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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78176 ***


     “_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.




                            HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
                           A WEEKLY JOURNAL.


                     CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.


       N^{o.} 11.]      SATURDAY, JUNE 8, 1850.      [PRICE 2_d._




                  FROM THE RAVEN IN THE HAPPY FAMILY.


Halloa!

You _won’t_ let me begin that Natural History of you, eh? You _will_
always be doing something or other, to take off my attention? Now, you
have begun to argue with the Undertakers, have you? What next!

Ugh! you are a nice set of fellows to be discussing, at this time of
day, whether you shall countenance that humbug any longer. “Performing”
funerals, indeed! I have heard of performing dogs and cats, performing
goats and monkeys, performing ponies, white-mice, and canary-birds; but,
performing drunkards at so much a day, guzzling over your dead, and
throwing half of you into debt for a twelvemonth, beats all I ever heard
of. Ha, ha!

The other day there was a person “went and died” (as our Proprietor’s
wife says) close to our establishment. Upon my beak I thought I should
have fallen off my perch, you made me laugh so, at the funeral!

Oh my crop and feathers, what a scene it was! _I_ never saw the Owl so
charmed. It was just the thing for him.

First of all, two dressed-up fellows came—trying to look sober, but they
couldn’t do it—and stuck themselves outside the door. There they stood,
for hours, with a couple of crutches covered over with drapery: cutting
their jokes on the company as they went in, and breathing such strong
rum and water into our establishment over the way, that the Guinea Pig
(who has a poor little head) was drunk in ten minutes. You are so proud
of your humanity. Ha, ha! As if a pair of respectable crows wouldn’t
have done it much better?

By-and-bye, there came a hearse and four, and then two carriages and
four; and on the tops of ’em, and on all the horses’ heads, were plumes
of feathers, hired at so much per plume; and everything, horses and all,
was covered over with black velvet, till you couldn’t see it. Because
there were not feathers enough yet, there was a fellow in the procession
carrying a board of ’em on his head, like Italian images; and there were
about five-and-twenty or thirty other fellows (all hot and red in the
face with eating and drinking) dressed up in scarves and hatbands, and
carrying—shut-up fishing-rods, I believe—who went draggling through the
mud, in a manner that I thought would be the death of me; while the
“Black Jobmaster”—that’s what he calls himself—who had let the coaches
and horses to a furnishing undertaker, who had let ’em to a haberdasher,
who had let ’em to a carpenter, who had let ’em to the parish-clerk, who
had let ’em to the sexton, who had let ’em to the plumber painter and
glazier, who had got the funeral to do, looked out of the public-house
window at the corner, with his pipe in his mouth, and said—for I heard
him—“that was the sort of turn-out to do a gen-teel party credit.” That!
As if any two-and-sixpenny masquerade, tumbled into a vat of blacking,
wouldn’t be quite as solemn, and immeasurably cheaper!

Do you think I don’t know you? You’re mistaken if you think so. But
perhaps you do. Well! Shall I tell you what I know? Can you bear it?
Here it is then. The Black Jobmaster is right. The root of all this, is
the gen-teel party.

You don’t mean to deny it, I hope? You don’t mean to tell me that this
nonsensical mockery isn’t owing to your gentility. Don’t I know a Raven
in a Cathedral Tower, who has often heard your service for the Dead?
Don’t I know that you almost begin it with the words, “We brought
nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing
out”? Don’t I know that in a monstrous satire on those words, you carry
your hired velvets, and feathers, and scarves, and all the rest of it,
to the edge of the grave, and get plundered (and serve you right!) in
every article, because you WILL be gen-teel parties to the last?

Eh? Think a little! Here’s the plumber painter and glazier come to take
the funeral order which he is going to give to the sexton, who is going
to give it to the clerk, who is going to give it to the carpenter, who
is going to give it to the haberdasher, who is going to give it to the
furnishing undertaker, who is going to divide it with the Black
Jobmaster. “Hearse and four, Sir?” says he. “No, a pair will be
sufficient.” “I beg your pardon, Sir, but when we buried Mr. Grundy at
number twenty, there was four on ’em, Sir; I think it right to mention
it.” “Well, perhaps there had better be four.” “Thank you, Sir. Two
coaches and four, Sir, shall we say?” “No. Coaches and pair.” “You’ll
excuse my mentioning it, Sir, but pairs to the coaches, and four to the
hearse, would have a singular appearance to the neighbours. When we put
four to anything, we always carry four right through.” “Well! say four!”
“Thank you, Sir. Feathers of course?” “No. No feathers. They’re absurd.”
“Very good, Sir. _No_ feathers?” “No.” “_Very_ good, Sir. We _can_ do
fours without feathers, Sir, but it’s what we never do. When we buried
Mr. Grundy, there was feathers, and—I only throw it out, Sir—Mrs. Grundy
might think it strange.” “Very well! Feathers!” “Thank you, Sir,”—and so
on.

_Is_ it and so on, or not, through the whole black job of jobs, because
of Mrs. Grundy and the gen-teel party?

I suppose you’ve thought about this? I suppose you’ve reflected on what
you’re doing, and what you’ve done? When you read about those poisonings
for the burial society money, you consider how it is that burial
societies ever came to be, at all? You perfectly understand—you who are
not the poor, and ought to set ’em an example—that, besides making the
whole thing costly, you’ve confused their minds about this burying, and
have taught ’em to confound expence and show, with respect and
affection. You know all you’ve got to answer for, you gen-teel parties?
I’m glad of it.

I believe it’s only the monkeys who are servile imitators, is it? You
reflect! To be sure you do. So does Mrs. Grundy—and she casts
reflections—don’t she?

What animals are those who scratch shallow holes in the ground in
crowded places, scarcely hide their dead in ’em, and become unnaturally
infected by their dead, and die by thousands? Vultures, I suppose. I
think you call the Vulture an obscene bird? I don’t consider him
agreeable, but I never caught him misconducting himself in that way.

My honourable friend, the dog—I call him my honourable friend in your
Parliamentary sense, because I hate him—turns round three times before
he goes to sleep. I ask him why? He says he don’t know; but he always
does it. Do _you_ know how you ever came to have that board of feathers
carried on a fellow’s head? Come. You’re a boastful race. Show
yourselves superior to the dog, and tell me!

Now, I don’t love many people; but I do love the undertakers. I except
them from the censure I pass upon you in general. They know you so well,
that I look upon ’em as a sort of Ravens. They are so certain of your
being gen-teel parties, that they stick at nothing. They are sure
they’ve got the upper hand of you. Our proprietor was reading the paper,
only last night, and there was an advertisement in it from a sensitive
and libelled undertaker, to wit, that the allegation “that funerals were
unnecessarily expensive, was an insult to his professional brethren.”
Ha! ha! Why he knows he has you on the hip. It’s nothing to him that
their being unnecessarily expensive is a fact within the experience of
all of you as glaring as the sun when there’s not a cloud. He is certain
that when you want a funeral “performed,” he has only to be down upon
you with Mrs. Grundy, to do what he likes with you—and then he’ll go
home, and laugh like a Hyæna.

I declare (supposing I wasn’t detained against my will by our
proprietor) that, if I had any arms, I’d take the undertakers to ’em!
There’s another, in the same paper, who says they’re libelled, in the
accusation of having disgracefully disturbed the meeting in favour of
what you call your General Interment Bill. Our establishment was in the
Strand, that night. There was no crowd of undertakers’ men there, with
circulars in their pockets, calling on ’em to come in coloured clothes
to make an uproar; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who got in with forged
orders to yell and screech; it wasn’t undertakers’ men who made a brutal
charge at the platform, and overturned the ladies like a troop of horse.
Of course not. _I_ know all about it.

But—and lay this well to heart, you Lords of the creation, as you call
yourselves!—it _is_ these undertakers’ men to whom, in the last trying,
bitter grief of life, you confide the loved and honoured forms of your
sisters, mothers, daughters, wives. It _is_ to these delicate gentry,
and to their solemn remarks, and decorous behaviour, that you entrust
the sacred ashes of all that has been the purest to you, and the dearest
to you, in this world. Don’t improve the breed! Don’t change the custom!
Be true to my opinion of you, and to Mrs. Grundy!

I nail the black flag of the black Jobmaster to our cage—figuratively
speaking—and I stand up for the gen-teel parties. So (but from different
motives) does the Owl. You’ve got a chance, by means of that bill I’ve
mentioned—by the bye, I call my own a General Interment Bill, for it
buries everything it gets hold of—to alter the whole system; to avail
yourselves of the results of all improved European experience; to
separate death from life; to surround it with everything that is sacred
and solemn, and to dissever it from everything that is shocking and
sordid. You won’t read the bill? You won’t dream of helping it? You
won’t think of looking at the evidence on which it’s founded—Will you?
No. That’s right!

Gen-teel parties, step forward, if you please, to the rescue of the
black Jobmaster! The rats are with you. I am informed that they have
unanimously passed a resolution that the closing of the London
churchyards will be an insult to their professional brethren, and will
oblige ’em “to fight for it.” The Parrots are with you. The Owl is with
you. The Raven is with you. No General Interments. Carrion for ever!

Ha, ha! Halloa!




                     HOW WE WENT FISHING IN CANADA.


There were three of us. Our purpose was fishing, in Canadian fashion,
_under_ the ice, and our destination was the township of New Ireland,
distant about seventy miles from our starting point, Quebec, and
situated about midway between the St. Lawrence and the American line.
Our conveyance was a stout, commodious, yet light, and not inelegant
sleigh, with seats for four, and plentifully supplied with buffalo
robes, which are dressed so as to be as soft as blankets—useful in a
temperature of twenty degrees below Zero, and ornamental from their
fringes, which were garnished with various devices, all of which had
some reference to the wild denizens of the forest. Under each seat was a
box, which we stowed with a goodly supply of creature comforts and a few
books, thus prudently making provision against the contingencies of
privation and _ennui_. Our locomotive power consisted of two small but
very spirited horses, which were neatly harnessed, with a string of
merry sleigh bells dangling from the girths of each.

In this comfortable condition we in due time arrived at “Richardson’s,”
one of the most celebrated hostelries in the seignory of St. Giles.

Here we put up for the night, tempted to do so by the superiority of the
accommodation, especially as we had but an easy day’s journey before us
for the morrow. During the morning it was so intensely cold that our
breath formed thick crusts of ice on the shawls which we had round our
necks, whilst the bushy whiskers of our companion Perroque were pendant
with tiny icicles. As our horses warmed, almost every hair on their
backs formed the nucleus of a separate icicle, which, by-and-bye, made
them all stand erect, and caused the animals to look more like
porcupines than horses. About midday it began to moderate, and by
nightfall the temperature had risen considerably. The wind had by this
time set in, with a steady current from the east. This, with the change
of temperature, made us somewhat uneasy as to the weather; but our hopes
rose when we found that it was yet a brilliant starlight about 10
o’clock, when we retired to rest. But even then the coming tempest was
not far off; and in about two hours afterwards the wind was howling
fearfully about the house, which it shook to its very foundations,
whilst the driving snow pattered against the windows as if clouds of
steel filings had been driven against them. I was soon soothed to sleep
by the wild lullaby of the winter night, and did not awake again until
eight in the morning, when I was called by a servant, who entered my
room with a lighted candle in her hand. I should otherwise have been in
darkness, for the snow had, over night, completely blocked up my window.
My room was on the ground-floor, and looked to the east. Against that
side of the house, the snow had been piled by the wind in an enormous
wreath, which partly encroached upon the windows of the floor above.
Blungle, my other friend, who had recently arrived from the region of
Russell Square, London, slept in a room contiguous to mine, but he
refused to get up, declaring that although it was still the middle of
the night, he was too wide awake to be humbugged. It was not until
breakfast was sent in to him, and he found by the state of his appetite
that it must have been several hours since he had supped, that he
condescended to examine his window, which discovered to him the true
state of the case.

The wind was still high, and although the snow had ceased to fall, the
tempest abated nothing of its fury. The dry snow was driven like light
sand before the blast, until the air was thick with it. Neither man nor
beast was astir, every living thing taking shelter from the storm.
By-and-bye, the heavy pall overhead began to rend, and a few faint
gleams of sunshine would occasionally light up the wild turmoil and
confusion that raged below. About ten o’clock, the clouds were rolled
away, and the sun shone steadily out. For a full hour afterwards the
wind maintained its strength, but by noon had so far abated, that the
drift had almost ceased.

But, by this time, the roads had become utterly impracticable. They
were, indeed, obliterated; the snow lying, in some places, lightly upon
them; and in others, forming huge swelling wreaths, either across or
along them. We were eager to go forward, but were dissuaded by our host
from attempting it, till the afternoon, when the road might be at least
practicable. On such occasions the law requires the owners of land to
“break the roads” passing through or by their respective properties; and
by two o’clock every sleigh in St. Giles’s was out for the purpose. As
soon as a track was opened, we prepared to start. The road for the first
quarter of a mile had been well sheltered; and as the evergreens were
still standing, there was but little difficulty in keeping the old
track, which afforded a firm footing for the horses. But beyond that the
evergreens had been prostrated and buried in the snow; and it was
evident that our pioneers had floundered in the midst of difficulties.
Such was presently our own fate, our horses having plunged into the soft
snow, where it was fully six feet deep, from which we had with no little
difficulty and labour to dig them out. This quenched our enthusiasm, and
we returned to the inn, where we remained for another night.

Next morning we were enabled to proceed, though but slowly, on our way.
Leaving St. Giles’s, we entered St. Sylvestre, the last, on this road,
of the belt of French seignories lying between the St. Lawrence and the
“Townships.” It is almost exclusively inhabited by British settlers. In
the townships, Frenchmen are as rare as negroes in Siberia. The first
township we came to was that of Leeds; on entering which we found a
great change in the whole aspect of the country. From being flat and
monotonous it became suddenly varied and undulating, and appeared to
consist of a succession of rather lofty ridges, with broad belts of
fertile table land at their summit. On gaining the top of the first, we
turned to enjoy the prospect which lay behind us. It was really
magnificent. The air was so clear and crisp, that almost every object
embraced within the distant horizon had a distinct form and outline. The
level tract over which we had passed lay extended beneath our feet,
stretching for about forty miles to the St. Lawrence. In appearance it
was as variegated as a carpet,—the white patches of every shape and size
with which it was interspersed indicating the clearances amongst the
dark brown woods. The bold and precipitous banks of the St. Lawrence
could be traced for miles, whilst here and there the stream itself was
visible. The distant city, on its rocky promontory, came out in fine
relief against the sky, its tin covered spires glistening in the
sunshine like silver pinnacles. A little to the right, the outline of
the chain of hills lying behind it, although they were fully sixty miles
distant from us, was distinctly visible in the far-off heavens.

On quitting Leeds, our way led chiefly through the woods, the clearances
being now the rare exception.

At length we reached the district, or “township,” of New Ireland, which
having been settled by immigrants from Maine and New Hampshire, more
than forty years ago, is now reckoned one of the wealthiest and most
prosperous parts of the country. To one of its well-to-do farmers we had
introductions, and took up our quarters. His large and spacious house
was built upon a high bank, overlooking one of the smaller lakes, from
which our sport was to be derived, because it afforded one of the best
fishing grounds in the neighbourhood. Shortly after breakfast (the
buck-wheat cakes and pumpkin pie were beyond praise), we prepared for a
day’s sport. Our tackle would appear rather odd to English sportsmen:
our lines consisted of strong hempen cords, of which we provided
ourselves with about a dozen. To each were attached two very large
hooks, dressed upon thin whip-cord. We had likewise three axes, and as
many chisels of the largest size, attached to handles about six feet
long. In addition to these we had a shovel and a broad hoe. They were
all stowed into a large hand sleigh, which was dragged to the fishing
ground by a servant.

The lake was about three miles long and half-a-mile wide. It lay in a
beautiful valley, embossed in the deep and sombre pine woods, which
covered the lower grounds. It was one of a series, some of which were
smaller and others much larger than itself. For fully five months in the
year the surface of each is frozen to the depth of several feet. We
started off to skate to the upper end, which was two-and-a-half miles
distant. My friend Blungle, not an accomplished skater, made so very
false a start, that he was speedily noticed spinning round rapidly on
the ice on a pivot, of which his heels and his head formed opposite
angles—precisely like a rotatory letter V. Perroque, our French
comforter and guide is a perfect Perrot in skates, and performed the
most graceful evolutions around our prostrate friend, in a manner that
produced a pretty and highly diverting tableau. At last, however, he
managed to “feel his feet” better, and we all soon afterwards reached
the fishing ground.

The spot selected was close to the head of the lake, where the stream
flowing from that immediately above, fell into it. Here the fish are
generally attracted by the greater quantity of food there deposited by
the stream. In winter they have additional inducements, owing to the
greater warmth of the water from the number of springs in the
neighbourhood, and to the greater abundance of light which they enjoy
through the ice which is here comparatively thin. Indeed, over some of
the springs no ice forms during the coldest seasons. Our first care was
to make at least half-a-dozen holes in the ice. This sportsman-like
operation we commenced with our axes, making each hole about three feet
in diameter. When we got down about a foot or so the axes became useless
to us, and we had to resort to our chisels, with which we speedily
progressed; clearing the holes of the broken ice with the shovel first
and afterwards with the hoe. We were not long at work, before we found
the utility of the long handles of both hoe and chisels, the ice which
we had to perforate being fully three feet thick. There is a legend in
the neighbourhood, of an Irishman, who, having forgotten his chisel,
very wisely got into the hole which he was cutting, that he might use
his axe with better effect; he, of course, kept going down as the hole
got deeper and deeper, until, at last, he went down altogether, and,
according to the report, made food for the fish he intended to capture.

Things being thus prepared, we baited our hooks with pieces of fat pork,
and dropped them into the water—the lines being set in each hole—the
other end of each line was attached to the middle of a stick, about six
feet in length, so placed, that it could not be dragged into the hole.
These we left lying upon the ice, some distance from the holes, so as to
give us warning of a bite, and the fish an opportunity of running a
little when hooked. The contemplative angler of the Waltonian School has
no chance here, for he would be inevitably frozen to an icicle before he
obtained so much as a bite. For amusement as well as for warmth,
therefore, we skated in the immediate vicinity of our lines, of which we
seldom lost sight. The fish, which is a species of pike, and attains a
large size, sometimes weighing upwards of thirty pounds, are soon
attracted to the spot by the columns of light descending through the
apertures in the ice. It is seldom, therefore, that the angler has to
remain long in suspense ere some token is afforded him that his labour
is not likely to be in vain. A few minutes after the casting of the
nets, I happened to approach the hole in which mine were set, and was
looking inquisitively into its leaden depths, eager, if possible, to
catch a glimpse of what was going on underneath, when suddenly the stick
to which one of the lines was attached, was dragged towards the aperture
with great velocity, and catching me by the heels, turned poor Blungle’s
laugh completely against me; for it laid me at once upon my back, with
my legs spanning the hole. I should certainly have gone with it, but
that the stick, when the fish came to the end of his run, lay firmly
across it, and kept me up. Having risen, I thought it my time, and began
to pull at the line. From the power with which I had to contend,
however, I found it necessary to have a better foundation than my skates
afforded me; so getting upon my knees, I soon brought my captive to
light, and deposited him upon the ice. He was a splendid fish, weighing
upwards of twenty pounds, and floundered prodigiously for a few minutes.
The frost, however, soon tranquilised him, and in about a
quarter-of-an-hour he was as hard and brittle as an icicle.

We continued our sport for some time with tolerable success, having, by
three o’clock, caught eleven fish, the smallest of which weighed eight
pounds. But our pleasures were brought to an untimely period by Blungle,
whose ill luck had now passed into a proverb amongst us. Hitherto no
fish had favoured his line with so much as the passing compliment of a
nibble. He had given up the attempt, and for nearly two hours had been
amusing himself by skating up and down the lake. Practice had improved
him, and like all beginners, he was proud of his prowess, and was
particularly anxious to redeem his lost character for skating by one
extraordinary achievement. He had been warned to give what a nautical
friend of our host called a “wide berth” to the mouth of the stream
which ran into the lake. Bold in the strength of his newly acquired
skill, he neglected this advice, and about three o’clock shot rapidly
past us in the direction of the stream. In less than a minute there was
a loud agonising cry for help.

We looked round. Every vestige of Blungle was invisible, except his
head, and that was seen just above the ice, his body being immersed in
water. He had ventured too far, and the ice had given way with him.
Mirth instantly was changed to the acutest apprehension. In that part,
the ice was so weak, that he might have broken it by pressing his arms
against it. But this he could not do; for although his toes touched
ground, he happened to be standing on the tail of a small bank, off
which the water rapidly deepened in one direction. For a moment or two
we were perplexed what to do, when it occurred to us that we might turn
the hand sleigh to account. Having tied the three chisels with their
long handles, firmly together, we tied the long pole thus furnished, to
the sleigh, and pushed it towards him; Perroque putting a large piece of
pork upon the sleigh, that he might bite at it. He hesitated for some
time to relinquish his secure foothold; but at length, seeing that it
was his only chance, and being terrified by a great fish which came up
and stared him hungrily in the face, he seized the sleigh, which we then
pulled towards us, and got safely to land. It crushed and broke the weak
ice, but rose upon that which was stronger, dragging Blungle with it.

For some time he lay where we landed him, and would soon have been as
stiff as the fish, had we not raised him to his feet, when he
immediately started for the house. We followed him as soon as we could,
dragging our tackle, implements, and spoils along with us, and were not
long in overtaking him; for before he had got half-way down the lake,
his clothes had become quite stiff, and he looked like a man in a
cracked glass case. On reaching the house, it was with difficulty we
undressed him and put him to bed; when by dint of warmth without, and
brandy administered within, we gradually thawed him. He did not
afterwards join our fishing; but confined himself to improving his skill
in skating in the centre of the lake.

We remained altogether four days, by which time we had caught as many
fish as we had room for in our sleigh. We then bade adieu to our kind
host and his family, and after a pleasant journey, arrived towards the
evening of the second day, at Quebec. The fish, which were still frozen
and in excellent condition, we distributed in presents to our friends.




                                A WISH.


            Oh, that I were the Spirit of a Plant,
            Rear’d in Imagination’s evergreen world,—
            To lift my head above the meadow grass,
            And strike my roots, far-spread and intervolved,
            Deep as the Central Heart, wherefrom to taste
            The springs of infinite being! From that source
            What pregnant fermentations would arise;
            What blossom, fruit, perfume, and influence;
            To purify mankind’s destructive blood,—
            So full of life and elevating powers—
            So cloy’d and clogg’d for exercise of good.




                     THE BLACK DIAMONDS OF ENGLAND.


                        CHAPTER I.—THE DIAMONDS.

The history and adventures of the ‘great diamonds’ of Eastern, Northern,
Southern, and Western potentates, have been often chronicled; their
several values have been estimated at hundreds of thousands, and at
millions; but not a syllable has ever been breathed of their utility.
The reason is tolerably obvious; these magnificent diamonds are of _no_
practical use at all, being purely ornamental luxuries. Now, it has
occurred to us that the diamonds indigenous to England, are the converse
of these brilliant usurpers of the chief fame of the nether earth (to
say nothing of the vain-glories on the upper surface) being black,
instead of prismatic white—opaque, instead of transpicuous; and in place
of deriving a fictitious and fluctuating value from scarcity and
ornamental beauty, deriving their value from the realities of their
surpassing utility and great abundance. They certainly make no very
striking figure in the ball-room dress of prince or princess; but it is
their destiny and office to carry comfort to the poor man’s home, as
well as to the mansion of the rich; they are not to be looked upon as
treasures of beauty, they are to be shovelled out and burnt; they are
not the bright emblems of no change, and no activity, but like heralds,
sent from the depths of night, where Nature works her secret wonders, to
advance those sciences and industrial arts which are equally the
consequence and the re-acting cause of the progress of humanity.

In the reign of King Edward the First of England, a new fuel was brought
to London, much to his subjects’ objection and the perplexity of his
majesty. Listen to the history—not of the king, but of the great event
of his time which few historians mention.

If chemical nature beneath the earth be accounted very slow, human
nature above ground is comparatively slower,—and without the same reason
for it. The transmutations beneath the earth require centuries for their
accomplishment, and of necessity;—the proper use of new and valuable
discoveries on the surface, is a matter of human understanding and
rational will. In the former case, the thing is not perfect without its
number of centuries; in the latter, the thing has very seldom been
acknowledged without great lapse and loss of time, because mankind will
_not_ be made more comfortable and happy without a long fight against
the innovation. Wherefore coals, the most excellent material of
fuel,—for cooking, for works of industry and skill, for trades and arts,
and the cutting short of long journeys,—have only been in use during the
last three centuries.

The first mention of coals, as a fuel, occurs in a charter of Henry the
Third, granting licenses to the burgesses of Newcastle to dig for coals;
and in 1281, this city had created, out of these diggings, a pretty good
trade.

In the beginning of the fourteenth century, coals were first sent from
Newcastle to London, by way of a little experiment on the minds of the
blacksmiths and brewers, and a few other trades needing fuel; but for no
other purposes. So the good black smoke rose from a score or two of
favoured chimneys.

As one man, all London instantly rose up against it, and was exceeding
wroth. Whereof, in 1316, came a petition from Parliament to the king,
praying his Majesty,—if he had any love for a fair garden, a clean face,
yea, or a clean shirt and ruff,—and if he did not wish his subjects to
be choked, or, at the very best, to be smoked into bad hams,—to forbid
all use of the new and pestilent fuel called “coals.”

So the king, seeing the good sense and reasonableness of the request,
forthwith issued a Proclamation, commanding all use of the dangerous
nuisance of coals to cease from that day henceforth.

But the blacksmiths and brewers took counsel together, and they were
joined by several other trades, who had found great advantage in the use
of coals; and they resolved to continue the same, as secretly as might
be—forgetting all about the smoke, or innocently trusting that it would
not again betray them.

No sooner, however, did the black smoke begin to rise and curl above the
chimneys, than it was actually seen by many eyes!—and away ran the
people bawling to Parliament; and more petitions were sent; and his
Majesty, being now very angry, ordered all these refractory coal-burning
smiths, brewers, and other injurious rogues to be heavily fined, and
their fire-places and furnaces cast down and utterly demolished.

All this was accordingly done. Still, it was done to no purpose; for so
very excellent was the result to the different trades of those who had
smuggled and used the prohibited fuel, that use it by some means they
would, let happen what might. More chimneys than ever now sent up black
curling clouds, and more fire-places and furnaces were destroyed; and so
they went on.

At length it was wisely discovered that nobody had been choked,
poisoned, “cured” into a bad ham, or otherwise injured and transformed.
Now, then, of course, it was reasonable to expect, as the advantages
were proved to be so great and numerous, the injuries trivial, and the
dangers nothing, the use of coal would become pretty general, without
more prohibition, contest, or question.

No, indeed; this is not the way the world goes on. Social benefits are
not to be forced upon worthy people at this rate. Centuries must
elapse—even as we find with the growth of metals and minerals beneath
the earth. In the latter case, it is a necessary condition; in the
former, it is made one.

The many good services and value of coals being now ascertained, as well
as their harmlessness (except that they certainly did give a bad colour
to all the public edifices and great houses), and the progressive
increase of many luxuries of life, together with their advantages to
numerous trades besides those of the wisely-valiant and not-to-be-denied
blacksmiths and brewers who first adopted and persisted in using them,
every facility for their importation into London was naturally expected
by the citizens of that highly-favoured place. Innocent human nature!
vain hopes of children, who always expect reason from those who preach
it! For now, various lets and hindrances were cunningly devised, in the
shape of taxes and duties, so as to check the facilities of interchange
between London and Newcastle. So, the new fuel—the product of the mine
destined one day to become the Black Diamonds of England—had to struggle
for its freedom through a succession of “wise and happy reigns.”


                              CHAPTER II.
                    THE EMANCIPATION OF THE DIAMOND.

Before a cargo of coals could be discharged from a collier, it was
necessary to get the permission of the Lord Mayor to land them. And how
was this to be obtained? By what sort of dulcet persuasion, we are left
in no difficulty to conjecture; but as to the amount of the sum, a
modest official veil of darkness enshrouds the record. The perquisites,
however, granted to the aldermen, are fortunately within reach of
knowledge; and accordingly we find it set down that the corporation were
empowered to measure and weigh coals, either in person, and in their
gowns, or by proxy, if they preferred that course, and to charge the sum
of 8_d._ per ton for their labour. This was confirmed by a charter in
1613. By this tax the City made some 50,000_l._ a year, and rejoiced
exceedingly.

This system of protection, under several forms and pleasant variations,
long continued, and was extended all over England, the pressure falling
most unequally, to the injury of the least wealthy and the poor,
according to the immemorial custom of Governments. Some of the people of
London were audacious enough to complain that they did not need to be
protected from the Newcastle coals, but all on the contrary, would give
any fair sum to obtain them; and that, indeed, what they really needed
was to be protected from the Lord Mayor and Corporation, and other taxes
and duties. But these people were reproved as ignorant and froward, and
told that they understood nothing at all:—what they had to do, was
simply—to pay, first for the protection, and then for the coals. So they
paid. But the importance of the article being found to exceed even the
greediness of the impost, the use of coals became general during the
reign of Charles the First; the same, with other taxes, being demanded,
from the reign of William the Third downwards.

In 1830, and not before, the heaviest of the above duties were
abolished; those, however, which were collected from the Londoners being
excepted—for their old impertinence—together with two or three
sea-ports, who had also spoken.

Who shall repress a truth? Coals were excellent good things—there was no
reason in denying it. But any foolish people, and there will always be
more than enough found to do it, _can_ repress a truth for an abominably
long period, denying it without reason, yet very effectually. Or, when
they admit it, then comes the tax and penalty to be paid for the fact.
Thus was the free introduction and use of coals repressed throughout
England until 1830; from which date, its grand rise from the bowels of
the earth into a new and most extensive importance may be dated.

Yet, as extremes meet, and as human nature delights in opposites, if
only by way of reaction or relaxation, so the long-continued obstinate
slowness of past ages bids fair, in our own day, to enter upon an
extreme change to flighty prematurities, and the over-leaping of all
intermediate and necessary knowledge. But the reign of the fast-ones is
now approaching its height; which having once reached, it will then have
a rapid decline into contempt, and so give place to regular and steady
advances upon solid ground.

Still, we are not to infer from the present flourishing state of things,
that the great black-diamond millionaires are very numerous, or that
fortunes are readily accumulated in the trade. Coal mines are hazardous
speculations: costly is the sinking of shafts—precarious the lives of
men and property from constant dangers of explosion or inundation;
whereof it comes that no Insurance Office will guarantee such property
against these or any other accidents. True may it be that the large coal
owners on the Tyne and the Wear rejoice in a sort of monopoly; as do
other owners; but herein shall we not find the cause of coals being sold
in London at nearly three times the price they cost at the pit’s mouth.
The cause is to be sought in the expenses of transit (which, alone, are
often equal to, and not unfrequently exceed, the cost price); in the
loss of screening; the expenses of lighters and lightermen wharfs,
officers, and wharfingers, coal-heavers, carmen, horses, waggons,
sacks—to say nothing of long credit, or bad debts;—and the profits of
the various middle-men, among the most numerous of whom are the
brass-plate coal merchants (whose establishments simply consist of an
order-book, wherein it appeareth that they get a little more than they
give); and the retailers of various gradations.

All these difficulties, and all these reductions and dues,
notwithstanding, and in spite of,—the coal trade has risen during the
last twenty years to a magnitude in quantity and influence which may be
regarded as one of the greatest commercial triumphs of this our England.

The coal-fields of the United States of America are upwards of fourteen
times larger extent than ours; yet, in 1845, while the American coal
mines produced 4,400,000 of tons, the coal mines of England produced
upwards of 32,000,000 of tons. In the same year, our production of iron
was more than four times the American amount. Moreover,—and here may the
gravest historian exalt his pen, and yet be accounted no flourisher,—we
have for some years past been able to supply coals to all the great
powers of the globe. In 1842, England exported 60,000 tons of coals to
the United States of America; 88,000 tons to Russia; 111,000 tons to
Prussia; 515,900 tons to France;—not to speak of the hundreds of
thousands of tons exported in the same year to Germany collectively, to
Holland, to Denmark, Sweden, the East Indies and China, &c., &c.

The use of coals has now extended, not only over the civilised world,
but in its potent form of steam has reached most of the remoter regions.
From Suez to Singapore are steam vessels already in course of passage,
and the line will soon be carried to Australia. When the American
locomotives have made their way to the shores of the Pacific, their
vessels will be ready to carry onward the traffic to China and the
Indian Islands from the east; “and thus,” as writes a learned critic,
discoursing of the virtues of steam-coal, “complete the circuit of the
globe.” Whereby, “a steam voyage round the world will in a few years, be
so practicable, that the merchant and tourist may make the circuit
within a year, and yet have time enough to see and learn much at many of
the principal ‘stations’ on his way.”

All rightful honour, then, to these priceless Diamonds—whether they be
black spirits or furnace-white, flame-red spirits, or ashy-grey—whether
cannel coal and caking coal—cherry coal and stone coal—whether any of
the forty kinds of Newcastle coal, or any of the seventy species of the
great family, from the highest class of the bituminous, down to the one
degree above old coke.


                    CHAPTER III.—THE COAL EXCHANGE.

Near to the Custom House rises one of the most ornate edifices in the
metropolis,—the Coal Exchange of London,—in which is carried on one of
our most stupendous trades.

It is Wednesday—a market day—we ascend the steps of a beautiful sort of
round tower, and pass through the folding swing-doors of the principal
entrance. The space here, or little vestibule, forms the base of the
centre of a well-staircase of iron. You look up, through the coiling
balustrades as they climb up to the top, and at the very top you see a
painting in the Rubens style of colouring, (though a long way _after_
Rubens in other respects,) of the figure of a prodigal lady, who is
upsetting a cornucopia, full—_not_ of coals—but of all the most richly
coloured fruits of Italy and the East, which seem about to descend
straight through the centre of the well-staircase, and shower down upon
your wondering and expectant head. Cupids—or, at least, little chubby
boys, tumbling in the air—are also in attendance on this theatrical
Goddess of Abundance.

Passing from this entrance into the grand central market, you find
yourself in a circular area boarded with oak planks of a light and dark
hue, arranged in a kind of mosaic of long angles, which converge to a
centre piece, wherein a great anchor is inlaid. Beside this, there is a
wooden dagger, to the blade of which a legend of no interest is
attached. Three ranges of cast-iron galleries rise all round,
terminating above in a large glass dome, with an orange-coloured centre
of stained glass. Around the floor of the area, at due intervals, long
desks of new polished oak, with inkstands let into the wood, stand
invitingly ready for the transaction of business. The City Arms, on a
series of small shields, is the simple adornment of the outer
balustrade-work of the three galleries,—except, also, that these
galleries often have many lady-visitors who lean over and contemplate
the ‘dark doings’ of the busy black-diamond merchants who congregate
below.

But let it not be supposed that the ornaments of the Coal Exchange of
London are confined to the City Arms, or even the beauty of the
lady-visitors. Private offices, and recesses for business, having the
most neat, orderly appearance, even to a primness and propriety worthy
of the Society of Friends, are observable round the area, beneath the
galleries; but the panels of the woodwork that separate these offices,
rejoice in the most lively adornments, _à la Jullien_. They are covered
with emblematic, fanciful, and not very characteristic pictures and
designs, all in the brightest hues; and, being painted on a light
ground, they have a look of gaiety and airiness quite of a continental
character. The weight and gravity of the City has, for once—and by way
of smiling antagonism to what every one would expect of a
coal-market—determined to emulate the gayest places of public amusement
in France or Germany. Restaurants, cafés, dancing-rooms—and oh!—shall we
say it—a touch of Cremorne! In one panel you see a figure of
_Watchfulness_, typified by a robed lady, with a wise-faced owl at her
side. The river Severn is typified by Naïads and a dolphin—by a little
poetic licence. In another panel we have _Charity_, bearing a couple of
children, with a figure of old Father Thames sitting among rushes below.
Then, we have _Perseverance_ for the Avon, emblemed by a snail at the
foot of a brunette lady with black eyes,—the favourite style of beauty
of the artist, Mr. Sang. The Trent and the Tyne are similarly
illustrated, and all in the brightest colours, on a light ground.

Let us now return to the principal entrance, and ascend to the first
gallery. The panels all round, are painted as below. The chief subject
of most of them appears to be a colliery—that is, the works above
ground, such as the little black house of the steam-engine, with its
long chain passing over the drum, and then over a wheel above the pit’s
mouth. The first we come to is the celebrated Wallsend colliery. Each
has fanciful designs above and beneath, as if to atone for the dark
reality of the centre piece, picturesque as this is always made. Over
some of these we find heraldic monsters of the right frightful Order of
the Griffin, prancing above greyhounds who crouch on each side of a
large ornamental cup, not unlike a head-dress of the ancient South
American Indians, which however is supported by a lady in the bright
costume of a Mexican peasant, wearing wings. Beneath there lies a rich
grouping of grapes, arborescent ferns, with vulture-headed griffins, and
flowers of the cactus. The collieries are occasionally varied with a
sea-piece, in which, of course, a black collier-vessel is sailing from
the North. Sometimes the scene is a shore-piece with a collier boat; but
presided over by the usual sort of nut-brown mining beauty with Italian
eyes, and hair in no particular order, bearing a fruit-basket on her
head, piled up with all sorts of ripe fruit of the most tempting size
and colour. Beneath her, we again find the griffin vultures holding
watch over some logs of antediluvian trees.

Wandering onwards in this way, we observed, a little in advance of us, a
seafaring man, in a rough blue pilot coat, with a face so weather-beaten
that it looked as hard as a ship’s figure-head, and a pair of great
dangling hands that seemed hewn out of solid oak. He was very busy in
front of one of the panels, admiring a lady with very good-humoured
black eyes, and cheeks as red as ripe tomatos, carrying on her head a
basket of Orlean plums and alligator pears, richly grouped with a
profusion of grapes, and crimson flowers of the cactus. Her face was
turned smilingly upwards at a collier brig in full sail.

We congratulated him on his ‘choice,’ and the suggestion appearing to
please his fancy, a little colloquy ensued, from which it turned out
that he was Thomas Oldcastle, of Durham, captain of the collier brig
‘Shiner,’ of South Shields, and having just discharged his cargo at
Rotherhithe, had come to London to amuse himself for a few hours.
Arriving at the entrance in the course of our talk, we ascended the
stairs together, and soon reached the second gallery.

The flooring of this gallery—in fact the whole of it, like the previous
one, was of cast iron. In the semicircle of the entrance was a picture
of Newcastle, on one side, with its iron bridge and railway combined,
and its old stone bridge below. It was very well and characteristically
painted, and of a sombre and rather smoky colour, which Captain
Oldcastle said was too like to be very pleasing. His thoughts were
evidently reverting to the very highly coloured operatic ladies below.
On the other side of this entrance was a picture of Durham, with the
cathedral among the trees—also a very good and truthful picture. Captain
Oldcastle, after great deliberation, and the slow pocketing of both
hands, was obliged to confess that it was something like the old place.
But this wall was not right—any how—and that spire did not look so—when
last he saw it—in short, it was clear he wanted reality, could not make
out perspective differences, and preferred the handsome looks of the
brunette fruit-bearer in the lower gallery.

But though our honest friend had no good taste in pictures, there was a
great mass of good solid practical knowledge in the hard-outlined head
of this rough captain of the North Sea. It turned out that he was an old
friend of Mr. Buddle, the coal engineer of Wallsend, and often quoted
him as authority. Chancing to ask him some question about the number of
people employed in the coal trade on the Tyne and the Wear, he said that
he had heard Buddle say (twenty years ago) there were nearly 5,000 boys,
and quite 3,500 men _underground_ in the works near the Tyne: and nearly
3,000 men, and 700 boys above ground. On the Wear, he said there were
9,000. All of these were employed in the mines, and taking the coal to
the ships on the two rivers. Captain Oldcastle estimated the vessels
employed at about 1,400, which would require 15,000 sailors and boys to
work them “as all ought to be.” Besides these, there were lots more
hands in other parts of the great coal trade of the north.

But as this estimate of his friend Buddle, we remarked, had been made
twenty years ago, was it not pretty certain that the numbers had
immensely increased by this time? To this the Captain replied that it
was so, no doubt; and supposing that every other district, besides the
North, of the entire coal trade of England, had increased in the same
proportion, and if you added to this all the agents, factors, clerks,
subordinates, whippers, lightermen, wharfingers, &c., there would be
found upwards of 200,000 men engaged in the Coal trade of
England,—enough, he added with a grimly comical look, if a war broke
out, to furnish the army and navy with 20,000 men each, at a week’s
notice.

“If they liked the work,” we added; but the Captain had walked on,
attracted by a picture in one of the panels. It was a portrait of a
miner in his underground dress—when he wears any—the darkness of his
figure and position in the mine being pleasantly and appropriately
relieved by an immense quantity of highly coloured _tropical_ fruits,
flowers, griffin vultures, long and sleek-necked cranes, arborescent
ferns, various logs of wood known in fossil botany, with here and there
a string of choice jewels,—rubies, emeralds, and carbuncles of
prodigious size, such as one has seen in “Blue Beard” and “Pizarro.” The
next figure was a miner with a Davy-lamp, whom Captain Oldcastle
shrewdly conjectured to be looking out for some of those jewels so
profusely accorded to the fortunate miner in the previous picture.

In walking round these galleries, amidst so many adornments attracting
the attention, a visitor might be excused for not too hastily turning
his thoughts to utility. But this thought, in these too practical days,
will obtrude itself. The number of the private rooms for offices, on
each gallery, is considerable; their accommodations, all that could be
desired; their appearance most neat, quiet, and unexceptionable; but by
far the greater part are _empty_. Nobody will take them. Many of those
on the ground-floor, or area of the market—obviously the best place by
far—are unlet. These are of the high-priced, of course; still, as the
price decreases with the ascent, why are not more of the upper offices
taken? Here—in the very centre of all the great Coal trade of
England!—and not one-third, not one-fourth, we think, of the offices
let? We expressed our astonishment to the Captain.

“Oh!” said he, “the City is a queer place, and the City authorities are
a rum sort of reasoners. They asked too much rent for these berths at
first; and though but a few factors and merchants can afford to give it,
the City still persists. And so they are obliged to go to the expence of
fires in all the empty offices to keep them aired three-quarters of the
year round, rather than see the place full at a moderate rent. That’s
how I read their log.”

We now ascended to the third gallery. Here, the cold, though not the
“beggarly array of empty boxes,” was most expressive of the
mismanagement, _somehow_ and _somewhere_ of this well-placed, and most
commodious building, on which so much money has been expended.

The paintings in the entrance of this uppermost gallery were of
‘Shields’ on one side, and ‘Sunderland’ on the other. That of Shields
was a view of colliers in the river by moonlight, with a dull sky of
indigo blue, and smoky clouds—very well done, and truthful, having a
sufficient mixture of reality for the nature of the subject, and of
fancy for the picturesque. The picture of Sunderland, with its
one-arched iron bridge, which is so high above the water, that a collier
can pass underneath without striking her topmasts, is also a night
scene; but by torch-light; the red flashes of which fall upon a train of
little upright waggons full of coals, coming from the pit to be shipped.

The panels round this gallery are adorned with paintings of gigantic
ferns, fragments of the trunks of the lepidodendron, and the sigillaria,
and other stems and foliage of those antediluvian plants and trees which
subsequently contributed most largely to the coal formations. These
paintings are interspersed with various miners’ tools, above which rises
the glass dome of the building.

Descending the well-staircase, we asked Captain Oldcastle what capital
he thought was employed by the great coal owners on the Tyne and Wear.
He said—quoting his friend Buddle again, as authority—that they could
not have embarked less than a million and a half of money, without
reckoning any of the vessels on the river; but taking these into the
account, the capital employed would not amount to less than between
eight and ten millions. And this estimate was made by Buddle twenty
years ago!




                      THE GREAT PENAL EXPERIMENTS.


Prison Life, like life in all other circumstances, has its extremes; and
these have been pushed to the farthest verge of contrast by the ‘great
experiments’ that have lately been essayed. There is an aristocracy of
prisoners, and a commonality of prisoners; there are palace prisons, and
kennel prisons in which it would be cruelty to confine refractory dogs.
We have hardened criminals put into training in Model Prisons for
pattern penitence, and novices in crime thrust into dens with the most
depraved felons; so as to bring them down in morals to the lowest
practicable level. The study of some of these extremes is instructive.
It shows what results have been produced by the ‘great experiments’
which have been tried; either how much reform they have effected; or how
many misdemeanants they are likely to add to the already over-populated
dangerous class. For the sake of impartiality we shall in each instance
offer no description of our own; but we intend to cite what has already
been in print.

A graphic but eccentric pen has supplied a vivid description of the
palace order of gaols. “Some months ago,” says Mr. Carlyle, in a recent
pamphlet, “some friends took me with them to see one of the London
Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An immense circuit of
buildings; cut out, girt with a high ring wall, from the lanes and
streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a
fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad
staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture
all round. It lodges some Thousand or Twelve-hundred prisoners, besides
the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the most perfect
buildings, within the compass of London. We looked at the apartments,
sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms, general courts or special
and private; excellent all, the ne-plus-ultra of human care and
ingenuity; in my life I never saw so clean a building; probably no Duke
in England lives in a mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.
The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food, in
their respective cooking-places, we tasted; found them of excellence
superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work, picking oakum and
the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs, of agreeable temperature
and perfect ventilation; silent, or at least conversing only by secret
signs; others were out, taking their hour of promenade in clean flagged
courts; methodic composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome
comfort, reigned everywhere supreme.”

This is the great model experiment. We can easily reverse the picture.
It is but a short walk from Pentonville to Smithfield—scarcely two
miles—yet, in the prison world, the two places are antipodes. Here,
within the hallowed precincts of the City, stands Giltspur Street
Compter, upon the state of which we produce another witness. Mr. Dixon,
in his work on London Prisons, testifies that in this jail the prisoners
“sleep in small cells, little more than half the size of the model cell
at Pentonville, which is calculated (on the supposition that the cell is
to be ventilated on the best plan which science can suggest, regardless
of cost) to be just large enough for _one_ inmate. The cell in Giltspur
Street Compter is little more than half the size, and is either not
ventilated at all, or is ventilated very imperfectly. I have measured
it, and know exactly the quantity of air which it will hold, and have no
doubt but that it contains less than any human being ought to breathe
in, in the course of a night. Well, in this cell, in which there is
hardly room for them to lie down, I have seen _five_ persons locked up,
at four o’clock in the day, to be there confined, in darkness, in
idleness, to pass all those hours, to do all the offices of nature, not
merely in each other’s presence, but crushed by the narrowness of their
den into a state of filthy contact which brute beasts would have
resisted to the last gasp of life! Think of these five wretched
beings—men with souls, and gifted with human reason—condemned, day by
day, to pass in this unutterably loathsome manner two-thirds of their
time! Can we wonder if these men come out of prison, after three or four
months of such treatment, prepared to commit the most revolting crimes?
Could five of the purest men in the world live together in such a manner
without losing every attribute of good which had once belonged to them?
He would be a rash man who would dare to answer—‘Yes.’ Take another fact
from Newgate. In any of the female wards may be seen, a week before the
Sessions, a collection of persons of every shade of guilt, and some who
are innocent. I remember one case particularly. A servant girl, of about
sixteen, a fresh-looking healthy creature, recently up from the country,
was charged by her mistress for stealing a brooch. She was in the same
room—lived all day, slept all night—with the most abandoned of her sex.
They were left alone; they had no work to do; no books—except a few
tracts for which they had no taste—to read. The whole day was spent, as
is usual in such prisons, in telling stories—the gross and guilty
stories of their own lives. There is no form of wickedness, no aspect of
vice, with which the poor creature’s mind would not be compelled to grow
familiar in the few weeks she passed in Newgate awaiting trial. When the
day came, the evidence against her was found to be the lamest in the
world, and she was at once acquitted. That she entered Newgate innocent
I have no doubt; but who shall answer for the state in which she left
it?”

Let us not wrong the City in supposing it singular in promoting these
loathsome prison scenes. A hundred passages, in nearly as many blue
books, are ready for quotation, to show how some of the ‘great
experiments’ in not a few of the National prisons have turned out. One,
however, will do. Here is a sentence or two from the Government’s own
report of the state of one of its own hulks at Woolwich—the same
Government which has been so good as to dispense upwards of 90,000_l._
of the public money in building the Pentonville Model. We cannot quote
it entire, by reason of some of the passages being too revolting for
reproduction in these pages:—

“In the hospital ship, the “Unité,” the great majority of the patients
were infested with vermin, and their persons in many instances,
particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body
linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks
without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the
blankets had been washed; and the number of sheets was so insufficient,
that the expedient had to be resorted to of only a single sheet at a
time to save appearances. Neither towels nor combs were provided for the
prisoners’ use. * * * On the admission of new cases into the hospital,
patients were directed to leave their beds and go into hammocks, and the
new cases were turned into the vacated beds, without changing the
sheets.”

Is anything more shocking than the Compter, Newgate, and the Unité to be
conceived? Do travellers tell us of anything worse in Russia, or China,
or Old Tartary? “O! yes; there is Austria and its life-punishments in
Spielberg,” some one may suggest, “surely there is no London parallel
for that.” But Mr. Dixon answers there is:—in the Millbank Penitentiary.
‘The dark cells,’ he says, ‘are fearful places, and sometimes melancholy
mistakes are made in committing persons to them. You descend about
twenty steps from the ground-floor into a very dark passage leading into
a corridor, on one side of which the cells—small, dark, ill-ventilated,
and doubly barred—are ranged. No glimpse of day ever comes into this
fearful place. The offender is locked up for three days, and fed on
bread and water only. There is only a board to sleep on; and the only
furniture of the cell is a water-closet. On a former visit to Millbank,
some months ago, I was told there was a person in one of these cells.
“He is touched, poor fellow!” said the warden, “in his intellects.” But
his madness was very mild. He wished to fraternise with the other
prisoners; declared that all mankind are brethren; sang hymns when told
to be silent; and when reprimanded for taking these unwarranted
liberties, declared that he was the “governor.” They said he _pretended_
to be mad; which, seeing that his vagaries subjected him to continual
punishments, and procured him no advantages, was very likely! They put
him into darkness to enlighten his understanding; and alone, to teach
him how unbrotherly men are. Poor wretch! He was frightened with his
solitude, and howled fearfully. I shall never forget his wail as we
passed the door of his horrid dungeon. The tones were quite unearthly,
and caused an involuntary shudder. On hearing footsteps, he evidently
thought they were coming to release him. While we remained in the
corridor, he did not cease to shout and implore most lamentably for
freedom: when he heard us retreating, his voice rose into a yell; and
when the fall of the heavy bolts told him that we were gone, he gave a
shriek of horror, agony, and despair, which ran through the pentagon,
and can never be forgotten. God grant that I may never hear such sounds
again! On coming again, after three or four months’ absence, to this
part of the prison, the inquiry naturally arose, “What has become of the
man who _pretended_ to be mad?” The answer was, “Oh, he went mad, and
was sent to Bedlam!”’

What happens at Pentonville, and what takes place at Millbank, is done
under the same eye, under the same legislative supervision. The two
“great experiments” of iron and feather-bed prison reform are worked out
by the same power. The despots of Russia, Austria, and China, are at
least consistent. They have not carried on opposite systems—one of
extreme severity, and another of superlative ‘coddling.’ In no other
country but this does Justice—blind as she is—administer cocoa and
condign misery to the same degree of crime with the same hand.

We have thrown these facts together, merely to awaken attention to them.
We purposely abstain from suggestive comment. We know that the subject
of reformatory punishment is fraught with difficulties, to conquer which
all the “great experiments” have been tried. But they have only been
“great” because of their great expense and their great failure; and when
the failure is incontestable—proved beyond doubt by the direst
results,—should they not be abandoned, and something else tried, instead
of being made an absolute matter of faith, and a test to which certain
county magistrates, whom we could name, bring every man who is unhappy
enough to be within their power? The cause of it is plainly and
constantly presented at the bar of every Police Court and in the dock of
every Sessions House. It has resulted from an utter misapprehension of
means to end, and a lofty disregard of the good old adage, “prevention
is better than cure.” Although it has been daily observed that
ignorance—moral more than intellectual—ignorance has been the forerunner
of all juvenile crime, we have never tried any very great experiment
upon _that_. On the contrary, we spend hundreds of thousands every year
to effect the manifest impossibility of re-forming what has never been
formed. We have tried every shade of system but the right. Ingenuity has
been on the rack to invent every sort of reformatory, from the iron rule
of Millbank, to the affectionate fattening at Pentonville—except one,
and that happens to be the right one. Punishment has occupied all our
thoughts,—training, none. We condemn young criminals for not knowing
certain moralities which we have not taught them, and—by herding them
with accomplished professors of dishonesty in transit jails—punish them
for immoralities which have been there taught them. Instances of this
can be adduced in so large a proportion as to amount to a rule; to which
the appearance of instructed juvenile criminals at the tribunals is the
exception. Two or three glaring cases occurred only the past month. We
select one as reported in the “Globe” newspaper of Tuesday, May 7:—

  ‘BOW-STREET POLICE-COURT.—This day, two little children, whose heads
  hardly reached the top of the dock, were placed at the bar before Mr.
  Jardine, charged with stealing a loaf. Their very appearance told the
  want they were in. The housekeeper to Mr. Mims, baker, Drury Lane,
  deposed, that they, about eight o’clock last evening, went into the
  shop and asked for a quartern loaf, and while her back was turned to
  get it for them, they stole a half quartern loaf, value 2½_d._, which
  was lying on the counter, and made off with it. Police constable, F
  14, deposed, that he was on duty in Drury Lane, and seeing them
  quarrelling over the loaf, he asked them where they had got it. One of
  them answered, they had stolen it. After ascertaining how they came by
  it, he took them into custody. In defence, the prisoners said they
  were starving. Mr. Jardine sentenced them both to be once whipped in
  the House of Correction.’

These children were without means, friends, or any sort of instruction.
They were whipped then for their ignorance and want, for both which they
are not responsible. After whipping and a few imprisonments they will
doubtless be boarded and instructed by fellow prisoners into finished
thieves. The authorities tell us, that five-eighths of the juvenile
criminals—and a few become professional after the age of twenty—who are
received into jails, have not received one spark of moral or
intellectual training!

These, and a thousand other facts too obvious for the common sense of
our readers to be troubled with, induce us to recommend one other ‘great
experiment’ which has never yet been tried. It has the advantage of
being a preventive as well as a cure—it is—compared with all the penal
systems now in practice—immeasurably safer, more humane, and
incalculably cheaper. The ‘great experiment’ we propose, is NATIONAL
EDUCATION.




                       THE ORPHAN’S VOYAGE HOME.


             The men could hardly keep the deck,
               So bitter was the night;
             Keen north-east winds sang thro’ the shrouds,
               The deck was frosty white;
             While overhead the glistening stars
               Put forth their points of light.

             On deck, behind a bale of goods,
               Two orphans crouch’d, to sleep;
             But ’twas so cold, the youngest boy
               In vain tried not to weep:
             They were so poor, they had no right
               Near cabin doors to creep.

             The elder round the younger wrapt
               His little ragged cloak,
             To shield him from the freezing sleet,
               And surf that o’er them broke;
             Then drew him closer to his side,
               And softly to him spoke:—

             “The night will not be long”—he said,
               “And if the cold winds blow,
             We shall the sooner reach our home,
               And see the peat-fire glow;
             But now the stars are beautiful—
               Oh, do not tremble so!

             “Come closer!—sleep—forget the frost—
               Think of the morning red—
             Our father and our mother soon
               Will take us to their bed;
             And in their warm arms we shall sleep.”
               He knew not they were dead.

             For them no father to the ship
               Shall with the morning come;
             For them no mother’s loving arms
               Are spread to take them home:
             Meanwhile the cabin passengers
               In dreams of pleasure roam.

             At length the orphans sank to sleep
               All on the freezing deck;
             Close huddled side to side—each arm
               Clasp’d round the other’s neck.
             With heads bent down, they dream’d the earth
               Was fading to a speck.

             The steerage passengers have all
               Been taken down below,
             And round the stove they warm their limbs
               Into a drowsy glow;
             And soon within their berths forget
               The icy wind and snow.

             Now morning dawns: the land in sight,
               Smiles beam on every face!
             The pale and qualmy passengers
               Begin the deck to pace,
             Seeking along the sun-lit cliffs
               Some well-known spot to trace.

             Only the orphans do not stir,
               Of all this bustling train:
             They reach’d their _home_ this starry night!
               They will not stir again!
             The winter’s breath proved kind to them,
               And ended all their pain.

             But in their deep and freezing sleep
               Clasp’d rigid to each other,
             In dreams they cried, “The bright morn breaks,
               Home! home! is here, my brother!
             The Angel Death has been our friend—
               We come! dear Father! Mother!”




                      ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHEAPNESS.


                                  TEA.

The history of tea, from its first introduction to England, may be read
in the history of taxation. It appears to have escaped the notice of
nearly all writers on tea, that the first tax is a curious illustration
of the original mode of its sale. By the act of the 22d and 23d Charles
II., 1670–1, a duty of eighteenpence was imposed upon ‘every _gallon_ of
chocolate, sherbet, and tea, made and sold, to be paid by the makers
thereof.’ It is manifest that such a tax was impossible to be collected
without constant evasion; and so, after having remained on the Statute
Book for seventeen years, it was discovered, in 1688, that ‘the
collecting of the duty by way of Excise upon the liquors of coffee,
chocolate, and tea, is not only very troublesome and unequal upon the
retailers of these liquors, but requireth such attendance of officers as
makes the neat receipt very inconsiderable.’ The excise upon the liquor
was therefore repealed, and heavy Customs’ duties imposed on the
imported tea.

The annals of tea may be divided into epochs. The first is that in which
the liquid only was taxed, which tax commenced about ten years after we
have any distinct record of the public or private use of tea. In 1660,
dear old Pepys writes, ‘I did send for a cup of tea (a China drink) of
which I never had drank before.’ In 1667, the herb had found its way
into his own house: ‘Home, and there find my wife making of tea; a drink
which Mr. Pelling, the Potticary, tells her is good for her cold and
defluxions.’

Mrs. Pepys making her first cup of tea is a subject to be painted. How
carefully she metes out the grains of the precious drug, which Mr.
Pelling, the Potticary, has sold her at a most enormous price—a crown an
ounce at the very least. She has tasted the liquor once before: but then
there was sugar in the infusion—a beverage only for the highest. If tea
should become fashionable, it will cost in housekeeping as much as their
claret. However, Pepys says, the price is coming down; and he produces
the handbill of Thomas Garway, in Exchange Alley, which the lady peruses
with great satisfaction; for the worthy merchant says, that although
‘tea in England hath been sold in the leaf for six pounds, and sometimes
for ten pounds the pound weight,’ he ‘by continued care and industry in
obtaining the best tea,’ now ‘sells tea for 16_s._ to 50_s._ a pound.’
Garway not only sells tea in the leaf, but ‘many noblemen, physicians,
merchants, &c., daily resort to his house to drink the drink thereof.’
The coffee-houses soon ran away with the tea-merchant’s liquid
customers. They sprang up all over London; they became a fashion at the
Universities. Coffee and tea came into England as twin-brothers. Like
many other foreigners, they received a full share of abuse and
persecution from the people and the state. Coffee was denounced as ‘hell
broth,’ and tea as ‘poison.’ But the coffee-houses became fashionable at
once; and for a century were the exclusive resorts of wits and
politicians. ‘Here,’ says a pamphleteer of 1673, ‘haberdashers of
political small wares meet, and mutually abuse each other and the
public, with bottomless stories and headless notions.’ Clarendon, in
1666, proposed, either to suppress them, or to employ spies to note down
the conversation. In 1670 the liquids sold at the coffee-houses were to
be taxed. We can scarcely imagine a state of society in which the excise
officer was superintending the preparation of a gallon of tea, and
charging his eightpence. The exciseman and the spy were probably united
in the same person. During this period we may be quite certain that tea
was unknown, as a general article of diet, in the private houses even of
the wealthiest. But it was not taxation which then kept it out of use.
The drinkers of tea were ridiculed by the wits, and frightened by the
physicians. More than all, a new habit had to be acquired. The praise of
Boyle was nothing against the ancient influences of ale and claret. It
was then a help to excess instead of a preventive. A writer in 1682
says,—‘I know some that celebrate good Thee for preventing drunkenness,
taking it before they go to the tavern, and use it very much also after
a debauch.’ One of the first attractions of ‘the cup which cheers but
not inebriates’ was as a minister of evil.

The second epoch of tea was that of excessive taxation; which lasted
from the five shillings Customs’ duty of 1688 to 1745, more than half a
century, in which fiscal folly and prohibition were almost convertible
terms. Yet tea gradually forced its way into domestic use. In a Tatler
of 1710 we read ‘I am credibly informed, by an antiquary who has
searched the registers in which the bills of fare of the court are
recorded, that instead of tea and bread and butter, which have prevailed
of late years, the maids of honour in Queen Elizabeth’s time were
allowed three rumps of beef for their breakfast.’ Tea for breakfast must
have been expensive in 1710. In the original edition of the Tatler, we
have many advertisements about tea, one of which we copy:—

                  _From the Tatler of October 10, 1710._

  “Mr. Fary’s 16_s._ Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the
  best Foreign Bohee Tea, is sold by himself only at the Bell in
  Gracechurch Street. Note,—the best Foreign Bohee is worth 30_s._ a
  pound; so that what is sold at 20_s._ or 21_s._ must either be faulty
  Tea, or mixed with a proportionate quantity of damaged Green or Bohee,
  the worst of which will remain black after infusion.”

‘Mr. Fary’s 16_s._ Bohee Tea, not much inferior in goodness to the best
Foreign Bohee Tea’ was, upon the face of it, an indigenous manufacture.
‘The best Foreign Bohee is worth 30_s._ a pound.’ With such Queen Anne
refreshed herself at Hampton Court:

            ‘Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
            Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.’

When the best tea was at 30_s._ a pound, the home consumption of tea was
about a hundred and forty thousand pounds per annum. A quarter of a
century later, in the early tea-drinking days of Dr. Johnson, the
consumption had quadrupled. And yet tea was then so dear, that Garrick
was cross even with his favourite actress for using it too freely. ‘I
remember,’ says Johnson, ‘drinking tea with him long ago, when Peg
Woffington made it, and he grumbled at her for making it too strong. He
had then begun to feel money in his purse, and did not know when he
should have enough of it.’ In 1745, the last year of the second tea
epoch, the consumption was only seven hundred and thirty thousand pounds
per annum. Yet even at this period tea was forcing itself into common
use. Duncan Forbes, in his Correspondence, which ranges from 1715 to
1748, is bitter against ‘the excessive use of tea; which is now become
so common, that the meanest families, even of labouring people,
particularly in boroughs, make their morning’s meal of it, and thereby
wholly disuse the ale, which heretofore was their accustomed drink; and
the same drug supplies all the labouring women with their afternoon’s
entertainments, to the exclusion of the twopenny.’ The excellent
President of the Court of Session had his prejudices; and he was
frightened at the notion that tea was driving out beer; and thus,
diminishing the use of malt, was to be the ruin of agriculture. Some one
gave the Government of the day wiser counsel than that of prohibitory
duties, which he desired.

In 1745, the quantity of tea retained for home consumption was 730,729
lbs. In 1746, it amounted to 2,358,589 lbs. The consumption was trebled.
The duty had been reduced, in 1745, from 4_s._ per lb. to 1_s._ per lb.,
and 25 per cent. on the gross price. For forty years afterwards, the
Legislature contrived to keep the consumption pretty equal with the
increase of the population, putting on a little more duty when the
demand seemed a little increasing. These were the palmy days of Dr.
Johnson’s tea triumphs—the days in which he describes himself as ‘a
hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for many years diluted his
meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has
scarcely time to cool; who with tea amuses the evenings; with tea
solaces the midnights; and with tea welcomes the morning.’ This was the
third epoch—that of considerable taxation, enhancing the monopoly price
of an article, sold to the people at exorbitant profits.

In 1785, the Government boldly repealed the Excise duty; and imposed
only a Customs’ duty of 12½ per cent. The consumption of tea was doubled
in the first year after the change, and quadrupled in the third. The
system was too good to last. The concession of three years in which the
public might freely use an article of comfort was quite enough for
official liberality and wisdom. New duties were imposed in 1787; the
consumption was again driven back, and by additional duty upon duty, was
kept far behind the increase of the population for another thirty years.
In 1784, the annual consumption was only 4,948,983 lbs.; in 1787, with a
reduced duty, it was 17,047,054 lbs.; in 1807, when we had almost
reached the climax of high duties, it was only 19,239,212 lbs. This
state of things, with very slight alteration, continued till the peace.
The consumption had been nearly stationary for thirty years, with a duty
raised from 12½ per cent. to 96 per cent. Those were the days, which
some of us may remember, when we paid 12_s._ a pound for our green tea,
and 8_s._ for our black; the days when convictions for the sale of
spurious tea were of constant occurrence; and yet the days when Cobbett
was alarmed lest tea should become a common beverage, and calculated
that between eleven and twelve pounds a year were consumed by a
cottager’s family in tea-drinking. During this fourth epoch of excessive
taxation, the habit of tea-drinking had become so rooted in the people,
that no efforts of the Government could destroy it. The teas under 2_s._
6_d._ a pound (the Company’s warehouse prices without duty), were the
teas of the working classes—the teas of the cottage and the kitchen. In
1801, such teas paid only an excise of 15 per cent.; in 1803, they paid
60 per cent.; in 1806, 90 per cent. And yet the washerwoman looked to
her afternoon ‘dish of tea,’ as something that might make her
comfortable after her twelve hours’ labour; and balancing her saucer on
a tripod of three fingers, breathed a joy beyond utterance as she cooled
the draught. The factory workman then looked forward to the singing of
the kettle, as some compensation for the din of the spindle. Tea had
found its way even to the hearth of the agricultural labourer. He ‘had
lost his rye teeth’—to use his own expression for his preference of
wheaten bread—and he would have his ounce of tea as well as the best of
his neighbours. Sad stuff the chandler’s shop furnished him: no
commodity brought hundreds of miles from the interior of China, chiefly
by human labour; shipped according to the most expensive arrangements;
sold under a limited competition at the dearest rate; and taxed as
highly as its wholesale cost. The small tea-dealers had their
manufactured tea. But they had also their smuggled tea. The pound of tea
which sold for eight shillings in England, was selling at Hamburg for
fourteenpence. It was hard indeed if the artisan did not occasionally
obtain a cup of good tea at a somewhat lower price than the King and
John Company had willed. No dealer could send out six pounds of tea
without a permit. Excisemen were issuing permits and examining permits
all over the kingdom. But six hundred per cent. profit was too much for
the weakness of human nature and the power of the exciseman.

From the peace, to the opening of the China tea-trade in 1833, and the
repeal of the excise duty in 1834, there was a considerable increase in
the consumption of tea, but not an increase at all comparable to the
increase since 1834. We consumed ten million pounds more tea in 1833
than in 1816, a period of sixteen years; we consumed in 1848, a period
of fifteen years, seventeen million pounds more than in 1833. In 1848 we
retained for home consumption, 48,735,791 pounds. It is this present
period of large consumption which forms the fifth epoch.

The present duty on tea is 2_s._ 2¼_d._ a pound. The experienced
housewife knows where to buy excellent tea at 4_s._ a pound. But there
are shops in London where tea may be bought at 3_s._, and 3_s._ 4_d._ a
pound. Such low priced teas are used more freely than ever by the
hard-working poor. The duty is now unvarying, but enormously high. It is
unnecessary to assume that the cheap teas are now adulterated teas. In
the London Price Currents of the present May, there are several sorts of
tea as low as 8_d._ per pound, wholesale without duty. The finer teas
vary from 1_s._ to 2_s._ In 1833, previous to the opening of the China
trade, the price of Congou tea in the Company’s warehouses ranged from
2_s._ to 3_s._ per pound; in 1850 the lowest current price was 9_d._,
the highest 1_s._ 4_d._ In 1833, the Company’s price of Hyson tea varied
from 3_s._ to 5_s._ 6_d._; in 1850, the lowest current price was 1_s._
2_d._, the highest 3_s._ 4_d._

With the amount of duty on tea twice as high in 1850 as in 1833, how is
it that tea may be universally bought at one half of the price of 1833?
How is it that an article which yields five millions of revenue has
become so cheap that it is now scarcely a luxury? Before we answer this,
let us explain why we say that the duty is twice as high now as in 1833.
Before the opening of the China trade tea was taxed under the Excise at
an ad-valorem duty of ninety-six per cent. on one sort, and one hundred
per cent. on another, which gave an average of about half-a-crown a
pound. Those who resisted the destruction of the Company’s monopoly
predicted that the supply would fall off under the open trade; that the
Chinese would not deal with private merchants; that the market for tea
in China was a limited one; that tea would become scarcer and dearer.
The Government knew better than this. It repealed the Excise duty with
all its cumbrous machinery of permits; and it imposed a Customs’ duty
_at per pound_, which exists now, as it did in 1836, with the addition
of five per cent. Had the duty of 1833 been continued,—the hundred per
cent duty—the great bulk of tea, which is sold at an average of a
shilling a pound would have been only taxed a shilling a pound; it is
now taxed 2_s._ 2¼_d._ By a side-wind, the Government, with what some
persons may call financial foresight, doubled the tax upon the humbler
consumers. But it may be fairly questioned whether, if the tax of 1833
had continued, the Government would not have secured as much revenue by
the poor doubling their consumption of tea. The demand for no article of
general use is so fluctuating as that for tea. In seasons of prosperity,
the consumption rises several millions of pounds above the average; in
times of depression it falls as much below. Tea is the barometer of the
poor man’s command of something more than bread. With a tax of 2_s._
2¼_d._ a pound, it is clear that if sound commercial principles,
improved navigation, wholesale competition, and moderate retail profits,
had not found their way into the tea-trade, since the abolition of the
monopoly in 1833, the revenue upon tea would have been stationary,
instead of having increased a million and a half. All the manifold
causes that produce commercial cheapness in general—science, careful
employment of capital in profitable exchange, certainty and rapidity of
communication, extension of the market—have been especially working to
make tea cheap. Tea is more and more becoming a necessary of life to all
classes. Tea was denounced first as a poison, and then as an
extravagance. Cobbett was furious against it. An Edinburgh Reviewer of
1823, keeps no terms with its use by the poor: ‘We venture to assert,
that when a labourer fancies himself refreshed with a mess of this
stuff, sweetened by the coarsest black sugar, and with azure blue milk,
it is only the warmth of the water that soothes him for the moment;
unless, perhaps, the sweetness may be palatable also.’ It is dangerous
even for great reviewers to ‘venture to assert.’ In a few years after
comes Liebig, with his chemical discoveries; and demonstrates that
coffee and tea have become necessaries of life to whole nations, by the
presence of one and the same substance in both vegetables, which has a
peculiar effect upon the animal system; that they were both originally
met with amongst nations whose diet is chiefly vegetable; and, by
contributing to the formation of bile, their peculiar function, have
become a substitute for animal food to a large class of the population
whose consumption of meat is very limited, and to another large class
who are unable to take regular exercise.

Tea and coffee, then, are more especially essential to the poor. They
supply a void which the pinched labourer cannot so readily fill up with
weak and sour ale; they are substitutes for the country walk to the
factory girl, or the seamstress in a garret. They are ministers to
temperance; they are home comforts. Mrs. Piozzi making tea for Dr.
Johnson till four o’clock in the morning, and listening contentedly to
his wondrous talk, is a pleasant anecdote of the first century of tea;
the artisan’s wife, lingering over the last evening cup, while her
husband reads his newspaper or his book, is something higher, which
belongs to our own times.




           THE SICKNESS AND HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE OF BLEABURN.


                      IN THREE PARTS.—CHAPTER VI.

The new clergyman was, as the landlord had supposed he would be, a very
different person from Mr. Finch. If he had not been a fearless man, he
would not have come: much less would he have brought his wife, which he
did. The first sight of this respectable couple, middle-aged, business
like, and somewhat dry in their manner, tended to give sobriety to the
tone of mind of the Bleaburn people; a sobriety which was more and more
wanted from day to day; while certainly the aspect of Bleaburn was
enough to discourage the new residents, let their expectations have been
as dismal as they might.

Mr. and Mrs. Kirby arrived when Bleaburn was at its lowest point of
depression and woe. The churchyard was now so full that it could not be
made to hold more; and ten or eleven corpses were actually lying
unburied, infecting half-a-dozen cottages from this cause. There was an
actual want of food in the place—so few were able to earn wages. Farmer
Neale did all he could to tempt his neighbours to work for him; for no
strangers would come near a place which was regarded as a pesthouse; but
the strongest arm had lost its strength; and the men, even those who had
not had the fever, said they felt as if they could never work again. The
women went on, as habitual knitters do, knitting early and late, almost
night and day; but there was no sale. Even if their wares were avouched
to have been passed through soap and water before they were brought to
O——, still no one would run the slightest risk for the sake of hose and
comforters; and week after week, word was sent that nothing was sold:
and at last, that it would be better not to send any more knitted goods.
In the midst of all this distress, there was no one to speak to the
people; no one to keep their minds clear and their hearts steady. For
many weeks, there had not been a prayer publicly read, nor a psalm sung.
Meanwhile, the great comet appeared nightly, week after week. It seemed
as if it would never go away; and there was a general persuasion that
the comet was sent for a sign to Bleaburn alone, and not at all for the
rest of the earth, or of the universe; and that the fever would not be
stayed while the sign remained in the sky. It would have been well if
this had been the worst. The people, always rude, were now growing
desperate; and they found, as desperate people usually do, an object
near at hand to vent their fury upon. They said that it was the doctor’s
business to make them well: that he had not made them well: that so many
had died, that anybody might see how foul means had been used; and that
at last some of the doctor’s tricks had come out. Two of Dick Taylor’s
children had been all but choked, by some of the doctor’s physic; and
they might have died, if the Good Lady had not chanced to have been
there at the moment, and known what to do. And the doctor tried to get
off with saying that it was a mistake, and that that physic was never
made to go down anybody’s throat. They said, too, that it was only in
this doctor’s time that there had been such a fever. There was none such
in the late doctor’s time; nor now, in other places—at least, not so
bad. It was nothing like so bad at O——. The doctor had spoken lightly of
the comet: he had made old Nan Dart burn the bedding that her
grandmother left her—the same that so many of her family had died on:
and, though he gave her new bedding, it could never be the same to her
as the old. But there was no use talking. The doctor was there to make
them well; and instead of doing that, he made two out of three die, of
those that had the fever. Such grumblings broke out into storm; and when
Mr. and Mrs. Kirby descended into the hollow which their friends feared
would be their tomb, they found the whole remaining population of the
place blocking up the street before the doctor’s house, and smashing his
phials, and making a pile of his pill-boxes and little drawers, as they
were handed out of his surgery window. A woman had brought a candle at
the moment to fire the pill-boxes: and she kneeled down to apply the
flame. The people had already broken bottles enough to spill a good deal
of queer stuff; and some of this stuff was so queer as to blaze up, half
as high as the houses, as quick as thought. The flame ran along the
ground, and spread like magic. The people fled, supposing this the
doings of the comet and the doctor together. Off they went, up and down,
and into the houses whose doors were open. But the woman’s clothes were
on fire. She would have run too; but Mr. Kirby caught her arm, and his
firm grasp made her stand, while Mrs. Kirby wrapped her camlet cloak
about the part that was on fire. It was so quickly done—in such a moment
of time, that the poor creature was not much burned; not at all
dangerously; and the new pastor was at once informed of the character of
the charge he had undertaken.

That very evening Warrender was sent through the village, as crier, to
give a notice, to which every ear was open. Mr. Kirby having had medical
assurance that it was injurious to the public health that more funerals
should take place in the churchyard, and that the bodies should lie
unburied, would next day, bury the dead above the brow, on a part of
Furzy Knoll, selected for the purpose. For anything unusual about this
proceeding, Mr. Kirby would be answerable, considering the present state
of the village of Bleaburn. A waggon would pass through the village at
six o’clock the next morning; and all who had a coffin in their houses
were requested to bring it out, for solemn conveyance to the new burial
ground: and those who wished to attend the interment must be on the
ground at eight o’clock.

All ears were open again the next morning, when the cart made its slow
progress down the street; and some went out to see. It was starlight:
and from the east came enough of dawn to show how the vehicle looked
with the pall thrown over it. Now and then, as it passed a space between
the houses, a puff of wind blew aside the edge of the pall, and then the
coffins were seen within, ranged one upon another,—quite a load of them.
It stopped for a minute at the bottom of the street; and it was a relief
to the listeners to hear Warrender tell the driver that there were no
more, and that he might proceed up to the brow. After watching the
progress of the cart till it could no longer be distinguished from the
wall of grey rock along which it was ascending, those who could be
spared from tending the sick put on such black as they could muster, to
go to the service.

It was, happily, a fine morning;—as fine a November morning as could be
seen. It is not often that weather is of so much consequence as it was
to the people of Bleaburn to-day. They could not themselves have told
how it was that they came down from the awful service at Furzy Knoll so
much more light-hearted than they went up; and when some of them were
asked the reason, by those who remained below, they could not explain
it,—but, somehow, everything looked brighter. It was, in fact, not
merely the calm sunshine on the hills, and the quiet shadows in the
hollows; it was not merely the ruddy tinge of the autumn ferns on the
slopes, or the lively hop and flit of the wag-tail about the
spring-heads and the stones in the pool; it was not merely that the fine
morning yielded cheering influences like these, but that it enabled
many, who would have been kept below by rain, to hear what their new
pastor had to say. After going through the burial service very quietly,
and waiting with a cheerful countenance while the business of lowering
so many coffins by so few hands was effected, he addressed, in a plain
and conversational style, those who were present. He told them that he
had never before witnessed an interment like this; and he did not at all
suppose that either he or they should see such another. Indeed,
henceforth any funerals must take place without delay; as they very well
might, now that, on this beautiful spot, there was room without limit.
He told them how Farmer Neale had had the space they saw staked out
since yesterday, and how it would be fenced in—roughly, perhaps, but
securely—before night. He hoped and believed the worst of the sickness
was over. The cold weather was coming on; and, perhaps, he said with a
smile, it might be a comfort to some of them to know that the comet was
going away. He could not say for himself that he should not be sorry
when it disappeared; for he thought it a very beautiful sight, and one
which reminded every eye that saw it how ‘the heavens declare the glory
of God;’ and the wisest men were all agreed that it was a sign,—not of
any mischief, but of the beauty of God’s handiwork in the firmament, as
the Scriptures call the starry sky. The fact was, it was found that
comets come round regularly, like some of the other stars and our own
moon; and when a comet had once been seen, people of a future time would
know when to look for it again, and would be too wise to be afraid of
it. But he had better tell them about such things at another time, when
perhaps they would let their children come up to his house, and look
through a telescope,—a glass that magnified things so much, that when
they saw the stars, they would hardly believe they were the same stars
that they saw every clear night. Perhaps they might then think the
commonest star as wonderful as any comet. Another reason why they might
hope for better health was, that people at a distance now knew more of
the distress of Bleaburn than they had done; and he could assure his
neighbours, that supplies of nourishing food and wholesome clothing
would be lodged with the cordon till the people of the place could once
more earn their own living. Another reason why they might hope for
better health was, that they were learning by experience what was good
for health and what was bad. This was a very serious and important
subject, on which he would speak to them again and again, on Sundays and
at all times, till he had shown them what he thought about their having,
he might almost say, their lives and health in their own hands. He was
sure that God had ordered it so; and he expected to be able to prove to
them, by and by, that there need be no fever in Bleaburn if they chose
to prevent it. And now, about these Sundays and week days. He deeply
pitied them that they had been cut off from worship during their time of
distress. He thought there might be an end to that now. He would not
advise their assembling in the church. There were the same reasons
against it that there were two months ago; but there was no place on
earth where men might not worship God, if they wished it. If it were now
the middle of summer, he should say that the spot they were standing
on,—even yet so fresh and so sunny,—was the best they could have; but
soon the winter winds would blow, and the cold rains would come driving
over the hills. This would not do: but there was a warm nook in the
hollow,—the crag behind the mill,—where there was shelter from the east
and north, and the warmest sunshine ever felt in the hollow,—too hot in
summer, but very pleasant now. There he proposed to read prayers three
times a week, at an hour which should be arranged according to the
convenience of the greatest number; and there he would perform service
and preach a sermon on Sundays, when the weather permitted. He should
have been inclined to ask Farmer Neale for one of his barns, or to
propose to meet even in his kitchen; but he found his neighbours still
feared that meeting anywhere but in the open air would spread the fever.
He did not himself believe that one person gave the fever to another;
but as long as his neighbours thought so, he would not ask them to do
what might make them afraid. Then there was a settling what hours should
be appointed for worship at the crag; and the mourners came trooping
down into the hollow, with brightened eyes, and freshened faces, and
altogether much less like mourners than when they went up.

Before night, Mr. Kirby had visited every sick person in the place, in
company with the doctor. The poor doctor would hardly have ventured to
go his round without the assistance of some novelty that might divert
the attention of the people from his atrocities. Mr. Kirby did not
attempt to get rid of the subject. He told the discontented, to their
faces, that the doctor knew his business better than they did; and bade
them remember that it was not the doctor but themselves that had set
fire to spirits of wine, or something of that sort, in the middle of the
street, whereby a woman was in imminent danger of being burnt to death;
and that their outrage on the good fame and property of a gentleman who
had worn himself half dead with fatigue and anxiety on their account
might yet cost them very dear, if it were not understood that they were
so oppressed with sorrow and want that they did not know what they were
about. His consultations with the doctor from house to house, and his
evident deference to him in regard to matters of health and sickness,
wrought a great change in a few hours; and the effect was prodigiously
increased when Mrs. Kirby, herself a surgeon’s daughter, and no stranger
in a surgery, offered her daily assistance in making up the medicines,
and administering such as might be misused by those who could not read
the labels.

“That is what the Good Lady does, when she can get out at the right
time,” observed some one; “but now poor Jem is down, and his mother
hardly up again yet, it is not every day, as she says, that she can go
so far out of call.”

“Who is this Good Lady?” inquired Mr. Kirby. “I have been hardly
twenty-four hours in this place, and I seem to have heard her name fifty
times; and yet nobody seems able to say who she is.”

“She almost overpowers their faculties, I believe,” replied the doctor;
“and, indeed, it is not very easy to look upon her as upon any other
young lady. It comes easier to one’s tongue to call her an angel than to
introduce her as Miss Mary Pickard, from America.”

When he had told what he knew of her, the Kirbys said, in the same
breath,

“Let us go and see her.” And the doctor showed them the way to Widow
Johnson’s, where poor Jem was languishing, in that state which is so
affecting to witness, when he who has no intellect seems to have more
power of patience than he who has most. The visitors arrived at a
critical moment, however, when poor Jem’s distress was very great, and
his mother’s hardly less. There lay the Good Lady on the ground, doubled
up in a strange sort of way; Mrs. Johnson trying to go to her, but
unable; and Jem, on his bed in the closet within, crying because
something was clearly the matter.

“What’s to do now?” exclaimed the doctor.

Mary laughed as she answered, “O nothing, but that I can’t get up. I
don’t know how I fell, and I can’t get up. But it is mere fatigue—want
of sleep. Do convince Aunty that I have not got the fever.”

“Let’s see,” said the doctor. Then, after a short study of his new
patient, he assured Mrs. Johnson that he saw no signs of fever about her
niece. She had had enough of nursing for the present, and now she must
have rest.

“That is just it,” said Mary. “If somebody will put something under me
here, and just let me sleep for a few days, I shall do very well.”

“Not there, Miss Pickard,” said Mrs. Kirby, “you must be brought to our
house, where everything will be quiet about you; and then you may sleep
on till Christmas, if you will.”

Mary felt the kindness; but she evidently preferred remaining where she
was; and, with due consideration, she was indulged. She did not wish to
be carried through the street, so that the people might see that the
Good Lady was down at last; and besides, she felt as if she should die
by the way, though really believing she should do very well if only let
alone. She was allowed to order things just as she liked. A mattress was
put under her, on the floor. Ann Warrender came and undressed her,
lifting her limbs as if she was an infant, for she could not move them
herself; and daily was she refreshed, as she had taught others to
refresh those who cannot move from their beds. Every morning the doctor
came, and agreed with her that there was nothing in the world the matter
with her; that she had only to lie still till she felt the wish to get
up; and every day came Mrs. Kirby to take a look at her, if her eyes
were closed: and if she was able to talk and listen, to tell her how the
sick were faring, and what were the prospects of Bleaburn. After these
visits, something good was often found near the pillow; some firm jelly,
or particularly pure arrow-root, or the like; odd things to be dropped
by the fairies; but Mrs. Kirby said the neighbours liked to think that
the Good Lady was waited on by the Good People.

Another odd thing was, that for several days Mary could not sleep at
all. She would have liked it, and she needed it extremely, and the
window curtain was drawn, and everybody was very quiet, and even poor
Jem caught the trick of quietness, and lay immoveable for hours, when
the door of his closet was open, watching to see her sleep. But she
could not. She felt, what was indeed true, that Aunty’s large black eyes
were for ever fixed upon her; and she could not but be aware that the
matter of the very first public concern in Bleaburn was, that she should
go to sleep; and this was enough to prevent it. At last, when people
were getting frightened, and even the doctor told Mr. Kirby that he
should be glad to correct this insomnolence, the news went softly along
the street one day, told in whispers even at the further end, that the
Good Lady was asleep. The children were warned that they must keep
within doors, or go up to the brow to play; there must be no noise in
the hollow. The dogs were not allowed to bark, nor the ducks to quack;
and Farmer Neale’s carts were, on no account, to go below the Plough and
Harrow. The patience of all persons who liked to make a noise was tried
and proved, for nobody broke the rule; and when Mary once began
sleeping, it seemed as if she would never stop. She could hardly keep
awake to eat, or to be washed; and, as for having her hair brushed, that
is always drowsy work, and she could never look before her for two
minutes together while it was done. She thought it all very ridiculous,
and laughed at her own laziness, and then, before the smile was off her
lips, she had sunk on her pillow and was asleep again.


                               PART III.
                              CHAPTER VII.

It was a regular business now for three or four of the boys of Bleaburn
to go up to the brow every morning to bring down the stores from O——,
which were daily left there under the care of the watch. Mr. Kirby had
great influence already with the boys of Bleaburn. He found plenty for
them to do, and, when they were very hungry with running about, he gave
them wholesome food to satisfy their healthy appetite. He said, he and
Mrs. Kirby and the doctor worked hard, and they could not let anybody be
idle but those who were ill: and, now that the regular work and wages of
the place were suspended, he arranged matters after his own sense of the
needs of the people. The boys who survived and were in health, formed a
sort of regiment under his orders, and they certainly never liked work
so well before. Every little fellow felt his own consequence, and was
aware of his own responsibility. A certain number, as has been said,
went up to the brow to bring down the stores. A certain number were to
succeed each other at the doctor’s door, from hour to hour, to carry
medicines, that the sick might neither be kept waiting, nor be liable to
be served with the wrong medicine, from too many sorts being carried in
a basket together. Others attended upon Warrender, with pail and brush,
and helped him with his lime-washing. At first it was difficult, as has
been said, to induce the lads to volunteer for this service, and Mr.
Kirby directed much argument and persuasion towards their supposed fear
of entering the cottages where people were lying sick. This was not the
reason, however, as Warrender explained, with downcast eyes, when Mr.
Kirby wondered what ailed the lads, that they ran all sorts of dangers
all day long, and shirked this one.

“’Tis not the danger, I fancy, Sir,” said Warrender; “they are not so
much afraid of the fever as of going with me, I’m sorry to say.”

“Afraid of you!” said Mr. Kirby, laughing. “What harm could you do
them?”

“’Tis my temper, Sir, I’m afraid.”

“What is the matter with your temper? I see nothing amiss with it.”

“And I hope you never may, Sir: but I can’t answer for myself, though at
this moment I know the folly of such passion as these lads have seen in
me. Sir, it has been my way to be violent with them; and I don’t wonder
they slink away from me. But—”

“I am really quite surprised,” said Mr. Kirby. “This is all news to me.
I should have said you were a remarkably staid, quiet, persevering man;
and, I am sure, very kind hearted.”

“You have seen us all at such a time, you know, Sir! It is not only the
misfortunes of the time that sober us, but when there is so much to do
for one’s neighbours, one’s mind does not want to be in a passion—so to
speak.”

“Very true. The best part of us is roused, and puts down the worse. I
quite agree with you, Warrender.”

The boys were not long in learning that there was nothing now to fear
from Warrender. No one was sent staggering from a box on the ear. No
hair was ever pulled; nor was any boy ever shaken in his jacket. Instead
of doing such things, Warrender made companions of his young assistants,
taught them to do well whatever they put their hands to, and made them
willing and happy. While two or three thus waited on him, others carried
home the clean linen that his daughter and a neighbour or two were
frequently ready to send out: and they daily changed the water in the
tubs where the foul linen was deposited. Others, again, swept and washed
down the long steep street, making it look almost as clean as if it
belonged to a Dutch village. After the autumn pig-killing, there were
few or no more pigs. The poor sufferers could not attend to them; could
not afford, indeed, to buy them; and had scarcely any food to give them.
Though this was a token of poverty, it was hardly to be lamented in
itself, under the circumstances; for there is no foulness whatever, no
nastiness that is to be found among the abodes of men, so dangerous to
health as that of pig-styes. There is mismanagement in this. People take
for granted that the pig is a dirty animal, and give him no chance of
being clean; whereas, if they would try the experiment of keeping his
house swept, and putting his food always in one place, and washing him
with soap and water once a week, they would find that he knows how to
keep his pavement clean, and that he runs grunting to meet his washing
with a satisfaction not to be mistaken. Such was the conclusion of the
boys who undertook the purification of the two or three pigs that
remained in Bleaburn. As for the empty styes, they were cleaner than
many of the cottages. After a conversation with Mr. Kirby, Farmer Neale
bought all the dirt-heaps for manure; and in a few days they were all
trundled away in barrows—even to the stable-manure from the Plough and
Harrow—and heaped together at the farm, and well shut down with a casing
of earth, beat firm with spades. Boys really like such work as this,
when they are put upon it in the right way. They were less dirty than
they would have been with tumbling about and quarrelling and cuffing in
the filthy street; in a finer glow of exercise; with a more wholesome
appetite; and far more satisfaction in eating, because they had earned
their food. Moreover, they began to feel themselves little friends of
the grown people—of Mr. and Mrs. Kirby, and the Doctor, and the
Warrenders—instead of a sort of reptiles, or other plague; and Mr. Kirby
astonished them so by a bit of amusement now and then, when he had time,
that they would have called him a conjuror, if he had not been a
clergyman. He made a star—any star they pleased—as large as the comet,
just by making them look at it through a tube; and he showed them how he
took a drop of foul water from a stinking pool, and put it between
glasses in a hole in his window-shutter; and how the drop became like a
pond, and was found to be swarming with loathsome live creatures,
swimming about, and trying to swallow each other. After these
exhibitions, it is true the comet seemed much less wonderful and
terrible than before; but then the drop of water was infinitely more so.
The lads studied Mr. Kirby’s cistern—so carefully covered, and so
regularly cleaned out; and they learned how the water he drank at dinner
was filtered; and then they went and scoured out the few water-tubs
there were in the village, and consulted their neighbours as to how the
public of Bleaburn could be persuaded not to throw filth and refuse into
the stream at the upper part, defiling it for those who lived lower
down.

One morning at the beginning of December—on such a morning as was now
sadly frequent, drizzly, and far too warm for the season—the lads who
went up to the brow saw the same sight that had been visible in the same
place one evening in the preceding August. There was a chaise, and an
anxious post-boy, and a lady talking with one of the cordon. Mr. Kirby
had learned what friends Mary Pickard had in England, and which of them
lived nearest, and he had taken the liberty of writing to declare the
condition of the Good Lady. His letter brought the friend, Mrs.
Henderson, who came charged with affectionate messages to Mary from her
young daughters, and a fixed determination not to return without the
invalid.

“To think,” as she said to Mary when she appeared by the side of her
mattress, “that you should be in England, suffering in this way, and we
not have any idea what you were going through!”

Mary smiled, and said she had gone through nothing terrible on her own
account. She might have been at Mr. Kirby’s for three weeks past, but
that she really preferred being where she was.

“Do not ask her now, Madam, where she likes to be,” said Mr. Kirby, who
had been brought down the street by the bustle of a stranger’s arrival.
“Do not consult her at all, but take her away, and nurse her well.”

“Yes,” said the Doctor; “lay her in a good air, and let her sleep, and
feed her well; and she will soon come round. She is better—even here.”

“Madam,” said Widow Johnson’s feeble but steady voice, “be to her what
she has been to us; raise her up to what she was when I first heard her
step upon those stairs, and we shall say you deserve to be her friend.”

“You will go, will not you?” whispered Mrs. Kirby to Mary. “You will let
us manage it all for you?”

“Do what you please with me,” was the reply. “You know best how to get
me well soonest. Only let me tell Aunty that I will come again, as soon
as I am able.”

“Better not,” said the prudent Mrs. Kirby. “There is no saying what may
be the condition of this place by the spring. And it might keep Mrs.
Johnson in a state of expectation not fit for one so feeble. Better
not.”

“Very well,” said Mary.

Mrs. Kirby thought of something that her husband had said of Mary; that
he had never seen any one with such power of will and command so docile.
She merely promised her aunt frequent news of her; agreed with those who
doubted whether she could bear the jolting of any kind of carriage on
the road up to the brow; admitted that, though she could now stand, she
could not walk across the room; allowed herself to be carried on her
mattress in a carpet, by four men, up to the chaise; and nodded in reply
to a remark made by one little girl to another in the street, and which
the doctor wished she had not heard, that she looked “rarely bad.”

The landlady at O—— seemed, by her countenance, to have much the same
opinion of Mary’s looks, when she herself brought out the glass of wine,
for which Mrs. Henderson stopped her chaise at the door of the Cross
Keys. The landlady brought it herself, because none of her people would
give as much as a glass of cold water, hand to hand with any one who
came from Bleaburn. The landlady stood shaking her head, and saying she
had done the best she could; she had warned the young lady in time.

“But you were quite out in your warning,” said Mary. “You were sure I
should have the fever: but I have not.”

“You have not!”

“I have had no disease—no complaint whatever. I am only weak from
fatigue.”

“It is quite true,” said Mrs. Henderson, as the hostess turned to her
for confirmation. “Good wine like this, the fresh air of our moors, and
the easy sleep that comes to Good Ladies like her, are the only
medicines she wants.”

The landlady curtsied low—said the payment made should supply a glass of
wine to somebody at Bleaburn, and bade the driver proceed. After a mile
or two, he turned his head, touched his hat, and directed the ladies’
attention to a bottle of wine, with loosened cork, and a cup which the
hostess had contrived to smuggle into the pocket of the chaise. She was
sure the young lady would want some wine before they stopped.

“How kind every body is!” said Mary, with swimming eyes. Mrs. Henderson
cleared her throat, and looked out of the window on her side.




                             YOUNG RUSSIA.


Certain social theorists have, of late years, proclaimed themselves to
the puzzled public under the name and signification of ‘Young.’ Young
France, Young Germany, and Young England have had their day, and having
now grown older, and by consequence wiser, are comparatively mute. In
accordance with what seems a natural law, it is only when a fashion is
being forgotten where it originated—in the west—that it reaches Russia,
which rigidly keeps a century or so behind the rest of the Continent. It
is only recently, therefore, that we hear of ‘Young Russia.’

The main principles of all these national youths are alike. They are
pleasingly picturesque—simperingly amiable; with a pretty and piquant
dash of paradox. What they propose is not new birth, or dashing out into
new systems, and taking advantage of new ideas; but reverting to old
systems, and furbishing them up so as to look as good as new.
Re-juvenescence is their aim; the middle ages their motto. Young
England, to wit, desires to replace things as they were in the days of
the pack-horse, the thumb-screw, the monastery, the ducking-stool, the
knight errant, trial by battle, and the donjon-keep. To these he wishes
to apply all possible modern improvements, to adapt them to present
ideas, and to present events. Though he would have no objection to his
mailed knight travelling per first-class railway, he would abolish
luggage-trains to encourage intestine trade and the breed of that noble
animal the pack-horse. He has indeed done something in the monastic
line; but his efforts for the dissemination of superstition, and his
denunciations of a certain sort of witchcraft, have signally failed. In
truth, the task he has set himself—that of re-constructing society anew
out of old materials—though highly archæological, historical, and
poetic, has the fatal disadvantage of being simply impossible. It is
telling the people of the nineteenth century to carry their minds,
habits, and sentiments back, so as to become people of the thirteenth
century; it is trying to make new muslin out of mummy cloth, or razors
out of rusty nails.

‘Young Russia’ is an equal absurdity, but from a precisely opposite
cause; for, indeed, this sort of youth out of age is a series of
paradoxes. The Russian of the present day _is_ the Russian of past ages.
He exists by rule—the rule of despotism—which is as old as the Medes and
Persians; and which forces him into an iron mould that shapes his
appearance, his mind, and his actions, to one pattern, from one
generation to another. Hence everything that lives and breathes in
Russia being antique, there is no appreciable antiquity. The new school,
therefore—even if amateur politics were allowable in Russia, which they
are not, as a large population of exiles in Siberia can testify—has no
materials to work upon. Stagnation is the political law, and Young
Russia dies in its babyhood for want of sustenance. What goes by the
name of civilisation, is no advance in wealth, morals, or social
happiness. It is merely a tinsel coating over the rottenness and rust
with which Russian life is ‘sicklied o’er.’ It has nothing to do with a
single soul below the rank of a noble; and with him it means champagne,
bad pictures, Parisian tailors, operas, gaming, and other expences and
elegancies imported from the West. Hundreds of provincial noblemen are
ruined every year in St. Petersburg, in undergoing this process of
civilisation. The fortunes thus wasted are enormous; yet there is only
one railroad now in operation throughout the whole empire, and that
belongs to the Emperor, and leads to one of his palaces a few miles from
the Capital. Such is Russian civilisation. What then is Young Russia to
do? Ask one of its youngest apostles, Ivan Vassilievitsch.

This young gentleman—for an introduction to whom we are indebted to
Count Sollogub—was, not long ago, parading the Iverskoy boulevard—one of
the thirteen which half encircle Moscow—when he met a neighbour from the
province of Kazan. Ivan had lately returned from abroad. He was a
perfect specimen of the new school, inside and out. Within, he had
imbibed all the ideas of the juvenile or verdant schools of Germany,
France, and England. Without, he displayed a London macintosh; his coat
and trowsers had been designed and executed by Parisian artists; his
hair was cut in the style of the middle ages; and his chin showed the
remnants of a Vandyke beard. He also resembled the new school in another
respect: he had spent all his money, yet he was separated from home by
the distance of a long—a Russian—journey.

To meet with a neighbour—which he did—who travelled in his own carriage,
in which he offered a seat, was the height of good fortune. The more so,
as Ivan wished to see as much of Russian life on the road as possible,
and to note down his _impressions_ in a journal, whose white leaves were
as yet unsullied with ink. From the information he intended to collect,
he intended to commence helping to reconstruct Russian society after the
order of the new Russiaites.

The vehicle in which this great mission was to be performed, was a
humble family affair called a _Tarantas_.[1] After a series of
adventures—but which did not furnish Ivan a single _impression_ for his
note-book—they arrive at Vladimir, the capital of a province or
‘government.’ Here the younger traveller meets with a friend, to whom he
confides his intention of visiting all the other Government towns for
‘Young Russia’ purposes. His friend’s reply is dispiriting to the last
degree:—

Footnote 1:

  For further particulars of this comfortable conveyance, its occupants,
  and their adventures, we must refer the reader to Count Sollogub’s
  amusing little book, to which he has given the name of ‘The Tarantas.’

“There is no difference between our government towns. See one, and
you’ll know them all!”

“Is it possible?”

“It is so, I assure you, Every one has a High-street; one principal
shop, where the country gentlemen buy silks for their wives, and
champagne for themselves; then there are the Courts of Justice, the
assembly-rooms, an apothecary’s shop, a river, a square, a bazaar, two
or three street-lamps, sentry-boxes for the watchmen, and the governor’s
house.”

“The society, however, in the government towns must be different?”

“On the contrary. The society is still more uniform than the buildings.”

“You astonish me: how is that?”

“Listen. There is, of course, in every government town a governor. These
do not always resemble each other; but as soon as any one of them
appears, police and secretaries immediately become active, merchants and
tradesmen bow, and the gentry draw themselves up, with, however, some
little awe. Wherever the governor goes, he is sure to find champagne,
the wine so much patronised in the province, and everybody drinks a
bumper to the health of the ‘_father of the province_.’ Governors
generally are well-bred, and sometimes very proud. They like to give
dinner parties, and benevolently condescend to play a game of whist with
rich brandy-contractors and landowners.”

“That’s a common thing,” remarked Ivan Vassilievitsch.

“Do not interrupt me. Besides the governor, there is in nearly every
government town the governor’s lady. She is rather a peculiar personage.
Generally brought up in one of the two capitals, and spoiled with the
cringing attentions of her company. On her husband’s first entry into
office, she is polite and affable; later, she begins to feel weary of
the ordinary provincial intrigues and gossips; she gets accustomed to
the slavish attentions she receives, and lays claim to them. At this
period she surrounds herself with a parasitical suite; she quarrels with
the lady of the vice-governor; she brags of St. Petersburg; speaks with
disdain of her provincial circle, and finally draws upon herself the
utmost universal ill-feeling, which is kept up till the day of her
departure, when all goes into oblivion, everything is pardoned, and
everybody bids her farewell with tears.”

“Two persons do not form the whole society of a town,” interrupted again
Ivan Vassilievitsch.

“Patience, brother, patience! Certainly there are other persons besides
the two I have just spoken of: there is the vice-governor and his lady;
several presidents, with their respective ladies, and an innumerable
crowd of functionaries serving under their leadership. The ladies are
ever quarrelling in words, whilst their husbands do the same thing upon
foolscap. The presidents, for the most part, are men of advanced age and
business-like habits, with great crosses hanging from their necks, and
are during the daytime to be seen out of their courts only on holidays.
The government attorney is generally a single man, and an enviable
match. The superior officer of the _gens-d’armes_ is a ‘good fellow.’
The nobility-marshal a great sportsman. Besides the government and the
local officers, there live in a government town stingy landowners, or
those who have squandered away their property; they gamble from evening
to morning, nay, from morning to evening too, without getting the least
bit tired of their exercise.”

“Now, about the mode of living?” asked Ivan Vassilievitsch.

“The mode of living is a very dull one. An exchange of ceremonious
visits. Intrigues, cards—cards, intrigues. Now and then, perchance, you
may meet with a kind, hospitable family, but such a case is very rare;
you much oftener find a ludicrous affectation to imitate the manners of
an imaginary high life. There are no public amusements in a government
town. During winter a series of balls are announced to take place at the
Assembly-rooms; however, from an absurd primness, these balls are little
frequented, because no one wants to be the first in the room. The ‘_bon
genre_’ remains at home and plays whist. In general, I have remarked,
that on arriving in a government town, it seems as if you were too early
or too late for some extraordinary event. You are ever welcomed: ‘What a
pity you were not here yesterday!’ or, ‘You should stay here till
to-morrow.’”

In process of time Ivan Vassilievitsch and his good-natured fat
companion, Vassily Ivanovitsch, reach a borough town, where the Tarantas
breaks down. There is a tavern and here is a description of it.

‘The tavern was like any other tavern,—a large wooden hut, with the
usual out-buildings. At the entrance stood an empty cart. The staircase
was crooked and shaky, and at the top of it, like a moving candelabrum,
stood a waiter with a tallow candle in his hand. To the right was the
tap-room, painted from time immemorial to imitate a grove. Tumblers,
tea-pots, decanters, three silver and a great number of pewter spoons,
adorned the shelves of a cupboard; a couple of lads in chintz shirts,
with dirty napkins over their shoulders, busied themselves at the bar.
Through an open door you saw in the next room a billiard table, and a
hen gravely promenading upon it.

‘Our travellers were conducted into the principal room of this elegant
establishment, where they found, seated round a boiling tea-urn, three
merchants,—one grey-haired, one red-haired, and one dark-haired. Each of
these was armed with a steaming tumbler; each of them sipped, smacked
his lips, stroked his beard and sipped again the fragrant beverage.

‘The red-haired man was saying:—’

“I made, last summer, a splendid bargain: I had bought from a company of
Samara-Tartars, some five hundred bags of prime quality, and had at the
same time a similar quantity, which I purchased from a nobleman who was
in want of money, but such dreadful stuff it was, that if it had not
been for the very low price, I would never have thought of looking at
it. What did I do? I mixed these two cargoes, and sold the whole lot to
a brandy-contractor at Ribna, for prime quality.”

“It was a clever speculation,” remarked the dark-haired.

“A commercial trick!” added the grey-haired.

‘Whilst this conversation was proceeding, Vassily Ivanovitsch and Ivan
Vassilievitsch had taken seats at a separate little table; they had
ordered their tea, and were listening to what the three merchants were
saying.

‘A poor looking fellow came in and took from his breast-pocket an
incredibly dirty sheet of paper, in which were wrapped up bank-notes and
some gold, and handed it over to the grey-haired merchant, who, having
counted them over, said:’

“Five thousand, two hundred and seventeen roubles. Is it right?”

“Quite right, Sir.”

“It shall be delivered according to your wish.”

‘Ivan asked why the sender had not taken a receipt?

‘The red and dark-haired merchants burst out laughing; the grey-haired
got into a passion.’

“A receipt!” he cried out furiously, “a receipt! I would have broken his
jaw with his own money had he dared to ask me for a receipt. I have been
a merchant now more than fifty years, and I have never yet been insulted
by being asked to give a receipt.”

“You see, Sir,” said the red-haired merchant, “it is only with noblemen
that such things as receipts and bills of exchange exist. We commercial
people do not make use of them. Our simple word suffices. We have no
time to spare for writing. For instance, Sir: here is Sidor
Avdeievitsch, who has millions of roubles in his trade, and his whole
writing consists of a few scraps of paper, for memory’s sake, Sir.”

“I don’t understand that,” interrupted Ivan Vassilievitsch.

“How could you, Sir? It is mere commercial business, without plan or
_façade_. We ourselves learn it from our childhood: first as
errand-boys, then as clerks, till we become partners in the business. I
confess it is hard work.”

Upon this text Ivan preaches a ‘Young Russia discourse.’

“Allow me a few words,” he said with fervour. “It appears to me that we
have in Russia a great number of persons buying and selling, but yet, I
must say, we have no systematic commerce. For commerce, science and
learning are indispensable; a conflux of civilised men, clever
mathematical calculations—but not, as seems to be the case with you,
dependence upon mere chance. You earn millions, because you convert the
consumer into a victim, against whom every kind of cheat is pardonable,
and then you lay by farthing by farthing, refusing yourselves not only
all the enjoyments of life, but even the most necessary comforts.... You
brag of your threadbare clothes; but surely this extreme parsimony is a
thousand times more blameable than the opposite prodigality of those of
your comrades who spend their time amongst gipsies, and their money in
feasting. You boast of your ignorance, because you do not know what
civilisation is. Civilisation, according to your notions, consists in
shorter laps of a coat, foreign furniture, bronzes, and champagne—in a
word, in outward trifles and silly customs. Trust me, not such is
civilisation.... Unite yourselves! Be it your vocation to lay open all
the hidden riches of our great country; to diffuse life and vigour into
all its veins; to take the whole management of its material interests
into your hands. Unite your endeavours in this beautiful deed, and you
may be certain of success! Why should Russia be worse than England?
Comprehend only your calling; let the beam of civilisation fall upon
you, and your love for your fatherland will strengthen such a union; and
you will see that not only the whole of Russia, but even the whole world
will be in your hands.”

‘At this eloquent conclusion, the red and the dark-haired merchants
opened wide their eyes. They, of course, did not understand a single
word of Ivan Vassilievitsch’s speech.’

“Alas, for Young Russia,” Ivan dolefully remarks in another place;—

“I thought to study life in the provinces: there is no life in the
provinces: every one there is said to be of the same cut. Life in the
capitals is not a Russian life, but a weak imitation of the petty
perfections and gross vices of modern civilisation. Where am I then to
find Russia? In the lower classes, perhaps, in the every-day life of the
Russian peasant? But have I not been now for five days chiefly amongst
this class? I prick up my ears and listen; I open wide my eyes and look,
and do what I may, I find not the least trifle worth noting in my
‘_Impressions_.’ The country is dead; there is nothing but land, land,
land; so much land, indeed, that my eyes get tired of looking at it; a
dreadful road—waggons of goods, swearing carriers, drunken
stage-inspectors; beetles creeping on every wall; soups with the smell
of tallow-candles! How is it possible for any respectable person to
occupy himself with such nasty stuff? And what is yet more provoking, is
the doleful uniformity which tires you so much, and affords you no rest
whatever. Nothing new, nothing unexpected! To-morrow what has been
to-day; to-day what has been yesterday. Here, a post-stage, there again
a post-stage, and further the same post-stage again; here, a
village-elder asking for drink-money, and again to infinity
village-elders all asking for drink-money. What can I write? I begin to
agree with Vassily Ivanovitsch; he is right in saying that we do not
travel, and that there is no travelling in Russia. We simply are going
to Mordassy. Alas! for my ‘_Impressions_.’”

Whoever wants to know more of this amusing Young Russian, must consult
“The _Tarantas_.” We can assure the reader that the book is fraught with
a store of amusement—chiefly descriptions of town and country life in
Russia—not often compressed into the modest and inexpensive compass of a
thin duodecimo.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
 ● Renumbered footnotes.
 ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
 ● The caret (^) is used to indicate superscript, whether applied to a
     single character (as in 2^d) or to an entire expression (as in
     1^{st}).

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78176 ***