IN A QUIET VILLAGE

First Edition, April 1900

Reprinted, May 1900

IN A QUIET VILLAGE

BY
S. BARING GOULD

AUTHOR OF “MEHALAH” “PERPETUA” ETC. ETC.

LONDON
ISBISTER AND COMPANY Limited
15 & 16 TAVISTOCK STREET COVENT GARDEN
1900

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press

CONTENTS

DAN’L COOMBE

DAN’L COOMBE

Old Dan’l was a character indeed, and for many years a mystery as well. He was a man of one object in life, and what that object was no one knew for thirty-five years.

He was by trade a tailor, and throughout the hours of daylight he sat cross-legged on his table near a very large window, viewed by all who passed along the road, but scarce looking away from his work to exchange a nod with a passer-by.

He shaved his face clean, that is to say he shaved it occasionally clean, but this was once a week only, on Saturday, and during the ensuing week a dusky shadow stole over cheek and chin that made Dan’l look anything but clean-shaved. He wore his hair short, but had thick and very protruding eyebrows.

He was a reticent man.

The tailor’s shop is often a place where many villagers congregate to have a chat, and the tailor is able to go on with his needlework in a mechanical fashion whilst conversing. But Daniel Coombe did not affect gossip and prattle; what he undertook he carried through with an almost grim persistency.

As the gamekeeper said: “Bless you, old Coombe, he do lay hold on and stick to a job just as a ferret do to a rabbit. There ain’t no gettin’ him to quit it.”

Coombe had a wife—the ugliest woman he could have picked up, but they lived contentedly enough together. They had no children. Had they possessed a family, a little more brightness and laughter would have entered into the household. Mrs. Coombe was a grumbler; she grumbled over her husband, over her house, over her work, over every thing and every person with which and with whom she was brought in contact. But Dan’l did not appear to mind it. He lived in a world of his own—his thoughts, his aspirations; and the mutter of discontent rumbled around him and rolled over his head, almost without his hearing it, certainly without his being moved by it.

No sooner was the sun set, and Dan’l could no longer ply his needle, than he put up his shutters. In these were two round orifices, and till late at night lamplight streamed forth into the road through these holes, that were as a pair of eyes glaring down the village street. What was he doing in his workshop at night? Certainly he was not cutting out and sewing. It was a well-known saying of his that with the set of sun was the set aside of work.

“I ain’t a-going to try my eyes and wear ’em out with needlework by lamplight,” said he.

Then what was his occupation after nightfall? Into his workshop he retired and bolted the door from within as soon as he had taken his evening meal.

Did he read? Was he a student of English literature? Was he a politician? He was no buyer of books, and subscribed to no other paper than the local weekly gazette.

It puzzled the parish. It roused curiosity. Then some boys climbed up outside the window to peer in through the holes in the shutters, but the noise of their scrambling, perhaps the appearance of their visages in the openings, showed Dan’l that he was having his privacy peered into, and before the urchins were able to observe what his occupation was, out went the lamp. He had extinguished it. The married women of the parish endeavoured to extract the secret from Mrs. Coombe; but she was either ignorant or uncommunicative.

“How should I know?” said she. “He has his megrims. I don’t meddle wi’ they. All I know is, he ain’t doing nothin’ as is good to nobody. But if it keeps him out o’ mischief and away from the public-house, naught I’ll say.”

Then the idea took hold that Dan’l was a wise man and could charm, stanch blood by his blessing, drive away warts, cure milk that would not turn to butter, and counteract ill wishes.

And to this he lent himself. He had not sought it. It was forced upon him. It might do good, he argued; it could do no harm. So his fame grew, and he was regarded with reverential awe. Whether he believed in his own efficacy as a healer, I cannot say; his gifts of healing were bruited about, his failures passed into the limbo of oblivion. He did not set store on his reputed powers, he rather disparaged them, or shrugged his shoulders and professed scepticism over them, and he always said: “Well, if good comes of it, it is not from me—you must know that—but from the great Healer of all. Some cures wi’ drugs, and some wi’ their touch. There are differences of administration.”

Dan’l Coombe was a regular churchgoer.

Woe betide the parson if, in preaching without a book, he quoted Scripture inaccurately. He became in time accustomed to find the tailor standing at the foot of the church steps awaiting him after service. Then would come the familiar touch of the hat, and, “I beg your pardon, sir, but did you not put in a the where there oughtn’t to be, in that there text from St. Paul to the Corinthians?”

Or else: “Please, sir, did you use the right word in that there quotation from the Acts?”

“Dear Mr. Coombe, I took the marginal rendering.”

“Oh, the margin. I don’t hold by that.”

Mr. Coombe was very much perplexed when the new version of the Scriptures was issued. It happily was not read in the parish church. I verily believe it would have driven him from it. “Nasty, lumpy thing,” he said; “it is like eatin’ bad-made porridge. Nothin’ smooth about it. Bits come in your mouth and teeth at every moment.”

He resented it as an immoral thing. “And to think,” said he, “that Christian money should ha’ been spent by Government out of our pockets to put this here stumbling-block in the way of the blind! It’s wicked, and I’ll vote against Government next ’lection.”

As already said, there had been an attempt made by scaling to peer in at the holes in Coombe’s shutter, to see him at his nightly occupation. It had failed. After that he pasted two pieces of oiled paper over the openings, and thus prevented any further observations being made.

So time went on, and his neighbours became accustomed to the two yellow eyes, and no longer actively concerned themselves about his doings, though still a good deal of puzzlement remained about his nightly doings.

“To my knowing,” said Mrs. Bacon to Mrs. Jones, “he had his lamp burning till half-past ten at night. Now he don’t burn a lamp all that time for the sake of wasting oil.”

“I’ll tell you something more,” said Mrs. Jones; “it isn’t oil only as he consumes, it is ink as well. He has bought ten penny ink-pots, and one wi’ red ink, at Miss Buck’s shop in a twelvemonth. What do he want wi’ so much ink? He can’t drink it.”

“He is writing a book. Take my word for it.”

“A book! What about? He don’t know nothing.”

“Poetry, perhaps. A man may write that with his head empty. Every fool knows that.”

“He don’t look like a poet—not when he’s unshaved.”

“I’ll tell you what—it may be his cures, and the way to strike wounds and white swellings.”

“Ah! there, that is more likely.”

And this purchase of penny pots of ink continued for thirty-five years. At the rate of ten a year, that would be three hundred and fifty pots of black ink. It was amazing. For what could he want so much ink? It was also ascertained that he sent by the carrier periodically to the market town for copy-books, and had them out in packets of a dozen at a time. What could he be putting into all those copy-books?

At last the mystery came out—not indeed to the whole parish, but into the ear of the rector was it revealed.

One Saturday evening the parson was informed that Mr. Coombe desired to speak with him very privately. The tailor was shown into the study. He brought with him a huge parcel strapped to his back.

Of this he relieved himself and placed it on the table.

“There, sir,” said he, “my life’s labour is accomplished. Now it is for the world.”

“What is it, Mr. Coombe?”

“You shall see, sir, you shall see. For thirty-five years have I been engaged on it every night. I have gone over the work most carefully three and four times, and I am quite certain that there is not an error in it. It has been my great labour to be strictly correct. I do not believe there is a the wrong. I began it thirty-five years agone last Friday, and last Friday I concluded it. Every man has his proper vocation and work to do. I found mine thirty-five years ago, and I have laboured at it unflaggingly since. It is done, and when the Lord pleases to call me, I shall be ready to go. But, sir—I don’t mean to deny it—I should ha’ been terrible sorry to ha’ submitted to be called away before I’d done the job.”

“I congratulate you on having accomplished what I am sure is a useful task. But what is it, Mr. Coombe?”

“You shall see, sir. You shall see.”

He went to his parcel and undid the string. There appeared an enormous pile of copy-books. He took from the heap two of them, and brought them to the rector.

“There, sir,” said he, “if you’d had this you would not have made—you’ll excuse my saying it—such a terrible lot o’ mistakes in quoting Scripture. It is, sir—IT IS—IT IS”—he raised himself and rubbed his hair up, then smoothed his fresh-shaven chin—“it is, sir, a dictionary of every word in Scripture, so that you have but to look out the word, and then you find where it comes in any book of the whole Bible.”

His face glowed with triumph.

“Just think, sir, what a boon to ministers of the Gospel! Just think what a help to teachers! How ever can English folk have got along for all this time without such an aid as this? It is better, sir, this, than conquering the Russians and taking of Sebastopol. It is grander this than Columbus discovering the New World. Now, what do you think, sir?”

“But, my dear Mr. Coombe——!”

“One moment, sir, and I shall have done. I intend to get it printed. It shall be ‘Coombe’s Dictionary of Bible Words,’ and will become a handbook in every library of God-fearing and Scripture-loving men and women. As for any profits from the sale, of that I care not—that’s no odds to me. It is the good it will do that I think of.”

“But, my dear Mr. Coombe——”

The rector rose and went to his shelf.

“The thing has already been done. Here it is: ‘Cruden’s Concordance to the Holy Scriptures.’ It was published in 1761, and has gone through innumerable editions since.”

The old man stood as though turned to stone.

“The thing already done!” he gasped.

The rector had no heart to say more. He bitterly regretted that he had blurted out the truth so abruptly.

“The thing already done! Thirty-five years spent for naught.”

Then he did up his packet again. But the tears dropped on it. This was to him a blow more crushing than he could bear.

He hoisted his parcel on his back, touched his forehead, but held the parson’s hand and wrung it, as speechlessly he left the house. His heart was too full for mere words.

The old man broke down rapidly after that. The object of his life was gone. The great ambition of his days was extinguished.

One day when he was being visited by the rector, as he lay on his death-bed, he said—

“Sir, I ha’ been thinking and worriting over my work o’ thirty-five years, and axing of myself whether it were all labour lost and time thrown away. It have fretted me terrible. But I seems to see now as it was not lost—not to me anyhow, for I got the Scriptur’ that into me that it became to me like the blood in my veins and the marrow in my bones—and it is my stand-by now.”

TIMOTHY SLOUCH

TIMOTHY SLOUCH

“Mother,” said John French, “you say that everybody has his place in the world, and his mission. I’d precious like to know what is Tim Slouch’s place and what his mission. It seems to me there never was such a chap for tumbling out of his place when he has got one, and bless’d if I know what good he can or does do, put him where you will.”

John French was a fine young fellow, the only son of a small farmer lately deceased, unmarried, who carried on the farm and was the pride of his mother.

Very much about the same time the Squire, who was riding round his estate to see how the planting was going on, what cottagers wanted repairs done to their roofs, torn by a late gale, what farmers needed additional sheds—for he was a man to see to these things himself—encountered the parson, who had been parishing. He drew rein.

“How d’ye do, rector? I say, I say. There is that Timothy Slouch out of work again. Upon my soul, I don’t know how the man could get on, were it not for Sela; and what the woman was thinking of when she took such a fellow—that beats my comprehension. They say that to every man there is a hole in the world into which he may be pegged, but that hole has not yet been found by Slouch.”

“I beg your pardon, Squire, he has found too many holes, and has never remained pegged into any one of them.”

“True, true. But, I say, I say. They must not starve. Though, bless my soul, a little starving might drive Timothy home into the first peg-hole that offers; but Sela—my wife has a great regard for her. So I have set the fellow a job.”

“And—what is that?”

“Well, I have given him the rhododendrons on the roadside and along the drives to peg down. It must be done, and now is the time. Surely he can do that. Fifteen shillings a week; and Sela picks up something.”

“I hear he has had notice to leave his cottage.”

“Yes—it is not mine, and—well, my agent has been peremptory with me. He says, ‘Give him work if you will, but I forewarn you it is throwing good money away; but do not get him rooted in the parish, or you will never be rid of him.’”

“Well,” said the rector, “he is not one of my sheep. He is in another parish, but Sela was—and why she married him——”

“Just what I say. But I say, I say—she was a poor girl, an orphan, and, I suppose, thought the man must find work, and would labour to maintain her.”

“And now she has to maintain him. Whatever can be the meaning of heaven in sending such men into the world?”

It was the rector who said that, and next moment he reproached himself for having said it.

Timothy—Slouch was not his surname, it was Luppencott, but every one called him Slouch, as expressive of the man, his walk and way, not only on the road and at his work, but throughout life’s course—Timothy had been brought up as a blacksmith, but had never advanced beyond blowing the bellows and hammering. He could do both, but not make a screw or bend a bar into a crook. All his experience had had no other effect than to convince his masters of his incapacity.

He lamed every horse he attempted to shoe, so that he was at once dismissed by the farrier to whom he offered his services. For a while he held a place as bellows-blower, at twelve shillings, but the blacksmith saw that he could get a boy at six who could do as well, and when Tim had the impudence to demand a full wage of fifteen the master dismissed him. “Tim,” said he, “I only took you on because I thought I might get some work out of you at the anvil. Why, confound you, you cannot even make a nail!”

Then Slouch heard that there was a new line being made at a distance, and he offered his services on that. As blacksmith he was not needed, but he was engaged as a navvy. But he did not remain long there; he was speedily dismissed. He did not arrive in time of a morning, he loitered over his work, and made other men loiter. What work he did, he did so badly that it had to be undone. So he came back, and brought no accumulation of wage in his pocket.

Next he offered himself to a blacksmith in a town distant ten miles, and was engaged. He kept the place about four months, returning to his wife every Saturday, and going back to his lodgings in the town on Sunday evenings. Then he was again out of work. He asked the Squire of the adjoining parish to give him employment. The reason why he was out of work was, said he, that what with the heavy rent he had to pay for his lodgings in the town, and what with the shoe-leather he wore out in his trudges to and fro, and on account of a sore foot, caused by an ingrowing nail on one of his toes, he was obliged to abandon his situation. Very likely this was all true, but it is also just as likely that the situation was closed up against him. His allegation was not inquired into. The Squire gave him his rhododendrons to peg.

“My dear,” said the Squire to his wife, “I think he cannot go wrong there—and for Sela’s sake we will give him the chance.”

Sela had been a poor girl who had attended to her mother, a widow confined for six years to her bed, or to a chair, and who had been maintained by the parish and such alms as were sent from the rectory and the hall.

When, finally, the mother died and Sela was left alone, she went into service at a farmhouse, where the mistress was somewhat of a termagant.

She did not long remain there, for Timothy Luppencott offered her his hand, his heart, and his hearth, and she accepted him. Sela had always been accustomed to poverty, and therefore did not shrink from the prospect of being the wife of a poor man. She had attended to a helpless mother; she found, when wedded, that she was tied to an almost helpless man.

Sela had been a good daughter, she was a good wife, and, in time, also a good mother. She had first one child and then another, and one of these proved rickety; very probably this was due to insufficiency of food. For Timothy when in work, and earning good wage, could not be relied upon to bring home a sufficiency for the support of his family. He was not a drunken man, but he went to the public-house, and he liked to enjoy himself. If there were a ploughing match, a harvest festival, a cricket match, a wild-beast show, a bazaar, Tim would be there. The work might go hang, he said, he must see the fun.

If Sela had seven shillings a week on which to clothe and feed herself and the children, she thought herself in luck’s way. When she was able she went out charing; but when the children arrived she could not do this, and then dire distress came on her.

She had been a particularly pretty girl, and she was a very sweet-looking woman, with great, soft brown eyes; but there was firmness about her lips.

Every one pitied Sela. She was as one born to trouble. She had a patient, suffering look about her brow and temples that told a tale of years of endurance and privation. But she did not murmur. She did not scold Tim. There was not the excuse for him, if he stayed at the tavern, that he was “jawed” at home.

“Really,” said the rector’s wife, “it is a satisfaction to give Sela any of the children’s old garments. She is wonderful with her needle. I did feel almost ashamed to let her have little Mary’s old school-dress, it was so frayed, so spotted, and so untidy. And will you believe it—her child was at church on Sunday in that identical gown! She had turned it, and contrived it in such a manner, that I could hardly believe my eyes. That is a woman to help, because every little help is put out to usury. But Timothy; oh, what a man he is!”

One Sunday, after service, the Squire awaited the rector as he left the church.

No sooner had the latter descended the avenue and the churchyard steps, than the Squire—without any other salutation than, “I say! I say!”—plunged into the matter that occupied his mind, and of which he desired to disburden himself.

“Rector, that Timothy Slouch.”

“Well, Squire?”

“I say—I say, you know that I set him the rhododendrons to pin down.”

“I know it.”

“Will you believe me—he has made a mess of the job.”

“I can believe a good deal of Slouch.”

“He has actually split them so as to get the refractory branches down, and where he has pegged, and not torn asunder, has done it so inefficiently that when his work is effected, in twenty-five minutes they have slipped their pegs out, and are erect as before.”

“How tiresome!”

“Yes, and he has half-ruined some of my choicest and most expensive varieties. He has riven and wrenched them about and knocked off the flowering buds. I was so angry I dismissed him. Not another day’s work shall he have from me. I am sorry—for Sela’s sake. But it cannot be helped.”

For three weeks Tim lounged about, said he was looking for work; but if he did, looked for it in the wrong quarters. Then he appeared before the rector—not of his own parish, but the parson whose wife had befriended Sela, and said that he had heard of work in South Wales. He had a cousin there who was in a colliery, and who wrote that there was always a place for a handy man, and above all for a blacksmith.

“Well,” said the rector hesitatingly—he saw what Tim was aiming at—“but exactly, are you the handy man?”

“I can turn my hand to anything. I have been in so many different situations. I have been blacksmith, and I have done farm-work, and recently, I may say, I have been a gardener.”

“I daresay you can turn your hand to anything, but can you keep it where turned?”

“One can but try. Luck so far has been against me. My notion is, sir, if you would draw me up a brief, I will try to collect money to take me to Wales, and when there and have got a situation, I will send for my wife and children to live there with me; one must first have a nest into which to put one’s doves.”

“Quite so. Well, we will give you one chance more.”

So the rector drew out a brief. It was cautiously worded; it contained a statement in accordance with Timothy’s representations.

Then he headed the subscription list with a pound. The Squire was next approached, and he gave thirty shillings, and his wife another ten.

Timothy spent a fortnight in rambling about the country asking for money, and he probably collected something like ten pounds.

Then off he started and was not heard of for a month. Inquiries were made about him from Sela. She had received no letter from him. Moreover, it leaked out that Slouch had carried away with him in his pocket all the money subscribed, and had not left a penny with his wife.

This made the neighbourhood very angry, the most angry were those who had not subscribed. Those who had, began to fear they had been hoaxed, but kept quiet; because no man likes to have it thought he has been imposed upon.

Presently, however, up turned Timothy. Work was slack in South Wales, he had been unable to find employ. The rector, very irate, sent for him, questioned him, and was convinced that the fellow had not been to Wales at all. He may have started with the intention of going there, that was all. The rector taxed him with it. Slouch was obliged, at last, to admit that he had not reached his destination. “You see, sir,” said he, “I got half-way and then heard such bad accounts, as hands was bein’ dismissed—that I thought it would be wasting money to go on.”

“Then you have brought some money back?”

“Well, no, sir, I can’t say I have. It comes very expensive travelling. But if your honour would be so good as to draw me up another brief——”

Then the parson flushed very red and bade the man be gone. Not another scrap of help should Slouch have from him.

And, indeed, Timothy found the whole district up in arms against him, and ready to kick him out of it, and would have done so—only that it pitied and respected Sela.

“Out he must go,” said the Squire. “He had notice to quit at Lady Day, and on Lady Day he goes and into no cottage of mine shall he come.”

Whither did he go? He wandered seeking shelter; every house was refused, till he came to John French.

A few hours later, Mrs. French exclaimed: “John! you don’t mean to tell me that you have let those good-for-naughts—the Slouches—into your cottage?”

“I have, mother, they cannot lie in the road under a hedge, and they were turned out to-day. Timothy has, at last, found an occupation—he is taken on to break stones for the road. He cannot go wrong in that. It is what any fool can do. As to the cottage, it is unoccupied, and has been for a twelvemonth. I have let him move his few sticks of furniture into it, and he is to pay me a weekly rent of a shilling. There is a bit of garden——”

“Which he will neglect.”

“Sela kept the garden where they were before, and she will attend to this. She has poultry.”

“Well—may you not regret it.”

So Sela and Tim and the children were admitted into French’s cottage, and with them moved a great number of cocks and hens, geese and ducks. Sela was a clever woman with fowls. Indeed, it was through her poultry that she had maintained herself and children, and had paid the rent. She sold eggs to the regrater every week, and spring chickens were readily purchased by the gentry around.

When it was known that the Luppencotts were given a new spell of occupation in the neighbourhood, that neighbourhood sighed, and said with one voice, “Well, we did think we were quit of Slouch, but we should have been sorry to lose Sela.”

Now it might have been supposed that on the roads, cleaning water-tables, scraping, in winter breaking stones, in autumn spreading them, gave work that it was not possible for Slouch to fail to execute satisfactorily. In fact, he was seen for one entire winter engaged on stone heaps, with a long-handled hammer cracking stones.

But then the heaps knew him no more. He was again out of work. He had thrown it up in a fit of spleen, because an old man was employed as well, to save his “coming on the parish,” and this Timothy regarded as a slight. Added to this, he heard that a new blacksmithery was being started in an adjoining parish, and, sanguine that he could obtain occupation there, he threw up his engagement on the roads before he had secured that at the forge.

And, naturally, he did not get the place on which he had calculated. He was too well known to be given it. Then ensued the familiar ramble in quest of employment, but no farmer, no landowner would give him any.

The family would have starved, but for Sela and her poultry. She did not make much by her fowls, as corn was dear, but they had, and were allowed, the run of the fields and arishes of John French. Then, also, she got plenty of skimmed milk from the farm, that was only a halfpenny per quart, and with milk none can starve. Sela had gleaned at harvest, and gleaned sufficient wheat to make bread for herself and children.

Mrs. French often saw her—sent for her to assist in cleaning the house, gave her a spare-rib when she killed a pig—showed her many little kindnesses. But the old woman had, as she said, no patience with Tim, and with him would not change a word.

Sela had a cool and clean hand, and was invaluable in butter-making. That Mrs. French ascertained; so in this new cottage the Slouches got on well, but no credit attached to Tim for that.

One day Tim was climbing along a rafter of an old outhouse in quest of eggs, as one of his wife’s hens had stolen a nest, when the rafter snapped—it was rotten—and down fell Tim on his head, and broke his neck. He was taken up dead.

The entire neighbourhood at once rushed to one conclusion: “It is just as well. He never was of any use to any one when alive.”

And once again John French said to his mother: “There’s an end of him, and I’d precious like to know what was Tim’s place in the world, and what his mission?”

And the rector said to the Squire, after the funeral, “Well, at last poor Slouch has found the hole in which he must stick. I have wondered, and do wonder still, what he was sent here for.”

A year passed, and to the surprise of most people, John French married Sela Luppencott.

“It’s a wonderful lift in life for her,” said some.

“But it is such a come down for him,” said others.

What John French said of it was this. He said it to his mother: “Do you mind what I asked some time agone about that Tim Slouch; whatever could have been his work and mission in the world? It often puzzled me. But I have found it out. He was the making of Sela. His very helplessness made her industrious, his thriftlessness made her saving, his dreadfully trying ways made her patient and enduring, his imprudence made her foreseeing. I do believe the work and mission of that fellow was just this—to make for me the very model and perfection of a farmer’s wife, and then to break his neck.”

“Aye,” said Mrs. French; “and the way he shifted about till he’d settled down close by us. ’Twere all ordained, I believe.”

“Upon my word,” said the rector one day to the Squire, “the proper thing to do, Tim has done at last: to break his neck and leave his widow to John French.”

“Aye,” replied the Squire, “and Tim has found his hole at last into which he will remain pegged.”

DOBLE DREWE

DOBLE DREWE

Doble Drewe was plumber, glazier, paperhanger, and house-painter; chiefly plumber, but also a most excellent house-painter.

Whatever Doble undertook in his profession he executed in the very best manner. If any fault appeared, it was in the quality of the material used, not in his use of it; and, consciously, he never would employ for his work any material but what he believed to be the very best. He spared himself no pains, he cut no time short over his work. The work he undertook, he undertook to do as well as it was possible for him to execute it, and I really believe he had not his superior in his own line in England, and if not in England then certainly not in Europe, and if not in Europe then—it goes without saying—not in the round world.

But he took, it must be conceded, a very long time over his task. Most persons who employed him lost patience because he was so slow. But slow he was not when one considered the quality of his workmanship. He scamped nothing. When he painted even a railing, he took infinite pains to holystone the wood till he had cleaned off every particle of old paint and had got the wood perfectly smooth. And each coat of paint was laid on with the greatest nicety. There was a carved oak table that once stood in our drawing-room. The fashion had set in for satin-wood, so the room was done up, doors, cabinets, tables, all to look like satin-wood. And all was done by Doble Drewe.

Most lovely make-believe satin-wood he produced. That was before the days of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” when Mr. Ruskin turned his bull’s-eye on shams, and showed that they were morally wrong. At the period of which I write everything must be a sham or it was not fashionable. Wood was painted to look like marble, and cement to imitate wood.

Well—about this carved table.

The other day I sent it to a furniture-dealer to remove the paint and develop the oak.

After a while it returned to me, and with it came the bill.

“Really, sir,” said the dealer, “I am ashamed at having asked so much, but it is incredible what labour it has taken my men to clean that table. Never saw nothing like it before. The paint simply wouldn’t come off. It was like taking the skin off a living man.”

“Ah!” said I, “Doble Drewe’s work.”

But if Doble was slow over his tasks, he was slower in sending in his bills. Why he did not make them out and transmit them to his customers till three, four, even six years had elapsed, I cannot tell, but it is a fact. And this lost him customers who could pay, because they did not relish having to give out money over items every one of which had passed from their memories. The only customers he gained were those thriftless creatures who did not want to pay there and then, and who hoped they might be more flush of money in a few years’ time than they were in the present. And some of his customers died, others became bankrupt, or left the neighbourhood without leaving their addresses, before Doble Drewe’s bills were ready. I know that mine came in for work done for my father five years after my father was dead, and I had thought all had been settled, probate paid, with deductions for bills, and Doble’s, of course, not deducted because I did not know it was due.

Now although scrupulously conscientious over his plumbing and glazing, his paper-hanging and painting, and though whilst on his work he had all his faculties engaged upon it, yet Doble had a soul for something very much above lead and paint and putty.

I found it out one day in this wise.

My mother had a marvellously lovely voice, and she was sitting in the drawing-room that had been satin-wooded, at the piano playing and singing, whilst Drewe was in the hall labouring at painting the panels to look like pollard willow, stippling, brushing, graining, putting in plenty of knots where no knots really were, and running the grain across the direction where its course by nature lay.

I happened to be in another part of the hall to that where was the painter on his knees engaged at his work. He did not know that I was there—so quiet was I, engaged on Captain Maryatt’s “Snarley Yow, or the Dog Fiend.”

If I remember aright my mother was singing Haynes Bayley’s “We met, ’twas in a crowd.”

It was not a song for a soprano or for a woman, and though she went through with it, seemed unsatisfied, put the book away and was for a while engaged in finding another piece.

I thought I heard a sound from the corner where the painter was. I looked up from “Snarley Yow,” but seeing nothing particular, looked again at the entrancing book.

Then my mother broke out in the song from the “Creation,” “With verdure clad.”

Before she had got half-way through I was sure that I heard something from Doble. It was a sob.

I stood up—but he put back his hand to stay me as I approached.

I waited till my mother’s singing and the chords of the piano had ceased to vibrate, and then I said to him:

“Are you unwell, Mr. Drewe? Is there anything I can get for you?”

He had a choke in his voice, and I saw as he turned that his cheeks were wet with tears.

“Excuse me, young gentleman,” said he. “Don’t mind me. I cannot help it. Indeed, indeed, I cannot refrain. When I hear music, good, beautiful music, it makes me cry like a woman—like a woman. You’ll excuse me. Go on with your book and don’t mind me.”

I had many a talk with the plumber after this, and I found that it was so with him. When he heard good music he passed into a transport, an ecstasy. But then, how seldom it was that he did hear and could hear good music! He lived in a little village some ten miles from a town, and that a sleepy, stagnant country town, and no railway within thirty miles.

Nowadays we have in our little centres all over England good choral societies, and concerts are given not only by amateurs, that may sing well, but often only think that they do so, but also by touring professionals.

It was not so when I was a boy. Then there were no such things as choral unions and concerts, out of the capital of the county, that was accessible only by coach.

Then locomotion was not easy; and the utmost length of a villager’s journey was to the market town and that only on a market day.

At that time the parish church indeed had its orchestra and its choir, but oh! what appalling, agonising productions were the concerted pieces there produced.

Poor Doble Drewe suffered acutely when an instrument was out of tune, and a piece played out of time; and when were all the instruments in the west gallery either in tune or in time the one with the other?

Doble’s sole ambition was to obtain a piano, and he did purchase one out of the savings of many years, to discover that he was powerless to play it, that his ardent musical soul could not relax his stiff fingers and enable them to play even a simple piece. He had not learned as a boy, and now it was too late. “Now look you here,” said Doble. “This is a terrible disappointment to me, but I’ll not be beat. I’ll have good music in my house somehow. I’ll marry a wife, and get a little boy or girl; it don’t matter which, and I’ll have that there child taught so soon as ever it has the sense to know its notes; and when I’m an old man I’ll just sit by the fire and listen, and my lad or my little maid shall play to me by the hour. I’ll have Handel, and Haydn, and Bishop, and Mozart. Ah! them will be times worth living for. I’ll go about it at once.”

And he did. He married a young woman, not because she could play a piano, for at that period there were none to be had in his walk of life who could finger an instrument, but with the prospect of becoming a parent of one who could be educated into a skilful player.

“You see,” said he, “there is the piano. All it wants is some one to play on it. It is only a matter of waiting some fifteen or eighteen years, and then—then my time of enjoyment will have come. Then—then I shall have music.”

But no. Again he encountered disappointment. No child was given to him, and the wife he had selected, instead of producing harmony in the home, was a fruitful source of discord. She had a tongue and she had a temper, and she was no idealist, and could not abide just those two things which made Doble what he was—a painstaking, scrupulous workman, and withal a dreamer.

“Why, Doble,” she would say, “what’s the good of your doing your jobs so slow and so fine? There’s other chaps get twice the work you do by just slurring along.”

“I cannot do other. It would go against my conscience.”

“And as to your dratted music. You ain’t got none, and you can’t have none, so just lump it and be joyful.”

To that he made no reply. No answer he could have made would have been comprehensible by her.

So time went on.

Doble’s back became bent. His look became more abstracted. His was an earnest face, with a questioning, craving, seeking look upon it.

Then came a chance.

In the cathedral city the “Messiah” was to be performed, and the choir of the minster were to take part, also sundry amateurs, and Formes and Albani were to sing.

I gave myself a treat. I went up, and took the plumber with me.

I do not think that Drewe had any conception of what massive chorus singing could be, or what cultured voices could effect in solos. Remember, he never had heard good music in his own village; only direful failures to achieve something that was supposed to be music. His only—I really believe his only previous acquaintance with good singing was his hearing my mother sing.

As to describing how Doble looked through that concert, I cannot. He was as one not himself, rigid, rapt, not of this earth, with the great tears rolling down his thin, worn cheeks; he sat with his hands folded between his knees and never moved—no more than had he been of stone.

Nor did Doble speak much after it; he went back to his lodging as in a dream.

And as we returned by coach next day he was reticent. I knew what was passing within the man, and did not tease him with questions, but as he left the coach at his door, he squeezed my hand and said: “Sir, I shall live on that all the rest of my days.”

In after years I have often pondered over Doble. It has seemed to me one of those unfathomable mysteries of life that there should be in a poor little country village a man created by God, endowed by God with high-strung musical faculties, yet absolutely incapacitated by position and circumstances for making any use of his great gift, for deriving any enjoyment from it. Why was not Doble placed somewhere else? Why was Doble given a faculty he could not use?

Many years passed, and I was cast into a far distant portion of England, yet I may say that this problem continually troubled me.

Once I came across a farmer’s wife in a low and peculiarly ugly portion of the East coast of England, and she had the same sort of craving soul after beautiful scenery. “I feel,” she said to me once, “as though I would like to look on the Alps—and die.”

It is the same throughout the world of men. It must have been so through countless ages. There must have been Mozarts and Purcells in the ages that were before musical instruments were made, and the laws of harmony laid down and concerted music was made possible. Hundreds and thousands of Doble Drewes over all the earth and in all time. A mystery! A perplexing problem I could not solve. It haunted me. It distressed me.

A few years ago I was at my old home, and I was talking to the curate of the parish in which Doble Drewe had lived.

“So,” said I, “poor old Drewe is dead.”

“Yes, and buried.”

“I wish——”

“You were not in this neighbourhood then?”

“No. Tell me something about the old fellow.”

“I really do not think I have anything to tell.”

“Was his wife a little less nagging as he grew older and faded away?”

He shook his head. “Tongues grow sharper the more they are used.”

“And—at the last? Had he much pain?”

“I was with him when he died. The woman was quiet then. He lay for some hours as though insensible, and I thought the end might be at any moment. All at once he moved, held up his hand, assumed a listening attitude, a wonderful light and smile broke out over his face; he seemed to be hearkening attentively. Then he said, ‘Now,’ laid his head on the pillow, and was dead.”

That night, after the curate was gone, I rocked in my chair, musing, looking into the fire. I muttered, “Poor old Doble!” then after a pause, said, “Happy Doble!” and then, “Now I also understand.”

Thereupon I took down a little book I had of Dr. Alexander’s poems, and read:

“Down below, a sad mysterious music,

Wailing through the woods and on the shore,

Burdened with a grand majestic secret,

That keeps sweeping from us evermore.

Up above, a music that entwineth

With eternal threads of golden sound,

The great poem of this strange existence,

All whose wondrous meaning hath been found.”

MARY TREMBATH

MARY TREMBATH

This is a sketch—no more—of a woman who was to me, and is still, a problem for a casuist to solve. How so, you shall hear in the sequel. But, to begin, you must know her life’s story.

Mary was, when a young married woman in a Cornish fishing-village, occupying a cottage at some little distance from the harbour. She must have been a fine woman then, she is fine in her old age.

“Ah!” said she, “you have been to Maker? Did you go about in a boat there?”

“Yes.” I had boated whilst staying in the place.

“And did you see the Lady Rock?”

“Yes, it was pointed out to me.”

“And the Dead Man’s Rock?”

“I think so.”

“Well, it is all along of the Lady Rock that I was a widow.”

“How so?”

“You have heard tell about the Lady?”

I had. The Lady is a little piece of white feldspar in a cliff that rises out of the sea, with a shelf before it, and this piece of quartz or feldspar bears a singular resemblance to the shape of a woman draped in white. Whenever the fishermen return with their trawls, they cast a few of the mackerel or herring they have caught on to the shelf before the White Lady, and, unless this be done, this oblation made, ill-luck will attend the fishermen on their next expedition; their nets will be caught and torn as by invisible hands in the deep, or no fish will enter the seines, or, worse still, the boat will capsize and possibly the fishermen on board will be drowned. The Dead Man’s Rock is another portion of cliff nearly horizontal, sometimes washed by the waves, and on this lies a mass of the same white spar, bearing something approaching the form of a corpse. But it demands more fancy to distinguish the corpse than the Lady.

“I will tell you the whole story, sir,” said Mary. “My husband, Thomas Trembath, was a fine standing-up man as you’d see anywhere. He was a fisherman, and a daring fellow. I don’t say he did not do a bit of smuggling now and then, but, lor’, sir! they all did, and if they didn’t, more shame to them, with their opportunities. Well, sir, I don’t say he was a Free-thinker, because he wasn’t, but he was a sort of no-thinker—no ways, if you can understand me. Well then, one day, as they was coming in after there had been a shoal, there was a lot of boats out that day, and as the boats went by, all the cap’ns threw a few whiting on to the ledge afore the Lady. But my Thomas he was a daring unconsiderate chap, and they’d caught a young dog-fish that day—the fishermen sometimes bring ’em home and gets a few pence by showing ’em, for they’re terrible mischievous beasts, and eat a lot of mackerel and whiting and just anything they can. Well, sir, will you believe it, when Thomas comes alongside of the Lady Rock, what did he do, in a fit o’ daring, but heave the dog-fish on to the shelf afore her!”

Mary paused and looked at me, expecting me to appear aghast at such an outrage.

“The other men, they was astounded and afraid after that—no man would go in the boat with him. And next time he wanted to go, they shook their heads, and said they weren’t going to court ill-luck. So Thomas—he was that reckless and regardless—he said he would go alone. And go alone he did. There was no wind and the sea was smooth—but he never came back. I reckon he alone couldn’t manage the boat and something went wrong. What it was I can’t tell—but he never came back. That’s what followed chucking of a dog-fish at the White Lady.”

After her husband’s death, Mary took to peddling. She was a middle-aged woman when I knew her, stoutly built, broad shouldered, with a hale and ruddy face; she wore short skirts, a man’s long greatcoat over her back, and a man’s hat on her head. Slung across her shoulder by a strap was a case that contained needles, thread, pins, and tape. She carried a staff, some four feet long, in her hand, not of bamboo but of ash, and she strode along the roads faster than a horse could walk.

There was not a farm, not a cottage within miles around, in which Mary was not known, and where she did not do business.

How she picked up a living on the things she sold was a marvel to me. The profits on each item can have been only small, and the amount of country she travelled over to sell these little articles was so great, that she must have worn out much shoe-leather.

She was abroad in all weathers and at all hours.

I said to her one day: “Why, Mary, are not you afraid in the lone lanes, at night?”

“Lor’, sir, not I. If there were a man as were imperent, I’d lay my stick across him, and he’d bite the dust. And as to spirits, I never meddles with them, and so they don’t meddle with me.”

“Spirits! Why, you never have the chance of interfering with their little games.”

She shook her head. “I won’t say that, sir,” she answered. “There’s queer things about at night, but I always gives ’em a good word and a text of Scriptur’, and they don’t hurt me.”

It used to be thought that a comet presaged war, that its tail tickled all the elements of irritation in the world and sent nations and kingdoms flying at one another. But this human comet, Mary Trembath, revolving in her elliptical orbits through the country, left peace and goodwill after her. She was an inveterate gossip, a chatterbox. She loved, when she had sold a paper of pins or a knot of tape, to sit and have a dish of tea and a bit of cake and talk, but never, so far as I am aware, did evil spring from what she said; on the contrary, she left those she had been with better disposed towards one another than they had been before.

A somewhat singular instance of this occurs to my memory.

There were two old ladies, spinsters both, who lived within a mile and a half of each other. One was the housekeeper to her brother, a farmer, who was a widower, and the other resided in a pleasant cottage of her own, surrounded by trees, smothered in laurels and snowberries that cut off sun and air, and made garden and house smell of mildew and moth. Now this old lady had a sharp tongue and a lively imagination, and had the credit of being a mischief-maker.

All at once a tremendous feud broke out between these spinsters. It involved more than themselves, their relations, their acquaintances also, in the village. Miss Spindle had said something very nasty and galling of Miss Shank that was absolutely untrue, but so injurious that Miss Shank vowed she would have the law of her.

Hearing of this, and finding the entire village agitated by the controversy, I tried to discover the truth—whether Miss Spindle really had spoken such cruel things of Miss Shank. I tracked the story from one to another, and found that gradually every objectionable expression and statement fell off en route as an assertion, and that what had actually been said was entirely harmless, for it was not said of Miss Shank at all, but of the shank-bone of mutton on which Miss Spindle had been making her meal. In fact, all this good lady had said was, that the shank had been served so often that it was becoming high and discoloured, and had best be hashed. Out of this a mountain of malignant insinuation and defamatory assertion had been evolved.

When I had got to the bottom of the story, I rushed off to Miss Shank to explain that the whole thing was a misunderstanding, and ought to be put aside, and peace made. But the lady was furious; she turned on me as a mischief-maker and a meddlesome person for having dared to interfere. She knew that what Miss Spindle meant was to cast slurs at her, and she employed the mutton-bone as a subterfuge so as to avoid prosecution. There it was, worse than ever. I was out with one. I went to Miss Spindle. She was exasperated because Miss Shank had dared to believe that what she had spoken about the mutton applied to her, and she broke into a torrent of abuse of me for interfering in the matter.

There it was; I was out with the other.

As I retired disconsolately, I ran across Mary Trembath, and somehow, for my heart was full, I told her of my ill success.

“Leave it to me,” said Mary.

What was my amazement next Sunday to see Miss Spindle and Miss Shank embracing in the churchyard after service, and walking off arm-in-arm and chatting affectionately together!

How had this transformation in the women, this change in the situation, been brought about? Only with difficulty did I get at the bottom of it. Mary, whilst selling a hank of coloured wool to Miss Spindle, had contrived to hint to her that Farmer Shank, the widower, was terribly concerned over the quarrel, as he was actually much enamoured of the fair spinster who lived in the bower of laurels.

Then, Mary Trembath had gone to the farm of the Shanks, and had let out in confidence that Miss Spindle’s conscience so pained her over the mischief done, that she was sending for the lawyer to alter her will and make over Laurel Cottage and her few hundreds in the Three per Cents. to the woman she had so grievously injured.

When I learned this, I thought I would have it out with Mary. She pulled a face as I reproached her.

“Please, sir, I didn’t say it was so; I merely hinted such a thing might be. They jumped at the conclusion, and turned what might be into it is so.”

“But, Mary, it was not true.”

“How do you know that, sir?—all things are possible.”

That was Mary Trembath’s secret way of making smooth water wherever she went. She was not a deliberate liar, even for a good purpose; but she managed somehow to create impressions that served to bring quarrels to an end, to make people once indifferent to each other become fast friends, and to dispel pretty nearly every cloud that hung over a parish in which she peddled.

And now you will see how it is that, as I said, she provided me with a problem only a casuist can solve. Of course, it is never right to speak an untruth even for a good end. Mary was too conscientious to say straight out what was false, but she had a clever, subtle manner of bewildering people through her hints and suggestions, till she induced them to deceive themselves, and that always with a good object in view.

She was a peacemaker, eminently a peacemaker, but was she justified in the method she employed to make peace?

THE OLD POST-BOY

THE OLD POST-BOY

One of the most characteristic and interesting features of old English life has passed away beyond recall—the post-boy. Whatever his age he was always a boy, for he always wore the short jacket. His confrère the postillion has lasted on somewhat longer on the Continent, but he also is nearly gone. He was a picturesque feature, very different from the dapper English post-boy.

The latter figures in most old English romances. He took a part in all elopements, and was concerned in the conveyance of Queen’s Messengers with despatches; he was suspected of affording information to and furnishing opportunities for highwaymen.

Who does not remember the flight of Jingle with Miss Rachel, in “Pickwick,” and the pursuit by Mr. Wardle and Mr. Pickwick?

But the post-boy has taken more than a subsidiary part in a story, he is the hero in Smollett’s “Humphry Clinker,” and he figures as a leading part in the opera of “Le Postillon de Longjumeau.” His place now knows him no more. He is as extinct an animal as the dodo or the great auk.

The last I knew was fallen from his old estate—a slim, grey-haired man, who drove a hired carriage, but no longer mounted one of a pair of post-horses. At weddings the post-boy made his final appearance, with a white beaver hat, a yellow jacket and white breeches and top-boots, a showy individual, and poor old George Spurle, whom I knew, had appeared in his proper character on many such occasions before leaving the saddle altogether to mount the box. His jacket was of a buttercup yellow, but other colours were indulged in by these servants of the public. Humphry Clinker wore “a narrow-brimmed hat with gold cording, a cut bob [wig], a decent blue jacket, leather breeches, and a clean linen shirt, puffed above the waistband.”

Old George, like every other post-boy I have known, loved his horses. In his old age he loved them too well, spared them so much as to annoy those whom he was conveying, and who proved impatient at his walking them up the least hill, and at his frequent dismounting to ease his brute.

There was a grey mare he was specially fond of, and one night the grey got her halter twisted about her neck and was found strangled. George Spurle sat down and fairly cried. The landlord seeing him so cut up endeavoured to comfort him.

“George,” said he, “do not take on so. After all it is only a horse, and that an old one. If you had lost a wife, that would have been a different matter altogether, and there would have been some excuse for tears, but—a horse—” “Ah, maister,” replied the post-boy, “wives!—one has but to hold up the finger, and they’d come flying to you from all sides—more than you can accommodate; but an ’oss—and such a mare as this—booh!” and he burst into tears again. “Such a mare as this is not to be found again in a hurry.” When a little subdued, he explained himself: “You see, maister, ’osses cost money, good ’osses cost a power of money, but wimen wifes—they don’t cost you a ha’penny piece.”

George Spurle kept a list of all the great persons he had ridden before, and his list is before me as I write. Unhappily he has not dated his several stages, and his spelling makes his MS. sometimes hard to unravel.

For instance, “Druv the Duck of Dangle’em” apparently means le Duc d’Angoulême, and “the Count D. Parry” is le Comte de Paris. After a long list beginning with royalty, he winds up, “Members of the American legation and Van Amburgh’s lions and tigers in American vans. Lunatics and hospital patients with fractured limbs, gold bullion, convicts in vans, also naturalists and gaiests [sic] to be married, the junior of springs [sic] two months old and an aged person living ninety-four years, the oldest to the grave a hundred years and six months. Adventurers, photographers, explorers of Mont Blanck [sic] and Africa. Comercials [sic], astronomers and philosophers and popular auctioneers, Canadian rifles, American merchants, racehorses in vans with gold caps. Mackeral [sic] fish and several deans and bankers. Paupers to onions [sic], some idjots and Sir H. Seale Hayne Bart.”

The old post-boy was never married. Before the days of railways he was in constant request, but the whirligig of time brought about its changes that touched George Spurle to the quick, and thrust him from his seat.

He had begun life as a little urchin perched on the back of the waggon horse that had brought in the wheat at harvest, and this had so raised his ambition that nothing would content the child but becoming a post-boy. The scarlet of the Queen’s livery presented no attraction to him, nor the blue jacket of the navy. Nothing would do but the stable with the anticipation of wearing at some time the yellow jacket and white beaver. When not in the stable, he was to be found in the bar, where he told many a yarn. Here is one. “Gentlemen—I cannot tell you precisely the year, but it was at the very beginning of the century that there was a rather remarkable robbery of the mail, going from Exeter to Plymouth, near Haldon. A party of fellows with black over their faces sprang out of the bushes, and were all armed with pistols. They stayed the coach, and they got the letter-bags and carried them off. Now I was here—some fifteen miles away—and somehow I saw it all take place; I saw and counted the men—that is, in my dream, for I was sleepin’ in the little chamber over the stable; and I saw the men take the bags off to a quarry and there they ripped ’em open, and searched and took away some of the letters, and left the rest. I see’d it all distinct as daylight, though it took place in the night. Well, when I came down in the mornin’ and had washed at the pump, I went into the bar and I told Mary Foale about it; she was maid there then, and I was a bit sweet upon her. She laughed and thought nought on it. Then I went on and told the mistress of the inn, but, bless you! she gave no heed. Well—gentlemen, you may believe me or not, as you please; but it’s true enough, the mail had been robbed during the night, on Haldon, just as I had described, and we didn’t hear the news till the afternoon of the day—and I told all about it in the morning early. But that is not all. The mail-bags were not found for ten or twelve days, and they were in the old quarry just where I had seen the chaps cutting them open. That is a coorious story, ain’t it?”

“Indeed it is, George. It almost looks as if you had been riding that night and had been in it.”

“Ah! I’m not that sort of chap. Now there was a sequel to it.”

“What was that?”

“Why, a day or two arter I asked Mary Foale if she’d condescend to be Mrs. Spurle.”

“‘No thank y’, George,’ sez she; ‘you see too much to make it comfortable for me.’ And she didn’t take me, she took Jeremiah Ancker; and that just shows she didn’t see enough, for he turned out a drunken lout as whacked her.”

“Were you ever robbed on the road, George?”

“I’ve been stopped, but on that occasion things didn’t turn out as was intended.”

“How so?”

“I’ll just tell y’, gentlemen. There was some bullion to be sent up to London from India. It had been landed at Falmouth. Now the authorities had some suspicion, and so they didn’t send it the way as was intended. I had orders quite independent—I knowed nothing about it—to go to Chudleigh; I reckon there was a gentleman there as wanted me to drive him across the moors to Tavistock, and he knowed he could rely on me. He was to start early in the morning, so I drove in the direction in the evening before, with a close conveyance, as I knew there might be rough weather and rain next day going over the moors.

“I hadn’t got half-way when I was stopped by a man on horseback with his face blackened. He held a pistol and levelled it at my head; I had no mind to be shot, so I pulled up. In a rough voice he asked me who was in the chaise. ‘No one,’ said I. ‘But there is something,’ said he. ‘Nothing in the world but cushions,’ I replied. ‘Get down, you rascal,’ he ordered. ‘You hold my horse, whilst I search the chaise.’ ‘I’m at your service,’ said I, and I took his horse by the bridle, and as I passed my hand along I felt that there were saddle-bags. Well, that highwayman opened the chaise door and went in to overhaul everything. I had made up my mind what to do. So while he was thus engaged I undid the traces of my ’osses with one hand, holding the highwayman’s ’oss with the other.

“Presently he put his head out, and said, ‘There is nothing within—I must search behind.’ ‘Search where you will,’ said I, ‘you’ve plenty o’ time at your disposal.’ And so saying I leaped into his saddle. Then I shouted, ‘Gee up and along, Beauty and Jolly Boy!’ and struck spurs into the flanks of the horse, and away I galloped on his steed with my two chaise horses galloping after me; and we never stayed till we came to Chudleigh.”

“And the saddle-bags?”

“There was a lot of money in them—but there’s my luck. That fellow had robbed a serge-maker the same night, and this serge-maker came and claimed it all.”

“But you were handsomely rewarded?”

“He gave me a guinea and the highwayman’s ’oss, and that same ’oss is the old grey mare, gentlemen, as folks ha’ laughed at me for weeping over when she were hanged. Now it is a coorious sarcumstance that so far as I know that there highwayman went scot free to his grave, and the poor innocent grey were hanged.”

George Spurle lived to an advanced age, but he was one of those men whose age it is hard to determine: his face was always keen and his eye bright, he had a ruddy cheek, was always closely shaven, and his grey hair cut short. Till he died he drove a conveyance belonging to the inn; he could not be induced to drive the ’bus to the station. To that, “No, sir!” he said; “an old post-boy can’t go to that. There be stations and callin’s, and the station and callin’ of a post-boy is one thing, and the station and callin’ of a ’bus man is another. You can’t pass from the one to the other.”

He fell ill very suddenly and died almost before any one in the town—where he was well known—suspected that he was in danger.

But he had no doubt in his own mind that his sickness would end fatally, and he asked to see the landlady of the inn.

“Beg pardon, ma’am!” he said from his bed, touching his forelock, “very sorry I han’t shaved for two days and you should see me thus. But please, ma’am, if it’s no offence, be you wantin’ that there yellow jacket any more? It seems to me post-boys is gone out altogether.”

“No, George, I certainly do not want it.”

“Nor these?—you’ll understand me, ma’am, if I don’t mention ’em.”

“No, George; what can you require them for?”

“Nor that there old white beaver? I did my best, but it is a bit rubbed.”

“I certainly do not need it.”

“Thank y’, ma’am, then I make so bold might I be buried in ’em as the last of the old post-boys?”

AUNTIE

AUNTIE

No one would suppose that Auntie had once been pretty. Yet Mrs. Estcourt, the Squire’s wife, said that she was so at one time, and Mrs. Estcourt had known her from a girl and ought to be an authority.

No one without a moment’s thought would suppose that she had once been young. Of course, when you considered, you knew that in the order of nature young she must have been; but her entire appearance and cut of figure and dress seemed to proclaim that she had been born old, and had remained at a standstill whilst the world moved on.

She was short, carried little curls like beer barrels arranged on each side of her forehead, had mild benevolent eyes of no particular colour, wore an old-fashioned bonnet, and gowns still older in fashion, for they were leg-of-mutton sleeved.

When tight sleeves came in, Auntie continued to wear her old-fashioned full sleeves. “My dear,” she would say to one who objected that they were antiquated, “my dear, leg-o’-muttons will come in again.”

Come in they have, but after Auntie had closed her eyes and could not see her prediction verified. Her skirts, flounced and full, saw the crinoline come in and go out, saw the tight straight skirt, and saw fulness again become fashionable.

Auntie’s gowns were mostly of dark grey, but she had one for the evening of good silk that was silver-grey, and in that, at night, Auntie looked quite presentable. But Auntie rarely wore it. She could not dine out, as she had no carriage or conveyance of any sort, and the risk of marring her one silk evening dress, by going on foot in such an unsettled climate as is ours in England to the house where the festive board was spread, that was too serious to be undertaken. But she did, once, dine in it at the Hall, without having been fetched. Then she had hired a farmer’s butter-cart, that in which he sent some of the home produce to market. It was without springs, it was without seats, and it was sans steps. The cob that drew it was white and ungroomed, brought in for the occasion from the field in which it lay and rolled. Auntie’s maid had put a chair in the cart and a chair beside the cart. By this means the old lady mounted into it, without the necessity of scrambling up the spokes of the wheel, or leaping on to the shaft, and thence somersaulting into the cart.

But this conveyance of two wheels so shook up Auntie internally that she had no appetite for her dinner, and no enjoyment of the social evening. Mrs. Estcourt, after that, sent the carriage for her, but Auntie could rarely be prevailed on to accept it. She was poor in pocket and large in heart, and she tipped the coachman on such occasions half-a-crown, and half-a-crown to Auntie was a sum of money that she could ill afford to miss.

No one in the parish, rich or poor, secular or clerical, thought of calling the old lady by other name than “Auntie,” yet was she aunt to no single person there, nor indeed remotely connected with any. Those who wished to be respectful called her Miss Jane, or Miss Auntie. Yet was there a tie, not of blood, that bound her to all and all to her, a tie even stronger than that of blood—the tie of infinite charity.

Never was there a woman with a kinder, more unselfish heart than old Auntie. Her mind was ever active, but occupied only with thought of others.

Unhappily we know by experience that this world of ours is full of selfishness, that among a hundred persons we meet, scarce one is not infected with this vice; nevertheless there is a salt of fresh unselfishness to be discovered. But among the many of these elect, the very crown and acme of all was, I verily believe, Auntie.

The parish knew her story, yet no one ventured on an allusion to it in her hearing, except possibly Mrs. Estcourt, who had been her schoolfellow, and with whom she did sometimes speak of the past, and open that old, but unwithered, heart.

The story was this.

When Auntie was young and pretty and little, for a little body she had ever been, she had been engaged to a handsome young fellow in the service of the East India Company. He had come to England for a holiday, happened to see her, had been attracted by her, as well, perhaps, as by the fact that she had some money of her own, and he proposed to her to accept him and go out with him to India.

She certainly was greatly attached to Mr. Warnacre. She had never cared for any man previously, never had gone into a gentle flirtation even.

Her younger sister was at school, finishing her education, but when the day of the marriage was fixed, she was brought home that she might serve as bridesmaid to her sister.

Emily—this schoolgirl—was far prettier than Jane who was to be married, and what money there was, left by the mother, went equally in shares to each sister.

The cares of trousseau weighed heavily on Miss Jane, and were undertaken with that thoroughness that characterised all she did. So occupied was she over the preliminaries, so necessarily occupied was she, as her mother was dead and she had no elder sister, that she could not be as much as she wished with her intended, and was constrained to leave him to walk and talk and lounge about with Emily.

On the day before the marriage, bridegroom and sister had disappeared. They had eloped together and were married before it was discovered whither they had gone.

The blow was acutely felt, how acutely no one knew. Mrs. Estcourt, who was not Mrs. Estcourt then, hastened to her friend to show sympathy and love.

“My dear,” said Jane, with her eyes full, “it was only natural. I ought not to have thought of keeping him. Emily is so beautiful. He naturally only cared for me till he saw her. I hope, please God, they will be happy together.”

Mr. Warnacre did not venture back to the village, but carried off his wife at once to India.

After a while Auntie’s friend became Mrs. Estcourt, and then this latter lady insisted on Jane taking a cottage on her husband’s estate, so as to be near her. She desired to befriend her, and befriend her she did. But the condition of life of a great country squire’s wife, the wife of a man who aimed at becoming representative of his county in Parliament, and that of a solitary lady with moderate means, in a cottage, and without connections in the place, were so diverse, that much as Mrs. Estcourt desired to see a great deal of her friend, she was not able to do so.

As time went on, and the Squire was elected, and a large part of Mrs. Estcourt’s life was spent in town, the opportunities for social intercourse with Auntie became less, and when the family was at the Hall there were so many visitors, friends made in London, and political allies and acquaintances, who crowded the house, who were there to dine, and dance, and shoot, and attend political meetings, that even whilst in the country, Mrs. Estcourt could not see much of her old school friend. Moreover, when Jane did dine at the Hall, it was with persons whom she did not understand, who belonged to another order of existence to herself, persons with whom she had no common topics of conversation, consequently she declined invitations and remained at home.

As yet she had not acquired the title of Auntie; that accrued to her in this way.

Before many years had elapsed Mrs. Warnacre sent home her only child, a little boy, to be brought up in England, as the Indian climate is fatal to growing European children. And to whom else could she confide her treasure but to Jane? She must have been an easy-going, shallow creature, this Emily, unable to understand the wrong she had done to her sister, and without an expression of regret, without a word of apology, sent her the child; and easy-going, unscrupulous must Warnacre have been, for he sent remittances for his son’s clothing and education but rarely, so that the cost of the maintenance of the child fell on Jane. Then Emily died of cholera, and after that no more money was sent, no inquiries were made; she found herself burdened with this nephew—and then it was that the title of Auntie attached itself to her never to be lost.

Young John Warnacre grew up under Auntie’s eye, and at her charge. She was obliged then to deprive herself of many little comforts and pleasures. Hitherto she had kept a pony-chaise, and a useful man who attended to her cob and the garden. Now she did without, abandoned the drives that once afforded her so much pleasure and had given such a healthy glow to her cheek, and reduced her garden to a couple of flower-beds that could be attended to by an occasional man.

As young John Warnacre grew up, he proved wayward, headstrong, and selfish. She yielded to him too much, but it was in her nature to yield. She had neither the moral nor physical strength to control a turbulent, self-willed boy.

When he was too old and too ungovernable for her, he was sent to school, and schooling, if good, is costly. Auntie was too conscientious not to send the boy to a school for gentlemen, and one that was expensive, and might therefore be supposed to furnish a thorough education.

So matters rubbed on. In his holidays John was with his aunt, tormenting her cat and dog, running over her flowers, breaking her windows, making for his aunt boobie-traps and apple-pie beds; in a word, leading her such a life that she sighed for the holidays to come to an end, but was too tender at heart to admit, even to herself, that she wished them over.

At last the Squire was obliged to complain. John had been laying snares in his preserves, and was getting into association with some of the worst characters in the place. After a struggle he was sent back to school for the rest of the holiday, but he never arrived at the tutor’s: he ran away, and was heard of no more. Many tears did Auntie shed over the prodigal, and bitterly did she reproach herself for having been so severe as to send him away.

It was ascertained at last that he had gone to sea, with the intention, if possible, of getting to India to his father.

But, if he ever got to India, he did not find Mr. Warnacre there, for this gentleman arrived at Auntie’s and quartered himself upon her. He had left the service of John Company, as he saw no prospect of advancement, and he believed he could better himself elsewhere, with his capacity for business, his knowledge of the world, and his faculty of speaking several languages.

Auntie was pleased rather than the contrary that Mr. Warnacre should come to her. It showed that he had forgotten the past and bore her no grudge. Alas! poor humble soul, it did not occur to her that it was she who should resent his conduct, not he hers, and that his throwing himself upon her showed singular moral insensibility.

He was very desirous that his sister-in-law should see the Squire, who as M.P. might be able to use influence to obtain him a post under Government.

Auntie was shy of asking a favour. Shy and retreating, she would have asked nothing for herself, but for another she would do a great deal. After a battle with her timidity, she did go to the Hall, and had an interview with Mr. Estcourt, who valued and admired the dear old lady, and he readily promised to see what could be done for Mr. Warnacre. All he desired were the testimonials of that gentleman.

But here precisely arose a difficulty. He could not produce them, and when inquiry was made into his antecedents, it was discovered that Mr. Warnacre had been dismissed from the service of the Company. This, Mr. Estcourt did not tell Auntie, but with many apologies expressed his regret at being unable to serve her.

Somehow—it is hard to say how—the rumour circulated that Auntie was about to sell out of the stocks so as to set up Mr. Warnacre in some business he had in view, in which great profits were certain to be made.

The rumour came to the ears of Mrs. Estcourt, and without ado that good, somewhat peremptory lady called on Auntie, and happily found her alone.

The Squire’s wife proceeded at once to attack the old lady on the topic. Was it true that she was about to place her little fortune in the hands of this brother-in-law? For if Jane meditated doing this, Mrs. Estcourt said it would be her painful duty to inform Auntie of certain matters concerning Mr. Warnacre that in kindness had been kept from her.

Auntie coloured and trembled, and raised her bemittened hands in deprecation of the interference and the revelation. Then she began to explain:

“Mr. Warnacre really was a surprisingly clever man. He had met with misfortunes, he had made enemies, who had not scrupled to blacken his character. It was too sad to see a man of his ability and acquirements without an opening in which to display his activity.”

“But, my dear Jane, he has been dishonest!”

“O Maria, we are all guilty of doing wrong sometimes, and I am sure we ought not to be hard on those who have. Even supposing he has made a mistake, we ought to give him the helping hand, and put him in a position where he can make amends.”

“My dear Jane,” said Mrs. Estcourt, and she set her lips. “Excuse me if I speak unpleasant truths. How do you know, how does Mr. Warnacre know, that what he proposes to undertake will be successful? There is many a slip between the cup and the lip. With the very best and most honourable intentions, he may miscarry. Then what will become of you?”

“Oh, my dear Maria, he is certain to succeed. He has shown it me so very plainly.”

“He may not. Always be prepared for a not.”

“But for his sake I must risk something. He was my dear Emily’s husband, remember that. And he has had such trials and troubles—he has lost her, and does not know where poor John is.”

“Jane, it won’t do. Excuse my bluntness. Suppose the whole thing fails. Where would you be? If your little income is gone, then you will be penniless in your old age. Now that means—” Mrs. Estcourt moved uncomfortably in her chair. She was going to say a harsh thing, but did it only because she believed that nothing else could save Auntie. “That means, Jane, that you will come upon me. I will not see you turned out of your cottage to starve. When all your income is gone, I shall have to furnish you with an annuity. Now, mind, I should not object to that, if the result of an accident, a bad investment, or failure of a bank. But that you should deliberately and with your eyes open throw this upon me is not fair; no, it is not fair to me.”

Poor little Auntie crimsoned to her temples. She tried to speak, but could not. Then she broke down, covered her face with her kerchief and wept. Mrs. Estcourt held to her point.

“I have promised it him,” sobbed Auntie.

“You may, if you will, give him something. But I insist—I insist for my own sake as well as for yours—that you do not give him all. Reserve to yourself so much as you can live on. Say, keep as much as was expended on yourself when you were sending that boy to school. That alone will satisfy me.”

At length Mrs. Estcourt carried her point. She extorted a solemn reluctant promise to that effect from the old lady, and that she would not go beyond her word Mrs. Estcourt knew very surely.

And well was it for the little Auntie that this interview had taken place, for within a twelvemonth all she had given to Mr. Warnacre was gone, and gone without return of interest or principal. With it also Mr. Warnacre had disappeared. Then she lived on, in the same house, on her shrunken means, doing good to all around—knitting crossovers for old women, making mittens for children, warm woollen caps and mufflers that she sent to the engine-drivers on the line to keep them comfortable on a winter’s night, busy before Christmas in contriving presents for all around, forgetful of no birthday, visiting and sitting with the sick and aged, and although her gifts were never costly, yet they were always valued highly by the recipients, for the love and kindly thought that was worked into them. She manufactured little book-markers, with crosses on them, of perforated card; she did embroidery for the church; she painted little pin-cushions, and her flower-painting was tasteful. These she was glad to sell, and Mrs. Estcourt came to her assistance and disposed of an astonishing number at sixpence each. They were so useful for gentlemen, would go into a breast pocket, and gentlemen were always wanting pins. But Auntie would use none of the money thus acquired upon herself; it was spent in the purchase of material for making her little gifts to the poor, or for the church.

The parson had his daily service, but the most constant of his congregation, certainly in the mornings, was Auntie, who never failed.

Mrs. Estcourt brought visitors from the Hall to see her, not such as were unable to appreciate the goodness and sweetness of the old lady, but kindly-hearted ladies and gentlemen, and somehow these visitors afterwards in town, or wherever else they met the Squire, always inquired after Auntie. They felt they were the better for having seen and spoken with her.

To some it was a revelation that there were, in this self-seeking and somewhat coarse world, some highly-refined, unselfish spirits, the violets of the moral world.

As already said, every one in the place knew her story, but to her face no one alluded to it. Among the English peasantry there is a wonderful and beautiful delicacy of feeling such as often puts to shame those who belong to highly-cultured grades. The utmost done was to ask, “Please, miss, have you heard anything of Master John?”

Then a quiver would pass over the old face, the lip would tremble, and the eye fall, and she would shake her head, unable to give the denial in words.

Often and often did Mrs. Estcourt send to her grapes or peaches or melons from the conservatories at the Hall, and yet she knew that most of these good things were at once distributed by the old lady among the children as they swarmed out of school, or given to some sick body with a capricious appetite.

The farmers also or their wives sent her poultry, the children picked for her watercress, the poor women gave her eggs, and then Auntie had no rest until she had proclaimed to the parson and his wife, to the squiress, to all she knew, how good and generous these poor bodies had been to her.

And every day she sat at her window painting her pin-cushions or making the little crosses for book-markers, or setting them up on little card stands, or illuminating texts, and nodding and smiling to all passers-by in the road, and to the children as they came to school. Between school hours in wet weather many a little girl found a refuge in Auntie’s kitchen, there to eat her dinner and have warm milk or tea.

It was a sad prospect to Auntie when her sight began to fail. Resigned to the will of Heaven she ever was, but she regretted the inability into which she would fall of manufacturing comforting articles for the poor.

So years passed.

Nothing was heard of Warnacre, nothing of John. No word of reproach passed her lips. I believe no resentful thought arose in her mind against her brother-in-law, and I am sure that both he and John were daily mentioned in her prayers.

Then, one stormy evening, a knock came at the door, and she heard some one coughing without. The little maid opened, and a wretched, wet, and draggled man staggered in. It was Warnacre, returned, but returned destitute, a wreck in health, and a beggar.

The little maid who had gone to the door at the rap was frightened, and thought that the man was drunk; she had never seen Mr. Warnacre, and her exclamations of distress and alarm brought the old lady to the passage.

Warnacre had thrown himself into a chair, the rain had sodden his battered hat, and his shapeless and napless greatcoat, and ran over the floor. The man was grey in face, his scanty hair dishevelled, and his eyes dull and sunk in his head.

A fit of coughing prevented him from speaking.

“Oh, please, miss, what shall we do? It’s a tipsy, it is. Shall I run for the police?”

“No, Kate, no, the gentleman is ill.” Auntie had not as yet recognised him, but she brought the light near, and with an exclamation of pain and surprise cried, “O William! William! you here again?”

“What,” said he, “are you like the rest, ready to turn against me? It is a bad and selfish world; no one has a hand to hold out for a fellow who is down on his luck. I’ve walked——”

Again the cough overtook him, and he put a soiled handkerchief to his mouth.

“I have walked, I suppose, fourteen miles in this cursed weather—haven’t had anything to eat. I’d turn out my pockets and prove to you I have not a stiver, but my hands are too cold, and my clothes cling to me with wet.”

“O William! how have you come to this?”

“Ill-health—breakdown—overmuch brain-work. And the world is dishonest; cursed cheats men are. It is no place for a man of genius and integrity.”

“But what will you do?”

He coughed again, and sank back, looking deadly in his exhaustion.

“It is a shame, my troubling you with questions. Kate, Kate, get hot water, and bread and meat, and a tumbler, and I will unlock my cellaret.”

Then, as the little maid bustled about fulfilling commands: “O William! I am so sorry, and why, why did you walk so far?”

“Because I wasn’t going to the workhouse. No, thank you, I am a gentleman. I thought you would give me food and a shake-down.”

“O William, how good of you to think of me. Oh, this is kind, and like a brother-in-law. Of course you could not go to the Union. I would have died of shame to think that you had, and of self-reproach to think you had not come on to me. But you forgive all that is past. That is dear of you, William.”

She took him in; of course she did.

She opened to him her heart as well as her home. And there he remained. He made no movement to leave. Perhaps he perceived that nowhere else would he be so kindly and forgivingly dealt with. Not one word of reproach came from her.

Then it became clear that his stay would not be for long, not that he desired and purposed leaving, but that a hand was pointing sternly to him to move on, to move on from a world in which he had done no worthy act, into another in which he would have to account for his worthlessness.

Auntie fought against the conviction that he was dying. She sent for the best doctors, she provided the most nourishing diet she could procure for him. Her great sorrow was that her means would not allow her to send him to Davos or to some other place of cure.

Warnacre was not a pleasant person to have in the house and as a patient. He grumbled at the wine provided—it came from the grocer, he said; it was without bouquet, mere made-up stuff. He grumbled at his meat, it was tough and overdone or underdone. He bragged about the great people with whom he had dined, whom he had known familiarly; or he whined over the ingratitude and heartlessness of the world, or murmured against that Providence which had thwarted him in all he had taken in hand.

Yet, through all, patiently, lovingly, cheerfully, the old maid ministered to him, bore with his meanness, turned aside his sarcasms, apologised for his ungraciousness when visited by any from the Hall or rectory.

She treasured up every imaginary sign of returning health and shut her eyes to the tokens of decline. At length he was dead, and was laid in the churchyard, unlamented save by Auntie.

Of his son he professed to know nothing. He had not run across him in his meanders through the shady world in which he had moved. But in the heart of Auntie there was still a root of love and expectation that concerned John.

Above Mr. Warnacre’s grave, Auntie, by stinting herself, was able to erect a costly monumental stone, on which was represented a broken lily, the symbol of Warnacre’s stainless life. The inscription recorded his merits in somewhat fulsome terms that were, however, not unreal and untrue to Auntie, or she would not have sanctioned them, for over that wretched creature still hung some of the halo of her first love and idealisation.

And after that her sight failed, and happily not long after that, gently, without pain, old Auntie’s eyes closed altogether.

But then Mrs. Estcourt was gone. Her husband had predeceased her, and at the Hall reigned a nephew, a man of sport, who knew not Auntie.

A year later there appeared a stranger in the place, who after some inquiries went to the churchyard and asked the sexton to point out to him where Auntie was buried. There was no headstone, only a green mound. But there were flowers strewn on it; the poor whom she had loved and to whom she had ministered had not forgotten her.

The stranger signed to the sexton to leave him. Then he stood, with folded hands and bowed head, looking at the little heap. He was a young man, but with a seamed face. Presently the tears came into his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. “Poor, dear Auntie,” he said in a whisper, “imposed on, ill-treated—only appreciated by me—and that too late.”

He drew out of his pocket a little cross made of perforated cardboard. It had been given years before to young John.

Then he went to a monumental stone-cutter and said: “Make me a marble cross, just like this.”

“And, sir, what shall I cut on it?”

“Only this—Auntie.”

BROTHER AUGUSTINE

BROTHER AUGUSTINE

In 1866 I was appointed to the perpetual curacy of Dalton, near Thirsk in Yorkshire. It was a new parish, cut out of Topcliffe; the church was not built at the time, but an old barn had been converted into a school-chapel, and a little red brick house had been erected, intended eventually to be a schoolmaster’s house, which I was given as parsonage. It was small—containing one sitting-room only, and three bedrooms upstairs. When I went to see the place, the outgoing incumbent said to me, “Would you like to take on Mills?”

“Mills! Who is Mills?”

“I mean Brother Augustine.”

“Brother Augustine!” I echoed; “and who the dickens is Brother Augustine?”

“Well,” replied my friend, “that is not so easy to answer. What he is now is my valet and sacristan. He is a man who can make your clothes, mend anything, wait on you, and be most serviceable in church.”

“What! that fellow who sang in the choir through his nose as though there had been a vibrating metallic tongue in it?”

“The same: very useful, but odd.”

“Where did you pick him up?”

“I advertised for him.”

I took on Brother Augustine or Mr. Mills. Some called him one, some the other, and rightly, for he had two aspects, very distinct.

When I engaged him he was aged, I suppose, thirty-five, but it was impossible to say what his age really was: he was one of those men who look old when twenty, and never alter. He did not tell me his age. He was as coy as an old maid about that, but he was very ready to tell me his story, and it was an odd one.

He had been given when quite a little boy by his father, in Colchester, to the Roman Catholic priest there, who brought him up, and made him serve him daily at the altar, black his boots, and help the old housekeeper to make the beds, and dust the rooms, and clean the dishes. He also brought in the meals.

This went on till, as Mr. Mills said to me, “the dear old priest got so very old that he was fit for nothing but to be chaplain to a convent, so he was moved away, and then I had to be put somewhere. So I was put with Hyams, the tailor.”

How long Mills was with Hyams I do not know, but the swirl of life in freedom after the even and quiet of a parsonage was more than he could bear, and he took it into his head to become a monk.

He entered on his novitiate, “And,” said he, “they shaved my head, and I have been a martyr to neuralgia ever since.”

After a while he was sent to Rome. I cannot now recall what the Order was into which he had entered.

“I got into trouble there,” said Brother Augustine. “You must know that I am passionately fond of cats, and I had not had a cat to pat and coax ever since I had become a monk. Well, one day we were walking in procession down the long street in Trastevere, when I saw a white cat, with one paw black and one ear black, sitting in a doorway of a house. I could not help myself. The sight of that puss was too much for my pent-up feelings—there was a sort of void in me that only a cat could fill. Well, I broke out of the procession and ran to the cat to catch it up. But it was frightened, and made a bolt and was gone. That set all the monks off laughing to see me after the cat. We had been singing a psalm, and they could not get on with it. I was put on bread and water for a week, all because of that cat.”

Brother Augustine was not happy in Rome, and was teased with neuralgia. After a twelvemonth he was sent back to England, and he had made up his mind not to take the vows. So on landing at London he gave the slip to the monk who was sent along with him, and found his way into some sort of refuge for runaway monks and nuns that had been set up, just as there are refuges for stray cats and dogs.

There he made acquaintance with Miss Headly Vicars, who was most kind to him, and of her he spoke with deep regard. By her advice he became a Scripture reader, or if not by her advice, with her consent.

He remained for some little while drawing a salary and doing some off-and-on work, very much against his taste, as Scripture reader, for it was a position for which he was totally unqualified. At last he became uneasy in his conscience, he felt he was earning money he did not deserve, and the work was uncongenial. Then he saw an advertisement from my predecessor at Dalton for a young man to act as man-servant, sing in the choir—(“Bray, rather,” said I to myself)—and attend to the church.

This was exactly what he wanted. He answered, was accepted; and I found him at Dalton, and kept him on.

I have said that Mr. Mills, or Brother Augustine, wore two different aspects.

Usually, about the house and at church he wore a cassock, and a little black square cap set on the back of his head.

When not engaged about the church, he was generally to be seen seated cross-legged on the kitchen table, making a suit for me, or mending or making clothes for himself.

But, when Mr. Mills was dressed to go to Thirsk, the market town, he was as though he had walked out of a bandbox—dapper, spick and span in everything; a masher one would call him now, but in 1866 the word was not invented.

A most disinterested fellow he was. I did not pay him any wage. He had his food and room with me, and nothing else. If he wanted to go to York or Ripon, I gave him his fare, and a shilling to spend as he liked. He never had more whilst with me for two years. His mind was like that of a child. He was happy over the merest trifles, and upset also by trifles. A good-hearted fellow with a limited education, very fond of puss, and devotedly attached to animals. Every one laughed at him, but every one liked him. He would do anything that I asked him to do, and go anywhere.

I had an old housekeeper, a worthy woman who was a widow, and she and Mills were always laughing, and, when not laughing, he was singing. The kitchen was immediately opposite my one sitting-room, and as the door was generally open, they made a good deal of noise, to which I had to become accustomed.

One morning Mr. Mills appeared in lavender small-clothes, a black frock coat, white waistcoat, straw-coloured kid gloves, and a silk hat that shone as if it had been oiled. In his button-hole he wore a stephanotis. His face was twinkling with smiles.

He appeared before me flourishing a Malacca cane.

“Why—Brother Augustine! what are you about?” I exclaimed.

“I have walked through the village,” he replied, “and I want to go into Thirsk.”

“What for?”

“Only to get a rise out of the Daltonians. You should have seen the round eyes they made as I walked past their houses. And I have just been into the school to show myself to the mistress and the children. I really am curious to know to whom they will have married me—for they will all jump to the conclusion that I have gone into Thirsk to be married.”

My predecessor had been accustomed to have the chorister boys go to the parsonage after the Litany, which was sung in the afternoon, and have tea there, and hang about the garden till evensong at half-past six. I found this a burden more than I could bear, and I announced that I was regretfully obliged to discontinue the usage.

After having made the announcement, I was breathing free, when Mills came to me with a blank face.

“They have struck,” he said.

“Struck what?—struck you?” I asked.

“They will not put on their cassocks and surplices and go into the choir this evening.”

“Well, Mr. Mills, then we will manage without them.”

So we did. One, faithful among the faithless found, did put on his surplice. A little fellow who could not read. However, we sang the whole service, psalms, responses, Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, hymns, just as though we had a full choir. I do not think there was any musician in the congregation that evening, for I do not recall any one being carried out fainting.

There was one peculiarity about Mills that I could not break him of. He had learned the Apostles’ Creed in the Roman version, which differed slightly from our form, and he would always bray forth that “form of sound words” which he had acquired in his childhood.

In 1868 there was about to be a change in my domestic arrangements—in fact, I was about to be married—consequently I was forced, much to my regret, to get rid of Mills.

After a little inquiry and some letter-writing, it was settled that he should go to Christ Church and become valet to Dr. Pusey, at that time getting old and infirm.

In the event of sickness, I knew that no one could be a more tender and devoted nurse than Brother Augustine. There was something feminine in his delicacy of touch and in his sweetness of manner. And he would give up his time in the most unselfish manner possible to the doctor. Of that I was quite confident.

So Brother Augustine departed, with tears in his eyes, and there was not a person in the parish who was not sorry to lose him. For although they had laughed at him, all appreciated his goodness and his kindness; and I am not sure but that what they laughed at most was his absolute guilelessness, his utter unworldliness, and that, to a Yorkshireman, is indeed astonishing. I heard next of him as installed at Christ Church, where he figured in the quad in just the same extraordinary costume as he had worn with me; and his funny ways, his old-fashioned politeness, and his simplicity vastly tickled the young students. I believe sundry tricks were played on him, but I never heard any particulars.

That he was very happy I did learn from himself.

He was given a room near Dr. Pusey’s quarters in Christ Church, that adjoined or was under another in which one of the men of the college was lodged.

Now, Brother Augustine had the way of singing the psalms in his discordant bray every night, and one evening the young fellow who was near him, unable to endure the noise, went to his door, knocked, and Brother Augustine appeared at his door half-undressed for bed. The Christ Church man complained—really he could not work—he was going in for his examination, and with that singing—he—he was distracted.

“I beg your pardon humbly! I really am most sorry,” said the poor brother, covered with confusion. “I had no idea—certainly, certainly—you shall not be troubled again.”

So with a bow he saw his visitor depart, shut his door, and with his psalm unfinished went to bed.

He was found next morning dead. He had died apparently painlessly—of heart complaint—gone off in his sleep, to finish his psalm where his voice would give no offence.

HAROUN THE CARPENTER

HAROUN THE CARPENTER

Haroun, bien entendu, was not his name, but it was that by which some called him among themselves. The reason will appear in the sequel. He lived in a low house of one storey, with a door in the middle, and a window on each side, a typical Welsh cottage, with a thatched roof, and the roof drawn down over the gables, also in a peculiarly Welsh style.

He had his yard and workshop behind the house. In front was a bit of garden, of which he took great care, and which was bright with flowers from earliest spring to latest fall.

“Aaron,” the squire’s wife would say, “how do you manage to get your bulbs to bloom before mine?”

“My lady,” he would reply, “I hold they like the smell of the wood.”

Aaron was, in fact, his Christian name. The reason why, in the rectory and in the Hall, he was called Haroun was this:—

Aaron was a man of one book, and that book was the “Arabian Nights.”

Many years ago a copy was given to the lending library of the village, and was taken out by Aaron Price, the carpenter. He had not read three pages before his mind was in the grip of the narrator. He read, he did not sleep, he did not work, or worked badly, he went to church, but did not pray—his mind had been carried up and away from the present, away from the green Welsh valley in which he lived, away, over the russet mountains to the gorgeous East, and to the times when Jinns were all-powerful unless controlled by Solomon’s seal, and magicians were as common as blackberries and as mischievous as kittens.

Aaron very nearly fell into disrepute as a carpenter on account of that book, so badly was his work done when under the spell. But he rallied. He became active, industrious, skilful once more, yet never, thenceforth, was the witchery of the “Arabian Nights” off his mind. He had no rest to his soul till he had purchased a copy for himself, and from that precious volume he read daily. He never wearied of it; he never wanted another book.

“Lord, sir, it is meat and drink to me!” he said once when questioned about it. He was advised to give it up. “I couldn’t do it,” was his reply. “Beside—what would be the good? It’s in me, all over me, in every fibre. I know it from one cover to the other.”

“Then why not part with it—if so familiar?”

“Why don’t you part with your wife because you know her face and voice and thoughts? I couldn’t do it. I love the book because so familiar to me—every tale, every word.”

One day a note from the Hall told the rector that the squiress had got a real treat for Haroun. She was going to give him as a Christmas present “Tales of the Genii.”

The rector laid down his daily paper, took his hat and stick, and pushed down to the Hall at once.

“My dear lady! I implore you, do nothing of the kind. Give him a book on practical carpentering or a dictionary of gardening. But another book of Jinns and necromancers will turn poor Haroun mad altogether.”

Now and then, on a Sunday evening, the rector would say to his wife, “Look here, Rosie, I could read Haroun’s mind to-day as he sat under the pulpit, as though it were a book in large primer type, open before me. He was very attentive when I began my sermon, and he followed me some way, but by degrees his eye became vacant, abstracted, his expression of face altered, and I knew that he was away with the Three Calenders, hearing why Zobeide whipped the hounds.”

“Harry,” responded the rectoress, “you have only yourself to blame. Try to be more interesting when you preach.”

“My dear Rosie,” exclaimed the parson, “I do my level best, but what pulpit discourse could ever compete with ‘Sindbad’s Voyages’ or ‘The Hunchback’?”

The good lady sighed and said, “Whatever will Haroun do for a wife? We have no Fatimas and Zobeides in this village.”

“I wish with all my heart that Haroun would weave his own web of romance, fall in love, and—then he’d forget the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“In time this infatuation will wear off.”

“I doubt it. This has now been going on for years, and that book only works its way deeper into his soul. Upon my word, Rosie, I believe the Bible interests him only because of the wonders that are in it.”

“Then, my dear, I am sure you judge him wrong. He is a good man, and God-fearing.”

“Yes—but oh! so fantastical.”

Aaron Price did not keep his treasury of stories bottled up in his own breast. He was great at retailing them, but he transferred the scenery to Wales, translated Camaralzaman and Badoura into David Jones and Sheena Williams, located every incident in some well-known spot, and thoroughly bewildered his hearers, who could not make out whether he were poking fun at them or narrating facts.

Perhaps the climax was reached when he converted Ganem the slave of Love, into the amiable, somewhat corpulent, and eminently respectable squire, Sir John Vaughan, at Llanselyf. The whole tale was told with so much circumstance and such actuality, that next Sunday, when the squire came to church, he found himself the object of intense interest, observation, and private whispered comment.

It may be remembered that in the original tale Ganem was up a tree overhanging a cemetery when he saw some slaves bury a chest, at the dead of night, in the earth. When they were gone he descended from the tree, dug down to and opened the chest, when he found it contained a lady of incomparable beauty who “as soon as she was released from her confined situation, and exposed to the open air began to sneeze, and half-opening her eyes and rubbing them exclaimed, ‘Zohorob Bostan (Flower of the Garden), Schagrom Marglan (Branch of Coral), Cassabos Souccar (Sugar-cane), Nouronnihar (Light of Day), Nagmatos Sohi (Star of the Morning), Nouzhetos Zaman (Delight of the Season), speak, where are you?’”

This, as related by the carpenter, took a very local and personal complexion. The incident was transferred to the churchyard of his own parish, and to a certain elm tree that grew there; it was Sir John Vaughan who climbed the tree, and the lady when released from the box exclaimed, “Mary Jones, my housemaid, Flower of the Garden, and you, Susanna Rees, scullery-maid, Branch of Coral; and you also, Elizabeth Thomas, tweenie maid and Sugar-cane; and you, Margaret Cole, the lady’s-maid, Light of Day, and under housemaid Joan, Star of the Morning, and third housemaid Wilmot, Delight of the Season, speak, my dear tried servants, where are you?”

Now, on this particular Sunday morning, not only was Sir John an object of great interest, but so was Lady Vaughan, and when, during the service, she sneezed, it produced a general agitation; so also were the maid-servants of the family. On their arrival there were nudgings, “Here comes Branch of Coral, and there is Light of the Day. But where is Flower of the Garden?” To which an answer came in a whisper, “Got a bad cold in her head, and can’t come to church.”

Now, a remarkable occurrence in the parish took place. Aaron, alias Haroun, fell in love, and took to courting Elizabeth Thomas, alias Sugar-cane, alias Cassabos Souccar, the tweenie maid. It took the whole parish by surprise, for Elizabeth was not beautiful; she had not the eyes or the frame, or the svelte movements or the elastic tread of the light gazelle. She was a somewhat heavily formed, broad-shouldered, pudding-faced damsel, who could not cross a room without rattling all the chimney ornaments, and who had no more imagination and genius than has a duck. And in what did the attraction consist? Why had Aaron not become enamoured of the lady’s-maid, a most willowy person with a very sweet and refined face? Why not with the kitchen-maid, the Sprig of Coral, who had indeed coralline lips, and who in time would know how to boil a potato and do a chop so as not to be done to leather. But a tweenie! and such a tweenie! The whole parish discussed it for a month. It was most astounding that the man who romanced about every one and everything and every place, should make such dead prose of his own love affair. However, after this had been debated in the servants’ hall, at the forge, in the stable, at the tavern, each such debate ended with some one remarking sententiously, “After all, it is his affair and not mine.”

It is, however, a mistake to say that Aaron’s courtship was prosaic. That it was not so was proved by one of his letters to Elizabeth Thomas, which the girl carelessly left about; and it got read, copied, and distributed through the village, and excited much admiration at the splendour of the style, till some one detected the original, of which it was but a copy, in the story of Abdul Hassan and Schemselnihar. Here is the epistle—

“Aaron Price, carpenter, to Elizabeth Thomas, tweenie maid.

“Deprived of your presence, I seek to continue the illusion, and converse with you by means of these ill-formed lines, which afford me some pleasure, while I am prevented the happiness of speaking to you.

“Patience, they say, is the remedy of all evils; yet those I suffer are increased instead of relieved by it. Although your image is indelibly engraven on my heart, my eyes nevertheless wish again to behold the original.

“These sentiments, which my fingers trace, and in expressing which I feel such inconceivable pleasure that I cannot repeat them too often, proceed from the bottom of my heart, from that incurable wound you have made in it; a wound which I bless a thousand times, notwithstanding the cruel sufferings I endure in your absence.

“Do not imagine that my words convey more than I feel. Alas! whatever expressions I may use, I shall still think much more than I can ever say. My eyes, which never cease looking for you, and incessantly weep till they shall behold you again; my afflicted heart, which seeks but you; my sighs, which escape my lips whenever I think on you, and that is continually; my imagination which never reflects any object but my beloved prince tweenie-maid; the complaints I offer to heaven of the rigour of my fate; in short, my melancholy, my uneasiness, my sufferings, from which I have had no respite since I lost sight of you, are all-sufficient pledges of the truth of what I write. I pray that we may be granted an opportunity of telling each other, without restraint, the tender affection we feel, and that we will never cease to love. Farewell.

“I salute Lady Vaughan, to whom we each have so many obligations.”

Not to make too long a story of this. The course of true love ran smoothly enough. The adored tweenie took it all very calmly, very much as a matter of course, and in due time they were married.

No one supposed that they could be happy together, so opposite were they to each other. Yet never did the parish see a more affectionate and devoted couple. Aaron “yarned” to his Bessie, telling her his marvellous tales. She knitted or darned listening with a stolid face, and when he had done said, “Aaron, get along with your nonsense, I don’t believe in any of your marvels.”

He took her unbelief in good part. If she did not relish his tales, it was her misfortune and not her fault. He was soul, she was body, and each has its proper place in the economy of nature. He was everything that was imaginative, she was wholly commonplace, and the mixture in one household produced not ferment, but peace.

“I wish,” said Aaron, “I wish, Lizzie, I could see wonders. I read of them, I think of them, I tell of them, and yet I have never seen one.”

Suddenly, to the amazement of every one, Aaron died. He caught a chill that settled on his lungs, and he was dead in three days. His wife attended to him with devotion and unflagging solicitude. One night he turned his bright feverish eyes on her and said—

“Liz! kiss me. I’m going at last to see wonders, and you won’t say to me there, where I am going: ‘Get along with your nonsense.’”

He did not say another word, but passed in this eager, expectant attitude of soul into the World of Wonders.

Every one respected Haroun, though he had perplexed all, and all had laughed at him. His death was felt by all, and the entire parish attended his funeral. Sir John Vaughan forgave having been converted into Ganem, the slave of Love, and he was there.

And when Aaron was gone, all said—

“We can’t, for certain, have a more pleasant and romancing carpenter in his place, even if we get—which is doubtful—a better workman.”

And now I come to another singular fact, and fact it is. The widow, Bessie Price, that dull, inanimate, prosaic body—soul none thought to call her—moped and drooped after his death. Nothing roused her, nothing interested her, she seemed to have lost everything when the earth closed over the dear, rodomontading carpenter. Folk said at first, “Bless you, she’s not one to feel her loss. She has not the depth in her.”

But they were mistaken. She felt her loss so deeply, so intensely, that without any apparent malady, she drooped, faded, and from no perceptible physical cause sank, and within twelve months, this bit of putty or dough was laid by the quicksilver of her husband.

And so, even in this dull, heavy creature there was the poetry of love, the romance of a life devoted to one man. Where Love is—there is the Spirit of Poesy.

SHONE EVANS

SHONE EVANS

Shone, that is to say John, Evans was a miner in the Dulais Valley, in South Wales, and a man nearer forty than thirty.

The Dulais Valley had been solitary, with a brawling mountain stream flowing between great ridges of brown heathery moss-land, on which the sheep had browsed and shone white in the sun. But of late years there had come a transformation of the scene. Coalpits had been opened. Plain, ugly rows of houses had been run up. Tall chimneys had been erected, chapels and churches, public-houses, factories as well. What sheep still fed on the hilltops were grey, if not black, for the air was heavy with smoke, and the soot settled everywhere, and not the sweetest herb could avoid a flavour of soot, nor the fairest flower escape a film of “smuts.”

As for the sparkling, laughing Dulais, it had turned to a sullen, dirty stream, of which nothing was required but that it should carry off the scum and sewage of the dense population that clogged the valley and dug into the hills. In long-gone-by days the stream had acquired its name of Blackwater, for so Dulais may be interpreted, from the lyns and pools of bottle-green deeps, formed after its leaps over the barriers of rocks. Now it merited its name more truly, so sombre was it, in the midst of heaps of coal refuse, and so soiled were its waters with every sort of defilement.

“Man makes the town, God made the country,” is a saying; but it is only half true. God makes the town, for He it is who has laid the beds of coal, and run into the rock the veins of ore that draw men to excavate them, and without which men would hunger, and civilisation could not progress.

Beautiful on the hills of old were the harebells, beautiful in the evening the glory of light that lit up the russet hills—ugly, maybe, is now the mining settlement; and yet there is a loveliness above that of harebell and bracken and heather and foaming mountain rill in the lives of the men and women who have invaded and displaced the rude natural charms of the Dulais Valley. And I am going to tell you of one of these beauties, and thus I introduce you to Shone Evans.

The man himself was not comely. A broad-shouldered, plain man, with a stoop such as is often seen in colliers—a reserved, a serious man, and somewhat shy. Perhaps in this he was a typical Welshman—that he was full of tenderness of heart and deep feeling, but at the least token of ridicule or superciliousness, he closed like a flower against rain, brooded over any injury his feelings may have received, but he said nothing.

Centuries of isolation and of wrong done to the Welsh race have had this effect on them. They have been sneered at, swaggered over by domineering Saxons or tyrannical Normans, then exploited by speculative North-countrymen; they have been treated as men to be employed for the advantage of others, and when useless, to be cast aside as broken tools. Their idiosyncrasies have been the subject of joke and scoff; their language has been derided; their aspirations, national and individual, disregarded. This has bred in them a sensitiveness that is foreign to the coarser Saxon—a reserve that forms a crust about the manner that is repellent to the stranger, if in that stranger there be the smallest assumption of superiority. Yet underneath lies the richest, deepest, purest vein of golden love and goodwill that God, who formed the mountains and made man, ever buried in the human heart.

Shone had not married till he was some way past thirty, and then, perhaps, more for convenience than that passion which whirls most men into matrimony; and about a year after his marriage his wife gave him a little son, but did not recover the confinement, and died.

Shone was left alone in the cottage with a baby, and he had his daily work to accomplish in order that he and his baby might live. He could not neglect his work, and he would not neglect his baby. Some neighbours offered to relieve him of the child, but to this Shone was averse. The baby was his; it was almost the only living being that was absolutely, indisputably his own. And now it was that the fountains of love in that closed and sealed heart opened and gushed forth. He loved that child with a love such as only a mother, one might have supposed, could entertain for a poor little, feeble, wailing lump of flesh.

Shone considered what he should do. He would not commit the child to Martha Rees, who had volunteered to take it, for she was a slovenly person, and he could not be sure that she would keep the little creature clean. Nor to Rachel Price, for she was violent tempered when put out: she might lose patience if the child cried, and maltreat it, though usually she was a most good-natured woman. Nor to Alice Tooker, for she was an Englishwoman, and he would not have his child reared save to the sound of the Welsh tongue, and sung to sleep with Welsh lullabies.

Then Shone formed his resolve—and to this he adhered for many, many months.

One morning Shone appeared among the men of his shift, presenting an aspect so surprising, that at first his mates were silent with astonishment, and then broke into laughter.

Shone had taken a sheet, and had cast it over his left shoulder, then wound it round him, thrown it over the right shoulder, and bound it about his waist like a plaid, and between his shoulders, safely bedded in the wraps, was his babe.

“Why, Shone, what have you brought the little kid here for?” was the general exclamation.

“To make a collier of him,” answered Evans good-humouredly. He expected some chaff, and did not take it amiss—from his mates. But chaff would not deter him from carrying out his purpose.

And here it must be observed that throughout this story the conversation must be understood to be translated from the Welsh, and will be, accordingly, free from those colloquialisms or dialectic terms that would be natural had it been carried on by English speakers.

“Shone, you are not going to take the child down the pit, surely?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then he must pay his footing!”

“You must give him something, mates, first with which to pay,” said Evans. “Or, hold! he will give you all round a swig at his bottle.”

“His bottle! You have brought that with you?”

“Certainly,” said Evans, and produced a feeder. “Who will have a smack? Drink to the health of the new hand!”

“Not I,” said one, “in milk and water!”

“We would not deprive him of the least taste!” said another.

Instinctively, and at once, these rough men understood and appreciated Shone’s conduct; he might have to, and he did, encounter good-natured jokes—he was called “Mammy Shone,” but nothing was said in ridicule that could wound. In every heart there sprang up great respect for Shone; and as to the babe, he became the pet of the coalpit.

Thenceforth, whether Evans were on day or night shift, when he went down to his work the child went with him, lodged between his shoulder-blades. When he reached his place where he had to work, he unfolded the sheet—often grimy, it could not be other—made up a nest of it among lumps of coal, and placed the little creature in the folds, with its feeding-bottle accessible. And as he toiled he turned his head over his shoulder every now and then to say an endearing word, and to soothe the child should it begin to cry.

When the men assembled for a meal, there were consultations held as to what was suitable for the stomach if griped, or the gums, should there appear a rash about the chin and lips; also as to whether the proportions of milk and sugar and water were correct; and a lively and heated discussion broke out relative to a suggestion made by one collier that he had known a drop of gin added with the best possible effects—not, of course, regularly, but when there was stomach-ache. Moreover, in the relaxation from work, the babe was passed round and dandled and fondled, admired and remarked upon by the colliers, and fulsome expressions of admiration were lavished upon it, which may or may not have been appropriate; but seeing that the infant succeeded in begriming its face and entire body with coal-dust after the first few minutes that it had been below, it was not possible for any one to pronounce a well-balanced and justified opinion on its personal appearance.

However, affection sees not with ordinary eyes, and as the child was loved by every man and boy in the pit, its beauties were accepted as absolutely beyond dispute.

Now although every collier set himself up to be an authority on baby-culture, and pumped his wife for information which he might retail as his own, acquired experimentally, when next he was below, yet there was an elderly man named Ebenezer Llewellyn who had been the father of fourteen children, ten of which were living, and who was, therefore, by common consent, regarded as a principal authority on the management of babies; and when Ebenezer pronounced an opinion, all bowed to it, whether on the constitution of milk or the adoption of fuller’s earth. Llewellyn did not hold by violet powder; he said coal-dust was better, if sufficiently fine.

On one occasion, in a panic, Shone rushed after Ebenezer to another portion of the pit to bid him come to his assistance—the child was strangling. According to his account it had got a lump of coal into its mouth twice as big as its head, and Shone could not get it out.

“There is no room in the mouth for my finger to be inserted so as to whisk it out. Come quick, Llewellyn, or the child will be dead—it is black in the face.”

“But it always is,” said Ebenezer.

“I mean turning black between the coal grains and where its tears have washed the face. Come at once.”

The father of fourteen, that man of wide experience, obeyed. He sat down, took the infant on his lap, and dexterously with his little finger worked the piece of coal out of the mouth; whereupon the babe set up a howl that rang down the passages of the mine.

“I will tell you what is in prospect,” said Llewellyn sententiously. “This kid is getting to use his hands. He will lay hold of everything he can touch, and he will put whatever he grips into his mouth. They all do it. I have had fourteen and have raised ten, so I ought to know. This is the most critical period in the lives of little ones, and if you don’t mind, he’ll eat up all your output every day—truckloads of coals he’ll put away, if you let him.”

“But I will not allow him.”

“Then you must sit over him and watch his every movement.”

“I cannot do that.”

“There it is that women come in to be of some use in the world. They can look after male babies when they are in the grabbing and devouring age—that’s about teething time. You see how he dribbles. That,” pursued Ebenezer gravely—“that comes of the gums being strained and painful. Babes, at this period, must bite—it’s a necessity. They will bite anything. I’ve had fourteen, so I ought to know. This is a terribly critical time.”

Shone left the pit that day depressed and meditative. As it happened, he encountered the doctor, who hailed him—

“What, Evans! still nursing your baby?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the collier gravely. “I had a bit of difficulty with him to-day; he shovelled about half a ton of coals into his mouth, and Ebenezer Llewellyn and I had a sight of trouble in getting him to disgorge.”

“You take my advice as a sensible man,” said the surgeon. “It is, first, if you value the child, to give it more sun and air; it wants it. Sun and air are more than beef and bread. If the little chap were not as black as a hedgehog, curled up there at your back, I should say it was bleached like sea-kale. It won’t do, Shone. The child now must be brought up upon another system; that is, if you desire it to live and be healthy and happy—unless you have insured its life, and want to get it under ground altogether, so as to pocket the insurance money.”

Evans turned as blank as he could, considering the grime on his face. His jaw dropped.

“But wherever am I to put him?” he asked.

“Now, I have been wanting to see you about this for some while,” said the surgeon, who was a thoroughly good-hearted man, and who valued and admired Shone. “There is Shian Thomas, the dressmaker, as good and steady a wench as I know. She is very badly off. She has been caring for her poor little crippled sister for several years. Now the child is dead, and she has had heavy expenses, what with doctor’s bill—mine, you know——”

“Ah!” said Evans, “I know better than that. You were never hard on the widow or the orphan. What is hard, is to get you to take anything for your trouble when folks are in need themselves.”

“Well, well! there was the funeral and the mourning,” said the doctor, laughing and colouring at the same time. “Now Shian [Jane] mopes for the loss of her sister, and I am sure—I am as sure of this as of anything—that if you confided the young shaver to her, it would be good for her, good for the child, and”—he said the last words as he turned away—“in the end might be good for you.”

Evans walked on his way meditatively. He did not act at once. He waited a day or two. But as the acquisitiveness of the babe became more pronounced, he resolved to put it beyond temptation, where it could not devour coals; and so he arranged with Shian Thomas that she should look after his child at such time, day and night, as he was at work. But as soon as ever he returned from the pit, whether in the very early morning before dawn, or whether in the afternoon, he was to reclaim the child and carry it home with him. He would not be in the house without it; but he brought himself to admit that now it was advisable, if not necessary, that it should no longer go down the pit with him till, as he said, “he comes of age and takes it upon himself.”

He undertook to make a small payment to Shian for her trouble, which was of assistance to her in her then straitened circumstances.

“And you may reckon on this, Shone,” said she, “I’ll take every bit as much care of him as if he were my own. There is an empty place in my house, and in my heart, since I have lost Bessie, and I will put the little man there.”

A couple of weeks under the care of Shian told on the child. He put on fat, became more merry, crowed, chirped, and waxed rosy.

It was a delight to his father to see him, and he did not always return from the pit alone. One day he brought with him Ebenezer Llewellyn to criticise the babe and judge whether the improvement was real or fictitious. He, a father of fourteen children, ten of whom he had reared, after weighing the little one and turning down his lips to see if the colour were red, gave verdict that was favourable. Then came what Shian called “the committee,” a body of workmen on the shift with Shone, to see with their own eyes that all was going on well with the “shaver.” He belonged to the pit, and all the men felt an interest in him, and all wanted to be satisfied that the child was flourishing. All wished to have their say about him, and to give Shian advice as to how he was to be dieted and clothed.

More critical than the rest was Shone, and the dressmaker was obliged to be forbearing with him, for his criticism became at times captious. As, for instance, on one occasion when he came to resume the child and found she had cut out for its amusement a score of dancing men and women, the latter with tall Welsh hats, holding hands, capering vigorously—she had cut them with her scissors out of a sheet of folded paper—Shone put on a grave face.

“I think you should not have encouraged levity in the boy,” said he. “I wouldn’t have the idea put into his head that men and women are created to dance.”

“But, Shone, they are only paper.”

“Paper or flesh and blood is all the same. They are dancing. I don’t like it. You can’t be too careful with a child. It’s just when they’re young that they take in ideas, as they do nourishment—they suck it in in buckets.”

“How would you have me cut them out?—walking to chapel?”

“That would be better.”

“Shone, if I do that, I must make them prance. One cannot cut out these paper men and women without giving them high action. You would not have a whole train of them prancing to church like war-horses!”

The fact of the case was that Shone was slightly jealous. His child had taken to Shian, he clung to her, dabbed his little mouth over her cheek—in kisses, and was distinctly more happy with her than with his father.

Shone was conscious of it, and fought against it. He reasoned with himself; but could not reason himself out of his jealousy.

Had his child not put on fat, not gained in colour—had it become peevish, he would have blamed the young woman, and taken it away. But when not only Ebenezer, but also the “committee,” and his own consciousness assured him that all was well with the infant—better than it had been when it lived half its time underground—then he could not withdraw it from Shian, save for those hours when he was free from work.

So matters went on for a while, and then the situation became aggravated, for the child began to cry when he took it in his arms to remove it, and stretched forth its little hands to Shian, and sobbed, and would not be comforted by the father. It fretted when at home, it screamed, moaned, was restless. Shone thought it must be ill, and consulted a doctor; he battled against the assurance that nothing ailed the child, save its temporary separation from the woman who was as a mother to it.

He worked himself into excitement against Shian; she was stealing his child’s heart from him. But his good sense returned. She was not willingly doing this. It was due to the irresistible. The natural nurse of a babe is a woman, and not a man, and the child instinctively clings to the nurse.

“I pay her six shillings for it,” grumbled Shone. “He ought to understand that she is a hireling and not his mother.”

This he said to the doctor, to whom, perhaps unguardedly, he had let out what embittered his heart.

“Quite so, Evans,” answered the surgeon. “But as the child has not as yet reached the age of reason in which it can draw such distinctions, why do you not make Shian its mother?”

Shone opened his eyes, stared at his adviser, turned his back, and walked away.

But the advice stuck.

Here was a solution to the difficulty, yet not one very pleasing to the collier. He brooded over his wrong, and also over the redress that lay open to him. Not a word could be said against Shian. She was a quiet, hard-working, steady girl.

Shone had taken to her stockings to be darned, garments to be mended, and had paid her for her work. He was obliged occasionally to call in the aid of a charwoman to do his washing, and also to clean up his house. As to his bit of cooking, he did that himself, but was not skilful at the fire and oven. He fared poorly, and was not infrequently out of sorts—the cause, his own bad cooking. Now all these inconveniences would be rectified had he a wife—and yet—and yet——Shone shook his head.

Then an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out in the Dulais Valley. Shone was frightened. For the sake of his child he considered what was to be done. Some provision must be made. If the little one sickened, who was to attend to it?—and attention it would need day and night. The proper person would be Shian—a stranger would never do. But Shian—he could not bid her nurse the child in his house, and to have it throughout the long sickness in hers, and he not with it—that would never do. Besides, she was a dressmaker. She could not take in needlework when there was risk of infection in her house. Shone stamped. What was to be done?

“How is it?” he asked, as he came back from the pit.

“Very well, Shone. As usual, very cheerful.”

“No signs of a sore throat? Have you looked?”

“None at all.”

“But suppose he were to get it?”

“Get what?”

“The scarlatina.”

“You need not suppose it. He is quite well.”

“We must provide against the worst.”

“The worst, Shone!”

“Oh!” with a shiver, “I do not mean the worst at all—God forbid; but against his catching the fever.”

“Well, what will you do?”

“Do, Shian? There is nothing else to be done but for you to marry me. You see—I do it for the babe’s sake, and because of the infection.”

She was surprised—a little amused.

“And,” put in Shone, a little apologetically, “there are my stockings want mending. But, really, for the child’s sake, I wish it.”

“I suppose, Shone, if the poor little chap were to be taken ill, he’d be removed from here?”

“No doubt of it. The sanitary officer wouldn’t allow it here.”

“Nor could I nurse it?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, then, Shone, for the scarlatina’s sake I don’t mind if I do take you.”

“Then,” said Shone, “we must look sharp. Let me see his throat. He might have it come on sudden. I’ll get a license.”

It was certainly an odd proposal and a queer acceptance, and no expense was spared.

“Bless me,” said Shone, “for the child’s sake, and because of the scarlet fever, I will stump up a guinea for the license.”

So Shone and Shian were married; and the child did not get scarlatina—so that all this trouble and expense were, in Shone’s eyes, thrown away.

“Might just as well have chucked it all down a disused coalpit!” said he.

Positively he became grumpy and querulous because his child showed no signs of drowsiness, sore throat, and eruption. Not that he wished it to be ill, but he wanted a justification of his marriage.

Shian did her utmost to make him comfortable. She brought the cottage to a condition of scrupulous cleanliness; she took in hand all his clothes, she mended them, and made some that he had discarded as neat as new. She did the washing in a manner very different from that of the charwoman. Above all, she cooked really-appetising meals that made Shone’s face relax.

No sooner did he return from the pit than at once she put the child in his arms. She made no attempt to stand between it and the father. On the contrary, she talked to the little creature of its daddy when he was away, and encouraged it to look out for his return. Indeed, as he came up the street every day, he could see Shian at the door holding up the child; he could see its arms extended, and the hands clapping with pleasure at his appearance.

Shian felt that she was an accessory, not a prime factor in the house and in the well-being of Shone—the baby was the monarch, engrossing all his affection, occupying all his thoughts. She was accepted as a necessity, as conducing to the health and happiness of the child—one who could be and would be dispensed with unless needed for the child’s sake. But she was a patient, sweet, and uncomplaining woman. She was not a little sad at heart, and the tears often filled her eyes. She coveted some of the kisses, some of the endearing terms lavished on the child—some, also, of the glow of love that lit up the father’s eyes as he watched his babe. Oh, if only, as he returned from the pit, he had looked at her a little—just a little—instead of fixing his eyes, from the first moment he saw it till he had it in his arms, on the child. But she had been taken into the house, had become Shone’s wife, for the sake of the child; and she submitted to be regarded with just so much consideration as behoved a dutiful servant to the little one.

Time went on. Shone began to mend in spirits. He looked more respectable on Sundays; his digestion was better; he had no more unpleasant attacks after a meal of what might have been beef, but was leather, which had troubled him at one time. He had now Yorkshire pudding dipped in gravy; he had not that in the days of his widowership.

He began to have words for Shian relative to other topics than the baby. She caught him, by the firelight—as he smoked in the evening and she knitted—observing her attentively.

Then came Christmas Day.

Now there were sprigs of holly stuck in the windows and about the mantelpiece. The fire blazed, and was reflected in the burnished Bristol ware that shone on the dresser as though real copper. And there was a savoury smell in the house.

“Goose!” exclaimed Shone. “By the powers—goose! And sage and onions,” said he, after a pause—“I smell them. Goodness me, I wish the boy were old enough to enjoy it all.”

“Here, father,” said Shian, as she laid the dinner—“here you are—goose, yes; onion and sage—yes. You would not have goose alone, surely?”

“Well,” said Shone, and his face beamed with peace and goodwill, “well—to—be—sure.”

“And”—when the first course was over—“I have another pleasure in store for you.”

“That is——”

“See!” Shian introduced a little Christmas tree, manufactured out of a branch of fir, and to it were hung two—just two—articles: a cap lined with swansdown, and trimmed with cherry ribbons, and a long pair of newly-knitted stockings. “There,” said Shian, “for baby and you—your Christmas presents. I bring it now, whilst he is awake, that he may enjoy it with us.”

“Well,” gasped Shone, “this is delightful! How lovely the child will look in such a glorious bonnet. And how warm my legs will be in these beautiful stockings.”

“That is not all,” said Shian.

“What more can there be?”

“This!” And she dished up a real Christmas plum-pudding.

When Shone saw this the tears came into his eyes.

“Why, Shian!” he said, and felt a pinch of the heart, “you have thought for every one but yourself!”

“No, no, father,” said she. “I have had some of the goose, and shall of the plum-pudding.”

“Some—some!” said he impatiently. “But there is nothing for yourself particularly.”

Then he jumped up, ran behind her at table, caught her head in his arms, pressed her face to his heart, and covered brow and lips with kisses.

“O Shian! You have my love—my very heart!”

“Because of—baby?”

“No, not only; because——”

“Of the goose?”

“No—no, not only; because——”

“Of the plum-pudding?”

“No—no; I mean——”

“Because of the long stockings?”

“No, Shian; because of yourself, your own dear, sweet self—the best in the world!”

“That is my Christmas box, Shone! You could not have given me a better.”

HENRY FROST

HENRY FROST

There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman, than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.

It is—so far as my experience goes—quite useless to assure a Frenchman that such transfer of wives is not a matter of every-day occurrence and is not legal; he replies, with an expression of incredulity, that of course English people endeavour to make light of, or deny a fact that is “notorious.”

In a book by the antiquary Colin de Plancy, on Legends and Superstitions connected with the Sacraments, he gives up some pages to an account of the prevalent English custom.

When I was in France a few years ago, in a town church in the south, I heard an abbé once preach on marriage, and contrast its indissolubility in Catholic France with the laxity in Protestant England, where “any one, when tired of his wife, puts a halter round her neck, takes her to the next market town and sells her for what she will fetch.” I ventured to call on this abbé and remonstrate, but he answered me he had seen the fact stated in books of the highest authority, and that my disputing the statement did not prove that his authorities were wrong, but that my experience was limited, and he asked me point-blank whether I had never known such cases. There, unhappily, he had me on the hip. And when I was obliged to confess that I did know of one such case, “Mais, voilà, mon Dieu,” said he, and shrugged his shoulders with a triumphant smile.

Now it must be allowed that such sales have taken place, and that this is so is due to rooted conviction in the rustic mind that such a transaction is legal and morally permissible.

The case I knew was this.

There lived a tall, thin man in the parish when I was a boy, who was the village poet. Whenever an event of any consequence took place within the confines of the parish, such as the marriage of the squire’s daughter, he came down to the manor-house with a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion, and was then given his dinner and a crown. Now this man had actually bought his wife for half-a-crown. Her husband had led her into Okehampton and had sold her there in the market. The poet purchased her for half the sum he had received for one of his poems, and led her home with him, a distance of twelve miles, by the halter, he holding it in his hand, she placidly, contentedly, wearing the loop about her neck.

The report that Henry Frost was leading home his half-crown wife preceded the arrival of the couple, and when they entered the village all the inhabitants turned out to see the spectacle.

Now this arrangement was not very satisfactory to either squire or rector, and both intervened. Henry Frost maintained that Anne was his legitimate wife, for “he had not only bought her in the market, but had led her home, with the halter in his hand, and he’d take his Bible oath that he never took the halter off her till she had crossed his doorstep and he had shut the door.”

The parson took down the Bible, the squire “Burn’s Justice of Peace,” and strove to convince Harry that his conduct was warranted by neither Scripture nor the law of the land. “I don’t care,” he said, “her’s my wife, as sure as if we was spliced at the altar, for and because I paid half-a-crown, and I never took off the halter till her was in my house; lor’ bless yer honours, you may ask any one if that ain’t marriage, good, sound, and Christian, and every one will tell you it is.”

Mr. Henry Frost lived in a cottage that was on lives, so the squire was unable to bring compulsion to bear on him.

When I call the man Frost, I am not employing his real name, because his relatives are alive, and I know them very well.

Frost, as already intimated, was village bard or poet. I remember well his coming down to the house with a poem on a transaction of my father’s, the advisability of which I now greatly doubt.

In our village, the “revel” was kept up every year on the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday, and the week following. A revel in Devonshire is the equivalent of the wake in other parts of England, and of the feast in Cornwall. It used to be celebrated on the day of the saint to whom the parish church is dedicated. But when the new style came into use, the conservative rustic mind resisted the change and adhered to the computation according to the unrevised calendar. Accordingly, in most places the feast or revel is eleven days after the day of the patron saint. In some places, however, it is movable. Now our church is dedicated to St. Peter, accordingly our revel ought to be on the nearest Sunday after June 29. It is rare indeed that the first Sunday after Trinity should fall so late, and impossible, I believe, that it could synchronise with old-style St. Peter’s Day. In 1899 the first Sunday after Trinity was on June 4—twenty-five days before new-style St. Peter’s Day, and thirty-six before the feast reckoned by the old style.

There is, however, some reason to believe that the earlier dedication was to St. Petrock, whose day is June 4, and that the title of the church was altered in 1261, when reconsecrated. The bishops of Exeter always endeavoured to get rid of the patron saints when belonging to the Celtic Church, and substitute for them some who were in the Roman calendar.

The revel at Lew Trenchard agreed much more closely with St. Petrock’s Day than with that of St. Peter the Apostle.

However, this is neither here nor there. The revel was kept up with shows, a fair, and horse-races, and it must be allowed there was some drunkenness.

My father, as squire, and in those days an autocrat, disapproved of the revel and abolished it, and substituted for it a cottage garden show, on no very determined date. The revel has never recovered, and the flower show, after living for two years, died a natural death.

I do not myself believe in the destruction of any ancient institution. Let it be reformed, but never abolished.

Well, now to the point.

Henry Frost appeared on the occasion of the first flower show with a poem composed to celebrate the birth of the cottage garden exhibition and the burial of the revel. It was very laudatory of my father, and every verse concluded with the refrain—

“For he had a most expansive mind.”

He had used incredible effort to obtain suitable rhymes. In one verse he had—

“In laudable efforts he was not behind,

For, &c.”

Another ran—

“To drunken abuses never was blind,

For, &c.

Another, in doubtful grammar, ran—

“Among his comperes greatly he shined,

For, &c.”

“Ah,” said my father, “all Henry Frost thinks of in his innermost mind is that I should have a most expansive pocket, and that he may be able to get drunk on what he draws from it in reward for his poem.”

When Anne died, then a difficulty arose: under what name was she to be entered in the register? The parson insisted that he could not and he would not enter her as Anne Frost, for that was not her legal name. Then Henry was angry, and carried her off to be buried in another parish, where the parson was unacquainted with the circumstances. I must say that Anne proved an excellent “wife.” She was thrifty, clean, and managed a rough-tempered and rough-tongued man with great tact, and was generally respected. She died in or about 1843.

Much later than that there lived a publican some miles off, whom I knew very well; indeed he was the namesake of and first cousin to a carpenter in my constant employ. He bought his wife for a stone two-gallon jar of Plymouth gin, if I was informed aright. She had belonged to a stonecutter, but as he was dissatisfied with her, he put up a written notice in several public places to this effect—

NOTICE.

This here be to hinform the publick as how G⸺ C⸺ be dispozed to sell his wife by Auction. Her be a dacent, clanely woman, and be of age twenty-five ears. The sale be to take place in the ⸺ Inn, Thursday next at seven o’clock.

In this case also I do not give the names, as the woman is, I believe, still alive. I believe—as I was told—that the foreman of the works remonstrated, and insisted that such a sale would be illegal. He was not, however, clear as to the points of law, and he asserted that it would be illegal unless the husband held an auctioneer’s license, and if money passed. This was rather a damper. However, the husband was very desirous to be freed from his wife, and he held the sale as he had advertised, making the woman stand on a table, and he armed himself with a little hammer. The biddings were to be in kind and not in money. One man offered a coat, but as he was a small man and the seller was stout, when he found that the coat would not fit him he refused it. Another offered a “phisgie,” i.e. a pick, but this also was refused, as the husband possessed a “phisgie” of his own. Finally the landlord offered a two-gallon jar of gin, and down fell the hammer with “gone.”

I knew the woman; she was not bad looking. The new husband drank, and treated her very roughly, and on one occasion when I was lunching at the inn she had a black eye. I asked her how she had hurt herself. She replied that she had knocked her face against the door, but I was told that this was a result of a domestic brawl. Now, the remarkable feature in these cases is that it is impossible to drive the idea out of the heads of those who thus deal in wives that such a transaction is not sanctioned by law and religion. In a parish register in my neighbourhood is the following entry—

1756. Robert Elford was baptized, child of Susanna Elford by her sister’s husband; she was married with the consent of her sister, the wife, who was at the wedding.

In this instance there is no evidence of a sale, but we may be sure that money did pass and that the contractor of the new marriage believed it was a right and proper union, although perhaps irregular; and the first wife unquestionably believed that she was acting in observance of a legal right in transferring her husband to her sister. There are instances in which country people have gone before a local solicitor and have had a contract of sale drawn up for the disposal of their wives. The Birmingham police court in 1853 had to adjudicate on such a case, and the astounding thing in this instance was that a lawyer could be found to draw up the contract. It is no wonder that the magistrates administered a very severe reprimand. But there was a far earlier case than this—that of Sir William de Paganel. The lady stoutly and indignantly resisted the transfer, and appealed against the contract to the law, which declared the sale to be null and void.

In 1815 a man held a regular auction in the market-place at Pontefract, offering his wife at a minimum bidding of one shilling, but he managed to excite a competition, and she was finally knocked down for eleven shillings.

In 1820 a man named Brouchet led his wife, a decent, pleasant-looking woman, but with a tongue in her mouth, into the cattle-market at Canterbury from the neighbouring village of Broughton. He required a salesman to dispose of her, but the salesman replied that his dealings were with cattle only, and not with women. Brouchet, not to be beaten, thereupon hired a cattle-pen, paying sixpence for the hire, and led his wife into it by the halter that was round her neck. She did not fetch a high figure, being disposed of to a young man of Canterbury for five shillings.

In 1832, on 7th April, a farmer named Joseph Thomson came into Carlisle with his wife, to whom he had been married three years before; he sent the bellman round the town to announce a sale, and this attracted a great crowd. At noon the sale took place. Thomson placed his wife on a chair, with a rope of straw round her neck. He then said—according to the report in the “Annual Register,”—“Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice, my wife, Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort, and the good of my home; but she became my tormentor, a domestic curse. Gentlemen, I speak the truth from my heart when I say—may God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad dog, or a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature. Now I have shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings, I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women in general—

‘Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace

To laugh, to weep, to cheat the human race.’

She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her with all her perfections and imperfections for the sum of fifty shillings.”

That this sermon was spoken by Thomson is most improbable—it is doubtless put into his mouth by the editor of the “Annual Register”; it was not to his interest to depreciate the article he desired to sell. After about an hour the woman was knocked down to one Henry Mears, for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog. They then parted company in perfect good-humour, each satisfied with his bargain; Mears and the woman went one way, and Thomson and the dog another.

In 1835 a man led his wife by a halter, in precisely the same way, into the market at Birmingham, and sold her for fifteen pounds. She at once went home with the purchaser. She survived both buyer and seller, and then married again. Some property came to her in the course of years from her first husband; for notwithstanding claims put forth by his relatives she was able to maintain in a court of law that the sale did not and could not vitiate her rights as his widow.

Much astonishment was caused in 1837 in the West Riding of Yorkshire by a man being committed to prison for a month with hard labour for selling or attempting to sell his wife by auction in the manner already described. It was generally and firmly believed that he was acting within his rights.

In 1858, in a tavern at Little Horton, near Bradford, a man named Hartley Thomson put up his wife, who is described by the local journals as a pretty young woman, for sale by auction, and he had the sale previously announced by sending round the bellman. He led her into the market with a ribbon round her neck, which exhibits an advance in refinement over the straw halter; and again in 1859, a man at Dudley disposed of his wife in a somewhat similar manner for sixpence. A feature in all these instances is the docility with which the wife submits to be haltered and sold. She would seem to have been equally imbued with the idea that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the transaction, and that it was perfectly legal.

If we look to see whence originated the idea, we shall probably find it in the conception of marriage as a purchase. Among savage races, the candidate for marriage is expected to pay the father for his daughter. A marriageable girl is worth so many cows or so many reindeer. The man pays over a sum of money or its equivalent to the father, and in exchange receives the girl. If he desires to be separated from her he has no idea of giving her away, but receives what is calculated to be her market value from the man who is disposed to relieve him of her. In all dealings for cattle, or horses, or sheep, a handsel is paid, half-a-crown to clinch the bargain, and the transfer of coin constitutes a legal transfer of authority and property over the animal. This is applied to a woman, and when a coin, even a sixpence, is paid over and received, the receiver regards this as releasing him from all further possession of the wife, who at once passes under the hand of the purchaser. There is probably no trace in our laws of women having been thus regarded as negotiable properties, but it is unquestionable that at an early period, before Christianity invaded the island, such a view was held, and if here and there the rustic mind is unable to rise to a higher view of the marriage state, it shows how extremely slow it is for opinions to alter when education has been neglected.

MILK-MAIDS

MILK-MAIDS

It is a sad subject for reflection that, among the extinct animals, we should have to reckon the milk-maids of Old England—the theme of so much poetry, the subject of such charming pictures.

The dodo exists now solely in a few specimens preserved in glass cases in two or at the outside three museums. The mammoth is discovered rarely embedded in blocks of ice under the Arctic Circle. The gigantic moa of New Zealand is recovered only from its scattered bones. The Great Auk was last seen off the coast of Waterford in 1834. Her egg sells for about a hundred pounds. A species of the English milk-maid is said to exist on the High Alps, and is called the Sennerin, but is so unlike the milk-maid of English picture and story, that naturalists are disposed to dispute it as a species, and regard it as belonging to a different genus.

Again, those temperate and frugal beings who frequent the A.B.C. establishments in London, and get a drink of milk for a penny and sandwiches for twopence, will see there very interesting and even charming specimens of the modern milk-maid, but in build, in plumage, and in habit, totally unlike the milk-maid we knew from nursery rhyme, and from illustrations. The old milk-maid—save the mark! the milk-maid was never old, her youth was perennial—I mean the milk-maid who lived and flourished in Britain till about 1834, when she disappeared along with the alca impennis—was fresh faced, rosy cheeked, strongly built, wore light cotton gowns and white aprons; carried her arms bare, sang cheerily as she went about her work, and had a tendency to become “bouncing.” Her habitat was a country farm, and she was to be found frequenting the fields, the cowshed, and the dairy.

The specimens exhibited by the Aerated Bread Company, on the other hand, are pale complexioned, somewhat lily faced, of a willowy build, always with plumage that is black, except for a white apron, the arms are clothed in black save for neat white cuffs about the wrists; they move silently, and are never seen in country pastures, only in A.B.C. refreshment places in London, and such large towns as can maintain these useful establishments.

But the difference extends further. The milk-maid of olden time was not exactly a wading, web-footed being, but she had large feet and shoes of the most solid, broad description, very necessary, as she was constrained to make her way through farm-yards over ankles in mud, or to go through the task of milking cows in byres or linneys that were—well, the reverse of clean. As to the modern milk-maid, it suffices to look at her feet—like those described by Sir John Suckling,

“Her feet beneath her petticoat,

Like little mice, steal in and out

As if they feared the light,”—

to be quite satisfied that she is not descended from, nor is a true variant of the milk-maid of olden time. The same Sir John Suckling admirably portrays the latter—

“No grape that’s kindly ripe could be,

So round, so plump, so soft as she,

Nor half so full of juice.”

It is obvious this does not describe the A.B.C. milk-lass. The latter is a banana, the former an apple.

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?

I’m going a-milking, sir, she said.”

No maids now go a-milking, that is why there are no true milk-maids. The old order changeth. Nowadays in the country it is the men who milk. Women cannot be found to do it. They object to the trudge through the dirt, and the planting of the three-legged peggy-stool, and their feet in the oozy substance that forms the cushion enveloping the floor of the cow stall. I do not blame them. It is a dirty place.

But the milking of the cows in the byre was itself a novelty. Formerly the operation took place in the meadows, where it was clean enough, and the feet were in the sweet grass. The milk-girl filled her pails, adjusted a hoop that they might not swing against and spill over her cotton dress, and carried the pails to the dairy, singing as she went. But the weather is not always bright, and it was not only unpleasant, but unsafe, to milk out of doors in the rain; so the cattle were driven under cover, and there the dirt speedily grew to be deep, and presently the girls found it intolerable to have to wade in mire, so the final stage was that they abandoned the milking to the men.

Do the cows like it as well? I trow not. Surely the woman’s hand is best for the process. A woman instinctively knows how to milk. All men cannot acquire the art, and cows are well aware as to which are skilful milkers and which are not. A man may be a good milker, a woman always is one. That is the difference. What a charming sketch that is of Caldecott’s of the “maid who milked the cow with the crumpled horn,” in his illustrated story of the House that Jack Built! When our children nowadays recite that nursery doggerel, the words concerning that maid who milked the cow are not understood by them. They are an anachronism; for as soon as they know anything they know that no maiden all forlorn or all smiles, no maiden whatever, does now milk cows. And to conceive the idea of a “man all tattered and torn” approach and kiss such a milk-maid as occupies a position in an Aerated Bread Company’s establishment, is to demand of their young intelligences something too preposterous.

Do you remember old Izaak Walton’s account of the milk-maid with her merry songs? How he asked her to sing to him. “What song was it?” she inquired. “I pray—was it ‘Come, shepherds, deck your heads’; or ‘As at noon Dulcina rested’; or ‘Philida flouts me’; or ‘Chevy Chace’; or ‘Johnny Armstrong’; or ‘Troy Town’?” The memories of the ancient milk-maids were storehouses of delightful old English ballads; now the only persons who know any are ancient silver-headed topers in taverns.

It was formerly the custom for the bonny milk-maids to dance before the houses of their customers in the month of May, to obtain a small gratuity; and there is a dear old English tune, “The merry milk-maids in green,” that was probably the one to which they were wont to dance. To be a milk-maid and to be merry were synonymous terms in the olden time.

Pepys, in his diary, 13th October 1662, says, “With my father took a melancholy walk to Portholme, seeing the country-maids milking their cows there, they being there now at grass; and to see with what mirth they come all home together in pomp with their milk, and sometimes they have music go before them.”

In Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, “The Coxcomb,” printed in 1647, two milk-maids are introduced, Nan and Madge, and the scene in which they are on the stage is so charming, that I venture to quote a good deal of it—the authors have so happily caught the kindliness, the simplicity, the joyousness of the English milk-maid of yore.

But one word I must premise. Viola, the heroine of the play is astray and wandering over the country seeking to conceal whence she is and who she is.

Viola wearied and lost sighs—

“The evening comes and every little flower

Droops now, as well as I.”

Then enter Nan and Madge with milk pails.

“Nan. Good Madge,

Let’s rest a little; by my troth, I’m weary.

This new pail is a plaguy heavy one.

Madge. With all my heart.

Viola (aside). What true contented happiness dwells here,

More than in cities! Would to God my father

Had lived like one of these, and bred me up

To milk, and do as they do. Methinks ’tis

A life that I would choose.

Maids!

For charity, give a poor wench one draught of milk,

That weariness and hunger have nigh famished!

Nan. If I’d but one cow’s milk in all the world

You should have some on’t: There, drink.

Madge. Do you dwell hereabouts?

Viola. No; would I did.

Nan. Madge, if she does not look as like my cousin Sue

O’ th’ Moor Lane, as one thing can look like another.

Madge. Nay; Sue has a hazel eye, I know Sue well;

And, by your leave, not so trim a body, neither;

This is a flat-bodied thing, I can tell you.

Nan. She laces close,

By the Mass, I warrant you; and so does Sue too.”

Then Viola entreats the two girls to find her where she may not only lodge, but also find work.

“Nan. Uds me, our Dorothy went away but last week,

And I know my mistress wants a maid, and why

May she not be placed there? This is a likely wench,

I tell you truly, and a good wench, I warrant her.

Madge. And ’tis a hard case if we, that have served

Four years apiece, cannot bring in one servant.

We will prefer her.… Can you milk a cow?

And make a merry-bush?

Viola. I shall learn quickly.

Nan. And dress a house with flowers? and—

This you must do, for we deal in the dairy—

And make a bed or two?

Viola. I hope I shall.

Nan. But be sure to keep the men out; they will mar

All that you make else, I know that by myself;

For I have been so touz’d among ’em in

My days! Come, you shall e’en home with us,

And be our fellow; our house is honest,

And we serve a very good woman and a gentle woman,

And we live as merrily, and dance o’ good days

After evensong. Our wake shall be on Sunday;

Do you know what a wake is? we have mighty cheer then,

And such a coil, ’twould bless ye!

You must be our sister, and love us best,

And tell us everything: and when cold weather

Comes, we’ll lie together: will you do this?

Viola. Yes.

Nan. Then home again, o’ God’s name.”

We learn that Princess Elizabeth, in Queen Mary’s reign, was closely guarded and only suffered to walk in the gardens of the palace, and not abroad. “In this situation,” says Holingshed, “no marvell if she, hearing upon a time out of her garden at Woodstock, a certain milk-maid singing pleasantlie, wished herself to be a milk-maid as she was; saying that her case was better, and life merrier.”

Sir Thomas Overbury in his “Character of a milk-maid,” in the reign of James I., says, “She dares go alone, and unfold her sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none: yet, to say truth, she is never alone, she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers, but short ones.”

There is still a reminiscence of the milk-maid that comes to us every spring, in the fresh flickering cuckoo-flower of the delicate lilac, like the pale cotton, of which the dresses of the girls were made. It is the Cardamine pratensis that bears both the name of “Milk-maids” and “Cuckoo-flower.” The latter name it obtains, says old Gerarde, because it “doth flower in April and Maie, when the cuckoo doth begin to sing her pleasant notes without stammering.” The same plant is also the “Lady’s Smock” of Shakespeare. I suppose it will retain the name of cuckoo-flower, for the cuckoo is still with us, but lose that of “milk-maids,” for, alas—milk-maids are no more.

The Alpine representative of the class is quite distinct. As soon as the high pastures are free from snow, the cattle are driven up the mountains and the women go with them. They remain at these high altitudes all the summer till the first frosts and snows come, when they, with the cattle, return. On the high Alps they have to milk the cows and make cheeses. They live in senn hüte (wooden hovels), and sleep in the lofts among the hay. Here is a description by a native of the Alps.

“The Sennerin is engaged through the summer with tubs and churns; she attends to the milking and the fodder. An Almbub, a little boy, is with her, and he has to look after the herds, drive the cattle to pasture, and bring them back at even. Both live on the boiled milk and some lard out of a pot. Then when darkness comes on they light the kichspan, a bit of firwood dipped in pitch that serves as a candle, and by its flare she mends his torn garments which must be made to last till they return in October; and the boy in turn takes between his knees her shoes which have been torn in the rocks, and sews the rents with waxed thread, and tells tales or sings songs.

“For the most part the sennerin is not under twenty. She is generally over forty, one who has spent her life in making butter, and understands the cows. And every summer she is aloft since she became old enough to be trusted. Young women, the farmer knows well, do not answer on the Alpine pastures exposed to every sort of climate and weather. And yet—sometimes, a young one is there aloft, and then romance steps in.”

These sennerins, old, withered, for the most part, in rusty and dark dresses, with storm and sun-tanned faces, wrinkled, eminently unpoetical objects, how can we consider them as of the same race as our recently extinct dairy-maids?

I will end with a couple of verses of Martin Parker’s ballad on the Milk-maids, composed in the reign of James I. or Charles I.

“The bravest lasses gay

Live not so merry as they;

In honest civil sort

They make each other sport,

As they trudge on their way.

Come fair or foul weather,

They’re fearful of neither—

Their courages never quail:

In wet and dry, though winds be high,

And dark’s the sky, they ne’er deny

To carry the milking pail.

Their hearts are free from care,

They never will despair;

Whatever may befall,

They bravely bear out all,

And Fortune’s frowns out-dare.

They pleasantly sing

To welcome the spring—

’Gainst heaven they never rail;

If grass will grow, their shanks they show;

And, frost or snow, they merrily go

Along with the milking pail.”

THE BRIDE’S WELL

THE BRIDE’S WELL

On what is locally called a Ramp, that is to say the refuse thrown out of a quarry, and left to decay or become covered with mould, was, in our quiet parish, a long white-washed cottage thatched. It was planted in a peculiar position: its back was against a dense oak wood, out of which shot up Scotch firs, and the portion of ramp it occupied was of very old standing, and was a good way from that part of the quarry on which workmen were engaged.

In front of the cottage was a garden, always well kept, and on the farther side of the garden, the inevitable pig-sty. But then—what would the garden have produced without the pig?

When I said that the cottage was on the ramp, I was not quite exact, it was on the slope of the hill, but ramp had been thrown up before it even to a level above the garden, so that the dwellers in the cottage were almost as much shut in as was Noah in his ark.

The ramp was not hideous, as new ramps are. It was so ancient that it was overgrown with trees, and moss, and fern. The crane’s-bill loved to ramble about it, and the wild strawberry covered it in June with a network of rubies.

The cottage was so closed about that every wind was shut out, but the sun flowed over it, frost rarely smote and killed the vegetables in the garden, and flowers came there earlier than elsewhere.

A great monthly rose was trained over the front of the house, and I believe that there were flowers on it all the year round.

Near the cottage stood a very ancient and wide-spreading oak, stunted and contorted, because growing in a minimum of soil and a maximum of slate rock. But in spite of disadvantages, the oak was very aged and bore innumerable acorns. Under the shade of the tree, rained over with shed acorns at the fall of the year, was a slab of rock, and it went by the name of the Conjuring Table. There was a certain Lady who was fondly believed, though dead for over a century, to haunt the parish. The story went that Seven Parsons met at this natural table to lay the Lady’s ghost. They would have succeeded but that one of the party was so tipsy that he said the wrong words and forgot the right.

But that which haunted the ramp was not a ghost, it was vipers, locally called “Long Cripples.” These creatures loved to lie in the sun on the hot slates, and they became so comatose in the heat, or perhaps with repletion from the number of flies and beetles they ate, that they were easily killed there by the village lads.

Now, although the cottage was in a lonely place, and was shut in from wind and from the sight of men, unless these latter came there purposely to see it, yet there was that in it which precluded its being out of mind, however much out of sight, and that was—an uncommonly pretty girl who lived in it with her father and mother.

Their name was Worden, and her Christian name was Prue, that is to say, Prudence.

Not only was she vastly pretty, but she was one of the happiest, brightest dispositioned girls in the place. The sun that loved the cottage seems to have been drunk in by her heart and to brim at her eyes.

Prue managed the beehives, of which there was a row in the garden, and she moved among the winged creatures without their attempting to sting her. “Talk to them, sing to them, and they become your friends,” she said.

They buzzed round her, as though she were a flower, as though they would light on her laughing lips, and she scolded them and away they flew—it was their fun, that was all, she explained. But it was not bees only that came about Prue. Village youths are not blind to female beauty, and hearts open at once to a bright spirit, as celandines open to the sun.

Prue had plenty of admirers, but her head was not turned; she laughingly kept them at a distance—that is to say, all but one, George Kennaway, and it soon became an understood thing that George also would not allow other young men to buzz about Prue. That flower was for his own sipping, not for another’s.

How this came about was as follows:—

The plank on which stood the beehives had become so rotten that Prue’s father, Roger Worden, purchased a good new Dantzic pine plank to replace that which was decayed.

The substitution must be made at night. So the plank was laid near the Conjuring Stone till the occasion came for its use. There were also there two or three short lengths of firbole, whereof to make props for the plank; as not only was Worden about to renew the old stand, but also to extend it, to sustain additional hives; until wanted, the plank was at Prue’s disposal, and she thus disposed it. She placed it across one of the logs and endeavoured to play at see-saw on it. This could only be effected by reducing the length of plank on her side to a couple of feet, and giving the other side a considerable extent. But this did not answer satisfactorily; it gave very little sway to the end on which Prue sat. She therefore tried another experiment. She rolled a big stone on to the farther end of the board, but here again the success was not great, as the stone tumbled off.

So engaged was Prue in endeavouring to obtain a ride by circumventing the difficulties that stood in her way, that she did not observe George Kennaway as he approached; and he startled her into dropping from the board when he said close to her, “You are a silly child. It takes two to play at see-saw.”

“Then you sit at the other end,” said Prue, picking herself up. She was flushed, and looked prettier than ever under the white cotton field bonnet.

“Certainly,” said the lad, “but b’aint it rather child’s play?”

“I never had brothers and sisters to play see-saw with me,” explained she.

“And are you so terrible fond of it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried proper yet.”

“Come—you shall have a ride.”

So the young man sat at one end astride, and the girl at the other as on a chair, and up and down they went. When he was aloft she was down, and when she soared he was on the ground. She laughed for joy of heart—then suddenly jumped off, and down in an ignominious, precipitate, and ungraceful manner fell George, sprawling on the ground.

“I had forgot,” said Prue.

“I should think you had—to give me such a fall.”

“I don’t mean that—I mean the water.”

“What water?”

“Mother wanted the pitchers filled.”

“Immediately?”

“N—n—o, but I just remembered it, so sprang off.”

“And sent me down.”

“I am sorry—did I hurt you?”

“You might have hurt me badly.”

“Let me go fetch the water and then we’ll see-saw again.”

“But understand there must be two together—always, for that.”

The cottage was supplied from a well that was some sixty to eighty feet below its level. From the oak and the Conjuring Stone a path descended to an old excavation, very deep, and so overhung with trees, and so limited in extent, that the sun never fell into it. At the bottom was deep bottle-green water—how deep none knew, and in it lived—so it was said—one enormous trout, too wary and well fed to allow himself to be caught. The slate sides of this abyss were hung with moss and fern and tendrils of creeping plants. A little way from this tremendous chasm, but only a few feet higher than the water’s edge was a well, that is to say a spring with the sides built up and a slab of slate covering it, in which was the coolest, most crystalline water. This spring never failed in the hottest summer, and its overflow trickled into the tarn that occupied the ancient, deserted quarry. It was a long way to go to get water for all requirements, but the water when got was most refreshing and delicious.

At least twice a day Prue had to descend to the well with empty pitchers, and toil up the ascent with them laden.

“And mind this, Prue,” said her mother repeatedly, “never you go no farther than the well, for the slate rock beyond by the water is that slippy you might fall in, and none ever hear you cry out.”

The whole way down was so thick with crane’s-bill that the air was strong with its geranium savour.

“No,” said George. “For once, Prue, I will fetch the water, and you bide here.”

Then the young man caught up the brown pitchers and descended the path. In ten minutes he was back with them brimming over.

“Now,” said Prue, “we will have another swing, only I will sit nearer the middle. I do not want to have a bad fall.”

“Why should you have a bad fall?”

“You might punish me for giving you one.”

“I am not like to do that.”

“I had rather not trust you.”

So they swayed up and down.

Then said Prue: “Why do you sit nearer the middle than I?”

“Because I am three times as heavy as you and must make the balance right.”

“It is still rather too much.”

“Then draw nearer.”

“But you will draw nearer still?”

“I must. I cannot help it. Now then—try how it feels in the middle.” He put out his arm and drew her to the midst above the fulcrum, and there they sat, side by side, gently rocking. The least displacement of balance set them swaying.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” asked George.

“Beautiful,” answered Prue.

“And I don’t see,” said George, “why we shouldn’t see-saw for always like this. I mean you and me together. It takes two, it does.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. I have fifteen shillings a week, we might see-saw on that. And I’ve got strong arms, and a good cottage, and a large garden. We might see-saw on that. And—I love you with all my heart.”

“But is there to be see-saw in that?”

“None—fast as a nail. Will you?”

“Well, if it must be, it must.”

That is how it came about.

The banns had been called and the marriage day had arrived. The parson was to be at the church at ten o’clock.

“Mother,” said Prue the evening before. “There is my white confirmation gown and the veil the young ladies at the Hall gave me—I will wear that.”

“And you must have flowers.”

“Yes—white.”

Now it so fell out that just before the time came for going to church Mrs. Worden exclaimed—

“Lor’ a mussy! The water be forgot. There ain’t a drop in the house, and there’ll be folk coming, and there must be tea for some, and, I reckon, gin and water for others, and there is all the washing up after, and, dear life, one can get along without bread, but never without water. Whatever shall I do?”

“I’ll run to the well with the pitchers.”

“But, Prue, you’m in your white dress.”

“I shall not stain it. It will not take me ten minutes.”

“I’d go myself but for my leg as is so bad,” said Mrs. Worden.

Then Prue caught up the pitchers and tripped away, past the old gnarled oak and the Conjuring Rock, down the path to the old quarry pit.

Never shall I forget what ensued.

There was a cluster of people about the church gate. These were friends ready to pelt with rice. The parson was in waiting. The bridegroom and his best man had arrived. Prue had been a favourite at the Hall, and the squire’s daughters were there, all smiles, and they had brought with them a present which was to be put into Prue’s hand as she went blushing like a June hedge-rose down the church avenue. And the ringers were all there, without their coats, in the tower, waiting and not oblivious of the fact that after a merry peal they would be called to the cottage to refresh themselves.

The party waited, then became impatient. Some ran along the road to see whether the bride were coming in sight. But all they saw was a child running. Presently the child came up breathless. “Please—Mrs. Worden says you’re all to come—something has happened. She’s in that state, she couldn’t say all.” Still no suspicion of real evil occurred. Some little misfortune perhaps.