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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12223 ***
+
+THE IDLER MAGAZINE.
+AN ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY.
+
+EDITED BY JEROME K. JEROME & ROBERT BARR.
+
+
+VOL. III. FEBRUARY TO JULY, 1893.
+
+XIII. FEB. 1893.
+
+
+LONDON: CHATTO & WINDUS, 214, PICCADILLY. 1893.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+CHEATING THE GALLOWS.
+    BY I. ZANGWILL.
+
+MY FIRST NOVEL.--THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.
+    BY MISS M. E. BRADDON.
+
+NOVEL NOTES.
+    BY JEROME K. JEROME.
+
+THE SKATER.
+    BY WILLIAM CANTON.
+
+MY SERVANT ANDREAS.
+    BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.
+
+TOLD BY THE COLONEL.--
+    X. A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.
+    BY W. L. ALDEN.
+
+"LIONS IN THEIR DENS."--
+    II. GEORGE GROSSMITH AND THE HUMOUR OF HIM.
+    BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.
+
+A BLIND BEGGARMAN.
+    BY FRANK MATHEW.
+
+CHURCH AND STAGE.--A REVIEW OF HENRY IRVING.
+    BY THE REV. DR. JOSEPH PARKER.
+
+THAT BEAST BEAUTY.
+    BY KIRBY HARE.
+
+PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET.--MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.
+    BY SCOTT RANKIN.
+
+THE IDLERS CLUB
+    Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+CHEATING THE GALLOWS.
+
+BY I. ZANGWILL.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+CURIOUS COUPLE.
+
+
+[Illustration: THE CORPSE WASHED UP BY THE RIVER.]
+
+They say that a union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and
+perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum are always so
+oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an
+auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk.
+Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of
+leisure, while he supplements his own experiences of life by his
+companion's.
+
+[Illustration: TOM PETERS.]
+[Illustration: EVERARD G. ROXDAL.]
+
+There could not be an odder couple than Tom Peters and Everard G.
+Roxdal--the contrast began with their names, and ran through the entire
+chapter. They had a bedroom and a sitting-room in common, but it would
+not be easy to find what else. To his landlady, worthy Mrs. Seacon, Tom
+Peters's profession was a little vague, but everybody knew that Roxdal
+was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to
+think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person,
+who smoked clay pipes and sipped whiskey and water all the evening when
+he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger
+was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined
+himself to a small glass of claret at dinner.
+
+It is possible to live with a man and see very little of him. Where each
+of the partners lives his own life in his own way, with his own circle
+of friends and external amusements, days may go by without the men
+having five minutes together. Perhaps this explains why these
+partnerships jog along so much more peaceably than marriages, where the
+chain is drawn so much tighter, and galls the partners rather than links
+them. Diverse, however, as were the hours and habits of the chums, they
+often breakfasted together, and they agreed in one thing--they never
+stayed out at night. For the rest Peters sought his diversions in the
+company of journalists, and frequented debating rooms, where he
+propounded the most iconoclastic views; while Roxdal had highly
+respectable houses open to him in the suburbs, and was, in fact, engaged
+to be married to Clara Newell, the charming daughter of a retired corn
+merchant, a widower with no other child.
+
+[Illustration: ASKED TWENTY-FIVE PER CENT. MORE.]
+
+Clara naturally took up a good deal of Roxdal's time, and he often
+dressed to go to the play with her, while Peters stayed at home in a
+faded dressing-gown and loose slippers. Mrs. Seacon liked to see
+gentlemen about the house in evening dress, and made comparisons not
+favourable to Peters. And this in spite of the fact that he gave her
+infinitely less trouble than the younger man. It was Peters who first
+took the apartments, and it was characteristic of his easy-going
+temperament that he was so openly and naïvely delighted with the view of
+the Thames obtainable from the bedroom window, that Mrs. Seacon was
+emboldened to ask twenty-five per cent. more than she had intended. She
+soon returned to her normal terms, however, when his friend Roxdal
+called the next day to inspect the rooms, and overwhelmed her with a
+demonstration of their numerous shortcomings. He pointed out that their
+being on the ground floor was not an advantage, but a disadvantage,
+since they were nearer the noises of the street--in fact, the house
+being a corner one, the noises of two streets. Roxdal continued to
+exhibit the same finicking temperament in the petty details of the
+_ménage_. His shirt fronts were never sufficiently starched, nor his
+boots sufficiently polished. Tom Peters, having no regard for rigid
+linen, was always good-tempered and satisfied, and never acquired the
+respect of his landlady. He wore blue check shirts and loose ties even
+on Sundays. It is true he did not go to church, but slept on till Roxdal
+returned from morning service, and even then it was difficult to get him
+out of bed, or to make him hurry up his toilette operations. Often the
+mid-day meal would be smoking on the table while Peters would smoke in
+the bed, and Roxdal, with his head thrust through the folding doors that
+separated the bedroom from the sitting-room, would be adjuring the
+sluggard to arise and shake off his slumbers, and threatening to sit
+down without him, lest the dinner be spoilt. In revenge, Tom was usually
+up first on week-days, sometimes at such unearthly hours that Polly had
+not yet removed the boots from outside the bedroom door, and would bawl
+down to the kitchen for his shaving water. For Tom, lazy and indolent as
+he was, shaved with the unfailing regularity of a man to whom shaving
+has become an instinct. If he had not kept fairly regular hours, Mrs.
+Seacon would have set him down as an actor, so clean shaven was he.
+Roxdal did not shave. He wore a full beard, and, being a fine figure of
+a man to boot, no uneasy investor could look upon him without being
+reassured as to the stability of the bank he managed so successfully.
+And thus the two men lived in an economical comradeship, all the firmer,
+perhaps, for their mutual incongruities.
+
+[Illustration: FOR HIS SHAVING WATER.]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+A WOMAN'S INSTINCT.
+
+
+[Illustration: "TOM SHAMBLED FROM THE SITTING-ROOM."]
+
+It was on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of October, ten days after
+Roxdal had settled in his new rooms, that Clara Newell paid her first
+visit to him there. She enjoyed a good deal of liberty, and did not mind
+accepting his invitation to tea. The corn merchant, himself
+indifferently educated, had an exaggerated sense of the value of
+culture, and so Clara, who had artistic tastes without much actual
+talent, had gone in for painting, and might be seen, in pretty
+toilettes, copying pictures in the Museum. At one time it looked as if
+she might be reduced to working seriously at her art, for Satan, who
+finds mischief still for idle hands to do, had persuaded her father to
+embark the fruits of years of toil in bubble companies. However, things
+turned out not so bad as they might have been, a little was saved from
+the wreck, and the appearance of a suitor, in the person of Everard G.
+Roxdal, ensured her a future of competence, if not of the luxury she had
+been entitled to expect. She had a good deal of affection for Everard,
+who was unmistakably a clever man, as well as a good-looking one. The
+prospect seemed fair and cloudless. Nothing presaged the terrible storm
+that was about to break over these two lives. Nothing had ever for a
+moment come to vex their mutual contentment, till this Sunday afternoon.
+The October sky, blue and sunny, with an Indian summer sultriness,
+seemed an exact image of her life, with its aftermath of a happiness
+that had once seemed blighted.
+
+Everard had always been so attentive, so solicitous, that she was as
+much surprised as chagrined to find that he had apparently forgotten the
+appointment. Hearing her astonished interrogation of Polly in the
+passage, Tom shambled from the sitting-room in his loose slippers and
+his blue check shirt, with his eternal clay pipe in his mouth, and
+informed her that Roxdal had gone out suddenly earlier in the afternoon.
+
+"G-g-one out," stammered poor Clara; all confused. "But he asked me to
+come to tea."
+
+"Oh, you're Miss Newell, I suppose," said Tom.
+
+"Yes, I am Miss Newell."
+
+"He has told me a great deal about you, but I wasn't able honestly to
+congratulate him on his choice till now."
+
+Clara blushed uneasily under the compliment, and under the ardour of his
+admiring gaze. Instinctively she distrusted the man. The very first
+tones of his deep bass voice gave her a peculiar shudder. And then his
+impoliteness in smoking that vile clay was so gratuitous.
+
+"Oh, then you must be Mr. Peters," she said in return. "He has often
+spoken to me of you."
+
+"Ah!" said Tom, laughingly, "I suppose he's told you all my vices. That
+accounts for your not being surprised at my Sunday attire."
+
+She smiled a little, showing a row of pearly teeth. "Everard ascribes to
+you all the virtues," she said.
+
+"Now that's what I call a friend!" he cried, ecstatically. "But won't
+you come in? He must be back in a moment. He surely would not break an
+appointment with _you_." The admiration latent in the accentuation of
+the last pronoun was almost offensive.
+
+She shook her head. She had a just grievance against Everard, and would
+punish him by going away indignantly.
+
+"Do let _me_ give you a cup of tea," Tom pleaded. "You must be awfully
+thirsty this sultry weather. There! I will make a bargain with you! If
+you will come in now, I promise to clear out the moment Everard returns,
+and not spoil your _tête-à-tête_." But Clara was obstinate; she did not
+at all relish this man's society, and besides, she was not going to
+throw away her grievance against Everard. "I know Everard will slang me
+dreadfully when he comes in if I let you go," Tom urged. "Tell me at
+least where he can find you."
+
+"I am going to take the 'bus at Charing Cross, and I'm going straight
+home," Clara announced determinedly. She put up her parasol in a pet,
+and went up the street into the Strand. A cold shadow seemed to have
+fallen over all things. But just as she was getting into the 'bus, a
+hansom dashed down Trafalgar Square, and a well-known voice hailed her.
+The hansom stopped, and Everard got out and held out his hand.
+
+"I'm so glad you're a bit late," he said. "I was called out
+unexpectedly, and have been trying to rush back in time. You wouldn't
+have found me if you had been punctual. But I thought," he added,
+laughing, "I could rely on you as a woman."
+
+"I _was_ punctual," Clara said angrily. "I was not getting out of this
+'bus, as you seem to imagine, but into it, and was going home."
+
+"My darling!" he cried remorsefully. "A thousand apologies." The regret
+on his handsome face soothed her. He took the rose he was wearing in the
+button-hole of his fashionably-cut coat and gave it to her.
+
+"Why were you so cruel?" he murmured, as she nestled against him in the
+hansom. "Think of my despair if I had come home to hear you had come and
+gone. Why didn't you wait a moment?"
+
+[Illustration: "SHE NESTLED AGAINST HIM."]
+
+A shudder traversed her frame. "Not with that man, Peters!" she
+murmured.
+
+"Not with that man, Peters!" he echoed sharply. "What is the matter with
+Peters?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I don't like him."
+
+"Clara," he said, half sternly, half cajolingly, "I thought you were
+above these feminine weaknesses; you are punctual, strive also to be
+reasonable. Tom is my best friend. From boyhood we have been always
+together. There is nothing Tom would not do for me, or I for Tom. You
+must like him, Clara; you must, if only for my sake."
+
+"I'll try," Clara promised, and then he kissed her in gratitude and
+broad daylight.
+
+"You'll be very nice to him at tea, won't you?" he said anxiously. "I
+shouldn't like you two to be bad friends."
+
+"I don't want to be bad friends," Clara protested; "only the moment I
+saw him a strange repulsion and mistrust came over me."
+
+"You are quite wrong about him--quite wrong," he assured her earnestly.
+"When you know him better, you'll find him the best of fellows. Oh, I
+know," he said suddenly, "I suppose he was very untidy, and you women go
+so much by appearances!"
+
+"Not at all," Clara retorted. "'Tis you men who go by appearances."
+
+"Yes, you do. That's why you care for me," he said, smiling.
+
+She assured him it wasn't, and she didn't care for him so much as he
+plumed himself, but he smiled on. His smile died away, however, when he
+entered his rooms and found Tom nowhere.
+
+"I daresay you've made him run about hunting for me," he grumbled.
+
+"Perhaps he knew I'd come back, and went away to leave us together," she
+answered. "He said he would when you came."
+
+"And yet you say you don't like him!"
+
+She smiled reassuringly. Inwardly, however, she felt pleased at the
+man's absence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+POLLY RECEIVES A PROPOSAL.
+
+
+[Illustration: "CARRYING ON WITH POLLY."]
+
+If Clara Newell could have seen Tom Peters carrying on with Polly in the
+passage, she might have felt justified in her prejudice against him. It
+must be confessed, though, that Everard also carried on with Polly.
+Alas! it is to be feared that men are much of a muchness where women are
+concerned; shabby men and smart men, bank managers and journalists,
+bachelors and semi-detached bachelors. Perhaps it was a mistake after
+all to say the chums had nothing patently in common. Everard, I am
+afraid, kissed Polly rather more often than Clara, and although it was
+because he respected her less, the reason would perhaps not have been
+sufficiently consoling to his affianced wife. For Polly was pretty,
+especially on alternate Sunday afternoons, and when at ten p.m. she
+returned from her outings, she was generally met in the passage by one
+or other of the men. Polly liked to receive the homage of real
+gentlemen, and set her white cap at all indifferently. Thus, just before
+Clara knocked on that memorable Sunday afternoon, Polly, being confined
+to the house by the unwritten code regulating the lives of servants, was
+amusing herself by flirting with Peters.
+
+"You _are_ fond of me a little bit," the graceless Tom whispered,
+"aren't you?"
+
+"You know I am, sir," Polly replied.
+
+"You don't care for anyone else in the house?"
+
+"Oh no, sir, and never let anyone kiss me but you. I wonder how it is,
+sir?" Polly replied ingenuously.
+
+"Give me another," Tom answered.
+
+She gave him another, and tripped to the door to answer Clara's knock.
+
+[Illustration: POLLY AND ROXDAL.]
+
+And that very evening, when Clara was gone and Tom still out, Polly
+turned without the faintest atom of scrupulosity, or even jealousy, to
+the more fascinating Roxdal, and accepted his amorous advances. If it
+would seem at first sight that Everard had less excuse for such
+frivolity than his friend, perhaps the seriousness he showed in this
+interview may throw a different light upon the complex character of
+the man.
+
+"You're quite sure you don't care for anyone but me?" he asked
+earnestly.
+
+"Of course not, sir!" Polly replied indignantly. "How could I?"
+
+"But you care for that soldier I saw you out with last Sunday?"
+
+"Oh no, sir, he's only my young man," she said apologetically.
+
+"Would you give him up?" he hissed suddenly.
+
+Polly's pretty face took a look of terror. "I couldn't, sir! He'd kill
+me. He's such a jealous brute, you've no idea."
+
+"Yes, but suppose I took you away from here?" he whispered eagerly.
+"Somewhere where he couldn't find you--South America, Africa, somewhere
+thousands of miles across the seas."
+
+"Oh, sir, you frighten me!" whispered Polly, cowering before his ardent
+eyes, which shone in the dimly-lit passage.
+
+"Would you come with me?" he hissed. She did not answer; she shook
+herself free and ran into the kitchen, trembling with a vague fear.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE CRASH.
+
+
+One morning, earlier than his earliest hour of demanding his shaving
+water, Tom rang the bell violently and asked the alarmed Polly what had
+become of Mr. Roxdal.
+
+"How should I know, sir?" she gasped. "Ain't he been in, sir?"
+
+"Apparently not," Tom answered anxiously. "He never remains out. We have
+been here three weeks now, and I can't recall a single night he hasn't
+been home before twelve. I can't make it out." All enquiries proved
+futile. Mrs. Seacon reminded him of the thick fog that had come on
+suddenly the night before.
+
+"What fog?" asked Tom.
+
+"Lord! didn't you notice it, sir?"
+
+"No, I came in early, smoked, read, and went to bed about eleven. I
+never thought of looking out of the window."
+
+"It began about ten," said Mrs. Seacon, "and got thicker and thicker. I
+couldn't see the lights of the river from my bedroom. The poor gentleman
+has been and gone and walked into the water." She began to whimper.
+
+"Nonsense, nonsense," said Tom, though his expression belied his words.
+"At the worst I should think he couldn't find his way home, and couldn't
+get a cab, so put up for the night at some hotel. I daresay it will be
+all right." He began to whistle as if in restored cheerfulness. At eight
+o'clock there came a letter for Roxdal, marked "immediate," but as he
+did not turn up for breakfast, Tom went round personally to the City and
+Suburban Bank. He waited half-an-hour there, but the manager did not
+make his appearance. Then he left the letter with the cashier and went
+away with anxious countenance.
+
+That afternoon it was all over London that the manager of the City and
+Suburban had disappeared, and that many thousand pounds of gold and
+notes had disappeared with him.
+
+[Illustration: "SCOTLAND YARD OPENED THE LETTER."]
+
+Scotland Yard opened the letter marked "immediate," and noted that there
+had been a delay in its delivery, for the address had been obscure, and
+an official alteration had been made. It was written in a feminine hand
+and said: "On second thoughts I cannot accompany you. Do not try to see
+me again. Forget me. I shall never forget you."
+
+There was no signature.
+
+Clara Newell, distracted, disclaimed all knowledge of this letter. Polly
+deposed that the fugitive had proposed flight to her, and the routes to
+Africa and South America were especially watched. Some months passed
+without result. Tom Peters went about overwhelmed with grief and
+astonishment. The police took possession of all the missing man's
+effects. Gradually the hue and cry dwindled, died.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FAITH AND UNFAITH.
+
+
+"At last we meet!" cried Tom Peters, while his face lit up in joy. "How
+_are_ you, dear Miss Newell?" Clara greeted him coldly. Her face had an
+abiding pallor now. Her lover's flight and shame had prostrated her for
+weeks. Her soul was the arena of contending instincts. Alone of all the
+world she still believed in Everard's innocence, felt that there was
+something more than met the eye, divined some devilish mystery behind it
+all. And yet that damning letter from the anonymous lady shook her
+sadly. Then, too, there was the deposition of Polly. When she heard
+Peters's voice accosting her all her old repugnance resurged. It flashed
+upon her that this man--Roxdal's boon companion--must know far more than
+he had told to the police. She remembered how Everard had spoken of him,
+with what affection and confidence! Was it likely he was utterly
+ignorant of Everard's movements? Mastering her repugnance, she held out
+her hand. It might be well to keep in touch with him; he was possibly
+the clue to the mystery. She noticed he was dressed a shade more trimly,
+and was smoking a meerschaum. He walked along at her side, making no
+offer to put his pipe out.
+
+"You have not heard from Everard?" he asked. She flushed. "Do you think
+I'm an accessory after the fact?" she cried.
+
+"No, no," he said soothingly. "Pardon me, I was thinking he might have
+written--giving no exact address, of course. Men do sometimes dare to
+write thus to women. But, of course, he knows you too well--you would
+have put the police on his track."
+
+"Certainly," she exclaimed, indignantly. "Even if he is innocent he must
+face the charge."
+
+"Do you still entertain the possibility of his innocence?"
+
+"I do," she said boldly, and looked him full in the face. His eyelids
+drooped with a quiver. "Don't you?"
+
+"I have hoped against hope," he replied, in a voice faltering with
+emotion. "Poor old Everard! But I am afraid there is no room for doubt.
+Oh, this wicked curse of money--tempting the noblest and the best
+of us."
+
+[Illustration: "SHE DID NOT REPULSE HIM."]
+
+The weeks rolled on. Gradually she found herself seeing more and more of
+Tom Peters, and gradually, strange to say, he grew less repulsive. From
+the talks they had together, she began to see that there was really no
+reason to put faith in Everard; his criminality, his faithlessness, were
+too flagrant. Gradually she grew ashamed of her early mistrust of
+Peters; remorse bred esteem, and esteem ultimately ripened into feelings
+so warm, that when Tom gave freer vent to the love that had been visible
+to Clara from the first, she did not repulse him.
+
+It is only in books that love lives for ever. Clara, so her father
+thought, showed herself a sensible girl in plucking out an unworthy
+affection and casting it from her heart. He invited the new lover to his
+house, and took to him at once. Roxdal's somewhat supercilious manner
+had always jarred upon the unsophisticated corn merchant. With Tom the
+old man got on much better. While evidently quite as well informed and
+cultured as his whilom friend, Tom knew how to impart his superior
+knowledge with the accent on the knowledge rather than on the
+superiority, while he had the air of gaining much information in return.
+Those who are most conscious of defects of early education are most
+resentful of other people sharing their consciousness Moreover, Tom's
+_bonhomie_ was far more to the old fellow's liking than the studied
+politeness of his predecessor, so that on the whole Tom made more of a
+conquest of the father than of the daughter. Nevertheless, Clara was by
+no means unresponsive to Tom's affection, and when, after one of his
+visits to the house, the old man kissed her fondly and spoke of the
+happy turn things had taken, and how, for the second time in their
+lives, things had mended when they seemed at their blackest, her heart
+swelled with a gush of gratitude and joy and tenderness, and she fell
+sobbing into her father's arms.
+
+[Illustration: "WITH TOM THE OLD MAN GOT ON MUCH BETTER."]
+
+Tom calculated that he made a clear five hundred a year by occasional
+journalism, besides possessing some profitable investments which he had
+inherited from his mother, so that there was no reason for delaying the
+marriage. It was fixed for May-day, and the honeymoon was to be spent
+in Italy.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE DREAM AND THE AWAKENING
+
+
+But Clara was not destined to happiness. From the moment she had
+promised herself to her first love's friend old memories began to rise
+up and reproach her. Strange thoughts stirred in the depths of her soul,
+and in the silent watches of the night she seemed to hear Everard's
+accents, charged with grief and upbraiding. Her uneasiness increased as
+her wedding-day drew near. One night, after a pleasant afternoon spent
+in being rowed by Tom among the upper reaches of the Thames, she retired
+to rest full of vague forebodings. And she dreamt a terrible dream. The
+dripping form of Everard stood by her bedside, staring at her with
+ghastly eyes. Had he been drowned on the passage to his land of exile?
+Frozen with horror, she put the question.
+
+"I have never left England!" the vision answered.
+
+Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.
+
+"Never left England?" she repeated, in tones which did not seem to be
+hers.
+
+The wraith's stony eyes stared on, but there was silence.
+
+"Where have you been then?" she asked in her dream.
+
+"Very near you," came the answer.
+
+"There has been foul play then!" she shrieked.
+
+The phantom shook its head in doleful assent.
+
+"I knew it!" she shrieked. "Tom Peters--Tom Peters has done away with
+you. Is it not he? Speak!"
+
+"Yes, it is he--Tom Peters--whom I loved more than all the world."
+
+Even in the terrible oppression of the dream she could not resist
+saying, woman-like:
+
+"Did I not warn you against him?"
+
+The phantom stared on silently and made no reply.
+
+"But what was his motive?" she asked at length.
+
+"Love of gold--and you. And you are giving yourself to him," it said
+sternly.
+
+"No, no, Everard! I will not! I will not! I swear it! Forgive me!"
+
+The spirit shook its head sceptically.
+
+"You love him. Women are false--as false as men."
+
+She strove to protest again, but her tongue refused its office.
+
+"If you marry him, I shall always be with you! Beware!"
+
+The dripping figure vanished as suddenly as it came, and Clara awoke in
+a cold perspiration. Oh, it was horrible! The man she had learnt to
+love, the murderer of the man she had learnt to forget! How her original
+prejudice had been justified! Distracted, shaken to her depths, she
+would not take counsel even of her father, but informed the police of
+her suspicions. A raid was made on Tom's rooms, and lo! the stolen notes
+were discovered in a huge bundle. It was found that he had several
+banking accounts, with a large, recently-paid amount in each bank. Tom
+was arrested. Attention was now concentrated on the corpses washed up by
+the river. It was not long before the body of Roxdal came to shore, the
+face distorted almost beyond recognition by long immersion, but the
+clothes patently his, and a pocket-book in the breast-pocket removing
+the last doubt. Mrs. Seacon and Polly and Clara Newell all identified
+the body. Both juries returned a verdict of murder against Tom Peters,
+the recital of Clara's dream producing a unique impression in the court
+and throughout the country. The theory of the prosecution was that
+Roxdal had brought home the money, whether to fly alone or to divide it,
+or whether even for some innocent purpose, as Clara believed, was
+immaterial. That Peters determined to have it all, that he had gone out
+for a walk with the deceased, and, taking advantage of the fog, had
+pushed him into the river, and that he was further impelled to the crime
+by love for Clara Newell, as was evident from his subsequent relations
+with her. The judge put on the black cap. Tom Peters was duly hung by
+the neck till he was dead.
+
+[Illustration: "IDENTIFIED THE BODY."]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+BRIEF RÉSUMÉ OF THE CULPRIT'S CONFESSION.
+
+
+When you all read this I shall be dead and laughing at you. I have been
+hung for my own murder. I am Everard G. Roxdal. I am also Tom Peters. We
+two were one. When I was a young man my moustache and beard wouldn't
+come. I bought false ones to improve my appearance. One day, after I had
+become manager of the City and Suburban Bank, I took off my beard and
+moustache at home, and then the thought crossed my mind that nobody
+would know me without them. I was another man. Instantly it flashed upon
+me that if I ran away from the Bank, that other man could be left in
+London, while the police were scouring the world for a non-existent
+fugitive. But this was only the crude germ of the idea. Slowly I matured
+my plan. The man who was going to be left in London must be known to a
+circle of acquaintance beforehand. It would be easy enough to masquerade
+in the evenings in my beardless condition, with other disguises of dress
+and voice. But this was not brilliant enough. I conceived the idea of
+living with him. It was Box and Cox reversed. We shared rooms at Mrs.
+Seacon's. It was a great strain, but it was only for a few weeks. I had
+trick clothes in my bedroom like those of quick-change artistes; in a
+moment I could pass from Roxdal to Peters and from Peters to Roxdal.
+Polly had to clean two pairs of boots a morning, cook two dinners, &c.,
+&c. She and Mrs. Seacon saw one or the other of us every moment; it
+never dawned upon them they never saw us _both together_. At meals I
+would not be interrupted, ate off two plates, and conversed with my
+friend in loud tones. At other times we dined at different hours. On
+Sundays he was supposed to be asleep when I was in church. There is no
+landlady in the world to whom the idea would have occurred that one man
+was troubling himself to be two (and to pay for two, including washing).
+I worked up the idea of Roxdal's flight, asked Polly to go with me,
+manufactured that feminine letter that arrived on the morning of my
+disappearance. As Tom Peters I mixed with a journalistic set. I had
+another room where I kept the gold and notes till I mistakenly thought
+the thing had blown over. Unfortunately, returning from here on the
+night of my disappearance, with Roxdal's clothes in a bundle I intended
+to drop into the river, it was stolen from me in the fog, and the man
+into whose possession it ultimately came appears to have committed
+suicide. What, perhaps, ruined me was my desire to keep Clara's love,
+and to transfer it to the survivor. Everard told her I was the best of
+fellows. Once married to her, I would not have had much fear. Even if
+she had discovered the trick, a wife cannot give evidence against her
+husband, and often does not want to. I made none of the usual slips, but
+no man can guard against a girl's nightmare after a day up the river and
+a supper at the Star and Garter. I might have told the judge he was an
+ass, but then I should have had penal servitude for bank robbery, and
+that is worse than death. The only thing that puzzles me, though, is
+whether the law has committed murder or I suicide.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+My First Novel.
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT.
+
+BY MISS M. E. BRADDON.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY MISS F. L. FULLER.
+
+
+My first novel! Far back in the distinctness of childish memories I see
+a little girl who has lately learnt to write, who has lately been given
+a beautiful brand new mahogany desk, with a red velvet slope, and a
+glass ink bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for three and
+sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least half-a-guinea. Very
+proud is the little girl, with the Kenwigs pigtails, and the Kenwigs
+frills, of that mahogany desk, and its infinite capacities for literary
+labour, above all, gem of gems, its stick of variegated sealing-wax,
+brown, speckled with gold, and its little glass seal with an intaglio
+representing two doves--Pliny's doves perhaps, famous in mosaic, only
+the little girl had never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine Villa.
+
+[Illustration: LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND.]
+
+Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary Elizabeth
+Braddon--very fond of writing her name at full-length, and her address
+also at full-length, though the word "Middlesex" offered
+difficulties--began that pilgrimage on the broad high road of fiction,
+which was destined to be a longish one. So much for the little girl of
+eight years old, in the third person, and now to become strictly
+autobiographical.
+
+My first story was based on those fairy tales which first opened to me
+the world of imaginative literature. My first attempt in fiction, and in
+round-hand, on carefully pencilled double lines, was a story of two
+sisters, a good sister and a wicked, and I fear adhered more faithfully
+to the lines of the archetypal story than the writer's pen kept to the
+double fence which should have ensured neatness.
+
+[Illustration: THE HALL.]
+
+The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a prolific period,
+fertile in unfinished MSS., among which I can now trace a historical
+novel on the Siege of Calais--an Eastern story, suggested by a
+passionate love of Miss Pardoe's Turkish tales, and Byron's "Bride of
+Abydos," which my mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read
+aloud to her--and doubtless murder in the reading--a story of the Hartz
+Mountains, with audacious flights in German diablerie; and lastly, very
+seriously undertaken, and very perseveringly worked upon, a domestic
+story, the outline of which was suggested by the same dear and
+sympathetic mother.
+
+Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be common to other
+story-spinners, that I have never been able to take kindly to a plot--or
+the suggestion of a plot--offered to me by anybody else. The moment a
+friend tells me that he or she is desirous of imparting a series of
+facts--strictly true--as if truth in fiction mattered one jot!--which in
+his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an admirable,
+startling, and altogether original three-volume novel, I know in advance
+that my imagination will never grapple with those startling
+circumstances--that my thoughts will begin to wander before my friend
+has got half through the remarkable chain of events, and that if the
+obliging purveyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end of
+the story, I should be spun ignominiously. For the most part, such
+subjects as have been proposed to me by friends have been hopelessly
+unfit for the circulating library; or, where not immoral, have been
+utterly dull; but it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader's
+mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will
+make an admirable subject for the novelist's art.
+
+[Illustration: THE STAIRCASE.]
+
+My dear mother, taking into consideration my tender years, and perhaps
+influenced in somewise by her own love of picking up odd bits of
+Sheraton or Chippendale furniture in the storehouses of the less
+ambitious second-hand dealers of those simpler days, offered me the
+following _scenario_ for a domestic story. It was an incident which, I
+doubt not, she had often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and
+which certainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and
+the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half-a-million. It
+was eminently a Simple Story, and far more worthy of that title than
+Mrs. Inchbald's long and involved romance.
+
+An honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among their small
+household gear a good old easy chair, which has been the pride of a
+former generation, and is the choicest of their household gods. A
+comfortable cushioned chair, snug and restful, albeit the chintz
+covering, though clean and tidy, as virtuous people's furniture always
+is in fiction, is worn thin by long service, while the dear chair itself
+is no longer the chair it once was as to legs and framework.
+
+Evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their dependent brood,
+among whom I faintly remember the love interest of the story to have
+lain; and that direful day arrives when the average landlord of juvenile
+fiction, whose heart is of adamant and brain of brass, distrains for the
+rent. The rude broker swoops upon the humble dovecot; a cart or
+hand-barrow waits on the carefully hearth-stoned door-step for the
+household gods; the family gather round the cherished chair, on which
+the rude broker has already laid his grimy fingers; they hang over the
+back and fondle the padded arms; and the old grandmother, with clasped
+hands, entreats that, if able to raise the money in a few days, they may
+be allowed to buy back that loved heirloom.
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM.]
+
+The broker laughs the plea to scorn; they might have their chair, and
+cheap enough, he had no doubt. The cover was darned and patched--as only
+the virtuous poor of fiction do darn and do patch--and he made no doubt
+the stuffing was nothing better than brown wool; and with that coarse
+taunt the coarser broker dug his clasp-knife into the cushion against
+which grandfatherly backs had leaned in happier days, and lo! an
+avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much-maligned horse-hair, and the
+family was lifted from penury to wealth. Nothing more simple--or more
+natural. A prudent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of
+putting by his savings, assured that, whenever discovered, the money
+would be useful to--somebody.
+
+So ran the _scenario_: but I fancy my juvenile pen hardly held on to the
+climax. My brief experience of boarding school occurred at this time,
+and I well remember writing "The Old Arm Chair" in a penny account book,
+in the schoolroom of Cresswell Lodge, and that I was both surprised and
+offended at the laughter of the kindly music-teacher who, coming into
+the room to summon a pupil, and seeing me gravely occupied, enquired
+what I was doing, and was intensely amused at my stolid method of
+composition, plodding on undisturbed by the voices and occupations of
+the older girls around me. "The Old Arm Chair" was certainly my first
+serious, painstaking effort in fiction; but as it was abandoned
+unfinished before my eleventh birthday, and as no line thereof ever
+achieved the distinction of type, it can hardly rank as my first novel.
+
+[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM.]
+
+There came a very few years later the sentimental period, in which my
+unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious form, and were modelled
+chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with occasional tentative imitations of
+Thackeray. Stories of gentle hearts that loved in vain, always ending in
+renunciation. One romance there was, I well remember, begun with
+resolute purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the
+endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the Restoration
+period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of England,
+which, after the lapse of thirty years, I am still as bent upon taking
+for the background of a love story as I was when I began "Master
+Anthony's Record" in Esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with
+the Reading-room of the British Museum, where I went in quest of local
+colour, and where much kindness was shown to my youth and inexperience
+of the book world. Poring over a folio edition of the State Trials at my
+uncle's quiet rectory in sleepy Sandwich, I had discovered the
+passionate romantic story of Lord Grey's elopement with his
+sister-in-law, next in sequence to the trial of Lawrence Braddon and
+Hugh Speke for conspiracy. At the risk of seeming disloyal to my own
+race, I must add that it seemed to me a very tinpot order of plot to
+which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal minds, and which cost
+the Braddon family a heavy fine in land near Camelford--confiscation
+which I have heard my father complain of as especially unfair--Lawrence
+being a younger son. The romantic story of Lord Grey was to be the
+subject of "Master Anthony's Record," but Master Anthony's sentimental
+autobiography went the way of all my earlier efforts. It was but a year
+or so after the collapse of Master Anthony, that a blindly-enterprising
+printer of Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the _Beverley
+Recorder_, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial story,
+to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on commission by a
+London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot picture to myself, in my
+after-knowledge of the bookselling trade, any enterprise more futile in
+its inception or more feeble in its execution; but to my youthful
+ambition the actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment
+of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my Yorkshire
+speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink paradise which I
+had sighed for ever since I could hold a pen. I had, previously to this
+date, found a Mæcenas in Beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman
+who volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by buying the copyright
+of a volume of poems and publishing the same at his own expense--which
+he did, poor man, without stint, and by which noble patronage of Poet's
+Corner verse, he must have lost money. He had, however, the privilege of
+dictating the subject of the principal poem, which was to sing--however
+feebly--Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign.
+
+[Illustration: THE EVENING ROOM.]
+
+The Beverley printer suggested that my Warwick Lane serial should
+combine, as far as my powers allowed, the human interest and genial
+humour of Dickens with the plot-weaving of G. W. R. Reynolds; and,
+furnished with these broad instructions, I filled my ink bottle, spread
+out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my first
+novel--now known as "The Trail of the Serpent"--but published in Warwick
+Lane, and later in the stirring High Street of Beverley, as "Three Times
+Dead." In "Three Times Dead" I gave loose to all my leanings to the
+violent in melodrama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages;
+and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last chapter. I
+wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not the face of a critic;
+and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of its original production, and its
+re-issue as the ordinary two-shilling railway novel, this first novel of
+mine has almost entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its
+way as a chartered libertine. People buy it and read it, and its faults
+and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen unchastened by
+experience; but faster and more facile at that initial stage than it
+ever became after long practice.
+
+[Illustration: THE SMOKING-ROOM.]
+
+I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images of horror or of
+mirth, and boldly built the framework of my story, and set my puppets
+moving. To me, at least, they were living creatures, who seemed to
+follow impulses of their own, to be impelled by their own passions, to
+love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord. There was
+unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story, and the
+knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published, and not to
+be declined with thanks by adamantine magazine editors, like a certain
+short story which I had lately written, and which contained the germ of
+"Lady Audley's Secret." Indeed, at this period of my life, the postman's
+knock had become associated in my mind with the sharp sound of a
+rejected MS. dropping through the open letter-box on to the floor of the
+hall, while my heart seemed to drop in sympathy with that
+book-post packet.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIBRARY.]
+
+Short of never being printed at all, my Beverley-born novel could have
+hardly entered upon the world of books in a more profound obscurity.
+That one living creature ever bought a number of "Three Times Dead" I
+greatly doubt. I can recall the thrill of emotion with which I tore open
+the envelope that contained my complimentary copy of the first number,
+folded across, and in aspect inferior to a gratis pamphlet about a
+patent medicine. The miserable little wood block which illustrated that
+first number would have disgraced a baker's whitey-brown bag, would have
+been unworthy to illustrate a penny bun. My spirits were certainly
+dashed at the technical shortcomings of that first serial, and I was
+hardly surprised when I was informed a few weeks later, that although my
+admirers at Beverley were deeply interested in the story, it was not a
+financial success, and that it would be only obliging on my part, and in
+accordance with my known kindness of heart, if I were to restrict the
+development of the romance to half its intended length, and to accept
+five pounds in lieu of ten as my reward. Having no desire that the rash
+Beverley printer should squander his own or his children's fortune in
+the obscurity of Warwick Lane, I immediately acceded to his request,
+shortened sail, and went on with my story, perhaps with a shade less
+enthusiasm, having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book
+world. I may add that the Beverley publisher's payments began and ended
+with his noble advance of fifty shillings. The balance was never paid;
+and it was rather hard lines that, on his becoming bankrupt in his poor
+little way a few years later, a judge in the Bankruptcy Court remarked
+that, as Miss Braddon was now making a good deal of money by her pen,
+she ought to "come to the relief" of her first publisher.
+
+[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S FAVOURITE MARE.]
+
+And now my volume of verses being well under weigh, I went with my
+mother to farm-house lodgings in the neighbourhood of that very
+Beverley, where I spent, perhaps, the happiest half-year of my
+life--half a year of tranquil, studious days, far from the madding
+crowd, with the mother whose society was always all sufficient for
+me--half a year among level pastures, with unlimited books from the
+library in Hull, an old farm-horse to ride about the green lanes, the
+breath of summer, with all its sweet odours of flower and herb, around
+and about us: half a year of unalloyed bliss, had it not been for one
+dark shadow, the heroic figure of Garibaldi, the sailor soldier, looming
+large upon the foreground of my literary labours, as the hero of a
+lengthy narrative poem in the Spenserian metre.
+
+My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume of verse
+commissioned by my Yorkshire Mæcenas, at that time a very rich man, who
+paid me a much better price for my literary work than his townsman, the
+enterprising printer, and who had the first claim on my thought
+and time.
+
+[Illustration: THE ORANGERY.]
+
+With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I went every
+morning to my file of the _Times_, and pored and puzzled over Neapolitan
+revolution and Sicilian campaign, and I can only say that if Emile Zola
+has suffered as much over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my
+youth, when flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer
+idlesse, over the fighting in Sicily, his dogged perseverance in
+uncongenial labour should place him among the Immortal Forty. How I
+hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenserian metre, with its exacting
+demands upon the rhyming faculty. How I hated my own ignorance of modern
+Italian history, and my own eyes for never having looked upon Italian
+landscape, whereby historical allusion and local colour were both
+wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour. I had only the
+_Times_ correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be
+picturesque--allowing always for the Spenserian straining--where he was
+rich in local colour I did my utmost to reproduce his colouring,
+stretched always on the Spenserian rack, and lengthened out by the
+bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes. Next to Guiseppe Garibaldi I
+hated Edmund Spenser, and it may be from a vengeful remembrance of those
+early struggles with a difficult form of versification, that, although
+throughout my literary life I have been a lover of England's earlier
+poet, and have delighted in the quaintness and _naïveté_ of Chaucer, I
+have refrained from reading more than a casual stanza or two of the
+"Faëry Queen." When I lived at Beverley, Spenser was to me but a name,
+and Byron's "Childe Harold" was my only model for that exacting verse. I
+should add that the Beverley Mæcenas, when commissioning this volume of
+verse, was less superb in his ideas than the literary patron of the
+past. He looked at the matter from a purely commercial standpoint, and
+believed that a volume of verse, such as I could produce, would pay--a
+delusion on his part which I honestly strove to combat before accepting
+his handsome offer of remuneration for my time and labour. It was with
+this idea in his mind that he chose and insisted upon the Sicilian
+Campaign as a subject for my muse, and thus started me heavily
+handicapped on the racecourse of Parnassus.
+
+[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S COTTAGE AT LYNDHURST.]
+
+The weekly number of "Three Times Dead" was "thrown off" in brief
+intervals of rest from my _magnum opus_, and it was an infinite relief
+to turn from Garibaldi and his brothers in arms to the angels and the
+monsters which my own brain had engendered, and which to me seemed more
+alive than the good great man whose arms I so laboriously sang. My
+rustic pipe far better loved to sing of melodramatic poisoners and
+ubiquitous detectives; of fine houses in the West of London, and dark
+dens in the East. So the weekly chapter of my first novel ran merrily
+off my pen while the printer's boy waited in the farm-house kitchen.
+
+Happy, happy days, so near to memory, and yet so far. In that peaceful
+summer I finished my first novel, knocked Garibaldi on the head with a
+closing rhapsody, saw the York spring and summer races in hopelessly wet
+weather, learnt to love the Yorkshire people, and left Yorkshire almost
+broken-heartedly on a dull gray October morning, to travel Londonwards
+through a landscape that was mostly under water.
+
+And, behold, since that October morning I have written fifty-three
+novels; I have lost dear old friends and found new friends, who are also
+dear, but I have never looked on a Yorkshire landscape since I turned my
+reluctant eyes from those level meadows and green lanes where the old
+chestnut mare used to carry me ploddingly to and fro between tall,
+tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle.
+
+[Illustration: MISS BRADDON'S INKSTAND.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+NOVEL NOTES.
+
+BY JEROME K. JEROME.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. GÜLICH AND J. GREIG,
+
+PART X.
+
+
+[Illustration: "DISCUSSION AT OUR LAST MEETING."]
+
+The final question discussed at our last meeting had been: What shall
+our hero be? MacShaugnassy had suggested an author, with a critic for
+the villain. Brown's fancy was an artist. My idea was a stockbroker,
+with an undercurrent of romance in his nature. Said Jephson, who has a
+practical mind, approaching at times the commercial: "The question is
+not what we like, but what the female novel-reader likes."
+
+"That is so," agreed MacShaugnassy. "I propose that we collect feminine
+opinion upon this point. I will write to my aunt, and get from her the
+old lady's view. You," he said, turning to me, "can put the case to your
+wife, and get the young lady's ideal. Let Brown write to his sister at
+Newnham, and find out whom the intellectual maiden favours, while
+Jephson can learn from Miss Medbury what is most attractive to the
+common-sensed girl."
+
+This plan we had adopted, and the result was now under consideration.
+MacShaugnassy opened the proceedings by reading his aunt's letter. Wrote
+the old lady:
+
+    "I think, if I were you, my dear boy, I should choose a
+    soldier. You know your poor grandfather, who ran away to
+    America with that _wicked_ Mrs. Featherly, the banker's wife,
+    was a soldier, and so was your poor cousin Robert, who lost
+    eight thousand pounds at Monte Carlo. I have always felt
+    singularly drawn towards soldiers, even as a girl; though your
+    poor dear uncle could not bear them. You will find many
+    allusions to soldiers and men of war in the Old Testament (see
+    Jer. 48,14). Of course one does not like to think of their
+    fighting and killing each other, but then they do not seem to
+    do much of that sort of thing nowadays."
+
+"So much for the old lady," said MacShaugnassy, as he folded up the
+letter and returned it to his pocket. "What says culture?"
+
+[Illustration: BROWN READ AS FOLLOWS.]
+
+Brown produced from his cigar-case a letter addressed in a bold round
+hand, and read as follows:
+
+    "What a curious coincidence! A few of us were discussing this
+    very subject last night in Millicent Hightopper's rooms, and I
+    may tell you at once that our decision was unanimous in favour
+    of soldiers. You see, my dear Selkirk, in human nature the
+    attraction is towards the opposite. To a milliner's apprentice
+    a poet would no doubt be satisfying; to a woman of intelligence
+    he would be an unutterable bore. The man of brain is not for
+    the woman of brain. What the intellectual woman requires in man
+    is not something to argue with, but something to look at. To an
+    empty-headed woman I can imagine the soldier type proving vapid
+    and uninteresting; to the woman of mind he represents her ideal
+    of man--a creature strong, handsome, well-dressed, and not
+    too clever."
+
+"That gives us two votes for the army," remarked MacShaugnassy, as Brown
+tore his sister's letter in two, and threw the pieces into the
+waste-paper basket. "What says the common-sensed girl?"
+
+"First catch your common-sensed girl," muttered Jephson, a little
+grumpily, as it seemed to me. "Where do you propose finding her?"
+
+"Well," returned MacShaugnassy, "I looked to find her in Miss Medbury."
+
+As a rule, the mention of Miss Medbury's name brings a flush of joy to
+Jephson's face; but now his features wore an expression distinctly
+approaching a scowl.
+
+"Oh!" he replied, "did you? Well, then, the common-sensed girl loves the
+military, also."
+
+"By Jove!" exclaimed MacShaugnassy, "what an extraordinary thing. What
+reason does she give?"
+
+"That they look so nice when they're dressed, and that they dance so
+divinely," answered Jephson, shortly.
+
+"Well, you do surprise me," murmured MacShaugnassy, "I am astonished."
+
+Then to me he said: "And what does the young married woman say? The
+same?"
+
+"Yes," I replied, "precisely the same."
+
+"Does _she_ give a reason?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, yes," I explained; "because you can't help liking them."
+
+There was silence for the next few minutes, while we smoked and thought.
+I fancy we were all wishing we had never started this enquiry.
+
+That four distinctly different types of educated womanhood should, with
+promptness and unanimity quite unfeminine, have selected the soldier as
+their ideal, was certainly discouraging to the civilian heart. Had they
+been nursemaids or servant girls, I should have expected it. The worship
+of Mars by the Venus of the white cap is one of the few vital religions
+left to this devoutless age. A year or two ago I lodged near a barracks,
+and the sight to be seen round its huge iron gates on Sunday afternoons
+I shall never forget. The girls began to assemble about twelve o'clock.
+By two, at which hour the army, with its hair nicely oiled and a cane in
+its hand, was ready for a stroll, there would be some four or five
+hundred of them waiting in a line. Formerly they had collected in a wild
+mob, and as the soldiers were let out to them two at a time, had fought
+for them, as lions for early Christians. This, however, had led to
+scenes of such disorder and brutality, that the police had been obliged
+to interfere; and the girls were now marshalled in _queue_, two abreast,
+and compelled, by a force of constables specially told off for the
+purpose, to keep their places and wait their proper turn.
+
+At three o'clock the sentry on duty would come down to the wicket and
+close it. "They're all gone, my dears," he would shout out to the girls
+still left; "it's no good your stopping, we've no more for you to-day."
+
+"Oh, not one!" some poor child would murmur pleadingly, while the tears
+welled up into her big round eyes, "not even a little one. I've been
+waiting _such_ a long time."
+
+"Can't help that," the honest fellow would reply, gruffly, but not
+unkindly, turning aside to hide his emotion; "you've had 'em all between
+you. We don't make 'em, you know: you can't have 'em if we haven't got
+'em, can you? Come earlier next time."
+
+[Illustration: "NOW THEN, PASS ALONG."]
+
+Then he would hurry away to escape further importunity; and the police,
+who appeared to have been waiting for this moment with gloating
+anticipation, would jeeringly hustle away the weeping remnant. "Now
+then, pass along, you girls, pass along," they would say, in that
+irritatingly unsympathetic voice of theirs. "You've had your chance.
+Can't have the roadway blocked up all the afternoon with this 'ere
+demonstration of the unloved. You'll have to put up with your ordinary
+young men for to-day. Pass along."
+
+In connection with this same barracks, our charwoman told Amenda, who
+told Ethelbertha, who told me a story, which I now told the boys.
+
+Into a certain house, in a certain street in the neighbourhood, there
+moved one day a certain family. Their servant had left them--most of
+their servants did at the end of a week--and the day after the moving-in
+an advertisement was drawn up and sent to the _Chronicle_ for a
+domestic. It ran thus:
+
+    WANTED GENERAL SERVANT, in small family of eleven. Wages, £6;
+    no beer money. Must be early riser and hard worker. Washing
+    done at home. Must be good cook, and not object to
+    window-cleaning. Unitarian preferred.--Apply, with references,
+    to A. B., &C.
+
+That advertisement was sent off on Wednesday afternoon. At seven o'clock
+on Thursday morning the whole family were awakened by continuous ringing
+of the street door bell. The husband, looking out of window, was
+surprised to see a crowd of about fifty girls surrounding the house. He
+slipped on his dressing-gown and went down to see what was the matter.
+The moment he opened the door, fifteen of them charged tumultuously into
+the passage, sweeping him completely off his legs. Once inside, these
+fifteen faced round, fought the other thirty-five or so back on to the
+door-step, and slammed the door in their faces. Then they picked up the
+master of the house, and asked him politely to conduct them to "A. B."
+
+[Illustration: "SURPRISED TO SEE ABOUT FIFTY GIRLS."]
+
+At first, owing to the clamour of the mob outside, who were hammering at
+the door and shouting curses through the keyhole on those inside, he was
+too confused to understand anything, but by dint of great exertion they
+succeeded at length in explaining to him that they were domestic
+servants come in answer to his wife's advertisement. The man went and
+told his wife, and his wife said she would see them, one at a time.
+
+Which one should have audience first was a delicate question to decide.
+The man, on being appealed to, said he would prefer to leave it to them.
+They accordingly discussed the matter among themselves. At the end of a
+quarter of an hour, the victor, having borrowed a packet of pins and a
+looking-glass from our charwoman, who had slept in the house, went
+upstairs, while the remaining fourteen sat down in the hall, and fanned
+themselves with their bonnets.
+
+"A. B." was a good deal astonished when the first applicant presented
+herself. She was a tall, genteel-looking, well-dressed girl. Up to
+yesterday she had been head housemaid at Lady Stanton's, and before that
+she had been under-cook for two years to the Duchess of York.
+
+"And why did you leave Lady Stanton?" asked "A. B."
+
+"To come here, mum," replied the girl.
+
+The lady was puzzled.
+
+"And you'll be satisfied with six pounds a year?" she asked.
+
+"Certainly, mum, I think it ample."
+
+"And you don't mind hard work?"
+
+"I love it, mum."
+
+"And you're an early riser?"
+
+"Oh yes, mum, it upsets me stopping in bed after half-past five."
+
+"You know we do the washing at home?"
+
+"Yes, mum. I think it so much better to do it at home. Those laundries
+ruin good clothes. They're so careless."
+
+"Are you a Unitarian?" continued the lady.
+
+"Not yet, mum," replied the girl, "but I should like to be one."
+
+The lady took her reference, and said she would write her.
+
+"I do hope you will give me a trial, mum," pleaded the girl, as she rose
+to go; "I would try so hard to give you satisfaction."
+
+The next applicant offered to come for three pounds--thought six pounds
+too much. She also expressed her willingness to sleep in the back
+kitchen: a shakedown under the sink was all she wanted. She likewise had
+yearnings towards Unitarianism.
+
+The third girl did not require any wages at all--could not understand
+what servants wanted with wages--thought wages only encouraged a love of
+foolish finery--thought a comfortable home in a Unitarian family ought
+to be sufficient wages for any girl.
+
+This girl said there was one stipulation she should like to make, and
+that was that she should be allowed to pay for all breakages caused by
+her own carelessness or neglect. She objected to holidays and evenings
+out on principle; she held that they distracted a girl from her work.
+
+[Illustration: "MET THE NEXT DOOR LADY ON THE DOOR-STEP."]
+
+The fourth candidate offered a premium of five pounds for the place; and
+then "A.B." began to get frightened, and refused to see any more of the
+girls, convinced that they must be lunatics from some neighbouring
+asylum out for a walk.
+
+Later in the day, meeting the next door lady on the door-step, she
+related her morning's experiences.
+
+"Oh, that's nothing extraordinary," said the next door lady; "none of us
+on this side of the street pay wages; and we get the pick of all the
+best servants in London. Why, girls will come from the other end of the
+kingdom to get into one of these houses. It's the dream of their lives.
+They save up for years, so as to be able to come here for nothing."
+
+"What's the attraction?" asked "A. B.," more amazed than ever.
+
+"Why, don't you see," explained the next door lady, "our back windows
+open upon the barrack yard. A girl living in one of these houses is
+always close to soldiers. By looking out of window she can always see
+soldiers; and sometimes a soldier will nod to her, or even call up to
+her. They never dream of asking for wages. They'll work eighteen hours a
+day, and put up with anything just to be allowed to stop."
+
+"A.B." profited by this information, and engaged the girl who offered
+the five pounds premium. She found her a perfect treasure of a servant.
+She was invariably willing and respectful, slept on a sofa in the
+kitchen, and was always contented with an egg for her dinner.
+
+[Illustration: "A SOLDIER'S ARM ROUND THE WAIST."]
+
+The truth of this story I cannot vouch for. Myself, I can believe it.
+Brown and MacShaugnassy made no attempt to do so, which seemed
+unfriendly. Jephson excused himself on the plea of a headache. I admit
+there are points in it presenting difficulties to the average intellect.
+As I explained at the commencement, it was told to me by Ethelbertha,
+who had it from Amenda, who got it from the charwoman, and exaggerations
+may have crept into it. The following, however, were incidents that came
+under my own personal observation. They afforded a still stronger
+example of the influence exercised by Tommy Atkins upon the British
+domestic, and I therefore thought it right to relate them also to
+the boys.
+
+"The heroine of them," I said, "is our Amenda. Now, you would call her a
+tolerably well-behaved, orderly young woman, would you not?"
+
+"She is my ideal of unostentatious respectability," answered
+MacShaugnassy.
+
+"That was my opinion also," I replied. "You can, therefore, imagine my
+feelings on passing her one evening in the Folkestone High Street with a
+Panama hat upon her head (my Panama hat), and a soldier's arm round her
+waist. She was one of a mob, composed of all the unoccupied riff-raff of
+Folkestone, who were following the band of the Third Berkshire Infantry,
+then in camp at Sandgate. There was an ecstatic, far-away look in her
+eyes. She was dancing rather than walking, and with her left hand she
+beat time to the music."
+
+"I should say you were suffering from a mild attack of D.T. when you saw
+all that," said MacShaugnassy.
+
+"So I might have thought myself," I said; "but Ethelbertha was with me
+at the time, and she saw it too. We stared after the procession until it
+had turned the corner, and then we stared at each other.
+
+"'Oh, it's impossible,' said Ethelbertha to me.
+
+"'But that was my hat,' I said to Ethelbertha.
+
+"The moment we reached home Ethelbertha looked for Amenda, and I looked
+for my hat. Neither were to be found.
+
+[Illustration: "AND HUNG MY HAT UP."]
+
+"Nine o'clock struck, ten o'clock struck. At half-past ten, we went down
+and got our own supper, and had it in the kitchen. At a quarter-past
+eleven, Amenda returned. She walked into the kitchen without a word,
+hung my hat up behind the door, and commenced clearing away the
+supper things.
+
+"Ethelbertha rose, calm but severe.
+
+"'Where have you been, Amenda?' she enquired.
+
+"'Gadding half over the county with a lot of low soldiers,' answered
+Amenda, continuing her work.
+
+"'You had on my hat,' I added, somewhat gloomily. It was not the right
+view to take of the case, I know, but, personally, that fact grieved me
+more than all the other incidents in the proceeding put together, sad
+though I felt these to be. It was an expensive hat, and Ethelbertha said
+it suited me (there are not many that do). After seeing it that night on
+Amenda's head, my pride in it was gone.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' replied Amenda, still continuing her work, 'it was the
+first thing that came to hand. What I'm thankful for is that it wasn't
+missis's best bonnet.'
+
+"Whether Ethelbertha was mollified by the proper spirit displayed in
+this last remark, I cannot say, but I think it probable. At all events,
+it was in a voice more of sorrow than of anger that she resumed her
+examination.
+
+"'You were walking with a soldier's arm around your waist when we passed
+you, Amenda?' she observed interrogatively.
+
+"'I know, mum,' admitted Amenda, 'I found it there myself when the music
+stopped.'
+
+"Ethelbertha looked her enquiries. Amenda filled a saucepan with water,
+and then replied to them.
+
+"'I'm a disgrace to a decent household,' she said; 'no mistress who
+respected herself would keep me a moment. I ought to be put out on the
+doorstep with my box and a month's wages.'
+
+"'But why did you do it then?' said Ethelbertha, with natural
+astonishment.
+
+"'Because I'm a helpless ninny, mum.' There was no trace of bitterness
+or passion in Amenda's tones. She spoke in the calm, even voice of a
+person stating facts.
+
+"'I can't help myself,' she went on; 'if I see soldiers I'm bound to
+follow them. It runs in our family. My poor cousin Emma was just such
+another fool. She was engaged to be married to a quiet, respectable
+young fellow with a shop of his own, and three days before the wedding
+she ran off with a regiment of marines and married the colour-sergeant.
+That's what I shall end by doing. I've been all the way to Sandgate with
+that lot you saw me with, and I've kissed four of them--the nasty
+wretches. I'm a nice sort of girl to be walking out with a
+respectable milkman.'
+
+"She was so deeply disgusted with herself that it seemed superfluous for
+anybody else to be indignant with her; and Ethelbertha changed her tone
+and tried to comfort her.
+
+"'Oh, you'll get over all that nonsense, Amenda,' she said, laughingly;
+'you see yourself how silly it is. You must tell Mr. Bowles to keep you
+away from soldiers.'
+
+"'Ah, I can't look at it in the same light way that you do, mum,'
+returned Amenda, somewhat reprovingly; 'a girl that can't see a bit of
+red marching down the street without wanting to rush out and follow it
+ain't fit to be anybody's wife. Why I should be leaving the shop with
+nobody in it about twice a week, and he'd have to go the round of all
+the barracks in London, looking for me. I shall save up and get myself
+into a lunatic asylum, that's what I shall do.'
+
+"Ethelbertha began to grow quite troubled. 'But surely this is something
+altogether new, Amenda,' she said; 'you must have often met soldiers
+when you've been out in London?'
+
+"'Oh, yes, one or two at a time, walking about anyhow, I can stand that
+all right. It's when there's a lot of them all together with a band that
+I lose my head.'
+
+[Illustration: "'WHEN THERE'S A LOT OF THEM WITH A BAND, I LOSE MY
+HEAD.'"]
+
+"'You don't know what it's like, mum,' she added, noticing Ethelbertha's
+puzzled expression; 'you've never had it. I only hope you never may.'
+
+"We kept a careful watch over Amenda during the remainder of our stay at
+Folkestone, and an anxious time we had of it. Every day some regiment or
+other would march through the town, and at the first sound of its music
+Amenda would become restless and excited. The Pied Piper's reed could
+not have stirred the Hamelin children deeper than did those Sandgate
+bands the heart of our domestic. Fortunately, they generally passed
+early in the morning when we were indoors, but one day, returning home
+to lunch, we heard distant strains dying away upon the Hythe Road. We
+hurried in. Ethelbertha ran down into the kitchen; it was empty!--up
+into Amenda's bedroom; it was vacant! We called. There was no answer.
+
+"'That miserable girl has gone off again,' said Ethelbertha. 'What a
+terrible misfortune it is for her. It's quite a disease.'
+
+"Ethelbertha wanted me to go to Sandgate camp and enquire for her. I was
+sorry for the girl myself, but the picture of a young and
+innocent-looking man wandering about a complicated camp, enquiring for a
+lost domestic, presenting itself to my mind, I said that I'd rather not.
+
+"Ethelbertha thought me heartless, and said that if I would not go she
+would go herself. I replied that I thought one female member of my
+household was enough in that camp at a time, and requested her not to.
+Ethelbertha expressed her sense of my inhuman behaviour by haughtily
+declining to eat any lunch, and I expressed my sense of her
+unreasonableness by sweeping the whole meal into the grate, after which
+Ethelbertha suddenly developed exuberant affection for the cat (who
+didn't want anybody's love, but wanted to get under the grate after the
+lunch), and I became supernaturally absorbed in the day-before-
+yesterday's newspaper.
+
+[Illustration: "'WHO LOCKED YOU IN THERE?'"]
+
+"In the afternoon, strolling out into the garden, I heard the faint cry
+of a female in distress. I listened attentively, and the cry was
+repeated. I thought it sounded like Amenda's voice, but where it came
+from I could not conceive. It drew nearer, however, as I approached the
+bottom of the garden, and at last I located it in a small wooden shed,
+used by the proprietor of the house as a dark room for developing
+photographs.
+
+"The door was locked. 'Is that you, Amenda?' I cried through the
+keyhole.
+
+"'Yes, sir,' came back the muffled answer. 'Will you please let me out;
+you'll find the key on the ground near the door.'
+
+"I discovered it on the grass about a yard away, and released her. 'Who
+locked you in there?' I asked.
+
+"'I did, sir,' she replied; 'I locked myself in, and pushed the key out
+under the door. I had to do it, or I should have gone off with those
+beastly soldiers.'
+
+"'I hope I haven't inconvenienced you, sir,' she added, stepping out; 'I
+left the lunch all laid.'"
+
+Amenda's passion for soldiers was her one tribute to sentiment. Towards
+all others of the male sex she maintained an attitude of callous
+unsusceptibility, and her engagements with them (which were numerous)
+were entered into or abandoned on grounds so sordid as to seriously
+shock Ethelbertha.
+
+When she came to us she was engaged to a pork butcher--with a milkman in
+reserve. For Amenda's sake we dealt with the man, but we never liked
+him, and we liked his pork still less. When, therefore, Amenda announced
+to us that her engagement with him was "off," and intimated that her
+feelings would in no way suffer by our going elsewhere for our bacon, we
+secretly rejoiced.
+
+[Illustration: "HER ENGAGEMENT WAS 'OFF.'"]
+
+"I am confident you have done right, Amenda," said Ethelbertha; "you
+would never have been happy with that man."
+
+"No, mum, I don't think I ever should," replied Amenda. "I don't see how
+any girl could as hadn't got the digestion of an ostrich."
+
+Ethelbertha looked puzzled. "But what has digestion got to do with it?"
+she asked.
+
+"A pretty good deal, mum," answered Amenda, "when you're thinking of
+marrying a man as can't make a sausage fit to eat."
+
+"But, surely," exclaimed Ethelbertha, "you don't mean to say you're
+breaking off the match because you don't like his sausages!"
+
+"Well, I suppose that's what it comes to," agreed Amenda, unconcernedly.
+
+"What an awful idea!" sighed poor Ethelbertha, after a long pause. "Do
+you think you ever really loved him?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Amenda, "I loved him right enough, but it's no good
+loving a man that wants you to live on sausages that keep you awake
+all night."
+
+"But does he want you to live on sausages?" persisted Ethelbertha.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't say anything about it," explained Amenda; "but you know
+what it is, mum, when you marry a pork butcher: you're expected to eat
+what's left over. That's the mistake my poor cousin Eliza made. She
+married a muffin man. Of course, what he didn't sell they had to finish
+up themselves. Why, one winter, when he had a run of bad luck, they
+lived for two months on nothing but muffins. I never saw a girl so
+changed in all my life. One has to think of these things, you know."
+
+Later on, she engaged herself to a solicitor's messenger. She did
+this--as she frankly avowed to Ethelbertha--to assist her family, who
+were prosecuting some petty law case at the time. He was a smart, steady
+man, a great favourite with his employers, and, out of kindly feeling
+towards him, they did the business for Amenda's father, charging only
+"out-of-pockets."
+
+[Illustration: "GAVE HER A COCOANUT."]
+
+Six months after the case was ended, she broke off the match. She said
+that, on reflection, she could not help seeing what an advantage he
+would have over her--he being in a solicitor's office, with the law at
+his fingers' ends--should she ever find it necessary to summons him.
+
+"But, my good girl," said Ethelbertha, quite distressed, "one doesn't
+marry a man with the idea of subsequently summonsing him!"
+
+"No, mum," said Amenda, "one always hopes one will never need to, I'm
+sure, but it's just as well to be prepared. I knew a girl, when I was in
+service at Hastings, that loved a printer, and they were both going to
+commit suicide because her parents didn't want 'em to marry; and now he
+costs her four shillings a month regular in summonses. It's no good
+shutting one's eyes to things, mum."
+
+But the most shamefully mercenary engagement that I think Amenda ever
+entered into was one with a 'bus conductor. We were living in the North
+of London then, and she had a young man, a cheesemonger, who kept a shop
+in Lupus Street, Chelsea. He could not come up to her because of the
+shop, so once a week she used to go down to him. One did not ride ten
+miles for a penny in those days, and she found the fare from Holloway to
+Victoria and back a severe tax upon her purse. The same 'bus that took
+her down at six brought her back at ten. During the first journey the
+'bus conductor stared at Amenda; during the second he talked to her,
+during the third he gave her a cocoanut, during the fourth he proposed
+to her, and was promptly accepted. After that, Amenda was enabled to
+visit her cheesemonger without expense.
+
+[Illustration: "'I DESIRE SHARING CROSS.'"]
+
+He was a quaint character himself, was this 'bus conductor. I often rode
+with him to Fleet Street. He knew me quite well (I suppose Amenda must
+have pointed me out to him), and would always ask me after her--aloud,
+before all the other passengers, which was trying--and give me messages
+to take back to her. Where women were concerned he had what is called "a
+way" with him, and from the extent and variety of his female
+acquaintance, and the evident tenderness with which the majority of them
+regarded him, I am inclined to hope that Amenda's desertion of him
+(which happened contemporaneously with her jilting of the cheesemonger)
+caused him less prolonged suffering than might otherwise have been
+the case.
+
+He was a man from whom I derived a good deal of amusement one way and
+another. Thinking of him brings back to my mind a somewhat odd incident.
+
+One afternoon, I jumped upon his 'bus in the Seven Sisters Road. An
+elderly Frenchman was the only other occupant of the vehicle. "You vil
+not forget me," the Frenchman was saying as I entered, "I desire
+Sharing Cross."
+
+"I won't forget yer," answered the conductor, "you shall 'ave yer
+Sharing Cross. Don't make a fuss about it."
+
+"That's the third time 'ee's arst me not to forget 'im," he remarked to
+me in a stentorian aside; "'ee don't giv' yer much chance of doin' it,
+does 'ee?"
+
+At the corner of the Holloway Road we drew up, and our conductor began
+to shout after the manner of his species: "Charing Cross--Charing
+Cross--'ere yer are--Come along, lady--Charing Cross."
+
+The little Frenchman jumped up, and prepared to exit; the conductor
+pushed him back.
+
+"Sit down and don't be silly," he said; "this ain't Charing Cross."
+
+The Frenchman looked puzzled, but collapsed meekly. We picked up a few
+passengers, and proceeded on our way. Half a mile up the Liverpool Road
+a lady stood on the kerb regarding us as we passed with that pathetic
+mingling of desire and distrust which is the average woman's attitude
+towards conveyances of all kinds. Our conductor stopped.
+
+"Where d'yer want to go to?" he asked her severely--omnibus conductors
+have a manner of addressing all pedestrians as though they were lost
+children or suspicious loiterers--"Strand--Charing Cross?"
+
+[Illustration: "THE CONDUCTOR COLLARED HIM."]
+
+The Frenchman did not hear or did not understand the first part of the
+speech, but he caught the words "Charing Cross," and bounced up and out
+on to the step. The conductor collared him as he was getting off, and
+jerked him back savagely.
+
+"Carnt yer keep still a minute," he cried indignantly; "blessed if you
+don't want lookin' after like a bloomin' kid."
+
+"I vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," answered the little Frenchman,
+humbly.
+
+"You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross," repeated the other bitterly,
+as he led him back to his seat. "I shall put yer down in the middle of
+the road if I 'ave much more of yer. You stop there till I come and
+sling yer out. I ain't likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross,
+I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o' yer."
+
+The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. At "The Angel" we, of
+course, stopped. "Charing Cross," shouted the conductor, and up sprang
+the Frenchman.
+
+"Oh, my Gawd," said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and
+forcing him down into the corner seat, "wot am I to do? Carnt somebody
+sit on 'im?"
+
+[Illustration: "'BLESSED IF I DIDN'T RUN HIM ON TO VICTORIA.'"]
+
+He held him firmly down until the 'bus started, and then released him.
+At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor
+little Frenchman became exasperated.
+
+"He keep on saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross," he exclaimed, turning
+to the other passengers; "and it is _not_ Sharing Cross. He is fool."
+
+"Carnt yer understand," retorted the conductor, equally indignant; "of
+course I say Sharing Cross--I mean Charing Cross, but that don't mean
+that it _is_ Charing Cross. That means that--" and then perceiving from
+the blank look in the Frenchman's face the utter impossibility of ever
+making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing
+gesture, and asked:
+
+"Does any gentleman know the French for 'bloomin' idiot'?"
+
+A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.
+
+"Well," I asked him, "did you get your French friend to Charing Cross
+all right?"
+
+"No, sir," he replied, "you'll 'ardly believe it, but I 'ad a bit of a
+row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put 'im
+clean out o' my 'ead. Blessed if I didn't run 'im on to Victoria."
+
+(_To be continued_.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+THE SKATER.
+
+BY WILLIAM CANTON. ILLUSTRATED BY A. L. BOWLEY.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+      O'er glassy levels of the mere
+        She glides on slanting skate;
+      She loves in fairy curves to veer
+        And weave her figure eight.
+    Bright flower in fur, I would thy feet
+    Could weave my heart and thine, my sweet,
+    Thus into one glad life complete!
+      Harsh winter, rage thy rudest:
+        Freeze, freeze, thou churlish sky;
+      Blow, arctic wind, thy shrewdest--
+        What care my heart and I!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+MY SERVANT ANDREAS
+
+BY ARCHIBALD FORBES.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY FREDERIC VILLIERS.
+
+
+[Illustration: "ANDREAS."]
+
+I think it quite likely that some of my young American friends, about
+ten months ago, were burning to have an opportunity of accompanying
+General Miles down the Pacific coast, and of describing in glowing
+sentences to their countrymen at home how Uncle Sam's young man turned
+to flight the Chilian insurrectionists, who were breathing out
+threatening and slaughter against the great Northern Republic. There is
+an undoubted fascination in the picturesque and adventurous life of the
+war correspondent. One must, of course, have a distinct bent for the
+avocation, and if he is to succeed he must possess certain salient
+attributes. He must expose himself to rather greater risks than fall to
+the lot of the average fighting man, without enjoying any of the
+happiness of retaliation which stirs the blood of the latter; the
+correspondent must sit quietly on his horse in the fire, and, while
+watching every turn in the battle, must wear the aspect as if he rather
+enjoyed the storm of missiles than otherwise. When the fighting is over,
+the soldier, if not killed, generally can eat and sleep; ere the echoes
+of it are silent, the correspondent of energy--and if he has not energy
+he is not worth his salt--must already be galloping his hardest towards
+the nearest telegraph wire, which, as like as not, is a hundred miles
+distant. He must "get there," by hook or by crook, in a minimum of time;
+and as soon as his message is on the wires, he must be hurrying back to
+the army, else he may chance to miss the great battle of the war. The
+correspondent must be most things to all men; he must have the sweet,
+angelic temper of a woman, be as affable as if he were running for
+office, and at the same time be big and ugly enough to impress the
+conviction that it would be extremely unwise to take any liberties
+with him.
+
+The career, no doubt, has some incidental drawbacks. No fewer than five
+British correspondents were killed in the recent campaigns in the
+Soudan. General Sherman threatened to hang all the correspondents found
+in his camp after a certain day, and General Sherman was the kind of man
+to fulfil any threat he made. I suppose there was no correspondent
+taking part in the Franco-German and Russo-Turkish wars who was not in
+custody over and over again on suspicion of being a spy. I have been a
+prisoner myself in France, Spain, Servia, Germany, Austria, Hungary,
+Russia, Roumania and Bulgaria; and I may perhaps venture to remark in
+passing that I cannot recommend any of these countries from this point
+of view. But the casual confinements, half irritating, half comic, to
+which he may be subjected, do not bother the war correspondent of the
+old world nearly as much as do the foreign languages which, if he is not
+a good linguist, hamper him every hour of every day. He really should
+possess the gift of tongues--be conversant with all European languages,
+a neat assortment of the Asiatic languages, and a few of the African
+tongues, such as Abyssinian, Ashantee, Zulu, and Soudanese. But how few
+in the nature of things can approximate this polyglot versatility. Often
+in Eastern Europe, and in Afghanistan, I have envied Messrs. Swinton,
+Smalley, Whitelaw Reed, and the other notable war correspondents of the
+American Civil War, in that they had not the difficulties of outlandish
+tongues to contend with. I own myself to be a poor linguist, and have
+many and many a time suffered for my dullness of what the Scotch call
+"up-take." It is true that I was fairly conversant with French and
+German, and could express my wants in Russian, Roumanian, Bulgarian,
+Spanish, Turkish, Hindustanee, Pushtoo, and Burmese, every word of which
+smatterings I have long since forgotten. But the truth is that the
+poorest peoples in the world in acquiring foreign languages are the
+English and the French; the readiest are the Russians and Americans. It
+was, after a fashion, a liberal education to listen to the fluency in
+some half-dozen languages of Poor McGahan, the "Ohio boy," who graduated
+from the plough to be perhaps the most brilliant war correspondent of
+modern times. His compatriot and colleague, Frank Millet, who has fallen
+away from glory as a war correspondent, and has taken to the inferior
+trade of painting, seemed to pick up a language by the mere accident of
+finding himself on the soil where it was spoken. In the first three
+days, after crossing the Danube into Bulgaria, Millet went about with
+book in hand, gathering in the names of things at which he pointed, and
+jotting down each acquisition in the book. On the fourth day he could
+swear in Bulgarian, copiously, fervently, and with a measure of
+intelligibility. Within a week he had conquered the uncouth tongue. As
+he voyaged lately down the Danube from source to mouth, charmingly
+describing the scenic panorama of the great river in the pages of
+_Harper_, those of you who have read those sketches will not have failed
+to notice how Millet talked to German, Hungarian, Servian, Bulgarian,
+Roumanian, and Turkish, each in his own tongue, those diverse languages
+having been acquired by him during the few months of the
+Russo-Turkish war.
+
+[Illustration: "MACGAHAN AND FRANK MILLET."]
+
+By this time, you may be wondering just where "Andreas" comes in.
+Perhaps I have been over long in getting to my specific subject; but I
+will not be discursive any more. It was at the _table d'hote_ in the
+Serbische Krone Hotel, in Belgrade, where I first set eyes on Andreas.
+In the year 1876, Servia had thought proper to throw off the yoke of her
+Turkish suzerain, and to attempt to assert her independence by force of
+arms. But for very irregularly paid tribute she was virtually
+independent already, and probably in all Servia there were not two
+hundred Turks. But she ambitiously desired to have the name of as well
+as the actuality of being independent; the Russians helped her with
+arms, officers, and volunteer soldiers; and when I reached Belgrade, in
+May of the year named, there had already been fighting, in which the
+Servians had by no means got the worst. No word of the Servian tongue
+had I, and it was the reverse of pleasant for a war correspondent in
+such plight to learn that outside of Belgrade nobody, or at least hardly
+anybody, knew a word of any other language than the native Servian. As I
+ate, I was being attended by a very assiduous waiter, whose alertness
+and anxiety to please were very conspicuous. He was smart with quite
+un-Oriental smartness; he whisked about the tables with deftness; he
+spoke to me in German, to the Russian officers over against me in what I
+assumed was Russian, to the Servians dining behind me in what I took to
+be Servian. I liked the look of the man; there was intelligence in his
+aspect. One could not call him handsome, but there was character in the
+keen black eye, the high features and the pronounced chin, fringed on
+either side by bushy black whiskers.
+
+[Illustration: "ANDREAS AS A FORAGER."]
+
+I had brought no servant with me; the average British servant is worse
+than useless in a foreign country, and the dubiously-polyglot courier is
+a snare and a deception on campaign. I had my eye on Andreas for a
+couple of days, during which he was of immense service to me. He seemed
+to know and stand well with everyone in Belgrade; it was he, indeed, who
+presented me in the restaurant to the Prime Minister and the Minister
+for War, who got together for me my field necessaries, who helped me to
+buy my horses, and who narrated to me the progress of the campaign so
+far as it had gone. On the third day I had him in my room and asked
+whether he would like to come with me into the field as my servant. He
+accepted the offer with effusion; we struck hands on the compact; he
+tendered me credentials which I ascertained to be extremely
+satisfactory; and then he gave me a little sketch of himself. It was
+somewhat mixed, as indeed was his origin. Primarily he was a Servian,
+but his maternal grandmother had been a Bosniak, an earlier ancestress
+had been in a Turkish harem, there was a strain in his blood of the
+Hungarian zinganee--the gipsy of Eastern Europe, and one could not look
+at his profile without a suspicion that there was a Jewish element in
+his pedigree. "A pure mongrel," was what a gentleman of the British
+Legation termed Andreas, and this self-contradictory epithet was
+scarcely out of place.
+
+Andreas turned out well. He was as hardy as a hill-goat, careless how
+and when he ate, or where he slept, which, indeed, was mostly in the
+open. It seemed to me that he had cousins all over Servia, chiefly of
+the female persuasion, and I am morally certain that the Turkish strain
+in his blood had in Andreas its natural development in a species of
+_fin-de-siècle_ polygamy. Sherman's prize "bummer" was not in it with
+Andreas as a forager. At first, indeed, I suspected him of actual
+plundering, so copiously did he bring in supplies, and so little had I
+to pay for them; but I was not long in discovering that all kinds of
+produce were dirt cheap in Servia, and that as I could myself buy a lamb
+for a quarter, it was not surprising that Andreas, to the manner born,
+could easily obtain one for half the money. He was an excellent
+horsemaster, and the stern vigour with which he chastised the occasional
+neglect of the cousin whom he had brought into my service as groom, was
+borne in upon me by the frequent howls which were audible from the rear
+of my tent. There was not a road in all Servia with whose every winding
+Andreas was not conversant, and this "extensive and peculiar" knowledge
+of his was often of great service to me. He was a light-weight and an
+excellent rider; I have sent him off to Belgrade with a telegram at
+dusk, and he was back again by breakfast time next morning, after a
+gallop of quite a hundred miles.
+
+No exertion fatigued him; I never saw the man out of humour; there was
+but one matter in regard to which I ever had to chide him, and in that I
+had perforce to let him have his own way, because I do not believe that
+he could restrain himself. He had served the term in the army which is,
+or was then, obligatory on all Servians; and on the road or in camp he
+was rather more of a "peace at any price" man than ever was the late Mr.
+John Bright himself. When the first fight occurred, Andreas claimed to
+be allowed to witness it along with me. I demurred; he might get hit;
+and if anything should happen to him, what should I do for a servant? At
+length I gave him the firm order to remain in camp, and started myself
+with the groom behind me on my second horse. The fighting occurred eight
+miles from camp, and in the course of it, leaving the groom in the rear,
+I had accompanied the Russian General Dochtouroff into a most
+unpleasantly hot place, where a storm of Turkish shells were falling in
+the effort to hinder the withdrawal of a disabled Servian battery. I
+happened to glance over my shoulder, and lo! Andreas on foot was at my
+horse's tail, obviously in a state of ecstatic enjoyment of the
+situation. I peremptorily ordered him back, and he departed sullenly,
+calmly strolling along the line of Turkish fire. Just then, Tchernaieff,
+the Servian Commander-in-Chief, had, it seemed, ordered a detachment of
+infantry to take in flank the Turkish guns. From where we stood I could
+discern the Servian soldiers hurrying forward close under the fringe of
+a wood near the line of retirement along which Andreas was sulking.
+Andreas saw them too, and retreated no step further, but cut across to
+them, snatching up a gun as he ran, and the last I saw of him was while
+he was waving on the militiamen with his billycock, and loosing off an
+occasional bullet, while he emitted yells of defiance against the Turks,
+which might well have struck terror into their very marrow. Andreas came
+into camp at night very streaky with powder stains, minus the lobe of
+one ear, uneasy as he caught my eye, yet with a certain elateness of
+mien. I sacked him that night, and he said he didn't care, and that he
+was not ashamed of himself. Next morning, as I was rising, he rushed
+into the tent, knelt down, clasped my knees, and bedewed my ankles with
+his tears. Of course I reinstated him; I couldn't do without him, and I
+think he knew it.
+
+[Illustration: "SNATCHING UP A GUN AS HE RAN."]
+
+But I had yielded too easily. Andreas had established a precedent. He
+insisted, in a quiet, positive manner, on accompanying me to every
+subsequent battle; and I had to consent, always taking his pledge that
+he would obey the injunctions I might lay upon him. And, as a matter of
+course, he punctually and invariably violated that pledge when the
+crisis of the fighting was drawing to a head, and just when this "peace
+at any price" man could not control the bloodthirst that was
+parching him.
+
+One never knows how events are to fall out. It happened that this
+resolution on the part of Andreas to accompany me into the fights once
+assuredly saved my life. It was on the day of Djunis, the last battle
+fought by the Servians. In the early part of the day there was a good
+deal of scattered woodland fighting in front of the entrenched line,
+which they abandoned when the Turks came on in earnest. Andreas and I
+were among the trees trying to find a position from which something was
+to be seen, when all of a sudden I, who was in advance, plumped right
+into the centre of a small scouting party of Turks. They tore me out of
+the saddle, and I had given myself up for lost--for the Turks took no
+prisoners, their cheerful practice being to slaughter first and then
+abominably to mutilate--when suddenly Andreas dashed in among my
+captors, shouting aloud in a language which I took to be Turkish, since
+he bellowed "Effendi" as he pointed to me. He had thrown away his
+billycock and substituted a fez, which he afterwards told me he always
+carried in case of accidents, and in one hand he waved a dingy piece of
+parchment with a seal dangling from it, which I assumed was some
+obsolete firman. The result was truly amazing, and the scene had some
+real humour in it. With profound salaams, the Turks unhanded me, helped
+me to mount, and, as I rode off at a tangent with Andreas at my horse's
+head, called after me what sounded like friendly farewells. When we were
+back among the Russians--I don't remember seeing much of the Servians
+later on that day--Andreas explained that he had passed himself for the
+Turkish dragoman of a British correspondent whom the Padishah delighted
+to honour, and that, after expressing a burning desire to defile the
+graves of their collective female ancestry, he had assured my captors
+that they might count themselves as dead men if they did not immediately
+release me. To his ready-witted conduct I undoubtedly owe the ability to
+write now this record of a man of curiously complicated nature.
+
+When the campaign ended with the Servian defeat at Djunis, Andreas went
+back to his headwaitership at the Serbische Krone in Belgrade. Before
+leaving that capital I had the honour of being present at his nuptials,
+a ceremony the amenity of which was somewhat disturbed by the violent
+incursion into the sacred edifice of sundry ladies all claiming to have
+prior claims on the bridegroom of the hour. They were, however,
+placated, and subsequently joined the marriage feast in the great arbour
+behind the Krone. Andreas faithfully promised to come to me to the ends
+of the earth on receipt of a telegram, if I should require his services,
+and he were alive.
+
+[Illustration: "ANDREAS DASHED IN AMONG MY CAPTORS."]
+
+Next spring the Russo-Turkish war broke out, and I hurried eastward in
+time to see the first Cossack cross the Pruth. I had telegraphed to
+Andreas from England to meet me at Bazias on the Danube below Belgrade.
+Bazias is the place where the railway used to end, and where we took
+steamer for the Lower Danube. Andreas was duly on hand, ready and
+serviceable as of old, a little fatter, and a trifle more consequential
+than when we had last parted. He was, if possible, rather more at home
+in Bucharest than he had been in Belgrade, and recommended me to
+Brofft's Hotel, in comparison with which the charges of the Brunswick in
+New York are infinitesimal. He bought my wagon and team, he found riding
+horses when they were said to be unprocurable, he constructed a most
+ingenious tent, of which the wagon was, so to speak, the roof-tree, he
+laid in stores, arranged for relays of couriers, and furnished me with a
+coachman in the person of a Roumanian Jew who he one day owned was a
+distant connection, and whose leading attribute was, that he could
+survive more sleep than any other human being I have ever known. We took
+the field auspiciously, Mr. Frederic Villiers, the war artist of the
+London _Graphic_, being my campaigning comrade. Thus early I discerned a
+slight rift in the lute. Andreas did not like Villiers, which showed his
+bad taste, or rather, perhaps, the narrowness of his capacity of
+affection; and I fear Villiers did not much like Andreas, whom he
+thought too familiar. This was true, and it was my fault; but really it
+was with difficulty that I could bring myself to treat Andreas as a
+servant. He was more, in my estimation, in the nature of the
+confidential major-domo, and to me he was simply invaluable. Villiers
+had to chew his moustache, and glower discontentedly at Andreas.
+
+I had some good couriers for the conveyance of despatches back across
+the Danube to Bucharest, whence everything was telegraphed to London;
+but they were essentially fair-weather men. The casual courier may be
+alert, loyal, and trustworthy; he may be relied on to try his honest
+best, but it is not to be expected of him that he will greatly dare and
+count his life but as dross when his incentive to enterprise is merely
+filthy lucre. But I could trust Andreas to dare and to endure--to
+overcome obstacles, and, if man could, to "get there," where, in the
+base-quarters in Bucharest, the amanuenses were waiting to copy out in
+round hand for the foreign telegraphist the rapid script of the
+correspondent scribbling for life in the saddle or the cleft of a
+commanding tree while the shells were whistling past. We missed him
+dreadfully when he was gone--even Villiers, who liked good cooking,
+owned to thinking long for his return. For, in addition to his other
+virtues, Andreas was a capital cook. It is true that his courses had a
+habit of arriving at long and uncertain intervals. After a dish of
+pungent stew, no other viands appearing to loom in the near future,
+Villiers and myself would betake ourselves to smoking, and perhaps on a
+quiet day would lapse into slumber. From this we would be aroused by
+Andreas to partake of a second course of roast chicken, the bird having
+been alive and unconscious of its impending fate when the first course
+had been served. No man is perfect, and as regarded Andreas there were
+some petty spots on the sun. He had, for instance, a mania for the
+purchase of irrelevant poultry, and for accommodating the fowls in our
+wagon, tied by the legs, against the day of starvation, which he always,
+but causelessly, apprehended. I do not suppose any reader has ever had
+any experience of domestic poultry as bedfellows, and I may caution him
+earnestly against making any such experiment.
+
+I do not know whether it is a detraction from Andreas's worth to mention
+that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking us in the
+still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting his views on
+recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how trivial were
+such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to be beaten in
+getting my despatch to the telegraph wire, that once, when three
+pontoons of the bridge across the Danube were sunk, he crossed the gap
+hand over hand by the hand-rope, sloshing down with the current as the
+slack of the rope gave to his weight! Andreas became quite an
+institution in the Russian camp. When Ignatieff, the Tsar's intimate,
+the great diplomatist who has now curiously fizzled out, would honour us
+by partaking sometimes of afternoon tea in our tent, he would call
+Andreas by his name and call him "Molodetz"--the Russian for "brave
+fellow." In the Servian campaign Dochtouroff had got him the Takova
+cross, which Andreas sported with great pride, and Ignatieff used to
+tell him that the Tsar was seriously thinking of conferring on him the
+Cross of St. George, badinage which Andreas took as dead earnest.
+MacGahan used gravely to entreat him to take greater care of his
+invaluable life, and hint that if any calamity occurred to him, the
+campaign would _ipso facto_ come to an end. Andreas knew that MacGahan
+was quizzing him, but it was exceedingly droll how he purred and bridled
+under the light touch of that genial humourist, whose merits his own
+countrymen, to my thinking, have never adequately recognised. The old
+story of a prophet having scant honour in his own country.
+
+[Illustration: "CROSSED THE GAP HAND OVER HAND."]
+
+After the long strain of the desperate but futile attack made by the
+Russians on Plevna in the early part of the September of the war, I fell
+a victim to the malarial fever of the Lower Danube, and had to be
+invalided back to Bucharest. The illness grew upon me, and my condition
+became very serious. Worthy Andreas nursed me with great tenderness and
+assiduity in the lodgings to which I had been brought, since they would
+not accept a fever patient at Brofft's. After some days of wretchedness
+I became delirious, and, of course, lost consciousness; my last
+recollection was of Andreas wetting my parched lips with lemonade. When
+I recovered my senses, and looked out feebly, there was nobody in the
+room. How long I had been unconscious I had no idea. I lay there in a
+half stupor till evening, unable from weakness to summon any assistance.
+In the dusk came the English doctor who had been attending me. "Where is
+Andreas?" he asked. I could not tell him. "He was here last night," he
+said; "you have been delirious for seven days." The woman of the house
+was summoned. She had not seen Andreas since the previous night, but,
+busy about her own domestic affairs, had no suspicion until she entered
+the room that Andreas was not with me still.
+
+Andreas never returned. It appeared that he had taken away all his
+belongings. One day, when gradually mending, I put my hand under the
+pillow with intent to find my watch, which was an heirloom, and wind it
+up. I could find no watch. No more could I find the bag of ducats which
+was alongside the watch before I lost my senses. Search was made
+throughout the room without success, and, with whatever reluctance to
+believe a thing so utterly unlikely, I could not refrain from the
+conviction that Andreas must have carried off both money and watch.
+The thought caused a relapse, but at length I attained convalescence,
+and was able to drive out. But the doctor was firm that during the now
+imminent winter I was not to return to the field. Fortunately, my able
+colleagues, MacGahan and Millet, were there; and I was therefore the
+less distressed by Dr. ----'s peremptory sentence on me. I was
+condemned to return to England as soon as I should be strong enough to
+travel.
+
+When I had to leave the Plevna front, my colleagues temporarily took
+charge of my field equipment. But I had brought back to Bucharest my
+best riding horse, and during my illness he had been standing at livery
+in the stables of the English Tramway Company. Determining now on the
+melancholy necessity of selling an animal which had on many a hard day
+and many a long night-ride served me staunchly, I drove to the stables,
+and instructed the manager to sell my horse. "Your horse!" he exclaimed,
+in evident surprise; "your horse was sold weeks ago! Your man, Andreas,
+came here with a message that we were to dispose of it; and I sold it
+next day to General Todleben on his way through Bucharest to take the
+command before Plevna. It fetched a good price, 105 ducats, more than
+you gave for it; Andreas called for the money, and, of course, I gave
+it to him."
+
+So Andreas was thief and rogue--deliberate thief and rogue. I was angry,
+but I was yet more heart-sorry that so fine and true a native should
+have thus fallen. Just as I was leaving Bucharest for England, a letter
+came to me from a friend in Galatz, a commercial city of Roumania, near
+the mouth of the Danube. Its P.S. only is worth quoting. "So you have
+parted with your man, Andreas. I thought from what you had told me that
+you would retain him for life. He is here now, I saw him drunk in the
+street yesterday. He told Kennedy that he believed you were dead."
+
+[Illustration: "ANDREAS DROPPED ON HIS KNEES."]
+
+I went straight to Galatz, a long half-day's journey. Andreas was not
+hard to find; he was smoking in the "Concordia" saloon. I saw him before
+he saw me; he had a furtive air, he was pallid and his lips twitched; he
+looked to me on the verge of _delirium tremens_. I approached him from
+behind, and uttered the one word, "Andreas!" At the word, he started as
+if he had been shot, spun round, dropped on his knees, with his hands
+raised beseechingly, and cried in a broken voice, "Before God, master, I
+thought you were dead, else I should never have done it! I have not had
+a happy moment since I threw away my good name--I could not go home!
+Kill me, send me to prison, punish me how you choose. I shall rejoice to
+suffer!" And the poor wretch grovelled before me on his stomach.
+
+I had meant to punish him; but he was too broken for chastisement. I
+could not send to prison the man who had saved my life among the
+pine-trees of Djunis. I wonder if he really thought me dead--not that,
+if so, his act was thereby materially palliated. And I thought of two
+little sentences which my mother taught me when I was a child: "Judge
+not that ye be not judged," and "Lead us not into temptation." I pulled
+the man on to his feet and grasped his hand, then with the words, "Give
+me my father's watch--good-bye, Andreas. I shall remember all the good
+in you, and forget those last bad days." I turned from him, and quitted
+the "Concordia" with a lump in my throat that I could not swallow down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+TOLD BY THE COLONEL.
+
+X.
+
+A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.
+
+BY W. L. ALDEN.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. JACK.
+
+
+"And by the way," continued the Colonel, "a curious thing about this
+Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and never had
+any wife whatever."
+
+The Colonel had begun a story concerning one Josiah Wilson, which
+promised to be interesting, but his incidental allusion to Mr. Wilson's
+matrimonial experience awakened our curiosity, and we begged him to
+interrupt his narrative long enough to tell us how it came to pass that
+Josiah was a married man who never had a wife.
+
+[Illustration: "HOWLED FOR HELP."]
+
+"The marriage laws in the United States," said the Colonel, giving his
+chair an increased tilt backwards, which was his usual way of beginning
+a fresh anecdote, "are as peculiar in their way as are the divorce laws.
+You would think to look at them that they would permit anybody to marry
+anybody else in any way that either of them might choose, but for all
+that they sometimes make it impossible for a man or a woman to get
+married. There was a couple who intended to be married in a balloon,
+which is a style of lunacy that is quite fashionable in some parts of
+the country, though I can't see why a man should want to risk his neck
+in a balloon on his wedding day unless it is that it takes so much
+courage to be married at all that a man forgets all about such minor
+dangers as are connected with ballooning. The bride, the minister, and
+two witnesses of assorted sexes went up in the balloon at the appointed
+time, and, naturally, the bridegroom intended to go with them, but he
+accidentally caught his foot in a neglected guy-rope, and went up head
+downwards about twenty feet below the car. The party in the balloon
+could not haul him up because they could not get hold of the rope, and
+the bride would not consent to give up the trip, because the groom had
+always been a little shy, and she was afraid that, if she let him go
+this time, she might not be able to land him again. So the parson went
+on with the ceremony, and the groom made most of his responses in bad
+language, and howled for help when he wasn't swearing. When the ceremony
+was over, the aeronaut managed to land the balloon without seriously
+damaging the bridegroom, but when, a year or two afterwards, the bride
+wanted to get her divorce, the court held that there had never been any
+marriage, for the reason that both the groom and the bride had not
+appeared together in the presence of the officiating minister, and that,
+furthermore, there was no provision in the law which would permit a man
+to be married upside down.
+
+[Illustration: "SMITH'S BULL-DOG."]
+
+"But to get back to Josiah Wilson. He lived in Indiana, close to the
+boundary line between that State and Illinois, and he courted Melinda
+Smith, a young woman who lived a little way up the mountain side with
+her father and three brothers. The girl was anxious to be married, but
+her family was dead against it. You see Josiah was a Republican and a
+Methodist, while the Smiths were Democrats and Baptists, and, naturally,
+they hated each other like poison, and one night as old man Smith and
+Josiah met on their way to rival prayer meetings, they exchanged
+revolver shots, without, however, doing any harm. Then once Josiah had
+most of the calf of his leg taken off by the Smiths' bull-dog, and twice
+the Smith boys came into the sitting-room where Josiah was calling on
+Melinda, and suggested to him with their shot-guns that he had better go
+home. Gradually Josiah and Melinda came to the conclusion that her
+family was resolved to discourage the match, so they determined to elope
+and be married without the knowledge or consent of anybody.
+
+"One dark night Josiah carried a ladder and planted it under Melinda's
+window. He had advised her to walk out of the front door, which was
+always left unlocked at night, but she refused, saying that if she was
+going to elope she should do it in the proper way, and that if Josiah
+had no respect for her, she had some little respect for herself. She
+climbed down the ladder with a good deal of difficulty, because she
+insisted that Josiah should help her, and also that he should stand
+forty yards away, for reasons connected with her ankles, and he found it
+rather trying to follow out these contradictory orders. However, Melinda
+reached the ground at last, and the pair started in a carriage that had
+been waiting just around a bend in the road, in company with the
+Methodist minister. Their plan was to drive to the next town and there
+to be married, but it happened that one of the Smith boys, being
+restless, got up in the night, and, looking out of the window, saw the
+ladder standing at Melinda's window. In about twenty minutes after the
+young people had started, the whole Smith family and their shot-guns
+were following the runaways in a waggon, and gaining on them fast.
+
+"The Methodist minister, whose hearing was unusually good, heard the
+sound of hoofs before Josiah noticed it, and told the young people that
+there was not the least doubt that they were pursued, and would be
+overtaken in a very few minutes. 'And then, you know,' he added, 'the
+chances are that, being Baptists, they will shoot first, and ask for
+explanations afterwards. The only thing for us to do is to get the
+marriage ceremony over before they come up. Then they will see that
+opposition is of no use, and will listen to reason.'
+
+[Illustration: "THEY WERE MARRIED."]
+
+"Josiah and Melinda at once consented, and the parson, noticing a little
+clearing in the woods on the left hand side of the road, and a flat sort
+of tombstone standing in the middle of it, said that he would stand on
+that stone and marry his young friends so quick that it would make their
+hair curl. He was particularly glad to meet with a handy tombstone, for
+he said that a tombstone was the next thing to a church, and that to be
+married by the side of a tomb would be almost as solemn as to be married
+in a minister's study. So the party hastily descended; the parson
+mounted the stone; Josiah and Melinda joined hands in front of him, and
+they were married, and the parson had kissed the bride and pocketed his
+fee just as the Smiths' waggon drove up and the Smith boys cocked their
+guns and covered the party. But the parson was wide awake. He had his
+revolver out and old man Smith covered before anybody had taken aim at
+him, but, instead of shooting, he remarked that he was a minister of the
+blessed gospel of peace; that there was no necessity for bloodshed, and
+that he would blow a hole through old Smith unless the Smith boys
+lowered their weapons and consented to argue the matter. 'The fact is,
+Colonel Smith,' said the parson, 'you're too late. The young people are
+legally married, and the sooner you accept the situation the better. I
+married them not two minutes ago, standing on that identical tombstone.'
+
+[Illustration: "'YOU'LL COME STRAIGHT HOME WITH ME.'"]
+
+"Colonel Smith was a lawyer, and the sharpest one in that part of the
+country. He saw the force of the minister's remarks, so he told the boys
+to put up their guns, and he shook hands with the minister. Then he
+inquired, in a careless sort of way, where Josiah and Melinda had stood
+while they were being married. The parson showed the footprints of the
+bride and groom, and then Colonel Smith turned to Melinda and said,
+'You'll come straight home with me. There hasn't been any marriage yet.
+That stone is the boundary mark between Indiana and Illinois, and you
+were standing in Indiana and that other idiot was standing in Illinois
+when the parson tried to marry you. Nobody can marry in two States at
+the same time, and I shan't recognise the pretended marriage till a
+court of law compels me to do so, which will be never. I hope this will
+teach you the folly of fooling with Methodism. When you want to get
+married next time try a Baptist minister, who will know the difference
+between a tombstone and a boundary mark.' There were too many Smiths,
+and they were too well armed to be reasoned with successfully, so the
+upshot was that Melinda went home with her family, and Josiah and the
+parson went to see a lawyer.
+
+"The next day Josiah brought a suit for divorce against Melinda. It was
+a friendly suit, you understand, and his only object was to test the
+question of the validity of his marriage, for, of course, no man can get
+a divorce unless he first proves that he is married. Old man Smith
+conducted the case on his side, and a lawyer named Starkweather, who is
+now a member of the Illinois Legislature, appeared for Josiah Wilson.
+Colonel Smith argued that while the parson who conducted the alleged
+marriage ceremony could undoubtedly have married a couple in the State
+of Indiana, he could not marry a woman in Indiana to a man in Illinois,
+for the reason that the man and the woman could not be in the same place
+while they were in two different commonwealths, and that hence Josiah
+and Melinda had not legally appeared together before the officiating
+minister. Furthermore, he argued that the minister at the time of the
+pretended marriage was standing neither in Indiana nor in Illinois, but
+on the boundary line; that the statute defined the boundary line as 'an
+imaginary line' running from such and such a point to such and such a
+point, and that a minister who stands in a purely imaginative locality
+stands virtually nowhere, and hence cannot perform any function of
+his calling.
+
+"On the other hand, Josiah's lawyer claimed that the minister had
+married Melinda Smith in the State of Indiana; that consequently she
+must have been married to somebody, and that that somebody was
+unquestionably Josiah Wilson. As to the point that the minister stood in
+an imaginary locality because, as was alleged, he stood on the boundary
+line, the lawyer maintained that it was a physical impossibility that a
+minister weighing two hundred and fifty pounds could stand in a purely
+imaginative place. Moreover, he was prepared to prove that, while
+performing the ceremony, at least one of the minister's feet was in the
+State of Indiana, which was sufficient to make him legally present in
+that State.
+
+"The arguments lasted three days, and the court before which it was
+tried, consisting of three judges, took all the third day to deliver its
+verdict. It decided that Melinda Smith was legally married to some
+person unknown, though not to Josiah Wilson, and that Josiah Wilson was
+also married to some unknown woman, who was not Melinda Smith, whoever
+else she might be; that no marriage between the plaintiff and the
+defendant had ever taken place, and that no divorce could be granted,
+but that if either of them married anyone else, he or she would be
+guilty of bigamy.
+
+[Illustration: "SHE WAS A GOOD DEAL CAST DOWN."]
+
+"The Smiths, with the exception of Melinda, were delighted with the
+decision, for it made it reasonably certain that Josiah could never be
+recognised as her husband. She was a good deal cast down about it, for,
+like every other Indiana girl, she had looked forward to being married
+and divorced as the natural lot of woman. Now it appeared that she was
+married, but in such an unsatisfactory way, that she could never have a
+husband, and never be divorced from anyone. As for Josiah, he was
+furious, but there was no help for it, the law was against him, and, as
+a law-abiding man, he was obliged to respect it, especially as he could
+not hope to kill off all four of the Smiths, if he decided to make a
+family feud of it; he himself having no family whatever, and no one to
+help him to keep up his end of the feud.
+
+"For the next fifteen years Josiah lived a single man except in name,
+and Melinda mourned her hard fate and kept house for her father and
+brothers; but one day Josiah's lawyer, who was by this time in the
+Legislature, came to him and offered to have his marriage to Melinda
+made legal in all respects for five hundred dollars. The lawyer was so
+certain that he could do this that he was willing to wait for his pay
+until after he had gained a verdict, and Josiah, after a little
+bargaining such as every self-respecting man would have made, in his
+place, consented to the lawyer's terms. It seems that the lawyer had
+accidentally discovered that there had been a mistake in the survey of
+part of the boundary line between Indiana and Illinois, and at the very
+place where Josiah and Melinda were married, A rectification of this
+mistake would move the line ten feet west, and so place the spot where
+the pair stood during their wedding entirely within the state of
+Indiana. The proper steps to obtain the rectification of the boundary
+were taken, and it was rectified. Then Melinda in her turn began a suit
+for divorce against Josiah, and had no difficulty in proving the
+marriage and in obtaining a decree. Josiah paid the lawyer his five
+hundred dollars, and was overjoyed at being finally able to call his
+Melinda his own. But he met with a little disappointment. Now that
+Melinda had obtained her divorce she thought she might as well live up
+to it, and marry a fresh husband. So she married the Methodist minister,
+who had just lost his third wife, and lived happily ever afterwards.
+
+[Illustration: "OFFERED TO HAVE HIS MARRIAGE MADE LEGAL."]
+
+"It was just after this that Josiah, being perhaps made a little
+reckless by his disappointment, became involved in the affair that I was
+going to tell you about when you interrupted me, and wanted to hear
+about his marriage. Matrimony is a mighty curious thing, and you can
+never tell precisely how it is going to turn out. That is one reason why
+I was never married but once, though I spent ten years of my life in
+Chicago, and had friends at bar who stood ready to obtain divorces for
+me at any moment and without a dollar of expense."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: IDLERS.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+"LIONS IN THEIR DENS."
+
+No. II.--GEORGE GROSSMITH AND THE HUMOUR OF HIM.
+
+BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEO. HUTCHINSON.
+
+(_Photographs by Messrs. Fraddle and Young and Alfred Ellis._)
+
+
+[Illustration: MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.]
+
+A little, slight man, with a thin, clever, mobile, clean-shaven face, a
+sharp inquisitive nose surmounted by a perpetual pair of _pince-nez_,
+and a rather sarcastic mouth, from which wit and humour as light and
+airy as the cigarette smoke which accompanied each remark
+continually flowed.
+
+Mr. George Grossmith, the well-known actor and society clown.
+
+He stands on the hearthrug of his own special sanctum in his handsome
+house in Dorset Square, with his back to the fire, cigarette in his
+mouth, his hands now in his pockets, now waving in the air, as he
+vivaciously tells me the story of his busy, energetic and wonderfully
+interesting life.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. GEORGE GROSSMITH.]
+
+"I was born," said he, "in 1847. I come of a family of actors and
+reciters. My father, whose portrait you see there on the wall, was a
+well-known lecturer and entertainer. Sixty or seventy years ago my uncle
+created a great sensation as a child actor, and he was commonly known as
+the 'celebrated infant Roscius.' Come out into the hall," continued the
+lively little entertainer, "and I will show you some old engravings
+which represent him in his favourite characters. Then my brother Weedon,
+as you know, is, of course, a well-known actor, as well as a clever
+artist, and part author with myself of several sketches which have
+appeared in _Punch_. My eldest son now begins to display the family
+tendency to a most alarming extent. For my own part, I started my career
+as a reporter at Bow Street Police Court, a training which I have found
+invaluable in many respects ever since. My subsequent history as actor
+and society clown is so well known that I need not trouble you with it
+any further."
+
+"I suppose you find the taste of your audiences has gone up considerably
+within the last twenty years, do you not?"
+
+"Why, yes," he replied. "They wouldn't stand to-day what they used to
+roar at then. My music is quite elaborate compared with the two or three
+chords which easily satisfied people in the sixties and early seventies.
+Listen to this," continued my host, as he sat down to the _piano_ and
+struck a couple of very simple chords. Then he glided softly into what
+he termed a modern accompaniment. It was all the difference between "Ten
+Little Niggers" and a slumber song of Schubert.
+
+[Illustration: MR. GROSSMITH'S HOUSE.]
+
+"And do you find the public very critical?"
+
+"Well," he replied, with a smile, "they are very kind. It is your
+professional critic who is severe, though I can honestly say they
+invariably treat me well. Criticism up to a certain point is good
+enough. Beyond that point it is absolutely disabling to me. My father
+was a very severe critic. When we went out together he used to take the
+first half-hour, and then go to the back of the hall and criticise me.
+But it so hampered me by causing me to think of and consider every pose
+that I had to beg of him to desist. And then again, as regards
+criticism, I always think--it may be very conceited on my part--that I
+know a great deal more what the public want than my critics do. I
+declare to you I should have to take everything out of my sketches if I
+attempted to carry out all the suggestions that are made to me. I can
+absolutely feel the public pulse after so many years upon the platform.
+I am almost always right. When I first started 'See me Dance the Polka'
+it fell quite flat. I gave it up, although I felt sure it ought to go.
+The public then demanded it, and it went with a swing. The public had
+changed its mind. Not I."
+
+[Illustration: THE DINING ROOM.]
+
+"And how do you prepare your sketches?" said I, as Mr. Grossmith lit
+another cigarette, and took up his position on the hearthrug again.
+
+"Anyhow and anywhere the idea comes to me for a sketch. I am seated in a
+railway train, and I think of a sea-side sketch. I close my eyes and try
+to recall every single feature of interest on a crowded fashionable
+beach in the height of the season. Nothing is too unimportant. The way
+in which an old lady settles herself comfortably into her chair, the
+manner in which a man, especially a shy man, walks into the room, all
+these things, slightly exaggerated, but still true to nature, are
+immensely appreciated. First I have the idea, then I elaborate,
+sometimes for months, then I produce on the stage, and the people say,
+'How remarkable it is you should invent all this on the spur of the
+moment!' That, of course, is a great compliment. The song-writing is
+always amusing," continued Mr. Grossmith, as he placed in my hand a
+little notebook in which were suggestions and elaborations innumerable.
+One thing I noticed, which he himself had condemned, but which was
+decidedly amusing, although it has never been allowed to see the
+light of day:
+
+[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM.]
+
+    "I've been engaged to many,
+    Quite a score of times at least;
+    I don't think I with safety _can say_
+    Where I met my first _fiancée_.
+    Oh! 'tis better to have loved and lost
+    Than never to have loved at all;
+    So I may say I have loved and _lost a lot_,
+    And my fickleness has _cost a lot_."
+
+"Ah!" said Mr. Grossmith, as he leaned over me and saw what I was
+reading; "my better judgment told me that was not good enough for
+the public."
+
+Then came a pencilled note in this little book, "You can take a horse to
+water, but can't make him drink." "That gave me an idea," cried Mr.
+Grossmith, as he sprang to his feet. "You can take a boy to the piano,
+but you can't make him play.' Thought I to myself, that would make a
+capital sketch. And here is how I set about it," continued he, as he
+proceeded to illustrate his remarks. "Imagine a little fellow in the
+corner there. I then begin in dumb show to encourage him to come to the
+piano. 'Come on, my boy; you know you can play that pretty piece you
+played yesterday. Come on, there's a good fellow!' Wonderful what you
+can do with persuasion! He refuses. I attempt to lead him to the piano.
+He won't budge an inch. I carry him under my arm and seat him in front
+of the instrument, the audience roaring all the time. At last his
+mistakes are so many and so ridiculous, I lose all patience and catch
+him a mighty box upon the ears! Tableau!! Of course there is no boy on
+the platform at all, I am quite alone, but I have so thoroughly lost
+myself in my imagination that people have declared years after, 'Oh! but
+I am quite sure you had a boy with you; why, don't you remember how you
+boxed his ears?'"
+
+[Illustration: "I ENCOURAGE HIM."]
+[Illustration: "I ATTEMPT TO LEAD HIM."]
+[Illustration: "I CARRY HIM."]
+[Illustration: "I LOSE ALL PATIENCE."]
+
+No less marvellous than his power of acting is his power of mimicry. "I
+will show you how I do Irving," said he, and in a moment the little man
+had ruffled his hair, had assumed to the life not only Irving's peculiar
+gait, but, even more remarkable still, had managed to secure almost
+exactly the very expression of the great tragedian's face.
+
+[Illustration: "HOW I DO IRVING."]
+
+"Then again, I find it a good idea to take up some craze or topic of the
+moment. 'The Drama on Crutches' I wrote when the craze first arose
+amongst the aristocracy for going on the stage. One of the sketches
+which you will find outlined in that little notebook is entitled, 'Is
+Music a Failure?' and I endeavoured to answer the question by showing
+how popular it is among all classes of the community." I will quote
+pretty freely from this outlined sketch, as it will give my readers an
+idea, better than anything else would do, of the manner in which Mr.
+Grossmith prepares his delightful sketches.
+
+"I am not going to treat the subject seriously," he writes, "but in my
+own particular, impertinent way. The question often arises--are we a
+musical nation? The foreigners think we are not. But where in the wide,
+wide world is there a country where you will hear so many organs and
+German bands? Where is the country, excepting ours, that can appreciate
+the concertina? Where, except in England, can you hear that delightful
+combination of harp and cornet outside a house of refreshment? The
+prejudice of other nations is distressing; and as for their ignorance,
+why, I don't suppose Italy and Germany have even heard of the ocarino
+and the Jew's harp."
+
+And so the sketch runs on, until, in speaking of the universal manner in
+which music is appreciated in England by all classes, Mr. Grossmith goes
+on to say: "We have made rapid strides, so have our servants. They don't
+know how to dust the piano, but they can play it. Everybody plays the
+piano, from the Peerage to the School Board. Then look how music has
+crept into our homes and social circles. Besides the piano, the mother
+and daughters play the banjo, the son plays the first fiddle, and the
+father the second fiddle--as usual. I know of a Lord Mayor who plays the
+trombone, a clergyman who plays the big drum--that's a nice
+unpretentious, giddy instrument!--and I know of any number of members of
+Parliament who blow their own trumpets!!" And so the notes go brightly
+on through many pages.
+
+[Illustration: THE STUDY.]
+[Illustration: MR. WEEDON GROSSMITH.]
+
+"This," explained my host, "is a fair specimen of the method I employ in
+preparing a drawing-room sketch. As a rule, my audiences of that class
+are capital. I always love a well-dressed audience, it is so cheerful.
+You mayn't perhaps get as much applause as you do from the sixpenny
+gallery, but then applause often spoils your point. Once, however, I
+remember singing at a private house in the country to an odd assortment
+of people. I was informed that the party followed a wedding which had
+taken place in the morning. If it had followed a funeral it could not
+have been more gloomy and depressed than it was. I played the piano and
+the fool for three-quarters of an hour, and anything more dismal than
+the result it would be impossible to conceive. A temptation seized me
+suddenly, and I said: 'Ladies and gentlemen,--I am going to reveal to
+you a secret. Pray don't let it go any further. This is supposed to be a
+comic entertainment. I don't expect you to laugh at it in the least; but
+if, during the next sketch, you would only once oblige me with a society
+smile, it would give me a great deal of encouragement.' The audience for
+a moment were dumbfounded. They first began to titter, then to laugh,
+and actually to roar, and for a time I could not proceed with the
+sketch. They were transformed into a capital and enthusiastic audience,
+and the hostess told me that both her guests and herself were most
+grateful to me. I am sometimes amused with the little eccentricities of
+people who wish to secure my services for their parties. A gentleman
+once wrote to me to entertain some friends of his, and, added he, 'I
+trust that your sketches are strictly _comme il faut_, as I have several
+young daughters.' I was so immensely tickled by this that, rightly or
+wrongly, I replied that my entertainments _were_ as they should be, for
+I was recently married, and hoped myself to have several young
+daughters. He wrote thanking me for this assurance, and I was to
+consider myself accordingly engaged. There is a story I tell in my book
+which will bear repetition: A young gentleman once called upon me. He
+explained that he was acting as a sort of ambassador for a friend of
+his, Mrs. ----, of Mayfair, who wished me to dine at her house. I
+replied that I had not the honour of the lady's acquaintance, and,
+though appreciating her kind invitation, I did not see how I could very
+well avail myself of it. He said that Prince Somebody or other and La
+Comtesse de So-and-so would be dining there, and Mrs. ---- would be so
+pleased if I would join the party, and sing a little song after dinner.
+'Oh,' I said, 'if Mrs. ---- wishes to engage me professionally, that is
+another matter, and if I am at liberty, I will come with much pleasure.'
+'Well,' said the ambassador, 'I fancy Mrs. ---- is under the impression
+that if she includes you in her dinner party it is an understood thing
+that you sing afterwards.' 'I am afraid I do not understand that,' I
+said. 'It would not pay me to do so. I only consume about ten shillings
+worth of food and wine, and my terms are more than that.' There," said
+Mr. Grossmith, "could you have believed that anyone would have been so
+inconceivably mean and caddish?"
+
+[Illustration: OLD ENGRAVINGS.]
+[Illustration: MR. GEORGE GROSSMITH.]
+[Illustration: MR. GEO. GROSSMITH, JUN.]
+
+"I have had some curious experiences on tour," he went on. "That is hard
+work, if you like. I have gone a four months' tour without missing a
+night. It takes it out of one terribly. But it is very paying work. In
+the South of England I have made as much as £300 a week. My friends
+tried to frighten me as to the apathy of my Scotch audiences; as a
+matter of fact, I have no better audiences anywhere. I like performing
+to country audiences. I am never nervous as I am apt to be at St.
+James's, where there are a number of my friends. And it is on my country
+tours that I have many curious experiences. Amateurs invariably call at
+the hotel to see me, and to ask my advice as to their powers of
+recitation. Some are quite hopeless, and I haven't the heart to condemn
+them utterly, or to go beyond 'I tell you quite candidly, since you ask
+me, that I have heard better.' As a rule they are very quiet and modest,
+but now and again one encounters some fearful specimens. I remember once
+at a country town, which we will call Mudborough, a flashy young cad, in
+a very loud suit, called to see me with a parcel under his arm. He had
+come, he told me, to learn my opinion of his singing. He further
+informed me that he was known as 'the Mudborough Grossmith.' He didn't
+have the courtesy to take off his hat; he walked up and down my room,
+whistling, singing, and handing me over now and again specimens of his
+powers as a water-colour painter. I looked at them. At last, tired of
+the idiot and his airs, I said, 'I hope your musical sketches are better
+than you water-colour sketches.' Nothing, however, could snub this
+fellow. He proceeded straightway to sing me an improved version of 'See
+me Dance the Polka.' 'Do your audience like it?' I asked. 'I should
+think they did,' he replied; 'I will let you have that last verse if you
+like.' I thanked him sarcastically, and at last he withdrew. I have,
+however, come across some real talent in this way. For instance, that
+admirable actor and entertainer, Eric Lewis, is a _protégé_ of mine, and
+you could not have a better man than he. Another amusing incident
+occurred at Southsea. My secretary was in a shop one day, and he
+overheard three ladies discussing the respective merits of Corney Grain
+and myself. Two of them were for Corney Grain and one was for me.
+Finding at last that the odds were too strong for her, she departed with
+this final shot: 'Well, never mind, Mr. Corney Grain can't jump on to a
+piano,' referring to my imitation of Minnie Palmer."
+
+[Illustration: "A FLASHY YOUNG CAD, IN A VERY LOUD SUIT."]
+
+Replying to a question I put to him as to his theatrical experiences,
+Mr. Grossmith told me that it was in the November of 1877 that he
+received the following letter:--
+
+"Beefsteak Club,
+
+"King William Street,
+
+"Tuesday Night.
+
+"Dear Mr. Grossmith,--Are you inclined to go on the stage for a time?
+There is a part in the new piece I am doing with Gilbert which I think
+you would play admirably. I can't find a good man for it. Let me have a
+line, or come to Albert Mansions to-morrow, after 4; or Thursday,
+before 2.30.
+
+"Yours sincerely,
+
+"ARTHUR SULLIVAN."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"This was a great moment in my life, although at the time my father,
+whose good judgment I valued much, was of opinion that I was not very
+successful as an actor. Sullivan, however, who had heard me give a
+musical sketch at a dinner party, was of the contrary opinion, and felt
+sure that I should suit him. It appears he and Arthur Cecil were both
+writing letters at the Beefsteak, when the former said, 'I can't find a
+fellow for this opera.' Cecil said, 'I wonder if Grossmith--' Before he
+had finished the sentence, Arthur Sullivan said, 'The very man!' And so
+I was engaged. I am much indebted to these two Arthurs," continued the
+bright little man with a laugh. "I reverence the very name of Arthur. I
+remember when Gilbert wanted to engage me for the part of _John
+Wellington Wells_, though I saw the part would suit me to perfection, I
+said to him, 'I should have thought you required a fine man with a fine
+voice for the part of a magician.' I can still see Gilbert's humorous
+expression as he replied, 'That is just what we _don't_ want.' I played
+_Sir Joseph Porter_ in 'Pinafore' every night for nearly two years. Long
+runs don't affect the nerves of the actors nearly as much as they affect
+the performance. Constant repetition begets mechanism, and that is a
+terrible enemy to contend against. I make a point of playing my best to
+a bad house; for it is a monstrous thing to slur through one's work
+because the stalls are empty, and thereby punish those who _have_ come
+for the fault of those who _have not_. Still, I repeat it, constant
+repetition is a dreadful thing. Fancy playing 'Pinafore,' as I did, for
+700 nights without missing a single performance!"
+
+[Illustration]
+[Illustration]
+
+As he said this Mr. Grossmith led the way out of the room in which we
+had been talking, and which he told me was his own special sanctum,
+"into which no one is ever allowed to come except my wife, for anyone
+rushing in here when I was composing or thinking out a sketch would
+inevitably drive every single idea from my head," and we went upstairs
+together. Here in the drawing-room he set himself down to a spinet which
+bore the date of 1770, and he struck a few exceedingly sweet-sounding,
+if slightly tinkling, chords from it. "And this," said he, "is the
+oldest _Broadwood_ in England. You can see for yourself the date--1795."
+Downstairs he showed me a beautiful model of a steam engine, upon which
+he was enabled to ride, and which he could drive himself. "I thoroughly
+understand locomotives," said he, as he pointed to a shelf full of all
+the works upon the subject which he had been able to discover.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+A BLIND BEGGARMAN
+
+BY FRANK MATHEW.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. PEGRAM.
+
+
+    "Left dark among mine enemies."
+
+Long ago, the Fairies often stole children; they chose the prettiest,
+and carried them to Fairyland--the Kingdom of Tyrnanoge,--leaving
+hideous Changelings instead. In those days no man had call to be ashamed
+of his offspring, since it a baby was deformed or idiotic it was known
+to be a Changeling.
+
+[Illustration: "THE PIG WAS A FRIENDLY ANIMAL."]
+
+It is sixty years now since old Mike Lonergan, who lived in a hovel in
+Moher Village, was robbed of his child. It was his wife first found out
+the theft, for she had seen her unborn son in a dream, and he was
+beautiful; so when she saw the sickly and ugly baby, she knew that he
+was not hers, and that the Fairies had stolen the child of her dream.
+Many advised her to roast the Changeling on the turf-fire, but the White
+Witch of Moher said it would be safer to leave him alone. So the child
+Andy grew up as a stranger in his father's hovel and had a dreary time
+of it, he got little food and no kindness. The Lonergans gave him
+neither offence nor welcome, hoping that he might see fit to go home to
+Tyrnanoge and yet bear them no grudge. He grew up an odd wizened little
+wretch, and everyone shunned him. The children loathed him because they
+were afraid of him, so they hooted him from a distance, or stoned him
+from behind walls.
+
+Indeed, at this time his only ally was the pig that lived in one corner
+of the hovel. The pig was a friendly animal, his front half was a dull
+white and the other half black, and this gave him a homely look as if he
+was sitting in his shirt-sleeves. Andy would shrink into the corner, and
+sit cuddled there with one arm round the pig's neck. Old Mike Lonergan
+took to drink, and spent every evening at the Shebeen--small blame to
+him--for how could a man be expected to stay at home with a Changeling
+sitting in a corner and staring at him?
+
+When the pig was driven to the Fair at Ennistimon, Andy was left
+friendless, and then--in all winds and weather--was to be found on the
+Cliffs of Moher. Sometimes he stopped out all night, till hunger would
+bring him back when the Lonergans were rejoicing at his disappearance.
+He knew every inch of the Cliffs, and spent half his time lying on the
+edge of the grey precipice, looking down at the sea, six hundred feet
+below, or watching the clouds of sea-birds; he found new paths down the
+cliff-side and clambered like a goat; he knew where the gulls nested,
+but never robbed them, and the caves where the seals lived, and the
+seals shouldered their way through the water close by him, looking at
+him with soft eyes.
+
+When he was about fourteen, the Famine Year came; fever and "The Hunger"
+swept Clare. The fever took Lonergan and his wife, and they were buried
+in the dead-pit at Liscannor; it left Andy, but it left him blind. Then
+the neighbours began to have their doubts whether he was a Changeling
+after all; for the Fairies are faithful, and who ever heard of a
+Changeling being left blind and penniless? If he was only mortal he had
+been cruelly treated, so to make amends they gave him the fiddle that
+had belonged to the "Dark" Man--that is the blind man--of St. Bridget's
+Well, who had lately starved. There was still a feeling that he was
+unfit for a Holy Well, so he took up a post at the Liscannor
+Cross-roads, and there levied a toll on passers with the professional
+heart-broken cry:
+
+"Remember the Dark Man! For God's sake, remember the Dark Man!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For nearly twenty years Andy haunted the Cross-roads, he came to be
+honoured as one of the institutions of Moher, though the folk considered
+there was much that was uncanny about him, he was so silent, and he
+hated the smell of whisky. Now those were the times when Cornelius
+Desmond ruled Moher in the old open-handed haphazard way, never
+troubling penniless tenants. But "Corney" died and the daisies grew over
+him, so the estate was managed by an agent who made short work of
+paupers, and evicted "Dark" Andy from his ancestral hovel. Andy did not
+seem to know his misfortune. He spent the day of the eviction, as usual,
+at the Cross-roads, and came back at night to a ruin. His neighbour,
+Larry Ronan the blacksmith, was grieved to see that he took the change
+as a matter of course, and that after groping in the four corners of the
+cabin he sat on the window-ledge as if unaware that nothing was left of
+his home but the walls.
+
+Next day it was rumoured that Bridget McCaura, of Moher Farm, had
+sheltered Dark Andy. Bridget was a warm woman, a "woman of three cows,"
+a masterful old maid, who in her time had refused many a pretty fellow,
+perhaps because she suspected them of hankering after her live stock,
+her poultry, and her sixty acres of rocks. Then the old parish priest,
+Father Peter Flannery, rode over to see her. Bridget was called out of
+her house to speak to him; he was afraid to dismount. She stood in the
+narrow gateway in front of her farm, with her arms akimbo, ready to
+defend her home against all comers. Peter's heart trembled; he has a
+great dread of angry women.
+
+"Is it thrue?" he asked--and was so frightened that he looked even
+sterner than usual--"is it thrue what I'm afther hearing, Bridget
+McCaura, that ye've taken the Dark Man, Lonergan, to live with ye--to
+live in the Farm?"
+
+"Is it thrue? 'Tis so," said Bridget.
+
+"But ye're not going to keep him, are ye now?"
+
+"Keep him? I am that," said Bridget.
+
+Peter screwed up his courage and told her warily, that though it was
+well-meant of her, and "'tis you have the kind warm heart, Bridget me
+dear," still, that propriety forbade it.
+
+He was afraid to look at her as he spoke. Bridget was purple.
+
+"What! a misfortnit ould omadhaun the likes of that?" she cried.
+
+"I know, I know," said Peter (this is a pet phrase of his and usually
+means that he does not know). "I know, I know, but 'tis because ye're a
+lone woman, tell me now are ye listening to me? If ye'd been married
+now, 'twould have been another thing."
+
+"Married!" cried Bridget with infinite scorn--"Married! If that's all,
+I'll marry the craythur to-morrow!"
+
+And so Dark Andy was married to the richest woman in Moher. He seemed
+indifferent; as for Bridget, she had made up her mind to shelter him,
+and there was an end of it, she took pleasure in astounding her
+neighbours.
+
+[Illustration: "I'LL MARRY THE CRAYTHUR TO-MORROW!"]
+
+There was never such excitement in Clare as when those banns were read.
+Everyone saw that poor Bridget McCaura--"dacint woman"--had been
+bewitched. All the old stories about Dark Andy came to life, there was
+no room for doubt now, and the bravest unbelievers trembled before him.
+There was many a woman would never hear his name without crossing
+herself, and he got the credit of every misfortune between Kilkee and
+Kinvarra, though some doubted whether a blind man could have the Evil
+Eye. It was felt that he should be asked to give up his post by the
+Cross-roads, since it was inconvenient for the neighbours to have to
+climb two stone walls to avoid passing him. However, no one could be
+found to suggest this to him, so he still sat there daily, for he liked
+to feel that he was earning his own livelihood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One rough afternoon during my first visit to Clare I was caught in a
+storm of rain, and took refuge at the Liscannor Cross-roads under a
+thick clump of trees that are stunted and bent eastward by cowering from
+the sea-wind. As I reached them I heard a shrill cry, "Remember the Dark
+Man!" Then I saw the blind beggarman sitting huddled in a ragged
+great-coat so much too big for him that till he stood up I did not see
+how tiny he was. He had a doleful peaked face, set in a shock of grey
+hair. By him sat a little brown dog--the queerest of mongrels--with a
+tin can tied round his neck.
+
+Andy was friendly that day, and talked eagerly in a shrill, stammering
+voice. I found later that he was wretched in still weather, and loved
+the malicious rush of the rain; he was happiest when the wind rattled in
+his ears and the rain whipped his face. "Call that rain?" he said, "sure
+th' air is flooded, an' ye might as well swim as walk."
+
+Many times after that I went out of my way on my long solitary walks to
+pass the Cross-roads, but as often as not he was glum and silent, and
+then Bonaparte, sharing his mood, would growl like a small thunderstorm.
+The seat was well chosen, for the cowering trees are like a shed over
+it, and there is a pleasant landscape in front (though that mattered
+little to Andy), a landscape of dim green moors--with brown stains on
+them where sedge grows and black shadows where bushes huddle in
+clefts--chequered by a grey net of low walls, dotted with the white
+gables of cabins, and framed by a wavering line of hills.
+
+Sometimes I found him playing his fiddle to keep himself company, but he
+stopped when he heard me, and, to tell the truth, I was glad of it, for
+his playing was uncanny. Sometimes I met him shambling along the brink
+of the Cliffs--a grotesque little figure, with his old shapeless hat,
+his huge coat flapping behind him, and the mighty blackthorn he
+carried--he knew the ground so well that he walked as if he could see
+(indeed, he saw more than I could, for while to me the breakers were
+only streaks of light, he spoke as if he was close to them on the wet
+weedy rocks), or I came on him lying by the edge, listening to the
+grumbling of the breakers and the cries of the gulls.
+
+[Illustration: "LISTENING TO THE GRUMBLING OF THE BREAKERS AND THE CRIES
+OF THE GULLS."]
+
+Mostly he was unsociable, he shrank from his neighbours because they had
+been cruel to him when they were children, and the dislike was more than
+returned; yet I think that, but for the loneliness of his whole life, he
+would have been friendly enough. No one knew more of folklore--I think
+he half believed that he was a Changeling, and found comfort in the
+thought of that former life when he was one of the merry "Little Good
+People"--and sure old Mike Lonergan and his wife ought to have known
+best. He knew the ways of every ghost in the county, and it was even
+said that he was on speaking terms with the Headless Man who haunted
+Liscannor. Of course he knew all about Fairies. When the fallen leaves
+scurried past his feet he knew that the "Little Good People" were
+playing football, when the wind whispered in the leaves overhead he
+heard them chatting, and when it whined in the creaking bare branches,
+heard the poor little folk crying with cold and bewailing the days when
+they found shelter by snug firesides and sat there unseen but not
+unwelcome. Once, before the world grew hard, they gathered in the
+cabins, and the roughest fare grew pleasanter, the saddest hearts
+lighter, from their good wishes; but no one cares for them now, and they
+cannot rest in unfriendly houses.
+
+[Illustration: "HE WAS ON SPEAKING TERMS WITH THE HEADLESS MAN OF
+LISCANNOR."]
+
+As he grew older, he talked more of them, grew more moody and restless,
+could not sit quiet while the wind was up, and spent night after night
+out of doors. My friend Father Peter Flannery, who is my chief authority
+for this history, told me that often, riding on his sick calls in stormy
+weather, he met Andy staggering along the rough roads.
+
+Last year on November Eve--the night when the Fairies have power, and
+the dead wake and dance reels with them--the blind beggarman started out
+from the Farm. An Atlantic gale was shattering seas against the Cliffs,
+the air was salt with foam, and throbbed with the pulse of the breakers.
+Bridget tried in vain to stop him; he said the "Little Good People" were
+calling him. She watched him disappear into the darkness, the whimpering
+of his fiddle died into the shrieks of the wind. "'Tis a quare divil, he
+is," she said, "God help him!"
+
+Once in the night she thought she heard a snatch of the "Fairies' Reel";
+but Andy never came back. Next morning they found Bonaparte whining on
+the edge of the Cliffs; there was no sign of his master. He must have
+gone over the Cliffs in the darkness, but the waves gave no token.
+
+Some folk in Moher believe that the Fairies took back their child, and
+that the old blind fiddler lives now in the Kingdom of Tyrnanoge, and
+makes music for their dances in that enchanted country where the old
+grow young and the blind see. Some say that he still haunts the
+Cross-roads, and only a week ago, Larry Ronan, coming back at night from
+Ennistimon Fair, saw a black shadowy figure under the black trees, and
+heard a heart-broken voice cry "Remember the Dark Man!" Larry's natural
+surprise at this accounted for his being found next morning asleep in
+the ditch. But it is agreed in Moher that Andy left life on November
+Eve, whether he became the playfellow of the Fairies or the plaything of
+the waves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+CHURCH AND STAGE.
+
+A REVIEW OF HENRY IRVING,
+
+BY THE REV. DR. JOSEPH PARKER.
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM F. BARNARD AND J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE.
+
+
+[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS "HAMLET."
+(_From the Portrait by EDWIN LONG._)]
+
+[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS "DIGBY GRANT" IN "TWO ROSES."]
+
+The innumerable reviews of Mr. Irving by literary and artistic experts
+have left room enough for an amateur estimate by a man who is accustomed
+to regard human life mainly from a religious standpoint. A complete
+review of the Stage by the Pulpit could hardly be the work of a single
+pen; for my own part, therefore, I can only make a very small
+contribution to such a review by indicating a few points which have
+occurred to me in the study of one particular actor. At once, however,
+the question arises, Is Mr. Irving a man who can be thus summarily
+characterised? In a dramatic sense, are there not many Mr. Irvings? When
+a man can act "The Two Roses" and "The Dead Heart" with equal effect,
+when he can at will be as vulgar as _Robert Macaire_, or as dignified as
+_Cardinal Wolsey;_ when he can be either as young as Hamlet or as old as
+Lear, the inquiry as to his plurality becomes natural and pertinent. For
+my part, I rank Mr. Irving the comedian above Mr. Irving the tragedian,
+just as I rank Nature above Art: each may be highest in its own way, yet
+the one may have a charm which the other cannot boast. Mr. Irving's
+tragedy sometimes requires working up, but his comedy is spontaneous and
+immediate. The needful working up of tragedy is no fault of the actor.
+Tragedy should hardly ever begin at once. The murder may come too soon.
+Premature rage is followed by untimely laughter. _Digby Grant_ begins at
+once, and can be his best self in the very first sentence, but _Macbeth_
+must move towards his passion by finely-graded ascents. In Mr. Irving's
+exquisite representation, _Macbeth's_ anxieties and perturbations, his
+rapid alternations of courage and cowardice, make delicate but obvious
+record of themselves in deepening the grey of his hair, and ploughing
+more deeply the lines of his face. A comedy may be judged scene by
+scene, almost sentence by sentence, but a tragedy can be truly estimated
+only when viewed in final perspective.
+
+[Illustration: "A LITTLE CHEQUE."
+(MR. IRVING AS "DIGBY GRANT" IN "TWO ROSES.")]
+
+Judged by this test, I have no hesitation in regarding Mr. Irving's
+_King Lear_ as the finest creation of his genius. This is an instance in
+which the actor creates the piece. Shakespeare is, as a poet and
+playwright, at his worst in "King Lear." Yet his accessories are
+wonderful in variety and suggestiveness. Only Shakespeare could have
+created the heath, and have so ordered the old King's passion, as to
+make his madness part of the very thunder and lightning. That was
+Shakespeare's magnificent conception, and Mr. Irving's rendering is
+worthy of its tempestuous grandeur. How to talk up to the storm, how to
+pierce the tumult with the cries of human distress, how to escape the
+ridiculous and the incongruous, how to be a King on the desolate heath,
+and to make the royalty gleam through the angry darkness, were the
+problems, and Mr. Irving solved them one and all, even with redundance
+of faculty and skill. At the end of the heath scene the man is more
+remembered than the storm. It has been objected that in the first scene
+Mr. Irving's _Lear_ is too old and feeble. I venture to think otherwise.
+I further venture to think that the King's age and the King's imbecility
+have both been accurately appreciated. A man at eighty, a man athirst
+for flattery, a man who would pay a kingdom in exchange for adulation,
+must have outlived all that is best and strongest in human nature. He
+comes upon the stage as a wreck. His vanity has eaten up his sagacity,
+so that she, _Goneril_ or _Regan_, who can flatter most, can lie most,
+and can play the devil best, shall fare most lavishly at his hands. Is
+it not well partly to excuse these excesses of self-valuation by such
+mitigations as can be found in the infirmity of old age? Even in an
+elderly man they would have been treated with contempt; they could only
+be endured in one whose eighty years had been doubled by the hardness of
+his life lot.
+
+In "Henry VIII." Mr. Irving had little to do. In that play the labour
+and the glory fell upon another, to the infinite delight of the public.
+In "Lear," Mr. Irving has everything to do. From beginning to end there
+is only one character. Even the fascinating _Cordelia_ is but a silver
+cloud on the far horizon. "The King is coming" is the cry of the play.
+His madness is more, as to display and effect, than the sense of all the
+others. The scene is stiff and cold until his wild hair is observed to
+approach the front, and then the whole spectacle is alight with feeling
+and purpose. The other actors are not to blame that, to a large extent,
+they are thrown into the shade; indeed, they are to be warmly
+congratulated upon their self-suppression and their passive sympathy. It
+is a hard task to play the part of two heartless and treacherous
+daughters, and a pitiful fate to have to represent the villainy of
+_Edmund_, yet all this was admirably done. It cannot be an easy thing to
+come forward to play the villain well, for the better the dramatic
+villain is played the more is the actor compelled to recognise in his
+execration the exact degree of his success. So admirably can Mr. Irving
+himself play the villain, that it is difficult to believe that any
+godparents ever, on his unconscious behalf, renounced the pomps and
+vanities of this wicked world.
+
+In many minor parts--or along the subsidiary lines of great parts--Mr.
+Irving's subtlest power comes into effective play. Who, for example, can
+be more gentle or more graceful with a little child? Who could hug the
+"fool" more fondly than old _King Lear_? Then recall his wonderful
+recognitions of old friends. When, in "The Dead Heart," he is liberated
+from the Bastille, how old times slowly but surely dawn into
+consciousness, and how quickly the dawn hastens into the noontide of the
+tenderest fellowship and highest festival of joy. It is verily a
+resurrection. After eighteen years' entombment this political Lazarus
+comes forth to liberty, to leadership, to dominance.
+
+In "Lear," there are two wonderful instances of recognition, the
+recognition of _Gloster_ and of _Cordelia_. _Gloster_ is blind and
+bandaged. _Cordelia_ has been long out of sight--if not in actual days
+yet in depth of feeling--and the King himself is demented. Little by
+little things shape themselves in the memory and fancy of the King.
+There is something confusedly familiar in the voice of _Gloster_ which,
+tone by tone, settles into recognition. In the case of _Cordelia_ the
+father gradually subdues the King, and instinct takes the place of
+reason; then, in a fine strain, comes the identification:
+
+            "Do not laugh at me,
+    For, as I am a man, I think this lady
+    To be my child Cordelia."
+
+The utterance of these words by Mr. Irving is simply thrilling. The
+tones, the glances, the approach, the embrace, lift up the words into
+new light, keen and tender as the brightness of a summer morning. The
+words themselves are by no means striking, are, indeed, the merest
+commonplace, but, uttered with the natural pathos of a consummate actor,
+they carry the play to its most subduing climax. The humanity and the
+genius satisfy expectation in its most eager and jealous temper. Failure
+at that point would have ruined the play. Which was better, _Lear_ or
+_Cordelia_, in that critical action? We must first settle, Which is
+better, the star of morning or the morning star?
+
+[Illustration: MR. IRVING AS "KING LEAR." (FROM THE LYCEUM SOUVENIR.)]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As I opened this brief review with a reference to the religious
+standpoint, it may be well now to ask how the Church is to regard the
+Stage as an educational institution? The Stage cannot be put down. It
+responds to an instinct which is ineradicable, and which need not be
+ignoble. The parables of the New Testament are the sublimest recognition
+of that instinct. The drama is older than the theatre. Much of the
+greatest preaching has been dramatic, by which I mean that it has
+touched human life through the medium of story and parable, coloured and
+toned by a living fancy. Sometimes, too truly, the dramatic in preaching
+has degenerated into impossible anecdotes, most of them originating in
+the Far West of America, yet even such anecdotes testify to the
+overpowering force of the dramatic instincts when limited to their most
+vulgar conditions. My submission is, that a properly-conducted stage
+might be the most powerful ally of the pulpit. I advance upon this
+submission, and contend that the function of the preacher is infinitely
+superior to the function of the actor. Whatever the preacher has to say
+that is distinctive he can trace to what he believes to be a Divine and
+authoritative origin. I hold the great preacher to be a spiritual
+medium. In his next evolution he will simply tell the people whatever
+may have been given him in the same hour to say. This does not mean that
+indolence will supersede industry. Through the indolent man God sends no
+messages. The true prophet will always be preparing himself. By
+learning, by meditation, by self-discipline, the true prophet will
+prepare his heart for the incoming of the Eternal Spirit, and the glory
+of Heaven will be as a fire on the altar of the honest heart. Art
+preachers we have had in too great abundance. Mechanical talkers have
+brought upon the pulpit the disrepute of dulness. The age now waits for
+the messenger in whose loving heart there is the glow and the radiance
+of divinest sympathy. The great actor himself would be the first to
+admit that the preacher cannot trace his own public secondariness to the
+poverty of his themes. Where the preacher falls behind the actor, it is
+because the preacher does not realise the majesty and the tenderness,
+the vehemence and the urgency, of his own message.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+THAT BEAST BEAUTY.
+
+BY KIRBY HARE.
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERNEST M. JESSOP.
+
+
+I was a man born to misfortune. In fact, my first misfortune, the death
+of my father, happened three months before I came into the world. When I
+did duly appear, and was giving a proper howl of disgust, a fresh
+misfortune fell upon me; my mother departed to join my father, leaving
+me in the lurch in a vale of unavailing tears. I should have preferred
+going with my family to that blessed Utopia where there are neither
+births, deaths, marriages, divorces, breaches of promise, nor return
+tickets; only, unfortunately, I was not invited. So I became a
+posthumous orphan, soothed by Daffy's elixir and the skim-milk of human
+kindness. The milk was none too sweet, human kindness did not spare the
+rod, and I firmly believe it was Daffy's elixir that turned my hair red.
+However, I grew up at length into stand-up collars and tail coats, and
+at the age of seventeen springs was adopted (on trial) by a maiden aunt
+of seven-and-forty autumns. Like a gleam of sunshine hope flashed into
+my loveless life, lighting up my path to fortune. But it was only the
+glimmer of an _ignis fatuus_, which led me into a quicksand and snuffed
+itself out in a fog.
+
+[Illustration: A PROPER HOWL OF DISGUST.]
+
+[Illustration: HIS MAIDEN AUNT.]
+
+My relative had plenty of money, and plenty of other equally good
+qualities in the long run, no doubt; but the period of my adoption was
+too short to make sure of either the one or the other. If the wealthy
+maiden was really a worthy soul she did not let her nephew know it.
+Corporeally she was angular and iron-grey, with a summary tongue and
+wintry temper, chastened by a fondness for feline favourites. Unluckily,
+I was always falling foul of the latter, and my aunt continually fell
+foul of me in consequence. Crabbed age and youth could not live together
+in our case on account of cats. Age, as represented by the mature
+virgin, adored the brutes; youth, in the shape of a sprouting
+hobbledehoy, abhorred them altogether, and one evil minded black Tom in
+particular. My aunt called him Beauty, in happy ignorance that all her
+household called him a Beast. I admire beauty in the abstract; I also
+like it in the concrete; and in the concreted form of youthful feminine
+humanity I love it. But that feline black Beauty was the most outrageous
+misnomer unhanged. I had tried to hang him several times, down in the
+cellar in the dead of night; but his patent cast-iron neck set
+suspensory science at defiance, and Beauty triumphantly refused to give
+up the ghost. At first, he kicked and fought against it lustily, and
+yelled murder with all his might; but after a little practice the
+malefactor acted more philosophically, regarding the performance quite
+as part of his nocturnal programme. He never allowed it to make him late
+for breakfast, nor take away his appetite. Each morning, after
+execution, the moment the bell rang for prayers, in marched Beauty with
+a swollen head well on one side, growling anathemas from somewhere round
+the corner all prayer-time; after which the escaped convict devoured
+breakfast with the voracity of a stiffnecked cannibal.
+
+[Illustration: ONE EVIL-MINDED BLACK TOM.]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Finding the beast utterly unhangable, I determined to try drowning. My
+nature is by no means a cruel one, quite the reverse; but Beauty's cup
+of iniquity had long been full to the brim, and running over into the
+saucer. He had gulped down my canaries like pills, poached my pigeons,
+fricasseed my rabbits, and made himself an abominable beast generally;
+and had now committed a crime that capped everything.
+
+My cock bantam, which had won first prize at the Slocum-Pogis poultry
+show, mysteriously disappeared. Jim, the gardener's boy, and I hunted
+everywhere without finding any trace till we sighted Beauty. The beast
+was seated on my verbena bed, with fearfully distended stomach, waving
+my poor little bantam's tail feathers from between his teeth. Had I been
+an ancient Egyptian high priest, and Beauty at the top of the tree of
+holy cats, his diabolical godship should have been made into a mummy
+instanter. As things were, he had to be drowned forthwith.
+
+[Illustration: AT A CABINET COUNCIL IN THE COAL CELLAR.]
+
+At a cabinet council in the coal cellar, composed of the cook, footman,
+Jim, and myself, all the executive details were arranged; my aunt being,
+of course, kept in happy ignorance of our intentions. As soon as my
+respected relative uttered the preliminary snore of her afternoon
+siesta, Beauty made an involuntary exit out of the house, all the lower
+doors and windows having been carefully fastened. Then commenced a
+silent cat-hunt, a serio-comic drama in dumb show, with a crowded
+audience breathlessly gazing from the windows. The scenery was a series
+of dissolving views, beginning on a flower-decked lawn, and ending at a
+mill-pool a mile or so away from the audience. Beauty played leading
+actor with considerable activity, notwithstanding the drawback of being
+handicapped with an undigested bantam. He flew over dozens of
+flower-beds, through all the outhouses, over the stable, out into the
+park, up and down all the tallest trees, and all over the country, till
+he took refuge in the deserted old mill. There we wriggled him into an
+ancient sack, and tied him up in the harmonious company of a couple of
+brickbats. Then we committed the body to the deep. The burial service
+was short, but hearty. "One--two--three, and away!" sung out in unison,
+was the special form for the occasion, accompanied by Beauty's farewell
+blessing as we "awayed" him into the silent depths of the mill-dam.
+There was a splash, a shrill cry from a frightened moorhen, a short
+jubilate from Jim, to which I piously added "amen," and all was over.
+Jim ran home with half-a-sovereign in his pocket, while I walked back to
+dress for dinner. On the stairs I met my aunt, already in evening array,
+and looking hungry. I knew the sign, and stealthily tried to
+vanish, vainly.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE DESERTED OLD MILL.]
+
+"Late again, Samuel!" she remarked, with a freezing spectacle-gleam that
+fixed me to the stair-carpet--my right foot two steps above the left.
+"You have just come in, I suppose. Have you seen Beauty?"
+
+[Illustration: "LATE AGAIN, SAMUEL!"]
+
+Horror! Could she suspect anything? I felt my face growing the colour of
+my hair, and my tongue frozen solid.
+
+"Can't you answer?" she went on wrathfully. "And can't you stand up
+straight?"
+
+I pulled my legs together and commenced to stammer.
+
+"I--I saw Beauty out--outside, aunt, in the garden," I managed to mutter.
+
+"Which way was he going?"
+
+"Why, I think he was running towards the house, aunt."
+
+[Illustration: THIRTY MILES AN HOUR.]
+
+And then the remembrance of how he _was_ running--thirty miles an hour,
+with tail on end and ears flat to his head, with Jim and my long-legged
+self racing in rear--made me choke with laughter I was forced to
+swallow. But my aunt's eyes were on me, and her gold-rimmed barnacles
+blazed through me, so I suffocated in silence.
+
+"Don't stand making faces like an idiot. Go and dress, and be quick,"
+snapped my loving relative, as she marched away downstairs and I flew to
+the region above.
+
+My bedroom door was partly open, and I dashed in hastily, pulling off my
+things as I went.
+
+[Illustration: DRESSING FOR DINNER.]
+
+My evening clothes were laid out ready on the bed, and--what was that on
+my shirt?--a black mass of--something moving!--some animal! Why, heavens
+and earth, it was the ghost of--that beast Beauty! It was Beauty
+himself! I ran for the poker; Beauty rushed out of the door. Confound
+that rotten old sack!
+
+I was late for dinner, and found Beauty seated in my chair, sleek and
+dry, with a ravenously whetted appetite. My aunt was so pleased with her
+favourite's improved appearance that she became quite affable, even to
+me. I was informed that as I had not been looking well lately I might go
+for a few days' change to the seaside; the salubrious air of
+Muddiford-on-the-Ooze would just suit me. What a blessing! To have
+escaped from those ice-gleaming spectacles and from that resuscitated
+beast Beauty I would gladly have gone to Jericho, much more to
+Muddiford-on-the-Ooze. Then my aunt continued her course of
+instructions, with the nearest approach to a smile I had ever seen
+on her face.
+
+[Illustration: A SHOW AT MUDDIFORD-ON-THE-OOZE.]
+
+"You will enjoy yourself, I am sure, Samuel, and you will also be able
+to show what pains you can take to please me," she said, sipping her
+first glass of Burgundy with approving relish. "There is to be a show at
+Muddiford the day after to-morrow, at which I intend exhibiting, and you
+will be able to manage everything for me; so mind you are careful to do
+your best."
+
+"I shall be most delighted," I declared gushingly. "What show is it? And
+what can I have the pleasure of taking charge of for you, my dear aunt?"
+
+"It's the Grand All-England Cat Show, and you will take Beauty; and I
+shall be greatly disappointed if you do not bring me back the first
+prize. So be on your best behaviour, Samuel, or perhaps you may live to
+regret it."
+
+My jaw dropped, and I thought I should have slid under the table. Good
+heavens! It was that beast Beauty who was to go for a holiday, while I
+was to act as the infernal fiend's keeper! O my prophetic soul--my aunt!
+But there was no help for it; I was bound in bonds of gold.
+
+On the following day, Beauty and I were duly driven to the station, the
+former being luxuriously nested in a small hamper specially furnished
+for the occasion. About half-way on the road, just as we had mounted a
+long, steep hill, the cat managed to roll his residence from the stern
+of the dog-cart and trundle himself half-way home again. Luckily, he
+screeched blue murder at the tip-top of his voice, or we might not have
+missed the beast. As it was, his cyclical retrogression made us just too
+late for the train, and we had to wait two hours for the next. So I
+seated myself on the hamper--like Patience on the proverbial
+monument--and beheld the coachman depart homewards, with a sympathetic
+hat-touching salute, leaving me with a gloomy conviction of coming
+misfortune. The train, when it did arrive, was tolerably empty, and I
+secured a vacant first-class. For a time all went happily; then the cat
+commenced groaning.
+
+[Illustration: SEATED MYSELF ON THE HAMPER.]
+
+My aunt having solemnly ordered me to give the brute dinner, I now
+prepared to stop his mouth with cold chicken. While I was cautiously
+unfastening the hamper lid, Beauty remained quiet as a dormouse; and
+then he proceeded personally to assist the unfastening, with a
+vengeance. There was a bouncing volcanic eruption, a blood-curdling
+howl, a mixed-up whirling round the carriage, and then--smash!--bang
+through the window went Beauty!--leaving me doubled up on the seat,
+holding out half a chicken. It was a forty-feline-power hurricane, while
+it lasted; and drops of perspiration trickled down my nose on to the
+chicken, at which I sat stupidly staring. After a dazed pause I
+staggered to the broken window and looked out. There was Beauty, with a
+perpendicular tail like a young fir-tree, going like great guns in
+exactly the wrong direction. We had just come through a long tunnel, and
+the last I saw of my aunt's pet demon was as he dived headlong into its
+Hades-like mouth. And I had to take home first prize for him from the
+Grand All-England Cat Show!
+
+[Illustration: LEAVING THE RAILWAY CARRIAGE.]
+
+[Illustration: INTO ITS HADES-LIKE MOUTH.]
+
+[Illustration: INCIPIENT CATALEPSY.]
+
+When the 4.40 down express arrived at Muddiford-on-the-Ooze station, an
+auburn-haired youth limply emerged from a first-class carriage. In his
+arms he bore a basket, and his grey-green eyes gleamed with incipient
+catalepsy. Yes, such would undoubtedly have been my description had I
+posed as the momentary hero of a penny novelette. I forgot all about my
+luggage, imbecilely clinging to the late habitation of the lost beast
+Beauty, wandering I knew not why nor whither. Outside the station, round
+a quiet corner, my steps were arrested by the surprising sight
+of--Beauty!--the very identical devil himself! There stood the
+unhangable, undrownable, hurricane-creating beast, looking as serene as
+a newly-born black cherub, washing his fiendish face! I approached on
+tiptoe, breathlessly, with the basket behind my back and the half
+chicken extended as a peaceable card of introduction. He scented it
+instantly--my aunt always keeping Beauty's tit-bits until sufficiently
+gamey to suit his highly epicurean taste.
+
+[Illustration: WASHING HIS FIENDISH FACE!]
+
+With a finishing toe-touch to his whiskers, he amicably trotted up to me
+and--yes!--actually rubbed against my new trousers! What could have
+happened to him! Had his run through the tunnel turned him out virtuous?
+And how could he possibly have got here? Experience has shown that a
+leopard can change his spots, and a negro can grow spotted; but could a
+diabolical cat become even as a sucking dove and fly over twelve miles
+all in the space of twenty minutes? Impossible! So I put on a pair of
+folder-glasses and scrutinised this new arrival doubtingly. No; it was
+_not_ Beauty--not nearly ugly enough. It was a twin, but larger,
+blacker, sleeker, a million times more amiable, and very much fatter.
+Ah!--ha, ha!--hurrah!--happy thought! Why not? I would. And, thereupon,
+I instantly did it.
+
+Placing the basket gently on the ground, I opened the lid and put in the
+cold chicken, when lo! in jumped the amiable twin. Half an hour later
+that basket, that heaven-descended twin, and that successful chicken,
+were safely deposited in custody of the cat-show steward, with the
+errant Beauty's entry ticket affixed. If the steward had never seen the
+real original he would never discover the difference; and if he did
+happen to be acquainted with the genuine article he could but think that
+the beast was surprisingly improved, and might even award it first prize
+for having turned over such a notable new leaf. And for the same reason,
+my aunt ought to be highly delighted at her favourite's favourable
+transformation. My heart was lightened of its oppressive troubles, as my
+hands were free from their feline load. With a hearty appetite I ate an
+excellent dinner at the hotel, went to the theatre, and turned into bed
+thankful for all fortune's favours.
+
+[Illustration: I ATE AN EXCELLENT DINNER.]
+
+During the two following days, carefully steering clear of the cat-show,
+I enjoyed my freedom gaily, and had--what our three-thousand-miles-
+removed cousins would call--real good time. On the third morning a
+letter arrived from my aunt, with an enclosure which for the first
+moment I took to be a big cheque--a grateful offering, as I hoped, for
+services skilfully performed. However, it proved to be merely a second
+letter, in writing that was strange to me, and which with some curiosity
+I proceeded to peruse. As I unfolded the sheet, a vision suddenly
+crossed my mind of that savage beast Beauty; a chilly shiver shot
+through my marrow, and I sent the waiter for soda and brandy. It was an
+awful thought of what that unkillable cat might do! There he was,
+rampaging over a civilised country populated with children and lambs,
+and other unprotected innocents, half mad, perhaps, with hunger, where
+neither canaries nor pigeons, rabbits or cold chicken were grabbable.
+What desperate murders he might commit! And should I be held
+responsible? Here the timely arrival of the waiter helped to raise my
+spirits by a strong dose of B. and S., and I began the enclosed letter.
+
+[Illustration: WHAT DESPERATE MURDERS HE MIGHT COMMIT!]
+
+It was headed from the cat-show secretary's office. Why, of course, that
+charming twin had got first prize, no doubt. Let us see. "Dear Madam,"
+so ran the official note, "I beg to call your attention to what I
+imagine must, in some way, have been an oversight. Your cat, described
+on the entrance form as 'a black male, named Beauty,' which was, on the
+evening of its arrival, placed in the class pertaining to the
+descriptive form, was found this morning to have presented us with four
+remarkably fine kittens. This, of course, necessitated the family's
+removal from the male cat class. I have much pleasure in being able to
+inform you that both mother and kittens are in the best of health, and
+will be carefully attended upon. If you will kindly forward your
+instructions respecting their disposal, I shall be greatly obliged."
+That was the note, and wildly did the letters dance before my eyes.
+
+[Illustration: FOUR REMARKABLY FINE KITTENS.]
+
+[Illustration: GASPING FOR BREATH.]
+
+Having saved myself from fainting by finishing the B. and S., I sat for
+some minutes gasping for breath. Then I rubbed my eyes and reread that
+awful epistle. Yes--it was so--in solemn, sober black ink! Beauty's twin
+had got four fine kittens! Great Jehoshaphat! How could I ever get over
+those confounded kittens! It was too late to murder them. And my
+aunt--but stop! Let me read her letter; it might suggest something--some
+feline legerdemain method of conjuring four fine kittens into a first
+prize black male cat. So here goes. And this is how it went: "I always
+considered you to be a fool, Samuel, but nothing worse, until now.
+Unless the enclosed letter is immediately fully explained, and the
+matter set right, I shall plainly let you know what I do think of you
+now, and act accordingly. See the secretary, and telegraph me the result
+at once." Not much hope in that, worse luck; only a limited respite.
+
+[Illustration: WENT FISHING.]
+
+Away I went to the show, saw the secretary--from a safe distance--and
+immediately telegraphed: "Have seen the secretary. Hard at work setting
+matters right. Awfully sorry." Then I hired a boat, and went fishing for
+the rest of the day. In the evening I wired: "Beauty must have got
+changed. Cats now all going home. Found clue and am following up. All
+right shortly." But my aunt's patience had expired. Next morning came a
+curt note saying she would at once join me, and either rescue Beauty or
+settle that secretary. How could I ever face those searching spectacles!
+I fled. From a lonely spot on the wilds of Dartmoor I wired: "Am
+following clue sharp. Getting close up. Good news next time." Back came
+an answer: "Shall be with you to-morrow at noon." At noon next day, I
+boarded the mail packet Tongariro, bound from Plymouth to New Zealand.
+
+[Illustration: OFF TO NEW ZEALAND.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+PEOPLE I HAVE NEVER MET
+
+BY SCOTT RANKIN.
+
+MRS. HUMPHRY WARD.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+    "You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you
+    also can do nothing by being too much afraid of them.... Be
+    content to be a new 'sect,' 'conventicle,' or what not, so long
+    as you feel that you are _something_, with a life and purpose
+    of its own, in this tangle of a world."--_Robert Elsmere_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+THE IDLERS CLUB
+
+Is Love a Practical Reality or a Pleasing Fiction?
+
+
+[Sidenote: Mrs. Lynn Linton thinks there is no doubt as to Love's
+reality.]
+
+Of the desperate reality of the passion there is no doubt; of the
+intrinsic value of the thing beloved there may be many. The passion for
+which men and women have died stands like a tower four-square to all the
+winds of heaven; but how far that tower has been self-created by fancy,
+and how much is objectively real, who is the wise man that can
+determine? What is Love? We know nothing of its source. Sense and sex
+cannot wholly explain its mystery, else would there be no friendship
+left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty carving on the
+chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that special person the
+veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is
+no rose that we adore--only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin
+is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of
+those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love.
+And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that
+harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring note spoils
+the chord; the idol once accepted as of gold and precious stones, proves
+to be only common clay, thinly gilt. The diamonds are paste; the pearls
+are beads of glass filled with shining fishes' scales; and the love
+which we thought would be a practical reality for life, is nothing but a
+pleasing fiction, good for its day, and now dead and done with. The
+lover sees nothing as it is. Life is distorted between jealousy and
+admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little
+understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic
+aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person; the
+happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are on
+all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable roadway
+of a rainbow. Custom, familiarity, daily habits are the sole tests by
+which the reality of the thing beloved can be tried--the reality of the
+thing beloved and consequent validity of love. Before these tests are
+applied, the whole affair is as a fairy dream born of the perfume and
+the mystery of night. With the clear cold breath of morning the dream
+vanishes, but--what is left? The sigh of the vanishing god?--a tear on
+the cheek of Psyche?--the loathing of the man who finds Mélusine a
+serpent rather than a woman?--or the peaceful joy of the child who
+dreams of angels and wakes in its mother's arms?--of those who sleeping
+on the ocean wake to find themselves safe in port?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: "Rita" thinks Love is beautiful and wise.]
+
+At one period of life, love is simply an emotion--the outcome of
+attraction, or the effect of that vague mystery which surrounds sex. In
+this emotional stage the _feeling_ may be real enough, but the passion
+is an illusion. A girl is often more in love with Love than with an
+actual lover. The youth who beholds his ideal in the First Woman is in
+love with the woman herself who for the time (usually very brief)
+embodies that ideal. But to the girl and the youth comes an hour when
+they are humiliatingly conscious of study wasted on a prettily-bound
+work of fiction that for all use and purpose in life is quite valueless.
+The edifice of romance is constructed much on the same plan as a child's
+castle of cards, and deservedly shares the same fate. That is to say,
+the topmost card overbalances the whole structure. It is usually the
+hand of Reason that topples over Love's romantic tenement by crowning it
+with the card of Common Sense. When we find Love has become a practical
+reality, the discovery is often very unpleasant. We would rather not be
+unhappy if we had the choice. Unfortunately, we haven't, and find
+ourselves in that condition without exactly knowing how we drifted into
+it. Drifters often discover Love to be a very practical reality, because
+of unpleasant consequences. It is decidedly humiliating to find
+ourselves in the toils of a siren the very reverse of our high ideal of
+the personage who is to have the honour and glory of subjugating us.
+This is one of Love's amusing little ways of proving that ideals are
+really not important. The best and safest test of the reality of Love is
+to ask yourself how much you have suffered on account of it. I don't
+speak of such trifles as tears, heartaches, sleepless nights, fevers of
+jealousy and despair, sacrifices, or discomforts, but of _real_ genuine
+self-torment and mental torture which only this passion is capable of
+inflicting on its victims. The most sceptical will acknowledge that its
+powers in this line are only excelled by its apparent animosity. To
+discover the life that completes and contents our own is not given to
+many of us poor mortals. Here and there some fortunate individuals have
+made that discovery--but they are rare--and not given to boasting on the
+subject; yet though worldly wise folk scoff at love as a myth, I
+question whether they could name any other passion of the heart which
+has occupied so important a place in the world's history, which has
+given life to all that is great and divine in art, or inspired such
+deeds of heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. Before its patient
+strength men have stood mute and wondering, and proud heads have bent in
+reverence, and stern eyes grown dim. For Love is beautiful, despite
+faults, and wise, despite follies. It alone of all human emotions can
+lift our souls heavenwards, and make even life's thorny path a thing
+of beauty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: John Strange Winter's opinions.]
+
+Love may be classed under several heads. The first, the great, the
+unattainable, the one-sided, and the worn-out. They are all real! What
+can be more real than the perhaps not very practical passion which first
+makes young hearts ache? What agony it is to _her_ when _he_ dances
+three times running with that horrid, stuck-up London girl, with her
+fashionable jargon, her languorous movements, just a turn or two, and
+then stop for as many minutes! First love is not often last love. _He_
+thinks _her_ unreasonable to mind those dances, yet when a great love
+comes into her life, making her think of him as "just a boy," he suffers
+all, or nearly all, the pangs of a great passion. Unavailing pain! _She_
+has cast the die of her life, and past loves are shadows compared with
+the absorbing power that now grips her heart like a vice. Much may
+happen to the great love, but it is very real! A great love may merge
+into matrimony, and life may run on oiled wheels, and Darby and Joan may
+pass through the world, loving faithfully, and without digression, to
+the end. Or something may come between, and the great love may become
+the unattainable! It will not be the less real for that.
+
+[Sidenote: The Unattainable.]
+
+The unattainable has more in it of pathos than despair. Romance sweetens
+it, and the romance never dies. The tenderness of "what might have been"
+gives balm to many a suffering soul! The wife may be unhappy, neglected,
+heartsick, she may even loathe him whose name she bears, but she is
+often upholden by the thought that _he_ would have been wholly
+different! A husband may know that he has married the wrong woman, yet
+he bears what is, because he cannot have _her_ who would have made life
+all sunshine. Few pity the one-sided love, helpless, hopeless, and
+without justification as it is; yet it is very real to the lonely soul.
+The worn-out love is the very essence of sadness! It is heart-breaking
+to watch the efforts of a foolish heart to keep a love dying or already
+dead, to see love, which would once have made a paradise, poured out at
+the feet of one who is only bored and not even touched by it. Nothing is
+so dead as a dead love--yet, even _that_ is real!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Miss May Crommelin takes a professional view]
+
+Can any sensible novelist hesitate? Does a shoe-maker depreciate
+leather? Would you saw off the tree-branch you sit on? Now, on this
+subject, anybody's opinion (full-grown) is as good as another's. Let the
+footman bring down word that love is the drawing-room topic, and the
+cook will cry out, "What do they know more about it than _us_?" Is it
+not a human feeling, call it instinct or no? Surely old Sally Jones has
+simpler feelings than the Dowager Countess; as much experience in this.
+Love is just as real as a rainbow on a wet day; as--as influenza. The
+first may be a "pleysing payne": the latter must be a very displeasing
+one. But there is little fiction about either to the victims. Well,
+suppose love a mere brain-fantasm; an odd survival when sensible folk
+have swept away beliefs in witchcraft, fairies, and the virtue of fire
+and faggot for the wicked ones who don't say their prayers the same way
+we do. _Still, was it not worth while to have invented it?_ However the
+idea was evoluted, just consider the glamour it throws over thorns and
+thistles, as we dig through life's long day of toil. As Trollope's stout
+widow says, when choosing her second: "It's a whiff of the rocks and the
+valleys." (So she had her marriage settlements tightly drawn up, to
+enjoy her romance comfortably.) Consider this epitaph--a real one--
+
+    "Poorly lived, and poorly died;
+    Poorly buried, and _nobody cried_."
+
+Broach this subject of love to a circle after dinner, round a good fire.
+Everybody laughs! The young men and maidens look conscious. What they
+feel is as real to them as pleasure in music they hear; in the taste of
+wine. Yes, and far more--while it lasts. Some elders profess scorn,
+because their minds are so choked with years' dust of daily cares they
+have forgotten how they, too, once believed love real--while it lasted!
+Ay! there's the rub. You are told--truthfully--that love is strong as
+death: inconstant as every breeze. Some declare, for them--
+
+    "In the whole wide world there was but one."
+
+Other as honest souls confess their hearts have known, since first love,
+"many other lodgers." This seems clear, love is real to those who _give
+it_! Only they who care more to _get it_, call it moonshine and naughty
+names. Like figures on an Egyptian monument, each follows one who looks
+at another. Never one scorned, but has rejected a third.
+
+    "As Pan loved Echo, Echo loved the satyr,
+    The satyr Lyda--and so the three went weeping."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Miss Quiller Couch wishes Love were a pleasing fiction.]
+
+"Pleasing fiction," forsooth; would that it were! It is a very real
+game, and the rules thereof are practical. I know it, for verily I
+myself have suffered. Let it not be understood, however, that it is _as_
+a "practical, real lover" that I have suffered. Not at all. It is that
+this order of beings walks abroad, and I am not of it, and I meet it,
+and I am pained, and I feel sorry. Could Love be but a pleasing fiction,
+how comfortable to sit aside and contemplate it--a trifle to talk of, a
+dainty to dally with, a joy to the juvenescent, a blessing to the
+book-writer, yet never an inconvenience. But it is a practical reality,
+and it has great effects. Why, I have seen good, healthy people, quite
+nice-tempered people, brought to a shadow by it and churned into so many
+pounds of incompetent irritability; _so_ exacting about trifles, so
+fidgetty about catching the mail, and so careless of the health of the
+uninteresting majority. There was one man I knew down in a village, and
+he fell in love with a pretty girl--they mostly do that--but she would
+have nothing to say to him; and after every rejected proposal he went
+straight home and made a three-legged stool (he was a carpenter by
+trade, or perhaps it might have affected him differently). He was what
+one might call an importunate man, for he proposed nineteen times in
+all, and nineteen three-legged stools stood as silent witnesses of his
+importunity. He changed houses after the twelfth, for he found a sad joy
+in contemplating his handiwork as he sat at his lonely meals, and his
+first sitting-room was only twelve feet by eight. Finally, either
+because of his importunity, or because she disliked the thought that the
+wordless witnesses might fall into unsympathetic hands, the girl married
+the man, and scrubbed the stools nicely with soap and sand, and grew
+quite fond of them. And only once did she regret her surrender; and that
+was when it flashed across her one day that twenty would have been a
+prettier number: but she stifled that pain as years went on, and grew
+happy. Then there was Dante's love for Beatrice, which caused him to sit
+down and write such a lot. Most remarkable persons seem to have produced
+something rather excellent as the outcome of their love. I know a
+naturally lazy and slightly dingy boy who endured a nice clean collar
+every day, and it cut his neck, and his soul abhorred it, for he told me
+so; and he spent from seventy-five to ninety minutes over his toilet
+every morning, while he loved, and he knew he could dress in four
+minutes and a quarter, for he had done it often. Love was a great
+beautifier. In this case I must admit that the lover suffered more than
+we outsiders, except that he became irritable in his cleanliness. Love
+should not be scorned, even if it is real and sometimes uncomfortably
+practical. It is very beautiful, and lovers make a pretty sight. What I
+protest is, that all creatures should be lovers--or _none_. It is the
+half-and-half state of the world which is irksome.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Morley Roberts hopes Love will some day be a pleasing
+reality]
+
+Ah, my gentle cocksure friends, how well you all know Love, and how
+ready you are to say what it is, to cut it up, to carve it, to classify
+it, and generally to spread it out. We live in a world of lies, and
+conventions, the dead leavings of an ignorant past, bind us still. Some
+day, perhaps, when men and women are free, Love will be a pleasing
+reality. It can never be so in the majority of cases so long as we play
+at make-believe, and teach nothing that we have learned. The good man
+won't teach his sons; he leaves them to learn in the gutter. The good
+woman keeps her daughters ignorant. As it stands it is an evil to love
+anyone over-much. And when we love we love over-much, for Love has been
+repressed till it has got savage in the race. "La privation radicale
+d'une chose crée léxeés." All the trouble comes from this--that we men
+have partially created women. But Nature had something to do with her
+compounding. That is, perhaps, a pity from the social point of view. For
+Nature can't be nice and comfortable. She is only kind when we go her
+way. Let us remember that Love is the foundation of the world. The very
+protoplasmic cells from which we sprang could love. The time will come,
+perhaps, when, having chipped away the lies and faced the truth, we
+shall find reality a thousand times more pleasing than any fiction. Love
+is something real and wonderful, and in a natural world we shall have
+passed through the blood-splashed gates of Passion and be calm. Now Love
+is tortured, for we love ignorantly. We are like shipwrecked folk on
+some strange land--we know not the fruits of the trees of it. We learn
+the poisons by experiment, and we let others learn. This is Love the
+Fiction. But some day when we awake we shall know what we now dream, and
+Love will be always the most precious flower that grows in the garden of
+the soul. It has the subtle fragrance of the heaven that is our own if
+we walk bravely in the world, desiring truth. Under its influence we
+discover ourselves. We build ships for new voyages, and burst into
+unknown waters with our Viking shields of victory ablaze in the morning
+sun. The air is sharp and keen, not foetid with poisonous lies; the
+waters are blue and beautiful; there are shining shores about us, and
+marvels of a new nature on every hand. We who were in the night, and of
+it, become vivid with the sun. Our atheism banishes the worshipped gods
+of evil that are no more extant in our dogmatic creed of joy. For Truth
+and Beauty have guided us hand in hand, and all they ask of us is to
+throw away the Law of Lies and to acknowledge that the two are one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Zangwill reviews the evidence.]
+
+The traces left by Love in life are so numerous and diverse that I am
+almost tempted to the hypothesis that it really exists. There seems to
+be no other way of accounting for the facts. When you start learning a
+new language you always find yourself confronted with the verb "to
+love"--invariably the normal type of the first conjugation. In every
+language on earth the student may be heard declaring, with more zeal
+than discretion, that he and you and they and every other person,
+singular or plural, have loved, and do love, and will love. "To love" is
+the model verb; expressing the archetype of activity. Once you can love
+grammatically there is a world of things you may do without stumbling.
+For, strange to say, "to love," which in real life is associated with so
+much that is bizarre and violent, is always "regular" in grammar, and
+this without barring accidence of any kind. For ancient and modern
+tongues tell the same tale--from Hebrew to street-Arabic, from Greek to
+the elephantine language that was "made in Germany." Not only is "to
+love" deficient in no language (as _home_ is deficient in French, and
+_Geist_ in English), but it is never even "defective." No mood or tense
+is ever wanting--a proof of how it has been conjugated in every mood and
+tense of life, in association with every variety of proper and improper
+noun, and every pronoun at all personal. Not merely have people loved
+unconditionally in every language, but there is none in which they would
+not have loved, or might not have loved, had circumstances permitted;
+none in which they have not been loved, or (for hope springs eternal in
+the human breast) have been about to be loved. Even woman has an Active
+Voice in the matter; indeed, "to love" is so perfect that, compared with
+it, "to marry" is quite irregular. For, while "to love" is sufficient
+for both sexes, directly you get to marriage you find in some languages
+that division has crept in, and that there is one word for the use of
+ladies and another for gentlemen only. Turning from the evidence
+enshrined in language to the records of history, the same truth meets us
+at any date we appoint. Everywhere "'Tis love that makes the world go
+round," though more especially in ball-rooms. It is awful to think what
+would have happened if Eve had not accepted Adam. What could have
+attracted her if it was not love? Surely not his money, nor his family.
+For these she couldn't have cared a fig-leaf. Unfortunately, the
+daughters of Eve have not always taken after their mother. The
+statistics of crime and insanity testify eloquently to the reality of
+love, arithmetic teaching the same lesson as history and grammar.
+Consider, too, the piles of love at Mudie's! A million story-tellers in
+all periods and at all places cannot have told all stories, though they
+have all, alas! told the same story. They must have had mole-hills for
+their mountains, if not straw for their bricks. There are those who,
+with Bacon, consider love a variety of insanity; but it is more often
+merely a form of misunderstanding. When the misunderstanding is mutual,
+it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power
+woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It
+must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist--he
+identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True. The woman's
+admiration has less of the ethical quality; she is dazzled, and too
+often feels, "If he be but true to me, what care I how false he be." The
+Romantic Love of the poets and novelists was of late birth; the savage
+and many civilisations knew it not, and philosophers explain that it
+could not be developed till Roman Law had developed the conception of
+Marriage as a Contract. Even to this day it is as rare as large paper
+editions of the books about it. Roughly speaking, I should say it would
+spring up here and there among all classes of the population, except
+poets and novelists. Romantic Love is the rose Evolution has grown on
+earthly soil. _Floreat!_
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Burgin thinks it all depends on the people who love.]
+
+One morning the average man gets up, lights his pipe, roams round his
+rooms in all the ease of unshaven countenance and dressing-gown-clad
+form. Then he goes out, and meets _her_. There may be a hundred women in
+the room, or park, or tennis ground, wherever the tragedy (Love is a
+tragedy) commences. When the lights are low he comes back, and is low
+also. Wonders how men can be such brutes as to want dinner; thinks his
+life has been misspent; that he is unworthy to touch her hand; that he
+has wallowed in the fleshpots, and here is a way out of them. And if the
+man's nature be noble and sweet and true; if he has hitherto drifted
+adown the stream of circumstance because his fellows have also drifted;
+then, with the deepening tides of his passion, the old spirit of
+knight-errantry descends upon him with its mystic mantle of white
+samite. And slowly out of this deepening torrent of bewildered impulse
+and devotion is born a new man--a man with a soul--a man who can dare
+all things, do all things, endure all things, for the sake of the woman
+he loves. At the baptism of her touch he becomes whole, and shapes his
+life to noble ends. Even if he can't marry her, he is the better for his
+passion. Such a love endures until the leaves of the Judgment Book
+unroll; for it laughs to scorn the pitiful fools who boast of
+infidelity, the "male hogs in armour," as Kingsley calls them, who look
+upon women as toys, the sport of an idle moment, rather than the
+spiritual force which leavens the world, and makes it an endurable and
+joyous dwelling-place.
+
+[Sidenote: And on the woman loved.]
+
+Of course, I was speaking of good women. I once heard a story about a
+bad woman--a woman of the world, who was very much amused at being taken
+seriously by a boy who loved her. "Tell me all about it," she would say
+to him. "Explain what you feel, why you love me, why you believe in me.
+Don't you see I'm courted and admired--a social force--that men flock
+round me everywhere I go?" "Oh, yes," said the boy, "I see all that. But
+you're an angel of goodness, and can't help men liking you. If I lost
+faith in you, I'd kill myself." "Ah," she rejoined, "that's what you all
+say. You would doubt me, and live on." Then, one afternoon, he had good
+cause to doubt, inasmuch as her engagement to another man was announced.
+That evening she received a note from him: "Good-bye. If I lived on, I
+might doubt; it's better to die and--believe!" They told her of the--the
+accident that night, and she wrote a touching little paragraph about it
+for the Society papers before dining out.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Gribble generaliseth confidently.]
+
+In a sense, of course, Love is necessarily a fiction, whether pleasing
+or otherwise; for illusion is of the essence of it. The lover, in fact,
+is like the artist who sees things through a temperament, and, by
+eliminating the irrelevant, builds up the ideal on the foundation of the
+real. Tityrus sees more in Amaryllis than his brother shepherds see,
+just as Mr. Whistler sees more in a November fog than is visible to the
+eye of the casual wayfarer who gets lost in it, and mingles profanity
+with his coughs, yet, granting this, the reality and completeness of the
+illusion does not admit of doubt. On no alternative hypothesis can the
+great majority of marriages be explained. If commonplace people saw each
+other as others see them, surely they would remain single all their
+lives. Yet most people are commonplace, and most people marry. The
+reality--the controlling over-mastering reality--of Love has to be
+assumed to make their behaviour intelligible.
+
+[Sidenote: Having hasted from a wedding for the purpose.]
+
+This point struck me forcibly the last time I was present at a wedding.
+It was a Jewish wedding, celebrated at the little synagogue behind the
+Haymarket. I had no acquaintance with anyone concerned in the ceremony,
+but had dropped in quite casually, having heard that Jewish weddings
+were picturesque. The one thing that impressed me more than anything
+else was the decided undesirability of both the bridegroom and the
+bride. That the bride was not comely goes for little. But her forehead
+indicated a limited range and low ideals; the corners of her mouth spoke
+of an irritable temper; her bearing was vulgar; her voice had a twang
+that made one long to take her by the shoulders and shake her violently.
+She was also escorted by gaudy female relatives, by looking at whom one
+could anticipate the awful possibilities of her maturity. As for the
+bridegroom, he was a Hebrew of the florid type. His waistcoat was
+protuberant; he had a red face with red whiskers sprawling all over it;
+he wore flash jewellery; his hair shone with pomatum; there was that in
+his bearing which indicated that he followed some sordid calling, such
+as pawnbroking, or the backing of horses on commission. Yet one could
+see that these two unattractive persons were really attracted by each
+other. A great and beautiful miracle had been performed; and the power
+which had performed it was that Love in which some profess to
+disbelieve.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: Frank Mathew displays his Ignorance.]
+
+Ignorance--says some wiseacre--is the mother of eloquence, and I take it
+that the less one knows of Love the easier it is to write of it. I side
+with those who hold that the Love described by poets and other wordy
+people is mainly fanciful, a flattering picture, that the best school
+for such writing is an unhappy affection, and that no man can want
+better luck than to have his heart broken, and so be made proof against
+lovesickness. An unrequited love runs no risk of being dulled by the
+prose of life. A man so fortunate as to be jilted or rejected finds his
+Beloved remaining beautiful and young to him when her husband sees her
+an unwieldy and wearisome old woman. And when at times he grows
+sentimental--a bachelor's privilege--he can feel again the old hopes
+that he never found false, and see the old perfections that were never
+disproved. He has a life-companion who comes only when she is wanted,
+and then with a "smile on her face and a rose in her hair," whose voice
+is always gentle, to whom wrinkles are not necessary and bills are
+not known.
+
+[Sidenote: And praises ugliness.]
+
+I am one of those who prefer the luckless adorers in novels to the
+conquering heroes; and hold that the quality an ideal lover needs most
+is ugliness, so that he may honour beauty the more. Once I knew a boy
+who was uglier than sin, and who wrote a story--in a sprawling hand and
+on ruled paper--a wonderful story, telling how an unlovely but admirable
+Knight, worshipping a Princess, rode out to win her by great deeds, and
+how when he came back triumphant, the sight of her brought his
+unworthiness home to him so that he dared not claim her. And I knew
+another boy who was good-looking, and wrote a story (during study-time,
+of course, and by stealth) about a handsome hero who went to Court in
+fine clothes, and was worshipped by all the girls. I think now that he
+was the manlier, but that the first would have made the more devout
+lover. But the drawback of luckless adorers is that their constancy has
+not been tried by the ordeal of success. Many a fellow who lived loyal
+and heart-broken would have made an unfaithful husband.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Sidenote: 'Q.' is surprised at his sister.]
+
+Love, no doubt, is a subject of popular interest, but a man is always
+staggered to find his sister holding an opinion upon it. If I remember
+rightly, in the days when Lilian Quiller Couch (then aged seven) did me
+the honour of playing Juliet to my Romeo, the interest was mainly
+acrobatic, Romeo descending the gardener's ladder head-foremost, while
+Juliet tilted her body as far over the nursery window-sill as she could
+manage without breaking her neck. We "cut" the love speeches. Two years
+later, indeed, my sister schemed to marry me to our common governess.
+There was no love on my side; so she turned over the Prayer-book, hoping
+to find "A man may not marry his governess" in the table of Forbidden
+Degrees. Such a prohibition (she well knew) would be a trumpet-call to
+my native spirit of disobedience. But I am convinced that even then the
+nature of true affection did not enter into her calculations. She merely
+counted on my marital influence to end or mend the French irregular
+verbs. I am delighted that, in these later days, she sees Love to be a
+"practical reality." For my part, I want a definition. Popular custom
+bestows the name of Love on a green sickness which is in fact a part of
+Nature's wise economy. I will expound. Almost all young men, say between
+the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, incline to consume much meat and
+do next to no work. Were there no corrective, it is clear that in a few
+years the face of the earth would be eaten bare as by locusts. But at
+this season Nature by the simplest stroke--the flush of a commonplace
+cheek, the warm touch of a commonplace hand--in a twinkling redresses
+the balance. Forthwith the ideal devourer of crops and herbs not only
+loses his appetite, but arising, smacks the earth with a hoe till the
+clods fly and the fields laugh with harvest. Thereon he mops his
+steaming brow, bedecks him with a bunch of white ribbons, and jogs
+jovially to church arm in arm with the pretty cause of all this
+beneficent disturbance. And the spectacle is mighty taking and
+commendable; but you'll excuse me for holding that it is not Love. It
+bears about the same relation to Love that Bumble-puppy bears to good
+whist. Among the eccentricities that make up the Average Man I find none
+more diverting than his complacent belief that he is, or has been, or
+will certainly some day be, in love. As a matter of fact, the capacity
+to love belongs to one man or woman in ten thousand. Listen to
+Matthew Arnold:
+
+    "But in the world I learnt, what there
+      Thou wilt too surely one day prove,
+    That will, that energy, though rare,
+      Are yet far, far less rare than love."
+
+I go further and believe it rarer even than Genius. Indeed, the capacity
+to love, is a specialised form of genius. You understand that I am not
+commending it. Its possessors are often disreputable and almost always
+unhappy. Their recompense is that they, and they only, have seen the
+splendours of the passion, and vibrated to the shaking inner music of
+the sheep-boy's pipe.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12223 ***