for
+dinner.  As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst with admiration; a
+look into that man's mind was like a retrospect over the smiling
+champaign of his past life, and very different from the Sinai-
+gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the dark
+souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men.  I cannot be
+very grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and
+prudence.  I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard,
+combative existence, full of doubt, difficulties, defeats,
+disappointments, and dangers, quite a hard enough life without
+their dark countenances at my elbow, so that what I want is a
+happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there at ugly corners of my
+life's wayside, preaching his gospel of quiet and contentment.
+
+
+ANOTHER
+
+
+I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp.  After I
+had forced my way through a gentleman's grounds, I came out on the
+high road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at the
+top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom.
+An Irish beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side,
+came up to ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the
+little tragedy of her life.  Her own sister, she told me, had
+seduced her husband from her after many years of married life, and
+the pair had fled, leaving her destitute, with the little girl upon
+her hands.  She seemed quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she
+was unaffectedly sorry for the loss of her husband's earnings, she
+made no pretence of despair at the loss of his affection; some day
+she would meet the fugitives, and the law would see her duly
+righted, and in the meantime the smallest contribution was
+gratefully received.  While she was telling all this in the most
+matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach of a tall man,
+with a high white hat and darkish clothes.  He came up the hill at
+a rapid pace, and joined our little group with a sort of half-
+salutation.  Turning at once to the woman, he asked her in a
+business-like way whether she had anything to do, whether she were
+a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth;
+and then, after a few kind words and some sweeties to the child, he
+despatched the mother with some tracts about Biddy and the Priest,
+and the Orangeman's Bible.  I was a little amused at his abrupt
+manner, for he was still a young man, and had somewhat the air of a
+navy officer; but he tackled me with great solemnity.  I could make
+fun of what he said, for I do not think it was very wise; but the
+subject does not appear to me just now in a jesting light, so I
+shall only say that he related to me his own conversion, which had
+been effected (as is very often the case) through the agency of a
+gig accident, and that, after having examined me and diagnosed my
+case, he selected some suitable tracts from his repertory, gave
+them to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went on his way.
+
+
+LAST OF SMETHURST
+
+
+That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for
+Keswick, and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in
+brown clothes.  This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease,
+and kept continually putting his head out of the window, and asking
+the bystanders if they saw HIM coming.  At last, when the train was
+already in motion, there was a commotion on the platform, and a way
+was left clear to our carriage door.  HE had arrived.  In the hurry
+I could just see Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of
+clay pipes into my companion's outstretched band, and hear him
+crying his farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at
+an ever accelerating pace.  I said something about it being a close
+run, and the broad man, already engaged in filling one of the
+pipes, assented, and went on to tell me of his own stupidity in
+forgetting a necessary, and of how his friend had good-naturedly
+gone down town at the last moment to supply the omission.  I
+mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst already, and that he had
+been very polite to me; and we fell into a discussion of the
+hatter's merits that lasted some time and left us quite good
+friends at its conclusion.  The topic was productive of goodwill.
+We exchanged tobacco and talked about the season, and agreed at
+last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick and sup in
+company.  As he had some business in the town which would occupy
+him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time and
+go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
+wonders.
+
+The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a
+place where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and
+as I went along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind
+blew in gusts from the far end of the lake.  The sky was covered
+with flying scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild
+chase of shadow and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering
+water.  I had to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and
+inclined to go back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to
+break the tedium.  A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the
+low underwood, and at the same time there came one of those brief
+discharges of moonlight, which leaped into the opening thus made,
+and showed me three girls in the prettiest flutter and disorder.
+It was as though they had sprung out of the ground.  I accosted
+them very politely in my capacity of stranger, and requested to be
+told the names of all manner of hills and woods and places that I
+did not wish to know, and we stood together for a while and had an
+amusing little talk.  The wind, too, made himself of the party,
+brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to do to
+repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
+pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
+specially strong gust had got the advantage over her.  They were
+just high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak
+to a gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a
+nervous consciousness of wrong-doing--of stolen waters, that gave a
+considerable zest to our most innocent interview.  They were as
+much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked
+baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
+inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
+waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
+descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick.  Now
+whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother
+of one of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but
+they incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up
+the path with friendly salutations.  I need not say that I found
+the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure, and
+speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water
+in the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller.  In the
+smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an
+ulster coat, who had got the best place and was monopolising most
+of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to me from
+both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre.  The
+presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must
+own that the manager showed himself equal to his position.  He had
+a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem,
+written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could
+be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant extracts,
+except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
+entertainment.  Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
+appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
+corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
+aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
+experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with
+one little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
+confirmation.  The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the
+elbows with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of
+that great man settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as
+noticeably the second person in the smoking-room as he was the
+first.  For a young man, this was a position of some distinction, I
+think you will admit. . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--AN AUTUMN EFFECT--1875
+
+
+
+'Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
+efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous
+en avons recue.'--M. ANDRE THEURIET, 'L'Automne dans les Bois,'
+Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {2}
+
+
+A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may
+leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed
+and dissipated if we stayed longer.  Clear vision goes with the
+quick foot.  Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective
+when we see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and
+simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain
+falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his
+figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards
+nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
+they showed us in the morning.  We expose our mind to the landscape
+(as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
+moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before
+the effect can change.  Hence we shall have in our memories a long
+scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the
+prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
+and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the
+unconscious processes of thought.  So that we who have only looked
+at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will
+have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a
+man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had
+his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and belied
+by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics
+of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion of
+variable effect.
+
+I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
+that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
+turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which
+he knows only by the vague report of others.  Such an one has not
+surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles,
+like a man on a railway.  He may change his mind at every finger-
+post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go
+the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine,
+suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately
+into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into
+the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
+range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
+horizon.  In short, he may gratify his every whim and fancy,
+without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to his
+self-respect.  It is true, however, that most men do not possess
+the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to
+live for the moment only; and as they begin to go forward on their
+journey, they will find that they have made for themselves new
+fetters.  Slight projects they may have entertained for a moment,
+half in jest, become iron laws to them, they know not why.  They
+will be led by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke
+above; and the mere fact that their informant mentioned one village
+and not another will compel their footsteps with inexplicable
+power.  And yet a little while, yet a few days of this fictitious
+liberty, and they will begin to hear imperious voices calling on
+them to return; and some passion, some duty, some worthy or
+unworthy expectation, will set its hand upon their shoulder and
+lead them back into the old paths.  Once and again we have all made
+the experiment.  We know the end of it right well.  And yet if we
+make it for the hundredth time to-morrow:  it will have the same
+charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes will be bright, as
+we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once again (as we
+have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves loose for
+ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies and
+circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new
+world.
+
+It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
+me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day
+for walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull,
+heavy, and lifeless.  A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its
+colour reacted on the colour of the landscape.  Near at hand,
+indeed, the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through
+with bright autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine.  But a little way
+off, the solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and
+hill-top were not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet
+and more grey as they drew off into the distance.  As they drew off
+into the distance, also, the woods seemed to mass themselves
+together, and lie thin and straight, like clouds, upon the limit of
+one's view.  Not that this massing was complete, or gave the idea
+of any extent of forest, for every here and there the trees would
+break up and go down into a valley in open order, or stand in long
+Indian file along the horizon, tree after tree relieved, foolishly
+enough, against the sky.  I say foolishly enough, although I have
+seen the effect employed cleverly in art, and such long line of
+single trees thrown out against the customary sunset of a Japanese
+picture with a certain fantastic effect that was not to be
+despised; but this was over water and level land, where it did not
+jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys.  The
+whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
+was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
+merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
+that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French
+landscape.  For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to
+art, than in art to nature; and we say a hundred times, 'How like a
+picture!' for once that we say, 'How like the truth!'  The forms in
+which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got
+from painted canvas.  Any man can see and understand a picture; it
+is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion
+of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.
+
+The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
+by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a
+labyrinth of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened
+considerably in colour, for it was the distance only that was grey
+and cold, and the distance I could see no longer.  Overhead there
+was a wonderful carolling of larks which seemed to follow me as I
+went.  Indeed, during all the time I was in that country the larks
+did not desert me.  The air was alive with them from High Wycombe
+to Tring; and as, day after day, their 'shrill delight' fell upon
+me out of the vacant sky, they began to take such a prominence over
+other conditions, and form so integral a part of my conception of
+the country, that I could have baptized it 'The Country of Larks.'
+This, of course, might just as well have been in early spring; but
+everything else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later
+year.  There was no stir of insects in the grass.  The sunshine was
+more golden, and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the
+shadows under the hedge were somewhat blue and misty.  It was only
+in autumn that you could have seen the mingled green and yellow of
+the elm foliage, and the fallen leaves that lay about the road, and
+covered the surface of wayside pools so thickly that the sun was
+reflected only here and there from little joints and pinholes in
+that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would have been
+troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of fowling-
+pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.
+
+For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human
+activity that came to disturb me as I walked.  The lanes were
+profoundly still.  They would have been sad but for the sunshine
+and the singing of the larks.  And as it was, there came over me at
+times a feeling of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was
+enough to make me quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one
+before me on the road.  This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a
+person than the parish constable.  It had occurred to me that in a
+district which was so little populous and so well wooded, a
+criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek with the
+authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the
+aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my side with
+deliberate dignity and turned-out toes.  But a few minutes'
+converse set my heart at rest.  These rural criminals are very tame
+birds, it appeared.  If my informant did not immediately lay his
+hand on an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after
+nightfall there would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary
+of outlawry, would give himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and
+resume his position in the life of the country-side.  Married men
+caused him no disquietude whatever; he had them fast by the foot.
+Sooner or later they would come back to see their wives, a peeping
+neighbour would pass the word, and my portly constable would walk
+quietly over and take the bird sitting.  And if there were a few
+who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood, and preferred to
+shift into another county when they fell into trouble, their
+departure moved the placid constable in no degree.  He was of
+Dogberry's opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince's
+name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he
+was rid of a knave.  And surely the crime and the law were in
+admirable keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic
+offender.  The officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the
+criminal came to visit him, and the criminal coming--it was a fair
+match.  One felt as if this must have been the order in that
+delightful seaboard Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in
+such sweet accents, and the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and
+the four-and-twenty shearers danced with nosegays in their bosoms,
+and chanted their three songs apiece at the old shepherd's
+festival; and one could not help picturing to oneself what havoc
+among good peoples purses, and tribulation for benignant
+constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over stile and
+footpath, of a new Autolycus.
+
+Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and
+struck across country.  It was rather a revelation to pass from
+between the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a
+great coming and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in
+every second field, lusty horses and stout country-folk a-
+ploughing.  The way I followed took me through many fields thus
+occupied, and through many strips of plantation, and then over a
+little space of smooth turf, very pleasant to the feet, set with
+tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making ready for the
+winter, and so back again into the quiet road.  I was now not far
+from the end of my day's journey.  A few hundred yards farther,
+and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I began to go down hill
+through a pretty extensive tract of young beeches.  I was soon in
+shadow myself, but the afternoon sun still coloured the upmost
+boughs of the wood, and made a fire over my head in the autumnal
+foliage.  A little faint vapour lay among the slim tree-stems in
+the bottom of the hollow; and from farther up I heard from time to
+time an outburst of gross laughter, as though clowns were making
+merry in the bush.  There was something about the atmosphere that
+brought all sights and sounds home to one with a singular purity,
+so that I felt as if my senses had been washed with water.  After I
+had crossed the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the
+hill; and just as I, mounting along with it, had got back again,
+from the head downwards, into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in
+front of me a donkey tied to a tree.  Now, I have a certain liking
+for donkeys, principally, I believe, because of the delightful
+things that Sterne has written of them.  But this was not after the
+pattern of the ass at Lyons.  He was of a white colour, that seemed
+to fit him rather for rare festal occasions than for constant
+drudgery.  Besides, he was very small, and of the daintiest
+portions you can imagine in a donkey.  And so, sure enough, you had
+only to look at him to see he had never worked.  There was
+something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that
+of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling.
+It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children
+oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes.
+He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and
+though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still
+gave proof of the levity of his disposition by impudently wagging
+his ears at me as I drew near.  I say he was somewhat solemnised
+just then; for, with the admirable instinct of all men and animals
+under restraint, he had so wound and wound the halter about the
+tree that he could go neither back nor forwards, nor so much as put
+down his head to browse.  There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled,
+part angry, part, I believe, amused.  He had not given up hope, and
+dully revolved the problem in his head, giving ever and again
+another jerk at the few inches of free rope that still remained
+unwound.  A humorous sort of sympathy for the creature took hold
+upon me.  I went up, and, not without some trouble on my part, and
+much distrust and resistance on the part of Neddy, got him forced
+backwards until the whole length of the halter was set loose, and
+he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to make him.  I was
+pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to a fellow-
+creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder to see
+how he was profiting by his freedom.  The brute was looking after
+me; and no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long white
+face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to
+bray derisively.  If ever any one person made a grimace at another,
+that donkey made a grimace at me.  The hardened ingratitude of his
+behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as he
+curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so
+tickled me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to
+myself about his character, that I could not find it in my heart to
+be angry, and burst into a peal of hearty laughter.  This seemed to
+strike the ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of
+rejoinder; and we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until
+I began to grow aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell,
+turned to pursue my way.  In so doing--it was like going suddenly
+into cold water--I found myself face to face with a prim little old
+maid.  She was all in a flutter, the poor old dear!  She had
+concluded beyond question that this must be a lunatic who stood
+laughing aloud at a white donkey in the placid beech-woods.  I was
+sure, by her face, that she had already recommended her spirit most
+religiously to Heaven, and prepared herself for the worst.  And so,
+to reassure her, I uncovered and besought her, after a very staid
+fashion, to put me on my way to Great Missenden.  Her voice
+trembled a little, to be sure, but I think her mind was set at
+rest; and she told me, very explicitly, to follow the path until I
+came to the end of the wood, and then I should see the village
+below me in the bottom of the valley.  And, with mutual courtesies,
+the little old maid and I went on our respective ways.
+
+Nor had she misled me.  Great Missenden was close at hand, as she
+had said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms
+about it.  The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the
+afternoon sunshine.  The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled
+the neighbouring fields and hung about the quaint street corners.
+A little above, the church sits well back on its haunches against
+the hillside--an attitude for a church, you know, that makes it
+look as if it could be ever so much higher if it liked; and the
+trees grew about it thickly, so as to make a density of shade in
+the churchyard.  A very quiet place it looks; and yet I saw many
+boards and posters about threatening dire punishment against those
+who broke the church windows or defaced the precinct, and offering
+rewards for the apprehension of those who had done the like
+already.  It was fair day in Great Missenden.  There were three
+stalls set up, sub jove, for the sale of pastry and cheap toys; and
+a great number of holiday children thronged about the stalls and
+noisily invaded every corner of the straggling village.  They came
+round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon penny trumpets as
+though they imagined I should fall to pieces like the battlements
+of Jericho.  I noticed one among them who could make a wheel of
+himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-
+eminence upon the strength of the accomplishment.  By and by,
+however, the trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors,
+leaving the fair, I fancy, at its height.
+
+Night had fallen before I ventured forth again.  It was pitch-dark
+in the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for
+a light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open
+door.  Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw
+within a charming genre picture.  In a room, all white wainscot and
+crimson wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty
+darkness in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a
+story, as well as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her
+knee, while an old woman sat placidly dozing over the fire.  You
+may be sure I was not behindhand with a story for myself--a good
+old story after the manner of G. P. R. James and the village
+melodramas, with a wicked squire, and poachers, and an attorney,
+and a virtuous young man with a genius for mechanics, who should
+love, and protect, and ultimately marry the girl in the crimson
+room.  Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences on the fancies that we
+are inspired with when we look through a window into other people's
+lives; and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged on the same text.
+The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom weary of
+entertaining.  I remember, night after night, at Brussels, watching
+a good family sup together, make merry, and retire to rest; and
+night after night I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad
+made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without any
+abatement of interest.  Night after night I found the scene rivet
+my attention and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint
+imaginations.  Much of the pleasure of the Arabian Nights hinges
+upon this Asmodean interest; and we are not weary of lifting other
+people's roofs, and going about behind the scenes of life with the
+Caliph and the serviceable Giaffar.  It is a salutary exercise,
+besides; it is salutary to get out of ourselves and see people
+living together in perfect unconsciousness of our existence, as
+they will live when we are gone.  If to-morrow the blow falls, and
+the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl will none the less
+tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage at Great
+Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix their
+salad, and go orderly to bed.
+
+The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a
+thrill in the air like a reminiscence of frost.  I went up into the
+sloping garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough,
+to the tune of my landlady's lamentations over sundry cabbages and
+cauliflowers that had been spoiled by caterpillars.  She had been
+so much pleased in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all
+hovered over by white butterflies.  And now, look at the end of it!
+She could nowise reconcile this with her moral sense.  And, indeed,
+unless these butterflies are created with a side-look to the
+composition of improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even
+for people who have read Hegel and Dr. M'Cosh, to decide
+intelligibly upon the issue raised.  Then I fell into a long and
+abstruse calculation with my landlord; having for object to compare
+the distance driven by him during eight years' service on the box
+of the Wendover coach with the girth of the round world itself.  We
+tackled the question most conscientiously, made all necessary
+allowance for Sundays and leap-years, and were just coming to a
+triumphant conclusion of our labours when we were stayed by a small
+lacuna in my information.  I did not know the circumference of the
+earth.  The landlord knew it, to be sure--plainly he had made the
+same calculation twice and once before,--but he wanted confidence
+in his own figures, and from the moment I showed myself so poor a
+second seemed to lose all interest in the result.
+
+Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with
+Great Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off
+on either hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain
+lies, like a sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had
+a good outlook over the place.  The vale, as it opened out into the
+plain, was shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of
+graceful convolutions.  From the level to which I have now attained
+the fields were exposed before me like a map, and I could see all
+that bustle of autumn field-work which had been hid from me
+yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown to me only for a moment as
+I followed the footpath.  Wendover lay well down in the midst, with
+mountains of foliage about it.  The great plain stretched away to
+the northward, variegated near at hand with the quaint pattern of
+the fields, but growing ever more and more indistinct, until it
+became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents of river,
+and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
+ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon.  The sky was an opal-grey,
+touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets
+that looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the
+autumnal woods below.  I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their
+horses, the uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and,
+from a field where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet
+tumultuous tinkle of sheep-bells.  All these noises came to me very
+thin and distinct in the clear air.  There was a wonderful
+sentiment of distance and atmosphere about the day and the place.
+
+I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky
+footholds cut in the turf.  The hills about Wendover and, as far as
+I could see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood
+of beech plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been
+suffered to extend itself into something more like a cloak, and
+hung down about the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of
+lying flatly along the summit.  The trees grew so close, and their
+boughs were so matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense
+as a bush of heather.  The prevailing colour was a dull,
+smouldering red, touched here and there with vivid yellow.  But the
+autumn had scarce advanced beyond the outworks; it was still almost
+summer in the heart of the wood; and as soon as I had scrambled
+through the hedge, I found myself in a dim green forest atmosphere
+under eaves of virgin foliage.  In places where the wood had itself
+for a background and the trees were massed together thickly, the
+colour became intensified and almost gem-like:  a perfect fire
+green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
+gold.  None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
+but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned
+and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
+the light up pleasantly.  Sometimes there would be a colonnade of
+slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
+the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
+something, and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.
+Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
+light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
+background it seemed almost luminous.  There was a great bush over
+the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
+and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
+occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
+had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
+imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
+carpeting of last year's leaves.  The spirit of the place seemed to
+be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath
+to number my footfalls.  One could not help feeling that there
+ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
+old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
+perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
+soon come pattering through the leaves.  It was not unpleasant, in
+such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
+the open plain.  This happened only where the path lay much upon
+the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
+wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
+be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
+miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
+appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
+and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
+and so shift my point of view.
+
+For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in
+the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
+gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream.  As I
+advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and
+I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure
+walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.  And sure enough,
+a rickyard it proved to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with
+the beech-woods growing almost to the door of it.  Just before me,
+however, as I came upon the path, the trees drew back and let in a
+wide flood of daylight on to a circular lawn.  It was here that the
+noises had their origin.  More than a score of peacocks (there are
+altogether thirty at the farm), a proper contingent of peahens, and
+a great multitude that I could not number of more ordinary barn-
+door fowls, were all feeding together on this little open lawn
+among the beeches.  They fed in a dense crowd, which swayed to and
+fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of tide, and of which
+the surface was agitated like the surface of a sea as each bird
+guzzled his head along the ground after the scattered corn.  The
+clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was formed by the
+blending together of countless expressions of individual
+contentment into one collective expression of contentment, or
+general grace during meat.  Every now and again a big peacock would
+separate himself from the mob and take a stately turn or two about
+the lawn, or perhaps mount for a moment upon the rail, and there
+shrilly publish to the world his satisfaction with himself and what
+he had to eat.  It happened, for my sins, that none of these
+admirable birds had anything beyond the merest rudiment of a tail.
+Tails, it seemed, were out of season just then.  But they had their
+necks for all that; and by their necks alone they do as much
+surpass all the other birds of our grey climate as they fall in
+quality of song below the blackbird or the lark.  Surely the
+peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour and the
+scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted
+throat, must, like my landlady's butterflies at Great Missenden,
+have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and
+support of homely virtue:  or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not
+quite so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a
+studious enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these
+melting greens and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would
+have given them my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all
+the spring woods.  For indeed there is no piece of colour of the
+same extent in nature, that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of
+a man's eyes; and to come upon so many of them, after these acres
+of stone-coloured heavens and russet woods, and grey-brown
+ploughlands and white roads, was like going three whole days'
+journey to the southward, or a month back into the summer.
+
+I was sorry to leave Peacock Farm--for so the place is called,
+after the name of its splendid pensioners--and go forwards again in
+the quiet woods.  It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
+beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the
+foliage; and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all
+the fine tracery of leaves and delicate gradations of living green
+that had before accompanied my walk.  I had been sorry to leave
+Peacock Farm, but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the
+open road, under a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky,
+and put my best foot foremost for the inn at Wendover.
+
+Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.
+Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street
+should go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen
+with a new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of
+neighbours to join in his heresy.  It would have somewhat the look
+of an abortive watering-place, such as we may now see them here and
+there along the coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely
+quiet design of some of them, and the look of long habitation, of a
+life that is settled and rooted, and makes it worth while to train
+flowers about the windows, and otherwise shape the dwelling to the
+humour of the inhabitant.  The church, which might perhaps have
+served as rallying-point for these loose houses, and pulled the
+township into something like intelligible unity, stands some
+distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take the public
+buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand to be the
+principal street:  a pleasant old house, with bay-windows, and
+three peaked gables, and many swallows' nests plastered about the
+eaves.
+
+The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside:  indeed, I
+never saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted
+parlour in which I spent the remainder of the evening.  It was a
+short oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one
+of the angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle
+was similarly truncated by a corner cupboard.  The wainscot was
+white, and there was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it
+might have been imported by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn
+almost through in some places, but in others making a good show of
+blues and oranges, none the less harmonious for being somewhat
+faded.  The corner cupboard was agreeable in design; and there were
+just the right things upon the shelves--decanters and tumblers, and
+blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water.  The furniture
+was old-fashioned and stiff.  Everything was in keeping, down to
+the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table.  And you may
+fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over by the
+light of a brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted
+sort of perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror
+above the chimney.  As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept
+looking round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture
+that was about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain
+childish pride in forming part of it.  The book I read was about
+Italy in the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves
+of princes, the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art;
+but it was written, by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion,
+that suited the room infinitely more nearly than the matter; and
+the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or
+Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had written
+in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure in
+his solemn polysyllables.
+
+I was not left without society.  My landlord had a very pretty
+little daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie.  If I had made any
+notes at the time, I might be able to tell you something definite
+of her appearance.  But faces have a trick of growing more and more
+spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of
+them but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in
+a face that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest
+painter's touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it.
+And if it is hard to catch with the finest of camel's-hair pencils,
+you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with
+clumsy words.  If I say, for instance, that this look, which I
+remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
+come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined
+to imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a
+cast in one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can,
+and the reader will not be much advanced towards comprehension.  I
+had struck up an acquaintance with this little damsel in the
+morning, and professed much interest in her dolls, and an impatient
+desire to see the large one which was kept locked away for great
+occasions.  And so I had not been very long in the parlour before
+the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked
+clumsily under her arm.  She was followed by her brother John, a
+year or so younger than herself, not simply to play propriety at
+our interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of his
+sister's dolls.  I did my best to make myself agreeable to my
+visitors, showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls' dresses,
+and, with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about
+their age and character.  I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my
+sincerity, but it was evident that she was both bewildered and a
+little contemptuous.  Although she was ready herself to treat her
+dolls as if they were alive, she seemed to think rather poorly of
+any grown person who could fall heartily into the spirit of the
+fiction.  Sometimes she would look at me with gravity and a sort of
+disquietude, as though she really feared I must be out of my wits.
+Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly into the question of
+their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily that I began to
+feel almost embarrassed.  But when, in an evil moment, I asked to
+be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself no longer to
+herself.  Clambering down from the chair on which she sat perched
+to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight out of the
+room and into the bar--it was just across the passage,--and I could
+hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently more in
+sorrow than in merriment, that THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR WANTED
+TO KISS DOLLY.  I fancy she was determined to save me from this
+humiliating action, even in spite of myself, for she never gave me
+the desired permission.  She reminded me of an old dog I once knew,
+who would never suffer the master of the house to dance, out of an
+exaggerated sense of the dignity of that master's place and
+carriage.
+
+After the young people were gone there was but one more incident
+ere I went to bed.  I heard a party of children go up and down the
+dark street for a while, singing together sweetly.  And the mystery
+of this little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely
+refrained from asking who they were, and wherefore they went
+singing at so late an hour.  One can rarely be in a pleasant place
+without meeting with some pleasant accident.  I have a conviction
+that these children would not have gone singing before the inn
+unless the inn-parlour had been the delightful place it was.  At
+least, if I had been in the customary public room of the modern
+hotel, with all its disproportions and discomforts, my ears would
+have been dull, and there would have been some ugly temper or other
+uppermost in my spirit, and so they would have wasted their songs
+upon an unworthy hearer.
+
+Next morning I went along to visit the church.  It is a long-backed
+red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a
+pleasant graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken
+already.  The sky was drowned in a mist.  Now and again pulses of
+cold wind went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy
+overhead, and the dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the
+church buttresses.  Now and again, also, I could hear the dull
+sudden fall of a chestnut among the grass--the dog would bark
+before the rectory door--or there would come a clinking of pails
+from the stable-yard behind.  But in spite of these occasional
+interruptions--in spite, also, of the continuous autumn twittering
+that filled the trees--the chief impression somehow was one as of
+utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish bell that peeped
+out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense of some
+possible and more inharmonious disturbance.  The grass was wet, as
+if with a hoar frost that had just been melted.  I do not know that
+ever I saw a morning more autumnal.  As I went to and fro among the
+graves, I saw some flowers set reverently before a recently erected
+tomb, and drawing near, was almost startled to find they lay on the
+grave a man seventy-two years old when he died.  We are accustomed
+to strew flowers only over the young, where love has been cut short
+untimely, and great possibilities have been restrained by death.
+We strew them there in token, that these possibilities, in some
+deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our dead
+loves remain with us and guide us to the end.  And yet there was
+more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in
+this little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old.  We are
+apt to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of
+the enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we see more to
+lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love,
+than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and
+goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy,
+or any consolation.  These flowers seemed not so much the token of
+love that survived death, as of something yet more beautiful--of
+love that had lived a man's life out to an end with him, and been
+faithful and companionable, and not weary of loving, throughout all
+these years.
+
+The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
+stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods,
+as I set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring.  The road lay
+for a good distance along the side of the hills, with the great
+plain below on one hand, and the beech-woods above on the other.
+The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here
+and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could
+see many a team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower
+stepped aside for a moment to take a draught.  Over all the brown
+ploughlands, and under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a
+stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic.
+The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the
+sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large,
+open-air existence.  The fellow who drove me was something of a
+humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an
+agricultural labourer's way of life.  It was he who called my
+attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not
+sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told
+me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the
+morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired
+this provision of nature.  He sang O fortunatos agricolas! indeed,
+in every possible key, and with many cunning inflections, till I
+began to wonder what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to
+sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.
+
+Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are
+not very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of
+old days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break
+loose in the town and work mischief.  I had a last walk, among
+russet beeches as usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the
+carolling of larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw,
+as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a
+pack of fox-hounds.  And then the train came and carried me back to
+London.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY--A FRAGMENT--
+1876
+
+
+
+At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the
+shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly.  On the
+Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle
+conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there
+with farms and tufts of wood.  Inland, it loses itself, joining, I
+suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the centre
+of the Lowlands.  Towards the sea it swells out the coast-line into
+a protuberance, like a bay-window in a plan, and is fortified
+against the surf behind bold crags.  This hill is known as the
+Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.
+
+It had snowed overnight.  The fields were all sheeted up; they were
+tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
+pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother.  The
+wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the
+sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand.  There was a frosty
+stifle in the air.  An effusion of coppery light on the summit of
+Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look through; but
+along the horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that
+there was no distinction of sky and sea.  Over the white shoulders
+of the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but
+a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the
+edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void
+space.
+
+The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out
+barking as they smelt a passer-by upon the road.  I met a fine old
+fellow, who might have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday
+Night,' and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving.
+And a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping
+out to gather cockles.  His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was
+broken up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and
+weathered in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey.  He had a
+faint air of being surprised--which, God knows, he might well be--
+that life had gone so ill with him.  The shape of his trousers was
+in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about
+his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had
+lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's festivity.  I will own I
+was not sorry to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young
+again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there.
+One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or
+a great student of respectability in dress; but there might have
+been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after fifty
+New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
+wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
+ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night.  Plainly, there
+was nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung
+heavily on his old arms.  He was seventy-six, he told me; and
+nobody would give a day's work to a man that age:  they would think
+he couldn't do it.  'And, 'deed,' he went on, with a sad little
+chuckle, ''deed, I doubt if I could.'  He said goodbye to me at a
+footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work.  It will make your
+heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the snow.
+
+He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.
+And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a
+babble of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep
+road leading downwards to the sea.  Dunure lies close under the
+steep hill:  a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate
+disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of
+fishers' houses.  Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang
+the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows.
+The snow lay on the beach to the tidemark.  It was daubed on to the
+sills of the ruin:  it roosted in the crannies of the rock like
+white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there would be a little
+cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse.  Everything was grey and white
+in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid.  In the profound
+silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
+sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a
+moment at the end of the clachan for letters.
+
+It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought
+him.
+
+The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,
+and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me
+'ben the hoose' into the guest-room.  This guest-room at Dunure was
+painted in quite aesthetic fashion.  There are rooms in the same
+taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme
+sensibility meet together without embarrassment.  It was all in a
+fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of
+colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt
+the better feelings of the most exquisite purist.  A cherry-red
+half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and
+threw quite a glow on the floor.  Twelve cockle-shells and a half-
+penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.
+Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust
+contained sea-shells.  And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an
+article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text.  It was
+patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old
+brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of
+some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way,
+and plainly a labour of love.  The patches came exclusively from
+people's raiment.  There was no colour more brilliant than a
+heather mixture; 'My Johnny's grey breeks,' well polished over the
+oar on the boat's thwart, entered largely into its composition.
+And the spoils of an old black cloth coat, that had been many a
+Sunday to church, added something (save the mark!) of preciousness
+to the material.
+
+While I was at luncheon four carters came in--long-limbed, muscular
+Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces.  Four quarts of stout
+were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as
+they drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words
+the four quarts were finished--another round was proposed,
+discussed, and negatived--and they were creaking out of the village
+with their carts.
+
+The ruins drew you towards them.  You never saw any place more
+desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
+at hand.  Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
+in.  The snow had drifted into the vaults.  The clachan dabbled
+with snow, the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the
+coves with faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked
+from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.
+If you had been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the
+afternoon, you would have had a rare fit of remorse.  How you would
+have heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers!  I think it would
+have come to homicide before the evening--if it were only for the
+pleasure of seeing something red!  And the masters of Dunure, it is
+to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.  One of these
+vaults where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr.
+Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery
+trials.  On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
+Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his
+cook, his pantryman, and another servant, bound the Poor
+Commendator 'betwix an iron chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly
+roasted him until he signed away his abbacy. it is one of the
+ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, somehow, without such a
+flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard to sympathise quite
+seriously with the victim.  And it is consoling to remember that he
+got away at last, and kept his abbacy, and, over and above, had a
+pension from the Earl until he died.
+
+Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly
+aspect, opened out.  Colzean plantations lay all along the steep
+shore, and there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the
+trees made a sort of shadowy etching over the snow.  The road went
+down and up, and past a blacksmith's cottage that made fine music
+in the valley.  Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a
+cart.  They were all drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the
+way to Dunure.  I told them it was; and my answer was received with
+unfeigned merriment.  One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly
+fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved by a companion, who
+either had not so fine a sense of humour or had drunken less.
+
+'The toune of Mayboll,' says the inimitable Abercrummie, {3}
+'stands upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open
+to the south.  It hath one principals street, with houses upon both
+sides, built of freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation
+of two castles, one at each end of this street.  That on the east
+belongs to the Erle of Cassilis.  On the west end is a castle,
+which belonged sometime to the laird of Blairquan, which is now the
+tolbuith, and is adorned with a pyremide [conical roof], and a row
+of ballesters round it raised from the top of the staircase, into
+which they have mounted a fyne clock.  There be four lanes which
+pass from the principall street; one is called the Black Vennel,
+which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads to a lower
+street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and it
+runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been
+many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
+countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert
+themselves in converse together at their owne houses.  It was once
+the principall street of the town; but many of these houses of the
+gentry having been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its
+ancient beautie.  Just opposite to this vennel, there is another
+that leads north-west, from the chiefe street to the green, which
+is a pleasant plott of ground, enclosed round with an earthen wall,
+wherein they were wont to play football, but now at the Gowff and
+byasse-bowls.  The houses of this towne, on both sides of the
+street, have their several gardens belonging to them; and in the
+lower street there be some pretty orchards, that yield store of
+good fruit.'  As Patterson says, this description is near enough
+even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot.  I am bound to
+add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary.
+Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though
+the population has increased, a roofless house every here and there
+seems to protest the contrary.  The women are more than well-
+favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and
+dissipated.  As they slouched at street corners, or stood about
+gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would have been more at home
+in the slums of a large city than here in a country place betwixt a
+village and a town.  I heard a great deal about drinking, and a
+great deal about religious revivals:  two things in which the
+Scottish character is emphatic and most unlovely.  In particular, I
+heard of clergymen who were employing their time in explaining to a
+delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming.  It is not
+very likely any of us will be asked to help. if we were, it is
+likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on
+more reliable authority.  And so I can only figure to myself a
+congregation truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as
+one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have fought the good
+fight to an end and outlived all worldly passion, and are to be
+regarded rather as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor,
+imperfect company on earth.  And yet I saw some young fellows about
+the smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count
+himself strait-laced, in need of some more practical sort of
+teaching.  They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do so
+speedily.  It was not much more than a week after the New Year; and
+to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable
+was not altogether pleasing.  Here is one snatch of talk, for the
+accuracy of which I can vouch-
+
+'Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?'
+
+'We had that!'
+
+'I wasna able to be oot o' my bed.  Man, I was awful bad on
+Wednesday.'
+
+'Ay, ye were gey bad.'
+
+And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual
+accents!  They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort
+of rational pride.  Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are
+not more boastful; a cock does not plume himself with a more
+unmingled satisfaction as he paces forth among his harem; and yet
+these were grown men, and by no means short of wit.  It was hard to
+suppose they were very eager about the Second Coming:  it seemed as
+if some elementary notions of temperance for the men and seemliness
+for the women would have gone nearer the mark.  And yet, as it
+seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is
+also typical of much that is best.  Some of the factories, which
+have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were
+originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
+sterling, stout old breed--fellows who made some little bit of an
+invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then,
+step by step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought their way
+upwards to an assured position.
+
+Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
+spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious
+to withhold:  'This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a
+Frenchman, the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors
+of the parish of Maiyboll.'  The Castle deserves more notice.  It
+is a large and shapely tower, plain from the ground upwards, but
+with a zone of ornamentation running about the top.  In a general
+way this adornment is perched on the very summit of the chimney-
+stacks; but there is one corner more elaborate than the rest.  A
+very heavy string-course runs round the upper story, and just above
+this, facing up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window,
+fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone heads.  It is so
+ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine.  And it was, indeed,
+the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
+gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old
+ballad of 'Johnnie Faa'--she who, at the call of the gipsies'
+songs, 'came tripping down the stair, and all her maids before
+her.'  Some people say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have
+written, I believe, unanswerable papers to the proof.  But in the
+face of all that, the very look of that high oriel window convinces
+the imagination, and we enter into all the sorrows of the
+imprisoned dame.  We conceive the burthen of the long, lack-lustre
+days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and saw
+the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children at
+play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray.  We
+conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her
+some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her
+eyes overflowed at the memory of the past.  And even if the tale be
+not true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is
+true in the essence of all men and women:  for all of us, some time
+or other, hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour
+cast.  Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire.  Most go and are
+brought back again, like Lady Cassilis.  A few, of the tribe of
+Waring, go and are seen no more; only now and again, at springtime,
+when the gipsies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can
+catch their voices in the glee.
+
+By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the
+day.  Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon
+battled the other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying
+silver; the town came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables,
+bestridden by smooth white roofs, and sprangled here and there with
+lighted windows.  At either end the snow stood high up in the
+darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the
+Castle.  As the moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the town
+between the racing clouds, the white roofs leaped into relief over
+the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over the white
+roofs.  In the town itself the lit face of the clock peered down
+the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and from
+behind the red curtains of a public-house some one trolled out--a
+compatriot of Burns, again!--'The saut tear blin's my e'e.'
+
+Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind.  From the street
+corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields.
+The road underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part
+water, and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 'A
+fine thowe' (thaw).  My way lay among rather bleak bills, and past
+bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the
+Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald.  It has little claim to
+notice, save that Burns came there to study surveying in the summer
+of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the original of Tam o'
+Shanter sleeps his last sleep.  It is worth noticing, however, that
+this was the first place I thought 'Highland-looking.'  Over the
+bill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast.  As I came
+down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different
+from the day before.  The cold fogs were all blown away; and there
+was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the
+Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran,
+veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue
+land of Cantyre.  Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the
+top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south.  The sea
+was bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down
+the Firth, lay over at different angles in the wind.  On Shanter
+they were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself,
+capered and whinnied as if the spring were in him.
+
+The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-
+hills and by wildernesses of tumbled bent.  Every here and there a
+few cottages stood together beside a bridge.  They had one odd
+feature, not easy to describe in words:  a triangular porch
+projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single
+upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be
+hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind
+was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular
+bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with
+comfort.  There is one objection to this device; for, as the post
+stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
+from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head.  So far as I
+am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about
+Girvan.  And that corner is noticeable for more reasons:  it is
+certainly one of the most characteristic districts in Scotland, It
+has this movable porch by way of architecture; it has, as we shall
+see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, and it has the
+handsomest population in the Lowlands. . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--FOREST NOTES 1875-6
+
+
+
+ON THE PLAIN
+
+
+Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of
+the Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of
+Fontainebleau.  Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the
+forest as if to sun themselves.  Here and there a few apple-trees
+stand together on a knoll.  The quaint, undignified tartan of a
+myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend
+and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
+accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
+against the sky.  Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of
+pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn
+and vast towards evening.  The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
+it were into the sea.  A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a
+harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods.  Another still works
+with his wife in their little strip.  An immense shadow fills the
+plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their
+heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved
+from time to time against the golden sky.
+
+These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
+overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
+representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of
+present times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days
+when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and
+lived, in Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows.  These
+very people now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that
+very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs
+of France.  It is they who have been their country's scapegoat for
+long ages; they who, generation after generation, have sowed and
+not reaped, reaped and another has garnered; and who have now
+entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in their
+turn.  For the days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and
+profited.  'Le Seigneur,' says the old formula, 'enferme ses
+manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre.  Tout est a
+lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete an
+buisson, l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.'
+Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a
+mere king.  And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look
+round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the country-side
+there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion.  At
+the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
+close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
+and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked
+roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun.  There is a glad
+spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
+flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade:  but no
+spring shall revive the honour of the place.  Old women of the
+people, little, children of the people, saunter and gambol in the
+walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.  Plough-
+horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables.  The dial-hand
+on the clock waits for some better hour.  Out on the plain, where
+hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and
+comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at
+his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold,
+which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper,
+while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night
+with empty bellies and cold feet.  And perhaps, as he raises his
+head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
+the sea-level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no
+unsimilar place in his affections.
+
+If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's;
+neither of them for this poor Jacques.  If he thought to eke out
+his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or
+for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole
+department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was
+a high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant
+like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform.
+For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of
+fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or
+circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be
+whipped, branded, or hanged.  There was a hangman over at Melun,
+and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
+Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
+market.
+
+And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more
+hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to
+trample it down.  My lord has a new horn from England.  He has laid
+out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting
+it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder.  The hounds have
+been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert
+in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a
+speciality of the health of hunting-dogs.  In the grey dawn the
+game was turned and the branch broken by our best piqueur.  A rare
+day's hunting lies before us.  Wind a jolly flourish, sound the
+bien-aller with all your lungs.  Jacques must stand by, hat in
+hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his
+field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
+been.  If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows
+but he may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may
+become the last and least among the servants at his lordship's
+kennel--one of the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at
+night among the hounds? {4}
+
+For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only
+warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of
+sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers
+and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some
+ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison.  In these
+dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of
+burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and
+fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
+gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
+from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming
+and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
+church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame.  It was but
+an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide
+all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers.  Often
+there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
+divisions of field from field.  And yet, as times went, when the
+wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
+was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
+caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.
+
+Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
+have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest,
+and noble by old associations.  These woods have rung to the horns
+of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards.  They
+have seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from
+Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his
+train; and Peter of Russia following his first stag.  And so they
+are still haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and
+progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore.
+And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead
+monarchs.
+
+Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of
+men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some
+significant and dramatic situation.  It was hence that Gruise and
+his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris.  Here,
+booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met
+the Pope beside a woodland cross.  Here, on his way to Elba not so
+long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words
+of passionate farewell to his soldiers.  And here, after Waterloo,
+rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful
+regiments burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the
+Grand Master's table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout
+priest consumes the remnants of the Host.
+
+
+IN THE SEASON
+
+
+Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
+bornage stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain
+small and very quiet village.  There is but one street, and that,
+not long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between
+the doorsteps.  As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the
+beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where
+artists lodge.  To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on
+some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of
+people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and
+waiting the omnibus from Melun.  If you go on into the court you
+will find as many more, some in billiard-room over absinthe and a
+match of corks some without over a last cigar and a vermouth.  The
+doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is drawing water
+from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can
+see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some
+idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
+jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-
+manger.  'Edmond, encore un vermouth,' cries a man in velveteen,
+adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought, 'un double, s'il vous
+plait.'  'Where are you working?' asks one in pure white linen from
+top to toe.  'At the Carrefour de l'Epine,' returns the other in
+corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way).  'I couldn't do a
+thing to it.  I ran out of white.  Where were you?'  'I wasn't
+working.  I was looking for motives.'  Here is an outbreak of
+jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about some new-
+comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the 'correspondence' has
+come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-
+and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.
+
+'A table, Messieurs!' cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
+first tureen of soup.  And immediately the company begins to settle
+down about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round
+with sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit.  There's the big
+picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his
+legs, and his legs--well, his legs in stockings.  And here is the
+little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a
+hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from the
+dessert.  And under all these works of art so much eating goes
+forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English,
+that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the
+door.  One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete
+at Fleury, and another how well so-and-so would sing of an evening:
+and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole future
+of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and
+making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most
+difficult and admirable!  A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a
+cigarette, and resigns himself to digestion.  A seventh has just
+dropped in, and calls for soup.  Number eight, meanwhile, has left
+the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano under powerful
+and uncertain fingers.
+
+Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat.  Perhaps we go
+along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
+there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
+pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening.  Or a dance is
+organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
+under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
+lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
+floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures,
+get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
+approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine.  Or sometimes--
+suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-
+lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light
+picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every
+vine-leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket
+made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
+The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the
+long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-
+trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and
+every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these
+two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.  We
+gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze
+flutters the shadows of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely
+beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall.  The
+bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding
+thimblefuls.  So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.
+And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal
+among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together
+again, as one of our leaders winds his horn.  Perhaps some one of
+the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
+his own.  As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the
+flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die
+finally out, and still walks on in the strange coolness and silence
+and between the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
+until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly,
+and he starts to find himself alone.  No surf-bell on forlorn and
+perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can
+speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
+Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind.
+And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent
+that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour
+out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away
+in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
+childhood passed between the sun and flowers.
+
+
+IDLE HOURS
+
+
+The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
+be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.
+The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these
+trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in
+the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these
+set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a
+foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a
+diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling,
+transitory surface of the sea.  And yet in itself, as I say, the
+strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully
+without the sense of contrast.  You must have risen in the morning
+and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the
+sun's light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at
+even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness
+of the groves.
+
+And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes.  If you
+have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous
+pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
+window--for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out--and the
+room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines
+all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights.  You may doze
+a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men
+and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the
+partitions:  Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in
+hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil.  Meanwhile
+artist after artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and
+then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a
+fagot, and sets of for what he calls his 'motive.'  And artist
+after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a
+little following of dogs.  For the dogs, who belong only nominally
+to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day
+long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by
+his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at
+hunting.  They would like to be under the trees all day.  But they
+cannot go alone.  They require a pretext.  And so they take the
+passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might
+take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe.  With quick ears, long
+spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with
+a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side
+all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth
+and wagging stunted tail.  Their good humour is not to be
+exhausted.  You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all
+they will do is to give you a wider berth.  If once they come out
+with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return;
+although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like
+as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.
+
+The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
+birds.  This is no country where every patch of wood among the
+meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered
+through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a
+profusion of clear notes.  And this rarity of birds is not to be
+regretted on its own account only.  For the insects prosper in
+their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt.  Ants
+swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever
+the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad
+transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and
+even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays
+into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual
+drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things
+between the trees.  Nor are insects the only evil creatures that
+haunt the forest.  For you may plump into a cave among the rocks,
+and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked
+viper slither across the road.
+
+Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
+beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a
+sudden by a friend:  'I say, just keep where you are, will you?
+You make the jolliest motive.'  And you reply:  'Well, I don't
+mind, if I may smoke.'  And thereafter the hours go idly by.  Your
+friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide
+shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
+sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
+another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.  You cannot watch
+your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk
+beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
+picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip
+through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the
+trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of
+light.  But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation
+with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the
+colour for a woodland scene in words.
+
+Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
+basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.
+All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight.  Everything stands
+out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained
+into its highest key.  The boulders are some of them upright and
+dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping
+cattle.  The junipers--looking, in their soiled and ragged
+mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the
+place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain--
+are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
+Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
+minuteness.  And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun,
+like misbegotten yew-trees!  The scene is all pitched in a key of
+colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent
+sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and not see.
+
+Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard
+to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress
+long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how
+white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat
+dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land.
+Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love;
+only to sit and remember loves that might have been.  There is a
+falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes
+back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm
+bed at night, with something of a forest savour.
+
+'You can get up now,' says the painter; 'I'm at the background.'
+
+And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the
+wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows
+stretching farther into the open.  A cool air comes along the
+highways, and the scents awaken.  The fir-trees breathe abroad
+their ozone.  Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret,
+aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven,
+but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long
+gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their
+brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.  One
+side of the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other
+is plunged in transparent shadow.  Over the trees the west begins
+to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels,
+and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.
+
+
+A PLEASURE-PARTY
+
+
+As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go
+in force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and
+ordered a large wagonette from Lejosne's.  It has been waiting for
+near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other
+hurried over his toilette and coffee; but now it is filled from end
+to end with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his
+whip, and amid much applause from round the inn door off we rattle
+at a spanking trot.  The way lies through the forest, up hill and
+down dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning
+sunshine.  The English get down at all the ascents and walk on
+ahead for exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this,
+and keep coyly underneath the tilt.  As we go we carry with us a
+pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some one will be
+always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.  Before we
+get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from
+Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with a case of
+merchandise; and it is 'Desprez, leave me some malachite green';
+'Desprez, leave me so much canvas'; 'Desprez, leave me this, or
+leave me that'; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with
+grave face and many salutations.  The next interruption is more
+important.  For some time back we have had the sound of cannon in
+our ears; and now, a little past Franchard, we find a mounted
+trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette to a stand.
+The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it appears;
+passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment.
+There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads
+and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most
+ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of
+Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks.  And meanwhile the
+doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is
+busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too
+facile sentry.  His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner
+dignified and insinuating.  It is not for nothing that the Doctor
+has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all languages from
+French to Patagonian.  He has not come borne from perilous journeys
+to be thwarted by a corporal of horse.  And so we soon see the
+soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart.
+'En voiture, Messieurs, Mesdames,' sings the Doctor; and on we go
+again at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us,
+and discretion prevails not a little over valour in some timorous
+spirits of the party.  At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who
+will send us back.  At any moment we may encounter a flying shell,
+which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez.
+
+Grez--for that is our destination--has been highly recommended for
+its beauty.  'Il y a de l'eau,' people have said, with an emphasis,
+as if that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am
+rather led to think it does.  And Grez, when we get there, is
+indeed a place worthy of some praise.  It lies out of the forest, a
+cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a
+quaint old church.  The inn garden descends in terraces to the
+river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed
+with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.  On the opposite
+bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with
+willows and poplars.  And between the two lies the river, clear and
+deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies.  Water-plants cluster
+about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way up
+upon the piers in green luxuriance.  They catch the dipped oar with
+long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of
+their leaves.  And the river wanders and thither hither among the
+islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old
+building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy.  You may
+watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for
+his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the
+yellow deal.  And you can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices
+from the shed under the old kirk, where the village women wash and
+wash all day among the fish and water-lilies.  It seems as if linen
+washed there should be specially cool and sweet.
+
+We have come here for the river.  And no sooner have we all bathed
+than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding
+under the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies.
+Some one sings; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean
+over the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below,
+and the shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own
+head protruded, glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream.
+At last, the day declining--all silent and happy, and up to the
+knees in the wet lilies--we punt slowly back again to the landing-
+place beside the bridge.  There is a wish for solitude on all.  One
+hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a walk
+in the country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church.  And it
+is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes
+round from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint
+and fuse once more into a jolly fellowship.
+
+Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some
+of the others, loath to break up company, will go with them a bit
+of the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte.  It is dark in the
+wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been.  The coachman
+loses the road.  So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most
+indifferent success.  Some sing, but the rest are too weary to
+applaud; and it seems as if the festival were fairly at an end -
+
+'Nous avons fait la noce,
+Rentrons a nos foyers!'
+
+And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and
+taken our places in the court at Mother Antonine's.  There is punch
+on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in
+summer weather.  The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces
+round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a
+background of complete and solid darkness.  It is all picturesque
+enough; but the fact is, we are aweary.  We yawn; we are out of the
+vein; we have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for
+pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't.  When here comes striding
+into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a
+jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and
+in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our
+laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-
+dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
+possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
+suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please.  We are as merry
+as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to
+all the good folk going farther.  Then, as we are far enough from
+thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an
+hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered
+with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by
+a wood fire in a mediaeval chimney.  And then we plod back through
+the darkness to the inn beside the river.
+
+How quick bright things come to confusion!  When we arise next
+morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and
+the face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops.
+Yesterday's lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally
+enough, their voyage towards the Seine and the salt sea.  A sickly
+shimmer lies upon the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is
+washed out of the green and golden landscape of last night, as
+though an envious man had taken a water-colour sketch and blotted
+it together with a sponge.  We go out a-walking in the wet roads.
+But the roads about Grez have a trick of their own.  They go on for
+a while among clumps of willows and patches of vine, and then,
+suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in some miry
+hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
+hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came!  So we draw
+about the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence,
+or go to the billiard-room, for a match at corks and by one consent
+a messenger is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-
+morrow.
+
+To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back
+for exercise, and let their kidnap-sacks follow by the trap.  I
+need hardly say they are neither of them French; for, of all
+English phrases, the phrase 'for exercise' is the least
+comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.  All goes well for a
+while with the pedestrians.  The wet woods are full of scents in
+the noontide.  At a certain cross, where there is a guardhouse,
+they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter of their
+good host at Barbizon.  And so there they are hospitably received
+by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
+prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince
+in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some
+prints of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting.  As they
+draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the
+big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a
+while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears
+and the rain beginning to fall.  The ways grow wider and sandier;
+here and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-
+shore; the fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks,
+and the race of sign-posts is no more.  One begins to look at the
+other doubtfully.  'I am sure we should keep more to the right,'
+says one; and the other is just as certain they should hold to the
+left.  And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls
+'sheer and strong and loud,' as out of a shower-bath.  In a moment
+they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors.  They cannot see out of
+their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their
+boots.  They leave the track and try across country with a
+gambler's desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make
+the situation worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from
+boulder to boulder, or plod along paths that are now no more than
+rivulets, and across waste clearings where the scattered shells and
+broken fir-trees tell all too plainly of the cannon in the
+distance.  And meantime the cannon grumble out responses to the
+grumbling thunder.  There is such a mixture of melodrama and sheer
+discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and so lurid, that
+it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the chimney-
+corner than to suffer in the person.  At last they chance on the
+right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest
+pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale.  Thence, by the
+Bois d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the
+clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.
+
+
+THE WOODS IN SPRING
+
+
+I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early
+springtime, when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable
+violets peep from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people
+at most sit down to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep
+a rug about your knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-
+manger opens on the court.  There is less to distract the
+attention, for one thing, and the forest is more itself.  It is not
+bedotted with artists' sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor
+bestrewn with the remains of English picnics.  The hunting still
+goes on, and at any moment your heart may be brought into your
+mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated
+peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes
+since, 'a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers.'
+
+If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills
+that permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of
+country, each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all
+mixed together and mingled the one into the other at the seams.
+You will see tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey,
+and leafless oaks a little ruddier in the hue.  Then zones of pine
+of a solemn green; and, dotted among the pines, or standing by
+themselves in rocky clearings, the delicate, snow-white trunks of
+birches, spreading out into snow-white branches yet more delicate,
+and crowned and canopied with a purple haze of twigs.  And then a
+long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with bright sand-breaks
+between them, and wavering sandy roads among the bracken and brown
+heather.  It is all rather cold and unhomely.  It has not the
+perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood in the
+later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
+shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
+of sunlight set in purple heather.  The loveliness of the woods in
+March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type.  It is made
+sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness.  It has a
+sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it as
+men acquire a taste for olives.  And the wonderful clear, pure air
+wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and
+makes the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune--
+or, rather, to an old tune; for you remember in your boyhood
+something akin to this spirit of adventure, this thirst for
+exploration, that now takes you masterfully by the hand, plunges
+you into many a deep grove, and drags you over many a stony crest.
+it is as if the whole wood were full of friendly voice, calling you
+farther in, and you turn from one side to another, like Buridan's
+donkey, in a maze of pleasure.
+
+Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches,
+barred with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched
+hand.  Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of
+underwood; thence the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great
+forest of stalwart boughs spreads out into the golden evening sky,
+where the rooks are flying and calling.  On the sward of the Bois
+d'Hyver the firs stand well asunder with outspread arms, like
+fencers saluting; and the air smells of resin all around, and the
+sound of the axe is rarely still.  But strangest of all, and in
+appearance oldest of all, are the dim and wizard upland districts
+of young wood.  The ground is carpeted with fir-tassel, and strewn
+with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark.  Rocks lie crouching in
+the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with lichen, white with
+years and the rigours of the changeful seasons.  Brown and yellow
+butterflies are sown and carried away again by the light air--like
+thistledown.  The loneliness of these coverts is so excessive, that
+there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge of fear.  You
+listen and listen for some noise to break the silence, till you
+grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your sense of
+your own identity is troubled; your brain reels, like that of some
+gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should
+you see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything of
+yours, but as a feature of the scene around you.
+
+Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always
+unbroken.  You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the
+tree-tops; sometimes briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes
+with a long steady rush, like the breaking of waves.  And
+sometimes, close at band, the branches move, a moan goes through
+the thicket, and the wood thrills to its heart.  Perhaps you may
+hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau, a bird gives a dry
+continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot, or you may time
+your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman's axe.
+From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks goes by;
+and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the ear,
+not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of
+voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places.
+Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs;
+scared deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a
+man or two running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a
+bandoleer; and then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar
+of rifle-shots.  Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are
+blown, and scarlet-coated huntsmen flash through the clearings, and
+the solid noise of horses galloping passes below you, where you sit
+perched among the rocks and heather.  The boar is afoot, and all
+over the forest, and in all neighbouring villages, there is a vague
+excitement and a vague hope; for who knows whither the chase may
+lead? and even to have seen a single piqueur, or spoken to a single
+sportsman, is to be a man of consequence for the night.
+
+Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are
+few people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters
+plying their axes steadily, and old women and children gathering
+wood for the fire.  You may meet such a party coming home in the
+twilight:  the old woman laden with a fagot of chips, and the
+little ones hauling a long branch behind them in her wake.  That is
+the worst of what there is to encounter; and if I tell you of what
+once happened to a friend of mine, it is by no means to tantalise
+you with false hopes; for the adventure was unique.  It was on a
+very cold, still, sunless morning, with a flat grey sky and a
+frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who shall here be
+nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
+hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green
+pine-tops, in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked
+boulders.  He drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated
+under a tree in an open.  The old father knitted a sock, the mother
+sat staring at the fire.  The eldest son, in the uniform of a
+private of dragoons, was choosing out notes on a key-bugle.  Two or
+three daughters lay in the neighbourhood picking violets.  And the
+whole party as grave and silent as the woods around them!  My
+friend watched for a long time, he says; but all held their peace;
+not one spoke or smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single
+notes upon the bugle, and the father knitted away at his work and
+made strange movements the while with his flexible eyebrows.  They
+took no notice whatever of my friend's presence, which was
+disquieting in itself, and increased the resemblance of the whole
+party to mechanical waxworks.  Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure
+might have played the bugle with more spirit than that strange
+dragoon.  And as this hypothesis of his became more certain, the
+awful insolubility of why they should be left out there in the
+woods with nobody to wind them up again when they ran down, and a
+growing disquietude as to what might happen next, became too much
+for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took to his heels.
+It might have been a singing in his ears, but he fancies he was
+followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.  Nothing has ever
+transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they were automata;
+or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean myself) that
+this is all another chapter of Heine's 'Gods in Exile'; that the
+upright old man with the eyebrows was no other than Father Jove,
+and the young dragoon with the taste for music either Apollo or
+Mars.
+
+
+MORALITY
+
+
+Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of
+men.  Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices
+have arisen to spread abroad its fame.  Half the famous writers of
+modern France have had their word to say about Fontainebleau.
+Chateaubriand, Michelet, Beranger, George Sand, de Senancour,
+Flaubert, Murger, the brothers Goncourt, Theodore de Banville, each
+of these has done something to the eternal praise and memory of
+these woods.  Even at the very worst of times, even when the
+picturesque was anathema in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the
+forest still preserved a certain reputation for beauty.  It was in
+1730 that the Abbe Guilbert published his Historical Description of
+the Palace, Town, and Forest of Fontainebleau.  And very droll it
+is to see him, as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of
+what was then permissible.  The monstrous rocks, etc., says the
+Abbe 'sont admirees avec surprise des voyageurs qui s'ecrient
+aussitot avec Horace:  Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari
+libet.'  The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you
+see how he sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak.
+Horace, at any rate, was classical.  For the rest, however, the
+Abbe likes places where many alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-
+Etoile, are kept up 'by a special gardener,' and admires at the
+Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and Waters,
+the Sieur de la Falure, 'qui a fait faire ce magnifique endroit.'
+
+But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes
+a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that
+quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so
+wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.  Disappointed men,
+sick Francis Firsts and vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind
+have come here for consolation.  Hither perplexed folk have retired
+out of the press of life, as into a deep bay-window on some night
+of masquerade, and here found quiet and silence, and rest, the
+mother of wisdom.  It is the great moral spa; this forest without a
+fountain is itself the great fountain of Juventius.  It is the best
+place in the world to bring an old sorrow that has been a long
+while your friend and enemy; and if, like Beranger's your gaiety
+has run away from home and left open the door for sorrow to come
+in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find the
+truant hid.  With every hour you change.  The air penetrates
+through your clothes, and nestles to your living body.  You love
+exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals.  You forget all
+your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the
+moment only.  For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral
+feeling.  Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or
+sorry; but you see them framed in the forest, like figures on a
+painted canvas; and for you, they are not people in any living and
+kindly sense.  You forget the grim contrariety of interests.  You
+forget the narrow lane where all men jostle together in
+unchivalrous contention, and the kennel, deep and unclean, that
+gapes on either hand for the defeated.  Life is simple enough, it
+seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes like a mad fancy out
+of a last night's dream.
+
+Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible.  You
+become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
+where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections.
+When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole
+round world.  You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on
+foot.  You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of
+saddle-bags, into the enchanted East.  You may cross the Black
+Forest, and see Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted
+with old cities, walled and spired, that dream all day on their own
+reflections in the Rhine or Danube.  You may pass the spinal cord
+of Europe and go down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends
+her marble moles and glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea.
+You may sleep in flying trains or wayside taverns.  You may be
+awakened at dawn by the scream of the express or the small pipe of
+the robin in the hedge.  For you the rain should allay the dust of
+the beaten road; the wind dry your clothes upon you as you walked.
+Autumn should hang out russet pears and purple grapes along the
+lane; inn after inn proffer you their cups of raw wine; river by
+river receive your body in the sultry noon.  Wherever you went warm
+valleys and high trees and pleasant villages should compass you
+about; and light fellowships should take you by the arm, and walk
+with you an hour upon your way.  You may see from afar off what it
+will come to in the end--the weather-beaten red-nosed vagabond,
+consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all near touch of
+human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast.  And yet it
+will seem well--and yet, in the air of the forest, this will seem
+the best--to break all the network bound about your feet by birth
+and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful of
+phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
+dissolvent.
+
+Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover.  For the forest is by
+itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
+land of labour.  Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
+the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes.  Not
+only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
+into their notion of a place.  If the sea, for instance, lie just
+across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
+the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-
+change.  And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness
+is for much in the effect produced.  You reckon up the miles that
+lie between you and intrusion.  You may walk before you all day
+long, and not fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble
+out of fairyland into the land of gin and steam-hammers.  And there
+is an old tale enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the
+woods of France, and secures you in the thought of your seclusion.
+When Charles VI. hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near
+Senlis, there was captured an old stag, having a collar of bronze
+about his neck, and these words engraved on the collar:  'Caesar
+mihi hoc donavit.'  It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved
+at this occurrence and they stood aghast to find themselves thus
+touching hands with forgotten ages, and following an antiquity with
+hound and horn.  And even for you, it is scarcely in an idle
+curiosity that you ponder how many centuries this stag had carried
+its free antlers through the wood, and how many summers and winters
+had shone and snowed on the imperial badge.  If the extent of
+solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the hunter's
+hounds and houses, might not you also play hide-and-seek, in these
+groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man's life, and
+elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of human
+years?  Here, also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest glade,
+sounds the gallop of the pale horse.  But he does not hunt this
+cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small:  and if
+you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest
+thickets, you too might live on into later generations and astonish
+men by your stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.
+
+For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die.  There is
+nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires.  Here all the
+impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more.  You may count
+your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter,
+or by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun
+wheeling his wide circuit through the naked heavens.  Here shall
+you see no enemies but winter and rough weather.  And if a pang
+comes to you at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger.  All
+the puling sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of
+duty that is no duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of
+these woods, fall away from you like a garment.  And if perchance
+you come forth upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you
+large and fresh, and the pines knock their long stems together,
+like an ungainly sort of puppets, and see far away over the plain a
+factory chimney defined against the pale horizon--it is for you, as
+for the staid and simple peasant when, with his plough, he upturns
+old arms and harness from the furrow of the glebe.  Ay, sure
+enough, there was a battle there in the old times; and, sure
+enough, there is a world out yonder where men strive together with
+a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.  So much you
+apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination.  A faint far-off
+rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as of some dead religion.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE {5} A FRAGMENT 1879
+Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of 'Travels
+with a Donkey in the Cevennes.'
+
+
+
+Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire,
+the ancient Velay.  As the name betokens, the town is of monastic
+origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a
+church of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-
+priest and several vicars.  It stands on the side of hill above the
+river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road
+where the wolves sometime pursue the diligence in winter.  The
+road, which is bound for Vivarais, passes through the town from end
+to end in a single narrow street; there you may see the fountain
+where women fill their pitchers; there also some old houses with
+carved doors and pediment and ornamental work in iron.  For
+Monastier, like Maybole in Ayrshire, was a sort of country capital,
+where the local aristocracy had their town mansions for the winter;
+and there is a certain baron still alive and, I am told, extremely
+penitent, who found means to ruin himself by high living in this
+village on the hills.  He certainly has claims to be considered the
+most remarkable spendthrift on record.  How he set about it, in a
+place where there are no luxuries for sale, and where the board at
+the best inn comes to little more than a shilling a day, is a
+problem for the wise.  His son, ruined as the family was, went as
+far as Paris to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and
+son mark an epoch in the history of centralisation in France.  Not
+until the latter had got into the train was the work of Richelieu
+complete.
+
+It is a people of lace-makers.  The women sit in the streets by
+groups of five or six; and the noise of the bobbins is audible from
+one group to another.  Now and then you will hear one woman
+clattering off prayers for the edification of the others at their
+work.  They wear gaudy shawls, white caps with a gay ribbon about
+the head, and sometimes a black felt brigand hat above the cap; and
+so they give the street colour and brightness and a foreign air.  A
+while ago, when England largely supplied herself from this district
+with the lace called torchon, it was not unusual to earn five
+francs a day; and five francs in Monastier is worth a pound in
+London.  Now, from a change in the market, it takes a clever and
+industrious work-woman to earn from three to four in the week, or
+less than an eighth of what she made easily a few years ago.  The
+tide of prosperity came and went, as with our northern pitmen, and
+left nobody the richer.  The women bravely squandered their gains,
+kept the men in idleness, and gave themselves up, as I was told, to
+sweethearting and a merry life.  From week's end to week's end it
+was one continuous gala in Monastier; people spent the day in the
+wine-shops, and the drum or the bagpipes led on the bourrees up to
+ten at night.  Now these dancing days are over.  'Il n'y a plus de
+jeunesse,' said Victor the garcon.  I hear of no great advance in
+what are thought the essentials of morality; but the bourree, with
+its rambling, sweet, interminable music, and alert and rustic
+figures, has fallen into disuse, and is mostly remembered as a
+custom of the past.  Only on the occasion of the fair shall you
+hear a drum discreetly in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company
+singing the measure while the others dance.  I am sorry at the
+change, and marvel once more at the complicated scheme of things
+upon this earth, and how a turn of fashion in England can silence
+so much mountain merriment in France.  The lace-makers themselves
+have not entirely forgiven our country-women; and I think they take
+a special pleasure in the legend of the northern quarter of the
+town, called L'Anglade, because there the English free-lances were
+arrested and driven back by the potency of a little Virgin Mary on
+the wall.
+
+From time to time a market is held, and the town has a season of
+revival; cattle and pigs are stabled in the streets; and
+pickpockets have been known to come all the way from Lyons for the
+occasion.  Every Sunday the country folk throng in with daylight to
+buy apples, to attend mass, and to visit one of the wine-shops, of
+which there are no fewer than fifty in this little town.  Sunday
+wear for the men is a green tailcoat of some coarse sort of
+drugget, and usually a complete suit to match.  I have never set
+eyes on such degrading raiment.  Here it clings, there bulges; and
+the human body, with its agreeable and lively lines, is turned into
+a mockery and laughing-stock.  Another piece of Sunday business
+with the peasants is to take their ailments to the chemist for
+advice.  It is as much a matter for Sunday as church-going.  I have
+seen a woman who had been unable to speak since the Monday before,
+wheezing, catching her breath, endlessly and painfully coughing;
+and yet she had waited upwards of a hundred hours before coming to
+seek help, and had the week been twice as long, she would have
+waited still.  There was a canonical day for consultation; such was
+the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study to
+conform.
+
+Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in
+polite concessions rather than in speed.  Each will wait an hour or
+two hours cheerfully while an old lady does her marketing or a
+gentleman finishes the papers in a cafe.  The Courrier (such is the
+name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and arrive
+at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier
+in good time for a six-o'clock dinner.  But the driver dares not
+disoblige his customers.  He will postpone his departure again and
+again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
+delay.  These purely personal favours, this consideration of men's
+fancies, rather than the hands of a mechanical clock, as marking
+the advance of the abstraction, time, makes a more humorous
+business of stage-coaching than we are used to see it.
+
+As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises
+and falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only
+to see new and father ranges behind these.  Many little rivers run
+from all sides in cliffy valleys; and one of them, a few miles from
+Monastier, bears the great name of Loire.  The mean level of the
+country is a little more than three thousand feet above the sea,
+which makes the atmosphere proportionally brisk and wholesome.
+There is little timber except pines, and the greater part of the
+country lies in moorland pasture.  The country is wild and tumbled
+rather than commanding; an upland rather than a mountain district;
+and the most striking as well as the most agreeable scenery lies
+low beside the rivers.  There, indeed, you will find many corners
+that take the fancy; such as made the English noble choose his
+grave by a Swiss streamlet, where nature is at her freshest, and
+looks as young as on the seventh morning.  Such a place is the
+course of the Gazeille, where it waters the common of Monastier and
+thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to hear birds
+singing; a place for lovers to frequent.  The name of the river was
+perhaps suggested by the sound of its passage over the stones; for
+it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed at
+Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell
+asleep.
+
+On the whole, this is a Scottish landscape, although not so noble
+as the best in Scotland; and by an odd coincidence, the population
+is, in its way, as Scottish as the country.  They have abrupt,
+uncouth, Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were
+trespassing, an 'Ou'st-ce que vous allez?' only translatable into
+the Lowland 'Whaur ye gaun?'  They keep the Scottish Sabbath.
+There is no labour done on that day but to drive in and out the
+various pigs and sheep and cattle that make so pleasant a tinkling
+in the meadows.  The lace-makers have disappeared from the street.
+Not to attend mass would involve social degradation; and you may
+find people reading Sunday books, in particular a sort of Catholic
+Monthly Visitor on the doings of Our Lady of Lourdes.  I remember
+one Sunday, when I was walking in the country, that I fell on a
+hamlet and found all the inhabitants, from the patriarch to the
+baby, gathered in the shadow of a gable at prayer.  One strapping
+lass stood with her back to the wall and did the solo part, the
+rest chiming in devoutly.  Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face
+asleep among some straw, to represent the worldly element.
+
+Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster's
+daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy,
+until she grew quite flushed.  I have heard the reverse process
+going on between a Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments
+in the two cases were identical.  Each apostle based her claim on
+the superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the
+business with a threat of hell-fire.  'Pas bong pretres ici,' said
+the Presbyterian, 'bong pretres en Ecosse.'  And the postmaster's
+daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied me, so to speak, with
+the butt of it instead of the bayonet.  We are a hopeful race, it
+seems, and easily persuaded for our good.  One cheerful
+circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each side
+relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address
+themselves to a supposed misgiving in their adversary's heart.  And
+I call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than
+imagination.
+
+Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy
+orders.  And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate.
+It is certainly not poverty that drives them to the great cities or
+across the seas, for many peasant families, I was told, have a
+fortune of at least 40,000 francs.  The lads go forth pricked with
+the spirit of adventure and the desire to rise in life, and leave
+their homespun elders grumbling and wondering over the event.
+Once, at a village called Laussonne, I met one of these
+disappointed parents:  a drake who had fathered a wild swan and
+seen it take wing and disappear.  The wild swan in question was now
+an apothecary in Brazil.  He had flown by way of Bordeaux, and
+first landed in America, bareheaded and barefoot, and with a single
+halfpenny in his pocket.  And now he was an apothecary!  Such a
+wonderful thing is an adventurous life!  I thought he might as well
+have stayed at home; but you never can tell wherein a man's life
+consists, nor in what he sets his pleasure:  one to drink, another
+to marry, a third to write scurrilous articles and be repeatedly
+caned in public, and now this fourth, perhaps, to be an apothecary
+in Brazil.  As for his old father, he could conceive no reason for
+the lad's behaviour.  'I had always bread for him,' he said; 'he
+ran away to annoy me.  He loved to annoy me.  He had no gratitude.'
+But at heart he was swelling with pride over his travelled
+offspring, and he produced a letter out of his pocket, where, as he
+said, it was rotting, a mere lump of paper rags, and waved it
+gloriously in the air.  'This comes from America,' he cried, 'six
+thousand leagues away!'  And the wine-shop audience looked upon it
+with a certain thrill.
+
+I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the
+country.  Ou'st que vous allez? was changed for me into Quoi, vous
+rentrez au Monastier and in the town itself every urchin seemed to
+know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it.
+There was one particular group of lace-makers who brought out a
+chair for me whenever I went by, and detained me from my walk to
+gossip.  They were filled with curiosity about England, its
+language, its religion, the dress of the women, and were never
+weary of seeing the Queen's head on English postage-stamps, or
+seeking for French words in English Journals.  The language, in
+particular, filled them with surprise.
+
+'Do they speak patois in England?'  I was once asked; and when I
+told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' said they.
+
+'No, no,' I said, 'not French.'
+
+'Then,' they concluded, 'they speak patois.'
+
+You must obviously either speak French or patios.  Talk of the
+force of logic--here it was in all its weakness.  I gave up the
+point, but proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon, I
+was met with a new mortification.  Of all patios they declared that
+mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in sound.  At
+each new word there was a new explosion of laughter, and some of
+the younger ones were glad to rise from their chairs and stamp
+about the street in ecstasy; and I looked on upon their mirth in a
+faint and slightly disagreeable bewilderment.  'Bread,' which
+sounds a commonplace, plain-sailing monosyllable in England, was
+the word that most delighted these good ladies of Monastier; it
+seemed to them frolicsome and racy, like a page of Pickwick; and
+they all got it carefully by heart, as a stand-by, I presume, for
+winter evenings.  I have tried it since then with every sort of
+accent and inflection, but I seem to lack the sense of humour.
+
+They were of all ages:  children at their first web of lace, a
+stripling girl with a bashful but encouraging play of eyes, solid
+married women, and grandmothers, some on the top of their age and
+some falling towards decrepitude.  One and all were pleasant and
+natural, ready to laugh and ready with a certain quiet solemnity
+when that was called for by the subject of our talk.  Life, since
+the fall in wages, had begun to appear to them with a more serious
+air.  The stripling girl would sometimes laugh at me in a
+provocative and not unadmiring manner, if I judge aright; and one
+of the grandmothers, who was my great friend of the party, gave me
+many a sharp word of judgment on my sketches, my heresy, or even my
+arguments, and gave them with a wry mouth and a humorous twinkle in
+her eye that were eminently Scottish.  But the rest used me with a
+certain reverence, as something come from afar and not entirely
+human.  Nothing would put them at their ease but the irresistible
+gaiety of my native tongue.  Between the old lady and myself I
+think there was a real attachment.  She was never weary of sitting
+to me for her portrait, in her best cap and brigand hat, and with
+all her wrinkles tidily composed, and though she never failed to
+repudiate the result, she would always insist upon another trial.
+It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment over the
+last.  'No, no,' she would say, 'that is not it.  I am old, to be
+sure, but I am better-looking than that.  We must try again.'  When
+I was about to leave she bade me good-bye for this life in a
+somewhat touching manner.  We should not meet again, she said; it
+was a long farewell, and she was sorry.  But life is so full of
+crooks, old lady, that who knows?  I have said good-bye to people
+for greater distances and times, and, please God, I mean to see
+them yet again.
+
+One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the
+oldest, and with hardly an exception.  In spite of their piety,
+they could twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person.  There
+was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human
+body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of
+it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment.  My
+landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided
+patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the
+language of a drunken bully.  And of all the swearers that I ever
+heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire.
+I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had
+finished it and took my departure.  It is true she had a right to
+be angry; for here was her son, a hulking fellow, visibly the worse
+for drink before the day was well begun.  But it was strange to
+hear her unwearying flow of oaths and obscenities, endless like a
+river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the
+clear and silent air of the morning.  In city slums, the thing
+might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a
+plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech surprised
+the ear.
+
+The Conductor, as he is called, of Roads and Bridges was my
+principal companion.  He was generally intelligent, and could have
+spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it was
+his specially to have a generous taste in eating.  This was what
+was most indigenous in the man; it was here he was an artist; and I
+found in his company what I had long suspected, that enthusiasm and
+special knowledge are the great social qualities, and what they are
+about, whether white sauce or Shakespeare's plays, an altogether
+secondary question.
+
+I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and
+grew to believe myself an expert in the business.  I thought I
+could make an entry in a stone-breaker's time-book, or order manure
+off the wayside with any living engineer in France.  Gondet was one
+of the places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
+apothecary's father, was another.  There, at Laussonne, George Sand
+spent a day while she was gathering materials for the Marquis de
+Villemer; and I have spoken with an old man, who was then a child
+running about the inn kitchen, and who still remembers her with a
+sort of reverence.  It appears that he spoke French imperfectly;
+for this reason George Sand chose him for companion, and whenever
+he let slip a broad and picturesque phrase in patois, she would
+make him repeat it again and again till it was graven in her
+memory.  The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it
+would be curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her
+works.  The peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so
+much as heard of local colour, could not explain her chattering
+with this backward child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady
+and far from beautiful:  the most famous man-killer of the age
+appealed so little to Velaisian swine-herds!
+
+On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials
+towards Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ardeche, I began an
+improving acquaintance with the foreman road-mender.  He was in
+great glee at having me with him, passed me off among his
+subalterns as the supervising engineer, and insisted on what he
+called 'the gallantry' of paying for my breakfast in a roadside
+wine-shop.  On the whole, he was a man of great weather-wisdom,
+some spirits, and a social temper.  But I am afraid he was
+superstitious.  When he was nine years old, he had seen one night a
+company of bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
+chaises, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
+Sabbath.  I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion,
+that this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party.
+Again, coming from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great
+empty cart drawn by six enormous horses before them on the road.
+The driver cried aloud and filled the mountains with the cracking
+of his whip.  He never seemed to go faster than a walk, yet it was
+impossible to overtake him; and at length, at the comer of a hill,
+the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the night.  At the time,
+people said it was the devil qui s'amusait a faire ca.
+
+I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
+amusement.
+
+The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of
+thing than formerly.  'C'est difficile,' he added, 'a expliquer.'
+
+When we were well up on the moors and the Conductor was trying some
+road-metal with the gauge -
+
+'Hark!' said the foreman, 'do you hear nothing?'
+
+We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the
+east, brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.
+
+'It is the flocks of Vivarais,' said he.
+
+For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
+pasture on these grassy plateaux.
+
+Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl,
+one spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently
+making lace.  This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a
+panic and put out her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a
+distance, and it was some seconds before we could persuade her of
+the honesty of our intentions.
+
+The Conductor told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
+asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled
+from him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
+information in despair.  A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read
+in these uncouth timidities.
+
+The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.
+Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail
+of their own fireside.  No man ventures abroad without meat and a
+bottle of wine, which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even
+thus equipped he takes the road with terror.  All day the family
+sits about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally
+without work or diversion.  The father may carve a rude piece of
+furniture, but that is all that will be done until the spring sets
+in again, and along with it the labours of the field.  It is not
+for nothing that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain
+habitations.  A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were
+indispensable in such a life . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--RANDOM MEMORIES:  ROSA QUO LOCORUM
+
+
+
+Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
+consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it
+should be not only interesting but instructive to inquire.  A
+matter of curiosity to-day, it will become the ground of science
+to-morrow.  From the mind of childhood there is more history and
+more philosophy to be fished up than from all the printed volumes
+in a library.  The child is conscious of an interest, not in
+literature but in life.  A taste for the precise, the adroit, or
+the comely in the use of words, comes late; but long before that he
+has enjoyed in books a delightful dress rehearsal of experience.
+He is first conscious of this material--I had almost said this
+practical--pre-occupation; it does not follow that it really came
+the first.  I have some old fogged negatives in my collection that
+would seem to imply a prior stage 'The Lord is gone up with a
+shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet'--memorial version, I
+know not where to find the text--rings still in my ear from my
+first childhood, and perhaps with something of my nurses accent.
+There was possibly some sort of image written in my mind by these
+loud words, but I believe the words themselves were what I
+cherished.  I had about the same time, and under the same
+influence--that of my dear nurse--a favourite author:  it is
+possible the reader has not heard of him--the Rev. Robert Murray
+M'Cheyne.  My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I
+must have been taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was
+breeched; and I remember two specimens of his muse until this day:-
+
+'Behind the hills of Naphtali
+The sun went slowly down,
+Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,
+A tinge of golden brown.'
+
+There is imagery here, and I set it on one side.  The other--it is
+but a verse--not only contains no image, but is quite
+unintelligible even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know
+not even how to spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my
+childhood:
+
+'Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her'; {6} -
+
+I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either,
+since I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse,
+from then to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation,
+has continued to haunt me.
+
+I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious
+and pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in
+images, words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture
+eloquent beyond their value.  Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes
+of memory, I came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm,
+'The Lord is my shepherd':  and from the places employed in its
+illustration, which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a
+house then occupied by my father, I am able, to date it before the
+seventh year of my age, although it was probably earlier in fact.
+The 'pastures green' were represented by a certain suburban
+stubble-field, where I had once walked with my nurse, under an
+autumnal sunset, on the banks of the Water of Leith:  the place is
+long ago built up; no pastures now, no stubble-fields; only a maze
+of little streets and smoking chimneys and shrill children.  Here,
+in the fleecy person of a sheep, I seemed to myself to follow
+something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant; and close by the
+sheep in which I was incarnated--as if for greater security--
+rustled the skirt, of my nurse.  'Death's dark vale' was a certain
+archway in the Warriston Cemetery:  a formidable yet beloved spot,
+for children love to be afraid,--in measure as they love all
+experience of vitality.  Here I beheld myself some paces ahead
+(seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny
+passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd's staff,
+such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod
+like a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff
+sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like
+one whispering, towards my ear.  I was aware--I will never tell you
+how--that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement.
+The third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-
+
+ 'My table Thou hast furnished
+ In presence of my foes:
+My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
+And my cup overflows':
+
+and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series.  I saw
+myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over
+my shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from
+an authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green
+court of a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white
+imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows.  The picture appears
+arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock
+analysed the dream of Alan Armadale.  The summer-house and court
+were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the
+imps conveyed from Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress; the bearded and
+robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the
+shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it
+figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed
+out to me as a jest by my father.  It was shown me for a jest,
+remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.
+Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an
+intermediary too trivial--that divine refreshment of whose meaning
+I had no guess; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn
+with delight, even as, a little later, I should have written
+flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word that might have
+appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean
+associations.  In this string of pictures I believe the gist of the
+psalm to have consisted; I believe it had no more to say to me; and
+the result was consolatory.  I would go to sleep dwelling with
+restfulness upon these images; they passed before me, besides, to
+an appropriate music; for I had already singled out from that rude
+psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in the minds of all, not
+growing old, not disgraced by its association with long Sunday
+tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age a companion
+thought:-
+
+'In pastures green Thou leadest me,
+The quiet waters by.'
+
+The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
+what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words.  If these
+pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great
+vacant world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful
+plots that I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and
+circumstances that I might call up before me, with closed eyes,
+when I was tired of Scotland, and home, and that weary prison of
+the sick-chamber in which I lay so long in durance.  Robinson
+Crusoe; some of the books of that cheerful, ingenious, romantic
+soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather gruesome and bloody for a
+child, but very picturesque, called Paul Blake; these are the three
+strongest impressions I remember:  The Swiss Family Robinson came
+next, longo intervallo.  At these I played, conjured up their
+scenes, and delighted to hear them rehearsed unto seventy times
+seven.  I am not sure but what Paul Blake came after I could read.
+It seems connected with a visit to the country, and an experience
+unforgettable.  The day had been warm; H--- and I had played
+together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness across the road;
+then came the evening with a great flash of colour and a heavenly
+sweetness in the air.  Somehow my play-mate had vanished, or is out
+of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent into the village on
+an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down alone
+through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.  How often since then has
+it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first time:
+the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my
+mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then that I
+knew I loved reading.
+
+
+II
+
+
+To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great
+and dangerous step.  With not a few, I think a large proportion of
+their pleasure then comes to an end; 'the malady of not marking'
+overtakes them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear
+never again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately
+period.  Non ragioniam of these.  But to all the step is dangerous;
+it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning.  In
+the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they
+digested, they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the
+books of childhood.  In the future we are to approach the silent,
+inexpressive type alone, like pioneers; and the choice of what we
+are to read is in our own hands thenceforward.  For instance, in
+the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my
+old nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my
+infancy, reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to
+read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on
+assonances and alliterations.  I know very well my mother must have
+been all the while trying to educate my taste upon more secular
+authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse
+triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these earliest
+volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery
+rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.
+
+I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
+school Readers.  We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on
+the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in
+'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to
+have surpassed myself.  'Robert's voice,' said the master on this
+memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive':  an opinion
+which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me
+for years in consequence.  I am sure one should not be so
+deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-
+
+'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,
+Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'
+
+I think this quip would leave us cold.  The 'Isles of Greece' seem
+rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
+Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'
+
+'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
+Whither flies the silent lark?' -
+
+does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon
+these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy,
+impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel?  And there was
+another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten;
+many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again,
+and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some
+inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom
+Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.
+
+But in the Reader we are still under guides.  What a boy turns out
+for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
+pleasure.  My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
+proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity,
+cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the
+chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners
+that anything really legible existed as by accident.  The Parent's
+Assistant, Rob Roy, Waverley, and Guy Mannering, the Voyages of
+Captain Woods Rogers, Fuller's and Bunyan's Holy Wars, The
+Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female Bluebeard, G. Sand's
+Mare au Diable--(how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's
+Tower of London, and four old volumes of Punch--these were the
+chief exceptions.  In these latter, which made for years the chief
+of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could
+spell) with the Snob Papers.  I knew them almost by heart,
+particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise
+when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed
+with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were
+the works of Mr. Punch.  Time and again I tried to read Rob Roy,
+with whom of course I was acquainted from the Tales of a
+Grandfather; time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and
+(think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never
+forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one
+summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with
+Andrew Fairservice.  'The worthy Dr. Lightfoot'--'mistrysted with a
+bogle'--'a wheen green trash'--'Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her':
+from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten.  I read
+on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow
+Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with
+transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about
+my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into
+the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith
+recalled me to myself.  With that scene and the defeat of Captain
+Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the
+little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no
+more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed
+before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or
+saw Rashleigh dying in the chair.  When I think of that novel and
+that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows
+and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this
+awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's
+by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.  Perhaps
+Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are
+always the most real.  And yet I had read before this Guy
+Mannering, and some of Waverley, with no such delighted sense of
+truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of
+the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or
+to the same degree.  One circumstance is suspicious:  my critical
+estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I
+was ten.  Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet first; then, a
+little lower; The Fortunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf,
+Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein:  the rest nowhere; such was the
+verdict of the boy.  Since then The Antiquary, St. Ronan's Well,
+Kenilworth, and The Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale;
+perhaps Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein have gone a trifle down;
+Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted
+world of Rob Roy; I think more of the letters in Redgauntlet, and
+Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about
+with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to
+the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress.  But the rest
+is the same; I could not finish The Pirate when I was a child, I
+have never finished it yet; Peveril of the Peak dropped half way
+through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since waded to
+an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was quite
+without enjoyment.  There is something disquieting in these
+considerations.  I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part
+of the Book of Snobs:  does that mean that I was right when I was a
+child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the
+child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into
+the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
+sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE IDEAL HOUSE
+
+
+
+Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to
+spend a life:  a desert and some living water.
+
+There are many parts of the earth's face which offer the necessary
+combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.  A great
+prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even
+greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye
+measure differently.  Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting
+than distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a
+fine forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble
+mountains.  A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and
+there upon a knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of
+Provence overgrown with rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma,
+are places where the mind is never weary.  Forests, being more
+enclosed, are not at first sight so attractive, but they exercise a
+spell; they must, however, be diversified with either heath or
+rock, and are hardly to be considered perfect without conifers.
+Even sand-hills, with their intricate plan, and their gulls and
+rabbits, will stand well for the necessary desert.
+
+The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea.
+A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood;
+its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the
+distance of one notable object from another; and a lively burn
+gives us, in the space of a few yards, a greater variety of
+promontory and islet, of cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool,
+with answerable changes both of song and colour, than a navigable
+stream in many hundred miles.  The fish, too, make a more
+considerable feature of the brookside, and the trout plumping in
+the shadow takes the ear.  A stream should, besides, be narrow
+enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or we are at once
+shut out of Eden.  The quantity of water need be of no concern, for
+the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara Fall of thirty
+inches.  Let us approve the singer of
+
+'Shallow rivers, by whose falls
+Melodious birds sing madrigals.'
+
+If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard
+with a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small
+havens and dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a
+first necessity, rocks reaching out into deep water.  Such a rock
+on a calm day is a better station than the top of Teneriffe or
+Chimborazo.  In short, both for the desert and the water, the
+conjunction of many near and bold details is bold scenery for the
+imagination and keeps the mind alive.
+
+Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we
+are to live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside
+the garden, we can construct a country of our own.  Several old
+trees, a considerable variety of level, several well-grown hedges
+to divide our garden into provinces, a good extent of old well-set
+turf, and thickets of shrubs and ever-greens to be cut into and
+cleared at the new owner's pleasure, are the qualities to be sought
+for in your chosen land.  Nothing is more delightful than a
+succession of small lawns, opening one out of the other through
+tall hedges; these have all the charm of the old bowling-green
+repeated, do not require the labour of many trimmers, and afford a
+series of changes.  You must have much lawn against the early
+summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, the year's morning
+frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full the
+period of their blossoming.  Hawthorn is another of the Spring's
+ingredients; but it is even best to have a rough public lane at one
+side of your enclosure which, at the right season, shall become an
+avenue of bloom and odour.  The old flowers are the best and should
+grow carelessly in corners.  Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find
+an old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect,
+and to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of
+nature and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake.
+The gardener should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the
+kitchen plots:  an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden
+landscape; a tasteful gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the
+borders raw, and take the bloom off nature.  Close adjoining, if
+you are in the south, an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded
+apple-orchard reaching to the stream, completes your miniature
+domain; but this is perhaps best entered through a door in the high
+fruit-wall; so that you close the door behind you on your sunny
+plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle, when you go down to watch
+the apples falling in the pool.  It is a golden maxim to cultivate
+the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
+Nor must the ear be forgotten:  without birds a garden is a prison-
+yard.  There is a garden near Marseilles on a steep hill-side,
+walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear will suddenly be
+ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing:  some
+score of cages being set out there to sun their occupants.  This is
+a heavenly surprise to any passer-by; but the price paid, to keep
+so many ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will make
+the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-lover.  There is
+only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I
+think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-
+d'Argent.  I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the
+quiet, hire house upon a silent street where I was then living,
+their song, which was not much louder than a bee's, but airily
+musical, kept me in a perpetual good humour.  I put the cage upon
+my table when I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals,
+and kept it by my head at night:  the first thing in the morning,
+these maestrini would pipe up.  But these, even if you can pardon
+their imprisonment, are for the house.  In the garden the wild
+birds must plant a colony, a chorus of the lesser warblers that
+should be almost deafening, a blackbird in the lilacs, a
+nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll to hear it, and
+yet a little farther, tree-tops populous with rooks.
+
+Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep
+and green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a
+knoll, for the sake of drainage.  Yet it must be open to the east,
+or you will miss the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you
+can go up a few steps and look the other way.  A house of more than
+two stories is a mere barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story,
+raised upon cellars.  If the rooms are large, the house may be
+small:  a single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more
+palatial than a castleful of cabinets and cupboards.  Yet size in a
+house, and some extent and intricacy of corridor, is certainly
+delightful to the flesh.  The reception room should be, if
+possible, a place of many recesses, which are 'petty retiring
+places for conference'; but it must have one long wall with a
+divan:  for a day spent upon a divan, among a world of cushions, is
+as full of diversion as to travel.  The eating-room, in the French
+mode, should be ad hoc:  unfurnished, but with a buffet, the table,
+necessary chairs, one or two of Canaletto's etchings, and a tile
+fire-place for the winter.  In neither of these public places
+should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of books; but the
+passages may be one library from end to end, and the stair, if
+there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very brightly
+carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to a
+windowed recess with a fire-place; this window, almost alone in the
+house, should command a handsome prospect.  Husband and wife must
+each possess a studio; on the woman's sanctuary I hesitate to
+dwell, and turn to the man's.  The walls are shelved waist-high for
+books, and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the
+wall.  Above are prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot
+and a Claude or two.  The room is very spacious, and the five
+tables and two chairs are but as islands.  One table is for actual
+work, one close by for references in use; one, very large, for MSS.
+or proofs that wait their turn; one kept clear for an occasion; and
+the fifth is the map table, groaning under a collection of large-
+scale maps and charts.  Of all books these are the least wearisome
+to read and the richest in matter; the course of roads and rivers,
+the contour lines and the forests in the maps--the reefs,
+soundings, anchors, sailing marks and little pilot-pictures in the
+charts--and, in both, the bead-roll of names, make them of all
+printed matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy the fancy.
+The chair in which you write is very low and easy, and backed into
+a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; close at the other, if
+you are a little inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering
+into song.
+
+Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-
+roofed, and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with
+bright marble, is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a
+capacious boiler.
+
+The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided
+chamber; here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or
+actual countries in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy
+pigments; a carpenter's bench; and a spared corner for photography,
+while at the far end a space is kept clear for playing soldiers.
+Two boxes contain the two armies of some five hundred horse and
+foot; two others the ammunition of each side, and a fifth the foot-
+rules and the three colours of chalk, with which you lay down, or,
+after a day's play, refresh the outlines of the country; red or
+white for the two kinds of road (according as they are suitable or
+not for the passage of ordnance), and blue for the course of the
+obstructing rivers.  Here I foresee that you may pass much happy
+time; against a good adversary a game may well continue for a
+month; for with armies so considerable three moves will occupy an
+hour.  It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion
+if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the
+operations in the character of army correspondent.
+
+I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings.  This
+should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor
+thick with rich furs.  The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic
+quality on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the
+seats deep and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust
+or so upon a bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table
+for the books of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves
+full of eternal books that never weary:  Shakespeare, Moliere,
+Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's comedies (the one volume open
+at Carmosine and the other at Fantasio); the Arabian Nights, and
+kindred stories, in Weber's solemn volumes; Borrow's Bible in
+Spain, the Pilgrim's Progress, Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, Monte
+Cristo and the Vicomte de Bragelonne, immortal Boswell sole among
+biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the State Trials.
+
+The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
+varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf
+of books of a particular and dippable order, such as Pepys, the
+Paston Letters, Burt's Letters from the Highlands, or the Newgate
+Calendar. . . .
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--DAVOS IN WINTER
+
+
+
+A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
+the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an
+invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most
+effective kind.  The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one
+footpath dodging up the hill; but to these the health-seeker is
+rigidly confined.  There are for him no cross-cuts over the field,
+no following of streams, no unguided rambles in the wood.  His
+walks are cut and dry.  In five or six different directions he can
+push as far, and no farther, than his strength permits; never
+deviating from the line laid down for him and beholding at each
+repetition the same field of wood and snow from the same corner of
+the road.  This, of itself, would be a little trying to the
+patience in the course of months; but to this is added, by the
+heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of detail and an
+almost unbroken identity of colour.  Snow, it is true, is not
+merely white.  The sun touches it with roseate and golden lights.
+Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness of tiny
+sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful
+depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is
+still water, and has watery tones of blue.  But, when all is said,
+these fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a
+trite and staring substitute for the infinite variety and
+pleasantness of the earth's face.  Even a boulder, whose front is
+too precipitous to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon
+it in your walk, a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost
+painfully of other places, and brings into your head the delights
+of more Arcadian days--the path across the meadow, the hazel dell,
+the lilies on the stream, and the scents, the colours, and the
+whisper of the woods.  And scents here are as rare as colours.
+Unless you get a gust of kitchen in passing some hotel, you shall
+smell nothing all day long but the faint and choking odour of
+frost.  Sounds, too, are absent:  not a bird pipes, not a bough
+waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere.  If a sleigh goes by, the
+sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to
+no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the
+frozen snow.
+
+It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from
+one end to the other.  Go where you please, houses will still be in
+sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left.  Climb as
+high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
+nested in the wood.  Nor is that all; for about the health resort
+the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
+about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to
+learn to jodel, and by German couples silently and, as you venture
+to fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love's young dream.  You may
+perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks
+about.  Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption--
+and at the second stampede of jodellers you find your modest
+inspiration fled.  Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it
+may try your nerves to have some one always in front whom you are
+visibly overtaking, and some one always behind who is audibly
+overtaking you, to say nothing of a score or so who brush past you
+in an opposite direction.  It may annoy you to take your walks and
+seats in public view.  Alas! there is no help for it among the
+Alps.  There are no recesses, as in Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill;
+no sacred solitude of olive gardens on the Roccabruna-road; no nook
+upon Saint Martin's Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and
+fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea-
+pines and the sea.
+
+For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the
+storms of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure,
+chequer and by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-
+weather scenes.  When sun and storm contend together--when the
+thick clouds are broken up and pierced by arrows of golden
+daylight--there will be startling rearrangements and
+transfigurations of the mountain summits.  A sun-dazzling spire of
+alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms and blackness; or
+perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will be designed
+in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance bright like
+a constellation, and alone 'in the unapparent.'  You may think you
+know the figure of these hills; but when they are thus revealed,
+they belong no longer to the things of earth--meteors we should
+rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but for a
+moment and return no more.  Other variations are more lasting, as
+when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some
+windless hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each
+stock-still and loaded with a shining burthen.  You may drive
+through a forest so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling
+silently in the cleft of the ravine, and all still except the
+jingle of the sleigh bells, and you shall fancy yourself in some
+untrodden northern territory--Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.
+
+Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down
+stairs in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by
+the glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find
+yourself by seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a
+freezing chill.  The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on,
+and you reach the top of the ascent in the first hour of the day.
+To trace the fires of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak,
+to see the unlit tree-tops stand out soberly against the lighted
+sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading
+shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half
+glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the
+greyness of the western heaven--these will seem to repay you for
+the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and
+these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther
+side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal black, with
+such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
+senseless watercourse bickering along the foot.  You have had your
+moment; but you have not changed the scene.  The mountains are
+about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold
+the sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can
+change only one for another.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
+
+
+
+There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has
+followed in the lives of sick folk.  A year or two ago and the
+wounded soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some
+basking angle of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting
+in dusty olive-yards within earshot of the interminable and
+unchanging surf--idle among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying,
+yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after
+livelier weather and some vivifying change.  These were certainly
+beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing in its
+softness.  Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine; you were
+not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
+would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death.  There was a
+lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
+bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that
+here was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.
+And it appears, after all, that there was something just in these
+appreciations.  The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a
+ruder air shall medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be
+fled from, but bearded in his den.  For even Winter has his  'dear
+domestic cave,' and in those places where he may be said to dwell
+for ever tempers his austerities.
+
+Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental
+railroad of America must remember the joy with which he perceived,
+after the tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and
+dismal moorlands of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone,
+the southern sky.  It is among these mountains in the new State of
+Colorado that the sick man may find, not merely an alleviation of
+his ailments, but the possibility of an active life and an honest
+livelihood.  There, no longer as a lounger in a plaid, but as a
+working farmer, sweating at his work, he may prolong and begin anew
+his life.  Instead of the bath-chair, the spade; instead of the
+regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest, and the pure, rare
+air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room--these
+are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and of
+self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors,
+none but an invalid can know.  Resignation, the cowardice that apes
+a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts,
+is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect.  The man can open the
+door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
+and not merely an invalid.
+
+But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains.  We cannot all of us go
+farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
+the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of
+the old.  Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its
+wholesome duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but
+this time at a great altitude, far among the mountains, with the
+snow piled before his door and the frost flowers every morning on
+his window.  The mere fact is tonic to his nerves.  His choice of a
+place of wintering has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of
+bold contract; and, since he has wilfully sought low temperatures,
+he is not so apt to shudder at a touch of chill.  He came for that,
+he looked for it, and he throws it from him with the thought.
+
+A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either
+hand that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the
+higher you climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a
+village of hotels; a world of black and white--black pine-woods,
+clinging to the sides of the valley, and white snow flouring it,
+and papering it between the pine-woods, and covering all the
+mountains with a dazzling curd; add a few score invalids marching
+to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating on the ice-rinks,
+possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the door of the
+hotel--and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.
+A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace
+never varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it;
+and its unchanging, senseless hurry is strangely tedious to
+witness.  It is a river that a man could grow to hate.  Day after
+day breaks with the rarest gold upon the mountain spires, and
+creeps, growing and glowing, down into the valley.  From end to end
+the snow reverberates the sunshine; from end to end the air tingles
+with the light, clear and dry like crystal.  Only along the course
+of the river, but high above it, there hangs far into the noon, one
+waving scarf of vapour.  It were hard to fancy a more engaging
+feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe that
+delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of the
+incontinent stream whose course it follows.  By noon the sky is
+arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour--mild and pale and melting
+in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of
+purple blue.  What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable
+lustre of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos.  An English
+painter, coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger
+that 'the values were all wrong.'  Had he got among the Alps on a
+bright day he might have lost his reason.  And even to any one who
+has looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the
+spectacles of representative art, the scene has a character of
+insanity.  The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your
+eye; the neighbouring dull-coloured house in comparison is miles
+away; the summit, which is all of splendid snow, is close at hand;
+the nigh slopes, which are black with pine trees, bear it no
+relation, and might be in another sphere.  Here there are none of
+those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty joinings-on and
+spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art of air and
+light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself in
+climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely.  A glaring
+piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism
+and defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding
+definition; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more
+than scenically trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the
+nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile:  such is the winter
+daytime in the Alps.
+
+With the approach of evening all is changed.  A mountain will
+suddenly intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten
+minutes the thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that
+are no longer shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile,
+overhead, if the weather be rightly characteristic of the place,
+the sky fades towards night through a surprising key of colours.
+The latest gold leaps from the last mountain.  Soon, perhaps, the
+moon shall rise, and in her gentler light the valley shall be
+mellowed and misted, and here and there a wisp of silver cloud upon
+a hilltop, and here and there a warmly glowing window in a house,
+between fire and starlight, kind and homely in the fields of snow.
+
+But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be
+eternally exempt from changes.  The clouds gather, black as ink;
+the wind bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead,
+the snow-flakes flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail
+comes in later from the top of the pass; people peer through their
+windows and foresee no end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and
+death by gradual dry-rot, each in his indifferent inn; and when at
+last the storm goes, and the sun comes again, behold a world of
+unpolluted snow, glossy like fur, bright like daylight, a joy to
+wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls of men.  Or perhaps from
+across storied and malarious Italy, a wind cunningly winds about
+the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean, upon our mountain
+valley.  Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience recognises, at a
+gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown; and the
+whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently
+recognises the empire of the Fohn.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI--ALPINE DIVERSIONS
+
+
+
+There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium.  The
+place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in
+double column, text and translation; but it still remains half
+German; and hence we have a band which is able to play, and a
+company of actors able, as you will be told, to act.  This last you
+will take on trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet,
+confine themselves to German and though at the beginning of winter
+they come with their wig-boxes to each hotel in turn, long before
+Christmas they will have given up the English for a bad job.  There
+will follow, perhaps, a skirmish between the two races; the German
+element seeking, in the interest of their actors, to raise a
+mysterious item, the Kur-taxe, which figures heavily enough already
+in the weekly bills, the English element stoutly resisting.
+Meantime in the English hotels home-played farces, tableaux-
+vivants, and even balls enliven the evenings; a charity bazaar
+sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year are solemnised
+with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the young folks
+carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures of a
+singing quadrille.
+
+A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the Quarterly to
+the Sunday at Home.  Grand tournaments are organised at chess,
+draughts, billiards and whist.  Once and again wandering artists
+drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going
+you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the
+hierarchy of musical art, from the recognised performer who
+announces a concert for the evening, to the comic German family or
+solitary long-haired German baritone, who surprises the guests at
+dinner-time with songs and a collection.  They are all of them good
+to see; they, at least, are moving; they bring with them the
+sentiment of the open road; yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol,
+and next week they will be far in Lombardy, while all we sick folk
+still simmer in our mountain prison.  Some of them, too, are
+welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake; some of them may
+have a human voice; some may have that magic which transforms a
+wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call a fiddle
+into what we mention with respect as a violin.  From that grinding
+lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies the beat
+of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference
+rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing
+that bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the
+true virtuoso.  Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so
+you will own it impossible to enjoy it more keenly than here, im
+Schnee der Alpen.  A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses
+packed in moss, or a piece of music by some one who knows the way
+to the heart of a violin, are things that, in this invariable
+sameness of the snows and frosty air, surprise you like an
+adventure.  It is droll, moreover, to compare the respect with
+which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready contempt with
+which they greet the dinner-time performers.  Singing which they
+would hear with real enthusiasm--possibly with tears--from a corner
+of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is offered
+by an unknown professional and no money has been taken at the door.
+
+Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks
+must be intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to
+many days of vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes
+well, it is certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the
+invalid to skate under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in
+a sweat, through long tracts of glare and passages of freezing
+shadow.  But the peculiar outdoor sport of this district is
+tobogganing.  A Scotchman may remember the low flat board, with the
+front wheels on a pivot, which was called a hurlie; he may remember
+this contrivance, laden with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran
+rattling down the brae, and was, now successfully, now
+unsuccessfully, steered round the corner at the foot; he may
+remember scented summer evenings passed in this diversion, and many
+a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson.  The
+toboggan is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is a
+hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a
+long declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of
+the tobogganist.  The correct position is to sit; but the fantastic
+will sometimes sit hind-foremost, or dare the descent upon their
+belly or their back.  A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks,
+but it is more classical to use the feet.  If the weight be heavy
+and the track smooth, the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth;
+and to steer a couple of full-sized friends in safety requires not
+only judgment but desperate exertion.  On a very steep track, with
+a keen evening frost, you may have moments almost too appalling to
+be called enjoyment; the head goes, the world vanishes; your blind
+steed bounds below your weight; you reach the foot, with all the
+breath knocked out of your body, jarred and bewildered as though
+you had just been subjected to a railway accident.  Another element
+of joyful horror is added by the formation of a train; one toboggan
+being tied to another, perhaps to the number of half a dozen, only
+the first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest pledged to
+put up their feet and follow their leader, with heart in mouth,
+down the mad descent.  This, particularly if the track begins with
+a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the
+world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to
+somersaults.
+
+There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some
+miles in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short
+rivers, furious in their brevity.  All degrees of skill and courage
+and taste may be suited in your neighbourhood.  But perhaps the
+true way to toboggan is alone and at night.  First comes the
+tedious climb, dragging your instrument behind you.  Next a long
+breathing-space, alone with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and
+solemn to the heart.  Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way;
+she begins to feel the hill, to glide, to, swim, to gallop.  In a
+breath you are out from under the pine trees, and a whole heavenful
+of stars reels and flashes overhead.  Then comes a vicious effort;
+for by this time your wooden steed is speeding like the wind, and
+you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering valley
+and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at your
+feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
+night with close-shut teeth and beating heart.  Yet a little while
+and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own
+hotel.  This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of
+frost, in a night made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with
+strange white mountains, teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and
+adds a new excitement to the life of man upon his planet.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII--THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS
+
+
+
+To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps,
+the row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first
+surprise.  He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would
+lose his pains, for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears
+the mark of sickness on his face.  The plump sunshine from above
+and its strong reverberation from below colour the skin like an
+Indian climate; the treatment, which consists mainly of the open
+air, exposes even the sickliest to tan, and a tableful of invalids
+comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful of hunters.  But
+although he may be thus surprised at the first glance, his
+astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects of
+the climate on himself.  In many ways it is a trying business to
+reside upon the Alps:  the stomach is exercised, the appetite often
+languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you have come
+so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you
+shall recover.  But one thing is undeniable--that in the rare air,
+clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a
+certain troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be
+paralleled.  He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.
+It does not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he
+feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate
+climates.  It may not be health, but it is fun.
+
+There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this
+baseless ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile
+joyousness of spirits.  You wake every morning, see the gold upon
+the snow-peaks, become filled with courage, and bless God for your
+prolonged existence.  The valleys are but a stride to you; you cast
+your shoe over the hilltops; your ears and your heart sing; in the
+words of an unverified quotation from the Scotch psalms, you feel
+yourself fit 'on the wings of all the winds' to 'come flying all
+abroad.'  Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of
+energy.  Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your
+bed; that you start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are
+unusually ready to turn home again; that the best of you is
+volatile; and that although the restlessness remains till night,
+the strength is early at an end.  With all these heady jollities,
+you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you
+prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you
+have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark,
+that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with
+you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your
+inn.
+
+It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters
+is its own reward.  Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth
+more permanent improvements.  The dream of health is perfect while
+it lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out
+the dear hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you
+are conscious of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in
+living as merry as it proves to be transient.
+
+The brightness--heaven and earth conspiring to be bright--the
+levity and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence--more
+stirring than a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted
+landscape:  all have their part in the effect and on the memory,
+'tous vous tapent sur la tete'; and yet when you have enumerated
+all, you have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the
+delicate exhilaration that you feel--delicate, you may say, and yet
+excessive, greater than can be said in prose, almost greater than
+an invalid can bear.  There is a certain wine of France known in
+England in some gaseous disguise, but when drunk in the land of its
+nativity still as a pool, clean as river water, and as heady as
+verse.  It is more than probable that in its noble natural
+condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved by Athos in
+the 'Musketeers.'  Now, if the reader has ever washed down a
+liberal second breakfast with the wine in question, and gone forth,
+on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling noontide,
+he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although strangely
+grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the snow
+and sunshine of the Alps.  That also is a mode, we need not say of
+intoxication, but of insobriety.  Thus also a man walks in a strong
+sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
+meditations.  And whether he be really so clever or so strong as he
+supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.
+
+The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary
+ways.  A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been
+recognised, and may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as
+a sort peculiar to that climate.  People utter their judgments with
+a cannonade of syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them;
+and the turn of a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom.  By
+the professional writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone.
+At first he cannot write at all.  The heart, it appears, is unequal
+to the pressure of business, and the brain, left without
+nourishment, goes into a mild decline.  Next, some power of work
+returns to him, accompanied by jumping headaches.  Last, the spring
+is opened, and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant,
+hustling polysyllables, and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be
+positively offensive in hot weather.  He writes it in good faith
+and with a sense of inspiration; it is only when he comes to read
+what he has written that surprise and disquiet seize upon his mind.
+What is he to do, poor man?  All his little fishes talk like
+whales.  This yeasty inflation, this stiff and strutting
+architecture of the sentence has come upon him while he slept; and
+it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame.  He is not,
+perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.  Nor is the ill
+without a remedy.  Some day, when the spring returns, he shall go
+down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
+and more modest language.  But here, in the meantime, there seems
+to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time
+coming, when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper
+measured level for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract;
+and a nook may be found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr.
+Swinburne shall be able to write more continently, and Mr. Browning
+somewhat slower.
+
+Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain?  It is
+a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all
+goes well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.
+It is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions,
+all the chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with
+vociferous nightmares, and many wakeful people come down late for
+breakfast in the morning.  Upon that theory the cynic may explain
+the whole affair--exhilaration, nightmares, pomp of tongue and all.
+But, on the other hand, the peculiar blessedness of boyhood may
+itself be but a symptom of the same complaint, for the two effects
+are strangely similar; and the frame of mind of the invalid upon
+the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth, with periods of
+lassitude.  The fountain of Juventus does not play steadily in
+these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII--ROADS--1873
+
+
+
+No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single
+drawing, over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so
+gradually study himself into humour with the artist, than he can
+ever extract from the dazzle and accumulation of incongruous
+impressions that send him, weary and stupefied, out of some famous
+picture-gallery.  But what is thus admitted with regard to art is
+not extended to the (so-called) natural beauties no amount of
+excess in sublime mountain outline or the graces of cultivated
+lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to weaken or degrade the
+palate.  We are not at all sure, however, that moderation, and a
+regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are not healthful and
+strengthening to the taste; and that the best school for a lover of
+nature is not to the found in one of those countries where there is
+no stage effect--nothing salient or sudden,--but a quiet spirit of
+orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the details, so that we
+can patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike in
+us, all of them together, the subdued note of the landscape.  It is
+in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the right temper
+to seek out small sequestered loveliness.  The constant recurrence
+of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon
+us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become
+familiar with something of nature's mannerism.  This is the true
+pleasure of your 'rural voluptuary,'--not to remain awe-stricken
+before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in
+the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty--to
+experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before
+evaded him.  It is not the people who 'have pined and hungered
+after nature many a year, in the great city pent,' as Coleridge
+said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself;
+it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy
+with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto
+to enjoy.  In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge
+and long-continued loving industry that make the true dilettante.
+A man must have thought much over scenery before he begins fully to
+enjoy it.  It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can
+possess itself of the last essence of beauty.  Probably most
+people's heads are growing bare before they can see all in a
+landscape that they have the capability of seeing; and, even then,
+it will be only for one little moment of consummation before the
+faculties are again on the decline, and they that look out of the
+windows begin to be darkened and restrained in sight.  Thus the
+study of nature should be carried forward thoroughly and with
+system.  Every gratification should be rolled long under the
+tongue, and we should be always eager to analyse and compare, in
+order that we may be able to give some plausible reason for our
+admirations.  True, it is difficult to put even approximately into
+words the kind of feelings thus called into play.  There is a
+dangerous vice inherent in any such intellectual refining upon
+vague sensation.  The analysis of such satisfactions lends itself
+very readily to literary affectations; and we can all think of
+instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise a morbid
+influence, even upon an author's choice of language and the turn of
+his sentences.  And yet there is much that makes the attempt
+attractive; for any expression, however imperfect, once given to a
+cherished feeling, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure we
+take in it.  A common sentiment is one of those great goods that
+make life palatable and ever new.  The knowledge that another has
+felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are little
+things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to
+the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.
+
+Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have
+recommended to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape.  In
+those homely and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will
+bring into relief many things worthy of notice, and urge them
+pleasantly home to him by a sort of loving repetition; such as the
+wonderful life-giving speed of windmill sails above the stationary
+country; the occurrence and recurrence of the same church tower at
+the end of one long vista after another:  and, conspicuous among
+these sources of quiet pleasure, the character and variety of the
+road itself, along which he takes his way.  Not only near at hand,
+in the lithe contortions with which it adapts itself to the
+interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when he sees a
+few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining in the
+afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and
+enlivening that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it.
+He may leave the river-side, or fall out of the way of villages,
+but the road he has always with him; and, in the true humour of
+observation, will find in that sufficient company.  From its subtle
+windings and changes of level there arises a keen and continuous
+interest, that keeps the attention ever alert and cheerful.  Every
+sensitive adjustment to the contour of the ground, every little dip
+and swerve, seems instinct with life and an exquisite sense of
+balance and beauty.  The road rolls upon the easy slopes of the
+country, like a long ship in the hollows of the sea.  The very
+margins of waste ground, as they trench a little farther on the
+beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of the hedge, have
+something of the same free delicacy of line--of the same swing and
+wilfulness.  You might think for a whole summer's day (and not have
+thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse and
+succession of circumstances has produced the least of these
+deflections; and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look
+for the secret of their interest.  A foot-path across a meadow--in
+all its human waywardness and unaccountability, in all the grata
+protervitas of its varying direction--will always be more to us
+than a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. {7}
+No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention:  we seem to have
+slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause
+and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old
+heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and
+attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to
+the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and
+cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our
+eyes.  We remember, as we write, some miles of fine wide highway
+laid out with conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken and
+richly cultivated tract of country.  It is said that the engineer
+had Hogarth's line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down.  And
+the result is striking.  One splendid satisfying sweep passes with
+easy transition into another, and there is nothing to trouble or
+dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the road.
+And yet there is something wanting.  There is here no saving
+imperfection, none of those secondary curves and little
+trepidations of direction that carry, in natural roads, our
+curiosity actively along with them.  One feels at once that this
+road has not has been laboriously grown like a natural road, but
+made to pattern; and that, while a model may be academically
+correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and cold.  The
+traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between himself and
+the road he travels.  We have all seen ways that have wandered into
+heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over the dunes
+like a trodden serpent.  Here we too must plod forward at a dull,
+laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our frame of
+mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
+roadway.  Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps
+resolve with a little trouble.  We might reflect that the present
+road had been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by
+generations of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression
+a testimony that those generations had been affected at the same
+ground, one after another, in the same manner as we are affected
+to-day.  Or we might carry the reflection further, and remind
+ourselves that where the air is invigorating and the ground firm
+under the traveller's foot, his eye is quick to take advantage of
+small undulations, and he will turn carelessly aside from the
+direct way wherever there is anything beautiful to examine or some
+promise of a wider view; so that even a bush of wild roses may
+permanently bias and deform the straight path over the meadow;
+whereas, where the soil is heavy, one is preoccupied with the
+labour of mere progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily and
+unobservantly forward.  Reason, however, will not carry us the
+whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in situations where it is
+very hard to imagine any possible explanation; and indeed, if we
+drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open vehicle, we
+shall experience this sympathy almost at its fullest.  We feel the
+sharp settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner; after
+a steep ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle
+precipitately down the other side, and we find it difficult to
+avoid attributing something headlong, a sort of ABANDON, to the
+road itself.
+
+The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day's walk
+in even a commonplace or dreary country-side.  Something that we
+have seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from
+us, as we wander through folded valleys or among woods, that our
+expectation of seeing it again is sharpened into a violent
+appetite, and as we draw nearer we impatiently quicken our steps
+and turn every corner with a beating heart.  It is through these
+prolongations of expectancy, this succession of one hope to
+another, that we live out long seasons of pleasure in a few hours'
+walk.  It is in following these capricious sinuosities that we
+learn, only bit by bit and through one coquettish reticence after
+another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole
+loveliness of the country.  This disposition always preserves
+something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to
+many different points of distant view before it allows us finally
+to approach the hoped-for destination.
+
+In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse
+with the country, there is something very pleasant in that
+succession of saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by,
+that peoples our ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls
+'the cheerful voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of
+the road.'  But out of the great network of ways that binds all
+life together from the hill-farm to the city, there is something
+individual to most, and, on the whole, nearly as much choice on the
+score of company as on the score of beauty or easy travel.  On some
+we are never long without the sound of wheels, and folk pass us by
+so thickly that we lose the sense of their number.  But on others,
+about little-frequented districts, a meeting is an affair of
+moment; we have the sight far off of some one coming towards us,
+the growing definiteness of the person, and then the brief passage
+and salutation, and the road left empty in front of us for perhaps
+a great while to come.  Such encounters have a wistful interest
+that can hardly be understood by the dweller in places more
+populous.  We remember standing beside a countryman once, in the
+mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that was more than ordinarily
+crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and bewildered by the
+continual passage of different faces; and after a long pause,
+during which he appeared to search for some suitable expression, he
+said timidly that there seemed to be a GREAT DEAL OF MEETING
+THEREABOUTS.  The phrase is significant.  It is the expression of
+town-life in the language of the long, solitary country highways.
+A meeting of one with one was what this man had been used to in the
+pastoral uplands from which he came; and the concourse of the
+streets was in his eyes only an extraordinary multiplication of
+such 'meetings.'
+
+And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to
+that sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully
+to our minds by a road.  In real nature, as well as in old
+landscapes, beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole
+variegated plain is plunged and saturated, the line of the road
+leads the eye forth with the vague sense of desire up to the green
+limit of the horizon.  Travel is brought home to us, and we visit
+in spirit every grove and hamlet that tempts us in the distance.
+Sehnsucht--the passion for what is ever beyond--is livingly
+expressed in that white riband of possible travel that severs the
+uneven country; not a ploughman following his plough up the shining
+furrow, not the blue smoke of any cottage in a hollow, but is
+brought to us with a sense of nearness and attainability by this
+wavering line of junction.  There is a passionate paragraph in
+Werther that strikes the very key.  'When I came hither,' he
+writes, 'how the beautiful valley invited me on every side, as I
+gazed down into it from the hill-top!  There the wood--ah, that I
+might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain summits--ah, that I
+might look down from them over the broad country! the interlinked
+hills! the secret valleys!  Oh to lose myself among their
+mysteries!  I hurried into the midst, and came back without finding
+aught I hoped for.  Alas! the distance is like the future.  A vast
+whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling
+alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to
+surrender our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the
+rapture of one single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten
+to the fruition, when THERE is changed to HERE, all is afterwards
+as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate,
+and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.'  It is to this
+wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.
+Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies
+before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can
+outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods,
+and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in
+the windings of the valleys that are still far in front.  The road
+is already there--we shall not be long behind.  It is as if we were
+marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard
+the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly
+and jubilant city.  Would not every man, through all the long miles
+of march, feel as if he also were within the gates?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV--ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES--1874
+
+
+
+It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and
+we have much in our own power.  Things looked at patiently from one
+side after another generally end by showing a side that is
+beautiful.  A few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio
+as to an 'austere regimen in scenery'; and such a discipline was
+then recommended as 'healthful and strengthening to the taste.'
+That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay.  This
+discipline in scenery, it must be understood, is something more
+than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the appetite.  For when
+we are put down in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially if
+we have come to be more or less dependent on what we see, we must
+set ourselves to hunt out beautiful things with all the ardour and
+patience of a botanist after a rye plant.  Day by day we perfect
+ourselves in the art of seeing nature more favourably.  We learn to
+live with her, as people learn to live with fretful or violent
+spouses:  to dwell lovingly on what is good, and shut our eyes
+against all that is bleak or inharmonious.  We learn, also, to come
+to each place in the right spirit.  The traveller, as Brantome
+quaintly tells us,  'fait des discours en soi pour soutenir en
+chemin'; and into these discourses he weaves something out of all
+that he sees and suffers by the way; they take their tone greatly
+from the varying character of the scene; a sharp ascent brings
+different thoughts from a level road; and the man's fancies grow
+lighter as he comes out of the wood into a clearing.  Nor does the
+scenery any more affect the thoughts than the thoughts affect the
+scenery.  We see places through our humours as through differently
+coloured glasses.  We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note
+of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will.  There is
+no fear for the result, if we can but surrender ourselves
+sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows us, so that
+we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves some
+suitable sort of story as we go.  We become thus, in some sense, a
+centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle
+and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in
+others.  And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the
+quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a
+place with some attraction of romance.  We may learn to go far
+afield for associations, and handle them lightly when we have found
+them.  Sometimes an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a
+spot lit up at once with picturesque imaginations, by a
+reminiscence of Callot, or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.  Dick Turpin has
+been my lay figure for many an English lane.  And I suppose the
+Trossachs would hardly be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man
+of admirable romantic instinct had not peopled it for them with
+harmonious figures, and brought them thither with minds rightly
+prepared for the impression.  There is half the battle in this
+preparation.  For instance:  I have rarely been able to visit, in
+the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable places of our own
+Highlands.  I am happier where it is tame and fertile, and not
+readily pleased without trees.  I understand that there are some
+phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such
+surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the
+imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put
+themselves into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way
+of life that was in its place upon these savage hills.  Now, when I
+am sad, I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David
+before Saul; and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in
+me but an unpleasant pity; so that I can never hit on the right
+humour for this sort of landscape, and lose much pleasure in
+consequence.  Still, even here, if I were only let alone, and time
+enough were given, I should have all manner of pleasures, and take
+many clear and beautiful images away with me when I left.  When we
+cannot think ourselves into sympathy with the great features of a
+country, we learn to ignore them, and put our head among the grass
+for flowers, or pore, for long times together, over the changeful
+current of a stream.  We come down to the sermon in stones, when we
+are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape.  We begin to
+peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects, we
+find many things beautiful in miniature.  The reader will recollect
+the little summer scene in Wuthering Heights--the one warm scene,
+perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel--and the great
+feature that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little
+sunshine:  this is in the spirit of which I now speak.  And,
+lastly, we can go indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful,
+often more picturesque, than the shows of the open air, and they
+have that quality of shelter of which I shall presently have more
+to say.
+
+With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the
+paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it
+is only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few
+hours agreeably.  For, if we only stay long enough we become at
+home in the neighbourhood.  Reminiscences spring up, like flowers,
+about uninteresting corners.  We forget to some degree the superior
+loveliness of other places, and fall into a tolerant and
+sympathetic spirit which is its own reward and justification.
+Looking back the other day on some recollections of my own, I was
+astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence; six weeks
+in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to quicken
+and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that jumped
+more nearly with my inclination.
+
+The country to which I refer was a level and tree-less plateau,
+over which the winds cut like a whip.  For miles and miles it was
+the same.  A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I
+resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as
+far up as ever I had the heart to follow it.  There were roads,
+certainly, but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there
+was no timber, and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your
+whole walk exposed to you from the beginning:  there was nothing
+left to fancy, nothing to expect, nothing to see by the wayside,
+save here and there an unhomely-looking homestead, and here and
+there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker; and you were only
+accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the gaunt telegraph-
+posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen sea-wind.  To
+one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant places by
+the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make it
+still bleaker by suggested contrast.  Even the waste places by the
+side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, 'taken
+back to Nature' by any decent covering of vegetation.  Wherever the
+land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.  There is a certain
+tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a
+lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this
+was of another description--this was the nakedness of the North;
+the earth seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and
+cold.
+
+It seemed to be always blowing on that coast.  Indeed, this had
+passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each
+other when they met with 'Breezy, breezy,' instead of the customary
+'Fine day' of farther south.  These continual winds were not like
+the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure against
+your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking over
+your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the
+country after a shower.  They were of the bitter, hard, persistent
+sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the
+eyes sore.  Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper
+time and place.  It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses
+of shadow.  And what a power they have over the colour of the
+world!  How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and
+make them shudder and whiten like a single willow!  There is
+nothing more vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods,
+with all its sights and noises; and the effect gets between some
+painters and their sober eyesight, so that, even when the rest of
+their picture is calm, the foliage is coloured like foliage in a
+gale.  There was nothing, however, of this sort to be noticed in a
+country where there were no trees and hardly any shadows, save the
+passive shadows of clouds or those of rigid houses and walls.  But
+the wind was nevertheless an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere
+could you taste more fully the pleasure of a sudden lull, or a
+place of opportune shelter.  The reader knows what I mean; he must
+remember how, when he has sat himself down behind a dyke on a
+hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss vainly through the
+crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth,
+and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that
+the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
+hills all marbled with sun and shadow.  Wordsworth, in a beautiful
+passage of the 'Prelude,' has used this as a figure for the feeling
+struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of
+the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other
+way with as good effect:-
+
+'Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,
+Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
+Abruptly into some sequester'd nook,
+Still as a shelter'd place when winds blow loud!'
+
+I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
+have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of
+escape.  He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a
+great cathedral somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral,
+the great unfinished marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in
+dark stairways, he issued at last into the sunshine, on a platform
+high above the town.  At that elevation it was quite still and
+warm; the gale was only in the lower strata of the air, and he had
+forgotten it in the quiet interior of the church and during his
+long ascent; and so you may judge of his surprise when, resting his
+arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking over into the Place far
+below him, he saw the good people holding on their hats and leaning
+hard against the wind as they walked.  There is something, to my
+fancy, quite perfect in this little experience of my fellow-
+traveller's.  The ways of men seem always very trivial to us when
+we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the blue sky and a
+few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs and
+foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city
+streets; but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as
+he stood, not only above other men's business, but above other
+men's climate, in a golden zone like Apollo's!
+
+This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I
+write.  The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in
+memory all the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter.  And it was
+only by the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found.
+Between the black worm-eaten head-lands there are little bights and
+havens, well screened from the wind and the commotion of the
+external sea, where the sand and weeds look up into the gazer's
+face from a depth of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming
+and flickering from the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and
+the sunshine.  One such place has impressed itself on my memory
+beyond all others.  On a rock by the water's edge, old fighting men
+of the Norse breed had planted a double castle; the two stood wall
+to wall like semi-detached villas; and yet feud had run so high
+between their owners, that one, from out of a window, shot the
+other as he stood in his own doorway.  There is something in the
+juxtaposition of these two enemies full of tragic irony.  It is
+grim to think of bearded men and bitter women taking hateful
+counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, when the sea
+boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was loose
+over the battlements.  And in the study we may reconstruct for
+ourselves some pale figure of what life then was.  Not so when we
+are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to
+intensify a contrary impression, and association is turned against
+itself.  I remember walking thither three afternoons in succession,
+my eyes weary with being set against the wind, and how, dropping
+suddenly over the edge of the down, I found myself in a new world
+of warmth and shelter.  The wind, from which I had escaped, 'as
+from an enemy,' was seemingly quite local.  It carried no clouds
+with it, and came from such a quarter that it did not trouble the
+sea within view.  The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks
+about them, were still distinguishable from these by something more
+insecure and fantastic in the outline, something that the last
+storm had left imminent and the next would demolish entirely.  It
+would be difficult to render in words the sense of peace that took
+possession of me on these three afternoons.  It was helped out, as
+I have said, by the contrast.  The shore was battered and bemauled
+by previous tempests; I had the memory at heart of the insane
+strife of the pigmies who had erected these two castles and lived
+in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and knew I had only to put
+my head out of this little cup of shelter to find the hard wind
+blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great tracts of
+motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned and
+apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of
+the precarious past.  There is ever something transitory and
+fretful in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it
+seems to have no root in the constitution of things; it must
+speedily begin to faint and wither away like a cut flower.  And on
+those days the thought of the wind and the thought of human life
+came very near together in my mind.  Our noisy years did indeed
+seem moments in the being of the eternal silence; and the wind, in
+the face of that great field of stationary blue, was as the wind of
+a butterfly's wing.  The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise
+to be remembered.  Shelley speaks of the sea as 'hungering for
+calm,' and in this place one learned to understand the phrase.
+Looking down into these green waters from the broken edge of the
+rock, or swimming leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that
+they were enjoying their own tranquillity; and when now and again
+it was disturbed by a wind ripple on the surface, or the quick
+black passage of a fish far below, they settled back again (one
+could fancy) with relief.
+
+On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so
+subdued and still that the least particular struck in me a
+pleasurable surprise.  The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in
+the afternoon sun usurped the ear.  The hot, sweet breath of the
+bank, that had been saturated all day long with sunshine, and now
+exhaled it into my face, was like the breath of a fellow-creature.
+I remember that I was haunted by two lines of French verse; in some
+dumb way they seemed to fit my surroundings and give expression to
+the contentment that was in me, and I kept repeating to myself -
+
+'Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,
+Sitot qu'on le touche, il resonne.'
+
+I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and
+for that very cause I repeat them here.  For all I know, they may
+serve to complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they
+were certainly a part of it for me.
+
+And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked
+least to stay.  When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own
+ingratitude.  'Out of the strong came forth sweetness.'  There, in
+the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my strongest
+impression of peace.  I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the
+earth, in that little corner, was all alive and friendly to me.
+So, wherever a man is, he will find something to please and pacify
+him:  in the town he will meet pleasant faces of men and women, and
+see beautiful flowers at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at
+the corner of the gloomiest street; and for the country, there is
+no country without some amenity--let him only look for it in the
+right spirit, and he will surely find.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  The Second Part here referred to is entitled 'ACROSS THE
+PLAINS,' and is printed in the volume so entitled, together with
+other Memories and Essays.
+
+{2}  I had nearly finished the transcription of the following pages
+when I saw on a friend's table the number containing the piece from
+which this sentence is extracted, and, struck with a similarity of
+title, took it home with me and read it with indescribable
+satisfaction.  I do not know whether I more envy M. Theuriet the
+pleasure of having written this delightful article, or the reader
+the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of reading it
+once and again, and lingering over the passages that please him
+most.
+
+{3}  William Abercrombie.  See Fasti Ecclesia Scoticanae, under
+'Maybole' (Part iii.).
+
+{4}  'Duex poures varlez qui n'ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la
+nuit avec les chiens.'  See Champollion--Figeac's Louis et Charles
+d'Orleans, i. 63, and for my lord's English horn, ibid. 96.
+
+{5}  Reprinted by permission of John Lane.
+
+{6}  'Jehovah Tsidkenu,' translated in the Authorised Version as
+'The Lord our Righteousness' (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. 16).
+
+{7}  Compare Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
+'Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads, without
+improvement, are roads of Genius.'
+
+
+
+
+
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+<title>Essays of Travel</title>
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">Essays of Travel, by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays of Travel, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Essays of Travel
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: August, 1996  [EBook #627]
+[This file was first posted on July 3, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: September 2, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+ESSAYS OF TRAVEL<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Contents<br>
+<br>
+THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT: FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE SECOND CABIN<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;EARLY IMPRESSION<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;STEERAGE IMPRESSIONS<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;STEERAGE TYPES<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE SICK MAN<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE STOWAWAYS<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NEW YORK<br>
+COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;COCKERMOUTH<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;AN EVANGELIST<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ANOTHER<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LAST OF SMETHURST<br>
+AN AUTUMN EFFECT<br>
+A WINTER&rsquo;S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY<br>
+FOREST NOTES -<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ON THE PLAINS<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;IN THE SEASON<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;IDLE HOURS<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A PLEASURE-PARTY<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;THE WOODS IN SPRING<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MORALITY<br>
+A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE<br>
+RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM<br>
+THE IDEAL HOUSE<br>
+DAVOS IN WINTER<br>
+HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS<br>
+ALPINE DIVERSION<br>
+THE STUMULATION OF THE ALPS<br>
+ROADS<br>
+ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE SECOND CABIN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.&nbsp;
+Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking askance
+on each other as on possible enemies.&nbsp; A few Scandinavians, who
+had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly and voluble
+over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and suspicion
+reigned supreme.&nbsp; The sun was soon overclouded, the wind freshened
+and grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening estuary; and
+with the falling temperature the gloom among the passengers increased.&nbsp;
+Two of the women wept.&nbsp; Any one who had come aboard might have
+supposed we were all absconding from the law.&nbsp; There was scarce
+a word interchanged, and no common sentiment but that of cold united
+us, until at length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and
+a rush to the starboard now announced that our ocean steamer was in
+sight.&nbsp; There she lay in mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her
+sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses,
+an aspiring forest of spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as
+populous as many an incorporated town in the land to which she was to
+bear us.<br>
+<br>
+I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger.&nbsp; Although anxious to
+see the worst of emigrant life, I had some work to finish on the voyage,
+and was advised to go by the second cabin, where at least I should have
+a table at command.&nbsp; The advice was excellent; but to understand
+the choice, and what I gained, some outline of the internal disposition
+of the ship will first be necessary.&nbsp; In her very nose is Steerage
+No. 1, down two pair of stairs.&nbsp; A little abaft, another companion,
+labelled Steerage No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three galleries, two
+running forward towards Steerage No. 1, and the third aft towards the
+engines.&nbsp; The starboard forward gallery is the second cabin.&nbsp;
+Away abaft the engines and below the officers&rsquo; cabins, to complete
+our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third nest of steerages, labelled
+4 and 5.&nbsp; The second cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis
+in the very heart of the steerages.&nbsp; Through the thin partition
+you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes
+as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the
+crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean
+flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement.<br>
+<br>
+There are, however, many advantages for the inhabitant of this strip.&nbsp;
+He does not require to bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths
+and a table completely if somewhat roughly furnished.&nbsp; He enjoys
+a distinct superiority in diet; but this, strange to say, differs not
+only on different ships, but on the same ship according as her head
+is to the east or west.&nbsp; In my own experience, the principal difference
+between our table and that of the true steerage passenger was the table
+itself, and the crockery plates from which we ate.&nbsp; But lest I
+should show myself ungrateful, let me recapitulate every advantage.&nbsp;
+At breakfast we had a choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a
+choice not easy to make, the two were so surprisingly alike.&nbsp; I
+found that I could sleep after the coffee and lay awake after the tea,
+which is proof conclusive of some chemical disparity; and even by the
+palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff in the former from a flavour
+of boiling and dish-cloths in the second.&nbsp; As a matter of fact,
+I have seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting which had been
+supplied them.&nbsp; In the way of eatables at the same meal we were
+gloriously favoured; for in addition to porridge, which was common to
+all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish, and sometimes rissoles.&nbsp;
+The dinner of soup, roast fresh beef, boiled salt junk, and potatoes,
+was, I believe, exactly common to the steerage and the second cabin;
+only I have heard it rumoured that our potatoes were of a superior brand;
+and twice a week, on pudding-days, instead of duff, we had a saddle-bag
+filled with currants under the name of a plum-pudding.&nbsp; At tea
+we were served with some broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in the
+comparatively elegant form of spare patties or rissoles; but as a general
+thing mere chicken-bones and flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold.&nbsp;
+If these were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied them sorely;
+yet we were all too hungry to be proud, and fell to these leavings greedily.&nbsp;
+These, the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and porridge which
+were both good, formed my whole diet throughout the voyage; so that
+except for the broken meat and the convenience of a table I might as
+well have been in the steerage outright.&nbsp; Had they given me porridge
+again in the evening, I should have been perfectly contented with the
+fare.&nbsp; As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky and water
+before turning in, I kept my body going and my spirits up to the mark.<br>
+<br>
+The last particular in which the second cabin passenger remarkably stands
+ahead of his brother of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment.&nbsp;
+In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies
+and gentlemen.&nbsp; For some time after I came aboard I thought I was
+only a male; but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks,
+I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman.&nbsp;
+Nobody knew it, of course.&nbsp; I was lost in the crowd of males and
+females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.&nbsp;
+Who could tell whether I housed on the port or starboard side of steerage
+No. 2 and 3?&nbsp; And it was only there that my superiority became
+practical; everywhere else I was incognito, moving among my inferiors
+with simplicity, not so much as a swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman
+after all, and had broken meat to tea.&nbsp; Still, I was like one with
+a patent of nobility in a drawer at home; and when I felt out of spirits
+I could go down and refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.<br>
+<br>
+For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.&nbsp; Six guineas is
+the steerage fare; eight that by the second cabin; and when you remember
+that the steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes, and, in
+five cases out of ten, either brings some dainties with him, or privately
+pays the steward for extra rations, the difference in price becomes
+almost nominal.&nbsp; Air comparatively fit to breathe, food comparatively
+varied, and the satisfaction of being still privately a gentleman, may
+thus be had almost for the asking.&nbsp; Two of my fellow-passengers
+in the second cabin had already made the passage by the cheaper fare,
+and declared it was an experiment not to be repeated.&nbsp; As I go
+on to tell about my steerage friends, the reader will perceive that
+they were not alone in their opinion.&nbsp; Out of ten with whom I was
+more or less intimate, I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they
+returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had left their wives behind
+them assured me they would go without the comfort of their presence
+until they could afford to bring them by saloon.<br>
+<br>
+Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps the most interesting on
+board.&nbsp; Perhaps even in the saloon there was as much good-will
+and character.&nbsp; Yet it had some elements of curiosity.&nbsp; There
+was a mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and Norsemen, one of whom, generally
+known by the name of &lsquo;Johnny,&rsquo; in spite of his own protests,
+greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country efforts to speak English,
+and became on the strength of that an universal favourite - it takes
+so little in this world of shipboard to create a popularity.&nbsp; There
+was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his favourite dish as &lsquo;Irish
+Stew,&rsquo; three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman,
+O&rsquo;Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of
+condemnation.&nbsp; One of them was Scots; the other claimed to be American;
+admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in England; and ultimately
+proved to be an Irishman born and nurtured, but ashamed to own his country.&nbsp;
+He had a sister on board, whom he faithfully neglected throughout the
+voyage, though she was not only sick, but much his senior, and had nursed
+and cared for him in childhood.&nbsp; In appearance he was like an imbecile
+Henry the Third of France.&nbsp; The Scotsman, though perhaps as big
+an ass, was not so dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them together
+because they were fast friends, and disgraced themselves equally by
+their conduct at the table.<br>
+<br>
+Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had a newly-married couple,
+devoted to each other, with a pleasant story of how they had first seen
+each other years ago at a preparatory school, and that very afternoon
+he had carried her books home for her.&nbsp; I do not know if this story
+will be plain to southern readers; but to me it recalls many a school
+idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and nine confronting each other
+stride-legs, flushed with jealousy; for to carry home a young lady&rsquo;s
+books was both a delicate attention and a privilege.<br>
+<br>
+Then there was an old lady, or indeed I am not sure that she was as
+much old as antiquated and strangely out of place, who had left her
+husband, and was travelling all the way to Kansas by herself.&nbsp;
+We had to take her own word that she was married; for it was sorely
+contradicted by the testimony of her appearance.&nbsp; Nature seemed
+to have sanctified her for the single state; even the colour of her
+hair was incompatible with matrimony, and her husband, I thought, should
+be a man of saintly spirit and phantasmal bodily presence.&nbsp; She
+was ill, poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the dirty tablecloth
+shocked her like an impropriety; and the whole strength of her endeavour
+was bent upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow time till she should
+reach New York.&nbsp; They had heard reports, her husband and she, of
+some unwarrantable disparity of hours between these two cities; and
+with a spirit commendably scientific, had seized on this occasion to
+put them to the proof.&nbsp; It was a good thing for the old lady; for
+she passed much leisure time in studying the watch.&nbsp; Once, when
+prostrated by sickness, she let it run down.&nbsp; It was inscribed
+on her harmless mind in letters of adamant that the hands of a watch
+must never be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie in wait
+for the exact moment ere she started it again.&nbsp; When she imagined
+this was about due, she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scotsmen,
+who was embarked on the same experiment as herself and had hitherto
+been less neglectful.&nbsp; She was in quest of two o&rsquo;clock; and
+when she learned it was already seven on the shores of Clyde, she lifted
+up her voice and cried &lsquo;Gravy!&rsquo;&nbsp; I had not heard this
+innocent expletive since I was a young child; and I suppose it must
+have been the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we all laughed
+our fill.<br>
+<br>
+Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend Mr. Jones.&nbsp; It
+would be difficult to say whether I was his right-hand man, or he mine,
+during the voyage.&nbsp; Thus at table I carved, while he only scooped
+gravy; but at our concerts, of which more anon, he was the president
+who called up performers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his
+errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.&nbsp; I knew I liked
+Mr. Jones from the moment I saw him.&nbsp; I thought him by his face
+to be Scottish; nor could his accent undeceive me.&nbsp; For as there
+is a <i>lingua franca</i> of many tongues on the moles and in the feluccas
+of the Mediterranean, so there is a free or common accent among English-speaking
+men who follow the sea.&nbsp; They catch a twang in a New England Port;
+from a cockney skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop an
+<i>h</i>; a word of a dialect is picked up from another band in the
+forecastle; until often the result is undecipherable, and you have to
+ask for the man&rsquo;s place of birth.&nbsp; So it was with Mr. Jones.&nbsp;
+I thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea; and yet he was from
+Wales, and had been most of his life a blacksmith at an inland forge;
+a few years in America and half a score of ocean voyages having sufficed
+to modify his speech into the common pattern.&nbsp; By his own account
+he was both strong and skilful in his trade.&nbsp; A few years back,
+he had been married and after a fashion a rich man; now the wife was
+dead and the money gone.&nbsp; But his was the nature that looks forward,
+and goes on from one year to another and through all the extremities
+of fortune undismayed; and if the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should
+look to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting
+things to rights.&nbsp; He was always hovering round inventions like
+a bee over a flower, and lived in a dream of patents.&nbsp; He had with
+him a patent medicine, for instance, the composition of which he had
+bought years ago for five dollars from an American pedlar, and sold
+the other day for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an English apothecary.&nbsp;
+It was called Golden Oil, cured all maladies without exception; and
+I am bound to say that I partook of it myself with good results.&nbsp;
+It is a character of the man that he was not only perpetually dosing
+himself with Golden Oil, but wherever there was a head aching or a finger
+cut, there would be Jones with his bottle.<br>
+<br>
+If he had one taste more strongly than another, it was to study character.&nbsp;
+Many an hour have we two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours
+in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called unkind; whenever
+a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you might have
+seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed
+in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day&rsquo;s
+experience.&nbsp; We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a
+day&rsquo;s kill.&nbsp; But the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical
+species, and we angled as often as not in one another&rsquo;s baskets.&nbsp;
+Once, in the midst of a serious talk, each found there was a scrutinising
+eye upon himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this double detection;
+but Jones, with a better civility, broke into a peal of unaffected laughter,
+and declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair of us indeed.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+EARLY IMPRESSIONS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We steamed out of the Clyde on Thursday night, and early on the Friday
+forenoon we took in our last batch of emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland,
+and said farewell to Europe.&nbsp; The company was now complete, and
+began to draw together, by inscrutable magnetisms, upon the decks.&nbsp;
+There were Scots and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Americans,
+a good handful of Scandinavians, a German or two, and one Russian; all
+now belonging for ten days to one small iron country on the deep.<br>
+<br>
+As I walked the deck and looked round upon my fellow-passengers, thus
+curiously assorted from all northern Europe, I began for the first time
+to understand the nature of emigration.&nbsp; Day by day throughout
+the passage, and thenceforward across all the States, and on to the
+shores of the Pacific, this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.&nbsp;
+Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful import, came to sound most
+dismally in my ear.&nbsp; There is nothing more agreeable to picture
+and nothing more pathetic to behold.&nbsp; The abstract idea, as conceived
+at home, is hopeful and adventurous.&nbsp; A young man, you fancy, scorning
+restraints and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle, to
+fight for his own hand.&nbsp; The most pleasant stories of ambition,
+of difficulties overcome, and of ultimate success, are but as episodes
+to this great epic of self-help.&nbsp; The epic is composed of individual
+heroisms; it stands to them as the victorious war which subdued an empire
+stands to the personal act of bravery which spiked a single cannon and
+was adequately rewarded with a medal.&nbsp; For in emigration the young
+men enter direct and by the shipload on their heritage of work; empty
+continents swarm, as at the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un&rsquo;s whistle, with
+industrious hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service
+of man.<br>
+<br>
+This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly
+of embellishments.&nbsp; The more I saw of my fellow-passengers, the
+less I was tempted to the lyric note.&nbsp; Comparatively few of the
+men were below thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families;
+not a few were already up in years; and this itself was out of tune
+with my imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young.&nbsp;
+Again, I thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity,
+with bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing
+disposition.&nbsp; Now those around me were for the most part quiet,
+orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly
+youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had
+seen better days.&nbsp; Mildness was the prevailing character; mild
+mirth and mild endurance.&nbsp; In a word, I was not taking part in
+an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia,
+but found myself, like Marmion, &lsquo;in the lost battle, borne down
+by the flying.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
+sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats.&nbsp; I had heard
+vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
+by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless
+men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside
+them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls.&nbsp;
+But I had never taken them home to me or represented these distresses
+livingly to my imagination.<br>
+<br>
+A turn of the market may be a calamity as disastrous as the French retreat
+from Moscow; but it hardly lends itself to lively treatment, and makes
+a trifling figure in the morning papers.&nbsp; We may struggle as we
+please, we are not born economists.&nbsp; The individual is more affecting
+than the mass.&nbsp; It is by the scenic accidents, and the appeal to
+the carnal eye, that for the most part we grasp the significance of
+tragedies.&nbsp; Thus it was only now, when I found myself involved
+in the rout, that I began to appreciate how sharp had been the battle.&nbsp;
+We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the
+weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances
+in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one
+or two might still succeed, all had already failed.&nbsp; We were a
+shipful of failures, the broken men of England.&nbsp; Yet it must not
+be supposed that these people exhibited depression.&nbsp; The scene,
+on the contrary, was cheerful.&nbsp; Not a tear was shed on board the
+vessel.&nbsp; All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination
+to innocent gaiety.&nbsp; Some were heard to sing, and all began to
+scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.<br>
+<br>
+The children found each other out like dogs, and ran about the decks
+scraping acquaintance after their fashion also.&nbsp; &lsquo;What do
+you call your mither?&rsquo; I heard one ask.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mawmaw,&rsquo;
+was the reply, indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in the social
+scale.&nbsp; When people pass each other on the high seas of life at
+so early an age, the contact is but slight, and the relation more like
+what we may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that of men;
+it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved, so open in its communications
+and so devoid of deeper human qualities.&nbsp; The children, I observed,
+were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a fair, while their elders
+were still ceremoniously manoeuvring on the outskirts of acquaintance.&nbsp;
+The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as familiar as home to these
+half-conscious little ones.&nbsp; It was odd to hear them, throughout
+the voyage, employ shore words to designate portions of the vessel.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Go &lsquo;way doon to yon dyke,&rsquo; I heard one say, probably
+meaning the bulwark.&nbsp; I often had my heart in my mouth, watching
+them climb into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship went swinging
+through the waves; and I admired and envied the courage of their mothers,
+who sat by in the sun and looked on with composure at these perilous
+feats.&nbsp; &lsquo;He&rsquo;ll maybe be a sailor,&rsquo; I heard one
+remark; &lsquo;now&rsquo;s the time to learn.&rsquo;&nbsp; I had been
+on the point of running forward to interfere, but stood back at that,
+reproved.&nbsp; Very few in the more delicate classes have the nerve
+to look upon the peril of one dear to them; but the life of poorer folk,
+where necessity is so much more immediate and imperious, braces even
+a mother to this extreme of endurance.&nbsp; And perhaps, after all,
+it is better that the lad should break his neck than that you should
+break his spirit.<br>
+<br>
+And since I am here on the chapter of the children, I must mention one
+little fellow, whose family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
+wherever he went, was like a strain of music round the ship.&nbsp; He
+was an ugly, merry, unbreeched child of three, his lint-white hair in
+a tangle, his face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to and
+fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked himself up again with
+such grace and good-humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful
+when he was in motion.&nbsp; To meet him, crowing with laughter and
+beating an accompaniment to his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin
+cup, was to meet a little triumph of the human species.&nbsp; Even when
+his mother and the rest of his family lay sick and prostrate around
+him, he sat upright in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant heartlessness
+of infancy.<br>
+<br>
+Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men made but a few advances.&nbsp;
+We discussed the probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged pieces
+of information, naming our trades, what we hoped to find in the new
+world, or what we were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we condoled
+together over the food and the vileness of the steerage.&nbsp; One or
+two had been so near famine that you may say they had run into the ship
+with the devil at their heels; and to these all seemed for the best
+in the best of possible steamers.&nbsp; But the majority were hugely
+contented.&nbsp; Coming as they did from a country in so low a state
+as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow, which commercially speaking
+was as good as dead, and many having long been out of work, I was surprised
+to find them so dainty in their notions.&nbsp; I myself lived almost
+exclusively on bread, porridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied
+to them, and found it, if not luxurious, at least sufficient.&nbsp;
+But these working men were loud in their outcries.&nbsp; It was not
+&lsquo;food for human beings,&rsquo; it was &lsquo;only fit for pigs,&rsquo;
+it was &lsquo;a disgrace.&rsquo;&nbsp; Many of them lived almost entirely
+upon biscuit, others on their own private supplies, and some paid extra
+for better rations from the ship.&nbsp; This marvellously changed my
+notion of the degree of luxury habitual to the artisan.&nbsp; I was
+prepared to hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller&rsquo;s
+pastime; but I was not prepared to find him turn away from a diet which
+was palatable to myself.&nbsp; Words I should have disregarded, or taken
+with a liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry biscuit there can
+be no question of the sincerity of his disgust.<br>
+<br>
+With one of their complaints I could most heartily sympathise.&nbsp;
+A single night of the steerage had filled them with horror.&nbsp; I
+had myself suffered, even in my decent-second-cabin berth, from the
+lack of air; and as the night promised to be fine and quiet, I determined
+to sleep on deck, and advised all who complained of their quarters to
+follow my example.&nbsp; I dare say a dozen of others agreed to do so,
+and I thought we should have been quite a party.&nbsp; Yet, when I brought
+up my rug about seven bells, there was no one to be seen but the watch.&nbsp;
+That chimerical terror of good night-air, which makes men close their
+windows, list their doors, and seal themselves up with their own poisonous
+exhalations, had sent all these healthy workmen down below.&nbsp; One
+would think we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in England
+the most malarious districts are in the bedchambers.<br>
+<br>
+I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half-pleased to have the
+night so quietly to myself.&nbsp; The wind had hauled a little ahead
+on the starboard bow, and was dry but chilly.&nbsp; I found a shelter
+near the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the night.<br>
+<br>
+The ship moved over the uneven sea with a gentle and cradling movement.&nbsp;
+The ponderous, organic labours of the engine in her bowels occupied
+the mind, and prepared it for slumber.&nbsp; From time to time a heavier
+lurch would disturb me as I lay, and recall me to the obscure borders
+of consciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil, the clear note
+of the clapper on the brass and the beautiful sea-cry, &lsquo;All&rsquo;s
+well!&rsquo;&nbsp; I know nothing, whether for poetry or music, that
+can surpass the effect of these two syllables in the darkness of a night
+at sea.<br>
+<br>
+The day dawned fairly enough, and during the early part we had some
+pleasant hours to improve acquaintance in the open air; but towards
+nightfall the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the sea rose
+so high that it was difficult to keep ones footing on the deck.&nbsp;
+I have spoken of our concerts.&nbsp; We were indeed a musical ship&rsquo;s
+company, and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the accordion,
+and the songs of all nations.&nbsp; Good, bad, or indifferent - Scottish,
+English, Irish, Russian, German or Norse, - the songs were received
+with generous applause.&nbsp; Once or twice, a recitation, very spiritedly
+rendered in a powerful Scottish accent, varied the proceedings; and
+once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men of us together,
+to the music of the violin.&nbsp; The performers were all humorous,
+frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in private life; but as soon
+as they were arranged for the dance, they conducted themselves like
+so many mutes at a funeral.&nbsp; I have never seen decorum pushed so
+far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille was soon whistled down,
+and the dancers departed under a cloud.&nbsp; Eight Frenchmen, even
+eight Englishmen from another rank of society, would have dared to make
+some fun for themselves and the spectators; but the working man, when
+sober, takes an extreme and even melancholy view of personal deportment.&nbsp;
+A fifth-form schoolboy is not more careful of dignity.&nbsp; He dares
+not be comical; his fun must escape from him unprepared, and above all,
+it must be unaccompanied by any physical demonstration.&nbsp; I like
+his society under most circumstances, but let me never again join with
+him in public gambols.<br>
+<br>
+But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
+the inclemencies of sea and sky.&nbsp; On this rough Saturday night,
+we got together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the
+wind and rain.&nbsp; Some clinging to a ladder which led to the hurricane
+deck, and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to
+support the women in the violent lurching of the ship; and when we were
+thus disposed, sang to our hearts&rsquo; content.&nbsp; Some of the
+songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse.&nbsp;
+Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, &lsquo;Around her splendid
+form, I weaved the magic circle,&rsquo; sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully
+silly.&nbsp; &lsquo;We don&rsquo;t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if
+we do,&rsquo; was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity
+with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night.&nbsp; I observed
+a Platt-Deutsch mason, entirely innocent of English, adding heartily
+to the general effect.&nbsp; And perhaps the German mason is but a fair
+example of the sincerity with which the song was rendered; for nearly
+all with whom I conversed upon the subject were bitterly opposed to
+war, and attributed their own misfortunes, and frequently their own
+taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand and Afghanistan.<br>
+<br>
+Every now and again, however, some song that touched the pathos of our
+situation was given forth; and you could hear by the voices that took
+up the burden how the sentiment came home to each, &lsquo;The Anchor&rsquo;s
+Weighed&rsquo; was true for us.&nbsp; We were indeed &lsquo;Rocked on
+the bosom of the stormy deep.&rsquo;&nbsp; How many of us could say
+with the singer, &lsquo;I&rsquo;m lonely to-night, love, without you,&rsquo;
+or, &lsquo;Go, some one, and tell them from me, to write me a letter
+from home&rsquo;!&nbsp; And when was there a more appropriate moment
+for &lsquo;Auld Lang Syne&rsquo; than now, when the land, the friends,
+and the affections of that mingled but beloved time were fading and
+fleeing behind us in the vessel&rsquo;s wake?&nbsp; It pointed forward
+to the hour when these labours should be overpast, to the return voyage,
+and to many a meeting in the sanded inn, when those who had parted in
+the spring of youth should again drink a cup of kindness in their age.&nbsp;
+Had not Burns contemplated emigration, I scarce believe he would have
+found that note.<br>
+<br>
+All Sunday the weather remained wild and cloudy; many were prostrated
+by sickness; only five sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two
+of these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end.&nbsp; The Sabbath
+was observed strictly by the majority of the emigrants.&nbsp; I heard
+an old woman express her surprise that &lsquo;the ship didna gae doon,&rsquo;
+as she saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the holy day.&nbsp;
+Some sang Scottish psalms.&nbsp; Many went to service, and in true Scottish
+fashion came back ill pleased with their divine.&nbsp; &lsquo;I didna
+think he was an experienced preacher,&rsquo; said one girl to me.<br>
+<br>
+Is was a bleak, uncomfortable day; but at night, by six bells, although
+the wind had not yet moderated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown
+away behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came out thickly overhead.&nbsp;
+I saw Venus burning as steadily and sweetly across this hurly-burly
+of the winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer woods.&nbsp;
+The engine pounded, the screw tossed out of the water with a roar, and
+shook the ship from end to end; the bows battled with loud reports against
+the billows: and as I stood in the lee-scuppers and looked up to where
+the funnel leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and the black and
+monstrous top-sails blotted, at each lurch, a different crop of stars,
+it seemed as if all this trouble were a thing of small account, and
+that just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and eternal.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+STEERAGE SCENES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Our companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3) was a favourite resort.&nbsp; Down
+one flight of stairs there was a comparatively large open space, the
+centre occupied by a hatchway, which made a convenient seat for about
+twenty persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the carpenter&rsquo;s
+bench afforded perches for perhaps as many more.&nbsp; The canteen,
+or steerage bar, was on one side of the stair; on the other, a no less
+attractive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter.<br>
+<br>
+I have seen people packed into this space like herrings in a barrel,
+and many merry evenings prolonged there until five bells, when the lights
+were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to roost.<br>
+<br>
+It had been rumoured since Friday that there was a fiddler aboard, who
+lay sick and unmelodious in Steerage No. 1; and on the Monday forenoon,
+as I came down the companion, I was saluted by something in Strathspey
+time.&nbsp; A white-faced Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience
+of white-faced women.&nbsp; It was as much as he could do to play, and
+some of his hearers were scarce able to sit; yet they had crawled from
+their bunks at the first experimental flourish, and found better than
+medicine in the music.&nbsp; Some of the heaviest heads began to nod
+in time, and a degree of animation looked from some of the palest eyes.&nbsp;
+Humanly speaking, it is a more important matter to play the fiddle,
+even badly, than to write huge works upon recondite subjects.&nbsp;
+What could Mr. Darwin have done for these sick women?&nbsp; But this
+fellow scraped away; and the world was positively a better place for
+all who heard him.&nbsp; We have yet to understand the economical value
+of these mere accomplishments.&nbsp; I told the fiddler he was a happy
+man, carrying happiness about with him in his fiddle-case, and he seemed
+alive to the fact.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It is a privilege,&rsquo; I said.&nbsp; He thought a while upon
+the word, turning it over in his Scots head, and then answered with
+conviction, &lsquo;Yes, a privilege.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+That night I was summoned by &lsquo;Merrily danced the Quake&rsquo;s
+wife&rsquo; into the companion of Steerage No. 4 and 5.&nbsp; This was,
+properly speaking, but a strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly
+lantern which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship.&nbsp; Through
+the open slide-door we had a glimpse of a grey night sea, with patches
+of phosphorescent foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the
+horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to the wind.&nbsp; In
+the centre the companion ladder plunged down sheerly like an open pit.&nbsp;
+Below, on the first landing, and lighted by another lamp, lads and lasses
+danced, not more than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and
+reels and hornpipes.&nbsp; Above, on either side, there was a recess
+railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood for
+orchestra and seats of honour.&nbsp; In the one balcony, five slatternly
+Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group.&nbsp; In the other was posted
+Orpheus, his body, which was convulsively in motion, forming an odd
+contrast to his somnolent, imperturbable Scots face.&nbsp; His brother,
+a dark man with a vehement, interested countenance, who made a god of
+the fiddler, sat by with open mouth, drinking in the general admiration
+and throwing out remarks to kindle it.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;That&rsquo;s a bonny hornpipe now,&rsquo; he would say, &lsquo;it&rsquo;s
+a great favourite with performers; they dance the sand dance to it.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And he expounded the sand dance.&nbsp; Then suddenly, it would be a
+long, &lsquo;Hush!&rsquo; with uplifted finger and glowing, supplicating
+eyes, &lsquo;he&rsquo;s going to play &ldquo;Auld Robin Gray&rdquo;
+on one string!&rsquo;&nbsp; And throughout this excruciating movement,
+- &lsquo;On one string, that&rsquo;s on one string!&rsquo; he kept crying.&nbsp;
+I would have given something myself that it had been on none; but the
+hearers were much awed.&nbsp; I called for a tune or two, and thus introduced
+myself to the notice of the brother, who directed his talk to me for
+some little while, keeping, I need hardly mention, true to his topic,
+like the seamen to the star.&nbsp; &lsquo;He&rsquo;s grand of it,&rsquo;
+he said confidentially.&nbsp; &lsquo;His master was a music-hall man.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Indeed the music-hall man had left his mark, for our fiddler was ignorant
+of many of our best old airs; &lsquo;Logie o&rsquo; Buchan,&rsquo; for
+instance, he only knew as a quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles,
+and had never heard it called by name.&nbsp; Perhaps, after all, the
+brother was the more interesting performer of the two.&nbsp; I have
+spoken with him afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the same
+quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains; but he never showed to
+such advantage as when he was thus squiring the fiddler into public
+note.&nbsp; There is nothing more becoming than a genuine admiration;
+and it shares this with love, that it does not become contemptible although
+misplaced.<br>
+<br>
+The dancing was but feebly carried on.&nbsp; The space was almost impracticably
+small; and the Irish wenches combined the extreme of bashfulness about
+this innocent display with a surprising impudence and roughness of address.&nbsp;
+Most often, either the fiddle lifted up its voice unheeded, or only
+a couple of lads would be footing it and snapping fingers on the landing.&nbsp;
+And such was the eagerness of the brother to display all the acquirements
+of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference of the performer, that
+the tune would as often as not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into
+a ballad before the dancers had cut half a dozen shuffles.<br>
+<br>
+In the meantime, however, the audience had been growing more and more
+numerous every moment; there was hardly standing-room round the top
+of the companion; and the strange instinct of the race moved some of
+the newcomers to close both the doors, so that the atmosphere grew insupportable.&nbsp;
+It was a good place, as the saying is, to leave.<br>
+<br>
+The wind hauled ahead with a head sea.&nbsp; By ten at night heavy sprays
+were flying and drumming over the forecastle; the companion of Steerage
+No. 1 had to be closed, and the door of communication through the second
+cabin thrown open.&nbsp; Either from the convenience of the opportunity,
+or because we had already a number of acquaintances in that part of
+the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a late visit.&nbsp; Steerage No. 1
+is shaped like an isosceles triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles
+bulging outward with the contour of the ship.&nbsp; It is lined with
+eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece, four bunks below and four above
+on either side.&nbsp; At night the place is lit with two lanterns, one
+to each table.&nbsp; As the steamer beat on her way among the rough
+billows, the light passed through violent phases of change, and was
+thrown to and fro and up and down with startling swiftness.&nbsp; You
+were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how so thin a glimmer could control
+and disperse such solid blackness.&nbsp; When Jones and I entered we
+found a little company of our acquaintances seated together at the triangular
+foremost table.&nbsp; A more forlorn party, in more dismal circumstances,
+it would be hard to imagine.&nbsp; The motion here in the ship&rsquo;s
+nose was very violent; the uproar of the sea often overpoweringly loud.&nbsp;
+The yellow flicker of the lantern spun round and round and tossed the
+shadows in masses.&nbsp; The air was hot, but it struck a chill from
+its foetor.<br>
+<br>
+From all round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human noises of the sick
+joined into a kind of farmyard chorus.&nbsp; In the midst, these five
+friends of mine were keeping up what heart they could in company.&nbsp;
+Singing was their refuge from discomfortable thoughts and sensations.&nbsp;
+One piped, in feeble tones, &lsquo;Oh why left I my hame?&rsquo; which
+seemed a pertinent question in the circumstances.&nbsp; Another, from
+the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper-shelf,
+found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses
+of the &lsquo;Death of Nelson&rsquo;; and it was odd and eerie to hear
+the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and &lsquo;this
+day has done his dooty&rsquo; rise and fall and be taken up again in
+this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows
+and the rattling spray-showers overhead.<br>
+<br>
+All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain dizziness had interrupted
+the activity of their minds; and except to sing they were tongue-tied.&nbsp;
+There was present, however, one tall, powerful fellow of doubtful nationality,
+being neither quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but of surprising
+clearness of conviction on the highest problems.&nbsp; He had gone nearly
+beside himself on the Sunday, because of a general backwardness to indorse
+his definition of mind as &lsquo;a living, thinking substance which
+cannot be felt, heard, or seen&rsquo; - nor, I presume, although he
+failed to mention it, smelt.&nbsp; Now he came forward in a pause with
+another contribution to our culture.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Just by way of change,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll ask
+you a Scripture riddle.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s profit in them too,&rsquo;
+he added ungrammatically.<br>
+<br>
+This was the riddle-<br>
+<br>
+C and P<br>
+Did agree<br>
+To cut down C;<br>
+But C and P<br>
+Could not agree<br>
+Without the leave of G;<br>
+All the people cried to see<br>
+The crueltie<br>
+Of C and P.<br>
+<br>
+Harsh are the words of Mercury after the songs of Apollo!&nbsp; We were
+a long while over the problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wondering
+how a man could be such a fool; but at length he put us out of suspense
+and divulged the fact that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.<br>
+<br>
+I think it must have been the riddle that settled us; but the motion
+and the close air likewise hurried our departure.&nbsp; We had not been
+gone long, we heard next morning, ere two or even three out of the five
+fell sick.&nbsp; We thought it little wonder on the whole, for the sea
+kept contrary all night.&nbsp; I now made my bed upon the second cabin
+floor, where, although I ran the risk of being stepped upon, I had a
+free current of air, more or less vitiated indeed, and running only
+from steerage to steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this
+couch, as well as the usual sounds of a rough night at sea, the hateful
+coughing and retching of the sick and the sobs of children, I heard
+a man run wild with terror beseeching his friend for encouragement.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The ship &lsquo;s going down!&rsquo; he cried with a thrill of
+agony.&nbsp; &lsquo;The ship&rsquo;s going down!&rsquo; he repeated,
+now in a blank whisper, now with his voice rising towards a sob; and
+his friend might reassure him, reason with him, joke at him - all was
+in vain, and the old cry came back, &lsquo;The ship&rsquo;s going down!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+There was something panicky and catching in the emotion of his tones;
+and I saw in a clear flash what an involved and hideous tragedy was
+a disaster to an emigrant ship.&nbsp; If this whole parishful of people
+came no more to land, into how many houses would the newspaper carry
+woe, and what a great part of the web of our corporate human life would
+be rent across for ever!<br>
+<br>
+The next morning when I came on deck I found a new world indeed.&nbsp;
+The wind was fair; the sun mounted into a cloudless heaven; through
+great dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded foam.&nbsp; The
+horizon was dotted all day with companionable sails, and the sun shone
+pleasantly on the long, heaving deck.<br>
+<br>
+We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time.&nbsp; There
+was a single chess-board and a single pack of cards.&nbsp; Sometimes
+as many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love.&nbsp; Feats
+of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some
+of the same order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
+were always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well
+as more conspicuously well done than the former.&nbsp; We had a regular
+daily competition to guess the vessel&rsquo;s progress; and twelve o&rsquo;clock,
+when the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment
+of considerable interest.&nbsp; But the interest was unmixed.&nbsp;
+Not a bet was laid upon our guesses.&nbsp; From the Clyde to Sandy Hook
+I never heard a wager offered or taken.&nbsp; We had, besides, romps
+in plenty.&nbsp; Puss in the Corner, which we had rebaptized, in more
+manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own favourite game; but
+there were many who preferred another, the humour of which was to box
+a person&rsquo;s ears until he found out who had cuffed him.<br>
+<br>
+This Tuesday morning we were all delighted with the change of weather,
+and in the highest possible spirits.&nbsp; We got in a cluster like
+bees, sitting between each other&rsquo;s feet under lee of the deck-houses.&nbsp;
+Stories and laughter went around.&nbsp; The children climbed about the
+shrouds.&nbsp; White faces appeared for the first time, and began to
+take on colour from the wind.&nbsp; I was kept hard at work making cigarettes
+for one amateur after another, and my less than moderate skill was heartily
+admired.&nbsp; Lastly, down sat the fiddler in our midst and began to
+discourse his reels, and jigs, and ballads, with now and then a voice
+or two to take up the air and throw in the interest of human speech.<br>
+<br>
+Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin passengers,
+a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little gracious
+titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which
+galled me to the quick.&nbsp; I have little of the radical in social
+questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was as
+good as another.&nbsp; But I began to be troubled by this episode.&nbsp;
+It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their
+presence.&nbsp; They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces.&nbsp;
+Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities.&nbsp;
+A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to
+indulge it in our hearing.&nbsp; Wait a bit, till they were all back
+in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners
+of the steerage.&nbsp; We were in truth very innocently, cheerfully,
+and sensibly engaged, and there was no shadow of excuse for the swaying
+elegant superiority with which these damsels passed among us, or for
+the stiff and waggish glances of their squire.&nbsp; Not a word was
+said; only when they were gone Mackay sullenly damned their impudence
+under his breath; but we were all conscious of an icy influence and
+a dead break in the course of our enjoyment.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+STEERAGE TYPES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We had a fellow on board, an Irish-American, for all the world like
+a beggar in a print by Callot; one-eyed, with great, splay crow&rsquo;s-feet
+round the sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over his moustache;
+a miraculous hat; a shirt that had been white, ay, ages long ago; an
+alpaca coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole, no buttons
+to his trousers.&nbsp; Even in these rags and tatters, the man twinkled
+all over with impudence like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard
+him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers with the air of
+a lord.&nbsp; Nothing could overlie such a fellow; a kind of base success
+was written on his brow.&nbsp; He was then in his ill days; but I can
+imagine him in Congress with his mouth full of bombast and sawder.&nbsp;
+As we moved in the same circle, I was brought necessarily into his society.&nbsp;
+I do not think I ever heard him say anything that was true, kind, or
+interesting; but there was entertainment in the man&rsquo;s demeanour.&nbsp;
+You might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.<br>
+<br>
+Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this impossible fellow.&nbsp;
+Rumours and legends were current in the steerages about his antecedents.&nbsp;
+Some said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him down for a harmless
+spendthrift, who had squandered fifty thousand roubles, and whose father
+had now despatched him to America by way of penance.&nbsp; Either tale
+might flourish in security; there was no contradiction to be feared,
+for the hero spoke not one word of English.&nbsp; I got on with him
+lumberingly enough in broken German, and learned from his own lips that
+he had been an apothecary.&nbsp; He carried the photograph of his betrothed
+in a pocket-book, and remarked that it did not do her justice.&nbsp;
+The cut of his head stood out from among the passengers with an air
+of startling strangeness.&nbsp; The first natural instinct was to take
+him for a desperado; but although the features, to our Western eyes,
+had a barbaric and unhomely cast, the eye both reassured and touched.&nbsp;
+It was large and very dark and soft, with an expression of dumb endurance,
+as if it had often looked on desperate circumstances and never looked
+on them without resolution.<br>
+<br>
+He cried out when I used the word. &lsquo;No, no,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;not
+resolution.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The resolution to endure,&rsquo; I explained.<br>
+<br>
+And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, <i>&lsquo;Ach, ja,&rsquo;</i>
+with gusto, like a man who has been flattered in his favourite pretensions.&nbsp;
+Indeed, he was always hinting at some secret sorrow; and his life, he
+said, had been one of unusual trouble and anxiety; so the legends of
+the steerage may have represented at least some shadow of the truth.&nbsp;
+Once, and once only, he sang a song at our concerts; standing forth
+without embarrassment, his great stature somewhat humped, his long arms
+frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown backward.&nbsp; It was
+a suitable piece of music, as deep as a cow&rsquo;s bellow and wild
+like the White Sea.&nbsp; He was struck and charmed by the freedom and
+sociality of our manners.&nbsp; At home, he said, no one on a journey
+would speak to him, but those with whom he would not care to speak;
+thus unconsciously involving himself in the condemnation of his countrymen.&nbsp;
+But Russia was soon to be changed; the ice of the Neva was softening
+under the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, &lsquo;<i>wie eine feine</i>
+<i>Violine</i>,&rsquo; were audible among the big empty drum notes of
+Imperial diplomacy; and he looked to see a great revival, though with
+a somewhat indistinct and childish hope.<br>
+<br>
+We had a father and son who made a pair of Jacks-of-all-trades.&nbsp;
+It was the son who sang the &lsquo;Death of Nelson&rsquo; under such
+contrarious circumstances.&nbsp; He was by trade a shearer of ship plates;
+but he could touch the organ, and led two choirs, and played the flute
+and piccolo in a professional string band.&nbsp; His repertory of songs
+was, besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from the very best
+to the very worst within his reach.&nbsp; Nor did he seem to make the
+least distinction between these extremes, but would cheerily follow
+up &lsquo;Tom Bowling&rsquo; with &lsquo;Around her splendid form.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-hood, could do everything
+connected with tinwork from one end of the process to the other, use
+almost every carpenter&rsquo;s tool, and make picture frames to boot.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I sat down with silver plate every Sunday,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;and
+pictures on the wall.&nbsp; I have made enough money to be rolling in
+my carriage.&nbsp; But, sir,&rsquo; looking at me unsteadily with his
+bright rheumy eyes, &lsquo;I was troubled with a drunken wife.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He took a hostile view of matrimony in consequence.&nbsp; &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+an old saying,&rsquo; he remarked: &lsquo;God made &rsquo;em, and the
+devil he mixed &rsquo;em.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I think he was justified by his experience.&nbsp; It was a dreary story.&nbsp;
+He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the
+clothes would be in pawn.&nbsp; Sick of the useless struggle, he gave
+up a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid
+jobs.&nbsp; &lsquo;A bad job was as good as a good job for me,&rsquo;
+he said; &lsquo;it all went the same way.&rsquo;&nbsp; Once the wife
+showed signs of amendment; she kept steady for weeks on end; it was
+again worth while to labour and to do one&rsquo;s best.&nbsp; The husband
+found a good situation some distance from home, and, to make a little
+upon every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the children were
+here and there, busy as mice; savings began to grow together in the
+bank, and the golden age of hope had returned again to that unhappy
+family.&nbsp; But one week my old acquaintance, getting earlier through
+with his work, came home on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and
+there was his wife to receive him reeling drunk.&nbsp; He &lsquo;took
+and gave her a pair o&rsquo; black eyes,&rsquo; for which I pardon him,
+nailed up the cook-shop door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself
+to a life of poverty, with the workhouse at the end.&nbsp; As the children
+came to their full age they fled the house, and established themselves
+in other countries; some did well, some not so well; but the father
+remained at home alone with his drunken wife, all his sound-hearted
+pluck and varied accomplishments depressed and negatived.<br>
+<br>
+Was she dead now? or, after all these years, had he broken the chain,
+and run from home like a schoolboy?&nbsp; I could not discover which;
+but here at least he was out on the adventure, and still one of the
+bravest and most youthful men on board.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to work again,&rsquo;
+said he; &lsquo;but I can do a turn yet.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was he not able to support
+him?<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Oh yes,&rsquo; he replied.&nbsp; &lsquo;But I&rsquo;m never happy
+without a job on hand.&nbsp; And I&rsquo;m stout; I can eat a&rsquo;most
+anything.&nbsp; You see no craze about me.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on board by another of a
+drunken father.&nbsp; He was a capable man, with a good chance in life;
+but he had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle of sherry,
+and involved his sons along with him in ruin.&nbsp; Now they were on
+board with us, fleeing his disastrous neighbourhood.<br>
+<br>
+Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions, is unfriendly to the
+most generous, cheerful, and human parts of man; but it could have adduced
+many instances and arguments from among our ship&rsquo;s company.&nbsp;
+I was, one day conversing with a kind and happy Scotsman, running to
+fat and perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for poetry and
+a genial sense of fun.&nbsp; I had asked him his hopes in emigrating.&nbsp;
+They were like those of so many others, vague and unfounded; times were
+bad at home; they were said to have a turn for the better in the States;
+a man could get on anywhere, he thought.&nbsp; That was precisely the
+weak point of his position; for if he could get on in America, why could
+he not do the same in Scotland?&nbsp; But I never had the courage to
+use that argument, though it was often on the tip of my tongue, and
+instead I agreed with him heartily adding, with reckless originality,
+&lsquo;If the man stuck to his work, and kept away from drink.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ah!&rsquo; said he slowly, &lsquo;the drink!&nbsp; You see, that&rsquo;s
+just my trouble.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He spoke with a simplicity that was touching, looking at me at the same
+time with something strange and timid in his eye, half-ashamed, half-sorry,
+like a good child who knows he should be beaten.&nbsp; You would have
+said he recognised a destiny to which he was born, and accepted the
+consequences mildly.&nbsp; Like the merchant Abudah, he was at the same
+time fleeing from his destiny and carrying it along with him, the whole
+at an expense of six guineas.<br>
+<br>
+As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompetency were the three great
+causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and foremost,
+this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest
+means of cure.&nbsp; You cannot run away from a weakness; you must some
+time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where
+you stand?&nbsp; <i>Coelum non animam</i>.&nbsp; Change Glenlivet for
+Bourbon, and it is still whisky, only not so good.&nbsp; A sea-voyage
+will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emigration
+has to be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only
+fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands,
+but in the heart itself.<br>
+<br>
+Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind more contemptible
+than another; for each is but a result and outward sign of a soul tragically
+ship-wrecked.&nbsp; In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure is resorted
+to by way of anodyne.&nbsp; The pleasure-seeker sets forth upon life
+with high and difficult ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and nobly
+happy, though at as little pains as possible to himself; and it is because
+all has failed in his celestial enterprise that you now behold him rolling
+in the garbage.&nbsp; Hence the comparative success of the teetotal
+pledge; because to a man who had nothing it sets at least a negative
+aim in life.&nbsp; Somewhat as prisoners beguile their days by taming
+a spider, the reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstaining
+from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that negation.&nbsp; There
+is something, at least, <i>not to be done</i> each day; and a cold triumph
+awaits him every evening.<br>
+<br>
+We had one on board with us, whom I have already referred to under the
+name Mackay, who seemed to me not only a good instance of this failure
+in life of which we have been speaking, but a good type of the intelligence
+which here surrounded me.&nbsp; Physically he was a small Scotsman,
+standing a little back as though he were already carrying the elements
+of a corporation, and his looks somewhat marred by the smallness of
+his eyes.&nbsp; Mentally, he was endowed above the average.&nbsp; There
+were but few subjects on which he could not converse with understanding
+and a dash of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto like a man
+who enjoyed his own sententiousness.&nbsp; He was a dry, quick, pertinent
+debater, speaking with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to launch
+and emphasise an argument.&nbsp; When he began a discussion, he could
+not bear to leave it off, but would pick the subject to the bone, without
+once relinquishing a point.&nbsp; An engineer by trade, Mackay believed
+in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the human machine.&nbsp;
+The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of carrion and perverse
+gases.&nbsp; He had an appetite for disconnected facts which I can only
+compare to the savage taste for beads.&nbsp; What is called information
+was indeed a passion with the man, and he not only delighted to receive
+it, but could pay you back in kind.<br>
+<br>
+With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young,
+on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little
+hope.&nbsp; He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his
+despair.&nbsp; &lsquo;The ship may go down for me,&rsquo; he would say,
+&lsquo;now or to-morrow.&nbsp; I have nothing to lose and nothing to
+hope.&rsquo;&nbsp; And again: &lsquo;I am sick of the whole damned performance.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He was, like the kind little man, already quoted, another so-called
+victim of the bottle.&nbsp; But Mackay was miles from publishing his
+weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on corrupt masters
+and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one night overtaken
+and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without
+tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade.&nbsp; It was a treat
+to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his gaze,
+and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force, and
+a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.<br>
+<br>
+In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long before
+for all good human purposes but conversation.&nbsp; His eyes were sealed
+by a cheap, school-book materialism.&nbsp; He could see nothing in the
+world but money and steam-engines.&nbsp; He did not know what you meant
+by the word happiness.&nbsp; He had forgotten the simple emotions of
+childhood, and perhaps never encountered the delights of youth.&nbsp;
+He believed in production, that useful figment of economy, as if it
+had been real like laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor,
+was his god and guide.&nbsp; One day he took me to task - novel cry
+to me - upon the over-payment of literature.&nbsp; Literary men, he
+said, were more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing-machines
+and butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few
+useful handbooks, made nothing worth the while.&nbsp; He produced a
+mere fancy article.&nbsp; Mackay&rsquo;s notion of a book was <i>Hoppus&rsquo;s
+Measurer</i>.&nbsp; Now in my time I have possessed and even studied
+that work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus&rsquo;s
+is not the book that I should choose for my companion volume.<br>
+<br>
+I tried to fight the point with Mackay.&nbsp; I made him own that he
+had taken pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view, insignificant;
+but he was too wary to advance a step beyond the admission.&nbsp; It
+was in vain for me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made and running
+from the spring, whereas his ploughs and butter-churns were but means
+and mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they
+start upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such
+conclusions.&nbsp; The thing was different, he declared, and nothing
+was serviceable but what had to do with food.&nbsp; &lsquo;Eat, eat,
+eat!&rsquo; he cried; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s the bottom and the top.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+By an odd irony of circumstance, he grew so much interested in this
+discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed and had to go without
+his tea.&nbsp; He had enough sense and humour, indeed he had no lack
+of either, to have chuckled over this himself in private; and even to
+me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.<br>
+<br>
+Mackay was a hot bigot.&nbsp; He would not hear of religion.&nbsp; I
+have seen him waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor
+human creatures who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had
+had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as
+the riddler&rsquo;s definition of mind.&nbsp; He snorted aloud with
+zealotry and the lust for intellectual battle.&nbsp; Anything, whatever
+it was, that seemed to him likely to discourage the continued passionate
+production of corn and steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against
+the people.&nbsp; Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that
+it was only in good books, or in the society of the good, that a man
+could get help in his conduct, he declared I was in a different world
+from him.&nbsp; &lsquo;Damn my conduct!&rsquo; said he.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+have given it up for a bad job.&nbsp; My question is, &ldquo;Can I drive
+a nail?&rdquo;&rsquo; And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
+seeking to reduce the people&rsquo;s annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.<br>
+<br>
+It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture;
+that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man
+the importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him
+the necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts;
+and that hence springs this overwhelming concern about diet, and hence
+the bald view of existence professed by Mackay.&nbsp; Had this been
+an English peasant the conclusion would be tenable.&nbsp; But Mackay
+had most of the elements of a liberal education.&nbsp; He had skirted
+metaphysical and mathematical studies.&nbsp; He had a thoughtful hold
+of what he knew, which would be exceptional among bankers.&nbsp; He
+had been brought up in the midst of hot-house piety, and told, with
+incongruous pride, the story of his own brother&rsquo;s deathbed ecstasies.&nbsp;
+Yet he had somehow failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead
+thing among external circumstances, without hope or lively preference
+or shaping aim.&nbsp; And further, there seemed a tendency among many
+of his fellows to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions.&nbsp;
+One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland, and that is the
+way to be happy.&nbsp; Yet that is the whole of culture, and perhaps
+two-thirds of morality.&nbsp; Can it be that the Puritan school, by
+divorcing a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts, and setting
+a stamp of its disapproval on whole fields of human activity and interest,
+leads at last directly to material greed?<br>
+<br>
+Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
+next, if not superior, to virtue; and we had on board an Irishman who
+based his claim to the widest and most affectionate popularity precisely
+upon these two qualities, that he was natural and happy.&nbsp; He boasted
+a fresh colour, a tight little figure, unquenchable gaiety, and indefatigable
+goodwill.&nbsp; His clothes puzzled the diagnostic mind, until you heard
+he had been once a private coachman, when they became eloquent and seemed
+a part of his biography.&nbsp; His face contained the rest, and, I fear,
+a prophecy of the future; the hawk&rsquo;s nose above accorded so ill
+with the pink baby&rsquo;s mouth below.&nbsp; His spirit and his pride
+belonged, you might say, to the nose; while it was the general shiftlessness
+expressed by the other that had thrown him from situation to situation,
+and at length on board the emigrant ship.&nbsp; Barney ate, so to speak,
+nothing from the galley; his own tea, butter, and eggs supported him
+throughout the voyage; and about mealtime you might often find him up
+to the elbows in amateur cookery.&nbsp; His was the first voice heard
+singing among all the passengers; he was the first who fell to dancing.&nbsp;
+From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there was not a piece of fun undertaken
+but there was Barney in the midst.<br>
+<br>
+You ought to have seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts
+- his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling
+to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement - and to have
+enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between
+grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion.&nbsp;
+He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, but his songs attracted
+the lords of the saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails
+of the hurricane-deck.&nbsp; He was somewhat pleased, but not at all
+abashed, by this attention; and one night, in the midst of his famous
+performance of &lsquo;Billy Keogh,&rsquo; I saw him spin half round
+in a pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old gentleman above.<br>
+<br>
+This was the more characteristic, as, for all his daffing, he was a
+modest and very polite little fellow among ourselves.<br>
+<br>
+He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly, nor throughout the passage
+did he give a shadow of offence; yet he was always, by his innocent
+freedoms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow margin where politeness
+must be natural to walk without a fall.&nbsp; He was once seriously
+angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish
+on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic.&nbsp; He had likewise
+strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the
+women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney&rsquo;s
+drab clothes were immediately missing from the group.&nbsp; His taste
+was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader&rsquo;s permission,
+there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided
+the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking.&nbsp; Mackay, partly
+from his superior powers of mind, which rendered him incomprehensible,
+partly from his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to the
+Irishman.&nbsp; I have seen him slink off with backward looks of terror
+and offended delicacy, while the other, in his witty, ugly way, had
+been professing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical readiness
+to be shipwrecked on the spot.&nbsp; These utterances hurt the little
+coachman&rsquo;s modesty like a bad word.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE SICK MAN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+One night Jones, the young O&rsquo;Reilly, and myself were walking arm-in-arm
+and briskly up and down the deck.&nbsp; Six bells had rung; a head-wind
+blew chill and fitful, the fog was closing in with a sprinkle of rain,
+and the fog-whistle had been turned on, and now divided time with its
+unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrilling and intense like a mosquito.&nbsp;
+Even the watch lay somewhere snugly out of sight.<br>
+<br>
+For some time we observed something lying black and huddled in the scuppers,
+which at last heaved a little and moaned aloud.&nbsp; We ran to the
+rails.&nbsp; An elderly man, but whether passenger or seaman it was
+impossible in the darkness to determine, lay grovelling on his belly
+in the wet scuppers, and kicking feebly with his outspread toes.&nbsp;
+We asked him what was amiss, and he replied incoherently, with a strange
+accent and in a voice unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the stomach,
+that he had been ailing all day, had seen the doctor twice, and had
+walked the deck against fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen
+where we found him.<br>
+<br>
+Jones remained by his side, while O&rsquo;Reilly and I hurried off to
+seek the doctor.&nbsp; We knocked in vain at the doctor&rsquo;s cabin;
+there came no reply; nor could we find any one to guide us.&nbsp; It
+was no time for delicacy; so we ran once more forward; and I, whipping
+up a ladder and touching my hat to the officer of the watch, addressed
+him as politely as I could -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I beg your pardon, sir; but there is a man lying bad with cramp
+in the lee scuppers; and I can&rsquo;t find the doctor.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He looked at me peeringly in the darkness; and then, somewhat harshly,
+&lsquo;Well, <i>I</i> can&rsquo;t leave the bridge, my man,&rsquo; said
+he.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, sir; but you can tell me what to do,&rsquo; I returned.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Is it one of the crew?&rsquo; he asked.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I believe him to be a fireman,&rsquo; I replied.<br>
+<br>
+I dare say officers are much annoyed by complaints and alarmist information
+from their freight of human creatures; but certainly, whether it was
+the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or from something conciliatory
+in my address, the officer in question was immediately relieved and
+mollified; and speaking in a voice much freer from constraint, advised
+me to find a steward and despatch him in quest of the doctor, who would
+now be in the smoking-room over his pipe.<br>
+<br>
+One of the stewards was often enough to be found about this hour down
+our companion, Steerage No. 2 and 3; that was his smoking-room of a
+night.&nbsp; Let me call him Blackwood.&nbsp; O&rsquo;Reilly and I rattled
+down the companion, breathing hurry; and in his shirt-sleeves and perched
+across the carpenters bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood; a neat,
+bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with a bead of an eye and a rank
+twang in his speech.&nbsp; I forget who was with him, but the pair were
+enjoying a deliberate talk over their pipes.&nbsp; I dare say he was
+tired with his day&rsquo;s work, and eminently comfortable at that moment;
+and the truth is, I did not stop to consider his feelings, but told
+my story in a breath.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Steward,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;there&rsquo;s a man lying bad
+with cramp, and I can&rsquo;t find the doctor.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but with a black look that is
+the prerogative of man; and taking his pipe out of his mouth -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;That&rsquo;s none of my business,&rsquo; said he.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+don&rsquo;t care.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I could have strangled the little ruffian where he sat.&nbsp; The thought
+of his cabin civility and cabin tips filled me with indignation.&nbsp;
+I glanced at O&rsquo;Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked like
+assault and battery, every inch of him.&nbsp; But we had a better card
+than violence.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You will have to make it your business,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;for
+I am sent to you by the officer on the bridge.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Blackwood was fairly tripped.&nbsp; He made no answer, but put out his
+pipe, gave me one murderous look, and set off upon his errand strolling.&nbsp;
+From that day forward, I should say, he improved to me in courtesy,
+as though he had repented his evil speech and were anxious to leave
+a better impression.<br>
+<br>
+When we got on deck again, Jones was still beside the sick man; and
+two or three late stragglers had gathered round, and were offering suggestions.&nbsp;
+One proposed to give the patient water, which was promptly negatived.&nbsp;
+Another bade us hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie; but as
+it was at least as well to keep him off the streaming decks, O&rsquo;Reilly
+and I supported him between us.&nbsp; It was only by main force that
+we did so, and neither an easy nor an agreeable duty; for he fought
+in his paroxysms like a frightened child, and moaned miserably when
+he resigned himself to our control.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O let me lie!&rsquo; he pleaded.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll no&rsquo;
+get better anyway.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then, with a moan that went to my
+heart, &lsquo;O why did I come upon this miserable journey?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I was reminded of the song which I had heard a little while before in
+the close, tossing steerage: &lsquo;O why left I my hame?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate charge, had gone off to the
+galley, where we could see a light.&nbsp; There he found a belated cook
+scouring pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one of these he sought
+to borrow.&nbsp; The scullion was backward.&nbsp; &lsquo;Was it one
+of the crew?&rsquo; he asked.&nbsp; And when Jones, smitten with my
+theory, had assured him that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left his
+scouring and came towards us at an easy pace, with one of the lanterns
+swinging from his finger.&nbsp; The light, as it reached the spot, showed
+us an elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years; but the shifting
+and coarse shadows concealed from us the expression and even the design
+of his face.<br>
+<br>
+So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave a sort of whistle.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>It&rsquo;s only a passenger</i>!&rsquo; said he; and turning
+about, made, lantern and all, for the galley.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;He&rsquo;s a man anyway,&rsquo; cried Jones in indignation.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nobody said he was a woman,&rsquo; said a gruff voice, which
+I recognised for that of the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un.<br>
+<br>
+All this while there was no word of Blackwood or the doctor; and now
+the officer came to our side of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
+rails, if the doctor were not yet come.&nbsp; We told him not.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No?&rsquo; he repeated with a breathing of anger; and we saw
+him hurry aft in person.<br>
+<br>
+Ten minutes after the doctor made his appearance deliberately enough
+and examined our patient with the lantern.&nbsp; He made little of the
+case, had the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him, and sent
+him forward to his bunk.&nbsp; Two of his neighbours in the steerage
+had now come to our assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such &lsquo;a
+fine cheery body&rsquo; should be sick; and these, claiming a sort of
+possession, took him entirely under their own care.&nbsp; The drug had
+probably relieved him, for he struggled no more, and was led along plaintive
+and patient, but protesting.&nbsp; His heart recoiled at the thought
+of the steerage.&nbsp; &lsquo;O let me lie down upon the bieldy side,&rsquo;
+he cried; &lsquo;O dinna take me down!&rsquo;&nbsp; And again: &lsquo;O
+why did ever I come upon this miserable voyage?&rsquo;&nbsp; And yet
+once more, with a gasp and a wailing prolongation of the fourth word:
+&lsquo;I had no <i>call</i> to come.&rsquo;&nbsp; But there he was;
+and by the doctor&rsquo;s orders and the kind force of his two shipmates
+disappeared down the companion of Steerage No.1 into the den allotted
+him.<br>
+<br>
+At the foot of our own companion, just where I found Blackwood, Jones
+and the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un were now engaged in talk.&nbsp; This last
+was a gruff, cruel-looking seaman, who must have passed near half a
+century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-bearded, with heavy blond
+eyebrows, and an eye without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard.&nbsp;
+I had not forgotten his rough speech; but I remembered also that he
+had helped us about the lantern; and now seeing him in conversation
+with Jones, and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to blow off
+my steam.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said I, &lsquo;I make you my compliments upon your
+steward,&rsquo; and furiously narrated what had happened.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve nothing to do with him,&rsquo; replied the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;They&rsquo;re all alike.&nbsp; They wouldn&rsquo;t mind if they
+saw you all lying dead one upon the top of another.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This was enough.&nbsp; A very little humanity went a long way with me
+after the experience of the evening.&nbsp; A sympathy grew up at once
+between the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un and myself; and that night, and during
+the next few days, I learned to appreciate him better.&nbsp; He was
+a remarkable type, and not at all the kind of man you find in books.&nbsp;
+He had been at Sebastopol under English colours; and again in a States
+ship, &lsquo;after the <i>Alabama</i>, and praying God we shouldn&rsquo;t
+find her.&rsquo;&nbsp; He was a high Tory and a high Englishman.&nbsp;
+No manufacturer could have held opinions more hostile to the working
+man and his strikes.&nbsp; &lsquo;The workmen,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;think
+nothing of their country.&nbsp; They think of nothing but themselves.&nbsp;
+They&rsquo;re damned greedy, selfish fellows.&rsquo;&nbsp; He would
+not hear of the decadence of England.&nbsp; &lsquo;They say they send
+us beef from America,&rsquo; he argued; &lsquo;but who pays for it?&nbsp;
+All the money in the world&rsquo;s in England.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Royal
+Navy was the best of possible services, according to him.&nbsp; &lsquo;Anyway
+the officers are gentlemen,&rsquo; said he; &lsquo;and you can&rsquo;t
+get hazed to death by a damned non-commissioned - as you can in the
+army.&rsquo;&nbsp; Among nations, England was the first; then came France.&nbsp;
+He respected the French navy and liked the French people; and if he
+were forced to make a new choice in life, &lsquo;by God, he would try
+Frenchmen!&rsquo;&nbsp; For all his looks and rough, cold manners, I
+observed that children were never frightened by him; they divined him
+at once to be a friend; and one night when he had chalked his hand and
+clothes, it was incongruous to hear this formidable old salt chuckling
+over his boyish monkey trick.<br>
+<br>
+In the morning, my first thought was of the sick man.&nbsp; I was afraid
+I should not recognise him, baffling had been the light of the lantern;
+and found myself unable to decide if he were Scots, English, or Irish.&nbsp;
+He had certainly employed north-country words and elisions; but the
+accent and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and incongruous in my
+ear.<br>
+<br>
+To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage No. 1, was an adventure
+that required some nerve.&nbsp; The stench was atrocious; each respiration
+tasted in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese; and the squalid
+aspect of the place was aggravated by so many people worming themselves
+into their clothes in twilight of the bunks.&nbsp; You may guess if
+I was pleased, not only for him, but for myself also, when I heard that
+the sick man was better and had gone on deck.<br>
+<br>
+The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun suffused the fog with
+pink and amber; the fog-horn still blew, stertorous and intermittent;
+and to add to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning to wash
+down the decks.&nbsp; But for a sick man this was heaven compared to
+the steerage.&nbsp; I found him standing on the hot-water pipe, just
+forward of the saloon deck house.&nbsp; He was smaller than I had fancied,
+and plain-looking; but his face was distinguished by strange and fascinating
+eyes, limpid grey from a distance, but, when looked into, full of changing
+colours and grains of gold.&nbsp; His manners were mild and uncompromisingly
+plain; and I soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to talk.&nbsp;
+His accent and language had been formed in the most natural way, since
+he was born in Ireland, had lived a quarter of a century on the banks
+of Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife.&nbsp; A fisherman in the season,
+he had fished the east coast from Fisherrow to Whitby.&nbsp; When the
+season was over, and the great boats, which required extra hands, were
+once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he worked as a labourer
+about chemical furnaces, or along the wharves unloading vessels.&nbsp;
+In this comparatively humble way of life he had gathered a competence,
+and could speak of his comfortable house, his hayfield, and his garden.&nbsp;
+On this ship, where so many accomplished artisans were fleeing from
+starvation, he was present on a pleasure trip to visit a brother in
+New York.<br>
+<br>
+Ere he started, he informed me, he had been warned against the steerage
+and the steerage fare, and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
+and a spice loaf.&nbsp; But he laughed to scorn such counsels.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid,&rsquo; he had told his adviser; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll
+get on for ten days.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve not been a fisherman for nothing.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+For it is no light matter, as he reminded me, to be in an open boat,
+perhaps waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a scowl, and for
+miles on every hand lee-shores, unbroken, iron-bound, surf-beat, with
+only here and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or a harbour
+impossible to enter with the wind that blows.&nbsp; The life of a North
+Sea fisher is one long chapter of exposure and hard work and insufficient
+fare; and even if he makes land at some bleak fisher port, perhaps the
+season is bad or his boat has been unlucky and after fifty hours&rsquo;
+unsleeping vigilance and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a
+loaf of bread.&nbsp; Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had been
+too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely trained.&nbsp; He had
+scarce eaten since he came on board, until the day before, when his
+appetite was tempted by some excellent pea-soup.&nbsp; We were all much
+of the same mind on board, and beginning with myself, had dined upon
+pea-soup not wisely but too well; only with him the excess had been
+punished, perhaps because he was weakened by former abstinence, and
+his first meal had resulted in a cramp.&nbsp; He had determined to live
+henceforth on biscuit; and when, two months later, he should return
+to England, to make the passage by saloon.&nbsp; The second cabin, after
+due inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the steerage.<br>
+<br>
+He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill.&nbsp; &lsquo;Ye see,
+I had no call to be here,&rsquo; said he; &lsquo;and I thought it was
+by with me last night.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve a good house at home, and plenty
+to nurse me, and I had no real call to leave them.&rsquo;&nbsp; Speaking
+of the attentions he had received from his shipmates generally, &lsquo;they
+were all so kind,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;that there&rsquo;s none to
+mention.&rsquo;&nbsp; And except in so far as I might share in this,
+he troubled me with no reference to my services.<br>
+<br>
+But what affected me in the most lively manner was the wealth of this
+day-labourer, paying a two months&rsquo; pleasure visit to the States,
+and preparing to return in the saloon, and the new testimony rendered
+by his story, not so much to the horrors of the steerage as to the habitual
+comfort of the working classes.&nbsp; One foggy, frosty December evening,
+I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edinburgh, an Irish labourer trudging
+homeward from the fields.&nbsp; Our roads lay together, and it was natural
+that we should fall into talk.&nbsp; He was covered with mud; an inoffensive,
+ignorant creature, who thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance
+of the masters the better to oppress labouring mankind; and I confess
+I was astonished to learn that he had nearly three hundred pounds in
+the bank.&nbsp; But this man had travelled over most of the world, and
+enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some American railroad, with two
+dollars a shift and double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my fellow-passenger
+had never quitted Tyneside, and had made all that he possessed in that
+same accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled mechanics, engineers,
+millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country
+of starvation.<br>
+<br>
+Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes and wages and hard
+times.&nbsp; Being from the Tyne, and a man who had gained and lost
+in his own pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say, and held
+strong opinions on the subject.&nbsp; He spoke sharply of the masters,
+and, when I led him on, of the men also.&nbsp; The masters had been
+selfish and obstructive, the men selfish, silly, and light-headed.&nbsp;
+He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which he had been present,
+and the somewhat long discourse which he had there pronounced, calling
+into question the wisdom and even the good faith of the Union delegates;
+and although he had escaped himself through flush times and starvation
+times with a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith in either
+man or master, and so profound a terror for the unerring Nemesis of
+mercantile affairs, that he could think of no hope for our country outside
+of a sudden and complete political subversion.&nbsp; Down must go Lords
+and Church and Army; and capital, by some happy direction, must change
+hands from worse to better, or England stood condemned.&nbsp; Such principles,
+he said, were growing &lsquo;like a seed.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words sounded unusually ominous
+and grave.&nbsp; I had heard enough revolutionary talk among my workmen
+fellow-passengers; but most of it was hot and turgid, and fell discredited
+from the lips of unsuccessful men.&nbsp; This man was calm; he had attained
+prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy which had been pursued
+by labour in the past; and yet this was his panacea, - to rend the old
+country from end to end, and from top to bottom, and in clamour and
+civil discord remodel it with the hand of violence.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE STOWAWAYS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On the Sunday, among a party of men who were talking in our companion,
+Steerage No. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure.&nbsp; He wore tweed
+clothes, well enough made if not very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap.&nbsp;
+His face was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough designed; but
+though not yet thirty, a sort of blackguardly degeneration had already
+overtaken his features.&nbsp; The fine nose had grown fleshy towards
+the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat.&nbsp; His hands were strong
+and elegant; his experience of life evidently varied; his speech full
+of pith and verve; his manners forward, but perfectly presentable.&nbsp;
+The lad who helped in the second cabin told me, in answer to a question,
+that he did not know who he was, but thought, &lsquo;by his way of speaking,
+and because he was so polite, that he was some one from the saloon.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I was not so sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air
+and bearing.&nbsp; He might have been, I thought, the son of some good
+family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home.&nbsp;
+But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk!&nbsp; I wish
+you could have heard hin, tell his own stories.&nbsp; They were so swingingly
+set forth, in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and there
+by such luminous bits of acting, that they could only lose in any reproduction.&nbsp;
+There were tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been an officer;
+of the East Indies, where in former years he had lived lavishly; of
+the Royal Engineers, where he had served for a period; and of a dozen
+other sides of life, each introducing some vigorous thumb-nail portrait.&nbsp;
+He had the talk to himself that night, we were all so glad to listen.&nbsp;
+The best talkers usually address themselves to some particular society;
+there they are kings, elsewhere camp-followers, as a man may know Russian
+and yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had a frank, headlong
+power of style, and a broad, human choice of subject, that would have
+turned any circle in the world into a circle of hearers.&nbsp; He was
+a Homeric talker, plain, strong, and cheerful; and the things and the
+people of which he spoke became readily and clearly present to the minds
+of those who heard him.&nbsp; This, with a certain added colouring of
+rhetoric and rodomontade, must have been the style of Burns, who equally
+charmed the ears of duchesses and hostlers.<br>
+<br>
+Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many points remained obscure
+in his narration.&nbsp; The Engineers, for instance, was a service which
+he praised highly; it is true there would be trouble with the sergeants;
+but then the officers were gentlemen, and his own, in particular, one
+among ten thousand.&nbsp; It sounded so far exactly like an episode
+in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one as I had imagined.&nbsp;
+But then there came incidents more doubtful, which showed an almost
+impudent greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent disregard for
+truth.&nbsp; And then there was the tale of his departure.&nbsp; He
+had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich, and one fine day, with a companion,
+slipped up to London for a spree.&nbsp; I have a suspicion that spree
+was meant to be a long one; but God disposes all things; and one morning,
+near Westminster Bridge, whom should he come across but the very sergeant
+who had recruited him at first!&nbsp; What followed?&nbsp; He himself
+indicated cavalierly that he had then resigned.&nbsp; Let us put it
+so.&nbsp; But these resignations are sometimes very trying.<br>
+<br>
+At length, after having delighted us for hours, he took himself away
+from the companion; and I could ask Mackay who and what he was.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;That?&rsquo; said Mackay.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why, that&rsquo;s one
+of the stowaways.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No man,&rsquo; said the same authority, &lsquo;who has had anything
+to do with the sea, would ever think of paying for a passage.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I give the statement as Mackay&rsquo;s, without endorsement; yet I am
+tempted to believe that it contains a grain of truth; and if you add
+that the man shall be impudent and thievish, or else dead-broke, it
+may even pass for a fair representation of the facts.&nbsp; We gentlemen
+of England who live at home at ease have, I suspect, very insufficient
+ideas on the subject.&nbsp; All the world over, people are stowing away
+in coal-holes and dark corners, and when ships are once out to sea,
+appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon deck.&nbsp; The career of
+these sea-tramps partakes largely of the adventurous.&nbsp; They may
+be poisoned by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of concealment;
+or when found they may be clapped at once and ignominiously into irons,
+thus to be carried to their promised land, the port of destination,
+and alas! brought back in the same way to that from which they started,
+and there delivered over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a county
+jail.&nbsp; Since I crossed the Atlantic, one miserable stowaway was
+found in a dying state among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and
+departed for a farther country than America.<br>
+<br>
+When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but one thing to pray for:
+that he be set to work, which is the price and sign of his forgiveness.&nbsp;
+After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he feels himself as secure
+as if he had paid for his passage.&nbsp; It is not altogether a bad
+thing for the company, who get more or less efficient hands for nothing
+but a few plates of junk and duff; and every now and again find themselves
+better paid than by a whole family of cabin passengers.&nbsp; Not long
+ago, for instance, a packet was saved from nearly certain loss by the
+skill and courage of a stowaway engineer.&nbsp; As was no more than
+just, a handsome subscription rewarded him for his success: but even
+without such exceptional good fortune, as things stand in England and
+America, the stowaway will often make a good profit out of his adventure.&nbsp;
+Four engineers stowed away last summer on the same ship, the <i>Circassia</i>;
+and before two days after their arrival each of the four had found a
+comfortable berth.&nbsp; This was the most hopeful tale of emigration
+that I heard from first to last; and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.<br>
+<br>
+My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard; and the next morning,
+as I was making the round of the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal
+Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint of a deck house.&nbsp;
+There was another fellow at work beside him, a lad not more than twenty,
+in the most miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown with grains of
+beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes.&nbsp; Four stowaways had been
+found aboard our ship before she left the Clyde, but these two had alone
+escaped the ignominy of being put ashore.&nbsp; Alick, my acquaintance
+of last night, was Scots by birth, and by trade a practical engineer;
+the other was from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the mast.&nbsp;
+Two people more unlike by training, character, and habits it would be
+hard to imagine; yet here they were together, scrubbing paint.<br>
+<br>
+Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and wasted many opportunities
+in life.&nbsp; I have heard him end a story with these words: &lsquo;That
+was in my golden days, when I used finger-glasses.&rsquo;&nbsp; Situation
+after situation failed him; then followed the depression of trade, and
+for months he had hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all
+day in the West Park, and going home at night to tell his landlady how
+he had been seeking for a job.&nbsp; I believe this kind of existence
+was not unpleasant to Alick himself, and he might have long continued
+to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a comrade, let us call
+him Brown, who grew restive.&nbsp; This fellow was continually threatening
+to slip his cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday, Glasgow
+was left widowed of her Brown.&nbsp; Some months afterwards, Alick met
+another old chum in Sauchiehall Street.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;By the bye, Alick,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;I met a gentleman in
+New York who was asking for you.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Who was that?&rsquo; asked Alick.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The new second engineer on board the <i>So-and-so</i>,&rsquo;
+was the reply.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, and who is he?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Brown, to be sure.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+For Brown had been one of the fortunate quartette aboard the <i>Circassia</i>.&nbsp;
+If that was the way of it in the States, Alick thought it was high time
+to follow Brown&rsquo;s example.&nbsp; He spent his last day, as he
+put it, &lsquo;reviewing the yeomanry,&rsquo; and the next morning says
+he to his landlady, &lsquo;Mrs. X., I&rsquo;ll not take porridge to-day,
+please; I&rsquo;ll take some eggs.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why, have you found a job?&rsquo; she asked, delighted.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, yes,&rsquo; returned the perfidious Alick; &lsquo;I think
+I&rsquo;ll start to-day.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but for America.&nbsp; I
+am afraid that landlady has seen the last of him.<br>
+<br>
+It was easy enough to get on board in the confusion that attends a vessel&rsquo;s
+departure; and in one of the dark corners of Steerage No. 1, flat in
+a bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the voyage from the Broomielaw
+to Greenock.&nbsp; That night, the ship&rsquo;s yeoman pulled him out
+by the heels and had him before the mate.&nbsp; Two other stowaways
+had already been found and sent ashore; but by this time darkness had
+fallen, they were out in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer
+had left them till the morning.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Take him to the forecastle and give him a meal,&rsquo; said the
+mate, &lsquo;and see and pack him off the first thing to-morrow.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+In the forecastle he had supper, a good night&rsquo;s rest, and breakfast;
+and was sitting placidly with a pipe, fancying all was over and the
+game up for good with that ship, when one of the sailors grumbled out
+an oath at him, with a &lsquo;What are you doing there?&rsquo; and &lsquo;Do
+you call that hiding, anyway?&rsquo;&nbsp; There was need of no more;
+Alick was in another bunk before the day was older.&nbsp; Shortly before
+the passengers arrived, the ship was cursorily inspected.&nbsp; He heard
+the round come down the companion and look into one pen after another,
+until they came within two of the one in which he lay concealed.&nbsp;
+Into these last two they did not enter, but merely glanced from without;
+and Alick had no doubt that he was personally favoured in this escape.&nbsp;
+It was the character of the man to attribute nothing to luck and but
+little to kindness; whatever happened to him he had earned in his own
+right amply; favours came to him from his singular attraction and adroitness,
+and misfortunes he had always accepted with his eyes open.&nbsp; Half
+an hour after the searchers had departed, the steerage began to fill
+with legitimate passengers, and the worst of Alick&rsquo;s troubles
+was at an end.&nbsp; He was soon making himself popular, smoking other
+people&rsquo;s tobacco, and politely sharing their private stock delicacies,
+and when night came he retired to his bunk beside the others with composure.<br>
+<br>
+Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being already far behind, and only
+the rough north-western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared
+on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate.&nbsp; As a matter of fact,
+he was known to several on board, and even intimate with one of the
+engineers; but it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions for
+the authorities to avow their information.&nbsp; Every one professed
+surprise and anger on his appearance, and he was led prison before the
+captain.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What have you got to say for yourself?&rsquo; inquired the captain.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Not much,&rsquo; said Alick; &lsquo;but when a man has been a
+long time out of a job, he will do things he would not under other circumstances.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Are you willing to work?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Alick swore he was burning to be useful.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And what can you do?&rsquo; asked the captain.<br>
+<br>
+He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter by trade.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I think you will be better at engineering?&rsquo; suggested the
+officer, with a shrewd look.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, sir,&rsquo; says Alick simply. - &lsquo;There&rsquo;s few
+can beat me at a lie,&rsquo; was his engaging commentary to me as he
+recounted the affair.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Have you been to sea?&rsquo; again asked the captain.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but no more,&rsquo;
+replied the unabashed Alick.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, we must try and find some work for you,&rsquo; concluded
+the officer.<br>
+<br>
+And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot engine-room, lazily scraping
+paint and now and then taking a pull upon a sheet.&nbsp; &lsquo;You
+leave me alone,&rsquo; was his deduction.&nbsp; &lsquo;When I get talking
+to a man, I can get round him.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The other stowaway, whom I will call the Devonian - it was noticeable
+that neither of them told his name - had both been brought up and seen
+the world in a much smaller way.&nbsp; His father, a confectioner, died
+and was closely followed by his mother.&nbsp; His sisters had taken,
+I think, to dressmaking.&nbsp; He himself had returned from sea about
+a year ago and gone to live with his brother, who kept the &lsquo;George
+Hotel&rsquo; - &lsquo;it was not quite a real hotel,&rsquo; added the
+candid fellow - &lsquo;and had a hired man to mind the horses.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+At first the Devonian was very welcome; but as time went on his brother
+not unnaturally grew cool towards him, and he began to find himself
+one too many at the &lsquo;George Hotel.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t
+think brothers care much for you,&rsquo; he said, as a general reflection
+upon life.&nbsp; Hurt at this change, nearly penniless, and too proud
+to ask for more, he set off on foot and walked eighty miles to Weymouth,
+living on the journey as he could.&nbsp; He would have enlisted, but
+he was too small for the army and too old for the navy; and thought
+himself fortunate at last to find a berth on board a trading dandy.&nbsp;
+Somewhere in the Bristol Channel the dandy sprung a leak and went down;
+and though the crew were picked up and brought ashore by fishermen,
+they found themselves with nothing but the clothes upon their back.&nbsp;
+His next engagement was scarcely better starred; for the ship proved
+so leaky, and frightened them all so heartily during a short passage
+through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew deserted and remained behind
+upon the quays of Belfast.<br>
+<br>
+Evil days were now coming thick on the Devonian.&nbsp; He could find
+no berth in Belfast, and had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer.&nbsp;
+She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday: the Devonian had a bellyful
+that morning, laying in breakfast manfully to provide against the future,
+and set off along the quays to seek employment.&nbsp; But he was now
+not only penniless, his clothes had begun to fall in tatters; he had
+begun to have the look of a street Arab; and captains will have nothing
+to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade, as in all others, it is the
+coat that depicts the man.&nbsp; You may hand, reef, and steer like
+an angel, but if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a millstone
+round your neck.&nbsp; The Devonian lost heart at so many refusals.&nbsp;
+He had not the impudence to beg; although, as he said, &lsquo;when I
+had money of my own, I always gave it.&rsquo;&nbsp; It was only on Saturday
+morning, after three whole days of starvation, that he asked a scone
+from a milkwoman, who added of her own accord a glass of milk.&nbsp;
+He had now made up his mind to stow away, not from any desire to see
+America, but merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the forecastle
+and a supply of familiar sea-fare.&nbsp; He lived by begging, always
+from milkwomen, and always scones and milk, and was not once refused.&nbsp;
+It was vile wet weather, and he could never have been dry.&nbsp; By
+night he walked the streets, and by day slept upon Glasgow Green, and
+heard, in the intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians of the
+spot clear up intricate points of doctrine and appraise the merits of
+the clergy.&nbsp; He had not much instruction; he could &lsquo;read
+bills on the street,&rsquo; but was &lsquo;main bad at writing&rsquo;;
+yet these theologians seem to have impressed him with a genuine sense
+of amusement.&nbsp; Why he did not go to the Sailors&rsquo; House I
+know not; I presume there is in Glasgow one of these institutions, which
+are by far the happiest and the wisest effort of contemporaneous charity;
+but I must stand to my author, as they say in old books, and relate
+the story as I heard it.&nbsp; In the meantime, he had tried four times
+to stow away in different vessels, and four times had been discovered
+and handed back to starvation.&nbsp; The fifth time was lucky; and you
+may judge if he were pleased to be aboard ship again, at his old work,
+and with duff twice a week.&nbsp; He was, said Alick, &lsquo;a devil
+for the duff.&rsquo;&nbsp; Or if devil was not the word, it was one
+if anything stronger.<br>
+<br>
+The difference in the conduct of the two was remarkable.&nbsp; The Devonian
+was as willing as any paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled
+his natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found work for himself
+when there was none to show him.&nbsp; Alick, on the other hand, was
+not only a skulker in the brain, but took a humorous and fine gentlemanly
+view of the transaction.&nbsp; He would speak to me by the hour in ostentatious
+idleness; and only if the bo&rsquo;s&rsquo;un or a mate came by, fell-to
+languidly for just the necessary time till they were out of sight. &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+not breaking my heart with it,&rsquo; he remarked.<br>
+<br>
+Once there was a hatch to be opened near where he was stationed; he
+watched the preparations for a second or so suspiciously, and then,
+&lsquo;Hullo,&rsquo; said he,&nbsp; &lsquo;here&rsquo;s some real work
+coming - I&rsquo;m off,&rsquo; and he was gone that moment.&nbsp; Again,
+calculating the six guinea passage-money, and the probable duration
+of the passage, he remarked pleasantly that he was getting six shillings
+a day for this job, &lsquo;and it&rsquo;s pretty dear to the company
+at that.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;They are making nothing by me,&rsquo; was
+another of his observations; &lsquo;they&rsquo;re making something by
+that fellow.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he pointed to the Devonian, who was just
+then busy to the eyes.<br>
+<br>
+The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be owned, you learned to
+despise him.&nbsp; His natural talents were of no use either to himself
+or others; for his character had degenerated like his face, and become
+pulpy and pretentious.&nbsp; Even his power of persuasion, which was
+certainly very surprising, stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised
+by over-confidence.&nbsp; He lied in an aggressive, brazen manner, like
+a pert criminal in the dock; and he was so vain of his own cleverness
+that he could not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the very
+trick by which he had deceived you.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why, now I have more
+money than when I came on board,&rsquo; he said one night, exhibiting
+a sixpence, &lsquo;and yet I stood myself a bottle of beer before I
+went to bed yesterday.&nbsp; And as for tobacco, I have fifteen sticks
+of it.&rsquo;&nbsp; That was fairly successful indeed; yet a man of
+his superiority, and with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows?
+have got the length of half a crown.&nbsp; A man who prides himself
+upon persuasion should learn the persuasive faculty of silence, above
+all as to his own misdeeds.&nbsp; It is only in the farce and for dramatic
+purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents to the world at
+large.<br>
+<br>
+Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever, unfortunate Alick; for
+at the bottom of all his misconduct there was a guiding sense of humour
+that moved you to forgive him.&nbsp; It was more than half a jest that
+he conducted his existence.&nbsp; &lsquo;Oh, man,&rsquo; he said to
+me once with unusual emotion, like a man thinking of his mistress, &lsquo;I
+would give up anything for a lark.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that Alick showed the best,
+or perhaps I should say the only good, points of his nature.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mind
+you,&rsquo; he said suddenly, changing his tone, &lsquo;mind you that&rsquo;s
+a good boy.&nbsp; He wouldn&rsquo;t tell you a lie.&nbsp; A lot of them
+think he is a scamp because his clothes are ragged, but he isn&rsquo;t;
+he&rsquo;s as good as gold.&rsquo;&nbsp; To hear him, you become aware
+that Alick himself had a taste for virtue.&nbsp; He thought his own
+idleness and the other&rsquo;s industry equally becoming.&nbsp; He was
+no more anxious to insure his own reputation as a liar than to uphold
+the truthfulness of his companion; and he seemed unaware of what was
+incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly sincere in both characters.<br>
+<br>
+It was not surprising that he should take an interest in the Devonian,
+for the lad worshipped and served him in love and wonder.&nbsp; Busy
+as he was, he would find time to warn Alick of an approaching officer,
+or even to tell him that the coast was clear, and he might slip off
+and smoke a pipe in safety.&nbsp; &lsquo;Tom,&rsquo; he once said to
+him, for that was the name which Alick ordered him to use, &lsquo;if
+you don&rsquo;t like going to the galley, I&rsquo;ll go for you.&nbsp;
+You ain&rsquo;t used to this kind of thing, you ain&rsquo;t.&nbsp; But
+I&rsquo;m a sailor; and I can understand the feelings of any fellow,
+I can.&rsquo;&nbsp; Again, he was hard up, and casting about for some
+tobacco, for he was not so liberally used in this respect as others
+perhaps less worthy, when Alick offered him the half of one of his fifteen
+sticks.&nbsp; I think, for my part, he might have increased the offer
+to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of them, and not lived to regret his
+liberality.&nbsp; But the Devonian refused.&nbsp; &lsquo;No,&rsquo;
+he said, &lsquo;you&rsquo;re a stowaway like me; I won&rsquo;t take
+it from you, I&rsquo;ll take it from some one who&rsquo;s not down on
+his luck.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It was notable in this generous lad that he was strongly under the influence
+of sex.&nbsp; If a woman passed near where he was working, his eyes
+lit up, his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly to other thoughts.&nbsp;
+It was natural that he should exercise a fascination proportionally
+strong upon women.&nbsp; He begged, you will remember, from women only,
+and was never refused.&nbsp; Without wishing to explain away the charity
+of those who helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed a little
+to his handsome face, and to that quick, responsive nature, formed for
+love, which speaks eloquently through all disguises, and can stamp an
+impression in ten minutes&rsquo; talk or an exchange of glances.&nbsp;
+He was the more dangerous in that he was far from bold, but seemed to
+woo in spite of himself, and with a soft and pleading eye.&nbsp; Ragged
+as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that respect more comfortably
+furnished, even on board he was not without some curious admirers.<br>
+<br>
+There was a girl among the passengers, a tall, blonde, handsome, strapping
+Irishwoman, with a wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had dubbed Tommy,
+with that transcendental appropriateness that defies analysis.&nbsp;
+One day the Devonian was lying for warmth in the upper stoke-hole, which
+stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came past, very neatly attired,
+as was her custom.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Poor fellow,&rsquo; she said, stopping, &lsquo;you haven&rsquo;t
+a vest.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;I wish I &lsquo;ad.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Then she stood and gazed on him in silence, until, in his embarrassment,
+for he knew not how to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe
+and began to fill it with tobacco.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Do you want a match?&rsquo; she asked.&nbsp; And before he had
+time to reply, she ran off and presently returned with more than one.<br>
+<br>
+That was the beginning and the end, as far as our passage is concerned,
+of what I will make bold to call this love-affair.&nbsp; There are many
+relations which go on to marriage and last during a lifetime, in which
+less human feeling is engaged than in this scene of five minutes at
+the stoke-hole.<br>
+<br>
+Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of the stowaways; but in
+a larger sense of the word I have yet more to add.&nbsp; Jones had discovered
+and pointed out to me a young woman who was remarkable among her fellows
+for a pleasing and interesting air.&nbsp; She was poorly clad, to the
+verge, if not over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old
+jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than your fist; but her
+eyes, her whole expression, and her manner, even in ordinary moments,
+told of a true womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and devotion.&nbsp;
+She had a look, too, of refinement, like one who might have been a better
+lady than most, had she been allowed the opportunity.&nbsp; When alone
+she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was not often alone; there was
+usually by her side a heavy, dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary
+of speech and gesture - not from caution, but poverty of disposition;
+a man like a ditcher, unlovely and uninteresting; whom she petted and
+tended and waited on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul.&nbsp;
+It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick, and this delicate,
+sad woman caring for him.&nbsp; He seemed, from first to last, insensible
+of her caresses and attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his insensibility.&nbsp;
+The Irish husband, who sang his wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl
+serving her Orson, were the two bits of human nature that most appealed
+to me throughout the voyage.<br>
+<br>
+On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets were collected; and soon
+a rumour began to go round the vessel; and this girl, with her bit of
+sealskin cap, became the centre of whispering and pointed fingers.&nbsp;
+She also, it was said, was a stowaway of a sort; for she was on board
+with neither ticket nor money; and the man with whom she travelled was
+the father of a family, who had left wife and children to be hers.&nbsp;
+The ship&rsquo;s officers discouraged the story, which may therefore
+have been a story and no more; but it was believed in the steerage,
+and the poor girl had to encounter many curious eyes from that day forth.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Travel is of two kinds; and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined
+both.&nbsp; &lsquo;Out of my country and myself I go,&rsquo; sings the
+old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude
+and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.&nbsp;
+Part of the interest and a great deal of the amusement flowed, at least
+to me, from this novel situation in the world.<br>
+<br>
+I found that I had what they call fallen in life with absolute success
+and verisimilitude.&nbsp; I was taken for a steerage passenger; no one
+seemed surprised that I should be so; and there was nothing but the
+brass plate between decks to remind me that I had once been a gentleman.&nbsp;
+In a former book, describing a former journey, I expressed some wonder
+that I could be readily and naturally taken for a pedlar, and explained
+the accident by the difference of language and manners between England
+and France.&nbsp; I must now take a humbler view; for here I was among
+my own countrymen, somewhat roughly clad to be sure, but with every
+advantage of speech and manner; and I am bound to confess that I passed
+for nearly anything you please except an educated gentleman.&nbsp; The
+sailors called me &lsquo;mate,&rsquo; the officers addressed me as &lsquo;my
+man,&rsquo; my comrades accepted me without hesitation for a person
+of their own character and experience, but with some curious information.&nbsp;
+One, a mason himself, believed I was a mason; several, and among these
+at least one of the seaman, judged me to be a petty officer in the American
+navy; and I was so often set down for a practical engineer that at last
+I had not the heart to deny it.&nbsp; From all these guesses I drew
+one conclusion, which told against the insight of my companions.&nbsp;
+They might be close observers in their own way, and read the manners
+in the face; but it was plain that they did not extend their observation
+to the hands.<br>
+<br>
+To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part without a hitch.&nbsp;
+It is true I came little in their way; but when we did encounter, there
+was no recognition in their eye, although I confess I sometimes courted
+it in silence.&nbsp; All these, my inferiors and equals, took me, like
+the transformed monarch in the story, for a mere common, human man.&nbsp;
+They gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh about the eye kept unrelaxed.<br>
+<br>
+With the women this surprised me less, as I had already experimented
+on the sex by going abroad through a suburban part of London simply
+attired in a sleeve-waistcoat.&nbsp; The result was curious.&nbsp; I
+then learned for the first time, and by the exhaustive process, how
+much attention ladies are accustomed to bestow on all male creatures
+of their own station; for, in my humble rig, each one who went by me
+caused me a certain shock of surprise and a sense of something wanting.&nbsp;
+In my normal circumstances, it appeared every young lady must have paid
+me some tribute of a glance; and though I had often not detected it
+when it was given, I was well aware of its absence when it was withheld.&nbsp;
+My height seemed to decrease with every woman who passed me, for she
+passed me like a dog.&nbsp; This is one of my grounds for supposing
+that what are called the upper classes may sometimes produce a disagreeable
+impression in what are called the lower; and I wish some one would continue
+my experiment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a man
+becomes invisible to the well-regulated female eye.<br>
+<br>
+Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more complete test; for, even
+with the addition of speech and manner, I passed among the ladies for
+precisely the average man of the steerage.&nbsp; It was one afternoon
+that I saw this demonstrated.&nbsp; A very plainly dressed woman was
+taken ill on deck.&nbsp; I think I had the luck to be present at every
+sudden seizure during all the passage; and on this occasion found myself
+in the place of importance, supporting the sufferer.&nbsp; There was
+not only a large crowd immediately around us, but a considerable knot
+of saloon passengers leaning over our heads from the hurricane-deck.&nbsp;
+One of these, an elderly managing woman, hailed me with counsels.&nbsp;
+Of course I had to reply; and as the talk went on, I began to discover
+that the whole group took me for the husband.&nbsp; I looked upon my
+new wife, poor creature, with mingled feelings; and I must own she had
+not even the appearance of the poorest class of city servant-maids,
+but looked more like a country wench who should have been employed at
+a roadside inn.&nbsp; Now was the time for me to go and study the brass
+plate.<br>
+<br>
+To such of the officers as knew about me - the doctor, the purser, and
+the stewards - I appeared in the light of a broad joke.&nbsp; The fact
+that I spent the better part of my day in writing had gone abroad over
+the ship and tickled them all prodigiously.&nbsp; Whenever they met
+me they referred to my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth
+of humorous intention.&nbsp; Their manner was well calculated to remind
+me of my fallen fortunes.&nbsp; You may be sincerely amused by the amateur
+literary efforts of a gentleman, but you scarce publish the feeling
+to his face. &lsquo;Well!&rsquo; they would say: &lsquo;still writing?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And the smile would widen into a laugh.&nbsp; The purser came one day
+into the cabin, and, touched to the heart by my misguided industry,
+offered me some other kind of writing, &lsquo;for which,&rsquo; he added
+pointedly, &lsquo;you will be paid.&rsquo;&nbsp; This was nothing else
+than to copy out the list of passengers.<br>
+<br>
+Another trick of mine which told against my reputation was my choice
+of roosting-place in an active draught upon the cabin floor.&nbsp; I
+was openly jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a considerable
+knot would sometimes gather at the door to see my last dispositions
+for the night.&nbsp; This was embarrassing, but I learned to support
+the trial with equanimity.<br>
+<br>
+Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new position sat lightly and
+naturally upon my spirits.&nbsp; I accepted the consequences with readiness,
+and found them far from difficult to bear.&nbsp; The steerage conquered
+me; I conformed more and more to the type of the place, not only in
+manner but at heart, growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers
+who looked down upon me, and day by day greedier for small delicacies.&nbsp;
+Such was the result, as I fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup
+and porridge.&nbsp; We think we have no sweet tooth as long as we are
+full to the brim of molasses; but a man must have sojourned in the workhouse
+before he boasts himself indifferent to dainties.&nbsp; Every evening,
+for instance, I was more and more preoccupied about our doubtful fare
+at tea.&nbsp; If it was delicate my heart was much lightened; if it
+was but broken fish I was proportionally downcast.&nbsp; The offer of
+a little jelly from a fellow-passenger more provident than myself caused
+a marked elevation in my spirits.&nbsp; And I would have gone to the
+ship&rsquo;s end and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.<br>
+<br>
+In other ways I was content with my position.&nbsp; It seemed no disgrace
+to be confounded with my company; for I may as well declare at once
+I found their manners as gentle and becoming as those of any other class.&nbsp;
+I do not mean that my friends could have sat down without embarrassment
+and laughable disaster at the table of a duke.&nbsp; That does not imply
+an inferiority of breeding, but a difference of usage.&nbsp; Thus I
+flatter myself that I conducted myself well among my fellow-passengers;
+yet my most ambitious hope is not to have avoided faults, but to have
+committed as few as possible.&nbsp; I know too well that my tact is
+not the same as their tact, and that my habit of a different society
+constituted, not only no qualification, but a positive disability to
+move easily and becomingly in this.&nbsp; When Jones complimented me
+- because I &lsquo;managed to behave very pleasantly&rsquo; to my fellow-passengers,
+was how he put it - I could follow the thought in his mind, and knew
+his compliment to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency
+in English.&nbsp; I dare say this praise was given me immediately on
+the back of some unpardonable solecism, which had led him to review
+my conduct as a whole.&nbsp; We are all ready to laugh at the ploughman
+among lords; we should consider also the case of a lord among the ploughmen.&nbsp;
+I have seen a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman; and I know,
+but nothing will induce me to disclose, which of these two was the better
+gentleman.&nbsp; Some of our finest behaviour, though it looks well
+enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to the gallery.&nbsp; We
+boast too often manners that are parochial rather than universal; that,
+like a country wine, will not bear transportation for a hundred miles,
+nor from the parlour to the kitchen.&nbsp; To be a gentleman is to be
+one all the world over, and in every relation and grade of society.&nbsp;
+It is a high calling, to which a man must first be born, and then devote
+himself for life.&nbsp; And, unhappily, the manners of a certain so-called
+upper grade have a kind of currency, and meet with a certain external
+acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends to keep us well
+satisfied with slight acquirements and the amateurish accomplishments
+of a clique.&nbsp; But manners, like art, should be human and central.<br>
+<br>
+Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved among them in a relation
+of equality, seemed to me excellent gentlemen.&nbsp; They were not rough,
+nor hasty, nor disputatious; debated pleasantly, differed kindly; were
+helpful, gentle, patient, and placid.&nbsp; The type of manners was
+plain, and even heavy; there was little to please the eye, but nothing
+to shock; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at the spring of
+behaviour than in many more ornate and delicate societies.&nbsp; I say
+delicate, where I cannot say refined; a thing may be fine, like ironwork,
+without being delicate, like lace.&nbsp; There was here less delicacy;
+the skin supported more callously the natural surface of events, the
+mind received more bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I
+do not think that there was less effective refinement, less consideration
+for others, less polite suppression of self.&nbsp; I speak of the best
+among my fellow-passengers; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon,
+there is a mixture.&nbsp; Those, then, with whom I found myself in sympathy,
+and of whom I may therefore hope to write with a greater measure of
+truth, were not only as good in their manners, but endowed with very
+much the same natural capacities, and about as wise in deduction, as
+the bankers and barristers of what is called society.&nbsp; One and
+all were too much interested in disconnected facts, and loved information
+for its own sake with too rash a devotion; but people in all classes
+display the same appetite as they gorge themselves daily with the miscellaneous
+gossip of the newspaper.&nbsp; Newspaper-reading, as far as I can make
+out, is often rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture.&nbsp;
+I have myself palmed off yesterday&rsquo;s issue on a friend, and seen
+him re-peruse it for a continuance of minutes with an air at once refreshed
+and solemn.&nbsp; Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention; but though they
+may be eager listeners, they have rarely seemed to me either willing
+or careful thinkers.&nbsp; Culture is not measured by the greatness
+of the field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the nicety with
+which we can perceive relations in that field, whether great or small.&nbsp;
+Workmen, certainly those who were on board with me, I found wanting
+in this quality or habit of the mind.&nbsp; They did not perceive relations,
+but leaped to a so-called cause, and thought the problem settled.&nbsp;
+Thus the cause of everything in England was the form of government,
+and the cure for all evils was, by consequence, a revolution.&nbsp;
+It is surprising how many of them said this, and that none should have
+had a definite thought in his head as he said it.&nbsp; Some hated the
+Church because they disagreed with it; some hated Lord Beaconsfield
+because of war and taxes; all hated the masters, possibly with reason.&nbsp;
+But these failings were not at the root of the matter; the true reasoning
+of their souls ran thus - I have not got on; I ought to have got on;
+if there was a revolution I should get on.&nbsp; How?&nbsp; They had
+no idea.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; Because - because - well, look at America!<br>
+<br>
+To be politically blind is no distinction; we are all so, if you come
+to that.&nbsp; At bottom, as it seems to me, there is but one question
+in modern home politics, though it appears in many shapes, and that
+is the question of money; and but one political remedy, that the people
+should grow wiser and better.&nbsp; My workmen fellow-passengers were
+as impatient and dull of hearing on the second of these points as any
+member of Parliament; but they had some glimmerings of the first.&nbsp;
+They would not hear of improvement on their part, but wished the world
+made over again in a crack, so that they might remain improvident and
+idle and debauched, and yet enjoy the comfort and respect that should
+accompany the opposite virtues; and it was in this expectation, as far
+as I could see, that many of them were now on their way to America.&nbsp;
+But on the point of money they saw clearly enough that inland politics,
+so far as they were concerned, were reducible to the question of annual
+income; a question which should long ago have been settled by a revolution,
+they did not know how, and which they were now about to settle for themselves,
+once more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic in a steamship
+of considerable tonnage.<br>
+<br>
+And yet it has been amply shown them that the second or income question
+is in itself nothing, and may as well be left undecided, if there be
+no wisdom and virtue to profit by the change.&nbsp; It is not by a man&rsquo;s
+purse, but by his character that he is rich or poor.&nbsp; Barney will
+be poor, Alick will be poor, Mackay will be poor; let them go where
+they will, and wreck all the governments under heaven, they will be
+poor until they die.<br>
+<br>
+Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average workman than his surprising
+idleness, and the candour with which he confesses to the failing.&nbsp;
+It has to me been always something of a relief to find the poor, as
+a general rule, so little oppressed with work.&nbsp; I can in consequence
+enjoy my own more fortunate beginning with a better grace.&nbsp; The
+other day I was living with a farmer in America, an old frontiersman,
+who had worked and fought, hunted and farmed, from his childhood up.&nbsp;
+He excused himself for his defective education on the ground that he
+had been overworked from first to last.&nbsp; Even now, he said, anxious
+as he was, he had never the time to take up a book.&nbsp; In consequence
+of this, I observed him closely; he was occupied for four or, at the
+extreme outside, for five hours out of the twenty-four, and then principally
+in walking; and the remainder of the day he passed in born idleness,
+either eating fruit or standing with his back against a door.&nbsp;
+I have known men do hard literary work all morning, and then undergo
+quite as much physical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this powerful
+frontiersman for the day.&nbsp; He, at least, like all the educated
+class, did so much homage to industry as to persuade himself he was
+industrious.&nbsp; But the average mechanic recognises his idleness
+with effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organised it.<br>
+<br>
+I give the story as it was told me, and it was told me for a fact.&nbsp;
+A man fell from a housetop in the city of Aberdeen, and was brought
+into hospital with broken bones.&nbsp; He was asked what was his trade,
+and replied that he was a <i>tapper</i>.&nbsp; No one had ever heard
+of such a thing before; the officials were filled with curiosity; they
+besought an explanation.&nbsp; It appeared that when a party of slaters
+were engaged upon a roof, they would now and then be taken with a fancy
+for the public-house.&nbsp; Now a seamstress, for example, might slip
+away from her work and no one be the wiser; but if these fellows adjourned,
+the tapping of the mallets would cease, and thus the neighbourhood be
+advertised of their defection.&nbsp; Hence the career of the tapper.&nbsp;
+He has to do the tapping and keep up an industrious bustle on the housetop
+during the absence of the slaters.&nbsp; When he taps for only one or
+two the thing is child&rsquo;s-play, but when he has to represent a
+whole troop, it is then that he earns his money in the sweat of his
+brow.&nbsp; Then must he bound from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate,
+sexduplicate his single personality, and swell and hasten his blows.,
+until he produce a perfect illusion for the ear, and you would swear
+that a crowd of emulous masons were continuing merrily to roof the house.&nbsp;
+It must be a strange sight from an upper window.<br>
+<br>
+I heard nothing on board of the tapper; but I was astonished at the
+stories told by my companions.&nbsp; Skulking, shirking, malingering,
+were all established tactics, it appeared.&nbsp; They could see no dishonesty
+where a man who is paid for an bones work gives half an hour&rsquo;s
+consistent idling in its place.&nbsp; Thus the tapper would refuse to
+watch for the police during a burglary, and call himself a honest man.&nbsp;
+It is not sufficiently recognised that our race detests to work.&nbsp;
+If I thought that I should have to work every day of my life as hard
+as I am working now, I should be tempted to give up the struggle.&nbsp;
+And the workman early begins on his career of toil.&nbsp; He has never
+had his fill of holidays in the past, and his prospect of holidays in
+the future is both distant and uncertain.&nbsp; In the circumstances,
+it would require a high degree of virtue not to snatch alleviations
+for the moment.<br>
+<br>
+There were many good talkers on the ship; and I believe good talking
+of a certain sort is a common accomplishment among working men.&nbsp;
+Where books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount of information
+will be given and received by word of mouth; and this tends to produce
+good talkers, and, what is no less needful for conversation, good listeners.&nbsp;
+They could all tell a story with effect.&nbsp; I am sometimes tempted
+to think that the less literary class show always better in narration;
+they have so much more patience with detail, are so much less hurried
+to reach the points, and preserve so much juster a proportion among
+the facts.&nbsp; At the same time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic
+ploddingly, have not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden lights from
+unexpected quarters, and when the talk is over they often leave the
+matter where it was.&nbsp; They mark time instead of marching.&nbsp;
+They think only to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use their
+reason rather as a weapon of offense than as a tool for self-improvement.&nbsp;
+Hence the talk of some of the cleverest was unprofitable in result,
+because there was no give and take; they would grant you as little as
+possible for premise, and begin to dispute under an oath to conquer
+or to die.<br>
+<br>
+But the talk of a workman is apt to be more interesting than that of
+a wealthy merchant, because the thoughts, hopes, and fears of which
+the workman&rsquo;s life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature.&nbsp;
+They are more immediate to human life.&nbsp; An income calculated by
+the week is a far more human thing than one calculated by the year,
+and a small income, simply from its smallness, than a large one.&nbsp;
+I never wearied listening to the details of a workman&rsquo;s economy,
+because every item stood for some real pleasure.&nbsp; If he could afford
+pudding twice a week, you know that twice a week the man ate with genuine
+gusto and was physically happy; while if you learn that a rich man has
+seven courses a day, ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and
+the whole is but misspent money and a weariness to the flesh.<br>
+<br>
+The difference between England and America to a working man was thus
+most humanly put to me by a fellow-passenger: &lsquo;In America,&rsquo;
+said he, &lsquo;you get pies and puddings.&rsquo;&nbsp; I do not hear
+enough, in economy books, of pies and pudding.&nbsp; A man lives in
+and for the delicacies, adornments, and accidental attributes of life,
+such as pudding to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy his
+leisure.&nbsp; The bare terms of existence would be rejected with contempt
+by all.&nbsp; If a man feeds on bread and butter, soup and porridge,
+his appetite grows wolfish after dainties.&nbsp; And the workman dwells
+in a borderland, and is always within sight of those cheerless regions
+where life is more difficult to sustain than worth sustaining.&nbsp;
+Every detail of our existence, where it is worth while to cross the
+ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive and enthralling by the presence
+of genuine desire; but it is all one to me whether Croesus has a hundred
+or a thousand thousands in the bank.&nbsp; There is more adventure in
+the life of the working man who descends as a common solder into the
+battle of life, than in that of the millionaire who sits apart in an
+office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the manoeuvres by telegraph.&nbsp;
+Give me to hear about the career of him who is in the thick of business;
+to whom one change of market means empty belly, and another a copious
+and savoury meal.&nbsp; This is not the philosophical, but the human
+side of economics; it interests like a story; and the life all who are
+thus situated partakes in a small way the charm of <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>;
+for every step is critical and human life is presented to you naked
+and verging to its lowest terms.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+NEW YORK<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+As we drew near to New York I was at first amused, and then somewhat
+staggered, by the cautious and the grisly tales that went the round.&nbsp;
+You would have thought we were to land upon a cannibal island.&nbsp;
+You must speak to no one in the streets, as they would not leave you
+till you were rooked and beaten.&nbsp; You must enter a hotel with military
+precautions; for the least you had to apprehend was to awake next morning
+without money or baggage, or necessary raiment, a lone forked radish
+in a bed; and if the worst befell, you would instantly and mysteriously
+disappear from the ranks of mankind.<br>
+<br>
+I have usually found such stories correspond to the least modicum of
+fact.&nbsp; Thus I was warned, I remember, against the roadside inns
+of the C&eacute;vennes, and that by a learned professor; and when I
+reached Pradelles the warning was explained - it was but the far-away
+rumour and reduplication of a single terrifying story already half a
+century old, and half forgotten in the theatre of the events.&nbsp;
+So I was tempted to make light of these reports against America.&nbsp;
+But we had on board with us a man whose evidence it would not do to
+put aside.&nbsp; He had come near these perils in the body; he had visited
+a robber inn.&nbsp; The public has an old and well-grounded favour for
+this class of incident, and shall be gratified to the best of my power.<br>
+<br>
+My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call M&rsquo;Naughten, had come from
+New York to Boston with a comrade, seeking work.&nbsp; They were a pair
+of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at the station, passed
+the day in beer saloons, and with congenial spirits, until midnight
+struck.&nbsp; Then they applied themselves to find a lodging, and walked
+the streets till two, knocking at houses of entertainment and being
+refused admittance, or themselves declining the terms.&nbsp; By two
+the inspiration of their liquor had begun to wear off; they were weary
+and humble, and after a great circuit found themselves in the same street
+where they had begun their search, and in front of a French hotel where
+they had already sought accommodation.&nbsp; Seeing the house still
+open, they returned to the charge.&nbsp; A man in a white cap sat in
+an office by the door.&nbsp; He seemed to welcome them more warmly than
+when they had first presented themselves, and the charge for the night
+had somewhat unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a quarter.&nbsp;
+They thought him ill-looking, but paid their quarter apiece, and were
+shown upstairs to the top of the house.&nbsp; There, in a small room,
+the man in the white cap wished them pleasant slumbers.<br>
+<br>
+It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some conveniences.&nbsp; The
+door did not lock on the inside; and the only sign of adornment was
+a couple of framed pictures, one close above the head of the bed, and
+the other opposite the foot, and both curtained, as we may sometimes
+see valuable water-colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of
+art more than usually skittish in the subject.&nbsp; It was perhaps
+in the hope of finding something of this last description that M&rsquo;Naughten&rsquo;s
+comrade pulled aside the curtain of the first.&nbsp; He was startlingly
+disappointed.&nbsp; There was no picture.&nbsp; The frame surrounded,
+and the curtain was designed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition,
+through which they looked forth into the dark corridor.&nbsp; A person
+standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or
+even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed.&nbsp; M&rsquo;Naughten and his
+comrade stared at each other like Vasco&rsquo;s seamen, &lsquo;with
+a wild surmise&rsquo;; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran
+to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain.&nbsp; There he stood,
+petrified; and M&rsquo;Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by the
+wrist in terror.&nbsp; They could see into another room, larger in size
+than that which they occupied, where three men sat crouching and silent
+in the dark.&nbsp; For a second or so these five persons looked each
+other in the eyes, then the curtain was dropped, and M&rsquo;Naughten
+and his friend made but one bolt of it out of the room and downstairs.&nbsp;
+The man in the white cap said nothing as they passed him; and they were
+so pleased to be once more in the open night that they gave up all notion
+of a bed, and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.<br>
+<br>
+No one seemed much cast down by these stories, but all inquired after
+the address of a respectable hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under
+the conduct of Mr. Jones.&nbsp; Before noon of the second Sunday we
+sighted the low shores outside of New York harbour; the steerage passengers
+must remain on board to pass through Castle Garden on the following
+morning; but we of the second cabin made our escape along with the lords
+of the saloon; and by six o&rsquo;clock Jones and I issued into West
+Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an open baggage-wagon.&nbsp;
+It rained miraculously; and from that moment till on the following night
+I left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no cessation of the downpour.&nbsp;
+The roadways were flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water filled
+the air; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet people and wet clothing.<br>
+<br>
+It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us a good deal of money,
+to be rattled along West Street to our destination: &lsquo;Reunion House,
+No. 10 West Street, one minutes walk from Castle Garden; convenient
+to Castle Garden, the Steamboat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool
+Ships; Board and Lodging per day 1 dollar, single meals 25 cents, lodging
+per night 25 cents; private rooms for families; no charge for storage
+or baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons; Michael Mitchell,
+Proprietor.&rsquo;&nbsp; Reunion House was, I may go the length of saying,
+a humble hostelry.&nbsp; You entered through a long bar-room, thence
+passed into a little dining-room, and thence into a still smaller kitchen.&nbsp;
+The furniture was of the plainest; but the bar was hung in the American
+taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.<br>
+<br>
+Jones was well known; we were received warmly; and two minutes afterwards
+I had refused a drink from the proprietor, and was going on, in my plain
+European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when Mr. Mitchell sternly interposed,
+and explained the situation.&nbsp; He was offering to treat me, it appeared,
+whenever an American bar-keeper proposes anything, it must be borne
+in mind that he is offering to treat; and if I did not want a drink,
+I must at least take the cigar.&nbsp; I took it bashfully, feeling I
+had begun my American career on the wrong foot.&nbsp; I did not enjoy
+that cigar; but this may have been from a variety of reasons, even the
+best cigar often failing to please if you smoke three-quarters of it
+in a drenching rain.<br>
+<br>
+For many years America was to me a sort of promised land; &lsquo;westward
+the march of empire holds its way&rsquo;; the race is for the moment
+to the young; what has been and what is we imperfectly and obscurely
+know; what is to be yet lies beyond the flight of our imaginations.&nbsp;
+Greece, Rome, and Judaea are gone by forever, leaving to generations
+the legacy of their accomplished work; China still endures, an old-inhabited
+house in the brand-new city of nations; England has already declined,
+since she has lost the States; and to these States, therefore, yet undeveloped,
+full of dark possibilities, and grown, like another Eve, from one rib
+out of the side of their own old land, the minds of young men in England
+turn naturally at a certain hopeful period of their age.&nbsp; It will
+be hard for an American to understand the spirit.&nbsp; But let him
+imagine a young man, who shall have grown up in an old and rigid circle,
+following bygone fashions and taught to distrust his own fresh instincts,
+and who now suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his own
+age, who keep house together by themselves and live far from restraint
+and tradition; let him imagine this, and he will have some imperfect
+notion of the sentiment with which spirited English youths turn to the
+thought of the American Republic.&nbsp; It seems to them as if, out
+west, the war of life was still conducted in the open air, and on free
+barbaric terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into parlours, nor
+begun to be conducted, like some unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise,
+costume forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-denial.&nbsp; Which
+of these two he prefers, a man with any youth still left in him will
+decide rightly for himself.&nbsp; He would rather be houseless than
+denied a pass-key; rather go without food than partake of stalled ox
+in stiff, respectable society; rather be shot out of hand than direct
+his life according to the dictates of the world.<br>
+<br>
+He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws, the Puritan sourness,
+the fierce, sordid appetite for dollars, or the dreary existence of
+country towns.&nbsp; A few wild story-books which delighted his childhood
+form the imaginative basis of his picture of America.&nbsp; In course
+of time, there is added to this a great crowd of stimulating details
+- vast cities that grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that have gone
+south in autumn, returning with the spring to find thousands camped
+upon their marshes, and the lamps burning far and near along populous
+streets; forests that disappear like snow; countries larger than Britain
+that are cleared and settled, one man running forth with his household
+gods before another, while the bear and the Indian are yet scarce aware
+of their approach; oil that gushes from the earth; gold that is washed
+or quarried in the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that bustle,
+courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic change that Walt Whitman
+has seized and set forth in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.<br>
+<br>
+Here I was at last in America, and was soon out upon New York streets,
+spying for things foreign.&nbsp; The place had to me an air of Liverpool;
+but such was the rain that not Paradise itself would have looked inviting.&nbsp;
+We were a party of four, under two umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots
+lads, recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome a compatriot.&nbsp;
+They had been six weeks in New York, and neither of them had yet found
+a single job or earned a single halfpenny.&nbsp; Up to the present they
+were exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.<br>
+<br>
+The lads soon left us.&nbsp; Now I had sworn by all my gods to have
+such a dinner as would rouse the dead; there was scarce any expense
+at which I should have hesitated; the devil was in it, but Jones and
+I should dine like heathen emperors.&nbsp; I set to work, asking after
+a restaurant; and I chose the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking
+passers-by to ask from.&nbsp; Yet, although I had told them I was willing
+to pay anything in reason, one and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price
+houses, where I would not have eaten that night for the cost of twenty
+dinners.&nbsp; I do not know if this were characteristic of New York,
+or whether it was only Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged
+enterprising suggestions.&nbsp; But at length, by our own sagacity,
+we found a French restaurant, where there was a French waiter, some
+fair French cooking, some so-called French wine, and French coffee to
+conclude the whole.&nbsp; I never entered into the feelings of Jack
+on land so completely as when I tasted that coffee.<br>
+<br>
+I suppose we had one of the &lsquo;private rooms for families&rsquo;
+at Reunion House.&nbsp; It was very small, furnished with a bed, a chair,
+and some clothes-pegs; and it derived all that was necessary for the
+life of the human animal through two borrowed lights; one looking into
+the passage, and the second opening, without sash, into another apartment,
+where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of wakefulness, drearily
+mumbled to each other all night long.&nbsp; It will be observed that
+this was almost exactly the disposition of the room in M&rsquo;Naughten&rsquo;s
+story.&nbsp; Jones had the bed; I pitched my camp upon the floor; he
+did not sleep until near morning, and I, for my part, never closed an
+eye.<br>
+<br>
+At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly afterwards the men in
+the next room gave over snoring for good, and began to rustle over their
+toilettes.&nbsp; The sound of their voices as they talked was low and
+like that of people watching by the sick.&nbsp; Jones, who had at last
+begun to doze, tumbled and murmured, and every now and then opened unconscious
+eyes upon me where I lay.&nbsp; I found myself growing eerier and eerier,
+for I dare say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and hurried
+to dress and get downstairs.<br>
+<br>
+You had to pass through the rain, which still fell thick and resonant,
+to reach a lavatory on the other side of the court.&nbsp; There were
+three basin-stands, and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap,
+white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget a looking-glass and
+a pair of questionable combs.&nbsp; Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing
+his face with a good will.&nbsp; He had been three months in New York
+and had not yet found a single job nor earned a single halfpenny.&nbsp;
+Up to the present, he also was exactly out of pocket by the amount of
+the fare.&nbsp; I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow-emigrants.<br>
+<br>
+Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I spare to tell.&nbsp; I had
+a thousand and one things to do; only the day to do them in, and a journey
+across the continent before me in the evening.&nbsp; It rained with
+patient fury; every now and then I had to get under cover for a while
+in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under this
+continued drenching it began to grow damp on the inside.&nbsp; I went
+to banks, post-offices, railway-offices, restaurants, publishers, booksellers,
+money-changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather about my feet,
+and those who were careful of their floors would look on with an unfriendly
+eye.&nbsp; Wherever I went, too, the same traits struck me: the people
+were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly kind.&nbsp; The money-changer
+cross-questioned me like a French commissary, asking my age, my business,
+my average income, and my destination, beating down my attempts at evasion,
+and receiving my answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he shook
+hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his lad nearly a quarter of
+a mile in the rain to get me books at a reduction.&nbsp; Again, in a
+very large publishing and bookselling establishment, a man, who seemed
+to be the manager, received me as I had certainly never before been
+received in any human shop, indicated squarely that he put no faith
+in my honesty, and refused to look up the names of books or give me
+the slightest help or information, on the ground, like the steward,
+that it was none of his business.&nbsp; I lost my temper at last, said
+I was a stranger in America and not learned in their etiquette; but
+I would assure him, if he went to any bookseller in England, of more
+handsome usage.&nbsp; The boast was perhaps exaggerated; but like many
+a long shot, it struck the gold.&nbsp; The manager passed at once from
+one extreme to the other; I may say that from that moment he loaded
+me with kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice, wrote me down
+addresses, and came bareheaded into the rain to point me out a restaurant,
+where I might lunch, nor even then did he seem to think that he had
+done enough.&nbsp; These are (it is as well to be bold in statement)
+the manners of America.&nbsp; It is this same opposition that has most
+struck me in people of almost all classes and from east to west.&nbsp;
+By the time a man had about strung me up to be the death of him by his
+insulting behaviour, he himself would be just upon the point of melting
+into confidence and serviceable attentions.&nbsp; Yet I suspect, although
+I have met with the like in so many parts, that this must be the character
+of some particular state or group of states, for in America, and this
+again in all classes, you will find some of the softest-mannered gentlemen
+in the world.<br>
+<br>
+I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell&rsquo;s toward the evening,
+that I had simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers,
+and leave them behind for the benefit of New York city.&nbsp; No fire
+could have dried them ere I had to start; and to pack them in their
+present condition was to spread ruin among my other possessions.&nbsp;
+With a heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the
+middle of a pool upon the floor of Mitchell&rsquo;s kitchen.&nbsp; I
+wonder if they are dry by now.&nbsp; Mitchell hired a man to carry my
+baggage to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me thither himself,
+and recommended me to the particular attention of the officials.&nbsp;
+No one could have been kinder.&nbsp; Those who are out of pocket may
+go safely to Reunion House, where they will get decent meals and find
+an honest and obliging landlord.&nbsp; I owed him this word of thanks,
+before I enter fairly on the second <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a>
+and far less agreeable chapter of my emigrant experience.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK - A FRAGMENT - 1871<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient unity
+may disengage itself from among the crowd of details, and what he sees
+may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the same principle,
+I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to intervene between
+any of my little journeyings and the attempt to chronicle them.&nbsp;
+I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the moment, or that has
+been before me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections
+to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except
+the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable
+by a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this
+way I ensure the Survival of the Fittest.&nbsp; If I make notes for
+future use, or if I am obliged to write letters during the course of
+my little excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never
+again find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be
+given in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile.&nbsp;
+This process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am somewhat
+afraid that I have made this mistake with the present journey.&nbsp;
+Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been entirely lost; I
+can tell you nothing about the beginning and nothing about the end;
+but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours about the middle remain
+quite distinct and definite, like a little patch of sunshine on a long,
+shadowy plain, or the one spot on an old picture that has been restored
+by the dexterous hand of the cleaner.&nbsp; I remember a tale of an
+old Scots minister called upon suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched
+an old sermon out of his study and found himself in the pulpit before
+he noticed that the rats had been making free with his manuscript and
+eaten the first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
+congregation how he found himself situated: &lsquo;And now,&rsquo; said
+he, &lsquo;let us just begin where the rats have left off.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I must follow the divine&rsquo;s example, and take up the thread of
+my discourse where it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+COCKERMOUTH<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
+did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street.&nbsp; When I
+did so, it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight
+lit up English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,
+- as it were, an English atmosphere blew against my face.&nbsp; There
+is nothing perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever
+really be more unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that
+is set between England and Scotland - a gulf so easy in appearance,
+in reality so difficult to traverse.&nbsp; Here are two people almost
+identical in blood; pent up together on one small island, so that their
+intercourse (one would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners
+who shared one cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion;
+and yet a few years of quarrelsome isolation - a mere forenoon&rsquo;s
+tiff, as one may call it, in comparison with the great historical cycles
+- has so separated their thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual
+dangers, nor steamers, nor railways, nor all the king&rsquo;s horses
+and all the king&rsquo;s men, seem able to obliterate the broad distinction.&nbsp;
+In the trituration of another century or so the corners may disappear;
+but in the meantime, in the year of grace 1871, I was as much in a new
+country as if I had been walking out of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.<br>
+<br>
+I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
+and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting
+in a dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes
+of the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and
+voices of the gossips round about me.<br>
+<br>
+Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
+following the course of the bright little river.&nbsp; I passed first
+one and then another, then a third, several couples out love-making
+in the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning
+to grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill -
+a great, gaunt promontory of building, - half on dry ground and half
+arched over the stream.&nbsp; The road here drew in its shoulders and
+crept through between the landward extremity of the mill and a little
+garden enclosure, with a small house and a large signboard within its
+privet hedge.&nbsp; I was pleased to fancy this an inn, and drew little
+etchings in fancy of a sanded parlour, and three-cornered spittoons,
+and a society of parochial gossips seated within over their churchwardens;
+but as I drew near, the board displayed its superscription, and I could
+read the name of Smethurst, and the designation of &lsquo;Canadian Felt
+Hat Manufacturers.&rsquo;&nbsp; There was no more hope of evening fellowship,
+and I could only stroll on by the river-side, under the trees.&nbsp;
+The water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and dusted all over with
+a little mist of flying insects.&nbsp; There were some amorous ducks,
+also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a little farther
+down.&nbsp; But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I was perpetually
+haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that had been playing
+such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to the inn,
+and supper, and my bed.<br>
+<br>
+The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress
+my intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to
+Furness, and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by
+that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to introduce
+tradition and authority into the choice of a man&rsquo;s own pleasures.&nbsp;
+I can excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical heresies,
+because them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by
+present argument.&nbsp; But I do not seek to justify my pleasures.&nbsp;
+If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland
+parks and woodlands to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont
+Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one
+or two chosen companions, to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward,
+and weary, I merely state these preferences as facts, and do not seek
+to establish them as principles.&nbsp; This is not the general rule,
+however, and accordingly the waitress was shocked, as one might be at
+a heresy, to hear the route that I had sketched out for myself.&nbsp;
+Everybody who came to Cockermouth for pleasure, it appeared, went on
+to Keswick.&nbsp; It was in vain that I put up a little plea for the
+liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I said I should prefer to
+go to Whitehaven.&nbsp; I was told that there was &lsquo;nothing to
+see there&rsquo; - that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood; and at last,
+as the handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave way, as men
+always do in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to leave for
+Keswick by a train in the early evening.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+AN EVANGELIST<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with &lsquo;nothing
+to see&rsquo;; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a pleasant,
+vague picture of the town and all its surroundings.&nbsp; I might have
+dodged happily enough all day about the main street and up to the castle
+and in and out of byways, but the curious attraction that leads a person
+in a strange place to follow, day after day, the same round, and to
+make set habits for himself in a week or ten days, led me half unconsciously
+up the same, road that I had gone the evening before.&nbsp; When I came
+up to the hat manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden
+gate.&nbsp; He was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others
+had been put to await their turn one above the other on his own head,
+so that he looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man.&nbsp;
+As I drew near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with
+so curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared myself
+to apologise for some unwitting trespass.&nbsp; His first question rather
+confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or not he had seen me
+going up this way last night; and after having answered in the affirmative,
+I waited in some alarm for the rest of my indictment.&nbsp; But the
+good man&rsquo;s heart was full of peace; and he stood there brushing
+his hats and prattling on about fishing, and walking, and the pleasures
+of convalescence, in a bright shallow stream that kept me pleased and
+interested, I could scarcely say how.&nbsp; As he went on, he warmed
+to his subject, and laid his hats aside to go along the water-side and
+show me where the large trout commonly lay, underneath an overhanging
+bank; and he was much disappointed, for my sake, that there were none
+visible just then.&nbsp; Then he wandered off on to another tack, and
+stood a great while out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine,
+trying to make out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some
+friend of mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel
+more friendly and at our ease with one another.&nbsp; At last he made
+a little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very words,
+for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the best writing
+and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only the sense, and
+that perhaps imperfectly.&nbsp; He began by saying that he had little
+things in his past life that it gave him especial pleasure to recall;
+and that the faculty of receiving such sharp impressions had now died
+out in himself, but must at my age be still quite lively and active.&nbsp;
+Then he told me that he had a little raft afloat on the river above
+the dam which he was going to lend me, in order that I might be able
+to look back, in after years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure
+from the recollection.&nbsp; Now, I have a friend of my own who will
+forgo present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
+sake of manufacturing &lsquo;a reminiscence&rsquo; for himself; but
+there was something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
+found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or unselfish
+luxury can be imagined.&nbsp; After he had unmoored his little embarkation,
+and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran away back to his
+hats with the air of a man who had only just recollected that he had
+anything to do.<br>
+<br>
+I did not stay very long on the raft.&nbsp; It ought to have been very
+nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
+moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I was
+bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and cherish
+its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure into a duty.&nbsp;
+Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon wearied and came ashore
+again, and that it gives me more pleasure to recall the man himself
+and his simple, happy conversation, so full of gusto and sympathy, than
+anything possibly connected with his crank, insecure embarkation.&nbsp;
+In order to avoid seeing him, for I was not a little ashamed of myself
+for having failed to enjoy his treat sufficiently, I determined to continue
+up the river, and, at all prices, to find some other way back into the
+town in time for dinner.&nbsp; As I went, I was thinking of Smethurst
+with admiration; a look into that man&rsquo;s mind was like a retrospect
+over the smiling champaign of his past life, and very different from
+the Sinai-gorges up which one looks for a terrified moment into the
+dark souls of many good, many wise, and many prudent men.&nbsp; I cannot
+be very grateful to such men for their excellence, and wisdom, and prudence.&nbsp;
+I find myself facing as stoutly as I can a hard, combative existence,
+full of doubt, difficulties, defeats, disappointments, and dangers,
+quite a hard enough life without their dark countenances at my elbow,
+so that what I want is a happy-minded Smethurst placed here and there
+at ugly corners of my life&rsquo;s wayside, preaching his gospel of
+quiet and contentment.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+ANOTHER<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I was shortly to meet with an evangelist of another stamp.&nbsp; After
+I had forced my way through a gentleman&rsquo;s grounds, I came out
+on the high road, and sat down to rest myself on a heap of stones at
+the top of a long hill, with Cockermouth lying snugly at the bottom.&nbsp;
+An Irish beggar-woman, with a beautiful little girl by her side, came
+up to ask for alms, and gradually fell to telling me the little tragedy
+of her life.&nbsp; Her own sister, she told me, had seduced her husband
+from her after many years of married life, and the pair had fled, leaving
+her destitute, with the little girl upon her hands.&nbsp; She seemed
+quite hopeful and cheery, and, though she was unaffectedly sorry for
+the loss of her husband&rsquo;s earnings, she made no pretence of despair
+at the loss of his affection; some day she would meet the fugitives,
+and the law would see her duly righted, and in the meantime the smallest
+contribution was gratefully received.&nbsp; While she was telling all
+this in the most matter-of-fact way, I had been noticing the approach
+of a tall man, with a high white hat and darkish clothes.&nbsp; He came
+up the hill at a rapid pace, and joined our little group with a sort
+of half-salutation.&nbsp; Turning at once to the woman, he asked her
+in a business-like way whether she had anything to do, whether she were
+a Catholic or a Protestant, whether she could read, and so forth; and
+then, after a few kind words and some sweeties to the child, he despatched
+the mother with some tracts about Biddy and the Priest, and the Orangeman&rsquo;s
+Bible.&nbsp; I was a little amused at his abrupt manner, for he was
+still a young man, and had somewhat the air of a navy officer; but he
+tackled me with great solemnity.&nbsp; I could make fun of what he said,
+for I do not think it was very wise; but the subject does not appear
+to me just now in a jesting light, so I shall only say that he related
+to me his own conversion, which had been effected (as is very often
+the case) through the agency of a gig accident, and that, after having
+examined me and diagnosed my case, he selected some suitable tracts
+from his repertory, gave them to me, and, bidding me God-speed, went
+on his way.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+LAST OF SMETHURST<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+That evening I got into a third-class carriage on my way for Keswick,
+and was followed almost immediately by a burly man in brown clothes.&nbsp;
+This fellow-passenger was seemingly ill at ease, and kept continually
+putting his head out of the window, and asking the bystanders if they
+saw <i>him</i> coming.&nbsp; At last, when the train was already in
+motion, there was a commotion on the platform, and a way was left clear
+to our carriage door.&nbsp; <i>He</i> had arrived.&nbsp; In the hurry
+I could just see Smethurst, red and panting, thrust a couple of clay
+pipes into my companion&rsquo;s outstretched band, and hear him crying
+his farewells after us as we slipped out of the station at an ever accelerating
+pace.&nbsp; I said something about it being a close run, and the broad
+man, already engaged in filling one of the pipes, assented, and went
+on to tell me of his own stupidity in forgetting a necessary, and of
+how his friend had good-naturedly gone down town at the last moment
+to supply the omission.&nbsp; I mentioned that I had seen Mr. Smethurst
+already, and that he had been very polite to me; and we fell into a
+discussion of the hatter&rsquo;s merits that lasted some time and left
+us quite good friends at its conclusion.&nbsp; The topic was productive
+of goodwill.&nbsp; We exchanged tobacco and talked about the season,
+and agreed at last that we should go to the same hotel at Keswick and
+sup in company.&nbsp; As he had some business in the town which would
+occupy him some hour or so, on our arrival I was to improve the time
+and go down to the lake, that I might see a glimpse of the promised
+wonders.<br>
+<br>
+The night had fallen already when I reached the water-side, at a place
+where many pleasure-boats are moored and ready for hire; and as I went
+along a stony path, between wood and water, a strong wind blew in gusts
+from the far end of the lake.&nbsp; The sky was covered with flying
+scud; and, as this was ragged, there was quite a wild chase of shadow
+and moon-glimpse over the surface of the shuddering water.&nbsp; I had
+to hold my hat on, and was growing rather tired, and inclined to go
+back in disgust, when a little incident occurred to break the tedium.&nbsp;
+A sudden and violent squall of wind sundered the low underwood, and
+at the same time there came one of those brief discharges of moonlight,
+which leaped into the opening thus made, and showed me three girls in
+the prettiest flutter and disorder.&nbsp; It was as though they had
+sprung out of the ground.&nbsp; I accosted them very politely in my
+capacity of stranger, and requested to be told the names of all manner
+of hills and woods and places that I did not wish to know, and we stood
+together for a while and had an amusing little talk.&nbsp; The wind,
+too, made himself of the party, brought the colour into their faces,
+and gave them enough to do to repress their drapery; and one of them,
+amid much giggling, had to pirouette round and round upon her toes (as
+girls do) when some specially strong gust had got the advantage over
+her.&nbsp; They were just high enough up in the social order not to
+be afraid to speak to a gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little
+tremor, a nervous consciousness of wrong-doing - of stolen waters, that
+gave a considerable zest to our most innocent interview.&nbsp; They
+were as much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked
+baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no inclination
+to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and waterfalls and
+on to more promising subjects, when a young man was descried coming
+along the path from the direction of Keswick.&nbsp; Now whether he was
+the young man of one of my friends, or the brother of one of them, or
+indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but they incontinently said
+that they must be going, and went away up the path with friendly salutations.&nbsp;
+I need not say that I found the lake and the moonlight rather dull after
+their departure, and speedily found my way back to potted herrings and
+whisky-and-water in the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller.&nbsp;
+In the smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an
+ulster coat, who had got the best place and was monopolising most of
+the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to me from both sides,
+that this was the manager of a London theatre.&nbsp; The presence of
+such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must own that the manager
+showed himself equal to his position.&nbsp; He had a large fat pocket-book,
+from which he produced poem after poem, written on the backs of letters
+or hotel-bills; and nothing could be more humorous than his recitation
+of these elegant extracts, except perhaps the anecdotes with which he
+varied the entertainment.&nbsp; Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified
+in my appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to corroborate
+some statements as to the depravity and vice of the aristocracy, and
+when he went on to describe some gilded saloon experiences, I am proud
+to say that he honoured my sagacity with one little covert wink before
+a second time appealing to me for confirmation.&nbsp; The wink was not
+thrown away; I went in up to the elbows with the manager, until I think
+that some of the glory of that great man settled by reflection upon
+me, and that I was as noticeably the second person in the smoking-room
+as he was the first.&nbsp; For a young man, this was a position of some
+distinction, I think you will admit. . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - AN AUTUMN EFFECT - 1875<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nous ne d&eacute;crivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous
+nous effor&ccedil;ons d&rsquo;exprimer sobrement et simplement l&rsquo;impression
+que nous en avons re&ccedil;ue.&rsquo; - M. ANDR&Eacute; THEURIET, &lsquo;L&rsquo;Automne
+dans les Bois,&rsquo; Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. <a name="citation2"></a><a href="#footnote2">{2}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may leave
+upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed and dissipated
+if we stayed longer.&nbsp; Clear vision goes with the quick foot.&nbsp;
+Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective when we see them
+for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and simply, and are gone
+before the sun is overcast, before the rain falls, before the season
+can steal like a dial-hand from his figure, before the lights and shadows,
+shifting round towards nightfall, can show us the other side of things,
+and belie what they showed us in the morning.&nbsp; We expose our mind
+to the landscape (as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera)
+for the moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away
+before the effect can change.&nbsp; Hence we shall have in our memories
+a long scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with
+the prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
+and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the unconscious
+processes of thought.&nbsp; So that we who have only looked at a country
+over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will have a conception
+of it far more memorable and articulate than a man who has lived there
+all his life from a child upwards, and had his impression of to-day
+modified by that of to-morrow, and belied by that of the day after,
+till at length the stable characteristics of the country are all blotted
+out from him behind the confusion of variable effect.<br>
+<br>
+I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours: that
+in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack, turns
+his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which he knows
+only by the vague report of others.&nbsp; Such an one has not surrendered
+his will and contracted for the next hundred miles, like a man on a
+railway.&nbsp; He may change his mind at every finger-post, and, where
+ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go the low road or the
+high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine, suffer himself to be tempted
+by the lane that turns immediately into the woods, or the broad road
+that lies open before him into the distance, and shows him the far-off
+spires of some city, or a range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps,
+along a low horizon.&nbsp; In short, he may gratify his every whim and
+fancy, without a pang of reproving conscience, or the least jostle to
+his self-respect.&nbsp; It is true, however, that most men do not possess
+the faculty of free action, the priceless gift of being able to live
+for the moment only; and as they begin to go forward on their journey,
+they will find that they have made for themselves new fetters.&nbsp;
+Slight projects they may have entertained for a moment, half in jest,
+become iron laws to them, they know not why.&nbsp; They will be led
+by the nose by these vague reports of which I spoke above; and the mere
+fact that their informant mentioned one village and not another will
+compel their footsteps with inexplicable power.&nbsp; And yet a little
+while, yet a few days of this fictitious liberty, and they will begin
+to hear imperious voices calling on them to return; and some passion,
+some duty, some worthy or unworthy expectation, will set its hand upon
+their shoulder and lead them back into the old paths.&nbsp; Once and
+again we have all made the experiment.&nbsp; We know the end of it right
+well.&nbsp; And yet if we make it for the hundredth time to-morrow:
+it will have the same charm as ever; our heart will beat and our eyes
+will be bright, as we leave the town behind us, and we shall feel once
+again (as we have felt so often before) that we are cutting ourselves
+loose for ever from our whole past life, with all its sins and follies
+and circumscriptions, and go forward as a new creature into a new world.<br>
+<br>
+It was well, perhaps, that I had this first enthusiasm to encourage
+me up the long hill above High Wycombe; for the day was a bad day for
+walking at best, and now began to draw towards afternoon, dull, heavy,
+and lifeless.&nbsp; A pall of grey cloud covered the sky, and its colour
+reacted on the colour of the landscape.&nbsp; Near at hand, indeed,
+the hedgerow trees were still fairly green, shot through with bright
+autumnal yellows, bright as sunshine.&nbsp; But a little way off, the
+solid bricks of woodland that lay squarely on slope and hill-top were
+not green, but russet and grey, and ever less russet and more grey as
+they drew off into the distance.&nbsp; As they drew off into the distance,
+also, the woods seemed to mass themselves together, and lie thin and
+straight, like clouds, upon the limit of one&rsquo;s view.&nbsp; Not
+that this massing was complete, or gave the idea of any extent of forest,
+for every here and there the trees would break up and go down into a
+valley in open order, or stand in long Indian file along the horizon,
+tree after tree relieved, foolishly enough, against the sky.&nbsp; I
+say foolishly enough, although I have seen the effect employed cleverly
+in art, and such long line of single trees thrown out against the customary
+sunset of a Japanese picture with a certain fantastic effect that was
+not to be despised; but this was over water and level land, where it
+did not jar, as here, with the soft contour of hills and valleys.&nbsp;
+The whole scene had an indefinable look of being painted, the colour
+was so abstract and correct, and there was something so sketchy and
+merely impressional about these distant single trees on the horizon
+that one was forced to think of it all as of a clever French landscape.&nbsp;
+For it is rather in nature that we see resemblance to art, than in art
+to nature; and we say a hundred times, &lsquo;How like a picture!&rsquo;
+for once that we say, &lsquo;How like the truth!&rsquo;&nbsp; The forms
+in which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got from
+painted canvas.&nbsp; Any man can see and understand a picture; it is
+reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion of nature,
+and see that distinctly and with intelligence.<br>
+<br>
+The sun came out before I had been long on my way; and as I had got
+by that time to the top of the ascent, and was now treading a labyrinth
+of confined by-roads, my whole view brightened considerably in colour,
+for it was the distance only that was grey and cold, and the distance
+I could see no longer.&nbsp; Overhead there was a wonderful carolling
+of larks which seemed to follow me as I went.&nbsp; Indeed, during all
+the time I was in that country the larks did not desert me.&nbsp; The
+air was alive with them from High Wycombe to Tring; and as, day after
+day, their &lsquo;shrill delight&rsquo; fell upon me out of the vacant
+sky, they began to take such a prominence over other conditions, and
+form so integral a part of my conception of the country, that I could
+have baptized it &lsquo;The Country of Larks.&rsquo;&nbsp; This, of
+course, might just as well have been in early spring; but everything
+else was deeply imbued with the sentiment of the later year.&nbsp; There
+was no stir of insects in the grass.&nbsp; The sunshine was more golden,
+and gave less heat than summer sunshine; and the shadows under the hedge
+were somewhat blue and misty.&nbsp; It was only in autumn that you could
+have seen the mingled green and yellow of the elm foliage, and the fallen
+leaves that lay about the road, and covered the surface of wayside pools
+so thickly that the sun was reflected only here and there from little
+joints and pinholes in that brown coat of proof; or that your ear would
+have been troubled, as you went forward, by the occasional report of
+fowling-pieces from all directions and all degrees of distance.<br>
+<br>
+For a long time this dropping fire was the one sign of human activity
+that came to disturb me as I walked.&nbsp; The lanes were profoundly
+still.&nbsp; They would have been sad but for the sunshine and the singing
+of the larks.&nbsp; And as it was, there came over me at times a feeling
+of isolation that was not disagreeable, and yet was enough to make me
+quicken my steps eagerly when I saw some one before me on the road.&nbsp;
+This fellow-voyager proved to be no less a person than the parish constable.&nbsp;
+It had occurred to me that in a district which was so little populous
+and so well wooded, a criminal of any intelligence might play hide-and-seek
+with the authorities for months; and this idea was strengthened by the
+aspect of the portly constable as he walked by my side with deliberate
+dignity and turned-out toes.&nbsp; But a few minutes&rsquo; converse
+set my heart at rest.&nbsp; These rural criminals are very tame birds,
+it appeared.&nbsp; If my informant did not immediately lay his hand
+on an offender, he was content to wait; some evening after nightfall
+there would come a tap at his door, and the outlaw, weary of outlawry,
+would give himself quietly up to undergo sentence, and resume his position
+in the life of the country-side.&nbsp; Married men caused him no disquietude
+whatever; he had them fast by the foot.&nbsp; Sooner or later they would
+come back to see their wives, a peeping neighbour would pass the word,
+and my portly constable would walk quietly over and take the bird sitting.&nbsp;
+And if there were a few who had no particular ties in the neighbourhood,
+and preferred to shift into another county when they fell into trouble,
+their departure moved the placid constable in no degree.&nbsp; He was
+of Dogberry&rsquo;s opinion; and if a man would not stand in the Prince&rsquo;s
+name, he took no note of him, but let him go, and thanked God he was
+rid of a knave.&nbsp; And surely the crime and the law were in admirable
+keeping; rustic constable was well met with rustic offender.&nbsp; The
+officer sitting at home over a bit of fire until the criminal came to
+visit him, and the criminal coming - it was a fair match.&nbsp; One
+felt as if this must have been the order in that delightful seaboard
+Bohemia where Florizel and Perdita courted in such sweet accents, and
+the Puritan sang Psalms to hornpipes, and the four-and-twenty shearers
+danced with nosegays in their bosoms, and chanted their three songs
+apiece at the old shepherd&rsquo;s festival; and one could not help
+picturing to oneself what havoc among good peoples purses, and tribulation
+for benignant constables, might be worked here by the arrival, over
+stile and footpath, of a new Autolycus.<br>
+<br>
+Bidding good-morning to my fellow-traveller, I left the road and struck
+across country.&nbsp; It was rather a revelation to pass from between
+the hedgerows and find quite a bustle on the other side, a great coming
+and going of school-children upon by-paths, and, in every second field,
+lusty horses and stout country-folk a-ploughing.&nbsp; The way I followed
+took me through many fields thus occupied, and through many strips of
+plantation, and then over a little space of smooth turf, very pleasant
+to the feet, set with tall fir-trees and clamorous with rooks making
+ready for the winter, and so back again into the quiet road.&nbsp; I
+was now not far from the end of my day&rsquo;s journey.&nbsp; A few
+hundred yards farther, and, passing through a gap in the hedge, I began
+to go down hill through a pretty extensive tract of young beeches.&nbsp;
+I was soon in shadow myself, but the afternoon sun still coloured the
+upmost boughs of the wood, and made a fire over my head in the autumnal
+foliage.&nbsp; A little faint vapour lay among the slim tree-stems in
+the bottom of the hollow; and from farther up I heard from time to time
+an outburst of gross laughter, as though clowns were making merry in
+the bush.&nbsp; There was something about the atmosphere that brought
+all sights and sounds home to one with a singular purity, so that I
+felt as if my senses had been washed with water.&nbsp; After I had crossed
+the little zone of mist, the path began to remount the hill; and just
+as I, mounting along with it, had got back again, from the head downwards,
+into the thin golden sunshine, I saw in front of me a donkey tied to
+a tree.&nbsp; Now, I have a certain liking for donkeys, principally,
+I believe, because of the delightful things that Sterne has written
+of them.&nbsp; But this was not after the pattern of the ass at Lyons.&nbsp;
+He was of a white colour, that seemed to fit him rather for rare festal
+occasions than for constant drudgery.&nbsp; Besides, he was very small,
+and of the daintiest portions you can imagine in a donkey.&nbsp; And
+so, sure enough, you had only to look at him to see he had never worked.&nbsp;
+There was something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like
+that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling.&nbsp;
+It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener
+than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes.&nbsp; He was
+altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was
+just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still gave proof of the
+levity of his disposition by impudently wagging his ears at me as I
+drew near.&nbsp; I say he was somewhat solemnised just then; for, with
+the admirable instinct of all men and animals under restraint, he had
+so wound and wound the halter about the tree that he could go neither
+back nor forwards, nor so much as put down his head to browse.&nbsp;
+There he stood, poor rogue, part puzzled, part angry, part, I believe,
+amused.&nbsp; He had not given up hope, and dully revolved the problem
+in his head, giving ever and again another jerk at the few inches of
+free rope that still remained unwound.&nbsp; A humorous sort of sympathy
+for the creature took hold upon me.&nbsp; I went up, and, not without
+some trouble on my part, and much distrust and resistance on the part
+of Neddy, got him forced backwards until the whole length of the halter
+was set loose, and he was once more as free a donkey as I dared to make
+him.&nbsp; I was pleased (as people are) with this friendly action to
+a fellow-creature in tribulation, and glanced back over my shoulder
+to see how he was profiting by his freedom.&nbsp; The brute was looking
+after me; and no sooner did he catch my eye than he put up his long
+white face into the air, pulled an impudent mouth at me, and began to
+bray derisively.&nbsp; If ever any one person made a grimace at another,
+that donkey made a grimace at me.&nbsp; The hardened ingratitude of
+his behaviour, and the impertinence that inspired his whole face as
+he curled up his lip, and showed his teeth, and began to bray, so tickled
+me, and was so much in keeping with what I had imagined to myself about
+his character, that I could not find it in my heart to be angry, and
+burst into a peal of hearty laughter.&nbsp; This seemed to strike the
+ass as a repartee, so he brayed at me again by way of rejoinder; and
+we went on for a while, braying and laughing, until I began to grow
+aweary of it, and, shouting a derisive farewell, turned to pursue my
+way.&nbsp; In so doing - it was like going suddenly into cold water
+- I found myself face to face with a prim little old maid.&nbsp; She
+was all in a flutter, the poor old dear!&nbsp; She had concluded beyond
+question that this must be a lunatic who stood laughing aloud at a white
+donkey in the placid beech-woods.&nbsp; I was sure, by her face, that
+she had already recommended her spirit most religiously to Heaven, and
+prepared herself for the worst.&nbsp; And so, to reassure her, I uncovered
+and besought her, after a very staid fashion, to put me on my way to
+Great Missenden.&nbsp; Her voice trembled a little, to be sure, but
+I think her mind was set at rest; and she told me, very explicitly,
+to follow the path until I came to the end of the wood, and then I should
+see the village below me in the bottom of the valley.&nbsp; And, with
+mutual courtesies, the little old maid and I went on our respective
+ways.<br>
+<br>
+Nor had she misled me.&nbsp; Great Missenden was close at hand, as she
+had said, in the trough of a gentle valley, with many great elms about
+it.&nbsp; The smoke from its chimneys went up pleasantly in the afternoon
+sunshine.&nbsp; The sleepy hum of a threshing-machine filled the neighbouring
+fields and hung about the quaint street corners.&nbsp; A little above,
+the church sits well back on its haunches against the hillside - an
+attitude for a church, you know, that makes it look as if it could be
+ever so much higher if it liked; and the trees grew about it thickly,
+so as to make a density of shade in the churchyard.&nbsp; A very quiet
+place it looks; and yet I saw many boards and posters about threatening
+dire punishment against those who broke the church windows or defaced
+the precinct, and offering rewards for the apprehension of those who
+had done the like already.&nbsp; It was fair day in Great Missenden.&nbsp;
+There were three stalls set up, <i>sub jove</i>, for the sale of pastry
+and cheap toys; and a great number of holiday children thronged about
+the stalls and noisily invaded every corner of the straggling village.&nbsp;
+They came round me by coveys, blowing simultaneously upon penny trumpets
+as though they imagined I should fall to pieces like the battlements
+of Jericho.&nbsp; I noticed one among them who could make a wheel of
+himself like a London boy, and seemingly enjoyed a grave pre-eminence
+upon the strength of the accomplishment.&nbsp; By and by, however, the
+trumpets began to weary me, and I went indoors, leaving the fair, I
+fancy, at its height.<br>
+<br>
+Night had fallen before I ventured forth again.&nbsp; It was pitch-dark
+in the village street, and the darkness seemed only the greater for
+a light here and there in an uncurtained window or from an open door.&nbsp;
+Into one such window I was rude enough to peep, and saw within a charming
+<i>genre</i> picture.&nbsp; In a room, all white wainscot and crimson
+wall-paper, a perfect gem of colour after the black, empty darkness
+in which I had been groping, a pretty girl was telling a story, as well
+as I could make out, to an attentive child upon her knee, while an old
+woman sat placidly dozing over the fire.&nbsp; You may be sure I was
+not behindhand with a story for myself - a good old story after the
+manner of G. P. R. James and the village melodramas, with a wicked squire,
+and poachers, and an attorney, and a virtuous young man with a genius
+for mechanics, who should love, and protect, and ultimately marry the
+girl in the crimson room.&nbsp; Baudelaire has a few dainty sentences
+on the fancies that we are inspired with when we look through a window
+into other people&rsquo;s lives; and I think Dickens has somewhere enlarged
+on the same text.&nbsp; The subject, at least, is one that I am seldom
+weary of entertaining.&nbsp; I remember, night after night, at Brussels,
+watching a good family sup together, make merry, and retire to rest;
+and night after night I waited to see the candles lit, and the salad
+made, and the last salutations dutifully exchanged, without any abatement
+of interest.&nbsp; Night after night I found the scene rivet my attention
+and keep me awake in bed with all manner of quaint imaginations.&nbsp;
+Much of the pleasure of the <i>Arabian Nights</i> hinges upon this Asmodean
+interest; and we are not weary of lifting other people&rsquo;s roofs,
+and going about behind the scenes of life with the Caliph and the serviceable
+Giaffar.&nbsp; It is a salutary exercise, besides; it is salutary to
+get out of ourselves and see people living together in perfect unconsciousness
+of our existence, as they will live when we are gone.&nbsp; If to-morrow
+the blow falls, and the worst of our ill fears is realised, the girl
+will none the less tell stories to the child on her lap in the cottage
+at Great Missenden, nor the good Belgians light their candle, and mix
+their salad, and go orderly to bed.<br>
+<br>
+The next morning was sunny overhead and damp underfoot, with a thrill
+in the air like a reminiscence of frost.&nbsp; I went up into the sloping
+garden behind the inn and smoked a pipe pleasantly enough, to the tune
+of my landlady&rsquo;s lamentations over sundry cabbages and cauliflowers
+that had been spoiled by caterpillars.&nbsp; She had been so much pleased
+in the summer-time, she said, to see the garden all hovered over by
+white butterflies.&nbsp; And now, look at the end of it!&nbsp; She could
+nowise reconcile this with her moral sense.&nbsp; And, indeed, unless
+these butterflies are created with a side-look to the composition of
+improving apologues, it is not altogether easy, even for people who
+have read Hegel and Dr. M&rsquo;Cosh, to decide intelligibly upon the
+issue raised.&nbsp; Then I fell into a long and abstruse calculation
+with my landlord; having for object to compare the distance driven by
+him during eight years&rsquo; service on the box of the Wendover coach
+with the girth of the round world itself.&nbsp; We tackled the question
+most conscientiously, made all necessary allowance for Sundays and leap-years,
+and were just coming to a triumphant conclusion of our labours when
+we were stayed by a small lacuna in my information.&nbsp; I did not
+know the circumference of the earth.&nbsp; The landlord knew it, to
+be sure - plainly he had made the same calculation twice and once before,
+- but he wanted confidence in his own figures, and from the moment I
+showed myself so poor a second seemed to lose all interest in the result.<br>
+<br>
+Wendover (which was my next stage) lies in the same valley with Great
+Missenden, but at the foot of it, where the hills trend off on either
+hand like a coast-line, and a great hemisphere of plain lies, like a
+sea, before one, I went up a chalky road, until I had a good outlook
+over the place.&nbsp; The vale, as it opened out into the plain, was
+shallow, and a little bare, perhaps, but full of graceful convolutions.&nbsp;
+From the level to which I have now attained the fields were exposed
+before me like a map, and I could see all that bustle of autumn field-work
+which had been hid from me yesterday behind the hedgerows, or shown
+to me only for a moment as I followed the footpath.&nbsp; Wendover lay
+well down in the midst, with mountains of foliage about it.&nbsp; The
+great plain stretched away to the northward, variegated near at hand
+with the quaint pattern of the fields, but growing ever more and more
+indistinct, until it became a mere hurly-burly of trees and bright crescents
+of river, and snatches of slanting road, and finally melted into the
+ambiguous cloud-land over the horizon.&nbsp; The sky was an opal-grey,
+touched here and there with blue, and with certain faint russets that
+looked as if they were reflections of the colour of the autumnal woods
+below.&nbsp; I could hear the ploughmen shouting to their horses, the
+uninterrupted carol of larks innumerable overhead, and, from a field
+where the shepherd was marshalling his flock, a sweet tumultuous tinkle
+of sheep-bells.&nbsp; All these noises came to me very thin and distinct
+in the clear air.&nbsp; There was a wonderful sentiment of distance
+and atmosphere about the day and the place.<br>
+<br>
+I mounted the hill yet farther by a rough staircase of chalky footholds
+cut in the turf.&nbsp; The hills about Wendover and, as far as I could
+see, all the hills in Buckinghamshire, wear a sort of hood of beech
+plantation; but in this particular case the hood had been suffered to
+extend itself into something more like a cloak, and hung down about
+the shoulders of the hill in wide folds, instead of lying flatly along
+the summit.&nbsp; The trees grew so close, and their boughs were so
+matted together, that the whole wood looked as dense as a bush of heather.&nbsp;
+The prevailing colour was a dull, smouldering red, touched here and
+there with vivid yellow.&nbsp; But the autumn had scarce advanced beyond
+the outworks; it was still almost summer in the heart of the wood; and
+as soon as I had scrambled through the hedge, I found myself in a dim
+green forest atmosphere under eaves of virgin foliage.&nbsp; In places
+where the wood had itself for a background and the trees were massed
+together thickly, the colour became intensified and almost gem-like:
+a perfect fire green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks
+of autumn gold.&nbsp; None of the trees were of any considerable age
+or stature; but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road
+turned and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
+the light up pleasantly.&nbsp; Sometimes there would be a colonnade
+of slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
+the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to something,
+and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.&nbsp; Sometimes
+a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the light lying
+flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark background it seemed
+almost luminous.&nbsp; There was a great bush over the thicket (for,
+indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood); and the vague rumours
+that went among the tree-tops, and the occasional rustling of big birds
+or hares among the undergrowth, had in them a note of almost treacherous
+stealthiness, that put the imagination on its guard and made me walk
+warily on the russet carpeting of last year&rsquo;s leaves.&nbsp; The
+spirit of the place seemed to be all attention; the wood listened as
+I went, and held its breath to number my footfalls.&nbsp; One could
+not help feeling that there ought to be some reason for this stillness;
+whether, as the bright old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta,
+or whether, perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops
+would soon come pattering through the leaves.&nbsp; It was not unpleasant,
+in such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
+the open plain.&nbsp; This happened only where the path lay much upon
+the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the wood
+at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to be walking;
+then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance, miniature fields,
+and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would appear for a moment
+in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller, and change and melt one
+into another, as I continued to go forward, and so shift my point of
+view.<br>
+<br>
+For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in the
+wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and gobbling,
+now and again interrupted by a harsh scream.&nbsp; As I advanced towards
+this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and I caught sight, through
+the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure walls, and something like
+the tops of a rickyard.&nbsp; And sure enough, a rickyard it proved
+to be, and a neat little farm-steading, with the beech-woods growing
+almost to the door of it.&nbsp; Just before me, however, as I came upon
+the path, the trees drew back and let in a wide flood of daylight on
+to a circular lawn.&nbsp; It was here that the noises had their origin.&nbsp;
+More than a score of peacocks (there are altogether thirty at the farm),
+a proper contingent of peahens, and a great multitude that I could not
+number of more ordinary barn-door fowls, were all feeding together on
+this little open lawn among the beeches.&nbsp; They fed in a dense crowd,
+which swayed to and fro, and came hither and thither as by a sort of
+tide, and of which the surface was agitated like the surface of a sea
+as each bird guzzled his head along the ground after the scattered corn.&nbsp;
+The clucking, cooing noise that had led me thither was formed by the
+blending together of countless expressions of individual contentment
+into one collective expression of contentment, or general grace during
+meat.&nbsp; Every now and again a big peacock would separate himself
+from the mob and take a stately turn or two about the lawn, or perhaps
+mount for a moment upon the rail, and there shrilly publish to the world
+his satisfaction with himself and what he had to eat.&nbsp; It happened,
+for my sins, that none of these admirable birds had anything beyond
+the merest rudiment of a tail.&nbsp; Tails, it seemed, were out of season
+just then.&nbsp; But they had their necks for all that; and by their
+necks alone they do as much surpass all the other birds of our grey
+climate as they fall in quality of song below the blackbird or the lark.&nbsp;
+Surely the peacock, with its incomparable parade of glorious colour
+and the scannel voice of it issuing forth, as in mockery, from its painted
+throat, must, like my landlady&rsquo;s butterflies at Great Missenden,
+have been invented by some skilful fabulist for the consolation and
+support of homely virtue: or rather, perhaps, by a fabulist not quite
+so skilful, who made points for the moment without having a studious
+enough eye to the complete effect; for I thought these melting greens
+and blues so beautiful that afternoon, that I would have given them
+my vote just then before the sweetest pipe in all the spring woods.&nbsp;
+For indeed there is no piece of colour of the same extent in nature,
+that will so flatter and satisfy the lust of a man&rsquo;s eyes; and
+to come upon so many of them, after these acres of stone-coloured heavens
+and russet woods, and grey-brown ploughlands and white roads, was like
+going three whole days&rsquo; journey to the southward, or a month back
+into the summer.<br>
+<br>
+I was sorry to leave <i>Peacock Farm</i> - for so the place is called,
+after the name of its splendid pensioners - and go forwards again in
+the quiet woods.&nbsp; It began to grow both damp and dusk under the
+beeches; and as the day declined the colour faded out of the foliage;
+and shadow, without form and void, took the place of all the fine tracery
+of leaves and delicate gradations of living green that had before accompanied
+my walk.&nbsp; I had been sorry to leave <i>Peacock</i> <i>Farm</i>,
+but I was not sorry to find myself once more in the open road, under
+a pale and somewhat troubled-looking evening sky, and put my best foot
+foremost for the inn at Wendover.<br>
+<br>
+Wendover, in itself, is a straggling, purposeless sort of place.&nbsp;
+Everybody seems to have had his own opinion as to how the street should
+go; or rather, every now and then a man seems to have arisen with a
+new idea on the subject, and led away a little sect of neighbours to
+join in his heresy.&nbsp; It would have somewhat the look of an abortive
+watering-place, such as we may now see them here and there along the
+coast, but for the age of the houses, the comely quiet design of some
+of them, and the look of long habitation, of a life that is settled
+and rooted, and makes it worth while to train flowers about the windows,
+and otherwise shape the dwelling to the humour of the inhabitant.&nbsp;
+The church, which might perhaps have served as rallying-point for these
+loose houses, and pulled the township into something like intelligible
+unity, stands some distance off among great trees; but the inn (to take
+the public buildings in order of importance) is in what I understand
+to be the principal street: a pleasant old house, with bay-windows,
+and three peaked gables, and many swallows&rsquo; nests plastered about
+the eaves.<br>
+<br>
+The interior of the inn was answerable to the outside: indeed, I never
+saw any room much more to be admired than the low wainscoted parlour
+in which I spent the remainder of the evening.&nbsp; It was a short
+oblong in shape, save that the fireplace was built across one of the
+angles so as to cut it partially off, and the opposite angle was similarly
+truncated by a corner cupboard.&nbsp; The wainscot was white, and there
+was a Turkey carpet on the floor, so old that it might have been imported
+by Walter Shandy before he retired, worn almost through in some places,
+but in others making a good show of blues and oranges, none the less
+harmonious for being somewhat faded.&nbsp; The corner cupboard was agreeable
+in design; and there were just the right things upon the shelves - decanters
+and tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water.&nbsp;
+The furniture was old-fashioned and stiff.&nbsp; Everything was in keeping,
+down to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table.&nbsp; And
+you may fancy how pleasant it looked, all flushed and flickered over
+by the light of a brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange,
+tilted sort of perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror
+above the chimney.&nbsp; As I sat reading in the great armchair, I kept
+looking round with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture
+that was about me, and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish
+pride in forming part of it.&nbsp; The book I read was about Italy in
+the early Renaissance, the pageantries and the light loves of princes,
+the passion of men for learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written,
+by good luck, after a solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely
+more nearly than the matter; and the result was that I thought less,
+perhaps, of Lippo Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman
+who had written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much
+pleasure in his solemn polysyllables.<br>
+<br>
+I was not left without society.&nbsp; My landlord had a very pretty
+little daughter, whom we shall call Lizzie.&nbsp; If I had made any
+notes at the time, I might be able to tell you something definite of
+her appearance.&nbsp; But faces have a trick of growing more and more
+spiritualised and abstract in the memory, until nothing remains of them
+but a look, a haunting expression; just that secret quality in a face
+that is apt to slip out somehow under the cunningest painter&rsquo;s
+touch, and leave the portrait dead for the lack of it.&nbsp; And if
+it is hard to catch with the finest of camel&rsquo;s-hair pencils, you
+may think how hopeless it must be to pursue after it with clumsy words.&nbsp;
+If I say, for instance, that this look, which I remember as Lizzie,
+was something wistful that seemed partly to come of slyness and in part
+of simplicity, and that I am inclined to imagine it had something to
+do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in one of her large eyes,
+I shall have said all that I can, and the reader will not be much advanced
+towards comprehension.&nbsp; I had struck up an acquaintance with this
+little damsel in the morning, and professed much interest in her dolls,
+and an impatient desire to see the large one which was kept locked away
+for great occasions.&nbsp; And so I had not been very long in the parlour
+before the door opened, and in came Miss Lizzie with two dolls tucked
+clumsily under her arm.&nbsp; She was followed by her brother John,
+a year or so younger than herself, not simply to play propriety at our
+interview, but to show his own two whips in emulation of his sister&rsquo;s
+dolls.&nbsp; I did my best to make myself agreeable to my visitors,
+showing much admiration for the dolls and dolls&rsquo; dresses, and,
+with a very serious demeanour, asking many questions about their age
+and character.&nbsp; I do not think that Lizzie distrusted my sincerity,
+but it was evident that she was both bewildered and a little contemptuous.&nbsp;
+Although she was ready herself to treat her dolls as if they were alive,
+she seemed to think rather poorly of any grown person who could fall
+heartily into the spirit of the fiction.&nbsp; Sometimes she would look
+at me with gravity and a sort of disquietude, as though she really feared
+I must be out of my wits.&nbsp; Sometimes, as when I inquired too particularly
+into the question of their names, she laughed at me so long and heartily
+that I began to feel almost embarrassed.&nbsp; But when, in an evil
+moment, I asked to be allowed to kiss one of them, she could keep herself
+no longer to herself.&nbsp; Clambering down from the chair on which
+she sat perched to show me, Cornelia-like, her jewels, she ran straight
+out of the room and into the bar - it was just across the passage, -
+and I could hear her telling her mother in loud tones, but apparently
+more in sorrow than in merriment, that <i>the gentleman in the parlour
+wanted to kiss Dolly</i>.&nbsp; I fancy she was determined to save me
+from this humiliating action, even in spite of myself, for she never
+gave me the desired permission.&nbsp; She reminded me of an old dog
+I once knew, who would never suffer the master of the house to dance,
+out of an exaggerated sense of the dignity of that master&rsquo;s place
+and carriage.<br>
+<br>
+After the young people were gone there was but one more incident ere
+I went to bed.&nbsp; I heard a party of children go up and down the
+dark street for a while, singing together sweetly.&nbsp; And the mystery
+of this little incident was so pleasant to me that I purposely refrained
+from asking who they were, and wherefore they went singing at so late
+an hour.&nbsp; One can rarely be in a pleasant place without meeting
+with some pleasant accident.&nbsp; I have a conviction that these children
+would not have gone singing before the inn unless the inn-parlour had
+been the delightful place it was.&nbsp; At least, if I had been in the
+customary public room of the modern hotel, with all its disproportions
+and discomforts, my ears would have been dull, and there would have
+been some ugly temper or other uppermost in my spirit, and so they would
+have wasted their songs upon an unworthy hearer.<br>
+<br>
+Next morning I went along to visit the church.&nbsp; It is a long-backed
+red-and-white building, very much restored, and stands in a pleasant
+graveyard among those great trees of which I have spoken already.&nbsp;
+The sky was drowned in a mist.&nbsp; Now and again pulses of cold wind
+went about the enclosure, and set the branches busy overhead, and the
+dead leaves scurrying into the angles of the church buttresses.&nbsp;
+Now and again, also, I could hear the dull sudden fall of a chestnut
+among the grass - the dog would bark before the rectory door - or there
+would come a clinking of pails from the stable-yard behind.&nbsp; But
+in spite of these occasional interruptions - in spite, also, of the
+continuous autumn twittering that filled the trees - the chief impression
+somehow was one as of utter silence, insomuch that the little greenish
+bell that peeped out of a window in the tower disquieted me with a sense
+of some possible and more inharmonious disturbance.&nbsp; The grass
+was wet, as if with a hoar frost that had just been melted.&nbsp; I
+do not know that ever I saw a morning more autumnal.&nbsp; As I went
+to and fro among the graves, I saw some flowers set reverently before
+a recently erected tomb, and drawing near, was almost startled to find
+they lay on the grave a man seventy-two years old when he died.&nbsp;
+We are accustomed to strew flowers only over the young, where love has
+been cut short untimely, and great possibilities have been restrained
+by death.&nbsp; We strew them there in token, that these possibilities,
+in some deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of our dead
+loves remain with us and guide us to the end.&nbsp; And yet there was
+more significance, perhaps, and perhaps a greater consolation, in this
+little nosegay on the grave of one who had died old.&nbsp; We are apt
+to make so much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
+enduring tragedy of some men&rsquo;s lives, that we see more to lament
+for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love, than in one
+that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and goes about the
+world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any consolation.&nbsp;
+These flowers seemed not so much the token of love that survived death,
+as of something yet more beautiful - of love that had lived a man&rsquo;s
+life out to an end with him, and been faithful and companionable, and
+not weary of loving, throughout all these years.<br>
+<br>
+The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old stone-coloured
+vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods, as I set forth on
+a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring.&nbsp; The road lay for a good distance
+along the side of the hills, with the great plain below on one hand,
+and the beech-woods above on the other.&nbsp; The fields were busy with
+people ploughing and sowing; every here and there a jug of ale stood
+in the angle of the hedge, and I could see many a team wait smoking
+in the furrow as ploughman or sower stepped aside for a moment to take
+a draught.&nbsp; Over all the brown ploughlands, and under all the leafless
+hedgerows, there was a stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were,
+a spirit of picnic.&nbsp; The horses smoked and the men laboured and
+shouted and drank in the sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong
+effect of large, open-air existence.&nbsp; The fellow who drove me was
+something of a humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of
+an agricultural labourer&rsquo;s way of life.&nbsp; It was he who called
+my attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not sufficiently
+express the liberality of these men&rsquo;s wages; he told me how sharp
+an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the morning air, whether
+with plough or spade, and cordially admired this provision of nature.&nbsp;
+He sang <i>O fortunatos agricolas</i>! indeed, in every possible key,
+and with many cunning inflections, till I began to wonder what was the
+use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to sing the same air myself in a
+more diffident manner.<br>
+<br>
+Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are not
+very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of old
+days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break loose in
+the town and work mischief.&nbsp; I had a last walk, among russet beeches
+as usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the carolling of larks;
+I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw, as a new sign of the fulfilled
+autumn, two horsemen exercising a pack of fox-hounds.&nbsp; And then
+the train came and carried me back to London.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - A WINTER&rsquo;S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY - A FRAGMENT
+- 1876<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire
+of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly.&nbsp; On the Carrick
+side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft
+with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of
+wood.&nbsp; Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd
+of similar hills that occupies the centre of the Lowlands.&nbsp; Towards
+the sea it swells out the coast-line into a protuberance, like a bay-window
+in a plan, and is fortified against the surf behind bold crags.&nbsp;
+This hill is known as the Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown
+Carrick.<br>
+<br>
+It had snowed overnight.&nbsp; The fields were all sheeted up; they
+were tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through
+the pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother.&nbsp;
+The wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the
+sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand.&nbsp; There was a frosty
+stifle in the air.&nbsp; An effusion of coppery light on the summit
+of Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look through; but
+along the horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that there
+was no distinction of sky and sea.&nbsp; Over the white shoulders of
+the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but a great
+vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the edge of the
+cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void space.<br>
+<br>
+The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out barking
+as they smelt a passer-by upon the road.&nbsp; I met a fine old fellow,
+who might have sat as the father in &lsquo;The Cottar&rsquo;s Saturday
+Night,&rsquo; and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving.&nbsp;
+And a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping
+out to gather cockles.&nbsp; His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was
+broken up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and weathered
+in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey.&nbsp; He had a faint air
+of being surprised - which, God knows, he might well be - that life
+had gone so ill with him.&nbsp; The shape of his trousers was in itself
+a jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about his knees;
+and his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had lain in a rain-dub
+during the New Year&rsquo;s festivity.&nbsp; I will own I was not sorry
+to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young again for an evening;
+but I was sorry to see the mark still there.&nbsp; One could not expect
+such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or a great student of respectability
+in dress; but there might have been a wife at home, who had brushed
+out similar stains after fifty New Years, now become old, or a round-armed
+daughter, who would wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect
+and for the ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night.&nbsp;
+Plainly, there was nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness
+hung heavily on his old arms.&nbsp; He was seventy-six, he told me;
+and nobody would give a day&rsquo;s work to a man that age: they would
+think he couldn&rsquo;t do it.&nbsp; &lsquo;And, &lsquo;deed,&rsquo;
+he went on, with a sad little chuckle, &lsquo;&rsquo;deed, I doubt if
+I could.&rsquo;&nbsp; He said goodbye to me at a footpath, and crippled
+wearily off to his work.&nbsp; It will make your heart ache if you think
+of his old fingers groping in the snow.<br>
+<br>
+He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.&nbsp;
+And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a babble
+of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep road leading
+downwards to the sea.&nbsp; Dunure lies close under the steep hill:
+a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate disrepair, much
+apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of fishers&rsquo; houses.&nbsp;
+Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang the sea, a few vaults,
+and one tall gable honeycombed with windows.&nbsp; The snow lay on the
+beach to the tidemark.&nbsp; It was daubed on to the sills of the ruin:
+it roosted in the crannies of the rock like white sea-birds; even on
+outlying reefs there would be a little cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse.&nbsp;
+Everything was grey and white in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd&rsquo;s
+plaid.&nbsp; In the profound silence, broken only by the noise of oars
+at sea, a horn was sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two
+bags, pause a moment at the end of the clachan for letters.<br>
+<br>
+It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought him.<br>
+<br>
+The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,
+and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me &lsquo;ben
+the hoose&rsquo; into the guest-room.&nbsp; This guest-room at Dunure
+was painted in quite aesthetic fashion.&nbsp; There are rooms in the
+same taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme
+sensibility meet together without embarrassment.&nbsp; It was all in
+a fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of colouring,
+with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings
+of the most exquisite purist.&nbsp; A cherry-red half window-blind kept
+up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the
+floor.&nbsp; Twelve cockle-shells and a half-penny china figure were
+ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.&nbsp; Even the spittoon was
+an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells.&nbsp;
+And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a
+coloured diagram to help the text.&nbsp; It was patchwork, but the patchwork
+of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese silk, shaken
+together in the kaleidoscope of some tasteful housewife&rsquo;s fancy;
+but a work of art in its own way, and plainly a labour of love.&nbsp;
+The patches came exclusively from people&rsquo;s raiment.&nbsp; There
+was no colour more brilliant than a heather mixture; &lsquo;My Johnny&rsquo;s
+grey breeks,&rsquo; well polished over the oar on the boat&rsquo;s thwart,
+entered largely into its composition.&nbsp; And the spoils of an old
+black cloth coat, that had been many a Sunday to church, added something
+(save the mark!) of preciousness to the material.<br>
+<br>
+While I was at luncheon four carters came in - long-limbed, muscular
+Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces.&nbsp; Four quarts of stout
+were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as they
+drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words the four
+quarts were finished - another round was proposed, discussed, and negatived
+- and they were creaking out of the village with their carts.<br>
+<br>
+The ruins drew you towards them.&nbsp; You never saw any place more
+desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
+at hand.&nbsp; Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
+in.&nbsp; The snow had drifted into the vaults.&nbsp; The clachan dabbled
+with snow, the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the coves
+with faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked from a loop-hole
+in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.&nbsp; If you had been
+a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the afternoon, you would
+have had a rare fit of remorse.&nbsp; How you would have heaped up the
+fire and gnawed your fingers!&nbsp; I think it would have come to homicide
+before the evening - if it were only for the pleasure of seeing something
+red!&nbsp; And the masters of Dunure, it is to be noticed, were remarkable
+of old for inhumanity.&nbsp; One of these vaults where the snow had
+drifted was that &lsquo;black route&rsquo; where &lsquo;Mr. Alane Stewart,
+Commendatour of Crossraguel,&rsquo; endured his fiery trials.&nbsp;
+On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr. Alan!), Gilbert,
+Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his cook, his pantryman,
+and another servant, bound the Poor Commendator &lsquo;betwix an iron
+chimlay and a fire,&rsquo; and there cruelly roasted him until he signed
+away his abbacy. it is one of the ugliest stories of an ugly period,
+but not, somehow, without such a flavour of the ridiculous as makes
+it hard to sympathise quite seriously with the victim.&nbsp; And it
+is consoling to remember that he got away at last, and kept his abbacy,
+and, over and above, had a pension from the Earl until he died.<br>
+<br>
+Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly aspect,
+opened out.&nbsp; Colzean plantations lay all along the steep shore,
+and there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the trees made
+a sort of shadowy etching over the snow.&nbsp; The road went down and
+up, and past a blacksmith&rsquo;s cottage that made fine music in the
+valley.&nbsp; Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a cart.&nbsp;
+They were all drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the way to Dunure.&nbsp;
+I told them it was; and my answer was received with unfeigned merriment.&nbsp;
+One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly fell out of the cart; indeed,
+he was only saved by a companion, who either had not so fine a sense
+of humour or had drunken less.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The toune of Mayboll,&rsquo; says the inimitable Abercrummie,
+<a name="citation3"></a><a href="#footnote3">{3}</a> &lsquo;stands upon
+an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open to the south.&nbsp;
+It hath one principals street, with houses upon both sides, built of
+freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation of two castles, one
+at each end of this street.&nbsp; That on the east belongs to the Erle
+of Cassilis.&nbsp; On the west end is a castle, which belonged sometime
+to the laird of Blairquan, which is now the tolbuith, and is adorned
+with a pyremide [conical roof], and a row of ballesters round it raised
+from the top of the staircase, into which they have mounted a fyne clock.&nbsp;
+There be four lanes which pass from the principall street; one is called
+the Black Vennel, which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads
+to a lower street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street,
+and it runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have
+been many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
+countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert themselves
+in converse together at their owne houses.&nbsp; It was once the principall
+street of the town; but many of these houses of the gentry having been
+decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its ancient beautie.&nbsp; Just
+opposite to this vennel, there is another that leads north-west, from
+the chiefe street to the green, which is a pleasant plott of ground,
+enclosed round with an earthen wall, wherein they were wont to play
+football, but now at the Gowff and byasse-bowls.&nbsp; The houses of
+this towne, on both sides of the street, have their several gardens
+belonging to them; and in the lower street there be some pretty orchards,
+that yield store of good fruit.&rsquo;&nbsp; As Patterson says, this
+description is near enough even to-day, and is mighty nicely written
+to boot.&nbsp; I am bound to add, of my own experience, that Maybole
+is tumbledown and dreary.&nbsp; Prosperous enough in reality, it has
+an air of decay; and though the population has increased, a roofless
+house every here and there seems to protest the contrary.&nbsp; The
+women are more than well-favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but
+they look slipshod and dissipated.&nbsp; As they slouched at street
+corners, or stood about gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would
+have been more at home in the slums of a large city than here in a country
+place betwixt a village and a town.&nbsp; I heard a great deal about
+drinking, and a great deal about religious revivals: two things in which
+the Scottish character is emphatic and most unlovely.&nbsp; In particular,
+I heard of clergymen who were employing their time in explaining to
+a delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming.&nbsp; It is not
+very likely any of us will be asked to help. if we were, it is likely
+we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on more reliable
+authority.&nbsp; And so I can only figure to myself a congregation truly
+curious in such flights of theological fancy, as one of veteran and
+accomplished saints, who have fought the good fight to an end and outlived
+all worldly passion, and are to be regarded rather as a part of the
+Church Triumphant than the poor, imperfect company on earth.&nbsp; And
+yet I saw some young fellows about the smoking-room who seemed, in the
+eyes of one who cannot count himself strait-laced, in need of some more
+practical sort of teaching.&nbsp; They seemed only eager to get drunk,
+and to do so speedily.&nbsp; It was not much more than a week after
+the New Year; and to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto
+unspeakable was not altogether pleasing.&nbsp; Here is one snatch of
+talk, for the accuracy of which I can vouch-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;We had that!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I wasna able to be oot o&rsquo; my bed.&nbsp; Man, I was awful
+bad on Wednesday.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, ye were gey bad.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual accents!&nbsp;
+They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort of rational
+pride.&nbsp; Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are not more
+boastful; a cock does not plume himself with a more unmingled satisfaction
+as he paces forth among his harem; and yet these were grown men, and
+by no means short of wit.&nbsp; It was hard to suppose they were very
+eager about the Second Coming: it seemed as if some elementary notions
+of temperance for the men and seemliness for the women would have gone
+nearer the mark.&nbsp; And yet, as it seemed to me typical of much that
+is evil in Scotland, Maybole is also typical of much that is best.&nbsp;
+Some of the factories, which have taken the place of weaving in the
+town&rsquo;s economy, were originally founded and are still possessed
+by self-made men of the sterling, stout old breed - fellows who made
+some little bit of an invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital,
+and then, step by step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought their
+way upwards to an assured position.<br>
+<br>
+Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of spelling,
+this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious to withhold:
+&lsquo;This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a Frenchman, the
+6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors of the parish of
+Maiyboll.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Castle deserves more notice.&nbsp; It is
+a large and shapely tower, plain from the ground upwards, but with a
+zone of ornamentation running about the top.&nbsp; In a general way
+this adornment is perched on the very summit of the chimney-stacks;
+but there is one corner more elaborate than the rest.&nbsp; A very heavy
+string-course runs round the upper story, and just above this, facing
+up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window, fluted and corbelled
+and carved about with stone heads.&nbsp; It is so ornate it has somewhat
+the air of a shrine.&nbsp; And it was, indeed, the casket of a very
+precious jewel, for in the room to which it gives light lay, for long
+years, the heroine of the sweet old ballad of &lsquo;Johnnie Faa&rsquo;
+- she who, at the call of the gipsies&rsquo; songs, &lsquo;came tripping
+down the stair, and all her maids before her.&rsquo;&nbsp; Some people
+say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have written, I believe, unanswerable
+papers to the proof.&nbsp; But in the face of all that, the very look
+of that high oriel window convinces the imagination, and we enter into
+all the sorrows of the imprisoned dame.&nbsp; We conceive the burthen
+of the long, lack-lustre days, when she leaned her sick head against
+the mullions, and saw the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and
+the children at play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray.&nbsp;
+We conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her
+some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her eyes
+overflowed at the memory of the past.&nbsp; And even if the tale be
+not true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is true
+in the essence of all men and women: for all of us, some time or other,
+hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour cast.&nbsp;
+Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire.&nbsp; Most go and are brought
+back again, like Lady Cassilis.&nbsp; A few, of the tribe of Waring,
+go and are seen no more; only now and again, at springtime, when the
+gipsies&rsquo; song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can catch
+their voices in the glee.<br>
+<br>
+By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the day.&nbsp;
+Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon battled the
+other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying silver; the town
+came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables, bestridden by smooth
+white roofs, and sprangled here and there with lighted windows.&nbsp;
+At either end the snow stood high up in the darkness, on the peak of
+the Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the Castle.&nbsp; As the moon
+flashed a bull&rsquo;s-eye glitter across the town between the racing
+clouds, the white roofs leaped into relief over the gables and the chimney-stacks,
+and their shadows over the white roofs.&nbsp; In the town itself the
+lit face of the clock peered down the street; an hour was hammered out
+on Mr. Geli&rsquo;s bell, and from behind the red curtains of a public-house
+some one trolled out - a compatriot of Burns, again! - &lsquo;The saut
+tear blin&rsquo;s my e&rsquo;e.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind.&nbsp; From the street
+corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields.&nbsp;
+The road underfoot was wet and heavy - part ice, part snow, part water,
+and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with &lsquo;A fine
+thowe&rsquo; (thaw).&nbsp; My way lay among rather bleak bills, and
+past bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the Highland-looking
+village of Kirkoswald.&nbsp; It has little claim to notice, save that
+Burns came there to study surveying in the summer of 1777, and there
+also, in the kirkyard, the original of Tam o&rsquo; Shanter sleeps his
+last sleep.&nbsp; It is worth noticing, however, that this was the first
+place I thought &lsquo;Highland-looking.&rsquo;&nbsp; Over the bill
+from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast.&nbsp; As I came down
+above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different from the
+day before.&nbsp; The cold fogs were all blown away; and there was Ailsa
+Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the Bass Rock;
+and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran, veined and tipped
+with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue land of Cantyre.&nbsp;
+Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the top of Arran, and blew
+out in long streamers to the south.&nbsp; The sea was bitten all over
+with white; little ships, tacking up and down the Firth, lay over at
+different angles in the wind.&nbsp; On Shanter they were ploughing lea;
+a cart foal, all in a field by himself, capered and whinnied as if the
+spring were in him.<br>
+<br>
+The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-hills
+and by wildernesses of tumbled bent.&nbsp; Every here and there a few
+cottages stood together beside a bridge.&nbsp; They had one odd feature,
+not easy to describe in words: a triangular porch projected from above
+the door, supported at the apex by a single upright post; a secondary
+door was hinged to the post, and could be hasped on either cheek of
+the real entrance; so, whether the wind was north or south, the cotter
+could make himself a triangular bight of shelter where to set his chair
+and finish a pipe with comfort.&nbsp; There is one objection to this
+device; for, as the post stands in the middle of the fairway, any one
+precipitately issuing from the cottage must run his chance of a broken
+head.&nbsp; So far as I am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner
+of country about Girvan.&nbsp; And that corner is noticeable for more
+reasons: it is certainly one of the most characteristic districts in
+Scotland, It has this movable porch by way of architecture; it has,
+as we shall see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, and it has
+the handsomest population in the Lowlands. . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - FOREST NOTES 1875-6<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+ON THE PLAIN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of the
+G&acirc;tinais, where they border with the wooded hills of Fontainebleau.&nbsp;
+Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the forest as if to sun
+themselves.&nbsp; Here and there a few apple-trees stand together on
+a knoll.&nbsp; The quaint, undignified tartan of a myriad small fields
+dies out into the distance; the strips blend and disappear; and the
+dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no accident save perhaps a
+thin line of trees or faint church spire against the sky.&nbsp; Solemn
+and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness in the near details, the
+impression becomes more solemn and vast towards evening.&nbsp; The sun
+goes down, a swollen orange, as it were into the sea.&nbsp; A blue-clad
+peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods.&nbsp;
+Another still works with his wife in their little strip.&nbsp; An immense
+shadow fills the plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders;
+and their heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved
+from time to time against the golden sky.<br>
+<br>
+These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means overworked;
+but somehow you always see in them the historical representative of
+the serf of yore, and think not so much of present times, which may
+be prosperous enough, as of the old days when the peasant was taxed
+beyond possibility of payment, and lived, in Michelet&rsquo;s image,
+like a hare between two furrows.&nbsp; These very people now weeding
+their patch under the broad sunset, that very man and his wife, it seems
+to us, have suffered all the wrongs of France.&nbsp; It is they who
+have been their country&rsquo;s scapegoat for long ages; they who, generation
+after generation, have sowed and not reaped, reaped and another has
+garnered; and who have now entered into their reward, and enjoy their
+good things in their turn.&nbsp; For the days are gone by when the Seigneur
+ruled and profited.&nbsp; &lsquo;Le Seigneur,&rsquo; says the old formula,
+&lsquo;enferme ses manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel &agrave;
+la terre.&nbsp; Tout est &agrave; lui, for&ecirc;t chenue, oiseau dans
+l&rsquo;air, poisson dans l&rsquo;eau, b&ecirc;te an buisson, l&rsquo;onde
+qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.&rsquo;&nbsp; Such was
+his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a mere king.&nbsp;
+And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look round for vestiges
+of my late lord, and in all the country-side there is no trace of him
+but his forlorn and fallen mansion.&nbsp; At the end of a long avenue,
+now sown with grain, in the midst of a close full of cypresses and lilacs,
+ducks and crowing chanticleers and droning bees, the old ch&acirc;teau
+lifts its red chimneys and peaked roofs and turning vanes into the wind
+and sun.&nbsp; There is a glad spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and
+the lilacs are all in flower, and the creepers green about the broken
+balustrade: but no spring shall revive the honour of the place.&nbsp;
+Old women of the people, little, children of the people, saunter and
+gambol in the walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.&nbsp;
+Plough-horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables.&nbsp; The
+dial-hand on the clock waits for some better hour.&nbsp; Out on the
+plain, where hot sweat trickles into men&rsquo;s eyes, and the spade
+goes in deep and comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement
+of joy at his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are
+now cold, which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at
+supper, while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night
+with empty bellies and cold feet.&nbsp; And perhaps, as he raises his
+head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
+the sea-level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no unsimilar
+place in his affections.<br>
+<br>
+If the chateau was my lord&rsquo;s, the forest was my lord the king&rsquo;s;
+neither of them for this poor Jacques.&nbsp; If he thought to eke out
+his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or
+for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole department,
+from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was a high-born lord,
+down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant like himself, and wore
+stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform.&nbsp; For the first offence,
+by the Salic law, there was a fine of fifteen sols; and should a man
+be taken more than once in fault, or circumstances aggravate the colour
+of his guilt, he might be whipped, branded, or hanged.&nbsp; There was
+a hangman over at Melun, and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by
+the town gate, where Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the
+sky as he went to market.<br>
+<br>
+And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more hares
+and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to trample
+it down.&nbsp; My lord has a new horn from England.&nbsp; He has laid
+out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting
+it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder.&nbsp; The hounds
+have been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert
+in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a speciality
+of the health of hunting-dogs.&nbsp; In the grey dawn the game was turned
+and the branch broken by our best piqueur.&nbsp; A rare day&rsquo;s
+hunting lies before us.&nbsp; Wind a jolly flourish, sound the <i>bien-aller</i>
+with all your lungs.&nbsp; Jacques must stand by, hat in hand, while
+the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his field, and a year&rsquo;s
+sparing and labouring is as though it had not been.&nbsp; If he can
+see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows but he may fall in
+favour with my lord; who knows but his son may become the last and least
+among the servants at his lordship&rsquo;s kennel - one of the two poor
+varlets who get no wages and sleep at night among the hounds? <a name="citation4"></a><a href="#footnote4">{4}</a><br>
+<br>
+For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only warming
+him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of sore trouble,
+when my lord of the ch&acirc;teau, with all his troopers and trumpets,
+had been beaten from field after field into some ultimate fastness,
+or lay over-seas in an English prison.&nbsp; In these dark days, when
+the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of burning villages on
+the sky-line, or a clump of spears and fluttering pensions drawing nigh
+across the plain, these good folk gat them up, with all their household
+gods, into the wood, whence, from some high spur, their timid scouts
+might overlook the coming and going of the marauders, and see the harvest
+ridden down, and church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame.&nbsp;
+It was but an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must
+abide all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers.&nbsp;
+Often there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
+divisions of field from field.&nbsp; And yet, as times went, when the
+wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
+was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
+caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.<br>
+<br>
+Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may have
+served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest, and noble
+by old associations.&nbsp; These woods have rung to the horns of all
+the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards.&nbsp; They have
+seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from Egypt; Francis
+I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his train; and Peter of
+Russia following his first stag.&nbsp; And so they are still haunted
+for the imagination by royal hunts and progresses, and peopled with
+the faces of memorable men of yore.&nbsp; And this distinction is not
+only in virtue of the pastime of dead monarchs.<br>
+<br>
+Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of men,
+have here left their note, here taken shape in some significant and
+dramatic situation.&nbsp; It was hence that Gruise and his leaguers
+led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris.&nbsp; Here, booted and spurred,
+and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met the Pope beside a woodland
+cross.&nbsp; Here, on his way to Elba not so long after, he kissed the
+eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words of passionate farewell to his
+soldiers.&nbsp; And here, after Waterloo, rather than yield its ensign
+to the new power, one of his faithful regiments burned that memorial
+of so much toil and glory on the Grand Master&rsquo;s table, and drank
+its dust in brandy, as a devout priest consumes the remnants of the
+Host.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+IN THE SEASON<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the <i>bornage</i>
+stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain small and very
+quiet village.&nbsp; There is but one street, and that, not long ago,
+was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between the doorsteps.&nbsp;
+As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the beginning of the wood,
+you will arrive at last before an inn where artists lodge.&nbsp; To
+the door (for I imagine it to be six o&rsquo;clock on some fine summer&rsquo;s
+even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of people have brought out
+chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and waiting the omnibus from
+Melun.&nbsp; If you go on into the court you will find as many more,
+some in billiard-room over absinthe and a match of corks some without
+over a last cigar and a vermouth.&nbsp; The doves coo and flutter from
+the dovecot; Hortense is drawing water from the well; and as all the
+rooms open into the court, you can see the white-capped cook over the
+furnace in the kitchen, and some idle painter, who has stored his canvases
+and washed his brushes, jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano
+in the salle-&agrave;-manger.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Edmond, encore un vermouth</i>,&rsquo;
+cries a man in velveteen, adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought,
+&lsquo;<i>un double, s&rsquo;il vous pla&icirc;t</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Where
+are you working?&rsquo; asks one in pure white linen from top to toe.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;At the Carrefour de l&rsquo;&Eacute;pine,&rsquo; returns the
+other in corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way).&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+couldn&rsquo;t do a thing to it.&nbsp; I ran out of white.&nbsp; Where
+were you?&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;I wasn&rsquo;t working.&nbsp; I was looking
+for motives.&rsquo;&nbsp; Here is an outbreak of jubilation, and a lot
+of men clustering together about some new-comer with outstretched hands;
+perhaps the &lsquo;correspondence&rsquo; has come in and brought So-and-so
+from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-and-so who has walked over from
+Chailly to dinner.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>&Agrave; table, Messieurs</i>!&rsquo; cries M. Siron, bearing
+through the court the first tureen of soup.&nbsp; And immediately the
+company begins to settle down about the long tables in the dining-room,
+framed all round with sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit.&nbsp;
+There&rsquo;s the big picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a
+dead boar between his legs, and his legs - well, his legs in stockings.&nbsp;
+And here is the little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one
+knocked a hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from
+the dessert.&nbsp; And under all these works of art so much eating goes
+forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English,
+that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the door.&nbsp;
+One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete at Fleury,
+and another how well so-and-so would sing of an evening: and here are
+a third and fourth making plans for the whole future of their lives;
+and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and making faces on his clenched
+fist, surely of all arts the most difficult and admirable!&nbsp; A sixth
+has eaten his fill, lights a cigarette, and resigns himself to digestion.&nbsp;
+A seventh has just dropped in, and calls for soup.&nbsp; Number eight,
+meanwhile, has left the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano
+under powerful and uncertain fingers.<br>
+<br>
+Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat.&nbsp; Perhaps we
+go along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
+there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some pickled
+oysters and white wine to close the evening.&nbsp; Or a dance is organised
+in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces under manful
+jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a lamp or two,
+while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden floor, and sober
+men, who are not given to such light pleasures, get up on the table
+or the sideboard, and sit there looking on approvingly over a pipe and
+a tumbler of wine.&nbsp; Or sometimes - suppose my lady moon looks forth,
+and the court from out the half-lit dining-room seems nearly as bright
+as by day, and the light picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear
+shadow under every vine-leaf on the wall - sometimes a picnic is proposed,
+and a basket made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the
+hotel.&nbsp; The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file
+down the long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and
+pine-trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and
+every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these two
+precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.&nbsp; We gather
+ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze flutters
+the shadows of the old bandits&rsquo; haunt, and shows shapely beards
+and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall.&nbsp; The bowl
+is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding thimblefuls.&nbsp;
+So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.&nbsp; And then we
+go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal among the birch
+tufts and the boulders, but ever called together again, as one of our
+leaders winds his horn.&nbsp; Perhaps some one of the party will not
+heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of his own.&nbsp; As he
+follows the winding sandy road, he hears the flourishes grow fainter
+and fainter in the distance, and die finally out, and still walks on
+in the strange coolness and silence and between the crisp lights and
+shadows of the moonlit woods, until suddenly the bell rings out the
+hour from far-away Chailly, and he starts to find himself alone.&nbsp;
+No surf-bell on forlorn and perilous shores, no passing knell over the
+busy market-place, can speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue
+to human ears.&nbsp; Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations
+in his mind.&nbsp; And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so
+utterly silent that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring
+the hour out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris,
+and away in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where
+his childhood passed between the sun and flowers.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+IDLE HOURS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
+be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.&nbsp;
+The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these trees
+that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving
+winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working
+on the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the
+side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water,
+fathoms below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea.&nbsp; And
+yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes
+is not to be felt fully without the sense of contrast.&nbsp; You must
+have risen in the morning and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled
+and coloured in the sun&rsquo;s light; you must have felt the odour
+of innumerable trees at even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads,
+and the coolness of the groves.<br>
+<br>
+And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes.&nbsp; If you
+have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon,
+you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window - for there
+are no blind or shutters to keep him out - and the room, with its bare
+wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort
+of glory of reflected lights.&nbsp; You may doze a while longer by snatches,
+or lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which
+former occupants have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile;
+local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed
+in oil.&nbsp; Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the salle-&agrave;-manger
+for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box,
+bound into a fagot, and sets of for what he calls his &lsquo;motive.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with
+him a little following of dogs.&nbsp; For the dogs, who belong only
+nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all
+day long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit
+by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting.&nbsp;
+They would like to be under the trees all day.&nbsp; But they cannot
+go alone.&nbsp; They require a pretext.&nbsp; And so they take the passing
+artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick
+as an excuse to bathe.&nbsp; With quick ears, long spines, and bandy
+legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with a bulldog&rsquo;s head,
+this company of mongrels will trot by your side all day and come home
+with you at night, still showing white teeth and wagging stunted tail.&nbsp;
+Their good humour is not to be exhausted.&nbsp; You may pelt them with
+stones if you please, and all they will do is to give you a wider berth.&nbsp;
+If once they come out with you, to you they will remain faithful, and
+with you return; although if you meet them next morning in the street,
+it is as like as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.<br>
+<br>
+The forest - a strange thing for an Englishman - is very destitute of
+birds.&nbsp; This is no country where every patch of wood among the
+meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered through
+by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a profusion
+of clear notes.&nbsp; And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted
+on its own account only.&nbsp; For the insects prosper in their absence,
+and become as one of the plagues of Egypt.&nbsp; Ants swarm in the hot
+sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole
+in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming
+and going in the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where
+there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood,
+you are conscious of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of
+infinitesimal living things between the trees.&nbsp; Nor are insects
+the only evil creatures that haunt the forest.&nbsp; For you may plump
+into a cave among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild
+boar, or see a crooked viper slither across the road.<br>
+<br>
+Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading beech-roots
+with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a friend:
+&lsquo;I say, just keep where you are, will you?&nbsp; You make the
+jolliest motive.&rsquo;&nbsp; And you reply: &lsquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t
+mind, if I may smoke.&rsquo;&nbsp; And thereafter the hours go idly
+by.&nbsp; Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off,
+in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of
+glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
+another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.&nbsp; You cannot watch
+your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning
+to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting
+dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead,
+and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither
+and thither like butterflies of light.&nbsp; But you know it is going
+forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get ready your own
+palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in words.<br>
+<br>
+Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin
+of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.&nbsp; All
+the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight.&nbsp; Everything stands out
+as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its
+highest key.&nbsp; The boulders are some of them upright and dead like
+monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle.&nbsp; The
+junipers - looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral
+procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred
+years and more in wind and rain - are daubed in forcibly against the
+glowing ferns and heather.&nbsp; Every tassel of their rusty foliage
+is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness.&nbsp; And a sorry figure
+they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees!&nbsp; The
+scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up with
+such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty years
+in England and not see.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to
+a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago,
+and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet
+the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as
+the shades embarked for the passionless land.&nbsp; Yet a little while,
+sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember
+loves that might have been.&nbsp; There is a falling flourish in the
+air that remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places,
+on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of
+a forest savour.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You can get up now,&rsquo; says the painter; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+at the background.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood,
+the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching
+farther into the open.&nbsp; A cool air comes along the highways, and
+the scents awaken.&nbsp; The fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone.&nbsp;
+Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour
+of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court
+ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked
+in the summer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk
+or bergamot upon the woodland winds.&nbsp; One side of the long avenues
+is still kindled with the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow.&nbsp;
+Over the trees the west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters
+gather up their chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the
+plain.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A PLEASURE-PARTY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go in
+force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and ordered
+a large wagonette from Lejosne&rsquo;s.&nbsp; It has been waiting for
+near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t&rsquo;other hurried
+over his toilette and coffee; but now it is filled from end to end with
+merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his whip, and amid
+much applause from round the inn door off we rattle at a spanking trot.&nbsp;
+The way lies through the forest, up hill and down dale, and by beech
+and pine wood, in the cheerful morning sunshine.&nbsp; The English get
+down at all the ascents and walk on ahead for exercise; the French are
+mightily entertained at this, and keep coyly underneath the tilt.&nbsp;
+As we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech,
+and some one will be always breaking out into a bar or two of opera
+bouffe.&nbsp; Before we get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the
+colourman from Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with
+a case of merchandise; and it is &lsquo;Desprez, leave me some malachite
+green&rsquo;; &lsquo;Desprez, leave me so much canvas&rsquo;; &lsquo;Desprez,
+leave me this, or leave me that&rsquo;; M. Desprez standing the while
+in the sunlight with grave face and many salutations.&nbsp; The next
+interruption is more important.&nbsp; For some time back we have had
+the sound of cannon in our ears; and now, a little past Franchard, we
+find a mounted trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette
+to a stand.&nbsp; The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral,
+it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the
+moment.&nbsp; There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring
+cross-roads and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the
+most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs
+of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks.&nbsp; And meanwhile the
+doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy
+wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too facile
+sentry.&nbsp; His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner dignified
+and insinuating.&nbsp; It is not for nothing that the Doctor has voyaged
+all the world over, and speaks all languages from French to Patagonian.&nbsp;
+He has not come borne from perilous journeys to be thwarted by a corporal
+of horse.&nbsp; And so we soon see the soldier&rsquo;s mouth relax,
+and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>En voiture,
+Messieurs, Mesdames</i>,&rsquo; sings the Doctor; and on we go again
+at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us, and discretion
+prevails not a little over valour in some timorous spirits of the party.&nbsp;
+At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who will send us back.&nbsp;
+At any moment we may encounter a flying shell, which will send us somewhere
+farther off than Grez.<br>
+<br>
+Grez - for that is our destination - has been highly recommended for
+its beauty.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Il y a de l&lsquo;eau</i>,&rsquo; people
+have said, with an emphasis, as if that settled the question, which,
+for a French mind, I am rather led to think it does.&nbsp; And Grez,
+when we get there, is indeed a place worthy of some praise.&nbsp; It
+lies out of the forest, a cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an
+old castle in ruin, and a quaint old church.&nbsp; The inn garden descends
+in terraces to the river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space
+of lawn, fringed with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.&nbsp;
+On the opposite bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set
+thickly with willows and poplars.&nbsp; And between the two lies the
+river, clear and deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies.&nbsp;
+Water-plants cluster about the starlings of the long low bridge, and
+stand half-way up upon the piers in green luxuriance.&nbsp; They catch
+the dipped oar with long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with
+the shadow of their leaves.&nbsp; And the river wanders and thither
+hither among the islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds,
+like an old building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy.&nbsp;
+You may watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive
+for his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the
+yellow deal.&nbsp; And you can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices
+from the shed under the old kirk, where the village women wash and wash
+all day among the fish and water-lilies.&nbsp; It seems as if linen
+washed there should be specially cool and sweet.<br>
+<br>
+We have come here for the river.&nbsp; And no sooner have we all bathed
+than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding under
+the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies.&nbsp; Some
+one sings; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean over
+the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below, and the
+shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own head protruded,
+glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream.&nbsp; At last, the
+day declining - all silent and happy, and up to the knees in the wet
+lilies - we punt slowly back again to the landing-place beside the bridge.&nbsp;
+There is a wish for solitude on all.&nbsp; One hides himself in the
+arbour with a cigarette; another goes a walk in the country with Cocardon;
+a third inspects the church.&nbsp; And it is not till dinner is on the
+table, and the inn&rsquo;s best wine goes round from glass to glass,
+that we begin to throw off the restraint and fuse once more into a jolly
+fellowship.<br>
+<br>
+Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some of
+the others, loath to break up company, will go with them a bit of the
+way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte.&nbsp; It is dark in the wagonette,
+and not so merry as it might have been.&nbsp; The coachman loses the
+road.&nbsp; So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most indifferent
+success.&nbsp; Some sing, but the rest are too weary to applaud; and
+it seems as if the festival were fairly at an end -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nous avons fait la noce,<br>
+Rentrons &agrave; nos foyers!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and taken
+our places in the court at Mother Antonine&rsquo;s.&nbsp; There is punch
+on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in summer
+weather.&nbsp; The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces round
+the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a background of
+complete and solid darkness.&nbsp; It is all picturesque enough; but
+the fact is, we are aweary.&nbsp; We yawn; we are out of the vein; we
+have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for pleasure&rsquo;s
+sake, let&rsquo;s make an end on&rsquo;t.&nbsp; When here comes striding
+into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a jacket
+of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and in a moment
+the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our laughter as
+he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-dealers, all eccentric
+ways of speaking and thinking, with a possession, a fury, a strain of
+mind and voice, that would rather suggest a nervous crisis than a desire
+to please.&nbsp; We are as merry as ever when the trap sets forth again,
+and say farewell noisily to all the good folk going farther.&nbsp; Then,
+as we are far enough from thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint
+house, and sit an hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with
+furs, littered with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow
+and shine, by a wood fire in a mediaeval chimney.&nbsp; And then we
+plod back through the darkness to the inn beside the river.<br>
+<br>
+How quick bright things come to confusion!&nbsp; When we arise next
+morning, the grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the
+face of the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops.&nbsp; Yesterday&rsquo;s
+lilies encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their voyage
+towards the Seine and the salt sea.&nbsp; A sickly shimmer lies upon
+the dripping house-roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green
+and golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken
+a water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge.&nbsp; We
+go out a-walking in the wet roads.&nbsp; But the roads about Grez have
+a trick of their own.&nbsp; They go on for a while among clumps of willows
+and patches of vine, and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease
+and determine in some miry hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have
+a short period of hope, then right-about face, and back the way you
+came!&nbsp; So we draw about the kitchen fire and play a round game
+of cards for ha&rsquo;pence, or go to the billiard-room, for a match
+at corks and by one consent a messenger is sent over for the wagonette
+- Grez shall be left to-morrow.<br>
+<br>
+To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for
+exercise, and let their kidnap-sacks follow by the trap.&nbsp; I need
+hardly say they are neither of them French; for, of all English phrases,
+the phrase &lsquo;for exercise&rsquo; is the least comprehensible across
+the Straits of Dover.&nbsp; All goes well for a while with the pedestrians.&nbsp;
+The wet woods are full of scents in the noontide.&nbsp; At a certain
+cross, where there is a guardhouse, they make a halt, for the forester&rsquo;s
+wife is the daughter of their good host at Barbizon.&nbsp; And so there
+they are hospitably received by the comely woman, with one child in
+her arms and another prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink
+some syrup of quince in the back parlour, with a map of the forest on
+the wall, and some prints of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting.&nbsp;
+As they draw near the Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of
+the big guns, they take a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a
+while somewhat vaguely, with the sound of the cannon in their ears and
+the rain beginning to fall.&nbsp; The ways grow wider and sandier; here
+and there there are real sand-hills, as though by the sea-shore; the
+fir-wood is open and grows in clumps upon the hillocks, and the race
+of sign-posts is no more.&nbsp; One begins to look at the other doubtfully.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I am sure we should keep more to the right,&rsquo; says one;
+and the other is just as certain they should hold to the left.&nbsp;
+And now, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain falls &lsquo;sheer
+and strong and loud,&rsquo; as out of a shower-bath.&nbsp; In a moment
+they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors.&nbsp; They cannot see out of
+their eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their
+boots.&nbsp; They leave the track and try across country with a gambler&rsquo;s
+desperatin, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation
+worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from boulder to boulder,
+or plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste
+clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too
+plainly of the cannon in the distance.&nbsp; And meantime the cannon
+grumble out responses to the grumbling thunder.&nbsp; There is such
+a mixture of melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at
+once so grey and so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and
+write about by the chimney-corner than to suffer in the person.&nbsp;
+At last they chance on the right path, and make Franchard in the early
+evening, the sorriest pair of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale.&nbsp;
+Thence, by the Bois d&rsquo;Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins
+Brul&eacute;s, to the clean hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE WOODS IN SPRING<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early springtime,
+when it is just beginning to reawaken, and innumerable violets peep
+from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit down
+to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your
+knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-&agrave;-manger opens
+on the court.&nbsp; There is less to distract the attention, for one
+thing, and the forest is more itself.&nbsp; It is not bedotted with
+artists&rsquo; sunshades as with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn with
+the remains of English picnics.&nbsp; The hunting still goes on, and
+at any moment your heart may be brought into your mouth as you hear
+far-away horns; or you may be told by an agitated peasant that the Vicomte
+has gone up the avenue, not ten minutes since, &lsquo;<i>&agrave; fond
+de train, monsieur, et avec douze pipuers</i>.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
+permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country,
+each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together
+and mingled the one into the other at the seams.&nbsp; You will see
+tracts of leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks
+a little ruddier in the hue.&nbsp; Then zones of pine of a solemn green;
+and, dotted among the pines, or standing by themselves in rocky clearings,
+the delicate, snow-white trunks of birches, spreading out into snow-white
+branches yet more delicate, and crowned and canopied with a purple haze
+of twigs.&nbsp; And then a long, bare ridge of tumbled boulders, with
+bright sand-breaks between them, and wavering sandy roads among the
+bracken and brown heather.&nbsp; It is all rather cold and unhomely.&nbsp;
+It has not the perfect beauty, nor the gem-like colouring, of the wood
+in the later year, when it is no more than one vast colonnade of verdant
+shadow, tremulous with insects, intersected here and there by lanes
+of sunlight set in purple heather.&nbsp; The loveliness of the woods
+in March is not, assuredly, of this blowzy rustic type.&nbsp; It is
+made sharp with a grain of salt, with a touch of ugliness.&nbsp; It
+has a sting like the sting of bitter ale; you acquire the love of it
+as men acquire a taste for olives.&nbsp; And the wonderful clear, pure
+air wells into your lungs the while by voluptuous inhalations, and makes
+the eyes bright, and sets the heart tinkling to a new tune - or, rather,
+to an old tune; for you remember in your boyhood something akin to this
+spirit of adventure, this thirst for exploration, that now takes you
+masterfully by the hand, plunges you into many a deep grove, and drags
+you over many a stony crest. it is as if the whole wood were full of
+friendly voice, calling you farther in, and you turn from one side to
+another, like Buridan&rsquo;s donkey, in a maze of pleasure.<br>
+<br>
+Comely beeches send up their white, straight, clustered branches, barred
+with green moss, like so many fingers from a half-clenched hand.&nbsp;
+Mighty oaks stand to the ankles in a fine tracery of underwood; thence
+the tall shaft climbs upwards, and the great forest of stalwart boughs
+spreads out into the golden evening sky, where the rooks are flying
+and calling.&nbsp; On the sward of the Bois d&rsquo;Hyver the firs stand
+well asunder with outspread arms, like fencers saluting; and the air
+smells of resin all around, and the sound of the axe is rarely still.&nbsp;
+But strangest of all, and in appearance oldest of all, are the dim and
+wizard upland districts of young wood.&nbsp; The ground is carpeted
+with fir-tassel, and strewn with fir-apples and flakes of fallen bark.&nbsp;
+Rocks lie crouching in the thicket, guttered with rain, tufted with
+lichen, white with years and the rigours of the changeful seasons.&nbsp;
+Brown and yellow butterflies are sown and carried away again by the
+light air - like thistledown.&nbsp; The loneliness of these coverts
+is so excessive, that there are moments when pleasure draws to the verge
+of fear.&nbsp; You listen and listen for some noise to break the silence,
+till you grow half mesmerised by the intensity of the strain; your sense
+of your own identity is troubled; your brain reels, like that of some
+gymnosophist poring on his own nose in Asiatic jungles; and should you
+see your own outspread feet, you see them, not as anything of yours,
+but as a feature of the scene around you.<br>
+<br>
+Still the forest is always, but the stillness is not always unbroken.&nbsp;
+You can hear the wind pass in the distance over the tree-tops; sometimes
+briefly, like the noise of a train; sometimes with a long steady rush,
+like the breaking of waves.&nbsp; And sometimes, close at band, the
+branches move, a moan goes through the thicket, and the wood thrills
+to its heart.&nbsp; Perhaps you may hear a carriage on the road to Fontainebleau,
+a bird gives a dry continual chirp, the dead leaves rustle underfoot,
+or you may time your steps to the steady recurrent strokes of the woodman&rsquo;s
+axe.&nbsp; From time to time, over the low grounds, a flight of rooks
+goes by; and from time to time the cooing of wild doves falls upon the
+ear, not sweet and rich and near at hand as in England, but a sort of
+voice of the woods, thin and far away, as fits these solemn places.&nbsp;
+Or you hear suddenly the hollow, eager, violent barking of dogs; scared
+deer flit past you through the fringes of the wood; then a man or two
+running, in green blouse, with gun and game-bag on a bandoleer; and
+then, out of the thick of the trees, comes the jar of rifle-shots.&nbsp;
+Or perhaps the hounds are out, and horns are blown, and scarlet-coated
+huntsmen flash through the clearings, and the solid noise of horses
+galloping passes below you, where you sit perched among the rocks and
+heather.&nbsp; The boar is afoot, and all over the forest, and in all
+neighbouring villages, there is a vague excitement and a vague hope;
+for who knows whither the chase may lead? and even to have seen a single
+piqueur, or spoken to a single sportsman, is to be a man of consequence
+for the night.<br>
+<br>
+Besides men who shoot and men who ride with the hounds, there are few
+people in the forest, in the early spring, save woodcutters plying their
+axes steadily, and old women and children gathering wood for the fire.&nbsp;
+You may meet such a party coming home in the twilight: the old woman
+laden with a fagot of chips, and the little ones hauling a long branch
+behind them in her wake.&nbsp; That is the worst of what there is to
+encounter; and if I tell you of what once happened to a friend of mine,
+it is by no means to tantalise you with false hopes; for the adventure
+was unique.&nbsp; It was on a very cold, still, sunless morning, with
+a flat grey sky and a frosty tingle in the air, that this friend (who
+shall here be nameless) heard the notes of a key-bugle played with much
+hesitation, and saw the smoke of a fire spread out along the green pine-tops,
+in a remote uncanny glen, hard by a hill of naked boulders.&nbsp; He
+drew near warily, and beheld a picnic party seated under a tree in an
+open.&nbsp; The old father knitted a sock, the mother sat staring at
+the fire.&nbsp; The eldest son, in the uniform of a private of dragoons,
+was choosing out notes on a key-bugle.&nbsp; Two or three daughters
+lay in the neighbourhood picking violets.&nbsp; And the whole party
+as grave and silent as the woods around them!&nbsp; My friend watched
+for a long time, he says; but all held their peace; not one spoke or
+smiled; only the dragoon kept choosing out single notes upon the bugle,
+and the father knitted away at his work and made strange movements the
+while with his flexible eyebrows.&nbsp; They took no notice whatever
+of my friend&rsquo;s presence, which was disquieting in itself, and
+increased the resemblance of the whole party to mechanical waxworks.&nbsp;
+Certainly, he affirms, a wax figure might have played the bugle with
+more spirit than that strange dragoon.&nbsp; And as this hypothesis
+of his became more certain, the awful insolubility of why they should
+be left out there in the woods with nobody to wind them up again when
+they ran down, and a growing disquietude as to what might happen next,
+became too much for his courage, and he turned tail, and fairly took
+to his heels.&nbsp; It might have been a singing in his ears, but he
+fancies he was followed as he ran by a peal of Titanic laughter.&nbsp;
+Nothing has ever transpired to clear up the mystery; it may be they
+were automata; or it may be (and this is the theory to which I lean
+myself) that this is all another chapter of Heine&rsquo;s &lsquo;Gods
+in Exile&rsquo;; that the upright old man with the eyebrows was no other
+than Father Jove, and the young dragoon with the taste for music either
+Apollo or Mars.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+MORALITY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.&nbsp;
+Not one or two only, but a great chorus of grateful voices have arisen
+to spread abroad its fame.&nbsp; Half the famous writers of modern France
+have had their word to say about Fontainebleau.&nbsp; Chateaubriand,
+Michelet, B&eacute;ranger, George Sand, de Senancour, Flaubert, Murger,
+the brothers Goncourt, Th&eacute;odore de Banville, each of these has
+done something to the eternal praise and memory of these woods.&nbsp;
+Even at the very worst of times, even when the picturesque was anathema
+in the eyes of all Persons of Taste, the forest still preserved a certain
+reputation for beauty.&nbsp; It was in 1730 that the Abb&eacute; Guilbert
+published his <i>Historical Description</i> <i>of the Palace, Town,
+and Forest of Fontainebleau</i>.&nbsp; And very droll it is to see him,
+as he tries to set forth his admiration in terms of what was then permissible.&nbsp;
+The monstrous rocks, etc., says the Abb&eacute; &lsquo;sont admir&eacute;es
+avec surprise des voyageurs qui s&rsquo;&eacute;crient aussit&ocirc;t
+avec Horace: Ut mihi devio rupee et vacuum nemus mirari libet.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The good man is not exactly lyrical in his praise; and you see how he
+sets his back against Horace as against a trusty oak.&nbsp; Horace,
+at any rate, was classical.&nbsp; For the rest, however, the Abb&eacute;
+likes places where many alleys meet; or which, like the Belle-&Eacute;toile,
+are kept up &lsquo;by a special gardener,&rsquo; and admires at the
+Table du Roi the labours of the Grand Master of Woods and Waters, the
+Sieur de la Falure, &lsquo;qui a fait faire ce magnifique endroit.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+But indeed, it is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a
+claim upon men&rsquo;s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality
+of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes
+and renews a weary spirit.&nbsp; Disappointed men, sick Francis Firsts
+and vanquished Grand Monarchs, time out of mind have come here for consolation.&nbsp;
+Hither perplexed folk have retired out of the press of life, as into
+a deep bay-window on some night of masquerade, and here found quiet
+and silence, and rest, the mother of wisdom.&nbsp; It is the great moral
+spa; this forest without a fountain is itself the great fountain of
+Juventius.&nbsp; It is the best place in the world to bring an old sorrow
+that has been a long while your friend and enemy; and if, like B&eacute;ranger&rsquo;s
+your gaiety has run away from home and left open the door for sorrow
+to come in, of all covers in Europe, it is here you may expect to find
+the truant hid.&nbsp; With every hour you change.&nbsp; The air penetrates
+through your clothes, and nestles to your living body.&nbsp; You love
+exercise and slumber, long fasting and full meals.&nbsp; You forget
+all your scruples and live a while in peace and freedom, and for the
+moment only.&nbsp; For here, all is absent that can stimulate to moral
+feeling.&nbsp; Such people as you see may be old, or toil-worn, or sorry;
+but you see them framed in the forest, like figures on a painted canvas;
+and for you, they are not people in any living and kindly sense.&nbsp;
+You forget the grim contrariety of interests.&nbsp; You forget the narrow
+lane where all men jostle together in unchivalrous contention, and the
+kennel, deep and unclean, that gapes on either hand for the defeated.&nbsp;
+Life is simple enough, it seems, and the very idea of sacrifice becomes
+like a mad fancy out of a last night&rsquo;s dream.<br>
+<br>
+Your ideal is not perhaps high, but it is plain and possible.&nbsp;
+You become enamoured of a life of change and movement and the open air,
+where the muscles shall be more exercised than the affections.&nbsp;
+When you have had your will of the forest, you may visit the whole round
+world.&nbsp; You may buckle on your knapsack and take the road on foot.&nbsp;
+You may bestride a good nag, and ride forth, with a pair of saddle-bags,
+into the enchanted East.&nbsp; You may cross the Black Forest, and see
+Germany wide-spread before you, like a map, dotted with old cities,
+walled and spired, that dream all day on their own reflections in the
+Rhine or Danube.&nbsp; You may pass the spinal cord of Europe and go
+down from Alpine glaciers to where Italy extends her marble moles and
+glasses her marble palaces in the midland sea.&nbsp; You may sleep in
+flying trains or wayside taverns.&nbsp; You may be awakened at dawn
+by the scream of the express or the small pipe of the robin in the hedge.&nbsp;
+For you the rain should allay the dust of the beaten road; the wind
+dry your clothes upon you as you walked.&nbsp; Autumn should hang out
+russet pears and purple grapes along the lane; inn after inn proffer
+you their cups of raw wine; river by river receive your body in the
+sultry noon.&nbsp; Wherever you went warm valleys and high trees and
+pleasant villages should compass you about; and light fellowships should
+take you by the arm, and walk with you an hour upon your way.&nbsp;
+You may see from afar off what it will come to in the end - the weather-beaten
+red-nosed vagabond, consumed by a fever of the feet, cut off from all
+near touch of human sympathy, a waif, an Ishmael, and an outcast.&nbsp;
+And yet it will seem well - and yet, in the air of the forest, this
+will seem the best - to break all the network bound about your feet
+by birth and old companionship and loyal love, and bear your shovelful
+of phosphates to and fro, in town country, until the hour of the great
+dissolvent.<br>
+<br>
+Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover.&nbsp; For the forest is by
+itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal land
+of labour.&nbsp; Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
+the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes.&nbsp; Not
+only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
+into their notion of a place.&nbsp; If the sea, for instance, lie just
+across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and the
+tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change.&nbsp;
+And so here, in this forest, a knowledge of its greatness is for much
+in the effect produced.&nbsp; You reckon up the miles that lie between
+you and intrusion.&nbsp; You may walk before you all day long, and not
+fear to touch the barrier of your Eden, or stumble out of fairyland
+into the land of gin and steam-hammers.&nbsp; And there is an old tale
+enhances for the imagination the grandeur of the woods of France, and
+secures you in the thought of your seclusion.&nbsp; When Charles VI.
+hunted in the time of his wild boyhood near Senlis, there was captured
+an old stag, having a collar of bronze about his neck, and these words
+engraved on the collar: &lsquo;Caesar mihi hoc donavit.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+It is no wonder if the minds of men were moved at this occurrence and
+they stood aghast to find themselves thus touching hands with forgotten
+ages, and following an antiquity with hound and horn.&nbsp; And even
+for you, it is scarcely in an idle curiosity that you ponder how many
+centuries this stag had carried its free antlers through the wood, and
+how many summers and winters had shone and snowed on the imperial badge.&nbsp;
+If the extent of solemn wood could thus safeguard a tall stag from the
+hunter&rsquo;s hounds and houses, might not you also play hide-and-seek,
+in these groves, with all the pangs and trepidations of man&rsquo;s
+life, and elude Death, the mighty hunter, for more than the span of
+human years?&nbsp; Here, also, crash his arrows; here, in the farthest
+glade, sounds the gallop of the pale horse.&nbsp; But he does not hunt
+this cover with all his hounds, for the game is thin and small: and
+if you were but alert and wary, if you lodged ever in the deepest thickets,
+you too might live on into later generations and astonish men by your
+stalwart age and the trophies of an immemorial success.<br>
+<br>
+For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die.&nbsp; There is
+nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires.&nbsp; Here all the
+impudencies of the brawling world reach you no more.&nbsp; You may count
+your hours, like Endymion, by the strokes of the lone woodcutter, or
+by the progression of the lights and shadows and the sun wheeling his
+wide circuit through the naked heavens.&nbsp; Here shall you see no
+enemies but winter and rough weather.&nbsp; And if a pang comes to you
+at all, it will be a pang of healthful hunger.&nbsp; All the puling
+sorrows, all the carking repentance, all this talk of duty that is no
+duty, in the great peace, in the pure daylight of these woods, fall
+away from you like a garment.&nbsp; And if perchance you come forth
+upon an eminence, where the wind blows upon you large and fresh, and
+the pines knock their long stems together, like an ungainly sort of
+puppets, and see far away over the plain a factory chimney defined against
+the pale horizon - it is for you, as for the staid and simple peasant
+when, with his plough, he upturns old arms and harness from the furrow
+of the glebe.&nbsp; Ay, sure enough, there was a battle there in the
+old times; and, sure enough, there is a world out yonder where men strive
+together with a noise of oaths and weeping and clamorous dispute.&nbsp;
+So much you apprehend by an athletic act of the imagination.&nbsp; A
+faint far-off rumour as of Merovingian wars; a legend as of some dead
+religion.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VI - A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE <a name="citation5"></a><a href="#footnote5">{5}</a>
+A FRAGMENT 1879<br>
+<i>Originally intended to serve as the opening chapter of &lsquo;Travels
+with a Donkey in the Cevennes.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute Loire,
+the ancient Velay.&nbsp; As the name betokens, the town is of monastic
+origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and a church
+of some architectural pretensions, the seat of an arch-priest and several
+vicars.&nbsp; It stands on the side of hill above the river Gazeille,
+about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometime
+pursue the diligence in winter.&nbsp; The road, which is bound for Vivarais,
+passes through the town from end to end in a single narrow street; there
+you may see the fountain where women fill their pitchers; there also
+some old houses with carved doors and pediment and ornamental work in
+iron.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; He certainly has claims to be considered the most
+remarkable spendthrift on record.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; His son, ruined as the family was, went as far as Paris
+to sow his wild oats; and so the cases of father and son mark an epoch
+in the history of centralisation in France.&nbsp; Not until the latter
+had got into the train was the work of Richelieu complete.<br>
+<br>
+It is a people of lace-makers.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Now and then you will hear one woman clattering
+off prayers for the edification of the others at their work.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Now, from a change
+in the market, it takes a clever and industrious work-woman to earn
+from three to four in the week, or less than an eighth of what she made
+easily a few years ago.&nbsp; The tide of prosperity came and went,
+as with our northern pitmen, and left nobody the richer.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; From week&rsquo;s
+end to week&rsquo;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.&nbsp; Now these dancing
+days are over.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Il n&rsquo;y a plus de jeunesse</i>,&rsquo;
+said Victor the gar&ccedil;on.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Only on the occasion of the fair shall you hear a drum discreetly
+in a wine-shop or perhaps one of the company singing the measure while
+the others dance.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The lace-makers themselves have not entirely forgiven our country-women;
+and I think they take a special pleasure in the legend of the northern
+quarter of the town, called L&rsquo;Anglade, because there the English
+free-lances were arrested and driven back by the potency of a little
+Virgin Mary on the wall.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Sunday wear for the men is a green
+tailcoat of some coarse sort of drugget, and usually a complete suit
+to match.&nbsp; I have never set eyes on such degrading raiment.&nbsp;
+Here it clings, there bulges; and the human body, with its agreeable
+and lively lines, is turned into a mockery and laughing-stock.&nbsp;
+Another piece of Sunday business with the peasants is to take their
+ailments to the chemist for advice.&nbsp; It is as much a matter for
+Sunday as church-going.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There was a canonical day for consultation;
+such was the ancestral habit, to which a respectable lady must study
+to conform.<br>
+<br>
+Two conveyances go daily to Le Puy, but they rival each other in polite
+concessions rather than in speed.&nbsp; 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;.&nbsp; The <i>Courrier</i> (such
+is the name of one) should leave Le Puy by two in the afternoon and
+arrive at Monastier in good on the return voyage, and arrive at Monastier
+in good time for a six-o&rsquo;clock dinner.&nbsp; But the driver dares
+not disoblige his customers.&nbsp; He will postpone his departure again
+and again, hour after hour; and I have known the sun to go down on his
+delay.&nbsp; These purely personal favours, this consideration of men&rsquo;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.<br>
+<br>
+As far as the eye can reach, one swelling line of hill top rises and
+falls behind another; and if you climb an eminence, it is only to see
+new and father ranges behind these.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; There is little
+timber except pines, and the greater part of the country lies in moorland
+pasture.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+Such a place is the course of the Gazeille, where it waters the common
+of Monastier and thence downwards till it joins the Loire; a place to
+hear birds singing; a place for lovers to frequent.&nbsp; The name of
+the river was perhaps suggested by the sound of its passage over the
+stones; for it is a great warbler, and at night, after I was in bed
+at Monastier, I could hear it go singing down the valley till I fell
+asleep.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; They have abrupt, uncouth,
+Fifeshire manners, and accost you, as if you were trespassing, an &lsquo;O&ugrave;&rsquo;st-ce
+que vous allez?&rsquo; only translatable into the Lowland &lsquo;Whaur
+ye gaun?&rsquo;&nbsp; They keep the Scottish Sabbath.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The lace-makers have disappeared from the street.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; One strapping lass stood with her back to
+the wall and did the solo part, the rest chiming in devoutly.&nbsp;
+Not far off, a lad lay flat on his face asleep among some straw, to
+represent the worldly element.<br>
+<br>
+Again, this people is eager to proselytise; and the postmaster&rsquo;s
+daughter used to argue with me by the half-hour about my heresy, until
+she grew quite flushed.&nbsp; I have heard the reverse process going
+on between a Scotswoman and a French girl; and the arguments in the
+two cases were identical.&nbsp; Each apostle based her claim on the
+superior virtue and attainments of her clergy, and clenched the business
+with a threat of hell-fire.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Pas bong pr&ecirc;tres ici</i>,&rsquo;
+said the Presbyterian, &lsquo;<i>bong pr&ecirc;tres en Ecosse</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And the postmaster&rsquo;s daughter, taking up the same weapon, plied
+me, so to speak, with the butt of it instead of the bayonet.&nbsp; We
+are a hopeful race, it seems, and easily persuaded for our good.&nbsp;
+One cheerful circumstance I note in these guerilla missions, that each
+side relies on hell, and Protestant and Catholic alike address themselves
+to a supposed misgiving in their adversary&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; And
+I call it cheerful, for faith is a more supporting quality than imagination.<br>
+<br>
+Here, as in Scotland, many peasant families boast a son in holy orders.&nbsp;
+And here also, the young men have a tendency to emigrate.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The wild swan in question was now an apothecary in Brazil.&nbsp; He
+had flown by way of Bordeaux, and first landed in America, bareheaded
+and barefoot, and with a single halfpenny in his pocket.&nbsp; And now
+he was an apothecary!&nbsp; Such a wonderful thing is an adventurous
+life!&nbsp; I thought he might as well have stayed at home; but you
+never can tell wherein a man&rsquo;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.&nbsp; As for his old father, he could
+conceive no reason for the lad&rsquo;s behaviour.&nbsp; &lsquo;I had
+always bread for him,&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;he ran away to annoy me.&nbsp;
+He loved to annoy me.&nbsp; He had no gratitude.&rsquo;&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;This comes from America,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;six thousand
+leagues away!&rsquo;&nbsp; And the wine-shop audience looked upon it
+with a certain thrill.<br>
+<br>
+I soon became a popular figure, and was known for miles in the country.&nbsp;
+<i>O&ugrave;&rsquo;st que vous allez</i>? was changed for me into <i>Quoi,
+vous rentrez au Monastier</i> and in the town itself every urchin seemed
+to know my name, although no living creature could pronounce it.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+They were filled with curiosity about England, its language, its religion,
+the dress of the women, and were never weary of seeing the Queen&rsquo;s
+head on English postage-stamps, or seeking for French words in English
+Journals.&nbsp; The language, in particular, filled them with surprise.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Do they speak <i>patois</i> in England?&rsquo;&nbsp; I was once
+asked; and when I told them not, &lsquo;Ah, then, French?&rsquo; said
+they.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, no,&rsquo; I said, &lsquo;not French.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Then,&rsquo; they concluded, &lsquo;they speak <i>patois</i>.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+You must obviously either speak French or <i>patios</i>.&nbsp; Talk
+of the force of logic - here it was in all its weakness.&nbsp; I gave
+up the point, but proceeding to give illustrations of my native jargon,
+I was met with a new mortification.&nbsp; Of all <i>patios</i> they
+declared that mine was the most preposterous and the most jocose in
+sound.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; &lsquo;Bread,&rsquo;
+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.&nbsp;
+I have tried it since then with every sort of accent and inflection,
+but I seem to lack the sense of humour.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; Life, since the fall in wages, had begun
+to appear to them with a more serious air.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; But
+the rest used me with a certain reverence, as something come from afar
+and not entirely human.&nbsp; Nothing would put them at their ease but
+the irresistible gaiety of my native tongue.&nbsp; Between the old lady
+and myself I think there was a real attachment.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It was as good as a play to see her sitting in judgment
+over the last.&nbsp; &lsquo;No, no,&rsquo; she would say, &lsquo;that
+is not it.&nbsp; I am old, to be sure, but I am better-looking than
+that.&nbsp; We must try again.&rsquo;&nbsp; When I was about to leave
+she bade me good-bye for this life in a somewhat touching manner.&nbsp;
+We should not meet again, she said; it was a long farewell, and she
+was sorry.&nbsp; But life is so full of crooks, old lady, that who knows?&nbsp;
+I have said good-bye to people for greater distances and times, and,
+please God, I mean to see them yet again.<br>
+<br>
+One thing was notable about these women, from the youngest to the oldest,
+and with hardly an exception.&nbsp; In spite of their piety, they could
+twang off an oath with Sir Toby Belch in person.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady
+in Gondet, a village of the Loire.&nbsp; I was making a sketch, and
+her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it and took my departure.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp;
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Conductor</i>, as he is called, <i>of Roads and Bridges</i> was
+my principal companion.&nbsp; He was generally intelligent, and could
+have spoken more or less falsetto on any of the trite topics; but it
+was his specially to have a generous taste in eating.&nbsp; 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&rsquo;s plays, an altogether
+secondary question.<br>
+<br>
+I used to accompany the Conductor on his professional rounds, and grew
+to believe myself an expert in the business.&nbsp; I thought I could
+make an entry in a stone-breaker&rsquo;s time-book, or order manure
+off the wayside with any living engineer in France.&nbsp; Gondet was
+one of the places we visited together; and Laussonne, where I met the
+apothecary&rsquo;s father, was another.&nbsp; There, at Laussonne, George
+Sand spent a day while she was gathering materials for the <i>Marquis</i>
+<i>de Villemer</i>; 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.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp;
+The word for a frog particularly pleased her fancy; and it would be
+curious to know if she afterwards employed it in her works.&nbsp; The
+peasants, who knew nothing of betters and had never so much as heard
+of local colour, could not explain her chattering with this backward
+child; and to them she seemed a very homely lady and far from beautiful:
+the most famous man-killer of the age appealed so little to Velaisian
+swine-herds!<br>
+<br>
+On my first engineering excursion, which lay up by Crouzials towards
+Mount Mezenc and the borders of Ard&egrave;che, I began an improving
+acquaintance with the foreman road-mender.&nbsp; 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 &lsquo;the gallantry&rsquo;
+of paying for my breakfast in a roadside wine-shop.&nbsp; On the whole,
+he was a man of great weather-wisdom, some spirits, and a social temper.&nbsp;
+But I am afraid he was superstitious.&nbsp; 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&rsquo; Sabbath.&nbsp; I suppose, but venture
+with timidity on the suggestion, that this may have been a romantic
+and nocturnal picnic party.&nbsp; Again, coming from Pradelles with
+his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by six enormous horses
+before them on the road.&nbsp; The driver cried aloud and filled the
+mountains with the cracking of his whip.&nbsp; He never seemed to go
+faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at length,
+at the comer of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily into the
+night.&nbsp; At the time, people said it was the devil <i>qui s&rsquo;amusait
+&agrave; faire ca.<br>
+<br>
+</i>I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
+amusement.<br>
+<br>
+The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
+than formerly.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>C&rsquo;est difficile</i>,&rsquo; he
+added, &lsquo;<i>&agrave; expliquer</i>.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+When we were well up on the moors and the <i>Conductor</i> was trying
+some road-metal with the gauge -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hark!&rsquo; said the foreman, &lsquo;do you hear nothing?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
+brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It is the flocks of Vivarais,&rsquo; said he.<br>
+<br>
+For every summer, the flocks out of all Ard&egrave;che are brought up
+to pasture on these grassy plateaux.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; 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.<br>
+<br>
+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.&nbsp; A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in these
+uncouth timidities.<br>
+<br>
+The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time.&nbsp;
+Houses are snowed up, and way-farers lost in a flurry within hail of
+their own fireside.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; All day the family sits
+about the fire in a foul and airless hovel, and equally without work
+or diversion.&nbsp; 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.&nbsp; It is not for nothing
+that you find a clock in the meanest of these mountain habitations.&nbsp;
+A clock and an almanac, you would fancy, were indispensable in such
+a life . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VII - RANDOM MEMORIES: ROSA QUO LOCORUM<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the consciousness
+of the man&rsquo;s art dawns first upon the child, it should be not
+only interesting but instructive to inquire.&nbsp; A matter of curiosity
+to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow.&nbsp; From the
+mind of childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished
+up than from all the printed volumes in a library.&nbsp; The child is
+conscious of an interest, not in literature but in life.&nbsp; A taste
+for the precise, the adroit, or the comely in the use of words, comes
+late; but long before that he has enjoyed in books a delightful dress
+rehearsal of experience.&nbsp; He is first conscious of this material
+- I had almost said this practical - pre-occupation; it does not follow
+that it really came the first.&nbsp; I have some old fogged negatives
+in my collection that would seem to imply a prior stage &lsquo;The Lord
+is gone up with a shout, and God with the sound of a trumpet&rsquo;
+- memorial version, I know not where to find the text - rings still
+in my ear from my first childhood, and perhaps with something of my
+nurses accent.&nbsp; There was possibly some sort of image written in
+my mind by these loud words, but I believe the words themselves were
+what I cherished.&nbsp; I had about the same time, and under the same
+influence - that of my dear nurse - a favourite author: it is possible
+the reader has not heard of him - the Rev. Robert Murray M&rsquo;Cheyne.&nbsp;
+My nurse and I admired his name exceedingly, so that I must have been
+taught the love of beautiful sounds before I was breeched; and I remember
+two specimens of his muse until this day:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Behind the hills of Naphtali<br>
+The sun went slowly down,<br>
+Leaving on mountain, tower, and tree,<br>
+A tinge of golden brown.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+There is imagery here, and I set it on one side.&nbsp; The other - it
+is but a verse - not only contains no image, but is quite unintelligible
+even to my comparatively instructed mind, and I know not even how to
+spell the outlandish vocable that charmed me in my childhood:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Jehovah Tschidkenu is nothing to her&rsquo;; <a name="citation6"></a><a href="#footnote6">{6}</a>
+-<br>
+<br>
+I may say, without flippancy, that he was nothing to me either, since
+I had no ray of a guess of what he was about; yet the verse, from then
+to now, a longer interval than the life of a generation, has continued
+to haunt me.<br>
+<br>
+I have said that I should set a passage distinguished by obvious and
+pleasing imagery, however faint; for the child thinks much in images,
+words are very live to him, phrases that imply a picture eloquent beyond
+their value.&nbsp; Rummaging in the dusty pigeon-holes of memory, I
+came once upon a graphic version of the famous Psalm, &lsquo;The Lord
+is my shepherd&rsquo;: and from the places employed in its illustration,
+which are all in the immediate neighbourhood of a house then occupied
+by my father, I am able, to date it before the seventh year of my age,
+although it was probably earlier in fact.&nbsp; The &lsquo;pastures
+green&rsquo; were represented by a certain suburban stubble-field, where
+I had once walked with my nurse, under an autumnal sunset, on the banks
+of the Water of Leith: the place is long ago built up; no pastures now,
+no stubble-fields; only a maze of little streets and smoking chimneys
+and shrill children.&nbsp; Here, in the fleecy person of a sheep, I
+seemed to myself to follow something unseen, unrealised, and yet benignant;
+and close by the sheep in which I was incarnated - as if for greater
+security - rustled the skirt, of my nurse.&nbsp; &lsquo;Death&rsquo;s
+dark vale&rsquo; was a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a
+formidable yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid, - in measure
+as they love all experience of vitality.&nbsp; Here I beheld myself
+some paces ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone
+in that uncanny passage; on the one side of me a rude, knobby, shepherd&rsquo;s
+staff, such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other
+a rod like a billiard cue, appeared to accompany my progress; the stiff
+sturdily upright, the billiard cue inclined confidentially, like one
+whispering, towards my ear.&nbsp; I was aware - I will never tell you
+how - that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement.&nbsp;
+The third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&lsquo;My table Thou hast furnished<br>
+&nbsp;In presence of my foes:<br>
+My head Thou dost with oil anoint,<br>
+And my cup overflows&rsquo;:<br>
+<br>
+and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series.&nbsp; I saw
+myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over my
+shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from an authentic
+shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green court of a ruin, and
+from the far side of the court black and white imps discharged against
+me ineffectual arrows.&nbsp; The picture appears arbitrary, but I can
+trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock analysed the dream of
+Alan Armadale.&nbsp; The summer-house and court were muddled together
+out of Billings&rsquo; <i>Antiquities of Scotland</i>; the imps conveyed
+from Bagster&rsquo;s <i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress</i>; the bearded and
+robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the shoe-horn
+was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it figured in the
+hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed out to me as a jest
+by my father.&nbsp; It was shown me for a jest, remark; but the serious
+spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.&nbsp; Children are all classics;
+a bottle would have seemed an intermediary too trivial - that divine
+refreshment of whose meaning I had no guess; and I seized on the idea
+of that mystic shoe-horn with delight, even as, a little later, I should
+have written flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word that might
+have appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean associations.&nbsp;
+In this string of pictures I believe the gist of the psalm to have consisted;
+I believe it had no more to say to me; and the result was consolatory.&nbsp;
+I would go to sleep dwelling with restfulness upon these images; they
+passed before me, besides, to an appropriate music; for I had already
+singled out from that rude psalm the one lovely verse which dwells in
+the minds of all, not growing old, not disgraced by its association
+with long Sunday tasks, a scarce conscious joy in childhood, in age
+a companion thought:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;In pastures green Thou leadest me,<br>
+The quiet waters by.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The remainder of my childish recollections are all of the matter of
+what was read to me, and not of any manner in the words.&nbsp; If these
+pleased me it was unconsciously; I listened for news of the great vacant
+world upon whose edge I stood; I listened for delightful plots that
+I might re-enact in play, and romantic scenes and circumstances that
+I might call up before me, with closed eyes, when I was tired of Scotland,
+and home, and that weary prison of the sick-chamber in which I lay so
+long in durance.&nbsp; <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>; some of the books of
+that cheerful, ingenious, romantic soul, Mayne Reid; and a work rather
+gruesome and bloody for a child, but very picturesque, called <i>Paul
+Blake</i>; these are the three strongest impressions I remember: <i>The
+Swiss Family Robinson</i> came next, <i>longo intervallo</i>.&nbsp;
+At these I played, conjured up their scenes, and delighted to hear them
+rehearsed unto seventy times seven.&nbsp; I am not sure but what <i>Paul
+Blake</i> came after I could read.&nbsp; It seems connected with a visit
+to the country, and an experience unforgettable.&nbsp; The day had been
+warm; H--- and I had played together charmingly all day in a sandy wilderness
+across the road; then came the evening with a great flash of colour
+and a heavenly sweetness in the air.&nbsp; Somehow my play-mate had
+vanished, or is out of the story, as the sages say, but I was sent into
+the village on an errand; and, taking a book of fairy tales, went down
+alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.&nbsp; How often since
+then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that was the first
+time: the shock of that pleasure I have never since forgot, and if my
+mind serves me to the last, I never shall, for it was then that I knew
+I loved reading.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+II<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+To pass from hearing literature to reading it is to take a great and
+dangerous step.&nbsp; With not a few, I think a large proportion of
+their pleasure then comes to an end; &lsquo;the malady of not marking&rsquo;
+overtakes them; they read thenceforward by the eye alone and hear never
+again the chime of fair words or the march of the stately period.&nbsp;
+<i>Non ragioniam</i> of these.&nbsp; But to all the step is dangerous;
+it involves coming of age; it is even a kind of second weaning.&nbsp;
+In the past all was at the choice of others; they chose, they digested,
+they read aloud for us and sang to their own tune the books of childhood.&nbsp;
+In the future we are to approach the silent, inexpressive type alone,
+like pioneers; and the choice of what we are to read is in our own hands
+thenceforward.&nbsp; For instance, in the passages already adduced,
+I detect and applaud the ear of my old nurse; they were of her choice,
+and she imposed them on my infancy, reading the works of others as a
+poet would scarce dare to read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling
+with delight on assonances and alliterations.&nbsp; I know very well
+my mother must have been all the while trying to educate my taste upon
+more secular authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities
+of my nurse triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these
+earliest volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery
+rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M&rsquo;Cheyne.<br>
+<br>
+I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their school
+Readers.&nbsp; We might not now find so much pathos in &lsquo;Bingen
+on the Rhine,&rsquo; &lsquo;A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,&rsquo;
+or in &lsquo;The Soldier&rsquo;s Funeral,&rsquo; in the declamation
+of which I was held to have surpassed myself.&nbsp; &lsquo;Robert&rsquo;s
+voice,&rsquo; said the master on this memorable occasion, &lsquo;is
+not strong, but impressive&rsquo;: an opinion which I was fool enough
+to carry home to my father; who roasted me for years in consequence.&nbsp;
+I am sure one should not be so deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,<br>
+Who would not be crusty with half a year&rsquo;s baking?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I think this quip would leave us cold.&nbsp; The &lsquo;Isles of Greece&rsquo;
+seem rather tawdry too; but on the &lsquo;Address to the Ocean,&rsquo;
+or on &lsquo;The Dying Gladiator,&rsquo; &lsquo;time has writ no wrinkle.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&rsquo;Tis the morn, but dim and dark,<br>
+Whither flies the silent lark?&rsquo; -<br>
+<br>
+does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these
+lines in the Fourth Reader; and &lsquo;surprised with joy, impatient
+as the wind,&rsquo; he plunged into the sequel?&nbsp; And there was
+another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten; many
+like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in
+its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsiderable
+measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in
+such a pomp of poetry, to London.<br>
+<br>
+But in the Reader we are still under guides.&nbsp; What a boy turns
+out for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
+pleasure.&nbsp; My father&rsquo;s library was a spot of some austerity;
+the proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias,
+physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon
+the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything really
+legible existed as by accident.&nbsp; The <i>Parent&rsquo;s Assistant,
+Rob</i> <i>Roy, Waverley</i>, and <i>Guy Mannering</i>, the<i> Voyages
+of</i> <i>Captain Woods Rogers</i>, Fuller&rsquo;s and Bunyan&rsquo;s
+<i>Holy Wars</i>,<i> The Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, The Female
+Bluebeard</i>, G. Sand&rsquo;s <i>Mare au Diable</i> - (how came it
+in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth&rsquo;s <i>Tower of London</i>,
+and four old volumes of Punch - these were the chief exceptions.&nbsp;
+In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early
+fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers.&nbsp;
+I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and
+I remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were
+famous, and signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired
+them, they were the works of Mr. Punch.&nbsp; Time and again I tried
+to read <i>Rob Roy</i>, with whom of course I was acquainted from the
+<i>Tales of a Grandfather</i>; time and again the early part, with Rashleigh
+and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never
+forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one
+summer evening, I struck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew
+Fairservice.&nbsp; &lsquo;The worthy Dr. Lightfoot&rsquo; - &lsquo;mistrysted
+with a bogle&rsquo; - &lsquo;a wheen green trash&rsquo; - &lsquo;Jenny,
+lass, I think I ha&rsquo;e her&rsquo;: from that day to this the phrases
+have been unforgotten.&nbsp; I read on, I need scarce say; I came to
+Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie
+in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds
+gathered once more about my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled
+half-asleep into the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach
+and Galbraith recalled me to myself.&nbsp; With that scene and the defeat
+of Captain Thornton the book concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even
+the little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no
+more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed before
+I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or saw Rashleigh
+dying in the chair.&nbsp; When I think of that novel and that evening,
+I am impatient with all others; they seem but shadows and impostors;
+they cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened; and I dare be
+known to think it the best of Sir Walter&rsquo;s by nearly as much as
+Sir Walter is the best of novelists.&nbsp; Perhaps Mr. Lang is right,
+and our first friends in the land of fiction are always the most real.&nbsp;
+And yet I had read before this <i>Guy Mannering</i>, and some of <i>Waverley</i>,
+with no such delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read immediately
+after the greater part of the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again
+in the same way or to the same degree.&nbsp; One circumstance is suspicious:
+my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all
+since I was ten.&nbsp; <i>Rob Roy</i>, <i>Guy Mannering</i>, and <i>Redgauntlet</i>
+first; then, a little lower; <i>The Fortunes of Nigel</i>; then, after
+a huge gulf, <i>Ivanhoe</i> and <i>Anne of Geierstein</i>: the rest
+nowhere; such was the verdict of the boy.&nbsp; Since then <i>The Antiquary,
+St. Ronan&rsquo;s Well, Kenilworth</i>, and <i>The</i> <i>Heart of Midlothian</i>
+have gone up in the scale; perhaps <i>Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein</i>
+have gone a trifle down; Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations
+in that enchanted world of <i>Rob Roy</i>; I think more of the letters
+in <i>Redgauntlet</i>, and Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism,
+I can now read about with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said
+pleasure, while to the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress.&nbsp;
+But the rest is the same; I could not finish <i>The Pirate</i> when
+I was a child, I have never finished it yet; <i>Peveril of the Peak</i>
+dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have
+since waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was
+quite without enjoyment.&nbsp; There is something disquieting in these
+considerations.&nbsp; I still think the visit to Ponto&rsquo;s the best
+part of the <i>Book of Snobs</i>: does that mean that I was right when
+I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that
+the child is not the man&rsquo;s father, but the man? and that I came
+into the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned
+sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VIII - THE IDEAL HOUSE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Two things are necessary in any neighbourhood where we propose to spend
+a life: a desert and some living water.<br>
+<br>
+There are many parts of the earth&rsquo;s face which offer the necessary
+combination of a certain wildness with a kindly variety.&nbsp; A great
+prospect is desirable, but the want may be otherwise supplied; even
+greatness can be found on the small scale; for the mind and the eye
+measure differently.&nbsp; Bold rocks near hand are more inspiriting
+than distant Alps, and the thick fern upon a Surrey heath makes a fine
+forest for the imagination, and the dotted yew trees noble mountains.&nbsp;
+A Scottish moor with birches and firs grouped here and there upon a
+knoll, or one of those rocky seaside deserts of Provence overgrown with
+rosemary and thyme and smoking with aroma, are places where the mind
+is never weary.&nbsp; Forests, being more enclosed, are not at first
+sight so attractive, but they exercise a spell; they must, however,
+be diversified with either heath or rock, and are hardly to be considered
+perfect without conifers.&nbsp; Even sand-hills, with their intricate
+plan, and their gulls and rabbits, will stand well for the necessary
+desert.<br>
+<br>
+The house must be within hail of either a little river or the sea.&nbsp;
+A great river is more fit for poetry than to adorn a neighbourhood;
+its sweep of waters increases the scale of the scenery and the distance
+of one notable object from another; and a lively burn gives us, in the
+space of a few yards, a greater variety of promontory and islet, of
+cascade, shallow goil, and boiling pool, with answerable changes both
+of song and colour, than a navigable stream in many hundred miles.&nbsp;
+The fish, too, make a more considerable feature of the brookside, and
+the trout plumping in the shadow takes the ear.&nbsp; A stream should,
+besides, be narrow enough to cross, or the burn hard by a bridge, or
+we are at once shut out of Eden.&nbsp; The quantity of water need be
+of no concern, for the mind sets the scale, and can enjoy a Niagara
+Fall of thirty inches.&nbsp; Let us approve the singer of<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Shallow rivers, by whose falls<br>
+Melodious birds sing madrigals.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+If the sea is to be our ornamental water, choose an open seaboard with
+a heavy beat of surf; one much broken in outline, with small havens
+and dwarf headlands; if possible a few islets; and as a first necessity,
+rocks reaching out into deep water.&nbsp; Such a rock on a calm day
+is a better station than the top of Teneriffe or Chimborazo.&nbsp; In
+short, both for the desert and the water, the conjunction of many near
+and bold details is bold scenery for the imagination and keeps the mind
+alive.<br>
+<br>
+Given these two prime luxuries, the nature of the country where we are
+to live is, I had almost said, indifferent; after that inside the garden,
+we can construct a country of our own.&nbsp; Several old trees, a considerable
+variety of level, several well-grown hedges to divide our garden into
+provinces, a good extent of old well-set turf, and thickets of shrubs
+and ever-greens to be cut into and cleared at the new owner&rsquo;s
+pleasure, are the qualities to be sought for in your chosen land.&nbsp;
+Nothing is more delightful than a succession of small lawns, opening
+one out of the other through tall hedges; these have all the charm of
+the old bowling-green repeated, do not require the labour of many trimmers,
+and afford a series of changes.&nbsp; You must have much lawn against
+the early summer, so as to have a great field of daisies, the year&rsquo;s
+morning frost; as you must have a wood of lilacs, to enjoy to the full
+the period of their blossoming.&nbsp; Hawthorn is another of the Spring&rsquo;s
+ingredients; but it is even best to have a rough public lane at one
+side of your enclosure which, at the right season, shall become an avenue
+of bloom and odour.&nbsp; The old flowers are the best and should grow
+carelessly in corners.&nbsp; Indeed, the ideal fortune is to find an
+old garden, once very richly cared for, since sunk into neglect, and
+to tend, not repair, that neglect; it will thus have a smack of nature
+and wildness which skilful dispositions cannot overtake.&nbsp; The gardener
+should be an idler, and have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots:
+an eager or toilful gardener misbecomes the garden landscape; a tasteful
+gardener will be ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take
+the bloom off nature.&nbsp; Close adjoining, if you are in the south,
+an olive-yard, if in the north, a swarded apple-orchard reaching to
+the stream, completes your miniature domain; but this is perhaps best
+entered through a door in the high fruit-wall; so that you close the
+door behind you on your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle,
+when you go down to watch the apples falling in the pool.&nbsp; It is
+a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will
+take care of themselves.&nbsp; Nor must the ear be forgotten: without
+birds a garden is a prison-yard.&nbsp; There is a garden near Marseilles
+on a steep hill-side, walking by which, upon a sunny morning, your ear
+will suddenly be ravished with a burst of small and very cheerful singing:
+some score of cages being set out there to sun their occupants.&nbsp;
+This is a heavenly surprise to any passer-by; but the price paid, to
+keep so many ardent and winged creatures from their liberty, will make
+the luxury too dear for any thoughtful pleasure-lover.&nbsp; There is
+only one sort of bird that I can tolerate caged, though even then I
+think it hard, and that is what is called in France the Bec-d&rsquo;Argent.&nbsp;
+I once had two of these pigmies in captivity; and in the quiet, hire
+house upon a silent street where I was then living, their song, which
+was not much louder than a bee&rsquo;s, but airily musical, kept me
+in a perpetual good humour.&nbsp; I put the cage upon my table when
+I worked, carried it with me when I went for meals, and kept it by my
+head at night: the first thing in the morning, these <i>maestrini</i>
+would pipe up.&nbsp; But these, even if you can pardon their imprisonment,
+are for the house.&nbsp; In the garden the wild birds must plant a colony,
+a chorus of the lesser warblers that should be almost deafening, a blackbird
+in the lilacs, a nightingale down the lane, so that you must stroll
+to hear it, and yet a little farther, tree-tops populous with rooks.<br>
+<br>
+Your house should not command much outlook; it should be set deep and
+green, though upon rising ground, or, if possible, crowning a knoll,
+for the sake of drainage.&nbsp; Yet it must be open to the east, or
+you will miss the sunrise; sunset occurring so much later, you can go
+up a few steps and look the other way.&nbsp; A house of more than two
+stories is a mere barrack; indeed the ideal is of one story, raised
+upon cellars.&nbsp; If the rooms are large, the house may be small:
+a single room, lofty, spacious, and lightsome, is more palatial than
+a castleful of cabinets and cupboards.&nbsp; Yet size in a house, and
+some extent and intricacy of corridor, is certainly delightful to the
+flesh.&nbsp; The reception room should be, if possible, a place of many
+recesses, which are &lsquo;petty retiring places for conference&rsquo;;
+but it must have one long wall with a divan: for a day spent upon a
+divan, among a world of cushions, is as full of diversion as to travel.&nbsp;
+The eating-room, in the French mode, should be <i>ad hoc</i>: unfurnished,
+but with a buffet, the table, necessary chairs, one or two of Canaletto&rsquo;s
+etchings, and a tile fire-place for the winter.&nbsp; In neither of
+these public places should there be anything beyond a shelf or two of
+books; but the passages may be one library from end to end, and the
+stair, if there be one, lined with volumes in old leather, very brightly
+carpeted, and leading half-way up, and by way of landing, to a windowed
+recess with a fire-place; this window, almost alone in the house, should
+command a handsome prospect.&nbsp; Husband and wife must each possess
+a studio; on the woman&rsquo;s sanctuary I hesitate to dwell, and turn
+to the man&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The walls are shelved waist-high for books,
+and the top thus forms a continuous table running round the wall.&nbsp;
+Above are prints, a large map of the neighbourhood, a Corot and a Claude
+or two.&nbsp; The room is very spacious, and the five tables and two
+chairs are but as islands.&nbsp; One table is for actual work, one close
+by for references in use; one, very large, for MSS. or proofs that wait
+their turn; one kept clear for an occasion; and the fifth is the map
+table, groaning under a collection of large-scale maps and charts.&nbsp;
+Of all books these are the least wearisome to read and the richest in
+matter; the course of roads and rivers, the contour lines and the forests
+in the maps - the reefs, soundings, anchors, sailing marks and little
+pilot-pictures in the charts - and, in both, the bead-roll of names,
+make them of all printed matter the most fit to stimulate and satisfy
+the fancy.&nbsp; The chair in which you write is very low and easy,
+and backed into a corner; at one elbow the fire twinkles; close at the
+other, if you are a little inhumane, your cage of silver-bills are twittering
+into song.<br>
+<br>
+Joined along by a passage, you may reach the great, sunny, glass-roofed,
+and tiled gymnasium, at the far end of which, lined with bright marble,
+is your plunge and swimming bath, fitted with a capacious boiler.<br>
+<br>
+The whole loft of the house from end to end makes one undivided chamber;
+here are set forth tables on which to model imaginary or actual countries
+in putty or plaster, with tools and hardy pigments; a carpenter&rsquo;s
+bench; and a spared corner for photography, while at the far end a space
+is kept clear for playing soldiers.&nbsp; Two boxes contain the two
+armies of some five hundred horse and foot; two others the ammunition
+of each side, and a fifth the foot-rules and the three colours of chalk,
+with which you lay down, or, after a day&rsquo;s play, refresh the outlines
+of the country; red or white for the two kinds of road (according as
+they are suitable or not for the passage of ordnance), and blue for
+the course of the obstructing rivers.&nbsp; Here I foresee that you
+may pass much happy time; against a good adversary a game may well continue
+for a month; for with armies so considerable three moves will occupy
+an hour.&nbsp; It will be found to set an excellent edge on this diversion
+if one of the players shall, every day or so, write a report of the
+operations in the character of army correspondent.<br>
+<br>
+I have left to the last the little room for winter evenings.&nbsp; This
+should be furnished in warm positive colours, and sofas and floor thick
+with rich furs.&nbsp; The hearth, where you burn wood of aromatic quality
+on silver dogs, tiled round about with Bible pictures; the seats deep
+and easy; a single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust or so upon a
+bracket; a rack for the journals of the week; a table for the books
+of the year; and close in a corner the three shelves full of eternal
+books that never weary: Shakespeare, Moli&egrave;re, Montaigne, Lamb,
+Sterne, De Musset&rsquo;s comedies (the one volume open at <i>Carmosine</i>
+and the other at <i>Fantasio</i>); the <i>Arabian Nights</i>, and kindred
+stories, in Weber&rsquo;s solemn volumes; Borrow&rsquo;s <i>Bible in
+Spain</i>, the <i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s Progress</i>, <i>Guy Mannering</i>
+and <i>Rob Roy</i>, <i>Monte Cristo</i> and the <i>Vicomte de Bragelonne</i>,
+immortal Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick, and the <i>State
+Trials</i>.<br>
+<br>
+The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of varnished
+wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of books of
+a particular and dippable order, such as <i>Pepys</i>, the <i>Paston
+Letters</i>, Burt&rsquo;s <i>Letters from the Highlands</i>, or the
+<i>Newgate Calendar</i>. . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IX - DAVOS IN WINTER<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A mountain valley has, at the best, a certain prison-like effect on
+the imagination, but a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid&rsquo;s
+weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind.&nbsp;
+The roads indeed are cleared, and at least one footpath dodging up the
+hill; but to these the health-seeker is rigidly confined.&nbsp; There
+are for him no cross-cuts over the field, no following of streams, no
+unguided rambles in the wood.&nbsp; His walks are cut and dry.&nbsp;
+In five or six different directions he can push as far, and no farther,
+than his strength permits; never deviating from the line laid down for
+him and beholding at each repetition the same field of wood and snow
+from the same corner of the road.&nbsp; This, of itself, would be a
+little trying to the patience in the course of months; but to this is
+added, by the heaped mantle of the snow, an almost utter absence of
+detail and an almost unbroken identity of colour.&nbsp; Snow, it is
+true, is not merely white.&nbsp; The sun touches it with roseate and
+golden lights.&nbsp; Its own crushed infinity of crystals, its own richness
+of tiny sculpture, fills it, when regarded near at hand, with wonderful
+depths of coloured shadow, and, though wintrily transformed, it is still
+water, and has watery tones of blue.&nbsp; But, when all is said, these
+fields of white and blots of crude black forest are but a trite and
+staring substitute for the infinite variety and pleasantness of the
+earth&rsquo;s face.&nbsp; Even a boulder, whose front is too precipitous
+to have retained the snow, seems, if you come upon it in your walk,
+a perfect gem of colour, reminds you almost painfully of other places,
+and brings into your head the delights of more Arcadian days - the path
+across the meadow, the hazel dell, the lilies on the stream, and the
+scents, the colours, and the whisper of the woods.&nbsp; And scents
+here are as rare as colours.&nbsp; Unless you get a gust of kitchen
+in passing some hotel, you shall smell nothing all day long but the
+faint and choking odour of frost.&nbsp; Sounds, too, are absent: not
+a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere.&nbsp;
+If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work
+all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your
+steps upon the frozen snow.<br>
+<br>
+It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one
+end to the other.&nbsp; Go where you please, houses will still be in
+sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left.&nbsp; Climb
+as high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations
+nested in the wood.&nbsp; Nor is that all; for about the health resort
+the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids
+about their shoulders, by sudden troops of German boys trying to learn
+to j&ouml;del, and by German couples silently and, as you venture to
+fancy, not quite happily, pursuing love&rsquo;s young dream.&nbsp; You
+may perhaps be an invalid who likes to make bad verses as he walks about.&nbsp;
+Alas! no muse will suffer this imminence of interruption - and at the
+second stampede of j&ouml;dellers you find your modest inspiration fled.&nbsp;
+Or you may only have a taste for solitude; it may try your nerves to
+have some one always in front whom you are visibly overtaking, and some
+one always behind who is audibly overtaking you, to say nothing of a
+score or so who brush past you in an opposite direction.&nbsp; It may
+annoy you to take your walks and seats in public view.&nbsp; Alas! there
+is no help for it among the Alps.&nbsp; There are no recesses, as in
+Gorbio Valley by the oil-mill; no sacred solitude of olive gardens on
+the Roccabruna-road; no nook upon Saint Martin&rsquo;s Cape, haunted
+by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness
+of the rosemary and the sea-pines and the sea.<br>
+<br>
+For this publicity there is no cure, and no alleviation; but the storms
+of which you will complain so bitterly while they endure, chequer and
+by their contrast brighten the sameness of the fair-weather scenes.&nbsp;
+When sun and storm contend together - when the thick clouds are broken
+up and pierced by arrows of golden daylight - there will be startling
+rearrangements and transfigurations of the mountain summits.&nbsp; A
+sun-dazzling spire of alp hangs suspended in mid-sky among awful glooms
+and blackness; or perhaps the edge of some great mountain shoulder will
+be designed in living gold, and appear for the duration of a glance
+bright like a constellation, and alone &lsquo;in the unapparent.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+You may think you know the figure of these hills; but when they are
+thus revealed, they belong no longer to the things of earth - meteors
+we should rather call them, appearances of sun and air that endure but
+for a moment and return no more.&nbsp; Other variations are more lasting,
+as when, for instance, heavy and wet snow has fallen through some windless
+hours, and the thin, spiry, mountain pine trees stand each stock-still
+and loaded with a shining burthen.&nbsp; You may drive through a forest
+so disguised, the tongue-tied torrent struggling silently in the cleft
+of the ravine, and all still except the jingle of the sleigh bells,
+and you shall fancy yourself in some untrodden northern territory -
+Lapland, Labrador, or Alaska.<br>
+<br>
+Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down stairs
+in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the glimmer
+of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by seven
+o&rsquo;clock outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill.&nbsp;
+The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the top
+of the ascent in the first hour of the day.&nbsp; To trace the fires
+of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-tops
+stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes
+in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn
+blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still
+half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven - these will
+seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early start; but as the
+hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself
+upon the farther side in yet another Alpine valley, snow white and coal
+black, with such another long-drawn congeries of hamlets and such another
+senseless watercourse bickering along the foot.&nbsp; You have had your
+moment; but you have not changed the scene.&nbsp; The mountains are
+about you like a trap; you cannot foot it up a hillside and behold the
+sea as a great plain, but live in holes and corners, and can change
+only one for another.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed
+in the lives of sick folk.&nbsp; A year or two ago and the wounded soldiery
+of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle of the Riviera,
+walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-yards within earshot
+of the interminable and unchanging surf - idle among spiritless idlers;
+not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either, and aspiring, sometimes
+fiercely, after livelier weather and some vivifying change.&nbsp; These
+were certainly beautiful places to live in, and the climate was wooing
+in its softness.&nbsp; Yet there was a later shiver in the sunshine;
+you were not certain whether you were being wooed; and these mild shores
+would sometimes seem to you to be the shores of death.&nbsp; There was
+a lack of a manly element; the air was not reactive; you might write
+bits of poetry and practise resignation, but you did not feel that here
+was a good spot to repair your tissue or regain your nerve.&nbsp; And
+it appears, after all, that there was something just in these appreciations.&nbsp;
+The invalid is now asked to lodge on wintry Alps; a ruder air shall
+medicine him; the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded
+in his den.&nbsp; For even Winter has his&nbsp; &lsquo;dear domestic
+cave,&rsquo; and in those places where he may be said to dwell for ever
+tempers his austerities.<br>
+<br>
+Any one who has travelled westward by the great transcontinental railroad
+of America must remember the joy with which he perceived, after the
+tedious prairies of Nebraska and across the vast and dismal moorlands
+of Wyoming, a few snowy mountain summits alone, the southern sky.&nbsp;
+It is among these mountains in the new State of Colorado that the sick
+man may find, not merely an alleviation of his ailments, but the possibility
+of an active life and an honest livelihood.&nbsp; There, no longer as
+a lounger in a plaid, but as a working farmer, sweating at his work,
+he may prolong and begin anew his life.&nbsp; Instead of the bath-chair,
+the spade; instead of the regulated walk, rough journeys in the forest,
+and the pure, rare air of the open mountains for the miasma of the sick-room
+- these are the changes offered him, with what promise of pleasure and
+of self-respect, with what a revolution in all his hopes and terrors,
+none but an invalid can know.&nbsp; Resignation, the cowardice that
+apes a kind of courage and that lives in the very air of health resorts,
+is cast aside at a breath of such a prospect.&nbsp; The man can open
+the door; he can be up and doing; he can be a kind of a man after all
+and not merely an invalid.<br>
+<br>
+But it is a far cry to the Rocky Mountains.&nbsp; We cannot all of us
+go farming in Colorado; and there is yet a middle term, which combines
+the medical benefits of the new system with the moral drawbacks of the
+old.&nbsp; Again the invalid has to lie aside from life and its wholesome
+duties; again he has to be an idler among idlers; but this time at a
+great altitude, far among the mountains, with the snow piled before
+his door and the frost flowers every morning on his window.&nbsp; The
+mere fact is tonic to his nerves.&nbsp; His choice of a place of wintering
+has somehow to his own eyes the air of an act of bold contract; and,
+since he has wilfully sought low temperatures, he is not so apt to shudder
+at a touch of chill.&nbsp; He came for that, he looked for it, and he
+throws it from him with the thought.<br>
+<br>
+A long straight reach of valley, wall-like mountains upon either hand
+that rise higher and higher and shoot up new summits the higher you
+climb; a few noble peaks seen even from the valley; a village of hotels;
+a world of black and white - black pine-woods, clinging to the sides
+of the valley, and white snow flouring it, and papering it between the
+pine-woods, and covering all the mountains with a dazzling curd; add
+a few score invalids marching to and fro upon the snowy road, or skating
+on the ice-rinks, possibly to music, or sitting under sunshades by the
+door of the hotel - and you have the larger features of a mountain sanatorium.&nbsp;
+A certain furious river runs curving down the valley; its pace never
+varies, it has not a pool for as far as you can follow it; and its unchanging,
+senseless hurry is strangely tedious to witness.&nbsp; It is a river
+that a man could grow to hate.&nbsp; Day after day breaks with the rarest
+gold upon the mountain spires, and creeps, growing and glowing, down
+into the valley.&nbsp; From end to end the snow reverberates the sunshine;
+from end to end the air tingles with the light, clear and dry like crystal.&nbsp;
+Only along the course of the river, but high above it, there hangs far
+into the noon, one waving scarf of vapour.&nbsp; It were hard to fancy
+a more engaging feature in a landscape; perhaps it is harder to believe
+that delicate, long-lasting phantom of the atmosphere, a creature of
+the incontinent stream whose course it follows.&nbsp; By noon the sky
+is arrayed in an unrivalled pomp of colour - mild and pale and melting
+in the north, but towards the zenith, dark with an intensity of purple
+blue.&nbsp; What with this darkness of heaven and the intolerable lustre
+of the snow, space is reduced again to chaos.&nbsp; An English painter,
+coming to France late in life, declared with natural anger that &lsquo;the
+values were all wrong.&rsquo;&nbsp; Had he got among the Alps on a bright
+day he might have lost his reason.&nbsp; And even to any one who has
+looked at landscape with any care, and in any way through the spectacles
+of representative art, the scene has a character of insanity.&nbsp;
+The distant shining mountain peak is here beside your eye; the neighbouring
+dull-coloured house in comparison is miles away; the summit, which is
+all of splendid snow, is close at hand; the nigh slopes, which are black
+with pine trees, bear it no relation, and might be in another sphere.&nbsp;
+Here there are none of those delicate gradations, those intimate, misty
+joinings-on and spreadings-out into the distance, nothing of that art
+of air and light by which the face of nature explains and veils itself
+in climes which we may be allowed to think more lovely.&nbsp; A glaring
+piece of crudity, where everything that is not white is a solecism and
+defies the judgment of the eyesight; a scene of blinding definition;
+a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically
+trying, and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and
+the mouth to smile: such is the winter daytime in the Alps.<br>
+<br>
+With the approach of evening all is changed.&nbsp; A mountain will suddenly
+intercept the sun; a shadow fall upon the valley; in ten minutes the
+thermometer will drop as many degrees; the peaks that are no longer
+shone upon dwindle into ghosts; and meanwhile, overhead, if the weather
+be rightly characteristic of the place, the sky fades towards night
+through a surprising key of colours.&nbsp; The latest gold leaps from
+the last mountain.&nbsp; Soon, perhaps, the moon shall rise, and in
+her gentler light the valley shall be mellowed and misted, and here
+and there a wisp of silver cloud upon a hilltop, and here and there
+a warmly glowing window in a house, between fire and starlight, kind
+and homely in the fields of snow.<br>
+<br>
+But the valley is not seated so high among the clouds to be eternally
+exempt from changes.&nbsp; The clouds gather, black as ink; the wind
+bursts rudely in; day after day the mists drive overhead, the snow-flakes
+flutter down in blinding disarray; daily the mail comes in later from
+the top of the pass; people peer through their windows and foresee no
+end but an entire seclusion from Europe, and death by gradual dry-rot,
+each in his indifferent inn; and when at last the storm goes, and the
+sun comes again, behold a world of unpolluted snow, glossy like fur,
+bright like daylight, a joy to wallowing dogs and cheerful to the souls
+of men.&nbsp; Or perhaps from across storied and malarious Italy, a
+wind cunningly winds about the mountains and breaks, warm and unclean,
+upon our mountain valley.&nbsp; Every nerve is set ajar; the conscience
+recognises, at a gust, a load of sins and negligences hitherto unknown;
+and the whole invalid world huddles into its private chambers, and silently
+recognises the empire of the F&ouml;hn.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XI - ALPINE DIVERSIONS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There will be no lack of diversion in an Alpine sanitarium.&nbsp; The
+place is half English, to be sure, the local sheet appearing in double
+column, text and translation; but it still remains half German; and
+hence we have a band which is able to play, and a company of actors
+able, as you will be told, to act.&nbsp; This last you will take on
+trust, for the players, unlike the local sheet, confine themselves to
+German and though at the beginning of winter they come with their wig-boxes
+to each hotel in turn, long before Christmas they will have given up
+the English for a bad job.&nbsp; There will follow, perhaps, a skirmish
+between the two races; the German element seeking, in the interest of
+their actors, to raise a mysterious item, the <i>Kur-taxe</i>, which
+figures heavily enough already in the weekly bills, the English element
+stoutly resisting.&nbsp; Meantime in the English hotels home-played
+farces, <i>tableaux-vivants</i>, and even balls enliven the evenings;
+a charity bazaar sheds genial consternation; Christmas and New Year
+are solemnised with Pantagruelian dinners, and from time to time the
+young folks carol and revolve untunefully enough through the figures
+of a singing quadrille.<br>
+<br>
+A magazine club supplies you with everything, from the <i>Quarterly</i>
+to the <i>Sunday at Home</i>.&nbsp; Grand tournaments are organised
+at chess, draughts, billiards and whist.&nbsp; Once and again wandering
+artists drop into our mountain valley, coming you know not whence, going
+you cannot imagine whither, and belonging to every degree in the hierarchy
+of musical art, from the recognised performer who announces a concert
+for the evening, to the comic German family or solitary long-haired
+German baritone, who surprises the guests at dinner-time with songs
+and a collection.&nbsp; They are all of them good to see; they, at least,
+are moving; they bring with them the sentiment of the open road; yesterday,
+perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week they will be far in Lombardy,
+while all we sick folk still simmer in our mountain prison.&nbsp; Some
+of them, too, are welcome as the flowers in May for their own sake;
+some of them may have a human voice; some may have that magic which
+transforms a wooden box into a song-bird, and what we jeeringly call
+a fiddle into what we mention with respect as a violin.&nbsp; From that
+grinding lilt, with which the blind man, seeking pence, accompanies
+the beat of paddle wheels across the ferry, there is surely a difference
+rather of kind than of degree to that unearthly voice of singing that
+bewails and praises the destiny of man at the touch of the true virtuoso.&nbsp;
+Even that you may perhaps enjoy; and if you do so you will own it impossible
+to enjoy it more keenly than here, <i>im Schnee der Alpen</i>.&nbsp;
+A hyacinth in a pot, a handful of primroses packed in moss, or a piece
+of music by some one who knows the way to the heart of a violin, are
+things that, in this invariable sameness of the snows and frosty air,
+surprise you like an adventure.&nbsp; It is droll, moreover, to compare
+the respect with which the invalids attend a concert, and the ready
+contempt with which they greet the dinner-time performers.&nbsp; Singing
+which they would hear with real enthusiasm - possibly with tears - from
+a corner of a drawing-room, is listened to with laughter when it is
+offered by an unknown professional and no money has been taken at the
+door.<br>
+<br>
+Of skating little need be said; in so snowy a climate the rinks must
+be intelligently managed; their mismanagement will lead to many days
+of vexation and some petty quarrelling, but when all goes well, it is
+certainly curious, and perhaps rather unsafe, for the invalid to skate
+under a burning sun, and walk back to his hotel in a sweat, through
+long tracts of glare and passages of freezing shadow.&nbsp; But the
+peculiar outdoor sport of this district is tobogganing.&nbsp; A Scotchman
+may remember the low flat board, with the front wheels on a pivot, which
+was called a <i>hurlie</i>; he may remember this contrivance, laden
+with boys, as, laboriously started, it ran rattling down the brae, and
+was, now successfully, now unsuccessfully, steered round the corner
+at the foot; he may remember scented summer evenings passed in this
+diversion, and many a grazed skin, bloody cockscomb, and neglected lesson.&nbsp;
+The toboggan is to the hurlie what the sled is to the carriage; it is
+a hurlie upon runners; and if for a grating road you substitute a long
+declivity of beaten snow, you can imagine the giddy career of the tobogganist.&nbsp;
+The correct position is to sit; but the fantastic will sometimes sit
+hind-foremost, or dare the descent upon their belly or their back.&nbsp;
+A few steer with a pair of pointed sticks, but it is more classical
+to use the feet.&nbsp; If the weight be heavy and the track smooth,
+the toboggan takes the bit between its teeth; and to steer a couple
+of full-sized friends in safety requires not only judgment but desperate
+exertion.&nbsp; On a very steep track, with a keen evening frost, you
+may have moments almost too appalling to be called enjoyment; the head
+goes, the world vanishes; your blind steed bounds below your weight;
+you reach the foot, with all the breath knocked out of your body, jarred
+and bewildered as though you had just been subjected to a railway accident.&nbsp;
+Another element of joyful horror is added by the formation of a train;
+one toboggan being tied to another, perhaps to the number of half a
+dozen, only the first rider being allowed to steer, and all the rest
+pledged to put up their feet and follow their leader, with heart in
+mouth, down the mad descent.&nbsp; This, particularly if the track begins
+with a headlong plunge, is one of the most exhilarating follies in the
+world, and the tobogganing invalid is early reconciled to somersaults.<br>
+<br>
+There is all manner of variety in the nature of the tracks, some miles
+in length, others but a few yards, and yet like some short rivers, furious
+in their brevity.&nbsp; All degrees of skill and courage and taste may
+be suited in your neighbourhood.&nbsp; But perhaps the true way to toboggan
+is alone and at night.&nbsp; First comes the tedious climb, dragging
+your instrument behind you.&nbsp; Next a long breathing-space, alone
+with snow and pinewoods, cold, silent and solemn to the heart.&nbsp;
+Then you push of; the toboggan fetches way; she begins to feel the hill,
+to glide, to, swim, to gallop.&nbsp; In a breath you are out from under
+the pine trees, and a whole heavenful of stars reels and flashes overhead.&nbsp;
+Then comes a vicious effort; for by this time your wooden steed is speeding
+like the wind, and you are spinning round a corner, and the whole glittering
+valley and all the lights in all the great hotels lie for a moment at
+your feet; and the next you are racing once more in the shadow of the
+night with close-shut teeth and beating heart.&nbsp; Yet a little while
+and you will be landed on the highroad by the door of your own hotel.&nbsp;
+This, in an atmosphere tingling with forty degrees of frost, in a night
+made luminous with stars and snow, and girt with strange white mountains,
+teaches the pulse an unaccustomed tune and adds a new excitement to
+the life of man upon his planet.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XII - THE STIMULATION OF THE ALPS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+To any one who should come from a southern sanitarium to the Alps, the
+row of sun-burned faces round the table would present the first surprise.&nbsp;
+He would begin by looking for the invalids, and he would lose his pains,
+for not one out of five of even the bad cases bears the mark of sickness
+on his face.&nbsp; The plump sunshine from above and its strong reverberation
+from below colour the skin like an Indian climate; the treatment, which
+consists mainly of the open air, exposes even the sickliest to tan,
+and a tableful of invalids comes, in a month or two, to resemble a tableful
+of hunters.&nbsp; But although he may be thus surprised at the first
+glance, his astonishment will grow greater, as he experiences the effects
+of the climate on himself.&nbsp; In many ways it is a trying business
+to reside upon the Alps: the stomach is exercised, the appetite often
+languishes; the liver may at times rebel; and because you have come
+so far from metropolitan advantages, it does not follow that you shall
+recover.&nbsp; But one thing is undeniable - that in the rare air, clear,
+cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled
+delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled.&nbsp;
+He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.&nbsp; It does
+not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm
+of the blood unknown in more temperate climates.&nbsp; It may not be
+health, but it is fun.<br>
+<br>
+There is nothing more difficult to communicate on paper than this baseless
+ardour, this stimulation of the brain, this sterile joyousness of spirits.&nbsp;
+You wake every morning, see the gold upon the snow-peaks, become filled
+with courage, and bless God for your prolonged existence.&nbsp; The
+valleys are but a stride to you; you cast your shoe over the hilltops;
+your ears and your heart sing; in the words of an unverified quotation
+from the Scotch psalms, you feel yourself fit &lsquo;on the wings of
+all the winds&rsquo; to &lsquo;come flying all abroad.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Europe and your mind are too narrow for that flood of energy.&nbsp;
+Yet it is notable that you are hard to root out of your bed; that you
+start forth, singing, indeed, on your walk, yet are unusually ready
+to turn home again; that the best of you is volatile; and that although
+the restlessness remains till night, the strength is early at an end.&nbsp;
+With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying
+languor in the body; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied;
+you weary before you have well begun; and though you mount at morning
+with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird&rsquo;s heart that
+you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish
+temper to your inn.<br>
+<br>
+It is hard to say wherein it lies, but this joy of Alpine winters is
+its own reward.&nbsp; Baseless, in a sense, it is more than worth more
+permanent improvements.&nbsp; The dream of health is perfect while it
+lasts; and if, in trying to realise it, you speedily wear out the dear
+hallucination, still every day, and many times a day, you are conscious
+of a strength you scarce possess, and a delight in living as merry as
+it proves to be transient.<br>
+<br>
+The brightness - heaven and earth conspiring to be bright - the levity
+and quiet of the air; the odd stirring silence - more stirring than
+a tumult; the snow, the frost, the enchanted landscape: all have their
+part in the effect and on the memory, &lsquo;<i>tous vous tapent sur
+la t&eacute;te</i>&rsquo;; and yet when you have enumerated all, you
+have gone no nearer to explain or even to qualify the delicate exhilaration
+that you feel - delicate, you may say, and yet excessive, greater than
+can be said in prose, almost greater than an invalid can bear.&nbsp;
+There is a certain wine of France known in England in some gaseous disguise,
+but when drunk in the land of its nativity still as a pool, clean as
+river water, and as heady as verse.&nbsp; It is more than probable that
+in its noble natural condition this was the very wine of Anjou so beloved
+by Athos in the &lsquo;Musketeers.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, if the reader has
+ever washed down a liberal second breakfast with the wine in question,
+and gone forth, on the back of these dilutions, into a sultry, sparkling
+noontide, he will have felt an influence almost as genial, although
+strangely grosser, than this fairy titillation of the nerves among the
+snow and sunshine of the Alps.&nbsp; That also is a mode, we need not
+say of intoxication, but of insobriety.&nbsp; Thus also a man walks
+in a strong sunshine of the mind, and follows smiling, insubstantial
+meditations.&nbsp; And whether he be really so clever or so strong as
+he supposes, in either case he will enjoy his chimera while it lasts.<br>
+<br>
+The influence of this giddy air displays itself in many secondary ways.&nbsp;
+A certain sort of laboured pleasantry has already been recognised, and
+may perhaps have been remarked in these papers, as a sort peculiar to
+that climate.&nbsp; People utter their judgments with a cannonade of
+syllables; a big word is as good as a meal to them; and the turn of
+a phrase goes further than humour or wisdom.&nbsp; By the professional
+writer many sad vicissitudes have to be undergone.&nbsp; At first he
+cannot write at all.&nbsp; The heart, it appears, is unequal to the
+pressure of business, and the brain, left without nourishment, goes
+into a mild decline.&nbsp; Next, some power of work returns to him,
+accompanied by jumping headaches.&nbsp; Last, the spring is opened,
+and there pours at once from his pen a world of blatant, hustling polysyllables,
+and talk so high as, in the old joke, to be positively offensive in
+hot weather.&nbsp; He writes it in good faith and with a sense of inspiration;
+it is only when he comes to read what he has written that surprise and
+disquiet seize upon his mind.&nbsp; What is he to do, poor man?&nbsp;
+All his little fishes talk like whales.&nbsp; This yeasty inflation,
+this stiff and strutting architecture of the sentence has come upon
+him while he slept; and it is not he, it is the Alps, who are to blame.&nbsp;
+He is not, perhaps, alone, which somewhat comforts him.&nbsp; Nor is
+the ill without a remedy.&nbsp; Some day, when the spring returns, he
+shall go down a little lower in this world, and remember quieter inflections
+and more modest language.&nbsp; But here, in the meantime, there seems
+to swim up some outline of a new cerebral hygiene and a good time coming,
+when experienced advisers shall send a man to the proper measured level
+for the ode, the biography, or the religious tract; and a nook may be
+found between the sea and Chimborazo, where Mr. Swinburne shall be able
+to write more continently, and Mr. Browning somewhat slower.<br>
+<br>
+Is it a return of youth, or is it a congestion of the brain?&nbsp; It
+is a sort of congestion, perhaps, that leads the invalid, when all goes
+well, to face the new day with such a bubbling cheerfulness.&nbsp; It
+is certainly congestion that makes night hideous with visions, all the
+chambers of a many-storeyed caravanserai, haunted with vociferous nightmares,
+and many wakeful people come down late for breakfast in the morning.&nbsp;
+Upon that theory the cynic may explain the whole affair - exhilaration,
+nightmares, pomp of tongue and all.&nbsp; But, on the other hand, the
+peculiar blessedness of boyhood may itself be but a symptom of the same
+complaint, for the two effects are strangely similar; and the frame
+of mind of the invalid upon the Alps is a sort of intermittent youth,
+with periods of lassitude.&nbsp; The fountain of Juventus does not play
+steadily in these parts; but there it plays, and possibly nowhere else.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XIII - ROADS - 1873<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+No amateur will deny that he can find more pleasure in a single drawing,
+over which he can sit a whole quiet forenoon, and so gradually study
+himself into humour with the artist, than he can ever extract from the
+dazzle and accumulation of incongruous impressions that send him, weary
+and stupefied, out of some famous picture-gallery.&nbsp; But what is
+thus admitted with regard to art is not extended to the (so-called)
+natural beauties no amount of excess in sublime mountain outline or
+the graces of cultivated lowland can do anything, it is supposed, to
+weaken or degrade the palate.&nbsp; We are not at all sure, however,
+that moderation, and a regimen tolerably austere, even in scenery, are
+not healthful and strengthening to the taste; and that the best school
+for a lover of nature is not to the found in one of those countries
+where there is no stage effect - nothing salient or sudden, - but a
+quiet spirit of orderly and harmonious beauty pervades all the details,
+so that we can patiently attend to each of the little touches that strike
+in us, all of them together, the subdued note of the landscape.&nbsp;
+It is in scenery such as this that we find ourselves in the right temper
+to seek out small sequestered loveliness.&nbsp; The constant recurrence
+of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon
+us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become familiar
+with something of nature&rsquo;s mannerism.&nbsp; This is the true pleasure
+of your &lsquo;rural voluptuary,&rsquo; - not to remain awe-stricken
+before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in
+the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty - to
+experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before evaded
+him.&nbsp; It is not the people who &lsquo;have pined and hungered after
+nature many a year, in the great city pent,&rsquo; as Coleridge said
+in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is
+not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy with her,
+or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy.&nbsp;
+In this, as in everything else, it is minute knowledge and long-continued
+loving industry that make the true dilettante.&nbsp; A man must have
+thought much over scenery before he begins fully to enjoy it.&nbsp;
+It is no youngling enthusiasm on hilltops that can possess itself of
+the last essence of beauty.&nbsp; Probably most people&rsquo;s heads
+are growing bare before they can see all in a landscape that they have
+the capability of seeing; and, even then, it will be only for one little
+moment of consummation before the faculties are again on the decline,
+and they that look out of the windows begin to be darkened and restrained
+in sight.&nbsp; Thus the study of nature should be carried forward thoroughly
+and with system.&nbsp; Every gratification should be rolled long under
+the tongue, and we should be always eager to analyse and compare, in
+order that we may be able to give some plausible reason for our admirations.&nbsp;
+True, it is difficult to put even approximately into words the kind
+of feelings thus called into play.&nbsp; There is a dangerous vice inherent
+in any such intellectual refining upon vague sensation.&nbsp; The analysis
+of such satisfactions lends itself very readily to literary affectations;
+and we can all think of instances where it has shown itself apt to exercise
+a morbid influence, even upon an author&rsquo;s choice of language and
+the turn of his sentences.&nbsp; And yet there is much that makes the
+attempt attractive; for any expression, however imperfect, once given
+to a cherished feeling, seems a sort of legitimation of the pleasure
+we take in it.&nbsp; A common sentiment is one of those great goods
+that make life palatable and ever new.&nbsp; The knowledge that another
+has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even if they are little things,
+not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end
+to be one of life&rsquo;s choicest pleasures.<br>
+<br>
+Let the reader, then, betake himself in the spirit we have recommended
+to some of the quieter kinds of English landscape.&nbsp; In those homely
+and placid agricultural districts, familiarity will bring into relief
+many things worthy of notice, and urge them pleasantly home to him by
+a sort of loving repetition; such as the wonderful life-giving speed
+of windmill sails above the stationary country; the occurrence and recurrence
+of the same church tower at the end of one long vista after another:
+and, conspicuous among these sources of quiet pleasure, the character
+and variety of the road itself, along which he takes his way.&nbsp;
+Not only near at hand, in the lithe contortions with which it adapts
+itself to the interchanges of level and slope, but far away also, when
+he sees a few hundred feet of it upheaved against a hill and shining
+in the afternoon sun, he will find it an object so changeful and enlivening
+that he can always pleasurably busy his mind about it.&nbsp; He may
+leave the river-side, or fall out of the way of villages, but the road
+he has always with him; and, in the true humour of observation, will
+find in that sufficient company.&nbsp; From its subtle windings and
+changes of level there arises a keen and continuous interest, that keeps
+the attention ever alert and cheerful.&nbsp; Every sensitive adjustment
+to the contour of the ground, every little dip and swerve, seems instinct
+with life and an exquisite sense of balance and beauty.&nbsp; The road
+rolls upon the easy slopes of the country, like a long ship in the hollows
+of the sea.&nbsp; The very margins of waste ground, as they trench a
+little farther on the beaten way, or recede again to the shelter of
+the hedge, have something of the same free delicacy of line - of the
+same swing and wilfulness.&nbsp; You might think for a whole summer&rsquo;s
+day (and not have thought it any nearer an end by evening) what concourse
+and succession of circumstances has produced the least of these deflections;
+and it is, perhaps, just in this that we should look for the secret
+of their interest.&nbsp; A foot-path across a meadow - in all its human
+waywardness and unaccountability, in all the <i>grata protervitas</i>
+of its varying direction - will always be more to us than a railroad
+well engineered through a difficult country. <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a>&nbsp;
+No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped
+for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect;
+and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification,
+always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free-will, an active
+and spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out,
+and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land
+before our eyes.&nbsp; We remember, as we write, some miles of fine
+wide highway laid out with conscious aesthetic artifice through a broken
+and richly cultivated tract of country.&nbsp; It is said that the engineer
+had Hogarth&rsquo;s line of beauty in his mind as he laid them down.&nbsp;
+And the result is striking.&nbsp; One splendid satisfying sweep passes
+with easy transition into another, and there is nothing to trouble or
+dislocate the strong continuousness of the main line of the road.&nbsp;
+And yet there is something wanting.&nbsp; There is here no saving imperfection,
+none of those secondary curves and little trepidations of direction
+that carry, in natural roads, our curiosity actively along with them.&nbsp;
+One feels at once that this road has not has been laboriously grown
+like a natural road, but made to pattern; and that, while a model may
+be academically correct in outline, it will always be inanimate and
+cold.&nbsp; The traveller is also aware of a sympathy of mood between
+himself and the road he travels.&nbsp; We have all seen ways that have
+wandered into heavy sand near the sea-coast, and trail wearily over
+the dunes like a trodden serpent.&nbsp; Here we too must plod forward
+at a dull, laborious pace; and so a sympathy is preserved between our
+frame of mind and the expression of the relaxed, heavy curves of the
+roadway.&nbsp; Such a phenomenon, indeed, our reason might perhaps resolve
+with a little trouble.&nbsp; We might reflect that the present road
+had been developed out of a tract spontaneously followed by generations
+of primitive wayfarers; and might see in its expression a testimony
+that those generations had been affected at the same ground, one after
+another, in the same manner as we are affected to-day.&nbsp; Or we might
+carry the reflection further, and remind ourselves that where the air
+is invigorating and the ground firm under the traveller&rsquo;s foot,
+his eye is quick to take advantage of small undulations, and he will
+turn carelessly aside from the direct way wherever there is anything
+beautiful to examine or some promise of a wider view; so that even a
+bush of wild roses may permanently bias and deform the straight path
+over the meadow; whereas, where the soil is heavy, one is preoccupied
+with the labour of mere progression, and goes with a bowed head heavily
+and unobservantly forward.&nbsp; Reason, however, will not carry us
+the whole way; for the sentiment often recurs in situations where it
+is very hard to imagine any possible explanation; and indeed, if we
+drive briskly along a good, well-made road in an open vehicle, we shall
+experience this sympathy almost at its fullest.&nbsp; We feel the sharp
+settle of the springs at some curiously twisted corner; after a steep
+ascent, the fresh air dances in our faces as we rattle precipitately
+down the other side, and we find it difficult to avoid attributing something
+headlong, a sort of <i>abandon</i>, to the road itself.<br>
+<br>
+The mere winding of the path is enough to enliven a long day&rsquo;s
+walk in even a commonplace or dreary country-side.&nbsp; Something that
+we have seen from miles back, upon an eminence, is so long hid from
+us, as we wander through folded valleys or among woods, that our expectation
+of seeing it again is sharpened into a violent appetite, and as we draw
+nearer we impatiently quicken our steps and turn every corner with a
+beating heart.&nbsp; It is through these prolongations of expectancy,
+this succession of one hope to another, that we live out long seasons
+of pleasure in a few hours&rsquo; walk.&nbsp; It is in following these
+capricious sinuosities that we learn, only bit by bit and through one
+coquettish reticence after another, much as we learn the heart of a
+friend, the whole loveliness of the country.&nbsp; This disposition
+always preserves something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful
+cicerone, to many different points of distant view before it allows
+us finally to approach the hoped-for destination.<br>
+<br>
+In its connection with the traffic, and whole friendly intercourse with
+the country, there is something very pleasant in that succession of
+saunterers and brisk and business-like passers-by, that peoples our
+ways and helps to build up what Walt Whitman calls &lsquo;the cheerful
+voice of the public road, the gay, fresh sentiment of the road.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But out of the great network of ways that binds all life together from
+the hill-farm to the city, there is something individual to most, and,
+on the whole, nearly as much choice on the score of company as on the
+score of beauty or easy travel.&nbsp; On some we are never long without
+the sound of wheels, and folk pass us by so thickly that we lose the
+sense of their number.&nbsp; But on others, about little-frequented
+districts, a meeting is an affair of moment; we have the sight far off
+of some one coming towards us, the growing definiteness of the person,
+and then the brief passage and salutation, and the road left empty in
+front of us for perhaps a great while to come.&nbsp; Such encounters
+have a wistful interest that can hardly be understood by the dweller
+in places more populous.&nbsp; We remember standing beside a countryman
+once, in the mouth of a quiet by-street in a city that was more than
+ordinarily crowded and bustling; he seemed stunned and bewildered by
+the continual passage of different faces; and after a long pause, during
+which he appeared to search for some suitable expression, he said timidly
+that there seemed to be a <i>great deal of meeting thereabouts</i>.&nbsp;
+The phrase is significant.&nbsp; It is the expression of town-life in
+the language of the long, solitary country highways.&nbsp; A meeting
+of one with one was what this man had been used to in the pastoral uplands
+from which he came; and the concourse of the streets was in his eyes
+only an extraordinary multiplication of such &lsquo;meetings.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And now we come to that last and most subtle quality of all, to that
+sense of prospect, of outlook, that is brought so powerfully to our
+minds by a road.&nbsp; In real nature, as well as in old landscapes,
+beneath that impartial daylight in which a whole variegated plain is
+plunged and saturated, the line of the road leads the eye forth with
+the vague sense of desire up to the green limit of the horizon.&nbsp;
+Travel is brought home to us, and we visit in spirit every grove and
+hamlet that tempts us in the distance.&nbsp; <i>Sehnsucht</i> - the
+passion for what is ever beyond - is livingly expressed in that white
+riband of possible travel that severs the uneven country; not a ploughman
+following his plough up the shining furrow, not the blue smoke of any
+cottage in a hollow, but is brought to us with a sense of nearness and
+attainability by this wavering line of junction.&nbsp; There is a passionate
+paragraph in <i>Werther</i> that strikes the very key.&nbsp; &lsquo;When
+I came hither,&rsquo; he writes, &lsquo;how the beautiful valley invited
+me on every side, as I gazed down into it from the hill-top!&nbsp; There
+the wood - ah, that I might mingle in its shadows! there the mountain
+summits - ah, that I might look down from them over the broad country!
+the interlinked hills! the secret valleys!&nbsp; Oh to lose myself among
+their mysteries!&nbsp; I hurried into the midst, and came back without
+finding aught I hoped for.&nbsp; Alas! the distance is like the future.&nbsp;
+A vast whole lies in the twilight before our spirit; sight and feeling
+alike plunge and lose themselves in the prospect, and we yearn to surrender
+our whole being, and let it be filled full with all the rapture of one
+single glorious sensation; and alas! when we hasten to the fruition,
+when <i>there</i> is changed to <i>here</i>, all is afterwards as it
+was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped estate, and our
+soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is to this
+wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.&nbsp;
+Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies before
+us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can outstrip the
+body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods, and overlook from
+the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in the windings of the
+valleys that are still far in front.&nbsp; The road is already there
+- we shall not be long behind.&nbsp; It is as if we were marching with
+the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard the acclamation
+of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly and jubilant city.&nbsp;
+Would not every man, through all the long miles of march, feel as if
+he also were within the gates?<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER XIV - ON THE ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES - 1874<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is a difficult matter to make the most of any given place, and we
+have much in our own power.&nbsp; Things looked at patiently from one
+side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.&nbsp;
+A few months ago some words were said in the <i>Portfolio</i> as to
+an &lsquo;austere regimen in scenery&rsquo;; and such a discipline was
+then recommended as &lsquo;healthful and strengthening to the taste.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay.&nbsp; This discipline
+in scenery, it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk
+before breakfast to whet the appetite.&nbsp; For when we are put down
+in some unsightly neighbourhood, and especially if we have come to be
+more or less dependent on what we see, we must set ourselves to hunt
+out beautiful things with all the ardour and patience of a botanist
+after a rye plant.&nbsp; Day by day we perfect ourselves in the art
+of seeing nature more favourably.&nbsp; We learn to live with her, as
+people learn to live with fretful or violent spouses: to dwell lovingly
+on what is good, and shut our eyes against all that is bleak or inharmonious.&nbsp;
+We learn, also, to come to each place in the right spirit.&nbsp; The
+traveller, as Brant&ocirc;me quaintly tells us,&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>fait
+des discours en soi pour soutenir en chemin</i>&rsquo;; and into these
+discourses he weaves something out of all that he sees and suffers by
+the way; they take their tone greatly from the varying character of
+the scene; a sharp ascent brings different thoughts from a level road;
+and the man&rsquo;s fancies grow lighter as he comes out of the wood
+into a clearing.&nbsp; Nor does the scenery any more affect the thoughts
+than the thoughts affect the scenery.&nbsp; We see places through our
+humours as through differently coloured glasses.&nbsp; We are ourselves
+a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony
+almost at will.&nbsp; There is no fear for the result, if we can but
+surrender ourselves sufficiently to the country that surrounds and follows
+us, so that we are ever thinking suitable thoughts or telling ourselves
+some suitable sort of story as we go.&nbsp; We become thus, in some
+sense, a centre of beauty; we are provocative of beauty, much as a gentle
+and sincere character is provocative of sincerity and gentleness in
+others.&nbsp; And even where there is no harmony to be elicited by the
+quickest and most obedient of spirits, we may still embellish a place
+with some attraction of romance.&nbsp; We may learn to go far afield
+for associations, and handle them lightly when we have found them.&nbsp;
+Sometimes an old print comes to our aid; I have seen many a spot lit
+up at once with picturesque imaginations, by a reminiscence of Callot,
+or Sadeler, or Paul Brill.&nbsp; Dick Turpin has been my lay figure
+for many an English lane.&nbsp; And I suppose the Trossachs would hardly
+be the Trossachs for most tourists if a man of admirable romantic instinct
+had not peopled it for them with harmonious figures, and brought them
+thither with minds rightly prepared for the impression.&nbsp; There
+is half the battle in this preparation.&nbsp; For instance: I have rarely
+been able to visit, in the proper spirit, the wild and inhospitable
+places of our own Highlands.&nbsp; I am happier where it is tame and
+fertile, and not readily pleased without trees.&nbsp; I understand that
+there are some phases of mental trouble that harmonise well with such
+surroundings, and that some persons, by the dispensing power of the
+imagination, can go back several centuries in spirit, and put themselves
+into sympathy with the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that
+was in its place upon these savage hills.&nbsp; Now, when I am sad,
+I like nature to charm me out of my sadness, like David before Saul;
+and the thought of these past ages strikes nothing in me but an unpleasant
+pity; so that I can never hit on the right humour for this sort of landscape,
+and lose much pleasure in consequence.&nbsp; Still, even here, if I
+were only let alone, and time enough were given, I should have all manner
+of pleasures, and take many clear and beautiful images away with me
+when I left.&nbsp; When we cannot think ourselves into sympathy with
+the great features of a country, we learn to ignore them, and put our
+head among the grass for flowers, or pore, for long times together,
+over the changeful current of a stream.&nbsp; We come down to the sermon
+in stones, when we are shut out from any poem in the spread landscape.&nbsp;
+We begin to peep and botanise, we take an interest in birds and insects,
+we find many things beautiful in miniature.&nbsp; The reader will recollect
+the little summer scene in <i>Wuthering Heights</i> - the one warm scene,
+perhaps, in all that powerful, miserable novel - and the great feature
+that is made therein by grasses and flowers and a little sunshine: this
+is in the spirit of which I now speak.&nbsp; And, lastly, we can go
+indoors; interiors are sometimes as beautiful, often more picturesque,
+than the shows of the open air, and they have that quality of shelter
+of which I shall presently have more to say.<br>
+<br>
+With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the paradox
+that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in
+a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably.&nbsp;
+For, if we only stay long enough we become at home in the neighbourhood.&nbsp;
+Reminiscences spring up, like flowers, about uninteresting corners.&nbsp;
+We forget to some degree the superior loveliness of other places, and
+fall into a tolerant and sympathetic spirit which is its own reward
+and justification.&nbsp; Looking back the other day on some recollections
+of my own, I was astonished to find how much I owed to such a residence;
+six weeks in one unpleasant country-side had done more, it seemed, to
+quicken and educate my sensibilities than many years in places that
+jumped more nearly with my inclination.<br>
+<br>
+The country to which I refer was a level and tree-less plateau, over
+which the winds cut like a whip.&nbsp; For miles and miles it was the
+same.&nbsp; A river, indeed, fell into the sea near the town where I
+resided; but the valley of the river was shallow and bald, for as far
+up as ever I had the heart to follow it.&nbsp; There were roads, certainly,
+but roads that had no beauty or interest; for, as there was no timber,
+and but little irregularity of surface, you saw your whole walk exposed
+to you from the beginning: there was nothing left to fancy, nothing
+to expect, nothing to see by the wayside, save here and there an unhomely-looking
+homestead, and here and there a solitary, spectacled stone-breaker;
+and you were only accompanied, as you went doggedly forward, by the
+gaunt telegraph-posts and the hum of the resonant wires in the keen
+sea-wind.&nbsp; To one who had learned to know their song in warm pleasant
+places by the Mediterranean, it seemed to taunt the country, and make
+it still bleaker by suggested contrast.&nbsp; Even the waste places
+by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, &lsquo;taken
+back to Nature&rsquo; by any decent covering of vegetation.&nbsp; Wherever
+the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow.&nbsp; There is a certain
+tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion,
+and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this was of
+another description - this was the nakedness of the North; the earth
+seemed to know that it was naked, and was ashamed and cold.<br>
+<br>
+It seemed to be always blowing on that coast.&nbsp; Indeed, this had
+passed into the speech of the inhabitants, and they saluted each other
+when they met with &lsquo;Breezy, breezy,&rsquo; instead of the customary
+&lsquo;Fine day&rsquo; of farther south.&nbsp; These continual winds
+were not like the harvest breeze, that just keeps an equable pressure
+against your face as you walk, and serves to set all the trees talking
+over your head, or bring round you the smell of the wet surface of the
+country after a shower.&nbsp; They were of the bitter, hard, persistent
+sort, that interferes with sight and respiration, and makes the eyes
+sore.&nbsp; Even such winds as these have their own merit in proper
+time and place.&nbsp; It is pleasant to see them brandish great masses
+of shadow.&nbsp; And what a power they have over the colour of the world!&nbsp;
+How they ruffle the solid woodlands in their passage, and make them
+shudder and whiten like a single willow!&nbsp; There is nothing more
+vertiginous than a wind like this among the woods, with all its sights
+and noises; and the effect gets between some painters and their sober
+eyesight, so that, even when the rest of their picture is calm, the
+foliage is coloured like foliage in a gale.&nbsp; There was nothing,
+however, of this sort to be noticed in a country where there were no
+trees and hardly any shadows, save the passive shadows of clouds or
+those of rigid houses and walls.&nbsp; But the wind was nevertheless
+an occasion of pleasure; for nowhere could you taste more fully the
+pleasure of a sudden lull, or a place of opportune shelter.&nbsp; The
+reader knows what I mean; he must remember how, when he has sat himself
+down behind a dyke on a hillside, he delighted to hear the wind hiss
+vainly through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over
+with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise,
+that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away
+hills all marbled with sun and shadow.&nbsp; Wordsworth, in a beautiful
+passage of the &lsquo;Prelude,&rsquo; has used this as a figure for
+the feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the
+uproar of the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned
+the other way with as good effect:-<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,<br>
+Escaped as from an enemy, we turn<br>
+Abruptly into some sequester&rsquo;d nook,<br>
+Still as a shelter&rsquo;d place when winds blow loud!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I remember meeting a man once, in a train, who told me of what must
+have been quite the most perfect instance of this pleasure of escape.&nbsp;
+He had gone up, one sunny, windy morning, to the top of a great cathedral
+somewhere abroad; I think it was Cologne Cathedral, the great unfinished
+marvel by the Rhine; and after a long while in dark stairways, he issued
+at last into the sunshine, on a platform high above the town.&nbsp;
+At that elevation it was quite still and warm; the gale was only in
+the lower strata of the air, and he had forgotten it in the quiet interior
+of the church and during his long ascent; and so you may judge of his
+surprise when, resting his arms on the sunlit balustrade and looking
+over into the <i>Place</i> far below him, he saw the good people holding
+on their hats and leaning hard against the wind as they walked.&nbsp;
+There is something, to my fancy, quite perfect in this little experience
+of my fellow-traveller&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The ways of men seem always very
+trivial to us when we find ourselves alone on a church-top, with the
+blue sky and a few tall pinnacles, and see far below us the steep roofs
+and foreshortened buttresses, and the silent activity of the city streets;
+but how much more must they not have seemed so to him as he stood, not
+only above other men&rsquo;s business, but above other men&rsquo;s climate,
+in a golden zone like Apollo&rsquo;s!<br>
+<br>
+This was the sort of pleasure I found in the country of which I write.&nbsp;
+The pleasure was to be out of the wind, and to keep it in memory all
+the time, and hug oneself upon the shelter.&nbsp; And it was only by
+the sea that any such sheltered places were to be found.&nbsp; Between
+the black worm-eaten head-lands there are little bights and havens,
+well screened from the wind and the commotion of the external sea, where
+the sand and weeds look up into the gazer&rsquo;s face from a depth
+of tranquil water, and the sea-birds, screaming and flickering from
+the ruined crags, alone disturb the silence and the sunshine.&nbsp;
+One such place has impressed itself on my memory beyond all others.&nbsp;
+On a rock by the water&rsquo;s edge, old fighting men of the Norse breed
+had planted a double castle; the two stood wall to wall like semi-detached
+villas; and yet feud had run so high between their owners, that one,
+from out of a window, shot the other as he stood in his own doorway.&nbsp;
+There is something in the juxtaposition of these two enemies full of
+tragic irony.&nbsp; It is grim to think of bearded men and bitter women
+taking hateful counsel together about the two hall-fires at night, when
+the sea boomed against the foundations and the wild winter wind was
+loose over the battlements.&nbsp; And in the study we may reconstruct
+for ourselves some pale figure of what life then was.&nbsp; Not so when
+we are there; when we are there such thoughts come to us only to intensify
+a contrary impression, and association is turned against itself.&nbsp;
+I remember walking thither three afternoons in succession, my eyes weary
+with being set against the wind, and how, dropping suddenly over the
+edge of the down, I found myself in a new world of warmth and shelter.&nbsp;
+The wind, from which I had escaped, &lsquo;as from an enemy,&rsquo;
+was seemingly quite local.&nbsp; It carried no clouds with it, and came
+from such a quarter that it did not trouble the sea within view.&nbsp;
+The two castles, black and ruinous as the rocks about them, were still
+distinguishable from these by something more insecure and fantastic
+in the outline, something that the last storm had left imminent and
+the next would demolish entirely.&nbsp; It would be difficult to render
+in words the sense of peace that took possession of me on these three
+afternoons.&nbsp; It was helped out, as I have said, by the contrast.&nbsp;
+The shore was battered and bemauled by previous tempests; I had the
+memory at heart of the insane strife of the pigmies who had erected
+these two castles and lived in them in mutual distrust and enmity, and
+knew I had only to put my head out of this little cup of shelter to
+find the hard wind blowing in my eyes; and yet there were the two great
+tracts of motionless blue air and peaceful sea looking on, unconcerned
+and apart, at the turmoil of the present moment and the memorials of
+the precarious past.&nbsp; There is ever something transitory and fretful
+in the impression of a high wind under a cloudless sky; it seems to
+have no root in the constitution of things; it must speedily begin to
+faint and wither away like a cut flower.&nbsp; And on those days the
+thought of the wind and the thought of human life came very near together
+in my mind.&nbsp; Our noisy years did indeed seem moments in the being
+of the eternal silence; and the wind, in the face of that great field
+of stationary blue, was as the wind of a butterfly&rsquo;s wing.&nbsp;
+The placidity of the sea was a thing likewise to be remembered.&nbsp;
+Shelley speaks of the sea as &lsquo;hungering for calm,&rsquo; and in
+this place one learned to understand the phrase.&nbsp; Looking down
+into these green waters from the broken edge of the rock, or swimming
+leisurely in the sunshine, it seemed to me that they were enjoying their
+own tranquillity; and when now and again it was disturbed by a wind
+ripple on the surface, or the quick black passage of a fish far below,
+they settled back again (one could fancy) with relief.<br>
+<br>
+On shore too, in the little nook of shelter, everything was so subdued
+and still that the least particular struck in me a pleasurable surprise.&nbsp;
+The desultory crackling of the whin-pods in the afternoon sun usurped
+the ear.&nbsp; The hot, sweet breath of the bank, that had been saturated
+all day long with sunshine, and now exhaled it into my face, was like
+the breath of a fellow-creature.&nbsp; I remember that I was haunted
+by two lines of French verse; in some dumb way they seemed to fit my
+surroundings and give expression to the contentment that was in me,
+and I kept repeating to myself -<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Mon coeur est un luth suspendu,<br>
+Sit&ocirc;t qu&rsquo;on le touche, il r&eacute;sonne.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I can give no reason why these lines came to me at this time; and for
+that very cause I repeat them here.&nbsp; For all I know, they may serve
+to complete the impression in the mind of the reader, as they were certainly
+a part of it for me.<br>
+<br>
+And this happened to me in the place of all others where I liked least
+to stay.&nbsp; When I think of it I grow ashamed of my own ingratitude.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Out of the strong came forth sweetness.&rsquo;&nbsp; There, in
+the bleak and gusty North, I received, perhaps, my strongest impression
+of peace.&nbsp; I saw the sea to be great and calm; and the earth, in
+that little corner, was all alive and friendly to me.&nbsp; So, wherever
+a man is, he will find something to please and pacify him: in the town
+he will meet pleasant faces of men and women, and see beautiful flowers
+at a window, or hear a cage-bird singing at the corner of the gloomiest
+street; and for the country, there is no country without some amenity
+- let him only look for it in the right spirit, and he will surely find.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a>&nbsp; The Second
+Part here referred to is entitled &lsquo;ACROSS THE PLAINS,&rsquo; and
+is printed in the volume so entitled, together with other Memories and
+Essays.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2"></a><a href="#citation2">{2}</a>&nbsp; I had nearly
+finished the transcription of the following pages when I saw on a friend&rsquo;s
+table the number containing the piece from which this sentence is extracted,
+and, struck with a similarity of title, took it home with me and read
+it with indescribable satisfaction.&nbsp; I do not know whether I more
+envy M. Theuriet the pleasure of having written this delightful article,
+or the reader the pleasure, which I hope he has still before him, of
+reading it once and again, and lingering over the passages that please
+him most.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3"></a><a href="#citation3">{3}</a>&nbsp; William Abercrombie.&nbsp;
+See <i>Fasti Ecclesia Scoticanae</i>, under &lsquo;Maybole&rsquo; (Part
+iii.).<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4"></a><a href="#citation4">{4}</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Duex
+poures varlez qui n&rsquo;ont nulz gages et qui gissoient la nuit avec
+les chiens.&rsquo;&nbsp; See Champollion - Figeac&rsquo;s <i>Louis et
+Charles d&rsquo;Orl&eacute;ans</i>, i. 63, and for my lord&rsquo;s English
+horn, <i>ibid</i>. 96.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5"></a><a href="#citation5">{5}</a>&nbsp; Reprinted
+by permission of John Lane.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6"></a><a href="#citation6">{6}</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;Jehovah
+Tsidkenu,&rsquo; translated in the Authorised Version as &lsquo;The
+Lord our Righteousness&rsquo; (Jeremiah xxiii. 6 and xxxiii. 16).<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a>&nbsp; Compare Blake,
+in the <i>Marriage of Heaven and Hell</i>: &lsquo;Improvement makes
+straight roads; but the crooked roads, without improvement, are roads
+of Genius.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, ESSAYS OF TRAVEL ***<br>
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+</pre></body>
+</html>
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