Across The Plains ................................................................................................................................................1

MONDAY. It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were all signalled to be present at the Ferry

Depot of the railroad. An emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night, another on the

Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train

on Sunday a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was

to travel. There was a babel of bewildered men, women, and children. The wretched little bookingoffice,

and the baggageroom, which was not much larger, were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and

rank with the atmosphere of dripping clothes. Open carts full of bedding stood by the halfhour in the rain.

The officials loaded each other with recriminations. A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to have

been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full of brimstone, blustering and interfering. It was

plain that the whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under the strain of so many

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil,

got my baggage registered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word to

move. I had taken along with me a small valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag

of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, in six fat volumes. It

was as much as I could carry with convenience even for short distances, but it insured me plenty of clothing,

and the valise was at that moment, and often after, useful for a stool. I am sure I sat for an hour in the

baggage room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was passed to me and I picked up my

bundles and got under way, it was only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West Street to the river. It was dark, the wind

blew clean through it from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage, hundreds of

one and tons of the other. I feel I shall have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene must

have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily repetition. It was a tight jam; there was no fair way

through the mingled mass of brute and living obstruction. Into the upper skirts of the crowd porters,

infuriated by hurry and overwork, clove their way with shouts. I may say that we stood like sheep, and that

the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep dogs; and I believe these men were no longer

answerable for their acts. It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight into the press, and

when they could get no farther, blindly discharged their barrowful. With my own hand, for instance, I saved

the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must

suppose that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening. It will give some idea of the

state of mind to which we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the

least attention to my act. It was not till some time after that I understood what I had done myself, for to ward

off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of human life. Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition

to progress, such as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the spirits. We had accepted this

purgatory as a child accepts the conditions of the world. For my part, I shivered a little, and my back ached

wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear, and all the activities of my nature had become tributary

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the crowd began to move, heavily straining

through itself. About the same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over the shed. We

were being filtered out into the river boat for Jersey City. You may imagine how slowly this filtering

proceeded, through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages or children, and yet under

the necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on deck

under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbowroom to stretch and breathe in. This was on the starboard;

for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by which we had entered. In vain the seamen

shouted to them to move on, and threatened them with shipwreck. These poor people were under a spell of

stupor, and did not stir a foot. It rained as heavily as ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and

capfuls, not without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept over the river in the darkness,

trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated

steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by strains of music. The contrast between these

pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of wet and silent

emigrants, was of that glaring description which we count too obvious for the purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede. I had a fixed sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct,

the same persuasion was common to us all. A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear, presided over the

disorder of our landing. People pushed, and elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could.

Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow. One child, who had lost her parents, screamed

steadily and with increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official kept her by him, but no

one else seemed so much as to remark her distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest. I was

so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards or so between the pier

and the railway station, so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover. There was no

waitingroom, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we

had to camp upon the draughty, gaslit platform. I sat on my valise, too crushed to observe my neighbours; but

as they were all cold, and wet, and weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we had

been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than myself. I bought halfadozen oranges from a

boy, for oranges and nuts were the only refection to be had. As only two of them had even a pretence of juice,

I threw the other four under the cars, and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far from dry. For my own part, I got out a

clothesbrush, and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood into the

bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least

precaution. As they were, they composed themselves to sleep. I had seen the lights of Philadelphia, and been

twice ordered to change carriages and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their example.

TUESDAY. When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing idle; I was in the last carriage, and,

seeing some others strolling to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as from a caravan

by the wayside. We were near no station, nor even, as far as I could see, within reach of any signal. A green,

open, undulating country stretched away upon all sides. Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn gave it a

foreign grace and interest; but the contours of the land were soft and English. It was not quite England,

neither was it quite France; yet like enough either to seem natural in my eyes. And it was in the sky, and not

upon the earth, that I was surprised to find a change. Explain it how you may, and for my part I cannot

explain it at all, the sun rises with a different splendour in America and Europe. There is more clear gold and

scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple, brown, and smoky orange in those of the new. It may be

from habit, but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter; it has a duskier glory, and

more nearly resembles sunset; it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as though

America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day. I

thought so then, by the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant

parts of the continent. If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its passage by the swift beating of a sort of

chapel bell upon the engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were summoned by the cry of

"All aboard!" and went on again upon our way. The whole line, it appeared, was topsyturvy; an accident at

midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear. We paid for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all

that day. Fruit we could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at some station with a

meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale; but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at

every opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day. There was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking;

yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a sparkling

freshness till late in the afternoon. It had an inland sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt

of woods, rivers, and the delved earth. These, though in so far a country, were airs from home. I stood on the

platform by the hour; and as I saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway and fishers by

the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining

blankly on the plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a

thousand accidents of form and surface, I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had

come into a rich estate. And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman, and heard that it was

called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As

when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the

fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no

part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the United States of

America. All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with

Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky. Chelsea, with its London associations of red brick, Sloane

Square, and the King's Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they have their seat,

translated names of cities, where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was

crossing the continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation of a plague. Old, red

Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory, below anglified New York. The names of the

States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio,

Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler

music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his

verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the

Late in the evening we were landed in a waitingroom at Pittsburg. I had now under my charge a young and

sprightly Dutch widow with her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a certain distance

farther on the way; but as I found she was furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waitingroom

to seek a dinner for myself. I mention this meal, not only because it was the first of which I had partaken for

about thirty hours, but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured gentleman. He did me

the honour to wait upon me after a fashion, while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture

marched me farther into the country of surprise. He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher

Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels of my youth. Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of a pleasant

warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and

armed with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their parallel in England. A butler

perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of sighing

patience which one is often moved to admire. And again, the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity. But

the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an upper form boy to a fag; he

unbends to you like Prince Hal with Poins and Falstaff. He makes himself at home and welcome. Indeed, I

may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper much as, with us, a young, free, and not

very selfrespecting master might behave to a goodlooking chambermaid. I had come prepared to pity the

poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice

of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of etiquette: if one should offer to tip the

American waiter? Certainly not, he told me. Never. It would not do. They considered themselves too highly

to accept. They would even resent the offer. As for him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation;

he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare

conjunctures.... Without being very clear seeing, I can still perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured

WEDNESDAY. A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train; and morning

found us far into Ohio. This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have played at being in

Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.

My preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY PAPER, and was read aloud

to me by my nurse. It narrated the doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter, very

obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebodyorother; a trick I never

forgave him. The idea of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a baronet, was one which

my mind rejected. It offended verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others to

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it. We were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken to the

Rocky Mountains. The country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull. All through Ohio, Indiana,

Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and

various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself. The tall corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in

themselves, and framed the plain into long, aerial vistas; and the clean, bright, gardened townships spoke of

country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop. It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am afraid, not

unfrequented by the devil. That morning dawned with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that

was not perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the heart and seemed to travel with the

blood. Day came in with a shudder. White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as we see them more

often on a lake; and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever

heat and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still been there, and we knew that this

paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria. The fences along the line bore but two descriptions

of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the other to vaunt remedies against the ague. At the point

of day, and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the state, who had got in at some way

The Dutch widow was a person of some character. She had conceived at first sight a great aversion for the

present writer, which she was at no pains to conceal. But being a woman of a practical spirit, she made no

difficulty about accepting my attentions, and encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry

all her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat. Nay, she was such a

rattle by nature, and, so powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for want of a better,

to take me into confidence and tell me the story of her life. I heard about her late husband, who seemed to

have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays. I could tell you her prospects, her

hopes, the amount of her fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of particular

matters that are not usually disclosed except to friends. At one station, she shook up her children to look at a

man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me she explained how she had been keeping

company with this Mr. Z., how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his desistance that she

was now travelling to the West. Then, when I was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgment

on that type of manly beauty. I admired it to her heart's content. She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in

talk, but broidered as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past; yet she had that sort of

candour, to keep me, in spite of all these confidences, steadily aware of her aversion. Her parting words were

ingeniously honest. "I am sure," said she, "we all OUGHT to be very much obliged to you." I cannot pretend

that she put me at my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike. A poor nature would have

slipped, in the course of these familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening. I was turned out of the cars, bundled into an omnibus, and driven off

through the streets to the station of a different railroad. Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city. I remember

having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld

street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers, I thought it would be a graceful

act for the corporation to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a cheerful dinner. But there

was no word of restitution. I was that city's benefactor, yet I was received in a thirdclass waiting room, and

I can safely say, I have never been so dogtired as that night in Chicago. When it was time to start, I

descended the platform like a man in a dream. It was a long train, lighted from end to end; and car after car,

as I came up with it, was not only filled but overflowing. My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six

ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot, feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great

darkness over me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas. When at last I found an empty bench, I

sank into it like a bundle of rags, the world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little

German gentleman, somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the dozen, as they say.

I did my best to keep up the conversation; for it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that. I

heard him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on the train, who had already robbed

a man of forty dollars and a return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I properly understood

the sense until next morning; and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it. What else he

talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words, his profuse gesticulation, and his smile,

which was highly explanatory: but no more. And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly;

for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German,

supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue; and finally, in despair, he rose and left me. I

felt chagrined; but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself as far as that was possible

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the suburbs after a DINER FIN, and was bent

on entertainment while the journey lasted. Having failed with me, he pitched next upon another emigrant,

who had come through from Canada, and was not one jot less weary than myself. Nay, even in a natural state,

as I found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy, uncommunicative man. After trying

him on different topics, it appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper, swore an oath or

two, and departed from that car in quest of livelier society. Poor little gentleman! I suppose he thought an

emigrant should be a rollicking, freehearted blade, with a flask of foreign brandy and a long, comical story

THURSDAY. I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I

was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk, and coffee and hot

cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi. Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of

remark. At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in. He was aggressively friendly, but, according to

English notions, not at all unpresentable upon a train. For one stage he eluded the notice of the officials; but

just as we were beginning to move out of the next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor. There

was a word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the shoulders, twitched him from his seat,

marched him through the car, and sent him flying on to the track. It was done in three motions, as exact as a

piece of drill. The train was still moving slowly, although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got

his feet without a fall. He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his cheeks; and he shook this menacingly

in the air with one hand, while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys. It was the first

indication that I had come among revolvers, and I observed it with some emotion. The conductor stood on the

steps with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature, for

he turned without further ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell followed by a peal

of laughter from the cars. They were speaking English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs,

on the eastern bank of the Missouri river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai, set apart

for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with

my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom, in my plain

European way, I should call the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers. They took my name,

assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my packages. And here came the tug of war. I wished to

give up my packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed. And this, it appeared, was impossible

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For

although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the

dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a

slang signification. Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at

Council Bluffs; so that what I was asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a monstrous

exigency. He refused, and that with the plainness of the West. This American manner of conducting matters

of business is, at first, highly unpalatable to the European. When we approach a man in the way of his calling,

and for those services by which he earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired servant. But

in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if

they shall agree to please. I know not which is the more convenient, nor even which is the more truly

courteous. The English stiffness unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular transaction is at an

end, and thus favours class separations. But on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironical

submission. I knew nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no desire to give trouble. If

there was nothing for it but to get to bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my habit, I

He burst into a shout of laughter. "Ah!" said he, "you do not know about America. They are fine people in

America. Oh! you will like them very well. But you mustn't get mad. I know what you want. You come along

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar

All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might meet with Dutch widows and little

German gentry fresh from table. I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once more, and

put apart with my fellows. It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the

Emigrant House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for the journey. A whitehaired

official, with a stick under one arm, and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and called name

after name in the tone of a command. At each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles

and run for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon concluded that this was to be set

apart for the women and children. The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men travelling

alone, and the third to the Chinese. The official was easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the

emigrants were both quick at answering their names, and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without ceremony by simultaneous assault. I

suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroadcar, that long, narrow wooden box, like a

flatroofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage down the middle, and

transverse benches upon either hand. Those destined for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable

for their extreme plainness, nothing but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the usual

inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned. The

benches are too short for anything but a young child. Where there is scarce elbowroom for two to sit, there

will not be space enough for one to lie. Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills about

the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived a plan for the better accommodation of

travellers. They prevail on every two to chum together. To each of the chums they sell a board and three

square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin cotton. The benches can be made to face each other

in pairs, for the backs are reversible. On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench to bench,

making a couch wide enough for two, and long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie

down side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van and the feet to the engine. When the

train is full, of course this plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every bench, neither can

it be carried out unless the chums agree. It was to bring about this last condition that our whitehaired official

now bestirred himself. He made a most active master of ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even

guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each. The greater the number of happy couples the better for his

pocket, for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds. His price for one board and three straw cushions

began with two dollars and a half; but before the train left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased

The matchmaker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at

any price; but certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined the honour without thanks.

He was an old, heavy, slowspoken man, I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity,

and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases. He didn't know the young man, he said. The young man

might be very honest, but how was he to know that? There was another young man whom he had met already

in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would prefer to chum with him upon the whole. All this without

any sort of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent. I began to tremble lest every one should refuse

my company, and I be left rejected. But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, longlimbed, smallheaded,

curlyhaired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly smartness in his manner. To be exact, he had acquired

it in the navy. But that was all one; he had at least been trained to desperate resolves, so he accepted the

match, and the whitehaired swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train. I am afraid to say how many baggagewaggons

followed the engine, certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the families, and the rear was

brought up by the conductor in what, if I have it rightly, is called his caboose. The class to which I belonged

was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians

among the Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families. But our own car was pure from admixture,

save for one little boy of eight or nine who had the whoopingcough. At last, about six, the long train

crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river to Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars. There was thunder in the air, which helped to keep us

restless. A man played many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to, until he came to

"Home, sweet home." It was truly strange to note how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.

I have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art

which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of

treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your

hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves and hate

the occasion of their weakness. It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment was interrupted. An

elderly, hardlooking man, with a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would

expect from a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop that "damned thing." "I've heard

about enough of that," he added; "give us something about the good country we're going to." A murmur of

adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then

struck into a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately the emotion he had raised.

The day faded; the lamps were lit; a party of wild young men, who got off next evening at North Platte, stood

together on the stern platform, singing "The Sweet Byandbye" with very tuneful voices; the chums began

to put up their beds; and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end. But it was not so; for, the train

stopping at some station, the cars were instantly thronged with the natives, wives and fathers, young men and

maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale.

Their charge began with twentyfive cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on again, to fifteen, with

the bedboard gratis, or less than onefifth of what I had paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books (such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops,

and cigars; and on emigrant journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee, tea, sugar,

and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early next morning the newsboy went around the cars,

and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a copartnery of two

to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate of three. I

myself entered a little after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania,

Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my

bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going

west to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking, and sometimes

chewing and smoking together. I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin

washingdish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used these instruments, one

after another, according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want

of borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the whole stock in

trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork

or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face and neck and hands; a cold, an

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves

with coffee, sugar, and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the cars.

Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the first station the natives would come on

board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with little

parties breakfasting upon the bedboards. It was the pleasantest hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: a breakfast in the morning, a dinner somewhere

between eleven and two, and supper from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less than twenty

minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a side

track among miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up to

time. For haste is not the foible of an emigrant train. It gets through on sufferance, running the gauntlet

among its more considerable brethren; should there be a block, it is unhesitatingly sacrificed; and they

cannot, in consequence, predict the length of the passage within a day or so. Civility is the main comfort that

you miss. Equality, though conceived very largely in America, does not extend so low down as to an

emigrant. Thus in all other trains, a warning cry of "All aboard!" recalls the passengers to take their seats; but

as soon as I was alone with emigrants, and from the Transfer all the way to San Francisco, I found this

ceremony was pretermitted; the train stole from the station without note of warning, and you had to keep an

eye upon it even while you ate. The annoyance is considerable, and the disrespect both wanton and petty.

Many conductors, again, will hold no communication with an emigrant. I asked a conductor one day at what

time the train would stop for dinner; as he made no answer I repeated the question, with a like result; a third

time I returned to the charge, and then Jackinoffice looked me coolly in the face for several seconds and

turned ostentatiously away. I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality; for when another person made the

same inquiry, although he still refused the information, he condescended to answer, and even to justify his

reticence in a voice loud enough for me to hear. It was, he said, his principle not to tell people where they

were to dine; for one answer led to many other questions, as what o'clock it was? or, how soon should we be

As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities, a great deal of your comfort depends on the character of

the newsboy. He has it in his power indefinitely to better and brighten the emigrant's lot. The newsboy with

whom we started from the Transfer was a dark, bullying, contemptuous, insolent scoundrel, who treated us

like dogs. Indeed, in his case, matters came nearly to a fight. It happened thus: he was going his rounds

through the cars with some commodities for sale, and coming to a party who were at SEVEN UP or

CASCINO (our two games), upon a bedboard, slung down a cigarbox in the middle of the cards, knocking

one man's hand to the floor. It was the last straw. In a moment the whole party were upon their feet, the cigars

were upset, and he was ordered to "get out of that directly, or he would get more than he reckoned for." The

fellow grumbled and muttered, but ended by making off, and was less openly insulting in the future. On the

other hand, the lad who rode with us in this capacity from Ogden to Sacramento made himself the friend of

all, and helped us with information, attention, assistance, and a kind countenance. He told us where and when

we should have our meals, and how long the train would stop; kept seats at table for those who were delayed,

and watched that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried. You, who live at home at

ease, can hardly realise the greatness of this service, even had it stood alone. When I think of that lad coming

and going, train after train, with his bright face and civil words, I see how easily a good man may become the

benefactor of his kind. Perhaps he is discontented with himself, perhaps troubled with ambitions; why, if he

but knew it, he is a hero of the old Greek stamp; and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents,

I must tell here an experience of mine with another newsboy. I tell it because it gives so good an example of

that uncivil kindness of the American, which is perhaps their most bewildering character to one newly

landed. It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train; and I am told I looked like a man at death's

door, so much had this long journey shaken me. I sat at the end of a car, and the catch being broken, and

myself feverish and sick, I had to hold the door open with my foot for the sake of air. In this attitude my leg

debarred the newsboy from his box of merchandise. I made haste to let him pass when I observed that he was

coming; but I was busy with a book, and so once or twice he came upon me unawares. On these occasions he

most rudely struck my foot aside; and though I myself apologised, as if to show him the way, he answered me

never a word. I chafed furiously, and I fear the next time it would have come to words. But suddenly I felt a

touch upon my shoulder, and a large juicy pear was put into my hand. It was the newsboy, who had observed

that I was looking ill, and so made me this present out of a tender heart. For the rest of the journey I was

petted like a sick child; he lent me newspapers, thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale,

It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were at sea there is

no other adequate expression on the plains of Nebraska. I made my observatory on the top of a

fruitwaggon, and sat by the hour upon that perch to spy about me, and to spy in vain for something new. It

was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway

stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiardboard; on either hand, the green plain ran till it

touched the skirts of heaven. Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers, no bigger than a crownpiece,

bloomed in a continuous flowerbed; grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and

diminution; and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more

distinct as we drew nearer till they turned into wooden cabins, and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake

until they melted into their surroundings, and we were once more alone upon the billiardboard. The train

toiled over this infinity like a snail; and being the one thing moving, it was wonderful what huge proportions

it began to assume in our regard. It seemed miles in length, and either end of it within but a step of the

horizon. Even my own body or my own head seemed a great thing in that emptiness. I note the feeling the

more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others. Day and night, above the

roar of the train, our ears were kept busy with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers a noise like the winding

up of countless clocks and watches, which began after a while to seem proper to that land.

To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy, this greatness of

the air, this discovery of the whole arch of heaven, this straight, unbroken, prisonline of the horizon. Yet

one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot's pace of

oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they

steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing

by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or for encouragement; but stage after stage, only the

dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon. But the eye, as I have been told, found

differences even here; and at the worst the emigrant came, by perseverance, to the end of his toil. It is the

settlers, after all, at whom we have a right to marvel. Our consciousness, by which we live, is itself but the

creature of variety. Upon what food does it subsist in such a land? What livelihood can repay a human

creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? He is cut off from books, from news, from company, from all

that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs. A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that

he can hope. He may walk five miles and see nothing; ten, and it is as though he had not moved; twenty, and

still he is in the midst of the same great level, and has approached no nearer to the one object within view, the

flat horizon which keeps pace with his advance. We are full at home of the question of agreeable

wallpapers, and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings. But

what is to be said of the Nebraskan settler? His is a wallpaper with a vengeance one quarter of the

His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world; it quails before so vast

an outlook, it is tortured by distance; yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs into his cabin, and can

repose his sight upon things near at hand. Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these empty

Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle, wife and family, the settler may create a

full and various existence. One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior to her

lot. This was a woman who boarded us at a way station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features

were more than comely; she had that great rarity a fine complexion which became her; and her eyes were

kind, dark, and steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a line in her countenance, not a

note in her soft and sleepy voice, but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have been fatuous

arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen

wooden houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted along the railway lines. Each stood apart

in its own lot. Each opened direct off the billiardboard, as if it were a billiard board indeed, and these only

models that had been set down upon it ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very empty,

and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire. This extreme newness, above all in so naked and flat a

country, gives a strong impression of artificiality. With none of the litter and discoloration of human life;

with the paths unworn, and the houses still sweating from the axe, such a settlement as this seems purely

scenic. The mind is loth to accept it for a piece of reality; and it seems incredible that life can go on with so

few properties, or the great child, man, find entertainment in so bare a playroom.

And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points; or at least it contained, as I passed through, one

person incompletely civilised. At North Platte, where we supped that evening, one man asked another to pass

the milkjug. This other was welldressed and of what we should call a respectable appearance; a darkish

man, high spoken, eating as though he had some usage of society; but he turned upon the first speaker with

"Pass! Hell! I'm not paid for that business; the waiter's paid for it. You should use civility at table, and, by

The other man very wisely made no answer, and the bully went on with his supper as though nothing had

occurred. It pleases me to think that some day soon he will meet with one of his own kidney; and that perhaps

To cross such a plain is to grow homesick for the mountains. I longed for the Black Hills of Wyoming, which

I knew we were soon to enter, like an icebound whaler for the spring. Alas! and it was a worse country than

the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains, or over the main ridge of the

Rockies, which is a fair match to them for misery of aspect. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and

unkindly world about our onward path; tumbled boulders, cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments

and fortifications how drearily, how tamely, none can tell who has not seen them; not a tree, not a patch of

sward, not one shapely or commanding mountain form; sagebrush, eternal sage brush; over all, the same

weariful and gloomy colouring, grays warming into brown, grays darkening towards black; and for sole sign

of life, here and there a few fleeing antelopes; here and there, but at incredible intervals, a creek running in a

canon. The plains have a grandeur of their own; but here there is nothing but a contorted smallness. Except

for the air, which was light and stimulating, there was not one good circumstance in that God forsaken land.

I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way; and at last, whether I was exhausted by my

complaint or poisoned in some wayside eatinghouse, the evening we left Laramie, I fell sick outright. That

was a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each made a faint shining in its own

neighbourhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers

lay in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling

on the floor, with his face upon his arm; there another half seated with his head and shoulders on the bench.

The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train; others stirred, turned, or

stretched out their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep; and

as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a halfformed

word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was

obliged to open my window, for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake

and using the full supply of life. Outside, in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by

unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I.

And yet when day came, it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon

mile, and not a tree, a bird, or a river. Only down the long, sterile canons, the train shot hooting and awoke

the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one

spectacle fit to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the railroad has been

pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some

12 pounds from the Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction, roaring, impromptu

cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations

in the desert; how in these uncouth places pigtailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians

and broken men from Europe, talking together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking,

quarrelling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last

fastness, the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember

that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats, and with a view to nothing more

extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway were the

one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it brought together into one plot all the ends of the

world and all the degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and

the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that

we require, what was Troy town to this? But, alas! it is not these things that are necessary it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so

many hidden perils. Thirst, hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared, so lightly do we

skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we

should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I have complained of

the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more than was enough, let me add an original document. It

was not written by Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty years ago. I shall

"My dear Sister Mary, I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you read my letter. If Jerry" (the writer's

eldest brother) "has not written to you before now, you will be surprised to heare that we are in California,

and that poor Thomas" (another brother, of fifteen) "is dead. We started from in July, with plenly of

provisions and too yoke oxen. We went along very well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of

California, when the Indians attacked us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants. We had one

passenger with us, too guns, and one revolver; so we ran all the lead We had into bullets (and) hung the guns

up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon; droave the

"Jerry took out one of the guns to shoot it, and told Tom drive the oxen. Tom and I drove the oxen, and Jerry

and the passenger went on. Then, after a little, I left Tom and caught up with Jerry and the other man. Jerry

stopped Tom to come up; me and the man went on and sit down by a little stream. In a few minutes, we heard

some noise; then three shots (they all struck poor Tom, I suppose); then they gave the war hoop, and as many

as twenty of the redskins came down upon us. The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the road in the

"I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot; so I told the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead, and that we

had better try to escape, if possible. I had no shoes on; having a sore foot, I thought I would not put them on.

The man and me run down the road, but We was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony. We then turend the

other way, and run up the side of the Mountain, and hid behind some cedar trees, and stayed there till dark.

The Indians hunted all over after us, and verry close to us, so close that we could here there tomyhawks

Jingle. At dark the man and me started on, I stubing my toes against sticks and stones. We traveld on all

night; and next morning, just as it was getting gray, we saw something in the shape of a man. It layed Down

in the grass. We went up to it, and it was Jerry. He thought we ware Indians. You can imagine how glad he

was to see me. He thought we was all dead but him, and we thought him and Tom was dead. He had the gun

that he took out of the wagon to shoot the prairie Chicken; all he had was the load that was in it.

"We traveld on till about eight o'clock, We caught up with one wagon with too men with it. We had traveld

with them before one day; we stopt and they Drove on; we knew that they was ahead of us, unless they had

been killed to. My feet was so sore when we caught up with them that I had to ride; I could not step. We

traveld on for too days, when the men that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them another

inch. We unyoked the oxen; we had about seventy pounds of flour; we took it out and divided it into four

packs. Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a blanket. I carried a little bacon, dried meat, and

little quilt; I had in all about twelve pounds. We had one pint of flour a day for our alloyance. Sometimes we

made soup of it; sometimes we (made) pancakes; and sometimes mixed it up with cold water and eat it that

way. We traveld twelve or fourteen days. The time came at last when we should have to reach some place or

starve. We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks. The morning come, we scraped all the flour out of the sack,

mixed it up, and baked it into bread, and made some soup, and eat everything we had. We traveld on all day

without anything to eat, and that evening we Caught up with a sheep train of eight wagons. We traveld with

them till we arrived at the settlements; and know I am safe in California, and got to good home, and going to

"Jerry is working in . It is a good country. You can get from 50 to 60 and 75 Dollars for cooking. Tell me

And so ends this artless narrative. The little man was at school again, God bless him, while his brother lay

At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific line of railroad. The change was

doubly welcome; for, first, we had better cars on the new line; and, second, those in which we had been

cooped for more than ninety hours had begun to stink abominably. Several yards away, as we returned, let us

say from dinner, our nostrils were assailed by rancid air. I have stood on a platform while the whole train was

shunting; and as the dwellingcars drew near, there would come a whiff of pure menagerie, only a little

sourer, as from men instead of monkeys. I think we are human only in virtue of open windows. Without fresh

air, you only require a bad heart, and a remarkable command of the Queen's English, to become such another

as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do

my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoolike

business of the emigrant train. But one thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably the least

The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high, and so proportionally airier; they were freshly

varnished, which gave us all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed; the seats drew out and joined in

the centre, so that there was no more need for bed boards; and there was an upper tier of berths which could

I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was among. They were in rather marked

contrast to the emigrants I had met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic. They were mostly lumpish

fellows, silent and noisy, a common combination; somewhat sad, I should say, with an extraordinary poor

taste in humour, and little interest in their fellowcreatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external

curiosity. If they heard a man's name and business, they seemed to think they had the heart of that mystery;

but they were as eager to know that much as they were indifferent to the rest. Some of them were on nettles

till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker; but beyond that, whether you were

Catholic or Mormon, dull or clever, fierce or friendly, was all one to them. Others who were not so stupid,

gossiped a little, and, I am bound to say, unkindly. A favourite witticism was for some lout to raise the alarm

of "All aboard!" while the rest of us were dining, thus contributing his mite to the general discomfort. Such a

one was always much applauded for his high spirits. When I was ill coming through Wyoming, I was

astonished fresh from the eager humanity on board ship to meet with little but laughter. One of the young

men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill nature, but mere

clodlike incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was phantom merriment.

Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though, of course, there were not wanting

some to help him, it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his

fellowpassengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead

body!" And there was a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station. This, by good

There was a good deal of storytelling in some quarters; in others, little but silence. In this society, more than

any other that ever I was in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was rarely that any

one listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to another man's story, it was because he was in immediate

want of a hearer for one of his own. Food and the progress of the train were the subjects most generally

treated; many joined to discuss these who otherwise would hold their tongues. One small knot had no better

occupation than to worm out of me my name; and the more they tried, the more obstinately fixed I grew to

baffle them. They assailed me with artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future; but I

was perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have

given me ten dollars for the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus preserving him a

lively interest throughout the journey. I met one of my fellowpassengers months after, driving a street

tramway car in San Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him my name without subterfuge.

You never saw a man more chapfallen. But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he

There were no emigrants direct from Europe save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who

kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest

discussing privately the secrets of their oldworld, mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could

make something great of the Cornish; for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races,

older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from neighbouring

Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel that

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter of that Continent. All the States of

the North had sent out a fugitive to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New

York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maime that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas

themselves some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better wages. The talk in the train,

like the talk I heard on the steamer, ran upon hard times, short commons, and hope that moves ever westward.

I thought of my shipful from Great Britain with a feeling of despair. They had come 3000 miles, and yet not

far enough. Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde, and stood to welcome them at Sandy Hook. Where

were they to go? Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? These were not places for immigration, but for

emigration, it appeared; not one of them, but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel and left it for an

ungrateful country. And it was still westward that they ran. Hunger, you would have thought, came out of the

east like the sun, and the evening was made of edible gold. And, meantime, in the car in front of me, were

there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter? Hungry Europe and hungry China, each

pouring from their gates in search of provender, had here come face to face. The two waves had met; east and

west had alike failed; the whole round world had been prospected and condemned; there was no El Dorado

anywhere; and till one could emigrate to the moon, it seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there

wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for, as we continued to steam

westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east;

and these were as crowded as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they

all bound for Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? It would seem not, for, whenever we met them, the

passengers ran on the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to "come

back." On the plains of Nebraska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my

heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good country we were going to." And at

that very hour the Sandlot of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the

bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love

Of all stupid illfeelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car

was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of

them, but hated them A PRIORI. The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battlefield

of money. They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny

too idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a

kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so

like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a

considerable distance, I have for an instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most

attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my

emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the

journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one

infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But the

Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their feet an act not dreamed of among

ourselves and going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way that

the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a

crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.

Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese

waggon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The Chinese are considered stupid,

because they are imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and

frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they

have no monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the AngloSaxon and the cheerful Irishman may each

reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to

the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have

we here! and what must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no

country is bound to submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and resistance

to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict

herself with open arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he loves

freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. It was but

the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for

arms and butchery. "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, "ye rose in the name of freedom to set

free the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the

stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a

school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long

past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock

strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a

baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is

thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wryeyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the

hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside; philosophy so wise

that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of

miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or

whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway

windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity

must there not have been in these pictures of the mind when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high

throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the redcoat sentry pacing over all; and the man in

the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the

Another race shared among my fellowpassengers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly

necessary to say, was the noble red man of old story over whose own hereditary continent we had been

steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the

neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way stations, a husband and wife and a few children,

disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The

silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any

thinking creature, but my fellowpassengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I

was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been

driven back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the

States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre

and even there find themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the

Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the illfaith

of all, nay, down to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter

of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or

forget. These old, well founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the independent. That the

Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought

of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed, honourable, since it depends on

wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour

on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high lying plateau in

Nevada. The man who kept the station eatinghouse was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew

very friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering. "You see," said he, "I tell you

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world. There is something in the simplicity of a

decimal coinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by

halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirtytwo, fortyfive, or

even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their

affairs by a coin that no longer that no longer exists the BIT, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of

the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarterdollar stands for

the required amount. But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is, short by a fifth.

That, then, is called a SHORT bit. If you have one, you lay it triumphantly down, and save two and a half

cents. But if you have not, and lay down a quarter, the barkeeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by

way of change; and thus you have paid what is called a LONG BIT, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by

comparison with a short bit, five cents. In country places all over the Pacific coast, nothing lower than a bit is

ever asked or taken, which vastly increases the cost of life; as even for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence

or sevenpencehalfpenny, as the case may be. You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as

broad as it was long; but I have discovered a plan to make it broader, with which I here endow the public. It is

brief and simple radiantly simple. There is one place where five cents are recognised, and that is the

postoffice. A quarter is only worth two bits, a short and a long. Whenever you have a quarter, go to the

postoffice and buy five cents worth of postagestamps; you will receive in change two dimes, that is, two

short bits. The purchasing power of your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of

beer all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of postagestamps into the

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horrible to man, and bare sagebrush

country that seemed little kindlier, and came by suppertime to Elko. As we were standing, after our manner,

outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across

country. They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before;

and several of my fellow passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke our fast at

Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked dearly to

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout,

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from that intention. He had a situation to

offer me, and if we could come to terms, why, good and well. "You see," he continued, "I'm running a theatre

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the

Green," I had no pretension whatever to that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and one of his

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a musician; I bet you weren't. No offence, I hope?"

"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I presume the debt was liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellowtravellers, who thought they had now come to a country

where situations went a begging. But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith. Indeed, I am more

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we

continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had fallen

asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of

enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were in a new country, and I must come forth

upon the platform and see with my own eyes. The train was then, in its patient way, standing halted in a

bytrack. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only

a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled

the air; it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains. The air

struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it were day or night, for the illumination

was unusual. I sat up at last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed; and

suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had

one glimpse of a huge pineforested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a sky already coloured with

the fires of dawn. I am usually very calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how my

heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had come home again home from unsightly deserts to

the green and habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the hilltop, every trouty pool along

that mountain river, was more dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more happily

than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta, Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through

a sea of mountain forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sealevel as we went, not I only, but all

the passengers on board, threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys, and

thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new creatures within and without. The sun no

longer oppressed us with heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountainside, until we were fain to laugh

ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see farther into the land and our own happy futures. At every town

the cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and crowing for the new day and the new country.

For this was indeed our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain of corn; and the next day before the dawn

we were lying to upon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;

the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the bay was perfect not a ripple, scarce a stain,

upon its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the

head of Tamalpais, and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to awaken, and

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were lit from end to end with summer daylight.

THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman to a bent fishinghook;

and the comparison, if less important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a soldier for

topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend;

and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the ancient capital of California faces across

the bay, while the Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her left flank and rear with

neverdying surf. In front of the town, the long line of seabeach trends north and northwest, and then

westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and

larger in the distance; you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the outline of the

shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet

weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard to find a walk more solitary and at the same

time more exciting to the mind. Crowds of ducks and seagulls hover over the sea. Sandpipers trot in and out

by troops after the retiring waves, trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea tangles,

new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes a whole whale's carcase, white with

carriongulls and poisoning the wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come in slowly,

vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and

waning, up and down the long keyboard of the beach. The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant to

the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The interest

is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle

of Ocean's greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of thunder in the sound. The very air is

Inshore, a tract of sandhills borders on the beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the

birds and hunters. A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy liveoaks flourish

singly or in thickets the kind of wood for murderers to crawl among and here and there the skirts of the

forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pinetrees hung with Spaniard's

Beard. Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City

though that and so many other things are now for ever altered and it was from here that you had the first

view of the old township lying in the sands, its white windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the ocean. A great faint sound of

breakers follows you high up into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean, empty rooms of

Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the

voice of the Pacific. You pass out of the town to the southwest, and mount the hill among pinewoods.

Glade, thicket, and grove surround you. You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a

deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance, like that of wind

among the trees, only harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the summit, out breaks on

every hand and with freshened vigour that same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now

you are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only mounts to you from behind along the

beach towards Santa Cruz, but from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and from

down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole woodland is begirt with thundering surges.

The silence that immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this

distant, circling rumour. It sets your senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and

unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn homeward. All woods lure a rambler onward; but

in those of Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my walks. I would push straight

for the shore where I thought it to be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not, sooner or

later, have brought me forth on the Pacific. The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and

discovery in these excursions. I never in all my visits met but one man. He was a Mexican, very dark of hue,

but smiling and fat, and he carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek for straying

cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked

me for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent. We stood and smiled upon each other for a

few seconds, and then turned without a word and took our several ways across the forest.

One day I shall never forget it I had taken a trail that was new to me. After a while the woods began to

open, the sea to sound nearer hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A step or two farther, and,

without leaving the woods, I found myself among trim houses. I walked through street after street, parallel

and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but still undeniable streets, and each with its

name posted at the corner, as in a real town. Facing down the main thoroughfare "Central Avenue," as it

was ticketed I saw an openair temple, with benches and soundingboard, as though for an orchestra. The

houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but of the waves, no moving thing. I have

never been in any place that seemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and its antiquity

and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and

perhaps had been deserted overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a deserted town as like a scene upon the

stage by daylight, and with no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led me at last to the only house still

occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre. The place was "The

Pacific Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm season, crowds come to enjoy a

life of teetotalism, religion, and flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable. The

neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pacific booms in front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the

lighthouse in a wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano, making models and

bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise in amateur oilpainting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits

and interests to surprise his brave, oldcountry rivals. To the east, and still nearer, you will come upon a

space of open down, a hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea gulls. Such scenes

are very similar in different climates; they appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots

in Scotland. And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into

the hamlet, you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are unfamiliar to the memory. The

jossstick burns, the opium pipe is smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper prayers, you

would say, that had somehow missed their destination and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to

left across the sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey,

when the air does not smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous treetops of the

other. For days together a hot, dry air will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and

aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to seek, for the woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from

the hills. These fires are one of the great dangers of California. I have seen from Monterey as many as three at

the same time, by day a cloud of smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. A little thing will

start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The

inhabitants must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant groves that are destroyed; the

climate and the soil are equally at stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up

perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of experience. The fire passes through

the underbrush at a run. Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root to summit, scattering

tufts of flame, and is quenched, it seems, as quickly. But this last is only in semblance. For after this first

squiblike conflagration of the dry moss and twigs, there remains behind a deeprooted and consuming fire

in the very entrails of the tree. The resin of the pitchpine is principally condensed at the base of the bole and

in the spreading roots. Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as the match to the

explosion, have already scampered down the wind into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this

giant of the woods. You may approach the tree from one side, and see it scorched indeed from top to bottom,

but apparently survivor of the peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the column, is a clear

mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer; while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are

being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the fissures to the surface. A little while, and, without

a nod of warning, the huge pinetree snaps off short across the ground and falls prostrate with a crash.

Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long afterwards, if

you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these

subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree instead of the print of an old one. These

pitchpines of Monterey are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most fantastic of forest

trees. No words can give an idea of the contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a

circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at which trees grow, and at which forest fires

spring up and gallop through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when there will not be

one of them left standing in that land of their nativity. At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but

perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death; while it is man in his shortsighted greed

that robs the country of the nobler redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver

man might have retained a thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain whether it was the moss, that

quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the

tree. I suppose I must have been under the influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my

experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pinetree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so

much as scorching, strike a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The tree went off

simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those

who were at work combating the original conflagration. I could see the waggon that had brought them tied to

a live oak in a piece of open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood

into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch

of snuff; after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up to convenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil; But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I went out of town, and there was my own

particular fire, quite distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power upon the climate. At sunset, for months

together, vast, wet, melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the hilltop above

Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow

still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves

among the sandhills; they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration;

to the south, where they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back

and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches, colour dies out of the world. The air grows

chill and deadly as they advance. The tradewind freshens, the trees begin to sigh, and all the windmills in

Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It takes but

a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea, in its lighter order, has submerged the earth. Monterey is

curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds, so to remain till day returns; and before the

sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the sea. And yet often when

the fog is thickest and most chill, a few steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and warm

The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic missionaries, a place of wise beneficence

to Indians, a place of arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another, an American

capital when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and lower from

the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and from that again, by the loss of its charter and town

lands, to a mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with which the soil has changedhands. The

Mexicans, you may say, are all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it and they hold

themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets, economically paved with seasand, and two

or three lanes, which were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent up by fissures four or

five feet deep. There were no street lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the dangers of

the night, for they were often high above the level of the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be

likely to begin or end. The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick, many of them old for

so new a country, some of very elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls so thick

that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart. At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and

a graveyard smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the chest are common and fatal

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people sat almost all day long playing cards. The

smallest excursion was made on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or

two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. It struck me oddly to come across

some of the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all the characters astride on

English saddles. As a matter of fact, an English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say, a

thing unknown in all the rest of California. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only

Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding men always at the handgallop up hill and down dale, and round

the sharpest corner, urging their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them

dead with a touch, or wheeling them rightaboutface in a square yard. The type of face and character of

bearing are surprisingly unAmerican. The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish, to something,

in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race

in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely

mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly courteous, and doing all things with grace and

decorum. In dress they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the most Americanised could always resist

the temptation to stick a red rose into his hatband. Not even the most Americanised would descend to wear

the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language of the streets. It was difficult to get along without

a word or two of that language for an occasion. The only communications in which the population joined

were with a view to amusement. A weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to the

numerous fandangoes in private houses. There was a really fair amateur brass band. Night after night

serenaders would be going about the street, sometimes in a company and with several instruments and voice

together, sometimes severally, each guitar before a different window. It was a strange thing to lie awake in

nineteenthcentury America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one of these old, heartbreaking Spanish

lovesongs mount into the night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high pitched, pathetic,

womanish alto which is so common among Mexican men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as

The town, then, was essentially and wholly Mexican; and yet almost all the land in the neighbourhood was

held by Americans, and it was from the same class, numerically so small, that the principal officials were

selected. This Mexican and that Mexican would describe to you his old family estates, not one rood of which

remained to him. You would ask him how that came about, and elicit some tangled story backforemost,

from which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men, and the Mexicans greedy

like children, but no other certain fact. Their merits and their faults contributed alike to the ruin of the former

landholders. It is true they were improvident, and easily dazzled with the sight of ready money; but they were

gentlefolk besides, and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee craft. Suppose they

have a paper to sign, they would think it a reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great

minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it is ten to one they would refuse from

delicacy to object to it. I know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case occur, and the

Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken in

the matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that he had seen a lawyer, would have "been

like doubting his word." The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought up to

understand all business as a competition in fraud, and honesty itself to be a virtue which regards the carrying

out but not the creation of agreements. This single unworldly trait will account for much of that revolution of

which we are speaking. The Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers, but certainly the accusation

cuts both ways. In a contest of this sort, the entire booty would scarcely have passed into the hands of the

Physically the Americans have triumphed; but it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves been

morally conquered. This is, of course, but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of

being solved in the various States of the American Union. I am reminded of an anecdote. Some years ago, at

a great sale of wine, all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh.

The agent had the curiosity to visit him some time after and inquire what possible use he could have for such

material. He was shown, by way of answer, a huge vat where all the liquors, from humble Gladstone to

imperial Tokay, were fermenting together. "And what," he asked, "do you propose to call this?" "I'm no very

sure," replied the grocer, "but I think it's going to turn out port." In the older Eastern States, I think we may

say that this hotchpotch of races in going to turn out English, or thereabout. But the problem is indefinitely

varied in other zones. The elements are differently mingled in the south, in what we may call the Territorial

belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast. Above all, in these last, we may look to see some

monstrous hybrid Whether good or evil, who shall forecast? but certainly original and all their own. In my

little restaurant at Monterey, we have sat down to table day after day, a Frenchman, two Portuguese, an

Italian, a Mexican, and a Scotchman: we had for common visitors an American from Illinois, a nearly pure

blood Indian woman, and a naturalised Chinese; and from time to time a Switzer and a German came down

from country ranches for the night. No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land to visitors from the

Eastern States, for each race contributes something of its own. Even the despised Chinese have taught the

youth of California, none indeed of their virtues, but the debasing use of opium. And chief among these

The Mexicans although in the State are out of it. They still preserve a sort of international independence, and

keep their affairs snug to themselves. Only four or five years ago Vasquez, the bandit, his troops being

dispersed and the hunt too hot for him in other parts of California, returned to his native Monterey, and was

seen publicly in her streets and saloons, fearing no man. The year that I was there, there occurred two reputed

murders. As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of every one behind his back,

it is not possible for me to judge how much truth there may have been in these reports; but in the one case

every one believed, and in the other some suspected, that there had been foul play; and nobody dreamed for

an instant of taking the authorities into their counsel. Now this is, of course, characteristic enough of the

Mexicans; but it is a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in this

inaction. Even when I spoke to them upon the subject, they seemed not to understand my surprise; they had

forgotten the traditions of their own race and upbringing, and become, in a word, wholly Mexicanised.

Again, the Mexicans, having no ready money to speak of, rely almost entirely in their business transactions

upon each other's worthless paper. Pedro the penniless pays you with an I O U from the equally penniless

Miguel. It is a sort of local currency by courtesy. Credit in these parts has passed into a superstition. I have

seen a strong, violent man struggling for months to recover a debt, and getting nothing but an exchange of

waste paper. The very storekeepers are averse to asking for cash payments, and are more surprised than

pleased when they are offered. They fear there must be something under it, and that you mean to withdraw

your custom from them. I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me with fervour to let my

account run on, although I had my purse open in my hand; and partly from the commonness of the case,

partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition which made all men welcome to their

tables, a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable to pay, and still find credit for the necessaries

of life in the stores of Monterey. Now this villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown into Californian

nature. I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers of Monterey are as lax as Mexicans; I

mean that American farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the

meanwhile, without a thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be

gained from this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their

bondslave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the

Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in the same chains with which they

themselves had formerly bound the Mexican. It seems as if certain sorts of follies, like certain sorts of grain,

were natural to the soil rather than to the race that holds and tills it for the moment.

In the meantime, however, the Americans rule in Monterey County. The new county seat, Salinas City, in the

bald, cornbearing plain under the Gabelano Peak, is a town of a purely American character. The land is

held, for the most part, in those enormous tracts which are another legacy of Mexican days, and form the

present chief danger and disgrace of California; and the holders are mostly of American or British birth. We

have here in England no idea of the troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of these large

landholders landthieves, landsharks, or landgrabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called. Thus

the townlands of Monterey are all in the hands of a single man. How they came there is an obscure, vexatious

question, and, rightly or wrongly, the man is hated with a great hatred. His life has been repeatedly in danger.

Not very long ago, I was told, the stage was stopped and examined three evenings in succession by disguised

horsemen thirsting for his blood. A certain house on the Salinas road, they say, he always passes in his buggy

at full speed, for the squatter sent him warning long ago. But a year since he was publicly pointed out for

death by no less a man than Mr. Dennis Kearney. Kearney is a man too well known in California, but a word

of explanation is required for English readers. Originally an Irish drayman, he rose, by his command of bad

language, to almost dictatorial authority in the State; throned it there for six months or so, his mouth full of

oaths, gallowses, and conflagrations; was first snuffed out last winter by Mr. Coleman, backed by his San

Francisco Vigilantes and three gatling guns; completed his own ruin by throwing in his lot with the grotesque

Greenbacker party; and had at last to be rescued by his old enemies, the police, out of the hands of his

rebellious followers. It was while he was at the top of his fortune that Kearney visited Monterey with his

battle cry against Chinese labour, the railroad monopolists, and the land thieves; and his one articulate

counsel to the Montereyans was to "hang David Jacks." Had the town been American, in my private opinion,

this would have been done years ago. Land is a subject on which there is no jesting in the West, and I have

seen my friend the lawyer drive out of Monterey to adjust a competition of titles with the face of a captain

On the ranche of another of these landholders you may find our old friend, the truck system, in full operation.

Men live there, year in year out, to cut timber for a nominal wage, which is all consumed in supplies. The

longer they remain in this desirable service the deeper they will fall in debt a burlesque injustice in a new

country, where labour should be precious, and one of those typical instances which explains the prevailing

In a comparison between what was and what is in California, the praisers of times past will fix upon the

Indians of Carmel. The valley drained by the river so named is a true Californian valley, bare, dotted with

chaparal, overlooked by quaint, unfinished hills. The Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a clear and

shallow river, loved by wading kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific,

passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the mission church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the

ear is filled with a continuous sound of distant breakers on the shore. But the day of the Jesuit has gone by,

the day of the Yankee has succeeded, and there is no one left to care for the converted savage. The church is

roofless and ruinous, seabreezes and seafogs, and the alternation of the rain and sunshine, daily widening

the breaches and casting the crockets from the wall. As an antiquity in this new land, a quaint specimen of

missionary architecture, and a memorial of good deeds, it had a triple claim to preservation from all thinking

people; but neglect and abuse have been its portion. There is no sign of American interference, save where a

headboard has been torn from a grave to be a mark for pistol bullets. So it is with the Indians for whom it was

erected. Their lands, I was told, are being yearly encroached upon by the neighbouring American proprietor,

and with that exception no man troubles his head for the Indians of Carmel. Only one day in the year, the day

before our Guy Fawkes, the PADRE drives over the hill from Monterey; the little sacristy, which is the only

covered portion of the church, is filled with seats and decorated for the service; the Indians troop together,

their bright dresses contrasting with their dark and melancholy faces; and there, among a crowd of somewhat

unsympathetic holidaymakers, you may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in

any other temple under heaven. An Indian, stoneblind and about eighty years of age, conducts the singing;

other Indians compose the choir; yet they have the Gregorian music at their finger ends, and pronounce the

Latin so correctly that I could follow the meaning as they sang. The pronunciation was odd and nasal, the

singing hurried and staccato. "In saecula saeculohohorum," they went, with a vigorous aspirate to every

additional syllable. I have never seen faces more vividly lit up with joy than the faces of these Indian singers.

It was to them not only the worship of God, nor an act by which they recalled and commemorated better

days, but was besides an exercise of culture, where all they knew of art and letters was united and expressed.

And it made a man's heart sorry for the good fathers of yore who had taught them to dig and to reap, to read

and to sing, who had given them European massbooks which they still preserve and study in their cottages,

and who had now passed away from all authority and influence in that land to be succeeded by greedy

landthieves and sacrilegious pistolshots. So ugly a thing may our AngloSaxon Protestantism appear

But revolution in this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulopast tense. The

Monterey of last year exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of

diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks;

and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waitingrooms at railway stations, as a resort

for wealth and fashion. Alas for the little town! it is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting

caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race,

THE charm of Fontainebleau is a thing apart. It is a place that people love even more than they admire. The

vigorous forest air, the silence, the majestic avenues of highway, the wilderness of tumbled boulders, the

great age and dignity of certain groves these are but ingredients, they are not the secret of the philtre. The

place is sanative; the air, the light, the perfumes, and the shapes of things concord in happy harmony. The

artist may be idle and not fear the "blues." He may dally with his life. Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious

classical contentment are of the very essence of the better kind of art; and these, in that most smiling forest,

he has the chance to learn or to remember. Even on the plain of Biere, where the Angelus of Millet still tolls

upon the ear of fancy, a larger air, a higher heaven, something ancient and healthy in the face of nature,

purify the mind alike from dulness and hysteria. There is no place where the young are more gladly conscious

The fact of its great and special beauty further recommends this country to the artist. The field was chosen by

men in whose blood there still raced some of the gleeful or solemn exultation of great art Millet who loved

dignity like Michelangelo, Rousseau whose modern brush was dipped in the glamour of the ancients. It was

chosen before the day of that strange turn in the history of art, of which we now perceive the culmination in

impressionistic tales and pictures that voluntary aversion of the eye from all speciously strong and beautiful

effects that disinterested love of dulness which has set so many Peter Bells to paint the river side

primrose. It was then chosen for its proximity to Paris. And for the same cause, and by the force of tradition,

the painter of today continues to inhabit and to paint it. There is in France scenery incomparable for

romance and harmony. Provence, and the valley of the Rhone from Vienne to Tarascon, are one succession of

masterpieces waiting for the brush. The beauty is not merely beauty; it tells, besides, a tale to the imagination,

and surprises while it charms. Here you shall see castellated towns that would befit the scenery of dreamland;

streets that glow with colour like cathedral windows; hills of the most exquisite proportions; flowers of every

precious colour, growing thick like grass. All these, by the grace of railway travel, are brought to the very

door of the modern painter; yet he does not seek them; he remains faithful to Fontainebleau, to the eternal

bridge of Gretz, to the wateringpot cascade in Cernay valley. Even Fontainebleau was chosen for him; even

in Fontainebleau he shrinks from what is sharply charactered. But one thing, at least, is certain, whatever he

may choose to paint and in whatever manner, it is good for the artist to dwell among graceful shapes.

Fontainebleau, if it be but quiet scenery, is classically graceful; and though the student may look for different

But, before all its other advantages charm, loveliness, or proximity to Paris comes the great fact that it is

already colonised. The institution of a painters' colony is a work of time and tact. The population must be

conquered. The innkeeper has to be taught, and he soon learns, the lesson of unlimited credit; he must be

taught to welcome as a favoured guest a young gentleman in a very greasy coat, and with little baggage

beyond a box of colours and a canvas; and he must learn to preserve his faith in customers who will eat

heartily and drink of the best, borrow money to buy tobacco, and perhaps not pay a stiver for a year. A colour

merchant has next to be attracted. A certain vogue must be given to the place, lest the painter, most

gregarious of animals, should find himself alone. And no sooner are these first difficulties overcome, than

fresh perils spring up upon the other side; and the bourgeois and the tourist are knocking at the gate. This is

the crucial moment for the colony. If these intruders gain a footing, they not only banish freedom and

amenity; pretty soon, by means of their long purses, they will have undone the education of the innkeeper;

prices will rise and credit shorten; and the poor painter must fare farther on and find another hamlet. "Not

here, O Apollo!" will become his song. Thus Trouville and, the other day, St. Raphael were lost to the arts.

Curious and not always edifying are the shifts that the French student uses to defend his lair; like the

cuttlefish, he must sometimes blacken the waters of his chosen pool; but at such a time and for so practical a

purpose Mrs. Grundy must allow him licence. Where his own purse and credit are not threatened, he will do

the honours of his village generously. Any artist is made welcome, through whatever medium he may seek

expression; science is respected; even the idler, if he prove, as he so rarely does, a gentleman, will soon begin

to find himself at home. And when that essentially modern creature, the English or American girlstudent,

began to walk calmly into his favourite inns as if into a drawingroom at home, the French painter owned

himself defenceless; he submitted or he fled. His French respectability, quite as precise as ours, though

covering different provinces of life, recoiled aghast before the innovation. But the girls were painters; there

was nothing to be done; and Barbizon, when I last saw it and for the time at least, was practically ceded to the

fair invader. Paterfamilias, on the other hand, the common tourist, the holiday shopman, and the cheap young

gentleman upon the spree, he hounded from his villages with every circumstance of contumely.

This purely artistic society is excellent for the young artist. The lads are mostly fools; they hold the latest

orthodoxy in its crudeness; they are at that stage of education, for the most part, when a man is too much

occupied with style to be aware of the necessity for any matter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is

excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else, is, for

awhile at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell

dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to

him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of

all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel

reading of historical events, mark the vocation of the writer and the painter. The arabesque, properly

speaking, and even in literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he first plays with his material as a child plays

with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a second stage when he begins to use his pretty counters for the end

of representation. In that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the

few who will really grow beyond it, and go forward, fully equipped, to do the business of real art to give

life to abstractions and significance and charm to facts. In the meanwhile, let him dwell much among his

fellowcraftsmen. They alone can take a serious interest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes of these

years. They alone can behold with equanimity this fingering of the dumb keyboard, this polishing of empty

sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They

will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may

even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style falsified for life.

And this brings me to a warning. The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing; it is

strewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure, patiently supported; the heaviest scholar is

conscious of a certain progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows

letterperfect in the domain of AB, ab. But the time comes when a man should cease prelusory gymnastic,

stand up, put a violence upon his will, and, for better or worse, begin the business of creation. This evil day

there is a tendency continually to postpone: above all with painters. They have made so many studies that it

has become a habit; they make more, the walls of exhibitions blush with them; and death finds these aged

students still busy with their hornbook. This class of man finds a congenial home in artist villages; in the

slang of the English colony at Barbizon we used to call them "Snoozers." Continual returns to the city, the

society of men farther advanced, the study of great works, a sense of humour or, if such a thing is to be had, a

little religion or philosophy, are the means of treatment. It will be time enough to think of curing the malady

after it has been caught; for to catch it is the very thing for which you seek that dreamland of the painters'

village. "Snoozing" is a part of the artistic education; and the rudiments must be learned stupidly, all else

Lastly, there is something, or there seems to be something, in the very air of France that communicates the

love of style. Precision, clarity, the cleanly and crafty employment of material, a grace in the handling, apart

from any value in the thought, seem to be acquired by the mere residence; or if not acquired, become at least

the more appreciated. The air of Paris is alive with this technical inspiration. And to leave that airy city and

awake next day upon the borders of the forest is but to change externals. The same spirit of dexterity and

finish breathes from the long alleys and the lofty groves, from the wildernesses that are still pretty in their

confusion, and the great plain that contrives to be decorative in its emptiness.

In spite of its really considerable extent, the forest of Fontainebleau is hardly anywhere tedious. I know the

whole western side of it with what, I suppose, I may call thoroughness; well enough at least to testify that

there is no square mile without some special character and charm. Such quarters, for instance, as the Long

Rocher, the BasBreau, and the Reine Blanche, might be a hundred miles apart; they have scarce a point in

common beyond the silence of the birds. The two last are really conterminous; and in both are tall and ancient

trees that have outlived a thousand political vicissitudes. But in the one the great oaks prosper placidly upon

an even floor; they beshadow a great field; and the air and the light are very free below their stretching

boughs. In the other the trees find difficult footing; castles of white rock lie tumbled one upon another, the

foot slips, the crooked viper slumbers, the moss clings in the crevice; and above it all the great beech goes

spiring and casting forth her arms, and, with a grace beyond church architecture, canopies this rugged chaos.

Meanwhile, dividing the two cantons, the broad white causeway of the Paris road runs in an avenue: a road

conceived for pageantry and for triumphal marches, an avenue for an army; but, its days of glory over, it now

lies grilling in the sun between cool groves, and only at intervals the vehicle of the cruising tourist is seen far

away and faintly audible along its ample sweep. A little upon one side, and you find a district of sand and

birch and boulder; a little upon the other lies the valley of Apremont, all juniper and heather; and close

beyond that you may walk into a zone of pine trees. So artfully are the ingredients mingled. Nor must it be

forgotten that, in all this part, you come continually forth upon a hilltop, and behold the plain, northward

and westward, like an unrefulgent sea; nor that all day long the shadows keep changing; and at last, to the red

fires of sunset, night succeeds, and with the night a new forest, full of whisper, gloom, and fragrance. There

are few things more renovating than to leave Paris, the lamplit arches of the Carrousel, and the long

alignment of the glittering streets, and to bathe the senses in this fragrant darkness of the wood.

In this continual variety the mind is kept vividly alive. It is a changeful place to paint, a stirring place to live

in. As fast as your foot carries you, you pass from scene to scene, each vigorously painted in the colours of

the sun, each endeared by that hereditary spell of forests on the mind of man who still remembers and salutes

And yet the forest has been civilised throughout. The most savage corners bear a name, and have been

cherished like antiquities; in the most remote, Nature has prepared and balanced her effects as if with

conscious art; and man, with his guiding arrows of blue paint, has countersigned the picture. After your

farthest wandering, you are never surprised to come forth upon the vast avenue of highway, to strike the

centre point of branching alleys, or to find the aqueduct trailing, thousandfooted, through the brush. It is not

a wilderness; it is rather a preserve. And, fitly enough, the centre of the maze is not a hermit's cavern. In the

midst, a little mirthful town lies sunlit, humming with the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug who called himself the hermit. In a

great tree, close by the highroad, he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family

Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope ladder; and if dirt be any proof of

sincerity, the man was savage as a Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly stupid,

not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small change; for that he had a great avidity. In the

course of time he proved to be a chicken stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from the first he

was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious, theatricallyminded beggar, and his cabin in the tree

was only stockintrade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to indicate so much; for if in

the forest there are no places still to be discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie

unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree, now

posted in the corner of a rock. But your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks, if

there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I may suppose the reader to have

committed some great crime and come to me for aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted

with a hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A confederate landscapepainter might

daily supply him with food; for water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond;

and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get gently on the train at some side station,

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasureground, and although, in favourable weather, and in

the more celebrated quarters, it literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and offers

some of the repose of natural forests. And the solitary, although he must return at night to his frequented inn,

may yet pass the day with his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands of the

imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by windows; others, like the ostrich, are

content with a solitude that meets the eye; and others, again, expand in fancy to the very borders of their

desert, and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an adjacent county. To these last, of course,

Fontainebleau will seem but an extended teagarden: a Rosherville on a byday. But to the plain man it

I was for some time a consistent Barbizonian; ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI, it was a pleasant season; and

that noiseless hamlet lying close among the borders of the wood is for me, as for so many others, a green spot

in memory. The great Millet was just dead, the green shutters of his modest house were closed; his daughters

were in mourning. The date of my first visit was thus an epoch in the history of art: in a lesser way, it was an

epoch in the history of the Latin Quarter. The PETIT CENACLE was dead and buried; Murger and his crew

of sponging vagabonds were all at rest from their expedients; the tradition of their real life was nearly lost;

and the petrified legend of the VIE DE BOHEME had become a sort of gospel, and still gave the cue to

zealous imitators. But if the book be written in rosewater, the imitation was still farther expurgated; honesty

was the rule; the innkeepers gave, as I have said, almost unlimited credit; they suffered the seediest painter to

depart, to take all his belongings, and to leave his bill unpaid; and if they sometimes lost, it was by English

and Americans alone. At the same time, the great influx of Anglo Saxons had begun to affect the life of the

studious. There had been disputes; and, in one instance at least, the English and the Americans had made

common cause to prevent a cruel pleasantry. It would be well if nations and races could communicate their

qualities; but in practice when they look upon each other, they have an eye to nothing but defects. The

AngloSaxon is essentially dishonest; the French is devoid by nature of the principle that we call "Fair Play."

The Frenchman marvelled at the scruples of his guest, and, when that defender of innocence retired overseas

and left his bills unpaid, he marvelled once again; the good and evil were, in his eyes, part and parcel of the

At Barbizon there was no master, no pontiff in the arts. Palizzi bore rule at Gretz urbane, superior rule his

memory rich in anecdotes of the great men of yore, his mind fertile in theories; sceptical, composed, and

venerable to the eye; and yet beneath these outworks, all twittering with Italian superstition, his eye scouting

for omens, and the whole fabric of his manners giving way on the appearance of a hunchback. Cernay had

Pelouse, the admirable, placid Pelouse, smilingly critical of youth, who, when a fullblown commercial

traveller, suddenly threw down his samples, bought a colourbox, and became the master whom we have all

admired. Marlotte, for a central figure, boasted Olivier de Penne. Only Barbizon, since the death of Millet,

was a headless commonwealth. Even its secondary lights, and those who in my day made the stranger

welcome, have since deserted it. The good Lachevre has departed, carrying his household gods; and long

before that Gaston Lafenestre was taken from our midst by an untimely death. He died before he had

deserved success; it may be, he would never have deserved it; but his kind, comely, modest countenance still

haunts the memory of all who knew him. Another whom I will not name has moved farther on, pursuing

the strange Odyssey of his decadence. His days of royal favour had departed even then; but he still retained,

in his narrower life at Barbizon, a certain stamp of conscious importance, hearty, friendly, filling the room,

the occupant of several chairs; nor had he yet ceased his losing battle, still labouring upon great canvases that

none would buy, still waiting the return of fortune. But these days also were too good to last; and the former

favourite of two sovereigns fled, if I heard the truth, by night. There was a time when he was counted a great

man, and Millet but a dauber; behold, how the whirligig of time brings in his revenges! To pity Millet is a

piece of arrogance; if life be hard for such resolute and pious spirits, it is harder still for us, had we the wit to

understand it; but we may pity his unhappier rival, who, for no apparent merit, was raised to opulence and

momentary fame, and, through no apparent fault was suffered step by step to sink again to nothing. No

misfortune can exceed the bitterness of such backforemost progress, even bravely supported as it was; but to

those also who were taken early from the easel, a regret is due. From all the young men of this period, one

stood out by the vigour of his promise; he was in the age of fermentation, enamoured of eccentricities. "Il faut

faire de la peinture nouvelle," was his watchword; but if time and experience had continued his education, if

he had been granted health to return from these excursions to the steady and the central, I must believe that

Siron's inn, that excellent artists' barrack, was managed upon easy principles. At any hour of the night, when

you returned from wandering in the forest, you went to the billiardroom and helped yourself to liquors, or

descended to the cellar and returned laden with beer or wine. The Sirons were all locked in slumber; there

was none to check your inroads; only at the week's end a computation was made, the gross sum was divided,

and a varying share set down to every lodger's name under the rubric: ESTRATS. Upon the more

longsuffering the larger tax was levied; and your bill lengthened in a direct proportion to the easiness of

your disposition. At any hour of the morning, again, you could get your coffee or cold milk, and set forth into

the forest. The doves had perhaps wakened you, fluttering into your chamber; and on the threshold of the inn

you were met by the aroma of the forest. Close by were the great aisles, the mossy boulders, the interminable

field of forest shadow. There you were free to dream and wander. And at noon, and again at six o'clock, a

good meal awaited you on Siron's table. The whole of your accommodation, set aside that varying item of the

ESTRALS, cost you five francs a day; your bill was never offered you until you asked it; and if you were out

Theoretically, the house was open to all corners; practically, it was a kind of club. The guests protected

themselves, and, in so doing, they protected Siron. Formal manners being laid aside, essential courtesy was

the more rigidly exacted; the new arrival had to feel the pulse of the society; and a breach of its undefined

observances was promptly punished. A man might be as plain, as dull, as slovenly, as free of speech as he

desired; but to a touch of presumption or a word of hectoring these free Barbizonians were as sensitive as a

teaparty of maiden ladies. I have seen people driven forth from Barbizon; it would be difficult to say in

words what they had done, but they deserved their fate. They had shown themselves unworthy to enjoy these

corporate freedoms; they had pushed themselves; they had "made their head"; they wanted tact to appreciate

the "fine shades" of Barbizonian etiquette. And once they were condemned, the process of extrusion was

ruthless in its cruelty; after one evening with the formidable Bodmer, the Baily of our commonwealth, the

erring stranger was beheld no more; he rose exceeding early the next day, and the first coach conveyed him

from the scene of his discomfiture. These sentences of banishment were never, in my knowledge, delivered

against an artist; such would, I believe, have been illegal; but the odd and pleasant fact is this, that they were

never needed. Painters, sculptors, writers, singers, I have seen all of these in Barbizon; and some were sulky,

and some blatant and inane; but one and all entered at once into the spirit of the association. This singular

society is purely French, a creature of French virtues, and possibly of French defects. It cannot be imitated by

the English. The roughness, the impatience, the more obvious selfishness, and even the more ardent

friendships of the AngloSaxon, speedily dismember such a commonwealth. But this random gathering of

young French painters, with neither apparatus nor parade of government, yet kept the life of the place upon a

certain footing, insensibly imposed their etiquette upon the docile, and by caustic speech enforced their edicts

against the unwelcome. To think of it is to wonder the more at the strange failure of their race upon the larger

theatre. This inbred civility to use the word in its completest meaning this natural and facile adjustment of

contending liberties, seems all that is required to make a governable nation and a just and prosperous country.

Our society, thus purged and guarded, was full of high spirits, of laughter, and of the initiative of youth. The

few elder men who joined us were still young at heart, and took the key from their companions. We returned

from long stations in the fortifying air, our blood renewed by the sunshine, our spirits refreshed by the silence

of the forest; the Babel of loud voices sounded good; we fell to eat and play like the natural man; and in the

high inn chamber, panelled with indifferent pictures and lit by candles guttering in the night air, the talk and

laughter sounded far into the night. It was a good place and a good life for any naturally minded youth;

better yet for the student of painting, and perhaps best of all for the student of letters. He, too, was saturated

in this atmosphere of style; he was shut out from the disturbing currents of the world, he might forget that

there existed other and more pressing interests than that of art. But, in such a place, it was hardly possible to

write; he could not drug his conscience, like the painter, by the production of listless studies; he saw himself

idle among many who were apparently, and some who were really, employed; and what with the impulse of

increasing health and the continual provocation of romantic scenes, he became tormented with the desire to

work. He enjoyed a strenuous idleness full of visions, hearty meals, long, sweltering walks, mirth among

companions; and still floating like music through his brain, foresights of great works that Shakespeare might

be proud to have conceived, headless epics, glorious torsos of dramas, and words that were alive with import.

So in youth, like Moses from the mountain, we have sights of that House Beautiful of art which we shall

never enter. They are dreams and unsubstantial; visions of style that repose upon no base of human meaning;

the last heart throbs of that excited amateur who has to die in all of us before the artist can be born. But they

come to us in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in

comparison. We were all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and

walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever

nature, is a kind mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed,

graver and more substantial; the symptoms change, the amiable malady endures; and still, at an equal

Gretz lies out of the forest, down by the bright river. It boasts a mill, an ancient church, a castle, and a bridge

of many sterlings. And the bridge is a piece of public property; anonymously famous; beaming on the

incurious dilettante from the walls of a hundred exhibitions. I have seen it in the Salon; I have seen it in the

Academy; I have seen it in the last French Exposition, excellently done by Bloomer; in a blackandwhite by

Mr. A. Henley, it once adorned this essay in the pages of the MAGAZINE OF ART. Longsuffering bridge!

And if you visit Gretz tomorrow, you shall find another generation, camped at the bottom of Chevillon's

The bridge taken for granted, Gretz is a less inspiring place than Barbizon. I give it the palm over Cernay.

There is something ghastly in the great empty village square of Cernay, with the inn tables standing in one

corner, as though the stage were set for rustic opera, and in the early morning all the painters breaking their

fast upon white wine under the windows of the villagers. It is vastly different to awake in Gretz, to go down

the green inn garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the

poplared level. The meals are laid in the cool arbour, under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers,

the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.

There is "something to do" at Gretz. Perhaps, for that very reason, I can recall no such enduring ardours, no

such glories of exhilaration, as among the solemn groves and uneventful hours of Barbizon. This "something

to do" is a great enemy to joy; it is a way out of it; you wreak your high spirits on some cutanddry

employment, and behold them gone! But Gretz is a merry place after its kind: pretty to see, merry to inhabit.

The course of its pellucid river, whether up or down, is full of gentle attractions for the navigator: islanded

reedmazes where, in autumn, the red berries cluster; the mirrored and inverted images of trees, lilies, and

mills, and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy

But even Gretz is changed. The old inn, long shored and trussed and buttressed, fell at length under the mere

weight of years, and the place as it was is but a fading image in the memory of former guests. They, indeed,

recall the ancient wooden stair; they recall the rainy evening, the wide hearth, the blaze of the twig fire, and

the company that gathered round the pillar in the kitchen. But the material fabric is now dust; soon, with the

last of its inhabitants, its very memory shall follow; and they, in their turn, shall suffer the same law, and,

both in name and lineament, vanish from the world of men. "For remembrance of the old house' sake," as

Pepys once quaintly put it, let me tell one story. When the tide of invasion swept over France, two foreign

painters were left stranded and penniless in Gretz; and there, until the war was over, the Chevillons

ungrudgingly harboured them. It was difficult to obtain supplies; but the two waifs were still welcome to the

best, sat down daily with the family to table, and at the due intervals were supplied with clean napkins, which

they scrupled to employ. Madame Chevillon observed the fact and reprimanded them. But they stood firm;

Nemours and Moret, for all they are so picturesque, have been little visited by painters. They are, indeed, too

populous; they have manners of their own, and might resist the drastic process of colonisation. Montigny has

been somewhat strangely neglected, I never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed himself

there with a barrel of PIQUETTE, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the

green country and to the music of the falling water. It was a most airy, quaint, and pleasant place of

residence, just too rustic to be stagey; and from my memories of the place in general, and that garden trellis in

particular at morning, visited by birds, or at night, when the dew fell and the stars were of the party I am

inclined to think perhaps too favourably of the future of Montigny. ChaillyenBiere has outlived all things,

and lies dustily slumbering in the plain the cemetery of itself. The great road remains to testify of its former

bustle of postilions and carriage bells; and, like memorial tablets, there still hang in the inn room the

paintings of a former generation, dead or decorated long ago. In my time, one man only, greatly daring, dwelt

there. From time to time he would walk over to Barbizon like a shade revisiting the glimpses of the moon,

and after some communication with flesh and blood return to his austere hermitage. But even he, when I last

revisited the forest, had come to Barbizon for good, and closed the roll of Chaillyites. It may revive but I

much doubt it. Acheres and Recloses still wait a pioneer; Bourron is out of the question, being merely Gretz

over again, without the river, the bridge, or the beauty; and of all the possible places on the western side,

Marlotte alone remains to be discussed. I scarcely know Marlotte, and, very likely for that reason, am not

much in love with it. It seems a glaring and unsightly hamlet. The inn of Mother Antonie is unattractive; and

its more reputable rival, though comfortable enough, is commonplace. Marlotte has a name; it is famous; if I

These are the words of an old stager; and though time is a good conservative in forest places, much may be

untrue today. Many of us have passed Arcadian days there and moved on, but yet left a portion of our souls

behind us buried in the woods. I would not dig for these reliquiae; they are incommunicable treasures that

will not enrich the finder; and yet there may lie, interred below great oaks or scattered along forest paths,

stores of youth's dynamite and dear remembrances. And as one generation passes on and renovates the field

of tillage for the next, I entertain a fancy that when the young men of today go forth into the forest they

shall find the air still vitalised by the spirits of their predecessors, and, like those "unheard melodies" that are

the sweetest of all, the memory of our laughter shall still haunt the field of trees. Those merry voices that in

woods call the wanderer farther, those thrilling silences and whispers of the groves, surely in Fontainebleau

they must be vocal of me and my companions? We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of

One generation after another fall like honeybees upon this memorable forest, rifle its sweets, pack

themselves with vital memories, and when the theft is consummated depart again into life richer, but poorer

also. The forest, indeed, they have possessed, from that day forward it is theirs indissolubly, and they will

return to walk in it at night in the fondest of their dreams, and use it for ever in their books and pictures. Yet

when they made their packets, and put up their notes and sketches, something, it should seem, had been

forgotten. A projection of themselves shall appear to haunt unfriended these scenes of happiness, a natural

child of fancy, begotten and forgotten unawares. Over the whole field of our wanderings such fetches are still

travelling like indefatigable bagmen; but the imps of Fontainebleau, as of all beloved spots, are very long of

life, and memory is piously unwilling to forget their orphanage. If anywhere about that wood you meet my

airy bantling, greet him with tenderness. He was a pleasant lad, though now abandoned. And when it comes

to your own turn to quit the forest, may you leave behind you such another; no Antony or Werther, let us

hope, no tearful whipster, but, as becomes this not uncheerful and most active age in which we figure, the

No art, it may be said, was ever perfect, and not many noble, that has not been mirthfully conceived.

And no man, it may be added, was ever anything but a wet blanket and a cross to his companions who

boasted not a copious spirit of enjoyment. Whether as man or artist let the youth make haste to Fontainebleau,

and once there let him address himself to the spirit of the place; he will learn more from exercise than from

studies, although both are necessary; and if he can get into his heart the gaiety and inspiration of the woods he

will have gone far to undo the evil of his sketches. A spirit once well strung up to the concertpitch of the

primeval outofdoors will hardly dare to finish a study and magniloquently ticket it a picture. The

incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuningfork by which we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that

Nature teaches and condemns, and still spurs up to further effort and new failure. Thus it is that she sets us

blushing at our ignorant and tepid works; and the more we find of these inspiring shocks the less shall we be

apt to love the literal in our productions. In all sciences and senses the letter kills; and today, when cackling

human geese express their ignorant condemnation of all studio pictures, it is a lesson most useful to be learnt.

Let the young painter go to Fontainebleau, and while he stupefies himself with studies that teach him the

mechanical side of his trade, let him walk in the great air, and be a servant of mirth, and not pick and

botanise, but wait upon the moods of nature. So he will learn or learn not to forget the poetry of life and

earth, which, when he has acquired his track, will save him from joyless reproduction.

THE country where they journeyed, that green, breezy valley of the Loing, is one very attractive to cheerful

and solitary people. The weather was superb; all night it thundered and lightened, and the rain fell in sheets;

by day, the heavens were cloudless, the sun fervent, the air vigorous and pure. They walked separate: the

Cigarette plodding behind with some philosophy, the lean Arethusa posting on ahead. Thus each enjoyed his

own reflections by the way; each had perhaps time to tire of them before he met his comrade at the

designated inn; and the pleasures of society and solitude combined to fill the day. The Arethusa carried in his

knapsack the works of Charles of Orleans, and employed some of the hours of travel in the concoction of

English roundels. In this path, he must thus have preceded Mr. Lang, Mr. Dobson, Mr. Henley, and all

contemporary roundeleers; but for good reasons, he will be the last to publish the result. The Cigarette walked

burthened with a volume of Michelet. And both these books, it will be seen, played a part in the subsequent

The Arethusa was unwisely dressed. He is no precisian in attire; but by all accounts, he was never so

illinspired as on that tramp; having set forth indeed, upon a moment's notice, from the most unfashionable

spot in Europe, Barbizon. On his head he wore a smokingcap of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed

and tarnished. A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark hue, which the satirical called black; a light tweed coat

made by a good English tailor; readymade cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters completed his array. In

person, he is exceptionally lean; and his face is not, like those of happier mortals, a certificate. For years he

could not pass a frontier or visit a bank without suspicion; the police everywhere, but in his native city,

looked askance upon him; and (though I am sure it will not be credited) he is actually denied admittance to

the casino of Monte Carlo. If you will imagine him, dressed as above, stooping under his knapsack, walking

nearly five miles an hour with the folds of the readymade trousers fluttering about his spindle shanks, and

still looking eagerly round him as if in terror of pursuit the figure, when realised, is far from reassuring.

When Villon journeyed (perhaps by the same pleasant valley) to his exile at Roussillon, I wonder if he had

not something of the same appearance. Something of the same preoccupation he had beyond a doubt, for he

too must have tinkered verses as he walked, with more success than his successor. And if he had anything

like the same inspiring weather, the same nights of uproar, men in armour rolling and resounding down the

stairs of heaven, the rain hissing on the village streets, the wild bull'seye of the storm flashing all night long

into the bare inn chamber the same sweet return of day, the same unfathomable blue of noon, the same

highcoloured, halcyon eves and above all, if he had anything like as good a comrade, anything like as

keen a relish for what he saw, and what he ate, and the rivers that he bathed in, and the rubbish that he wrote,

But there was another point of similarity between the two journeys, for which the Arethusa was to pay dear:

both were gone upon in days of incomplete security. It was not long after the Franco Prussian war. Swiftly

as men forget, that countryside was still alive with tales of uhlans, and outlying sentries, and hairbreadth

'scapes from the ignominious cord, and pleasant momentary friendships between invader and invaded. A

year, at the most two years later, you might have tramped all that country over and not heard one anecdote.

And a year or two later, you would if you were a rather illlooking young man in nondescript array have

gone your rounds in greater safety; for along with more interesting matter, the Prussian spy would have

For all that, our voyager had got beyond Chateau Renard before he was conscious of arousing wonder. On the

road between that place and ChatillonsurLoing, however, he encountered a rural postman; they fell

together in talk, and spoke of a variety of subjects; but through one and all, the postman was still visibly

preoccupied, and his eyes were faithful to the Arethusa's knapsack. At last, with mysterious roguishness, he

inquired what it contained, and on being answered, shook his head with kindly incredulity. "NON," said he,

"NON, VOUS AVEZ DES PORTRAITS." And then with a languishing appeal, "VOYONS, show me the

portraits!" It was some little while before the Arethusa, with a shout of laughter, recognised his drift. By

portraits he meant indecent photographs; and in the Arethusa, an austere and rising author, he thought to have

identified a pornographic colporteur. When countryfolk in France have made up their minds as to a person's

calling, argument is fruitless. Along all the rest of the way, the postman piped and fluted meltingly to get a

sight of the collection; now he would upbraid, now he would reason "VOYONS, I will tell nobody"; then

he tried corruption, and insisted on paying for a glass of wine; and, at last when their ways separated

"NON," said he, "CE N'EST PAS BIEN DE VOTRE PART. O NON, CE N'EST PAS BIEN." And shaking

On certain little difficulties encountered by the Arethusa at ChatillonsurLoing, I have not space to dwell;

another Chatillon, of grislier memory, looms too near at hand. But the next day, in a certain hamlet called La

Jussiere, he stopped to drink a glass of syrup in a very poor, bare drinking shop. The hostess, a comely

woman, suckling a child, examined the traveller with kindly and pitying eyes. "You are not of this

department?" she asked. The Arethusa told her he was English. "Ah!" she said, surprised. "We have no

English. We have many Italians, however, and they do very well; they do not complain of the people of

hereabouts. An Englishman may do very well also; it will be something new." Here was a dark saying, over

which the Arethusa pondered as he drank his grenadine; but when he rose and asked what was to pay, the

light came upon him in a flash. "O, POUR VOUS," replied the landlady, "a halfpenny!" POUR VOUS? By

heaven, she took him for a beggar! He paid his halfpenny, feeling that it were ungracious to correct her. But

when he was forth again upon the road, he became vexed in spirit. The conscience is no gentleman, he is a

That night the travellers slept in Gien; the next day they passed the river and set forth (severally, as their

custom was) on a short stage through the green plain upon the Berry side, to Chatillon surLoire. It was the

first day of the shooting; and the air rang with the report of firearms and the admiring cries of sportsmen.

Overhead the birds were in consternation, wheeling in clouds, settling and rearising. And yet with all this

bustle on either hand, the road itself lay solitary. The Arethusa smoked a pipe beside a milestone, and I

remember he laid down very exactly all he was to do at Chatillon: how he was to enjoy a cold plunge, to

change his shirt, and to await the Cigarette's arrival, in sublime inaction, by the margin of the Loire. Fired by

these ideas, he pushed the more rapidly forward, and came, early in the afternoon and in a breathing heat, to

And the Arethusa, strong in his innocence, forgetful of his vile attire, replied I had almost said with gaiety:

"His papers are in order?" said the gendarme. And when the Arethusa, with a slight change of voice, admitted

he had none, he was informed (politely enough) that he must appear before the Commissary.

The Commissary sat at a table in his bedroom, stripped to the shirt and trousers, but still copiously perspiring;

and when he turned upon the prisoner a large meaningless countenance, that was (like Bardolph's) "all whelks

and bubuckles," the dullest might have been prepared for grief. Here was a stupid man, sleepy with the heat

THE COMMISSARY. You know, however, that it is forbidden to circulate without papers?

THE ARETHUSA. Pardon me: I am convinced of the contrary. I am here on my rights as an English subject

THE COMMISSARY (WITH SINGULAR ANNOYANCE). A Scotch advocate! Do you then pretend to

The Arethusa modestly disclaimed the pretension. The Commissary had scored a point.

AVEC CA? VOYEZVOUS, JE SUIS UN HOMME INTELLIGENT! (With that? Look here, I am a person

The culprit remaining silent under this home thrust, the Commissary relished his triumph for a while, and

then demanded (like the postman, but with what different expectations!) to see the contents of the knapsack.

And here the Arethusa, not yet sufficiently awake to his position, fell into a grave mistake. There was little or

no furniture in the room except the Commissary's chair and table; and to facilitate matters, the Arethusa (with

all the innocence on earth) leant the knapsack on a corner of the bed. The Commissary fairly bounded from

his seat; his face and neck flushed past purple, almost into blue; and he screamed to lay the desecrating object

The knapsack proved to contain a change of shirts, of shoes, of socks, and of linen trousers, a small

dressingcase, a piece of soap in one of the shoes, two volumes of the COLLECTION JANNET lettered

POESIES DE CHARLES D'ORLEANS, a map, and a version book containing divers notes in prose and the

remarkable English roundels of the voyager, still to this day unpublished: the Commissary of Chatillon is the

only living man who has clapped an eye on these artistic trifles. He turned the assortment over with a

contumelious finger; it was plain from his daintiness that he regarded the Arethusa and all his belongings as

the very temple of infection. Still there was nothing suspicious about the map, nothing really criminal except

the roundels; as for Charles of Orleans, to the ignorant mind of the prisoner, he seemed as good as a

VOUS ETES ALLEMAND ET VOUS VENEZ CHANTER A LA FOIRE. (Well, then, I will tell you what

THE ARETHUSA. Would you like to hear me sing? I believe I could convince you of the contrary.

THE ARETHUSA. Well, sir, oblige me at least by looking at this book. Here, I open it with my eyes shut.

Read one of these songs read this one and tell me, you who are a man of intelligence, if it would be

THE ARETHUSA. COMMENT, MONSIEUR! What! But do you not observe it is antique. It is difficult to

understand, even for you and me; but for the audience at a fair, it would be meaningless.

PASSER DU NOM. CA NE S'ECRIT PAS. (Well, we must do without the name: it is unspellable.)

The above is a rough summary of this momentous conversation, in which I have been chiefly careful to

preserve the plums of the Commissary; but the remainder of the scene, perhaps because of his rising anger,

has left but little definite in the memory of the Arethusa. The Commissary was not, I think, a practised

literary man; no sooner, at least, had he taken pen in hand and embarked on the composition of the

PROCESVERBAL, than he became distinctly more uncivil and began to show a predilection for that

simplest of all forms of repartee: "You lie!" Several times the Arethusa let it pass, and then suddenly flared

up, refused to accept more insults or to answer further questions, defied the Commissary to do his worst, and

promised him, if he did, that he should bitterly repent it. Perhaps if he had worn this proud front from the

first, instead of beginning with a sense of entertainment and then going on to argue, the thing might have

turned otherwise; for even at this eleventh hour the Commissary was visibly staggered. But it was too late; he

had been challenged the PROCESVERBAL was begun; and he again squared his elbows over his writing,

A step or two down the hot road stood the gendarmerie. Thither was our unfortunate conducted, and there he

was bidden to empty forth the contents of his pockets. A handkerchief, a pen, a pencil, a pipe and tobacco,

matches, and some ten francs of change: that was all. Not a file, not a cipher, not a scrap of writing whether

to identify or to condemn. The very gendarme was appalled before such destitution.

"I regret," he said, "that I arrested you, for I see that you are no VOYOU." And he promised him every

The Arethusa, thus encouraged, asked for his pipe. That he was told was impossible, but if he chewed, he

might have some tobacco. He did not chew, however, and asked instead to have his handkerchief.

"NON," said the gendarme. "NOUS AVONS EU DES HISTOIRES DE GENS QUI SE SONT PENDUS."

"What," cried the Arethusa. "And is it for that you refuse me my handkerchief? But see how much more

The man was struck by the novelty of the idea; but he stuck to his colours, and only continued to repeat vague

"At least," said the Arethusa, "be sure that you arrest my comrade; he will follow me ere long on the same

This promised, the prisoner was led round into the back court of the building, a cellar door was opened, he

was motioned down the stair, and bolts grated and chains clanged behind his descending person.

The philosophic and still more the imaginative mind is apt to suppose itself prepared for any mortal accident.

Prison, among other ills, was one that had been often faced by the undaunted Arethusa. Even as he went

down the stairs, he was telling himself that here was a famous occasion for a roundel, and that like the

committed linnets of the tuneful cavalier, he too would make his prison musical. I will tell the truth at once:

the roundel was never written, or it should be printed in this place, to raise a smile. Two reasons interfered:

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, that although all men are liars, they can none of them bear to be

told so of themselves. To get and take the lie with equanimity is a stretch beyond the stoic; and the Arethusa,

who had been surfeited upon that insult, was blazing inwardly with a white heat of smothered wrath. But the

physical had also its part. The cellar in which he was confined was some feet underground, and it was only

lighted by an unglazed, narrow aperture high up in the wall and smothered in the leaves of a green vine. The

walls were of naked masonry, the floor of bare earth; by way of furniture there was an earthenware basin, a

water jug, and a wooden bedstead with a bluegray cloak for bedding. To be taken from the hot air of a

summer's afternoon, the reverberation of the road and the stir of rapid exercise, and plunged into the gloom

and damp of this receptacle for vagabonds, struck an instant chill upon the Arethusa's blood. Now see in how

small a matter a hardship may consist: the floor was exceedingly uneven underfoot, with the very

spademarks, I suppose, of the labourers who dug the foundations of the barrack; and what with the poor

twilight and the irregular surface, walking was impossible. The caged author resisted for a good while; but

the chill of the place struck deeper and deeper; and at length, with such reluctance as you may fancy, he was

driven to climb upon the bed and wrap himself in the public covering. There, then, he lay upon the verge of

shivering, plunged in semidarkness, wound in a garment whose touch he dreaded like the plague, and (in a

spirit far removed from resignation) telling the roll of the insults he had just received. These are not

Meantime (to look at the upper surface where the sun was still shining and the guns of sportsmen were still

noisy through the tufted plain) the Cigarette was drawing near at his more philosophic pace. In those days of

liberty and health he was the constant partner of the Arethusa, and had ample opportunity to share in that

gentleman's disfavour with the police. Many a bitter bowl had he partaken of with that disastrous comrade.

He was himself a man born to float easily through life, his face and manner artfully recommending him to all.

There was but one suspicious circumstance he could not carry off, and that was his companion. He will not

readily forget the Commissary in what is ironically called the free town of FrankfortontheMain ; nor the

FrancoBelgian frontier; nor the inn at La Fere; last, but not least, he is pretty certain to remember

At the town entry, the gendarme culled him like a wayside flower; and a moment later, two persons, in a high

state of surprise, were confronted in the Commissary's office. For if the Cigarette was surprised to be

arrested, the Commissary was no less taken aback by the appearance and appointments of his captive. Here

was a man about whom there could be no mistake: a man of an unquestionable and unassailable manner, in

applepie order, dressed not with neatness merely but elegance, ready with his passport, at a word, and well

supplied with money: a man the Commissary would have doffed his hat to on chance upon the highway; and

this BEAU CAVALIER unblushingly claimed the Arethusa for his comrade! The conclusion of the interview

was foregone; of its humours, I remember only one. "Baronet?" demanded the magistrate, glancing up from

the passport. "ALORS, MONSIEUR, VOUS ETES LE FIRS D'UN BARON?" And when the Cigarette (his

one mistake throughout the interview) denied the soft impeachment, "ALORS," from the Commissary, "CE

N'EST PAS VOTRE PASSEPORT!" But these were ineffectual thunders; he never dreamed of laying hands

upon the Cigarette; presently he fell into a mood of unrestrained admiration, gloating over the contents of the

knapsack, commanding our friend's tailor. Ah, what an honoured guest was the Commissary entertaining!

what suitable clothes he wore for the warm weather! what beautiful maps, what an attractive work of history

he carried in his knapsack! You are to understand there was now but one point of difference between them:

what was to be done with the Arethusa? the Cigarette demanding his release, the Commissary still claiming

him as the dungeon's own. Now it chanced that the Cigarette had passed some years of his life in Egypt,

where he had made acquaintance with two very bad things, cholera morbus and pashas; and in the eye of the

Commissary, as he fingered the volume of Michelet, it seemed to our traveller there was something Turkish. I

pass over this lightly; it is highly possible there was some misunderstanding, highly possible that the

Commissary (charmed with his visitor) supposed the attraction to be mutual and took for an act of growing

friendship what the Cigarette himself regarded as a bribe. And at any rate, was there ever a bribe more

singular than an odd volume of Michelet's history? The work was promised him for the morrow, before our

departure; and presently after, either because he had his price, or to show that he was not the man to be

behind in friendly offices "EH BIEN," he said, "JE SUPPOSE QU'IL FAUT LAHER VOIRE

CAMARADE." And he tore up that feast of humour, the unfinished PROCESVERBAL. Ah, if he had only

torn up instead the Arethusa's roundels! There were many works burnt at Alexandria, there are many

treasured in the British Museum, that I could better spare than the PROCESVERBAL of Chatillon. Poor

bubuckled Commissary! I begin to be sorry that he never had his Michelet: perceiving in him fine human

traits, a broadbased stupidity, a gusto in his magisterial functions, a taste for letters, a ready admiration for

To the imprisoned one, shivering under the public covering, there came suddenly a noise of bolts and chains.

He sprang to his feet, ready to welcome a companion in calamity; and instead of that, the door was flung

wide, the friendly gendarme appeared above in the strong daylight, and with a magnificent gesture (being

probably a student of the drama) "VOUS ETES LIBRE!" he said. None too soon for the Arethusa. I doubt

if he had been halfanhour imprisoned; but by the watch in a man's brain (which was the only watch he

carried) he should have been eight times longer; and he passed forth with ecstasy up the cellar stairs into the

healing warmth of the afternoon sun; and the breath of the earth came as sweet as a cow's into his nostril; and

he heard again (and could have laughed for pleasure) the concord of delicate noises that we call the hum of

And here it might be thought that my history ended; but not so, this was an actdrop and not the curtain.

Upon what followed in front of the barrack, since there was a lady in the case, I scruple to expatiate. The wife

of the Marechaldeslogis was a handsome woman, and yet the Arethusa was not sorry to be gone from her

society. Something of her image, cool as a peach on that hot afternoon, still lingers in his memory: yet more

of her conversation. "You have there a very fine parlour," said the poor gentleman. "Ah," said Madame la

Marechale (deslogis), "you are very well acquainted with such parlours!" And you should have seen with

what a hard and scornful eye she measured the vagabond before her! I do not think he ever hated the

Commissary; but before that interview was at an end, he hated Madame la Marechale. His passion (as I am

led to understand by one who was present) stood confessed in a burning eye, a pale cheek, and a trembling

utterance; Madame meanwhile tasting the joys of the matador, goading him with barbed words and staring

It was certainly good to be away from this lady, and better still to sit down to an excellent dinner in the inn.

Here, too, the despised travellers scraped acquaintance with their next neighbour, a gentleman of these parts,

returned from the day's sport, who had the good taste to find pleasure in their society. The dinner at an end,

The cafe was crowded with sportsmen conclamantly explaining to each other and the world the smallness of

their bags. About the centre of the room, the Cigarette and the Arethusa sat with their new acquaintance; a

trio very well pleased, for the travellers (after their late experience) were greedy of consideration, and their

sportsman rejoiced in a pair of patient listeners. Suddenly the glass door flew open with a crash; the

Marechaldeslogis appeared in the interval, gorgeously belted and befrogged, entered without salutation,

strode up the room with a clang of spurs and weapons, and disappeared through a door at the far end. Close at

his heels followed the Arethusa's gendarme of the afternoon, imitating, with a nice shade of difference, the

imperial bearing of his chief; only, as he passed, he struck lightly with his open hand on the shoulder of his

late captive, and with that ringing, dramatic utterance of which he had the secret "SUIVEZ!" said he.

The arrest of the members, the oath of the Tennis Court, the signing of the declaration of independence, Mark

Antony's oration, all the brave scenes of history, I conceive as having been not unlike that evening in the cafe

at Chatillon. Terror breathed upon the assembly. A moment later, when the Arethusa had followed his

recaptors into the farther part of the house, the Cigarette found himself alone with his coffee in a ring of

empty chairs and tables, all the lusty sportsmen huddled into corners, all their clamorous voices hushed in

And the Arethusa? Well, he had a long, sometimes a trying, interview in the back kitchen. The

Marechaldeslogis, who was a very handsome man, and I believe both intelligent and honest, had no clear

opinion on the case. He thought the Commissary had done wrong, but he did not wish to get his subordinates

into trouble; and he proposed this, that, and the other, to all of which the Arethusa (with a growing sense of

"In short," suggested the Arethusa, "you want to wash your hands of further responsibility? Well, then, let me

And at noon the next day the travellers were telling their misadventure in the diningroom at Siron's.

MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the first night at school; to a boy of any

enterprise, I believe, they are more often agreeably exciting. Misery or at least misery unrelieved is

confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful lookingfor" of departure; when the old

life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of an

imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious preexistence. The area railings, the

beloved shopwindow, the smell of semi suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the

thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playingfield what a sudden, what an overpowering pathos

breathes to him from each familiar circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems to

him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like

any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is

going away unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with

yearning and reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place where it

seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the

face of all I saw the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the woody

hillside garden a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door step, I

shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations we two were

alone in all that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow and she

fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of my weakness; and so it comes about

that I owed a certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was

judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense)

indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should take

me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first professional tour, my first journey in the

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious on the map, occupying a tongue

of land between the firths of Forth and Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among

the rest, from the windows of my father's house) dying away into the distance and the easterly HAAR with

one smoky seaside town beyond another, or in winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hilltops. It

has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, seasalted, windvexed promontory; trees very rare, except (as

common on the east coast) along the dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to

the eye. It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the

world like the easterly HAAR. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place names bear testimony to an

old and settled race. Of these little towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of

harbour, its old weatherbeaten church or public building, its flavour of decayed prosperity and decaying

fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still

observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith;

Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled";

Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between

tidemarks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect;

Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the

witches once prevailed extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea; Dysart, famous

well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of

flowers and cages of songbirds in the cabin windows, and for one particular Dutch skipper who would sit all

day in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its

bathaunted caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed a night of

superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but

yesterday the tall figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was

still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the

streets of the imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless

brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond

Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk,

better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons,

which the reader will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, and the two

Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country

minister: on to the heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a seawood of matted elders and the quaint

old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or the quiescence of the deep the Carr Rock

beacon rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand,

and the star of the May Island on the other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of

St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of

the province and the light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison

against the world, and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative)

under the knives of trueblue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There was a crashing

run of sea upon the shore, I recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes raise

their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance, that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an

ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its drowsy

classrooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike drowned in

oblivion, and only the seagull beats on the windows and the draught of the seaair rustles in the pages of the

open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews in general, the reader must consult the works

of Mr. Andrew Lang; who has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his incommunicable

humour, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace, and local truth, and a note of unaffected pathos.

Mr. Lang knows all about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his

attention to the harbour lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable.

Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, I

looked for the first time upon that tragicomedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often

reenacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: "It is the most painful

thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to

the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and welcome their Family,

it is distressing when oneis obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour." This painful

obligation has been hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspection

of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the question of stormpanes; and felt a keen pang of

selfreproach, when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for his infant child; and

then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had done the man a service, and when the proper

inspector came, he would be readier with his panes. The human race is perhaps credited with more duplicity

than it deserves. The visitation of a lighthouse at least is a business of the most transparent nature. As soon as

the boat grates on the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the very slouch of the

fellows' shoulders tells their story, and the engineer may begin at once to assume his "angry countenance."

Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to

match the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the stormpanes in the storehouse. If a light is not

rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be

unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the

Service, he had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood (in the mediaeval

phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired

From St. Andrews, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we were "to post," and the phrase

called up in my hopeful mind visions of topboots and the pictures in Rowlandson's DANCE OF DEATH;

but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low

price of one shilling on the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that

drive. It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any single trait. The

fact has not been suffered to encroach on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred

years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop; the

assassins loosereined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has ever

written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of

my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the live bumbee

that flew out of Sharpe's 'baccobox, thus clearly indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because,

as it was after all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday books and afforded a grateful relief

from MINISTERING CHILDREN or the MEMOIRS OF MRS. KATHATINE WINSLOWE. The figure that

always fixed my attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with his cloak about his

mouth, and through all that long, bungling, vociferous hurlyburly, revolving privately a case of conscience.

He would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against the victim, and "that action" must

be sullied with no suggestion of a worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action," in itself, was highly

justified, he had cast in his lot with "the actors," and he must stay there, inactive but publicly sharing the

responsibility. "You are a gentleman you will protect me!" cried the wounded old man, crawling towards

him. "I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, and put his cloak about his mouth. It is an old

temptation with me, to pluck away that cloak and see the face to open that bosom and to read the heart.

With incomplete romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were lumbered. I read him up in every

printed book that I could lay my hands on. I even dug among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shamefaced

in the very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and keenly conscious of my youth in

the midst of other and (as I fondly thought) more gifted students. All was vain: that he had passed a riotous

nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared with his grotesque companions) some

tincture of soldierly resolution and even of military common sense, and that he figured memorably in the

scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I make out. But whenever I cast my eyes backward, it is to

see him like a landmark on the plains of history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How

small a thing creates an immortality! I do not think he can have been a man entirely commonplace; but had he

not thrown his cloak about his mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not thus

have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and today he would scarce delay me for a paragraph. An

incident, at once romantic and dramatic, which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the eye,

how little do we realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does so but the author, just as none but he

appreciates the influence of jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with something of a covert smile,

seeing people led by what they fancy to be thoughts and what are really the accustomed artifices of his own

trade, or roused by what they take to be principles and are really picturesque effects. In a pleasant book about

a school class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently told a little anecdote. A "Philosophical Society" was

formed by some Academy boys among them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin, and Andrew

Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of THE ABODE OF SNOW. Before these learned pundits, one

member laid the following ingenious problem: "What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in

a pot of porter?" "I should think there would be a number of interesting biproducts," said a smatterer at my

elbow; but for me the tale itself has a biproduct, and stands as a type of much that is most human. For this

inquirer who conceived himself to burn with a zeal entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of a

quite different nature; unconsciously to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was engaged in literature.

Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial p, mediant t that was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics

and that which excites men in the present, so with history and that which rouses them in the past: there lie at

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke, all three Royal Burghs or two

Royal Burghs and a less distinguished suburb, I forget which lies continuously along the seaside, and

boasts of either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three separate harbours. These

ambiguities are painful; but the fact is (although it argue me uncultured), I am but poorly posted upon

Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a stream divides them, spanned by a bridge;

and over the bridge at the time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the west. This

had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his fond tenancy, he had illustrated the outer walls,

as high (if I remember rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and snatches of verse in the

vein of EXEGI MONUMENTUM; shells and pebbles, artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his

medium; and I like to think of him standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished, drinking in the

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century. Mr. Thomson, the "curat" of Anstruther

Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to the devout: in the first place, because he was a "curat"; in the second

place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in the third place, because he was

generally suspected of dealings with the Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular

literature of the time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing quite by itself, and in the

proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had been at a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and

elsewhere, I suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our cold modern way, the

reverend gentleman was on the brink of DELIRIUM TREMENS. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie

came carrying a lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they went down the street of Anstruther Wester,

the lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand, the barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of

slumbering houses, and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all appearance) easy in his

mind. The pair had reached the middle of the bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in

some baseless fear and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the minister's strange behaviour,

started also; in so doing, she would jerk the lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows

would be all confounded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the twittering child, a huge bulk of

blackness seemed to sweep down, to pass them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the

farther side in the general darkness of the night. "Plainly the devil come for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child.

What Mr. Thomson thought himself, we have no ground of knowledge; but he fell upon his knees in the

midst of the bridge like a man praying. On the rest of the journey to the manse, history is silent; but when

they came to the door, the poor caitiff, taking the lantern from the child, looked upon her with so lost a

countenance that her little courage died within her, and she fled home screaming to her parents. Not a soul

would venture out; all that night, the minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and when the day

dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, they found the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson.

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful association. It was early in the morning,

about a century before the days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed to welcome a

Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just landed in the harbour underneath. But sure there was

never seen a more decayed grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of exile.

Halfway between Orkney and Shetland, there lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other

the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; soreeyed, short living, inbred fishers and their families herd in

its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreckwood stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more

inhospitable spot. BELLEISLEENMER FairIsle atSea that is a name that has always rung in my

mind's ear like music; but the only "Fair Isle" on which I ever set my foot, was this unhomely, rugged

turrettop of submarine sierras. Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for

long months he and certain of his men were harboured; and it was from this durance that he landed at last to

be welcomed (as well as such a papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of Anstruther Easter; and

after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must that have appeared! and after the island diet, what a hospitable spot

the minister's table! And yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his outlandish hosts. For to this day

there still survives a relic of the long winter evenings when the sailors of the great Armada crouched about

the hearths of the FairIslanders, the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, and the

gale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing their melancholy voices. All the folk of the north isles

are great artificers of knitting: the FairIslanders alone dye their fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day,

gloves and nightcaps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland warehouse at Edinburgh, or

on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's house; and to this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for "persons of quality." When I landed there myself, an

elderly gentleman, unshaved, poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to and fro,

with a book in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our arrival, which we thought a strange thing in

itself; but when one of the officers of the PHAROS, passing narrowly by him, observed his book to be a

Greek Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher flight. The catechist was cross examined; he said

the gentleman had been put across some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the only link

between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held services and was doing "good." So much

came glibly enough; but when pressed a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment. A singular

diffidence appeared upon his face: "They tell me," said he, in low tones, "that he's a lord." And a lord he was;

a peer of the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, and his plaid about his

shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy man! And his grandson, a goodlooking little

boy, much better dressed than the lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent very foreign to

the scene, accompanied me for a while in my exploration of the island. I suppose this little fellow is now my

lord, and wonder how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept very

quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it is like that this was not his first nor yet his last

ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a considerable extent) Tennant's

vernacular poem ANST'ER FAIR; and I have there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was

when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the breakwater. What I

gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be an author; I

loved the art of words and the appearances of life; and TRAVELLERS, and HEADERS, and RUBBLE, and

POLISHED ASHLAR, and PIERRES PERDUES, and even the thrilling question of the STRING

COURSE, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as

words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the compensation of years; youth is oneeyed; and

in those days, though I haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the sunshine,

the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far

below, and the musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere, and my only

industry was in the hours when I was not on duty. I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade;

and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented with dry roseleaves, drew in my chair to

the table and proceeded to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death and

immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder. Then it was that I wrote VOCES FIDELIUM, a series of

dramatic monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a covenanting novel like so many others,

never finished. Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of death, toiling to leave a

memory behind me. I feel moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot, to bid

him go to bed and clap VOCES FIDELIUM on the fire before he goes; so clear does he appear before me,

sitting there between his candles in the rosescented room and the late night; so ridiculous a picture (to my

elderly wisdom) does the fool present! But he was driven to his bed at last without miraculous intervention;

and the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently youthful business. The weather was then

so warm that I must keep the windows open; the night without was populous with moths. As the late darkness

deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more brightly; thicker and thicker came the dusty nightfliers, to

gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not

endure the spectacle; to capture immortality was doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such a

cost of suffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go to bed in the darkness raging to think that

the blow might fall on the morrow, and there was VOCES FIDELIUM still incomplete. Well, the moths are

all gone, and VOCES FIDELIUM along with them; only the fool is still on hand and practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that was the diving, an experience I burned to

taste of. But this was not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a change of scene to the

subarctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness,

the land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by single slate stones

set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led nowhere)

thrumming in the telegraph wires. Only as you approached the coast was there anything to stir the heart. The

plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall outstacks rose like pillars ringed about

with surf, the coves were over brimmed with clamorous froth, the seabirds screamed, the wind sang in the

thyme on the cliff's edge; here and there, small ancient castles toppled on the brim; here and there, it was

possible to dip into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you were a little warm, and hear

(near at hand) the whinpods bursting in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent sea.

As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man's towns, and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays.

It lives for herring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights of Pulteney blackened by

seawardlooking fishers, as when a city crowds to a review or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground is

horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a

rising moon, the sealine rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one after another, a boat flitting

swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all proportion to the town

itself; and the oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the outer

Hebrides), who come for that season only, and depart again, if "the take" be poor, leaving debts behind them.

In a bad year, the end of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are common, riots often

possible; an apple knocked from a child's hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I

was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To contrary interests, it should be observed, the

curse of Babel is here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers. Caithness has adopted English; an odd

circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by descent. I remember seeing one of the

strongest instances of this division: a thing like a Punchand Judy box erected on the flat gravestones of

the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium I know not what to call it an eldritch looking preacher

laying down the law in Gaelic about some one of the name of POWL, whom I at last divined to be the apostle

to the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the

crowd, some of the town's children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely playing

tigg. The same descent, the same country, the same narrow sect of the same religion, and all these bonds

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the

travellers (like frames of churches) overplumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers toiling unseen

on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the assistants turned their airmills; a stone might be

swinging between wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a mailed dragon

with a windowglass snout came dripping up the ladder. Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick

was in the year of VOCES FIDELIUM and the roseleaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already I did not care

two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more

rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the divingdress, that was

my absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I

It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out in the open there were "skipper's

daughters," when I found myself at last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and my

whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One moment, the salt wind was whistling

round my nightcapped head; the next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As that

intolerable burthern was laid upon me, I could have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off

from the whole enterprise. But it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdygurdy, and the air to

whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of the vizor; and I was cut off in a moment

from my fellowmen; standing there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature deaf and

dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his own. Except that I could move and feel, I

was like a man fallen in a catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the weights were

hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust into my unresisting hand; and setting a

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with

vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a

green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the

PIERRES PERDUES of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as

I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There we

were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; and either might have burst himself with shouting,

and not a whisper come to his companion's hearing. Each, in his own little world of air, stood

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at the bottom of the sea, which at that moment

possibly shot across my mind. He was down with another, settling a stone of the seawall. They had it well

adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone set home; and it was time to turn to

something else. But still his companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or only

raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown to the vocabulary of the diver.

There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into

Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of that other world, and beheld the face of its

inhabitant wet with streaming tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was

the trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot of that unfortunate he was caught alive at the bottom of

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the scissors, may appear strange to the

inexpert. These must bear in mind the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of

transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are, and how a man's weight, so far from

being an encumbrance, is the very ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.

The knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the hand of my estranged

companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible, pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: overhead,

a flat roof of green: a little in front, the seawall, like an unfinished rampart. And presently in our upward

progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only

signed to me the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high; it would have been quite a leap to me

unencumbered; with the breast and back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering

load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he

was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side.

As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight. Even when the strong arm

of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an

autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of a sail, and propped upon

my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow. Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected

by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze of wind. Or so I must suppose; for, safe in my

cushion of air, I was conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne helplessly

abroad, and now swiftly and yet with dreamlike gentleness impelled against my guide. So does a child's

balloon divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch, and slide off again from every obstacle. So must

have ineffectually swung, so resented their inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades,

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely wearying, in these uncommanded

evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet,

by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform,

closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that

he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasonsalthough I had a fine, dizzy, muddleheaded joy in my

surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there

about me, swift as hummingbirds yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise when Bain brought me

back to the ladder and signed to me to mount. And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a

sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of

rosy, almost of sanguine light the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson.

And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I desired. It was one of the best things I got

from my education as an engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It

takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harboursides, which is the richest form of idling; it

carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with

dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he

had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an

office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and

with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his

longsighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of

consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts

of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier,

to go down with Bob Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and

shouting orders not always very wise than to be warm and dry, and dull, and deadalive, in the most

comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it

much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the

clock. The gipsies must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women tending

their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off their coarse potations; and where, in winter gales, the

surf would beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller today upon the Thurso coach

would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a

private still. He would not indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach. And even if he could,

one little thing that happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coachtop was crowded with Lews fishers going home, scarce

anything but Gaelic had sounded in my ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very

northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon

the shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran

seaward; in front was the little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond,

but the North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial icefields of the Pole. And here, in the last imaginable

place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the

coach with its load of Hebridean fishers as they had pursued VETTURINI up the passes of the Apennines

or perhaps along the grotto under Virgil's tomb two little darkeyed, whitetoothed Italian vagabonds, of

twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice. The coach

passed on, and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how they had wandered

into that country, and how they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see

again the silver windbreaks run among the olives, and the stonepine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost. For as far back as he goes in his own

land, he will find some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican halfblood, the negro

in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged

country such as mine, the days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at that time

far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the shore of that illomened strait of whirlpools,

in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to

decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as though a birdofparadise had

risen from the heather or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to their

surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on the Fair Isle.

THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly fishervillage, where they tasted in a high

degree the glory of existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the diversion of young

gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered

about the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady alley; many little gardens more

than usually bright with flowers; nets adrying, and fisherwives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of

fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the streetcorners; shops with golfballs and

bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL,

dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as

memory serves me, were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two

sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not

enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray

islets: to the left, endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hidingholes, alive with popping rabbits and

soaring gulls: to the right, a range of seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty

and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between now charmed into sunshine quiet, now whistling

with wind and clamorous with bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and

southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent of the sea in front of all, the Bass

Rock, tilted seaward like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan geese hanging round its

summit like a great and glittering smoke. This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker;

and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of

Tantallon still rang with horseshoe iron, and echoed to the commands of BelltheCat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in that part, but the embarrassment of

pleasure. You might golf if you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete yourself

in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and

dotted here and there by the streamside with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites. To fit themselves

for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbour

there; and you might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife,

bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again, you might join our fishing parties, where we sat perched as

thick as solangeese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to the to the

much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and consequent shrill recrimination shrill as the geese

themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but though fishing be a fine pastime,

the podley is scarce to be regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour that a boy should eat

all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the

buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires of many towns, and the sails

of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now

in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath

their guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or

you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the

nonce discovered; following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of

ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the

march off the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might go Crusoeing, a word that covers

all extempore eating in the open air: digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a fire of

the seaware, and cooking apples there if they were truly apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant

must have played us off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving, in the neighbourhood of

fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine; or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches

and visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or clambering along the

coast, eat geans (the worst, I must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken

root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew

so foreign among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were joyous. Of the fisherwife, for instance,

who had cut her throat at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top of the Quadrant, and

beheld a posse of silent people escorting a cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and the

bandage all bloody horror! the fisherwife herself, who continued thenceforth to hagride my thoughts,

and even today (as I recall the scene) darkens daylight. She was lodged in the little old jail in the chief

street; but whether or no she died there, with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired. She had been

tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard that, after all these years, the poor crazy

sinner should be still pilloried on her cart in the scrapbook of my memory. Nor shall I readily forget a

certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the

dead body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one of my cousins, and in the dread

hour of the dusk, as we were clambering on the gardenwalls, opened a window in that house of mortality

and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins

that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment,

compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of

rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to

make when the wind had any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the pierhead, where (if

fate was against them) they might see boat and husband and sons their whole wealth and their whole family

engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of neighbours forcing such an unfortunate

homeward, and she squalling and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory dwells upon the most, I have been all this

while withholding. It was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two months' holiday

there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces

inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and

the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It

may still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to introduce it on

Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be

Toward the end of September, when schooltime was drawing near and the nights were already black, we

would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull'seye lantern. The thing was

so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time,

began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist

upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned topcoat. They smelled

noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use

was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull'seye under his topcoat asked

for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had

got the hint; but theirs were not bull'seyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them

at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. Burglars,

indeed, we may have had some haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns

were more common, and to certain storybooks in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take

it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull'seye under his topcoat

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!"

That was the shibboleth, and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could

recognise a lanternbearer, unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into

the belly of a tenman lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them for the cabin was usually locked, or

choose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would be

unbuttoned and the bull'seyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the

night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch

together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges of the fishingboat, and delight themselves with

inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I may not give some specimens some of their foresights of life, or deep

inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly,

so romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only

accidents in the career of the lanternbearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black

night; the slide shut, the topcoat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make

your glory public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your

fool's heart, to know you had a bull'seye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.

It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this

(somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not

done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem

but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted;

and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull'seye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old

Bailey Reports," a prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired

man, his house beleaguered by the impish schoolboy, and he himself grinding and fuming and impotently

fleeing to the law against these pinpricks. You marvel at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so

destitute of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that had he chosen, had he ceased to be a miser,

he could have been freed at once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and gone escorted by

a squadron. For the love of more recondite joys, which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy,

the man had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration. "His mind to him a kingdom was"; and sure

enough, digging into that mind, which seems at first a dustheap, we unearth some priceless jewels. For

Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, a noble character in itself; disdain of

many pleasures, a chief part of what is commonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable end, that finest

trait of mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another element of virtue; and at the back of all, a conscience just

like yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like a thimble rigger, but still pointing (there or

thereabout) to some conventional standard. Here were a cabinet portrait to which Hawthorne perhaps had

done justice; and yet not Hawthorne either, for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us

that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not

what: insatiable, insane, a god with a muckrake. Thus, at least, looking in the bosom of the miser,

consideration detects the poet in the full tide of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to

epics; and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth, and to and fro in his discomfortable house, spies

within him a blazing bonfire of delight. And so with others, who do not live by bread alone, but by some

cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat salesmen to the external eye, and possibly to

themselves are Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who have not one virtue to rub against another in

the field of active life, and yet perhaps, in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints. We see them on the

street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in what they pride themselves! heaven knows where

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life: the fable of the monk who passed into the woods,

heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his return a stranger at his

convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognise

him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the

most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are moments. With no more apparatus

than an illsmelling lantern I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is

spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to

value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those

fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the pages of the

realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires

and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget;

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure. They have been boys and youths; they have lingered

outside the window of the beloved, who was then most probably writing to some one else; they have sat

before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere continents of congested poetry, not one line of which would

flow; they have walked alone in the woods, they have walked in cities under the countless lamps; they have

been to sea, they have hated, they have feared, they have longed to knife a man, and maybe done it; the wild

taste of life has stung their palate. Or, if you deny them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to

the full their books are there to prove it the keen pleasure of successful literary composition. And yet they

fill the globe with volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, and whose consistent

falsity to all I care to call existence, with despairing wrath. If I had no better hope than to continue to revolve

among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by the paltry hopes and fears with which they

surround and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now. But there has never an hour of mine gone quite

so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could

count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of these romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was very true; that it was the same with

themselves and other persons of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were exceptional,

and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but that our works must deal exclusively with (what they

call) the average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to all but the paltriest considerations.

I accept the issue. We can only know others by ourselves. The artistic temperament (a plague on the

expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen, or it would make us incapable of writing novels;

and the average man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would not be average. It was

Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very

well, and showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his own. And this

harping on life's dulness and man's meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of two things: the

cry of the blind eye, I CANNOT SEE, or the complaint of the dumb tongue, I CANNOT UTTER. To draw a

life without delights is to prove I have not realised it. To picture a man without some sort of poetry well, it

goes near to prove my case, for it shows an author may have little enough. To see Dancer only as a dirty, old,

smallminded, impotently fuming man, in a dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by

small attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the Harrow boys. But these young gentlemen

(with a more becoming modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coattails; they did not suppose they

had surprised his secret or could put him living in a book: and it is there my error would have lain. Or say that

in the same romance I continue to call these books romances, in the hope of giving pain say that in the

same romance, which now begins really to take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and follow instead

the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some such business as that of my lanternbearers on the links; and

described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were;

and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. I might upon these lines, and had I Zola's genius,

turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary art, render the lanternlight with the touches of a master, and lay

on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was done, what a triumph would my picture

be of shallowness and dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have belied the boys! To

the ear of the stenographer, the talk is merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they are

discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the possibilities of existence. To the eye of the observer they

are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite

For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like

the lantern; it may reside, like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology. It may consist with

perpetual failure, and find exercise in the continued chase. It has so little bond with externals (such as the

observer scribbles in his notebook) that it may even touch them not; and the man's true life, for which he

consents to live, lie altogether in the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning

battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the arts: all leading another life, plying another

trade from that they chose; like the poet's housebuilder, who, after all, is cased in stone,

In such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For

to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but

he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by

nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some

And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a

For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation,

that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the links is meaningless. And

hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. Hence, when we read the English realists,

the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's constancy under the submerging tide of dulness,

and how he bears up with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his

whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the

French, in that meatmarket of middleaged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero

drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every description of misconduct and dishonour. In each,

we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked

and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon

into the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth, among

salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows far better Tolstoi's POWERS OF

DARKNESS. Here is a piece full of force and truth, yet quite untrue. For before Mikita was led into so dire a

situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful at least in part; and a work which dwells on the

ugliness of crime and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against the modesty of life, and

even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to melodrama. The peasants are not understood; they saw their life in

fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for Mikita, or he had never fallen. And so, once again,

even an Old Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetry and lustre of existence, falls into the

In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of life; and this emotion is very variously

provoked. We are so moved when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, when

Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his

helmet," when Kent has infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffky's DESPISED AND

REJECTED, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering and virtue. These are notes that please the

great heart of man. Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and

unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them, we long

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters. Here is the door, here is the open air. ITUR IN

THE past is all of one texture whether feigned or suffered whether acted out in three dimensions, or only

witnessed in that small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the jets are

down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder of the body. There is no distinction on the

face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising to

remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair to prove. The past

stands on a precarious footing; another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it.

There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle

and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of

idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper storybook

fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its ancient honours, and

reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my young

ears) which was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the sugar

trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny

that they are possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever: our old days and deeds, our old selves,

too, and the very world in which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as a

last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a

mood, not a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us robbed of it,

conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked

nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these airpainted pictures

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived longer and more richly than their

neighbours; when they lay asleep they claim they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that

all men review for their amusement, these count in no second place the harvests of their dreams. There is one

of this kind whom I have in my eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was from

a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled

and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and now

drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what

must follow, and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows.

But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later the nighthag would have him by the throat, and pluck him

strangling and screaming, from his sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace enough, at times very

strange, at times they were almost formless: he would be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than

a certain hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was awake, but feared and loathed while

he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on every detail of circumstance, as when once he supposed he

must swallow the populous world, and awoke screaming with the horror of the thought. The two chief

troubles of his very narrow existence the practical and everyday trouble of school tasks and the ultimate

and airy one of hell and judgment were often confounded together into one appalling nightmare. He seemed

to himself to stand before the Great White Throne; he was called on, poor little devil, to recite some form of

words, on which his destiny depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped for him; and he

These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that time of life my dreamer would have very

willingly parted with his power of dreams. But presently, in the course of his growth, the cries and physical

contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his visions were still for the most part miserable, but they were

more constantly supported; and he would awake with no more extreme symptom than a flying heart, a

freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear. His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better

stocked with particulars, became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life. The look of

the world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his

waking thoughts, so that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns and beautiful places

as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, an odd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for

stories laid in that period of English history, began to rule the features of his dreams; so that he masqueraded

there in a threecornered hat and was much engaged with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and

that for breakfast. About the same time, he began to read in his dreams tales, for the most part, and for the

most part after the manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any printed book,

And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a dream adventure which he has no anxiety to

repeat; he began, that is to say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life one of the day, one of

the night one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving

to be false. I should have said he studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, which (it may be

supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, in his dreamlife, he passed a long day in the surgical theatre,

his heart in his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the abhorred dexterity of

surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street,

and entered the door of a tall LAND, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. All night long, in his

wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp

with a reflector. All night long, he brushed by single persons passing downward beggarly women of the

street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women but all drowsy and

weary like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they passed. In the end, out of a northern

window, he would see day beginning to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a

breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, trudging to another day of

monstrosities and operations. Time went quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can

guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the

day, and he had not shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them. I cannot tell how

long it was that he endured this discipline; but it was long enough to leave a great black blot upon his

memory, long enough to send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor; whereupon with

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were for some while

like other men's, now blank, now chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes

appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary kind. I will just note one of these

occasions, ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the first

floor of a rough hillfarm. The room showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I

think, against the wall; but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a moorland place,

among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard,

that seemed to have been long disused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There was no sign of the

farmfolk or of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in

against the wall of the house and seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog disquieted the dreamer; it

was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast looked right enough indeed, he was so old and dull and dusty

and brokendown, that he should rather have awakened pity; and yet the conviction came and grew upon the

dreamer that this was no proper dog at all, but something hellish. A great many dozing summer flies hummed

about the yard; and presently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly in his open palm, carried it to his

mouth like an ape, and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked to him with one eye. The

dream went on, it matters not how it went; it was a good dream as dreams go; but there was nothing in the

sequel worthy of that devilish brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly in that very fact: that

having found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end

and fall back on indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors. It would be different now; he knows his

For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in the custom of setting himself to sleep

with tales, and so had his father before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the teller's

pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one

adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the little people who manage man's internal

theatre had not as yet received a very rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should

have slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled actors performing a set piece to a huge

hall of faces. But presently my dreamer began to turn his former amusement of storytelling to (what is

called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his tales. Here was he, and here were the

little people who did that part of his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed and

pared and set upon all fours, they must run from a beginning to an end and fit (after a manner) with the laws

of life; the pleasure, in one word, had become a business; and that not only for the dreamer, but for the little

people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as he. When he lay down to prepare himself for

sleep, he no longer sought amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed off in his

boxseat, his little people continued their evolutions with the same mercantile designs. All other forms of

dream deserted him but two: he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still visits at times the

most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of note that to these same places, and to one in particular, he

returns at intervals of months and years, finding new fieldpaths, visiting new neighbours, beholding that

happy valley under new effects of noon and dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions is quite

lost to him: the common, mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the rawheadandbloodybones

nightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted cheese these and their like are gone; and, for the most part,

whether awake or asleep, he is simply occupied he or his little people in consciously making stories for

the market. This dreamer (like many other persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune.

When the bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the back gate, he sets to belabouring his

brains after a story, for that is his readiest moneywinner; and, behold! at once the little people begin to bestir

themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales

upon their lighted theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things

bygone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness (for he

takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, that'll do!" upon his

lips: with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in

the play, he scatters the performance in the midst. Often enough the waking is a disappointment: he has been

too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone stumbling and

maundering through their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And

yet how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he was the son of a very rich and wicked man, the owner of

broad acres and a most damnable temper. The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad, on

purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he returned to England, it was to find him married again to a

young wife, who was supposed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the

dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son to have a meeting; and yet both being

proud and both angry, neither would condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy

country by the sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by some intolerable insult, struck down the

father dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to the

broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with his father's widow, for whom no

provision had been made. These two lived very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down to

table together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better friends; until it seemed to him of a sudden that

she was prying about dangerous matters, that she had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched him

and tried him with questions. He drew back from her company as men draw back from a precipice suddenly

discovered; and yet so strong was the attraction that he would drift again and again into the old intimacy, and

again and again be startled back by some suggestive question or some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So

they lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed passion; until,

one day, he saw the woman slipping from the house in a veil, followed her to the station, followed her in the

train to the seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place where the murder was done. There

she began to grope among the bents, he watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something in

her hand I cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against the dreamer and as she held

it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the

brink of the tall sandwreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and rescue her; and there they stood face to

face, she with that deadly matter openly in her hand his very presence on the spot another link of proof. It

was plain she was about to speak, but this was more than he could bear he could bear to be lost, but not to

talk of it with his destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm, they returned together

to the train, talking he knew not what, made the journey back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and

passed the evening in the drawingroom as in the past. But suspense and fear drummed in the dreamer's

bosom. "She has not denounced me yet" so his thoughts ran "when will she denounce me? Will it be to

morrow?" And it was not tomorrow, nor the next day, nor the next; and their life settled back on the old

terms, only that she seemed kinder than before, and that, as for him, the burthen of his suspense and wonder

grew daily more unbearable, so that he wasted away like a man with a disease. Once, indeed, he broke all

bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden away

among her jewels, found the damning evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, in the

hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not

use it; and then the door opened, and behold herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence

between them; and once more she raised to him a face brimming with some communication; and once more

he shied away from speech and cut her off. But before he left the room, which he had turned upside down, he

laid back his death warrant where he had found it; and at that, her face lighted up. The next thing he heard,

she was explaining to her maid, with some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her things. Flesh and blood

could bear the strain no longer; and I think it was the next morning (though chronology is always hazy in the

theatre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had been breakfasting together in one corner of a

great, parqueted, sparelyfurnished room of many windows; all the time of the meal she had tortured him

with sly allusions; and no sooner were the servants gone, and these two protagonists alone together, than he

leaped to his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face, she heard him as he raved out his

complaint: Why did she torture him so? she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not

denounce him at once? what signified her whole behaviour? why did she torture him? and yet again, why did

she torture him? And when he had done, she fell upon her knees, and with outstretched hands: "Do you not

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mercantile delight was not

of long endurance; for it soon became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable elements; which

is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told. But his wonder has still kept growing; and I think the

reader's will also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the little people as of substantive

inventors and performers. To the end they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having

excellent grounds for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever at the motive of the woman the

hinge of the whole wellinvented plot until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not his

tale; it was the little people's! And observe: not only was the secret kept, the story was told with really

guileful craftsmanship. The conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct, and the

emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot

better it. I am awake, and I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo could not perhaps equal that

crafty artifice (as of some old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which the same

situation is twice presented and the two actors twice brought face to face over the evidence, only once it is in

her hand, once in his and these in their due order, the least dramatic first. The more I think of it, the more I

am moved to press upon the world my question: Who are the Little People? They are near connections of the

dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries and have an eye to the bankbook; they share

plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the scheme of a considerate story and to

arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they

can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim.

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself; as I might have told

you from the beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism; and as I am positively

forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little farther with my story. And for the Little People, what

shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do onehalf my work for me while I am fast

asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I

do it for myself. That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond contention; but that

which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies

have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself what I call I, my

conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man

with the conscience and the variable bankaccount, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of

voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections I am sometimes tempted to suppose he is no

storyteller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired

up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the

singlehanded product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a

back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I

am an excellent adviser, something like Moliere's servant; I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole

in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table,

which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so

that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what part awake, and leave the reader to

share what laurels there are, at his own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will first

take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to read, the STRANGE CASE OF DR.

JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle,

for that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of

every thinking creature. I had even written one, THE TRAVELLING COMPANION, which was returned by

an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the

ground that it was not a work of genius, and that JEKYLL had supplanted it. Then came one of those

financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third person. For two

days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the

window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and

underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously,

although I think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning of the tale is therefore

mine, and had long preexisted in my garden of Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do

most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience. Mine,

too, is the setting, mine the characters. All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central

idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so liberally

ladling out praise to my unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot, into the arena of

the critics? For the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine

at all but the Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at it, I may say a word: the

not very defensible story of OLALLA. Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's

chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk

and detail as I have tried to write them; to this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was

beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last

pages, such as, alas! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose

immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the

first. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but

suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a

moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger limitations and that

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot and hot, full of

passion and the picturesque, alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the

supernatural. But the other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me with a lovestory, a little April

comedy, which I ought certainly to hand over to the author of A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE, for he could

write it as it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that I cannot. But who would have

IN a pleasant, airy, uphill country, it was my fortune when I was young to make the acquaintance of a

certain beggar. I call him beggar, though he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which were

openmouthed, indeed) to beg for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far

gone in consumption, with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken on his face; but still active afoot,

still with the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute. Three ways led through this piece of country;

and as I was inconstant in my choice, I believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he

caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he would spring suddenly forth in the

regulation attitude, and launching at once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my farther

course. "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I

don't feel as hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am pleased to meet you on

the road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward to one of our little conversations." He loved the sound of his

own voice inordinately, and though (with something too offhand to call servility) he would always hasten to

agree with anything you said, yet he could never suffer you to say it to an end. By what transition he slid to

his favourite subject I have no memory; but we had never been long together on the way before he was

dealing, in a very military manner, with the English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle

atheistical in his opinions. His Queen Mab, sir, is quite an atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a

writer. With the works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine poet. Keats John

Keats, sir he was a very fine poet." With such references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his

own knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward uphill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his

deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all

the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of

He would often go the whole way home with me: often to borrow a book, and that book always a poet. Off he

would march, to continue his mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged coat;

and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came always back again at last, not much the

worse for its travels into beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib, random

criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he

was already brimful of Shelley and the atheistical Queen Mab, and "Keats John Keats, sir." And I have

often wondered how he came by these acquirements; just as I often wondered how he fell to be a beggar. He

had served through the Mutiny of which (like so many people) he could tell practically nothing beyond the

names of places, and that it was "difficult work, sir," and very hot, or that soandso was "a very fine

commander, sir." He was far too smart a man to have remained a private; in the nature of things, he must

have won his stripes. And yet here he was without a pension. When I touched on this problem, he would

content himself with diffidently offering me advice. "A man should be very careful when he is young, sir. If

you'll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentleman like yourself, sir, should be very careful. I was

perhaps a trifle inclined to atheistical opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than we are

inclined in these days to admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism with beer and skittles.

Keats John Keats, sir and Shelley were his favourite bards. I cannot remember if I tried him with

Rossetti; but I know his taste to a hair, and if ever I did, he must have doted on that author. What took him

was a richness in the speech; he loved the exotic, the unexpected word; the moving cadence of a phrase; a

vague sense of emotion (about nothing) in the very letters of the alphabet: the romance of language. His

honest head was very nearly empty, his intellect like a child's; and when he read his favourite authors, he can

almost never have understood what he was reading. Yet the taste was not only genuine, it was exclusive; I

tried in vain to offer him novels; he would none of them, he cared for nothing but romantic language that he

could not understand. The case may be commoner than we suppose. I am reminded of a lad who was laid in

the next cot to a friend of mine in a public hospital and who was no sooner installed than he sent out (perhaps

with his last pence) for a cheap Shakespeare. My friend pricked up his ears; fell at once in talk with his new

neighbour, and was ready, when the book arrived, to make a singular discovery. For this lover of great

literature understood not one sentence out of twelve, and his favourite part was that of which he understood

the least the inimitable, mouthfilling rodomontade of the ghost in HAMLET. It was a bright day in

hospital when my friend expounded the sense of this beloved jargon: a task for which I am willing to believe

my friend was very fit, though I can never regard it as an easy one. I know indeed a point or two, on which I

would gladly question Mr. Shakespeare, that lover of big words, could he revisit the glimpses of the moon, or

could I myself climb backward to the spacious days of Elizabeth. But in the second case, I should most likely

pretermit these questionings, and take my place instead in the pit at the Blackfriars, to hear the actor in his

favourite part, playing up to Mr. Burbage, and rolling out as I seem to hear him with a ponderous gusto

What a pleasant chance, if we could go there in a party I and what a surprise for Mr. Burbage, when the ghost

As for my old soldier, like Mr. Burbage and Mr. Shakespeare, he is long since dead; and now lies buried, I

suppose, and nameless and quite forgotten, in some poor city graveyard. But not for me, you brave heart,

have you been buried! For me, you are still afoot, tasting the sun and air, and striding southward. By the

groves of Comiston and beside the Hermitage of Braid, by the Hunters' Tryst, and where the curlews and

plovers cry around Fairmilehead, I see and hear you, stalwartly carrying your deadly sickness, cheerfully

The thought of the old soldier recalls that of another tramp, his counterpart. This was a little, lean, and fiery

man, with the eyes of a dog and the face of a gipsy; whom I found one morning encamped with his wife and

children and his grinder's wheel, beside the burn of Kinnaird. To this beloved dell I went, at that time, daily;

and daily the knifegrinder and I (for as long as his tent continued pleasantly to interrupt my little wilderness)

sat on two stones, and smoked, and plucked grass, and talked to the tune of the brown water. His children

were mere whelps, they fought and bit among the fern like vermin. His wife was a mere squaw; I saw her

gather brush and tend the kettle, but she never ventured to address her lord while I was present. The tent was

a mere gipsy hovel, like a sty for pigs. But the grinder himself had the fine self sufficiency and grave

politeness of the hunter and the savage; he did me the honours of this dell, which had been mine but the day

before, took me far into the secrets of his life, and used me (I am proud to remember) as a friend.

Like my old soldier, he was far gone in the national complaint. Unlike him, he had a vulgar taste in letters;

scarce flying higher than the story papers; probably finding no difference, certainly seeking none, between

Tannahill and Burns; his noblest thoughts, whether of poetry or music, adequately embodied in that

which is indeed apt to echo in the ears of Scottish children, and to him, in view of his experience, must

have found a special directness of address. But if he had no fine sense of poetry in letters, he felt with a deep

joy the poetry of life. You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched beside the

talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest return of morning, the peep of day over the moors,

the awaking birds among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and with what delight, at

the return of the spring, he once more pitched his camp in the living outofdoors. But we were a pair of

tramps; and to you, who are doubtless sedentary and a consistent firstclass passenger in life, he would

scarce have laid himself so open; to you, he might have been content to tell his story of a ghost that of a

buccaneer with his pistols as he lived whom he had once encountered in a seaside cave near Buckie; and

that would have been enough, for that would have shown you the mettle of the man. Here was a piece of

experience solidly and livingly built up in words, here was a story created, TERES ATQUE ROTUNDUS.

And to think of the old soldier, that lover of the literary bards! He had visited stranger spots than any seaside

cave; encountered men more terrible than any spirit; done and dared and suffered in that incredible, unsung

epic of the Mutiny War; played his part with the field force of Delhi, beleaguering and beleaguered; shared in

that enduring, savage anger and contempt of death and decency that, for long months together, bedevil'd and

inspired the army; was hurled to and fro in the battlesmoke of the assault; was there, perhaps, where

Nicholson fell; was there when the attacking column, with hell upon every side, found the soldier's enemy

strong drink, and the lives of tens of thousands trembled in the scale, and the fate of the flag of England

staggered. And of all this he had no more to say than "hot work, sir," or "the army suffered a great deal, sir,"

or "I believe General Wilson, sir, was not very highly thought of in the papers." His life was naught to him,

the vivid pages of experience quite blank: in words his pleasure lay melodious, agitated words printed

words, about that which he had never seen and was connatally incapable of comprehending. We have here

two temperaments face to face; both untrained, unsophisticated, surprised (we may say) in the egg; both

boldly charactered: that of the artist, the lover and artificer of words; that of the maker, the seeer, the lover

and forger of experience. If the one had a daughter and the other had a son, and these married, might not

some illustrious writer count descent from the beggarsoldier and the needy knifegrinder?

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. The burglar sells at the same time his own

skill and courage and my silver plate (the whole at the most moderate figure) to a Jew receiver. The bandit

sells the traveller an article of prime necessity: that traveller's life. And as for the old soldier, who stands for

central mark to my capricious figures of eight, he dealt in a specially; for he was the only beggar in the world

who ever gave me pleasure for my money. He had learned a school of manners in the barracks and had the

sense to cling to it, accosting strangers with a regimental freedom, thanking patrons with a merely regimental

difference, sparing you at once the tragedy of his position and the embarrassment of yours. There was not one

hint about him of the beggar's emphasis, the outburst of revolting gratitude, the rant and cant, the "God bless

you, Kind, Kind gentleman," which insults the smallness of your alms by disproportionate vehemence, which

is so notably false, which would be so unbearable if it were true. I am sometimes tempted to suppose this

reading of the beggar's part, a survival of the old days when Shakespeare was intoned upon the stage and

mourners keened beside the deathbed; to think that we cannot now accept these strong emotions unless they

be uttered in the just note of life; nor (save in the pulpit) endure these gross conventions. They wound us, I

am tempted to say, like mockery; the high voice of keening (as it yet lingers on) strikes in the face of sorrow

like a buffet; and the rant and cant of the staled beggar stirs in us a shudder of disgust. But the fact disproves

these amateur opinions. The beggar lives by his knowledge of the average man. He knows what he is about

when he bandages his head, and hires and drugs a babe, and poisons life with POOR MARY ANN or LONG,

LONG AGO; he knows what he is about when he loads the critical ear and sickens the nice conscience with

intolerable thanks; they know what they are about, he and his crew, when they pervade the slums of cities,

ghastly parodies of suffering, hateful parodies of gratitude. This trade can scarce be called an imposition; it

has been so blown upon with exposures; it flaunts its fraudulence so nakedly. We pay them as we pay those

who show us, in huge exaggeration, the monsters of our drinkingwater; or those who daily predict the fall of

Britain. We pay them for the pain they inflict, pay them, and wince, and hurry on. And truly there is nothing

that can shake the conscience like a beggar's thanks; and that polity in which such protestations can be

Are there, then, we may be asked, no genuine beggars? And the answer is, Not one. My old soldier was a

humbug like the rest; his ragged boots were, in the stage phrase, properties; whole boots were given him

again and again, and always gladly accepted; and the next day, there he was on the road as usual, with toes

exposed. His boots were his method; they were the man's trade; without his boots he would have starved; he

did not live by charity, but by appealing to a gross taste in the public, which loves the limelight on the actor's

face, and the toes out of the beggar's boots. There is a true poverty, which no one sees: a false and merely

mimetic poverty, which usurps its place and dress, and lives and above all drinks, on the fruits of the

usurpation. The true poverty does not go into the streets; the banker may rest assured, he has never put a

penny in its hand. The selfrespecting poor beg from each other; never from the rich. To live in the

frockcoated ranks of life, to hear canting scenes of gratitude rehearsed for twopence, a man might suppose

that giving was a thing gone out of fashion; yet it goes forward on a scale so great as to fill me with surprise.

In the houses of the working class, all day long there will be a foot upon the stair; all day long there will be a

knocking at the doors; beggars come, beggars go, without stint, hardly with intermission, from morning till

night; and meanwhile, in the same city and but a few streets off, the castles of the rich stand unsummoned.

Get the tale of any honest tramp, you will find it was always the poor who helped him; get the truth from any

workman who has met misfortunes, it was always next door that he would go for help, or only with such

exceptions as are said to prove a rule; look at the course of the mimetic beggar, it is through the poor quarters

that he trails his passage, showing his bandages to every window, piercing even to the attics with his nasal

song. Here is a remarkable state of things in our Christian commonwealths, that the poor only should be

There is a pleasant tale of some worthless, phrasing Frenchman, who was taxed with ingratitude: "IL FAUT

SAVOIR GARDER L'INDEPENDANCE DU COEUR," cried he. I own I feel with him. Gratitude without

familarity, gratitude otherwise than as a nameless element in a friendship, is a thing so near to hatred that I do

not care to split the difference. Until I find a man who is pleased to receive obligations, I shall continue to

question the tact of those who are eager to confer them. What an art it is, to give, even to our nearest friends!

and what a test of manners, to receive! How, upon either side, we smuggle away the obligation, blushing for

each other; how bluff and dull we make the giver; how hasty, how falsely cheerful, the receiver! And yet an

act of such difficulty and distress between near friends, it is supposed we can perform to a total stranger and

leave the man transfixed with grateful emotions. The last thing you can do to a man is to burthen him with an

obligation, and it is what we propose to begin with! But let us not be deceived: unless he is totally degraded

to his trade, anger jars in his inside, and he grates his teeth at our gratuity.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of

friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. We are all too proud

to take a naked gift: we must seem to pay it, if in nothing else, then with the delights of our society. Here,

then, is the pitiful fix of the rich man; here is that needle's eye in which he stuck already in the days of Christ,

and still sticks today, firmer, if possible, than ever: that he has the money and lacks the love which should

make his money acceptable. Here and now, just as of old in Palestine, he has the rich to dinner, it is with the

rich that he takes his pleasure: and when his turn comes to be charitable, he looks in vain for a recipient. His

friends are not poor, they do not want; the poor are not his friends, they will not take. To whom is he to give?

Where to find note this phase the Deserving Poor? Charity is (what they call) centralised; offices are

hired; societies founded, with secretaries paid or unpaid: the hunt of the Deserving Poor goes merrily

forward. I think it will take more than a merely human secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that

is to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to receive from strangers; and to be quite

respectable, and at the same time quite devoid of selfrespect; and play the most delicate part of friendship,

and yet never be seen; and wear the form of man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature:

and all this, in the hope of getting a bellygod Burgess through a needle's eye! O, let him stick, by all means:

and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to

form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of

dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the

And yet there is one course which the unfortunate gentleman may take. He may subscribe to pay the taxes.

There were the true charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all. There

were a destination for loveless gifts; there were the way to reach the pocket of the deserving poor, and yet

save the time of secretaries! But, alas! there is no colour of romance in such a course; and people nowhere

WITH the agreeable frankness of youth, you address me on a point of some practical importance to yourself

and (it is even conceivable) of some gravity to the world: Should you or should you not become an artist? It

is one which you must decide entirely for yourself; all that I can do is to bring under your notice some of the

materials of that decision; and I will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by assuring you that all depends

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The

essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life. These

two unknowns the young man brings together again and again, now in the airiest touch, now with a bitter

hug; now with exquisite pleasure, now with cutting pain; but never with indifference, to which he is a total

stranger, and never with that near kinsman of indifference, contentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses or a

brain easily heated, the interest of this series of experiments grows upon him out of all proportion to the

pleasure he receives. It is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that he seeks, though he may think so; his

design and his sufficient reward is to verify his own existence and taste the variety of human fate. To him,

before the razoredge of curiosity is dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot chase of experience wears

a face of a disgusting dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if there be any exception and here destiny

steps in it is in those moments when, wearied or surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, he calls up

before memory the image of transacted pains and pleasures. Thus it is that such an one shies from all

cutanddry professions, and inclines insensibly toward that career of art which consists only in the tasting

This, which is not so much a vocation for art as an impatience of all other honest trades, frequently exists

alone; and so existing, it will pass gently away in the course of years. Emphatically, it is not to be regarded; it

is not a vocation, but a temptation; and when your father the other day so fiercely and (in my view) so

properly discouraged your ambition, he was recalling not improbably some similar passage in his own

experience. For the temptation is perhaps nearly as common as the vocation is rare. But again we have

vocations which are imperfect; we have men whose minds are bound up, not so much in any art, as in the

general ARS ARTIUM and common base of all creative work; who will now dip into painting, and now

study counterpoint, and anon will be inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, all often with genuine

knowledge. And of this temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult to speak; but I should counsel such an

one to take to letters, for in literature (which drags with so wide a net) all his information may be found some

day useful, and if he should go on as he has begun, and turn at last into the critic, he will have learned to use

the necessary tools. Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men

who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create

with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or

the turninglathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of

success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all

the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this

inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind to take his

very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest

improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata,

must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT

WORTH DOING? when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly

answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the diningroom sofa,

nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be

If you recognise in yourself some such decisive taste, there is no room for hesitation: follow your bent. And

observe (lest I should too much discourage you) that the disposition does not usually burn so brightly at the

first, or rather not so constantly. Habit and practice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows less disgusting,

grows even welcome, in the course of years; a small taste (if it be only genuine) waxes with indulgence into

an exclusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can look back over a fair interval, and see that your chosen art

has a little more than held its own among the thronging interests of youth. Time will do the rest, if devotion

help it; and soon your every thought will be engrossed in that beloved occupation.

But even with devotion, you may remind me, even with unfaltering and delighted industry, many thousand

artists spend their lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: a thousand artists, and never one work of art.

But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of doing anything reasonably well, art among the rest. The

worthless artist would not improbably have been a quite incompetent baker. And the artist, even if he does

not amuse the public, amuses himself; so that there will always be one man the happier for his vigils. This is

the practical side of art: its inexpugnable fortress for the true practitioner. The direct returns the wages of

the trade are small, but the indirect the wages of the life are incalculably great. No other business offers a

man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. The soldier and the explorer have moments of a worthier

excitement, but they are purchased by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that beggar language. In the life

of the artist there need be no hour without its pleasure. I take the author, with whose career I am best

acquainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious material, and that the act of writing is cramped and trying

both to the eyes and the temper; but remark him in his study, when matter crowds upon him and words are

not wanting in what a continual series of small successes time flows by; with what a sense of power as of

one moving mountains, he marshals his petty characters; with what pleasures, both of the ear and eye, he sees

his airy structure growing on the page; and how he labours in a craft to which the whole material of his life is

tributary, and which opens a door to all his tastes, his loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that what he

writes is only what he longed to utter. He may have enjoyed many things in this big, tragic playground of the

world; but what shall he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the

wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable.

Nor will the practice of art afford you pleasure only; it affords besides an admirable training. For the artist

works entirely upon honour. The public knows little or nothing of those merits in the quest of which you are

condemned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. Merits of design, the merit of firsthand energy, the merit

of a certain cheap accomplishment which a man of the artistic temper easily acquires these they can

recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the

artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a

miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects the gross mass of the

public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may

possibly do justice; suppose, as is so probable, you fall by even a hair's breadth of the highest, rest certain

they shall never be observed. Under the shadow of this cold thought, alone in his studio, the artist must

preserve from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It is this which makes his life noble; it is by this that the

practice of his craft strengthens and matures his character; it is for this that even the serious countenance of

the great emperor was turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on the followers of Apollo, and that sternly

And here there fall two warnings to be made. First, if you are to continue to be a law to yourself, you must

beware of the first signs of laziness. This idealism in honesty can only be supported by perpetual effort; the

standard is easily lowered, the artist who says "IT WILL DO," is on the downward path; three or four pot

boilers are enough at times (above all at wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the practice of journalism a

man runs the risk of becoming wedded to cheap finish. This is the danger on the one side; there is not less

upon the other. The consciousness of how much the artist is (and must be) a law to himself, debauches the

small heads. Perceiving recondite merits very hard to attain, making or swallowing artistic formulae, or

perhaps falling in love with some particular proficiency of his own, many artists forget the end of all art: to

please. It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be forgotten, it is

he who is to pay us, and that (surely on the face of it) for services that he shall desire to have performed. Here

also, if properly considered, there is a question of transcendental honesty. To give the public what they do not

want, and yet expect to be supported: we have there a strange pretension, and yet not uncommon, above all

with painters. The first duty in this world is for a man to pay his way; when that is quite accomplished, he

may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but emphatically not till then. Till then, he must pay assiduous

court to the bourgeois who carries the purse. And if in the course of these capitulations he shall falsify his

talent, it can never have been a strong one, and he will have preserved a better thing than talent character.

Or if he be of a mind so independent that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one course is yet open: he can

I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a point on which I must be frank. To live by a pleasure is not a high

calling; it involves patronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, however ambitious, along with dancing

girls and billiard markers. The French have a romantic evasion for one employment, and call its practitioners

the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please

himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man.

Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was blamed for

condescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet

was more happily inspired; with a better modesty he accepted the honour; and anonymous journalists have

not yet (if I am to believe them) recovered the vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it comes to their

turn, these gentlemen can do themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to think of it; for to my barbarian

eyesight, even Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in that assembly. There should be no honours for

the artist; he has already, in the practice of his art, more than his share of the rewards of life; the honours are

But the devil in these trades of pleasing is to fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a man offers to do a

certain thing or to produce a certain article with a merely conventional accomplishment, a design in which

(we may almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist steps forth out of the crowd and proposes to delight:

an impudent design, in which it is impossible to fail without odious circumstances. The poor Daughter of Joy,

carrying her smiles and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, makes a figure which it is impossible to

recall without a wounding pity. She is the type of the unsuccessful artist. The actor, the dancer, and the singer

must appear like her in person, and drain publicly the cup of failure. But though the rest of us escape this

crowning bitterness of the pillory, we all court in essence the same humiliation. We all profess to be able to

delight. And how few of us are! We all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to delight. And the day will

come to each, and even to the most admired, when the ardour shall have declined and the cunning shall be

lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth ashamed. Then shall he see himself condemned to do work for

which he blushes to take payment. Then (as if his lot were not already cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes

of the wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter bread by the condemnation of trash which they have not

And observe that this seems almost the necessary end at least of writers. LES BLANCS ET LES BLEUS (for

instance) is of an order of merit very different from LE VICOMTE DE BRAGLONNE; and if any gentleman

can bear to spy upon the nakedness of CASTLE DANGEROUS, his name I think is Ham: let it be enough for

the rest of us to read of it (not without tears) in the pages of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupation and

comfort are most needful, the writer must lay aside at once his pastime and his breadwinner. The painter

indeed, if he succeed at all in engaging the attention of the public, gains great sums and can stand to his easel

until a great age without dishonourable failure. The writer has the double misfortune to be illpaid while he

can work, and to be incapable of working when he is old. It is thus a way of life which conducts directly to a

For the writer (in spite of notorious examples to the contrary) must look to be illpaid. Tennyson and

Montepin make handsome livelihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tennyson, and we do not all perhaps

desire to be Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of

money. What you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a

clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right to look for

more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages. It

will be seen I have little sympathy with the common lamentations of the artist class. Perhaps they do not

remember the hire of the field labourer; or do they think no parallel will lie? Perhaps they have never

observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of

pleasing more important than the services of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little Millet was content

to live; or do they think, because they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal virtues?

But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he be

not frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX SALTIMBANQUE; if he be not frugal,

he will find it hard to continue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door, he may be

tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly piece of work. If the obligation shall have arisen

through no wantonness of his own, he is even to be commanded; for words cannot describe how far more

necessary it is that a man should support his family, than that he should attain to or preserve distinction in

the arts. But if the pressure comes, through his own fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and stolen

And now you may perhaps ask me, if the debutant artist is to have no thought of money, and if (as is implied)

he is to expect no honours from the State, he may not at least look forward to the delights of popularity?

Praise, you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so far as you may mean the countenance of other artists you

would put your finger on one of the most essential and enduring pleasures of the career of art. But in so far as

you should have an eye to the commendations of the public or the notice of the newspapers, be sure you

would but be cherishing a dream. It is true that in certain esoteric journals the author (for instance) is duly

criticised, and that he is often praised a great deal more than he deserves, sometimes for qualities which he

prided himself on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies and gentlemen who have denied themselves the

privilege of reading his work. But if a man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must suppose him equally alive

to that which often accompanies and always follows it wild ridicule. A man may have done well for years,

and then he may fail; he will hear of his failure. Or he may have done well for years, and still do well, but the

critics may have tired of praising him, or there may have sprung up some new idol of the instant, some "dust

a little gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacrifice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of that empty and

We look for some reward of our endeavours and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace

of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the

battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun. The canting moralist tells us of right and wrong; and

we look abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with every climate, and no country

where some action is not honoured for a virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our

experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the best a municipal fitness. It is not strange

if we are tempted to despair of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed to

flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher

strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than

the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things and all of them appalling. There seems

no substance to this solid globe on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios carry

us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity that swings the incommensurable suns and worlds through

space, is but a figment varying inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds themselves,

imponderable figures of abstraction, NH3, and H2O. Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way

madness lies; science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no habitable city for the mind of

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We behold space sown with rotatory

islands, suns and worlds and the shards and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,

like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of these we take to be made of something we

call matter: a thing which no analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no familiarity

can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something

we call life; seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in tumours that become

independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions

cohering into one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital putrescence of the dust, used as

we are to it, yet strikes us with occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient turf, or

the air of a marsh darkened with insects, will sometimes check our breathing so that we aspire for cleaner

places. But none is clean: the moving sand is infected with lice; the pure spring, where it bursts out of the

mountain, is a mere issue of worms; even in the hard rock the crystal is forming.

In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in

some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal

mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds:

a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored

vermin, we have little clue, doubtless they have their joys and sorrows, their delights and killing agonies: it

appears not how. But of the locomotory, to which we ourselves belong, we can tell more. These share with us

a thousand miracles: the miracles of sight, of hearing, of the projection of sound, things that bridge space; the

miracles of memory and reason, by which the present is conceived, and when it is gone, its image kept living

in the brains of man and brute; the miracle of reproduction, with its imperious desires and staggering

consequences. And to put the last touch upon this mountain mass of the revolting and the inconceivable, all

these prey upon each other, lives tearing other lives in pieces, cramming them inside themselves, and by that

summary process, growing fat: the vegetarian, the whale, perhaps the tree, not less than the lion of the desert;

Meanwhile our rotatory island loaded with predatory life, and more drenched with blood, both animal and

vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying

drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with

hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming; and yet

looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so

little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely

surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have

blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold

him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind;

sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up

to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing

forth in pain, rearing with longsuffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find, in

him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to

himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit

of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is one of conformity; here

and there, in picked natures, it transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with

independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought: Not in man alone, for we trace it in dogs

and cats whom we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the

oyster, and the louse, of whom we know so little: But in man, at least, it sways with so complete an empire

that merely selfish things come second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are conquered,

pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all

but the most cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having strongly conceived an act as

due to their ideal, affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted

practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the

contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded

what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly

violence and treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly

drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry,

how tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it both touching

and inspiriting, that in a field from which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on

this nearer sight, he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look, under what climate we

observe him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality;

by campfires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits,

passing the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man

inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened trull who sells

herself to rob him, and he for all that simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to

drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent millions to mechanical employments,

without hope of change in the future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his virtues, honest

up to his lights, kind to his neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright ginpalace, perhaps

longsuffering with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time) kneeling with broken cries

and streaming tears, as she drowns her child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society, living

mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the

point of honour and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon

a scruple, and at a certain cost, rejecting riches: everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere

some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness: ah! if I could

show you this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over, in every stage of history, under

every abuse of error, under every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without thanks, still

obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of

honour, the poor jewel of their souls! They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their

privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some nobility; all their lives long, the desire of

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this

haircrowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare

delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with

man. A new doctrine, received with screams a little while ago by canting moralists, and still not properly

worked into the body of our thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but noble universe.

For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a

thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genus: and in him too, we see dumbly

testified the same cultus of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We

look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in

the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his

ordered politics and rigorous justice, we see confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it

stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of welldoing and this doom of frailty run through all the grades of

life: rather is this earth, from the frosty top of Everest to the next margin of the internal fire, one stage of

ineffectual virtues and one temple of pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth and

travaileth together. It is the common and the godlike law of life. The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the

hairy coats of field and forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousandfooted creeper in the dust, as they share

with us the gift of life, share with us the love of an ideal: strive like us like us are tempted to grow weary of

the struggle to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment, visitings of support, returns of

courage; and are condemned like us to be crucified between that double law of the members and the will. Are

they like us, I wonder, in the timid hope of some reward, some sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast

at unrewarded virtues, at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be just, and the prosperity

of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked? It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even

while they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by thousands in the dust, the yelping

hounds burst upon their trail, the bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the vivisectionist; or the

dew falls, and the generation of a day is blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror and under the imminent hand of death, God forbid it

should be man the erected, the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes God forbid it should be man that wearies

in welldoing, that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for

faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: Surely not all in

BY the time this paper appears, I shall have been talking for twelve months; and it is thought I should take

my leave in a formal and seasonable manner. Valedictory eloquence is rare, and death bed sayings have not

often hit the mark of the occasion. Charles Second, wit and sceptic, a man whose life had been one long

lesson in human incredulity, an easygoing comrade, a manoeuvring king remembered and embodied all

his wit and scepticism along with more than his usual good humour in the famous "I am afraid, gentlemen, I

An unconscionable time adying there is the picture ("I am afraid, gentlemen,") of your life and of mine.

The sands run out, and the hours are "numbered and imputed," and the days go by; and when the last of these

finds us, we have been a long time dying, and what else? The very length is something, if we reach that hour

of separation undishonoured; and to have lived at all is doubtless (in the soldierly expression) to have served.

There is a tale in Ticitus of how the veterans mutinied in the German wilderness; of how they mobbed

Germanicus, clamouing go home; and of how, seizing their general's hand, these old, warworn exiles passed

his finger along their toothless gums. SUNT LACRYMAE RERUM: this was the most eloquent of the songs

of Simeon. And when a man has lived to a fair age, he bears his marks of service. He may have never been

remarked upon the breach at the head of the army; at least he shall have lost his teeth on the camp bread.

The idealism of serious people in this age of ours is of a noble character. It never seems to them that they

have served enough; they have a fine impatience of their virtues. It were perhaps more modest to be singly

thankful that we are no worse. It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters it is we ourselves who

know not what we do, thence springs the glimmering hope that perhaps we do better than we think: that to

scramble through this random business with hands reasonably clean to have played the part of a man or

woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it,

is for the poor human soldier to have done right well. To ask to see some fruit of our endeavour is but a

transcendental way of serving for reward; and what we take to be contempt of self is only greed of hire.

And again if we require so much of ourselves, shall we not require much of others? If we do not genially

judge our own deficiencies, is it not to be feared we shall be even stern to the trespasses of others? And he

who (looking back upon his own life) can see no more than that he has been unconscionably long adying,

will he not be tempted to think his neighbour unconscionably long of getting hanged? It is probable that

nearly all who think of conduct at all, think of it too much; it is certain we all think too much of sin. We are

not damned for doing wrong, but for not doing right; Christ would never hear of negative morality; THOU

SHALT was ever his word, with which he superseded THOU SHALT NOT. To make our idea of morality

centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellowmen a

secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell upon the thought of it; or we shall

soon dwell upon it with inverted pleasure. If we cannot drive it from our minds one thing of two: either our

creed is in the wrong and we must more indulgently remodel it; or else, if our morality be in the right, we are

criminal lunatics and should place our persons in restraint. A mark of such unwholesomely divided minds is

the passion for interference with others: the Fox without the Tail was of this breed, but had (if his biographer

is to be trusted) a certain antique civility now out of date. A man may have a flaw, a weakness, that unfits him

for the duties of life, that spoils his temper, that threatens his integrity, or that betrays him into cruelty. It has

to be conquered; but it must never he suffered to engross his thoughts. The true duties lie all upon the farther

side, and must be attended to with a whole mind so soon as this preliminary clearing of the decks has been

effected. In order that he may be kind and honest, it may be needful he should become a total abstainer; let

him become so then, and the next day let him forget the circumstance. Trying to be kind and honest will

require all his thoughts; a mortified appetite is never a wise companion; in so far as he has had to mortify an

appetite, he will still be the worse man; and of such an one a great deal of cheerfulness will be required in

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We

require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and honest

seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather set

ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut

off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to coendure with our existence, is rather

one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian

To be honest, to be kind to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier

for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but

these without capitulation above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself here is a

task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a

hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human

destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to

succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of

living well. Here is a pleasant thought for the year's end or for the end of life. Only selfdeception will be

But Christmas is not only the milemark of another year, moving us to thoughts of selfexamination: it is a

season, from all its associations, whether domestic or religious, suggesting thoughts of joy. A man

dissatisfied with his endeavours is a man tempted to sadness. And in the midst of the winter, when his life

runs lowest and he is reminded of the empty chairs of his beloved, it is well he should be condemned to this

fashion of the smiling face. Noble disappointment, noble selfdenial, are not to be admired, not even to be

pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim

yourself and stay without. And the kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please,

who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have

lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and

twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if WE should lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come

before all morality; they are the perfect duties. And it is the trouble with moral men that they have neither one

nor other. It was the moral man, the Pharisee, whom Christ could not away with. If your morals make you

dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal

them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

A strange temptation attends upon man: to keep his eye on pleasures, even when he will not share in them; to

aim all his morals against them. This very year a lady (singular iconoclast!) proclaimed a crusade against

dolls; and the racy sermon against lust is a feature of the age. I venture to call such moralists insincere. At any

excess or perversion of a natural appetite, their lyre sounds of itself with relishing denunciations; but for all

displays of the truly diabolic envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the

backbiter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life their standard is quite different. These are

wrong, they will admit, yet somehow not so wrong; there is no zeal in their assault on them, no secret

element of gusto warms up the sermon; it is for things not wrong in themselves that they reserve the choicest

of their indignation. A man may naturally disclaim all moral kinship with the Reverend Mr. Zola or the

hobgoblin old lady of the dolls; for these are gross and naked instances. And yet in each of us some similar

element resides. The sight of a pleasure in which we cannot or else will not share moves us to a particular

impatience. It may be because we are envious, or because we are sad, or because we dislike noise and

romping being so refined, or because being so philosophic we have an overweighing sense of life's

gravity: at least, as we go on in years, we are all tempted to frown upon our neighbour's pleasures. People are

nowadays so fond of resisting temptations; here is one to be resisted. They are fond of selfdenial; here is a

propensity that cannot be too peremptorily denied. There is an idea abroad among moral people that they

should make their neighbours good. One person I have to make good: myself. But my duty to my neighbour

Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was

never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our

constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion

with unusual keenness, and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very

sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to

help us. It is not even its own reward, except for the selfcentred and I had almost said the unamiable. No

man can pacify his conscience; if quiet be what he want, he shall do better to let that organ perish from

disuse. And to avoid the penalties of the law, and the minor CAPITIS DIMINUTIO of social ostracism, is an

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on

duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not

ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or

other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others. And no doubt there comes

in here a frequent clash of duties. How far is he to make his neighbour happy? How far must he respect that

smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to brighten again? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be his

brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far must he resent evil?

The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on the point being hard to reconcile with each

other, and (the most of them) hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this: in our own

person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is OUR cheek we are to turn, OUR coat

that we are to give away to the man who has taken OUR cloak. But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a

little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not

conceivable and surely not desirable. Revenge, says Bacon, is a kind of wild justice; its judgments at least are

delivered by an insane judge; and in our own quarrel we can see nothing truly and do nothing wisely. But in

the quarrel of our neighbour, let us be more bold. One person's happiness is as sacred as another's; when we

cannot defend both, let us defend one with a stout heart. It is only in so far as we are doing this, that we have

any right to interfere: the defence of B is our only ground of action against A. A has as good a right to go to

The truth is that all these interventions and denunciations and militant mongerings of moral halftruths,

though they be sometimes needful, though they are often enjoyable, do yet belong to an inferior grade of

duties. Illtemper and envy and revenge find here an arsenal of pious disguises; this is the playground of

inverted lusts. With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found

in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrelscene in private life, or, in public

affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices, might yet have

To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose; and how often

we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all

day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these

discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his

long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and

pleasures as it is so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinnercall

when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall

through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his

own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there

need be few illusions left about himself. HERE LIES ONE WHO MEANT WELL, TRIED A LITTLE,

FAILED MUCH: surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed. Nor will he complain at

the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field: defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!

but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his

lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of laying

down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out of the glorious suncoloured earth, out of the

From a recent book of verse, where there is more than one such beautiful and manly poem, I take this

memorial piece: it says better than I can, what I love to think; let it be our parting word.

"The smoke ascends In a rosyandgolden haze. The spires Shine, and are changed. In the valley Shadows

rise. The lark sings on. The sun, Closing his benediction, Sinks, and the darkening air Thrills with a sense of

the triumphing night Night, with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.

"So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some

late lark singing, Let me be gathered to the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death."