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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78184 ***
+
+
+     “_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE.
+
+
+
+
+                            HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
+                           A WEEKLY JOURNAL.
+
+
+                     CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+      N^{o.} 19.]      SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1850.      [PRICE 2_d._
+
+
+
+
+                        THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.
+
+
+                      IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.
+
+Sir Roger Rockville of Rockville was the last of a very long line. It
+extended from the Norman Conquest to the present century. His first
+known ancestor came over with William, and must have been a man of some
+mark, either of bone and sinew, or of brain, for he obtained what the
+Americans would call a prime location. As his name does not occur in the
+Roll of Battle Abbey, he was, of course, not of a very high Norman
+extraction; but he had done enough, it seems, in the way of knocking
+down Saxons, to place himself on a considerable eminence in this
+kingdom. The centre of his domains was conspicuous far over the country,
+through a high range of rock overhanging one of the sweetest rivers in
+England. On one hand lay a vast tract of rich marsh land, capable, as
+society advanced, of being converted into meadows; and on the other, as
+extensive moorlands, finely undulating, and abounding with woods and
+deer.
+
+Here the original Sir Roger built his castle on the summit of the range
+of rock, with huts for his followers; and became known directly all over
+the country of Sir Roger de Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the
+Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty hunter before the lord of the
+feudal district: it is certain that his descendants were. For
+generations they led a jolly life at Rockville, and were always ready to
+exchange the excitement of the chase for a bit of civil war. Without
+that the country would have grown dull, and ale and venison lost their
+flavour. There was no gay London in those days, and a good brisk
+skirmish with their neighbours in helm and hauberk was the way of
+spending their season. It was their parliamentary debate, and was
+necessary to thin their woods. Protection and Free Trade were as much
+the great topics of interest as they are now, only they did not trouble
+themselves so much about Corn bills. Their bills were of good steel, and
+their protective measures were arrows a cloth-yard long. Protection
+meant a good suit of mail; and a castle with its duly prescribed moats,
+bastions, portcullises, and donjon keep. Free Trade was a lively inroad
+into the neighbouring baron’s lands, and the importation thence of
+goodly herds and flocks. Foreign cattle for home consumption was as
+_sticking an article_ in their markets as in ours, only the blows were
+expended on one another’s heads, instead of the heads of foreign
+bullocks—that is, bullocks from over the Welch or Scotch Marches, as
+from beyond the next brook.
+
+Thus lived the Rockvilles for ages. In all the iron combats of those
+iron times they took care to have their quota. Whether it were Stephen
+against Matilda, or Richard against his father, or John against the
+barons; whether it were York or Lancaster, or Tudor or Stuart. The
+Rockvilles were to be found in the _mêlée_, and winning power and lands.
+So long as it required only stalwart frames and stout blows, no family
+cut a more conspicuous figure. The Rockvilles were at Bosworth Field.
+The Rockvilles fought in Ireland under Elizabeth. The Rockvilles were
+staunch defenders of the cause in the war of Charles I. with his
+Parliament. The Rockvilles even fought for James II. at the Boyne, when
+three-fourths of the most loyal of the English nobility and gentry had
+deserted him in disgust and indignation. But from that hour they had
+been less conspicuous.
+
+The opposition to the successful party, that of William of Orange, of
+course brought them into disgrace: and though they were never molested
+on that account, they retired to their estate, and found it convenient
+to be as unobtrusive as possible. Thenceforward you heard no more of the
+Rockvilles in the national annals. They became only of consequence in
+their own district. They acted as magistrates. They served as high
+sheriffs. They were a substantial county family, and nothing more.
+Education and civilisation advanced; a wider and very different field of
+action and ambition opened upon the aristocracy of England. Our fleets
+and armies abroad, our legislature at home, law and the church,
+presented brilliant paths to the ambition of those thirsting for
+distinction, and the good things that follow it. But somehow the
+Rockvilles did not expand with this expansion. So long as it required
+only a figure of six feet high, broad shoulders, and a strong arm, they
+were a great and conspicuous race. But when the head became the member
+most in request, they ceased to go a-head. Younger sons, it is true,
+served in army and in navy, and filled the family pulpit, but they
+produced no generals, no admirals, no archbishops. The Rockvilles of
+Rockville were very conservative, very exclusive, and very stereotype.
+Other families grew poor, and enriched themselves again by marrying
+plebeian heiresses. New families grew up out of plebeian blood into
+greatness, and intermingled the vigour of their fresh earth with the
+attenuated aristocratic soil. Men of family became great lawyers, great
+statesmen, great prelates, and even great poets and philosophers. The
+Rockvilles remained high, proud, bigotted, and _borné_.
+
+The Rockvilles married Rockvilles, or their first cousins, the
+Cesgvilles, simply to prevent property going out of the family. They
+kept the property together. They did not lose an acre, and they were a
+fine, tall, solemn race—and nothing more. What ailed them?
+
+If you saw Sir Roger Rockville,—for there was an eternal Sir Roger
+filling his office of high sheriff,—he had a very fine carriage, and a
+very fine retinue in the most approved and splendid of antique
+costumes;—if you saw him sitting on the bench at quarter sessions, he
+was a tall, stately, and solemn man. If you saw Lady Rockville shopping,
+in her handsome carriage, with very handsomely attired servants; saw her
+at the county ball, or on the race-stand, she was a tall, aristocratic,
+and stately lady. That was in the last generation—the present could
+boast of no Lady Rockville.
+
+Great outward respect was shown to the Rockvilles on account of the
+length of their descent, and the breadth of their acres. They were
+always, when any stranger asked about them, declared, with a serious and
+important air, to be a very ancient, honourable, and substantial family.
+“Oh! a great family are the Rockvilles, a very great family.”
+
+But if you came to close quarters with the members of this great and
+highly distinguished family, you soon found yourself fundamentally
+astonished: you had a sensation come over you, as if you were trying,
+like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without his delegated power.
+There was a goodly outside of things before you, but nothing came of it.
+You talked, hoping to get talking in return, but you got little more
+than “noes” and “yeses,” and “oh! indeeds!” and “reallys,” and sometimes
+not even that, but a certain look of aristocratic dignity or
+dignification, that was meant to serve for all answers. There was a sort
+of resting on aristocratic oars or “sculls,” that were not to be too
+vulgarly handled. There was a feeling impressed on you, that eight
+hundred years of descent and ten thousand a-year in landed income did
+not trouble themselves with the trifling things that gave distinction to
+lesser people—such as literature, fine arts, politics, and general
+knowledge. These were very well for those who had nothing else to pride
+themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—oh! certainly they were by no
+means requisite.
+
+In fact, you found yourself, with a little variation, in the predicament
+of Cowper’s people,
+
+                       —— who spent their lives
+               In dropping buckets into empty wells,
+               And _growing tired_ of drawing nothing up.
+
+Who hasn’t often come across these “dry wells” of society; solemn gulphs
+out of which you can pump nothing up? You know them; they are at your
+elbow every day in large and brilliant companies, and defy the best
+sucking-buckets ever invented to extract anything from them. But the
+Rockvilles were each and all of this adust description. It was a family
+feature, and they seemed, if either, rather proud of it. They must be
+so; for proud they were, amazingly proud; and they had nothing besides
+to be proud of, except their acres, and their ancestors.
+
+But the fact was, they could not help it. It was become organic. They
+had acted the justice of peace, maintained the constitution against
+upstarts and manufacturers, signed warrants, supported the church and
+the house of correction, committed poachers, and then rested on the
+dignity of their ancestors for so many generations, that their skulls,
+brains, constitutions, and nervous systems, were all so completely
+moulded into that shape and baked into that mould, that a Rockville
+would be a Rockville to the end of time, if God and Nature would have
+allowed it. But such things wear out. The American Indians and the
+Australian nations wear out; they are not progressive, and as Nature
+abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the vacuum wherever it may be,
+whether in a hot desert, or in a cold and stately Rockville;—a very
+ancient, honourable, and substantial family that lies fallow till the
+thinking faculty literally dies out.
+
+For several generations there had been symptoms of decay about the
+Rockville family. Not in its property, that was as large as ever; not in
+their personal stature and physical aspect. The Rockvilles continued, as
+they always had been, a tall and not bad-looking family. But they grew
+gradually less prolific. For a hundred and fifty years past there had
+seldom been more than two, or at most three, children. There had
+generally been an heir to the estate, and another to the family pulpit,
+and sometimes a daughter married to some neighbouring squire. But Sir
+Roger’s father had been an only child, and Sir Roger himself was an only
+child. The danger of extinction to the family, apparent as it was, had
+never induced Sir Roger to marry. At the time that we are turning our
+attention upon him, he had reached the mature age of sixty. Nobody
+believed that Sir Roger now would marry; he was the last, and likely to
+be, of his line.
+
+It is worth while here to take a glance at Sir Roger and his estate.
+They wore a strange contrast. The one bore all the signs of progress,
+the other of a stereotyped feudality. The estate, which in the days of
+the first Sir Roger de Rockville had been half morass and half
+wilderness, was now cultivated to the pitch of British agricultural
+science. The marshlands beyond the river were one splendid expanse of
+richest meadows, yielding a rental of four solid pounds per acre. Over
+hill and dale on this side for miles, where formerly ran wild deer, and
+grew wild woodlands or furze-bushes, now lay excellent farms and
+hamlets, and along the ridge of the ancient cliffs rose the most
+magnificent woods. Woods, too, clothed the steep hill-sides, and swept
+down to the noble river, their very boughs hanging far out over its
+clear and rapid waters. In the midst of these fine woods stood Rockville
+Hall, the family seat of the Rockvilles. It reared its old brick walls
+above the towering mass of elms, and travellers at a distance recognised
+it for what it was, the mansion of an ancient and wealthy family.
+
+The progress of England in arts, science, commerce, and manufacture, had
+carried Sir Roger’s estate along with it. It was full of active and
+moneyed farmers, and flourished under modern influences. How lucky it
+would have been for the Rockville family had it done the same!
+
+But amid this estate there was Sir Roger solitary, and the last of the
+line. He had grown well enough—there was nothing stunted about him, so
+far as you could see on the surface. In stature, he exceeded six feet.
+His colossal elms could not boast of a properer relative growth. He was
+as large a landlord, and as tall a justice of the peace, as you could
+desire; but, unfortunately, he was, after all, only the shell of a man.
+Like many of his veteran elms, there was a very fine stem, only it was
+hollow. There was a man, just with the rather awkward deficiency of a
+soul.
+
+And it were no difficult task to explain, either, how this had come
+about. The Rockvilles saw plainly enough the necessity of manuring their
+lands, but they scorned the very idea of manuring their family. What!
+that most ancient, honourable, and substantial family, suffer any of the
+common earth of humanity to gather about its roots! The Rockvilles were
+so careful of their good blood, that they never allied it to any but
+blood as pure and inane as their own. Their elms flourished in the
+rotten earth of plebeian accumulations, and their acres produced large
+crops of corn from the sewage of towns and fat sinks, but the Rockvilles
+themselves took especial care that no vulgar vigour from the real heap
+of ordinary human nature should infuse a new force of intellect into
+their race. The Rockvilles needed nothing; they had all that an ancient,
+honourable, and substantial family could need. The Rockvilles had no
+need to study at school—why should they? They did not want to get on.
+The Rockvilles did not aspire to distinction for talent in the world—why
+should they? They had a large estate. So the Rockville soul, unused from
+generation to generation, grew—
+
+                Fine by degrees, and _spiritually_ less,
+
+till it tapered off into nothing.
+
+Look at the last of a long line in the midst of his fine estate. Tall he
+was, with a stoop in his shoulders, and a bowing of his head on one
+side, as if he had been accustomed to stand under the low boughs of his
+woods, and peer after intruders. And that was precisely the fact. His
+features were thin and sharp; his nose prominent and keen in its
+character; his eyes small, black, and peering like a mole’s, or a hungry
+swine’s. Sir Roger was still oracular on the bench, after consulting his
+clerk, a good lawyer,—and looked up to by the neighbouring squires in
+election matters, for he was an unswerving tory. You never heard of a
+rational thing that he had said in the whole course of his life; but
+that mattered little, he was a gentleman of solemn aspect, of stately
+gait, and of a very ancient family.
+
+With ten thousand a-year, and his rental rising, he was still, however,
+a man of overwhelming cares. What mattered a fine estate if all the
+world was against him? And Sir Roger firmly believed that he stood in
+that predicament. He had grown up to regard the world as full of little
+besides upstarts, radicals, manufacturers, and poachers. All were
+banded, in his belief, against the landed interest. It demanded all the
+energy of his very small faculties to defend himself and the world
+against them.
+
+Unfortunately for his peace, a large manufacturing town had sprung up
+within a couple of miles of him. He could see its red-brick walls, and
+its red-tiled roofs, and its tall smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and
+extending over the slopes beyond the river. It was to him the most
+irritating sight in the world; for what were all those swarming weavers
+and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts, sworn foes of the ancient
+institutions and the landed interests of England? Sir Roger had passed
+through many a desperate conflict with them for the return of members to
+parliament. They brought forward men that were utter wormwood to all his
+feelings, and they paid no more respect to him and his friends on such
+occasions than they did to the meanest creature living. Reverence for
+ancient blood did not exist in that plebeian and rapidly multiplying
+tribe. There were master manufacturers there actually that looked and
+talked as big as himself, and _entre nous_, a vast deal more cleverly.
+The people talked of rights and franchises, and freedom of speech and of
+conscience, in a way that was really frightful. Then they were given
+most inveterately to running out in whole and everlasting crowds on
+Sundays and holidays into the fields and woods; and as there was no part
+of the neighbourhood half so pleasant as the groves and river banks of
+Rockville, they came swarming up there in crowds that were enough to
+drive any man of acres frantic.
+
+Unluckily, there were roads all about Rockville; foot roads, and high
+roads, and bridle roads. There was a road up the river side, all the way
+to Rockville woods, and when it reached them, it divided like a fork,
+and one pony or footpath led straight up a magnificent grove of a mile
+long, ending close to the hall; and another ran all along the river
+side, under the hills and branches of the wood.
+
+Oh, delicious were these woods! In the river there were islands, which
+were covered in summer with the greenest grass, and the freshest of
+willows, and the clear waters rushed around them in the most inviting
+manner imaginable. And there were numbers of people extremely ready to
+accept this delectable invitation of these waters. There they came in
+fine weather, and as these islands were only separated from the mainland
+by a little and very shallow stream, it was delightful for lovers to get
+across—with laughter, and treading on stepping-stones, and slipping off
+the stepping-stones up to the ankles into the cool brook, and pretty
+screams, and fresh laughter, and then landing on those sunny, and to
+them really enchanted, islands. And then came fishermen, solitary
+fishermen, and fishermen in rows; fishermen lying in the flowery grass,
+with fragrant meadow-sweet and honey-breathing clover all about their
+ears; and fishermen standing in file, as if they were determined to
+clear all the river of fish in one day. And there were other lovers, and
+troops of loiterers, and shouting roysterers, going along under the
+boughs of the wood, and following the turns of that most companionable
+of rivers. And there were boats going up and down; boats full of young
+people, all holiday finery and mirth, and boats with duck-hunters and
+other, to Sir Roger, detestable marauders, with guns and dogs, and great
+bottles of beer. In the fine grove, on summer days, there might be found
+hundreds of people. There were pic-nic parties, fathers and mothers with
+whole families of children, and a grand promenade of the delighted
+artisans and their wives or sweethearts.
+
+In the times prior to the sudden growth of the neighbouring town, Great
+Stockington, and to the simultaneous development of the love-of-nature
+principle in the Stockingtonians, nothing had been thought of all these
+roads. The roads were well enough till they led to these inroads. Then
+Sir Roger aroused himself. This must be changed. The roads must be
+stopped. Nothing was easier to his fancy. His fellow-justices, Sir
+Benjamin Bullockshed and Squire Sheepshank, had asked his aid to stop
+the like nuisances, and it had been done at once. So Sir Roger put up
+notices all about, that the roads were to be stopped by an Order of
+Session, and these notices were signed, as required by law, by their
+worships of Bullockshed and Sheepshank. But Sir Roger soon found that it
+was one thing to stop a road leading from One-man-Town to Lonely Lodge,
+and another to attempt to stop those from Great Stockington to
+Rockville.
+
+On the very first Sunday after the exhibition of those notice-boards,
+there was a ferment in the grove of Rockville, as if all the bees in the
+county were swarming there, with all the wasps and hornets to boot.
+Great crowds were collected before each of these obnoxious placards, and
+the amount of curses vomited forth against them was really shocking for
+any day, but more especially for a Sunday. Presently there was a rush at
+them; they were torn down, and simultaneously pitched into the river.
+There were great crowds swarming all about Rockville all that day, and
+with looks so defiant that Sir Roger more than once contemplated sending
+off for the Yeoman Cavalry to defend his house, which he seriously
+thought in danger.
+
+But so far from being intimidated from proceeding, this demonstration
+only made Sir Roger the more determined. To have so desperate and
+irreverent a population coming about his house and woods, now presented
+itself in a much more formidable aspect than ever. So, next day, not
+only were the placards once more hoisted, but rewards offered for the
+discovery of the offenders, attended with all the maledictions of the
+insulted majesty of the law. No notice was taken of this, but the whole
+of Great Stockington was in a buzz and an agitation. There were posters
+plastered all over the walls of the town, four times as large as Sir
+Roger’s notices, in this style:—
+
+“Englishmen! your dearest rights are menaced! The Woods of Rockville,
+your ancient, rightful, and enchanting resorts, are to be closed to you.
+Stockingtonians! the eyes of the world are upon you. ‘Awake! arise! or
+be for ever fallen!’ England expects every man to do his duty! And your
+duty is to resist and defy the grasping soil-lords, to seize on your
+ancient Patrimony!”
+
+“Patrimony! Ancient and rightful resort of Rockville!” Sir Roger was
+astounded at the audacity of this upstart, plebeian race. What! they
+actually claimed Rockville, the heritage of a hundred successive
+Rockvilles, as their own. Sir Roger determined to carry it to the
+Sessions; and at the Sessions was a magnificent muster of all his
+friends. There was Sir Roger himself in the chair; and on either hand, a
+prodigious row of county squire-archy. There was Sir Benjamin
+Bullockshed, and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the squires,—Sheepshank,
+Ramsbottom, Turnbull, Otterbrook, and Swagsides. The Clerk of Session
+read the notice for the closing of all the footpaths through the woods
+of Rockville, and declared that this notice had been duly, and for the
+required period publicly, posted. The Stockingtonians protested by their
+able lawyer Daredeville, against any order for the closing of these
+ancient woods—the inestimable property of the public.
+
+“Property of the public!” exclaimed Sir Roger. “Property of the public!”
+echoed the multitudinous voices of indignant Bullocksheds, Tenterhooks,
+and Ramsbottoms. “Why, Sir, do you dispute the right of Sir Roger
+Rockville to his own estate?”
+
+“By no means;” replied the undaunted Daredeville; “the estate of
+Rockville is unquestionably the property of the honourable baronet, Sir
+Roger Rockville; but the roads through it are the as unquestionable
+property of the public.”
+
+The whole bench looked at itself; that is, at each other, in wrathful
+astonishment. The swelling in the diaphragms of the squires Otterbrook,
+Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all the rest of the worshipful row, was too
+big to admit of utterance. Only Sir Roger himself burst forth with an
+abrupt—
+
+“Impudent fellows! But I’ll see them —— first!”
+
+“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin Bullockshed; and the whole bench
+nodded assent. The able lawyer Daredeville retired with a pleasant
+smile. He saw an agreeable prospect of plenty of grist to his mill. Sir
+Roger was rich, and so was Great Stockington. He rubbed his hands, not
+in the least like a man defeated, and thought to himself, “Let them go
+at it—all right.”
+
+The next day the placards on the Rockville estate were changed for
+others bearing “STOPPED BY ORDER OF SESSIONS!” and alongside of them
+were huge carefully painted boards, denouncing on all trespassers
+prosecutions according to law. The same evening came a prodigious
+invasion of Stockingtonians—tore all the boards and placards down, and
+carried them on their shoulders to Great Stockington, singing as they
+went, “See, the Conquering Heroes come!” They set them up in the centre
+of the Stockington marketplace, and burnt them, along with, an effigy of
+Sir Roger Rockville.
+
+That was grist at once to the mill of the able lawyer Daredeville. He
+looked on, and rubbed his hands. Warrants were speedily issued by the
+Baronets of Bullockshed and Tenterhook, for the apprehension of the
+individuals who had been seen carrying off the notice-boards, for
+larceny, and against a number of others for trespass. There was plenty
+of work for Daredeville and his brethren of the robe; but it all ended,
+after the flying about of sundry mandamuses and assize trials, in Sir
+Roger finding that though Rockville was his, the roads through it were
+the public’s.
+
+As Sir Roger drove homeward from the assize, which finally settled the
+question of these footpaths, he heard the bells in all the steeples of
+Great Stockington burst forth with a grand peal of triumph. He closed
+first the windows of his fine old carriage, and sunk into a corner; but
+he could not drown the intolerable sound. “But,” said he, “I’ll stop
+their pic-nic-ing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll have hold of them for
+trespassing and poaching!” There was war henceforth between Rockville
+and Great Stockington.
+
+On the very next Sunday there came literally thousands of the jubilant
+Stockingtonians to Rockville. They had brought baskets, and were for
+dining, and drinking success to all footpaths. But in the great grove
+there were keepers, and watchers, who warned them to keep the path, that
+narrow well-worn line up the middle of the grove. “What! were they not
+to sit on the grass?”—“No!”—“What! were they not to pic-nic?”—“No! not
+there!”
+
+The Stockingtonians felt a sudden damp on their spirits. But the river
+bank! The cry was “To the river bank! There they _would_ pic-nic.” The
+crowd rushed away down the wood, but on the river bank they found a
+whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again to the narrow line of
+footpath, and told them not to trespass beyond it. But the islands! they
+went over to the islands. But there too were Sir Roger’s forces, who
+warned them back! There was no road there—all found there would be
+trespassers, and be duly punished.
+
+The Stockingtonians discovered that their triumph was not quite so
+complete as they had flattered themselves. The footpaths were theirs,
+but that was all. Their ancient license was at an end. If they came
+there, there was no more fishing; if they came in crowds, there was no
+more pic-nic-ing; if they walked through the woods in numbers, they must
+keep to Indian file, or they were summoned before the county magistrates
+for trespass, and were soundly fined; and not even the able Daredeville
+would undertake to defend them.
+
+The Stockingtonians were chop-fallen, but they were angry and dogged;
+and they thronged up to the village and the front of the hall. They
+filled the little inn in the hamlet—they went by scores, and roving all
+over the churchyard, read epitaphs
+
+                That teach the rustic moralists to die,
+
+but don’t teach them to give up their old indulgences very
+good-humouredly. They went and sat in rows on the old churchyard wall,
+opposite to the very windows of the irate Sir Roger. They felt
+themselves beaten, and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he could
+coerce them to the keeping of the footpaths—but, then, they had the
+footpaths! True, thought the Stockingtonians, we have the footpaths, but
+then the pic-nic-ing, and the fishing, and the islands! The
+Stockingtonians were full of sullen wrath, and Sir Roger was—oh, most
+expressive old Saxon phrase—HAIRSORE! Yes, he was one universal round of
+vexation and jealousy of his rights. Every hair in his body was like a
+pin sticking into him. Come within a dozen yards of him; nay, at the
+most, blow on him, and he was excruciated—you rubbed his sensitive hairs
+at a furlong’s distance.
+
+The next Sunday the people found the churchyard locked up, except during
+service, when beadles walked there, and desired them not to loiter and
+disturb the congregation, closing the gates, and showing them out like a
+flock of sheep the moment the service was over. This was fuel to the
+already boiling blood of Stockington. The week following, what was their
+astonishment to find a much frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone!
+not a trace of it; but the spot where it had stood for ages, turfed,
+planted with young spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail! The
+exasperated people now launched forth an immensity of fulminations
+against the churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of them resolved to
+come and seat themselves in the street of the hamlet and there dine; but
+a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed in league with Sir Roger, soon
+routed them, drenched them through, and on attempting to seek shelter in
+the cottages, the poor people said they were very sorry, but it was as
+much as their holdings were worth, and they dare not admit them.
+
+Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over with the old delightful days at
+Rockville. There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and of roving in
+the islands. One sturdy disciple of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling
+a line from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir Roger came upon him
+and endeavoured to seize him. The man coolly walked into the middle of
+the river, and, without a word, continued his fishing.
+
+“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger, “that is still on my property.”
+The man walked through the river to the other bank, where he knew that
+the land was rented by a farmer. “Give over,” shouted Sir Roger, “I tell
+you the water is mine.”
+
+“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and be hanged to you! Don’t you
+see it is running away to Stockington?”
+
+There was bad blood between Rockville and Stockington-green. Stockington
+was incensed, and Sir Roger was hairsore.
+
+A new nuisance sprung up. The people of Stockington looked on the
+cottagers of Rockville as sunk in deepest darkness under such a man as
+Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar. They could not pic-nic, but they
+thought they could hold a camp-meeting; they could not fish for roach,
+but they thought they might for souls. Accordingly there assembled
+crowds of Stockingtonians on the green of Rockville, with a chair and a
+table, and a preacher with his head bound in a red handkerchief; and
+soon there was a sound of hymns, and a zealous call to come out of the
+darkness of the spiritual Babylon. But this was more than Sir Roger
+could bear; he rushed forth with all his servants, keepers, and
+cottagers, overthrew the table, and routing the assembly, chased them to
+the boundary of his estate.
+
+The discomfited Stockingtonians now fulminated awful judgments on the
+unhappy Sir Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They dared not enter
+again on his park, but they came to the very verge of it, and held
+weekly meetings on the highway, in which they sang and declaimed as
+loudly as possible, that the winds might bear their voices to Sir
+Roger’s ears.
+
+To such a position was now reduced the last of the long line of
+Rockville. The spirit of a policeman had taken possession of him. He had
+keepers and watchers out on all sides, but that did not satisfy him. He
+was perpetually haunted with the idea that poachers were after his game,
+that trespassers were in his woods. His whole life was now spent in
+stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations, and prowling along
+his river side. He looked under hedges, and watched for long hours under
+the forest trees. If any one had a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had
+only to enter his fields by the wood side, and wander a few yards from
+the path, and he was almost sure to spring out over the hedge, and in
+angry tones demand their name and address. The descendant of the
+chivalrous and steel-clad De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless spy on
+his own ample property. There was but one idea in his mind—encroachment.
+It was destitute of all other furniture but the musty technicalities of
+warrants and commitments. There was a stealthy and skulking manner in
+everything that he did. He went to church on Sundays, but it was no
+longer by the grand iron gate opposite to his house, that stood
+generally with a large spider’s web woven over the lock, and several
+others in different corners of the fine iron tracery, bearing evidence
+of the long period since it had been opened. How different to the time
+when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville had had these gates thrown wide
+on a Sunday morning, and, with all their train of household servants
+after their back, with true antique dignity, marched with much proud
+humility into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the solitary, suspicious,
+undignified Sir Roger, the keeper and policeman of his own
+property—stole in at a little side gate from his paddock, and back the
+same way, wondering all the time whether there was not somebody in his
+pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers in his grove.
+
+If you entered his house, it gave you as cheerless a feeling as its
+owner. There was the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants and
+flowers in his mother’s time—now a dusty receptacle of hampers, broken
+hand-glasses, and garden tools. These tools could never be used, for the
+gardens were grown wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the huge
+unpruned shrubs disputed the passage with you. In the wood above the
+gardens, reached by several flights of fine, but now moss-grown, steps,
+there stood a pavilion, once clearly very beautiful. It was now damp and
+ruinous—its walls covered with greenness and crawling insects. It was a
+great lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the watch for poachers.
+
+The line of the Rockvilles was evidently running fast out. It had
+reached the extremity of imbecility and contempt—it must soon reach its
+close.
+
+Sir Roger used to make his regular annual visit to town; but of late,
+when there, he had wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping into
+the shop-windows; and if it rained, standing under entries for hours
+after, till it was gone over. The habit of lurking and peering about,
+was upon him; and his feet bore him instinctively into those narrow and
+crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of the city—the trespassers and
+anglers in the game preserves and streams of humanity. He had lost all
+pleasure in his club; the most exciting themes of political life
+retained no piquancy for him. His old friends ceased to find any
+pleasure in him. He was become the driest of all dry wells. Poachers,
+and anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched purlieus of his lost
+fading-out mind, and he resolved to go to town no more. His whole nature
+was centred in his woods. He was for ever on the watch; and when at
+Rockville again, if he heard a door clap when in bed, he thought it a
+gun in his woods, and started up, and was out with his keepers.
+
+Of what value was that magnificent estate to him?—those superb woods;
+those finely-hanging cliffs; that clear and _riant_ river coming
+travelling on, and taking a noble sweep below his windows,—that glorious
+expanse of neat verdant meadows stretching almost to Stockington, and
+enlivened by numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle—those old farms
+and shady lanes overhung with hazel and wild rose; the glittering brook,
+and the songs of woodland birds—what were they to that worn-out old man,
+that victim of the delusive doctrine of blood, of the man-trap of an
+hereditary name?
+
+There the poet could come, and feel the presence of divinity in that
+noble scene, and hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create new
+heavens and earths from the glorious chaos of nature around him, and in
+one short hour live an empyrean of celestial life and love. There could
+come the very humblest children of the plebeian town, and feel a throb
+of exquisite delight pervade their bosoms at the sight of the very
+flowers on the sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above them. And
+poor Sir Roger, the holder, but not the possessor of all, walked only in
+a region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas than poachers and
+trespassers—no more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of
+hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was
+a specimen of human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine to
+the bestial, through the long-operating influences of false notions and
+institutions, continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a
+keeper. Had he been only a keeper, he had been a much happier man.
+
+His time was at hand. The severity which he had long dealt out towards
+all sorts of offenders made him the object of the deepest vengeance. In
+a lonely hollow of his woods, watching at midnight with two of his men,
+there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An affray ensued. The men
+perceived that their old enemy, Sir Roger, was there: and the blow of a
+hedge-stake stretched him on the earth. His keepers fled—and thus
+ignominiously terminated the long line of the Rockvilles. Sir Roger was
+the last of his line, but not of his class. There is a feudal art of
+sinking, which requires no study; and the Rockvilles are but one family
+amongst thousands who have perished in its practice.
+
+
+
+
+                       THE CHEMISTRY OF A CANDLE.
+
+
+The Wilkinsons were having a small party,—it consisted of themselves and
+Uncle Bagges—at which the younger members of the family, home for the
+holidays, had been just admitted to assist after dinner. Uncle Bagges
+was a gentleman from whom his affectionate relatives cherished
+expectations of a testamentary nature. Hence the greatest attention was
+paid by them to the wishes of Mr. Bagges, as well as to every
+observation which he might be pleased to make.
+
+“Eh! what? you sir,” said Mr. Bagges, facetiously addressing himself to
+his eldest nephew, Harry,—“Eh! what? I am glad to hear, sir, that you
+are doing well at school. Now—eh? now, are you clever enough to tell me
+where was Moses when he put the candle out?”
+
+“That depends, uncle,” answered the young gentleman, “on whether he had
+lighted the candle to see with at night, or by daylight, to seal a
+letter.”
+
+“Eh! Very good, now! ’Pon my word, very good,” exclaimed Uncle Bagges.
+“You must be Lord Chancellor, sir—Lord Chancellor, one of these days.”
+
+“And now, uncle,” asked Harry, who was a favourite with the old
+gentleman, “can you tell me what you do when you put a candle out?”
+
+“Clap an extinguisher on it, you young rogue, to be sure.”
+
+“Oh! but I mean, you cut off its supply of oxygen,” said Master Harry.
+
+“Cut off its ox’s—eh? what? I shall cut off your nose, you young dog,
+one of these fine days.”
+
+“He means something he heard at the Royal Institution,” observed Mrs.
+Wilkinson. “He reads a great deal about chemistry, and he attended
+Professor Faraday’s lectures there on the chemical history of a candle,
+and has been full of it ever since.”
+
+“Now, you sir,” said Uncle Bagges, “come you here to me, and tell me
+what you have to say about this chemical, eh?—or comical; which?—this
+comical chemical history of a candle.”
+
+“He’ll bore you, Bagges,” said Mr. Wilkinson. “Harry, don’t be
+troublesome to your uncle.”
+
+“Troublesome! Oh, not at all. He amuses me. I like to hear him. So let
+him teach his old uncle the comicality and chemicality of a farthing
+rushlight.”
+
+“A wax candle will be nicer and cleaner, uncle, and answer the same
+purpose. There’s one on the mantel-shelf. Let me light it.”
+
+“Take care you don’t burn your fingers, or set anything on fire,” said
+Mrs. Wilkinson.
+
+“Now, uncle,” commenced Harry, having drawn his chair to the side of Mr.
+Bagges, “we have got our candle burning. What do you see?”
+
+“Let me put on my spectacles,” answered the uncle.
+
+“Look down on the top of the candle around the wick. See, it is a little
+cup full of melted wax. The heat of the flame has melted the wax just
+round the wick. The cold air keeps the outside of it hard, so as to make
+the rim of it. The melted wax in the little cup goes up through the wick
+to be burnt, just as oil does in the wick of a lamp. What do you think
+makes it go up, uncle?”
+
+“Why—why, the flame draws it up, doesn’t it?”
+
+“Not exactly, uncle. It goes up through little tiny passages in the
+cotton wick, because very, very small channels, or pipes, or pores, have
+the power in themselves of sucking up liquids. What they do it by is
+called cap—something.”
+
+“Capillary attraction, Harry,” suggested Mr. Wilkinson.
+
+“Yes, that’s it; just as a sponge sucks up water, or a bit of lump-sugar
+the little drop of tea or coffee left in the bottom of a cup. But I
+mustn’t say much more about this, or else you will tell me I am doing
+something very much like teaching my grandmother to—you know what.”
+
+“Your grandmother, eh, young sharpshins?”
+
+“No—I mean my uncle. Now, I’ll blow the candle out, like Moses; not to
+be in the dark, though, but to see into what it is. Look at the smoke
+rising from the wick. I’ll hold a bit of lighted paper in the smoke, so
+as not to touch the wick. But see, for all that, the candle lights
+again. So this shows that the melted wax sucked up through the wick is
+turned into vapour; and the vapour burns. The heat of the burning vapour
+keeps on melting more wax, and that is sucked up too within the flame,
+and turned into vapour, and burnt, and so on till the wax is all used
+up, and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle, you see, is the last of
+the candle, and the candle seems to go through the flame into
+nothing—although it doesn’t, but goes into several things, and isn’t it
+curious, as Professor Faraday said, that the candle should look so
+splendid and glorious in going away?”
+
+“How well he remembers, doesn’t he?” observed Mrs. Wilkinson.
+
+“I dare say,” proceeded Harry, “that the flame of the candle looks flat
+to you; but if we were to put a lamp glass over it, so as to shelter it
+from the draught, you would see it is round,—round sideways, and running
+up to a peak. It is drawn up by the hot air; you know that hot air
+always rises, and that is the way smoke is taken up the chimney. What
+should you think was in the middle of the flame?”
+
+“I should say, fire,” replied Uncle Bagges.
+
+“Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright flame we see is something no
+thicker than a thin peel, or skin; and it doesn’t touch the wick. Inside
+of it is the vapour I told you of just now. If you put one end of a bent
+pipe into the middle of the flame, and let the other end of the pipe dip
+into a bottle, the vapour or gas from the candle will mix with the air
+there; and if you set fire to the mixture of gas from the candle and air
+in the bottle, it would go off with a bang.”
+
+“I wish you’d do that, Harry,” said Master Tom, the younger brother of
+the juvenile lecturer.
+
+“I want the proper things,” answered Harry. “Well, uncle, the flame of
+the candle is a little shining case, with gas in the inside of it, and
+air on the outside, so that the case of flame is between the air and the
+gas. The gas keeps going into the flame to burn, and when the candle
+burns properly, none of it ever passes out through the flame; and none
+of the air ever gets in through the flame to the gas. The greatest heat
+of the candle is in this skin, or peel, or case of flame.”
+
+“Case of flame!” repeated Mr. Bagges. “Live and learn. I should have
+thought a candle-flame was as thick as my poor old noddle.”
+
+“I can show you the contrary,” said Harry. “I take this piece of white
+paper, look, and hold it a second or two down upon the candle-flame,
+keeping the flame very steady. Now I’ll rub off the black of the smoke,
+and—there—you find that the paper is scorched in the shape of a ring;
+but inside the ring it is only dirtied, and not singed at all.”
+
+“Seeing is believing,” remarked the uncle.
+
+“But,” proceeded Harry, “there is more in the candle-flame than the gas
+that comes out of the candle. You know a candle won’t burn without air.
+There must be always air around the gas, and touching it like, to make
+it burn. If a candle hasn’t got enough air, it goes out, or burns badly,
+so that some of the vapour inside of the flame comes out through it in
+the form of smoke, and this is the reason of a candle smoking. So now
+you know why a great clumsy dip smokes more than a neat wax candle; it
+is because the thick wick of the dip makes too much fuel in proportion
+to the air that can get to it.”
+
+“Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a reason for everything,” exclaimed
+the young philosopher’s mamma.
+
+“What should you say, now,” continued Harry, “if I told you that the
+smoke that comes out of a candle is the very thing that makes a candle
+light? Yes; a candle shines by consuming its own smoke. The smoke of a
+candle is a cloud of small dust, and the little grains of the dust are
+bits of charcoal, or carbon, as chemists call it. They are made in the
+flame, and burnt in the flame, and, while burning, make the flame
+bright. They are burnt the moment they are made; but the flame goes on
+making more of them as fast as it burns them; and that is how it keeps
+bright. The place they are made in, is in the case of flame itself,
+where the strongest heat is. The great heat separates them from the gas
+which comes from the melted wax, and, as soon as they touch the air on
+the outside of the thin case of flame, they burn.”
+
+“Can you tell how it is that the little bits of carbon cause the
+brightness of the flame?” asked Mr. Wilkinson.
+
+“Because they are pieces of solid matter,” answered Harry. “To make a
+flame shine, there must always be some solid—or at least liquid—matter
+in it.”
+
+“Very good,” said Mr. Bagges,—“solid stuff necessary to brightness.”
+
+“Some gases and other things,” resumed Harry, “that burn with a flame
+you can hardly see, burn splendidly when something solid is put into
+them. Oxygen and hydrogen—tell me if I use too hard words, uncle—oxygen
+and hydrogen gases, if mixed together and blown through a pipe, burn
+with plenty of heat but with very little light. But if their flame is
+blown upon a piece of quicklime, it gets so bright as to be quite
+dazzling. Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass through the same
+flame, and it gives the flame a beautiful brightness directly.”
+
+“I wonder,” observed Uncle Bagges, “what has made you such a bright
+youth.”
+
+“Taking after uncle, perhaps,” retorted his nephew. “Don’t put my candle
+and me out. Well, carbon or charcoal is what causes the brightness of
+all lamps, and candles, and other common lights; so, of course, there is
+carbon in what they are all made of.”
+
+“So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing to your carbon. Giving light
+out of smoke, eh? as they say in the classics,” observed Mr. Bagges.
+
+“But what becomes of the candle,” pursued Harry, “as it burns away?
+where does it go?”
+
+“Nowhere,” said his mamma, “I should think. It burns to nothing.”
+
+“Oh, dear, no!” said Harry, “everything—everybody goes somewhere.”
+
+“Eh!—rather an important consideration that,” Mr. Bagges moralised.
+
+“You can see it goes into smoke, which makes soot for one thing,”
+pursued Harry. “There are other things it goes into, not to be seen by
+only looking, but you can get to see them by taking the right
+means,—just put your hand over the candle, uncle.”
+
+“Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather be excused.”
+
+“Not close enough down to burn you, uncle; higher up. There,—you feel a
+stream of hot air; so something seems to rise from the candle. Suppose
+you were to put a very long slender gas-burner over the flame, and let
+the flame burn just within the end of it, as if it were a chimney,—some
+of the hot steam would go up and come out at the top, but a sort of dew
+would be left behind in the glass chimney, if the chimney was cold
+enough when you put it on. There are ways of collecting this sort of
+dew, and when it is collected it turns out to be really water. I am not
+joking, uncle. Water is one of the things which the candle turns into in
+burning,—water coming out of fire. A jet of oil gives above a pint of
+water in burning. In some lighthouses they burn, Professor Faraday says,
+up to two gallons of oil in a night, and if the windows are cold the
+steam from the oil clouds the inside of the windows, and, in frosty
+weather, freezes into ice.”
+
+“Water out of a candle, eh?” exclaimed Mr. Bagges. “As hard to get, I
+should have thought, as blood out of a post. Where does it come from?”
+
+“Part from the wax, and part from the air, and yet not a drop of it
+comes either from the air or the wax. What do you make of that, uncle?”
+
+“Eh? Oh! I’m no hand at riddles. Give it up.”
+
+“No riddle at all, uncle. The part that comes from the wax isn’t water,
+and the part that comes from the air isn’t water, but when put together
+they become water. Water is a mixture of two things, then. This can be
+shown. Put some iron wire or turnings into a gun-barrel open at both
+ends. Heat the middle of the barrel red-hot in a little furnace. Keep
+the heat up, and send the steam of boiling water through the red-hot
+gun-barrel. What will come out at the other end of the barrel won’t be
+steam; it will be gas, which doesn’t turn to water again when it gets
+cold, and which burns if you put a light to it. Take the turnings out of
+the gun-barrel, and you will find them changed to rust, and heavier than
+when they were put in. Part of the water is the gas that comes out of
+the barrel, the other part is what mixes with the iron turnings, and
+changes them to rust, and makes them heavier. You can fill a bladder
+with the gas that comes out of the gun-barrel, or you can pass bubbles
+of it up into a jar of water turned upside down in a trough, and, as I
+said, you can make this part of the water burn.”
+
+“Eh?” cried Mr. Bagges. “Upon my word! One of these days, we shall have
+you setting the Thames on fire.”
+
+“Nothing more easy,” said Harry, “than to burn part of the Thames, or of
+any other water; I mean the gas that I have just told you about, which
+is called hydrogen. In burning, hydrogen produces water again, like the
+flame of the candle. Indeed, hydrogen is that part of the water, formed
+by a candle burning, that comes from the wax. All things that have
+hydrogen in them produce water in burning, and the more there is in them
+the more they produce. When pure hydrogen burns, nothing comes from it
+but water, no smoke or soot at all. If you were to burn one ounce of it,
+the water you would get would be just nine ounces. There are many ways
+of making hydrogen, besides out of steam by the hot gun-barrel. I could
+show it you in a moment by pouring a little sulphuric acid mixed with
+water into a bottle upon a few zinc or steel filings, and putting a cork
+in the bottle with a little pipe through it, and setting fire to the gas
+that would come from the mouth of the pipe. We should find the flame
+very hot, but having scarcely any brightness. I should like you to see
+the curious qualities of hydrogen, particularly how light it is, so as
+to carry things up in the air; and I wish I had a small balloon to fill
+with it and make go up to the ceiling, or a bag-pipe full of it to blow
+soap-bubbles with, and show how much faster they rise than common ones,
+blown with the breath.”
+
+“So do I,” interposed Master Tom.
+
+“And so,” resumed Harry, “hydrogen, you know, uncle, is part of water,
+and just one-ninth part.”
+
+“As hydrogen is to water, so is a tailor to an ordinary individual, eh?”
+Mr. Bagges remarked.
+
+“Well, now then, uncle, if hydrogen is the tailor’s part of the water,
+what are the other eight parts? The iron turnings used to make hydrogen
+in the gun-barrel, and rusted, take just those eight parts from the
+water in the shape of steam, and are so much the heavier. Burn iron
+turnings in the air, and they make the same rust, and gain just the same
+in weight. So the other eight parts must be found in the air for one
+thing, and in the rusted iron turnings for another, and they must also
+be in the water; and now the question is, how to get at them?”
+
+“Out of the water? Fish for them, I should say,” suggested Mr. Bagges.
+
+“Why, so we can,” said Harry. “Only, instead of hooks and lines, we must
+use wires—two wires, one from one end, the other from the other, of a
+galvanic battery. Put the points of these wires into water, a little
+distance apart, and they instantly take the water to pieces. If they are
+of copper, or a metal that will rust easily, one of them begins to rust,
+and air-bubbles come up from the other. These bubbles are hydrogen. The
+other part of the water mixes with the end of the wire and makes rust.
+But if the wires are of gold, or a metal that does not rust easily,
+air-bubbles rise from the ends of both wires. Collect the bubbles from
+both wires in a tube, and fire them, and they turn to water again; and
+this water is exactly the same weight as the quantity that has been
+changed into the two gases. Now then, uncle, what should you think water
+was composed of?”
+
+“Eh? well—I suppose of those very identical two gases, young gentleman.”
+
+“Right, uncle. Recollect that the gas from one of the wires was
+hydrogen, the one-ninth of water. What should you guess the gas from the
+other wire to be?”
+
+“Stop—eh?—wait a bit—eh?—oh!—why, the other eight-ninths, to be sure.”
+
+“Good again, uncle. Now this gas that is eight-ninths of water is the
+gas called oxygen that I mentioned just now. This is a very curious gas.
+It won’t burn in air at all itself, like gas from a lamp, but it has a
+wonderful power of making things burn that are lighted and put into it.
+If you fill a jar with it——”
+
+“How do you manage that?” Mr. Bagges inquired.
+
+“You fill the jar with water,” answered Harry, “and you stand it upside
+down in a vessel full of water too. Then you let bubbles of the gas up
+into the jar and they turn out the water and take its place. Put a
+stopper in the neck of the jar, or hold a glass plate against the mouth
+of it, and you can take it out of the water and so have bottled oxygen.
+A lighted candle put into a jar of oxygen blazes up directly and is
+consumed before you can say Jack Robinson. Charcoal burns away in it as
+fast, with beautiful bright sparks—phosphorus with a light that dazzles
+you to look at—and a piece of iron or steel just made red-hot at the end
+first, is burnt in oxygen quicker than a stick would be in common air.
+The experiment of burning things in oxygen beats any fire-works.”
+
+“Oh, how jolly!” exclaimed Tom.
+
+“Now we see, uncle,” Harry continued, “that water is hydrogen and oxygen
+united together, that water is got wherever hydrogen is burnt in common
+air, that a candle won’t burn without air, and that when a candle burns
+there is hydrogen in it burning, and forming water. Now, then, where
+does the hydrogen of the candle get the oxygen from, to turn into water
+with it?”
+
+“From the air, eh?”
+
+“Just so. I can’t stop to tell you of the other things which there is
+oxygen in, and the many beautiful and amusing ways of getting it. But as
+there is oxygen in the air, and as oxygen makes things burn at such a
+rate, perhaps you wonder why air does not make things burn as fast as
+oxygen. The reason is, that there is something else in the air that
+mixes with the oxygen and weakens it.”
+
+“Makes a sort of gaseous grog of it, eh?” said Mr. Bagges. “But how is
+that proved?”
+
+“Why, there is a gas, called nitrous gas, which, if you mix it with
+oxygen, takes all the oxygen into itself, and the mixture of the nitrous
+gas and oxygen, if you put water with it, goes into the water. Mix
+nitrous gas and air together in a jar over water, and the nitrous gas
+takes away the oxygen, and then the water sucks up the mixed oxygen and
+nitrous gas, and that part of the air which weakens the oxygen is left
+behind. Burning phosphorus in confined air will also take all the oxygen
+from it, and there are other ways of doing the same thing. The portion
+of the air left behind is called nitrogen. You wouldn’t know it from
+common air by the look; it has no colour, taste, nor smell, and it won’t
+burn. But things won’t burn in it, either; and anything on fire put into
+it goes out directly. It isn’t fit to breathe,—and a mouse, or any
+animal, shut up in it, dies. It isn’t poisonous, though; creatures only
+die in it for want of oxygen. We breathe it with oxygen, and then it
+does no harm, but good; for if we breathed pure oxygen, we should
+breathe away so violently, that we should soon breathe our life out. In
+the same way, if the air were nothing but oxygen, a candle would not
+last above a minute.”
+
+“What a tallow-chandler’s bill we should have!” remarked Mrs. Wilkinson.
+
+“‘If a house were on fire in oxygen,’ as Professor Faraday said, ‘every
+iron bar, or rafter, or pillar, every nail and iron tool, and the
+fire-place itself; all the zinc and copper roofs, and leaden coverings,
+and gutters, and pipes, would consume and burn, increasing the
+combustion.’”
+
+“That would be, indeed, burning ‘like a house on fire,’” observed Mr.
+Bagges.
+
+“‘Think,’” said Harry, continuing his quotation, “‘of the Houses of
+Parliament, or a steam-engine manufactory. Think of an iron-proof
+chest—no proof against oxygen. Think of a locomotive and its
+train,—every engine, every carriage, and even every rail would be set on
+fire and burnt up.’ So now, uncle, I think you see what the use of
+nitrogen is, and especially how it prevents a candle from burning out
+too fast.”
+
+“Eh?” said Mr. Bagges. “Well, I will say I do think we are under
+considerable obligations to nitrogen.”
+
+“I have explained to you, uncle,” pursued Harry, “how a candle, in
+burning, turns into water. But it turns into something else besides
+that; there is a stream of hot air going up from it that won’t condense
+into dew; some of that is the nitrogen of the air which the candle has
+taken all the oxygen from. But there is more in it than nitrogen. Hold a
+long glass tube over a candle, so that the stream of hot air from it may
+go up through the tube. Hold a jar over the end of the tube to collect
+some of the stream of hot air. Put some lime-water, which looks quite
+clear, into the jar; stop the jar, and shake it up. The lime-water,
+which was quite clear before, turns milky. Then there is something made
+by the burning of the candle that changes the colour of the lime-water.
+That is a gas, too, and you can collect it, and examine it. It is to be
+got from several things, and is a part of all chalk, marble, and the
+shells of eggs or of shell-fish. The easiest way to make it is by
+pouring muriatic or sulphuric acid on chalk or marble. The marble or
+chalk begins to hiss or bubble, and you can collect the bubbles in the
+same way that you can oxygen. The gas made by the candle in burning, and
+which also is got out of the chalk and marble, is called carbonic acid.
+It puts out a light in a moment; it kills any animal that breathes it,
+and it is really poisonous to breathe, because it destroys life even
+when mixed with a pretty large quantity of common air. The bubbles made
+by beer when it ferments, are carbonic acid, so is the air that fizzes
+out of soda-water,—and it is good to swallow though it is deadly to
+breathe. It is got from chalk by burning the chalk as well as by putting
+acid to it, and burning the carbonic acid out of chalk makes the chalk
+lime. This is why people are killed sometimes by getting in the way of
+the wind that blows from lime-kilns.”
+
+“Of which it is advisable carefully to keep to the windward,” Mr.
+Wilkinson observed.
+
+“The most curious thing about carbonic acid gas,” proceeded Harry, “is
+its weight. Although it is only a sort of air, it is so heavy that you
+can pour it from one vessel into another. You may dip a cup of it and
+pour it down upon a candle, and it will put the candle out, which would
+astonish an ignorant person; because carbonic acid gas is as invisible
+as the air, and the candle seems to be put out by nothing. A soap-bubble
+or common air floats on it like wood on water. Its weight is what makes
+it collect in brewers’ vats; and also in wells, where it is produced
+naturally; and owing to its collecting in such places it causes the
+deaths we so often hear about of those who go down into them without
+proper care. It is found in many springs of water, more or less; and a
+great deal of it comes out of the earth in some places. Carbonic acid
+gas is what stupifies the dogs in the Grotto del Cane. Well, but how is
+carbonic acid gas made by the candle?”
+
+“I hope with your candle you you’ll throw some light upon the subject,”
+said Uncle Bagges.
+
+“I hope so,” answered Harry. “Recollect it is the burning of the smoke,
+or soot, or carbon of the candle that makes the candle-flame bright.
+Also that the candle won’t burn without air. Likewise that it will not
+burn in nitrogen, or air that has been deprived of oxygen. So the carbon
+of the candle mingles with oxygen, in burning, to make carbonic acid
+gas, just as the hydrogen does to form water. Carbonic acid gas, then,
+is carbon or charcoal dissolved in oxygen. Here is black soot getting
+invisible and changing into air; and this seems strange, uncle, doesn’t
+it?”
+
+“Ahem! Strange, if true,” answered Mr. Bagges. “Eh?—well! I suppose it’s
+all right.”
+
+“Quite so, uncle. Burn carbon or charcoal either in the air or in
+oxygen, and it is sure always to make carbonic acid, and nothing else,
+if it is dry. No dew or mist gathers in a cold glass jar if you burn dry
+charcoal in it. The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic acid gas, and
+leaves nothing behind but ashes, which are only earthy stuff that was in
+the charcoal, but not part of the charcoal itself. And now, shall I tell
+you something about carbon?”
+
+“With all my heart,” assented Mr. Bagges.
+
+“I said that there was carbon or charcoal in all common lights,—so there
+is in every common kind of fuel. If you heat coal or wood away from the
+air, some gas comes away, and leaves behind coke from coal, and charcoal
+from wood; both carbon, though not pure. Heat carbon as much as you will
+in a close vessel, and it does not change in the least; but let the air
+get to it, and then it burns and flies off in carbonic acid gas. This
+makes carbon so convenient for fuel. But it is ornamental as well as
+useful, uncle. The diamond is nothing else than carbon.”
+
+“The diamond, eh? You mean the black diamond.”
+
+“No; the diamond, really and truly. The diamond is only carbon in the
+shape of a crystal.”
+
+“Eh? and can’t some of your clever chemists crystallise a little bit of
+carbon, and make a Koh-i-noor?”
+
+“Ah, uncle, perhaps we shall, some day. In the meantime I suppose we
+must be content with making carbon so brilliant as it is in the flame of
+a candle. Well; now you see that a candle-flame is vapour burning, and
+the vapour, in burning, turns into water and carbonic acid gas. The
+oxygen of both the carbonic acid gas and the water comes from the air,
+and the hydrogen and carbon together are the vapour. They are distilled
+out of the melted wax by the heat. But, you know, carbon alone can’t be
+distilled by any heat. It can be distilled, though, when it is joined
+with hydrogen, as it is in the wax, and then the mixed hydrogen and
+carbon rise in gas of the same kind as the gas in the streets, and that
+also is distilled by heat from coal. So a candle is a little gas
+manufactory in itself, that burns the gas as fast as it makes it.”
+
+“Haven’t you pretty nearly come to your candle’s end?” said Mr.
+Wilkinson.
+
+“Nearly. I only want to tell uncle, that the burning of a candle is
+almost exactly like our breathing. Breathing is consuming oxygen, only
+not so fast as burning. In breathing we throw out water in vapour and
+carbonic acid from our lungs, and take oxygen in. Oxygen is as necessary
+to support the life of the body, as it is to keep up the flame of a
+candle.”
+
+“So,” said Mr. Bagges, “man is a candle, eh? and Shakespeare knew that,
+I suppose, (as he did most things,) when he wrote—
+
+                       ‘Out, out, brief candle!’
+
+“Well, well; we old ones are moulds, and you young squires are dips and
+rushlights, eh? Any more to tell us about the candle?”
+
+“I could tell you a great deal more about oxygen, and hydrogen, and
+carbon, and water, and breathing, that Professor Faraday said, if I had
+time; but you should go and hear him yourself, uncle.”
+
+“Eh? well! I think I will. Some of us seniors may learn something from a
+juvenile lecture, at any rate, if given by a Faraday. And now, my boy, I
+will tell you what,” added Mr. Bagges, “I am very glad to find you so
+fond of study and science; and you deserve to be encouraged; and so I’ll
+give you a what-d’ ye-call-it?—a Galvanic Battery on your next
+birth-day; and so much for your teaching your old uncle the chemistry of
+a candle.”
+
+
+
+
+                             AN OLD HAUNT.
+
+
+        The rippling water, with its drowsy tone,—
+          The tall elms, tow’ring in their stately pride,—
+        And—sorrow’s type—the willow sad and lone,
+          Kissing in graceful woe the murmuring tide;—
+
+        The grey church-tower,—and dimly seen beyond,
+          The faint hills gilded by the parting sun,—
+        All were the same, and seem’d with greeting fond
+          To welcome me as they of old had done.
+
+        And for a while I stood as in a trance,
+          On that loved spot, forgetting toil and pain;—
+        Buoyant my limbs, and keen and bright my glance,
+          For that brief space I was a boy again!
+
+        Again with giddy mates I careless play’d,
+          Or plied the quiv’ring oar, on conquest bent;—
+        Again, beneath the tall elms’ silent shade,
+          I woo’d the fair, and won the sweet consent.
+
+        But brief, alas! the spell,—for suddenly
+          Peal’d from the tower the old familiar chimes,
+        And with their clear, heart-thrilling melody,
+          Awaked the spectral forms of darker times.
+
+        And I remember’d all that years had wrought—
+          How bow’d my care-worn frame, how dimm’d my eye,
+        How poor the gauds by Youth so keenly sought,
+          How quench’d and dull Youth’s aspirations high!
+
+        And in half mournful, half upbraiding host,
+          Duties neglected—high resolves unkept—
+        And many a heart by death or falsehood lost,
+          In lightning current o’er my bosom swept.
+
+        Then bow’d the stubborn knees, as backward sped
+          The self-accusing thoughts in dread array,
+        And slowly, from their long-congealèd bed,
+          Forced the remorseful tears their silent way.
+
+        Bitter, yet healing drops! in mercy sent,
+          Like soft dews falling on a thirsty plain,—
+        And ’ere those chimes their last faint notes had spent,
+          Strengthen’d and calm’d, I stood erect again.
+
+        Strengthen’d, the tasks allotted to fulfil;—
+          Calm’d, the thick-coming sorrows to endure;
+        Fearful of nought but of my own frail will,—
+          In His Almighty strength and aid secure.
+
+        For a sweet voice had whisper’d hope to me,—
+          Had through my darkness shed a kindly ray;—
+        It said: “The past is fix’d immutably,
+          Yet is there comfort in the coming day!”
+
+
+
+
+                           THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.
+
+
+Before we give a more exclusive attention to the “illustrious stranger,”
+we think it will be advisable to present the reader with a brief
+authentic account of the circumstances which led to the honour conferred
+upon England by the visit of this extraordinary personage. These
+circumstances are little known to the world; indeed, we have reason to
+believe they have never before been published.
+
+The British Consul at Cairo had frequently intimated to His Highness the
+Pasha of Egypt, that a live hippopotamus would be regarded as a very
+interesting and valuable present in England. Now, there were sundry
+difficulties of a serious nature involved in this business. In the first
+place, the favourite resort of the hippopotami is a thousand or fifteen
+hundred miles distant from Cairo; in the second place, the hippopotamus
+being amphibious, is not easily come-at-able; when he is environed, he
+is a tremendous antagonist, by reason of his great strength, enormous
+weight, his wrathfulness when excited, and we may add his prodigious
+mouth with its huge tusks. We are speaking of the _male_ hippopotamus.
+He is often slain by a number of rifle-balls (he only makes a comic grin
+of scorn at a few) and laid low from a distance: but as to being taken
+alive, that is a triumph which has scarcely ever been permitted to
+mortal man of modern times. It is quite a different matter in respect of
+the elephant. He cannot take to the water, and neither dive clean away,
+nor upset your boat with a plunge of his forehead; besides which you
+cannot get two tame renegade hippopotami to assist in the capture and
+subjugation of a relative, as is the case with elephants. Accordingly,
+His Highness the Pasha, not liking to compromise the dignity of
+despotism, and his own position as sovereign of Egypt, by promising
+anything which he might, perhaps, be unable to perform, turned a deaf
+ear to the repeated overtures of the British Consul. He never refused
+his request; he simply did not hear what he said, or could not be made
+to have a clear understanding as to what the Consul really wanted. His
+Highness had already given him the skin and bones of hippopotami, and
+many other animals alive and dead. If he wished for any birds, he was
+welcome to as many as he pleased!
+
+It so chanced, however, that Abbas Pasha took it into his head, or
+somebody told him, that we had in England several extraordinary breeds
+of dogs, horses, and cows,—hounds that could catch a gazelle by sheer
+fleetness, small fighting-dogs that would master a bull,—horses that
+could compete with his finest Arabian steeds, and beat them in a hard
+day’s hunt over rough ground. He bethought himself, therefore, of the
+hippopotamus. One good turn of this kind might deserve another of a
+different kind.
+
+“So, Consul,” said the Pasha abruptly one day, when Mr. Murray was
+dining with him, “so, you want a hippopotamus?”
+
+“Very much, your Highness.”
+
+“And you think that such an animal would be an acceptable present to
+your Queen and country?”
+
+“He would be accounted a great rarity,” said the Consul; “our
+naturalists would receive him with open arms—figuratively speaking,—and
+the public would crowd to pay their respects to him.”
+
+Abbas Pasha laughed at this pleasantry of the Consul. “Well,” said he,
+“we will inquire about this matter.” He half-turned his head over one
+shoulder to his attendants: “Send here the Governor of Nubia!” The
+attendants thus ordered made their salam, and retired.
+
+Anybody, not previously aware of the easy habits of a despotic
+sovereign, would naturally conclude that the Governor of Nubia was, at
+this time, in Cairo, and at no great distance from the royal abode. But
+it was not so. The Governor of Nubia was simply there—at home—smoking
+his pipe in Nubia. This brief and unadorned order, therefore, involved a
+post-haste messenger on a dromedary across the Desert, with a boat up
+the Nile, and then more dromedaries, and then another boat, and again a
+dromedary, till the Pasha’s mandate was delivered. We next behold the
+Governor of Nubia, in full official trim, proceeding post-haste with his
+suite across the Desert, and down the Nile, travelling day and night,
+until finally he is announced to the Pasha, and admitted to his most
+serene and fumigatious presence. The Governor makes his grand salam.
+
+“Governor,” says the Pasha—and we have this unique dialogue on the best
+authority—“Governor, have you hippopotami in your country?”
+
+“We have, your Highness.”
+
+Abbas Pasha reflected a moment; then said—“Send to me the Commander of
+the Nubian army. Now, go!”
+
+This was the whole dialogue. The Governor made his salam, and retired.
+With the same haste and ceremony, so far as the two things can be
+combined, he returned to Nubia by boat, and dromedary, and horse, and
+covered litter; and the same hour found the Commander of the army of
+Nubia galloping across the Desert with his attendants, in obedience to
+the royal mandate.
+
+The Pasha, knowing that all means of speed will be used, and what those
+means will be, together with the nature of the route, is able to
+calculate to a day when the Commander ought to arrive—and therefore
+_must_ arrive,—at his peril, otherwise. The British Consul is invited to
+dine with his Highness on this day.
+
+Duly, as expected, the Commander of the Nubian army arrives, and is
+announced, just as the repast is concluded. He is forthwith ushered into
+the presence of the sublime beard and turban. Coffee and pipes are being
+served. The Commander makes his grand salam, shutting his eyes before
+the royal pipe.
+
+“Commander,” says the Pasha, without taking his pipe from his mouth, “I
+hear that you have hippopotami in your country.”
+
+“It is true, your Highness; but——”
+
+“Bring me a live hippopotamus—a young one. Now, go!”
+
+This was actually the dialogue which took place on the occasion—and the
+whole of it. The Commander of the Nubian forces made his grand
+salam—retired—and returned as he came,—“big” with the importance of his
+errand,—but also not without considerable anxiety for its result.
+
+Arriving at Dongola, the Commander summoned his chief officers and
+captains of the Nubian hosts to a council of war on the subject of the
+hippopotamus hunt, on the result of which—he intimated—several heads
+were at stake, besides his own. A similar communication was speedily
+forwarded to the chief officers of the right wing of the army, quartered
+in their tents at Sennaar. The picked men of all the forces having been
+selected, the two parties met in boats at an appointed village on the
+banks of the Nile, and there concerted their measures for the
+expedition.
+
+The Commander divided the chosen body into several parties, and away
+they sped up the Nile. They followed the course of the river, beyond the
+point where it branches off into the Blue Nile, and the White Nile. Good
+fortune at length befel one of the parties; but this cost much time, and
+many unsuccessful efforts—now pursuing a huge savage river-horse, with
+rifle-balls and flying darts; now pursued by him in turn with foaming
+jaws and gnashing tusks—all of which may readily be conjectured, from
+the fact that they did not fall in with their prize till they had
+reached a distance, up the White Nile, of one thousand five hundred
+miles above Cairo. In the doublings and re-doublings of attack and
+retreat, of pursuit and flight, and renewed assault, they must of course
+have traversed in all, at least two thousand miles.
+
+Something pathetic attaches to the death of the mother of “our
+hero,”—something which touches our common nature, but which such hunters
+as Mr. Gordon Cumming would not be at all able to understand. A large
+female hippopotamus being wounded, was in full flight up the river; but
+presently a ball or two reached a mortal part, and then the maternal
+instinct made the animal pause. She fled no more, but turned aside, and
+made towards a heap of brushwood and water-bushes that grew on the banks
+of the river, in order (as the event showed) to die beside her young
+one. She was unable to proceed so far, and sank dying beneath the water.
+The action, however, had been so evidently caused by some strong impulse
+and attraction in that direction, that the party instantly proceeded to
+the clump of water-bushes. Nobody moved—not a green flag stirred; not a
+sprig trembled; but directly they entered, out burst a burly young
+hippopotamus-calf, and plunged head foremost down the river banks. He
+had all but escaped, when amidst the excitement and confusion of the
+picked men, one of them who had “more character” than the rest, made a
+blow at the slippery prize with his boat-hook, and literally brought him
+up by burying the hook in his fat black flank. Two other hunters—next to
+him in presence of mind and energy—threw their arms round the great
+barrel-bellied infant, and hoisted him into the boat, which nearly
+capsized with the weight and struggle.
+
+In this one circumstance of a hippopotamus being ordered by his Highness
+Abbas Pasha, has been pleasantly shown the ease and brevity with which
+matters are managed by a despotic government. We complain at home—and
+with how much reason, everybody knows too well—of the injurious and
+provoking slowness of all good legislative acts; but here we have a
+beautiful little instance, or series of little instances, of going
+rather too fast. Things are settled off-hand in the East by a royal
+mandate—from the strangling of a whole seraglio, to the suckling of a
+young hippopotamus.
+
+Returning down the Nile with their unwieldy prize, for whose wounded
+flank the best surgical attendance the country afforded, was of course
+procured, it soon became a matter of immense importance and profound
+consultation as to how and on what the innocent young monster should be
+fed. He would not touch flesh of any kind; he did not seem to relish
+fruit; and he evidently did not, at present, understand grass. A live
+fish was put into his mouth, but he instantly gave a great gape and
+allowed it to flap its way out again and fall into the water. Before
+long, however, the party reached a village. The Commander of the army
+saw what to do. He ordered his men to seize all the cows in the village,
+and milk them. This was found very acceptable to their interesting
+charge, who presently despatched a quantity that alarmed them, lest they
+should be unable to keep up the due balance of supply and demand. The
+surplus milk, however, they carried away in gourds and earthen vessels.
+But they found it would not keep: it became sour butter, and melted into
+oil. They were, therefore, compelled, after a milking, to carry off with
+them one of the best cows. In this way they returned fifteen hundred
+miles down the Nile, stopping at every village on their way—seizing all
+the cows and milking them dry. By these means they managed to supply the
+“table” of the illustrious captive, whose capacities in disposing of the
+beverage appeared to increase daily.
+
+The hunting-division of the army, headed by the Commander-in-Chief,
+arrived at Cairo with their prize on the 14th of November, 1849. The
+journey down the Nile, from the place where he was captured, _viz._, the
+White Nile, had occupied between five and six months. This, therefore,
+with a few additional days, may be regarded as the age of our
+hippopotamus on reaching Cairo. The colour of his skin, at that time,
+was for the most part of a dull, reddish tone, very like that (to
+compare great things with small) of a naked new-born mouse. The
+Commander hastened to the palace to report his arrival with the prize to
+his royal master, into the charge of whose officers he most gladly
+resigned it. His Highness, having been informed of the little affair of
+the succession of “cows,” determined to place the vivacious un-weaned
+“infant prodigy” in the hands of the British Consul without a moment’s
+delay.
+
+The announcement was accordingly made with oriental formality by the
+chief officer of Abbas Pasha’s palace, to whom the Honorable Mr. Murray
+made a suitable present in return for the good tidings. A lieutenant of
+the Nubian army, with a party of soldiers, arrived shortly after,
+bringing with them the animal, whose renown had already filled the whole
+city. He excited full as much curiosity in Cairo, as he has since done
+here, being quite as great a rarity. This will be easily intelligible
+when the difficulties of the capture, and the immense distance of the
+journey are taken into consideration, with all the contingencies of men,
+boats, provisions, cows, and other necessary expenses.
+
+The overjoyed Consul had already made all his preparations for receiving
+the illustrious stranger. He had, in the first place, secured the
+services of Hamet Safi Cannana, well known for his experience and skill
+in the care and management of animals. A commodious apartment had then
+been fitted up in the court-yard of the Consul’s house, with one door
+leading out to a bath. As the winter would have to be passed in Cairo,
+proper means were employed for making this a warm, or tepid bath. Here
+then our hippopotamus lived, “the observed of all observers,” drinking
+so many gallons of milk a day (never less than twenty or thirty quarts)
+that he soon produced a scarcity of that article in Cairo. Nor will this
+be so much a matter of surprise, when it is considered that they do not
+understand there the excellent methods of manufacturing enough milk to
+answer any demand, which obtains with us in London, where such an event
+as a scarcity of milk was never known by the oldest inhabitant.
+
+Meanwhile active preparations were making for his arrival in Alexandria,
+to be shipped on board the Ripon steamer. The vessel was furnished with
+a house on the main-deck, opening by steps down into a tank in the hold,
+containing four hundred gallons of water. It had been built and fitted
+up at Southampton from a plan furnished by Mr. Mitchell, Secretary of
+the Zoological Gardens in the Regent’s Park, to whose energies and
+foresight we are indebted for the safe possession of this grotesque,
+good-tempered and unique monster. The tank, by various arrangements,
+they contrived to fill with _fresh_ water every other day. A large
+quantity was taken on board in casks; a fresh supply at Malta; and,
+besides this, which was by no means enough, they made use of the
+condensed water of the engines, which amounted to upwards of three
+hundred gallons per day. As there are some hippopotami who enjoy the sea
+on certain coasts of the world, it is not improbable but our friend
+would soon have got used to sea-water; but Mr. Mitchell was determined
+to run no risks, prudently considering that, in the first place, the
+strength of the salt water, to one whose mother had been accustomed, and
+her ancestors for generations, to the mild streams of Nilus, might
+disagree with “young pickle;” and secondly, if he chanced to take to it
+amazingly, how would he bear the change when he arrived at his mansion
+in the Regent’s Park. Fresh water, therefore, was provided for his bath
+every other day throughout the voyage.
+
+The British Consul began to prepare for the departure of his noble guest
+at the end of April; and in the early part of May, the Consul took an
+affectionate leave of him, and would have embraced him, but that the
+extraordinary girth of his body rendered such a demonstration
+impossible.
+
+So, our hippopotamus departed from Grand Cairo in a large padded cart.
+He had refused a very nice horse-box which the Consul had provided for
+him. Some feeling about his dignity, we suppose; though Hamet Safi
+Cannana considered the objection arose from a certain care of his skin,
+which might have got a little chafe or hard rub in the horse-box. It was
+a lesson to Mr. Murray for life. No effort, of course, was made to
+compel the great personage to enter this machine, because it is one of
+Hamet’s principles of management never to irritate an animal—always to
+keep him in good temper—never, directly and immediately to thwart his
+will in anything that is not injurious, impracticable, or particularly
+unreasonable. Very delightful all this! Who would not be a hippopotamus?
+Who that was not Caesar, would not wish to be Pompey?
+
+On arriving at Alexandria, full ten thousand people rushed out into the
+streets to see our hippopotamus pass. If no one had ever seen the
+amphibious prodigy in Cairo, it is not to be wondered at that the mental
+condition of Alexandria was in the same lamentable degree of darkness.
+
+The crowd was so great, that the British Consul (whose feelings had so
+mastered him on taking leave of his guest, that he had been obliged to
+follow the _cortége_) was under the necessity of applying to the
+Governor of Alexandria for an escort of troops. This was forthwith
+granted, and down they came galloping along the streets of Alexandria,
+with waving scimetars! It was well the hippopotamus did not see them
+from his padded cart, where he lay asleep—it might have caused a little
+misunderstanding.
+
+Order being restored, and a great lane made in the crowd, Hamet Safi
+Cannana commenced the gradual and delicate process of awaking the great
+personage. In the course of an hour or so, during which time the escort
+of soldiers all “stood attention,” the excited feelings of the anxious
+lane of population were gratified by the sight of the Arab ceremoniously
+advancing in gentleman-usher fashion, while close behind him slowly
+lounged the hippopotamus.
+
+He embarked on board the Ripon, where he was soon joined by his
+Excellency General Jung Bahadoor Ranajee, and the Nepaulese princes, his
+brothers. These latter personages would have been great objects of
+attraction under any other circumstances; but what could stand against
+such a rival as the occupant of the great house and bath on the
+main-deck?
+
+During the voyage, “our fat friend” attached himself yet more strongly
+to his attendant and interpreter, Hamet; indeed, the devotion to his
+person which this assiduous and thoughtful person had manifested from
+his first promotion to the office, had been of a kind to secure such a
+result from any one at all accessible to kindly affections. Hamet had
+commenced by sleeping side-by-side with his charge in the house at
+Cairo, and adopted the same arrangement for the night during the first
+week of the voyage to England. Finding, however, as the weather grew
+warmer, and the hippopotamus bigger and bigger, that this was attended
+with some inconvenience, Hamet had a hammock slung from the beams
+immediately over the place where he used to sleep—in fact, just over his
+side of the bed—by which means he was raised two or three feet above his
+usual position. Into this hammock got Hamet, and having assured the
+hippopotamus, both by his voice, and by extending one arm over the side
+so as to touch him, that he was there as usual at his side, and “all was
+right,” he presently fell asleep. How long he slept Hamet does not know,
+but he was awoke by the sensation of a jerk and a hoist, and found
+himself lying on the bed in his old place, close beside our fat friend.
+Hamet tried the experiment once more: but the same thing again occurred.
+No sooner was he asleep than the hippopotamus got up—raised his broad
+nose beneath the heaviest part of the hammock that swung lowest, and by
+an easy and adroit toss, pitched Hamet clean out. After this, Hamet,
+acting on his rule of never thwarting his charge in anything reasonable,
+abandoned the attempt of a separate bed, and took up his nightly
+quarters by his side as before.
+
+As for the voyage, it was passed pleasantly enough by the most important
+of the illustrious strangers on board. His Excellency the Nepaulese
+ambassador, together with the prince his brother, were uncommonly
+seasick; but as for our fat friend, he enjoyed himself all the way. He
+liked his bath, for which there was no lack of fresh water supplies, and
+his provisions were equally satisfactory. Two cows and ten goats had
+been taken on board for his sole use and service; these, however, not
+being found sufficient for a “growing youth,” the ship’s cow was
+confiscated for the use of his table; and this addition, together with
+we forget how many dozen sacks of Indian corn meal, enabled him to reach
+our shores in excellent health and spirits.
+
+A word as to the title of “river-horse,” when taken in conjunction with
+his personal appearance, his habits, and his diet. The hippopotamus has
+nothing in common with the horse; he seems to us rather an aquatic pig,
+or a four-footed land porpoise. In fact, he appears to partake of the
+wild boar, the bull, and the porpoise—the latter predominating at
+present, but when he gets his tusks, we much fear there will be an
+alteration in his manners for the worse. As to his eventual size, the
+prospect is alarming. He is at present only seven months old, and he
+will continue growing till he is fifteen years of age. What news for the
+London cows!
+
+Arrived at Southampton, our hippopotamus, house and all, with Hamet Safi
+Cannana at his side, was hoisted up at the vessel’s yard-arm, and
+gradually lowered upon a great iron truck, which was then wheeled off to
+the railway station. The whole concern was deposited in the special
+carriage of a special train, and on this he travelled from Southampton
+to London. He arrived at the Zoological Gardens in the Regent’s Park at
+ten o’clock at night, and found Lord Brougham, Professor Owen, Thomas
+Bell, and Mr. Mitchell all waiting (we believe they were not in court
+dresses) to receive him. They were presently joined by the learned
+Editor of the “Annals of Natural History,” the learned Editor of the
+“Zoologist,” in company with Mr. Van Voorst, and several artists who
+made sketches by the light of a lanthorn. Doyle, Wolff, Harrison Weir,
+Foster, (for the “Illustrated London News”) and others, were all in
+assiduous attendance, watchful of every varying outline. The illustrious
+stranger descended from his carriage, and entered the gardens. First
+went the lanthorn; then Hamet Safi Cannana with a bag of dates slung
+over his shoulder; and after him slowly lounged our uncouth treasure,
+with a prodigy of a grin such as he alone can give, expressive of his
+humorous sense of all the honours and luxuries that awaited him.
+
+We understand it is a cabinet secret, that the Pasha has ordered a fresh
+party of hunting soldiers to proceed up the river, as far as the White
+Nile, to search for another young hippopotamus—a female! We may,
+therefore, look forward to the unrivalled fame of possessing a royal
+pair—“sure _such_ a pair” as were never yet seen in any collection of
+Natural History—to say nothing of the chance of a progeny. These are
+national questions,—why should they be cabinet secrets?
+
+We are certainly a strange people—we English. Our indefatigable energies
+and matchless wealth often exhibit themselves in eccentric fancies. No
+wonder, foreigners—philosophers and all—are so much puzzled what to make
+of us. They point to the unaided efforts of a Waghorn, and to his
+widow’s pension-mite—and then they point to our hippopotamus! Truly, it
+is not easy to reply to the inference, and impossible to evade it. We
+have had a Chaucer and a Milton, a Hobbes, and a Newton, a Watt and a
+Winsor; and we have had other great poets, and philosophers, and
+machinists, and men of learning and science, and have several of each
+now living among us: but any amount of a people’s anxious interest,
+which the present state of popular education induces, is very limited
+indeed compared to that which is felt by all classes for a Tom Thumb, a
+Jim Crow, or our present Idol. Howbeit, as the last is really a great
+improvement on the two former fascinating exotics, it is to be hoped
+that we shall, in course of time, more habitually display some kind of
+discrimination in the objects of our devotion.
+
+
+
+
+                                 CHIPS.
+
+
+                            RAILWAY COMFORT
+
+In all the utilities of Railway travelling, England is supreme. Speed,
+represented by from thirty to sixty miles an hour, “just (to quote the
+words of Lubin Log) as the passenger pleases;” punctuality, that admits
+of the setting of watches by arrivals and departures; and safety,
+exemplified by the loss of no human life from any other cause than the
+carelessness of the sufferer, during the past two years, are proofs of
+British supremacy in locomotion. Yet—by a strange perversity not easily
+accounted for in a country known all over the rest of the world as the
+Kingdom of Comfort—the point apparently aimed at is to render the
+transit of the human frame as uncomfortable an operation as possible.
+Every elegance and luxury is bestowed upon waiting-rooms where extreme
+punctuality renders it unnecessary for people to wait; and upon
+refreshment-rooms in which travellers are allowed ten minutes to scald
+themselves with boiling coffee, or to choke themselves with impossible
+pork-pies; but carriages in which travellers have to be cramped up,
+often for hours, and sometimes for whole days, are apparently contrived
+to inflict as much torture as practicable. In order to force those who
+cannot afford it into the first-class, second and third-class carriages
+are only one and two degrees removed from cattle pens. And that these
+should not be too delicious, the humbler order of passengers will not
+easily forget that a director once proposed to hire a number of
+chimney-sweeps to render—what, with the best company, are nothing better
+than locomotive hutches—perfectly untenable.
+
+They manage these things better abroad. There a detestable
+class-feeling—a contemptible purse-worship, which rigidly separates
+people according to their pecuniary circumstances; which metes out the
+smallest privilege or comfort at a price—does not exist to prevent the
+managers of railways from making the journeys of their customers and
+supporters as pleasant as possible. On the French railroads, (setting
+aside the question that the fares are much lower,) the second-class
+carriages are comfortably cushioned, having pretty silk blinds to keep
+out the sun; windows that really are capable of being pulled up and
+down, besides hooks for hats,—a great convenience on a journey. For the
+blinds, indeed, an enterprising blind-maker in France agreed to furnish
+them to one railway company, gratis, on condition that they used no
+other for a certain number of years, and allowed him to make them the
+medium of his advertisements. Talk of advertising vans—can they be
+compared to the brilliant notion of advertising railways—trains of
+puffs, wafting the genius of inventors faster than the wind! We throw
+out the hint to the “advertising world” in this country.
+
+In winter, even in an English first-class carriage, there is no
+protection against frost and damp; but in nearly all the foreign
+railways, no sooner does the winter set in than the first-class
+traveller finds the bottom of his carriage provided with a long tin case
+full of hot water. In the cold months, masses of woollen cloth and
+railway wrappers, are seen shaking in the corners of first-class English
+carriages with shivering, comfortless, human beings inside them,
+despairing of any sort of warmth whatever.
+
+Comfort in railway travelling is, however brought to the highest
+perfection in Germany. An esteemed correspondent at Vienna writes to us
+on this subject in the following terms:—On the “_Wiener-Neustäder
+Eisenbahn_,” (the Vienna and Neustadt Railway), the carriages of the
+first, second, and third-class may each be said to resemble a spacious
+room, furnished with seats, something like a concert-room, and having a
+broad passage down the middle. Thus one may get up, walk towards a
+friend a dozen seats off; or, if you require more air or a change of
+position, you will find the backs of the seats shift so as to enable you
+to turn round, and sit down the other way without inconvenience to any
+one. I need not say that on this railway there is no struggle for “that
+corner place with your back to the engine,” which is a desirable object
+throughout our three kingdoms,—for every place is a corner place, having
+light and air, and you may sit which way you please.
+
+Attached to each carriage, and going the whole length of the train, is a
+broad wooden plank, along which the guards are constantly walking, so
+that the slightest thing amiss could scarcely occur without their
+perceiving it immediately. Just before the arrival of the train at any
+station, one of these functionaries—for there are several—quietly opens
+the door and, instead of calling out “I say, you sir!” or “Come, marm,
+your ticket, I carn’t be a waitin’ here all day,” as we have heard in
+England, walks without any hurry or bustle down the division from one
+end to the other, repeating, in a clear and ordinary tone of voice the
+name of the station which is being approached, and requiring the tickets
+of such passengers as are going to alight there. With such an
+arrangement—giving ample time for the gathering together of coats,
+canes, umbrellas, reticules, and so forth—even Martha Struggles herself
+might have got through a journey unscathed and “unflustered.”
+
+The admirable arrangement displayed in America, as well as in Germany,
+for receiving tickets without that delay which has been so much
+complained of in England, cannot be sufficiently applauded. When however
+delay is unavoidable, to receive the mails, or from some other cause, no
+sooner does the train stop, than a waiter, or sometimes a pretty
+waitress—who is more likely to find customers—trips up the steps with a
+tray laden with iced water and lemonade, glasses of light wine or
+_maitrank_,(a kind of Burridge-cup,) biscuits, cakes, and other edible
+nick-nacks, so that the passenger may take some slight refection without
+getting down.
+
+In the railway from Bonn to Cologne, on the Rhine, they have pushed
+convenience yet farther, having provided the first-class carriages with
+tables, so that during the journey, one pressed for time may write
+letters with the greatest ease; pens and a portable inkstand being all
+that is necessary for that purpose. Paper may be had at the station.
+
+It has been also suggested on several of the continental railways, that
+such travellers as chose to pay for the space, might have a regular bed;
+a great convenience for ladies or invalids, unable to bear the fatigue
+of a journey of many hours by night.
+
+These hints might be followed with very great advantage to the
+shareholders in particular and to the public in general, by the
+directors of British lines.
+
+
+
+
+                           IMPROVING A BULL.
+
+
+The highly respectable old lady who addressed us on a former occasion,
+has obliged us with another communication, on a most important subject:—
+
+“Sir,—You would have heard before, but the cause was a mad bull, which
+being tossed might at my age be very ill-convenient. But that’s nothing
+to what I’m going to tell you. Only to think of the power of horns!
+Bulls tosses very high, I’ve heard, but did you ever hear, Mr.
+Conductor, of a mad bull tossing a widow and six children across the
+sea, half over the side of the round world, from our Borough to
+Australia? Well you may stare, but it’s a fact!
+
+“The bull run right at me, full butt, and so I grasped my umbrella with
+both hands and ran to where the shops was—drat the boys, how they did
+screech about one!—and it was cold water, which I doesn’t often drink,
+by which means I came to in a pastry-cook’s. The name was Bezzle, I see
+it on a bag while she was putting in gingerbread nuts for Mrs. Jenks’s
+baby, which I bought not to be under obligation for stepping in.
+
+“‘Gracious mussy, Mrs. Bezzle,’ says I, ‘why wasn’t I killed? What ever
+is the reason of them bulls?’
+
+“Says she, ‘It’s market day.’
+
+“‘Smithfield!’ says I.
+
+“Says Mrs. Bezzle, ‘Mum, all the abuse and outcry against Smithfield is
+very narrow-minded.’
+
+“Says I, ‘How so?’
+
+“Says she, ‘It don’t consider shop-keepers. When a bull takes a line of
+street, it drives the people into the shops on either side, and they
+make purchases for fear of being gored.’
+
+“‘Heighty teighty, mum,’ I says, ‘you are alluding to my gingerbread.’
+
+“Says she, ‘I scorn allusions. It’s a rule. Whether it’s bulls or
+thunderstorms, or what it is we look to, we respects whatever sends us
+customers.’
+
+“Says I, ‘Mrs. Bezzle, you astonish me. Where’s your family trade?’
+
+“Says she, ‘There are too many traders. Where one of us earns meat,
+three of us only earn potatoes.’
+
+“‘Emigrate,’ says I.
+
+“Says she, ‘That’s very well, but then,’ says she, ‘in such a move it’s
+hard to know which way to put one’s foot, and when a step’s made, if
+it’s a wrong one, it’s not easy to retrace it.’
+
+“‘Spirited trading—’ says I.
+
+“‘Ah!’ says she, cutting me short rudely; but I forgive her, owing to
+her feelings. ‘Take Chandlery, within seven minutes of this door, mum.
+One man sells soap under cost price, and other things at profit, hoping
+to bring people to his shop for soap, and then get them to buy other
+articles. But his neighbour sells cheap herrings in the same way;
+another sacrifices pickles, and another makes light of the candle
+business. What’s the result? Folks buy in the cheapest market; go for
+soap to the man who sells that at the ruin prices, go for herrings to
+his neighbour, go down the other street for pickles, and get candles
+over the way.’
+
+“‘Well,’ says I, ‘that’s an Illustration of Cheapness, but,’ says I,
+‘it’s dishonest. A fair trader has no right to sell an article at less
+than its first cost.’
+
+“‘No right!’ says she. ‘And I dessay he thinks he has no right to
+starve. It’s very hard to judge. The young tradesman, with his little
+capital and knowledge of a trade, has got his sweetheart and his
+ambition. He must wedge into society somehow, and he begins with the
+sharp end.’
+
+“‘But,’ says I, ‘it isn’t sharp, Mrs. Bezzle.’
+
+“So she shakes her head; says she, ‘I’ll give you an example which is
+true, and one out of a many.’
+
+“‘I once knew an excellent young man who died of cholera. He left a
+widow and three little children. After deducting all expenses for her
+husband’s burial, the widow found that she possessed a hundred pounds.
+With fear and trembling, she embarked this money, in an effort to
+support herself. With it she fitted up a little shop, and had begun to
+earn a livelihood, when——’
+
+“‘Well, Mrs. Bezzle, what prevented her?’
+
+——“‘An empty house close by was taken by another person following her
+trade. Immediately her receipts diminished. One cannot live except by
+bread that can be got out of a neighbour’s cupboard. The widow and the
+children have already lost eighty pounds, have only twenty left; their
+house is taken by the year, and so they still are in it; and the poor
+lost woman cannot be comforted. Her hope is gone.’
+
+“‘Heigh, dear,’ says I, ‘it wasn’t so in my young days. I believe this
+is owing to overpopulation,’ says I.
+
+“‘Well,’ says Mrs. Bezzle, perking up. ‘It’s cruel to blame us for our
+struggles. What if I _have_ got nine, and six on ’em dependant on penny
+tarts and gingerbread for meat, drink, washing, and lodging, are they to
+be thrown in my teeth?’
+
+“‘Emigrate,’ says I, six times more pointedly than before.
+
+“‘Where to?’ says she, ‘and how? Who can tell me that?’
+
+“‘Go and lay your case before Parson Pullaway; he knows our M.P., and
+_he_ knows all about colonial places. Hasn’t his brother’s wife’s first
+cousin got one of them? He is Sub-under-Secretary to Lord Oxfordmixture,
+who has all the emigration settlements under his thumb.’
+
+“‘I’ll think about it,’ says Mrs. Bezzle, quite struck-like,—for down
+came the scales on the counter like a shot, and the whole ounce of
+sugar-candy jumped into the little boy’s apron of its own accord. He had
+come for two penn’orth on pretence of a cough. ‘Besides, didn’t Mr.
+Pullaway christen seven out of my nine children, and not a penny of the
+fees owing for?’
+
+“The last word as ever I spoke to Mrs. Bezzle was, ‘Emigrate!’
+
+“Well, who would have thought it? Next week Mrs. Bezzle’s business was
+to sell. The week after, it was sold. The week after that, Mrs. Bezzle
+and her son Tom, and Tom’s wife, and Tom’s brother Sam, and Mrs.
+Bezzle’s eldest daughter, and little James, and Sarah, and Mary Ann, and
+the two little urchins, were on board a ship, at Liverpool, bound for
+Port Philip. That’s a year, come Michaelmas, ago.
+
+“But, drat ’em, why didn’t they pay the postage? Two-and-two is a
+consideration when butter (best fresh) is a rising a penny a pound every
+week. Not but what I was glad to hear from Mrs. Bezzle. Tom and his
+wife, and his brother Sam, are settled in a ‘run;’ and though there was
+some words I couldn’t make out, I dare say they didn’t explain how a
+‘run’ could be a settlement. ‘Quite the reverse!’ as Mrs. Jenks said—(I
+have made it up with her, though she did insinuate the gingerbread nuts
+the mad bull made me buy gave her babby the cholera; and, bless it! it
+was only the teeth after all). Mrs. Bezzle has settled herself in the
+mutton-pie and cheesecake line, and has no fear of opposition; and as in
+Port Philip there is good digestions and plenty of ’em, pies is popular.
+Prices, too, is better,—penny pies being tuppence. James is on the
+‘run,’ along with his eldest brother. Sarah an’t married yet,—for out of
+six offers, a young gal of seventeen has a right to be puzzled for six
+months or so, and more dropping in every week. Mary Anne is family
+governess to a rich copper-man, with plenty of stock—I suppose by that
+he is in the soup line. However, all is doing well.
+
+“Well, Mr. Conductor, it was all owing to that bull, wasn’t it? If I
+hadn’t improved that solemn occasion, where would Mrs. Bezzle, and four
+out of six of her helpless offspring have been by this time?—why, in the
+workhus.”
+
+
+
+
+                           LUNGS FOR LONDON.
+
+
+Travellers describe nothing to be so much dreaded by the people of the
+East as a flight of locusts, except indeed a settlement of locusts. When
+those devouring insects alight on the fields and pastures, they begin
+from a centre composed of myriads, and eat up everything green within
+radii extending over not acres, but miles. They fall upon gardens and
+leave them deserts; and upon a field they do not permit so much as a
+blade of grass to indicate where grass was.
+
+Although, in fact, these little devastators do not trouble us; in
+effect, Londoners are the victims of equally efficient destroyers of
+their green places.
+
+Bricklayers are spreading the webs and meshes of houses with such
+fearful rapidity in every direction, that the people are being gradually
+confined within narrow prisons, only open at the top for the admission
+of what would be air if it were not smoke. Suburban open spaces are
+being entombed in brick-and-mortar mausoleums for the suffocation as
+well as for the accommodation of an increasing populace; who, if they
+wish to get breath, can find nowhere to draw it from, short of a long
+journey. The Lungs of London have undergone congestion, and even their
+cells are underground.
+
+Of all the neighbourhoods of which London is a collection, Finsbury and
+Islington have suffered most. Within the recollection of middle-aged
+memories, Clerkenwell Green was of the right colour; Moorfields,
+Spafields, and the East India Company’s Fields, were adorned with grass;
+and he must be young indeed who cannot remember cricket-playing in White
+Conduit, Canonbury, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Rhodes, and Laycock’s,
+besides countless acres of other “Fields,” which are now blotted out
+from the face of the Country to become Town, in the densest sense of the
+word. Thanks to the window tax and the bricklayer, fresh air will be
+thoroughly bricked out, unless a vigorous effort be made to stop the
+invasion of burnt clay and water.
+
+Mr. Lloyd, a gentleman of Islington who dreamt a few years since that he
+lived in the country, but has recently awoke to the conviction that his
+once suburban residence has been completely incorporated with the town,
+determined, if possible, to arrest the invasion of habitations. His plan
+is to dam out the flood of encroachment by emparking a large space at
+Islington for the behoof of the Borough of Finsbury, which contains a
+population of three hundred thousand panting souls. This space is,
+according to his plan, that which surrounds the village of Highbury, one
+of the highest and airiest suburbs of London. It is within two miles of
+the City, and might be rendered accessible to Victoria Park in the east,
+and to Regent’s Park in the west. The proposed enclosure will take in a
+good portion of the course of the New River, and a large quantity of
+ground so well and picturesquely wooded, that a paling and a name are
+only requisite to convert it at once into a park. In shape the enclosure
+would be a triangle, the base of which is the Holloway Road and Hopping
+Lane, and the apex, a point at which the Seven Sisters’ Road joins the
+Green Lanes. The extent of these grounds is about three hundred acres,
+and the total cost of securing them to the public is not more than one
+hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
+
+Mr. Lloyd has been vigorously agitating this matter for more than nine
+years, and yet—such is the pace at which the public are apt to move in
+affairs in which the public alone is itself concerned—it is only lately
+that he has obtained an attentive hearing for his plan.
+
+A prospect of success appears now, however, to dawn. Public meetings
+have been lately held in every district concerned, in which every sort
+of co-operation has been promised. A single difficulty seems to stand in
+the way; one little thing needful is only required to turn the project
+into an accomplished fact, and that is, the money,—one hundred and fifty
+thousand pounds merely. Mr. Lloyd and his coadjutors have, we believe,
+mentioned their little difficulty at the Treasury, and are awaiting an
+answer. This state of things would form a curious problem for De Morgan,
+Quetelet, or others learned in the doctrine of probabilities: given,
+official routine multiplied by systematic delay, what are the chances of
+the cash required within the present generation?
+
+A park for Finsbury is too urgent a demand for a dense population to
+allow of much time being wasted in knocking at the door of the Treasury.
+The public must bestir _themselves_ in the scheme, and it will soon be
+accomplished and carried out.
+
+
+
+
+                          THE LOVE OF NATURE.
+
+
+         Where the green banners of the forest float,
+           Where, from the Sun’s imperial domain,
+         Armour’d in gold, attentive to the note
+           Of piping birds, the sturdy trees remain,
+           Those never-angered armies; where the plain
+         Boasts to the day its bosom ornaments
+           Of corn and fruitage; where the low refrain
+         Of seaside music song on song invents,
+       Laden with placid thought, whereto the heart assents,
+         Often I wander. Nor does the light Noon,
+           Garrulous to man’s eye, declaring all
+         That Morning pale (watched by her spectre moon,
+           Or solemn Vesper, seated near the pall
+           Of Day) holds unrevealed; nor does the fall
+         Of curtain on our human pantomime,
+           The sweeping by of Day’s black funeral
+         Through Night’s awe-stricken realms, with tread sublime,
+       Chiefly delight my heart; beauty pervades all time.
+         Morning: the Day is innocent, and weeps;
+           Noon: she is wedded and enjoys the Earth;
+         Evening: wearied of the world she sleeps.
+           Night watches till another Day has birth.
+           The innocence of Morning, and the mirth
+         Of Noon, the holy calm of Eventide,
+           The watching while Day is not, there is dearth
+         Of joy within his soul who hath not cried:
+       “I welcome all, O God,—share all Thou wilt provide!”
+
+
+
+
+                THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE FROM SHIPWRECK.
+
+
+It is a difficult matter to reconcile with the sympathy, which it is
+well-known the sufferings of the unfortunate always receive in England,
+the apparent apathy which exists among the public, on a subject so
+important as the preservation of Life from Shipwreck. Several pleas in
+extenuation have been urged by those most interested. In the first
+place, there is that natural hardihood and contempt of danger in the
+English sailor, which it is, occasionally, impossible to tame down to
+anything like prudence and forethought. This indomitable spirit of
+emulation and daring, is found to be the greatest enemy to the adoption
+of any of those appliances which science has rendered available. The
+Deal boatman trusts his life in precisely the same sort of craft that
+his father, and his father’s father, did before him. Confident in, and
+proud of, the skill which he has inherited from them, he scorns to
+tarnish, as he falsely reasons, his name by the habitual use of buoy or
+belt, lest those of his comrades who are firmly entrenched behind their
+ancient prejudices, should set him down as faint-hearted, and unworthy
+the honourable name of a “Deal boatman.”
+
+The still more inaccessible Scotch fisherman, with his four thousand
+piscatory brethren, “shoots his nets” on the exposed coast of Caithness,
+in the open boat used by his ancestors, notwithstanding the evil
+consequences which have often ensued. The latest example of the ill
+effects of this tenacity of opinion occurred two years since, when a
+fearful gale, which did more or less damage along the whole eastern face
+of England and Scotland, wrecked and damaged a hundred and twenty-four
+of their boats, drowned a hundred men, and occasioned a loss to the
+fishing community of above seven thousand pounds, which, although a
+large sum, will not bear any comparison with the misery and destitution
+thus entailed upon the widows and orphans of the lost.
+
+It is impossible to say how many of these unfortunate men might have
+been saved, had they had proper harbours to run for, with lights and
+beacons to warn, and life-boats to afford assistance; proper boats to
+keep the sea, and buoys and belts, as a last resource; but surely we are
+warranted in thinking that fully one half would have been left among us.
+
+In both these examples, it must be acknowledged that it would be a
+useless effort to attempt any sudden innovations on these deeply-seated
+prejudices; the only thing that can be done, in either case, is to let
+the new principle quietly work of itself. Let us find a life-belt for
+the Deal boatman, which he can wear and work in, until in it he
+recognises his best friend; let the Scotch fisherman have ocular
+demonstration that the “model” boat prosecutes the fishery with equal
+success, and far greater safety and comfort in bad weather, and we shall
+soon have a different system of things.
+
+In the course of each year an average of something like six hundred ship
+disasters occur on the shores of this kingdom alone,—some wrecked
+through stress of weather; some by carelessness, and other disgraceful
+causes; some through mistaking lights, or having been lured to
+destruction by useless ones; some through actual rottenness of timber;
+some dashed to pieces on the very rock for which they were anxiously
+looking half a mile further a-head, where it _ought_ to have been,
+according to the chart; and some from other causes, more or less easily
+averted. These losses are attended by the almost incredible destruction
+of a thousand lives, and the value of tens of thousands of pounds
+sterling.
+
+The shocking wreck of the Orion—not, we say with sorrow, the last
+occurrence of the kind—startled, for a moment, the public from their
+culpable apathy. But the shock passed away; and attention to this
+subject is gradually subsiding into the usual indifference. The details
+of this catastrophe ought to have had a more permanent effect on the
+public mind. In the moment of danger, the gear of the boats was so
+imperfect, that these could only be released from their davits by
+capsizing their human cargoes into the deep. Even when they righted,
+they immediately filled, for the plug-holes were actually unstopped. The
+most ordinary precautions for saving life were not at hand, as
+precautions. The hen-coops, barrels, seats, combings, and other means of
+escape, by which many were saved, were purely accidental
+life-preservers.
+
+Every English ship, before leaving port, should be submitted to a
+supervising power similar to the inspection that emigrant ships undergo,
+in order that it should be certified that means, both simple and
+efficacious, for the safety of the passengers and crew, exist on
+board—boats, belts, mattresses, rafts; everything, in short, that can
+add to the security of those about to “go down to the sea in ships.”
+
+That this sort of supervision is effectual, is proved by the few
+disasters which happen to the vessels of the Royal Navy. In these ships,
+everything is not only kept in its proper place, to be ready when
+wanted, but each man is constantly exercised in what he is to do with it
+when no danger is apprehended, that he may be in a state of prompt
+efficiency when it is. The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean
+squadron can step on board any one of his ships in the middle of the
+night; and although three-fourths of its crew are asleep in their
+hammocks, he can, by ordering the “beat to quarters,” make sure of every
+man being at his post in seven minutes, ready for action or for any
+sudden disaster. This sort of discipline it is which is so much required
+in the merchant navy. In case of a ship striking, a dozen men rush to do
+one thing,—perhaps to release a boat from one of her davits,—and,
+consequently, swamp the boat, by leaving the stern rope untouched.
+Captain Basil Hall, in his “Fragments of Voyages and Travels,” describes
+the vigilant precaution daily made even against the loss of one life. To
+each life-buoy there is as regular a “service” as to any other part or
+apparatus of the ship. He says:—
+
+“On the top of the mast is fixed a port-fire, calculated to burn, I
+think, twenty minutes or half-an-hour; this is ignited most ingeniously
+by the same process which lets the buoy down into the water. So that a
+man falling overboard at night, is directed to the buoy by the blaze on
+the top of its pole or mast, and the boat sent to rescue him also knows
+in what direction to pull. Even supposing, however, the man not to have
+gained the life-buoy, it is clear that, if above the surface at all, he
+must be somewhere in that neighbourhood; and if he shall have gone down,
+it is still some satisfaction, by recovering the buoy, to ascertain that
+the poor wretch is not left to perish by inches. The method by which
+this excellent invention is attached to the ship, and dropped into the
+water in a single instant, is perhaps not the least ingenious part of
+the contrivance. The buoy is generally fixed amidships over the stern,
+where it is held securely in its place by being strung, or threaded, as
+it were, on two strong perpendicular iron rods fixed to the taffrail,
+and inserted in holes piercing the framework of the buoy. The apparatus
+is kept in its place by what is called a slip-stopper, a sort of
+catch-bolt or detent, which can be unlocked at pleasure, by merely
+pulling a trigger. Upon withdrawing the stopper, the whole machine slips
+along the rods, and falls at once into the ship’s wake. The trigger
+which unlocks the slip-stopper is furnished with a lanyard, passing
+through a hole in the stern, and having at its inner end a large knob,
+marked ‘Life-Buoy;’ this alone is used in the day-time. Close at hand is
+another wooden knob, marked ‘Lock,’ fastened to the end of a line fixed
+to the trigger of a gun-lock primed with powder: and so arranged, that
+when the line is pulled, the port-fire is instantly ignited, while, at
+the same moment, the life-buoy descends, and floats merrily away,
+blazing like a lighthouse. It would surely be an improvement to have
+both these operations always performed simultaneously, that is, by one
+pull of the string. The port-fire would thus be lighted in every case of
+letting go the buoy; and I suspect the smoke in the day-time would often
+be as useful in guiding the boat, as the blaze always is at night. The
+gunner who has charge of the life-buoy lock sees it freshly and
+carefully primed every evening at quarters, of which he makes a report
+to the captain. In the morning the priming is taken out, and the lock
+uncocked. During the night a man is always stationed at this part of the
+ship, and every half-hour, when the bell strikes, he calls out
+‘Life-buoy!’ to show that he is awake and at his post, exactly in the
+same manner as the lookout-men abaft, on the beam, and forward, call out
+‘Starboard quarter!’ ‘Starboard gangway!’ ‘Starboard bow!’ and so on,
+completely round the ship, to prove that they are not napping.”
+
+We should like to hear of Government experimenting with rockets and
+mortars, with a view to their improvement. Often the safety of a whole
+ship’s company has depended upon the strength of a light cord, attached
+to a rocket, which has been lying in store for years; often it has
+happened that this very cord has been _just_ a few feet too short! or
+has snapped, or has got entangled, or something else equally simple, but
+equally fatal. Let us look also to our _quasi_ life-boats, some so heavy
+that they cannot be launched, or so dangerous as to drown their own
+crews—some constructed one way, some another—none on any recognised and
+universal principle. We are very proud of our name of Englishmen, and
+lay the flattering unction to our soul, that we are a highly civilised
+and reasonable community; but whilst we grow magniloquent in praises of
+our country and her commerce, we forget that we owe it all to the poor
+Jack Tar, for whose life and comfort we don’t seem to care a fig. Else
+why have these inquiries not been before instituted? What is the use of
+our Trinity Boards, and Ballast Boards, and Lighthouse Boards, and all
+other Boards, if the seaman is not to know one light from another when
+he sees it, or if it is to be placed so that he _cannot_ see it? What is
+the use of our keeping up a Hydrographic department, at an expense
+little short of thirty thousand a-year, if the surveys, and charts, and
+valuable data, the result of its labours, are to be so little
+appreciated? The truth is, that the masters of many of the mercantile
+marine are incapable of taking advantage of them, and of other
+improvements in nautical science, from incompetence. We trust, however,
+that the bill intended to remedy _that_ defect, lately introduced by the
+Ministry into the House of Commons, will, if passed, have the desired
+object. Although it has been abandoned “at this late period of the
+session” out of respect to the approaching 12th of August and 1st of
+September, we trust it will be taken up again soon after the next
+meeting of Parliament.
+
+
+
+
+                           WINGED TELEGRAPHS.
+
+
+Magnetic Electricity for telegraphic purposes has nearly superseded
+pigeons. Till very recently a regular “service” of Carrier Pigeons
+existed between London and Paris, for the quick conveyance of such
+intelligence as was likely to affect the funds. The French capital was
+the focus of the system, in exemplification of the adage that “all roads
+lead to Paris,” and pigeon expresses branched off in all directions from
+that city even to St. Petersburg. Relays of them are still kept up
+between Paris and Madrid, besides a few other places. The most
+celebrated relays of winged messengers were those which bore
+intelligence between Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris. In the former city a
+society of pigeon fanciers, for amusement and emulation, keeps up an
+establishment of them. Their doings are amusingly chronicled in Kohl’s
+last book of Travels, _Reisen in den Neiderlanden_.
+
+Having been invited to join some members of the Society of Antwerp
+Pigeon Fanciers, he wended his way about five o’clock one morning
+through the silent streets of the ancient city. A few members of the
+association, he says, who directed the expedition, were followed by
+servants carrying two flat baskets, in which the pigeons, about to be
+dispatched, were carefully deposited. As we proceeded along, my
+companions related to me some particulars concerning the carrier
+pigeons, or “_pigeons voyageurs_,” as these winged messengers are
+designated. The carriers are a peculiar race of pigeons endowed with
+powers of memory and observation which enable them to find their way to
+any place by a course along which they have once flown. Every kind of
+pigeon is not capable of being taught to do this. Of the methods adopted
+by the Antwerp association for training and teaching these carriers, I
+learnt the following particulars.
+
+Supposing a dispatch of pigeons is to be sent off from Antwerp to
+Brussels or Paris, the birds are kept for some time at the place of
+arrival or terminus, and during that interval are plentifully fed and
+carefully tended. By little excursive flights, taken day by day, they
+are gradually familiarised with different parts of the town in which
+they have been nurtured, and with places in its vicinity. When
+sufficiently practised in finding their way to short distances, the
+pigeons are conveyed to a station some leagues from their dove-cote.
+Here they are kept for a time without food, and then set to flight. On
+taking wing, they rapidly soar to a vast height, scanning the line of
+the horizon to discern the church spires, or other lofty points which
+enable them to distinguish their home. Some of the less intelligent
+birds lose their way, and are seen no more. Those who return home (to
+Paris, or wherever else it may be), are again plentifully fed. Then
+after a little space of time they are carried in baskets some miles
+further in the direction of Antwerp; again they are put on a short
+allowance of food and negligently tended. When the pigeons depart on
+their next flight, the Parisian church spires have sunk far beneath the
+horizon; however, they soon succeed in combining that portion of the
+route with which they are acquainted with the part as yet unknown to
+them. They hover round and round in the air, seeking to catch one or
+other thread that is to guide them through the labyrinth. Some find it;
+others do not.
+
+In this manner the carrier pigeons are practised bit by bit along the
+whole distance between Paris and Antwerp. They attentively observe, or
+study, and learn by heart, each conspicuous object which serves them as
+a land-mark on the way. It is usual to exercise particular pigeons
+between the two cities, which it is wished to connect by this sort of
+postal communication; and it is necessary to have a certain number for
+going, and others for returning. After the birds have been accustomed to
+inhabit a certain district, and to travel by a particular route, it is
+not found easy to divert them from their wonted course, and to make them
+available in any other direction.
+
+My friends, the members of the Antwerp Society, assured me that their
+pigeons had frequently flown from Paris to Antwerp in six or seven
+hours; consequently in a much shorter time than that in which the same
+journey is performed by the railway train. By bird’s flight, the
+distance between the two cities is forty miles (German[1]), and
+therefore it follows that these carrier pigeons must travel at the rate
+of from twenty to thirty English miles an hour. It is scarcely
+conceivable that they should possess the strength of wing and vigour of
+lungs requisite for such a flight; and it is no unfrequent occurrence
+for several of them to die on arriving at their journey’s end. In stormy
+weather the loss of two-thirds of the birds dispatched on such a long
+flight, is a disaster always to be counted on. It is, therefore, usual
+to send off a whole flock, all bearing the same intelligence, so as to
+ensure the chance of one at least reaching its destination.
+
+Footnote 1:
+
+  The German mile includes nearly three and a half English miles.
+
+The pigeon expedition which I saw dispatched from Antwerp, consisted of
+about thirty birds. The point of departure was a somewhat elevated site
+in the outskirts of the city. A spot like this is always made choice of,
+lest the pigeons, on first taking flight, should lose themselves amidst
+the house-tops and church spires of the city with which they are
+unacquainted; and by having the open country before them, they are
+enabled to trace out their own land-marks. When the pigeons are to be
+sent off on lengthened journeys, it is usual to convey them to the point
+of departure at a very early hour in the morning:—by this means they are
+dispatched in quietude, unmolested by an assemblage of curious gazers,
+and they have the light of a whole day before them for their journey.
+Carrier pigeons do not pursue their flight after night-fall, being then
+precluded by the darkness from seeing the surrounding country with
+sufficient distinctness to enable them to discern their resting-places,
+or stations. In the obscurity of night the whole flock might light on
+strange dove-cotes, and be captured; an accident which would occasion
+the total failure of a postal expedition, for the few pigeons who might
+escape capture, would, on the return of morning, be bewildered, and
+unable to recombine their plan of route.
+
+Pigeons are not suited for postal communication between places so remote
+one from another that the journey cannot be completed in a single day.
+If it can be accomplished in one flight, so much the better. Antwerp and
+Paris are, I believe, the extreme points of distance within which
+carrier pigeons are capable of journeying with certainty.
+
+Herr Kohl gives no account of these stations or stages. We once saw one
+at Montrieul, the first station beyond Dover, towards Paris. The town
+stands on a high eminence, and is well adapted for the purpose. The cote
+was on the roof of a _café_. It was a square apartment with a flat
+ceiling, in which was cut a small door or trap: on the inside of this
+was fixed a small bell. If a Dover pigeon had alighted on the trap, the
+bell would have rung, and called the attention of an attendant always in
+waiting. The pigeon would have been secured, the dispatch taken from
+under its wing, and the messenger put into its cage. In a twinkling the
+cyphered paper would be fastened under the wing of the Beauvais or
+Amiens pigeon, and it would be sent off. On arriving at its destination,
+the same formula would be gone through, and the Paris pigeon would take
+the dispatch to its destination. Although several pigeons, even in fine
+weather, are entrusted with the same message, two seldom arrive at the
+common destination at the same time, so that at each place the operation
+we have described is frequently repeated, in order that at least one of
+many dispatches may be certain of arriving at the destination.
+
+These establishments were costly. Besides the great number of pigeons
+necessary to be kept at each station, some of the single birds were
+valuable. Fifty and sixty pounds was sometimes given for a clever
+pigeon. Those between Dover and Montrieul, and _vice versâ_, were among
+the most valuable, for none but sharp-sighted messengers could find
+their way across the Channel; few flights were sent away without some
+members of it being lost.
+
+But to return to the Antwerp pigeons—and to Mr. Kohl. Having, he
+continues, reached the open, elevated spot before-mentioned, the flat
+baskets carried by the servants were uncovered, and the little
+_voyageurs_ rapidly winged their way upwards. The intelligence they were
+to convey to Paris was written in little billets, fastened under their
+wings. The pigeons I saw sent off had been brought in covered baskets
+from Paris, and were as yet totally unacquainted with Antwerp and its
+environs. Their ignorance of the locality was manifest in the wavering
+uncertainty of their movements when they first took wing. On rising into
+the air, they gathered closely together, like foreigners in a strange
+country, and presently they steered their course along the confines of
+the city, in a direction quite contrary to that of Paris. They then
+soared upwards, spirally, and after several irregular movements (during
+which they seemed to be looking for the right way, and hesitating which
+course to take), they all suddenly darted off to south-west, directing
+their rapid flight straight to Paris, as if gladly quitting inhospitable
+Antwerp, where they had been scantily fed and carelessly tended.
+
+As soon as the birds were fairly out of sight, the pigeon-trainers
+proceeded homeward, not a little gratified by the conviction that their
+fleet messengers, with the intelligence they bore under their wings,
+would outstrip the speed of a railway train which had started some time
+before them.
+
+To me the most interesting point in the whole scene was the interval
+(about the space of a quarter of an hour) during which the pigeons
+wavered to and fro, seeking their way in a state of uncertainty. That
+appeared to me to be a wonderful manifestation of intelligence on the
+part of the birds. It is frequently affirmed that the carrier pigeon
+finds its way without the exercise of intelligence or observation, and
+merely by the aid of some incomprehensible instinct; but, from my own
+observations of the Antwerp pigeons, I am convinced that this is a
+mistake. Another circumstance tending to show that the birds are guided
+by something more than mere instinct, is, that during foggy weather the
+employment of carrier pigeons is found to be almost as impracticable as
+the use of the optical telegraph. But though it is not the practice to
+dispatch carrier pigeons at times when the atmosphere is very thickly
+obscured by fog, yet, owing to the keenness and accuracy of the visual
+power of these birds, which is much more perfect than that of man, they
+have an advantage over the telegraph. The latter is wholly useless when
+the atmosphere is only slightly obscured; but carrier pigeons frequently
+soar quite above the region of mist, and are thus enabled to trace their
+course without interruption. Stations of carrier pigeons are established
+in most of the principal towns of Belgium.
+
+The members of the Antwerp pigeon-training society, whom I accompanied
+on the occasion above described, were citizens of the middle class of
+society. But in Belgium, pigeon-training has its attractions even for
+persons of rank and wealth, many of whom are enthusiastic pigeon
+fanciers; indeed, pigeon-flying is as fashionable an amusement in
+Belgium as horse racing in England. Prizes, consisting of sums of money
+as high as sixty thousand francs, are frequently won in matches of
+pigeons—to say nothing of the betting to which those matches give
+occasion.
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+                Monthly Supplement of “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,”
+                      Conducted by CHARLES DICKENS.
+
+
+                       _Price 2d., Stamped, 3d._,
+
+                         THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
+                                   OF
+                             CURRENT EVENTS.
+
+
+  _The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with
+                             the Magazines._
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          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 78184 ***
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+  </head>
+  <body>   
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78184 ***</div>
+
+<div class='tnotes covernote'>
+
+<p class='c000'><strong>Transcriber’s Note:</strong></p>
+
+<p class='c000'>New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='double titlepage'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c001'>
+    <div>“<i>Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.</i>”—<span class='sc'>Shakespeare.</span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div>
+  <span class='pageno' id='Page_433'>433</span>
+  <h1 class='c002'>HOUSEHOLD WORDS.<br> <span class='xlarge'>A WEEKLY JOURNAL.</span></h1>
+</div>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c001'>
+    <div><span class='large'>CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.</span></div>
+    <div class='c001'>N<sup>o.</sup> 19.]&#8196; &#8196; &#8196; SATURDAY, AUGUST 3, 1850.&#8196; &#8196; &#8196; [<span class='sc'>Price</span> 2<i>d.</i></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.</h2>
+</div>
+<h3 class='c004'>IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.</h3>
+
+<p class='c005'>Sir Roger Rockville of Rockville was
+the last of a very long line. It extended from
+the Norman Conquest to the present century.
+His first known ancestor came over with
+William, and must have been a man of some
+mark, either of bone and sinew, or of brain,
+for he obtained what the Americans would
+call a prime location. As his name does not
+occur in the Roll of Battle Abbey, he was, of
+course, not of a very high Norman extraction;
+but he had done enough, it seems, in the way
+of knocking down Saxons, to place himself
+on a considerable eminence in this kingdom.
+The centre of his domains was conspicuous
+far over the country, through a high range of
+rock overhanging one of the sweetest rivers
+in England. On one hand lay a vast tract of
+rich marsh land, capable, as society advanced,
+of being converted into meadows; and on
+the other, as extensive moorlands, finely undulating,
+and abounding with woods and
+deer.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Here the original Sir Roger built his castle
+on the summit of the range of rock, with
+huts for his followers; and became known
+directly all over the country of Sir Roger de
+Rockville, or Sir Roger of the hamlet on the
+Rock. Sir Roger, no doubt, was a mighty
+hunter before the lord of the feudal district:
+it is certain that his descendants were. For
+generations they led a jolly life at Rockville,
+and were always ready to exchange the excitement
+of the chase for a bit of civil
+war. Without that the country would have
+grown dull, and ale and venison lost their
+flavour. There was no gay London in those
+days, and a good brisk skirmish with their
+neighbours in helm and hauberk was the
+way of spending their season. It was their
+parliamentary debate, and was necessary to
+thin their woods. Protection and Free Trade
+were as much the great topics of interest as
+they are now, only they did not trouble themselves
+so much about Corn bills. Their bills
+were of good steel, and their protective measures
+were arrows a cloth-yard long. Protection
+meant a good suit of mail; and a
+castle with its duly prescribed moats, bastions,
+portcullises, and donjon keep. Free Trade
+was a lively inroad into the neighbouring
+baron’s lands, and the importation thence of
+goodly herds and flocks. Foreign cattle for
+home consumption was as <i>sticking an article</i>
+in their markets as in ours, only the blows
+were expended on one another’s heads,
+instead of the heads of foreign bullocks—that
+is, bullocks from over the Welch or
+Scotch Marches, as from beyond the next
+brook.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Thus lived the Rockvilles for ages. In all
+the iron combats of those iron times they
+took care to have their quota. Whether it
+were Stephen against Matilda, or Richard
+against his father, or John against the barons;
+whether it were York or Lancaster, or Tudor
+or Stuart. The Rockvilles were to be found
+in the <i><span lang="fr">mêlée</span></i>, and winning power and lands.
+So long as it required only stalwart frames
+and stout blows, no family cut a more conspicuous
+figure. The Rockvilles were at
+Bosworth Field. The Rockvilles fought in
+Ireland under Elizabeth. The Rockvilles
+were staunch defenders of the cause in the
+war of Charles I. with his Parliament. The
+Rockvilles even fought for James II. at the
+Boyne, when three-fourths of the most loyal
+of the English nobility and gentry had deserted
+him in disgust and indignation. But
+from that hour they had been less conspicuous.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The opposition to the successful party, that
+of William of Orange, of course brought them
+into disgrace: and though they were never
+molested on that account, they retired to their
+estate, and found it convenient to be as unobtrusive
+as possible. Thenceforward you heard
+no more of the Rockvilles in the national
+annals. They became only of consequence in
+their own district. They acted as magistrates.
+They served as high sheriffs. They were a
+substantial county family, and nothing more.
+Education and civilisation advanced; a wider
+and very different field of action and ambition
+opened upon the aristocracy of England. Our
+fleets and armies abroad, our legislature at
+home, law and the church, presented brilliant
+paths to the ambition of those thirsting for
+distinction, and the good things that follow it.
+But somehow the Rockvilles did not expand
+with this expansion. So long as it required
+only a figure of six feet high, broad shoulders,
+and a strong arm, they were a great and conspicuous
+race. But when the head became the
+member most in request, they ceased to go
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_434'>434</span>a-head. Younger sons, it is true, served in
+army and in navy, and filled the family pulpit,
+but they produced no generals, no admirals,
+no archbishops. The Rockvilles of Rockville
+were very conservative, very exclusive, and
+very stereotype. Other families grew poor,
+and enriched themselves again by marrying
+plebeian heiresses. New families grew up out
+of plebeian blood into greatness, and intermingled
+the vigour of their fresh earth with
+the attenuated aristocratic soil. Men of family
+became great lawyers, great statesmen, great
+prelates, and even great poets and philosophers.
+The Rockvilles remained high, proud, bigotted,
+and <i>borné</i>.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Rockvilles married Rockvilles, or their
+first cousins, the Cesgvilles, simply to prevent
+property going out of the family. They kept
+the property together. They did not lose an
+acre, and they were a fine, tall, solemn race—and
+nothing more. What ailed them?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>If you saw Sir Roger Rockville,—for there
+was an eternal Sir Roger filling his office of
+high sheriff,—he had a very fine carriage, and
+a very fine retinue in the most approved and
+splendid of antique costumes;—if you saw him
+sitting on the bench at quarter sessions, he
+was a tall, stately, and solemn man. If you
+saw Lady Rockville shopping, in her handsome
+carriage, with very handsomely attired
+servants; saw her at the county ball, or on
+the race-stand, she was a tall, aristocratic,
+and stately lady. That was in the last generation—the
+present could boast of no Lady
+Rockville.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Great outward respect was shown to the
+Rockvilles on account of the length of their
+descent, and the breadth of their acres. They
+were always, when any stranger asked about
+them, declared, with a serious and important
+air, to be a very ancient, honourable, and
+substantial family. “Oh! a great family are
+the Rockvilles, a very great family.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>But if you came to close quarters with the
+members of this great and highly distinguished
+family, you soon found yourself
+fundamentally astonished: you had a sensation
+come over you, as if you were trying,
+like Moses, to draw water from a rock, without
+his delegated power. There was a goodly
+outside of things before you, but nothing
+came of it. You talked, hoping to get talking
+in return, but you got little more than
+“noes” and “yeses,” and “oh! indeeds!”
+and “reallys,” and sometimes not even that,
+but a certain look of aristocratic dignity or
+dignification, that was meant to serve for all
+answers. There was a sort of resting on aristocratic
+oars or “sculls,” that were not to be
+too vulgarly handled. There was a feeling
+impressed on you, that eight hundred years of
+descent and ten thousand a-year in landed
+income did not trouble themselves with the
+trifling things that gave distinction to lesser
+people—such as literature, fine arts, politics,
+and general knowledge. These were very
+well for those who had nothing else to pride
+themselves on, but for the Rockvilles—oh!
+certainly they were by no means requisite.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In fact, you found yourself, with a little
+variation, in the predicament of Cowper’s
+people,</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c007'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in8'>—— who spent their lives</div>
+      <div class='line'>In dropping buckets into empty wells,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And <i>growing tired</i> of drawing nothing up.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c006'>Who hasn’t often come across these “dry
+wells” of society; solemn gulphs out of
+which you can pump nothing up? You
+know them; they are at your elbow every day
+in large and brilliant companies, and defy the
+best sucking-buckets ever invented to extract
+anything from them. But the Rockvilles
+were each and all of this adust description.
+It was a family feature, and they seemed, if
+either, rather proud of it. They must be so; for
+proud they were, amazingly proud; and they
+had nothing besides to be proud of, except
+their acres, and their ancestors.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>But the fact was, they could not help it.
+It was become organic. They had acted the
+justice of peace, maintained the constitution
+against upstarts and manufacturers, signed
+warrants, supported the church and the
+house of correction, committed poachers, and
+then rested on the dignity of their ancestors
+for so many generations, that their skulls,
+brains, constitutions, and nervous systems,
+were all so completely moulded into that
+shape and baked into that mould, that a
+Rockville would be a Rockville to the end of
+time, if God and Nature would have allowed
+it. But such things wear out. The American
+Indians and the Australian nations wear
+out; they are not progressive, and as Nature
+abhors a vacuum, she does not forget the
+vacuum wherever it may be, whether in a hot
+desert, or in a cold and stately Rockville;—a
+very ancient, honourable, and substantial
+family that lies fallow till the thinking faculty
+literally dies out.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>For several generations there had been
+symptoms of decay about the Rockville family.
+Not in its property, that was as large as ever;
+not in their personal stature and physical
+aspect. The Rockvilles continued, as they
+always had been, a tall and not bad-looking
+family. But they grew gradually less prolific.
+For a hundred and fifty years past there had
+seldom been more than two, or at most three,
+children. There had generally been an heir
+to the estate, and another to the family pulpit,
+and sometimes a daughter married to some
+neighbouring squire. But Sir Roger’s father
+had been an only child, and Sir Roger himself
+was an only child. The danger of extinction
+to the family, apparent as it was, had
+never induced Sir Roger to marry. At the
+time that we are turning our attention upon
+him, he had reached the mature age of sixty.
+Nobody believed that Sir Roger now would
+marry; he was the last, and likely to be, of
+his line.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>It is worth while here to take a glance at
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_435'>435</span>Sir Roger and his estate. They wore a strange
+contrast. The one bore all the signs of progress,
+the other of a stereotyped feudality.
+The estate, which in the days of the first Sir
+Roger de Rockville had been half morass and
+half wilderness, was now cultivated to the
+pitch of British agricultural science. The
+marshlands beyond the river were one splendid
+expanse of richest meadows, yielding a rental
+of four solid pounds per acre. Over hill and
+dale on this side for miles, where formerly ran
+wild deer, and grew wild woodlands or furze-bushes,
+now lay excellent farms and hamlets,
+and along the ridge of the ancient cliffs rose
+the most magnificent woods. Woods, too,
+clothed the steep hill-sides, and swept down
+to the noble river, their very boughs hanging
+far out over its clear and rapid waters. In
+the midst of these fine woods stood Rockville
+Hall, the family seat of the Rockvilles. It
+reared its old brick walls above the towering
+mass of elms, and travellers at a distance
+recognised it for what it was, the mansion of
+an ancient and wealthy family.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The progress of England in arts, science,
+commerce, and manufacture, had carried Sir
+Roger’s estate along with it. It was full of
+active and moneyed farmers, and flourished
+under modern influences. How lucky it
+would have been for the Rockville family had
+it done the same!</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>But amid this estate there was Sir Roger
+solitary, and the last of the line. He had
+grown well enough—there was nothing stunted
+about him, so far as you could see on the surface.
+In stature, he exceeded six feet. His
+colossal elms could not boast of a properer relative
+growth. He was as large a landlord, and
+as tall a justice of the peace, as you could
+desire; but, unfortunately, he was, after all,
+only the shell of a man. Like many of his
+veteran elms, there was a very fine stem, only
+it was hollow. There was a man, just with
+the rather awkward deficiency of a soul.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>And it were no difficult task to explain,
+either, how this had come about. The Rockvilles
+saw plainly enough the necessity of manuring
+their lands, but they scorned the very
+idea of manuring their family. What! that
+most ancient, honourable, and substantial
+family, suffer any of the common earth of
+humanity to gather about its roots! The
+Rockvilles were so careful of their good blood,
+that they never allied it to any but blood
+as pure and inane as their own. Their elms
+flourished in the rotten earth of plebeian accumulations,
+and their acres produced large
+crops of corn from the sewage of towns and
+fat sinks, but the Rockvilles themselves took
+especial care that no vulgar vigour from the
+real heap of ordinary human nature should
+infuse a new force of intellect into their race.
+The Rockvilles needed nothing; they had all
+that an ancient, honourable, and substantial
+family could need. The Rockvilles had no
+need to study at school—why should they?
+They did not want to get on. The Rockvilles
+did not aspire to distinction for talent in the
+world—why should they? They had a large
+estate. So the Rockville soul, unused from
+generation to generation, grew—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c007'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Fine by degrees, and <i>spiritually</i> less,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c008'>till it tapered off into nothing.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Look at the last of a long line in the midst
+of his fine estate. Tall he was, with a stoop
+in his shoulders, and a bowing of his head on
+one side, as if he had been accustomed to stand
+under the low boughs of his woods, and peer
+after intruders. And that was precisely the
+fact. His features were thin and sharp; his
+nose prominent and keen in its character;
+his eyes small, black, and peering like a
+mole’s, or a hungry swine’s. Sir Roger was
+still oracular on the bench, after consulting
+his clerk, a good lawyer,—and looked up
+to by the neighbouring squires in election
+matters, for he was an unswerving tory. You
+never heard of a rational thing that he had
+said in the whole course of his life; but that
+mattered little, he was a gentleman of solemn
+aspect, of stately gait, and of a very ancient
+family.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>With ten thousand a-year, and his rental
+rising, he was still, however, a man of overwhelming
+cares. What mattered a fine estate
+if all the world was against him? And Sir
+Roger firmly believed that he stood in that
+predicament. He had grown up to regard
+the world as full of little besides upstarts,
+radicals, manufacturers, and poachers. All
+were banded, in his belief, against the landed
+interest. It demanded all the energy of his
+very small faculties to defend himself and the
+world against them.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Unfortunately for his peace, a large manufacturing
+town had sprung up within a couple
+of miles of him. He could see its red-brick
+walls, and its red-tiled roofs, and its tall
+smoke-vomiting chimneys, growing and extending
+over the slopes beyond the river. It
+was to him the most irritating sight in the
+world; for what were all those swarming
+weavers and spinners but arrant radicals, upstarts,
+sworn foes of the ancient institutions
+and the landed interests of England? Sir
+Roger had passed through many a desperate
+conflict with them for the return of members
+to parliament. They brought forward men
+that were utter wormwood to all his feelings,
+and they paid no more respect to him and his
+friends on such occasions than they did to the
+meanest creature living. Reverence for ancient
+blood did not exist in that plebeian and rapidly
+multiplying tribe. There were master
+manufacturers there actually that looked and
+talked as big as himself, and <i><span lang="fr">entre nous</span></i>, a vast
+deal more cleverly. The people talked of
+rights and franchises, and freedom of speech
+and of conscience, in a way that was really
+frightful. Then they were given most inveterately
+to running out in whole and everlasting
+crowds on Sundays and holidays into
+the fields and woods; and as there was no
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_436'>436</span>part of the neighbourhood half so pleasant as
+the groves and river banks of Rockville, they
+came swarming up there in crowds that were
+enough to drive any man of acres frantic.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Unluckily, there were roads all about Rockville;
+foot roads, and high roads, and bridle
+roads. There was a road up the river side,
+all the way to Rockville woods, and when it
+reached them, it divided like a fork, and one
+pony or footpath led straight up a magnificent
+grove of a mile long, ending close to the hall;
+and another ran all along the river side, under
+the hills and branches of the wood.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Oh, delicious were these woods! In the
+river there were islands, which were covered
+in summer with the greenest grass, and the
+freshest of willows, and the clear waters
+rushed around them in the most inviting
+manner imaginable. And there were numbers
+of people extremely ready to accept this
+delectable invitation of these waters. There
+they came in fine weather, and as these
+islands were only separated from the mainland
+by a little and very shallow stream, it
+was delightful for lovers to get across—with
+laughter, and treading on stepping-stones, and
+slipping off the stepping-stones up to the
+ankles into the cool brook, and pretty screams,
+and fresh laughter, and then landing on those
+sunny, and to them really enchanted, islands.
+And then came fishermen, solitary fishermen,
+and fishermen in rows; fishermen lying in the
+flowery grass, with fragrant meadow-sweet
+and honey-breathing clover all about their
+ears; and fishermen standing in file, as if
+they were determined to clear all the river of
+fish in one day. And there were other lovers,
+and troops of loiterers, and shouting roysterers,
+going along under the boughs of the
+wood, and following the turns of that most
+companionable of rivers. And there were
+boats going up and down; boats full of young
+people, all holiday finery and mirth, and boats
+with duck-hunters and other, to Sir Roger,
+detestable marauders, with guns and dogs,
+and great bottles of beer. In the fine grove,
+on summer days, there might be found
+hundreds of people. There were pic-nic
+parties, fathers and mothers with whole
+families of children, and a grand promenade
+of the delighted artisans and their wives or
+sweethearts.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In the times prior to the sudden growth of
+the neighbouring town, Great Stockington,
+and to the simultaneous development of the
+love-of-nature principle in the Stockingtonians,
+nothing had been thought of all these
+roads. The roads were well enough till they
+led to these inroads. Then Sir Roger aroused
+himself. This must be changed. The roads
+must be stopped. Nothing was easier to his
+fancy. His fellow-justices, Sir Benjamin
+Bullockshed and Squire Sheepshank, had
+asked his aid to stop the like nuisances, and
+it had been done at once. So Sir Roger put
+up notices all about, that the roads were to
+be stopped by an Order of Session, and these
+notices were signed, as required by law, by
+their worships of Bullockshed and Sheepshank.
+But Sir Roger soon found that it was
+one thing to stop a road leading from One-man-Town
+to Lonely Lodge, and another to
+attempt to stop those from Great Stockington
+to Rockville.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>On the very first Sunday after the exhibition
+of those notice-boards, there was a
+ferment in the grove of Rockville, as if all
+the bees in the county were swarming there,
+with all the wasps and hornets to boot.
+Great crowds were collected before each of
+these obnoxious placards, and the amount of
+curses vomited forth against them was really
+shocking for any day, but more especially for
+a Sunday. Presently there was a rush at
+them; they were torn down, and simultaneously
+pitched into the river. There were
+great crowds swarming all about Rockville
+all that day, and with looks so defiant that
+Sir Roger more than once contemplated
+sending off for the Yeoman Cavalry to defend
+his house, which he seriously thought in
+danger.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>But so far from being intimidated from
+proceeding, this demonstration only made
+Sir Roger the more determined. To have so
+desperate and irreverent a population coming
+about his house and woods, now presented
+itself in a much more formidable aspect than
+ever. So, next day, not only were the placards
+once more hoisted, but rewards offered
+for the discovery of the offenders, attended
+with all the maledictions of the insulted
+majesty of the law. No notice was taken of
+this, but the whole of Great Stockington was
+in a buzz and an agitation. There were
+posters plastered all over the walls of the
+town, four times as large as Sir Roger’s
+notices, in this style:—</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Englishmen! your dearest rights are
+menaced! The Woods of Rockville, your
+ancient, rightful, and enchanting resorts, are
+to be closed to you. Stockingtonians! the
+eyes of the world are upon you. ‘Awake!
+arise! or be for ever fallen!’ England expects
+every man to do his duty! And your
+duty is to resist and defy the grasping soil-lords,
+to seize on your ancient Patrimony!”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Patrimony! Ancient and rightful resort
+of Rockville!” Sir Roger was astounded at
+the audacity of this upstart, plebeian race.
+What! they actually claimed Rockville, the
+heritage of a hundred successive Rockvilles,
+as their own. Sir Roger determined to carry
+it to the Sessions; and at the Sessions was a
+magnificent muster of all his friends. There
+was Sir Roger himself in the chair; and on
+either hand, a prodigious row of county squire-archy.
+There was Sir Benjamin Bullockshed,
+and Sir Thomas Tenterhook, and all the
+squires,—Sheepshank, Ramsbottom, Turnbull,
+Otterbrook, and Swagsides. The Clerk of
+Session read the notice for the closing of all
+the footpaths through the woods of Rockville,
+and declared that this notice had been
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_437'>437</span>duly, and for the required period publicly,
+posted. The Stockingtonians protested by
+their able lawyer Daredeville, against any
+order for the closing of these ancient woods—the
+inestimable property of the public.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Property of the public!” exclaimed Sir
+Roger. “Property of the public!” echoed
+the multitudinous voices of indignant Bullocksheds,
+Tenterhooks, and Ramsbottoms. “Why,
+Sir, do you dispute the right of Sir Roger
+Rockville to his own estate?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“By no means;” replied the undaunted
+Daredeville; “the estate of Rockville is unquestionably
+the property of the honourable
+baronet, Sir Roger Rockville; but the roads
+through it are the as unquestionable property
+of the public.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The whole bench looked at itself; that is,
+at each other, in wrathful astonishment. The
+swelling in the diaphragms of the squires
+Otterbrook, Turnbull, and Swagsides, and all
+the rest of the worshipful row, was too big to
+admit of utterance. Only Sir Roger himself
+burst forth with an abrupt—</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Impudent fellows! But I’ll see them —— first!”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Grant the order!” said Sir Benjamin
+Bullockshed; and the whole bench nodded
+assent. The able lawyer Daredeville retired
+with a pleasant smile. He saw an agreeable
+prospect of plenty of grist to his mill. Sir
+Roger was rich, and so was Great Stockington.
+He rubbed his hands, not in the least like a
+man defeated, and thought to himself, “Let
+them go at it—all right.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The next day the placards on the Rockville
+estate were changed for others bearing
+“<span class='sc'>Stopped by Order of Sessions!</span>” and
+alongside of them were huge carefully painted
+boards, denouncing on all trespassers prosecutions
+according to law. The same evening
+came a prodigious invasion of Stockingtonians—tore
+all the boards and placards down, and
+carried them on their shoulders to Great
+Stockington, singing as they went, “See, the
+Conquering Heroes come!” They set them
+up in the centre of the Stockington marketplace,
+and burnt them, along with, an effigy of
+Sir Roger Rockville.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>That was grist at once to the mill of the
+able lawyer Daredeville. He looked on, and
+rubbed his hands. Warrants were speedily
+issued by the Baronets of Bullockshed and
+Tenterhook, for the apprehension of the individuals
+who had been seen carrying off the
+notice-boards, for larceny, and against a number
+of others for trespass. There was plenty
+of work for Daredeville and his brethren of
+the robe; but it all ended, after the flying
+about of sundry mandamuses and assize trials,
+in Sir Roger finding that though Rockville
+was his, the roads through it were the public’s.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>As Sir Roger drove homeward from the
+assize, which finally settled the question of
+these footpaths, he heard the bells in all the
+steeples of Great Stockington burst forth with
+a grand peal of triumph. He closed first the
+windows of his fine old carriage, and sunk
+into a corner; but he could not drown the
+intolerable sound. “But,” said he, “I’ll stop
+their pic-nic-ing. I’ll stop their fishing. I’ll
+have hold of them for trespassing and poaching!”
+There was war henceforth between
+Rockville and Great Stockington.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>On the very next Sunday there came literally
+thousands of the jubilant Stockingtonians
+to Rockville. They had brought baskets, and
+were for dining, and drinking success to all
+footpaths. But in the great grove there were
+keepers, and watchers, who warned them to
+keep the path, that narrow well-worn line up
+the middle of the grove. “What! were they
+not to sit on the grass?”—“No!”—“What!
+were they not to pic-nic?”—“No! not there!”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Stockingtonians felt a sudden damp on
+their spirits. But the river bank! The cry
+was “To the river bank! There they <i>would</i>
+pic-nic.” The crowd rushed away down the
+wood, but on the river bank they found a
+whole regiment of watchers, who pointed again
+to the narrow line of footpath, and told them
+not to trespass beyond it. But the islands!
+they went over to the islands. But there too
+were Sir Roger’s forces, who warned them back!
+There was no road there—all found there
+would be trespassers, and be duly punished.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Stockingtonians discovered that their
+triumph was not quite so complete as they had
+flattered themselves. The footpaths were
+theirs, but that was all. Their ancient license
+was at an end. If they came there, there was
+no more fishing; if they came in crowds,
+there was no more pic-nic-ing; if they walked
+through the woods in numbers, they must
+keep to Indian file, or they were summoned
+before the county magistrates for trespass,
+and were soundly fined; and not even the able
+Daredeville would undertake to defend them.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Stockingtonians were chop-fallen, but
+they were angry and dogged; and they
+thronged up to the village and the front of
+the hall. They filled the little inn in the
+hamlet—they went by scores, and roving all
+over the churchyard, read epitaphs</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c007'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>That teach the rustic moralists to die,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c008'>but don’t teach them to give up their old
+indulgences very good-humouredly. They
+went and sat in rows on the old churchyard
+wall, opposite to the very windows of the
+irate Sir Roger. They felt themselves beaten,
+and Sir Roger felt himself beaten. True, he
+could coerce them to the keeping of the footpaths—but,
+then, they had the footpaths!
+True, thought the Stockingtonians, we have
+the footpaths, but then the pic-nic-ing, and
+the fishing, and the islands! The Stockingtonians
+were full of sullen wrath, and Sir
+Roger was—oh, most expressive old Saxon
+phrase—<span class='fss'>HAIRSORE!</span> Yes, he was one universal
+round of vexation and jealousy of his rights.
+Every hair in his body was like a pin sticking
+into him. Come within a dozen yards of him;
+nay, at the most, blow on him, and he was
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_438'>438</span>excruciated—you rubbed his sensitive hairs at
+a furlong’s distance.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The next Sunday the people found the
+churchyard locked up, except during service,
+when beadles walked there, and desired them
+not to loiter and disturb the congregation,
+closing the gates, and showing them out like
+a flock of sheep the moment the service was
+over. This was fuel to the already boiling
+blood of Stockington. The week following,
+what was their astonishment to find a much
+frequented ruin gone! it was actually gone!
+not a trace of it; but the spot where it had
+stood for ages, turfed, planted with young
+spruce trees, and fenced off with post and rail!
+The exasperated people now launched forth
+an immensity of fulminations against the
+churl Sir Roger, and a certain number of
+them resolved to come and seat themselves
+in the street of the hamlet and there dine;
+but a terrific thunderstorm, which seemed
+in league with Sir Roger, soon routed them,
+drenched them through, and on attempting
+to seek shelter in the cottages, the poor
+people said they were very sorry, but it was
+as much as their holdings were worth, and
+they dare not admit them.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Sir Roger had triumphed! It was all over
+with the old delightful days at Rockville.
+There was an end of pic-nic-ing, of fishing, and
+of roving in the islands. One sturdy disciple
+of Izaak Walton, indeed, dared to fling a line
+from the banks of Rockville grove, but Sir
+Roger came upon him and endeavoured to
+seize him. The man coolly walked into the
+middle of the river, and, without a word, continued
+his fishing.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Get out there!” exclaimed Sir Roger,
+“that is still on my property.” The man
+walked through the river to the other bank,
+where he knew that the land was rented by a
+farmer. “Give over,” shouted Sir Roger, “I
+tell you the water is mine.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Then,” said the fellow, “bottle it up, and
+be hanged to you! Don’t you see it is running
+away to Stockington?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>There was bad blood between Rockville
+and Stockington-green. Stockington was incensed,
+and Sir Roger was hairsore.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>A new nuisance sprung up. The people of
+Stockington looked on the cottagers of Rockville
+as sunk in deepest darkness under such
+a man as Sir Roger and his cousin the vicar.
+They could not pic-nic, but they thought they
+could hold a camp-meeting; they could not
+fish for roach, but they thought they might for
+souls. Accordingly there assembled crowds
+of Stockingtonians on the green of Rockville,
+with a chair and a table, and a preacher with
+his head bound in a red handkerchief; and
+soon there was a sound of hymns, and a
+zealous call to come out of the darkness of the
+spiritual Babylon. But this was more than
+Sir Roger could bear; he rushed forth with
+all his servants, keepers, and cottagers, overthrew
+the table, and routing the assembly,
+chased them to the boundary of his estate.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The discomfited Stockingtonians now fulminated
+awful judgments on the unhappy Sir
+Roger, as a persecutor and a malignant. They
+dared not enter again on his park, but they
+came to the very verge of it, and held weekly
+meetings on the highway, in which they sang
+and declaimed as loudly as possible, that the
+winds might bear their voices to Sir Roger’s
+ears.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>To such a position was now reduced the
+last of the long line of Rockville. The spirit
+of a policeman had taken possession of him.
+He had keepers and watchers out on all sides,
+but that did not satisfy him. He was perpetually
+haunted with the idea that poachers
+were after his game, that trespassers were in
+his woods. His whole life was now spent in
+stealing to and fro in his fields and plantations,
+and prowling along his river side. He
+looked under hedges, and watched for long
+hours under the forest trees. If any one had
+a curiosity to see Sir Roger, they had only to
+enter his fields by the wood side, and wander
+a few yards from the path, and he was almost
+sure to spring out over the hedge, and in
+angry tones demand their name and address.
+The descendant of the chivalrous and steel-clad
+De Rockvilles was sunk into a restless
+spy on his own ample property. There was
+but one idea in his mind—encroachment. It
+was destitute of all other furniture but the
+musty technicalities of warrants and commitments.
+There was a stealthy and skulking
+manner in everything that he did. He went
+to church on Sundays, but it was no longer
+by the grand iron gate opposite to his house,
+that stood generally with a large spider’s web
+woven over the lock, and several others in
+different corners of the fine iron tracery,
+bearing evidence of the long period since it
+had been opened. How different to the time
+when the Sir Roger and Lady of Rockville
+had had these gates thrown wide on a Sunday
+morning, and, with all their train of household
+servants after their back, with true antique
+dignity, marched with much proud humility
+into the house of God. Now, Sir Roger—the
+solitary, suspicious, undignified Sir Roger,
+the keeper and policeman of his own property—stole
+in at a little side gate from his paddock,
+and back the same way, wondering all
+the time whether there was not somebody in
+his pheasant preserves, or Sunday trespassers
+in his grove.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>If you entered his house, it gave you as
+cheerless a feeling as its owner. There was
+the conservatory, so splendid with rich plants
+and flowers in his mother’s time—now a
+dusty receptacle of hampers, broken hand-glasses,
+and garden tools. These tools could
+never be used, for the gardens were grown
+wild. Tall grass grew in the walks, and the
+huge unpruned shrubs disputed the passage
+with you. In the wood above the gardens,
+reached by several flights of fine, but now
+moss-grown, steps, there stood a pavilion,
+once clearly very beautiful.  It was now
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_439'>439</span>damp and ruinous—its walls covered with
+greenness and crawling insects. It was a
+great lurking-place of Sir Roger when on the
+watch for poachers.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The line of the Rockvilles was evidently
+running fast out. It had reached the extremity
+of imbecility and contempt—it must
+soon reach its close.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Sir Roger used to make his regular annual
+visit to town; but of late, when there, he had
+wandered restlessly about the streets, peeping
+into the shop-windows; and if it rained,
+standing under entries for hours after, till it
+was gone over. The habit of lurking and
+peering about, was upon him; and his feet
+bore him instinctively into those narrow and
+crowded alleys where swarm the poachers of
+the city—the trespassers and anglers in the
+game preserves and streams of humanity. He
+had lost all pleasure in his club; the most
+exciting themes of political life retained no
+piquancy for him. His old friends ceased
+to find any pleasure in him. He was become
+the driest of all dry wells. Poachers, and
+anglers, and Methodists, haunted the wretched
+purlieus of his lost fading-out mind, and he
+resolved to go to town no more. His whole
+nature was centred in his woods. He was
+for ever on the watch; and when at Rockville
+again, if he heard a door clap when in
+bed, he thought it a gun in his woods, and
+started up, and was out with his keepers.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Of what value was that magnificent estate
+to him?—those superb woods; those finely-hanging
+cliffs; that clear and <i>riant</i> river
+coming travelling on, and taking a noble
+sweep below his windows,—that glorious expanse
+of neat verdant meadows stretching
+almost to Stockington, and enlivened by
+numerous herds of the most beautiful cattle—those
+old farms and shady lanes overhung
+with hazel and wild rose; the glittering
+brook, and the songs of woodland birds—what
+were they to that worn-out old man,
+that victim of the delusive doctrine of blood,
+of the man-trap of an hereditary name?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>There the poet could come, and feel the
+presence of divinity in that noble scene, and
+hear sublime whispers in the trees, and create
+new heavens and earths from the glorious
+chaos of nature around him, and in one short
+hour live an empyrean of celestial life and
+love. There could come the very humblest
+children of the plebeian town, and feel a
+throb of exquisite delight pervade their
+bosoms at the sight of the very flowers on the
+sod, and see heaven in the infinite blue above
+them. And poor Sir Roger, the holder, but
+not the possessor of all, walked only in a
+region of sterility, with no sublimer ideas
+than poachers and trespassers—no more rational
+enjoyment than the brute indulgence
+of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men
+like a bulldog. He was a specimen of
+human nature degenerated, retrograded from
+the divine to the bestial, through the long-operating
+influences of false notions and institutions,
+continued beyond their time. He
+had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been
+only a keeper, he had been a much happier
+man.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>His time was at hand. The severity which
+he had long dealt out towards all sorts of
+offenders made him the object of the deepest
+vengeance. In a lonely hollow of his woods,
+watching at midnight with two of his men,
+there came a sturdy knot of poachers. An
+affray ensued. The men perceived that their
+old enemy, Sir Roger, was there: and the
+blow of a hedge-stake stretched him on the
+earth. His keepers fled—and thus ignominiously
+terminated the long line of the Rockvilles.
+Sir Roger was the last of his line, but
+not of his class. There is a feudal art of
+sinking, which requires no study; and the
+Rockvilles are but one family amongst thousands
+who have perished in its practice.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE CHEMISTRY OF A CANDLE.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The Wilkinsons were having a small party,—it
+consisted of themselves and Uncle
+Bagges—at which the younger members of
+the family, home for the holidays, had been
+just admitted to assist after dinner. Uncle
+Bagges was a gentleman from whom his
+affectionate relatives cherished expectations
+of a testamentary nature. Hence the greatest
+attention was paid by them to the wishes of
+Mr. Bagges, as well as to every observation
+which he might be pleased to make.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh! what? you sir,” said Mr. Bagges,
+facetiously addressing himself to his eldest
+nephew, Harry,—“Eh! what? I am glad to
+hear, sir, that you are doing well at school.
+Now—eh? now, are you clever enough to tell
+me where was Moses when he put the candle
+out?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“That depends, uncle,” answered the young
+gentleman, “on whether he had lighted the
+candle to see with at night, or by daylight, to
+seal a letter.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh! Very good, now! ’Pon my word,
+very good,” exclaimed Uncle Bagges. “You
+must be Lord Chancellor, sir—Lord Chancellor,
+one of these days.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“And now, uncle,” asked Harry, who was
+a favourite with the old gentleman, “can you
+tell me what you do when you put a candle
+out?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Clap an extinguisher on it, you young
+rogue, to be sure.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Oh! but I mean, you cut off its supply of
+oxygen,” said Master Harry.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Cut off its ox’s—eh? what? I shall cut
+off your nose, you young dog, one of these fine
+days.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“He means something he heard at the
+Royal Institution,” observed Mrs. Wilkinson.
+“He reads a great deal about chemistry, and
+he attended Professor Faraday’s lectures there
+on the chemical history of a candle, and has
+been full of it ever since.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Now, you sir,” said Uncle Bagges, “come
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_440'>440</span>you here to me, and tell me what you have to
+say about this chemical, eh?—or comical;
+which?—this comical chemical history of a
+candle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“He’ll bore you, Bagges,” said Mr. Wilkinson.
+“Harry, don’t be troublesome to your
+uncle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Troublesome! Oh, not at all. He
+amuses me. I like to hear him. So let him
+teach his old uncle the comicality and chemicality
+of a farthing rushlight.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“A wax candle will be nicer and cleaner,
+uncle, and answer the same purpose. There’s
+one on the mantel-shelf. Let me light it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Take care you don’t burn your fingers,
+or set anything on fire,” said Mrs. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Now, uncle,” commenced Harry, having
+drawn his chair to the side of Mr. Bagges,
+“we have got our candle burning. What do
+you see?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Let me put on my spectacles,” answered
+the uncle.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Look down on the top of the candle around
+the wick. See, it is a little cup full of melted
+wax. The heat of the flame has melted the
+wax just round the wick. The cold air keeps
+the outside of it hard, so as to make the rim
+of it. The melted wax in the little cup goes
+up through the wick to be burnt, just as oil
+does in the wick of a lamp. What do you
+think makes it go up, uncle?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Why—why, the flame draws it up, doesn’t
+it?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Not exactly, uncle. It goes up through
+little tiny passages in the cotton wick, because
+very, very small channels, or pipes, or pores,
+have the power in themselves of sucking up
+liquids. What they do it by is called cap—something.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Capillary attraction, Harry,” suggested
+Mr. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Yes, that’s it; just as a sponge sucks up
+water, or a bit of lump-sugar the little drop
+of tea or coffee left in the bottom of a cup.
+But I mustn’t say much more about this, or
+else you will tell me I am doing something
+very much like teaching my grandmother to—you
+know what.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Your grandmother, eh, young sharpshins?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“No—I mean my uncle. Now, I’ll blow
+the candle out, like Moses; not to be in the
+dark, though, but to see into what it is. Look
+at the smoke rising from the wick. I’ll hold
+a bit of lighted paper in the smoke, so as not
+to touch the wick. But see, for all that, the
+candle lights again. So this shows that the
+melted wax sucked up through the wick is
+turned into vapour; and the vapour burns.
+The heat of the burning vapour keeps on
+melting more wax, and that is sucked up too
+within the flame, and turned into vapour, and
+burnt, and so on till the wax is all used up,
+and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle,
+you see, is the last of the candle, and the
+candle seems to go through the flame into
+nothing—although it doesn’t, but goes into
+several things, and isn’t it curious, as Professor
+Faraday said, that the candle should
+look so splendid and glorious in going away?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“How well he remembers, doesn’t he?”
+observed Mrs. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I dare say,” proceeded Harry, “that the
+flame of the candle looks flat to you; but if
+we were to put a lamp glass over it, so as to
+shelter it from the draught, you would see it
+is round,—round sideways, and running up to
+a peak. It is drawn up by the hot air; you
+know that hot air always rises, and that is the
+way smoke is taken up the chimney. What
+should you think was in the middle of the
+flame?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I should say, fire,” replied Uncle Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright
+flame we see is something no thicker than a
+thin peel, or skin; and it doesn’t touch the
+wick. Inside of it is the vapour I told you
+of just now. If you put one end of a bent
+pipe into the middle of the flame, and let the
+other end of the pipe dip into a bottle, the
+vapour or gas from the candle will mix with
+the air there; and if you set fire to the mixture
+of gas from the candle and air in the
+bottle, it would go off with a bang.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I wish you’d do that, Harry,” said
+Master Tom, the younger brother of the juvenile
+lecturer.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I want the proper things,” answered
+Harry. “Well, uncle, the flame of the candle
+is a little shining case, with gas in the inside
+of it, and air on the outside, so that the case
+of flame is between the air and the gas. The
+gas keeps going into the flame to burn, and
+when the candle burns properly, none of it
+ever passes out through the flame; and none
+of the air ever gets in through the flame to
+the gas. The greatest heat of the candle is
+in this skin, or peel, or case of flame.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Case of flame!” repeated Mr. Bagges.
+“Live and learn. I should have thought a
+candle-flame was as thick as my poor old
+noddle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I can show you the contrary,” said Harry.
+“I take this piece of white paper, look, and
+hold it a second or two down upon the candle-flame,
+keeping the flame very steady. Now
+I’ll rub off the black of the smoke, and—there—you
+find that the paper is scorched in
+the shape of a ring; but inside the ring it is
+only dirtied, and not singed at all.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Seeing is believing,” remarked the uncle.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“But,” proceeded Harry, “there is more in
+the candle-flame than the gas that comes out
+of the candle. You know a candle won’t
+burn without air. There must be always air
+around the gas, and touching it like, to make
+it burn. If a candle hasn’t got enough air,
+it goes out, or burns badly, so that some of
+the vapour inside of the flame comes out
+through it in the form of smoke, and this is
+the reason of a candle smoking. So now you
+know why a great clumsy dip smokes more
+than a neat wax candle; it is because the
+thick wick of the dip makes too much fuel in
+proportion to the air that can get to it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'><span class='pageno' id='Page_441'>441</span>“Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a
+reason for everything,” exclaimed the young
+philosopher’s mamma.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“What should you say, now,” continued
+Harry, “if I told you that the smoke that
+comes out of a candle is the very thing that
+makes a candle light? Yes; a candle shines
+by consuming its own smoke. The smoke of
+a candle is a cloud of small dust, and the little
+grains of the dust are bits of charcoal, or
+carbon, as chemists call it. They are made
+in the flame, and burnt in the flame, and,
+while burning, make the flame bright. They
+are burnt the moment they are made; but
+the flame goes on making more of them as
+fast as it burns them; and that is how it
+keeps bright. The place they are made in, is
+in the case of flame itself, where the strongest
+heat is. The great heat separates them from
+the gas which comes from the melted wax,
+and, as soon as they touch the air on the outside
+of the thin case of flame, they burn.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Can you tell how it is that the little bits
+of carbon cause the brightness of the flame?”
+asked Mr. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Because they are pieces of solid matter,”
+answered Harry. “To make a flame shine,
+there must always be some solid—or at least
+liquid—matter in it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Very good,” said Mr. Bagges,—“solid stuff
+necessary to brightness.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Some gases and other things,” resumed
+Harry, “that burn with a flame you can
+hardly see, burn splendidly when something
+solid is put into them. Oxygen and hydrogen—tell
+me if I use too hard words, uncle—oxygen
+and hydrogen gases, if mixed together
+and blown through a pipe, burn with plenty
+of heat but with very little light. But if
+their flame is blown upon a piece of quicklime,
+it gets so bright as to be quite dazzling.
+Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass
+through the same flame, and it gives the flame
+a beautiful brightness directly.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I wonder,” observed Uncle Bagges, “what
+has made you such a bright youth.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Taking after uncle, perhaps,” retorted his
+nephew. “Don’t put my candle and me out.
+Well, carbon or charcoal is what causes the
+brightness of all lamps, and candles, and
+other common lights; so, of course, there is
+carbon in what they are all made of.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing
+to your carbon. Giving light out of smoke,
+eh? as they say in the classics,” observed
+Mr. Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“But what becomes of the candle,” pursued
+Harry, “as it burns away? where does it go?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Nowhere,” said his mamma, “I should
+think. It burns to nothing.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Oh, dear, no!” said Harry, “everything—everybody
+goes somewhere.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh!—rather an important consideration
+that,” Mr. Bagges moralised.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“You can see it goes into smoke, which makes
+soot for one thing,” pursued Harry. “There
+are other things it goes into, not to be seen by
+only looking, but you can get to see them by
+taking the right means,—just put your hand
+over the candle, uncle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather
+be excused.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Not close enough down to burn you, uncle;
+higher up. There,—you feel a stream of hot
+air; so something seems to rise from the
+candle. Suppose you were to put a very long
+slender gas-burner over the flame, and let the
+flame burn just within the end of it, as if it
+were a chimney,—some of the hot steam would
+go up and come out at the top, but a sort of
+dew would be left behind in the glass chimney,
+if the chimney was cold enough when you put
+it on. There are ways of collecting this sort
+of dew, and when it is collected it turns out
+to be really water. I am not joking, uncle.
+Water is one of the things which the candle
+turns into in burning,—water coming out of
+fire. A jet of oil gives above a pint of water
+in burning. In some lighthouses they burn,
+Professor Faraday says, up to two gallons of
+oil in a night, and if the windows are cold
+the steam from the oil clouds the inside of
+the windows, and, in frosty weather, freezes
+into ice.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Water out of a candle, eh?” exclaimed
+Mr. Bagges. “As hard to get, I should have
+thought, as blood out of a post. Where does
+it come from?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Part from the wax, and part from the
+air, and yet not a drop of it comes either
+from the air or the wax. What do you make
+of that, uncle?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh? Oh! I’m no hand at riddles. Give
+it up.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“No riddle at all, uncle. The part that
+comes from the wax isn’t water, and the part
+that comes from the air isn’t water, but when
+put together they become water. Water is a
+mixture of two things, then. This can be
+shown. Put some iron wire or turnings into
+a gun-barrel open at both ends. Heat the
+middle of the barrel red-hot in a little furnace.
+Keep the heat up, and send the steam of
+boiling water through the red-hot gun-barrel.
+What will come out at the other end of the
+barrel won’t be steam; it will be gas, which
+doesn’t turn to water again when it gets cold,
+and which burns if you put a light to it. Take
+the turnings out of the gun-barrel, and you will
+find them changed to rust, and heavier than
+when they were put in. Part of the water is
+the gas that comes out of the barrel, the other
+part is what mixes with the iron turnings, and
+changes them to rust, and makes them
+heavier. You can fill a bladder with the gas
+that comes out of the gun-barrel, or you can
+pass bubbles of it up into a jar of water
+turned upside down in a trough, and, as I
+said, you can make this part of the water
+burn.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh?” cried Mr. Bagges. “Upon my word!
+One of these days, we shall have you setting
+the Thames on fire.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Nothing more easy,” said Harry, “than
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_442'>442</span>to burn part of the Thames, or of any other
+water; I mean the gas that I have just told
+you about, which is called hydrogen. In
+burning, hydrogen produces water again, like
+the flame of the candle. Indeed, hydrogen is
+that part of the water, formed by a candle
+burning, that comes from the wax. All
+things that have hydrogen in them produce
+water in burning, and the more there is in
+them the more they produce. When pure
+hydrogen burns, nothing comes from it but
+water, no smoke or soot at all. If you were
+to burn one ounce of it, the water you would
+get would be just nine ounces. There are
+many ways of making hydrogen, besides out
+of steam by the hot gun-barrel. I could
+show it you in a moment by pouring a little
+sulphuric acid mixed with water into a bottle
+upon a few zinc or steel filings, and putting a
+cork in the bottle with a little pipe through
+it, and setting fire to the gas that would come
+from the mouth of the pipe. We should find
+the flame very hot, but having scarcely any
+brightness. I should like you to see the
+curious qualities of hydrogen, particularly
+how light it is, so as to carry things up in the
+air; and I wish I had a small balloon to fill
+with it and make go up to the ceiling, or a
+bag-pipe full of it to blow soap-bubbles with,
+and show how much faster they rise than
+common ones, blown with the breath.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“So do I,” interposed Master Tom.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“And so,” resumed Harry, “hydrogen, you
+know, uncle, is part of water, and just one-ninth
+part.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“As hydrogen is to water, so is a tailor to
+an ordinary individual, eh?” Mr. Bagges
+remarked.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Well, now then, uncle, if hydrogen is the
+tailor’s part of the water, what are the other
+eight parts? The iron turnings used to
+make hydrogen in the gun-barrel, and rusted,
+take just those eight parts from the water in
+the shape of steam, and are so much the
+heavier. Burn iron turnings in the air, and
+they make the same rust, and gain just the
+same in weight. So the other eight parts
+must be found in the air for one thing, and in
+the rusted iron turnings for another, and they
+must also be in the water; and now the
+question is, how to get at them?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Out of the water? Fish for them, I should
+say,” suggested Mr. Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Why, so we can,” said Harry. “Only,
+instead of hooks and lines, we must use wires—two
+wires, one from one end, the other from
+the other, of a galvanic battery. Put the
+points of these wires into water, a little distance
+apart, and they instantly take the water
+to pieces. If they are of copper, or a metal
+that will rust easily, one of them begins to
+rust, and air-bubbles come up from the other.
+These bubbles are hydrogen. The other part
+of the water mixes with the end of the wire
+and makes rust. But if the wires are of gold,
+or a metal that does not rust easily, air-bubbles
+rise from the ends of both wires.
+Collect the bubbles from both wires in a tube,
+and fire them, and they turn to water again;
+and this water is exactly the same weight as
+the quantity that has been changed into the
+two gases. Now then, uncle, what should
+you think water was composed of?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh? well—I suppose of those very identical
+two gases, young gentleman.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Right, uncle. Recollect that the gas from
+one of the wires was hydrogen, the one-ninth
+of water. What should you guess the gas
+from the other wire to be?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Stop—eh?—wait a bit—eh?—oh!—why,
+the other eight-ninths, to be sure.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Good again, uncle. Now this gas that is
+eight-ninths of water is the gas called oxygen
+that I mentioned just now. This is a very
+curious gas. It won’t burn in air at all
+itself, like gas from a lamp, but it has a
+wonderful power of making things burn that
+are lighted and put into it. If you fill a jar
+with it——”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“How do you manage that?” Mr. Bagges
+inquired.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“You fill the jar with water,” answered
+Harry, “and you stand it upside down in a
+vessel full of water too. Then you let bubbles
+of the gas up into the jar and they turn out the
+water and take its place. Put a stopper in
+the neck of the jar, or hold a glass plate
+against the mouth of it, and you can take it
+out of the water and so have bottled oxygen.
+A lighted candle put into a jar of oxygen
+blazes up directly and is consumed before you
+can say Jack Robinson. Charcoal burns
+away in it as fast, with beautiful bright
+sparks—phosphorus with a light that dazzles
+you to look at—and a piece of iron or steel
+just made red-hot at the end first, is burnt
+in oxygen quicker than a stick would be in
+common air. The experiment of burning
+things in oxygen beats any fire-works.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Oh, how jolly!” exclaimed Tom.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Now we see, uncle,” Harry continued,
+“that water is hydrogen and oxygen united
+together, that water is got wherever hydrogen
+is burnt in common air, that a candle won’t
+burn without air, and that when a candle
+burns there is hydrogen in it burning, and
+forming water. Now, then, where does the
+hydrogen of the candle get the oxygen from,
+to turn into water with it?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“From the air, eh?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Just so. I can’t stop to tell you of the
+other things which there is oxygen in, and the
+many beautiful and amusing ways of getting it.
+But as there is oxygen in the air, and as oxygen
+makes things burn at such a rate, perhaps
+you wonder why air does not make things
+burn as fast as oxygen. The reason is, that
+there is something else in the air that mixes
+with the oxygen and weakens it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Makes a sort of gaseous grog of it,
+eh?” said Mr. Bagges. “But how is that
+proved?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Why, there is a gas, called nitrous gas,
+which, if you mix it with oxygen, takes all the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_443'>443</span>oxygen into itself, and the mixture of the
+nitrous gas and oxygen, if you put water with
+it, goes into the water. Mix nitrous gas and
+air together in a jar over water, and the
+nitrous gas takes away the oxygen, and then
+the water sucks up the mixed oxygen and
+nitrous gas, and that part of the air which
+weakens the oxygen is left behind. Burning
+phosphorus in confined air will also take all
+the oxygen from it, and there are other ways
+of doing the same thing. The portion of
+the air left behind is called nitrogen. You
+wouldn’t know it from common air by the
+look; it has no colour, taste, nor smell, and it
+won’t burn. But things won’t burn in it,
+either; and anything on fire put into it goes
+out directly. It isn’t fit to breathe,—and a
+mouse, or any animal, shut up in it, dies. It
+isn’t poisonous, though; creatures only die in
+it for want of oxygen. We breathe it with
+oxygen, and then it does no harm, but good;
+for if we breathed pure oxygen, we should
+breathe away so violently, that we should soon
+breathe our life out. In the same way, if the
+air were nothing but oxygen, a candle would
+not last above a minute.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“What a tallow-chandler’s bill we should
+have!” remarked Mrs. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘If a house were on fire in oxygen,’ as
+Professor Faraday said, ‘every iron bar, or
+rafter, or pillar, every nail and iron tool, and
+the fire-place itself; all the zinc and copper
+roofs, and leaden coverings, and gutters, and
+pipes, would consume and burn, increasing the
+combustion.’”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“That would be, indeed, burning ‘like a
+house on fire,’” observed Mr. Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Think,’” said Harry, continuing his
+quotation, “‘of the Houses of Parliament, or a
+steam-engine manufactory. Think of an iron-proof
+chest—no proof against oxygen. Think
+of a locomotive and its train,—every engine,
+every carriage, and even every rail would be set
+on fire and burnt up.’ So now, uncle, I think
+you see what the use of nitrogen is, and
+especially how it prevents a candle from
+burning out too fast.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh?” said Mr. Bagges. “Well, I will say
+I do think we are under considerable obligations
+to nitrogen.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I have explained to you, uncle,” pursued
+Harry, “how a candle, in burning, turns into
+water. But it turns into something else besides
+that; there is a stream of hot air going up
+from it that won’t condense into dew; some
+of that is the nitrogen of the air which the
+candle has taken all the oxygen from. But
+there is more in it than nitrogen. Hold a
+long glass tube over a candle, so that the
+stream of hot air from it may go up through
+the tube. Hold a jar over the end of the tube
+to collect some of the stream of hot air. Put
+some lime-water, which looks quite clear, into
+the jar; stop the jar, and shake it up. The
+lime-water, which was quite clear before, turns
+milky. Then there is something made by the
+burning of the candle that changes the colour
+of the lime-water. That is a gas, too, and you
+can collect it, and examine it. It is to be got
+from several things, and is a part of all chalk,
+marble, and the shells of eggs or of shell-fish.
+The easiest way to make it is by pouring
+muriatic or sulphuric acid on chalk or marble.
+The marble or chalk begins to hiss or bubble,
+and you can collect the bubbles in the same
+way that you can oxygen. The gas made by
+the candle in burning, and which also is got
+out of the chalk and marble, is called carbonic
+acid. It puts out a light in a moment; it kills
+any animal that breathes it, and it is really
+poisonous to breathe, because it destroys life
+even when mixed with a pretty large quantity
+of common air. The bubbles made by beer
+when it ferments, are carbonic acid, so is the
+air that fizzes out of soda-water,—and it is
+good to swallow though it is deadly to breathe.
+It is got from chalk by burning the chalk as
+well as by putting acid to it, and burning the
+carbonic acid out of chalk makes the chalk
+lime. This is why people are killed sometimes
+by getting in the way of the wind that
+blows from lime-kilns.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Of which it is advisable carefully to keep
+to the windward,” Mr. Wilkinson observed.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“The most curious thing about carbonic
+acid gas,” proceeded Harry, “is its weight.
+Although it is only a sort of air, it is so
+heavy that you can pour it from one vessel
+into another. You may dip a cup of it and
+pour it down upon a candle, and it will put
+the candle out, which would astonish an
+ignorant person; because carbonic acid gas
+is as invisible as the air, and the candle seems
+to be put out by nothing. A soap-bubble or
+common air floats on it like wood on water.
+Its weight is what makes it collect in brewers’
+vats; and also in wells, where it is produced
+naturally; and owing to its collecting in such
+places it causes the deaths we so often hear
+about of those who go down into them without
+proper care. It is found in many springs of
+water, more or less; and a great deal of it
+comes out of the earth in some places. Carbonic
+acid gas is what stupifies the dogs in
+the Grotto del Cane. Well, but how is
+carbonic acid gas made by the candle?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I hope with your candle you you’ll throw
+some light upon the subject,” said Uncle
+Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I hope so,” answered Harry. “Recollect
+it is the burning of the smoke, or soot, or
+carbon of the candle that makes the candle-flame
+bright. Also that the candle won’t
+burn without air. Likewise that it will not
+burn in nitrogen, or air that has been deprived
+of oxygen. So the carbon of the candle
+mingles with oxygen, in burning, to make
+carbonic acid gas, just as the hydrogen does
+to form water. Carbonic acid gas, then, is
+carbon or charcoal dissolved in oxygen. Here
+is black soot getting invisible and changing
+into air; and this seems strange, uncle,
+doesn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Ahem! Strange, if true,” answered Mr.
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_444'>444</span>Bagges. “Eh?—well! I suppose it’s all
+right.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Quite so, uncle. Burn carbon or charcoal
+either in the air or in oxygen, and it is sure
+always to make carbonic acid, and nothing
+else, if it is dry. No dew or mist gathers in
+a cold glass jar if you burn dry charcoal in
+it. The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic
+acid gas, and leaves nothing behind but ashes,
+which are only earthy stuff that was in the
+charcoal, but not part of the charcoal itself.
+And now, shall I tell you something about
+carbon?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“With all my heart,” assented Mr. Bagges.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I said that there was carbon or charcoal
+in all common lights,—so there is in every
+common kind of fuel. If you heat coal or
+wood away from the air, some gas comes away,
+and leaves behind coke from coal, and charcoal
+from wood; both carbon, though not pure.
+Heat carbon as much as you will in a close
+vessel, and it does not change in the least;
+but let the air get to it, and then it burns and
+flies off in carbonic acid gas. This makes
+carbon so convenient for fuel. But it is ornamental
+as well as useful, uncle. The diamond
+is nothing else than carbon.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“The diamond, eh? You mean the black
+diamond.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“No; the diamond, really and truly. The
+diamond is only carbon in the shape of a
+crystal.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh? and can’t some of your clever chemists
+crystallise a little bit of carbon, and
+make a Koh-i-noor?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Ah, uncle, perhaps we shall, some day.
+In the meantime I suppose we must be
+content with making carbon so brilliant as it
+is in the flame of a candle. Well; now you
+see that a candle-flame is vapour burning,
+and the vapour, in burning, turns into water
+and carbonic acid gas. The oxygen of both
+the carbonic acid gas and the water comes
+from the air, and the hydrogen and carbon
+together are the vapour. They are distilled
+out of the melted wax by the heat. But, you
+know, carbon alone can’t be distilled by any
+heat. It can be distilled, though, when it
+is joined with hydrogen, as it is in the wax,
+and then the mixed hydrogen and carbon
+rise in gas of the same kind as the gas in
+the streets, and that also is distilled by
+heat from coal. So a candle is a little gas
+manufactory in itself, that burns the gas as
+fast as it makes it.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Haven’t you pretty nearly come to your
+candle’s end?” said Mr. Wilkinson.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Nearly. I only want to tell uncle, that
+the burning of a candle is almost exactly like
+our breathing. Breathing is consuming oxygen,
+only not so fast as burning. In breathing
+we throw out water in vapour and carbonic
+acid from our lungs, and take oxygen in.
+Oxygen is as necessary to support the life of
+the body, as it is to keep up the flame of a
+candle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“So,” said Mr. Bagges, “man is a candle,
+eh? and Shakespeare knew that, I suppose,
+(as he did most things,) when he wrote—</p>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c007'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>‘Out, out, brief candle!’</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Well, well; we old ones are moulds, and you
+young squires are dips and rushlights, eh?
+Any more to tell us about the candle?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“I could tell you a great deal more about
+oxygen, and hydrogen, and carbon, and water,
+and breathing, that Professor Faraday said,
+if I had time; but you should go and hear
+him yourself, uncle.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Eh? well! I think I will. Some of us
+seniors may learn something from a juvenile
+lecture, at any rate, if given by a Faraday.
+And now, my boy, I will tell you what,”
+added Mr. Bagges, “I am very glad to find
+you so fond of study and science; and you
+deserve to be encouraged; and so I’ll give
+you a what-d’ ye-call-it?—a Galvanic Battery
+on your next birth-day; and so much for
+your teaching your old uncle the chemistry
+of a candle.”</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>AN OLD HAUNT.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c010'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>The rippling water, with its drowsy tone,—</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The tall elms, tow’ring in their stately pride,—</div>
+      <div class='line'>And—sorrow’s type—the willow sad and lone,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Kissing in graceful woe the murmuring tide;—</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>The grey church-tower,—and dimly seen beyond,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The faint hills gilded by the parting sun,—</div>
+      <div class='line'>All were the same, and seem’d with greeting fond</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>To welcome me as they of old had done.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And for a while I stood as in a trance,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>On that loved spot, forgetting toil and pain;—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Buoyant my limbs, and keen and bright my glance,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>For that brief space I was a boy again!</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Again with giddy mates I careless play’d,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Or plied the quiv’ring oar, on conquest bent;—</div>
+      <div class='line'>Again, beneath the tall elms’ silent shade,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>I woo’d the fair, and won the sweet consent.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>But brief, alas! the spell,—for suddenly</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Peal’d from the tower the old familiar chimes,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And with their clear, heart-thrilling melody,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Awaked the spectral forms of darker times.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And I remember’d all that years had wrought—</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>How bow’d my care-worn frame, how dimm’d my eye,</div>
+      <div class='line'>How poor the gauds by Youth so keenly sought,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>How quench’d and dull Youth’s aspirations high!</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>And in half mournful, half upbraiding host,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Duties neglected—high resolves unkept—</div>
+      <div class='line'>And many a heart by death or falsehood lost,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>In lightning current o’er my bosom swept.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Then bow’d the stubborn knees, as backward sped</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>The self-accusing thoughts in dread array,</div>
+      <div class='line'>And slowly, from their long-congealèd bed,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Forced the remorseful tears their silent way.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>Bitter, yet healing drops! in mercy sent,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Like soft dews falling on a thirsty plain,—</div>
+      <div class='line'>And ’ere those chimes their last faint notes had spent,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Strengthen’d and calm’d, I stood erect again.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'><span class='pageno' id='Page_445'>445</span>Strengthen’d, the tasks allotted to fulfil;—</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Calm’d, the thick-coming sorrows to endure;</div>
+      <div class='line'>Fearful of nought but of my own frail will,—</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>In His Almighty strength and aid secure.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line'>For a sweet voice had whisper’d hope to me,—</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Had through my darkness shed a kindly ray;—</div>
+      <div class='line'>It said: “The past is fix’d immutably,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Yet is there comfort in the coming day!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE HIPPOPOTAMUS.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Before we give a more exclusive attention
+to the “illustrious stranger,” we think it will
+be advisable to present the reader with a brief
+authentic account of the circumstances which
+led to the honour conferred upon England by
+the visit of this extraordinary personage.
+These circumstances are little known to the
+world; indeed, we have reason to believe they
+have never before been published.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The British Consul at Cairo had frequently
+intimated to His Highness the Pasha of
+Egypt, that a live hippopotamus would be
+regarded as a very interesting and valuable
+present in England. Now, there were sundry
+difficulties of a serious nature involved in this
+business. In the first place, the favourite
+resort of the hippopotami is a thousand or
+fifteen hundred miles distant from Cairo; in
+the second place, the hippopotamus being amphibious,
+is not easily come-at-able; when he
+is environed, he is a tremendous antagonist,
+by reason of his great strength, enormous
+weight, his wrathfulness when excited, and
+we may add his prodigious mouth with its
+huge tusks. We are speaking of the <i>male</i>
+hippopotamus. He is often slain by a number
+of rifle-balls (he only makes a comic
+grin of scorn at a few) and laid low from a
+distance: but as to being taken alive, that is
+a triumph which has scarcely ever been permitted
+to mortal man of modern times. It is
+quite a different matter in respect of the
+elephant. He cannot take to the water, and
+neither dive clean away, nor upset your boat
+with a plunge of his forehead; besides which
+you cannot get two tame renegade hippopotami
+to assist in the capture and subjugation of a relative,
+as is the case with elephants. Accordingly,
+His Highness the Pasha, not liking to
+compromise the dignity of despotism, and his
+own position as sovereign of Egypt, by promising
+anything which he might, perhaps, be
+unable to perform, turned a deaf ear to the repeated
+overtures of the British Consul. He
+never refused his request; he simply did not
+hear what he said, or could not be made to
+have a clear understanding as to what the
+Consul really wanted. His Highness had
+already given him the skin and bones of hippopotami,
+and many other animals alive and dead.
+If he wished for any birds, he was welcome to
+as many as he pleased!</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>It so chanced, however, that Abbas Pasha
+took it into his head, or somebody told him,
+that we had in England several extraordinary
+breeds of dogs, horses, and cows,—hounds
+that could catch a gazelle by sheer fleetness,
+small fighting-dogs that would master a bull,—horses
+that could compete with his finest
+Arabian steeds, and beat them in a hard day’s
+hunt over rough ground. He bethought himself,
+therefore, of the hippopotamus. One
+good turn of this kind might deserve another
+of a different kind.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“So, Consul,” said the Pasha abruptly one
+day, when Mr. Murray was dining with him,
+“so, you want a hippopotamus?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Very much, your Highness.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“And you think that such an animal would
+be an acceptable present to your Queen and
+country?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“He would be accounted a great rarity,”
+said the Consul; “our naturalists would
+receive him with open arms—figuratively
+speaking,—and the public would crowd to pay
+their respects to him.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Abbas Pasha laughed at this pleasantry of
+the Consul. “Well,” said he, “we will inquire
+about this matter.” He half-turned his head
+over one shoulder to his attendants: “Send
+here the Governor of Nubia!” The attendants
+thus ordered made their salam, and retired.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Anybody, not previously aware of the easy
+habits of a despotic sovereign, would naturally
+conclude that the Governor of Nubia was, at
+this time, in Cairo, and at no great distance
+from the royal abode. But it was not so.
+The Governor of Nubia was simply there—at
+home—smoking his pipe in Nubia. This
+brief and unadorned order, therefore, involved
+a post-haste messenger on a dromedary across
+the Desert, with a boat up the Nile, and then
+more dromedaries, and then another boat, and
+again a dromedary, till the Pasha’s mandate
+was delivered. We next behold the Governor
+of Nubia, in full official trim, proceeding post-haste
+with his suite across the Desert, and
+down the Nile, travelling day and night, until
+finally he is announced to the Pasha, and admitted
+to his most serene and fumigatious presence.
+The Governor makes his grand salam.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Governor,” says the Pasha—and we have
+this unique dialogue on the best authority—“Governor,
+have you hippopotami in your country?”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“We have, your Highness.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Abbas Pasha reflected a moment; then
+said—“Send to me the Commander of the
+Nubian army. Now, go!”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>This was the whole dialogue. The Governor
+made his salam, and retired. With the
+same haste and ceremony, so far as the two
+things can be combined, he returned to
+Nubia by boat, and dromedary, and horse,
+and covered litter; and the same hour found
+the Commander of the army of Nubia galloping
+across the Desert with his attendants, in
+obedience to the royal mandate.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Pasha, knowing that all means of
+speed will be used, and what those means
+will be, together with the nature of the
+route, is able to calculate to a day when the
+Commander ought to arrive—and therefore
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_446'>446</span><i>must</i> arrive,—at his peril, otherwise. The
+British Consul is invited to dine with his
+Highness on this day.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Duly, as expected, the Commander of the
+Nubian army arrives, and is announced, just
+as the repast is concluded. He is forthwith
+ushered into the presence of the sublime beard
+and turban. Coffee and pipes are being served.
+The Commander makes his grand salam,
+shutting his eyes before the royal pipe.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Commander,” says the Pasha, without
+taking his pipe from his mouth, “I hear that
+you have hippopotami in your country.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“It is true, your Highness; but——”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Bring me a live hippopotamus—a young
+one. Now, go!”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>This was actually the dialogue which took
+place on the occasion—and the whole of it.
+The Commander of the Nubian forces made
+his grand salam—retired—and returned as
+he came,—“big” with the importance of his
+errand,—but also not without considerable
+anxiety for its result.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Arriving at Dongola, the Commander
+summoned his chief officers and captains of
+the Nubian hosts to a council of war on the
+subject of the hippopotamus hunt, on the
+result of which—he intimated—several heads
+were at stake, besides his own. A similar
+communication was speedily forwarded to the
+chief officers of the right wing of the army,
+quartered in their tents at Sennaar. The picked
+men of all the forces having been selected, the
+two parties met in boats at an appointed
+village on the banks of the Nile, and there
+concerted their measures for the expedition.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The Commander divided the chosen body
+into several parties, and away they sped up
+the Nile. They followed the course of the
+river, beyond the point where it branches off
+into the Blue Nile, and the White Nile. Good
+fortune at length befel one of the parties; but
+this cost much time, and many unsuccessful
+efforts—now pursuing a huge savage river-horse,
+with rifle-balls and flying darts; now
+pursued by him in turn with foaming jaws
+and gnashing tusks—all of which may readily
+be conjectured, from the fact that they did not
+fall in with their prize till they had reached
+a distance, up the White Nile, of one thousand
+five hundred miles above Cairo. In the
+doublings and re-doublings of attack and
+retreat, of pursuit and flight, and renewed
+assault, they must of course have traversed in
+all, at least two thousand miles.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Something pathetic attaches to the death of
+the mother of “our hero,”—something which
+touches our common nature, but which such
+hunters as Mr. Gordon Cumming would not
+be at all able to understand. A large female
+hippopotamus being wounded, was in full flight
+up the river; but presently a ball or two
+reached a mortal part, and then the maternal
+instinct made the animal pause. She fled no
+more, but turned aside, and made towards a
+heap of brushwood and water-bushes that grew
+on the banks of the river, in order (as the event
+showed) to die beside her young one. She
+was unable to proceed so far, and sank dying
+beneath the water. The action, however, had
+been so evidently caused by some strong impulse
+and attraction in that direction, that
+the party instantly proceeded to the clump of
+water-bushes. Nobody moved—not a green
+flag stirred; not a sprig trembled; but
+directly they entered, out burst a burly
+young hippopotamus-calf, and plunged head
+foremost down the river banks. He had all
+but escaped, when amidst the excitement and
+confusion of the picked men, one of them who
+had “more character” than the rest, made a
+blow at the slippery prize with his boat-hook,
+and literally brought him up by burying the
+hook in his fat black flank. Two other
+hunters—next to him in presence of mind and
+energy—threw their arms round the great
+barrel-bellied infant, and hoisted him into the
+boat, which nearly capsized with the weight
+and struggle.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In this one circumstance of a hippopotamus
+being ordered by his Highness Abbas Pasha,
+has been pleasantly shown the ease and
+brevity with which matters are managed by a
+despotic government. We complain at home—and
+with how much reason, everybody
+knows too well—of the injurious and provoking
+slowness of all good legislative acts;
+but here we have a beautiful little instance,
+or series of little instances, of going rather
+too fast. Things are settled off-hand in the
+East by a royal mandate—from the strangling
+of a whole seraglio, to the suckling of a
+young hippopotamus.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Returning down the Nile with their unwieldy
+prize, for whose wounded flank the
+best surgical attendance the country afforded,
+was of course procured, it soon became a
+matter of immense importance and profound
+consultation as to how and on what the innocent
+young monster should be fed. He would
+not touch flesh of any kind; he did not seem
+to relish fruit; and he evidently did not, at
+present, understand grass. A live fish was put
+into his mouth, but he instantly gave a
+great gape and allowed it to flap its way
+out again and fall into the water. Before long,
+however, the party reached a village. The
+Commander of the army saw what to do.
+He ordered his men to seize all the cows in
+the village, and milk them. This was found
+very acceptable to their interesting charge,
+who presently despatched a quantity that
+alarmed them, lest they should be unable to
+keep up the due balance of supply and demand.
+The surplus milk, however, they carried
+away in gourds and earthen vessels. But
+they found it would not keep: it became sour
+butter, and melted into oil. They were, therefore,
+compelled, after a milking, to carry off
+with them one of the best cows. In this way
+they returned fifteen hundred miles down the
+Nile, stopping at every village on their way—seizing
+all the cows and milking them dry. By
+these means they managed to supply the
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_447'>447</span>“table” of the illustrious captive, whose capacities
+in disposing of the beverage appeared
+to increase daily.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The hunting-division of the army, headed
+by the Commander-in-Chief, arrived at Cairo
+with their prize on the 14th of November,
+1849. The journey down the Nile, from the
+place where he was captured, <i>viz.</i>, the White
+Nile, had occupied between five and six
+months. This, therefore, with a few additional
+days, may be regarded as the age of our
+hippopotamus on reaching Cairo. The colour
+of his skin, at that time, was for the most part
+of a dull, reddish tone, very like that (to
+compare great things with small) of a naked
+new-born mouse. The Commander hastened
+to the palace to report his arrival with the
+prize to his royal master, into the charge of
+whose officers he most gladly resigned it. His
+Highness, having been informed of the little
+affair of the succession of “cows,” determined
+to place the vivacious un-weaned “infant
+prodigy” in the hands of the British Consul
+without a moment’s delay.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The announcement was accordingly made
+with oriental formality by the chief officer of
+Abbas Pasha’s palace, to whom the Honorable
+Mr. Murray made a suitable present in return
+for the good tidings. A lieutenant of the
+Nubian army, with a party of soldiers, arrived
+shortly after, bringing with them the animal,
+whose renown had already filled the whole
+city. He excited full as much curiosity in
+Cairo, as he has since done here, being quite
+as great a rarity. This will be easily intelligible
+when the difficulties of the capture, and
+the immense distance of the journey are taken
+into consideration, with all the contingencies
+of men, boats, provisions, cows, and other
+necessary expenses.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The overjoyed Consul had already made all
+his preparations for receiving the illustrious
+stranger. He had, in the first place, secured
+the services of Hamet Safi Cannana, well
+known for his experience and skill in the care
+and management of animals. A commodious
+apartment had then been fitted up in the
+court-yard of the Consul’s house, with one
+door leading out to a bath. As the winter
+would have to be passed in Cairo, proper
+means were employed for making this a warm,
+or tepid bath. Here then our hippopotamus
+lived, “the observed of all observers,” drinking
+so many gallons of milk a day (never less
+than twenty or thirty quarts) that he soon
+produced a scarcity of that article in Cairo.
+Nor will this be so much a matter of surprise,
+when it is considered that they do not understand
+there the excellent methods of manufacturing
+enough milk to answer any demand,
+which obtains with us in London, where such
+an event as a scarcity of milk was never known
+by the oldest inhabitant.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Meanwhile active preparations were making
+for his arrival in Alexandria, to be shipped on
+board the Ripon steamer. The vessel was
+furnished with a house on the main-deck,
+opening by steps down into a tank in the
+hold, containing four hundred gallons of
+water. It had been built and fitted up at
+Southampton from a plan furnished by Mr.
+Mitchell, Secretary of the Zoological Gardens
+in the Regent’s Park, to whose energies and
+foresight we are indebted for the safe possession
+of this grotesque, good-tempered and
+unique monster. The tank, by various
+arrangements, they contrived to fill with
+<i>fresh</i> water every other day. A large quantity
+was taken on board in casks; a fresh supply at
+Malta; and, besides this, which was by no
+means enough, they made use of the condensed
+water of the engines, which amounted to
+upwards of three hundred gallons per day.
+As there are some hippopotami who enjoy
+the sea on certain coasts of the world, it is not
+improbable but our friend would soon have
+got used to sea-water; but Mr. Mitchell was
+determined to run no risks, prudently considering
+that, in the first place, the strength
+of the salt water, to one whose mother had
+been accustomed, and her ancestors for generations,
+to the mild streams of Nilus, might
+disagree with “young pickle;” and secondly,
+if he chanced to take to it amazingly, how
+would he bear the change when he arrived
+at his mansion in the Regent’s Park. Fresh
+water, therefore, was provided for his bath
+every other day throughout the voyage.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The British Consul began to prepare for
+the departure of his noble guest at the end of
+April; and in the early part of May, the
+Consul took an affectionate leave of him, and
+would have embraced him, but that the extraordinary
+girth of his body rendered such
+a demonstration impossible.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>So, our hippopotamus departed from Grand
+Cairo in a large padded cart. He had refused
+a very nice horse-box which the Consul had
+provided for him. Some feeling about his
+dignity, we suppose; though Hamet Safi Cannana
+considered the objection arose from a
+certain care of his skin, which might have
+got a little chafe or hard rub in the horse-box.
+It was a lesson to Mr. Murray for life.
+No effort, of course, was made to compel the
+great personage to enter this machine, because
+it is one of Hamet’s principles of management
+never to irritate an animal—always to keep
+him in good temper—never, directly and
+immediately to thwart his will in anything
+that is not injurious, impracticable, or particularly
+unreasonable. Very delightful all
+this! Who would not be a hippopotamus?
+Who that was not Caesar, would not wish to
+be Pompey?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>On arriving at Alexandria, full ten thousand
+people rushed out into the streets to see
+our hippopotamus pass. If no one had ever
+seen the amphibious prodigy in Cairo, it is not
+to be wondered at that the mental condition
+of Alexandria was in the same lamentable
+degree of darkness.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The crowd was so great, that the British
+Consul (whose feelings had so mastered him
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_448'>448</span>on taking leave of his guest, that he had been
+obliged to follow the <i><span lang="fr">cortége</span></i>) was under the
+necessity of applying to the Governor of
+Alexandria for an escort of troops. This was
+forthwith granted, and down they came
+galloping along the streets of Alexandria,
+with waving scimetars! It was well the
+hippopotamus did not see them from his
+padded cart, where he lay asleep—it might
+have caused a little misunderstanding.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Order being restored, and a great lane made
+in the crowd, Hamet Safi Cannana commenced
+the gradual and delicate process of
+awaking the great personage. In the course
+of an hour or so, during which time the escort
+of soldiers all “stood attention,” the excited
+feelings of the anxious lane of population were
+gratified by the sight of the Arab ceremoniously
+advancing in gentleman-usher
+fashion, while close behind him slowly lounged
+the hippopotamus.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>He embarked on board the Ripon, where
+he was soon joined by his Excellency General
+Jung Bahadoor Ranajee, and the Nepaulese
+princes, his brothers. These latter personages
+would have been great objects of attraction
+under any other circumstances; but what
+could stand against such a rival as the
+occupant of the great house and bath on the
+main-deck?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>During the voyage, “our fat friend”
+attached himself yet more strongly to his
+attendant and interpreter, Hamet; indeed, the
+devotion to his person which this assiduous
+and thoughtful person had manifested from
+his first promotion to the office, had been of a
+kind to secure such a result from any one at
+all accessible to kindly affections. Hamet
+had commenced by sleeping side-by-side with
+his charge in the house at Cairo, and adopted
+the same arrangement for the night during
+the first week of the voyage to England.
+Finding, however, as the weather grew
+warmer, and the hippopotamus bigger and
+bigger, that this was attended with some inconvenience,
+Hamet had a hammock slung
+from the beams immediately over the place
+where he used to sleep—in fact, just over his
+side of the bed—by which means he was
+raised two or three feet above his usual
+position. Into this hammock got Hamet, and
+having assured the hippopotamus, both by
+his voice, and by extending one arm over the
+side so as to touch him, that he was there as
+usual at his side, and “all was right,” he
+presently fell asleep. How long he slept
+Hamet does not know, but he was awoke by
+the sensation of a jerk and a hoist, and found
+himself lying on the bed in his old place, close
+beside our fat friend. Hamet tried the experiment
+once more: but the same thing
+again occurred. No sooner was he asleep than
+the hippopotamus got up—raised his broad
+nose beneath the heaviest part of the hammock
+that swung lowest, and by an easy and adroit
+toss, pitched Hamet clean out. After this,
+Hamet, acting on his rule of never thwarting
+his charge in anything reasonable, abandoned
+the attempt of a separate bed, and took up
+his nightly quarters by his side as before.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>As for the voyage, it was passed pleasantly
+enough by the most important of the illustrious
+strangers on board. His Excellency
+the Nepaulese ambassador, together with
+the prince his brother, were uncommonly seasick;
+but as for our fat friend, he enjoyed
+himself all the way. He liked his bath, for
+which there was no lack of fresh water supplies,
+and his provisions were equally satisfactory.
+Two cows and ten goats had been
+taken on board for his sole use and service;
+these, however, not being found sufficient for a
+“growing youth,” the ship’s cow was confiscated
+for the use of his table; and this addition,
+together with we forget how many dozen
+sacks of Indian corn meal, enabled him to reach
+our shores in excellent health and spirits.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>A word as to the title of “river-horse,”
+when taken in conjunction with his personal
+appearance, his habits, and his diet. The
+hippopotamus has nothing in common with
+the horse; he seems to us rather an aquatic
+pig, or a four-footed land porpoise. In fact,
+he appears to partake of the wild boar, the
+bull, and the porpoise—the latter predominating
+at present, but when he gets his tusks,
+we much fear there will be an alteration in
+his manners for the worse. As to his eventual
+size, the prospect is alarming. He is at
+present only seven months old, and he will
+continue growing till he is fifteen years of
+age. What news for the London cows!</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Arrived at Southampton, our hippopotamus,
+house and all, with Hamet Safi Cannana
+at his side, was hoisted up at the vessel’s
+yard-arm, and gradually lowered upon a great
+iron truck, which was then wheeled off to the
+railway station. The whole concern was
+deposited in the special carriage of a special
+train, and on this he travelled from Southampton
+to London. He arrived at the Zoological
+Gardens in the Regent’s Park at ten
+o’clock at night, and found Lord Brougham,
+Professor Owen, Thomas Bell, and Mr. Mitchell
+all waiting (we believe they were not in
+court dresses) to receive him. They were
+presently joined by the learned Editor of the
+“Annals of Natural History,” the learned
+Editor of the “Zoologist,” in company with
+Mr. Van Voorst, and several artists who made
+sketches by the light of a lanthorn. Doyle,
+Wolff, Harrison Weir, Foster, (for the “Illustrated
+London News”) and others, were all in
+assiduous attendance, watchful of every varying
+outline. The illustrious stranger descended
+from his carriage, and entered the gardens.
+First went the lanthorn; then Hamet Safi
+Cannana with a bag of dates slung over his
+shoulder; and after him slowly lounged our
+uncouth treasure, with a prodigy of a grin
+such as he alone can give, expressive of his
+humorous sense of all the honours and
+luxuries that awaited him.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>We understand it is a cabinet secret, that
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_449'>449</span>the Pasha has ordered a fresh party of hunting
+soldiers to proceed up the river, as far as
+the White Nile, to search for another young
+hippopotamus—a female! We may, therefore,
+look forward to the unrivalled fame of
+possessing a royal pair—“sure <i>such</i> a pair”
+as were never yet seen in any collection of
+Natural History—to say nothing of the chance
+of a progeny. These are national questions,—why
+should they be cabinet secrets?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>We are certainly a strange people—we
+English. Our indefatigable energies and
+matchless wealth often exhibit themselves
+in eccentric fancies. No wonder, foreigners—philosophers
+and all—are so much puzzled
+what to make of us. They point to the
+unaided efforts of a Waghorn, and to his
+widow’s pension-mite—and then they point
+to our hippopotamus! Truly, it is not easy
+to reply to the inference, and impossible to
+evade it. We have had a Chaucer and a
+Milton, a Hobbes, and a Newton, a Watt and
+a Winsor; and we have had other great poets,
+and philosophers, and machinists, and men of
+learning and science, and have several of each
+now living among us: but any amount of a
+people’s anxious interest, which the present
+state of popular education induces, is very
+limited indeed compared to that which is felt
+by all classes for a Tom Thumb, a Jim Crow,
+or our present Idol. Howbeit, as the last is
+really a great improvement on the two former
+fascinating exotics, it is to be hoped that we
+shall, in course of time, more habitually display
+some kind of discrimination in the objects
+of our devotion.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>CHIPS.</h2>
+</div>
+<h3 class='c004'>RAILWAY COMFORT</h3>
+
+<p class='c005'>In all the utilities of Railway travelling,
+England is supreme. Speed, represented by
+from thirty to sixty miles an hour, “just (to
+quote the words of Lubin Log) as the passenger
+pleases;” punctuality, that admits of the setting
+of watches by arrivals and departures; and
+safety, exemplified by the loss of no human
+life from any other cause than the carelessness
+of the sufferer, during the past two years,
+are proofs of British supremacy in locomotion.
+Yet—by a strange perversity not easily
+accounted for in a country known all over
+the rest of the world as the Kingdom of
+Comfort—the point apparently aimed at is
+to render the transit of the human frame as
+uncomfortable an operation as possible. Every
+elegance and luxury is bestowed upon waiting-rooms
+where extreme punctuality renders it
+unnecessary for people to wait; and upon
+refreshment-rooms in which travellers are
+allowed ten minutes to scald themselves with
+boiling coffee, or to choke themselves with impossible
+pork-pies; but carriages in which travellers
+have to be cramped up, often for hours,
+and sometimes for whole days, are apparently
+contrived to inflict as much torture as practicable.
+In order to force those who cannot
+afford it into the first-class, second and third-class
+carriages are only one and two degrees
+removed from cattle pens. And that these
+should not be too delicious, the humbler order
+of passengers will not easily forget that a
+director once proposed to hire a number of
+chimney-sweeps to render—what, with the
+best company, are nothing better than locomotive
+hutches—perfectly untenable.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>They manage these things better abroad.
+There a detestable class-feeling—a contemptible
+purse-worship, which rigidly separates people
+according to their pecuniary circumstances;
+which metes out the smallest privilege or
+comfort at a price—does not exist to prevent
+the managers of railways from making
+the journeys of their customers and supporters
+as pleasant as possible. On the
+French railroads, (setting aside the question
+that the fares are much lower,) the second-class
+carriages are comfortably cushioned,
+having pretty silk blinds to keep out the sun;
+windows that really are capable of being pulled
+up and down, besides hooks for hats,—a great
+convenience on a journey. For the blinds, indeed,
+an enterprising blind-maker in France
+agreed to furnish them to one railway company,
+gratis, on condition that they used no
+other for a certain number of years, and allowed
+him to make them the medium of his advertisements.
+Talk of advertising vans—can they
+be compared to the brilliant notion of advertising
+railways—trains of puffs, wafting the
+genius of inventors faster than the wind! We
+throw out the hint to the “advertising world”
+in this country.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In winter, even in an English first-class
+carriage, there is no protection against frost
+and damp; but in nearly all the foreign railways,
+no sooner does the winter set in than
+the first-class traveller finds the bottom of his
+carriage provided with a long tin case full of
+hot water. In the cold months, masses of
+woollen cloth and railway wrappers, are seen
+shaking in the corners of first-class English
+carriages with shivering, comfortless, human
+beings inside them, despairing of any sort of
+warmth whatever.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Comfort in railway travelling is, however
+brought to the highest perfection in Germany.
+An esteemed correspondent at Vienna writes
+to us on this subject in the following terms:—On
+the “<i><span lang="de">Wiener-Neustäder Eisenbahn</span></i>,” (the
+Vienna and Neustadt Railway), the carriages
+of the first, second, and third-class
+may each be said to resemble a spacious room,
+furnished with seats, something like a concert-room,
+and having a broad passage down the
+middle. Thus one may get up, walk towards
+a friend a dozen seats off; or, if you require
+more air or a change of position, you will find
+the backs of the seats shift so as to enable you
+to turn round, and sit down the other way
+without inconvenience to any one. I need
+not say that on this railway there is no
+struggle for “that corner place with your back
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_450'>450</span>to the engine,” which is a desirable object
+throughout our three kingdoms,—for every
+place is a corner place, having light and air,
+and you may sit which way you please.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Attached to each carriage, and going the
+whole length of the train, is a broad wooden
+plank, along which the guards are constantly
+walking, so that the slightest thing amiss
+could scarcely occur without their perceiving it
+immediately. Just before the arrival of the
+train at any station, one of these functionaries—for
+there are several—quietly opens the door
+and, instead of calling out “I say, you sir!”
+or “Come, marm, your ticket, I carn’t be a
+waitin’ here all day,” as we have heard in
+England, walks without any hurry or bustle
+down the division from one end to the other,
+repeating, in a clear and ordinary tone of voice
+the name of the station which is being approached,
+and requiring the tickets of such
+passengers as are going to alight there. With
+such an arrangement—giving ample time for
+the gathering together of coats, canes, umbrellas,
+reticules, and so forth—even Martha
+Struggles herself might have got through a
+journey unscathed and “unflustered.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The admirable arrangement displayed in
+America, as well as in Germany, for receiving
+tickets without that delay which has been
+so much complained of in England, cannot be
+sufficiently applauded. When however delay is
+unavoidable, to receive the mails, or from some
+other cause, no sooner does the train stop, than
+a waiter, or sometimes a pretty waitress—who
+is more likely to find customers—trips up the
+steps with a tray laden with iced water and
+lemonade, glasses of light wine or <i>maitrank</i>,(a
+kind of Burridge-cup,) biscuits, cakes, and other
+edible nick-nacks, so that the passenger may
+take some slight refection without getting down.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In the railway from Bonn to Cologne, on
+the Rhine, they have pushed convenience yet
+farther, having provided the first-class carriages
+with tables, so that during the journey,
+one pressed for time may write letters with
+the greatest ease; pens and a portable inkstand
+being all that is necessary for that purpose.
+Paper may be had at the station.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>It has been also suggested on several of the
+continental railways, that such travellers as
+chose to pay for the space, might have a
+regular bed; a great convenience for ladies or
+invalids, unable to bear the fatigue of a journey
+of many hours by night.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>These hints might be followed with very
+great advantage to the shareholders in particular
+and to the public in general, by the
+directors of British lines.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>IMPROVING A BULL.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>The highly respectable old lady who addressed
+us on a former occasion, has obliged
+us with another communication, on a most
+important subject:—</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Sir,—You would have heard before, but
+the cause was a mad bull, which being tossed
+might at my age be very ill-convenient. But
+that’s nothing to what I’m going to tell you.
+Only to think of the power of horns! Bulls
+tosses very high, I’ve heard, but did you ever
+hear, Mr. Conductor, of a mad bull tossing a
+widow and six children across the sea, half
+over the side of the round world, from our
+Borough to Australia? Well you may stare,
+but it’s a fact!</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“The bull run right at me, full butt, and so
+I grasped my umbrella with both hands and
+ran to where the shops was—drat the boys,
+how they did screech about one!—and it was
+cold water, which I doesn’t often drink, by
+which means I came to in a pastry-cook’s. The
+name was Bezzle, I see it on a bag while she
+was putting in gingerbread nuts for Mrs.
+Jenks’s baby, which I bought not to be under
+obligation for stepping in.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Gracious mussy, Mrs. Bezzle,’ says I,
+‘why wasn’t I killed? What ever is the
+reason of them bulls?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says she, ‘It’s market day.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Smithfield!’ says I.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says Mrs. Bezzle, ‘Mum, all the abuse
+and outcry against Smithfield is very narrow-minded.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says I, ‘How so?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says she, ‘It don’t consider shop-keepers.
+When a bull takes a line of street, it drives
+the people into the shops on either side,
+and they make purchases for fear of being
+gored.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Heighty teighty, mum,’ I says, ‘you are
+alluding to my gingerbread.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says she, ‘I scorn allusions. It’s a rule.
+Whether it’s bulls or thunderstorms, or what
+it is we look to, we respects whatever sends
+us customers.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says I, ‘Mrs. Bezzle, you astonish me.
+Where’s your family trade?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says she, ‘There are too many traders.
+Where one of us earns meat, three of us only
+earn potatoes.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Emigrate,’ says I.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Says she, ‘That’s very well, but then,’
+says she, ‘in such a move it’s hard to know
+which way to put one’s foot, and when a
+step’s made, if it’s a wrong one, it’s not easy
+to retrace it.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Spirited trading—’ says I.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Ah!’ says she, cutting me short rudely;
+but I forgive her, owing to her feelings.
+‘Take Chandlery, within seven minutes of
+this door, mum. One man sells soap under
+cost price, and other things at profit, hoping
+to bring people to his shop for soap, and then
+get them to buy other articles. But his
+neighbour sells cheap herrings in the same
+way; another sacrifices pickles, and another
+makes light of the candle business. What’s
+the result? Folks buy in the cheapest
+market; go for soap to the man who sells
+that at the ruin prices, go for herrings to his
+neighbour, go down the other street for
+pickles, and get candles over the way.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Well,’ says I, ‘that’s an Illustration of
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_451'>451</span>Cheapness, but,’ says I, ‘it’s dishonest. A
+fair trader has no right to sell an article at
+less than its first cost.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘No right!’ says she. ‘And I dessay he
+thinks he has no right to starve. It’s very
+hard to judge. The young tradesman, with
+his little capital and knowledge of a trade,
+has got his sweetheart and his ambition. He
+must wedge into society somehow, and he
+begins with the sharp end.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘But,’ says I, ‘it isn’t sharp, Mrs. Bezzle.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“So she shakes her head; says she, ‘I’ll
+give you an example which is true, and one
+out of a many.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘I once knew an excellent young man
+who died of cholera. He left a widow
+and three little children. After deducting
+all expenses for her husband’s burial, the
+widow found that she possessed a hundred
+pounds. With fear and trembling, she embarked
+this money, in an effort to support
+herself. With it she fitted up a little
+shop, and had begun to earn a livelihood,
+when——’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Well, Mrs. Bezzle, what prevented
+her?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>——“‘An empty house close by was taken
+by another person following her trade. Immediately
+her receipts diminished. One cannot
+live except by bread that can be got out
+of a neighbour’s cupboard. The widow and
+the children have already lost eighty pounds,
+have only twenty left; their house is taken
+by the year, and so they still are in it; and
+the poor lost woman cannot be comforted.
+Her hope is gone.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Heigh, dear,’ says I, ‘it wasn’t so in my
+young days. I believe this is owing to overpopulation,’
+says I.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Well,’ says Mrs. Bezzle, perking up. ‘It’s
+cruel to blame us for our struggles. What if
+I <i>have</i> got nine, and six on ’em dependant on
+penny tarts and gingerbread for meat, drink,
+washing, and lodging, are they to be thrown
+in my teeth?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Emigrate,’ says I, six times more pointedly
+than before.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Where to?’ says she, ‘and how? Who
+can tell me that?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘Go and lay your case before Parson Pullaway;
+he knows our M.P., and <i>he</i> knows all
+about colonial places. Hasn’t his brother’s
+wife’s first cousin got one of them? He is
+Sub-under-Secretary to Lord Oxfordmixture,
+who has all the emigration settlements under
+his thumb.’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“‘I’ll think about it,’ says Mrs. Bezzle,
+quite struck-like,—for down came the scales
+on the counter like a shot, and the whole
+ounce of sugar-candy jumped into the little
+boy’s apron of its own accord. He had come
+for two penn’orth on pretence of a cough.
+‘Besides, didn’t Mr. Pullaway christen seven
+out of my nine children, and not a penny of
+the fees owing for?’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“The last word as ever I spoke to Mrs. Bezzle
+was, ‘Emigrate!’</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Well, who would have thought it? Next
+week Mrs. Bezzle’s business was to sell. The
+week after, it was sold. The week after that,
+Mrs. Bezzle and her son Tom, and Tom’s wife,
+and Tom’s brother Sam, and Mrs. Bezzle’s
+eldest daughter, and little James, and Sarah,
+and Mary Ann, and the two little urchins,
+were on board a ship, at Liverpool, bound for
+Port Philip. That’s a year, come Michaelmas,
+ago.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“But, drat ’em, why didn’t they pay the
+postage? Two-and-two is a consideration
+when butter (best fresh) is a rising a penny a
+pound every week. Not but what I was glad
+to hear from Mrs. Bezzle. Tom and his wife,
+and his brother Sam, are settled in a ‘run;’
+and though there was some words I couldn’t
+make out, I dare say they didn’t explain how
+a ‘run’ could be a settlement. ‘Quite the
+reverse!’ as Mrs. Jenks said—(I have made
+it up with her, though she did insinuate the
+gingerbread nuts the mad bull made me buy
+gave her babby the cholera; and, bless it! it
+was only the teeth after all). Mrs. Bezzle has
+settled herself in the mutton-pie and cheesecake
+line, and has no fear of opposition; and
+as in Port Philip there is good digestions and
+plenty of ’em, pies is popular. Prices, too, is
+better,—penny pies being tuppence. James
+is on the ‘run,’ along with his eldest brother.
+Sarah an’t married yet,—for out of six offers,
+a young gal of seventeen has a right to be
+puzzled for six months or so, and more
+dropping in every week. Mary Anne is family
+governess to a rich copper-man, with plenty
+of stock—I suppose by that he is in the soup
+line. However, all is doing well.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“Well, Mr. Conductor, it was all owing to
+that bull, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t improved
+that solemn occasion, where would Mrs.
+Bezzle, and four out of six of her helpless
+offspring have been by this time?—why, in
+the workhus.”</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>LUNGS FOR LONDON.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Travellers describe nothing to be so much
+dreaded by the people of the East as a flight
+of locusts, except indeed a settlement of
+locusts. When those devouring insects alight
+on the fields and pastures, they begin from
+a centre composed of myriads, and eat up
+everything green within radii extending
+over not acres, but miles. They fall upon
+gardens and leave them deserts; and upon
+a field they do not permit so much as a blade
+of grass to indicate where grass was.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Although, in fact, these little devastators
+do not trouble us; in effect, Londoners are
+the victims of equally efficient destroyers of
+their green places.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Bricklayers are spreading the webs and
+meshes of houses with such fearful rapidity
+in every direction, that the people are being
+gradually confined within narrow prisons,
+only open at the top for the admission of
+what would be air if it were not smoke.
+Suburban open spaces are being entombed in
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_452'>452</span>brick-and-mortar mausoleums for the suffocation
+as well as for the accommodation of an
+increasing populace; who, if they wish to get
+breath, can find nowhere to draw it from,
+short of a long journey. The Lungs of
+London have undergone congestion, and even
+their cells are underground.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Of all the neighbourhoods of which London
+is a collection, Finsbury and Islington have
+suffered most. Within the recollection of
+middle-aged memories, Clerkenwell Green was
+of the right colour; Moorfields, Spafields, and
+the East India Company’s Fields, were adorned
+with grass; and he must be young indeed
+who cannot remember cricket-playing in
+White Conduit, Canonbury, Shepherd and
+Shepherdess, Rhodes, and Laycock’s, besides
+countless acres of other “Fields,” which are
+now blotted out from the face of the Country
+to become Town, in the densest sense of the
+word. Thanks to the window tax and the
+bricklayer, fresh air will be thoroughly
+bricked out, unless a vigorous effort be
+made to stop the invasion of burnt clay and
+water.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Mr. Lloyd, a gentleman of Islington who
+dreamt a few years since that he lived in the
+country, but has recently awoke to the conviction
+that his once suburban residence has
+been completely incorporated with the town,
+determined, if possible, to arrest the invasion
+of habitations. His plan is to dam out the
+flood of encroachment by emparking a large
+space at Islington for the behoof of the
+Borough of Finsbury, which contains a population
+of three hundred thousand panting
+souls. This space is, according to his plan,
+that which surrounds the village of Highbury,
+one of the highest and airiest suburbs of London.
+It is within two miles of the City, and
+might be rendered accessible to Victoria Park
+in the east, and to Regent’s Park in the west.
+The proposed enclosure will take in a good
+portion of the course of the New River,
+and a large quantity of ground so well and
+picturesquely wooded, that a paling and a
+name are only requisite to convert it at once
+into a park. In shape the enclosure would
+be a triangle, the base of which is the Holloway
+Road and Hopping Lane, and the apex,
+a point at which the Seven Sisters’ Road
+joins the Green Lanes. The extent of these
+grounds is about three hundred acres, and the
+total cost of securing them to the public is
+not more than one hundred and fifty thousand
+pounds.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Mr. Lloyd has been vigorously agitating
+this matter for more than nine years, and
+yet—such is the pace at which the public are
+apt to move in affairs in which the public
+alone is itself concerned—it is only lately that
+he has obtained an attentive hearing for his
+plan.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>A prospect of success appears now, however,
+to dawn. Public meetings have been lately
+held in every district concerned, in which
+every sort of co-operation has been promised.
+A single difficulty seems to stand in the way;
+one little thing needful is only required to
+turn the project into an accomplished fact,
+and that is, the money,—one hundred and
+fifty thousand pounds merely. Mr. Lloyd
+and his coadjutors have, we believe, mentioned
+their little difficulty at the Treasury,
+and are awaiting an answer. This state of
+things would form a curious problem for De
+Morgan, Quetelet, or others learned in the
+doctrine of probabilities: given, official routine
+multiplied by systematic delay, what are the
+chances of the cash required within the present
+generation?</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>A park for Finsbury is too urgent a demand
+for a dense population to allow of much time
+being wasted in knocking at the door of the
+Treasury. The public must bestir <i>themselves</i>
+in the scheme, and it will soon be accomplished
+and carried out.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE LOVE OF NATURE.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class='lg-container-b c010'>
+  <div class='linegroup'>
+    <div class='group'>
+      <div class='line in2'>Where the green banners of the forest float,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Where, from the Sun’s imperial domain,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Armour’d in gold, attentive to the note</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Of piping birds, the sturdy trees remain,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Those never-angered armies; where the plain</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Boasts to the day its bosom ornaments</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Of corn and fruitage; where the low refrain</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Of seaside music song on song invents,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Laden with placid thought, whereto the heart assents,</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Often I wander. Nor does the light Noon,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Garrulous to man’s eye, declaring all</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>That Morning pale (watched by her spectre moon,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Or solemn Vesper, seated near the pall</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Of Day) holds unrevealed; nor does the fall</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Of curtain on our human pantomime,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>The sweeping by of Day’s black funeral</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Through Night’s awe-stricken realms, with tread sublime,</div>
+      <div class='line'>Chiefly delight my heart; beauty pervades all time.</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Morning: the Day is innocent, and weeps;</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Noon: she is wedded and enjoys the Earth;</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Evening: wearied of the world she sleeps.</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>Night watches till another Day has birth.</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>The innocence of Morning, and the mirth</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Of Noon, the holy calm of Eventide,</div>
+      <div class='line in4'>The watching while Day is not, there is dearth</div>
+      <div class='line in2'>Of joy within his soul who hath not cried:</div>
+      <div class='line'>“I welcome all, O God,—share all Thou wilt provide!”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE FROM SHIPWRECK.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>It is a difficult matter to reconcile with the
+sympathy, which it is well-known the sufferings
+of the unfortunate always receive in
+England, the apparent apathy which exists
+among the public, on a subject so important
+as the preservation of Life from Shipwreck.
+Several pleas in extenuation have been urged
+by those most interested. In the first place,
+there is that natural hardihood and contempt
+of danger in the English sailor, which it is,
+occasionally, impossible to tame down to anything
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_453'>453</span>like prudence and forethought. This
+indomitable spirit of emulation and daring,
+is found to be the greatest enemy to the
+adoption of any of those appliances which
+science has rendered available. The Deal
+boatman trusts his life in precisely the same
+sort of craft that his father, and his father’s
+father, did before him. Confident in, and
+proud of, the skill which he has inherited
+from them, he scorns to tarnish, as he falsely
+reasons, his name by the habitual use of buoy
+or belt, lest those of his comrades who are
+firmly entrenched behind their ancient prejudices,
+should set him down as faint-hearted,
+and unworthy the honourable name of a
+“Deal boatman.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The still more inaccessible Scotch fisherman,
+with his four thousand piscatory brethren,
+“shoots his nets” on the exposed coast
+of Caithness, in the open boat used by his
+ancestors, notwithstanding the evil consequences
+which have often ensued. The latest
+example of the ill effects of this tenacity of
+opinion occurred two years since, when a
+fearful gale, which did more or less damage
+along the whole eastern face of England and
+Scotland, wrecked and damaged a hundred
+and twenty-four of their boats, drowned a
+hundred men, and occasioned a loss to the
+fishing community of above seven thousand
+pounds, which, although a large sum, will not
+bear any comparison with the misery and
+destitution thus entailed upon the widows
+and orphans of the lost.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>It is impossible to say how many of these
+unfortunate men might have been saved, had
+they had proper harbours to run for, with
+lights and beacons to warn, and life-boats to
+afford assistance; proper boats to keep the
+sea, and buoys and belts, as a last resource;
+but surely we are warranted in thinking
+that fully one half would have been left
+among us.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In both these examples, it must be acknowledged
+that it would be a useless effort
+to attempt any sudden innovations on these
+deeply-seated prejudices; the only thing that
+can be done, in either case, is to let the new
+principle quietly work of itself. Let us find
+a life-belt for the Deal boatman, which he can
+wear and work in, until in it he recognises
+his best friend; let the Scotch fisherman
+have ocular demonstration that the “model”
+boat prosecutes the fishery with equal success,
+and far greater safety and comfort in bad
+weather, and we shall soon have a different
+system of things.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In the course of each year an average of
+something like six hundred ship disasters
+occur on the shores of this kingdom alone,—some
+wrecked through stress of weather; some
+by carelessness, and other disgraceful causes;
+some through mistaking lights, or having been
+lured to destruction by useless ones; some
+through actual rottenness of timber; some
+dashed to pieces on the very rock for which
+they were anxiously looking half a mile
+further a-head, where it <i>ought</i> to have
+been, according to the chart; and some
+from other causes, more or less easily averted.
+These losses are attended by the almost
+incredible destruction of a thousand lives,
+and the value of tens of thousands of pounds
+sterling.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The shocking wreck of the Orion—not, we
+say with sorrow, the last occurrence of the
+kind—startled, for a moment, the public from
+their culpable apathy. But the shock passed
+away; and attention to this subject is gradually
+subsiding into the usual indifference.
+The details of this catastrophe ought to have
+had a more permanent effect on the public
+mind. In the moment of danger, the gear
+of the boats was so imperfect, that these could
+only be released from their davits by capsizing
+their human cargoes into the deep.
+Even when they righted, they immediately
+filled, for the plug-holes were actually unstopped.
+The most ordinary precautions for
+saving life were not at hand, as precautions.
+The hen-coops, barrels, seats, combings,
+and other means of escape, by which many
+were saved, were purely accidental life-preservers.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Every English ship, before leaving port,
+should be submitted to a supervising power
+similar to the inspection that emigrant ships
+undergo, in order that it should be certified
+that means, both simple and efficacious, for
+the safety of the passengers and crew, exist
+on board—boats, belts, mattresses, rafts;
+everything, in short, that can add to the
+security of those about to “go down to the
+sea in ships.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>That this sort of supervision is effectual, is
+proved by the few disasters which happen to
+the vessels of the Royal Navy. In these ships,
+everything is not only kept in its proper place,
+to be ready when wanted, but each man is
+constantly exercised in what he is to do with
+it when no danger is apprehended, that he
+may be in a state of prompt efficiency when it is.
+The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean
+squadron can step on board any one of his
+ships in the middle of the night; and although
+three-fourths of its crew are asleep in their
+hammocks, he can, by ordering the “beat to
+quarters,” make sure of every man being at
+his post in seven minutes, ready for action or
+for any sudden disaster. This sort of discipline
+it is which is so much required in the merchant
+navy. In case of a ship striking, a dozen
+men rush to do one thing,—perhaps to release
+a boat from one of her davits,—and, consequently,
+swamp the boat, by leaving the
+stern rope untouched. Captain Basil Hall,
+in his “Fragments of Voyages and Travels,”
+describes the vigilant precaution daily made
+even against the loss of one life. To each
+life-buoy there is as regular a “service” as
+to any other part or apparatus of the ship.
+He says:—</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>“On the top of the mast is fixed a port-fire,
+calculated to burn, I think, twenty minutes
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_454'>454</span>or half-an-hour; this is ignited most ingeniously
+by the same process which lets the
+buoy down into the water. So that a man
+falling overboard at night, is directed to the
+buoy by the blaze on the top of its pole or
+mast, and the boat sent to rescue him also
+knows in what direction to pull. Even supposing,
+however, the man not to have gained
+the life-buoy, it is clear that, if above the
+surface at all, he must be somewhere in that
+neighbourhood; and if he shall have gone
+down, it is still some satisfaction, by recovering
+the buoy, to ascertain that the poor
+wretch is not left to perish by inches. The
+method by which this excellent invention is
+attached to the ship, and dropped into the
+water in a single instant, is perhaps not the
+least ingenious part of the contrivance. The
+buoy is generally fixed amidships over the
+stern, where it is held securely in its place by
+being strung, or threaded, as it were, on two
+strong perpendicular iron rods fixed to the
+taffrail, and inserted in holes piercing the
+framework of the buoy. The apparatus is
+kept in its place by what is called a slip-stopper,
+a sort of catch-bolt or detent, which
+can be unlocked at pleasure, by merely pulling
+a trigger. Upon withdrawing the stopper,
+the whole machine slips along the rods, and
+falls at once into the ship’s wake. The trigger
+which unlocks the slip-stopper is furnished
+with a lanyard, passing through a hole in the
+stern, and having at its inner end a large
+knob, marked ‘Life-Buoy;’ this alone is used
+in the day-time. Close at hand is another
+wooden knob, marked ‘Lock,’ fastened to
+the end of a line fixed to the trigger of
+a gun-lock primed with powder: and so
+arranged, that when the line is pulled, the
+port-fire is instantly ignited, while, at the
+same moment, the life-buoy descends, and
+floats merrily away, blazing like a lighthouse.
+It would surely be an improvement
+to have both these operations always performed
+simultaneously, that is, by one pull of
+the string. The port-fire would thus be
+lighted in every case of letting go the buoy;
+and I suspect the smoke in the day-time
+would often be as useful in guiding the boat,
+as the blaze always is at night. The gunner
+who has charge of the life-buoy lock sees it
+freshly and carefully primed every evening
+at quarters, of which he makes a report to
+the captain. In the morning the priming is
+taken out, and the lock uncocked. During
+the night a man is always stationed at this
+part of the ship, and every half-hour, when
+the bell strikes, he calls out ‘Life-buoy!’
+to show that he is awake and at his post,
+exactly in the same manner as the lookout-men
+abaft, on the beam, and forward,
+call out ‘Starboard quarter!’ ‘Starboard
+gangway!’ ‘Starboard bow!’ and so on,
+completely round the ship, to prove that they
+are not napping.”</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>We should like to hear of Government experimenting
+with rockets and mortars, with a
+view to their improvement. Often the safety
+of a whole ship’s company has depended upon
+the strength of a light cord, attached to a
+rocket, which has been lying in store for years;
+often it has happened that this very cord has
+been <i>just</i> a few feet too short! or has snapped,
+or has got entangled, or something else equally
+simple, but equally fatal. Let us look also to
+our <i>quasi</i> life-boats, some so heavy that they
+cannot be launched, or so dangerous as to
+drown their own crews—some constructed one
+way, some another—none on any recognised
+and universal principle. We are very proud
+of our name of Englishmen, and lay the
+flattering unction to our soul, that we are a
+highly civilised and reasonable community;
+but whilst we grow magniloquent in praises
+of our country and her commerce, we forget
+that we owe it all to the poor Jack Tar, for
+whose life and comfort we don’t seem to care
+a fig. Else why have these inquiries not been
+before instituted? What is the use of our
+Trinity Boards, and Ballast Boards, and Lighthouse
+Boards, and all other Boards, if the seaman
+is not to know one light from another when
+he sees it, or if it is to be placed so that he <i>cannot</i>
+see it? What is the use of our keeping up a
+Hydrographic department, at an expense little
+short of thirty thousand a-year, if the surveys,
+and charts, and valuable data, the result of its
+labours, are to be so little appreciated? The
+truth is, that the masters of many of the mercantile
+marine are incapable of taking advantage
+of them, and of other improvements
+in nautical science, from incompetence. We
+trust, however, that the bill intended to
+remedy <i>that</i> defect, lately introduced by the
+Ministry into the House of Commons, will, if
+passed, have the desired object. Although it
+has been abandoned “at this late period of
+the session” out of respect to the approaching
+12th of August and 1st of September, we
+trust it will be taken up again soon after the
+next meeting of Parliament.</p>
+
+<div class='chapter'>
+  <h2 class='c003'>WINGED TELEGRAPHS.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c009'>Magnetic Electricity for telegraphic purposes
+has nearly superseded pigeons. Till
+very recently a regular “service” of Carrier
+Pigeons existed between London and Paris,
+for the quick conveyance of such intelligence
+as was likely to affect the funds. The French
+capital was the focus of the system, in exemplification
+of the adage that “all roads lead
+to Paris,” and pigeon expresses branched off
+in all directions from that city even to St.
+Petersburg. Relays of them are still kept up
+between Paris and Madrid, besides a few other
+places. The most celebrated relays of winged
+messengers were those which bore intelligence
+between Antwerp, Brussels, and Paris. In
+the former city a society of pigeon fanciers,
+for amusement and emulation, keeps up an
+establishment of them. Their doings are
+amusingly chronicled in Kohl’s last book of
+Travels, <cite><span lang="de">Reisen in den Neiderlanden</span></cite>.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'><span class='pageno' id='Page_455'>455</span>Having been invited to join some members
+of the Society of Antwerp Pigeon Fanciers,
+he wended his way about five o’clock one
+morning through the silent streets of the
+ancient city. A few members of the association,
+he says, who directed the expedition,
+were followed by servants carrying two flat
+baskets, in which the pigeons, about to be
+dispatched, were carefully deposited. As we
+proceeded along, my companions related to
+me some particulars concerning the carrier
+pigeons, or “<i><span lang="fr">pigeons voyageurs</span></i>,” as these
+winged messengers are designated. The carriers
+are a peculiar race of pigeons endowed
+with powers of memory and observation
+which enable them to find their way to any
+place by a course along which they have once
+flown. Every kind of pigeon is not capable
+of being taught to do this. Of the methods
+adopted by the Antwerp association for training
+and teaching these carriers, I learnt the
+following particulars.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Supposing a dispatch of pigeons is to be
+sent off from Antwerp to Brussels or Paris,
+the birds are kept for some time at the place
+of arrival or terminus, and during that interval
+are plentifully fed and carefully tended.
+By little excursive flights, taken day by day,
+they are gradually familiarised with different
+parts of the town in which they have been
+nurtured, and with places in its vicinity.
+When sufficiently practised in finding their
+way to short distances, the pigeons are conveyed
+to a station some leagues from their
+dove-cote. Here they are kept for a time
+without food, and then set to flight. On
+taking wing, they rapidly soar to a vast
+height, scanning the line of the horizon to
+discern the church spires, or other lofty points
+which enable them to distinguish their home.
+Some of the less intelligent birds lose their
+way, and are seen no more. Those who return
+home (to Paris, or wherever else it may be),
+are again plentifully fed. Then after a little
+space of time they are carried in baskets some
+miles further in the direction of Antwerp;
+again they are put on a short allowance of
+food and negligently tended. When the
+pigeons depart on their next flight, the
+Parisian church spires have sunk far beneath
+the horizon; however, they soon succeed in
+combining that portion of the route with
+which they are acquainted with the part as
+yet unknown to them. They hover round
+and round in the air, seeking to catch one
+or other thread that is to guide them
+through the labyrinth. Some find it; others
+do not.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>In this manner the carrier pigeons are
+practised bit by bit along the whole distance
+between Paris and Antwerp. They attentively
+observe, or study, and learn by heart,
+each conspicuous object which serves them as
+a land-mark on the way. It is usual to exercise
+particular pigeons between the two
+cities, which it is wished to connect by this
+sort of postal communication; and it is necessary
+to have a certain number for going, and
+others for returning. After the birds have
+been accustomed to inhabit a certain district,
+and to travel by a particular route, it is not
+found easy to divert them from their wonted
+course, and to make them available in any
+other direction.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>My friends, the members of the Antwerp
+Society, assured me that their pigeons had
+frequently flown from Paris to Antwerp in
+six or seven hours; consequently in a much
+shorter time than that in which the same
+journey is performed by the railway train.
+By bird’s flight, the distance between the two
+cities is forty miles (German<a id='r1'></a><a href='#f1' class='c011'><sup>[1]</sup></a>), and therefore
+it follows that these carrier pigeons must
+travel at the rate of from twenty to thirty
+English miles an hour. It is scarcely conceivable
+that they should possess the strength
+of wing and vigour of lungs requisite for such
+a flight; and it is no unfrequent occurrence
+for several of them to die on arriving at their
+journey’s end. In stormy weather the loss of
+two-thirds of the birds dispatched on such a
+long flight, is a disaster always to be counted
+on. It is, therefore, usual to send off a whole
+flock, all bearing the same intelligence, so as
+to ensure the chance of one at least reaching
+its destination.</p>
+
+<div class='footnote' id='f1'>
+<p class='c006'><a href='#r1'>1</a>. The German mile includes nearly three and a half
+English miles.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class='c006'>The pigeon expedition which I saw dispatched
+from Antwerp, consisted of about
+thirty birds. The point of departure was a
+somewhat elevated site in the outskirts of the
+city. A spot like this is always made choice
+of, lest the pigeons, on first taking flight,
+should lose themselves amidst the house-tops
+and church spires of the city with which they
+are unacquainted; and by having the open
+country before them, they are enabled to trace
+out their own land-marks. When the pigeons
+are to be sent off on lengthened journeys, it is
+usual to convey them to the point of departure
+at a very early hour in the morning:—by
+this means they are dispatched in quietude,
+unmolested by an assemblage of curious
+gazers, and they have the light of a whole day
+before them for their journey. Carrier pigeons
+do not pursue their flight after night-fall,
+being then precluded by the darkness from
+seeing the surrounding country with sufficient
+distinctness to enable them to discern their
+resting-places, or stations. In the obscurity
+of night the whole flock might light on strange
+dove-cotes, and be captured; an accident
+which would occasion the total failure of a
+postal expedition, for the few pigeons who
+might escape capture, would, on the return of
+morning, be bewildered, and unable to recombine
+their plan of route.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Pigeons are not suited for postal communication
+between places so remote one
+from another that the journey cannot be
+completed in a single day. If it can be
+accomplished in one flight, so much the
+better. Antwerp and Paris are, I believe,
+<span class='pageno' id='Page_456'>456</span>the extreme points of distance within which
+carrier pigeons are capable of journeying
+with certainty.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>Herr Kohl gives no account of these stations
+or stages. We once saw one at Montrieul,
+the first station beyond Dover, towards Paris.
+The town stands on a high eminence, and is
+well adapted for the purpose. The cote was
+on the roof of a <i>café</i>. It was a square apartment
+with a flat ceiling, in which was cut a
+small door or trap: on the inside of this was
+fixed a small bell. If a Dover pigeon had
+alighted on the trap, the bell would have
+rung, and called the attention of an attendant
+always in waiting. The pigeon would have
+been secured, the dispatch taken from under
+its wing, and the messenger put into its cage.
+In a twinkling the cyphered paper would be
+fastened under the wing of the Beauvais or
+Amiens pigeon, and it would be sent off. On
+arriving at its destination, the same formula
+would be gone through, and the Paris pigeon
+would take the dispatch to its destination.
+Although several pigeons, even in fine weather,
+are entrusted with the same message, two
+seldom arrive at the common destination at
+the same time, so that at each place the
+operation we have described is frequently
+repeated, in order that at least one of many
+dispatches may be certain of arriving at the
+destination.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>These establishments were costly. Besides
+the great number of pigeons necessary to be
+kept at each station, some of the single birds
+were valuable. Fifty and sixty pounds was
+sometimes given for a clever pigeon. Those
+between Dover and Montrieul, and <i>vice versâ</i>,
+were among the most valuable, for none
+but sharp-sighted messengers could find their
+way across the Channel; few flights were
+sent away without some members of it being
+lost.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>But to return to the Antwerp pigeons—and
+to Mr. Kohl. Having, he continues,
+reached the open, elevated spot before-mentioned,
+the flat baskets carried by the servants
+were uncovered, and the little <i><span lang="fr">voyageurs</span></i> rapidly
+winged their way upwards. The intelligence
+they were to convey to Paris was
+written in little billets, fastened under their
+wings. The pigeons I saw sent off had been
+brought in covered baskets from Paris, and
+were as yet totally unacquainted with Antwerp
+and its environs. Their ignorance of the locality
+was manifest in the wavering uncertainty
+of their movements when they first took
+wing. On rising into the air, they gathered
+closely together, like foreigners in a strange
+country, and presently they steered their
+course along the confines of the city, in a
+direction quite contrary to that of Paris.
+They then soared upwards, spirally, and after
+several irregular movements (during which
+they seemed to be looking for the right way,
+and hesitating which course to take), they all
+suddenly darted off to south-west, directing
+their rapid flight straight to Paris, as if
+gladly quitting inhospitable Antwerp, where
+they had been scantily fed and carelessly
+tended.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>As soon as the birds were fairly out of
+sight, the pigeon-trainers proceeded homeward,
+not a little gratified by the conviction
+that their fleet messengers, with the intelligence
+they bore under their wings, would
+outstrip the speed of a railway train which
+had started some time before them.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>To me the most interesting point in the
+whole scene was the interval (about the space
+of a quarter of an hour) during which the
+pigeons wavered to and fro, seeking their way
+in a state of uncertainty. That appeared to
+me to be a wonderful manifestation of intelligence
+on the part of the birds. It is frequently
+affirmed that the carrier pigeon finds
+its way without the exercise of intelligence or
+observation, and merely by the aid of some
+incomprehensible instinct; but, from my own
+observations of the Antwerp pigeons, I am
+convinced that this is a mistake. Another
+circumstance tending to show that the birds
+are guided by something more than mere
+instinct, is, that during foggy weather the
+employment of carrier pigeons is found to be
+almost as impracticable as the use of the
+optical telegraph. But though it is not the
+practice to dispatch carrier pigeons at times
+when the atmosphere is very thickly obscured
+by fog, yet, owing to the keenness and
+accuracy of the visual power of these birds,
+which is much more perfect than that of man,
+they have an advantage over the telegraph.
+The latter is wholly useless when the atmosphere
+is only slightly obscured; but carrier
+pigeons frequently soar quite above the
+region of mist, and are thus enabled to trace
+their course without interruption. Stations
+of carrier pigeons are established in most of
+the principal towns of Belgium.</p>
+
+<p class='c006'>The members of the Antwerp pigeon-training
+society, whom I accompanied on
+the occasion above described, were citizens
+of the middle class of society. But in
+Belgium, pigeon-training has its attractions
+even for persons of rank and wealth, many
+of whom are enthusiastic pigeon fanciers;
+indeed, pigeon-flying is as fashionable an
+amusement in Belgium as horse racing in
+England. Prizes, consisting of sums of money
+as high as sixty thousand francs, are frequently
+won in matches of pigeons—to say
+nothing of the betting to which those matches
+give occasion.</p>
+
+<hr class='c012'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+  <div class='nf-center'>
+    <div>Monthly Supplement of “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,”</div>
+    <div>Conducted by <span class='sc'>Charles Dickens</span>.</div>
+    <div class='c001'><i>Price 2d., Stamped, 3d.</i>,</div>
+    <div class='c013'><span class='large'>THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE</span></div>
+    <div>OF</div>
+    <div>CURRENT EVENTS.</div>
+    <div class='c001'><span class='small'><i>The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with the Magazines.</i></span></div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<div class='pbb'>
+ <hr class='pb c013'>
+</div>
+<div class='tnotes x-ebookmaker'>
+
+<div class='chapter ph2'>
+
+<div class='nf-center-c0'>
+<div class='nf-center c014'>
+    <div>TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+ <ul class='ul_1 c001'>
+    <li>Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+
+    </li>
+    <li>Renumbered footnotes.
+    </li>
+  </ul>
+
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78184 ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for eBook #78184
+(https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78184)