Harriet Martineau

in Household Words

Harriet Martineau

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The original text is in the Public Domain. All additional material copyright Alex Bell, 2015.

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Contents

About this ebook

The Sickness and Health of the People of Bleaburn

The Home of Woodruffe the Gardener

The Ghost that appeared to Mrs Wharton

The Marsh Fog and the Sea Breeze

A New Plea for a New Food

A Real Sister of Charity

The Highest House in Wathendale

The Fortunes of the Reverend Caleb Ellison

Malvern Water

Flower Shows in a Birmingham Hot-house

The Magic Troughs at Birmingham

The Wonders of Nails and Screws

Kendal Weavers and Weaving

The Bobbin Mill at Ambleside

What Christmas is in Country Places

The Miller and His Men

An Account of Some Treatment of Gold and Gems

Rainbow Making

Needles

Time and the Hour

Guns and Pistols

Birmingham Glassworks

The New School for Wives

What there is in a Button

Tubal-cain

The Forbidden Land

Household Scenery

News of an Old Place

Shawls

The Life of a Salmon

Peatal Aggression

The English Passport System

Triumphant Carriages

Hope with a Slate Anchor

The Irish Union

The Famine Time

Butter

The Deaf Playmate’s Story

Mr Wiseman in Print

Deaf Mutes

Idiots Again

Three Graces of Christian Science

Blindness

Freedom, or Slavery?

Cheshire Cheese

How to get Paper

Colophon

About this ebook

Harriet Martineau was born in 1802, the sixth of eight children, to a Unitarian family of Huguenot background. Despite being deaf for most of her life she was a prolific author and traveller, an abolitionist, feminist, and sociologist, and one of the first woman journalists. After her father’s death in 1829 she became the main financial support for her mother and sisters, and became well known. Her clear and simple style and her ability to explain complicated issues and to present her ideas in the form of stories gave her a wide readership, and made her wealthy. She was incapacitated by illness from 1839-44, and again from 1855 when she wrote her Autobiography – though it was not published until after her death in 1876.

At the end of March 1850 Charles Dickens started Household Words, a weekly journal which contained both fiction and non-fiction. Much of the content dealt with the social issues of the time. This ebook contains the 46 contributions Harriet Martineau made to Houshold Words from May 1850 to October 1854. A few are fiction, and others are about ‘manufactories,’ Ireland, politics, or social issues – sometimes with satire or fantasy or parody.

The source material was the text files from the Dickens Journals Online site, checked against the images of the original pages. I have silently corrected typos and inconsistencies, simplified punctuation, made changes to spelling and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com, collected footnotes and annotations as end notes, italicised book names, and used modern geographic names. In the 19th century ‘receipt’ meant ‘recipe’, and I have silently changed the words.

The cover was adapted from an image provided by the National Portrait Gallery, and the author’s image was adapted from an image provided by the HistorysHeroes site.

The Sickness and Health

of the People of Bleaburn

In three parts

Household Words, Volume 1,

pages 193, 230, 256

Part 1

Chapter 1

It was not often that anything happened to enliven the village of Bleaburn, in Yorkshire: but there was a day in the summer of 1811, when the inhabitants were roused from their apathy, and hardly knew themselves. A stranger was once heard to say, after some accident had compelled him to pass through Bleaburn, that he saw nothing there but a blacksmith asleep, and a couple of rabbits hung up by the heels. That the blacksmith was wholly asleep at midday might indicate that there was a public house in the place; but, even there, in that liveliest and most intellectual spot in a country village of those days, – the alehouse kitchen – the people sat half asleep. Sodden with beer, and almost without ideas and interests, the men of the place let indolence creep over them; and there they sat, as quiet a set of customers as ever landlord had to deal with. For one thing, they were almost all old or elderly men. The boys were out after the rabbits on the neighbouring moor; and the young men were far away. A recruiting party had met with unusual success, for two successive years – (now some time since) – in inducing the men of Bleaburn to enter the king’s service. In a place where nobody was very wise, and everybody was very dull, the drum and fife, the soldierly march, the scarlet coats, the gay ribbons, the drink and the pay, had charms which can hardly be conceived of by dwellers in towns, to whose eyes and ears something new is presented every day. Several men went from Bleaburn to be soldiers, and Bleaburn was declared to be a loyal place; and many who had never before heard of its existence, spoke of it now as a bright example of attachment and devotion to the throne in a most disloyal age. While throughout the manufacturing districts, the people were breaking machinery – while on these very Yorkshire hills they were drilling their armed forces – while the moneyed men were grumbling at the taxes, and at the war in Spain, whence, for a long time, they had heard of many disasters and no victories; and while the hungry labourers in town and country were asking how they were to buy bread when wheat was selling at 95s. the quarter, and while there were grave apprehensions of night-burnings of the corn magazines, the village of Bleaburn, which could not be seen without being expressly sought, was sending up strong men out of its cleft of the hills, to fight the battles of their country.

Perhaps the chief reason of the loyalty, as well as the quietness of Bleaburn, was its lying in a cleft of the hills; in a fissure so deep and narrow, that a traveller in a chaise might easily pass near it without perceiving that there was any settlement at all, unless it was in the morning when the people were lighting their fires, or on the night of such a day as that on which our story opens. In the one case, the smoke issuing from the cleft might hint of habitations: in the other, the noise and ruddy light would leave no doubt of there being somebody there. There was, at last, a victory in Spain. The news of the battle of Albuera had arrived; and it spread abroad over the kingdom, lighting up bonfires in the streets, and millions of candles in windows, before people had time to learn at what cost this victory was obtained, and how very nearly it had been a fatal defeat, or anything about it, in short. If they had known the fact that while our allies, the Spaniards, Portuguese, and Germans, suffered but moderately, the British were slaughtered as horribly as they could have been under defeat: so that, out of six thousand men who went up the hill, only fifteen hundred were left standing at the top, the people might have let their bonfires burn out as soon as they would, and might have put out their candles that mourners might weep in darkness. But they burst into rejoicing first, and learned details afterwards.

Every boy in Bleaburn forgot the rabbits that day. All were busy getting in wood for the bonfire. Not a swinging shutter, not a loose pale, not a bit of plank, or ricketty gate, or shaking footbridge escaped their clutches. Where they hid their stock during the day, nobody knew; but there was a mighty pile at dusk. It was then that poor Widow Slaney, stealing out to close her shutter, because she could not bear the sound of rejoicing, nor the sight of her neighbours abroad in the ruddy light, found that her shutter was gone. All day, she had been in the loft, lest she should see anybody; for the clergyman had been to tell her that her son Harry had been shot as a deserter. She had refused to believe it at first; but Mr Finch had explained to her that the soldiers in Spain had suffered so cruelly from hunger, and want of shoes and of every comfort, that hundreds of them had gone into the towns to avoid starvation; and then, when the towns were taken by the allies, such British soldiers as were found, and were declared to have no business there, were treated as deserters, for an example. It was some comfort that Mr Finch did not think that Harry had done any thing very wicked; but Mrs Slaney could not meet any one, nor bear the flaring light on her ceiling; so she went up to the loft again, and cried all night in the dark. Farmer Neale was the wonder of the place this evening. He was more gracious than anybody, though there was nobody who was not, at all times, afraid of him. When he was seen striding down the steep narrow street, the little boys hid themselves. They had not been able to resist altogether the temptation of dry thorns in his fences, and of the chips which had still lain about where his winter felling had been done, and they concluded he was come now to give them a rough handling: but they found themselves mistaken. He was in high good-humour, sending such boys as he could catch with orders upon his people at home for a tar barrel and a whole load of faggots.

“’Tis hardly natural, though, is it?” said Mrs Billiter to Ann Warrender. “It does not seem natural for any father to rejoice in a victory when his own son has lost his best leg there.”

“Has Jack Neale lost his leg? O! what a thing!” exclaimed Ann Warrender. She was going on, but she perceived that the farmer had heard her.

“Yes,” said he, without any sound of heartpain in his voice. “Jack has lost his right leg, Mr Finch tells me. And I tell Mr Finch, it is almost a pity the other did not go after it. He deserved no more good of either of them when he had let them do such a thing as carry him off from his home and his duty.”

“How can you, Mr Neale?” burst out both the women.

“How can I do what, my dears? One thing I can do; and that is, see when an undutiful son is properly punished. He must live on his pension, however: he can be of no use to me, now; and I can’t be burdened with a cripple at home.”

“I don’t think he will ask you,” Mrs Billiter said. “He was none so happy there before as to want to come again.”

Ann Warrender told this speech to her father afterwards as the severest she had ever heard from Mrs Billiter; and they agreed that it was very bold, considering that Billiter was one of Farmer Neale’s labourers.

But they also agreed that it was enough to stir up flesh and blood to see a man made hearty and good-humoured by misfortune having befallen a son who had offended him. After all, poor Jack Neale had run away only because he could not bear his father’s tyranny. Two more of the Bleaburn recruits had suffered – had been killed outright; one a widower, who, in his first grief, had left his babes with their grandmother, and gone to the wars; and the other, an ignorant lout, who had been entrapped because he was tall and strong; had been fuddled with beer, flattered with talk of finery, and carried off before he could recover his slow wits. He was gone, and would soon be forgotten.

“I say, Jem,” said Farmer Neale, when he met the village idiot, Jem Johnson, shuffling along the street, staring at the lights: “you’re the wise man, after all: you’re the best off, my man.”

Widow Johnson, who was just behind, put her arm in poor Jem’s, and tried to make him move on. She was a stern woman; but she was as much disgusted at Farmer Neale’s hardness as her tender-hearted daughter, Mrs Billiter, or anyone else.

“Good day, Mrs Johnson,” said Neale. “You are better off for a son than I am, after all. Yours is not such a fool as to go and get his leg shot off, like my precious son.”

Mrs Johnson looked him hard in the face, as she would a madman or a drunken man whom she meant to intimidate; and compelled her son to pass on. In truth, Farmer Neale was drunk with evil passions in such high spirits, that, when he found that the women – mothers of sons – would have nothing to say to him today, he went to the public house, where he was pretty sure of being humoured by the men who depended on his employment for bread, and on his temper for much of the peace of their lives.

On his way he met the clergyman, and proposed to him to make a merry evening of it. “If you will just step in at the Plough and Harrow, Sir,” said he, “ and tell us all you have heard about the victory, it will be the finest thing – just what the men want. And we will drink your health, and the King’s, and Marshal Beresford’s, who won the victory. It is a fine occasion, Sir; an occasion to confirm the loyalty of the people. You will come with me, Sir?”

“No,” replied Mr Finch, “I have to go among another sort of people, Neale. If you have spirits to make merry tonight, I own to you I have not. Victories that cost so much, do not make me very merry.”

“Oh, fie, Mr Finch! How are we to keep up our character for loyalty, if you fail us – if you put on a black face in the hour of rejoicing?”

“Just come with me,” said Mr Finch, “and I can show you cause enough for heaviness of heart. In our small village, there is mourning in many houses. Three of our late neighbours are dead, and one of them in such a way as will break his mother’s heart.”

“And another has lost a leg, you are thinking. Out with it, Sir, and don’t be afraid of my feelings about it. Well, it is certain that Bleaburn has suffered more than is the fair share of one place; but we must be loyal.”

“And so,” said Mr Finch, “you are going to prepare more of your neighbours to enlist, the next time a recruiting party comes this way. Oh, I don’t say that men are not to be encouraged to serve their king and country: but it seems to me that our place has done its duty well enough for the present. I wonder that you, as a farmer, do not consider the rates, and dread the consequences of having the women and children on our hands, if our able men get killed and maimed in the wars. I should have thought that the price of bread –”

“There, now, don’t let us talk about that!” said Neale; “You know that is a subject that we never agree about. We will let alone the price of bread for today.”

Neale might easily forget this sore subject, and every other that was disagreeable to other people, in the jollity at the Plough and Harrow, where there was an uproar of tipsy mirth for the greater part of the night. But Mr Finch found little mirth among the people left at home in the cottages. The poor women, who lived hardly, knitting for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and finding themselves less and less able to overtake the advancing prices of the necessaries of life, had no great store of spirits to spend in rejoicing over victories, or anything else; and among them there was one who loved Jack Neale, and was beloved by him; and others, who respected Widow Slaney, and could not countenance noisy mirth while she was sunk in horror and grief. They were hungry enough, too, to look upon young Slaney’s death as something of an outrage. If hunger and nakedness had driven him into the shelter of a town, to avoid dying by the roadside, it seemed to them that being shot was a hard punishment for the offence. Mr Finch endeavoured to show, in hackneyed language, what the dereliction of duty really was, and how intolerable during warfare; but the end of it was that the neighbours pitied the poor young man the more, the more they dwelt upon his fate.

As it turned out, Bleaburn made more sacrifices to the war than those of the Battle of Albuera, even before drum or fife was again heard coming over the moor. The place had not been healthy before; and illness set in somewhat seriously after the excitements of the bonfire night. The cold and wet spring had discouraged the whole kingdom about the harvest; and in Bleaburn it had done something more. Where there are stone houses, high winds aggravate the damage of wet weather. The driven rain had been sucked in by the stone; and more wet was absorbed from the foundations, when the swollen stream had rushed down the hollow, and overflowed into the houses, and the pigsties, and every empty place into which it could run. Where there were glass windows and fires in the rooms, the panes were dewy, and the walls shiny with trickling drops; and in the cottages where there were no fires, the inhabitants were so chilly, that they stuffed up every broken windowpane, and closed all chinks by which air might enter, in hopes of keeping themselves warm; but the floors were never really dry that summer, and even the beds had a chilly feel. The best shoes showed mould between one Sunday and another; and the meal in the bin (of those who were so fortunate as to have a meal-bin) did not keep well. Mr Finch had talked a great deal about what was to be expected from summer weather and the harvest; but as the weeks went on, there were graver doubts about the harvest than there had been even while people were complaining at Easter, and shaking their heads at Whitsuntide; and when a few days of hot weather came at last, the people of Bleaburn did not know how to bear them at all. The dead rats and decaying matter which had been deposited by the spring overflow, made such a stench that people shut their windows closer than ever. Their choice now was between being broiled in the heat which was reflected from the sides of the cleft in which they lived, and being shut into houses where the walls, floors, and windows were reeking with steam. The women, who sat still all day, knitting, had little chance for health in such abodes; and still less had such of the men as, already weakened by low diet, had surfeited themselves with beer on the night of the rejoicing, and broiled themselves in the heat of the bonfire, and fevered mind and body with shouting, and singing, and brawling, and been brought home to be laid upon musty straw, under a somewhat damp blanket. This excess was hardly more pernicious to some than depression was to others. Those of the people at Bleaburn that had received heartwounds from the Battle of Albuera, thought they could never care again for any personal troubles or privations; but they were not long in learning that they now suffered more than before from low diet and every sort of discomfort. They blamed themselves for being selfish; but this self-blame again made the matter worse. They had lost a hope which had kept them up. They were not only in grief, but thoroughly discouraged. Their gloom was increased by seeing that a change had come over Mr Finch. On Sundays he looked so anxious, that it was enough to lower people’s spirits to go to church. His very voice was dismal, as he read the service; his sermon grew shorter almost every Sunday: and it was about everything that the people cared least about. He gave them discussions of doctrine, or dry moral essays, which were as stones to them when they wanted the bread of consolation and the wine of hope. Here and there, women said it really was too much for their spirits to go to church, and they stayed away; and the boys and girls took the opportunity to go spying upon the rabbits. It was such boys and girls that gave news of Mr Finch during the week. Every morning, he was so busy over his books in his study, that it was no easy matter to get a sight of him; and every fine afternoon he went quietly, by a bypath,to a certain spot on the moor, where an ostler from the Cross Keys at O— was awaiting him with the horse on which he took long rides over the hills. Mr Finch was taking care of his health.

Chapter 2

“Can I have a chaise?” inquired a young lady, on being set down by the coach at the Cross Keys, at O—

“Yes, ma’am, certainly,” replied the neat landlady.

“How far do you call it to Bleaburn?”

“To Bleaburn, ma’am! It is six miles. But, ma’am, you are not going to Bleaburn, surely.”

“Indeed I am. Why not?”

“Because of the fever, ma’am. There never was anything heard of like it. You cannot go there, I assure you, ma’am, and I could not think of sending a chaise there. Neither of my postboys would go.”

“One of them shall take me as near as is safe, then. I dare say we shall find somebody who will take care of my little trunk till I can send for it.”

“The cordon would take care of your trunk, if that were all, but –“

“The what?” interrupted the young lady.

“The cordon, they call it, ma’am. To preserve ourselves, we have set people to watch on the moor above, to prevent anybody from Bleaburn coming among us, to spread the fever. Ma’am, it is worse than anything you ever heard of.”

“Not worse than the plague,” thought Mary Pickard, in whose mind now rose up all she had read and heard of the horrors of the great plague, and all the longing she had felt when a child to have been a clergyman at such a time, or at least, a physician, to give comfort to numbers in their extremity.

“Indeed, ma’am,” resumed the landlady, “you cannot go there. By what I hear, there are very few now that are not dead, or down in the fever.”

“Then they will want me the more,” said Mary Pickard. “I must go and see my aunt. I wrote to her that I should go; and she may want me more than I thought.”

“Have you an aunt living at Bleaburn?” asked the landlady, in some surprise. “I did not know that there was any lady living at Bleaburn. I thought they had been all poor people there.”

“I believe my aunt is poor,” said Mary. “I have heard nothing of her for several years, except merely that she was living at Bleaburn. She had the education of a gentlewoman; but I believe her husband became a common labourer before he died. I am from America, and my name is Mary Pickard, and my aunt’s name is Johnson; and I shall be glad if you can tell me anything about her, if this fever is really raging as you say. I must see her before I go home to America.”

“You see, ma’am, if you go,” said the landlady, contemplating the little trunk, “you will not be able to come away again while the fever lasts.”

“And you think I shall not have clothes enough,” said Mary, smiling. “I packed my box for a week only, but I dare say I can manage. If everybody was ill, I could wash my clothes myself. I have done such a thing with less reason. Or, I could send to London for more. I suppose one can get at a post office.”

“Through the cordon, I dare say you might, ma’am. But, really, I don’t know that there is anybody at Bleaburn that can write a letter, except the clergyman and the doctor and one or two more.”

“My aunt can,” said Mary, “and it is because she does not answer our letters, that I am so anxious to see her. You did not tell me whether you know her name, – Johnson.”

“A widow, I think you said, ma’am.” And the landlady called to the ostler to ask him if he knew anything of a Widow Johnson, who lived at Bleaburn. Will Ostler said there was a woman of that name who was the mother of Silly Jem. “Might that be she?” Mary had never heard of Silly Jem; but when she found that Widow Johnson had a daughter, some years married, that she had white hair, and strong black eyes, and a strong face altogether, and that she seldom spoke, she had little doubt that one so like certain of her relations was her aunt. The end of it was that Mary went to Bleaburn. She ordered the chaise herself, leaving it to the landlady to direct the postboy where to set her down; she appealed to the woman’s good feelings to aid her if she should find that wine, linen or other comforts were necessary at Bleaburn, and she could not be allowed to come and buy them: explained that she was far from rich, and told the exact sum which she at present believed she should be justified in spending on behalf of the sick; and gave a reference to a commercial house in London. She did not tell – and indeed she gave only a momentary thought to it herself – that the sum of money she had mentioned was that which she had saved up to take her to Scotland, to see some friends of her family, and travel through the Highlands. As she was driven off from the gateway of the Cross Keys, nodding and smiling from the chaise window in turning the corner, the landlady ceased from beyond the brow, and said to herself that this Miss Pickard was the most wilful young lady she had ever known, but that she could not help liking her, too. She did not seem to value her life any more than a pin; and yet she appeared altogether cheerful and sensible. If the good woman had been able to see into Mary’s heart, she would have discovered that she had the best reason in the world for valuing life very much indeed: but she had been so accustomed, all her life, to help everybody that needed it, that she naturally went straight forward into the business, without looking at difficulties or dangers, on the right hand or the left.

Mary never, while she lived, forgot this drive. Her tone of mind was, no doubt, high, though she was unconscious of it. It was a splendid August evening, and she had never before seen moorland. In America, she had travelled among noble inland forests, and a hard granite region near the coasts of New England: but the wide-spreading brown and green moorland, with its pools of clear brown water glittering in the evening sunshine, and its black cocks popping out of the heather, and running into the hollows, was quite new to her. She looked down, two or three times, into a wooded dell where grey cottages were scattered among the coppices, and a little church tower rose above them; but the swelling ridges of the moor, with the tarns between, immediately attracted her eye again.

“Surely,” thought she, “the cordon will let me walk on the moor in the afternoons, if I go where I cannot infect any body. With a walk in such places as these every day, I am sure I could go through anything.”

This seemed very rational beforehand. It never entered Mary’s head that for a long while to come, she should never once have leisure for a walk.

“Yon’s the cordon,” said the postboy, at last, pointing with his whip.

“What do you understand by a cordon?”

“Them people that you may see there. I don’t know why they call them so; for I don’t hear that they do anything with a cord.”

“Perhaps it is because there is a French word – cordon – that means any thing that encloses any other thing. They would call your hat band a cordon, and an officer’s sash, and a belt of trees round a park. So, I suppose these people surround poor Bleaburn and let nobody out.”

“May be so,” said the man, “but I don’t see why we should go to the French for our words or anything else, when we have everything better of our own. For my part, I shall be beholden to the French for no word, now I know of it. I shall call them people the watch, or something of that like.”

“I think I will call them messengers,” said Mary: “and that will sound least terrible to the people below. They do go on errands, do not they, – and take and send parcels and messages?”

“They are paid to do it, Miss: but they put it upon one another, or get out of the way, if they can, – they are so afraid of the fever, you see – I think we must stop here, please, Miss. I could go a little nearer, only, you see –”

“I see that you are afraid of the fever too,” said Mary, with a smile, as she jumped out upon the grass. One of the sentinels was within hail. Glad of the relief from the dullness of his watch, he came with alacrity, took charge of the little trunk, and offered to show the lady, from the brow, the way down the hollow to the village.

The postboy stood, with his money in his hand, watching the retreating lady, till, under a sudden impulse, he hailed her. Looking round, she saw him running towards her, casting a momentary glance back at his horses. He wanted to try once more to persuade her to return to O— He should be so happy to drive her back, out of the way of danger. His employer would be so glad to see her again! When he perceived that it was no use talking, he went on touching his hat, while he begged her to take back the shilling she had just given him. It would make his mind easier, he said, not to take money for bringing any lady to such a place. Mary saw that this was true; and she took back the shilling, promising that it should be spent in the service of some poor sick person.

As Mary descended into the hollow, she was struck with the quiet beauty of the scene. The last sun-blaze rushed level along the upper part of the cleft, while the lower part lay in deep shadow. While she was descending a steep slope, with sometimes grass, and sometimes grey rock, by the roadside, the opposite height rose precipitous; and from chinks in its brow, little drips of water fell or oozed down, calling into life ferns, and grass, and ivy, in every moist crevice. Near the top, there were rows of swallow holes; and the birds were at this moment all at play in the last glow of the summer day, now dipping into the shaded dell, down to the very surface of the water, and then sprinkling the grey precipice with their darting shadows. Below, when Mary reached the bridge, she thought all looked shadowy in more senses than one. The first people she saw were some children, excessively dirty, who were paddling about in a shallow pool, which was now none of the sweetest, having been filled by the spring overflow, and gradually drying up ever since. Mary called to these children from the bridge, to ask where Widow Johnson lived. She could learn nothing more than that she must proceed; for, if the creatures had not been almost too boorish to speak, she could have made nothing of the Yorkshire dialect, on the first encounter. In the narrow street, every window seemed closed, and even the shutters of some. She could see nobody in the first two or three shops that she passed; but, at the baker’s, a woman was sitting at work. On the entrance of a stranger, she looked up in surprise; and, when at the door, to point out the turn down to Widow Johnson’s, she remained there, with her work on her arm, to watch the lady up the street. The doctor, quickening his pace, came up, saying,

“Who was that you were speaking to? A lady wanting Widow Johnson! What a very extraordinary thing! Did you tell her the fever had got there?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she must go and nurse them.”

“Do you mean that she is going to stay here?”

“I suppose so, by her talking of nursing them. She says Widow Johnson is her aunt.”

“O! that’s it! I have heard that Mrs Johnson came of a good family. But what a good creature this must be – that is, if she knows what she is about. If she is off before morning, I shall think it was a vision, dropped down out of the clouds. Eh?”

“She is not handsome enough to be an angel, or anything of that kind,” said the baker’s wife.

“O! isn’t she? I did not see her face. But it is all the better, if she is not very like an angel. She is all the more likely to stay and nurse the Johnsons. Upon my word, they are lucky people if she does. I must go and pay my respects to her presently. – Do look now – at the doors all along the street, on both sides the way! I have not seen so many people at once for weeks past; – for, you know, I have no time to go to church in these days.”

“You would not see many people, if you went. See! some of the children are following her! It is long since they have seen a young lady, in a white gown, and with a smile on her face, in our street. There she goes, past the corner; she has taken the right turn.”

“I will just let her get the meeting over, and settle herself a little,” said the doctor; “and then I will go and pay my respects to her.”

The little rabble of dirty children followed Mary round the corner, keeping in the middle of the lane, and at some distance behind. When she turned to speak to them, they started and fled, as they might have done, if she had been a ghost. But when she laughed, they returned cautiously; and all their brown forefingers pointed the same way at once, when she made her final inquiry about which was the cottage she wanted. Two little boys were pushed forward by the rest; and it transpired that these were grandchildren of Widow Johnson.

“Is she your granny?” said Mary. “Then, I am your cousin. Come with me; and if granny is very much surprised to see me, you must tell her that I am your cousin Mary.”

The boys, however, had no notion of entering the cottage. They slipped away, and hid themselves behind it; and Mary had to introduce herself.

After knocking in vain for some time, she opened the door, and looked in. No one was in the room but a man, whom she at once recognised for Silly Jem. He was half standing, half sitting, against the table by the wall, rolling his head from side to side. By no mode of questioning could Mary obtain a word from him. The only thing he did was to throw a great log of wood on the fire, when she observed what a large fire he had. She tried to take it off again; but this he would not permit. The room was insufferably hot and close. The only window was beside the door; so that there was no way of bringing a current of fresh air through the room. Mary tried to open the window; but it was not made to open, except that a small pane at the top, three inches square, went upon hinges. As soon as Mary had opened it, however, poor Jem went and shut it. Within this kitchen, was a sort of closet for stores; and this was the whole of the lower floor. Mary opened one other door, and found within it a steep, narrow stair, down which came a sickening puff of hot, foul air. She went up softly, and Jem slammed the door behind her. It seemed as if it was the business of his life to shut everything.

Groping her way, Mary came to a small chamber, which she surveyed for an instant from the stair, before showing herself within. There was no ceiling; and long cobwebs hung from the rafters. A small window, two feet from the floor, and curtained with a yellow and tattered piece of muslin, was the only break in the wall. On the deal table stood a phial or two, and a green bottle, which was presently found to contain rum. A turn-up bedstead, raised only a foot from the floor, was in a corner; and on it lay some one who was very restless, feebly throwing off the rug, which was immediately replaced by a sleepy woman who dozed between times in a chair that boasted a patchwork cushion. Mary doubted whether the large black eyes which stared forth from the pillow had any sense in them. She went to see.

“Aunty,” said she, going to the bed, and gently taking one of the wasted hands that lay outside. “I am come to nurse you.”

The poor patient made a strong effort to collect herself, and to speak. She did not want anybody. She should do very well. This was no place for strangers. She was too ill to see strangers, and so on; but, from time to time, a few wandering words about her knowing best how to choose a husband for herself – her having a right to marry as she pleased – or of insisting that her relations would go their own way in the world, and leave her hers – showed Mary that she was recognised, and what feelings she had to deal with.

“She knows where I came from; but she takes me for my mother or my grandmother,” thought she. “If she grows clear in mind, we shall be friends on our own account. If she remains delirious, she will become used to the sight of me. I must take matters into my own hands at once.”

The first step was difficult. Coolness and fresh air were wanted above everything. But there was no chimney; the window would not open; poor Jem would not let any door remain open for a moment; and the sleepy neighbour was one of those who insist upon warm bedclothes, large fires, and hot spirit and water, in fever cases. She was got rid of by being paid to find somebody who would go for Mary’s trunk, and bring it here before dark. She did her best to administer another dose of rum before she tied on her bonnet; but as the patient turned away her head with disgust, Mary interposed her hand. The dram was offered to her, and, as she would not have it, the neighbour showed the only courtesy then possible, by drinking Mary’s health, and welcome to Bleaburn. The woman had some sharpness. She could see that if she took Jem with her, and put the trunk on his shoulder, she should get the porter’s fee herself, instead of giving it to some rude boy; and, as Mary observed, would be doing a kindness to Jem in taking him for a pleasant evening walk. Thus the coast was cleared. In little more than half an hour they would be back. Mary made the most of her time.

She set the doors below wide open, and lowered the fire. She would fain have put on some water to boil, for it appeared to her that everybody and everything wanted washing extremely. But she could find no water, but some which seemed to have been used – which was, at all events, not fit for use now. For water she must wait till somebody came. About air, she did one thing more – a daring thing. She had a little diamond ring on her finger. With this, without noise and quickly, she cut so much of two small panes of the chamber window as to be able to take them clean out; and then she rubbed the neighbouring panes bright enough to hide, as she hoped, an act which would be thought mad. When she looked round again at Aunty, she could fancy that there was a somewhat clearer look about the worn face, and a little less dullness in the eye. But this might be because she herself felt less sick now that fresh air was breathing up the stairs.

There was something else upon the stairs – the tread of some one coming up. It was the doctor. He said he came to pay his respects to the lady before him, as well as to visit his patient. It was no season for losing time, and doctor and nurse found in a minute that they should agree very well about the treatment of the patient. Animated by finding that he should no longer be wholly alone in his terrible wrestle with disease and death, the doctor did things which he could not have believed he should have courage for. He even emptied out the rum bottle, and hurled it away into the bed of the stream. The last thing he did was to turn up his cuffs, and actually bring in two pails of water with his own hands. He promised (and kept his promise) to send his boy with a supply of vinegar, and a message to the neighbour that she was wanted elsewhere, that Mary might have liberty to refresh the patient, without being subject to the charge of murdering her. “A charge, however,” said he, “which I fully expect will be brought against any one of us who knows how to nurse. I confess they have cowed me. In sheer despair, I have let them take their own way pretty much. But now we must see what can be done.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “It is fairly our turn now. We must try how we can cow the fever.”

Chapter 3

Mr Finch was standing in front of his bookcase, deeply occupied in ascertaining a point in ecclesiastical history, when he was told that Ann Warrender wished to speak to him.

“O dear!” he half-breathed out. He had for some time been growing nervous about the state of things at Bleaburn; and there was nothing he now liked so little as to be obliged to speak face to face with any of the people. It was not all cowardice; though cowardice made up sadly too much of it. He did not very well know how to address the minds of his people; and he felt that he could not do it well. He was more fit for closet study than for the duties of a parish priest; and he ought never to have been sent to Bleaburn. Here he was, however; and there was Ann Warrender waiting in the passage to speak to him.

“Dear me!” said he, “I am really very busy at this moment. Ask Ann Warrender if she can come again tomorrow.”

Tomorrow would not do. Ann followed the servant to the door of the study to say so. Mr Finch hastily asked her to wait a moment, and shut the door behind the servant. He unlocked a cupboard, took out a green bottle and a wineglass, and fortified himself against infection with a draught of something whose scent betrayed him to Ann the moment the door was again opened.

“Come in,” said he, when the cupboard was locked.

“Will you please come, sir, and see John Billiter? He is not far from death; he asked for you just now; so I said I would step for you.”

“Billiter! The fever has been very fatal in that house, has it not? Did not he lose two children last week?”

“Yes, sir; and my father thinks the other two are beginning to sicken. I’m sure I don’t know what will become of them. I saw Mrs Billiter stagger as she crossed the room just now; and she does not seem, somehow, to be altogether like herself this morning. That looks as if she were beginning. But if you will come and pray with them, Sir, that is the comfort they say they want.”

“Does your father allow you to go to an infected house like that?” asked Mr Finch. “And does he go himself?”

Ann looked surprised, and said she did not see what else could be done. There was no one but her father who could lift John Billiter, or turn him in his bed; and as for her, she was the only one that Mrs Billiter had to look to, day and night. The Good Lady went in very often, and did all she could; but she was wanted in so many places, besides having her hands full with the Johnsons, that she could only come in and direct and cheer them, every few hours. She desired to be sent for at any time, night or day; and they did send when they were particularly distressed, or at a loss; but for regular watching and nursing, Ann said the Billiters had no one to depend on but herself. She could not stay talking now, however. How soon might she say that Mr Finch would come?

Mr Finch was now walking up and down the room. He said he would consider, and let her know as soon as he could.

“John Billiter is as bad as can be, Sir. He must be very near his end.”

“Ah! well; you shall hear from me very soon.”

As Ann went away, she wondered what could be the impediment to Mr Finch’s going with her. He, meantime, roused his mind to undertake a great argument of duty. It was with a sense of complacency, even of elevation, that he now set himself to work to consider of his duty – determined to do it when his mind was made up.

He afterwards declared that he went to his chamber to be secure against interruption, and there walked up and down for two hours in meditation and prayer. He considered that it had pleased God that he should be the only son of his mother, whose whole life would be desolate if he should die. He thought of Ellen Price, feeling almost sure that she would marry him whenever he felt justified in asking her; and he considered what a life of happiness she would lose if he should die. He remembered that his praying with the sick would not affect life on the one side, while it might on the other. The longer he thought of Ellen Price and of his mother, and of all that he might do if he lived, the more clear did his duty seem to himself to become. At the end of the two hours, he was obliged to bring his meditations to a conclusion; for Ann Warrender’s father had been waiting for some time to speak to him, and would then wait no longer.

“It is not time lost, Warrender,” said Mr Finch, when at last he came down stairs. “I have been determining my principle, and my mind is made up.”

“Then, Sir, let us be off, or the man will be dead. What! you cannot come, Sir! Why, bless my soul!”

“You see my reasons, surely, Warrender.”

“Why, yes; such as they are. The thing that I can’t see the reason for, is your being a clergyman.”

While Mr Finch was giving forth his amiable and gentlemanly notions of the position of a clergyman in society, and of filial consideration, Warrender was twirling his hat, and fidgetting, as if in haste; and his summing up was –

“I don’t know what your mother herself might say, Sir, to your consideration for her; but most likely she has, being a mother, noticed that saying about a man leaving father and mother, and houses and lands, for Christ’s sake; and also – But it is no business of mine to be preaching to the clergyman, and I have enough to do, elsewhere.”

“One thing more, Warrender. I entrust it to you to let the people know that there will be no service in church during the infection. Why, do not you know that, in the time of the plague, the churches were closed by order, because it was found that the people gave one another the disease, by meeting there?”

John had never heard it; and he was sorry to hear it now. He hastened away to the Good Lady, to ask her if he must really tell the afflicted people that all religious comfort must be withheld from them now, when they were in the utmost need of it. Meantime, Mr Finch was entering at length in his diary, the history of his conflict of mind, his decision, and the reasons of it.

Henceforth, Mr Finch had less time for his diary, and for clearing up points of ecclesiastical history. There were so many funerals that he could never be sure of leisure; nor, when he had it, was he in a state to use it. Sometimes he almost doubted whether he was in his right mind, so overwhelmingly dreadful to him was the scene around him. He met Farmer Neale one day. Neale was at his wit’s end what to do about his harvest. Several of his labourers were dead, and others were kept aloof by his own servants, who declared they would all leave him if any person from Bleaburn was brought among them; and no labourers from a distance would come near the place. Farmer Neale saw no other prospect than of his crops rotting on the ground.

“You must offer high wages,” said Mr Finch. “You must be well aware that you do not generally tempt people into your service by your rate of wages. You must open your hand at such a time as this.”

Neale was ready enough now to give good wages; but nobody would reap an acre of his for love or money. He was told to be thankful that the fever had spared his house; but he said it was no use bidding a man be thankful for anything, while he saw his crops perishing on the ground.

Next, Mr Finch saw, in his afternoon ride, a waggon load of coffins arrive at the brow from O— He saw them sent down, one by one, on men’s shoulders, to be ranged in the carpenter’s yard. The carpenter could not work fast enough; and his stock of wood was so nearly exhausted that there had been complaints, within the last few days, that the coffins would not bear the least shock, but fell to pieces when the grave was opened for the next. So an order was sent to O— for coffins of various sizes; and now they were carried down the road, and up the street, before the eyes of some who were to inhabit one or another of them. The doctor, hurrying from house to house, had hardly a moment to spare, and no comfort to give. He did not see what there was to prevent the whole population from being swept away. He was himself almost worn out; and just at such a moment, his surgery boy had disappeared. He had no one that he could depend on to help him in making up the medicines, or even to deliver them. The fact was, he said in private, the place was a pesthouse; and, except to Miss Pickard, he did not know where to look for any aid or any hope whatever. It would not do to say so to the people; but, frankly speaking, this was what he felt. When the pastor’s heart was thus sunk very low, he thought he would just pass the Plough and Harrow, and see who was there. If there were any cheerful people in Bleaburn, that was where they would be found. At the Plough and Harrow, the floor was swept and the table was clean; and the chimney was prettily dressed with green boughs; but there were only two customers there; and they were smoking their pipes in silence. The landlord said the scores were run up so high, he could not give more credit till better days. The people wanted their draught of comfort badly enough, and he had given it as long as he could; but he must stop somewhere: and if the baker had to stop scores (as he knew he had) the publican had little chance of getting his own. At such a time, however, he knew men ought to be liberal; so he went on serving purl and bitters at five in the morning. The men said it strengthened their stomachs against the fever before they went to work (such of them as could work) and God forbid he should refuse them that! But he knew the half of those few that came at five in the morning would never be able to pay their score. Yet did the publican, amidst all these losses, invite the pastor to sit down and have a cheerful glass; and the pastor did not refuse. There was too little cheerfulness to be had at present to justify him in declining any offer of it. So he let the landlord mix his glass for him, and mix it strong.

It was easy to make the mixture strong; but not so easy to have a ‘cheerful glass.’ The host had too many dismal stories to tell for that; and, when he could be diverted from the theme of the fate of Bleaburn, it was only to talk of the old king’s madness, and the disasters of the war, and the weight of the taxes, and the high price of food, and the riots in the manufacturing districts; a long string of disasters all undeniably true. He was just saying that he had been assured that something would soon appear which would explain the terrors of the time, when a strange cry was heard in the street, and a bustle among the neighbours; and then two or three people ran in and exclaimed, with white lips, that there was a fearful sign in the sky.

There indeed it was, a lustrous thing, shining down into the hollow. Was there ever such a star seen, – as large as a saucer – some of the people said, and with a long white tail, which looked as if it was about to sweep all the common stars out of the sky! The sounds of amazement and fear that ran along the whole street, up and down, brought the neighbours to their doors; and some to the windows, to try how much they could see from windows that would not open. Each one asked somebody else what it was; but all agreed that it was a token of judgment, and that it accounted for everything; the cold spring, the bad crops, the king’s illness, the war, and this dreadful sickly autumn. At last, they bethought them of the pastor, and they crowded round him for an explanation. They received one in a tone so faltering as to confirm their fears, though Mr Finch declared that it certainly must be a comet: he had never seen a comet; but he was confident this must be one, and that it must be very near the earth: – he did not mean near enough to do any harm; – it was all nonsense talking of comets doing any harm.

“Will it do us any good, Sir?” asked the carpenter, sagely.

“Not that I know of. How should it do us any good?”

“Exactly so, Sir: that is what we say. It is there for no good, you may rely upon it: and, for the rest, Heaven knows!”

“I hope farmer Neale may be seeing it,” observed a man to his neighbour. “It may be a mercy to him, if it is sent to warn him of his hard ways.”

“And the doctor, too. I hope it will take effect upon him,” whispered another. The whisper was caught up and spread. “The doctor! the doctor!” every one said, glancing at the comet, and falling to whispering again.

“What are they saying about the doctor?” whispered Mr Finch to the landlord. “What is the matter about him?” But the landlord only shook his head, and looked excessively solemn in the yellow light which streamed from his open door. After this, Mr Finch was very silent, and soon stole away homewards. Some who watched him said that he was more alarmed than he chose to show. And this was true. He was more shaken than he chose to admit to his own mind. He would not have acknowledged to himself that he, an educated man, could be afraid of a comet: but, unnerved before by anxiety of mind, and a stronger dose of spirit and water than he had intended to take, he was as open to impression as in the most timid days of his childhood. As he sat in his study, the bright, silent, steady luminary seemed to be still shining full upon his very heart and brain: and the shadowy street, with its groups of gazers, was before his eyes; and the hoarse or whimpering voices of the terrified people were in his ear. He covered his eyes, and thought that he lived in fearful times. He wished he was asleep: but then, there were three funerals for tomorrow! He feared he could not sleep, if he went to bed. Yet, to sit up would be worse; for he could not study tonight, and sitting up was the most wearing thing of all to the nerves. Presently he went to his cupboard. Now, if ever, was the time for a cordial; for how should he do his duty, if he did not get sleep at night, with so many funerals in the morning? So he poured out his medicine, as he called it, and uncorked his laudanum bottle, and obtained the oblivion which is the best comfort of the incapable.

Part 2

Chapter 4

There were some people in Bleaburn to whom the sign in heaven looked very differently. On the night when the people assembled in the street to question each other about it, Mary was at the Billiters’ house, where, but for her, all would have been blank despair. Mrs Billiter lay muttering all night in the low delirium of the fever; and Mary could not do more for her than go to the side of her mattress now and then, to speak to her, and smooth her pillow, or put a cool hand on her forehead, while one of the dying children hung on the other shoulder. At last, the little fellow was evidently so near death that the slightest movement on her part might put out the little life. As he lay with his head on her shoulder, his bony arms hanging helpless, and his feet like those of a skeleton across her lap, she felt every painful breath through her whole frame. She happened to sit opposite the window; and the window, which commanded a part of the brow of the hollow, happened to be open. Wherever the Good Lady had been, the windows would open now; and, when closed, they were so clear that the sunshine and moonlight could pour in cheerfully. This September night was sultry and dry; and three fever patients in two little low rooms needed whatever fresh air could be had. There sat Mary, immoveable, with her eyes fixed on the brow from which she had seen more than one star come up, since she last left her seat. She now and then spoke cheerfully to the poor mutterer in the other room, to prevent her feeling lonely, or for the chance of bringing back her thoughts to real things: and then she had to soothe little Ned, lying on a bed of shavings in the corner, sore and fretful, and needing the help that she could not stir to give. His feeble cry would have upset any spirits but Mary’s; but her spirits were never known to be upset, though few women have gone through such ghastly scenes, or sustained such tension of anxiety.

“I cannot come to you at this moment, Ned,” said she, “but I will soon, – very soon. Do you know why your brother is not crying? He is going to sleep, – for a long quiet sleep. Perhaps he will go to sleep more comfortably if you can stop crying. Do you think you can stop crying, Ned?”

The wailing was at once a little less miserable, and by degrees it came to a stop as Mary spoke.

“Do you know, your little brother will be quite well, when he wakes from that long sleep. It will be far away from here, – where daddy is.”

“Let me go, too.”

“I think you will go, Ned. If you do, you will not live here any more. You will live where daddy is gone.”

“Will Dan Cobb tease me then? Dan does tease us so!”

Mary had to learn who Dan Cobb was, – a little boy next door, who was not in the fever as yet. He was always wanting Ned’s top. Would he want Ned’s top in that place where they were all going to be well?

“No,” said Mary; “and you will not want it, either. When we go to that place, we have no trouble of carrying anything with us. We shall find whatever we want there.”

“What shall I play at?”

“I don’t know till we go and see; but I am sure it will be with something better than your top. But, Ned, are you angry with Dan? Do you wish that he should have the fever? And are you glad or sorry that he has no top?”

By this time the crying had stopped; and Ned, no longer filling his ears with his own wailing, wondered and asked what that odd sound was, – he did not like it.

“It will soon be over,” said Mary, very gently. “It is your brother just going to sleep. Now, lie and think what you would say to Dan, if you were going a long way off, and what you would like to be done with your top, when you do not want it yourself. You shall tell me what you wish when I come to you presently.”

Whether Ned was capable of thinking she could not judge, but he lay quite silent for the remaining minutes of his little brother’s life; – a great comfort to Mary, who could not have replied, because the mere vibration of her own voice would now have been enough to stop entirely the breathings which came at longer and longer intervals. Her frame ached, and her arms seemed to have lost power, – so long was it since she had changed her posture. At such a moment it was that the great comet came up from behind the brow. The apparition was so wonderful, and so wholly unexpected, that Mary’s heart beat; but it was from no fear, but rather a kind of exhilaration. Slowly it ascended, proving that it was no meteor, as she had at the first moment conjectured. When the bright tail disclosed itself, she understood the spectacle, and rejoiced in it, she scarcely knew why.

When at last the breathing on her shoulder ceased, she let down the little corpse upon her knee, and could just see, by the faint light from the rush candle in the outer room, that the eyes were half closed, and the face expressive of no pain. She closed the eyes, and, after a moment’s silence, said:

“Now, Ned, I am coming to you, in a minute.”

“Is he asleep?”

“Yes. He is in the quiet long sleep I told you of.”

Ned feebly tried to make room for his brother on the poor bed of shavings; and he wondered when Mary said that she was making a bed in the other corner which would do very well. She was only spreading mammy’s cloak on the ground, and laying her own shawl over the sleeper; but she said that would do very well.

Mary was surprised to find Ned’s mind so clear as that he had really been thinking about Dan and the top. She truly supposed that it was the clearing before death. He said:

“You told me daddy was dead. Am I going to be dead?”

“Yes, I think so. Would not you like it? – to go to sleep, and then be quite well?”

“But, shan’t I see Dan, then?”

“Not for a long time, I dare say: and whenever you do, I don’t think you and he will quarrel again. I can give Dan any message, you know.”

“Tell him he may have my top. And tell him I hope he won’t have the fever. I’ sure I don’t like it at all. I wish you would take me up, and let me be on your knee.”

Mary could not refuse it, though it was soon to be going over again the scene just closed. Poor Ned was only too light, as to weight; but he was so wasted and sore that it was not easy to find a position for him. For a few minutes he was interested by the comet, which he was easily led to regard as a beautiful sight, and then he begged to be laid down again.

The sun was just up when Mary heard the tap at the door below, which came every morning at sunrise. She put her head out of the window, and said softly that she was coming, – would be down in two minutes. She laid poor Ned beside his brother, and covered him with the same shawl; drew off the old sheets and coverlid from the bed of shavings, bundled them up with such towels as were in the room, and put them out of the window, Warrender being below, ready to receive them. She did not venture to let the poor mother see them, delirious as she was. Softly did Mary tread on the floor, and go down the creaking stair. When she reached the street she drew in, with a deep sigh, the morning air.

“The poor children’s bedding,” she said to Warrender.

“They are gone?” he inquired. “What, both?”

“One just before midnight. The other half an hour ago. And their mother will follow soon.”

“The Lord have mercy upon us,” said Warrender, solemnly.

“I think it is mercy to take a family thus together,” replied Mary. “But I think of poor Aunty. If I could find any one to sit here for half an hour, I would go to her, and indeed, I much wish it.”

“There is a poor creature would be glad enough to come, ma’am, if she thought you would countenance it. A few words will tell you the case. She is living with Simpson, the baker’s man, without being his wife. Widow Johnson was very stern with her, and with her daughter, Billiter, for being neighbourly with the poor girl – though people do say that Simpson deceived her cruelly. I am sure, if I might fetch Sally, she would come, and be thankful; and –“

“O! ask her to come and help me. If she has done wrong, that is the more reason why she should do what good she can. How is Ann?”

“Pretty well. Rather worn, as we must all expect to be. She never stood so many hours at the washtub, any one day, as she does now every day: but then, as she says, there never was so much reason.”

“And you, yourself?”

“I am getting through, ma’am, thank you. I seem to see the end of the whitewashing, for one thing. They have sent us more brushes of the right sort from O—, and I should like, if I could, to get two or three boys into training. They might do the outhouses and the lower parts, where there are fewest sick, while I am upstairs. But, for some reason or other, the lads are shy of me. There is some difference already, I assure you, ma’am, both as to sight and smell; but there might be more, if I could get better help.”

“And you are careful, I hope, for Ann’s sake, to put all the linen first into a tub of water outside.”

“Yes, surely. I got the carpenter’s men to set a row of tubs beside our door, and to promise to change the water once a day. I laughed at them for asking if they could catch the fever that way: and they are willing enough to oblige where there’s no danger. Simpson offered to look to our boiler as he goes to the bakehouse when, as he says, Ann and I ought to be asleep. I let him do it and thank him; but it is not much that we sleep, or think of sleeping, just now.”

“Indeed,” said Mary, “you have a hard life of it, and without pay or reward, I am afraid. I never saw such –“

“Why, ma’am,” said Warrender, “you are the last person to say those sort of things. However, it is not a time for praising one another, when there are signs in the heaven, and God’s wrath on earth.”

“You saw the comet, did you? How beautiful it is! It will cheer our watch at nights now. Ah! you see I don’t consider it anything fearful, or a sign of anything but that, having a new sort of stars brought before our eyes to admire, we don’t understand all about the heavens yet, though we know a good deal; and just so with the fever: it is a sign, not of wrath, as I take it, but that the people here do not understand how to keep their health. They have lived in dirt, and damp, and closeness, some hungry and some drunken: and when unusual weather comes, a wet spring and a broiling summer, down they sink under the fever. Do you know, I dare not call this God’s wrath.”

Warrender did not like to say it, but the thought was in his mind, why people were left so ignorant and so suffering. Mary was quick at reading faces, and she answered the good fellow’s mind, while she helped to hoist the bundle of linen on his shoulder.

“We shall see, Warrender, whether the people can learn by God’s teaching. He is giving us a very clear and strong lesson now.”

Warrender touched his hat in silence, and walked away.

Aunty had for some time been out of danger from the fever, or Mary could not have left her to attend on the Billiters, urgent as was their need. But her weakness was so great that she had to be satisfied to lie still all day in the intervals of Mary’s little visits. Poor Jem brought her this and that, when she asked for it, but he was more trouble than help, from his incurable determination to shut all doors and windows, and keep a roaring fire: he did everything else, within his power, that his mother desired him, but on these points he was immoveable. If ever his mother closed her eyes, he took the opportunity to put more wood on the fire; and he looked so grievously distressed if requested to take it off again, that at last he was let alone. Mary was fairly accustoming him to occupy himself in bringing pails of water and carrying away all refuse, when she was summoned to the Billiters; but the hint was given, and the neighbours saw that they need no longer use water three or four times over for washing, while poor Jem was happy to carry it away, rinse the pails, and bring fresh. His cousin Mary had often of late found him thus engaged: but this morning he was at home, cowering in a chair. When she set the windows open, he made no practical objection; and the fire was actually out. Mary was not therefore surprised at Aunty’s reply to her inquiries.

“I am tolerably easy myself, my dear, but I can’t tell what has come over Jem; it seems to me that somebody must have been giving him drink, he staggered so when he crossed the room half an hour ago; yet I hardly think he would take it, he has such a dislike to everything strong. What a thing it is that I am lying here, unable to stir to see about it myself!”

“We will see about it,” said Mary, going to poor Jem. “I neither think he would touch drink, nor that any body would play such a trick with him at such a time. No,” she went on, when she had felt his pulse and looked well at his face, “it is not drink: it is illness.”

“The fever,” groaned the mother.

“I think so. Courage, Aunty! we will nurse him well: and the house is wholesome now, you know. You are through the fever: and his chance is a better one than yours, the house is so much more airy, and I have more experience.”

“But, Mary, you cannot go on for ever, without sleep or rest, in this way. What is to be done, I don’t see.”

“I do, Aunty. I am very well today. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I must get Jem to bed; and if he soon seems to be moaning and restless, you must mind it as little as you can. It is very miserable, as you have good reason to know; but –“

“I know something that you do not, I see,” said Aunty. “A more patient creature than my poor Jem does not live in Bleaburn, nor anywhere else.”

“What a good chance that gives him!” observed Mary, “and what a blessing it is, for himself and for you! I must go to my cousin now presently; and I will send the doctor to see Jem.”

The poor fellow allowed himself to be undressed; and let his head fall on his bolster, as if it could not have kept up a minute longer. He was fairly down in the fever.

Chapter 5

That evening, Mary felt more at leisure and at rest than for weeks past. There was nothing to be done for Mrs Billiter but to watch beside her: and the carpenter had had his whispered orders in the street for the coffins for the two little boys. The mother had asked no questions, and had appeared to be wandering too much to take notice of anything passing before her eyes. Now she was quiet, and Mary felt the relief. She had refreshed herself (and she used to tell, in after years, what such refreshments were worth) with cold water, and a clean wrapper, and a mutton chop, sent hot from the Plough and Harrow for the Good Lady (with some wine which she kept for the convalescents), and she was now sitting back in her chair beside the open window, through which fell a yellow glow of reflected sunshine from the opposite heights. All was profoundly still. When she had once satisfied her conscience that she ought not to be plying her needle because her eyes were strained for want of sleep, she gave herself up to the enjoyment – for she really was capable of enjoyment through everything – of watching the opposite precipice; how the shadow crept up it; and how the sunny crest seemed to grow brighter; and how the swallows darted past their holes, and skimmed down the hollow once more before night should come on. Struck, at last, by the silence, she turned her head, and was astonished at the change she saw. Her cousin lay quiet, looking as radiant as the sunset itself; her large black eyes shining, unoppressed by the rich light; her long dark hair on each side the wasted face, and waving down to the white hands which lay outside the quilt. Their eyes met, full and clear; and Mary knew that her cousin’s mind was now clear, like the gaze of her eyes.

“I see it all now.” said the dying woman, gently.

“What do you see, love?”

“I see the reason of everything that I did not understand before.” And she began to speak of her life and its events, and went on with a force and clearness, and natural eloquence – yet more, with a simple piety – which Mary was wont to speak of afterwards as the finest revelation of a noble soul that she had ever unexpectedly met with. Mrs Billiter knew that her little boys were dead; she knew, by some means or other, all the horrors by which she was surrounded; and she knew that she was about to die. Yet the conversation was a thoroughly cheerful one. The faces of both were smiling; the voices of both were lively, though that of the dying woman was feeble. After summing up the experience of her life, and declaring what she expected to experience next, and leaving a message for her mother, she said there was but one thing more; she ’should like to receive the sacrament.’ Mary wrote a note in pencil to Mr Finch, and sent it by Sally, who had been hovering about ever since the morning, in the hope of being of further use, but who was glad now to get out of sight, that her tears might have way; for she felt that she was about to lose the only friend who had been kind to her (in a way she could accept) since Simpson had put her off from the promised marriage.

“She is sorry to part with me,” said that dying friend. “Cousin Mary, you do not think, as my mother does, that I have done wrong in noticing Sally, do you?”

“No; I think you did well. And I think your mother will be kind to her, for your sake, from this time forward. Sickness and death open our eyes to many things, you know, cousin.”

“Ay, they do. I see it all now.”

Sally was sorely ashamed to bring back Mr Finch’s message. Well as she knew that time was precious, she lingered with it at the door.

Mr Finch was sorry, but he was too busy. He hoped he should not be sent for again; for he could not come.

“Perhaps, Miss,” said Sally, with swimming eyes, “it might have been better to send somebody else than me. Perhaps, if you sent somebody else –“

“I do not think that, Sally. However, if you will remain here, I will go myself. It does not matter what he thinks of me, a stranger in the place; and perhaps none of his flock could so well tell him that this is a duty which he cannot refuse.”

Mary had not walked up the street for several weeks. Though her good influence was in almost every house, in the form of cleanliness, fresh air, cheerfulness, and hope, she had been seen only when passing from one sick room to another, among a cluster of houses near her aunt’s. She supposed it might be this disuse which made everything appear strange; but it was odd scarcely to feel her limbs when she walked, and to see the houses and people like so many visions. She had no feeling of illness, however, and she said to herself, that some time or other she should get a good long sleep; and then everything would look and feel as it used to do.

As she passed along the street, the children at play ran in to the houses to say that the Good Lady was coming; and the healthy and the convalescent came out on their doorsteps, to bid God bless her; and the sick, who were sensible enough to know what was going on, bade God bless her from their beds.

What influence the Good Lady used with the clergyman there is no saying, as the conversation was never reported by either of them; but she soon came back bright and cheerful, saying that Mr Finch would follow in an hour. She had stepped in at Warrender’s, to beg the father and daughter to come and communicate with the dying woman. They would come: and Sally would go, she was sure, and take Ann Warrender’s place at the washtub at home; for there were several sick people in want of fresh linen before night. Poor Sally went sobbing through the streets. She understood the Good Lady’s kindness in sending her away, and on a work of usefulness, because she, alas! could not receive the communion. She was living in sin; and when two or three were gathered together in the name of Christ, she must be cast out.

There was little comfort in the service, unless, as the bystanders hoped, the sick woman was too feeble and too much absorbed in her own thoughts to notice some things that dismayed them. Mrs Billiter was, indeed, surprised at first at the clergyman’s refusal to enter the chamber. He would come no further than the door. Mary saw at a glance that he was in no condition to be reasoned with, and that she must give what aid she could to get the administration over as decently as possible. Happily, he made the service extremely short. The little that there was he read wrong: but Mrs Billiter (and she alone) was not disturbed by this. Whether it was that the deadening of the ear had begun, or that Mr Finch spoke indistinctly, and was chewing spices all the time, or that the observance itself was enough for the poor woman, it seemed all right with her. She lay with her eyes still shining, her wasted hands clasped, and a smile on her face, quite easy and content; and when Mr Finch was gone, she told Mary again that she saw it all now, and was quite ready. She was dead within an hour.

As for Warrender, he was more disturbed than any one had seen him since the breaking out of the fever.

“Why, there it is before his eyes in the Prayer Book,” said he, “that clergymen ’shall diligently from time to time (but especially in the time of pestilence, or other infectious sickness) exhort their parishioners to the often receiving of the holy communion:’ and instead of this, he even shuts up the church on Sundays.”

“He is not the first who has done that,” said Mary. “It was done in times of plague, as a matter of precaution.”

“But, Miss, should not a clergyman go all the more among the people, and not the less, for their having no comfort of worship?”

“Certainly: but you see how it is with Mr Finch, and you and I cannot alter it. He has taken a panic; and I am sure he is the one most to be pitied for that. I can tell you too, between ourselves, that Mr Finch judges himself, at times, as severely as we can judge him; and is more unhappy about being of so little use to his people than his worst enemy could wish him.”

“Then, Ma’am, why does not he pluck up a little spirit, and do his duty?”

“He has been made too soft,” he says, “by a fond mother, who is always sending him cordials and spices against the fever. We must make some allowance, and look another way. Let us be thankful that you and Ann are not afraid. If our poor neighbours have not all that we could wish, they have clean bedding and clothes, and lime-washed rooms, fresh and sweet compared with anything they have known before.”

“And,” thought Warrender, though he did did not say it, but only touched his hat as he went after his business, “one as good as any clergyman to pray by their bedsides, and speak cheerfully to them of what is to come. When I go up the stair, I might know who is praying by the cheerfulness of the voice. I never saw such a spirit in any woman, – never. I have never once seen her cast down, ever so little. If there is a tear in her eye, for other people’s sake, there is a smile on her lips, because her heart tells her that everything that happens is all right.”

This night, Mary was to have slept. She herself had intended it, warned by the strange feelings which had come over her as she walked up the street: and it would gratify Aunty’s feelings that the corpse should not be left. She intended to lie down and sleep beside the still and unbreathing form of the cousin whose last hours had been so beautiful in her eyes. But Aunty’s feelings were now tried in another direction. Unable to move, Aunty was sorely distressed by Jem’s moanings and restlessness; and Mary was the only one who could keep him quiet in any degree. So, without interval, she went to her work of nursing again. Next, the funeral of Mrs Billiter, and two or three more, fixed for the same day, were put off, because Mr Finch was ill. And when Mr Finch was ill, he sent to beg the Good Lady to come immediately and nurse him. After writing to his own family, to desire some of them to come and take charge of him, she did go to him: but not to remain day and night as she did with the poor who had none to help them. She saw that all was made comfortable about him, gave him his medicines at times, and always spoke cheerfully. But it was as she saw from the beginning. He was dying of fear, and of the intemperate methods of precaution which he had adopted, and of dissatisfaction with himself. His nervous depression from the outset was such as to predispose him to disease, and to allow him no chance under it. He was sinking when his mother and sister arrived, pale and tearful, to nurse him: and it did no good that they isolated the house, and locked the doors, and took things in by the window, after being fumigated by a sentinel outside. The doctor laughed as he asked them whether they would not be more glad to see him, if he came down the chimney, instead of their having to unlock the door for him. He wondered they had not a vinegar bath for him to go overhead in, before entering their presence. The ladies thought this shocking levity; and they did not conceal their opinion. The doctor then spoke gravely enough of the effects of fear on the human frame. With its effects on the conscience, and on the peace of the mind, he said he had nothing to do. That was the department of the physician of souls. (His hearers were unconscious of the mournful satire conveyed in these words.) His business was with the effect of fear on the nerves and brain, exhausting through them the resources of life. He declared that Mr Finch would probably have been well at that moment, if he had gone about as freely as other persons among the sick, more interested in getting them well than afraid of being ill himself; and, for confirmation, he pointed to the Good Lady and the Warrenders, who had now for two months run all sorts of risks, and showed no sign of fever. They were fatigued, he said; too much so; as he was himself; and something must be done to relieve Miss Pickard especially; but –

“Who is she?” inquired the ladies. “Why is she so prominent here?”

“As for who she is,” replied he, “I only know that she is an angel.”

“Come down out of the clouds, I suppose.”

“Something very like it. She dropped into our hollow one August evening – nobody knows whence nor why. As for her taking the lead here, I imagine it is because there was nobody else to do it.”

“But has she saved many lives, do you think?”

“Yes, of some that are too young to be aware what they owe her; and of some yet unborn. She could not do much for those who were down in the fever before she came: except, indeed, that it is much to give them a sense of relief and comfort of body (though short of saving life) and peace of mind, and cheerfulness of heart. But the great consequences of her presence are to come. When I see the change that is taking place in the cottages here, and in the clothes of the people, and their care of their skins, and their notions about their food, I feel disposed to believe that this is the last plague that will ever be known in Bleaburn.”

“Plague! O horrid!” exclaimed the shuddering sister.

“Call it what you will,” the doctor replied. “The name matters little when the thing makes itself so clear. Yes, by the way, it may matter much with such a patient as we have within there. Pray, whatever you do, don’t use the word ‘plague’ within his hearing. You must cheer him up; only that you sadly want cheering yourselves. I think an hour a day of the Good Lady’s smile would be the best prescription for you all.’

“Do you think she would come? We should be so obliged to her if she would!”

“And she should have a change of dress lying ready in the passage room,” declared the young lady. “I think she is about my size. Do ask her to come.”

“When I see that she is not more wanted elsewhere,” replied the doctor. “I need not explain, however, that that smile of hers is not an effect without a cause. If we could find out whether we have anything of the same cause in ourselves, we might have a cheerfulness of our own, without troubling her to come and give us some.”

The ladies thought this odd, and did not quite understand it, and agreed that they should not like to be merry and unfeeling in a time of affliction; so they cried a great deal when they were not in the sick room. They derived some general idea, however, from the doctor’s words, that cheerfulness was good for the patient; and they kept assuring him, in tones of forced vivacity, that there was no danger, and that the doctor said he would be well very soon. The patient groaned, remembering the daily funerals of the last few weeks; and the only consequence was that he distrusted the doctor. He sank more rapidly than any other fever patient in the place. In a newspaper paragraph, and on a monumental tablet, he was described as a martyr to his sacred office in a season of pestilence; and his family called on future generations to honour him accordingly.

“I am sorry for the poor young man,” observed the host at the Plough and Harrow; “he did very well while nothing went wrong; but he had no spirit for trying times.”

“Who has?” murmured farmer Neale. “Any man’s heart may die within him that looks into the churchyard now.”

“There’s a woman’s that does not,” observed the host; “I saw the Good Lady crossing the churchyard this very morning, with a basket of physic bottles on her arm –“

“Ah! she goes to help to make up the medicines every day now,” the hostess explained, “since the people began to suspect foul play in their physic.”

“Well; she came across the bit of grass that is left, and looked over the rows of graves – not smiling exactly, but as if there was not a sad thought from top to bottom of her mind – much as she might look if she was coming away from her own wedding.”

“What is that about ’sweet hopes,’ in the newspaper?’ asked Neale; “about some ‘sweet hopes’ that Mr Finch had? Was he going to be married?”

“By that, I should think he was in love,” said the host: “and that may excuse some backwardness in coming forward, you know.”

“The Good Lady is to be married, when she gets home to America,” the hostess declared. “Yes, ’tis true. Widow Johnson told the doctor so.”

“What will her lover say to her risking her life, and spending her time in such a way, here?” said Neale.

“She tells her aunt that he will only wish he was here to help her. He is a clergyman. ‘O!’ says she, ‘he will only wish he was here to help us.’”

“I am sure I wish he was,” sighed Neale. “I wonder what sort of a man will be sent us next. I hope he will be something unlike poor Mr Finch.”

“I think you will have your wish,” said the landlord. “No man of Mr Finch’s sort would be likely to come among us at such a time.”

Chapter 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 3

Chapter 7

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

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

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

“’Tis my temper, Sir, I’m afraid.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very well,” said Mary.

Mrs Kirby thought of something that her husband had said of Mary; that he had never seen any one with such power of will and command so docile. She merely promised her aunt frequent news of her; agreed with those who doubted whether she could bear the jolting of any kind of carriage on the road up to the brow; admitted that, though she could now stand, she could not walk across the room; allowed herself to be carried on her mattress in a carpet, by four men, up to the chaise; and nodded in reply to a remark made by one little girl to another in the street, and which the doctor wished she had not heard, that she looked “rarely bad.” The landlady at O— seemed, by her countenance, to have much the same opinion of Mary’s looks, when she herself brought out the glass of wine, for which Mrs Henderson stopped her chaise at the door of the Cross Keys. The landlady brought it herself, because none of her people would give as much as a glass of cold water, hand to hand with any one who came from Bleaburn. The landlady stood shaking her head, and saying she had done the best she could; she had warned the young lady in time.

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

“You have not!”

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8

The spectacle of carrying the Good Lady up to the brow was more terrifying to the people of Bleaburn than any of the funerals they had seen creeping along by the same path, – more even than the passage of the laden cart, with the pall over it, on the morning of the opening of the new burying grounds. The people of Bleaburn, extremely ignorant, were naturally extremely superstitious. It was not only the very ignorant who were superstitious. The fever itself was never supposed to be more catching than a mood of superstition; and so it now appeared in Bleaburn. For many weeks past the Good Lady had been regarded as a sort of talisman in the people’s possession. She breathed out such cheerfulness wherever she turned her face, that it seemed as if the place could not go quite to destruction while she was in it. Some who would not have admitted to themselves that they held such an impression were yet infected with the common dismay, as well as with the sorrow of parting with her. If Mary had had the least idea of the probable effect of her departure, she would have been less admired by the Kirbys for her docility, – for she would certainly have insisted on staying where she was.

“I declare I don’t know what to do,” the doctor confessed in confidence to the clergyman. “Every patient I have is drooping, and the people in the street look like creatures under doom. The comet was bad enough; and, before we have well done with it, here is a panic which is ten times worse.”

“I tried to lend a hand to help you against the comet,” replied Mr Kirby. “I think I may be of some use again now. Shall I tell them it is a clear case of idolatry?”

“Why, it is in fact so, Mr Kirby; but yet, I shrink from appearing to cast the slightest disrespect on her.”

“Of course; of course. The thing I want to show them is what she would think, – how shocked she would be if she knew the state of mind she left behind.”

“Ah! if you can do that!”

“I will see about it. Now tell me how we are going on.”

The Doctor replied by a look, which made Mr Kirby shake his head. Neither of them liked to say in words how awful was the state of things.

“It is such weather you see,” said the Doctor. “Damp and disagreeable as it is, this December is as warm as September.”

“Five-and-twenty sorts of flowers out in my garden,” observed Mr Kirby. “I set the boys to count them yesterday. We shall have as many as that on Christmas Day. A thing unheard of!”

“There will be no Christmas kept this year, surely,” said the Doctor.

“I don’t know that. My wife and I were talking it over yesterday. We think… Well, my boy,” to a little fellow who stood pulling his forelock, “what have you to say to me? I am wanted at home, am I? Is Mrs Kirby there?”

The Doctor heard him say to himself, “Thank God!” when they saw the lady coming out of a cottage near. The Doctor had long suspected that the clergyman and his wife were as sensible of one another’s danger as the most timid person in Bleaburn was of his own; and now he was sure of it. Henceforth, he understood that they were never easy out of one another’s sight; and that when the clergyman was sent for from the houses he was passing, his first idea always was that his wife was taken ill. It was so. They were not people of sentiment. They had settled their case with readiness and decision, when it first presented itself to them; and they never looked back. But it did not follow that they did not feel. They agreed, with the smallest possible delay, that they ought to succeed to the charge of Bleaburn on Mr Finch’s death; that they ought to place their boys at school, and their two girls with their aunt till Bleaburn should be healthy again; and that they must stand or fall by the duty they had undertaken. As for separating, that was an idea mentioned only to be dismissed. They now nodded across the little street, as Mrs Kirby proceeded on her round of visits, and her husband went home, to see who wanted him there.

In the corner of the little porch was a man sitting, crouching and cowering as if in bodily pain. Mr Kirby went up to him, stooped down to see his face (but it was covered with his hands), and at last ventured to remove his hat. Then the man looked up. It was a square, hard face, which from its make would have seemed immovable; but it was anything but that now. It is a strange sight, the working of emotion in a countenance usually as hard as marble!

“Neale!” exclaimed Mr Kirby. “Somebody ill at the farm, I am afraid.”

“Not yet, Sir; not yet, Mr Kirby. But Lord save us! we know nothing of how soon it may be so.”

“Exactly so: that has been the case of every man, woman, and child, hour by hour since Adam fell.”

“Yes, Sir; but the present time is something different from that. I came, Sir, to say… I came, Mr Kirby, because I can get no peace or rest, day or night; for thoughts, Sir; for thoughts.”

Mr Kirby glanced round him. “Come in,” said he, “Come into my study.”

Neale followed him in; but instead of sitting down, he walked straight to the window, and seemed to be looking into the garden. Mr Kirby, who had been on foot all the morning, sat down and waited, shaving away at a pen meanwhile.

“On Sunday, Sir,” said Neale at last, in a whispering kind of voice, “you read that I have kept back the hire of the labourers that reaped down my fields, and that their cry has entered into the ears of the Lord.”

“That you kept back the hire of the labourer?” exclaimed Mr Kirby, quickly turning in his seat, so as to face his visitor. He laid his hand on the pocket bible on the table, opened at the Epistle of James, and, with his finger on the line, walked to the window with it.

“Yes, Sir, that is it,” said Neale. “I would return the hire I kept back, – (I can’t exactly say by fraud, for it was from hardness) – I would pay it all willingly now; but the men are dead. The fever has left but a few of them.”

“I see,” said Mr Kirby. “I see how it is. You think the fever is dogging your heels, because the cries of your labourers have entered into the ears of the Lord. You want to buy off the complaints of the dead, and the anger of God, by spending now on the living. You are afraid of dying; and you would rather part with your money, dearly as you love it, than die; and so you are planning to bribe God to let you live.”

“Is not that rather hard, Sir?”

“Hard? – Is it true? that is the question.”

When they came to look closely into the matter, it was clear enough. Neale, driven from his accustomed methods and employments, and from his profits, and all his outward reliances, was adrift and panic-stricken. When the Good Lady was carried out of the hollow, the last security seemed gone, and the place appeared to be delivered over to God’s wrath; his share of which, his conscience showed him to be pointed out in the words of scripture which had so impressed his mind, and which were ringing in his ears, as he said, day and night.

“As for the Good Lady,” said Mr Kirby, “I am sure I hope she will never hear how some of the people here regard her, after all she has done for them. If anything could bow her spirit, it would be that.” Seeing Neale stare in surprise, he went on. “One would think she was a kind of witch or sorceress; that there was some sort of magic about her; instead of her being a sensible, kind-hearted, fearless woman, who knows how to nurse, and is not afraid to do it when it is most wanted.”

“Don’t you think then, Sir, that God sent her to us?”

“Certainly; as he sent the Doctor, and my wife and me: as he sends people to each other whenever they meet. I am sure you never heard the Good Lady say that she was specially sent.”

“She is so humble, – so natural, Sir, – she was not likely to say such a thing.”

“Very true: and she is too wise to think it. No – there is nothing to be frightened about in her going away. She could have done no good here, while unable to walk or sit up; and she will recover better where she is gone. If she recovers, as I expect she will, she will come and see us; and I shall think that as good luck as you can do; not because she carries luck about with her, but because there is nothing we so much want as her example of courage, and sense, and cheerfulness.”

“To be sure,” said Neale, in a meditative way, “she could not keep the people from dying.”

“No indeed,” observed Mr Kirby; “you and some others took care that she should not.”

In reply to the man’s stare of amazement, Mr Kirby asked:

“Are not you the proprietor of several of the cottages in Bleaburn?”

“Yes; I have seven altogether.”

“I know them well, – too well. Neale, your conscience accuses you about the hire of your labourers: but you have done worse things than oppress them about wages. Part of the mischief you may be unaware of; but I know you are not of all. I know that Widow Slaney speaks to you, year by year, about repairing that wretched place she lives in. Have you done it yet? Not you! I need not have asked; and yet you screw that poor woman for her rent till she cannot sleep at night for thinking of it. You know in your heart that what she says is true, – that if her son was alive, – (and it was partly your hardness that sent him to the wars, and to his terrible fate) –“

“Stop, Sir! I cannot bear it!” exclaimed Neale. “Sir, you should not bear so hard on me. I have a son that met another bad fate at the wars: and you know it, Mr Kirby.”

“To be sure I do. And how do you treat him? You drove him away by harshness; and now you say he shall not come back, because you cannot be troubled with a cripple at home.”

“Not now, Sir. I say no such thing now. When I said that, I was in a bad mood. I mean to be kind to him now: and I have told him so: that is, I have said so to the girl he is attached to.”

“You have? You have really seen her, and shown respect to the young people?”

“I have, Sir.”

“Well: that is so far good. That is some foundation laid for a better future.”

“I should be thankful, Sir, to make up for the past.”

“Ah!” said Mr Kirby, shaking his head; “that is what can never be done. The people, as you say, are dead: the misery is suffered: the mischief is done, and cannot be undone. It is a lie, and a very fatal one, to say that past sins may be atoned for.”

“O, Mr Kirby! – don’t say that!”

“I must say it, because it is true. You said yourself that you cannot make it up to those you have injured, because the men are dead. What is that you are saying? that you wish the fever had taken you; and you could go now and shoot yourself? Before you dare to say such things, you should look at the other half of the case. Is not the future greater than the past, because we have power over it? And is there not a good text somewhere about forgetting the things that are behind, and pressing forwards to those that are before?”

“O, Sir! if I could forget the past!”

“Well: you see you have scripture warrant for trying. But then the pressing forwards to better things must go with it. If you forget the past, and go on the same as ever, you might as well be in hell at once. Then, I don’t know that your shooting yourself would do much harm to anybody.”

“But, Sir, I am willing to do all I can. I am willing to spend all I have. I am, indeed.”

“Well, spend away, – money, time, thought, kindness, – till you can fairly say that you have done by everybody as you would be done by! It will be time enough then to think what next. And, first, about these cottages of yours. If no more people are to die in them, murdered by filth and damp, you have no time to lose. You must not sit here, talking remorse, and planning fine deeds, but you must set the work going this very day. Come! let us go and see.”

Farmer Neale walked rather feebly through the hall: so Mr Kirby called him into the parlour, and gave him a glass of wine. Still, as they went down the street, one man observed to another, that Neale looked ten years older in a day. He looked round him, however, with some signs of returning spirits, when he saw the boys at their street cleaning, and observed, that hereabouts things looked wholesome enough.

“Mere outside scouring,” said Mr Kirby. “Better than dirt, as far as it goes; unless, indeed, it makes us satisfied to have whited sepulchres for dwellings. Come and see the uncleanness within.”

Mr Kirby did not spare him. He took him through all the seven cottages, for which he had extorted extravagant rents, without fulfilling any conditions on his own part. He showed him every bit of broken roof, of damp wall, of soaked floor. He showed him every heap of filth, every puddle of nastiness caused by there being no drains, or other means of removal of refuse. He advised him to make a note of every repair needed; and, when he saw that Neale’s hand shook so that he could not write, took the pencil from his hand, and did it himself. Two of the seven cottages he condemned utterly: and Neale eagerly agreed to pull them down, and rebuild them with every improvement requisite to health. To the others he would supply what was wanting, and especially drainage. They stood in such a cluster that it was practicable to drain them all into a gully of the rock which, by being covered over, by a little building up at one end, and a little blasting at one side, might be made into a considerable tank, which was to be closed by a tight-fitting, and very heavy slab at top. Mr Kirby conceded so much to the worldly spirit of the man he had to deal with, as to point out that the manure thus saved would so fertilise his fields as soon to repay the cost of this batch of drainage. Neale did not care for this at the moment. He was too sore at heart at the spectacle of these cottages and their inmates, – too much shaken by remorse and fear, – for any idea of profit and loss: but Mr Kirby thought it as well to point out the fact, as it might help to animate the hard man to proceed in a good work, when his present melting mood should be passing away.

“Well: I think this is all we can do today,” said Mr Kirby, as they issued from the seventh cottage. “The worst of it is, the workmen from O— will not come, – I am afraid no builder will come, even to make an estimate – till we are declared free of fever. But there is a good deal that your own people can do.”

“They can knock on a few slates before dark, Sir; and those windows can be mended today. I trust, Mr Kirby, you will give me encouragement; and not be harder than you can help.”

“Why, Neale; the thing is this. You do not hold your doom from my hand; and you ought not to hang upon my words. You come to me to tell me what you feel, and to ask what I think. All I can do is to be honest with you, and (as indeed I am) sorry for you. Time must do the rest. If you are now acting well from fear of the fever only, time will show you how worthless is the effort; for you will break off as soon as the fright has passed away. If you really mean to do justly and love mercy, through good and bad fortune, time will prove you there, too: and then you will see whether I am hard, or whether we are to be friends. This is my view of the matter.”

Neale touched his hat, and was slowly going away, when Mr Kirby followed him, to say one thing more.

“It may throw light to yourself, on your own state of mind, to tell you that it is quite a usual one among people who have deeply sinned, when any thing happens to terrify them. Histories of earthquakes and plagues tell of people thinking and feeling as you do today. I dare say you think nobody ever felt the same before; but you are not the only one in Bleaburn”

“Indeed, Sir!” exclaimed Neale, exceedingly struck.

“Far from it. A person who has often robbed your poultry yard, and taken your duck eggs, thought that I was preaching at him, last Sunday; though I knew nothing about it. He wished to make reparation; and he asked me if I thought you would forgive him. Do you really wish to know my answer? I told him I thought you would not: but that he must confess and make reparation, nevertheless.”

“You thought I should not forgive him?”

“I did: and I think so now, thus far. You would say and believe that you forgave him: but, at odd times, for years to come, you would show him that you had not forgotten it, and remind him that you had a hold over him. If not, – if I do you injustice in this, I should –“

“You do not, Sir. I am afraid what you say is very true.”

“Well, just think it over, before he comes to you. This is the only confession made to me which it concerns you to hear: but I assure you, I believe there is not an evil doer in Bleaburn that is not sick at heart as you are; and for the same reason. We all have our pains and troubles; and yours may turn out a great blessing to you, – or a curse, according as you persevere or give way.”

Neale said to himself as he went home, that Mr Kirby had surely been very hard. If a man hanged for murder was filled with hope and triumph, and certainty of glory, there must be some more speedy comfort for him than the pastor had held out. Yet, in his inmost heart, he felt that Mr Kirby was right; and he could not for the life of him, keep away from him. He managed to meet him every day. He could seldom get a word said about the state of his mind; for Mr Kirby did not approve of people’s talking of their feelings, – and especially of those connected with conscience: but in the deeds which issued from conscientious feelings, he found cordial assistance given. And Farmer Neale sometimes fancied that he could see the time, – far as it was ahead – when Mr Kirby and he might be, as the pastor had himself said, – friends.

The amount of confession and remorse opened out to the pastor was indeed striking, and more affecting to him than he chose to show to anybody but his wife; and not even to her did he tell many of the facts. The mushroom resolutions spawned in the heat of panic were offensive and discouraging to him: but there were better cases than these. A man who had taken into wrath with a neighbour about a gate, and had kept so for years, and refused to go to church lest he should meet him there, now discovered that life is too short for strife, and too precarious to be wasted in painful quarrels. A little girl whispered to Mr Kirby that she had taken a turnip in his field without leave, and got permission to weed the great flower-bed without pay, to make up for it. Simpson and Sally asked him to marry them; and for poor Sally’s sake, he was right glad to do it. They were straightforward enough in their declaration of their reasons. Simpson thought nobody’s life was worth a halfpenny now, and he did not wish to be taken in his sins: while Sally said it would be worse still if the innocent baby was taken for its parents’ sin. They had to hear the publication of banns, at a time when other people were thinking of anything but marriage; and, when the now disused church was unlocked to admit them to the altar, – just themselves and the clerk, – it was very dreary; but they immediately after felt the safer and better for it. Sally thought the Good Lady would have gone to church with her, if she had been here; and she wished she could let her know that Simpson had fulfilled his promise at last. Other people besides Sally wished they could let the Good Lady know how they were going on; – how frost came at last, in January, and stopped the fever; – how families who had lived crowded together now spread themselves into the empty houses; and how there was so much room that the worst cottages were left uninhabited, or were already in course of demolition, to make airy spaces, or afford sites for better dwellings; and how it was now certain that above two thirds of the people of Bleaburn had perished in the fever, or by decline, after it. But they did not think of getting anybody who could write to tell all this to the Good Lady: nor did it occur to them that she might possibly know it all. The men and boys collected pretty spars for her; and the women and girls knitted gloves and comforters, and made pincushions for her, in the faith that they should some day see her again. Meanwhile, they talked of her every day.

Chapter 9

It was a fine spring day when the Good Lady re-appeared at Bleaburn. There she was, perfectly well, and glad to see health on so many of the faces about her. Some were absent whom she had left walking about in the strength of their prime; but others whom she had last seen lying helpless, like living skeletons, were now on their feet, with a light in their eyes, and some little tinge of colour in their cheeks. There were sad spectacles to be seen of premature decrepitude, of dreadful sores, of deafness, of lameness, left by the fever. There were enough of these to have saddened the heart of any stranger entering Bleaburn for the first time, but to Mary, the impression was that of a place risen from the dead. There was much grass in the churchyard, and none in the streets: the windows of the cottages were standing wide, letting it been seen that the rooms were white-washed within. There was an indescribable air of freshness and brightness about the whole place, which made her feel and say that she hardly thought the fever could harbour there again. As she turned into the lane leading to her aunt’s, the sound of the hammer, and the chipping of stone were heard; and some workmen whom she did not know, turned from their work of planing boards, to see why a crowd could be coming round the corner. These were workmen from O—, building Neale’s new cottages, in capital style. And, for a moment, two young ladies entering from the other end, were equally perplexed as to what the extraordinary bustle could mean. Their mother, however, understood it at a glance, and hastened forward to greet the Good Lady, sending a boy to fetch Mr Kirby immediately. Mrs Kirby’s dryness of manner broke down altogether when she introduced her daughters to Mary. “Let them say they have shaken hands with you,” said she, as she herself kissed the hand she held.

It was not easy for Mary to spare a hand, so laden was she with pincushions and knitted wares; but the Kirbys took them from her, and followed in her train, till the Widow Johnson appeared on her threshold, pale as marble, and grave as a monument, but well and able to hold out her arms to Mary. Poor Jem’s excitement seemed to show that he was aware that some great event was happening. His habits were the same as before his illness, and he had no peace till he had shut the door when Mary entered. Everybody then went away for the time; plenty of eyes, however, being on the watch for the moment when the Good Lady should be visible again.

In a few minutes, the movements of Jem’s head showed his mother that, as she said, something was coming. Jem’s hearing was uncommonly acute: and what he now heard, and what other people heard directly after, was a drum and fife. Neighbour after neighbour came to tell the Johnsons what their ears had told them already, – that there was a recruiting party in Bleaburn again; and Jem went out, attracted by the music.

“It is like the candle to the moth to him,” said his mother. “I must go and see that nobody makes sport of him, or gives him drink.”

“Sit still, Aunty; I will go. And there is Warrender, I see, and Ann. We will take care of Jem.”

And so they did. Ann looked so meaningly at Mary, meantime, as to make Mary look inquiringly at Ann.

“Only, Ma’am,” said Ann, “that Sally Simpson is standing yonder. She does not like to come forward, but I know she would be pleased.”

“Her name is Simpson? How glad I am he has married her!” whispered Mary, as she glanced at the ring which Sally was rather striving to show. “I hope you are happy at last, Sally.”

“Oh, Ma’am, it is such a weight gone! And I do try to make him happy at home, that he may never repent.”

Mary thought the doubt should be all the other way – whether the wife might not be the most likely to repent having bound herself to a man who could act towards her as Simpson had done. Widow Slaney was not to be seen. The fife and drum had sent her to the loft. She came down to see Mary; but her agitation was so great that it would have been cruelty to stay. They heard her draw the bolt as they turned from the door.

“She does not like seeing Jack Neale any more than hearing the drum,” observed the host of the Plough and Harrow, who had come forth to invite the Good Lady in, ‘to take a glass of something.’ “That is Jack Neale, Ma’am; that wooden-legged young man. He is married, though, for all his being so crippled. The young woman loved him before; and she loves him all the more now; and they married last week, and live at his father’s. It must be a sad sight to his father; but he says no word about it. Better not; for Britons must be loyal.”

“And why not?” said the Doctor, who had hastened in from the brow, on seeing that something unusual was going forward below, and had ventured to offer the Good Lady his arm, as he thought an old comrade in the conflict with sickness and death might do.

“Why not?” said the Doctor. “We make grievous complaints of the fatality of war; and it is sad to see the maiming and hear of the slaughter. But we had better spend our lamentations on a fatality that we can manage. It would take many a battle of Albuera to mow us down, and hurt us in sense and limb, as the fever has done.”

“Why, that is true!” cried some, as if struck by a new conviction.

“True, yes,” continued the Doctor. “I don’t like the sight of a recruiting party, or the sound of the drum much better than the poor woman in yonder house, who will die of heartbreak after all – of horror and pining for her son. But there is something that I like still less; the first giddiness and trembling of the strong man, the sinking feebleness of the young mother, the dimming of the infant’s eyes; and the creeping fog along the river bank, the stench in the hot weather, and the damp in the cold, that tell us that fever has lodged among us. I know then that we shall have, many times over, the slaughter of war, without any comfort from thoughts of glory to ourselves or duty to our country. There is neither glory nor duty in dying like vermin in a ditch.”

“I don’t see,” said Warrender, “that the sergeant will carry off any of our youngsters now. If he had come with his drum three months since, some might have gone with him to get away from the fever, as a more terrible thing than war; but at present I think he will find that death has left us no young men to spare.”

And so it proved. The sergeant and his party soon marched up to the brow, and disappeared, delivering the prophecy that Bleaburn would now lose its reputation for eagerness to support king and country. And in truth, Bleaburn was little heard of from that time till the peace.

Mary could not stay now. She had been detained very long from home – in America – and somebody was waiting very impatiently there to give her a new and happy home. This is said as if we were speaking of a real person – and so we are. There was such a Mary Pickard; and what she did for a Yorkshire village in a season of fever is TRUE.

The Home of Woodruffe

the Gardener

In eight chapters

Household Words, Volume 1,

pages 518, 540, 569

Chapter the first

“How pleased the boy looks, to be sure!” observed Woodruffe to his wife, as his son Allan caught up little Moss (as Maurice had chosen to call himself before he could speak plain) and made him jump from the top of the the drawers upon the chair, and then from the chair to the ground. “He is making all that racket just because he is so pleased he does not know what to do with himself.”

“I suppose he will forgive Fleming now for carrying off Abby,” said the, mother. “I say, Allan, what do you think now of Abby marrying away from us?”

“Why, I think it’s a very good thing. You know she never told me that we should go and live where she lived, and in such a pretty place, too, where I may have a garden of my own, and see what I can make of it – all fresh from the beginning, as father says.”

“You are to try your hand at the business, I know,” replied the mother, “but I never heard your father, nor any one else, say that the place was a pretty one. I did not think new railway stations had been pretty places at all.”

“It sounds so to him, naturally,” interposed Woodruffe. “He hears of a south aspect, and a slope to the north for shelter, and the town seen far off; and that sounds all very pleasant. And then, there is the thought of the journey, and the change, and the fun of getting the ground all into nice order, and, best of all, the seeing his sister so soon again. Youth is the time for hope and joy, you know, love.”

And Woodruffe began to whistle, and stepped forward to take his turn at jumping Moss, whom he carried in one flight from the top of the drawers to the floor. Mrs Woodruffe smiled, as she thought that youth was not the only season, with some people, for hope and joy.

Her husband, always disposed to look on the bright side, was particularly happy this evening. The lease of his market garden ground was just expiring. He had prospered on it; and would have desired nothing better than to live by it as long as he lived at all. He desired this so much that he would not believe a word of what people had been saying for two years past, that his ground would be wanted by his landlord on the expiration of the lease, and that it would not be let again. His wife had long foreseen this; but not till the last moment would he do what she thought should have been done long before – offer to buy the ground. At the ordinary price of land, he could accomplish the purchase of it; but when he found his landlord unwilling to sell, he bid higher and higher, till his wife was so alarmed at the rashness, that she was glad when a prospect of entire removal opened. Woodruffe was sure that he could have paid off all he offered at the end of a few years; but his partner thought it would have been a heavy burden on their minds, and a sad waste of money; and she was therefore, in her heart, obliged to the landlord for persisting in his refusal to sell.

When that was settled, Woodruffe became suddenly sure that he could pick up an acre or two of land somewhere not far off. But he was mistaken; and, if he had not been mistaken, market gardening was no longer the profitable business it had been, when it enabled him to lay by something every year. By the opening of a railway, the townspeople, a few miles off, got themselves better supplied with vegetables from another quarter, it was this which put it into the son-in-law’s head to propose the removal of the family into Staffordshire, where he held a small appointment on a railway. Land might be had at a low rent near the little country station where his business lay; and the railway brought within twenty minutes’ distance a town where there must be a considerable demand for garden produce. The place was in a raw state at present; and there were so few houses, that, if there had been a choice of time, the Flemings would rather have put off the coming of the family till some of the cottages already planned had been built; but the Woodruffes must remove in September, and all parties agreed that they should not mind a little crowding for a few months. Fleming’s cottage was to hold them all till some chance of more accommodation should offer.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Woodruffe, after standing for some time, half whistling and thinking, with that expression on his face which his wife had long learned to be afraid of, “I’ll write tomorrow – let’s see – I may as well do it tonight;” and he looked round for paper and ink. “I’ll write to Fleming, and get him to buy the land for me at once.”

“Before you see it?” said his wife, looking up from her stocking mending.

“Yes. I know all about it, as much as if I were standing on it this moment; and I am sick of this work – of being turned out just when I had made the most of a place, and got attached to it. I’ll make a sure thing of it this time, and not have such a pull at my heartstrings again. And the land will be cheaper now than later; and we shall go to work upon it with such heart, if it is our own! Eh?”

“Certainly, if we find, after seeing it, that we like it as well as we expect. I would just wait till then.”

“As well as we expect! Why, bless my soul! don’t we know all about it? It is not any land agent or interested person, that has described it to us; but our own daughter and her husband; and do not they know what we want? The quantity at my own choice; the aspect capital; plenty of water (only too much, indeed); the soil anything but poor, and sand and marl within reach to reduce the stiffness; and manure at command, all along the railway, from half a dozen towns; and osier beds at hand (within my own bounds if I like) giving all manner of convenience for fencing, and binding, and covering! Why, what would you have?”

“It sounds very pleasant, certainly.”

“Then, how can you make objections? I can’t think where you look, to find any objections?”

“I see none now, and I only want to be sure that we shall find none when we arrive.”

“Well! I do call that unreasonable! To expect to find any place on earth altogether unobjectionable! I wonder what objection could be so great as being turned out of one after another, just as we have got them into order. Here comes our girl. Well, Becky, I see how you like the news! Now, would not you like it better still if we were going to a place of our own, where we should not be under any landlord’s whims? We should have to work, you know, one and all. But we would get the land properly manured, and have a cottage of our own in time; would not we? Will you undertake the pigs, Becky?”

“Yes, father; and there are many things I can do in the garden too. I am old and strong, now; and I can do much more than I have ever done here.”

“Aye; if the land was our own,” said Woodruffe, with a glance at his wife. She said no more, but was presently upstairs putting Moss to bed. She knew, from long experience, how matters would go. After a restless night, Woodruffe spoke no more of buying the land without seeing it; and he twice said, in a meditative, rather than a communicative, way, that he believed it would take as much capital as he had to remove his family, and get his new land into fit condition for spring crops.

Chapter the second

“You may look out now for the place. Look out for our new garden. We are just there now,” said Woodruffe to the children as the whistle sounded, and the train was approaching the station. It had been a glorious autumn day from the beginning; and for the last hour, while the beauty of the light on fields and trees and water had been growing more striking, the children, tired with the novelty of all that they had seen since morning, had been dropping asleep. They roused up suddenly enough at the news that they were reaching their new home; and thrust their heads to the windows, eagerly asking on which side they were to look for their garden. It was on the south, the left-hand side; but it might have been anywhere, for what they could see of it. Below the embankment was something like a sheet of grey water, spreading far away.

“It is going to be a foggy night,” observed Woodruffe. The children looked into the air for the fog, which had always, in their experience, arrived by that way from the sea. The sky was all a clear blue, except where a pale green and a faint blush of pink streaked the west. A large planet beamed clear and bright: and the air was so transparent that the very leaves on the trees might almost be counted. Yet could nothing be seen below for the grey mist which was rising, from moment to moment.

Fleming met them as they alighted; but he could not stay till he had seen to the other passengers. His wife was there. She had been a merry hearted girl; and now, still so young, as to look as girlish as ever, she seemed even merrier than ever. She did not look strong, but she had hardly thrown off what she called “a little touch of the ague;” and she declared herself perfectly well when the wind was anywhere but in the wrong quarter. Allan wondered how the wind could go wrong. He had never heard of such a thing before. He had known the wind too high, when it did mischief among his father’s fruit trees; but it had never occurred to him that it was not free to come and go whence and whither it would, without blame or objection.

“Come – come home,” exclaimed Mrs Fleming. “Never mind about your bags and boxes! My husband will take care of them. Let me show you the way home.”

She let go the hands of the young brothers, and loaded them, and then herself, with parcels, that they might not think they were going to lose every thing, as she said; and then tripped on before to show the way. The way was down steps, from the highest of which two or three chimney tops might be seen piercing the mist which hid everything else. Down, down, down went the party, by so many steps that little Moss began to totter under his bundle.

“How low this place lies!” observed the mother.

“Why, yes;” replied Mrs Fleming. “And yet I don’t know. I believe it is rather that the railway runs high.”

“Yes, yes; that is it,” said Woodruffe. “What an embankment this is! If this is to shelter my garden to the north –”

“Yes, yes, it is. I knew you would like it,” exclaimed Mrs Fleming. “I said you would be delighted. I only wish you could see your ground at once: but it seems rather foggy, and I suppose we must wait till the morning. Here we are at home.”

The travellers were rather surprised to see how very small a house this “home” was. Though called a cottage, it had not the look of one. It was of a red brick, dingy, though evidently new: and, to all appearance, it consisted of merely a room below, and one above. On walking round it, however, a sloping roof in two directions gave a hint of further accommodation.

When the whole party had entered, and Mrs Fleming had kissed them all round, her glance at her mother asked, as plainly as any words, “Is not this a pleasant room?”

“A pretty room, indeed, my dear,” was the mother’s reply, “and as nicely furnished as one could wish.”

She did not say anything of the rust which her quick eye perceived on the fire irons and the door key, or of the damp which stained the walls just above the skirting board. There was nothing amiss with the ceiling, or the higher parts of the walls – so it might be an accident.

“But, my dear,” asked the mother, seeing how sleepy Moss looked, “Where are you going to put us all? If we crowd you out of all comfort, I shall be sorry we came so soon.”

As Mrs Fleming led the way upstairs, she reminded her family of their agreement not to mind a little crowding for a time. If her mother thought there was not room for all the newly arrived in this chamber, they could fit out a corner for Allan in the place where she and her husband were to sleep.

“All of us in this room?” exclaimed Becky.

“Yes, Becky; why not? Here, you see, is a curtain between your bed and the large one; and your bed is large enough to let little Moss sleep with you. And here is a morsel of a bed for Allan in the other corner; and I have another curtain ready to shut it in.”

“But,” said Becky, who was going on to object. Her mother stopped her by a sign.

“Or,” continued Mrs Fleming, “if you like to let Allan and his bed and curtain come down to our place, you will have plenty of room here; much more than my neighbours have, for the most part. How it will be when the new cottages are built, I don’t know. We think them too small for new houses; but, meantime, there are the Brookes sleeping seven in a room no bigger than this, and the Vines six in one much smaller.”

“How do they manage, now?” asked the mother. “In case of illness, say: and how do they wash and dress?”

“Ah! that is the worst part of it. I don’t think the boys wash themselves – what we should call washing for weeks together: or at least only on Saturday nights. So they slip their clothes on in two minutes; and then their mother and sisters can get up. But there is the pump below for Allan, and he can wash as much as he pleases.”

It was not till the next day that, Mrs Woodruffe knew – and then it was Allan who told her – that the pump was actually in the very place where the Flemings slept – close by their bed. The Flemings were, in truth, sleeping in an outhouse, where the floor was of brick, the swill tub stood in one corner, the coals were heaped in another, and the light came in from a square hole high up, which had never till now been glazed. Plenty of air rushed in under the door, and yet some more between the tiles – there being no plaster beneath them. As soon as Mrs Woodruffe had been informed of this, and had stepped in, while her daughter’s back was turned, to make her own observations, she went out by herself for a walk – so long a walk, that it was several hours before she reappeared, heated and somewhat depressed. She had roamed the country round, in search of lodgings; and finding none – finding no occupier who really could possibly spare a room on any terms – she had returned convinced that, serious as the expense would be, she and her family ought to settle themselves in the nearest town – her husband going to his business daily by the third class train, till a dwelling could be provided for them on the spot.

When she returned, the children were on the watch for her; and little Moss had strong hopes that she would not know him. He had a great cap of rushes on his head, with a heavy bulrush for a feather; he was stuck all over with water-flags and bulrushes, and carried a long osier wand, wherewith to flog all those who did not admire him enough in his new style of dress. The children were clamorous for their mother to come down, and see the nice places where they got these new playthings: and she would have gone, but that their father came up, and decreed it otherwise. She was heated and tired, he said; and he would not have her go till she was easy and comfortable enough to see things in the best light.

Her impression was that her husband was, more or less (and she did not know why), disappointed; but he did not say so. He would not hear of going off to the town, being sure that some place would turn up soon – some place where they might put their heads at night; and the Flemings should be no losers by having their company by day. Their boarding all together, if the sleeping could but be managed, would be a help to the young couple – a help which it was pleasant to him, as a father, to be able to give them. He said nothing about the land that was not in praise of it. Its quality was excellent; or would be when it had good treatment. It would take some time and trouble to get it into order – so much that it would never do to live at a distance from it. Besides, no trains that would suit him ran at the proper hours; so there was an end of it. They must all rough it a little for a time, and expect their reward afterwards.

There was nothing that Woodruffe was so hard to please in as the time when he should take his wife to see the ground. It was close at hand; yet he hindered her going in the morning, and again after their early dinner. He was anxious that she should not be prejudiced, or take a dislike at first; and in the morning, the fog was so thick that everything looked dank and dreary; and in the middle of the day, when a warm autumn sun had dissolved the mists, there certainly was a most disagreeable smell hanging about. It was not gone at sunset; but by that time Mrs Woodruffe was impatient, and she appeared – Allan showing her the way – just when her husband was scraping his feet upon his spade, after a hard day of digging.

“There, now!” said he, good-humouredly, striking his spade into the ground, “Fleming said you would be down before we were ready for you: and here you are! – Yes, ready for you. There are some planks coming, to keep your feet out of the wet among all this clay.”

“And yours too, I hope,” said the wife. “I don’t mind such wet, after rain, as you have been accustomed to; but to stand in a puddle like this is a very different thing.”

“Yes – so ’tis. But we’ll have the planks; and they will serve for running the wheelbarrow too. It is too much for Allan, or any boy, to run the barrow in such a soil as this. We’ll have the planks first; and then we’ll drain, and drain, and get rare spring crops.”

“What have they given you this artificial pond for,” asked the wife, “if you must drain so much?”

“That is no pond. All the way along here, on both sides the railway, there is the mischief of these pits. They dig out the clay for bricks, and then leave the places – pits like this, some of them six feet deep. The railways have done a deal of good for the poor man, and will do a great deal more yet; but, at present this one has left those pits.”

“I hope Moss will not fall into one. They are very dangerous,” declared the mother, looking about for the child.

“He is safe enough there, among the osiers,” said the father. “He has lost his heart outright to the osiers. However, I mean to drain and fill up this pit, when I find a good outfall: and then we will have all high and dry, and safe for the children. I don’t care so much for the pit as for the ditches there. Don’t you notice the bad smell?”

“Yes, indeed, that struck me the first night.”

“I have been inquiring today, and I find there is one acre in twenty hereabouts occupied with foul ditches like that. And then the overflow from them and the pits, spoils many an acre more. There is a stretch of water-flags and bulrushes, and nasty coarse grass and rushes, nothing but a swamp, where the ground is naturally as good as this; and, look here! Fleming was rather out, I tell him, when he wrote that I might graze a pony on the pasture below, whenever I have a market cart. I ask him if he expects me to water it here.”

So saying, Woodruffe led the way to one of the ditches which, instead of fences, bounded his land; and, moving the mass of weeds with a stick, showed the water beneath, covered with a whitish bubbling scum, the smell of which was insufferable.

“There is plenty of manure there,” said Woodruffe: “that is the only thing that can be said for it. We’ll make manure of it, and sweep out the ditch, and deepen it, and narrow it, and not use up so many feet of good ground for a ditch that does nothing but poison us. A fence is better than a ditch any day. I’ll have a fence, and still save ten feet of ground, the whole way down.”

“There is a great deal to do here,” observed the wife.

“And good reward when it is done,” Woodruffe replied. “If I can fall in with a stout labourer, he and Allan and I can get our spring crops prepared for; and I expect they will prove the goodness of the soil. There is Fleming. Supper is ready, I suppose.”

The children were called, but both were so wet and dirty that it took twice as long as usual to make them fit to sit at table: and apologies were made for keeping supper waiting. The grave half hour before Moss’s bedtime was occupied with the most solemn piece of instruction he had ever had in his life. His father carried him up to the railway, and made him understand the danger of playing there. He was never to play there. His father would go up with him once a day, and let him see a train pass: and this was the only time he was ever to mount the steps, except by express leave. Moss was put to bed in silence, with his father’s deep, grave voice sounding in his ears.

“He will not forget it,” declared his father. “He will give us no trouble about the railway. The next thing is the pit. Allan, I expect you to see that he does not fall into the pit. In time, we shall teach him to take care of himself; but you must remember, meanwhile, that the pit is six feet deep – deeper than I am high: and that the edge is the same clay that you slipped on so often this morning.”

“Yes, father,” said Allan, looking as grave as if power of life and death were in his hands.

Chapter the third

One fine morning in the next spring, there was more stir and cheerfulness about the Woodruffes’ dwelling than there had been of late. The winter had been somewhat dreary; and now the spring was anxious; for Woodruffe’s business was not, as yet, doing very well. His hope, when he bought his pony and cart, was to dispatch by railway to the town the best of his produce, and sell the commoner part in the country neighbourhood, sending his cart round within the reach of a few miles. As it turned out, he had nothing yet to send to the town, and his agent there was vexed and displeased. No radishes, onions, early salads, or rhubarb were ready: and it would be sometime yet before they were.

“I am sure I have done everything I could,” said Woodruffe to Fleming, as they both lent a hand to put the pony into the cart. “Nobody can say that I have not made drains enough, or that they are not deep enough; yet the frost has taken such a hold that one would think we were living in the north of Scotland, instead of in Staffordshire.”

“It has not been a severe season either,” observed Fleming.

“There’s the vexation,” replied Woodruffe. “If it had been a season which set us at defiance, and made all sufferers alike, one must just submit to a loss, and go on again, like one’s neighbours. But, you see, I am cut out, as my agent says, from the market. Everybody else has spring vegetables there, as usual. It is no use telling him that I never failed before. But I know what it is. It is yonder great ditch that does the mischief.”

“Why, we have nothing to do with that.”

“That is the very reason. If it was mine or yours, do you think I should not have taken it in hand long ago? All my draining goes for little, while that shallow ditch keeps my ground a continual sop. It is all uneven along the bottom – not the same depth for three feet together anywhere, and not deep enough by two feet in any part. So there it is, choked up and putrid; and, after an hour or two of rain, my garden gets such a soaking, that the next frost is destruction.”

“I will speak about it again,” said Fleming. “We must have it set right before next winter.”

“I think we have seen enough of the uselessness of speaking,” replied Woodruffe, gloomily. “If we tease the gentry any more, they may punish you for it. I would show them my mind by being off, throwing up my bargain at all costs, if I had not put so much into the ground that I have nothing left to move away with.”

“Don’t be afraid for me,” said Fleming, cheerfully. “It was chiefly my doing that you came here, and I must try my utmost to obtain fair conditions for you. We must remember that the benefit of your outlay has all to come.”

“Yes; I can’t say we have got much of it yet.”

“By next winter,” continued Fleming, “your privet hedges and screens will have grown up into some use against the frost; and your own drainage – Come, come, Allan, my boy! be off! It is getting late.”

Allan seemed to be idling, re-arranging his bunches of small radishes, and little bundles of rhubarb, in their clean baskets, and improving the stick with which he was to drive: but he pleaded that he was waiting for Moss, and for the parcel which his mother was getting ready for Becky.

“Ah! my poor little girl!” said Woodruffe. “Give my love to her, and tell her it will be a happy day when we can send for her to come home again. Be sure you observe particularly, to tell us, how she looks; and, mind, if she fancies anything in the cart – any radishes, or whatever else, because it comes out of our garden, be sure you give it her. I wish I was going myself with the cart, for the sake of seeing Becky; but I must go to work. Here have I been all the while, waiting to see you off. Ah! here they come! you may always have notice now of who is coming by that child’s crying.”

“O, father! not always!” exclaimed Allan.

“Far too often, I’m sure. I never knew a child grow so fractious. I am saying, my dear,” to his wife, who now appeared with her parcel, and Moss in his best hat, “that boy is the most fractious child we ever had: and he, is getting too old for that to begin now. How can you spoil him so?”

“I am not aware,” said Mrs Woodruffe, her eyes filling with tears, “that I treat him differently from the rest: but the child is not well. His chilblains tease him terribly; and I wish there may be nothing worse.”

“Warm weather will soon cure the chilblains, and then I hope we shall see an end of the fretting. – Now, leave off crying this minute, Moss, or you don’t go. You don’t see me cry with my rheumatism, and that is worse than chilblains, I can tell you.”

Moss tried to stifle his sobs, while his mother put more straw into the cart tor him, and cautioned Allan to be careful of him, for it really seemed as if the child was tender all over. Allan seemed to succeed best as comforter. He gave Moss the stick to wield, and showed him how to make believe to whip the pony, so that before they turned the corner, Moss was wholly engrossed with what he called driving.

“Yes, yes,” said Woodruffe, as he turned away, to go to his garden, “Allan is the one to manage him. He can take as good care of him as any woman, without spoiling him.”

Mrs Woodruffe submitted to this in silence; but with the feeling that she did not deserve it.

Becky had had no notice of this visit from her brothers: but no such visit could take her by surprise; for she was thinking of her family all day long, every day, and fancying she should see them, whichever way she turned. It was not her natural destination to be a servant in a farmhouse: she had never expected it – never been prepared for it. She was as willing to work as any girl could be; and her help in the gardening was beyond what most women are capable of: but it was a bitter thing to her to go among strangers, and toil for them, when she knew that she was wanted at home by father and mother, and brothers, and just at present, by her sister too; for Mrs Fleming’s confinement was to happen this spring. The reason why Becky was not at home while so much wanted there was, that there really was no accommodation for her. The plan of sleeping all huddled together as they were at first would not do. The girl herself could not endure it; and her parents felt that she must be got out at any sacrifice. They had inquired diligently till they found a place for her in a farmhouse where the good wife promised protection, and care, and kindness; and fulfilled her promise to the best of her power.

“I hope they do well by you here, Becky,” asked Allan, when the surprise caused by his driving up with a dash had subsided, and everybody had retired, to leave Becky with her brothers for the few minutes they could stay. “I hope they are kind to you here.”

“O, yes – very kind. And I am sure you ought to say so to father and mother.”

Becky had jumped into the cart, and had her arms round Moss, and her head on his shoulder. Raising her head, and with her eyes filling as she spoke, she inquired anxiously how the new cottages went on, and when father and mother were to have a home of their own again. She owned, but did not wish her father and mother to hear of it, that she did not like being among such rough people as the farm servants. She did not like some of the behaviour that she saw; and, still less, such talk as she was obliged to overhear. When would a cottage be ready for them?

“Why, the new cottages would soon be getting on now,” Allan said: but he didn’t know; nobody fancied the look of them. He saw them just after the foundations were laid; and the enclosed parts were like a clay puddle. He did not see how they were ever to be improved; for the curse of wet seemed to be on them, as upon everything about the Station. Fleming’s cottage was the best he had seen, after all, if only it was twice as large. If anything could be done to make the new cottages what cottages should be, it would be done: for every body agreed that the railway gentlemen desired to do the best for their people, and to set an example in that respect: but it was beyond anybody’s power to make wet clay as healthy as warm gravel. Unless they could go to work first to dry the soil, it seemed a hopeless sort of affair.

“But, I say, Becky,” pursued Allan, “you know about my garden – that father gave me a garden of my own.”

Becky’s head was turned quite away; and she did not look round, when she replied,

“Yes; I remember. How does your garden get on?”

There was something in her voice which made her brother lean over and look into her face; and, as he expected, tears were running down her cheeks.

“There now!” said he, whipping the back of the cart with his stick; “something must be done, if you can’t get on here.”

“O! I can get on. Be sure you don’t tell mother that I can’t get on, or anything about it.”

“You look healthy, to be sure.”

“To be sure I am. Don’t say any more about it. Tell me about your garden.”

“Well: I am trying what I can make of it, after I have done working with father. But it takes a long time to bring it round.”

“What! is the wet there, too?”

“Lord, yes! The wet was beyond everything at first. I could not leave the spade in the ground ten minutes, if father called me, but the water was standing in the hole when I went back again. It is not so bad now, since I made a drain to join upon father’s principal one; and father gave me some sand, and plenty of manure: but it seems to us that manure does little good. It won’t sink in when the ground is so wet.”

“Well, there will be the summer next, and that will dry up your garden.”

“Yes. People say the smells are dreadful in hot weather, though. But we seem to get used to that. I thought it sickly work, just after we came, going down to get osiers, and digging near the big ditch that is our plague now: but somehow, it does not strike me now as it did then, though Fleming says it is getting worse every warm day. But come – I must be off. What will you help yourself to? And don’t forget your parcel.”

Becky’s great anxiety was to know when her brothers would come again. O! very often, she was assured – oftener and oftener as the vegetables came forward: whenever there were either too many or too few to send to the town by rail.

After Becky had jumped down, the farmer and one of the men were seen to be contemplating the pony.

“What have you been giving your pony lately?” asked the farmer of Allan. “I ask as a friend, having some experience of this part of the country. Have you been letting him graze?”

“Yes, in the bit of meadow that we have leave for. There is a good deal of grass there, now. He has been grazing there these three weeks.”

“On the meadow where the osier beds are? Ay! I knew it, by the look of him. Tell your father that if he does not take care, his pony will have the staggers in no time. An acquaintance of mine grazed some cattle there once; and in a week or two, they were all feverish, so that the butcher refused them on any terms; and I have seen more than one horse in the staggers, after grazing in marshes of that sort.”

“There is fine thick grass there, and plenty of it,” said Allan, who did not like that anybody but themselves should criticise their new place and plans.

“Ay, ay; I know,” replied the farmer. “But if you try to make hay of that grass, you’ll be surprised to find how long it takes to make, and how like wool it comes out at last. It is a coarse grass, with no strength in it; and it must be a stronger beast than this that will bear feeding on it. Just do you tell your father what I say, that’s all; and then he can do as he pleases: but I would take a different way with that pony, without loss of time, if it was mine.”

Allan did not much like taking this sort of message to his father, who was not altogether so easy to please as he used to be. If anything vexed him ever so little, he always began to complain of his rheumatism – and he now complained of his rheumatism many times in a day. It was managed, however, by tacking a little piece of amusement and pride upon it. Moss was taught, all the way as they went home, after selling their vegetables, how much everything sold for; and he was to deliver the money to his father, and go through his lesson as gravely as any big man. It succeeded very well. Everybody laughed. Woodruffe called the child his little man-of-business; gave him a penny out of the money he brought; and when he found that the child did not like jumping as he used to do, carried him up to the railway to listen for the whistle, and see the afternoon train come up, and stop a minute, and go on again.

Chapter the fourth

Fleming did what he could to find fair play for his father-in-law. He spoke to one and another – to the officers of the railway, and to the owners of neighbouring plots of ground, about the bad drainage, which was injuring everybody; but he could not learn that anything was likely to be done. The ditch – the great evil of all – had always been there, he was told, and people never used to complain of it. When Fleming pointed out that it was at first a comparatively deep ditch, and that it grew shallower eveiy year, from the accumulations formed by its uneven bottom, there were some who admitted that it might be as well to clean it out; yet nobody set about it. And it was truly a more difficult affair now than it would have been at an earlier time. If the ditch was shallower, it was much wider. It had once been twelve feet wide, and it was now eighteen. When any drain had been flowing into it, or after a rainy day, the contents spread through and over the soil on each side, and softened it, and then the next time any horse or cow came to drink, the whole bank was made a perfect bog; for the poor animals, however thirsty, tried twenty places to find water that they could drink, before going away in despair. Such was the bar in the way of poor Woodruffe’s success with his ground. Before the end of summer, his patience was nearly worn out. During a showery and gleamy May and a pleasant June, he had gone on as prosperously as he could expect under the circumstances; and he confidently anticipated that a seasonable July and August would quite set him up. But he had had no previous experience of the peculiarities of ill-drained land; and the hot July and August from which he hoped so much did him terrible mischief. The drought which would have merely dried and pulverised a well-drained soil, leaving it free to profit much by small waterings, baked the over-charged soil of Woodruffe’s garden into hard hot masses of clay, amidst which his produce died off faster and faster every day, even though he and all his family wore out their strength with constant watering. He did hope, he said, that he should have been spared drought at least; but it seemed as if he was to have every plague in turn; and the drought seemed, at the time, to be the worst of all.

One day, Fleming saw a welcome face in one of the carriages; Mr Nelson, a Director of the railway, who was looking along the line to see how matters went. Though Mr Nelson was not exactly the one, of all the Directors, whom Fleming would have chosen to appeal to, he saw that the opportunity must not be lost; and he entreated him to alight, and stay for the next train.

“Eh! what?” said Mr Nelson “what can you want with us here? A station like this! Why, one has to put on spectacles to see it!”

“If you would come down, Sir, I should be glad to show you …”

“Well: I suppose I must.”

As they were standing on the little platform, and the train was growing smaller in the distance, Fleming proceeded to business. He told of the serious complaints that were made for a distance of a few miles on either hand, of the clay pits, left by the railway brickmakers, to fill with stagnant waters.

“Pho! pho! Is that what you want to say?” replied Mr Nelson. “You need not have stopped me just to tell me that. We hear of those pits all along the line. We are sick of hearing of them.”

“That does not mend the matter in this place,” observed Fleming. “I speak freely, Sir, but I think it my duty to say that something must be done. I heard, a few days ago, more than the people hereabouts know – much more than I shall tell them – of the fever that has settled on particular points of our line; and I now assure you, Sir, that if the fever once gets a hold in this place, I believe it may carry us all off, before anything can be done. Sir, there is not one of us, within half a mile of the Station, that has a wholesome dwelling.”

“Pho! pho! you are a croaker,” declared Mr Nelson. “Never saw such a dismal fellow! Why, you will die of fright, if ever you die of anything.”

“Then, Sir, will you have the goodness to walk round with me, and see for yourself what you think of things. It is not only for myself and my family that I speak. In an evil day, I induced my wife’s family to settle here, and …”

“Ay! that is a nice garden,” observed Mr Nelson, as Fleming pointed to Woodruffe’s land. “You are a croaker, Fleming. I declare I think the place is much improved since I saw it last. People would not come and settle here if the place was like what you say.”

Instead of arguing the matter, Fleming led the way down the long flight of steps. He was aware that leading the gentleman among bad smells and over shoes in a foul bog would have more effect than any argument was ever known to have on his contradictious spirit.

“You should have seen worse things than these, and then you would not be so discontented,” observed Mr Nelson, striking his stick upon the hard-baked soil, all intersected with cracks. “I have seen such a soil as this in Spain, some days after a battle, when there were scores of fingers and toes sticking up out of the cracks. What would you say to that? – eh?”

“We may have a chance of seeing that here,” replied Fleming; “if the plague comes – and comes too fast for the coffin makers – a thing which has happened more than once in England, I believe.”

Mr Nelson stopped to laugh; but he certainly attended more to business as he went on; and Fleming, who knew something of his ways, had hopes that if he could only keep his own temper, this visit of the Director might not be without good results.

In passing through Woodruffe’s garden, very nice management was necessary. Woodruffe was at work there, charged with ire against railway directors and landed proprietors, whom, amidst the pangs of his rheumatism, he regarded as the poisoners of his land and the bane of his fortunes; while, on the other hand, Mr Nelson, who had certainly never been a market gardener, criticised and ridiculed everything that met his eye. What was the use of such a tool house as that? – big enough for a house for them all. What was the use of such low fences? – of such high screens? – of making the walks so wide? – sheer waste! – of making the beds so long one way, and so narrow another? – of planting or sowing this and that? – things that nobody wanted. Woodruffe had pushed back his hat, in preparation for a defiant reply, when Fleming caught his eye, and, by a good-tempered smile, conveyed to him that they had an oddity to deal with. Allan, who had begun by listening reverently, was now looking from one to another, in great perplexity.

“What is that boy here for, staring like a dunce? Why don’t you send him to school? You neglect a parent’s duty if you don’t send him to school.”

Woodruffe answered by a smile of contempt, walked away, and went to work at a distance.

“That boy is very well taught,” Fleming said, quietly. “He is a great reader, and will soon be fit to keep his father’s accounts.”

“What does he stare in that manner for, then? I took him for a dunce.”

“He is not accustomed to hear his father called in question, either as a gardener or a parent.”

“Pho! pho! I might as well have waited, though, till he was out of hearing. Well, is this all you have to show me? I think you make a great fuss about nothing.”

“Will you walk this way?” said Fleming, turning down towards the osier beds, without any compassion for the gentleman’s boots or olfactory nerves. For a long while Mr Nelson affected to admire the reeds, and waterflags, and marsh blossoms, declared the decayed vegetation to be peat soil, very fine peat, which the ladies would be glad of for their heaths in the flower garden – and thought there must be good fowling here in winter. Fleming quietly turned over the so-called peat with a stick, letting it be seen that it was a mere dung heap of decayed rushes, and wished Mr Nelson would come in the fowling season, and see what the place was like.

“The children are merry enough, however,” observed the gentleman. “They can laugh here, much as in other places. I advise you to take a lesson from them, Fleming. Now, don’t you teach them to croak.”

The laughter sounded from the direction of the old brick-ground; and thither they now turned. Two little boys were on the brink of a pit, so intent on watching a rat in the water and on pelting it with stones, that they did not see that anybody was coming to disturb them. In answer to Mr Nelson’s question, whether they were vagrants, and why vagrants were permitted there, Fleming answered that the younger one – the pale-faced one – was his little brother-in-law; the other –

“Ay, now, you will be telling me next that the pale face is the fault of this place.”

“It certainly is,” said Fleming. “That child was chubby enough when he came.”

“Pho, pho! a puny little wretch as ever I saw puny – from its birth, I have no doubt of it. And who is the other, a gypsy?”

“He looks like it,” replied Fleming. On being questioned, Moss told that the boy lived near, and he had often played with him lately. Yes, he lived near, just beyond those trees; not in a house, only a sort of house the people had made for themselves. Mr Nelson liked to lecture vagrants, even more than other people; so Moss was required to show the way, and his dark-skinned playfellow was not allowed to skulk behind.

Moss led his party on, over the tufty hay-coloured grass, skipping from bunch to bunch of rushes, round the osier beds, and at last straight through a clump of alders, behind whose screen now appeared the house, as Moss had called it, which the gypsies had made for themselves. It was the tilt of a waggon, serving as a tent. Nobody was visible but a woman, crouching under the shadow of the tent, to screen from the sun that which was lying across her lap.

“What is that that she’s nursing? Lord bless me! Can that be a child?” exclaimed Mr Nelson.

“A child in the fever,” replied Fleming.

“Lord bless me! – to see legs and arms hang down like that!” exclaimed the gentleman: and he forthwith gave the woman a lecture on her method of nursing – scolded her for letting the child get a fever – for not putting it to bed – for not getting a doctor to it – for being a gypsy, and living under an alder clump. He then proceeded to inquire whether she had anybody else in the tent, where her husband was, whether he lived by thieving, how they would all like being transported, whether she did not think her children would all be hanged, and so on. At first, the woman tried a facetious and wheedling tone, then a whimpering one, and, finally, a scolding one. The last answered well. Mr Nelson found that a man, to say nothing of a gentleman, has no chance with a woman with a sore heart in her breast, and a sick child in her lap, when once he has driven her to her weapon of the tongue. He said afterwards, that he had once gone to Billingsgate, on purpose to set two fishwomen quarrelling, that he might see what it was like. The scene had fulfilled all his expectations; but he now declared that it could not compare with this exhibition behind the alders. He stood a long while, first trying to overpower the woman’s voice; and, when that seemed hopeless, poking about among the rushes with his stick, and finally, staring in the woman’s face, in a mood between consternation and amusement: – thus he stood, waiting till the torrent should intermit; but there was no sign of intermission; and when the sick child began to move and rouse itself, and look at the strangers, as if braced by the vigour of its mother’s tongue, the prospect of an end seemed further off than ever. Mr Nelson shrugged his shoulders, signed to his companions, and walked away through the alders. The woman was not silent because they were out of sight. Her voice waxed shriller as it followed them, and died away only in the distance. Moss was grasping Fleming’s hand with all his might when Mr Nelson spoke to him, and shook his stick at him, asking him how he came to play with such people, and saying that if ever he heard him learning to scold like that woman, he would beat him with that stick: so Moss vowed he never would.

When the train was in sight by which Mr Nelson was to depart, be turned to Fleming, with the most careless air imaginable, saying,

“Have you any medicine in your house? – any bark?”

“Not any. But I will send for some.”

“Ay, do. Or – no – I will send you some. See if you can’t get these people housed somewhere, so that they may not sleep in the swamp. I don’t mean in any of your houses, but in a barn, or some such place. If the physic comes before the doctor, get somebody to dose the child. And don’t fancy you are all going to die of the fever. That is the way to make yourselves ill: and it is all nonsense, too, I dare say.”

“Do you like that gentleman?” asked Moss, sapiently, when the train was whirling Mr Nelson out of sight. “Because I don’t – not at all.”

“I believe he is kinder than he seems, Moss. He need not be so rough: but I know he does kind things sometimes.”

“But, do you like him?”

“No, I can’t say I do.”

Before many hours were over, Fleming was sorry that he had admitted this, even to himself; and for many days after he was occasionally heard telling Moss what a good gentleman Mr Nelson was, for all his roughness of manners. With the utmost speed, before it would have been thought possible, arrived a surgeon from the next town, with medicines, and the news that he was to come every day while there was any fear of fever. The gypsies were to have been cared for; but they were gone. The marks of their fire and a few stray feathers which showed that a fowl had been plucked, alone told where they had encamped. A neighbour, who loved her poultry yard, was heard to say that the sick child would not die for want of chicken broth, she would be bound; and the nearest farmer asked if they had left any potato peels and turnip tops for his pig. He thought that was the least they could do after making their famous gypsy stew (a capital dish, it was said,) from his vegetables. They were gone; and if they had not left fever behind, they might be forgiven, for the sake of the benefit of taking themselves off. After the search for the gypsies was over, there was still an unusual stir about the place. One and another stranger appeared and examined the low grounds, and sent for one and another of the neighbouring proprietors, whether farmer, or builder, or gardener, or labourer; for every one who owned or rented a yard of land on the borders of the great ditch, or anywhere near the clay pits or osier beds. It was the opinion of the few residents near the Station that something would be done to improve the place before another year; and everybody said that it must be Mr Nelson’s doings, and that it was a thousand pities that he did not come earlier, before the fever had crept thus far along the line.

Chapter the fifth

For some months past, Becky had believed without a doubt, that the day of her return home would be the very happiest day of her life. She was too young to know yet that it is not for us to settle which of our days shall be happy ones, nor what events shall yield us joy. The promise had not been kept that she should return when her father and mother removed into the new cottage. She had been told that there really was not, even now decent room for them all and that they must at least wait till the hot weather was completely over before they crowded the chamber, as they had hitherto done. And then, when autumn came on, and the creeping mists from the low grounds hung round the place from sunset till after breakfast the next day, the mother delayed sending for her daughter, unwilling that she should lose the look of health which she alone now, of all the family, exhibited. Fleming and his wife and babe prospered better than the others. The young man’s business lay on the high ground, at the top of the embankment. He was there all day while Mr Woodruffe and Allan were below, among the ditches and the late and early fogs. Mrs Fleming was young and strong, full of spirit and happiness; and so far fortified against the attacks of disease, as a merry heart strengthens nerve and bone and muscle, and invigorates all the vital powers. In regard to her family, her father’s hopeful spirit seemed to have passed into her. While he was becoming permanently discouraged, she was always assured that everything would come right next year. The time had arrived for her power of hope to be tested to the utmost. One day this autumn, she admitted that Becky must be sent for. She did not forget, however, to charge Allan to be cheerful, and make the best of things, and not frighten Becky by the way.

It was now the end of October. Some of the days were balmy elsewhere – the afternoons ruddy; the leaves crisp beneath the tread; the squirrel busy after the nuts in the wood; the pheasants splendid among the dry ferns in the brake, the sportsman warm and thirsty in his exploring among the stubble. In the evenings the dwellers in country houses called one another out upon the grass, to see how bright the stars were, and how softly the moonlight slept upon the woods. While it was thus in one place, in another, and not far off, all was dank, dim, dreary and unwholesome; with but little sun, and no moon or stars; all chill, and no glow; no stray perfumes, the last of the year, but sickly scents coming on the steam from below. Thus it was about Fleming’s house, this latter end of October, when he saw but little of his wife, because she was nursing her mother in the fever, and when he tried to amuse himself with his young baby at mealtimes (awkward nurse as he was) to relieve his wife of the charge for the little time he could be at home. When the baby cried, and when he saw his Abby look wearied, he did wish, now and then, that Becky was at home: but he was patient, and helpful, and as cheerful as he could, till the day which settled the matter. On that morning he felt strangely weak, barely able to mount the steps to the station. During the morning, several people told him he looked ill; and one person did more. The porter sent a message to the next large Station that somebody must be sent immediately to fill Fleming’s place, in case of his being too ill to work. Somebody came; and before that, Fleming was in bed – certainly down in the fever. His wife was now wanted at home; and Becky must come to her mother.

Though Becky asked questions all the way home, and Allan answered them as truthfully as he knew how, she was not prepared tor what she found – her father aged and bent, always in pain, more or less, and far less furnished with plans and hopes than she had ever known him; Moss, fretful and sickly, and her mother unable to turn herself in her bed. Nobody mentioned death. The surgeon who came daily, and told Becky exactly what to do, said nothing of anybody dying of the fever, while Woodruffe was continually talking of things that were to be done when his wife got well again. It was sad, and sometimes alarming, to hear the strange things that Mrs Woodruffe said in the evenings when she was delirious; but if Abby stepped in at such times, she did not think much of it, did not look upon it as any sign of danger; and was only thankful that her husband had no delirium. His head was always clear, she said, though he was very weak. Becky never doubted, after this, that her mother was the most severely ill of the two; and she was thunderstruck when she heard one morning the surgeon’s answers to her father’s questions about Fleming. He certainly considered it a bad case; he would not say that he could not get through; but he must say it was contrary to his expectation. When Becky saw her father’s face as he turned away and went out, she believed his heart was broken.

“But I thought,” said she to the surgeon, “I thought my mother was most ill of the two.”

“I don’t know that,” was the reply, “but she is very ill. We are doing the best we can. – You are, I am sure,” he said, kindly; “and we must hope on, and do our best till a change comes. The wisest of us do not know what changes may come. But I could not keep your father in ignorance of what may happen in the other house.”

No appearances alarmed Abby. Because there was no delirium, she apprehended no danger. Even when the fatal twitchings came, the arm twitching as it lay upon the coverlid, she did not know it was a symptom of anything. As she nursed her husband perfectly well, and could not have been made more prudent and watchful by any warning, she had no warning. Her cheerfulness was encouraged, for her infant’s sake, as well as for her husband’s and her own. Some thought that her husband knew his own case. A word or two – now a gesture, and now a look – persuaded the surgeon and Woodruffe that he was aware that he was going. His small affairs were always kept settled; he had probably no directions to give; and his tenderness for his wife showed itself in his enjoying her cheerfulness to the last. When, as soon as it was light, one December morning, Moss was sent to ask if Abby could possibly come for a few minutes, because mother was worse, he found his sister alone, looking at the floor, her hands on her lap, though the baby was fidgetting in its cradle. Fleming’s face was covered, and he lay so still that Moss, who had never seen death, felt sure that all was over. The boy hardly knew what to do; and his sister seemed not to hear what he said. The thought of his mother – that Abby’s going might help or save her – moved him to act. He kissed Abby, and said she must please go to mother; and he took the baby out of the cradle, and wrapped it up, and put it into its mother’s arms; and fetched Abby’s bonnet, and took her cloak down from its peg, and opened the door for her, saying, that he would stay and take care of everything. His sister went without a word; and, as soon as he had closed the door behind her, Moss sank down on his knees before the chair where she had been sitting, and hid his face there till some one came for him – to see his mother once more before she died.

As the two coffins were carried out, to be conveyed to the churchyard together, Mr Nelson, who had often been backward and forward during the last six weeks, observed to the surgeon that the death of such a man as Fleming was a dreadful loss.

“It is that sort of men that the fever cuts off,” said the surgeon. “The strong man, in the prime of life, at his best period, one may say, for himself and for society, is taken away – leaving wife and child helpless and forlorn. That is the ravage that the fever makes.”

“Well: would not people tell you that it is our duty to submit?” asked Mr Nelson, who could not help showing some emotion by voice and countenance.

“Submit!” said the surgeon. “That depends on what the people mean who use the word. If you or I were ill of the fever, we must resign ourselves, as cheerfully as we could. But if you ask me whether we should submit to see more of our neighbours cut off by fever as these have been, I can only ask in return, whose doing it is that they are living in a swamp, and whether that is to go on? Who dug the clay pits? Who let that ditch run abroad, and make a filthy bog? Are you going to charge that upon Providence, and talk of submitting to the consequences? If so, that is not my religion.”

“No, no. There is no religion in that,” replied Mr Nelson, for once agreeing in what was said to him. “It must be looked to.”

“It must,” said the surgeon, as decidedly as if he had been a railway director, or king and parliament in one.

Chapter the sixth

“I wonder whether there is a more forlorn family in England than we are now,” said Woodruffe, as he sat among his children, a few hours after the funeral.

His children were glad to hear him speak, however gloomy might be his tone. His silence had been so terrible that nothing that he could say could so weigh upon their hearts. His words, however, brought out his widowed daughter’s tears again. She was sewing – her infant lying in her lap. As her tears fell upon its face, it moved and cried. Becky came and took it up, and spoke cheerfully, to it. The cheerfulness seemed to be the worst of all. Poor Abby laid her forehead to the back of her chair, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

“Ay, Abby,” said her father, “your heart is breaking, and mine too. You and I can go to our rest, like those that have gone before us: but I have to think what will become of these young things.”

“Yes, father,” said Becky gently, but with a tone of remonstrance, “you must endeavour to live, and not make up your mind to dying, because life has grown heavy and sad.”

“My dear, I am ill – very ill. It is not merely that life is grown intolerable to me. I am sure I could not live long in such misery of mind: but I am breaking up fast.”

The young people looked at each other in dismay. There was something worse than the grief conveyed by their father’s words in the hopeless daring – the despair – of his tone when he ventured to say that life was unendurable.

Becky had the child on one arm; with the other hand she took down her father’s plaid from its peg, and put it round his rheumatic shoulders, whispering in his ear a few words about desiring that God’s will should be done.

“My dear,” he replied, “it was I who taught you that lesson when you were a child on my knee, and it would be strange if I forgot it when I want so much any comfort that I can get. But I don’t believe (and if you ask the clergyman, he will tell you that he does not believe), that it is God’s will that we, or any other people, should be thrust into a swamp like this, scarcely fit for the rats and the frogs to live in. It is man’s doing, not God’s, that the fever makes such havoc as it has made with us. The fever does not lay waste healthy places.”

“Then why are we here?” Allan ventured to say. “Father, let us go.”

“Go! I wonder how or where! I can’t go, or let any of you go. I have not a pound in the world to spend in moving, or in finding new employment. And if I had, who would employ me? Who would not laugh at a crippled old man asking for work and wages?”

“Then, father, we must see what we can do here, and you must not forbid us to say ‘God’s will be done!’ If we cannot go away, it must be His will that we should stay and have as much hope and courage as we can.”

Woodruffe threw himself back in his chair. It was too much to expect that he would immediately rally; but he let the young people confer, and plan, and cheer each other.

The first thing to be done, they agreed, was to move hither, whenever the dismal rain would permit it, all Abby’s furniture that could not be disposed of to her husband’s successors. It would fit up the lower room. And Allan and Becky settled how the things could stand so as to make it at once a bedroom and sitting room. If, as Abby had said, she meant to try to get some scholars, and keep a little school, room must be left to seat the children.

“Keep a school?” exclaimed Woodruffe, looking round at Abby.

“Yes, father,” said Abby, raising her head. “That seems to be a thing that I can do: and it will be good for me to have something to do. Becky is the stoutest of us all, and …”

“I wonder how long that will last,” groaned the father.

“I am quite stout now,” said Becky; “and I am the one to help Allan with the garden. Allan and I will work under your direction, father, while your rheumatism lasts; and …”

“And what am I to do?” asked Moss, pushing himself in.

“You shall fetch and carry the tools,” said Becky; “that is, when the weather is fine, and when your chilblains are not very bad. And you shall be bird-boy when the sowing season comes on.”

“And we are going to put up a penthouse for you, in one corner, you know, Moss,” said his brother. “And we will make it so that there shall be room for a fire in it, where father and you may warm yourselves, and always have dry shoes ready.”

“I wonder what our shoe leather will have cost us by the time the spring comes,” observed Woodruffe. “There is not a place where we ever have to take the cart or the barrow that is not all mire and ruts: not a path in the whole garden that I call a decent one. Our shoes are all pulled to pieces; while the frost, or the fog, or something or other, prevents our getting any real work done. The waste is dreadful. Nothing should have made me take a garden where none but summer crops are to be had, if I could have foreseen such a thing. I never saw such a thing before – never – as market gardening without winter and spring crops. Never heard of such a thing!”

Becky glanced towards Allan, to see if he had nothing to propose. If they could neither mend the place nor leave it, it did seem a hard case. Allan was looking into the fire, musing. When Moss announced that the rain was over, Allan started, and said he must be fetching some of Abby’s things down, if it was fair. Becky really meant to help him: but she also wanted opportunity for consultation, as to whether it could really be God’s will that they should neither be able to mend their condition nor to escape from it. As they mounted the long flight of steps, they saw Mr Nelson issue from the Station, looking about him to ascertain if the rain was over, and take his stand on the embankment, followed by a gentleman who had a roll of paper in his hand. As they stood, the one was seen to point with his stick, and the other with his roll of paper, this way and that. Allan set off in that direction, saying to his sister, as he went,

“Don’t you come. That gentleman is so rude, he will make you cry. Yes, I must go; and I won’t get angry; I won’t indeed. He may find as much fault as he pleases; I must show him how the water is standing in our furrows.”

“Hallo! what do you want here?” was Mr Nelson’s greeting, when, after a minute or two, he saw Allan looking and listening. “What business have you here, hearkening to what we are saying?”

“I wanted to know whether anything is going to be done below there. I thought, if you wished it, I could tell you something about it.”

“You! what, a dainty little fellow like you? – a fellow that wears his Sunday clothes on a Tuesday, and a rainy Tuesday too! You must get working clothes and work.”

“I shall work tomorrow, Sir. My mother and my brother-in-law were buried today.”

“Lord bless me! You should have told me that. How should I know that unless you told me?” He proceeded in a much gentler tone, however, merely remonstrating with Allan for letting the wet stand in the furrows, in such a way as would spoil any garden. Allan had a good ally, all the while, in the stranger, who seemed to understand everything before it was explained. The gentleman was, in fact, an agricultural surveyor one who could tell, when looking abroad from a height, what was swamp and what meadow; where there was a clean drain, and where an uneven ditch; where the soil was likely to be watered, and where flooded by the winter rains; where genially warmed, and where fatally baked by the summer’s sun. He had seen, before Allan pointed it out, how the great ditch cut across between the cultivated grounds and the little river into which those grounds should be drained: but he could not know, till told by Allan, who were the proprietors and occupiers of the parcels of land lying on either side the ditch. Mr Nelson knew little or nothing under this head, though he contradicted the lad every minute; was sure such an one did not live here, nor another there: told him he was confusing Mr Smith and Mr Brown: did not believe a word of Mr Taylor having bought yonder meadow, or Mrs Scott now renting that field. All the while, the surveyor went on setting down the names as Allan told them; and then observed that they were not so many but that they might combine, if they would, to drain their properties, if they could be relieved of the obstruction of the ditch – if the surveyor of highways would see that the ditch were taken in hand. Mr Nelson pronounced that there should be no difficulty about the ditch, if the rest could be managed and then, after a few whispered words between the gentlemen, Allan was asked first, whether he was sure that he knew where every person lived whose name was down in the surveyor’s book; and next, whether he would act as guide tomorrow. For a moment he thought he should be wanted to move Abby’s things: but, remembering the vast importance of the plan which seemed now to be fairly growing under his eye, he replied that he would go: he should be happy to make it his day’s work to help, ever so little, towards what he wished above everything in the world.

“What makes you in such a hurry to suppose we want to get a day’s work out of you for nothing?” asked Mr Nelson. He thrust half-a-crown into the lad’s waistcoat pocket, saying that he must give it back again, if he led the gentleman wrong. The gentleman had no time to go running about the country on a fool’s errand; Allan must mind that. As Allan touched his hat, and ran down the steps, Mr Nelson observed that boys with good hearts did not fly about in that way, as if they were merry, on the day of their mother’s funeral.

“Perhaps he is rather thinking of saving his father,” observed the surveyor.

“Well; save as many of them as you can. They seem all going to pot as it is.”

When Allan burst in, carrying nothing of Abby’s, but having a little colour in his cheeks for once, his father sat up in his chair, the baby suddenly stopped crying, and Moss asked where he had been. At first, his father disappointed him by being listless – first refusing to believe anything good, and then saying that any good that could happen now was too late; and Abby could not help crying all the more because this was not thought about a year sooner. It was her poor husband that had made the stir; and now they were going to take his advice the very day that he was laid in his grave. They all tried to comfort her, and said how natural it was that she should feel it so; yet, amidst all their sympathy, they could not help being cheered that something was to be done at last.

By degrees, and not slow degrees, Woodruffe became animated. It was surprising how many things he desired Allan to be sure not to forget to point out to the surveyor, and to urge upon those he was to visit. At last he said he would go himself. It was a very serious business, and he ought to make an effort to have it done properly. It was a great effort, but he would make it. Not rheumatism, nor anything else, should keep him at home. Allan was glad at heart to see such signs of energy in his father, though he might feel some natural disappointment at being left at home, and some perplexity as to what, in that case, he ought to do about the half-crown, if Mr Nelson should be gone home. The morning settled this, however. The surveyor was in his gig. If Allan could hang on, or keep up with it, it would be very well, as he would be wanted to open the gates, and to lead the way in places too wet for his father, who was not worth such a pair of patent waterproof tall boots as the surveyor had on.

The circuit was not a very wide one; yet it was dark before they got home. There are always difficulties in arrangements which require combined action. Here there were different levels in the land, and different tempers and views among the occupiers. Mr Brown had heard nothing about the matter, and could not be hurried till he saw occasion. Mr Taylor liked his field best, wet – would not have it drier on any account, for fear of the summer sun. When assured that drought took no hold on well-dried land in comparison with wet land, he shook with laughter, and asked if they expected him to believe that. Mrs Scott, whose combination with two others was essential to the drainage of three portions, would wait another year. They must go on without her; and after another year, she would see what she would do. Another had drained his land in his own way long ago, and did not expect that anybody would ask him to put his spade into another man’s land, or to let any other man put his spade into his. These were all the obstructions. Everybody else was willing, or at least, not obstructive. By clever management, it was thought that the parties concerned could make an island of Mrs Scott and her field, and win over Mr Brown by the time he was wanted, and show Mr Taylor that, as his field could no longer be as wet as it had been, he might as well try the opposite condition – they promising to flood his field as often and as thoroughly as he pleased, if he found it the worse for being drained. They could not obtain all they wished, where every body was not as wise as could be wished; but so much was agreed upon as made the experienced surveyor think that the rest would follow; enough, already, to set more labourers to work than the place could furnish. Two or three stout men were sent from a distance; and when they had once cut a clear descent from the ditch to the river, and had sunk the ditch to seven feet deep, and made the bottom even, and narrowed it to three feet, it was a curious thing to see how ready the neighbours became to unite their drains with it. It used to be said, that here – however it might be elsewhere – the winter was no time for digging: but that must have meant that no winter digging would bring a spring crop; and that therefore it was useless. Now, the sound of the spade never ceased for the rest of the winter; and the labourers thought it the best winter they had ever known for constant work. Those who employed the labour hoped it would answer – found it expensive – must trust it was all right, and would yield a profit by and by. As for the Woodruffes, they were too poor to employ labourers. But some little hope had entered their hearts again, and brought strength, not only to their hearts, but to their very limbs. They worked like people beginning the world. As poor Abby could keep the house and sew, while attending to her little school, Becky did the lighter parts (and some which were far from light) of the garden work, finding easy tasks for Moss; and Allan worked like a man at the drains. They had been called good drains before; but now, there was an outfall for deeper ones; and deeper they must be made. Moreover, a strong rivalry arose among the neighbours about their respective portions of the combined drainage; and under the stimulus of ambition, Woodruffe recovered his spirits and the use of his limbs wonderfully. He suffered cruelly from his rheumatism; and in the evenings felt as if he could never more lift a spade; yet, not the less was he at work again in the morning, and so sanguine as to the improvement of his ground, that it was necessary to remind him, when calculating his gains, that it would take two years, at least, to prove the effects of his present labours.

Chapter the seventh

It was observed by Woodruffe’s family, during one week of spring of the next year, that he was very absent. He was not in low spirits, but absorbed in thought, and much devoted to making calculations with pencil and paper. At last, out it came, one morning at breakfast.

“I wonder how we should all like to have Harry Hardiman to work with us again?”

Every one looked up. Harry! where was Harry? Was he here? Was he coming?

“Why, I will tell you what I have been thinking,” said their father. “I have thought long and carefully, and I believe I have made up my mind to send for Harry, to come and work for us as he used to do. We have not labour enough on the ground. Two stout men to the acre is the smallest allowance for trying what could be made of the place.”

“That is what Taylor and Brown are employing now on the best part of their land,” said Allan; “that is, when they can get the labour. There is such difference between that and one man to four or five acres, as there was before, that they can’t always get the labour.”

“Just so; and therefore,” continued Woodruffe, “I am thinking of sending for Harry. Our old neighbourhood was not prosperous when we left it, and I fancy it cannot have improved since; and Harry might be glad to follow his master to a thriving neighbourhood; and he is such a careful fellow that I dare say he has money for the journey – even if he has a wife by this time, as I suppose he has.”

Moss looked most pleased, where all were pleased, at the idea of seeing Harry again. His remembrance of Harry was of a tall young man, who used to carry him on his shoulders, and wheel him in the empty water barrel, and sometimes offer to dip him in it when it was full, and show him how to dig in the sand-heap with his little wooden spade.

“Your rent, to be sure, is much lower than in the old place,” observed Abby.

“Why, we must not build upon that,” replied the lather; “rent is rising here, and will rise. My landlord was considerate in lowering mine to £3 per acre, when he saw how impossible it was to make it answer; and he says he shall not ask more yet, on account of the labour I laid out at the time of the drainage. But when I have partly repaid myself, the rent will rise to £5 and, in fact, I have made my calculations, in regard to Harry’s coming, at a higher rent than that.”

“Higher than that?”

“Yes: I should not be surprised if I found myself paying, as market gardeners near London do, ten pounds per acre, before I die.”

“Or rather, to let the ground to me, for that, father,” said Allan, “when it is your own property, and you are tired of work, and disposed to turn it over to me. I will pay you ten pounds per acre then, and let you have all the cabbages you can eat, besides. It is capital land, and that is the truth. Come – shall that be a bargain?”

Woodruffe smiled, and said he owed a duty to Allan. He did not like to see him so hard worked as to be unable to take due care of his own corner of the garden – unable to enter fairly into the competition for the prizes at the Horticultural Show in the summer. Becky now, too, ought to be spared from all but occasional help in the garden. Above all, the ground was now in such an improving state that it would be waste not to bestow due labour upon it. Put in the spade where you would, the soil was loose and well aired as needs be: the manure penetrated it thoroughly; the frost and heat pulverised, instead of binding it; and the crops were succeeding each other so fast, that the year would be a very profitable one.

“Where will Harry live, if he comes?” asked Abby.

“We must get another cottage added to the new row. Easily done! Cottages so healthy as these new ones pay well. Good rents are offered for them – to save doctors’ bills and loss of time from sickness – and, when once a system of house drainage is set a-going, it costs scarcely more, in adding a cottage to a group, to make it all right, than to run it up upon solid clay as used to be the way here. Well, I have good mind to write to Harry today. What do you think – all of you?”

Fortified by the opinion of all his children, Mr Woodruffe wrote to Harry. Meantime, Allan and Becky went to cut the vegetables that were for sale that day; and Moss delighted himself in running after and catching the pony in the meadow below. The pony was not very easily caught, for it was full of spirit. Instead of the woolly insipid grass that it used to crop, and which seemed to give it only fever and no nourishment, it now fed on sweet fresh grass, which had no sour stagnant water soaking its roots. The pony was so full of play this morning that Moss could not get hold of it. Though much stronger than a year ago, he was not yet anything like so robust as a boy of his age should be; and he was growing heated, and perhaps a little angry, as the pony galloped off towards some distant trees, when a boy started up behind a bush, caught the halter, brought the pony round with a twitch, and led him to Moss, Moss fancied he had seen the boy before, and then his white teeth reminded Moss of one thing after another.

“I came for some marsh plants,” said the boy. “You and I got plenty once, somewhere hereabouts: but I cannot find them now.”

“You will not find any now. We have no marsh now.”

The stranger said he dared not go back without them: mother wanted them badly. She would not believe him if he said he could not find any. There were plenty about two miles off, along the railway, among the clay pits, he was told; but none nearer. The boy wanted to know where the clay pits hereabouts were. He could not find one of them.

“I will show you one of them,” said Moss; “the one where you and I used to hunt rats.” And, leading the pony, he showed his old gypsy playfellow all the improvements, beginning with the great ditch – now invisible from being covered in. While it was open, he said, it used to get choked, and the sides were plastered after rain, and soon became grass-grown, so that it was found worth while to cover it in; and now it would want little looking to for years to come. As for the clay pit, where the rats used to pop in and out – it was now a manure pit, covered in. There was a drain into it from the pony’s stable and from the pigsties; and it was near enough to the garden to receive the refuse and sweepings, A heavy lid, with a ring in the middle, covered the pit, so that nobody could fall in, in the dark, and no smell could get out. Moss begged the boy to come a little further, and he would show him his own flower bed; and when the boy was there, he was shown everything else: what a cartload of vegetables lay cut for sale; and what an arbour had been made of the penthouse under which Moss used to take shelter, when he could do nothing better than keep off the birds; and how fine the ducks were – the five ducks that were so serviceable in eating off the slugs; and what a comfortable nest had been made for them to lay their eggs in, beside the water tank in the corner; and what a variety of scarecrows the family had invented – each having one, to try which would frighten the sparrows most. While Moss was telling how difficult it was to deal with the sparrows, because they could not be frightened for more than three days by any kind of scarecrow, he heard Allan calling him, in a tone of vexation, at being kept waiting so long. In an instant the stranger boy was off – leaping the gate, and flying along the meadow till he was hidden behind a hedge.

Two or three days after this one of the ducks was missing. The last time that the five had been seen together was when Moss was showing them to his visitor. The morning after Moss ‘finally gave up hope,’ the glass of Allan’s hotbed was found broken, and in the midst of the bed itself was a deep foot-track, crushing the cucumber plants, and, with them, Allan’s hopes of a cucumber prize at the Horticultural Exhibition in the summer. On more examination, more mischief was discovered, some cabbages had been stolen, and another duck was missing. In the midst of the general concern, Woodruffe burst out a-laughing. It struck him that the chief of the scarecrows had changed his hat; and so he had. The old straw hat which used to flap in the wind so serviceably was gone, and in its stead appeared a helmet – a saucepan full of holes, battered and split, but still fit to be a helmet to a scarecrow.

“I could swear to the old hat,” observed Woodruffe, “if I should have the luck to see it on anybody’s head.”

“And so could I,” said Becky, “for I mended it – bound it with black behind, and green before, because I had not green ribbon enough. But nobody would wear it before our eyes.”

“That is why I suspect there are strangers hovering about. We must watch.”

Now Moss, for the first time, bethought himself of the boy he had brought in from the meadow; and now, for the first time, he told his family of that encounter.

“I never saw such a simpleton,” his father declared. “There, go along and work! Now, don’t cry, but hold up like a man and work.”

Moss did cry; he could not help it; but he worked too. He would fain have been one of the watchers, moreover; but his father said he was too young. For two nights he was ordered to bed, when Allan took his dark lantern, and went down to the penthouse; the first night accompanied by his father, and the next by Harry Hardiman, who had come on the first summons. By the third evening, Moss was so miserable that his sisters interceded for him, and he was allowed to go down with his old friend Harry.

It was a starlight night, without a moon. The low country lay dim, but unobscured by mist. After a single remark on the fineness of the night, Harry was silent. Silence was their first business. They stole round the fence as if they had been thieves themselves, listened for some time before they let themselves in at the gate, passed quickly in, and locked the gate (the lock of which had been well oiled), went behind every screen, and along every path, to be sure that no one was there, and finally, perceiving that the remaining ducks were safe, settled themselves in the darkness of the penthouse.

There they sat, hour after hour, listening. If there had been no sound, perhaps they could not have borne the effort: but the sense was relieved by the bark of a dog at a distance; and then by the hoot of the owl that was known to have done them good service in mousing, many a time; and once, by the passage of a train on the railway above. When these were all over, poor Moss had much ado to keep awake, and at last his head sank on Harry’s shoulder, and he forgot where he was, and everything else in the world. He was awakened by Harry’s moving, and then whispering quite into his ear –

“Sit you still. I hear somebody yonder. No – sit you still. I won’t go far – not out of call: but I must get between them and the gate.”

With his lantern under his coat, Harry stole forth, and Moss stood up, all alone in the darkness and stillness. He could hear his heart beat, but nothing else, till footsteps on the path came nearer and nearer. They came quite up; they came in, actually into the arbour; and then the ducks were certainly fluttering. In an instant more, there was a gleam of light upon the white plumage of the ducks, and then light enough to show that this was the gypsy boy, with a dark lantern hung round his neck, and, at the same moment, to show the gypsy boy that Moss was there. The two boys stood, face to face, motionless from utter amazement, and the ducks had scuttled and waddled away before they recovered themselves. Then, Moss flew at him in a glorious passion, at once of rage and fear.

“Leave him to me, Moss,” cried Harry, casting light upon the scene from his lantern, while he collared the thief with the other hand. “Let go, I say, Moss. There, now we’ll go round and be sure whether there is any one else in the garden, and then we’ll lodge this young rogue where he will be safe.”

Nobody was there, and they went home in the dawn, locked up the thief in the shed, and slept through what remained of the night.

It was about Mr Nelson’s usual time for coming down the line; and it was observed that he now always stopped at this station till the next train passed – probably because it was a pleasure to him to look upon the improvement of the place. It was no surprise therefore to Woodruffe to see him standing on the embankment after breakfast; and it was natural that Mr Nelson should be immediately told that the gypsies were here again, and how one of them was caught thieving.

“Thieving! So you found some of your property upon him, did you!”

“Why, no. I thought myself that it was a pity that Moss did not let him alone till he had laid hold of a duck or something.”

“Pho! pho! don’t tell me you can punish the boy for theft, when you can’t prove that he stole anything. Give him a whipping, and let him go.”

“With all my heart. It will save me much trouble to finish off the matter so.”

Mr Nelson seemed to have some curiosity about the business; for he accompanied Woodruffe to the shed. The boy seemed to feel no awe of the great man whom he supposed to be a magistrate, and when asked whether he felt none, he giggled and said No; he had seen the gentleman more afraid of his mother than anybody ever was of him, he fancied. On this, a thought struck Mr Nelson. He would now have his advantage of the gypsy woman, and might enjoy, at the same time, an opportunity of studying human nature under stress – a thing he liked, when the stress was not too severe. So he passed a decree on the spot that, it being now nine o’clock, the boy should remain shut up without food till noon, when he should be severely flogged, and driven from the neighbourhood: and with this pleasant prospect before him, the young rogue remained, whistling ostentatiously, while his enemies locked the door upon him.

“Did you hear him shoot the bolt?” asked Woodruffe. “If he holds to that, I don’t know how I shall get at him at noon.”

“There, now, what fools people are! Why did you not take out the bolt? A pretty constable you would make! Come – come this way. I am going to find the gypsy tent again. You are wondering that I am not afraid of the woman, I see: but, you observe, I have a hold over her this time. What do you mean by allowing those children to gather about your door? You ought not to permit it.”

“They are only the scholars. Don’t you see them going in? My daughter keeps a little school, you know, since her husband’s death.”

“Ah, poor thing! poor thing!” said Mr Nelson, as Abby appeared on the threshold, calling the children in.

Mr Nelson always contrived to see some one or more of the family when he visited the station; but it so happened, that he had never entered the door of their dwelling. Perhaps he was not himself fully conscious of the reason. It was, that he could not bear to see Abby’s young face within the widow’s cap, and to be thus reminded that hers was a case of cruel wrong; that if the most ordinary thought and care had been used in preparing the place for human habitation, her husband might be living now, and she the happy creature that she would never be again.

On his way to the gypsies, Mr Nelson saw some things that pleased him in his heart, though he found fault with them all. What business had Woodruffe with an additional man in his garden? It could not possibly answer. If it did not, the fellow must be sent away again. He must not burden the parish. The occupiers here seemed all alike. Such a fancy for new labour! One, two, six men at work on the land within sight at that moment, over and above what there used to be! It must be looked to. Humph! he could get to the alders dry-shod now; but that was owing solely to the warmth of the spring. It was nonsense to attribute everything to drainage. Drainage was a good thing; but fine weather was better.

The gypsy tent was found behind the alders as before, but no longer in a swamp. The woman was sitting on the ground at the entrance as before, but not now with a fevered child laid across her knees. She was weaving a basket.

“Oh, I see,” said Woodruffe, “This is the way our osiers go.”

“You have not many to lose, nowadays,” said the woman.

“You are welcome to all the rushes you can find,” said Woodruffe; “but where is your son?”

Some change of countenance was seen in the woman; but she answered carelessly that the children were playing yonder.

“The one I mean is not there,” said Woodruffe. “We have him safe – caught him stealing my ducks.”

She called the boy a villain – disowned him, and so forth; but when she found the case a hopeless one, she did not, and therefore, probably could not, scold – that is, anybody but herself and her husband. She cursed herself for coming into this silly place, where now no good was to be got. When she was brought to the right point of perplexity about what to do, seeing that it would not do to stay, and being unable to go while her boy was in durance, she was told that his punishment should be summary, though severe, if she would answer frankly certain questions. When she had once begun giving her confidence, she seemed to enjoy the license. When her husband came up, he looked as if he only waited for the departure of his visitors to give his wife the same amount of thrashing that her son was awaiting elsewhere. She vowed that they would never pitch their tent here again. It used to be the best station in their whole round – the fogs were so thick! From sunset to long after sunrise, it had been as good as a winter night, for going where they pleased without fear of prying eyes. There was not a poultry yard or pigsty within a couple of miles round, where they could not creep up through the fog. And they escaped the blame, too; for the swamp and ditches used to harbour so much vermin, that the gypsies were not always suspected, as they were now. Till lately, people shut themselves into their homes, or the men went to the public house in the chill evenings; and there was little fear of meeting any one. But now that the fogs were gone, people were out in their gardens, on these fine evenings, and there were men in the meadows, returning from fishing; for they could angle now, when their work was done, without the fear of catching an ague in the marsh as they went home.

Mr Nelson used vigorously his last opportunity of lecturing these people. He had it all his own way, for the humility of the gypsies was edifying. Woodruffe fancied he saw some finger-talk passing, the while, though the gypsies never looked at each other, or raised their eyes from the ground. Woodruffe had to remind the Director that the whistle of the next train would soon be heard; and this brought the lecture to an abrupt conclusion. On his finishing off with, “I expect, therefore, that you will remember my advice, and never show your faces here again, and that you will take to a proper course of life in future, and bring up your son to honest industry; the woman, with a countenance of grief, seized one hand and covered it with kisses, and the husband took the other hand and pressed it to his breast.

“We must make haste,” observed Mr Nelson, as he led the way quickly back; “but I think I have made some impression upon them. You see now the right way to treat these people. I don’t think you will see them here again.”

“I don’t think we shall.”

As he reached the steps the whistle was heard, and Mr Nelson could only wave his hand to Woodruffe, rush up the embankment, and throw himself panting into a carriage. Only just in time!

By an evening train, he re-appeared. When thirty miles off, he had wanted his purse, and it was gone. It had no doubt paid for the gypsies’ final gratitude.

Of course, a sufficient force was immediately sent to the alder clump; but there was nothing there but some charred sticks, and some clean pork bones, this time, instead of feathers of fowls, and a cabbage leaf or two. The boy had had his whipping at noon, after a conference with his little brother at the keyhole, which had caused him to withdraw the bolt, and offer no resistance. Considering his cries and groans, he had run off with  surprising agility, and was now, no doubt, far away.

Chapter the eighth

The gypsies came no more. The fogs came no more. The fever came no more; at least, in such a form as to threaten the general safety. Where it still lingered, it was about those only who deserved it – in any small farmhouse, where the dung yard was too near the house; and in some cottage where the slatternly inmates did not mind a green puddle or choked ditch within reach of their noses. More dwellings arose, as the fertility of the land increased, and invited a higher kind of tillage; and among the prettiest of them was one which stood in the corner – the most sunny corner of Woodruffe’s paddock. Harry Hardiman and his wife and child lived there, and the cottage was Woodruffe’s property.

Yet Woodruffe’s rent had been raised; and pretty rapidly. He was now paying eight pounds per acre for his garden-ground, and half that for what was out of the limits of the garden. He did not complain of it; for he was making money fast. His skill and industry deserved this; but skill and industry could not have availed without opportunity. His ground once allowed to show what it was worth, he treated it well; and it answered well to the treatment. By the railway, he obtained what manure he wanted from the town; and he sent it back by the railway to town in the form of crisp celery and salads, wholesome potatoes and greens, luscious strawberries, and sweet and early peas. He knew that a Surrey gardener had made his ground yield a profit of two hundred and twenty pounds per acre. He thought that, with his inferior market, he should do well to make his yield one hundred and fifty pounds per acre; and this, by close perseverance, he attained. He could have done it more easily if he had enjoyed good health; but he never enjoyed good health again. His rheumatism had fixed itself too firmly to be entirely removed; and, for many days in the year, he was compelled to remain within doors, or to saunter about in the sun, seeing his boys and Harry at work, but unable to help them.

From the time that Allan’s work became worth wages, in addition to his subsistence, his father let him rent half a rood of the garden-ground for three years, saying –

“I limit it to three years, my boy, because that term is long enough for you to show what you can do. After three years, I shall not be able to spare the ground, at any rent. If you fail, you have no business to rent ground. If you succeed, you will have money in your pocket wherewith to hire land elsewhere. Now you have to show us what you can do.”

“Yes, father,” was Allan’s short but sufficient reply.

It was observed by the family that, from this time forward, Allan’s eye was on every plot of ground in the neighbourhood which could, by possibility, ever be offered for hire: yet did his attention never wander from that which was already under his hand. And that which was so great an object to him became a sort of pursuit to the whole family. Moss guarded Allan’s frames, and made more and more prodigious scarecrows. Their father gave his very best advice. Becky, who was no longer allowed, as a regular thing, to work in the garden, found many a spare half hour for hoeing and weeding, and trimming and tying up, in Allan’s beds; and Abby found, as she sat in her little school, that she could make nets for his fruit trees. It was thus no wonder that, when a certain July day in the second year arrived, the whole household was in a state of excitement, because it was a sort of crisis in Allan’s affairs.

Though breakfast was early that morning, Becky and Allan and Moss were spruce in their best clothes. A hamper stood at the door, and Allan was packing in another, which had no lid, two or three flowerpots, which presented a glorious show of blossom. Abby was putting a new ribbon on her sister’s straw bonnet; and Harry was in waiting to cany up the hampers to the station. It was the day of the Horticultural Show at the town. Woodruffe had been too unwell to think of going till this morning; but now the sight of the preparations, and the prospect of a warm day, inspired him, and he thought he would go. At last he went, and they were gone. Abby never went up to the station: nobody ever asked her to go there; not even her own child, who perhaps had not thought of the possibility of it. But when the train was starting, she stood at the upper window with her child, and held him so that he might lean out, and see the last carriage disappear, as it swept round the curve. After that the day seemed long, though Harry came up at his dinner hour to say what he thought of the great gooseberry in particular, and of everything else that Allan had carried with him. It was holiday time, and there was no school to fill up the day. Before the evening, the child became restless, and Abby fell into low spirits, as she was apt to do when left long alone; so that Harry stopped suddenly at the door when he was rushing in to announce that the train was within sight.

“Shall I take the child, Miss?” said Harry. (He always called her “Miss.”) “I will carry him – But, sure, here they come! Here comes Moss – ready to roll down the steps! My opinion is that there’s a prize.”

Moss was called back by a voice which everybody obeyed. Allan should himself tell his sister the fortune of the day, their father said.

There were two prizes, one of which was for the wonderful plate of gooseberries; and at this news Harry nodded, and declared himself anything but surprised. If that gooseberry had not carried the day, there would have been partiality in the judges, that was all; and nobody could suppose such a thing as that. Yet Harry could have told, if put upon his honour, that he was rather disappointed that everything that Allan carried had not gained a prize. When he mentioned one or two, his master told him he was unreasonable; and he supposed he was.

Allan laid down on the table, for his sister’s full assurance, his sovereign, and his half sovereign, and his tickets. She turned away rather abruptly, and seemed to be looking whether the kettle was near boiling for tea. Her father went up to her; and on his first whispered words, the sob broke forth which made all look round.

“I was thinking of one, too, my dear, that I wish was here at this moment. I can feel for you, my dear.”

“But you don’t know – you don’t know – you never knew –” She could not go on.

“What don’t I know, my dear?”

“That he constantly blamed himself for saying anything to bring you here. He said you had never prospered from the hour you came, and now –”

And now Woodrufie could not speak, as the past came fresh upon him. In a few moments, however, he rallied, saying,

“But we must consider Allan. He must not think that his success makes us sad.”

Allan declared that it was not about gaining the prizes that he was chiefly glad. It was because it was now proved what a fair field he had before him. There was nothing that might not be done with such a soil as they had to deal with now.

Harry was quite of this opinion. There were more and more people set to work upon the soil all about them; and the more it was worked the more it yielded. He never saw a place of so much promise. And if it had a bad name in regard to healthiness, he was sure that was unfair – or no longer fair. He and his were full of health and happiness, as they hoped to see everybody else in time; and, for his part, if he had all England before him, or the whole world, to choose a place to live in, he would choose the very place he was in, and the very cottage; and the very ground to work on that had produced such a gooseberry and such strawberries as he had seen that day.

The Ghost that appeared

to Mrs Wharton

Household Words, Volume 2, page 139

When my mother was a girl, some rumours began to steal through the town where she lived, about something having gone amiss with old Mrs Wharton: for, if Mrs Wharton was not known by all the townspeople, she was known and respected by so many, that it was really no trifle when she was seen to have the contracted brow, and the pinched look about the nose that people have when they are in alarm, or living a life of deep anxiety. Nobody could make out what was the matter. If asked, she said she was well. Her sons were understood to be perfectly respectable, and sufficiently prosperous; and there could be no doubt about the health, and the dutifulness, and the cheerfulness, of the unmarried daughter who lived with her. The old lady lived in a house which was her own property; and her income, though not large, was enough for comfort. What could it be that made her suddenly so silent and grave? Her daughter was just the same as ever, except that she was anxious about the change in her mother. It was observed by one or two that the clergyman had nothing to say, when the subject was spoken of in his hearing. He rolled and nodded his head, and he glanced at the ceiling, and then stuck his chin deep into his shirt-frill: but those were things that he was always doing, and they might mean nothing. When inquired of about his opinion of Mrs Wharton’s looks and spirits, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as he stood before the fire with his hands behind him, and said, with the sweet voice and winning manner that charmed young and old, that, as far as he knew, Mrs Wharton’s external affairs were all right; and, as for peace of mind, he knew of no one who more deserved it. If the course of her life, and the temper of her mind did not entitle her to peace within, he did not know who could hope for it. Somebody whispered that it would be dreadful if a shocking mortal disease should be seizing upon her: whereupon he, Mr Gurney, observed that he thought he should have known if any such thing was to be apprehended. As far as a fit of indigestion went, he believed she suffered occasionally; but she did not herself admit even that. Dr Robinson, who was present, said that Mrs Wharton’s friends might be quite easy about her health. She was not troubled with indigestion, nor with any other complaint. People could only go on to ask one another what could be the matter. One or two agreed that Mr Gurney had made very skilful answers, in which he was much assisted by his curious customary gestures; but that he had never said that he did not know of any trouble being on Mrs Wharton’s mind.

Soon after this, a like mysterious change appeared to come over the daughter; but no disasters could be discovered to have happened. No disease, no money losses, no family anxieties were heard of; and, by degrees, both the ladies recovered nearly their former cheerfulness and ease of manner – nearly, but not altogether. They appeared somewhat subdued, in countenance and bearing; and they kept a solemn silence when some subjects were talked of, which often turn up by the Christmas fireside. It was years before the matter was explained. My mother was married by that time, and removed from her smoky native town, to a much brighter city in the south. She used to tell us, as we grew up, the story of Mrs Wharton, and what she endured; and we could, if we had not been ashamed, have gone on to say, as if we had still been little children, “tell us again.” When we were going into the north to visit our grandparents, it was all very well to tell us of coal waggons that we should see running without horses, or iron rails laid down in the roads; and of the keelmen rowing their keelboats in the river, and all at once kicking up their right legs behind them, when they gave the long pull; and of the glasshouses in the town, with fire coming out of the top of the high chimneys; and of the ever burning mounds near the mouths of the coal pits, where blue and yellow flames leaped about, all night, through the whole year round. It was all very well to think of seeing these things; but we thought much more of walking past old Mrs Wharton’s house, and perhaps inducing Mr Gurney to tell us, in his way, the story we had so often heard my mother tell in hers.

The story was this.

One Midsummer morning Mrs Wharton was so absent at breakfast, that her daughter found all attempts at conversation to be in vain. So she quietly filled the coffee pot, which her mother had forgotten to do, and in the middle of the forenoon ordered dinner, which she found her mother had also forgotten. They had just such a breakfasting three times more during the next fortnight. Then, on Miss Wharton crossing the hall, she met her mother in bonnet and shawl, about to go out, so early as half past nine. The circumstance would not have been remarked, but for the mother’s confused and abashed way of accounting for going out. She should not be gone long. She had only a little call to make, and so on. The call was on Mr Gurney. He had hardly done breakfast, when he was told that Mrs Wharton wished to speak with him alone.

When he entered the study, Mrs Wharton seemed to be as unready with her words as himself; and when he shook hands with her, he observed that her hand was cold. She said she was well, however. Then came a pause during which the good pastor was shifting from one foot to the other, on the hearthrug, with his hands behind him, though there was nothing in the grate but shavings. Mrs Wharton, meantime, was putting her veil up and down, and her gloves on and off. At last, with a constrained and painful smile, she said that she was really ashamed to say what she came to say, but she must say it; and she believed and hoped that Mr Gurney had known her long enough to be aware that she was not subject to foolish fancies and absurd fears.

“No one further from it,” he dropped, and now he fixed his eyes on her face. Her eyes fell under his, when she went on.

“For some time past, I have suffered from a most frightful visitation in the night.”

“Visitation! What sort of visitation?”

She turned visibly cold while she answered “It was last Wednesday fortnight that I awoke in the middle of the night – that is between two and three in the morning, when it was getting quite light, and I saw –”

She choked a little, and stopped.

“Well!” said Mr Gurney, “What did you see?”

“I saw at the bottom of the bed, a most hideous – a most detestable face – gibbering, and making mouths at me.”

“A face!”

“Yes; I could see only the face (except, indeed, a hand upon the bedpost), because it peeped round the bedpost from behind the curtain. The curtains are drawn down to the foot of the bed.”

She stole a look at Mr Gurney. He was rolling his head; and there was a working about his mouth before he asked –

“What time did you sup that night?”

“Now,” she replied, “you are not going to say, I hope, that it was nightmare. Most people would; but I hoped that you knew me better than to suppose that I eat such suppers as would occasion nightmare, or that I should not know nightmare from reality.”

“But, my dear Mrs Wharton, what else can I say?”

“Perhaps you had better listen further, before you say anything.”

He nodded and smiled, as much as to say that was true.

“I have seen the same appearance on three occasions since.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, on three several nights, about the same hour. And, since the first appearance, my supper has been merely a little bread arid butter, with a glass of water. I chose to exclude nightmare, as I would exclude anything whatever that could possibly cause an appearance so horrible.”

“What sort of face is it?”

“Short and broad; – silly, and yet sly; and the features gibber and work, Oh! fearfully!”

“Do you hear it come and go?”

“No. When I wake – (and I never used to wake in the night) – it is there: and it disappears – to say the truth – while my eyes are covered; for I cannot meet its eyes. I hear nothing. When I venture a glance, sometimes it is still there; sometimes it is gone.”

“Have you missed any property?”

“No: nor found any trace whatever. We have lost nothing; and there is really not a door or window that seems ever to have been touched: not an opening where any one could get in or out.”

“And if there were, what could be the object? – What does your daughter say to it?”

“Oh!“ said Mrs Wharton, rising quickly, “she does not, and indeed she must not know a word of it. I ought to have said, at first, that what I am telling you is entirely in confidence. If I told my daughter, it must then go no further. We could not keep our servants a week, if it got out. And if I should want to let my house, I could not find a tenant. The value of the property would go down to nothing; and, in justice to my daughter, I must consider that; for it is to be hers hereafter. And we could never have a guest to stay with us. No one would sleep in the house a single night. Indeed, you must not…”

“Well, well: I will not mention it. But I don’t see…”

He paused; and Mrs Wharton replied to his thought.

“It is difficult to form conjectures – to say anything, in such a case, which does not appear too foolish to be uttered. But one must have some thoughts; and perhaps – if one can talk of possibilities – it is possible that this appearance may be meant for me alone; and therefore, if I can conceal it from my daughter… till I am convinced whether it is meant for me alone…”

“I would soon try that,” observed Mr Gurney. Seeing Mrs Wharton look wistfully at him, he continued,

“My advice is that you have your daughter sleep with you, after hearing your story. Try whether she can see this face.”

“You do not think she would?”

“I think she would not. – My dear friend, if I were a medical man, I could tell you facts which you are little aware of – anecdotes of the strange tricks that our nerves play with us; – of delusions so like reality…”

“Do you think I have not considered that? “ exclaimed the poor lady. “Mr Gurney, I did not think that you would try to persuade me out of my senses, when I tell you, that four times I have seen in daylight, and when wide awake, and in perfect health, what I have said.”

Mr Gurney was very gentle; but, as he said, what could he suggest but indigestion, or some such cause of nervous disturbance? Yet his heart smote him when his old friend laid her forehead against the mantelpiece, and cried heartily.

He did all he could. He tried indefatigably, though in vain, to persuade her to let her daughter share the spectacle: and he went, the same day, when Miss Wharton was out for her walk, and the servants were at dinner, to examine the house. He made no discovery. The gratings of the underground cellars were perfect. The attics had no trapdoors; and the house had no parapet. The chimneys were too high and narrow for any one to get in at the top. No window or door was ever found unfastened in the morning. Mrs Wharton did not think she could engage for courage enough to get out of bed, or to look beyond the curtains. Nor could she promise not to draw her curtains. The face had never appeared within them; and they seemed a sort of protection where there was no other.

Without having made any promises, she went so far as to start up in bed, the next time she saw the face. The eyes winked horribly at her; the head nodded – and was gone. The beating of her heart prevented her hearing anything that time; but once or twice during the autumn she fancied she heard a light and swift footstep in the passage. She always left her room door open, for the sake of the same sort of feeling of security that most people crave when they shut and bolt theirs. If this was a ghost, bolts would not keep it out; and she could fly the more easily through the open door if her terror should become too great to be endured alone. For the first time, she now burned a night light in her chamber, as the nights lengthened, and not a dim, flickering rush candle, but a steady wax light. She knew that her daughter wondered at the strange extravagance; but she could not bear darkness, or a very feeble light, when the thing might be behind the curtain.

Throughout October the visits were almost nightly. In the first week in November they suddenly ceased; and so many weeks passed away without a return, that Mrs Wharton began to be a little alarmed about her own wits, and to ask herself whether, after all, it was not possible that this was a trick of the nerves. One night in January, that doubt, at least, was settled; for there, at the same bedpost, was the same face. Mrs Wharton was now, after this interval, subdued at once. She had borne, for half a year, her pastor’s suspicious of her digestion and of her wisdom, and now, she really wanted sympathy. She let him tell her daughter (let him, rather than tell it herself, because he could make light of it, and she could not); and she gladly agreed to let her daughter sleep with her. For long, she gained nothing by it. During the whole fortnight that the visits now continued, Miss Wharton never once saw the face. She tried to wake the moment her mother touched her; she tried to keep awake; but she never saw the face: and after that fortnight, it did not come again till April.

One bright May dawn, she saw it. Her mother pulled her wrist, and, she waked up to a sight which burned itself in upon her brain. She suppressed a shriek at the moment; but she could not tell Mr Gurney of it afterwards, without tears. She wanted that day to leave the house immediately; but the thought of her mother’s long-suffering with this horror, the consideration of the serious consequences of declaring themselves ghost seers in the town, and of the disastrous effect upon their property, and of the harmlessness of the ghost, induced her to summon up her courage, and bear on. She did more. When a little inured, she one night sprang out of bed, rushed round the foot of it, and out upon the landing. The stairs were still dim in the dawn; but she was confident that she saw something moving there – passing down to the hall. As soon as she could make the servants attend her, she told them she believed somebody was in the house; and all the four women – two ladies and two maids – went, armed with pokers and shovels, and examined the whole house. They found nothing, neither in the chimneys, nor under the beds, nor in any closet – nothing, from cellar to attic. And when the maids had recovered a little, they agreed what a tiresome and wearying thing it was when ladies took fancies. This was only their first night of disturbance. Miss Wharton called them up three times more; and then she gave the matter up. The servants thought her strangely altered, and wished she might not be going to be ill.

Thus matters went on for some years. The oddest thing was the periodicity of the visits. In winter they were rare; but there was generally a short series in or about January after which they ceased till the end of March, or the beginning of April. They went on through nearly the whole summer, with one or two intervals of about a fortnight. The servants never suspected even the existence of the mystery. Their ladies never mentioned it; and no article was ever displaced at night. The ladies became in time so accustomed to the appearance as to bear it almost without uneasiness. It occurred to them sometimes, how odd it was to be living under the weight of such a mystery; and they were silent when ghosts were talked about, and felt and looked very serious when they were laughed at: but their alarm had subsided. The Thing never did them any harm; and they had now got merely to open drowsy eyes, to see if it was there; and to drop asleep the moment it was there no longer. This may seem strange to those who have not (and also to those who have,) seen, ghosts; but we none of us know what we may come to; and these two ladies reached the point of turning their heads on their pillows, without much beating of the heart, under the gibbering of a hideous ghost.

One circumstance worth noting is, that the Thing once spoke. After one of its mocking nods, it said, “I come to see you whenever I please.” When Mr Gurney was told this, he asked whether the language was English, and what sort of English it was. It must have been English, as the ladies did not observe anything remarkable. As to the dialect, it had made no particular impression upon them, but when they came to remember and consider, they thought it must have been the broad dialect of the district, which they were accustomed to hear in the kitchen, and in the streets and shops, every day. This was all. Amidst the multitude of nightly visitations, no explanation – no new evidence – occurred for several years. Mr Gurney was not fond of being puzzled. His plan was to dismiss from his mind what puzzled him. He seldom inquired after the ghost; and when he did, he always received the same answer.

One morning, after this lapse of years, Mr Gurney called to ask the ladies if they would like to join a party to see a glasshouse. The residents of manufacturing towns, cannot intrude in such places at their own pleasure, but (as is well known) take their opportunity when an arrival of strangers, or other such occasion, opens the doors of any manufactory. Mr Gurney was the first man in the town, in regard to doing the honours of it. All strangers were introduced to him; and the doors of all show-places flew open before him. He was wont to invite his friends in turn to accompany him and his party of strangers to these show-places; and he now invited the Whartons to the glasshouse. Miss Wharton was unavoidably engaged at the school, but her mother went.

When the whole party were standing near one of the furnaces, observing the coarsest kind of glass blowing – that of green-glass bottles – Mrs Wharton suddenly seized Mr Gurney’s arm with one hand, while with the other she pointed, past the glare, to a figure on the other side of the furnace.

“That’s the face!“ she exclaimed, in great agitation; “Keep quiet, and pull down your veil,” said Mr Gurney in her ear. She drew back into the shadow, and let down her veil, feeling scarcely able to stand. Mr Gurney did not offer her an arm; he had something else to do.

“Who is that man?” he inquired of the foreman, who was showman at the moment. The man inquired about looked scarcely human. He was stunted in figure, large in face, and hideous – making all allowance for the puffing out of his cheeks, as he blew vigorously at the end of the long pipe he was twirling in his baboon-like hands.

“That poor fellow, sir? His name is Middleton. He is a halfwit – indeed, very nearly a complete idiot. He is just able to do what you see – blow the coarsest sort of glass.”

Mr Gurney wished to speak with him; and the poor creature was summoned. He came, grinning; and he grinned yet more when he was requested to show the glasshouse to the gentleman. Mrs Wharton, with her veil down, hung on her friend’s arm; and they followed the idiot, who was remarkably light-footed (for a wonder), to the place he was most fond of. He took them down to the annealing chamber; and then he observed that it was “a nice warm place o’ nights.” Being asked how he knew that, he began pointing with his finger at Mrs Wharton, and peeping under her bonnet. Being advised to look him in the face, she raised her veil; and he sniggled and giggled, and said he had seen her many a time when she was asleep, and many a time when she was awake; and another lady too, who was not there. He hid himself down here when the other men went away – it was so warm! and then he could go when he pleased, and see “her there,” and the other, when they were asleep. Mr Gurney enticed him to whisper how he managed it; and then, with an air of silly cunning, he showed a little square trapdoor in the wall, close by the floor, through which he said he passed. It seemed too small for the purpose; but he crept in and out again. On the other side, he declared, was Mrs Wharton’s cellar. It was so. Far distant as the glasshouse seemed from her house, it ran back so far, the cellar running back also, that they met. No time was lost in sending round to the cellar; and, by a conversation held through the trapdoor, it was ascertained that when Mrs Wharton’s stock of coals was low, that is, in summer, and before a fresh supply came in in midwinter, Middleton could get in, and did get in, almost every night. When he did not appear, it was only because the coals covered the trapdoor.

Who shall say with what satisfaction the ladies watched the nailing up of the trapdoor, and with what a sense of blissful comfort they retired to rest henceforth? Who shall estimate the complacency of the good clergyman at this complete solution of the greatest mystery he had ever encountered? Who will not honour the courage and fortitude of the ladies, and rejoice that their dwelling escaped the evil reputation of being a Haunted House? Lastly, who will not say that most of the goblin tales extant may, it inquired into, be as easily accounted for as that appertaining to the good Mrs Wharton; which has this advantage over all other ghost stories: – it is perfectly and literally true.

The Marsh Fog

and the Sea Breeze

in two chapters

Household Words, Volume 3,

pages 53, 88

Chapter the first

The mere mention of French prisoners brings back, full and clear before my mind, the details of one of the most memorable days of my childhood. I never knew exactly how old I was. Nobody ever told me; and I do not remember that any one ever asked me: so that I never inquired; and I doubt whether my poor mother ever had such an idea in her head as the number or name of the year. She could count as far as twenty, because our fish were sometimes reckoned by scores; but I doubt whether she ever heard of hundreds of anything. So that if I had asked her, she would only have said that I was two years younger than my brother Jos, or five years older than the baby. At a guess, however, I should say that I was about six when the French prisoners were removed from the barracks on the moor. At that time, it seemed to me very long indeed – so far back as scarcely to be remembered – when my “Dad,” as I have ever called him, used to put his hot, greasy hat over my head and face, so that I was frightened and cried, and stamped. One thing more he did, which made me hide myself behind the boat, or in the house. He pretended to be “Bony.” I did not know what Bony was; but I knew it must be something very dreadful, by the faces that Dad made, and the roar that he gave, when he said he was Bony. One day, when he was not thinking of me, he told my mother that Bony was coming; and that there were to be great fires all along the coast when he came. In my agony at hearing this, I threw myself down in the sand, and rolled. I suppose that the sight softened my mother’s heart, for she pulled my father by the sleeve, while she called me to her, and let me hide my face in her lap. When I looked up, my father was laughing; so I ventured to ask him what he would do if Bony came.

“What would I do?” said he, taking the cork out of his tin bottle, and lifting it to his lips. “Why, I would ask him to take a sup out of my can.”

This was a great relief to me, for it gave me the notion that Bony was a man; a thing which I did not know before.

It must have been soon after this that the terrible night came when my Dad was carried away by the press gang. I was less afraid of the press gang than of Bony, because I knew something of what it was. A young man from our hamlet had been seized by them, and I saw them in the boat as they went away, and thought they looked very much like other people in boats. But yet it was terrible when I woke from my sleep in the middle of the night, and heard the bustle. I often waked from my sleep, frightened or uncomfortable. I was sometimes very hot and stifled, and sometimes very cold: and I had bad dreams; and now and then, on winter nights, the sea would come roaring and dashing almost to the very door: and Dad would get up, or make my mother get up, and see how high the water was coming, or whether the tide had turned: and it frightened me to feel the wind rush in when she opened the door, or to see the foam dancing about in the dim light of the lantern, almost on the very threshold: but no fright had ever been like that of the night when Dad was carried away. There were growling voices outside; and one loud, and clear, and commanding; and my Dad swore more terribly than I had ever heard him before, though I believe he swore about something or other every day. My mother’s crying was the worst. She cried aloud, so that it took my breath away. I do not think I cried at all; nor did Jos. He had been asleep beside me, under the folds of the hot, heavy old sail that was our bed. He was now sitting up in his ragged little blue shirt, with his eyes all bright, when nobody stood between him and the lantern, and his face all white and fixed. The press gang did not stay very long; and when they were gone, my mother threw herself down on her face on her bed, and cried and moaned, without ever thinking of shutting the door; so that the wind blew in, and the door swung about; and then baby began to cry sharply. Jos and I wondered whether we dared get up and shut the door. At last, we slipped out from under the sail, and ran and did it together. Then we took up baby, and rocked him to sleep; and I suppose after that we went to sleep again ourselves; for I remember nothing more about that night.

I am ashamed now to think (and yet I do not see how we could help it) how pleasant the next morning was, and many more mornings. Jos and I played about, without being afraid of anything. Nobody gave us knocks on the head: nobody made faces and roared like Bony; nobody swore at us. It is true, we had not now the fearful pleasure of helping to push off the boat, that Dad might go to sea, and not come back the whole day. It was a fearful pleasure, because, when my mother sent us to help to push the boat off, it was a chance whether Dad did not kick us out of his way; but he sometimes was kind, and put his great hand over mine, to make believe that I did the pushing; and then, he always went away, further and further out to sea; and it would be many hours before he came back again. Now, it could no longer be so. Our boat lay upside down on the sand. Sometimes the sun shone hot upon it, so that what paint there was left rose in blisters, and scaled off: and sometimes the rain poured down upon it, and we got under it – Jos and I, and the baby. We liked to be there, snug on the dry sand, when the rain did not last too long. We liked to hear the rain pelt over our heads; and it was a better shelter than the cottage, because the thatch there was so bad that the rain was always coming through. The smell there was so bad, too! The thatch was worse than all others put together. It rotted, and dropped in pieces, sometimes in the house, and sometimes outside; and the bits that were not full of vermin were mouldy, and sickening to come near. So Jos and I liked the boat, and were glad it was now never stirred; though my mother cried sometimes when she looked at it, and said we were little fools to sit laughing there, when no bread came out of the boat any more.

After a time, the boat came to be used again; but never at hours when I could help to push it off. Jos and I used to find it wet in the morning; and my mother said it had been out trading. She did not bid us be secret about this trading; because we knew nobody except the children belonging to four or five other cottages, like our own; and the families who lived there traded too. I doubt whether the grown people knew that there was anything wrong about their way of trading; and I am sure the children did not. My mother took me to sleep with her, and put the goods under the sail, which was still Jos’s bed. Jos’s bed looked all the handsomer for being raised by the packages beneath it; but he did not like it so well; and when our hut was very full of goods, used to steal out, and sleep on the sand, under the boat.

It is best to speak plainly, I think, that there may be no secret about how some people live. The truth, then, is, that I was never, really never, in a state of bodily ease, owing to the dirt in which we lived. I did not know this at the time. I first became aware of it in after years, when those changes had occurred which caused me to become clean in my person. I am now quite sure that there never was an hour of my childhood in which my skin was not irritated so as to make me more or less cross, or restless, or low-spirited; and this was not the worst. If I had not headache, or some distinct pain somewhere within my body (which was very often the case), I was always suffering from a feeling of heaviness, or weakness, or of indistinct uneasiness of my whole frame – miserable feelings which I now know to belong to an unwholesome state of the skin. It seems to me now, that Jos and I were never really clean. We often dabbled in the seawater, up to the knees and elbows; but this only made the salt stick upon the fish oil that had covered our skins first, and made its way into every pore. Our clothes were fishy; our hair was fishy, rough and tangled; our eyes smarted with the salt that seemed to gather upon us from the air and the earth, as well as the water. My breath felt hot; my sleep was troubled: though sometimes grievously wanting food, I seldom relished what I ate; and it was seldom that I felt light and gay. I suppose it was because everybody about us felt the same, from living in the same way, that nobody complained. In our little hamlet, there was no cottage where the floor was clean, and the building wholesome; where the clothes were washed with soap, or people’s skin knew the comfort of soft water, and of being made pure, and flexible, and comfortable, by its pores being open, and the circulation of the blood free and easy. If any one household had been in this happy natural state of health, others might have learned the lesson; and I have in my own mind no doubt that they might have enjoyed an amount of ease and good spirits, and cheerfulness of temper, which would have been of more consequence to their happiness than money, or any of the good luck that they complained of the want of. They used to sit on the half-putrid sands, the women as well as the men drinking spirits because they felt weak and low, and saying that there was no use in catching fish when there was nobody to buy it. That there was no market for their fish was, they felt, a hardship.

Almost the only customers we had had for fish, for a longer time than I could remember, were the French prisoners at the barracks on the moor. It was only the cheapest sorts of fish that they wanted; but they took enough to give Jos and me many a walk to the barracks. In the pilchard season, my mother went with us sometimes; pilchards were so cheap, and the poor fellows wanted so many more than we children could carry. When we carried fresh mackerel, they used to be on the watch at the rails, and beckon, and call, and make signs so eagerly, that it was droll to see. They were very knowing, too, about whitings and haddocks; but the red herrings were the wonder to us. I never knew any people care so much for red herrings; and surely no other people in England made red herrings go so far. Instead of eating their allowance of bread as people usually do, they used to make it into soup. Or, if they could get a little pearl barley or barley meal, they would stew and stew it, till the water really looked as thick as soup; and then they would make balls or little dumplings of their bread, crumbled with some morsels of red herring, minced as fine as pins’ heads; and when these were set swimming in the soup, the poor fellows used to look as satisfied as if a piece of roast beef was before them. Now and then I stood to see them eat their dinner, and I dare say there might be some wonder in my face, or perhaps I was munching a piece of dry bread, at the time; for they used to smile at me, and lay their hands on their stomachs with a pleased look, to make me understand that their soup had done them good. Certainly it looked and smelled very good; and the biggest men seemed, after one basinful, to have had as much as they could eat; but when we told my mother about it, she used to give us each a bit of bread, and divide a herring between us, and say it was just the same thing which way we ate it, and she saw no use in the trouble of stewing. I did long to try sometimes, when I was almost as hungry as ever after dinner; and there was always a fire of driftwood burning on the sands, and I could have managed with our iron pot: but my mother said she would not have us go near the fire. We often did, however, when she was busy elsewhere. I have roasted a potato in that sly way many a time, though I never could be sure of time enough to try the experiment of stewing my bread.

One day, when Jos had been up the moor, he brought home two plovers’ eggs; and we roasted them, and got behind the rock to eat them. I do not remember that we were at all ashamed of such sly doings, or that we ever had any shame about anything; but I do remember, heartily, the goodness of those eggs, and how I used to dream, almost every night, of finding plovers’ eggs on the moor. We were often missing for hours, Jos and I, while out on this hunt; but we tried for so many months in vain, that we grew tired, and gave it up. We were so very ignorant as not to know that the eggs of wild birds are not to be found all the year round.

One day, the news spread that the French prisoners were going away. They were to be moved higher up the country; because it was thought that Bony was really coming at last, after having been talked of so long; and it was not safe to have any Frenchmen so near the coast as that he might let them out of prison, and have them for soldiers. We were all very sorry at first about their going. The grown people said there would be nobody now to buy any fish; and the children had liked the amusement of seeing them cook, and cut pretty toys with their knives out of common meat bones; and also of hearing their talk to each other, which sounded a curious jabber to us. I cried desperately because my mother would not let me go to see them off. As I said at the beginning, the day of their departure was among the most remarkable of all my childhood. But my mother had some trading to do, and she wanted us to help. She had known for some time that soldiers were coming to the barracks, after which the secret trading – in plain words, smuggling – would be difficult, if not impossible to manage. But few days more of comparative liberty remained, before the soldiers would be coming down to watch and defend the coast against the French; and of these few days, the most favourable was that when all eyes – even those of the Preventive Service men – would be fixed on the departure of the prisoners.

I well knew what my share of the day’s work would be; – a dull one enough. I happened to have remarkably good sight; a gift which is highly valued on the coast. If few or none of my other powers were trained, that one was. My father had had it when he was young; but I believe his spirit drinking had spoiled it. He could neither see so far as I could with the natural sight, nor fix a glass steadily, for some time before he was carried away; and he used to put me between his knees, and make me count the sails out at sea, and find out when anybody was in the marsh, or coming down from the moor. Now I knew I should have to watch while the smuggling sloop was creeping in, under the shore, and while our boat was stealing out to meet her; and while the goods were landed. It was a favourable day for the business, but all the more dull for me, from its being a calm sea fog. As I sat on the rock which rose behind our cottage to the height of forty feet or so, I could see pretty clearly over the dark moor, and could just make out the barracks, with the crowd collected there: but I could see no sail on the water, and had lost sight of the bows of our own boat, while I could still see neighbour Glassford, who was steering her, sitting in the stern. I could hear the dipping of the oars, after he had disappeared; and when they were returning from the sloop, I knew it by the dipping of the oars again. I did not see the sloop at all; but I knew she must have been very near – not only because the boat came back so soon, but because I am sure I heard the murmur of voices, careful as smugglers are to speak low while about their business.

After the second return of the boat, I could see through the fog the dim figures, moving like spectres, of my mother and Jos below the rock, carrying in the goods, no doubt. It was very dull on my perch, looking out upon nothing at all; so I thought I would go down and help. Before I had taken the first step down, I fancied I heard something very sweet – far, far away. Then I lost it; and then it came again – some music, swelling gently on the still air. It was military music. In straining my sight, I saw something red on the dark moor, beyond the barracks. It was near noon now; and there was some break in the fog which allowed the sun to touch the furthest ridges; and in a minute or two, I saw a little flash. The soldiers, with their bayonets, were certainly coming to the barracks almost before the Frenchmen were gone. I skipped down the rock to tell my mother this. I hoped she would let me bustle about and help her, as the soldiers would so soon be down upon us; and she did let me carry in some large loaves, with a hard crust, which I knew well enough had little crumb within, but plenty of silk stockings. We ranged the brown loaves on the shelf; and then Jos and I hung a great net about a square package of silks, and doubled it over, so that anybody would have sworn that we had a pile of nets in the corner. A small barrel was packed with ribbons, with a layer of cod sounds at the top. The tobacco went into holes under the floor, under a loose plank. My mother was puzzling her brain to find a place for the largest package of all – a bale too big to go under her bed, or look like any article of furniture, when a faint gleam of sunshine touched the floor, through the dim pane of glass which was our only window.

“There, go, child!” said my mother, giving me a push to the door. “We shall be caught because you won’t mind your watch. Now, hold your tongue about the fog. ’Tis noon, and the fog is breaking away. If the boat does not come quick, the sea will be clear. There, go, and keep a look-out.”

She thrust a piece of bread and a lump of cheese into my hand, and put her gin bottle to my mouth, giving me a sup which almost strangled me. I think she must have been paid for her services partly in the gin which came over with every batch of goods; for, however hungry and ragged we might be, there seemed to be always plenty of gin on the shelf. I ran up the rock, rather giddy, and sat down to sober myself with my bread and cheese. The music was playing again – sweet and lulling from so great a distance. The sun was coming out warm. Where the fog had flaked away, the calm sea was glittering. The sloop was bending away from the land, and the boat was fast making for the beach. I was very sleepy; and I should have been fast asleep in another minute but for the usual noonday plague – the multitude of flies, which were one of the worries of my life. I know now that they were one of the punishments of our own dirt. I have seen many dirty places since swarming with flies; but I never saw anything to compare with the myriads that teased us, almost the whole year round. The offal on the shore was covered with black clouds of them; and so was the cleanest looking sand; for the fact was, the sand itself was poisoned. As for ourselves, we let them cover us when we were awake and busy; but they would not let us go to sleep. I was now fighting with them, somewhat passionately, when I suddenly discovered that they had done us a very great service, by keeping me awake.

My heavy eyes were struck with the sight of two red coats in the marsh, where few coats of any colour were ever seen. This marsh was a long stretch of shore, into which the sea flowed twice a day, leaving it fit for no purposes, for either land or sea. It was possible, for those who knew it as well as Jos and I did, to cross it. We knew where the rock came up, here and there, to afford a foothold, and could skip through it in pretty good time, much as we saw the whinchat hop from stone to stone. But it was never with my mother’s goodwill that we went into it. It was not only dangerous for young children, from being plashy and spongy, and with a considerable depth of bog in some places, but few people went into it – at least in the warm months of the year – without being ill afterwards. This was the real reason why the townspeople at the inner end of it got no fish, while we got no custom. In that town of Dunridge there were (as I have since seen) whole courts and alleys full of poor people, who would have feasted cheaply on pilchards and mackerel in the season; and gentry, who were always wishing for cod, and soles, and whitings, but could never get any; while, on the other side of the marsh, we were burying whole cartloads of fish, because we could not sell them while they were good. The gentry got such fish as they chose to have from more distant places, and the poor went without, and we had no sale – all on account of this foul tract of waste land. My mother used to say, that all the illness we ever had was caught there; and the doctors at Dunridge said nearly the same of the sickness in the town. If the wind blew into the town from the marsh side, the doctors were sure to be busy; and at last, as the bog grew deeper, and the salt made a thicker crust upon the stones, and the slime of rotting weeds was more offensive, and the osprey hovered more frequently in that part of the sky, showing that there was animal death below, people left off crossing the marsh altogether, for such an object as buying or selling fish. Jos and I could not always resist the temptation of going to play there. We liked to blow the thistledown, and to pull out the marsh cotton from its catkins; and to get bundles of rushes; and to look for gaping mussels and crawling crabs on the slime, while the seagulls were wheeling over our heads. We did not remember till the headache and sickness came, that they would be sure to come after that particular frolic. After this account, any one may understand how strange it was to me to see two soldiers in the marsh.

They were picking their way, striding or hopping from one bit of rock to another, but certainly tending towards me. I was wide awake in a moment, and saw that it would not do to let them come within sight of our smuggling transactions. I gave the childish sort of whoop which was our concerted signal. Jos popped up his head.

“Soldiers!” said I. “Make haste, Jos; I’ll go, and lead them out on the moor.”

When once children have tasted the pleasure of misleading grown people, they are, perhaps, more sly than their elders. I well remember the satisfaction with which I now set forth to mislead the soldiers. No peewit on the moor could more cleverly entice away the stranger from her nest of young, than I now set about diverting these redcoats from the place where my mother was in sore dread of visitors, I slipped down upon the marsh, and turned north, when the strangers went south-east. When they saw me stooping, and apparently busy gathering the stiff stalks of the salt-lavender, they called, and for some time I pretended not to hear them. At last I turned, and then I hopped and skipped towards them readily enough. They asked me where I lived, and I pointed to the town. They asked me if I was not afraid that Bony would catch me, if I came so far from home. This frightened me very much; but I said I did not think Bony was anywhere here. They told me that if he was not here now, he would be very soon, and that they had come to prevent Bony catching little girls and boys. I asked how they were going to prevent it, and they told me that they were come to live at the barracks; that some of them would always be keeping watch on the rocks, or along the hills, and that they were to make great fires, that might be seen many miles off, whenever Bony should make his appearance. They wanted now to find a convenient place, the top of some rock, where such a fire might be made; and to see how a good path could be made along the shore, without interruption, that soldiers might always be walking and watching, and that the townspeople might feel safe. I promised to show them a very fine rock, where they might make a big fire, if they would follow me; and I turned towards the moor; but the strangers were so perverse that they would look along the coast first. They did not mind getting wet, I saw; they were so earnest in examining the place. They consulted together, and looked about, and went to the edge, where the wet part became a quicksand on the beach; and I gathered that they thought that by some means the swamp must be made passable. At last, my rock caught their attention; and nothing would serve them but they must go up it. I wanted now to slip away, and run round below to give warning; but they took me between them to show them the way, as they said, and amused themselves by swinging me over the muddy places, till in a few minutes we were all on the rock. The moment I obtained my release, I shot away homewards. It was a great relief to me to find my mother sitting before the door, mending a net, and Jos cleaning out the boat in a harmless sort of way; for the soldiers were peeping down upon us from above, and nothing could pass without their seeing it.

“Why, here is a village – a fishing village!” we heard one of them say. When they came down, they asked me why I did not tell them there was a village here; to which I replied that they found they could see it for themselves. They shook their heads with great gravity; told my mother that I had pretended to come from the town, and that they were afraid I was in partnership with “Bony.” They asked my mother if that was her husband’s boat; and when they had heard the sad story about my father, they went up to Jos, who was still in the boat, and asked him if he had brought home anything.

“Here, look,” cried my mother; “if you want any lobsters, here are some now just out of the boat.”

“Lobsters,” said one of them. “Ah! that’s good. Let’s see your lobsters.”

My mother produced some which she had, two days before, despaired of selling.

“Why, they are as red as we are!” cried the soldiers. “Do you think we don’t know fresh lobsters from boiled?”

My mother coolly protested that the boat had not been back an hour, and that the lobsters were just out of it: two assertions which were literally true; for the lobsters had been offered for sale on board the smuggler, and not received. I heard the strangers say to each other that they had got among a parcel of cheats, and that they never had been fixed in such a neighbourhood. The town was full of beggars; the country was moor or swamp, and this filthy village seemed a good match for the rest.

By this time, the fishermen’s wives began to show themselves from their respective houses; some bringing out fish for sale, and all carefully shutting their doors behind them. Most or all would willingly have cheated; but one or two had sense to perceive that the soldiers knew fresh fish from stale. They bought a little; examined the situation of the hamlet thoroughly, expressed their disgust at the dell which stretched back from the cottages, between the rocks, and disappeared at the further end of it. This dell might have been very pretty; and a stranger now and then, coming upon it from behind, pronounced that it was very pretty: but it would not bear a second look. Heaps of garbage lay there; and it was so over-strewn with the dirt of every sort that was thrown there by everybody, that only patches of the natural green of its really good soil showed themselves in places. Many a load of unsaleable fish was cast out there, to save the trouble of burying it in the sands.

In the evening, down came two officers from the barracks, evidently directed by our visitors of the morning. The lieutenant carried a glass; and long and careful was their survey of the points of the coast, and then, their gaze out to sea.

“There are four of them,” said I; “and two more south-west.”

“Four what?” asked the lieutenant, fixing his glass again.

“Four sail to the south-east,” said I.

“There’s only three,” declared Bill Oulton, positively, coming up breathless, to obtain his share of the stranger’s notice.

“There are four,” I protested. “Two brigs ”

“To be sure,” Bill put in; “two brigs and a schooner.”

“And further out,” I declared, “so that I can see only her topsails, there is a large ship.”

I appealed to the lieutenant to know whether it was not so. He handed his glass to his companion, owning that he could not see one. Neither could the ensign; and this seemed to us very odd. We did not know that it requires practice to see all that the human eye may perceive out at sea. A neighbour, old Glassford, of long experience, was called; and he declared me to be right, owning that he doubted whether any eyes in the place but mine would have found out the fourth sail, without being told where to look. The officers praised my eyesight, and said they must take me into the service; and then, if I would tell them when Bonaparte was coming, they would fight him for me. I had never heard the name at full length before; and while I was puzzling about it, Glassford ventured to correct the officers, telling them that he supposed they came from some way inland, but that we on the coast, who must know best about the enemy, called him Bony. The officers laughed, and hoped the wise men on the coast would fight him as well as the soldiers, whatever they called him. They asked me if I would have a little red coat, and enter the service; to which I answered that I had something else to do than to go amongst people who could not see what was before their eyes.

“What have you to do? Do you catch fish?”

“To be sure I do.”

“Does she?” they asked of our neighbour.

“A little matter of shrimping, perhaps,” he said, with a patronising smile.

The officers asked me if I would get some shrimps for their breakfast the next morning. As the tide would serve, I readily promised to do so. They desired me to bring them to the barracks alive, because they did not want curious shrimps that were caught ready boiled. We might be very clever in catching red lobsters; but they preferred the blue sort, and shrimps all alive. By this I knew that the soldiers had put them on their guard against us.

They afterwards examined every cottage on the outside, and asked some questions about the stones on the beach, and the rocks above. They borrowed a hammer, and knocked off some bits of the rock. They made faces at the dell behind, but asked for a spade, and, with their own hands, dug a spit here and there. They counted the men and boys in the place; or, rather, they tried to do so, but could get no true answers – so afraid were we all that they were somehow connected with the press gang. They were exceedingly surprised to find that we knew no more about Dunridge and its people than if the town had been a hundred miles off. They pitied the townspeople for having no fish, and ordered some for their own table. Their chief surprise, however, was to find that we had no vegetables, except when a cargo of potatoes now and then came by sea. As we had none ourselves, we could not help them to any. Certainly, their notions of things were very different from ours; so much so, that as soon as they were out of hearing, my mother and the neighbours agreed that they wished those might be real British soldiers, after all, and not some sort of press gang, or people belonging to Bony. As for me, I felt as if something great was going to happen. I got my mother to mend our shrimping net, and tumbled into bed, with plenty of marsh slime between my toes, and a head somewhat troubled with wonder as to whether the officers would buy my shrimps, and let me come home again, or whether they would put on me a little red coat, and make me stand all day long on the rocks, to look out for sails, and tell when Bony was coming.

Chapter the second.

When I went out to my shrimping, the next morning, I saw the last of the extreme quietness of our beach. Up to this time, it was no unusual thing for Jos and me to have the long range of shore entirely to ourselves; so lazy were the few people who lived there, and so rare was it for any stranger to come near us. After this morning, I never knew it so again. I slipped out of the house before anybody else was awake, carrying my net and basket. It must have been very early; for it was mackerel season then, when the days are long; and, when I looked back from the first headland, my shadow reached almost as far as the houses. I thought I would go over the headland, instead of stepping into the sea to go round it. It was rather further; but I liked the feel of the warm sand where the sea vetch and the slender crop of grass grew, up the steep. It was pleasant treading for bare feet. Two or three little lambs browsed there at this season; and shining green beetles now and then ran about in the sun: and perhaps a rabbit might cock up its white tail. I was soon at the top; and there I found one of the Preventive Service men. His back was towards the sea, and his eye and glass fixed upon the barracks, as I suppose they had been the day before when we were busy about our trading.

He would not answer me for some time, when I asked him what he saw; but at last he put down his glass, and told me that there were to be great doings immediately, which would make a vast alteration in the neighbourhood. He did not know what to think of it; but he supposed we had only to obey, as soldiers and sailors should. It was a new thing, as far as he knew, for soldiers to do building work, and the like; and we should see how they would manage it. A messmate who had strolled up to us here put in his word, saying that it was a regular part of a soldier’s business, to build up walls, and dig ditches, and do any work that was necessary for defence; and this was a time and place when such service was much wanted from soldiers who were sent to defend the coast. I asked what they were going to build; and I was told “a sea wall:“ and I was as wise as ever.

As I went on my way the shrimps were very kind, and came into my net in swarms. I soon filled my basket. It was so very heavy that I soon bethought me of throwing out all the very little shrimps, and returning them to the water. When I had done this, the pools looked so tempting that I could not help going in again; and I got plenty more good-sized shrimps. When my shadow had shortened considerably, so that I thought it was time to be turning my face towards the barracks, I made haste back, round the point of the headland. I had heard a dull sound of knocking before; and now, when I turned the point, I saw several soldiers, in their gaiters and small clothes, but without their red coats, very busy within sight. Some had pickaxes, and were hewing away at the rocks; a few had barrows, and were gathering stones from the beach. The lazy cottagers had turned out sooner than usual to see the sight; and some of the boys were helping to pick up stones.

My mother was looking out for me impatiently. She had obtained a quantity of mackerel from a boat just come in, and was going with me to the barracks, without having said a word of it to the neighbours. What a load she could carry on her back, in our largest creel! In addition, she and Jos took between them another heavy basket. I had enough to do to carry my shrimps. We left poor little Peter, with a great piece of bread in his hand, to take his chance on the beach. My mother locked her door, and carried away the key, and set Peter down on the sand, with a heap of gay pebbles about him, and a bit of rope to play with, and trusted he would come to no harm. She gave one look back as she left the beach, and said she thought that, with so many people about, he would be safe; and she would make all the haste she could back again.

We walked so fast that we were sadly hot and out of breath when we came upon the moor. My mother stopped to take a sup out of her bottle, and to give us a mouthful with our bread, which we ate as we walked. When we came near the barracks, there were no more the French prisoners, with their eager faces looking out through the rails, and their curious jabber. What we saw through the rails was a line of soldiers on parade; and what we heard was the loud voice of the officer in command, and the jingle of the muskets, as the men changed arms. We soon found that our market was greatly improved. We sold half our mackerel, as soon as the parade was over, and nearly all my shrimps. Another piece of luck befell us. The baker’s cart was there, delivering bread; and the baker was willing, for the consideration of a couple of mackerel, to carry Jos and me and the rest of our fish to Dunridge, where we had no doubt of selling off everything. We heaped up the basket in the cart, and saw my mother set off homewards at a brisk trot, with her empty creel on her back, to see as soon as possible whether little Peter was safe. She had not forgotten to leave with Jos the fishy canvas bag into which we were to put our money. The baker told us we must take good care of it, for he had never known such a place as Dunridge was for beggars and thieves. He was obliged, he said, to buy off some of them with a daily allowance of crusts and old bread, to prevent his door being infested by them; and they were growing so saucy now as to say that they did not like stale bread, and should soon make him give them new. His wife was afraid to sit alone in the shop, while he was away, even with the half-door bolted – the poor creatures were so abusive. He said the butcher over the way was under the same difficulty. It was unknown what he gave away every week in odd pieces of meat and bone: and yet the poor sickly wretches looked never the better for it.

Jos asked why the rich people did not take care of the poor, as they ought to do? and the baker answered that he believed the gentry did all they could. They had to pay dearer for their meat and bread, to repay the tradesmen for what was extorted from them; and they could not go ten yards from their own doors, without being beset by abusive beggars, and mobbed if they did not give. The ladies had almost left off taking walks; and even when they went to church, they were not free. The church bells brought out the pale-faced, ragged, desperate looking beggars from their cellars, and close courts and alleys, to tread on the heels of the gentry as they went through the churchyard, and wait for them when they came out. Last Sunday, indeed, he had seen something which almost made him doubt his eyesight. Some young ladies were in a pew by themselves, and a ghastly-looking man leaned over the door, putting out his hand, and even touching the nearest lady on the shoulder, as she bent her head over her prayer book. The baker said that he had lost no time, after observing this, in finding the beadle; but before he could get to the pew, the ladies had given silver to the beggar, to get rid of him. The constables were afraid to do much, they were over-matched, and the magistracy were perplexed and timid. Nobody saw how the matter was to end; for Dunridge was a wretchedly poor town now. His own opinion was that the unhealthiness of the place was more to blame than the war. People had no strength or spirit to work, when they were having the fever and ague so often; and there was less and less of work and wages, every year, from the decay of the place. It hurt the baker so much to think of this, that he vented his vexation in giving a sharp cut to his horse, which made it spring forward, knocking Jos and me against the back of the cart, and spilling some of our slippery fish.

I was quite ready to cry before, so frightful was the prospect of going among the beggars and thieves; and now I roared, and said I would get out. I believe Jos was nearly as much frightened. The baker must have greatly needed to ease his mind, to pour out all this to two children. Perhaps it had done him good, for he began to console us, said he had no doubt we should sell our fish well; and that we had only to get into the houses, when we could, so as not to show our money bag in the streets; and he finished off with the consolatory declaration that we looked so like thieves or beggars ourselves, that he did not think any of that sort of people would hurt us.

When we alighted at the entrance of the town, it would have been a satisfaction to me to stand in the middle of the pavement, and roar, as my family well knew that I could; but I was too desperately alarmed to try. I only whimpered; and I believe this and our bare feet, and tattered clothes were powerful in obtaining for us the patronage of the cellars and small courts. The food we had to sell, really was cheap and excellent, and such as the poor of Dunridge would have been glad of an opportunity of obtaining often; but I think the novelty had something to do with the favour we met in the very first street. Haggard faces, and half naked forms popped up from under the pavement, as it seemed, when Jos strengthened his heart to cry “fresh mackerel.” One woman carried away two on half a plate; and another hoisted a boiler from below for two more. A child who could scarcely walk held out a farthing in one hand and stretched out the other for a fish. Two or three cook-maids appeared with dishes at back doors; and Jos then got behind the door to bag his halfpence unperceived. One gentleman whom we met, told us to follow him; and when we got to his house, we found he was a schoolmaster; and he bought so many that he paid us in silver. When we had sold the last, the baker saw us from his door, and asked us if we did not want some bread, as it was such a long way to go home. He had no idea that we should attempt the short cut by the marsh, the townspeople had such a horror of that place. He said he should never see us again alive, if we went into that poisonous hole. This was not the sort of threat to frighten us.

What a pity it was that this marsh was in the way between us and the Dunridge people, who had shown themselves so eager to buy our fish! Jos’s bag was so heavy with halfpence, that it tore his old jacket; and then we agreed that, if we came again, we would ask our friend, the baker, to give us silver for our copper: as for our coming again, we agreed that it should be very soon. Excited by our gains, we fancied we could bring a load of fish this way, by swinging a creel between us; wading where we knew the depth, and resting where a bit of rock afforded room. Yet it did not seem easy to me now to cross it without anything to carry but an empty basket. I lost my footing several times, and fell into the slime, so that Jos scolded me; but I could not help it. At first, he refused to lend me a hand, but when he found that I could not get upon the rock where he stood, and when I said I was giddy, he became suddenly very kind, and helped me all he could. I think he remembered what the baker said, and thought I might have come once too often. I was beginning to feel very sick, when a whiff of air passed me, which I think of now as one of the pleasantest things that ever happened to me. The warm, sharp, penetrating, smell of burning tar came on the breeze, and it cured my sickness for the moment. I plunged and staggered on, revived now and then by another whiff, and then turning sick, and feeling strangely again. The last thing I remember is, that I heard some knocking near, and saw some people moving; that Jos pulled me by the arm with all his force to make me get up, while I seemed to be sinking in chilly water, and that I heard gruff voices over me, and Jos saying that it was Molly, and that she would not get up. It seems to me that there was some flickering of flame, but whether it was from my own intense headache, or real fire before my eyes, I cannot say. Some of the soldiers were beginning the sea wall that day, driving piles, and sounding the quicksand, and making preparations for laying the broad foundation of stones, from which the embankments were to arise. They were burning tar, not only for their piles, but to lessen the danger of the bad air of the marsh. The working party saw Jos and me from a distance, and came to the rescue. One of them covered me with his coat, after wringing the water out of my old frock (which finished tearing it to pieces), and carried me home.

My mother’s conclusion from the adventure, was that there was bad luck in dealing with the Dunridge people, and that she would never send fish there any more. Considering the weight of Jos’s money bag, and her pleased surprise in laying hold of it, this ought to be considered a remarkable proof of her affection. I knew nothing about that, however, nor about anything else for so long a time, that that summer has always remained a perplexing one to me. All I know is, that I lay in a miserable state, which seemed to me to be stretching on for ever and ever. I was almost too feeble to move under the rug; I could not lie still; I was too weak to cry aloud, and yet I was always crying. The fish that my mother kept under the bed smelled so, that it seemed to suffocate me; and when any body opened the door, my mother scolded if it was not shut again directly. I believe thus much was all real, and so was little Peter’s crying, which went through and through my head. But there were worse things that were not real. For hours together, I thought I was going down and down in the sea, and could never get to the bottom; and then it seemed as if somebody pulled me by the hair, and tugged, and pulled, and could not get me up again. I saw terrible monsters, and they, too, seemed to pull at my head.

One day I was so scared that I tried to run away, and got to the door, and stood there a minute before I fell. My mother was coming when she saw me, and she and another woman took me for a ghost, as I stood on the doorstep, and set up such a shriek that some of the officers, who were within hearing, turned to see what was the matter. One of them happened to be the surgeon from the barracks – a kind gentleman, as I had afterwards good reason to know. He came at a moment when my mother was so frightened that she let him do whatever he pleased, and frightened indeed she must have been to let him do such things as he did.

She must bring out a clean sheet. She had not such a thing as a sheet in the world; nor was there one among all the cottages. Presently a sheet was borrowed from the nearest Preventive Station. While the messenger was gone about this, the doctor had all the fish taken from under the bed, and the whole floor swept. My mother did this herself, at the first word, lest her smuggled goods should be found out. When the fish was all cleared out of the house, there was still the thatch. The doctor shook his head as he looked up at it, and said he could not answer for anybody’s life under such a roof as that. All they could do was to stretch a sail above the bed, as near the roof as they could fasten it. This prevented insects and bits of mouldy thatch from falling upon me as I lay; but it could not cure the smell. To my mother’s great surprise (considering the season of the year), the doctor said, I should have a better chance with no roof over me at all, than with such a thatch.

I really think she believed that the doctor meant outright murder when he put me into a tub and poured cold water over me. Still I got better; and one day, after a long sleep, when I woke, I knew quite clearly who they all were, and what they were saying; and I did not fancy that the sea was in the house, or that I was in the sea; or that there were any monsters about the bed. I heard my mother say that I had been bewitched, and that the doctor had washed out the spell: and then the neighbours said, that, after he had once done it himself, anybody else could do it; and that she must not let the evil imp get a hold again; but, as soon as I began to toss and look wild, she must wash out the spell again. She must also let the door stand wide, that, if the imp got in again, there might be plenty of room for him to flee, when the water began to dash. For their part, they promised to leave a free passage, by staying away from the door.

The days grew shorter and shorter, and still I could not walk at all. My mother used to set me down, like a baby, on the doorsteps, in the sunny autumn mornings; but the evenings were long and rather dreary, with the firelight flickering on the rafters, and I with nothing to do but to lie on the bed and watch it; and doze, and wake again, till my mother came to bed. One evening, when I was in a pretty deep doze, I heard such a shriek as I shall never forget. It made me shriek before I knew what I was about. Then came a terrible clamour; – men’s voices shouting, and children screaming, and the women crying aloud for the Lord to have mercy upon them. Then there was a blaze of light all abroad, which shone in at the window; and this convinced me that “Bony” was come at last. I fixed my eyes on the door, to see him come in. But I could not bear this long. Even if I met him by the way, I must go where every body else was. So I slipped off the bed, all trembling as I was, and held fast by the barrel and the chest that stood against the wall, and got to the door. What a sight it was! The great fire on the rock above our house was kindled; and it blazed away, so that every pebble and sprig of seaweed on the beach could be seen as in broad day. The boys kept throwing on wood – and a good deal that had been tarred; and up shot the flame, each time, as if it was in spirits at being fed. Then a light appeared on a headland to the east, a great way off: and presently another, so far off that it looked like a flickering yellow star. And the same to the west. The whole coast was lighted up, to receive Bony, at last. I looked round for him; but I saw only faces that I knew. Well, as I knew them, they looked very terrible. My mother was quite wild. When the night breeze brought the clang of the church bells from the town, where every bell was ringing the alarm, she put her hands to her ears. She sat down, and hid her face in her apron, and kept shaking her head in her own lap, so that I was afraid to speak to her; but, at last, I put my arms round her neck, and said, “Mother, where’s Bony?”

She looked up with a dreadful face – all drawn with terror.

“Let’s run away,” she whispered in a hoarse voice, which I heard in my heart, through all the roar of the flame.

“I can’t run,” I whimpered, sinking on the sand.

She caught me up in her arms, gave Jos a box on the ear to attract his attention from the beacon fire, ordered him to carry Peter and follow her, and made for the little dell, which led up into the country. Before we had fled half through it, another dismal yell from behind, and our own name shouted, made us look round. Some brands from the beacon had been blown upon the roof of our cottage, and the thatch had caught. That rotten thatch was doomed, and the whole dwelling with it! My mother put me down, and wrung her hands. Between the fear of Bony, and that of losing the smuggled goods, she was well nigh distracted. But the smuggled goods were not wholly, nor chiefly her own, while her life was: so she took me up again, and continued her flight. Jos, however, was of a different mind. He made little Peter take hold of my mother’s apron, and ran back to save what he could of our goods. By the help of the neighbours, every thing was dragged out before the rafters fell in, and nothing was lost but the tobacco, which was poked in under the boards. When our neighbours and partners, Glassford and Oulton, perceived that Bony was not yet actually on the beach, they ventured to secure the goods in their own houses, and hide them cleverly before the officers should come down.

The officers were not long in coming. Amidst the other sounds of that awful night, were the gun fired at intervals from the Preventive Station, and the military music approaching from the barracks; and again (what seemed to me as terrific as anything), the jingling and crashing of the heavy waggons, that came down the lanes from the inland farmsteads, to carry away the women and children, and most valuable goods. My mother hailed two or three of these; but the drivers only inquired whereabouts the French had really landed, and whether we had seen them; and then told us that we must wait, and they would pick us up as they returned.

“Don’t, mother, don’t!” I said at last, when her loud crying became more than I could bear. “Don’t cry so loud. Bony is not here.”

She told me that I did not know that; and the words froze my very heart. I hid my face on her shoulder; and of the rest of the night I remember nothing.

The next was a brilliant autumn morning, and I saw the wide stretch of coast, and broad expanse of sea, for the first time for some months. We were brought down to our own beach again. When the heaving sea, with its glittering tract to the eastward, was seen without ship or boat upon it (for the boats were drawn up along the whole coast where the beacon fires had been visible), it was supposed that the French fleet of gunboats had passed on to the westward: but by degrees it came out that the whole was a prodigious mistake. The soldiers, and the country people whom they had got to help them with the sea wall, had been in the habit, all the summer, of burning tarred wood, as a safeguard against the stench of the marsh; and on concluding their work, some of the lads had fed the little fire into one so far visible from a distance as to be taken by the townspeople for the kindling of a beacon. Out rang their bells; forth went the news, gathering force and fullness at every step; and the consequence was the firing of the beacons all along the coast. It was a consolation dear to the hearts of many, to their dying day, that the Prime Minister was waked out of his sleep the next night, to hear about our town, and our beacon, and our headland; and that our doings were heard of by King George the Third himself, who was, in fact, almost as much interested in Bony’s landing as we were. We were a prouder set of people from that day.

Except that a heap of charred wood lay where our cottage had stood, the scene looked to everybody else just the same as usual. But to me, it was wonderfully changed. Since I had seen it last, the sea wall had been built, and the whole marsh had quite changed in appearance. No more water had flowed in, and a vast deal had drained out. There were no glittering pools and little streams, and the land was almost as dark as the moor. Along its seaward edge was a broad, firm walk, on which sentries were now placed, and by which we could reach the hard sands to the west in a few minutes, without wetting the soles of our feet. I was told that the townspeople, and the boys of the whole neighbourhood, were so eager about the new work and pay, and so sorry when the sea wall was finished, that it was thought that another work would answer; and a causeway to the town across the narrowest part of the marsh was planned. It was likely to pay well in time by a very small toll, and as the fishermen along the coast would traffic in the town every day of the week the shops would have their custom; and the townspeople would be glad of a constant supply of fish. The doctors said the wall and causeway would be paid for presently, if toll was taken from the average number of persons that would have had the fever if the marsh had remained as it was. The mere money saving from abolishing so much illness, though it was the least part of the good, was such as to justify a free expenditure on such improvements.

What the doctors said was confirmed by experience. From that time, the fever lessened, year by year, as the marsh dried up, till at last (and that was before I was in my teens) it became a matter of public information and serious inquiry when a case of fever occurred in the town. Before that time the marsh had changed its aspect again and again. It was very ugly while it was black, with brown water trickling through its drains, and rusting the sands at low water. Then it was covered by degrees with a woolly bluish grass; and in July we saw it dotted over with rushy ricks of meadow hay, such as cattle would not take if they could get anything better. Then we saw more and more beasts grazing there, and patches of it were manured upon trial. When once a turnip crop was taken off one corner of it, the improvement went on rapidly. The rent that it yields is rather low still; but I have seen more loads of potatoes and turnips carried from it, than of manure carried to it: and in a few years there were thin crops of oats waving in the breeze. As the fish carts pass to the town, along the clean sandy causeway, with hedges and green fields on either hand, it is difficult to believe how, within the remembrance of many residents of Dunridge, the sea eagle hovered over the fishy morass, the only creature that gathered any other harvest there, than that of disease and death.

But I have got on a long way from the morning after the invasion, as the people used to call that panic.

How we who were burnt out were to be housed, was the first question. On a hint from the doctor, I was kindly received in the nearest Preventive Station house. My mother and her other children found corners in the neighbours’ houses for a time. In a week’s time, I was quite able to take care of myself; and in another week, I was at play on the sands again, and even earning money, in a curious sort of way, on the sea wall. The station house was as clean as a quaker’s meeting; and in a fine air, of course. By day, I lay on the dry grass in the sun; and by night, I slept – and oh! so soundly – on a little mattress, in the corner of a whitewashed room, where the floor was cleaner than our plates at home ever were, and where the window was open all day, and left a little open at the top, all night. The first time I walked down to the beach, I met the doctor and another of the officers; and I heard him say that he could never have brought me round entirely, if I had staid among fish garbage, and under rotten thatch; and that it was a good thing for me that we had been burnt out.

“This is the child that has such a sharp sight, you may remember,” he said to the other officer.

“What! this little wretch?” asked the lieutenant. “I should not have believed that she was the same child.”

“And yet she is plump, compared with what she was ten days since. And I dare say her eyes are as good as ever, by this time.”

The gentlemen tried me, and found that at any rate my sea sight was better than theirs, and that I could see more without the glass, than they could with it. After a few words of consultation, they bade me follow them to the sea wall; and then the lieutenant promised me a farthing for every sail I could make the sentinel see; and a halfpenny for every sail that he could not see, but that I could bring two witnesses to avouch. This seemed to me strange at the time; a waste of money, though I was to get it; and to some it might seem strange now, after the many years of peace, during which we have been released from looking out for an enemy from the sea. But in those times a strange sail was the daily and nightly thought of all people on the coast, and especially of those who were charged with the defence of our beloved native shores. A good sea sight was a qualification worth paying for in those times.

The soldiers had managed to make gardens of the bog that surrounded the barracks, and I longed that my mother would do as the soldiers and the other fishwives did, that we might now and then taste fresh vegetables with our dry bread and salt fish. But she did not like the trouble. She sat down anywhere on the sands to clean her fish, and left the stuff all strewed about where she had sat.

We did not see why we should not have a garden of our own, where our seaweed, ashes, and garbage might grow vegetables for us, without being carried so far as the barracks. I told Jos that if he could get anybody to go into partnership with him about a garden, I would try and get a place in Dunridge, where I might learn to make good soup, and to cook and manage so that we might have something better to eat than dry bread and salt fish.

Perhaps few children of our age would have thought of this, in other circumstances; but, to speak the truth, we were growing very unhappy about my mother’s bottle; and we had lately been gathering up notions of comfort which were all the more striking, because they were new.

The notion was so cheering, that I ran over to Dunridge as fast as my feet would carry me; and at the same moment Jos was running as fast in the contrary direction, in an equal hurry about the other half of our scheme. He soon found a man in the Preventive Service who offered to go into partnership with him in his scheme of a garden.

The dell was the proper place; and there Jos and his friend soon fixed on a promising bit of ground, with a south-east aspect; and Butter, his partner, desired Jos to be collecting materials for a fence which would keep out the rabbits, while he obtained the owner’s consent to begin to dig. He knew the gentleman well, from having had many a conversation with him about the smugglers and the defence of the coast; and he was sure there would be no difficulty. There was no difficulty. It was a new idea to the proprietor that any thing could be done with that corner of his land; and he was pleased that the experiment should be tried. The rent of the first quarter acre was the merest trifle; but not so since the neighbours have asked for gardens there too. From end to end of that well tilled dell, now covered with heavy crops of garden produce, and smelling sweet with the beanflower and fragrant pot-herbs in their season, every yard of ground pays rent to the owner, whose father was wont, to the day of his death, to point out Jos to his visitors, when they came down to the coast, as the lad who made the first move towards turning a sink of corruption into a wholesome and fruitful garden.

I have said how eagerly I ran towards the town, with my head full of my new plan. My only idea was to apply to the baker. I had no success the first day; for, besides that the baker’s wife did not want a little maid who needed to be taught everything, no one would think of taking me while my feet were bare, and my clothes in rags, and my hair all tangled and rusted with the weather. My mother was not really poor, I knew; and I coaxed her into a bargain, with the butcher’s wife, by which a certain quantity of fish was to be delivered in consideration of a suit of clothes for me. My own history has nothing to do, from this time, with that of our hamlet, as I never lived there again. It is enough to say that I have found that “where there’s a will there’s a way;” that I learned not only to cook, but to read and write, and a good deal besides; and that, having been first a scholar, and then a teacher in the Sunday School of Dunridge, when Sunday schools were first heard of there, I married the best of the teachers, who became master of the Orphan Asylum.

I had not been married long when I had occasion to go to the hamlet, one fine August evening. It was a pleasant walk now by the causeway. There was a low blossomy hedge on either hand, over which one looked upon clover and turnip fields, with the sea beyond, now all golden and glittering with the sunset. On the other side, the reapers were busy, cutting wheat – about the first, I should think, that had been grown where the marsh had been. Where the grain had been carried, the children were driving flocks of geese from the moor into the stubbles, and dressing themselves up with poppies and blue cornflowers. If they had ventured hither ten years before, they would have been smeared with slime, and sick with stench, and would have gathered nothing better than rushes. The change was striking enough to me, though I had watched its progress: much more so was it to another, who came suddenly upon it.

I was sitting with my mother on the shingle, just as the pale moon came up over the headland, and Peter, now a stout lad, was helping Jos to draw up the boat, after a successful trip, when, chancing to turn my head, I saw a sailor, with a bundle over his shoulder, looking down into the dell from the further end. He came along, staring about him like one bewildered; and he stood still and listened when he heard the creak and jingle of the harvest waggon.

It was my father; and I think we knew him before he was sure that he knew us. He was much aged, but not nearly so much as my mother, who was, indeed, taken by strangers for our grandmother. I saw that my father was shocked. With his children he was strangely shy at first. He could not order us about, and knock us about as he used to do; and I think he was awkward as to how to speak to us.

I left him sitting beside my mother, and looking about him in great amazement, and asking many questions of the lads, while I cooked his supper. He liked his supper well, and when he heard that I was going to Dunridge on foot that night, he was more puzzled than ever. We told him there was a short and pleasant way now; he would go part of the way with me to see it. He was in the midst of telling me that, during all his wanderings and adventures, he had never once set eyes on Bony, when we came in sight of the harvest fields; as he looked over the hedge, I gathered him a wild rose, and he put it in his hat, saying, it was the last thing he had ever thought of to have a posy from that place. After we had said good night and parted, as the town appeared before us in the moonlight, I heard his whistle so long, that I am sure he must have gone home much more slowly than I did. I saw him twice again before he had to go afloat. He told me that he had not brought home much money, but that he had left what he had with Jos (as Jos was clearly a steady young man), desiring that it might go to make my mother comfortable, for he had a strong belief that he should never see her again. He never did see her again, for she died the next year. He returned to us after a few years. He had wounds, and was too far broken to be a fisherman again, though he went out with his sons, now and then, in warm weather. His chief pleasure was to sit in an arbour in Jos’s garden, smoking his pipe and looking at the sea. He knew that Jos’s tidy wife did not like that any one should drink spirits in the house, so he sat chiefly in the arbour, except in very cold weather. He said he should like no better than to die among the honeysuckles there; but he died in his bed, as kindly waited upon by Jos’s wife, as if she had not disliked some of his ways.

As for our town, whether it is that the schools have made a great difference in the course of a generation, or that the peace did us more good than we knew of at the time, or whether it really is that the improvement in the general health has renewed the place, I cannot say with certainty; but it certainly is not like the same town that it was when I was a child. It is a quiet place still, with no great wealth, or stir of any kind: but nobody now lives in cellars; and it is a rare thing to see a beggar. My husband and I think it is a comfortable and pleasant place to live in – between the fruitfulness of the land, and the beauty of the sea. And this is exactly what Jos says of our old hamlet, and of his own home in the midst of it.

A New Plea

for a New Food

Household Words, Volume 3, page 138

When the great question of the day and year was, how to feed the Irish in their extremity of hunger, large quantities of the cheapest flour that could be found were imported. Indian meal was brought over from America. The Irish ate it, because they must eat it or starve; and many were the English poor who did the same. The English rich tried it at their tables, with a real anxiety to recognise in it a wholesome and pleasant article of food. How impossible this was found, Mr Carlyle and others have told the world. Under the best management, under the most careful disguises, the food was found unpalatable. It was sour, or bitter, or musty; sometimes all these.

The reason was this. The moisture contained in the grain is an acid. When the shell of the grain is broken, this moisture forms an oxide, all the sweet qualities of the grain disappear, and a bad flavour is substituted. Whether the meal came over ground, or merely broken, or kiln-dried, before it sailed, the effect was much the same, and people naturally concluded that the mischief was done by bringing the meal over the sea. The case was thus supposed to be hopeless, and the “yellow meal,” as the Irish call it, was regarded as a mere refuge, and an odious one, from starvation.

This is now found to be a mistake; and, long as it will probably take to remove an impression so reasonable, it may be worth while to declare that Indian corn flour may now be had in a perfect state, as wholesome and pleasant as any other flour, and so cheap as to make it an object of serious importance to establish the facts of the case.

A Mr Stafford, in America, discovered the cause of the mischief, and invented a process by which the acid moisture of the grain is evaporated, without injury to any of its other constituents. The meal is passed over warm cylinders, and comes away almost as incapable of deterioration as sand. It has been shut up in a garret for two years; it has been carried round the world, without losing its sweetness and delicate flavour. This meal can now be sold at two thirds of the price of the best wheaten flour. With the addition of the cost of carriage into the country, it may be reckoned at less than three fourths of the price of wheaten flour. Owing to the exertions of the American Minister, and others in London, an extensive trial is in progress there; and here and there, in country districts, a cask has been distributed among neighbours, who immediately become anxious to know how they may obtain the flour regularly. But, as yet, little is done towards introducing it where it is most wanted – among the Irish, who are still lingering on towards the grave, and the Scotch, who are in some parts sinking under the prospect of death by famine. In the island of Skye, the weather was tempestuous last summer. The harvest season was wet; the potatoes failed, as completely as in Ireland in 1847; few of the peasantry have seed corn or potatoes, and those few are daily driven to consume that which is their only hope for another year. A gloom hangs over the bare land, and over the sinking people. On the other side of the sea, the great American valleys are producing a vast surplus of this meal, over and above what the inhabitants can consume, or have, as yet, sold; and in London are the means of communication between those who abound and those who need.

The inventor of the new process has printed instructions and other advice to teach how the Indian corn flour may be dressed. Our present notice would not be entertaining if it should take the form of an extract from a recipe book; and we will, therefore, merely say, in regard to the cookery branch of the subject, that the ordinary English taste appears to be best met by a half-and-half mixture of the meal with wheaten flour, or two thirds of wheaten to one of Indian flour. We cannot, however, refrain from giving the recipe for the true American pudding, which, though rarely or never described in recipe books, is exceedingly grateful to the palates of tourists as well as natives:

Six tablespoonfuls of Indian corn flour; one pint of milk scalded with an ounce of butter (or suet); stir in the milk and butter to the flour, and also two tablespoonfuls of molasses, and a very little salt; lemon-peel or citron is an improvement. Tie up in a basin, with a thick cloth, and boil four hours. If baked, it will take two hours. Eat with butter, molasses, or lemon. The flour should always be worked up with boiling water or milk.

And, finally, the Americans in England complain of the varying qualities of our yeast, which they declare to be never the same from any two breweries, and therefore difficult to prescribe about in their recipe books. They are glad when we use the dried German yeast, as giving the experiment of their flour the fairest chance.

Considering how many anxious persons are considering what can best be done for those emaciated Highlanders, who are ready to eat the very seaweed under their feet, if it would only nourish them; considering how many new owners of Irish estates, and old owners of released estates, are pondering, day and night, what can best be done for the peasantry – may we not hope that the opportunity of introducing a fourth or third more good food for the same money will not be overlooked? May not the prevalent disrelish of the “yellow meal” be overcome by an explanation, that the flour under Stafford’s patent is not the same article, nor anything like it? Is it not pretty certain that the food which is relished throughout the American navy, and at the tables of gentlemen in London, and tradesmen in country towns, would be well received among those who know, by personal experience, what dearth is in Scotland, and famine in Ireland? Dare we refuse to try?

Everyone may begin the experiment as he pleases, of course. One was tried in this way. A box arrived at a country town, containing several packages of the flour, done up in weight of seven pounds each. One was sent to the clergyman; one to each inn; one each, to three or four houses where good cooks were kept: and, again, to several shopkeepers. Various labourers were asked, as a favour, to accept a hot pudding, or a loaf, and give a perfectly honest account, whether they liked it or not. In every case but one, the report was favourable. Tradesmen and labourers came to the house to know how they could get more, without running the risk of expensive carriage, by ordering of the flour dealers. The patron of the experiment sent to London for a cask, out of which, after paying the carriage by luggage train, the flour will issue at little more than half the present price of wheaten flour in that somewhat expensive little town. As it is by no means the wish of the patron to steal the trade of the baker and flour dealer, they will come up, bringing their own scales and weights, if they like, and weigh out for themselves; and then, if they please their customers, they can henceforth send their own orders to London. It appears that two or three pounds a year will be saved to the patron’s purse by the adoption, to a certain extent, of this new food; and many and many a hard-earned shilling to the labouring man.

More than this – how many shillings may be, not only saved, but brought to the labouring man, if a large importation of American meal should take place! The more food we take from America, the more of our manufactures will the Americans, or somebody else, take in payment for it. We all know how serious have been the alarm and the mischief of the varying and the enhanced price of cotton within the last three years, and how earnestly some capitalists are now setting to work to grow flax in England and Ireland, in order to render us somewhat less dependent on the United States for the staple of our largest manufacture. What a vast amount of risk may be saved if we divide with that country the production of that staple and of food! By such a method, there may be a vast and most moral and politic reduction of the gambling character of our manufacture and commerce, and of that worst of gambling which involves the state of human virtue and human life. Instead of our having all cotton from America, and all food (as regards America) grown at home, let us have some cotton and some food from America, and some flax and some food at home (with cotton from India by and by), and our operatives may find their lives equalised, somewhat in the same way that foreign commerce is deprived of much of its gambling character by marine insurance; the illustration, however, being a comparison of small things with great.

There is another view of the matter – not so generally interesting as it should be, but profoundly so to those who understand and appreciate the case. Cotton is grown by slave labour: Indian corn is grown by the labour of freemen. A great struggle – one of the most serious in principle, and in its certain consequences, whenever they occur, that the human race has ever been engaged in – is now going on, between the slave power in the Southern States of America, which grow the cotton, and Abolition principles, in the free States in the North, which grow the food. Every increased demand for cotton on our part rivets the chains of the slave. Every increased demand for corn on our part strengthens the hands of those who would free the slave. Among the best – the most effectual – friends of the slave, are those who promote the growth of cotton in India, and of flax at home, and who encourage the demand of agricultural produce from the American States north of the Ohio. It is but to few, perhaps, that this plea will be interesting; but to those few, the interest will be supreme; for it is they who are aware that, of all the great political questions now stirring in the world, no one involves so many principles important to the welfare of the whole human race, as that of the abolition of slavery in the United States. Every moralist – even every politician – knows that the abolition is certain. It is the time alone that is uncertain: and that time will be hastened – whether little or much – by the extensive use of this humble article – this cheap Indian corn flour – in our islands.

A Real Sister of Charity

Household Words, Volume 3, page 291

Jane Ball was scarcely ever known to be alone, from the earliest years of her life: one might almost say from the early months of her life, before she had any years to reckon; for, as soon as her mother could leave her to sit or sprawl on the floor or the threshold, some kitten or little dog would come to her, or the birds would hop about her, as if she somehow belonged to them. Jane had no sisters; and her only brother was many years older than herself; so there were no children at home for her to play with; and her mother was too busy to do more than see that the child came to no harm. Yet little Jane always had companions, and plenty to do. In the winter, she and the cat kept each other warm by the fireside: and she had the birds to take care of. She watched for every crumb that fell from the loaf, and put it outside the door for the birds, which fed just the same, whether she was by or in the house. Before she could well walk on the ice, she used to go to the slides, where there was sure to be some little creature crying with cold, while the elder boys and girls were sliding; and wherever there was such a little creature crying with cold, there was Jane putting its hands round her neck, or covering up its feet with her frock, and telling it they would soon be warm. On the bitterest nights she was afraid dolly would be cold even in her arms; and she tucked in the sheet round the smart young lady’s neck before going to sleep herself. In spring, there were almost always some young birds to feed and rear, while boys would go bird-nesting, as boys do everywhere. The first strangers who came to that part of the coast for sea bathing used to stare at the child whom they met walking with a bird perched on her head, and another on her shoulder. If there was a crab that was thrown out by the fishermen because it had lost a claw, Jane would make a pool for it in the sands, and watch over it till she saw whether it could shift for itself. She was no favourite with the shepherds on the down; for they lost many a wheatear in August by her letting the birds out of their traps. She was told that it was wrong to do so, and she believed it; but still she never could see the bit of stick and horsehair, and the hole in the turf, without peeping to look if a poor bird was within; and if there was one not strangled, she could not possibly help setting it free. She got many a scolding, and not a few blows, before she learned that other people who take wheatears out of traps leave a penny or a halfpenny in the trap. After that, every halfpenny she had, went that way; and when she had no more coppers, she would leave a few cherries, or an apple, or a bit of gingerbread – any treasure she happened to have; and then she was exceedingly surprised when the trapper knew who had been there. The shepherds treated her more respectfully after a certain day, when something happened that frightened the child a good deal. She was sitting on the down, making a daisy-chain for her doll’s neck, when some dogs came scouring up the slope. They were in pursuit of a leveret; and the leveret, hard-pressed, jumped into the child’s lap. Instantly she covered it with her frock, and sprang to her feet. The dogs leaped about her, and made an alarming noise; and when the farmer to whom the dogs belonged came up, he found her hugging the leveret close, but very red in the face, and half crying. Some shepherds near told the story everywhere; and many were found to agree that there must be something strange about the child, that a wild animal should take refuge in her lap, and that the dogs should not pull her down. When the bad weather came on, and the winds were too high for the downs, there was always somebody’s lame foot or aching head to nurse in her lap. And then came the shipwrecks, when there were only too many wet and cold, and hungry, and wretched people for her to try to warm and comfort.

Perhaps the greatest event of her whole childhood was the arrival in the next town of a menagerie of wild beasts. When her father took her to see it, he was little aware what he was doing. There was a young lady, dressed very grandly, with a little wand in her hand, who went into the lion’s cage, and then into the tigers’, and played with the creatures, and came out safe. Little Jane longed to go too, but she did not venture to ask that. She only asked, and never ceased for many months to entreat, that she might be brought up to be a waiter in a menagerie. When she was so laughed at that she dared not say any more about it by day, she muttered about it in her sleep. She had glorious dreams about living with lions and tigers, and playing with monkeys and parrots; and she still hoped that her parents would see that what another woman did, she might do. Before the day arrived, however, for her parents to reach her point of view, she had changed her object. The neighbour whose bad foot she had so often nursed, was obliged to go at last to the county hospital; and there Jane went with her mother one market day. Her soul was now really roused. She thought no more of playing with lions and tigers, and wearing embroidered trousers, and flourishing a wand; she wanted to be a nurse in the clean wards of an hospital. She asked endless, questions on the spot about the ways of the place. She set a chair for one tottering patient; smoothed the pillow of another who was restless; watched how others took their physic, and thought she should like, above everything, to spend her life in this place.

Jane found, however, as most of us do, that, after all our fine visions of doing grand things, and things after our own fancy, the business of our lives lies at home. When she was sixteen – old enough to be ashamed of speaking her wild wishes, but young enough to dream of them still – her mother became so delicate that it was impossible to think of leaving her; and before her mother died, five years after, a certain young carpenter, named Ewing, occupied more of her thoughts than either menagerie or hospital. In due time she married Ewing; and, some years after, her father died. Her brother lived in London. So her husband and children made her home-world; and the rest of her world was made up of such sick and suffering neighbours as she could help.

At forty years of age she was living in a narrow lane of the town where she had seen the menagerie. There were not even cheerful houses opposite; but high warehouse walls, without one single glazed window, but only square spaces closed with dark shutters. By peeping from the second floor windows, the ridge of a chalk cliff might be seen, with its cap of grass, and a strip of sky above; but otherwise, there was nothing visible but the lane. The eldest boy, now fourteen, worked with his father as a carpenter. The eldest girl was eleven, and there were some younger ones who, with the lodgers, gave mother and daughter plenty to do. There were two rooms let to lodgers – single men, who would be out of the way all day at their work. The rooms were never unlet long together; for they were clean, and the bedding was good.

When the railway works were begun on that part of the coast, there were plenty of applicants for the Ewings’ rooms. They could now pick and choose; and they chose, as the tenant of their second floor room, Allan Marsh, a young man who came from the north of England, to work upon the railway. They liked, from the first, his open, good-humoured countenance, full of health and cheerfulness – to say nothing of its being very handsome – with the thick bright hair curling above his broad forehead. They liked his frank manner, and his way of speaking to the children, and they agreed, after one interview, that they had no doubt he was an honest man, who would pay his way and be sober. So it proved. He paid his bill on the first Saturday night; and during that week and the next, the comrades he brought home to spend an hour with him, or engage the room above, were as respectable as himself. Allan made himself quite at home; called Mrs Ewing “Mother”; played with the little ones; and told the elder ones all about his way of life as a miner in the north. He had not liked his way of life as a miner; and had come south on that account. Moreover, he hoped his brother would soon follow his example; for no man could keep his health long who had to sleep in a lodging-shop.

“A lodging-shop!” exclaimed Jack Ewing. “What is that?”

“Something like a beehive, only not by any means so sweet. Very far from it, indeed.”

And Allan told how he and his brother used to divide the week – the one going forth on the Sunday night, with wallet on shoulder, containing three days’ provisions, and clambering up the mountain to the place of work, near which stood the lodging-shop; and the other setting out in the same way on the Wednesday night. The work was so hard that no man undertook more than half a week of it; and it was this which saved many lives; for no man could long survive sleeping seven nights in a week in a lodging-shop. The brothers usually met at a certain spot in the ascent, and sat down for half an hour’s talk; and very pleasant those talks were; but Allan had sent a message to his brother, that they could here, in the south, work together for six days in the week, and have every evening for talk, and seven nights of such sleep as could never be had in a lodging-shop.

“But what is a lodging-shop?” asked Jack again.

“It is a great house of two stories, with no opening at the back or sides, except the chimney of the fireplace below, and only two windows in each floor, on the fourth side; so that there is not air enough for so many people to breathe. Pah! I seem to smell the bad air now.”

“How many people?”

“Sometimes above a hundred. There were the beds, row above row, up to the ceiling; the upper rows on posts, with ladders to get up to them; and sometimes three of us in a bed, with a fourth sleeping across the foot.”

“I should never have slept, in such a way as that.”

“You must, if you wanted to sleep at all. There was no other place to sleep in, up that mountain.”

“But did you sleep?”

“Not much. Among so many, there were always some that had coughs; and they disturbed the rest. Then some came in late up to midnight, and they were cooking their suppers, frying their bacon at the fire below; and the smell came up among the bad breath. I used to think the night seemed as long as a week. We got up more tired than we went to bed.”

“Could not you go somewhere else?”

“No: the nearest public house was seven miles off. And if we had made any difficulty, we should have been discharged. It was only for three nights out of seven; but that has killed off many good fellows who ought to be living now. It shall not be so with my brother. I will find somebody to write him a letter from me, begging him to come and work on the railway, and lodge here, where he can breathe free, and not lose his precious strength from bad air.”

Before any answer arrived to message or letter, a dreadful change had come over Allan’s state and prospects. He went out merrily to his work, one morning, when he had been about three weeks at the Ewings’; little dreaming that he should never go forth to work more. As he passed through the passage, he bade the children be good at school. When he got to the door, he saw the pretty, bright-haired little Betsy Holt, three years old, peeping at him, and begging play from an opposite entrance; and he stopped a minute to give the child a toss, and pretend to run after her: and this was the last time he was seen on his feet. While at work that day, he set his foot on a round lump of chalk, which began to roll; and, before he could recover himself, he was carried over the verge of the cliff, and fell to a great depth.

When taken up, he said he was a dead man; and those who climbed to the slope where he lay, told the people who began to gather below that his back was broken. A hurdle was brought, and he was carried down and along the beach, as gently as possible, but groaning so as to sicken the hearts of those who heard him. They were going to take him to the nearest public house; but now he showed that he was sensible. He begged them not to stop anywhere, but carry him to “Mother’s.” He tried hard to stop groaning; that they might not be disheartened at the way they had to go.

“Mother” was at home, busy baking, while little Jane took care of the children. In a moment, Mrs Ewing comprehended the case. She wiped the flour from her hands, handed a pair of large scissors to the bearers, and bade them cut off poor Allan’s clothes, as easily as they could, while she put clean sheets upon his bed. The doctors had already been sent for. One or two prudent neighbours asked her, in a whisper, who would pay expenses; to which she replied that she would see about that afterwards. It was terrible work moving him from the hurdle upon the bed, after the difficult business of getting him up the narrow stairs. She did not shrink from the sight, though she perceived, at once, that the knees and the toes were dislocated. The sufferer did not seem aware of this; his complaint being of his back. The surgeons presently arrived. They could not, at present, be sure about the extent of the injury to the spine; but they thought it would be soon fatal; and they declined attempting anything with the limbs meanwhile.

Next came the husband and son home to dinner. Ewing was much disturbed that the poor fellow had been brought here. What could they do with him? It was not so much further to the workhouse; and he ought to have been taken there. The expenses would be very great; and who was to pay? And how was the house to go on, with the poor fellow groaning there, night and day? The wife answered little in words, beyond pleading that Allan had begged to be brought hither. She had no doubt she could manage to nurse him. His brother might be expected any time now; and with him they might arrange about the future. To satisfy Mr Ewing’s mind, the clergyman, who came as soon as he heard of the accident, wrote to Allan’s family. Alas! no comfort was sent back in answer. When Mr Franklin’s letter arrived, the family were already in deep affliction. Allan’s brother had been killed by the caving in of the mine where he was at work. Who should tell Allan this piece of news? Mr Franklin would have done it; but “Mother” was not afraid to do it; and some favourable opportunity might present itself, in the course of her daily and nightly watch. She did find an opportunity; and, whether it was her method of doing it, or her steady temper of acquiescence in all events communicating itself to him, or whether his own fearful pain of body rendered him less sensible to other kinds of suffering, Allan bore the tidings better than could have been hoped. When he spoke of his brother, it was of his being out of his pain; the greatest good, perhaps, that, at that time, poor Allan could conceive of.

Night and day did “Mother” nurse the groaning stranger thus thrown upon her charity. For many months Allan scarcely slept; for there was no complete intermission of his pain. How she did it, nobody could understand. The mere washing of the linen would have been work enough for some women; for the sheets and shirts required very frequent changing, while the treatment of the case was going on. The doctors said that no sick room they ever entered was in better condition. Her husband, though discontented and anxious, could not say that he was neglected, nor the children either. Mrs Ewing only said that Jane was growing up to be a nice little help; and that it was good for the boys to have to help too. And they really were good little boys; quiet, and willing to give up their play, and lend a hand in any way they could. As for the expenses, it was some time before any money could be obtained from any quarter; but at last, Allan’s claim was so pressed upon the Railway Company by Mr Franklin, that they decreed an allowance of ten shillings a week. This was, perhaps, as much as they could be expected to give; but it was very far from being a repayment even of Allan’s expenses, without considering the nursing. The one article of clean linen would have used up the half of it, in any other house.

At the end of six months, when the spring was coming on, Allan declared himself no better; and his groaning was almost as terrible to hear as at first. But the doctors assured the Ewings and Mr Franklin that the pain was very much lessened; and that it would lessen still more, till the lower half of the body would be wholly insensible. Poor Allan was quite sincere in believing that he suffered as much as ever. It was a case in which such a mistake often occurs, when a habit of groaning – a mood of fixed misery – keeps up, in a degree, the original sensations. If Allan could think himself easier, he would find he was so. “Mother” had for some time suspected this; suspected that this was the turning point when the pain of body was becoming disease of mind. Not for one moment did she think of relieving herself of a burden now clearly shown to be hopeless. If Allan was neither to recover nor die – if he was to lie there year after year, she must lay her plans for a continuance; she must enter upon a higher kind of nursing than he had yet needed. She must minister to his mind, even more carefully than to his body.

She led him to observe, as from his own sensations, the total paralysis of his legs and the lower part of his body; and when he said he feared he should never again leave his bed, she did not contradict him, but spoke cheerfully of it as the condition of his life. The tears streamed down the poor fellow’s face, and she had much ado to restrain her own when he sobbed out, “O! Mother, shall I never see the sun again?” Then, he had fits of thirst for the wind on the cliffs. If he could feel the breeze upon his face on the cliffs, he thought he could rest and be happy. But this was what he could not have; for, as has been said, it was only by peeping up from the window that the ridge of the cliff and a strip of sky could be seen. She did not rebuke him, and preach to him, and go into the sunshine, and leave him to cry in bed – with feeble nerves, and no change of objects. She turned over in her mind what could be done to amuse him, and occupy his faculties. She did speak of resignation, and in a way which made him. devour her words; but it was while putting herself in his place, and resigning herself to his circumstances. She liked the breeze upon the heights, but every spare half hour was given to Allan; and every little indulgence that offered itself to her was, somehow, changed into some comfort for him. By the time the crocuses should blow, there was a little green balcony put up before the window. That was Jack’s handiwork; and, after one of Mr Franklin’s visits, somebody sent two hyacinths and three tulips, soon to come into blow. One day, “Mother” laughed, and said she had brought a lady to visit him; and the bright-haired little Betsy Holt peeped shily from behind her apron. Everybody grew free where “Mother” was; and, in a few minutes, Betsy was on the bed, with her arm round Allan’s neck, laughing and prattling, till she was tired; and then she went to sleep upon his arm. After that, little Betsy’s tiny footstep was heard often upon the stairs, toiling up, a stair at a time, and many a laugh came from Allan’s room when the child was there.

Little Miss Betsy was too young and too precious to be allowed to cross the lane alone. When there was nobody to bring her, she would go to one of the great warehouse windows opposite, and, if Allan’s window was open, she would call to him till he raised himself in bed by the cord that hung from the ceiling, and gave her the nod she wanted. Allan was not her only attraction in that room. Allan had pretty birds – such pretty birds, that Betsy liked them better than any she saw on the downs. There was a family of canaries. “Mother” knew where she could have a pair of canaries, if only she had a cage. This cage was Allan’s first piece of real work; and it occupied his mind for many days. It was to be a large cage, fit for building in, and rearing a brood. Then, it was necessary to know what were the materials for building, and how the brood should be reared. Mr Franklin was inquired of; and then Allan felt what a comfort it would be if he could read for himself what he wanted to know. He could read a little, but it was irksome – almost impossible to him – to make out the meaning of anything in print. The children and he came to an agreement that they should help him to what they learned at school. They did their part as well as they could; but Allan was too quick and clever for them; and, in a little while, Mr Franklin himself was so good as to take up the task. He came for an hour every Sunday; and a few minutes two or three times in the week besides, set Allan forward so well, that he could read for his own pleasure and other people’s. Mr Franklin brought him merry and entertaining, as well as grave books: and on the summer evenings, two years after his accident, Allan might be seen propped up in bed, his face as healthful, and his hair as curly as ever, and his broad hands, apparently as fit as ever for work – and often with a merry smile upon his countenance, reading to “Mother,” as she darned stockings; and Ewing, smoking his pipe out of the window, and the children leaning round the bed. There were times, however, when the poor fellow could do nothing but cry; and then reading was out of the question; for no one could read fluently but himself. At such times the best resource was to ask him to do something for “Mother;” to mend a wire sieve, or a child’s cart, or even to sew. He learned to sew neatly enough to hem house linen, and do the least difficult parts of the boys’ weekday shirts. He might even be seen unripping a gown. He declined learning to darn stockings, lest, as he said, laughing, all the old wives in the neighbourhood should keep him at work, and leave him no time for other things. Basketmaking was one of his arts; and when anybody brought him prints, or other pictures, he framed them; so that in time his room was hung all round with them; and it was a pretty task to teach little Betsy what they were about. There was something, however, that she liked better – quite as well as the canaries – and that was a skylark, with a piece of fresh turf from the down, at the bottom of the cage. Not a day had Allan ever to wait for materials for any of these works which took his fancy. He always asked “Mother,” and she, the hardest-worked of women, always contrived to procure for him what he wanted. She looked upon it as giving him his medicine – as being an indispensable part of the duty towards him which she had undertaken.

A feeling of self-reproach arises in detailing these luxuries of the sick-room, though it is true that they were all there. It is easy to present this gay side of the picture, so readily apprehended and relished by the imagination, and enjoyed by the sympathy of the healthy and the happy: while it is totally impossible to convey any sense of the suffering which often prevented the enjoyment of such pleasures by him for whom they were provided. The healthy and the happy cannot know, cannot conceive, how unavailing they often were to the sufferer, whose whole capacity for pleasure was overborne by the pressure of sickness and confinement. To the inexperienced, it sometimes seems as if it must be a pleasant thing to be ill, when everybody is kind and helpful, when the whole day is holiday, the bed comfortable, the delicate meals luxurious, the room full of flowers, and pictures, and pleasant books. But the inexpressible, incommunicable misery of the nerves, the total depression of the spirits, the terrors about anything or nothing, the haunting ideas, the wretched sensations, are things all unknown to the inexperienced, unless he have a power of sympathy which is as rare as it is beautiful. A child who had this power of sympathy was once seen to look grave while his brother was admiringly surveying the luxuries of a sick room; and then he answered, with a sigh from the bottom of his little heart, “Ah! but the unhealthiness! That spoils every thing:” and the melancholy of his tone carried solace to the heart of the patient. Such a power of sympathy it was that made “Mother” the best of nurses. She knew that these luxuries were all very well for the gayer hours, but were of no avail for the sadder. In those darker hours, she found time to sit on the edge of Allan’s bed, and let him hold her gown, and look in her face, and speak of his strange fears and miseries, till she could lead him away to happier thoughts. Or she roused him by consultation about the troubles of some neighbour, or by news of some good fortune happening to somebody. It was at those times that she felt most the want of education in herself and him. She knew enough to be aware how many more sources of interest would have been open to him, if both had known more of the structure of the universe, and of the wonders of science, and of the history and present interests of men. She was aware how much less oppressive the narrowness of his prison would have been, if his mind could have gone abroad, on the wings of knowledge, through the great world, and the vast and varied scene of human life: and she was deeply humble about what she could do for him, because it was not more.

Such experience as she had was carefully reviewed in his service, and used to plead his cause. Her husband, who had never been ill in his life, was sometimes vexed that “so much fuss" was made about Allan’s pleasures. She reminded her husband that when people have a terrible care on their minds, the worst time of day is the waking in the morning. Then everything looks black, and fearful, and wretched; but, when one has splashed one’s self with cold water, and gone out into the morning air, everything looks so differently, that one can hardly believe one was so miserable an hour before. Now, this mood of misery was exactly what Allan could not escape from. There was no rising from bed, no going into the open air for him; no refreshing of the frame, no change of ideas for him; but the continuing of weary sensations and dreary thoughts, from day to day, and from month to month. Her husband said slightingly, that this was all very fine talk – but it made its impression on him, as she soon found. When Allan wanted anything in the night, he knocked on the floor with a stick. One night, at a time when she had daily to prepare breakfast at five o’clock, for her husband and son, she had gone to bed at some time past midnight, so weary, that she slept through two of Allan’s knocks. Her husband woke her, and asked her how she could let the poor fellow keep knocking without going to him. She sprang up in great delight at such a proof of sympathy from her husband.

A time of adversity for the family was now at hand. Ewing hurt his arm at his work, and was obliged to be idle for four months. The maintenance of the family now depended on “Mother,” with such help as Jack could give. Mrs Ewing took in more washing, having lately procured a mangle. Still, her great anxiety was that poor Allan should not suffer – should not even perceive any change in the affairs of the household. Her husband could spend more time with him, now that she had less to spare. This was not the same thing to Allan; and, try as he would, he could not help showing it. He could not help listening for her step on the stairs; and he did not know how his face lighted up when she entered the room. He could not help telling Mr Franklin that he “loved to hear her talk.” It was at time that the news came of the death of her brother in London. The event was sudden; and she wept bitterly. The more she tried to restrain her tears, for Allan’s sake – he being then in one of his seasons of depression and alarm – the more the tears would come; and, as soon as she had regained her composure, some ladies, who had heard of Allan’s case from Mr Franklin, called to see him. “Mother’s” countenance lighted up at the sight of “more friends for poor Allan.” She washed her face, and hoped she had got rid of all signs of grief, when she led the way into his room with a smile and cheerful talk. But, just as if no strangers had been present, Allan looked wistfully in her face, and whispered, “What is the matter, ‘Mother?’” She at once told him; speaking of her loss, not as a misfortune, but with such sense and religious cheerfulness as did him more good than any concealment or cant could have done. It happened to be a Saturday afternoon; and Ewing, coming in, apologised to the ladies for the staircase being dirty. There was some vexation in his tone when he said it was always so on Saturdays – after rain especially – for the schoolfellows of his children always came, more or fewer of them, to visit Allan; and their feet made a sad mess. His wife said, with a smile, that perhaps the ladies would come some Sunday; and then they would see how clean the stairs could be. It was a pleasure to Allan, and a good thing for the children, that they should meet; and it was only cleaning the stairs at night, instead of in the morning. Everybody’s stairs were cleaned on Saturdays: it was only doing it at night.

Even at this time, her charities were not confined to Allan. While she was spreading clothes on the beach, and giving the little ones charge to watch them, she observed a ragged old man, pinched, feeble, and very dirty. He had slept four nights under a boat, without having taken his clothes off. She invited him home, that she might wash his shirt; gave him warm water to wash himself; made up a bed for him by the kitchen fire; and sat up to wash, iron, and mend his clothes, when everybody else was asleep. By this time, any one would have taken her to be ten years older than she was – so worn and haggard was her face, from fatigue and insufficient sleep: but it was beautiful in the eyes of all good people, from the expression it bore of a bright and serene spirit.

She had yet more to endure, however. Allan was now, from his bodily state, very far from being bright or serene. Some of his pains returned, from time to time; and his nervous terrors seized him more frequently. Some change seemed most desirable; and while “Mother” was considering what novelty she could invent, his old thirst for the sight of the face of nature revived. He wept grievously for a sight of the sky and the grass, and he dreamed of them, as a starving wretch dreams of delicious food. One day, when Ewing was out, (and if he had been at home, the state of his arm would have prevented his helping) Allan’s desire became uncontrollable. As has been said, a strip of sky and a ridge of cliff could be seen from the windowsill. It was rashly resolved to try whether Allan could not be got to the window. The distance was really so very small from the bed, and his arms were strong, and would support him on the sill. “O, Mother, let me try;” he piteously cried. Somehow or other they managed it. It was very wrong, as she said afterwards, but she really could not deny him: it was very wrong, because Allan did not know what he asked. Indeed he did not, either for himself or for her. As for himself, he could not have believed that grass could look so green, or sky so blue. His heart felt as if it would burst; and just at the moment he saw a man walking on the ridge – swinging along with vigorous strides, and his head turned towards the sea. A vision of white gliding sails, of glittering waters, of floating seagulls came up before the sufferer’s mind at the same moment with the recollection of what it was to stand with ease, and walk with vigour. If any one wonders that this was too much for the stout heart of a man, let him be sure that he knows nothing of what it is to lie in bed in one room for years together. Allan’s wild cry wrung “Mother’s” heart. It brought in neighbours. It made little Betsy look out from the opposite warehouse, with grave concern. Allan was soon in bed again; but his hysterical weeping did not cease all that day, nor all that night; and “Mother” was not there to comfort him. She was in bed – prematurely confined, and in great danger.

Now was the time for all friends to help the family. Now was the time when Mr Franklin called almost daily, and sent kind ladies, “new friends for Allan,” as “Mother,” exultingly exclaimed; whereas, the ladies came for her sake, even more than his: but the last person she ever thought of was herself. Now was the time when little Betsy was oftener missed from home, and found on the bed, getting “her dear old Allan” to help her to dress her doll. Now was the time for the children to show what their rearing had been. Jack toiled abroad, and Jane at home, doing an incredible quantity of work. The air in Allan’s room was as pure, and his sheets as white as ever: and the younger children waited on him, fed his birds, watered his plants, and reported to their mother that he wanted for nothing. Many times a day he sent her that message himself; but O! he wanted something – he wanted to see her again; he wanted “to hear her talk,” as he earnestly told Mr Franklin, who was not jealous of “Mother’s” being the sufferer’s best minister.

Things came round again in time. Ewing got to work again; “Mother” recovered at last; and more clothes were spread on the beach, and the mangle was heard at work. Allan returned to his usual state; and then said that, but for the injury to “Mother,” he could not be sorry that he had seen the grass and the sky. But he never said a word about trying again; and he had indeed seen the last of the world without. The incident seemed to have done him good. He had always been patient and resigned, his nurse declared; but now he was more grateful, and sensible of his blessings. He asked visitors whether his room was not wonderfully fresh – as fresh as any nobleman’s room; and he told more people than ever about the lodging-shops where he and his poor brother used to sleep. He was thankful that his poor brother had been killed outright; for if he had been merely hurt, and had been laid up in a lodging-shop, (owing to its being twelve miles from home), he would have died by inches of bad air and misery.

Allan’s time came for dying by inches; but he never complained of his lot, though his sufferings were, at times, too severe to be borne in silence. When he had been confined to his bed between five and six years, the pains from the spine, and from other internal injuries, came on again, and at times he looked like a dying man. His mind was awake and observant, however – almost as much as in his best days. He noticed that the mangle stood still; and he asked why. There was no concealing from him that “Mother” had given up the chief part of the washing on his account. He remonstrated strongly against this, and urged that, for the children’s sake, the parents’ occupations should proceed. He wished, as he told Mr Franklin, that he had a thousand pounds to leave, and his nurse should have every shilling of it; but as he had nothing to leave but his blessing, he must see that the children suffered no more than was necessary on his account. He wished that they should have nothing to complain of when he was gone. This showed that he thought his death was near; and he told “Mother” so. He said he knew she would grieve, and the more – not the less – because he had been such a trouble to her. But she must remember he would be much better off – at least that was what he expected – though she had done everything that mortal could do to make him comfortable. He was evidently anxious to speak privately to the visitors who were still admitted, when he was sufficiently at ease to see them. The poor neighbours came on Sundays and in the evenings; and the ladies at other times; and he had the same thing to say to them all – that he hoped they would, if they cared for him, keep on the watch to serve “Mother.” For his sake, they must never let her go without help, if she needed it. If he should be where he could know such things, he should be grateful for every good act done to her.

By degrees, the broad, cheerful face became ghastly; the curling brown hair was limp; the veins were shrivelled on the forehead; but the most noticeable thing of all was that he would not let “Mother” leave him. He clutched hold of her gown, and held it, even in his snatches of sleep. His not perceiving that she never slept, struck those who knew him best as a sure sign that he was dying, losing the sense of the lapse of time and seasons, as dying persons often do. It was sad work enough, until a kind lady, who called, and saw at a glance how matters stood, sent in an active, helpful woman, who took charge of the house and the children, and enabled “Mother” to tell Allan that she need not now leave him, night or day. This went on for four days, during which his hand scarcely left hold of her dress. On the fifth morning, he looked much as he had done for some days; and “Mother” sat on the edge of the bed, sewing. Happening to look at the hand which had clutched her gown, she saw that the fingers were relaxed. Laying her hand on his, she found it growing cold. His eyes were half shut, and she could not see that he breathed. He was indeed gone.

Ewing and Jack made him a coffin, which cost them three pounds, before they knew whether the Railway Company would repay them. The Company paid two pounds ten shillings some time after he was laid in the ground. “Mother” paid all the rest of the funeral expenses out of her own earnings. Mr Franklin ordered a headstone for the grave, on which the story of poor Allan’s trials is told briefly – principally by the significant method of dates. In doing this, Mr Franklin was not unmindful of Allan’s latest requests; of the test which he proposed of the regard of neighbours for him. Through the clergyman’s exertions, “Mother” is now in the place for which she was destined by nature, and prepared by lifelong habit. She is Matron of an Institution for Sick Seamen, where she will continue to be “Mother” to a succession of sufferers, to the end of her. days. Mr Franklin is of opinion that she did much more for Allan than provide him with the air and cleanliness that visitors admired so much; that she saved his intellect, and rescued his very heart from perishing. It is a great thing for the Sick Seamen to have “Mother” to watch over them, and minister to them, mind and body.

The Highest House

in Wathendale

in four chapters

Household Words, Volume 3, page 291

Chapter the first

High up among the mountains of Westmoreland, there is a valley which we shall call Wathendale. The lowest part of this valley is some hundreds of feet above the heads of the dwellers on the nearest mail road; and yet, as if such a place of abode was not near enough to the sky, there are houses as high up as they can well be put, in the hollows of the mountains which overlook the dale. One of these small farmsteads is as old-fashioned a place as can be seen; and well it may be so; for the last owners were fond of telling that the land had been in their family for five hundred years. A stranger might wonder what could carry anybody up to such a place five hundred years ago; but the wonder would only show that the stranger did not know what was doing in the district in those days. Those were the days when the tenants of the Abbots of Furness used to hold land in the more fertile spots, in companies of four – one of whom was always to be ready to go forth to fight in the Border wars. And those were the days when the shepherds and herdsmen in the service of the Abbey used to lead their sheep and cattle as far up the mountains as they could find food – to be the better out of the way of the marauders from the north. Besides the coarse grass of these uplands, there were the sprouts of the ash and holly, which were a good food for the beasts. To be sure, there were wolves, up in those lonely places; but they were kept out by rough stone walls, which were run up higher and higher on the mountain side, as the woods receded before the tillage of new settlers. The first of the Fells, who made their boast of a proprietorship of five hundred years, was probably a shepherd of the Abbots of Furness; who, having walled in some of the sprouting and sheltering wood on this upland, and built himself a hut of stones in the midst, became regarded as the tenant first, and then the proprietor, like many of the dwellers in the vales below. When the woods were decayed and gone, the croft came under tillage; and no tradition has told of the time when the Fells did not yearly crop, in one way or another, the three fields which were seen from below, like little patches of green beside the fissure which contained the beck (or brook) that helped to feed the tarn (or mountain pond) a quarter of a mile below.

There was grumbling in this mountain nest about the badness of our times in comparison with the old days – grumbling in a different dialect from that which is heard in our cities; but in much the same spirit. In this house, people were said to be merrier formerly – the girls spinning and weaving, and the lads finding plenty to do in all weathers; while the land produced almost everything that the family wanted – with the help of the hillside range for the cows and sheep. A man had not to go often to market then; and very rarely was it necessary to buy anything for money, though a little bartering might go forward among the Dalesmen on occasion. Now – But we shall see how it was “now.”

Mrs Fell and her daughter Janet were making oaten bread one December day; – a work which requires the full attention of two persons. The cow boy appeared at the door, with a look of excitement very unusual in him. He said somebody was coming; and the somebody was Backhouse, the travelling merchant. The women could not believe it – so late in the year; but they left their baking to look out; and there, sure enough, was the pedlar, with his pack on his shoulders, toiling up the steep. They saw him sit down beside the barn, and wipe his brows, though it was December. They saw him shoulder his pack again; and then the women entered into consultation about something very particular that they had to say to him. As people who live in such places grow dull, and get to think and speak with extraordinary slowness, the plot was not complete when the pedlar appeared at the door. He explained himself quickly enough – had thought he would make one more round, as the season was mild – did not know how long the snow might lie when it did come – believed people liked to wear something new at Christmas; so here he was. When would he take his next round? O! when the weather should allow of his bringing his stock of spring goods. He detected some purpose under the earnestness with which he was pressed to say when he would come. He would come when the Fells pleased, and bring what they pleased. He must come before the first of April, and must bring a bunch of orange flowers, and a white shawl, and –

“Two sets of the orange flowers,” said Janet.

“What! two brides!” exclaimed Backhouse. “Are they to be both married in one day?”

Mrs Fell explained that there was to be a bride’s maid, and that Janet wished that her friend should be dressed exactly like herself. Backhouse endeavoured to prove that only brides should wear orange flowers; but Janet was sure her friend would be best pleased to wear what she wore; and the pedlar remembered that nobody within call of the chapel bell would know any better; so he promised all that was desired. And next, he sold half the contents of his pack, supplying the women with plenty of needlework for the winter evenings. Brides enjoy having a new wardrobe as much in the mountains as in towns – perhaps more.

Whenever the young carpenter, Raven, came up to see his betrothed, he found her sewing, and some pretty print, or muslin, or bit of gay silk lying about. It was all very pleasant. The whole winter went off pleasantly, except for some shadow of trouble now and then, which soon passed away. For instance, Raven was once absent longer than usual, by full three days; and when he did come, there were marks left which told that he had stayed away because he had been ashamed of two black eyes.

“He had been drinking, I dare say,” said Mrs Fell to Janet afterwards, with the air of indifference with which drunkenness is apt to be spoken of in the district. “I don’t wonder he did not like to show himself.”

“I don’t think it is his way,” observed Janet.

“No; it is not a habit with him; and they all do get too much, now and then – two or three times a year – and it will be seldomer than that when he comes to live up here.”

Raven was to be adopted as a son, on marrying the only child, and it was very right; for Fell was growing old; and he was more feeble than his years warranted. Rheumatism plagued him in the winter, and he was overworked in the summer. Raven would help to manage the little farm, and he would do all the carpentering work, and put the whole place in repair, outside and in. Everything was to go well after the wedding.

Sally, the bridesmaid, came in good time to put the orange flowers into her coarse Dunstable bonnet, which streamed with white ribbons. It was a fine April morning, when the party set off down the mountain for their walk of three miles to the chapel. The mother remained at home. When Fell returned, he told her it had gone off extremely well, and the clergyman had spoken very kindly; and that Fleming’s cart was ready, as had been promised, to take the young people to the town where they were to be entertained at dinner. It was all right, and very pleasant. And the old people sat down to dinner, dressed in their best, and saying, many times over, that it was all right with them, and very pleasant. The only thing was – if Raven’s name had but been Fell! The Fells having lived here for five hundred years –

“The family, but not always the name,” the wife observed. There was a Bell that lived here once; and the land would be in the family still, in the best way it could, as they had no children but Janet.

Well; that was true, Fell agreed; and it was all right, and very pleasant.

Chapter the second

That evening, three ladies went up to the chapel to see the sunset from the churchyard, which commanded an exquisite view. It was a place in which, at such an hour, it was easy to forget, even with the graves before their eyes, that there was sin or sorrow in the world. The ladies sat on the steps till the last glow had faded from the clouds, and the mountains stood up, clear and solemn, against a green sky, from which every tinge of sunset had vanished; and then they came down, with thoughts as bright and calm as the stars which were beginning to come out overhead. When they entered on a long stretch of straight road, they saw before them an odd-looking group. In the dusk it seemed as if a man and a woman were carrying something very heavy – moving towards them at a pace hopelessly slow. A woman was some way in advance of them – loitering and looking back. When they came up to her, it was a young woman, with orange flowers in her bonnet, and a smart white shawl on her shoulders. She was carrying a man’s hat, new, but half covered with mud. It was now too clear that the heavy thing which the other two were trying to haul along was a man. Never did man look more like a brute. His face, when it could be seen, was odious; swollen, purple, without a trace of reason or feeling left in it; but his head hung so low, with his long black hair dipping on the ground, that it was not easy to see his face. His legs trailed behind him, and his new clothes were spattered with dirt.

“It looks like apoplexy,” said the elder lady to her companions: and she asked the young woman who was carrying the hat, whether the man was in a fit.

“No, ma’am; he has only been overcome. It is his wedding. He was married this morning.”

“Married this morning! And is that his wife?”

“Yes, ma’am; and the other is bridegroom’s man.”

It would have touched any heart to see poor Janet, as the ladies passed – her honest sunburned face, all framed in orange flowers, grave and quiet, while she put forth her utmost strength (which was not small) to hold up her wretched husband from the dirt of the road. The other man was a comely youth, dressed in his best, with a new plaid fastened across his breast. The ladies looked back, and saw that it would never do. The elder lady returned, and laying her hand on the poor young woman’s shoulder, said, “This is no work for you. It is too much for you. Let him lie, while I speak to the people at this farmhouse. I know them; and they will send a man to take him into the house.”

Poor Janet spoke very calmly when she said they could take him a little further; but her lips quivered slightly. The lady spoke to a man who was feeding calves in a stable; and asked him to help to dip the bridegroom’s head in a cistern by the roadside, and then take him into the house.

“How far is it from his home?” the lady inquired of Sally. “The High House in Wathendale! You will not get him there tonight at this rate.”

The farmhouse people promised a cart, if the party could wait till it came by.

“How could such a thing happen?” said the lady. “Is there no one to teach this man his duty better than this? Does he know the clergyman?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sally – adding, very simply, “but there would be no use in the clergyman speaking to him now, he would not understand.”

“No, indeed,” replied the lady. “But he will feel ill enough tomorrow, and then I hope somebody that he respects will speak to him in a way that he will remember.”

“To think,” she said to her companions, as they walked away past the cistern where the grovelling bridegroom was undergoing his ducking, “that that is the creature whom the poor girl bound herself this morning to love, cherish, and obey! What a beginning of the cherishing!”

Fell and his wife had not expected the young people home early; but it was much later than the latest time they had fixed, before they heard anything of them. When at last the party appeared, emerging from the night mist, all the three sober ones were dreadfully weary. The ascent had been terrible; for Raven had not yet begun to recover.

No fine sentiment was wasted upon the occasion; for the indifference which had rather shocked the ladies, was the real state of mind of people too much accustomed to the spectacle of intemperance. Mrs Fell declared she was vexed with him – that she was; and then she put on her bedgown, in order to sit up with her daughter, for Raven was now so sick that he must be waited on all night. Mrs Fell said repeatedly, as so often before, that all men were apt to take too much now and then; and it would happen less often now he had come to live up here. Yet, her husband’s words would run in her head, that it was all right, and very pleasant. When, in the dawn of the morning, her daughter made her go to bed, she dropped asleep with those words in her ears; while poor Janet, chilly, sick at heart, and worn out, was at length melting into tears.

When, the next afternoon, her husband sat nursing his aching head beside the fireplace, he was struck with some compunction at the sight of her red eyes. Of course, he declared, as drunkards always do, it should never happen again. Of course, he laid the blame, as drunkards always do, on other people. Of course, he said, as drunkards always do, that it was no habit of his; and that this was an accident – for once and away. Of course, his wife believed him, as young wives always do.

For some time it appeared all true, and everything went on very cheerfully. On the fine days there was as much fieldwork as both men could do; and so many repairs were needed, of gates and posts, cart and cowhouse, dwelling house and utensils, that all the rainy days for six months were too little for the carpentering Raven had upon his hands. He had not been tipsy above twice in all that time: once on a stormy day, when he had sat lazily scorching himself before the fire, with the labourer and cow boy, who were driven in by stress of weather, and who yawned till they made the whole party weary. Raven disappeared for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and came out of the barn to supper in a state far from sober. The other time was when he had gone to market in October, to sell oats. At all other times he worked well, was kind to the old people, and very fond of Janet, and justified Fell’s frequent declaration that it was all right now, and very pleasant.

The winter was the trying season. Sometimes the dwellers in the high house were snowed up, and many days were too stormy for work. The men grew tired of sitting round the fire all day, hearing the wind blow, and the rain pelt; and the women were yet more tired of having them there. There were no books; and nobody seemed to think of reading. There were some caricatures of the Pope and of Bonaparte, and a portrait of King George the Third, on the walls; and these were all the intellectual entertainment in the house, unless we except four lines of a hymn which Janet had marked on her sampler, when she was a child. Raven went more and more to the barn, sometimes on pretence of working; but his hammer and saw were less and less heard; and instead of coming in cheerfully to supper, he was apt to loiter in, in a slouching way, to hide the unsteadiness of his gait, and was quarrelsome with Fell, and cross to Janet. He never conducted himself better, however; never was more active, affectionate, helpful, and considerate, than at the time when old Fell sank and died – during that month of early spring when Janet was confined. He was like son and daughter at once, Mrs Fell declared – and doctor and nurse, too, for that matter: and his father-in-law died, blessing him, and desiring him to take care of the farm, and prosper on it, as it had been in the family for five hundred years.

When the old man was buried, and the seed all in the ground, and Janet about again, Raven not only relaxed in his industry, but seemed to think some compensation due to him for his late good behaviour. Certain repairs having been left too long untouched, and Mrs Fell being rather urgent that they should not be further neglected, it came out that Raven had sold his tools. Sold his tools! – Yes; how could he help it? It was necessary, as they had all agreed, to change away the old cow for a spring calver; and what could he do but sell his tools to pay the difference? Janet knew, and so did her mother, though neither of them said so, that more money had gone down his throat, all alone in the barn, than would have paid for the exchange of cows.

The decline of their property began with this. When decline has begun with the “statesmen” of the Lake District, it is seldom or never known to stop; and there was nothing to stop it in this case. On a small farm, where the health and industry of the owner are necessary to enable him to contend with the new fashions and improvements of the low country, and where there is no money capital behind to fall back upon, any decline of activity is fatal; and in two or three years Raven’s health had evidently given way. His industry had relaxed before. He lost his appetite; could not relish the unvaried and homely fare which his land supplied; craved for dainties which could not, be had, except by purchase; lost his regular sleep, and was either feverish and restless, or slept for fifteen hours together, in a sort of stupor. His limbs lost their strength, and he became subject to rheumatism. Then he could not go out in all weathers to look after his stock. One of his best sheep was missing after a flood; and it was found jammed in between two rocks in the beck, feet uppermost – drowned, of course. Another time, four more sheep were lost in a snowdrift, from not being looked after in time. Then came the borrowing a plough. It was true, many people borrowed a plough; nobody thought much of that – nobody but Mrs Fell. She thought much of it; for her husband, and his father before him, had always used their own ploughs. Then came borrowing money upon the land, to buy seed and stock. It was true, many “statesmen” mortgaged their land; but then, sooner or later, it was always found too difficult to pay the interest, and the land went into the hands of strangers; and Mrs Fell sighed when she said she hoped Raven would remember that the farm had been in one family for five hundred years. Raven answered that he was not likely to forget it for want of being told; and from that moment the fact was not mentioned again. Mrs Fell kept it in her heart, and died in the hope that no new-fangled farmer, with a south-country name, would ever drive his plough through the old fields.

Chapter the third

After her mother’s death, Janet found her hands over-full of work, when her heart was, as she thought, over-full of care. She did not know how much more she could bear. There were two children now, and another coming. Fine children they were; and the eldest was her pride and comfort. He was beginning to prattle; and never was speech so pretty as his. His father loved to carry him about in his arms; and sometimes, when he was far from sober, this child seemed to set his wits straight, and soften his temper, in a sort of magical way. There was the drawback that Raven would sometimes insist on having the boy with him when he was by no means fit to have the charge of so young a child: but the mother tried to trust that all would be well; and that God would watch over an innocent little creature who was like an angel to his sinning parent. She had not considered (as too many do not consider), that “the promises” are given under conditions, and that it is impious to blame Providence for disasters when the conditions are not observed. The promises, as she had heard them at the chapel, dwelt on her mind, and gave her great comfort in dark seasons; and it would have been a dreary word to her if any one had reminded her that they might fail through man’s neglect and sin. She had some severe lessons on this head, however. It was pleasant to hear that day and night, seed time and harvest, should not cease; and when difficulties pressed, she looked on the dear old fields, and thought of this: but, to say nothing of what day and night were often to her – the day as black to her spirits as night, and the night as sleepless as the day – seed time was nothing, if her husband was too ill or too lazy to sow his land; and the harvest month was worse than nothing if there was no crop: and there was no true religion in trusting that her babes would be safe if she put them into the hands of a drunkard, who was as likely as not to do them a mischief. And so she too sadly learned. One day, Raven insisted on carrying the boy with him into the barn. He staggered, stumbled, dashed the child’s head against the doorpost, and let him fall. It was some minutes before the boy cried; and when he did, what a relief it was! But, O! that cry! It went on for days and nights, with an incessant prattle. When at last he slept, and the doctor hoped there would be no lasting mischief, the prattle went on in his sleep, till his mother prayed that he might become silent, and look like himself again. He became silent; but he never more looked like himself. After he seemed to be well, he dropped one pretty word, after another – very slowly – week by week, for long months; but the end of it was that he grew up a dumb idiot.

His father had heart and conscience enough to be touched by this to the point of reformation. For some months, he never went down into the valley at all, except to church, for fear of being tempted to drink. He suffered cruelly, in body as well as mind, for a time; and Janet wished it had pleased God to take the child at once, as she feared her husband would never recover his spirits with that sad spectacle always before his eyes. Yet she did not venture to propose any change of scene or amusement, for fear of the consequences. She did her utmost to promote cheerfulness at home; but it was a great day to her when Backhouse, paying his spring visit, with his jack, produced, among the handbills, of which he was the hawker, one which announced a Temperance meeting in the next vale. The Temperance movement had reached these secluded vales at last, where it was only too much wanted; and so retired had been the life of the family of the High House, that they had not even heard of it. They heard much of it now; for Backhouse had sold a good many ribbons and gay shawls among members who were about to attend Temperance festivals. When he told of processions, and bands of music, and public tea drinkings, and speeches, and clapping, with plenty of laughter, and here and there even dancing, or a picnic on a mountain, Janet thought it the gayest news she had ever heard. Here would be change, and society, and amusement for her husband – not only without danger, but with the very object of securing him from danger. Raven was so heartily willing, that the whole household made a grand day of it – labourer, cow boy, and all. The cows were milked early, and for once left for a few hours. The house was shut up, the children carried down by father and mother; and, after a merry afternoon, the whole party came home, pledged teetotallers.

This event made a great change in Raven’s life. He could go down among his old acquaintances now, for he considered himself a safe man; and Janet could encourage his going, and be easy about his return; for she, too, considered all danger over. Both were deceived as to the kind and degree of safety caused by a vow.

The vow was good, in as far as it prevented the introduction of drink at home, and gave opportunity for the smell, and the habit, and the thought of drink to die out. It was good as a reason for refusing when a buyer or seller, down in the vale, to seal a bargain with a dram. It was good as keeping all knowledge of drinking from the next generation in the house. It was good as giving a man character in the eyes of his neighbours and his pastor. But, was it certainly and invariably good in every crisis of temptation? Would it act as a charm when a weak man – a man weak in health, weak in old associations, weak in self-respect – should find himself in a merry company of old comrades, with fumes of grog rising on every side, intoxicating his mind before a drop had passed his lips? Raven came to know, as many have learned before him, that self-restraint is too serious a thing to be attained at a skip, in a moment, by taking an oath; and that reform must have gone deeper, and risen higher, than any process of sudden conversion, before a man should venture upon a vow; and in such a case, a vow is not needed. And if a man is not strong enough for the work of moral restraint, his vow may become a snare, and plunge him into two sins instead of one. A Temperance pledge is an admirable convenience for the secure; but it must always be doubtful whether it will prove a safeguard or a snare to the infirm. If they trust wholly to it, it will, too probably, become a snare – and thus it was with poor Raven. When the Temperance lecturer was gone, and the festival was over, and the flags were put away, and the enthusiasm passed, while his descents among his old companions were continued, without fear or precaution, he was in circumstances too hard for a vow, the newness of which had faded. He hardly knew how it happened. He was, as the neighbours said, “overcome.” His senses once opened to the old charm, the seven devils of drink rushed into the swept and garnished house, and the poor sinner was left in a worse state than ever before.

Far worse; for now his self-respect was utterly gone. There is no need to dwell on the next years – the increase of the mortgage, the decrease of the stock – the dilapidation of house, barn, and stable – the ill health and discomfort at home, and the growing moroseness of him who caused the misery.

No more festivals now! no talk to the children of future dances! and so few purchases of Backhouse, that he ceased to come, and the household were almost in rags. No more going to church, therefore, for anybody! When the wind was in the right quarter for bringing to the uplands the din-dinning of the chapel bell, Janet liked to hear it, though it was no summons to her to listen to the promises. The very sound revived the promises in her mind. But what could she make of them now? An incident, unspeakably fearful to her, suddenly showed her how she ought to view them. The eldest girl was nursing her idiot brother’s head in her lap while the younger children were at play, when the poor fellow nestled closer to her.

“Poor Dan!” said she. “You can’t play about, and be merry, like the others: but I will always take care of you, poor Dan!”

Little Willy heard this, and stopped his play. In another moment his face flushed, his eyes flashed, he clenched his hands, he even stamped, as he cried out,

“Mother, it’s too bad! Why did God make Dan different from the rest?”

His panic-stricken mother clapped her hand over his mouth. But this was no answer to his question. She thought she must be a wicked mother, that a child of hers should ask such a question as that. It was not often that she wept; but she wept sorely now. It brought her back to the old lesson of the seed time and harvest. The promise here, too, failed, because the conditions were not fulfilled. The hope had been broken by a collision with the great natural laws, under which alone all promise can be fulfilled. But how explain this to Willy? How teach him that the Heavenly Father had made Dan as noble a little fellow as ever was seen, and that it was his own father there that had made him an idiot?

When Raven came in, he could not but see her state; and he happened to be in so mild a mood, that she ventured to tell him what her terror and sorrow were about. He was dumb for a time. Then he began to say that he was bitterly punished for what was no habit of his, but that he vowed –

“No, no – don’t vow!” said his wife, more alarmed than ever. She put her arm round his neck, and whispered into his ear, “I dare not hear you vow any more. You know how often – You know you had better not. I dare not hear you promise any more.”

He loosened her arm from his neck, and called Willy to him. He held the frightened boy between his knees, and looked him full in the face, while he said,

“Willy, you must not say that God made Dan an idiot. God is very good, and I am very bad. I made Dan an idiot.”

The stare with which Willy heard this was too much for his mother. She rushed upstairs and threw herself upon the bed, where she was heard long afterwards sobbing as if her heart would break.

“Father,” said Willy, timidly, but curiously, “did you make mother cry too?”

“Yes, Willy, I did. It is all my doing.”

“Then I think you are very wicked.”

“So I am – very wicked. Take care that you are not. Take care you are never wicked.”

“That I will. I can’t bear that mother should cry.”

Chapter the fourth

Janet did all she could to arrest the ruin which all saw to be inevitable. Her great piece of success was the training she gave to her eldest daughter, little Sally. By the time she was twelve years old, she was the most efficient person in the house. Without her, they could hardly have kept their last remaining cow; and many a time she set her mother at liberty to attend upon her father and protect him, when otherwise the children must have engrossed her. There was no cow boy now; and her mother too often filled the place of the labourer, when the sowing or reaping season would otherwise have passed away unused. It was a thing unheard of in the district that a woman should work in the fields; but what else could be done? Raven’s wasted and trembling limbs were unequal to the work alone; and, little as he could do at best, he could always do his best when his wife was helping him. So Sally took care of poor Dan and the four younger ones, and made the oaten bread with Willy’s help, and boiled the potatoes, and milked and fed the cow, and knitted, at all spare minutes; for there was no prospect of stockings for anybody, in the bitter winter, but from the knitting done at home. The children had learned to be thankful now, when they could eat their oat bread and potatoes in peace. They seldom had anything else; and they wanted nothing else when they could eat that without terror. But their father was now sometimes mad. It was a particular kind of madness, which they had heard the doctor call by a long name (delirium tremens), and they thought it must be the most terrible kind of all, though it always went off, after a fit of it, which might last from a day to a week. The doctor had said that it would not always go off – that he would die in one of the attacks. The dread was lest he should kill somebody else before that day came; for he was as ungovernable as any man in Bedlam at those times, and fearfully strong, though so weak before and after them.

When it was possible, the children went down into the valley, and sent up strong men to hold him; but if the weather was stormy or if their father was in the way, they could only go and hide themselves out of his sight, among the rocks in the beck, or up in the loft, or somewhere; and then they knew what their mother must be suffering with him. By degrees they had scarcely any furniture left whole but their heavy old-fashioned bedsteads. The last of their crockery was broken by his overturning the lame old table at which they had been dining. Then their mother said, with a sigh, that they must somehow manage to buy some things before winter. There really was nothing now for any of them to eat out of. She must get some wooden trenchers and tin mugs; for she would have no more crockery. But how to get the money! for the whole of the land was mortgaged now.

A little money was owing for oats when November arrived; and the purchaser had sent word that he should be at a certain sale in Langdale, at Martinmas; and that if Raven should be there, they could then settle accounts. Now, this money had been destined to go as far as it would towards the payment of interest due at Christmas. But if Raven went to the sale (the usual occasions for social meetings in the Lake district, in spring and autumn), he would only waste or lose the money. He had long ceased to bring home any money, unless his wife was with him; and then it was she that brought it, and, if possible, without his knowledge. She must go with him, and lay out the money immediately, in necessaries for the house and the children, before her husband could make away with it, in a worse way than if he threw it into the sea.

They went, at dawn, in a clear cold November day. Raven had taken care of himself for a day or two, aware of the importance of the occasion, and anxious not to disable himself for the first social meeting he had enjoyed for long, and thinking, in spite of himself, of the glasses of spirits which are, unhappily, handed round very often indeed at these country sales. As the walk was an arduous one for an infirm man, and the days were short, and the sale was to last two days, the children were to be left for one night. Oatmeal and potatoes enough were left out for two days, and peat, to dry within the house, for fuel. Willy engaged to nurse the baby, while Sally looked to the cow. Their mother promised the little ones some nice things for the winter, if they were good while she was gone; and their father kissed them all, and said he knew they would be good.

And so they were, all that first day; and a very good dinner they made, after playing about the whole morning; and they all went instantly to sleep at night, while Sally sat knitting for an hour longer by the dim red light of the peat fire. The next day was not so fine. The mountain ridges were clear; but the sky was full of very heavy grey clouds; and before dinner, at noon, there was some snow falling. It came on thicker and thicker; and the younger children began to grow cross, because they could not go out to play, and did not know what to do with themselves. Sally cheered them with talking about how soon mother would come home. Mother had not come, however, when the little things, worried and tired, went to bed. Nor had she come, hours after, when Sally herself wanted very much to be asleep. She had looked out at the door very often, and it was still snowing; and the last time, such a cloud of snow was driven against her face, that it was a settled matter in her mind at once that father and mother would not be home tonight. They would stay in the vale for daylight, and come up to breakfast. So she put on another peat, to keep in the fire, and went to bed.

In the morning, it seemed dark when baby cried to get up; and well it might; for the window was blocked up with snow, almost to the very top. When the door was opened, a mass of snow fell in, though what remained was up to Willy’s shoulders. The first thing to be done was to get to the cow, to give her her breakfast, and bring baby’s. So Sally laid on her last dry peat, and filled the kettle; and then she and Willy set to work to clear a way to the cow. They were obliged to leave baby to the little ones; and it took an hour to cross the yard. Willy was to have brought in some fuel; but the peat stack was at the end of the house, and, as they could see, so completely buried in snow as to be hopelessly out of reach. Here was the milk, however, and there was a little of the oatmeal left, and some potatoes. Sally wished now they had brought in more from the barn; but who could have thought they would want any more? Father would get them presently, when he came.

But nobody came all that day. Late at night, all the children but Sally were asleep at last, though they had been too cold and too hungry to go to rest quietly, as usual. The fire had been out since noon; and the last cold potatoes had been eaten in the afternoon. Sally was lying with the baby cuddled close to her for warmth: and, at last, she fell asleep too, though she was very unhappy. In the morning, she felt that their affairs were desperate. Willy must get down the mountain, be the snow what it might, and tell somebody what state they were in; for now, there was no more food for the cow within reach, and she gave very little milk this morning; and there was nothing else. It had not snowed for some hours; and Willy knew the way so well that he got down to the valley, being wet to the neck, and having had a good many falls by the way. At the first farmhouse he got help directly. The good woman took one of the labourers with her, with food, and a basket of dry peat, and a promise to clear the way to the oat-straw and hay, for the relief of the cow. The farmer set off to consult the neighbours about where Raven and his wife could be; and the rest of the family dried the boy’s clothes, and gave him a good bowl of porridge.

In a very short time, all the men in the valley, and their dogs, were out on the snow, their figures showing like moving specks on the white expanse. Two of them, who had been at the sale, knew that Raven and his wife had set out for home, long before dark on the second day. Raven was, as might be expected, the worse for liquor; but not so much so but that he could walk, with his wife to keep him in the path. They might possibly have turned back; but it was too probable that they were lost. Before night, it was ascertained that they had not been seen again in Langdale; and in two days more, during which the whole population was occupied in the search, or in taking care of the children, their fate was known. Raven’s body was found, a little way from the track, looking like a man in a drunken sleep. Some hours after, the barking of a dog brought the searchers to where Janet was lying, at the foot of a precipice, about thirty feet deep. Her death must have been immediate. It seemed that her husband, overcome by the effect of the cold (which, however, had not been excessive) on his tipsy brain, had fallen down in sleep or a stupor; and that Janet, unable to rouse him, had attempted to find her way back; and, by going three or four yards aside from the path, in the uniformity of the snow, had stepped over the rock. There was a strange and ghastly correspondence between the last day of her married life and the first; and so thought her old friend and bridesmaid, Sally, who came over to the funeral, and who, in turning over the poor remnants of Janet’s wardrobe, found the bunches of orange flowers carefully papered up, and put away in the furthest corner of a drawer.

There was nothing left for the children, but the warning of their father’s life, and the memory of their mother’s trials. They were not allowed to go upon the parish – not even Dan. It was plain that he would not live very long; and neighbourly charity was sure to last as long as he. The others were dispersed among the farms in that and the nearest vales, and they have grown up as labourers. The land and buildings had been mortgaged beyond their value, and they went at once into the hands of strangers.

The Fortunes of

the Reverend Caleb Ellison

in three chapters

Household Words, Volume 3, page 533

Chapter the first

The Reverend Caleb Ellison had an odd way of doing everything; but he was so good a man, and so adored a clergyman, that his being in love was an interesting circumstance to a large proportion of the inhabitants of the country town in which he lived. When he looked up at the chimney pots as he walked the streets, or went slowly skipping along the pavement to the Reading Room in the marketplace, the elders of his congregation might wish that he would walk more like other men, and the children giggled at the sight; but the ladies, young and old, regarded these things as a part of the “originality" which they admired in him; and Joanna Carey would scarcely admit to herself that such freaks required forbearance.

One Friday evening Mr Carey returned before the rest of his party from a strawberry feast, to tell his wife that their dear girl had shown him by a look, that she must now decide on her lot for life. Ellison had certainly spoken. Joanna must decide for herself. If she was satisfied to have the greatest blessings that a woman could have – high moral and spiritual excellence in a man who loved her – and could, for these, make light of the daily drawbacks of his oddities, it was not for any one else to object. Mr Carey could not say that his own temper would bear with so eccentric a companion; but perhaps he was narrow: perhaps his wife’s nice household ways for twenty-five years had spoiled him. Joanna knew what she was undertaking. She knew that it was as much as the clerk and the deacons could do, to get the pastor into the pulpit in proper time every Sunday, and that this would be her business now. She knew that he seldom remembered to shave, and how he had burned his marble chimney piece black; and – Well; perhaps these were trifles. Perhaps it was a fault not to regard them as such. If a father was fortunate enough to have a man of eminent single-mindedness for his son-in-law, and genius to boot, he ought not perhaps to require common sense also; but it had always been Mr Carey’s belief that good sense was the greatest part of genius.

By Sunday evening Mr Carey was little disposed to desire anything more in his intended son-in-law than had appeared that day. Joanna had engaged herself to him on Saturday evening. On Sunday morning there was something in the tone of his pathetic voice so unusual, in the very first verses of the Psalm, that many hearers looked up; and then they saw something very unusual in his countenance. He so preached, that a stranger inquired earnestly who this Mr Ellison was, and whence he came; and his admirers in the congregation said he was inspired.

“Joanna behaved very well, did not she?” whispered Mrs Carey to her husband, as they were returning from chapel.

“Very well, indeed. And it was extremely fine, his preaching today. Extremely fine!”

And this particular day, the father feared as little for Joanna as Joanna for herself.

There was no reason for delay about the marriage. Mr Ellison had three hundred pounds a year from his office, and was never likely to have any more. The interest of Joanna’s portion – one thousand pounds – was hers whenever she married. She was four-and-twenty, and Mr Ellison was years older.

They were no children; there was no reason for delay; so everybody knew of the engagement immediately, and the preparations went on diligently.

A pastor’s marriage is always a season of great interest and amusement. In this case it was unusually diverting from the singular innocence of the gentleman about all household affairs. He showed all the solicitude of which he was capable to have everything right and comfortable for Joanna; but his ideas were so extraordinary, that his friends suspected that he had been quizzed by certain youths of his congregation, who had indeed made solemn suggestions to him about dredging-boxes and rolling-pins, and spigots, and ball-irons, and other conveniences, the names of which were strange to him. He had promised to leave the whole concern of furnishing in the hands of a discreet lady and her daughters, with a power of appeal to Mrs Carey in doubtful cases; but when these mysterious names had been lying on his mind for some days, he could not help making inquiries and suggestions, which brought nothing but laughter upon him. Mr and Mrs Carey thought the quizzing went rather too far; but Joanna did not seem to mind it.

“His head should not be stuffed with nonsense,” observed Mr Carey to his wife, “when business that he really ought to be attending to is left undone.”

“You mean the Life Insurance,” replied she. “Why do you not remind him of it?”

“I believe I must. But it is not a pleasant thing to do. No man in his circumstances ought to need to be spoken to more than once. However, I have to suggest to him to insure all this pretty furniture that his friends are giving him; and while I am speaking about the Fire Insurance, I can easily mention the more important one.”

“I should feel no difficulty,” observed Mrs Carey. “He will be purely thankful to you for telling him what he ought to do.”

An opportunity soon occurred. The presents came in fast: the Careys were consulted about how to stow them all. One evening at supper, the conversation naturally turned – as it probably does in every house – on what should be saved first in case of fire. Mr Carey asked Mr Ellison whether his landlord had not insured the cottage, and whether he himself was not thinking of insuring the furniture from fire.

Instant opposition arose from Mr Carey’s second daughter, Charlotte, who declared that she could not bear to think of such a thing. She begged that nobody would speak of such a thing. Indeed, she wondered that anybody could. When induced to explain the emotions with which her mind was labouring, she declared her horror that any one belonging to her could feel that any money could compensate for the loss of the precious things, such as old letters, and fond memorials, which perish in a fire.

“How old are you, my dear?” inquired her father.

“Sixteen, papa.”

“Indeed! I should have taken you to be six years younger. I should wonder at a child of ten talking so sillily as you are doing.”

Mr Ellison stared; for his sympathy with Charlotte’s sentiment was so strong, that he was looking at her with beaming eyes, and softly ejaculating, “Dear Charlotte! dear child!”

It took some time to convince both (for young ladies of sixteen sometimes see things less clearly than six years before and ten years after that age) that, if precious papers and gifts are unhappily lost in a fire, that is no reason why tables and chairs, and fish-kettles and dredging-boxes, and carpets and house linen should not be paid for by an Insurance Office; but at last both young lady and pastor saw this. Still, Charlotte did not look satisfied; and her father invited her to utter what was in her mind. After some fencing about whether her thoughts were silly, and whether it would be silly to speak them, out came the scruple. Was there not something worldly in thinking so much about money and the future?

“Dear Charlotte! dear child!” again soliloquised Mr Ellison.

Mr Carey did not think the apprehension silly; but, in his opinion, the danger of worldliness lay the other way. He thought the worldliness lay in a man’s spending all his income, leaving wife and children to be maintained by their neighbours, in case of accidents which may happen any day to anybody, and which do happen to a certain proportion of people, within an assigned time, as regularly as death happens to all. Charlotte had nothing to say against life insurance, because every man knows that he shall die; and there is no speculation in the case. But she was extremely surprised to hear that there is an equal certainty, though of a narrower extent, about fire, and other accidents; that it is a fact that, out of so many householders, such and such a number will have their houses burned down.

“Is it indeed so?” asked Joanna.

“It is indeed so. Moreover, out of so much property, such and such an amount will perish by fire. Every householder being bound in with this state of things for his share of the risk, he owes it equally to others and to himself to secure the compensation, in case of accident. Does he not?”

“How to others?”

“Because he should contribute his share to the subscription, if you like to call it so, by which the sufferer from fire, whoever he be, is to be compensated. Thus, you see, Charlotte, that which seems to you an act of worldliness is a neighbourly act, as well as a prudent one.”

When reminded, Charlotte admitted that she had herself said so about the Cow Club at B— She had told many people how the cottagers at B— were now saved from all danger of ruin by the loss of a cow – a loss fatal to so many cottagers elsewhere. The farmers at B— who could ill afford to lose from nine pounds to fifteen pounds at a stroke by the death of a cow, had joined with the cottagers in setting up a Cow Life Insurance. The club employed a skilful cow doctor. The members paid in a small portion of the weekly profits of their milk selling; and had the comfort of knowing that, whenever their cow died, they would be supplied with another, or with a part of the value of one, according to the length of time, or the yearly amount they had paid. Charlotte admitted that she had been delighted with the scheme, but now asserted that she was much more pleased about the Quakers and their ship.

“Ha! Quakers?” said Mr Ellison.

Yes; those Quakers, now, were the sort of people whom Charlotte admired. So unworldly! so trusting! There was a rich India ship, belonging to some Quakers, lately wrecked in the Channel, very near her port. The whole cargo was lost. It had been a total loss to the owners, because their principles would not allow them to insure – to put themselves out of the hands of Providence, and speculate in “the stormy winds fulfilling his word.” That had been their statement; and was there not something very beautiful in it? Charlotte looked at her father for an answer.

“Tell me, first, my dear,” he replied, “whether you admire Tasker, the shoemaker, for refusing to have his children vaccinated, saying that it was taking them out of the hands of the Lord?”

Charlotte could not think of poor little Mary Tasker, disfigured and half blind, and not wish that she had been vaccinated; and yet Tasker had acted in a resigned spirit.

“Well: exactly as much as you admire Tasker, I admire your Quakers. I honour their motive, but I am sorry for their mistake – sorry that they refuse one safeguard against worldliness.”

“Worldliness, papa!”

Mr Carey explained how the moral dangers of commercial pursuits are in proportion to their gambling character. Large gains and great hazards must be more engrossing to the mind, and more stimulating to the passions than small and secure profits. The great drawback upon commerce with very remote countries is, or was, its gambling character, from the variety and seriousness of the risks, and the largeness of the profits laid on to cover them. By means of insurance against sea risks and other dangers, the losses are spread over so large a number that they cease to be losses, and become a mere tax, such as men may willingly pay for security. When a man has so introduced moderation into his gains and his losses, as to detach himself from “the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches,” he may listen with a quiet pulse (as far as his own affairs are concerned) to the wind roaring over the sea, and need not be “afraid of evil tidings.” It was quite a new view to Charlotte that her Quakers had been gambling, in fact, when they should have been trading safely; but she could not deny that it was so. Nobody wished her to give them up, in regard to their spirit of faith and trust; but nobody could stand up for their prudence.

The most striking view to Charlotte was that there is nothing accidental in storms and tempests; and that it is only our ignorance which makes us call them so. The realm of Meteorology is, no doubt, governed by laws as invariable as that of Astronomy. We know this fact, though we, as yet, know little of these laws. Something more we know: and that is, the average of shipwrecks and conflagrations, in a certain condition of society; in the same way that we know the average of men that will die, out of a certain number, in a certain time: and it is this knowledge of the averages which justifies the resource of insurance in all the three cases. When Mr Ellison at length comprehended that there were thousands of prudent men now paying their mite to compensate him for the loss of his new furniture, in case of its being burned, on the simple condition of his paying his mite also, he was so struck by their neighbourly conduct, that he could scarcely express his sense of it. The ladies considered it impossible that he should feel so strongly, and be heedless about the condition on his own part. Mr Carey shook his head.

Mr Carey was right. The wedding day came, and the insurance was not effected. Joanna did not like to tease her betrothed about worldly affairs. If the subject was mentioned, and the train of thought revived, he went into an enthusiasm about the benevolent class of insurers: but he did not become one himself.

Chapter the second

The wedding day came and went. The young people were married and gone. Mr Ellison’s flock were assembled, almost entire, in the parish church, for the first and last time. In those days, dissenters could not marry in their own chapels, or anywhere but in church; and the present was an occasion when the clergyman of the parish appeared to great advantage, with his kind courtesy towards his dissenting neighbours. The whole affair was talked over from day to day, during the wedding-trip of the Ellisons, in the intervals of Charlotte’s business in preparing their house for their return. Then began her sisterly relation towards the pastor beloved by so many. Her reverence for him, and her pride on Joanna’s account, made her consider his dignity (in spite of himself) on all occasions; from the receiving him at his own door, on the evening of arrival, to the defending him in every trifle in which he vexed her orderly father. When Mr Carey complained of his being found at breakfast unshaven, and wondered how he would like to see Joanna come down with her hair in papers, Charlotte contended that these things mattered less in a gentleman than a lady; and that it was from a meditative turn that he forgot to shave, even as Newton forgot to dine. If he fell over all his new furniture in turn, she declared it was because the affection of his friends had overcrowded his cottage with memorials of their love. If he was met halfway to the town without his hat, she looked with reverence in his face for a foretaste of his next Sunday’s sermon. When it came out that Joanna had paid all the postboys and bills on the journey; that Joanna had to go with him to the tailor’s, when he was to be measured for a new coat; that Joanna had to carve, because he did not know the wing of a fowl from the leg – But we will not dwell further on the foibles of a good man whose virtues were as uncommon in their degree, as his weaknesses, it may be hoped, in kind.

Full as the cottage was of pretty things, it was destined to be yet fuller in another year. Never was there a prettier little wardrobe of tiny caps and robes, and the like, than room must be found for, the next autumn, in preparation for that prettiest of all things – a baby. Half the ladies in the congregation brought their offerings of delicate work, in cambric and lace, and the softest of flannel, and most fantastical of pincushions and baskets. It was a delightful season to the whole family; and Joanna was so well and bright! And when the great day was over, there were such rallyings of Mr and Mrs Carey, on their being so early a grandpapa and grandmamma; and it was so droll to see Mr Ellison, who seemed never to have seen a baby, but in baptising the little creatures, whom he had always hitherto regarded as young Christians, and never as little infants! Mr Carey was rather ashamed of the extent of his ignorance, shown on the first sight of his child in its sleep, by its mother’s side.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, “a baby!” in as much surprise as if it had been the last thing he expected to see.

“Yes; there is your baby. How do you like her?”

He gazed in silence, and at length said: “But can she walk?”

“My dear Ellison! At a day old!”

“But can she talk?”

“All in good time. You will have enough of that by and by.”

“Dear, dear! Ha!” said he, again and again, till he was sent off to dinner, at a friend’s house.

He dined at some friend’s house every day. On the fourth day it was at a distance of three miles. Mrs Carey had gone home, in the twilight of a November day. As soon as she was gone, the nurse stepped out, very improperly, for something that she wanted, the child being asleep beside Joanna. She desired the servant girl to carry up her mistress’s gruel in a quarter of an hour, if she was not back. The girl did so; and approached the bed, with the basin in one hand and a candle in the other. She poked the candle directly against the dimity curtains, and set the bed on fire. It was a large bed, in a small crowded room, close to two walls, and near the window curtain. The flame caught the tester instantly, and then the corner of the pillow, and the edge of the sheet. Before that, the girl had thrown down the basin of hot gruel on the baby, rushed to the window, thrown up the sash, and screamed; and she next rushed out at the door, leaving it wide open, and then at the house door, leaving that wide open too. The air streamed up the staircase, and the bed was on fire all round.

Poor Joanna crept off the bed, and took the child in one arm, whilst with the other she tried to pull off a blanket. She was found weakly tugging at it. He who so found her was a sailor, who had seen the light from the road, and run up the stairs.

“I see how it is, Madam,” said he, in a cheerful voice. “Don’t be alarmed; you are very safe. Come in here.” And he carried her into the next room – the little drawing room, and laid her, with her baby on her arm, on the sofa. He summoned a comrade, who was in the road. They pulled up the drugget from the floor, doubled it again and again, laid it over her, and tucked it nicely in, as if there was no hurry.

“Now, Madam,” said he, “where shall we carry you?” She was carried through damp and dusk to her father’s house. Her mother was not there. Such news spreads, nobody knows how. Her mother was then in the streets, without her bonnet, imploring everybody she met to save her child. She presently encountered one of the sailors, returning to the fire. He assured her the lady and child were safe, and sent her home. Mr Carey was almost as much beside himself. His first idea was, that it was Mr Ellison who had, by some awkwardness, set his house on fire; and he said so, very publicly; and very sorry he was for it afterwards.

Mr Ellison was called from the dinner table, and told he was wanted at home. He strode along, in a bewildered state, till he saw the flames from a distance. As he stood before the cottage, which was now one blaze, nobody could tell him where his wife was. He was trying to break from many hands, and enter the house, when some one at last came up with the news of the safety of his wife and babe. As for the servant, it was some days before she was heard of; and there were serious apprehensions about her, when her aunt came in from the country, to say that the poor creature had fled to her, and would never come near the town, or see any of the family again. Nobody wondered that she said she should never be happy again.

Joanna seemed to be really no worse for the adventure; and for some days it was confidently believed that the infant would do well, though it was severely scalded. Everything was lost – every article of clothing of all three, all the pretty gifts, all the furniture, two precious portraits, all Mr Ellison’s books and manuscripts. But he was so happy and thankful that his chief treasures were saved, that he never preached more nobly than on the next Sunday, without a scrap of notes; – he who took such pains with his sermons, and never preached extempore! It was from the abundance of his heart that he spoke.

“I have to beg your pardon, Ellison,” said Mr Carey, “for what I said in the first moments of misery.”

“It was natural – it was not doing me wrong; for my mother used to say that I did awkward things sometimes; that I was not expert; and it appears to me that I really have erred.” And the good man went on to blame himself for having no furniture and clothes to give Joanna, no piano, no books! His landlord was no loser by the fire, while he was destitute. In short, Mr Ellison was full of remorse for not having insured. All the ladies of his acquaintance were stitching away in his and his wife’s behalf; but this was rather an aggravation than a comfort; and he fully intended to effect an insurance, both against fire (when he should again be settled) and on his life. Still, Mr Carey told his wife, with a shake of the head, that his impression was that it would never be done.

All such thoughts were presently banished. The baby did not get through. After pining for ten days, she died. Then it was that the pastor’s fine qualities manifested themselves. He surrendered so patiently a happiness and hope which had really become very dear to his heart; he supported Joanna so tenderly; he considered the whole family so much more than himself, that Mr Carey vowed he would never more be vexed or ashamed at the peculiarities of such a man.

Chapter the third

Nobody would hear of the pastor going into furnished lodgings. The pastor and his wife would not hear of Mr Carey’s furnishing another house for them. Joanna was allowed to draw half her little fortune to buy furniture and clothes, and a few indispensable books for her husband. Thus, their income was reduced by twenty-five pounds, and the half of the principal was gone. If that twenty-five pounds of lost income had been devoted to a life insurance, it would, at Mr Ellison’s present age, have secured one thousand pounds at his death. Thus he had, by neglect, in fact, thrown away one thousand five hundred pounds of future provision for his family. The present was not the easiest moment for contracting new obligations; but the duty was clear, even to the unpractical mind of the pastor. He went to London to effect his insurances, and his wife went with him, partly for change of scene and thoughts, and partly because she knew that her husband could never get through the business by himself.

It was not got through after all. One pious friend had affected them with fears, that they would find it an ensnaring bondage to worldly things to have to think of the payment of the annual premium; another thought it was speculating in God’s will; another assured them that they could not spare the money, and should provide for their own household, and hospitality to neighbours, today, instead of taking thought for the morrow. They returned without having been near an insurance office at all. The Careys thought this a sad mistake, and pointed out to them the peace of mind they would lose by the precariousness of their fortunes, and the ease with which the business might be managed, by the trustees of the chapel being authorised to deduct the necessary sum from the pastor’s salary, and the pastor’s way of living being proportioned to an income of three hundred pounds a-year. It was certain that Mr Ellison would never lay by money in any other way than this; for he could never see a beggar without giving him whatever he had in his pocket.

It may be observed, that insurance was a more onerous matter in those days than in ours. Science has introduced much ease and many varieties into the process of insurance. The rates of premium in Mr Ellison’s younger days were higher; the methods were restricted; middle class men drank more, and taxed their brother insurers for their accelerated mortality, though precautions were taken against obviously fatal intemperance. The “bondage,” that friends talked of, was greater, and the advantages were less, than at present. If Mr Ellison was wrong in his delays and hesitation, much more are family men wrong who delay and hesitate now.

Time went on, and Joanna was made happy by the birth of a son. During the whole period of her confinement, her husband refused to leave the house, except on Sundays; and he went about, many times in the day, from the attics to the cellars, with his nose in the air, trying to smell fire. There was none, however, to reward his anxious search. No accident happened. The mother and child throve without drawback; and a finer little fellow really was never seen.

For two years – two precious years – all went well. Then came one of those seasons of unhealthiness which occur at intervals, as if to warn men of their ignorance of the laws on which their life depends, and to rebuke their carelessness about observing such conditions of health as they do understand. No town was less prepared to encounter an onset of autumnal fever than that in which the Ellisons lived. It had no right to expect health at any time: the history of the place told of plague in old times, and every epidemic which visited England became a pestilence amidst its ill-drained streets, its tidal expanse of mud, and its crowded alleys. These were the times when the beloved pastor’s fidelity shone out. For weeks he was, night and day, in close attendance on the poor of his flock, and any other poor who were needing help. He could not aid them in the way that a more practical man would have done; but Joanna supplied that kind of ability, while the voice of her husband carried peace and support into many a household, prostrated in grief and dread. He ran far greater risks all the while than he needed, if he could have been taught common prudence. He forgot to eat, and went into unwholesome chambers with an empty stomach and an exhausted frame. In spite of his wife’s watchfulness, he omitted to give himself the easy advantages of freshened air, change of clothes, and a sufficiency of wholesome food; and, for one week, he hardly came home to sleep. It was no wonder that, at last, both were down in the fever. The best care failed to save Joanna. She died, without having bidden farewell to husband and child. Her husband was in bed delirious, and her boy was in the country, whither he had been taken for safety when fever entered the house.

Mr Ellison recovered slowly, as might be expected, from the weight upon his mind. There was something strange, it appeared to his physician, in his anxiety to obtain strength to go to London. He was extremely pertinacious about this. The Careys, glad to see that he could occupy himself with any project, humoured this, without understanding it. They spoke as if he was going to London when he should be strong enough. They did not dream of his not waiting for this. But, in the dark, damp evening of the day when he dismissed his physician, after Mrs Carey had gone home, leaving him on the sofa, and promising that her husband should call after tea, he was seen at the coach office, in the marketplace; and he made a night journey to London. There were no railways in those days; and this journey of one hundred miles required twelve hours by the “Expedition,” the “High-Flyer,” the “Express,” or whatever the fastest coach might be called. As soon as he arrived, Mr Ellison swallowed a cup of coffee in the bar of the inn, had a coach called, and proceeded to an insurance – office to insure his life. As he presented himself, emaciated and feeble, unwashed, unshaven, with a crimson handkerchief tied over his white lips, which quivered when he uncovered them; – as he told his errand, in a weak and husky voice, the clerks of the office stared at him in pitying wonder; and the directors dismissed him from their parlour, under the gentlest pretexts they could devise.

He returned home immediately, and told his adventure to Mr Carey.

“I could not rest till I had made the effort,” he said. “When dear Joanna was gone, and I believed that I should follow her, it occurred to me that our child would be left destitute. I saw that I had neglected my duty; and I resolved that, if I recovered, it should be so no longer. I have made the effort; it has failed; and God’s will be done!”

Mr Carey would not allow that the matter must be given up. In fact, there was no difficulty in effecting the insurance, in the next spring, when Mr Ellison was restored to his ordinary state of health, and Mr Carey was his guide and helper in the business. The interest of Joanna’s little portion was appropriated for the purpose, with a small addition, rendered necessary by the lapse of three years. It is well known that the most unworldly and unapt persons are the most proud of any act of prudence or skill that they may have been able to achieve. So it was in this case. When the pastor sat gazing at his child, it appeared to him a marvellous thing that he, even he, should have endowed any human being with a fortune. He was heard to say to himself, on such occasions, in a tone of happy astonishment,

“A thousand pounds! Ha! – a thousand pounds!”

We cannot here follow out the curious process of that boy’s rearing. We have not space to tell how tenderly he was watched by grandmamma, and by Charlotte, till her marriage gave her cares of her own: nor what a stroke it was when Mr Ellison moved to a distant city, being invited to a higher post in the ministry of his sect; nor how curiously he and his child lived in a lodging, where, notwithstanding all his efforts to fill the place of both parents, his boy was too often seen in rags; nor how the child played leapfrog and other games with little beggars and ruffians in the streets, so cleverly, that his father might be seen gazing at him from the foot-pavement, in a rapture of admiration; nor how, on the great occasion of the little lad’s first going to chapel, he told everybody within reach, that it was “Pa” in the pulpit; nor how, when he was tired of the sermon, he was wont to scrape the sand from the floor, and powder with it the wigs of the old men who sat in the long pew before him; nor how, at length, the importunity of friends prevailed to get him sent to school; nor how comfortably his father was boarded in a private family when the lodging plan became too bad to be borne even by him. All this we must leave undescribed; and also his satisfaction when, in a later time – when his son was grown up, and prosperous, and well married – the good pastor found himself at liberty to do, if he should wish it, what he had always thought ministers had better do, leave the pulpit before they were worn out – before anybody had begun to look for their wearing out. The “dear child,” as he still calls the father of his grandchildren, early persuaded his father to take advantage of that modern improvement by which his life insurance can be commuted into an annuity at sixty years of age, if he should attain it, or receivable in full, if that method should be preferred. A small independence being thus secured, if he lives to leave the pulpit at sixty, and a legacy to his son, if he dies before that time, Mr Ellison feels more free from worldly cares than is often the case with dissenting ministers who begin the world without fortune, and with thoughts far above the lucre of gain.

No one wonders that he never seemed to think of marrying again. Before his removal, the name of his “dear Joanna” was often on his lips. After his removal, it was never again heard, except on the rare occasions of his meeting old friends. He did not speak of her to those who had never known her; but not the less was her image understood to be ever in his thoughts.

Malvern Water

Household Words, Volume 4, page 67

To spend two days out of the smoke, after having lived for five years in it, is a memorable event. It does not follow that there was no holiday in all those five years. There might have been visits to London, and visits to Manchester, and to Newcastle; but such trips were merely from one density of smoke to another. What a sensation it is now – on a brilliant September day – to look back on the even, brownish cloud which occupies, below a straight line, the sky, on the side where Birmingham lies! What a sensation it is to perceive, from the noisy railroad, the lanes stealing away under the trees, hiding here, and peeping out there, behind the villages, and among the cornfields! And to see the gleaners in the upland wheat grounds; and the geese waddling in the stubbles; and the partridges, in their aristocratic “family compact,” perking up their heads here and there, or skirring together over the yellow field! There is still one band of reapers at work – a numerous band on the highest arable ground – whence they look down upon our train, all stopping at once, and all turning at once to their work, as we are swallowed up by the tunnel. And then comes quiet Worcester, with the lights and shadows of its cathedral architecture, cut sharp by the strong sunlight. Even the central streets are quiet, in comparison with Birmingham – much more so the clean, old-fashioned, red-brick houses within the precincts, where the very pavement seems to be never soiled by the tread of less dainty feet than those of clergy and ladies. In the cloisters, how the shady side contrasts with that which is sun-flecked; and how brilliant is the square carpet of green in the middle! And when Worcester is left behind, and we are wondering at the sensation of coach travelling, after years of railroads, how beautiful is the first hop-ground, with its tossing clusters, and waving streamers of the freshest green; and little avenues opening between the poles, to quench the thirst of the eye and mind, long parched in the town-desert! Then, there are pear trees, where the pears cluster, and head the topmost boughs of trees fifty feet high. Those are the pears of which the famous Barlam perry is made. As for the apples, the imagination aches with the question – What is to become of so many? Behind these, however, there is something much better than them – the clear outline of the Malvern Hills. First, the blue mass, growing browner and greener with every mile; then, the black surface of rich woods, rising from the skirts; then, the long, straight row of dwellings, with their white walls shining in the sun. By this time the brown smoke cloud is almost out of sight; and here is the playground of our three days’ holiday. And what a holiday air there is about the place! We meet invalids among the pleasure seekers; but even they look merrier than most people elsewhere. The paralytic gentleman, pursuing his infirm walk between his wife’s arm and his stick, looks anything but sad – so does the ashy-pale lady coming briskly down from St. Ann’s Well – so does the emaciated girl who is resting, with her cheerful mother, under the tree in the churchyard. In fact, it is notorious that the patients at Malvern are generally given to intoxication – sure to be tipsy with water, after a few days’ trial of the sparkling luxury. Whatever may be the woes of the world in general, Malvern is always merry – that is, the water patients are; and when we speak of Malvern now, we mean water patients.

The conditions of life in England – and, we may add, in America – are much changed within this century; much changed since the beloved Andrew Combe gave us familiar books, to show us something of the laws of health, and teach us, among other truths, the nature and business of the human skin. It is within the period of steamboat travelling that American ladies were wont to emerge from their berths in the morning, ready dressed, and to dip the corner of a towel in water, wipe their eyes and mouth, and consider themselves finished for the day. It is within the memory of middle-aged English women, that when at school – at an expensive and eminent school – the pupils had one footbath for the whole number, and only on Saturday nights. It is within the memory of middle-aged men that they were struck with astonishment and amusement on first hearing of such a thing as washing all over every day. And, perhaps, it is too much within the observation of us all, (as Mr Tremenheere tells us of the pitmen in collieries), that, for years together, the clean shirt goes on every Sunday, over an unwashed skin. It is not long since a clergyman, finding an old woman of his flock very ill, met with a shocking answer to the advice he gave. “I will send the doctor to you,” said he; “and I can tell you what to do meantime. Put your feet in warm water, and go to bed.”

“Put my feet in water!” exclaimed the patient; “why, not a drop of water has touched my feet for thirty years.” Moreover, she vowed that not a drop of water should ever touch her feet; and, thinking it proper to render a reason to the clergyman, she told him that she had had a daughter who had once been persuaded to wash her feet, and that that daughter had died before she was twenty-five. It is not longer ago than some months, that a decent woman, too ill after her confinement to dress her infant, interfered to prevent its arms being washed, saying that if a child’s arms felt the water before it was six months old, it would become a thief; and, she added pathetically, “I wouldn’t like that!”

Till lately, the gentle knew as little as the simple now do, what they suffered from neglect of the skin, nor how it was that they suffered as they did. They did not know how, when the pores of the skin are loaded, and its action checked, an undue burden is thrown on the interior organs. When, in this state of chronic fever, the interior organs flagged in their work, and the sufferer was oppressed by sensations of sinking and languor, he was apt to resort to stimulants, which, affording relief for the moment, aggravated the mischief. And when, at last, the weakest organ gave way, and some attack of illness occurred, the treatment was for the immediate symptoms alone, and the false system of management went on, till occasion was ripe for another fit of sickness. All the while the portion of the brain appropriate to the performance of the bodily functions was suffering. By day, there was oppression, languor, and dull pain somewhere; by night, disturbed sleep, and bad dreams; and always, night and day, and from month to month, liability to low spirits, and all the moral mischiefs which attend unhappiness. Wordsworth used to say, to the last, that times were changed for the better, in homes and in society, since he was young. In his early days, everybody was understood to have a temper; and the admission in the abstract did not much help the endurance of such peculiarities by neighbours, in daily life. But now, it was considered the rule that people should be amiable, and it has become a sin to be otherwise. No doubt, the bodily state of bad washers – that is, of the vast majority – subject, as they were, to low spirits – must have had an incalculable amount of influence on the domestic temper; however gay may be the traditions that have come down to us of the mirth of society in the last and preceding centuries. If we would see the difference now, let us look round for (not the bad washers, for that is disagreeable – and the good ones will answer every purpose) the most healthy and cheerful households we know. Is there a house where the doctor seldom enters, but as a guest – where the lads are brisk in shop or warehouse, and the lasses merry at home? It is pretty certain that early hours are found there, and plenty of cold water. The fever patient finds inexpressible relief from the sponging with vinegar and water; and the same kind of relief is given by ablution, under the lesser fever of toil. The anxious merchant or statesman is haunted in his bed by images of terror, or wearied with galling cares: his morning draught and his morning bath restore all things to their true aspect and their right proportion. The author – the most sensitive of human beings – has gone to Graefenberg, or Beurhydding, or Malvern, burdened with care and dread, trembling at the arrival of the mail, recoiling from the sight of reviews and newspapers – and, in a week or two, has omitted to speculate on the fate of his own book. So one of the fraternity bears witness to his friends in private; and, if one of the genus irritabile is thus made serene by cold water, what wonder is there in any effect that it may have had on the tempers of men in general?

The slipperiness of the grass on these slopes seems really worse than ice. As we sit under a bank, eating our dinner, we see two young ladies on an opposite slope in a most helpless position. They have poles, with spikes at the end, and they hold each others’ hands; but they can make no way, upwards or sideways, with feet, knees, or hands. There is nothing to grasp; and the grass is shiny as satin. If they join hands, they go down only the faster. They drive their toes into the ground, and rest on their poles. Now they try again. Worse and worse! Now they scramble, using all their resources, and achieve two or three feet of ascent; only to slide down half a dozen. Their shoe soles must be like satin by this time. They must take their chance of getting safe to the bottom, and make one slide of it. So we think; but they do not. By the time we have dined, one of them has sidled to a patch of gravel, whence she can extend aid to her companion. When they are on the stony path, how they step on, enjoying the security, and roughening their shoe soles as they go!

How happy every body looks! the elderly lady with her newspaper under the tree; the pretty girl in the riding habit, with her pocket handkerchief tied about her throat, as, heated by her ride, she comes up into the wind; the pale gentleman, who takes the short cuts up the hill, instead of following the zigzag. He brought the pale face with him, no doubt; but hardly that springy step. And there is a cheerful granny, knitting in the sunshine, while that unparalleled creature, her first grandchild, tottles and topples on a safe piece of level grass. How many women, young and old, are sewing or knitting in the open air! And in the cool chamber at St. Ann’s Well, where the water is trickling into the marble basin, sits another, plying her needle, while enjoying pious conversation with a lady who has some tracts in her hand. They are saying, how very “’andsome” the clergyman was that preached last Sunday. We leave these sedentary people behind us, and rove where we shall meet the rovers. While dining, we surveyed the vast expanse through which the Severn winds to the south-west, and where we can descry Worcester in one direction, and see in another the smoke which indicates Gloucester, and some glittering appearance, which we are told is Cheltenham. Now we turn our backs on this, and walk a mile through the serpentine valley, to see what the other side of the range will show.

When we come out upon that glorious view, we find a little party of Scotch ladies, pleasant and kind, who show us the Bristol Channel, a bright line issuing from behind faraway hills; and Welsh mountains, cloudlike, but well defined, through an atmosphere reeking with heat. While we sit, picking out churches and gentlemen’s seats, and tracing roads, and envying the dwellers in nestling farmhouses, and counting ponds (because the complaint of the fastidious is of want of water in the landscape), and laughing at the ploughing (four bullocks, two horses, and four men and boys to a plough), the Scotch party think “it is very warm, certainly,” but that they must “just go over the hill.” They will not stop short of the beacon, we think. It is only half a mile off; steep, certainly, but only half a mile. At all events, we go.

When there, and leaning against the pole, and remembering how many hats have been blown either into Herefordshire or Worcestershire, we inquire for a wind. See there! there is a little girl actually weighing snuff in her tiny scales of gourd-skin, balanced upon a forked stick stuck in the ground. Not a grain flies off to set anybody sneezing. Who comes here for snuff? The mother, sitting with her face to the north, to make a shadow to sew in, may sell cakes and fruit; but who would come one thousand three hundred feet above the level of the sea for snuff? – this being, moreover, the most windy point in the county. It cannot be snuff that these very small bees have come hither for; these little, dusty looking, fawn coloured bees; and these tiny red and black butterflies. Why are they here? We have left the blossoming gorse far below; and the foxgloves are lower still; yet there are bees resting on my companion’s bonnet, and butterflies flapping their wings on the stones of the crumbling mound.

There go the swallows, sending specks of shadow skimming down the slopes. We shall see more of them, no doubt, in the dewy morning, tomorrow. And look, what a noble pair of hawks! Their brown plumage and the outline of head and beak are wonderfully distinct against the sky, in such a light as this. Now they quiver in one spot of air for a minute together; and then they swoop majestically, and rise to quiver again. Where is the doomed mouse that the nearest seems to have fixed its eye on? Will it not have the sense to run in under the gorse, as I saw one do, as we came up the hill? There are many mice here, I see; and that is why we are treated with this show of balancing and wheeling hawks.

Those who want shade here must bring umbrellas. There are only scraps of shade anywhere about, and those are taken possession of by the sheep; except one, where I saw a baby laid, for its noonday nap. The sheep huddle in, and coil themselves up like dogs. They look so sleepy, that we are sorry to disturb them. We say so, in the civilest manner, but they will not trust us, but go leaping and trotting away into the sun. Perhaps they will come back to their sofas when our backs are turned.

For some time, as we walk southwards along the ridge, the grass has been growing thinner; and now we have really rough walking on broken rock. This is an adventurous lady on her donkey, at such a height, on such a ridge, among these débris. What is her child asking, that toddling two year old? “Who made all this mess?” My dear little fellow, what an irreverent question! He will not find that out; for his mother cannot answer him for laughing. His father informs him that we cannot always tell how messes are made. Here is another kind of mess; chaff scattered about. We soon see why. On this sharp edge of the ridge, the very narrowest, whence it seems as if we could leap into Wales on the one hand, and England on the other, is a man threshing his little crop of wheat on the bare ground. No doubt, he brings it up here to be winnowed by the wind; for it is a strange threshing floor enough. If so, he is disappointed; for not a speck of chaff rises in the air. It lies as dead as the grain. In answer to our question, he says he brings it from his field on the hillside, below.

One more glance down upon Great Malvern, before we turn towards the Wyche. The old church looks well, though the square top, the roof, of the tower is the most conspicuous part of it to us: and how gay the white houses look, with their gardens! The parterres, one rose-colour with verbenas, another scarlet with geraniums, are bright to the eye, even here. That white road looks terribly dusty. This is decidedly the best way to the Wells to those who are not in a hurry.

We pass the chasm of the Wyche, turning our heads away from the tobacco and snuff shop, and the handbills which are stuck on the rocky walls. We lose sight of Welsh mountains and Herefordshire orchards for today, and descend gradually, by broad, easy paths, to the great ash, under whose hospitable shade we rest. Then, down and down, till we are under great oaks, loaded with acorns, and beeches rich with mast, and chestnuts with their prickly green fruit, and mountain-ash with berries of brilliant scarlet, bright beyond all precedent. We enter the back door of the Well’s House, and find ourselves on the third story. We go down to the upstairs drawing room, where friends and coffee are awaiting us. O! what a view it is from that window! How the shadows are spreading over that vast champaign, swallowing up a pool here, a range of corn-ricks there, and beyond, nook after nook of the reaches of the Severn! We cannot stay within. If a carriage is to be had, we must be off, and see Eastnor Park and Ledbury church – never mind how far it is! Don’t count the miles! It is full moon tonight, the harvest moon, and we shall be on high ground, far above the mists of the champaign.

Into that wide champaign we must not now set foot, in description, or we shall lose sight of all bounds. We have to do with the hills alone.

The early morning is, after all we have said, the time for the hills. Then the trees have shaken down dew enough to lay the dust on the lower paths; and on the uplands, the grass is glistening with the tiny drops. Then the sheep come running up the shaded side to meet the sun, instead of crouching into dark nooks. Then the lark springs up from some grassy crevice, and the swallows are innumerable. The hawks are not abroad yet, and every other creature is. It is pleasant to see the water-patients running about already, with all the vigour of the healthy. We know that they have had the balmy sleep which creeps over them from the folds of the wet sheet, and the animating stimulus of the cold bath, and of the draught of water at St. Ann’s Well; and here they are – a few of the bravest, on the ridge. Those who remain below see but little of the prospect; for on the east, the mists still shroud the landscape; but on the Herefordshire side all is clear and bright, both within the shadow of the hills and beyond it. What a vast shadow it is! and how cool lie the farmsteads and orchards and dark pools within it! Brilliant as the sunshine is, to us all looks cool, while the pure breeze searches out every pore of the skin, and refreshes the whole frame. There is one, however, who does not enjoy this like the rest. That young lady is heated and panting, as if she had raced all the way up the hill, instead of being brought on a donkey. No wonder! Look at her waist! Compare that pinched waist with the unlaced human form, and say if it can be true and good. Compare it with the Venus de Medici, and say if it can be beautiful. As for the beauty, can she not see, by examples before her eyes, and by her own looking glass, that she has to pay in complexion for any fancied gain in form by tight-lacing? As for the rashness, we could take her to a school where two or three of the girls cannot write an exercise without palpitation of the heart, and seem doomed to the fate of a companion who lately died suddenly from tight-lacing. This young lady can hardly be a water patient; for no physician would surely undertake the case. Any physician would tell her that nothing can be done while the trunk is compressed, the circulation impeded; too much work thrown upon the lungs, too little play allowed to the heart, and no action to a considerable portion of the skin. The tightness is not the only, though it is the greatest, mischief. There should be free access of air allowed to every part of the external frame, and that cannot be while the trunk is closely cased in double or treble jean. The bath and the draught of water can be of little use, if the skin is immediately after stopped in its action. The bringing of the blood to the surface by the water treatment, and the impulse to the circulation by this morning exercise, are of no use – of less than none – if the heart and lungs are to labour as we see them labouring in this panting girl, whose life may, any day, go out under the effort. Is there no one who will show her a few illustrations of what she is about, in thus dressing herself? – no one who will show her examples (or plates, as more striking) of the bent spine, the contracted heart, the congested liver and lungs, the impure complexion, the starved or gorged brain, which come of tight-lacing?

See how the shadow is drawing in! It is well we are so hungry, or it would be too hard to leave this breezy summit, and the sunny bench which somebody has been kind enough to set up for us. The shadowy circles on Camp Hill look tempting; and, in this clear light, the summit seems very near. If we were not so hungry, we could not but go – almost as straight as the bird flies. We will be there before the noon haze veils the prospect – will not we?

“Yes; but if so, we must go down now to breakfast.” “So be it. Will you engage to be in the house within ten minutes? – Is it impossible? Let us try.”

Flower Shows in a

Birmingham Hot-house

Household Words, Volume 4, page 82

Forty years ago, one of the things we were most sure to see on entering the parlour of the farmhouse, lodging house, or shopkeeper’s back room, or the kitchen of the best sort of cottage, was a gaudy tea tray, set up against the wall on the top of the bureau, or the side table, or the dresser. On the tray might be painted a yellow tiger, or a scarlet lion, or a pink shepherdess with a green shepherd; or a very yellow sheep beside a very red cow; or flowers and fruit, not particularly like anything that ever was really seen. Those were the war days; when the English taste had no opportunity of being improved by intercourse with foreign countries. Those were the days when brown and white cats, and green and scarlet parrots in frail plaster, stood on the mantelpiece, where we now see busts of great men, and casts of the Graces and the Muses, and of Cherubs and Gladiators, and of Joan of Arc, and William Tell. Those were the days when we knew nothing of the most graceful and brilliant flowers that the great were importing from foreign lands. The China rose was only just beginning to grow beside the cottage window. Lady Holland was bringing the dahlia from Spain; but it had not yet superseded the sunflower in common gardens. The fuchsia has still the small red blossom that we now see less often than the variegated and highly magnified kinds which are the pride of the windowsill in town and country. There might be no harm in this; for there are many who prefer the original fuchsia to this day. But it was not common, and we do not remember that it ever grew to half the size that may now be seen all over England. If there were verbenas in those days, they must have been rare; for we saw no parterres of brilliant lilac and scarlet and rose-coloured verbenas, such as now catch the eye of the traveller, as he is whirled along the railway. Again, all the Californian annuals are new – but there would be no end, if we were to make a list of the beautiful things that have become common since the Peace; things, beautiful in themselves, and elements of beauty in the arts of common life. To see what the advance has been, we need but look at the papers on the walls of humble parlours; at the mantelpiece, and at the grate and fender beneath, and (to come back to our first thought) at the tea tray on the top of the bureau.

Forty years ago, the tray was heavy – being of iron. It was gay when new, but the colours soon flaked off in the middle group, and rusty spots broke out in the black ground. It warped, and stood uneven, and clattered with every jog of the table. The rim was apt to crack, and leave jagged edges, which tore whatever they caught. When this rim became rusty, any drop which fell upon it from the kettle was sure to leave an iron mould on the sleeve, or apron, or cloth, which touched it. In finer houses, there were better trays; lighter to carry, less ugly to the eye, and less mischievous when they began to wear out. But nobody looked for much beauty in trays, and there was little variety. They were either of an oblong square, or round. They were plain black, polished in the middle, and there were lines, and sometimes vine or oak leaves in gilding round the rims, but the gilding did not wear well. Those who chose to have their trays kept bright and clean, must make up their minds to see the gilding rub off in patches, leaving a dull surface which no “elbow grease” could polish. The advantages of lightness and steadiness remained, however, when the first beauty was gone. This was because the trays of the gentry were made of a good material. They were made of paper. It had then been known for half a century that paper would wear better than iron, in this particular article. Not only is paper, under certain management, harder than wood – turning the edges of tools sooner than any common wood – but it was found to stand the wear and tear of daily use better than iron.

What could this paper be? and what could be the management of it? The paper is a kind of blotting paper, soft and porous. It is when changed by treatment to papier mâché (which is French for “chewed paper”) that it becomes hard enough to turn the edge of the plane and the chisel. We went, the other day, to see the process, and found that we were viewing the works of the very men, Jennens and Bettridge, who, forty years ago, set to work to improve the national tea tray, and who have since carried their improvements into every sort of dwelling – from the cottage kitchen to the state rooms of Buckingham Palace. There are other palaces, too, in which this mashed or chewed paper is found, in the shape of inkstands inlaid with pearl; brilliant chess and work tables; folding screens adorned with trailing flowers, with burnished hummingbirds glittering on the sprays; chairs and couches, framed in a series of classic groups; miniature frames, and paperknives; and even rosaries, for Catholic or Mahomedan use; the beads of which are black and polished, and light as jet, while less liable to fracture. In Egypt, the Pasha may be found dining from a vast tray made at these works – a tray made to receive the filigree saucers on which great Oriental dinners are served. And at the Persian court there will soon be seen tables, and screens, and flower stands, all glowing with our common fuchsia, and rose, and convolvulus. But, amidst all we saw in that wonderful showroom, there was nothing which charmed the eye and mind so much as a tray, of a simple form – circular, with a scalloped rim – with a handful of glowing verbenas in the middle; so natural, as to deserve to take a good place in any school of flower painting.

From this room, full of landscape and flower painting, of arabesques and mosaic, of pearl, and gilding, and burnish; of couches and tables, screens, allumettes, card cases, paperknives, pen dishes, rosaries, hearth-brush cases, desks, jewel boxes, and a host of other beauties, we went at once among the primary elements of the manufacture. The first thing we saw was the model of the great tray for the Pasha of Egypt. The rim hung against the wall, giving no idea of the beauty which was to grow out of it. Next, we passed a pile of the paper, as it came from the mill – simple grey blotting paper, which tears with a touch. Some women were pasting sheets of this paper, one upon another, on a model – the paste being made of flour, glue, and boiling water. A man who was covering the model of a tray, where the stress would fall between the level part and the rim, was pasting slips of paper from the one to the other. The advantage of thus uniting a great number of sheets, over every other method of producing the same thickness, is that the faulty spot of one sheet comes between a sound portion of two others; and thus an equality of substance is produced. An ordinary tea tray, which is about a quarter of an inch thick, is made of ten layers, or about thirty sheets of paper. The greatest thickness attained (without a hollow) is that of six inches; a wonderful solidity to be obtained from paper.

And here we found – what we were far from thinking of – a new illustration of the mischief of the paper duty. The duty paid on this paper is three halfpence per pound; and the price is sixpence halfpenny. For a cheaper and coarser manufacture, the fragments of this paper, together with rags, are reduced to a pulp at the paper mill; and this pulp (which may be called the “devil’s dust” of the papier mâché manufacture) is pressed into form, and used for the cheapest trays. A set of three trays, of this material, can be sold for ten shillings. In the raw state, the sheets look like thick oatcake. The material does not admit of good finish; and, what is of far more importance, it has little wear in it. It may be torn by the hand; it easily bursts asunder when burdened with any heavy weight. But the duty is only three-farthings per pound on this mashed paper; and the cheapness thus occasioned causes a preference for the bad article over the good, which would be accessible but for this duty. Messrs Jennens and Bettridge do not affix their names to the articles they make of this material, because they cannot warrant the wear, and cannot be proud of the workmanship. They have represented to the Excise the mischief that is done by this duty, in depraving the manufacture; and they have even asked that, if the duty cannot be removed from the real paper, it may be laid equally upon the paper-pulp; that the manufacturer and the buyer may have a fair chance of producing and enjoying a good article. The potentates of the Excise have listened respectfully, and promised consideration; and the thing to be desired next is, that their consideration should be quickened and deepened by a popular demand for the repeal of the duty. Official men should know, that while authors and publishers are straitened in their best enterprises by this duty, and the upholsterer cannot fully display his art in paper hanging, the humble housewife is mourning over the wrecks of her best china, smashed by the tea tray having burst across the middle. One would like, too, that – as it is quite possible to put such a luxury within common use – the cottage tray should have the smoothness and polish of a mirror, instead of being rough and dull, even when new.

Articles which are flat, or merely curved, are removed from the mould simply by cutting off the overlapping edges. Round articles, such as vases, allumette stands, and hearth-brush cases, are split, and joined together by glue. Every article is subjected to strong pressure, in various presses, to prevent warping. After that, the processes are the same as in cabinetmaking, allowance being made for the material being harder to work than wood. When thin, it is lighter than wood: or, rather, its texture admits of its being used thinner; for, in the mass, it is heavier than wood. The reason why screen stands, the legs of worktables, and feet of pillars, are so light, is, that the material admits of their being made hollow. They are formed on a mould, and paper is afterwards pasted over the bottom, leaving a hollow space within.

The rough articles are now brought under the saw, the plane, the chisel, the file, and the lathe, as if they were wood. The sharp edges and round mouldings, which come out from the rough surface in the lathe, are curious to see, when one considers what the material really is. A final smoothing is given by sandpaper, before the varnish is applied. The varnish (shellac) is obtained from the same manufactory which supplies the coachmakers. The articles are “stoved,” – put into ovens, where the varnish turns black under a heat of two hundred and thirty degrees. Fresh coats of varnish are laid on – from twelve to eighteen, according to circumstances; and the articles, after each coating, remain in the stoves from twelve to twenty-four hours. This must be unwholesome work to the superintendents of the process. The heat of the stove rooms is very great, and the smell of baked varnish almost intolerable to novices.

In the midst of the series of varnishings occur the decorative processes. A large quantity of goods, partly varnished, and smoothed by being rubbed with pumice stone, sand, and rag, are ranged on shelves and in racks, in a gloomy apartment, where everything is black. These are the “plain goods;” – goods which are hereafter to be decorated to order. When the order comes, and a tray, for instance, is to be inlaid with pearl, with certain initials on a medallion in the centre, a neat handed woman may be seen to undertake the task: or, more probably, a skilful man; for the nicest parts of the work are usually done by men. We were rather surprised at this, till we heard the reason. The decorative parts of this manufacture seem to suit women’s faculties of head and hand; and it looks strange, at first sight, that only about a fourth of the three hundred people employed in this establishment are women; and that the women do the coarser parts of the work – having, necessarily, lower wages than the men. The reason is, that women do not learn the business and stick to it, as men do. A boy serves an apprenticeship of seven years; and then regards the business as the main employment of his life. Girls come for months, or years, as it may happen: and it never does happen that they look upon it as the one settled business of their lives. They marry, or they think of marrying. They are, sooner or later, more or less unsettled; and it commonly happens that a home and a baby call them from the manufactory, as soon as they have become thoroughly trained to their work. It is, therefore, most probably a man who has to inlay this tray with pearl.

The pretty flakes of pearl which lie about in little heaps, and in saucers and cups, are, for the most part, from New Zealand. Some come also from Guernsey. For the best and most expensive kind of work, the flakes are carefully selected, that the grain (so to speak) may lie all one way, that there may be no cross lights in the figures. In a chess table, worth sixteen guineas, which we saw in the showroom, the squares are formed of these pearl flakes, disposed in different patterns, with all the grain lying one way. The pattern is disposed on the varnish, to which it is fastened by an adhesive substance. Coat after coat of varnish is then laid on, and the pearl is covered with asphalt, till it first glimmers red, then brown, and then disappears completely buried from sight. When the last coat is fairly baked on, the surface is rubbed with pumice stone, as before; then with sand and rag; then with rotten-stone; and the pattern is revealed. It now only remains to give the final polish with the hand, under which the surface becomes bright as a mirror. A peculiar quality of hand is requisite for this; a quality attained only by practice. The finest of aristocratic ladies, whose hand is seldom out of her glove, could not polish a pen-dish, or door plate. She might possibly find that she had scratched it; while she might see a hard-working, poorly dressed woman, with long, bony, turned-up fingers, skinny and yellow, producing an unrivalled polish, though she finishes her job by daubing the work with little touches of oil, which she carries smeared upon her left wrist. This is to remove any dust or dimness which may have lodged in any corner, or crease. One final stroke, removing the oil, turns out the work complete.

If the tray, or other article, is to have the initials of the purchaser, or any other figure, embossed in the centre, it is done by embedding a plate of pearl; painting the letters or figures on it, in a substance which cannot be corroded; and then rubbing over the whole with rotten-stone, and an acid which corrodes the pearl. More varnish is then laid on; and the raised letters are disencumbered of their covering.

There is a great fancy at present for a style of ornament which we do not at all admire. The pearl is used for flowers and fruit, coloured after nature, but looking as unlike nature as anything can well do. Flowers and fruit do not shine and glitter; but tinfoil does: and there is too much of a tinfoil look about this method of ornament. The genuine flower painting will be far more permanent, no doubt; for it is very beautiful.

In the colouring room, one of the prettiest processes seen is the gilding of borders and other designs. The artist paints his border with a steady hand and graceful strokes, with a camel hair pencil, dipped in isinglass and water. He then lays on leaf-gold; and presently rubs off the superfluous gold, leaving the pattern gilt. Near him may be seen another man varnishing a set of maroon-coloured pen-dishes. These had been coloured brown, and then painted over with lake, to produce the maroon colour; then gilded in graceful patterns with isinglass and gold leaf; and now the last transparent varnish is laid on with a brush. Not far off sits another artist, with a convolvulus in water before him. He is painting flowers on a workbox. On some of the screens in the showroom, the flowers were finished with a most mysterious softness. We could not conceive how such a melting away of colours could be managed. We now see how it is done. An artist has laid on various flowers in white or cream-colour; he throws on some colouring powder; depositing it in the darkest centre, and wiping it thinner and thinner towards the lighter edges. A flower thus tinted, with the dark folds of the centre, indicated by the black under surface being more slightly covered, gives real enjoyment to the eye that rests upon it.

A patent was taken out, two years ago, by this firm, for inlaying gems under glass. We saw some panels – such as might form the doors of small cabinets, or the top of jewel boxes – splendidly inlaid with pearls, rubies, amethysts, emeralds, and turquoises. Two of these were designed from the Queen of Spain’s jewels; the quick eye of the artist having seized their character, while on view in the Exhibition. We are not learned in jewels; but it appeared to us that these panels are quite as pretty as the Queen of Spain’s jewels; and that neither the one nor the other is half so pretty as the convolvulus in the wine glass, or the half open lily, or drooping fuchsia, on many a screen or paperknife in the colouring room.

There is something to be said about the forms, as well as the colouring of these beautiful productions. Those who have seen the contributions of this firm to the Exhibition will not be surprised to hear that such men as Bell the sculptor, and Redgrave the painter, are employed in its service. The Oriental chair at the Exhibition is a marvel for beauty of form, ease to the lounger, splendour of decoration, and – as we learned while viewing the model – difficulty of production. It is said to be unique: but it will probably not be so for long; for orders from Eastern potentates are flowing in fast. Mr Redgrave has transferred to trays the convenience of horseshoe tables. Instead of the painful sight of waiters holding trays of wine and cake at a long stretch, supporting the inner edge against their bodies, we shall now see them in a state of ease, if not an attitude of grace. The inner rim of the wine and fruit tray is now cut out, so that the whole tray presents the arc of a circle projecting towards the guest, and relieving the waiter from his strained attitude. At each corner is a little pit, sunk to contain the decanter.

From end to end of the showroom of this manufacture, there is a refinement of convenience as well as of beauty, which would make one ashamed, but for the evidence presented throughout, that the luxury is not confined to the rich, even now, and that it is likely to descend more and more abundantly into humble homes. The truest beauty – that which is natural – ought to cost nothing: beauty of form ought to be had as cheap as ugliness. The humblest cottage may as easily be well proportioned as not; and the cheapest tea tray will soon be of as convenient and graceful a form as the most cumbrous. It may be of plain black, with a simple coloured or gilt border, instead of being painted with flowers, or inlaid with gems; but it will be ornamental from its form, and will drive out for ever the yellow tiger, and pink and green shepherdesses of a grosser time. At a more removed, but already promised period, we, or the next generation, may see the inkstand or writing desk in the cottage window, or on the bureau, where the pen has scarcely yet found its way. If we can but see this, we shall willingly let unique Oriental chairs go to Persia, and sixteen guinea chess tables to India, satisfied with our humbler share in the improvements of the arts of life. We may even look without envy on our Norwegian neighbours, if we see them line their churches with papier mâché. There is a church actually existing, near Bergen, which can contain nearly one thousand persons. It is circular within, octagonal without. The relievos outside, and the statues within, the roof, the ceiling, the Corinthian capitals, are all of papier mâché, rendered waterproof, by saturation in vitriol, lime-water, whey, and white of egg. We have not yet reached this pitch of audacity, in our use of paper; but it should hardly surprise us, inasmuch as we employ the same material in private houses, in steamboats, and in some public buildings, instead of carved decorations and plaster cornices. When Frederick the Second of Prussia set up a limited papier mâché manufactory at Berlin, in 1765, he little thought that paper cathedrals might, within a century, spring out of his snuffboxes, by the sleight of hand of advancing art. At present, we old-fashioned English, who haunt cathedrals, and build churches, like stone better. But there is no saying what we may come to. It is not very long since it would have seemed as impossible to cover eighteen acres of ground with glass, as to erect a pagoda of soap bubbles; yet the thing is done. When we think of a psalm sung by one thousand voices pealing through an edifice made of old rags, and the universal element bound down to carry our messages with the speed of light, it would be presumptuous to say what can and what can not be achieved by Science and Art, under the training of steady old Time.

The Magic Troughs

at Birmingham

Household Words, Volume 4, page113

On the 7th of next May, it will be twenty years since the largest meeting ever held in our island was assembled at Newhall Hill, Birmingham. At the bottom of the hill were the hustings, whence it was declared that the Reform Bill should become the law of the land; and from every part of the slope, from tens of thousands of voices, came the solemn chant of the Union Hymn, and the words of the oath, singly spoken, by every man present, to devote himself and his children to the great cause. There is no room now for such a meeting on Newhall Hill. Within these twenty years, buildings have sprung up, over nearly the whole surface; and the roaring of the furnace and the din of the hammer are heard where the hymn and the solemn oath resounded in a less peaceful time.

Among those buildings, at the bottom of the hill, are the large premises of Messrs Elkington, Mason, and Co. – the firm celebrated for their electrogilding and plating. They have actually enclosed the canal within their premises – built over it – and their workshops are still extending. There may be seen nearly four hundred men and boys employed, diligently and constantly, upon work of so high an order, that the wonder is how, in the imperfect state of our popular education, so many can be found to manage such processes. As, for the diligence – arts of so high an order as these cannot be served by halves. Here must be no Monday laziness after Sunday’s rest; no caprice as to going to work or staying away. Like time and tide – like brewing and dyeing – the work at Messrs Elkington’s cannot wait for men’s humours. Any one who engages himself here must go through with what he undertakes. He is told, on being engaged, “We find you six days’ work, and you are to find six days’ labour.” And the wages given are such as to justify this compact being made stringent. They rise from twenty-five shillings to three pounds a week, according to the nature and quality of the work.

Any one who has seen the contributions to the Exhibition from this house, will understand that a special education is required for almost every department of this manufacture. The fruit baskets, twined with the convolvulus and the vine, are graceful enough; but the inkstands, with their groups – Rebecca at the Well; the Milkmaid and her Goats; and the race cups and the statuettes – are productions which require artistic heads and hands at almost every stage. And, as yet, this order of art is new in England, and so is the process of manufacture. Formerly, we bought our plated candlesticks, and table forks, and mustard pots, and inkstands from Sheffield. There was a small choice of patterns; very rarely anything new – seldom anything remarkably beautiful. The few who could spend money largely – princes and peers, and half a dozen wealthy commoners – might go to Rundell and Bridge, and indulge their taste for works of art in gold and silver; but in plated goods there was little beauty, little variety, and very poor wear. Preparation was making, half a century ago, for the day which has arrived. Mr Rundell was bringing over works of art – seizing every interval of continental truce to import pictures, statues, and gems, and paying Flaxman six hundred and twenty pounds for his model and drawing of the Shield of Achilles – of which four casts only were made – for two royal princes and two peers: but meantime, the middle classes were served with patterns almost as hackneyed as the willow pattern in our dinner plates. Preparation was making, unawares, for the other grand improvement, by Mr Spencer, of Liverpool, and Mr Smea, of the Bank of England, having applied the process of electroplating to taking copies of embossed surfaces. Where the discovery originated, is not yet settled. Russia claims it. Italy claims it. But while it was used only for taking copies of gems and coins, we of the middle classes, who cannot afford to buy silver plate, were annoyed by seeing the copper peeping through the edges and prominences of our plated candlesticks, forks, and sugar basins; and, too often, a bend or a dent here and there, showing that there was as little wear in the metal and its solder in one way, as in its silver covering in another.

Mr Elkington was one of those who first saw how the process of electroplating might be extended to the supply of our needs. He saw that by the agency of electricity, the gold or silver plating might become one substance with the material on which it is deposited, instead of being a mere covering, liable to be rubbed off by use. He saw that a whiter and harder metal than copper might be used as a base, and employed German silver for the purpose. He saw that the most various and elaborate designs and ornaments could be produced by this method, in place of the few old forms; and that it would be an inestimable advantage to do the plating last, after all the repairs and finishings, instead of the clumsy old method of smoothing, and finishing and burnishing, after the frail coating of silver had been laid on. Seeing all this, he took out a patent for his process in 1840. About thirty other manufacturers in England are licensed by him to use his process; and there are not more than two houses now which maintain the old Sheffield method of laying silver on copper, and using the old soft tin solder. That any such houses remain, may be very well, because they turn out their work cheap, and keep down the price of the superior article. By the time they also have recourse to the new method, the patent will have expired, and competition will keep prices reasonable. The process has also spread widely over the Continent; so that society may consider that it has the discovery safe for general use. What remains to be wished is, that our Schools of Design should be extended and improved; and that a Museum of practical work, in various departments of manufacture, should be attached to them. We have not enough of fresh and beautiful designs actually offered; but, few as they are, they are more than can be used, from the designers’ want of knowledge of the practical business of the manufacture. While we are complaining of the dearth of employment for educated women, here is one, remarkably suited to the female faculties, much needed, and therefore very profitable; but from which young women are at present almost excluded, for want of the practical part of the study. One, here and there, may design a pattern, unexceptionable in taste, and in every sort of fitness but one: but if it cannot be wrought, her labour and her hopes are lost.

Let us send a glance over what we saw at Messrs Elkington and Mason’s the other day, where a friend, connected with the establishment, showed us whatever we wished to see. From the showroom – the Art chamber – which we shall not describe, because every one may go there, we were conducted to the room where the modellers were at work. There, on a shelf, stood some tall volumes – books on Art, and choice engravings. Engravings, and patterns of beautiful forms were hung up; and at their respective tables sat several artists, modelling in wax. One should come here to understand what pains are spent on the common articles which we use every day. Here is one side of a stand for castors. This one side consists of three pieces; the straight centre, and the two oblique sides, on which the pattern must be reversed, every hair’s breadth of each of which must be modelled with the nicest care – a smooth stroke here, a gentle touch there. And then there is the stem, with the handle at the top, and two sides again. These common articles surprise one more by the detail than the more luxurious productions – the nautilus shell, for instance, in pink wax, which is the pattern of a flower stand; or the group of palm tree and oak, overshadowing the sick Hindoo, and the soldier-surgeon stooping over him, lancet in hand; – the piece of testimonial plate presented to the surgeon of a regiment.

It seems as if as much precision and care were necessary in the coarse interior parts of the work as in the outside finish: for instance, in raising the foundation of a sugar basin, which must have no join in its circumference, because it is to be gilt inside. It is one of the nicest arts in cookery to make a raised pie a true circle or oval; and, in the hairdresser’s business, to make one side of a wig match the other. In forming the foundation of a sugar basin, the flat sheet of metal has to be raised in a bulge first, and then contracted; and then it must bulge again: and this form must be truly given by turning the metal with one hand, on the vibrating steel bar, which serves for the anvil, while the other hand uses the hammer, with equal and steady strokes. A similar process is used for raising an embossed pattern on the metal, when the form renders casting out of the question. Under the process of snarling, as this is called, it is curious to see the bumps rising under the hammer – bumps caused by the round head of the steel bar beneath, and destined to group themselves into clusters of leaves or fruit as the work advances. When a hard mixed metal is used for these foundations, and the copper scales at the surface, the work must go into pickle before it can be further dealt with. In a yard, therefore, stand little vats of this pickle, in which sulphuric or nitric acid predominates, causing the copper to scale away.

But the foundations must be annealed before hammering, that the pores of the metal may be opened. In the annealing room is a furnace, such as was formerly blown by bellows, like that of a blacksmith’s forge. Now the engine saves that labour. A cock is turned, and there is an instant commotion among the lazy embers. Blue, yellow, red, and white flames dance and leap, and want something to devour. A sugar basin or teapot is held over them on a metal slice; and, in a few seconds, the black metal becomes a deep red; and then, in a few more seconds, scarlet, pink, white; and then it is laid down on the ground, to grow black again at its leisure.

Meantime, the ornamental rims, and little panels, and all the decorations which are to be afterwards attached to the article, are in preparation elsewhere. A man stands at a pair of shears fastened to his counter, and cuts out pieces of German silver, as marked roughly from a pattern. These are the little plates which are to receive the embossed patterns, now in course of being struck off from steel dies in another room, or the slips which are to become rims themselves. In that other room are three or four men, who seem to be seized with a frantic convulsion, at intervals of a minute or so. They are the stampers. Having fixed the concave part of the die under the stamper, and attached the punch to the stamper, they lay on a slip of German silver, throw themselves by one foot and hand into a sling of rope, raising the stamper by their weight, and then let it fall, punching the slip of metal, which then gives place to another. There are no less than thirty tons of steel dies on the premises, each die being a costly and precious article of property. They are the most expensive part of the apparatus; as the castings are the most expensive process of the manufacture, from the time and minute pains required. Of the castings, nothing need be said here, as the process is the same as in every iron foundry – the work being only on a smaller scale, and more delicately finished. The sand, employed in the castings, is from the neighbouring Cemetery. As fast as the red sandstone is hewn away there, to make room for new chambers of the dead, and fresh nooks for flowering shrubs and green graves, the rubbish is bought by the manufacturers for their castings, to an amount which materially supports the funds of the Cemetery.

The chasing of the cast articles is one of the most astonishing processes to an observer. It seems as if every man so employed must be an artist. One sits with a salver before him. With the left hand, he turns it this way and that, while with the graving tool which he holds in his right, he runs graceful patterns, without hesitation and without fault. Parallel curves, and curves that meet, are marked off with a roundness and steadiness that no mechanism could surpass. The folded leaf, the pendulous flower, the wandering tendril, grow under his touch; and no one of them wanders out of its place. Near him sits another artist, at work upon a statuette, fixed in the position he wants by being stuck in pitch. A row of little chasing tools is arranged at his side, each pointed with a different pattern. Here he, by gentle taps of the hammer on the tool in hand, makes a rim round the head or arm: there, by using another tool, he produces a diced pattern, where shadow is to be represented. Then, the folds of the drapery are more finely streaked, and a finish is given to the bands of hair. Close by is another man, so intent on his work, that he twists a wire round his head to keep his hair from falling over his eyes. He is engaged on a vase filled with pitch, to preserve the smallest indentations of the pattern from injury, while he hammers away, daintily, at the minutest finishings of the bark of a tree, or the fleece of a sheep.

Next, we see how the stamped rims, or other loose parts, are soldered on to the main body of the work. It is not now as in the old days, when the spout of a teapot was liable to come off, or the top of the nozzle of a candlestick to part company with the cylinder. Those were the days when the soft tin solder was used: and the soft solder was used because the work had to be carried to the fire; whereas now, the fire is brought to the work. On stands in the middle of the room are huge iron pans, like saucers, containing cinders. At each of these pans or saucers stands a man, with pincers in one hand, wherewith he applies the solder, and turns over the article to be soldered; and, in the other hand, a flexible tube, by which he administers air and oxygen gas to the fire among the cinders. This tube consists of two compartments, one of which conveys air, and the other gas; and it is in the power of the holder to increase the flame to any intensity, and apply it in any direction, to this side or that, above, below, and around the most delicate ornament that has to be united with any other piece. The white powder that is thrown on, where the solder has been applied, is borax, which fuses the solder. One sees the metal bubbling and running like a liquid; and when it has diffused itself, and shown by a white streak that it is done enough, and then become cool, the join is evidently as lasting as any other part of the work. Nothing comes to pieces that is soldered under this blowpipe.

There is, of course, some roughness at these joins. Formerly, under the old method of plating, the silver had to be laid on before such blemishes were removed. A finishing process was gone through after the plating. The advantage of electroplating, in this respect, is great. The gilding and silvering are done the last thing. Now, therefore, the goods are carried from the soldering to receive such touches from the file, and smoothing apparatus, as may make all sharp, and polished, and fit for the final process. When the file has removed all roughness at the joins, the whole surface of the article is smoothed and polished, under the hands of sooty workmen in paper caps, who apply the surface to swift revolving cylinders, which administer a polishing with oil and sand. After being cleansed in vats containing a ley of caustic potash, the goods are ready for the final process. The fumes from a little congregation of vats, direct the observer to the place where this cleansing goes on; and he finds them suspended in the liquor, where they part with the oil, and every other kind of soil that they may have brought from the workman’s hands.

The visitor may next find himself introduced to what looks like a dinner party of nearly fifty people. A second glance, however, shows him that the guests are all women, and that their dress, however neat, is not precisely suitable to the decorations of the table. The long table is set out, from end to end, with epergnes, candelabra, fruit baskets, cruet frames, bottle stands, and silver dishes; and between forty and fifty women are employed in burnishing and finishing, giving the last polish with the hand, and clearing out the last speck of dust or dimness which may lurk in any crease or corner.

As for the gilding and silvering chambers, they are like seats of magic. One might look on for a year, and have no idea of the process, but that it must be done by magic. There is a machine, containing a great wheel, and large bands of a horseshoe shape, which we are told are magnets. From this machine, loose wires extend to the troughs, and dangle over the sides. In the troughs are plates of silver, standing in a brownish liquor; and in this liquor hang the articles to be silvered, suspended by copper wires from thicker copper wires laid across the top of the troughs. There hang the teapots, and spoons, and trays; and nothing ensues till the magician, in the shape of a man in a dark blue blouse, takes hold of one of the dangling wires, and unites it with the wires on which the goods are hung. Then, in an instant, they become overspread with silver. The coating is a mere film at first, and it requires some hours (from five to ten, according to the quality of the article) to obtain a sufficient silvering. The brownish liquor in the troughs is a solution of oxide of silver in cyanide of potassium. At the magnetic touch of the loose wire from the machine, the silver is deposited upon the surface of the article communicated with; and not only laid upon it, but intimately united with it. Gilding is done more rapidly than silvering; and the gilding process is therefore that which is usually exhibited to strangers. In this case, a man holds a bent copper wire, from which is suspended the bunch of spoons, plate, scissors, watch keys, or vinaigrettes to be gilt; he holds, at the same time, the loose wire in connexion with the other, and washes his charge for a few seconds to and fro, and, lo! it comes out golden. Having heard something of a cobweb having been gilded at this trough, in the service of Prince Albert, we made inquiry, and found that it was really so – that a cobweb had been gilt – but it was by accident. A rosebud was gilded in the Prince’s presence, and when it came out of the trough, it was found to have been crossed by a delicate thread of cobweb.

We asked, what could be done in the case of articles parcel-gilt? where, for instance, bunches of silver flowers or fruit appear on a gold ground, or a gold net-work covers a silver ground – and we found that the matter was very simple. The parts which are not to be gilt are varnished over, and the varnish is easily removed afterwards. The minutest atoms of the gold and silver are saved, by the goods being dipped in four or five troughs in succession, till every loose particle is washed off. The superintendence of these troughs is a situation of great trust. The value of a pint of the solution may be about fifteen shillings, and, of course, it would not be difficult to carry off small quantities of it. The whole work of the establishment, however, requires a somewhat superior order of men – men who might be supposed superior to the temptation of theft.

But here, alas! comes in the regret which cannot but be felt by the observer of the working classes in Birmingham – regret for their extreme and unaccountable improvidence. Without doubting that there may be exceptions, we are obliged to see that, as a general rule, the best wages, and the most constant work, are no security against poverty and dependence. It is too common a thing to find that a man who has, for years together, earned from thirty shillings to sixty shillings a week (twice or three times the income of a multitude of clergymen, retired military and naval officers, poor gentlemen, and widow ladies), has not a shilling beforehand when he falls sick, and must be sustained by a subscription – by private charity – as the only alternative from public relief. It is too common a case that women, employed in the manufactures of the town, buy expensive shawls or gowns, paying for them by weekly instalments (extending over years for a single shawl), and pawning them every Monday morning, to redeem them on Saturday night for the Sunday’s wear. It is too common to hear employers speak coolly, if not with satisfaction, of this state of things, because it keeps the workmen dependent and humble, and lessens the danger of those strifes about wages, which are the plague of the manufacturer’s life. “Well; never mind!” says the employer, significantly. “Let things be. It may be all very well.”

To us, however, it seems not well that men, with incomes exceeding one hundred pounds a year should fail to secure their own independence; should fail to educate their children; should fail to provide a soft pillow for a time of sickness; while indulging in pleasure and luxury during their best days. To us, it seems not well that, just at present, when the necessaries of life are one third cheaper than they were when the men were receiving the same wages as now, no attempt at saving should be made by so many as, in Birmingham, exhibit their improvidence to all the world. Here and there, however, something better is seen. In the manufactory we have been describing, every workman above twenty one years of age, is a member of a relief club, paying threepence a week to secure support under sickness or accident. Many of the people on the premises, also, are members of the Freehold Land Association, and are acquiring property in that excellent manner. One pleasant change in their mode of life appears in their love of reading. At the tea hour, those who do not go home, and who used to gossip over a pot of beer, have turned readers; and under their counters several popular periodicals may be seen stowed away. We must hope that the improvement will proceed, and that, while dismissing from under their hands, to the houses of the great, the articles of luxury and beauty which Birmingham supplies, the men of Birmingham will aspire to have their own humble homes furnished with every needful comfort, and brightened by that intellectual enlightenment, and that peace of mind about their families and their future, without which neither luxuries nor comforts can yield any true and lasting pleasure.

The Wonders

of Nails and Screws

Household Words, Volume 4, page 138

Seventy-five years ago our fathers were told, by a man of high character whose testimony could not be doubted, that he had himself seen several boys, under twenty years of age, each of whom could make two thousand three hundred, nails in a day. This gentleman – Adam Smith – explained that, to produce so surprising a result, these boys must have passed their whole lives in nail-making; for that a smith, who had been pretty well accustomed to making nails but not wholly devoted to it, could not make more than from eight hundred to one thousand in a day; while a smith who could handle his tools cleverly but was unused to making nails, could not turn out more in a day than two or three hundred. The making of nails, Adam continues, is by no means a simple operation: he tells how the bellows have to be blown, and the fire mended, and the iron heated, and every part of the nail forged; and how the tools have to be changed when the head comes to be shaped. Considering all this, it seemed, in 1776 (when this account was published), a wonderful example of dexterity, that young people should be able, with due effort, to make two thousand three hundred nails in a day.

That year seems not so very long ago: 1776 was the date of the American declaration of independence: and we are fond of saying how extremely young a nation is that of the United States. It is the date of our compulsory permission to that young nation to take care of itself, and to see what it could do by its own faculties. It has done a great many wonderful things; and, among others, it has invented, and sent over to us, a machine by which boys can make more nails in a day than our readers would remember, if we were to set down the long row of figures. These Americans used to buy our nails, made in the way that Adam Smith describes. But in a few years, they found they had the iron and coal, and the heads and hands necessaiy for making steam engines and nail-cutting machines – all at home: and instead of taking our nails, they have shown us how to make so many, that, if the same number were made in the old way, it would take half the nation to accomplish the work.

We do not want all these nails ourselves. Of the smallest kind of nail (tacks), some are still made on the anvil; and those are probably for home use. They must be regarded as a humble manufacture, remaining from old times, on account of the expense of the new machinery. The establishment we saw, the other day, at Birmingham, makes twenty tons of nails per week, of all sizes together; that is, about four tons of the largest size commonly made – six inches long – and sixteen tons of other sizes, descending to the little tack which measures only three-sixteenths of an inch. No one can tell precisely how many are made in the kingdom, because there are numerous small manufacturers in the inland towns, whose sales are not ascertainable. But it is supposed that Birmingham alone may supply two hundred tons a week; and the whole kingdom, perhaps, five hundred tons. Now let the imagination follow this – let us think of a handful of tacks, or the household box of nails, and follow these up to the pound, and the hundredweight, and the twenty hundredweights which make a ton, and think of five hundred of these tons, as a weekly supply; and we shall be full of wonder as to what becomes of such heaps of uncountable masses of nails.

The fact is, we send them very far over the world: even to Australia, where they are wanted in large quantities by the growing people there, who are always building more and more houses, and edifices of other kinds. We send vast quantities to the German ports, whence they spread over the interior of the continent. Canada is too near the United States to need any supply from us; and, indeed, there is nail-making going on at Montreal, which nearly satisfies the wants of that colony.

The sheets of iron brought as material to the establishment which we saw at Birmingham are six feet in length and two in width. These have to be cut into strips. The strips must not be cut the long way of the sheet, because that would bring the grain of the iron (for even iron has a grain) the wrong way for the nail, and a bad article would be produced, as surely as the wristbands of a shirt would look ill, and soon wear out, if they were cut the wrong way of the linen. As the nails are cut across the strip of iron, the strip must be cut across the sheet. Thus, it is clear the nails will be cut from the long way of the sheet.

As for the width of the strip, it must be somewhat more than the length of the nail, because the head must be allowed for. The longest nail that has been made in these machines is one of nine inches. A strip which is to make inch nails, must be an inch and one-eighth in width. It is a marvellous thing to see the cutting of these strips, which might seem to be thin pasteboard, but for the noise they make in falling. The hidden steam engine turns the wheels of the shearing machine. The iron plate is held to it, the edge put into a grove, and off comes the strip, as quick as thought. It is, in fact, cut from end to end, and not struck off with one blow; but the process is too rapid for the eye to follow – the machine making fifty revolutions in a minute. Thus, these iron ribbons are rained down at the rate of nearly one, every second of time.

Now we have the strips. How many nails will each yield? The number that must be got is two hundred and forty small tacks, or, if of the six inch size, one hundred and twenty; the other sizes ranging between. It would be impossible to get this number, if one edge of the strip was to yield all the heads, and the other edge all the points. There would be much fewer nails, and a great waste of iron. The strip must be turned for the cutting of each nail, that the slope made by cutting the narrow part of the last, may serve for the broad edge of the next. This incessant turning of the strip is the one thing which the workman has to do. His machine actually does all the rest, and without failure or pause. Before each machine stands a rest – a good deal like what soldiers used to carry in the days of matchlocks, to rest their pieces on. It is like a large two-pronged fork set on end, prongs uppermost, and moveable in its socket. Taking hold of his strip of cold iron with a pair of long pincers, very like tongs, the boy lodges it across this fork, and proceeds to feed the machine with the metal which it is rapidly to digest into nails. A most vigorous and certain process of digestion it is. There is a sharp steel tooth at what may be called the mouth of the machine, the ledge on which the strip is laid. The tooth doubles back, like the fang of a rattlesnake, and, in doing so, it allows a sharp blade to fall, and slice off a nail. While the boy is turning the strip, the severed bit drops into a groove, where a pair of nippers seizes it by the point, and another advances from behind to strike and hold the shank. The point and shank being thus formed and held fast, a hammer comes on, driven from the right hand, to form the head. The severe blow which forms the head, releases the point and shank, and the finished nail slides down an inclined plain into a trough below. This process of forming the nail goes on in the dark – in a space below the cutting apparatus – in the stomach to which the mouth has sent down the aliment. But never was such quick digestion known in any kind of stomach, for it is empty between the mouthfuls. While the boy is turning his strip, and the blade is cutting it, the nail is dismissed from the groove – finished, head and point; but only finished as to form. It has still to be annealed – that is, to be roasted, baked, stoned – call it what you will. The nails are shovelled into square iron pans, with a chemical mixture, and thoroughly baked. When they come out, they are shaken in a sieve with sawdust; when cool, they are weighed, and made up into parcels, or put into cases or sacks of “Dudley muslin;” as the coarsest and strongest of packing fabrics is ironically called.

The premises used for this manufacture need not be large. The machinery occupies a very small space. A small Pembroke table fills more width than a single machine; and the machines may be placed as near together as will merely leave room to pass. The steam engine must be accommodated; and there must be an apartment or two for the repair or making of the machinery. The annealing, and cooling, and weighing, and packing can be done in a shed and yard. Adam Smith’s young acquaintances would have wanted the whole site of Birmingham for their forges, to make as many nails as go forth from the premises we saw. So compact is the space required, that one man attends to four machines. He is called a “minder.” He engages a boy for each machine, and sees that it is properly fed. The “minder” is paid by the hundredweight, for all sizes of nails, except tacks, which are paid by the thousand. It is calculated that one hundredweight contains about fifty thousand nails of all sizes. If so, the quantity of nails formed in a year, in this one apartment, is no less than a thousand and forty millions! When we see the stroke given, which makes the head, we cannot but wonder where the nail will next be struck on the head – whether in some shed on the banks of the Danube, or in the cabin of some peasant on the bleak plains of Russia, or in some Indian bungalow, or in a cattle-fold on the grassy levels of Australia, or in some chalêt on the Alps, or on the brink of some mine high up in the Andes, or under the palm roof of some missionary chapel in the South Sea islands. As the nails are snipped off and fashioned, much faster than the nimblest fingers can snip paper, it is wonderful to think how they will be spread over the globe, nowhere meeting, probably, with a single person who will think of where their heads were last struck; unless one of them should be floated, in some piece of wreck, to the feet of some Robinson Crusoe, who will start at this trace of a man’s hand, and seem to hear once more the pant of the steam engine, and all the sounds of busy toil, and the voices of men, for which his ear and his heart are thirsting. What would he not give to be a “minder” where that nail was made? – or the humblest helper on the premises, so that he might work among his fellow men?

The “minder” has it in his power to enjoy all the best things of life, if he so pleases. He easily earns from one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty pounds a year. But, unfortunately, he reckons his wages by the week. If clergymen and others – who would be glad of his income – did so, they might make less of their small means than they do; the weekly surplus being a constant temptation to spend. And too truly, too sadly, it is so with the “minder,” with an exception here and there. If he receives five pounds a week for months together, and pays away nearly, or quite half, to the four boys below him, keeping fifty shillings or more for himself; and if the machinery has to stop for a few days, he is sure to borrow money of his employer. After years of constant employment and good health, if he falls sick, he has not a shilling beforehand. This story has been told before – often before – and it must be told again now – and often again till the workman learns to accept that welfare from himself which he is too apt to expect from law or society, which can effectually help only those who help themselves.

In a neighbouring manufactory, which would seem to require the strength of hard-handed men, we find women employed in the proportion of ten to one: and of that one portion, many are boys. The manufacture is that of screws; steel, brass, copper, and a few of silver. From the smallest screws required for putting together the nicest philosophical instruments, to the heavy bolt-screws which sustain the wear and tear of mighty steam engines, we find here specimens of all sorts and sizes. The forging must be done by men, of course: and here we find the anvil, and the glowing furnace (fed by the steam engine), and see the great square heads of bolt-screws beaten while at a white or red heat.

The coils of wire, of different thicknesses, of which the screws are made, come from the wire-drawers. They have been made by drawing the heated iron through holes in hardened steel plates. The smaller kinds of wire are drawn, by a hard mechanical gripe, through smaller and smaller holes, till they become of the thickness required. Then the wire is brought to the screw manufactory; and there we see it lying about in shining coils. One end of a coil is presented to a machine worked by boys or women; when we see the end seized, and drawn forward, and snipped off the proper length, the snip falling, hot, into a pan of sawdust below. Women are preferred to boys for this work. Their attention is more steady, and they are more careful of their own flesh and blood. Boys are apt to make mischief; and, if they look off their work, it is too likely that they may lose their finger-ends. It is in this department of the business that most of the accidents happen. It is more satisfactory to see the lads filing the circular saws used in making the machinery, or in other processes where they have not to deal with such inexorable powers as those which cut or stamp the metal.

The heads of the bits of steel are next stamped by machinery, and delivered over to women to have the heads polished. There is nice fingering required here; and, to do it, we see rows of women, who earn from five to twelve shillings per week, each attending a machine of her own. She presents the head of the screw to a vice, which seizes it and carries it to a flying wheel, which smooths and polishes it; and it comes out in an instant, brightened with that radiating polish which we observe in the head of a finished screw. All the while, a yellowish ugly liquid is dropping upon the metal, and upon the work-woman’s fingers, from a can above. It is a mixture of soapsuds and oil, which dribbles from a spout, and keeps the metal from becoming too hot for the touch.

We have now the shank of the screw, and its neat polished head: but there is no slit in the head wherein to insert the screw-driver; and the shank is plain and blunt. The next thing is to “nick" the head. This part of the business used to be done by working the “nicking" machine with treadles. By the modern method, a barrel – somewhat like that of a barrel-organ, but pierced with holes, instead of being stuck over with upright bits of wire – revolves slowly, so that every row of holes is brought under the line of a cleaver, which descends to make the cleft across the heads of the screws in a row beneath. It is the business of the steam engine to turn the barrel, and send down the cleaver: it is that of the women to stick the screws into the holes in the barrel – as they would put pins in rows into a pincushion. They do this with quickness and dexterity, as the empty holes come up; and the notched screws fall out by their own weight, on the other side, as it descends with the revolution of the barrel.

This is all very well, as far as it goes: but the shank is still plain and blunt, and perfectly useless. The grand operation of “worming" remains. This also is women’s work; and we may see one hundred and twenty women at a time busy about it. The soapsuds and oil are still dropping upon their fingers and their work; and the job looks anything but a tidy one, while we regard the process alone. But it is different when we stand aside, and survey the room. Then we see that these six score women are neatly dressed; hair smooth, or cap clean – handkerchief or little shawl nicely crossed over, and fastened behind; faces healthy, and countenances cheerful. These women are paid by piecework; and they can easily earn ten shillings per week. Their business still is to feed the machinery – to present the heads of the screws to a vice which seizes them, and carries them forward – then back again, and again forward – as often as is necessary to have the worming made deep enough. As the shank is pressed, in its passage forward, against the cutter which grooves out the steel between the “thread,” – which, in other words, “worms,” it – the filings curl away and drop off, like so much wood, or rasped cheese rind. It is wonderful to see this rasping of steel. But we were informed that there will be something hereafter more curious still to be seen. On these premises, there is at work now some machinery which is shut up from prying eyes, by which the shank is picked up, wormed, and dropped, without being touched by human hands: and strange it must be to see the screw, not a quarter of an inch long, picked up by a metallic gripe, and the largest – massive and heavy as they are – carried onward, again, and again, and again, as the depth of their worming requires.

After this comes the cooking in sawdust; and the drying and bolting (as a Miller would say) of the finished screws in sieves; and the counting, and the packing. They are counted by weight, of course. The packing is a pretty affair. A nimble-fingered woman throws down half a dozen or more screws, according to size, on a square paper, the heads lying all one way; and then the same number, with the heads lying the other way, and the shanks falling between the first. Then the same number are laid across; and so the pile is built up into a square, which is kept compact by the wall of round heads on all the four sides. The paper is folded over, and the square packet is passed to a neighbour, to be tied up. With a dexterous twist of the string she fastens on a specimen screw, ties the knot, and passes on the packet – to be sent to Germany, or almost anywhere in the world where men are screwing anything together – always excepting the United States. Very few are sent there; for, as we were again told here, America rivals us, or, as would be said across the Atlantic, “America flogs the world" in screw making. There are eight houses in Birmingham employed in this manufacture: and this was all we could learn of the amount of production. No one seems to know how many are made in England; for no one call tell what proportion the produce of the little manufactories bears to these larger ones.

Seeing whole bins full of steel filings, and copper, and brass, we inquired what became of them. They are sold; the steel being worth little, and the brass much. The brass comes in at the cost of ninepence per pound; and the refuse goes out, as filings, at fivepence per pound. After the noise and dirt of the earlier processes – the oily wheels, the greasy candles in dark places, the smutty forge, and the yellow dropping from the cans, there is something pleasant in the aspect of the last stages – the barrels of shining brass filings; the quiet light room where two or three neat women are fingering polished screws, surrounded by drab and brown paper, while behind them are compartments completely covering the wall, filled with their square drab packets.

As we turned away from the hundreds of women thus respectably earning their bread, we could but hope that they would look to it that there was no screw loose in their household ways, that the machinery of their daily life might work as truly and effectually as that dead mechanism which is revolving under their care, for so many hours of every day. It is much to see dead mechanism producing strength and convenience, in a flow as constant as that of the stream from the cavern in the rock: but it is much more to see vital comfort and beauty issuing from an intelligent daily industry, which works on behalf, not of vanity and wasteful pleasure, but of home.

Kendal Weavers

and Weaving

Household Words, Volume 4, page 183

In Domesday Boke, there is mention of a church at Kirkby Candale; whereby we know that Kendal, as we call it now, was a centre to which the Saxon inhabitants of the Westmoreland moors came for worship and religious comforts. And perhaps for other comforts too; for, by the church, dwelt monks, who, in those days, fed the helpless, and gave out the little knowledge that was free to the many. According to tradition, there lived the hermit, in a hut shaped like a beehive, and almost hidden by a double fence; and here and there, among the heathery hills which slope up from the river Kent on either side, were scattered the cottages of that time – thatched with reeds, and fit to yield only the rudest shelter to the shepherds, whose flocks were all abroad over the fells, and on the green margins of the nearer lakes. This church was to serve the whole population, from the foot of Helvellyn to the borders of Lancashire; and it probably served well enough; for though there were a good many sheep, there were very few people. That there were so many sheep, and that they fed on hills covered with broom and heather, were the circumstances out of which arose afterwards the existence of a multitude of people, and the importance to which Kendal attained a few hundred years later. How came it that from these sheep being on these particular hills, we have seen, in our own time, upwards of half a million of people employed on the woollen manufactures of our island?

It happened thus. For two or three hundred years after the church of Candale was entered in Domesday Boke, the Flemings were the greatest woollen manufacturers in the world, and indeed almost the only considerable manufacturers. History states (we may please ourselves about believing it or not) that in the city of Louvain there were, in the times of the insurrection against Spain, one hundred and fifty thousand weavers, and four thousand woollen drapers; and that when the operatives were going home from work, a great bell was rung, to warn mothers to gather their little children within doors, lest they should be trodden down by the crowd in the streets. When political troubles broke up this mass of people, our English kings invited some of them over – or, at least, permitted them to come. Henry the First settled some of them in Wales; but the first who settled in England opened his manufacture in the reign of Edward the Third. His name was John Kempe. Of all places in the island, he chose that little valley in Westmoreland, and that bend of the river, on which stood Kirkby Candale, for his abiding place. Of course, he had reasons; and it is pretty clear what they were. The sheep were one reason; and another was, no doubt, the abundance of the broom, called by the country people “woodas,” which grew on the neighbouring wilds. At this time, and for long after, wool made thirteen-fourteenths of our exports; and foreigners sent us in return woollen cloth, dyed and dressed, and a dyeing material wherewith to dye the small quantity of woollen woven at home. This dye was woad. Indigo was not then known as a dye, and woad was the only blue. Now, blue is one half of green; and in the broom which grew near Kendal, Mr John Kempe and his successors had the other half – the yellow; hence arose the famous Kendal green, which was renowned for centuries, even to within a hundred years, when it was driven out by the Saxon green. This Kendal green was the first celebrated English colour. The cloth, of the colour of the wool, was first boiled in alum water, and then in a decoction from this broom: which made it a bright yellow. Then, there was only to dip it in the blue liquor from the woad, and it was Kendal green. This was all! And now, in a shed which overhangs the same bend of the river, there is dyeing going on, for one establishment alone, which requires between forty and fifty elementary dyes; the compounds from which would be almost innumerable – woods, gums, acids, insects, earths; a vast apparatus for giving colour, compared with the simple broom and woad of John Kempe’s time! The time and the man were held in vivid remembrance for several centuries. They were celebrated at the last Kendal Guild, in 1759, together with some times and persons which were a good deal older. After Jason, with his golden fleece, supported by a shepherd and shepherdess, and Bishop Blaise, attended by wool-combers, came Edward III, with a company of Shearmen dyers; and the English King, in armour, was followed by Minerva and Arachne, in honour of the weaving and spinning arts; and it is said that some of John Kempe’s descendants were present. A feast, given within this week, seems at once a curious linking with, and a curious contrast to, that ancient celebration of the Guild. The rejoicing this week was on account of the honour borne by Kendal at the Great Exhibition, where prizes were gained by carpets of Messrs Whitwell’s manufacture. When John Kempe was setting up the Kendal manufacture, he dreamed not of carpets. In the royal palace, the floors were strewn with rushes, in which were only half hidden all manner of abominations; spillings of wine, lumps of fat, mire from unpaved streets, and whatever it was convenient to throw away, that was not too offensive for the interior of a dwelling. It was a grand feature of the luxury of Becket that his dining room floor was daily strewn with straw or hay in winter, and with green branches in summer, that the guests for whom there was not room at the board might sit on the floor, without soiling their clothes. The office of rush-strewer to the royal household was retained in name until lately; and every year we see rush-bearing processions in the small towns of the district, in memory of the time when the churches were dressed annually with fresh rushes. Probably many a child who is employed in filling spools for the modern carpet weaving, carries a garland on the rush-bearing day, in honour of the ancient makeshift.

Whether John Kempe detained any of the best wool at home, there is no saying; but it seems clear that, in general, the coarser sorts locally produced were kept at home, and the finer sent to foreign markets. Yet, we know, by acts of Parliament, passed during successive reigns, that Kendal cloths – soon called Kendal cottons – were an article of commerce of considerable importance. The length and breadth of these “cottons” (supposed to mean “coatings”) were settled by legislative acts; and corn, then forbidden to be imported, was permitted to be brought to Kendal from Ireland. Within a century of John Kempe’s settlement, his fabrics were originating at least one fair in the interior of the island. His woollens clothed a multitude of London people; and the Kendal men had no other idea than of carrying their ware to London. Now, a fair in London was no joke to the traders in those days. The journey was a dreary one, to begin with. The toll levied for the king in the market was heavy; but that, of course, was laid upon the price of the goods. The kings would not allow fairs to be held within a great distance, except at the places appointed by themselves; and no care was taken to shelter the trader from the weather; so that some dismal accounts of London fairs have come down to us. On one occasion, a Kendal clothier got wet – both he and his goods got wet – on his journey to London; and he stopped on the spot where since, as Stourbridge fair, more woollen goods have been sold than at any other place in Europe. His cloth being sadly wetted, he thought he had better sell it for what it would fetch, and go home. It fetched more than his London journey would have left him. He and some of his townsmen naturally came again, next year, with cloth in good condition. “So that,” says Fuller, “within a few years hither came a confluence of buyers, sellers, and lookers-on, which are the three principles of a fair.”

Perhaps this is not the only occasion of Kendal goods being intercepted in their passage to London. The packhorses which carried the “cottons" had to pass through districts where gentlemen of the road helped themselves to what they wanted from the stock of travellers. We are not referring to Robin Hood and his merry men, for they were cold in their graves before John Kempe set foot in England. The true date of Robin’s adventures is now found to be the reign of Edward the First. Whether he and his band would have been dressed in Kendal green, if there had been such an article in his day, we may have our own conjectures. As it was, the old ballad tells us that King Edward borrowed garments of “Lyncolne Grene” from the outlaw’s wardrobe. But Falstaff’s enemies – the three who set upon him behind – were “in Kendal green;” a fact which that accurate narrator vouched for, though it was so dark that he could not see his hand. Kendal green was worn by knights of the road, it is clear; and they probably got it, as they got whatever else they wanted – by helping themselves with it on the road. Midway between the times of Prince Harry and his poet, the manufacture had reached its highest fame. The chroniclers tell us how the goods were spread over all the land; a local tradition relates how country weavers multiplied in every hamlet among the hills, and how fulling-mills might be found on every favourable stream. But the time had arrived when the woollen yarn was to be vised for something else than Kendal cottons. We have mentioned the church at Candale. There is also a castle – (that is, the mere ruins of one). No one knows when it was built; but a young lady was born there, and brought up there, who was courted, by a King sadly given to fall in love. His wives had not been the happiest in the world; but the young lady married him – becoming the last queen of Henry the Eighth. This King had been accustomed, like other gentlemen, to wear cloth stockings; but during his reign silk stockings were heard of from abroad, and Henry much preferred knitted hose to the ordinary awkward cloth. It appears that the Kendal folk were quick in taking a hint; for soon after this, there was a knitting of woollen hose proceeding in thousands of dwellings. This may seem like exaggeration; but if the local records be true, the quantity of stockings sold weekly at the Kendal market, one hundred years ago, was about three thousand pairs. The hosiers used to set out on their rounds at stated times; going to the principal markets to give out worsted, and to receive the finished goods. This amount of knitting may be more easily believed when we find that the number of packhorses employed to carry out Kendal goods, before wagons were established, was above three hundred per week. One would like to know who, of all the people about the King when he came to Kendal Castle, examined his new silk stockings from Spain, and gave out the idea from which sprang all this industry, and all the comfort that it spread through the northern dales.

Meantime, the Kendal cottons were going beyond sea. They had lost favour at home before they were sent to clothe the negroes in Virginia. Raleigh’s tobacco was a fine thing for Kendal. The more tobacco, the more slaves; the more slaves, the more Kendal cloth wanted for their wear. It was the American war which stopped the manufacture at last. Before the war was over, Yorkshire had got the start in regard to quality, owing to the introduction of improved machinery. The “cottons” descended in dignity – being used at last for horse cloths, floorcloths, scouring cloths (sometimes called “dwiles”). At last, the manufacture was admitted on all hands to have sunk below that of the linsey-woolsey (mixed linen and woollen), which had been rising for some years. Cotton fabrics were as yet scarcely heard of; almost all the Welsh, and multitudes of the Scotch and English working classes, were dressed in linsey-woolsey – as indeed they are still. Between three and four hundred weavers are at this day employed in Kendal, in the manufacture of linsey-woolseys – all, of the old patterns that were preferred hundreds of years ago. The patterns and colours are various; more than could be supposed possible without inspecting the manufacturer’s pattern book; more than would be supposed possible in a material which is simply striped, and of which one pattern alone is required in any one locality. This local prevalence is the most curious feature of the case. The farmers’ wives who wear the blue and black stripe, would not look at a pattern of the blue and red, which is exclusively worn a dozen miles off; and the neighbours who wear red and white, have a new red and white petticoat every three years or so, and will not hear of the red and black, which are the boast of the next county. The Glasgow sale is large; but it would stop at once if the good wives could have only the pattern which is worn on the shores of the Solway; and on the two banks of the Mersey, the linsey-woolseys are as distinct in their colours as the plaids of the Highland clans – without the same reasons – with no other reason than antique custom. There is something bewitching in this fragment of permanency, in the midst of the changes which are going on in everything but costume. The manufacturers, however, are shaking their heads, fearing that the Exhibition has “done them harm,” by giving people the idea of new patterns. So the world marches on!

Change in abundance may be found side by side with this steady adherence to old custom. Railway rugs – a new article – are in great request, and the manufacture is increasing prodigiously. So is that of “trousering.” The checked, and striped, and mottled trousers, that we see everywhere, come chiefly from Kendal; and so does a large proportion of the horse cloths, and serge, and the checked and mottled woollen of which miners’ shirts are made. Mr Tremenheere’s Reports tell us sad stories of the colliers putting on clean Sunday shirts for six months together, without ever washing the skin beneath; and those who have acquaintance with Staffordshire colliers, know too well the spectacle of the throat plastered and ingrained with coal dust, which shows itself above the shirt collar; but, however it may be with the wearer, the shirt washes well; and there is so much comfort in it, that one cannot wonder that miners’ custom remains steady to Kendal fabrics, instead of wandering to Manchester.

The great manufacture of Kendal, however, is carpets; and this, though the wages of linsey-weavers are said to be a good deal higher. For the weaving of linseys, the wages rise from ten shillings to twenty-five shillings per week; whereas for carpet weaving, they vary from twelve shillings to twenty shillings. A carpet-weaver can earn, by such excessive labour as no man ought to undergo, as much as sixty shillings in a week, at piece-work; but the fair average may be stated at sixteen shillings, while the average of linsey-weaving is seventeen shillings and sixpence. But the linsey-weavers are employed for only eight months out of the twelve; whereas the carpet manufacture is steady. The collective woollen manufacture employs about a third of the population of Kendal. Happily, their wages are not their only resource. In this old-fashioned place, the land is not all appropriated; and almost every cottage has a garden – and a good-sized one. Men who have not gardens at home, look out for and obtain them, in order to grow all the vegetables that they want. Some hire land of the farmers, who are glad to let them have it for potato grounds, for the sake of the capital manuring and breaking up by the spade, which is thus obtained. The farmers lend the manure and the produce, and the tenants supply the seed, the manure (which they purchase from the town), and the cultivation; and the bargain answers well to both parties. The weavers have done something better still – they have clubbed their money to buy a field, and have divided it into allotments, which they cultivate with zeal and profit. It is scarcely necessary to say, after this, that the Kendal weavers are not the pallid, dwarfed, sharp-visaged order of men that one sees in Spitalfields and at Norwich – trained to one bodily action only, and moody and captious from ill-health, and from the want of general bodily exercise. Not satisfied with exercise of their limbs in the loom, and at the spade, some of them work their lungs as well – under prodigious difficulties. Amidst the clack and shock of twenty Jacquard looms in one apartment, they talk to each other from bench to bench. Those who can keep up conversation under such circumstances, certainly yield a strong testimony to the sociability of human nature, and may consider themselves qualified to address the noisiest mob that could be mustered – as far, at least, as concerns the power of the human lungs. It is pleasant to hear that these men have formed a cricket club – and pleasanter still to know that the morality of their class is far above that of the average manufacturing population. The morals and manners of the millworkers are superior to those of the weavers who do their work at home; but the homes may contrast advantageously with those of most other towns: and they might present a better aspect still, if the dwellings were better. They are sadly small and unwholesome.

Various reasons are assigned for the creditable social condition of the Kendal weavers: but it may be said, in a general way, that the clergy have been diligent; that two or three generations have had the benefit of Sunday schools; and that these influences have been aided by the superior means of health and comfort enjoyed by the labouring class. It may be added that there is here no apparent danger of the suffering from poverty, and from angry passions, which arises from strikes for wages. The Kendal weavers allow no interlopers, and permit no mischief-making between themselves and their employers. They formerly experienced just enough of the misery to guard themselves against a recurrence of it. Delegates from the south came among them, some years ago, and stirred up some discontent: but the Kendal men were intelligent enough, and few enough, to be able to study and manage their own case. They formed themselves into a sort of guild (without the name). They permit no one to enter it who has not served a due apprenticeship to the business; and, of course, the employers prefer those who have so qualified themselves. No straggler from north or south finds employment here, merely because he will work for low wages – or for any other reason than that he is really wanted. And, in consequence of some threat of trouble when agitators came from the south, the employers and their men arrived at an understanding, which has made all smooth for the last seven years. An average was struck between the highest wages known to be asked, and the lowest wages known to be given; and this has been, through all changes, the rate of wages ever since. A compensating fund is formed, by subscription of the men; and out of this a maintenance is provided for any surplus labour in seasons of slack demand. Such is the state of things in Kendal. Some may say that the steadiness of the demand, and the restriction of the numbers, and the intelligence of the people, make this an exceptional case: others may object that it cannot last. However that may be, such is the state of things in Kendal now. Those who can’t believe it had better go and see; and we can promise them that they shall see a very pleasant sight.

On entering Kendal from the north, one naturally looks upon the river from the first bridge. There, in the green meadows, some little way down the stream, stands a large grey-stone mill – built over the water. It is the Messrs Whitwell’s mill. Let us go and see what we can find there. We shall find there all the preparations for the carpet weaving, which is going on in their factory, in another part of the town. Let us see what those preparations are.

In a shed, there are heaps and stacks of wool as it comes in, rough and dirty. We shall see it better upstairs, where it is carried in heavy sacks, by means of a crane. Before we follow it there, we will look into the shed where the dyes are prepared. In the yard there are piles, and stacks, and logs of the oddest looking woods; some yellow and splintering; some red and scraggy; some purple and solid. There are barrels of salts, and carboys of acids and oils, and bundles of bark. Entering the sloppy shed, where red and yellow and purple puddles have to be avoided, we are stunned by the noise of wheels. There goes the great waterwheel, which tells us that the river is flowing under our feet; and creaking, rushing, and crushing, go several more wheels, set in motion by it. The rasping is the noisiest process. The wood to be rasped, is brought endwise to a wheel which is set with blades like those of a plane, and which, revolving, mince off the wood, which falls as it is cut, into an inclined trough, and finds its way to its receptacle below. A more awful looking machine is the granulating-mill. In a prodigious basin, a stout shaft is set upright, which revolves, carrying with it two vast millstones. These, being round, and set on edge, must, in being carried round, thoroughly stir and crush against the sides whatever the basin holds. We see, accordingly, the rasped wood becoming a scarlet paste. These reds, however, are rather a sore point with the manufacturer; for, in our climate, no pains and care, and no science that we yet possess, can enable us to compete with certain foreigners in our red dyes. The same materials, used in precisely the same manner, which produce a glorious depth of red in Turkey and at Nismes, and a dazzling carmine at Tunis, here come out flat and dull in comparison. It cannot be helped. We cannot “have our cake and eat it.” If we rejoice in our insular position, which keeps us out of many mischiefs, we must accept its fogs. We must be thankful for a stout national character and a lasting political freedom; though we must do without carmine and Turkey-red dyes.

The dyeing process is not done in this shed, but in another, which needs no particular description, as it consists simply in boiling the yarns in various decoctions. We may mention here, however, the method by which “tapestry carpets” are woven in a pattern, as it belongs to the dyeing department, rather than the weaving. We all know the streaked, and clouded, and shaded work that comes out in purses, comforters, and the like, from under the hands of knitting young ladies, or crochet-workers. We see that the silk or the worsted is party-coloured, and that it forms clouds or shades in the working. Just so is it with the tapestry carpets which have been in use for seven years past. The yarn is party-coloured; and it is dyed carefully, so that the red of the weft may return upon the red, to make a rose; and a green upon a former patch of green, to make a leaf – and so on. This is done by encrusting the portions of the yarn with their respective dyes, and cooking them in this crust. As might be anticipated, these dyes cannot be made so permanent as in the case of a batch of yarn boiled in one dye; consequently the tapestry carpets do not wear well.

Now let us mount, and see the wool at the top of the mill. What an immense room it is! – airy, though low. Here are women employed, and boys, and a tall young man in a pinafore. He is wise to wear a pinafore; for the wool is, of course, oily and dusty. Two or three fleeces are brought; and we ask again whether they can be fleeces of ordinary sheep – they are so very large. Yes; they are from Westmoreland sheep. The greater part of the wool used here is of home growth. If it be true that an ingenious man has discovered a method of waterproofing the fleeces of sheep without injuring the animal’s skin, and without interfering with its transpiration, it is a great discovery. We heard of it some time since, and we hope it is true. The great object was to obviate the rot in sheep, by preserving them from damp; but it is an important object, though secondary, to keep the wool from the plaster of tar which the shepherds smear all over it, to save the lungs of their bleating charge. The native wool is certainly horribly dirty; and, after fingering the long staple and the short staple, and the more silky and the more woolly wool (so to speak), we are glad to wash our hands. This black handful is from the Punjab; and so is that shiny, curly, white specimen. They have come down the Indus to Bombay, and thence to this nook among the hills. The dwellers in this nook are ready to take a great deal more of this Punjab wool, whenever we can agree with the inhabitants that they shall change their spears into shepherds’ crooks. The long staple, that is required for the warp of certain fabrics, comes from Russia. It used to come over in a very rough state; but it is growing cleaner, with time and experience. The wool from Buenos Aires is highly valued, and, if there could be an assured supply, the demand would be an important one; but that assurance of supply is exactly what is wanting. Sometimes the trade has been locked up for eighteen mouths together; and an inferior article is a less evil than such uncertainty.

Women and boys are sorting the wool here, pulling out the long staple and the short; throwing the finer fibre here, and the coarser there, ready for the operations below. The women earn about five shillings a week here, and the boys about three shillings.

The next destiny of the wool is to be “teased” by “the devil.” This “devil” is a tremendous affair to be teased by. It has cylinders set with crooked teeth, among which the wool is pulled this way and that, and torn with the most persevering malignity, until there is nothing left but shreds and patches. The wool is next “fanned” in a revolving machine, which sends the dust down through a grating, to a receptacle below. The carding, and combing, and the “scribbling,” which brings the wool out in a gauzy state, ready for spinning, and the spinning process, are so like the preparation of flax and cotton, as it may be seen in every mill, that there is no need to describe them here. There is, however, a “piecing” process, ingeniously managed by machinery, which was new to us, and very interesting, from its dispensing with the labour of children. As the proprietor observed to us, the little things can be at school while this machine is doing their work. By the revolution of a cylinder, lengths of wool are turned out horizontally, each falling into a tin channel; and being carried on, till there are about a dozen, when the dozen channels turn completely over, and spill the lengths upon a cloth beneath, so as that one end joins upon the other end of a length below. The join is then pressed, so as to unite by a cylinder beneath; and an interminable length is made. It seems to us that we have seldom seen anything more ingenious – more original in its ingenuity – than this process. It has been in use about three years.

After the spinning and reeling (women’s work chiefly), comes the washing and drying. Here again we find machinery doing what was, until lately, slow and toilsome human work. The hanks, in bundles, are carried, wet and hot, round wheels, and pressed under rollers in their passage, by which the dirt is squeezed out. They are thrown into vats, where boiling water is violently soused upon them: and the same process is gone through in another vat with cold water. Here we have the yarn clean, but wet. Formerly, it took two men with staves to twist the hanks in opposite directions, to wring out the moisture, which still left the yarn very wet. Now, there is a new machine, by which centrifugal force is made use of to send the water flying off, in proportion to the rapidity of the revolutions. By peeping into this wonderful box, we see the yarn carried madly round, faster than the eye can follow, and the moisture raining off in streams from the top and down the sides. When the rain ceases, the yarn is taken out – now merely damp.

While we are among the hot water, we inspect the foiling process. The coarse inferior cloths, which serve for saddle linings, &c., are cleansed in the fulling-mill; thrust into a box, open on one side, to be beaten by the “fulling-stocks,” – heavy hammers, which are raised by strong pegs fixed in a revolving wheel, and let fall, and raised again. It is a rough method of scouring, but most effectual for a fabric strong enough to bear it.

The yarn being dried and dyed, and dried again, must next be warped. The warping mill is an enormous reel; and the warper has to reel off from the bobbins whatever colours are wanted for the warp of a carpet. Suspended before his eyes is a bit of the carpet to be imitated. He picks out his greens, and his reds, and his yellows, and winds them all off together on his great reel, in readiness for the loom. If it be a new pattern of carpet that he is preparing for, he has a pretty picture before him, instead of a strip of carpet.

Who paints this pretty picture? The designer to the firm. Great is the intellectual exercise, severe the toil, keen the eyesight, required to make that pattern. The artist has been trained at the Government School of Design; and he has so much taste and invention that his employers declare that they can nowhere find, within the range of the carpet manufacture, patterns which can be compared with those furnished by this young man. He sits in his office, surrounded by portfolios of drawings – containing not only his educational exercises, but sheetsful of results of later observation. There are impressions from the various ferns of the neighbourhood, from the plane leaf and the ivy, and many another familiar growth. We see them reproduced in the carpets unrolled for us in the warehouse; and those who adjudged the Exhibition prizes had others before their eyes. The designer sketches his fancies; and, if he like them on paper, draws them carefully in little – on paper diced with little squares, where they look so pretty in black and white, that we should be in raptures with them if they had been ours. If still approved, they are next to be drawn in colours on paper diced with larger squares, containing little ones equivalent to stitches; – the same that patterns are produced on for ladies’ Berlin wool work. It is this which must be so severely trying to the eyes; for every stitch has to be attended to. As he works, the artist now and then tries his pattern by the mirror – two pieces of glass fixed at right angles, which, placed along two sides of his pattern, present him with an expanse – a repetition of his work – and enables him to judge of its effect.

The choicest designs have to be wrought in the highest kinds of carpets – Wilton and Brussels; and, for these, Jacquard looms are chiefly employed. The Jacquard looms are so familiar to all who know the Spitalfields or other silk manufacture, that there can be no need to describe them here: but we may mention, that at Messrs Whitwell’s mill may be seen a curious and recent invention – an invention of their own – called a “repeating machine,” for taking copies of the Jacquard pattern cards.

In carpets, as in other things, society is subject to “rages;” and when there is a pressing demand for a fresh pattern, cards are wanted for many looms. The machine before us multiplies the needed cards. Moveable pegs, of the size of the round holes in the cards, are selected, as it were, by the pattern card on one side of the machine, and deposited in order in a perforated frame. This frame is then transferred to the other side, and pressed down under a roller upon slips of card underneath, several of which can be thus perforated at a stroke. The piecing machine and this repeating machine were to us the most novel and interesting particulars of the whole manufacture.

And now everything is ready for the weaving. It is noon, and the people are ready for their dinners. We, who have travelled many miles to see this mill since breakfast, and have used our eyes diligently, and our ears more than is agreeable, are ready for luncheon, though it is hardly past noon. We agree to suspend operations for an hour or two, and go to the factory when the workers have returned from dinner.

We had no idea that we should find anything picturesque in a carpet factory: but, on entering any one of the long rooms, we certainly felt a wish that an artist had been with us, to represent things just as we saw them. All along both sides of a long room are looms, placed as close as liberty of weaving will allow – so close, that a weaver has to stop his work while a party of three steps in to observe the feats of his neighbour. The tricks of the light, falling from the high windows upon the posts and beams of the looms, are striking; and so are the gay colours of the webs, shining out here and there – and so are the characteristic outlines of the men themselves; but, much more so, are the figures of the children, one of whom sits lowly at the end of each loom, winding the spools for the shuttle. Each child has its little reel, and works beside its father, or other employer. The youngest looking boy we spoke to was nine, and few of the girls could have been much older. All looked neat and healthy; and the work is light enough. They earn about three shillings per week, each.

The most responsible work done by children here, and that which requires the most diligent attention, is that of the boy who attends the Jacquard loom in which a Brussels or Wilton carpet is woven. The weaver has enough to do to mind his weft, without being charged with the other management of the loom. So an intelligent boy does three or four things in succession (with a moment’s rest between), which seemed to us to make up a great day’s work, and for which he is paid three shillings and sixpence per week. He pulls the cord by which, in Jacquard looms, the threads of the warp are raised or depressed as they are wanted. The weaver having passed his fingers between the raised and depressed threads, to make sure that they are clear of each other, the boy slides in a polished piece of wood, thin and broad (called the “sword”), by which, when turned on its side, the upper and under series of threads are kept well apart, and the weaver inserts his “wire” – a steel skewer, as long (from the head) as the carpet is wide. The shuttle is now thrown, and the yarn which encloses the wires of course forms loops when the wires are withdrawn. There is something almost painful in seeing by how gradual and laborious a process every hair’s-breadth of the carpets we tread upon so carelessly, is made. We buy a good Brussels carpet at four shillings and sixpence a yard, or a Wilton (called Velvet) at five shillings and sixpence, and we do not think of the wool coming down the Indus to Bombay; nor of the dyes from the Pacific; nor of the linen thread, sown, grown, and prepared near Belfast; nor of the mill processes; nor of this weaver, who has to give his mind to every cast of the shuttle; nor of this boy, who is now heaving at the cord – now thrusting in his “sword,” and turning, and withdrawing it – for every new loop of the whole fabric. But, what an amount of human diligence it is, to purchase at the rate of four or five shillings a yard!

The Velvet or Wilton carpets are woven much in the same way. The difference is, that the “wires,” instead of being of steel, and round, are of brass, and angular, with a groove along one of the sides. This groove is indicated to the touch of the weaver by the handle of the wire being open in a line with the groove. The wire is inserted with the grooved edge uppermost; and when the weaver has covered a few wires, he runs his knife along the groove of the hindmost, cutting the loops; and, of course, giving the pile which causes the fabric to be called Velvet.

One man in this establishment wove the rug, with a dog from Landseer for the pattern, which won a prize at the Exhibition. It is of the fabric called “finger rugs,” from the yarn being dexterously inserted by the fingers; and, when well fastened in by a weft of linen thread, snipped off with shears, and left soft and velvety. Very soft are the eyes and muzzle of this prize dog, and very tufty are his black spots. To be sure, we do not think him a very good subject for a rug, as we do not habitually tread upon dogs; but then the same might be said of a large proportion of the carpets bought by people who do not suppose themselves deficient in taste.

Of one hundred and twenty looms, one sixth may be employed in weaving Brussels carpets, and about eighty in weaving Kidderminster or Scotch carpets. A good deal of Dutch carpeting is also made for landings and passages, and for some bedrooms. It is the simplest sort of all, with small variety of patterns, but excellent for wear, and agreeable from its look of homely neatness and comfort. There is a “barrel loom,” invented by a workman of Messrs Whitwell’s, which is worth notice from its ingenuity, though it cannot compete with the Jacquard loom. It looks, in its place aloft, much like the apparatus of a shower bath. Its barrel is set with wires, like those of a barrel organ, by which certain threads of the warp are lifted up and held apart from others, while the shuttle is thrown. Of other kinds of loom, it would be merely puzzling to speak; or we could tell of more.

Four engineers are retained by this establishment; and it takes about the half of the time of one of them to keep the looms in order.

When the fabric comes from the looms, it has still to pass under the eye and hand of a woman, whose business it is to see that no knots or other blemishes remain visible. Having been thus revised and “picked,” the carpet is wound on a roller, in a machine,, which indicates its precise length at the same time: and then it is tacked with pack-thread, ticketed, and (unless made to order from a distance) deposited on the shelves of the warehouse. If it have to travel, it is packed in a hydraulic press, which reduces it to the smallest compass.

Such is a history of the trouble Kendal takes to give us an easy and pleasant footing in our homes. All honour to the art, and prosperity to the artists!

The Bobbin Mill

at Ambleside

Household Words, Volume 4, page 224

October is the time for the late traveller in the Lake District to wonder why little parties of men are roaming at midday on the hillsides, leaving their business below just as the daylight hours are becoming precious. October is the time for residents in the district to look up anxiously to these hillsides, and to peep into the recesses of the mountains, to see what woods are to fall this year under the axe. October is the time when the gentleman checks his horse under the great sycamore in the village, or before the market cross in the little towns, and reads, over the heads of the group on foot, the handbills, nailed up, or stuck on, which tell what lots of coppice wood are on view for sale during the latter days of the month. October is the time when the land agent, well-booted, makes his way through moss, bog, brambles, and underwood, into every corner of certain plantations, followed by a labourer, who carries a great pot of white or red paint, and a brush, wherewith he marks the wood that is doomed. October is the time when the cooper, and the hooper, and the field carpenter, and the bobbin maker, come up from town and village to the mountain side, to inspect the timber and coppice that are to be sold. These are the little parties that the late tourist watches from below. They are not leaving their business in the shortening days. They come here in the course of business, to measure, and inspect, and calculate, and make up their minds how high to go, in bidding on the auction day. It does not follow that they have no pleasure, because they come upon business. It is probable that the weather is delicious. It usually is so towards the end of October, in this region. The air is probably so still that the wet is heard to drop before the intruders reach the hazels, and the acorn to fall as they pass the larger oaks. The bulrush is as still on the brink of the tarn, as the grey rock which juts into it; and both are reflected, sharp and clear, by waters which are not disturbed by the wing of fly above, or the fin of fish from below.

In that looking glass, too, may perhaps be seen the first party of wild swans, arriving in good time from the north, and now looking down from their lofty flight, to see where they will alight, and which of these mountain pools has the best promise of withered reeds and rushes for the nest, with seeds and roots and water insects for food. The sandpipers, which were running about so busily a month ago, are gone; but the stonechat is flitting among the bushes, and click-clicking amidst the silence.

The season has been fine here: it must have been fine, by the quantity of foliage left in the woods. Here and there a dead branch hangs down, torn by the equinoctial winds; but the leaves hang thick: not only the red leaves of the oak, but the spotted leaves of the sycamore, and the lemon-coloured leaves of the birch. The season has been a fine one here; what has it been in Alabama and South Carolina? That is the question which most nearly concerns the bobbin makers of this party. Their purchases of these coppices depend mainly on whether the cotton crop in America has been a good or a deficient one. It is of some importance to them whether the mulberries have flourished in Italy and India; and whether the flax has ripened well in Ireland; and whether the farmers at home are caring most about their sheep or their corn; but the grand question is, what the season has been in the cotton growing states of America. If Manchester is in good spirits, these bobbin makers on the mountain may make up their minds to pay as high for coppice as they ever do, even to eighteen pounds per acre. If Manchester is low-spirited, they may even refuse to go beyond four pounds per acre. They may resolve to buy, each for himself, ten thousand or twelve thousand feet; or to buy only enough to hold on, until better news shall come to Manchester from over the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps there may be among the bobbin makers one as sure of a demand for his article as the coopers and hoopers. There are powder mills at Elter Water; and, as firearms are not out of use yet (nor likely to be), charcoal is wanted; and there is a viewer from the powder mills out on the hills today.

The explorers have examined the mountain ash, and the birch, in the more exposed situations. They now come down among the ash and beech groves; and leap from tuft to tuft in the bogs, after the alder and the willow; and look well to the hazel, and the aspiring sycamore, in the sheltered recesses. The wood is, for the most part, of from fourteen to sixteen years’ growth; though some may be of twenty. Thus, the excursion is to some new place, every October, for nearly twenty years – the distance, however, is seldom more than twenty miles from any one man’s home.

The wood will need a year’s seasoning in the sheds of the bobbin mill; and by that time the prospects of trade may have changed; but it comes to the same thing as if this growing wood were to be used immediately; for there is last year’s purchase stored up at home, and more or less of it may be used this year, or left over for next.

In passing from wood to wood, our party winds through streams, and round lakes of arable lands, to reach the islands and promontories of coppice which are scattered between. It is curious that the seasons in America, and the spirits of the Manchester people, should affect the scenery of the Lake District; but it is so. Hundreds of years ago the whole region was covered with wood, except where the Romans made clearings, for a camp here, and a road there. The Saxons afterwards settled on their traces. When the Normans came, and their monks established themselves at Furness, they sent out their husbandmen and herdsmen to till the ground, and to pasture their flocks, farther and farther in the dales, and higher and higher up the hillsides, building walls as they went, until the sunshine was let in over wide tracts, and the forest-like look of the region nearly disappeared. Yet, when Wordsworth was young, some old people at Wythburn (about ten miles on the Keswick road, under Helvellyn) told him of the time when the squirrel could go from Wythburn to Keswick on the tops of the trees, without touching the ground. In those days, the people grew their own flax or hemp, and their own wool; and the spinning and weaving were done at home; and itinerant tailors went their rounds through the district, staying at the farmhouses to make up the clothes. It did not occur to any one then (about a hundred years ago) that the woods of the district would be required to make this matter of popular clothing easier to everybody. Hence the felling went on too fast. Many patches of holly and ash were preserved within the higher enclosures, to feed the cattle and sheep, with the sprouts, where no other pasturage could be obtained; but large tracts of rocky soil were laid bare, which had better have remained clothed with wood. Some improvement in the process of weaving had before this taken place. The Kays, father and son, of Bury, in Lancashire, had invented the flying shuttle and the dropbox, by which much time was saved to the weaver, and a wider cloth could be produced by one pair of hands. But there was not thread enough or yarn enough, spun, to keep the shuttle going so fast as was wanted. The weaver had to go about something else, while waiting for the spinners; yet, in thousands of cottages, the wheel was whirring from morning until night, every day but Sundays.

This was a state of things which could not last; for, in regard to the arts of life, a great want is sure to be soon met with a remedy. Several ingenious men invented spinning machines, during the latter half of the last century, and before its close, it was shown that one thousand threads could be spun by one pair of hands. Instead of the packhorse toiling along the mountain path, which was then the only way open from Kendal to Whitehaven, there might now be seen the carrier’s wagon, winding round the hills on a broad road, bringing the new cotton fabrics to the “statesmen’s” dwellings, but still carrying away the “homespun,” in which the Westmoreland folks were as yet dressed. The “single thread” wheels were destined to whirr for some time longer; but a new source of profit was opening to those who held land. There was a call for an infinity of bobbins for the new spinning machines; and the proprietors of bobbin mills came from a distance to buy up the coppices of the district. At first, the effect of this new demand was to lay the hillsides barer than ever; but, as the wood grew again, and its owners saw that the demand was likely to be a lasting one, they began to foster their woods, and to plant anew on soil which could not grow anything more immediately profitable. They arranged a succession of coppices, so as to render it feasible to sell to the axe one after another, as it reached the age of from fifteen to twenty-one years. Thus, with every extension of the growth of cotton abroad, and of its manufacture at home, there has been a new cherishing of coppice in the Lake District; and much is the beauty of the scenery enhanced by this, and very valuable is the shelter given to flocks, and to human habitations, and to the tilled lands which lie between the woods.

There are myriads of bobbins sent from the neighbourhood of Windermere, all over Lancashire and Yorkshire, and into Scotland and Ireland, and to the United States, and our own colonies, and many to busy Belgium, where the sound of the loom is heard in clusters of towns. The bobbin mills round Windermere are, five mills (belonging to three establishments) at Stavely; one at Troutbeck; one at Hawkshead; one at Skelwith; and one at Ambleside; all, probably, visible at once from the top of Wansfell. That Ambleside mill was a very humble affair a quarter of a century ago. Let us see what may be found there now.

The viewers have made up their minds about some tracts of coppice on the sides of Wansfell, and we see by their looks that before the primroses and wood anemones cover the ground, in some dearly loved dells, every sheltering twig will be gone, and only stumps left. The axe will soon be calling out the echoes from the rocks above, and then we shall see piles of faggots, and stacks of bark, awaiting the wains which will come clinking and clanging and creaking along the wintry road. While the viewers go down one side of the mountains to see such portions of Bishop Watson’s woods, at Calgarth, as are on sale this year, we will go down the other to Horrox’s mill at Ambleside.

Down we go, among the red ferns and green mosses, and through many a boggy spot, to the road, and within hearing of the Stock – the beck (brook) which scampers down the hollow between Wansfell and the road to Patterdale. There lies Ambleside, nestling at the base of the mountain – a mile inland from the lake; and between us and Ambleside is the exquisite waterfall, called Stockghyll Force. Grander cataracts there may be – scarcely a more beautiful one. A breast of rock, feathered with wood, divides the stream exactly in two – and each current takes two leaps; so that the symmetry of the picture is singular. The two lesser falls above, and the two greater below, answer to each other, as by the nicest art; yet the ravine is as wild as if nobody had been here since the old Briton and the wolf hid themselves together from the Romans who were making a camp at Ambleside, and a road along the ridge of the Troutbeck hills. Along the verge of the ravine and of the woods we go down, catching glimpses through the foliage of white foam, of green and brown stones, of clear gushes of water below, until we see a humble grey roof before us, and observe that the woods are opening, and that the waters are smooth as the oily flow of Niagara above Table Rock – smooth, but rapid, as we see by a red and yellow leaf here and there. Those leaves danced merrily down from the bough, and now they are sailing joyously into the midst of a prodigious hubbub. They are close upon the Weir; and we are close upon the old mill, and the great brown waterwheel – a very dark brown, but shedding diamonds when touched by the sun; and now, in its wet sheen, reflecting the emerald colour of the opposite slope of the dell.

This is not much like visiting Birmingham or Manchester manufactories. For the muddy canal, we have a cataract of water “softer than rainwater,” the proprietor assures us, and clear as starlight. The very sight of it, slipping over the Weir, and drowning the stones below, makes one thirsty. Instead of the coiling smoke, we have the balancing gossamer above the stream. The stir from the fall shakes, but spares it. Instead of attic windows opposite, we have the old rookery. The rooks are our spies and gossips here; and they and the babbling waters seem to be telling tales against each other, all the year round. The rooks never fail, and the noise never fails. We asked the proprietor whether he had ever to complain of want of water. “Very rarely, indeed,” said he. “It is scant only in very hot and dry summers, and has not been so for some years now.” “And the noise; is it always like this?” Does he live in the sound of a cataract? O yes! and he never knows it, unless reminded of it. And perhaps his men do not know what an infernal din they are living in, with those circular saws, and the whirring of a multitude of wheels and lathes. We begin to shrink from it, though we have as yet got no further than the old mill. We just look into it as we pass, and find it a mere room, packed now with materials. The path which winds up into the wood was the old road to the mill; and this little yard held all the timber.

It is very different now. We pass and examine large stacks of timber and poles – beech, ash, mountain ash, sycamore, “seal” (sallow), hazel, birch, and alder. The greater part is stacked under slated roofs; but some piles stand uncovered at present. There is timber thick enough to make posts; and much of fourteen years’ growth – as large as a stout man’s leg – which is split and dressed into rails. While the circular saws and the lathes are at work, it is as well to make other things, besides bobbins; so we observe a new and much improved kind of mangle in the old mill; and besides the posts and rails for fences, we see the legs of bedsteads lying about, and other neat pieces of turnery.

The knots of the stouter wood are sliced off before the splitting; and the peeling is done on the premises, while the wood is fresh. The peel serves for fuel; the baker buys for his ovens the chips and dust which lie almost knee-deep everywhere within the mill. As for the corners, and odds and ends of the wood, they are sold for “kindling” to the neighbours round.

The circular saws are from Sheffield. The rest of the machinery is home-made. Down in a chamber below the rest of the mill, are the cogwheels, which are turned by the great waterwheel. There they whirl, smoothly, steadily; and between, and under them, may be seen again the clear gushing waters, and green and grey rocks; and over them the sunny wood, where the latest bees are swinging in the last blossoms of the year. Mr Horrox’s house is completely covered with ivy; and the fuchsia and China-rose blossom beside the door.

We may seem to dwell long on the natural features of the place; but there is an unspeakable charm in seeing the commonest manufacturing toil cheered and brightened by the presence of that antique and ever young beauty, who is supposed to be mournfully displaced by the establishment of the arts of life. We would fain convey some sense of this charm to our readers. We are thankful to be able to add, that there is here no drawback from the vice which is the curse of the district, as of too many rural neighbourhoods. The one great pain to the inhabitants of the exquisite valley in which Ambleside lies, is the intemperance of the people. It is not quite so bad as it was; but still, the early walker, who begins the winter day by a walk under the stars, when the last fragment of the gibbous moon hangs over Wansfell, is but too likely to meet the labourer staggering tipsy to his work. In the summer twilight, or the repose of Sunday afternoon, when the mind should be awake and enjoying the interval from bodily labour, too many two legged brutes may be seen, who have abdicated their prerogative of reason, and are courting disease and early death from drink, amidst a scene and an air which should make men wise and long-lived. It is pretty sure that no such sinner belongs to this mill. It is known that Mr Horrox will employ none such. From the moment that a man is found to have been drunk, he must come no more there. And this is an important discouragement of vice; for nine-and-twenty men and boys (only eight boys) are employed at the mill; and that is a number which tells upon so small a population as the people of Ambleside.

They are paid by the gross of bobbins; and they earn from fourteen shillings to twenty-three shillings a week, at an average of fourpence per gross. There must be a change soon. The “thread-men,” (spinners of sewing cotton) in manufacturing towns, have new machinery, by which bobbins can be produced at five farthings, which here cost fourpence halfpenny. There have been contentions and strikes in those towns, ending, as strikes on account of machinery always do: and the change must reach this place in natural course.

And now for the process. The wood being sorted – some sold in blocks to the turners at so much per solid foot, and poles to the hoopers by the thousand (six score to the hundred) – the tree stem to be wrought is brought to the circular saw. It is first cut across into blocks. Then, the block is split into slices. A man and boy sit opposite each other, at each end of the saw. The man applies the block, and pushes it from him some way; and the boy finishes the severance by drawing it towards him; – their fingers being thus kept out of danger. No accidents of consequence have happened at this mill; but, elsewhere, it has been no uncommon thing for a careless workman to have all the fingers of one hand sawn off across the middle. The wood is sliced into squares, about a quarter of an inch thick, and of different sizes, according to the sort of bobbin, of which these slices are to make the ends. The squares are baked, dry as a brown crust, in an outhouse which has an iron floor, heated by a furnace beneath. On this floor the squares are laid in rows, thick and close, and shut in until they are done enough. After they are cool, they are bored with a round hole in the middle, which is to receive the shank. Two slices are glued together – the corners of one crossing the sides of the other, that the grain may cross, and obviate fracture. One has a smaller hole than the other, that the end of the shank may fit in more securely. When glued, the crosspieces are strung on a round iron bar, and screwed tight upon each other, to prevent warping. While they are thus drying, the shank is preparing.

The shank is made round, in the lathe. It has next to be bored. This is done by boys, who simply drive the end against the steel borer which is turned by machinery. In an instant of time, the borer makes its way through to the inner end. The shank goes again to the lathe, to be made a little smaller at each end, in order to fit into the holes in the crosspieces. Next, the end and the shank are to be united. A little boy, sitting at a glue pot, holds a dauber (as we may call it), which is made of two rings, answering to the margins of the two holes in the crosspieces. He dabs these holes with glue, and hands the pieces to a man at his elbow, who inserts the end of the shank, and puts it in the way of a sharp rap from a driven hammer, which fixes it in its place. When both ends are thus glued on, we have a bobbin; but with ends that are square, large, and rough. The bobbin goes to a lathe, where, in turning, it is met by a stout, three-sided sharp tooth or blade, which, quicker than the eye can follow, cuts off the corners, and leaves a bobbin, perfect in shape. It is still rough, however; and it must be finished in the lathe; – rounded at the edges, and smoothed, and, if necessary, grooved.

Some bobbins, wanted for certain kinds of spinning, must have their bore lined with a smoother substance than the ordinary wood. When they are thus lined, they are said to be “bushed.” Some are “bushed” with metal; some with box-wood. In some, the “bush” goes only part of the way through the bore; in others, the whole way. When the lining is of box, the bobbin and the “bush” are fluted, in order to fit more firmly into each other. All who have examined bobbins may remember that a circle of lighter or darker wood appears round the bore. This is the “bush."

Now we have bobbins before us of various shapes and sizes; some for silk; some for flax; some for wool, as well as the myriads for cotton; and here are also parts of the shuttle of the Manchester weaver. Does anything remain to be done? Yes; some buyers like to have their bobbins dyed; some prefer them black; some, oak colour; some, yellow. The black dye is obtained from logwood and from copperas; the oak from catechu and fustic; and the yellow from fustic, with a little alum. The dye certainly gives a finished appearance to the bobbins; and ladies know that, when buying sewing cotton. The eye is drawn towards the neatness of black or oak-coloured bobbins, in preference to the undyed – other things being equal. The dyeing is done by boiling the bobbins in coppers, with the chemical materials.

We were tempted to follow the faggots of poles down to the hooper’s, to see what was doing there. The new world spirit, which is found wherever machinery is whirling, has not made its way yet into the hoopers’ sheds in Ambleside. Here is no head-splitting din – no cloud of wood dust, which visibly fills the nostrils of the turners at the lathe, and makes the visitor inquire about diseases of the lungs. Here, half a dozen men and boys are at work, with no newer machinery than “the horse,” “the mare,” “the dog,” and the hoop. Do our readers wonder how the horse, the mare, and the dog can help in making hoops? The answer is, these are nicknames, given to the sort of bench on which the workman sits, in different stages of hoop making. To cleave the poles, the man sits on a raised log, “the horse,” and simply splits the unpeeled wood into two or four pieces, with an axe. These pieces are taken possession of by the boy on “the mare,” who, by a treadle, raises or lets fall a block, to hold fast his strip of wood, which he thins and equalises with a two-handled knife, to render it smooth, and pliable for the “bending” machine. This machine consists simply of a pair of rollers turned by a cogwheel and a winch: the strip of wood being drawn out between the rollers.

Next, the strips have to be made into hoops. A man who sits in the middle of the shed, with a stout model hoop on his knees, bends the strip round within the model, takes it out, and ties it with string, and then bends within it another and another strip, (tying none but the first), until he has made a compact mass of hooping. Nothing can well be slower, or more primitive.

Still, the business is a profitable one. Hoops are sent from Ambleside over the far parts of the globe. The very largest go to Liverpool. These sell for about five pounds per thousand (six score to the hundred). In seasons when copses are scarce, or when the demand for casks is great, coopers have given as much as nine or ten pounds per thousand for hoops. This cannot, however, go on. If it be true that, by new machinery, a porter barrel can be made complete, from the tree to the heading, in five minutes, it cannot be that the slow and clumsy method of fashioning hoops by hand can remain, even in the old-fashioned Lake District.

We may soon be having some instrument which will rain hoops as a firework gives out sparks, or as rings of luminous vapour ascend from the chemical lecturer’s magic wine glass. Meanwhile, “the horse,” “the mare,” and “the dog,” with their stiff backs and wooden heads, look as if they did not mean to budge, and had never heard of change.

What Christmas is

in Country Places

Household Words, Volume 4, page 608,

Christmas issue

If we want to see the good old Christmas – the traditional Christmas – of old England, we must look for it in the country. There are lasting reasons why the keeping of Christmas cannot change in the country as it may in towns. The seasons themselves ordain the festival. The close of the year is an interval of leisure in agricultural regions; the only interval of complete leisure in the year; and all influences and opportunities concur to make it a season of holiday and festivity. If the weather is what it ought to be at that time, the autumn crops are in the ground; and the springing wheat is safely covered up with snow. Everything is done for the soil that can be done at present; and as for the clearing and trimming and repairing, all that can be looked to in the after part of the winter; and the planting is safe if done before Candlemas. The plashing of hedges, and cleaning of ditches, and trimming of lanes, and mending of roads, can be got through between Twelfth Night and the early spring ploughing; and a fortnight may well be given to jollity, and complete change.

Such a holiday requires a good deal of preparation: so Christmas is, in this way also, a more weighty affair in the rural districts than elsewhere. The strong beer must be brewed. The pigs must be killed weeks before; the lard is wanted; the bacon has to be cured; the hams will be in request; and, if brawn is sent to the towns, it must be ready before the children come home for the holidays. Then, there is the fattening of the turkeys and geese to be attended to; a score or two of them to be sent to London, and perhaps half a dozen to be enjoyed at home. When the gentleman, or the farmer, or the country shopkeeper, goes to the great town for his happy boys and girls, he has a good deal of shopping to do. Besides carrying a note to the haberdasher, and ordering coffee, tea, dried fruit, and spices, he must remember not to forget the packs of cards that will be wanted for loo and whist. Perhaps he carries a secret order for fiddlestrings from a neighbour who is practising his part in good time.

There is one order of persons in the country to whom the month of December is any thing but a holiday season – the cooks. Don’t tell us of town cooks in the same breath! It is really overpowering to the mind to think what the country cooks have to attend to. The goose pie, alone, is an achievement to be complacent about; even the most ordinary goose pie; still more, a superior one, with a whole goose in the middle, and another cut up and laid round; with a fowl or two, and a pheasant or two, and a few larks put into odd corners; and the top, all shiny with white of egg, figured over with leaves of pastry, and tendrils and crinkle-crankles, with a bunch of the more delicate bird feet standing up in the middle. The oven is the cook’s child and slave; the great concern of her life, at this season. She pets it, she humours it, she scolds it, and she works it without rest. Before daylight she is at it – baking her oat bread; that bread which requires such perfect behaviour on the part of the oven! Long lines of oatcakes hang overhead, to grow crisp before breakfast; and these are to be put away when crisp, to make room for others; for she can hardly make too much. After breakfast, and all day, she is making and baking meat pies, mince pies, sausage rolls, fruit pies, and cakes of all shapes, sizes, and colours. And at night, when she can scarcely stand for fatigue, she “banks” the oven fire, and puts in the great jar of stock for the soups, that the drawing may go on, from all sorts of savoury odds and ends, while everything but the drowsy fire is asleep. She wishes the dear little lasses would not come messing and fussing about, making gingerbread and cheesecakes. She would rather do it herself, than have them in her way. But she has not the heart to tell them so. On the contrary, she gives them ginger, and cuts the citron peel bountifully for them; hoping, the while, that the weather will be fine enough for them to go into the woods with their brothers for holly and ivy. Meantime, the dairy woman says, (what she declares every Christmas,) that she never saw such a demand for cream and butter; and that, before Twelfth Night, there will be none. And how, at that season, can she supply eggs by scores, as she is expected to do? The gingerbread baked, the rosiest apples picked out from their straw in the apple closet, the cats, and dogs, and canary birds, played with and fed, the little lasses run out to see what the boys are about.

The woodmen want something else than green to dress the house with. They are looking for the thickest, and hardest, and knottiest block of wood they can find, that will go into the kitchen chimney. A gnarled stump of elm will serve their purpose best; and they trim it into a size to send home. They fancy that their holiday is to last as long as this log remains; and they are satisfied that it will be uncommonly difficult to burn up this one. This done, one of them proceeds with the boys and girls to the copses where the hollies are thickest; and by carrying his billhook, he saves a vast deal of destruction by rending and tearing. The poor little birds, which make the hollies so many aviaries in winter, coming to feed on the berries, and to pop in among the shining leaves for shelter, are sadly scared, and out they flit on all sides, and away to the great oak, where nobody will follow them. For, alas! there is no real mistletoe now. There is to be something so called hung from the middle of the kitchen ceiling, that the lads and lasses may snatch kisses and have their fun; but it will have no white berries, and no Druidical dignity about it. It will be merely a bush of evergreen, called by some a mistletoe, and by others the Bob, which is supposed to be a corruption of “bough.” When all the party have got their faggots tied up, and strung over their shoulders, and buttonholes, hats, and bonnets stuck with sprigs, and gay with berries, it is time they were going home; for there is a vast deal to be done this Christmas Eve, and the sunshine is already between the hills, in soft yellow gushes, and not on them.

A vast deal there is to be done; and especially if there is any village near. First, there is to dress the house with green; and then to go and help to adorn the church. The Bob must not be hung up till tomorrow: but every door has a branch over it; and the leads of the latticed windows are stuck with sprigs; and every picture frame, and looking glass, and candlestick is garnished. Any “scraps” (very young children) who are too small to help, pick up scattered holly leaves, and, being not allowed to go upon the rug, beg somebody to throw them into the fire; whence ensues a series of cracklings, and sputtering blazes, and lighting up of wide open eyes. In the midst of this – hark! is not that the church bell? The boys go out to listen, and report that it is so – the “Christmas deal” (or dole) is about to begin; so, off go all who are able, up to the church.

It is very cold there, and dim, and dreary, in spite of the candles, and the kindness, and other good things that are collected there. By the time the bell has ceased to clang, there are a few gentlemen there, and a number of widows, and aged men, and orphan children. There are piles of blankets; and bits of paper, which are orders for coals. One gentleman has sent a bag of silver money; and another, two or three sheep, cut up ready for cooking; and another, a great pile of loaves. The boys run and bring down a ladder to dress the pillars; and scuffle in the galleries; and venture into the pulpit, under pretence of dressing the church. When the dole is done and the poor people gone, the doors are closed; and, if the boys remain, they must be quiet; for the organist and the singers are going to rehearse the anthem that is to be sung tomorrow. If the boys are not quiet, they are turned out.

There is plenty of bustle in the village. The magistrates are in the long room of the inn, settling justice business. The inn looks as if it were illuminated. The waiters are seen to glide across the hall; and on the steps are the old constable, and the new rural policeman, and the tax collector, and the postman. It is so cold that something steaming hot will soon be brought for them to drink; and the poor postman will be taken on his weak side. Christmas is a trying season to him, with his weak head, and his popularity, and his Christmas boxes, and his constant liability to be reported. Cold as it is, there are women flitting about; or from the grocer’s shop, and all bringing away the same things. The grocers give away, this night, to their regular customers, a good mould candle each, and a nutmeg. This is because the women must be up by candlelight tomorrow, to make something that is to be spiced with nutmeg. So a good number of women pass by with a candle and a nutmeg; and some, with a bottle or pitcher, come up the steps, and go to the bar for some rum. But the clock strikes supper time, and away go the boys home.

Somebody wonders at supper whether the true oval mince pie is really meant to be in the form of a certain manger; and its contents to signify the gifts, various and rich, brought by the Magi to that manger. And while the little ones are staring at this news, somebody else observes that it was a pretty idea of the old pagans, in our island, of dressing up their houses with evergreens, that there might be a warm retreat for the spirits of the woods in times of frost and bitter winter storms. Some child peeps timidly up at the biggest branch in the room, and fancies what it would be to see some sprite sitting under a leaf, or dancing along a spray. When supper is done, and the youngest are gone to bed, having been told not to be surprised if they should hear the stars singing in the night, the rest of the party turn to the fire, and begin to roast their chestnuts in the shovel, and to heat the elderwine in the old-fashioned saucepan, silvered inside. One absent boy, staring at the fire, starts when his father offers him a chestnut for his thoughts. He hesitates, but his curiosity is vivid, and he braves all the consequences of saying what he is thinking about. He wonders whether he might, just for once – just for this once – go to the stalls when midnight has struck, and see whether the oxen are kneeling. He has heard, and perhaps read, that the oxen kneeled, on the first Christmas Day, and kept the manger warm with their breath; and that all oxen still kneel in their stalls when Christmas Day comes in. Father and mother exchange a quick glance of agreement to take this seriously; and they explain that there is now so much uncertainty, since the New Style of reckoning the days of the year was introduced, that the oxen cannot be depended on; and it is not worth while to be out of bed at midnight for the chance. Some say the oxen kneel punctually when Old Christmas comes in; and if so, they will not do it tonight.

This is not the quietest night of the year; even if nobody visits the oxen. Soon after all are settled to sleep, sounds arise which thrill through some who are half-awakened by them, and then, remembering something about the stars singing, the children rouse themselves, and lie, with open eyes and feeling that Christmas morning has come. They must soon, one would think, give up the star theory; for the music is only two fiddles, or a fiddle and clarionet; or, possibly, a fiddle and drum, with a voice or two, which can hardly be likened to that of the spheres. The voices sing, “While shepherds watch’d their flocks by night;” and then – marvellously enough – single out this family of all the families on the earth, to bless with the good wishes of the season. They certainly are wishing to master and mistress and all the young ladies and gentlemen, “good morning,” and “a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.” Before this celestial mystery is solved, and before the distant twang of the fiddle is quite out of hearing, the celestial mystery of sleep enwraps the other, and lays it to rest until the morrow. The boys – the elder ones – meant to keep awake; first, for the Waits, and afterwards to determine for themselves whether the cock crows all night on Christmas Eve, to keep all hurtful things from walking the earth. When the Waits are gone, they just remember that any night, between this and Old Christmas, will do for the cock, which is said to defy evil spirits in this manner for the whole of that season. Which the boys are very glad to remember; for they are excessively sleepy; so off they go into the land of dreams.

It is now past two; and at three the maids must be up. Christmas morning is the one, of all the year, when, in the North of England especially, families make a point of meeting, and it must be at the breakfast table. In every house, far and near, where there is fuel and flour, and a few pence to buy currants, there are cakes making, which everybody must eat of; cakes of pastry, with currants between the layers. The grocer has given the nutmeg; and those who can afford it, add rum, and other dainties. The ladies are up betimes, to iet out the best candlesticks, to garnish the table, to make the coffee, and to prepare a welcome for all who claim a seat. The infant in arms must be there, as seven o’clock strikes. Any married brother or sister, living within reach, must be there, with the whole family train. Long before sunrise, there they sit, in the glow of the fire and the glitter of candles, chatting and laughing, and exchanging good wishes.

In due time, the church bell calls the flock of worshippers from over hill, and down dale, and along commons, and across fields: and presently they are seen coming, all in their best – the majority probably saying the same thing – that, somehow, it seems always to be fine on Christmas Day. Then, one may reckon up the exceptions he remembers; and another may tell of different sorts of fine weather that he has known; how, on one occasion, his daughter gathered thirty-four sorts of flowers in their own garden on Christmas Day; and the rose bushes had not lost their leaves on Twelfth Day; and then the wise will agree how much they prefer a good seasonable frost and sheeted snow like this, to April weather in December.

The Miller and His Men

Household Words, Volume 4, page 415

Half a century ago affairs were in a dismal state for bread eaters. Some people thought it was a question whether, in a little while, there would be any bread to eat at all. The landlords were everywhere obtaining Inclosure Bills, and this afforded some hope of a better supply hereafter; and the excessive dearness of bread inclined a good many landowners, and some few farmers, to attend to what such men as Sir H. Davy had to set about improving the productiveness of land, by putting into it the ingredients required for the composition of wheat and other grains. Manuring the land is so familiar a matter to us now, that we are apt to forget how new a thing it is. Or, if it be true that the old monks, centuries ago, taught the art of manuring, to make orchards and kitchen gardens productive, the farmers of England did not carry out the practice in their fields, or dream of the connexion between the stuff they spread over the ground and the plant that was to come out of it. These farmers laughed when, in 1800, they saw a few landowners putting bone manure upon their land, at the instigation of philosophers. They were well off, and did not want any change. Wheat was at one hundred and fifteen shillings and eleven-pence per quarter: why should they want any change? There was the tradesman in the town, however, who was beginning to wonder what would become of his children, if some change did not come. He was paying one shilling and tenpence each for quartern loaves; and ninepence per pound for meat; and every great article of his expenditure was two, three, four, or five times as high as when he married. Then, there was the housewife, trying to make good bread with only half the quantity of flour, and the rest potatoes, or other vegetable matter, which may be very good under their own names, but are disagreeable when they make our bread clammy or heavy. The flour itself was often very bad. There was not enough wheat brought in from distant countries to mix with our own; and in such bad seasons as had followed each other from 1795 to 1800, our own wheat was wretched stuff. It was so desperately wanted that it was ground and eaten damp and new. We never see such bread now as even the upper classes had to eat then. Some of the workpeople gave up bread, and made into porridge such flour as they could still get. Many got none at all. Many went out into the lanes, and along the ditches for nettles, and any roots, and berries, and herbs, that they could eat. But what are herbs – the best herbs – without salt? and upon salt there was a duty of fifteen shillings per bushel. What would the people of Birmingham have said, at that time, if they had been told that in half a century the population of their town would have more than trebled, while the price of wheat would have fallen to one third of what they were paying then?

We pick out Birmingham from among the suffering towns, and that period from the mournful course of years of the war, because there and then arose an establishment suited to the popular need, which is sufficiently remarkable to be put upon record. This establishment has been imitated at Birmingham; but, at this day, there is (as far as we can learn) nothing like it in any other town in England. In 1795, when wheat was damp and mouldy, and flour was sour, and the inside of the loaf was a loathsome mess of grey sticky paste, a company was formed at Birmingham, for the purpose of supplying the town with good flour and good bread. The millers and bakers did not like the scheme, of course; but the inhabitants did; at least during the years of scarcity which followed the opening of the Union Mills. We are told that it was a pleasant sight – in those days before we were born – the vans laden with wholesome bread, going through the streets in the morning, and dropping the loaves as they went. The establishment was hated, was persecuted, was mobbed, was reduced to a very low point of adversity; and, in 1809, it was prosecuted in the name of the king, on the plea that it was illegal, and injurious to the interests of the millers and bakers of Birmingham. The finding of the jury was looked to with great and widespread curiosity; the whole affair was such a novelty. The jury found that the object of the company was laudable; that the town had been much the better for the good flour and bread which they had provided, and which had often been really out of the reach of single millers and bakers, or small firms; and, finally, that the interests of the millers and bakers had suffered in the competition with the aggregate capitalists of the company.

The company fell so low at one time that its one pound shares were to be had in abundance for half-a-crown each. They wisely bought up most of the depreciated shares, knowing their town well enough to be sure that their concern must, sooner or later, answer well there, though no one could say as much of any other place. Their confidence was justified. As their profits increased – slowly and quietly – they were allowed to lay them by; for the shares were so small that the profits were hardly worth looking after by the scattered holders. Last year, their capital (exclusive of their mills and apparatus) amounted to twenty-four thousand pounds; and a division of profits has recommenced. In the course of their ascent to prosperity, they sold more and more flour, as well as bread; and their spreading trade began to invade that of millers within a considerable range of country. Among others, the Lucys of Stratford-upon-Avon (a name and place for ever associated in men’s minds) found their business injured by this great Birmingham company. Instead of grumbling and growling, and going to law, the Messrs. Lucy, father and sons, bravely stepped into Birmingham, and set up mills of their own – fairly trying to divide the custom of the growing town with the original association. In this they succeeded. Others have followed their example; and there are now four mill establishments in Birmingham belonging to private firms, besides two which are the property of companies. There are peculiarities about Mr Lucy’s establishment, and his methods, which mark it out for observation, in preference to others. We have surveyed the whole of it, and have found some curious things there which are to be seen nowhere else.

Before we tell what we have seen, however, we must explain why it is that these establishments are confined to Birmingham – why the same reasons which maintain them there, do not call up similar works in other towns.

The fact is, the working classes of Birmingham have a remarkable fancy for buying what they want at the small hucksters’ shops, of which there are an infinity in the town. One would like to know how many of these hucksters’ shops there are in the midst of this population of two hundred and thirty-two thousand people. Whichever way one turns in the streets, one sees a shop in which the housewife may buy bread and thread, bacon and shoes, cheese and knitting needles, or whatsoever it may be that she wants. In such a shop it was that a little child once made its demand – unintelligible to a stranger’s ear. Laying down a penny on the counter, the little creature sang out, “Farden tate, farden teed, farden lang tannen, farden aden;” and she received a cake, a skein of thread, a long candle, and a farthing of change – “again.” The purchasers at these shops seem to be always forgetting that they must pay for the prodigious waste of time that they require from the seller, and for the paper and string used up in an infinity of small parcels; for, in short, all the waste of the ultimate degree of retailing. Easy and careless, and usually well employed, large numbers of the people despise the higher and better ease which would be secured by sensible economy – and buy their sugar, and butter, and tea, by the ounce; their thread, by the skein; their ham, by the pound; their apples, by the pennyworth; seduced by the convenience of such ways to the thoughtless, and yet more by the credit given at these hucksters’ shops. The one thing that the workmen of Birmingham (so clever in so many ways) seem wholly unable to do, is to keep their affairs well in hand. Whatever they may be earning, they are always anticipating. If they can get their wages in advance, they do; and whether they can or not, they ask and obtain credit at these hucksters’ shops – a week’s credit at all events, and, too often, very much more. For this, and the hucksters’ losses from bad debts, in consequence, they have to pay in the price of what they buy. Yet the people stick to the hucksters, and the hucksters continue to thrive by the improvidence of the people, through all changes of times; and, as a consequence, Birmingham goes on to be distinguished by its peculiar possession of bread mills.

From these mills hucksters supply themselves. Every morning, at seven o’clock, three wagons draw up below certain folding doors on the upper floor of Mr Lucy’s mill, and are filled, once and again, with loaves from the racks where the bread has been cooling – fragrant, fresh loaves, which will all be eaten before night. These are dropped at the hucksters’ shops, the money received on the instant, and deposited in the counting house on each return of the empty wagons. The twenty or forty loaves, paid for by the huckster in the morning, will be carried to twenty or forty homes, in a few hours – in company with candles and cheese, ink and writing paper, nails and soap, and every odd thing that can be thought of.

The fluctuations in the trade of the mills are a curious subject of inquiry. Flour is sold at these mills, as well as bread; and when the sale of bread falls off, that of flour usually increases in proportion. All being well with the millers, at all events, we are at liberty to look at the case. At present, the sale of bread from the mills has fallen off prodigiously, while that of flour is flourishing. Bread is cheap: the people are prosperous: they eat more meat, and puddings, and vegetables, and various luxuries, than in bad times; and, of course, less bread; and the bread that they do eat they go to the bakers’ for. They like it new; and, as they can pay for it, they get it new. Of course, the bakers want more flour from the mills, to supply this demand. As soon as bread becomes dearer, more will be sold from the mills. Other provisions rise in price when bread rises; less meat, less pudding, less vegetables are eaten, and more bread. From the same cause, there will be an increased demand for bread whenever wages fall, whether the price of provisions rises or not. Mr Lucy’s mill did, at one time, send out as much as five hundred sacks of flour per week, in the shape of loaves; and it is supposed that the Union Mills even now send out as much as four hundred and fifty sacks; but this is little in comparison with what the sales amount to in hard times.

Being curious to know what was the proportion of bread sent out by the mills, in comparison with the supply furnished by bakers and by private ovens, we obtained an approximate calculation from a well qualified informant, and found that the bakers, at present, bake about one thousand five hundred sacks of flour per week; the mills about one thousand; and private ovens nearly as much as the bakers. The larger calculation by the year, averages something like this: the consumption of flour is reckoned at about a sack per head for the whole population, which is two hundred and thirty-two thousand. The bakers send out nearly half of this; viz., about one hundred thousand sacks; the mills about sixty thousand; and private ovens consume the remaining seventy-two thousand.

And now for Mr Lucy’s mill, which we have mentioned as distinguished by some peculiarities. These peculiarities are inventions of his own, by which the production of bread is raised to the rank of an established Birmingham manufacture. Everybody knows the services which Mr Lucy, as Mayor of Birmingham, rendered to the Great Exhibition last year. Many wish that his dough machine, and other contrivances, could have been exhibited there; but they could not have been worked in the Crystal Palace. They must be seen at home.

We will go first to the top of the mill, without looking or listening as we go, and come down through the successive processes, from the bringing in of the wheat to the sending out of the bread.

At the top there is the crane, by which the sacks of wheat are hauled up from the canal below – the muddy, rippling canal, on which we peep down from the landing stage in the top story. Up comes the wheat through that door – wheat from the far interior of Russia, from the plains of Hungary, from the slopes of Italy, from the valleys of France – to be destroyed as wheat. It has grown for a long time, and travelled very far, to be put an end to here. The garners of the mill are on this story, and we see huge assemblages of fat sacks.

Next below are the millstones, pair after pair, each fed by its hopper. The funnels of these hoppers are made spies and informers. As soon as the heap of grain on which the funnel rests, and which it feeds, sinks too low, the funnel presses upon a strap which rings a bell, and proclaims that somebody is negligent. The millstones are a valuable property, difficult to obtain, but very durable. They come from a particular part of France; although, very lately, the proper kind of stone has been found also in Belgium. They will stand the wear and tear of forty years, with proper dressing and care. The dressing of the millstones is a curious sight. A highly skilled workman is needed for this business. He kneels, with one knee upon the stone, tapping with his sharp chipper in a way which looks like mere trifling to the eyes of the ignorant. But his tiny grooves come out clear at last; and the slopes and risings of the one stone, co-operating with those of its fellow, act like a series of scissors. There are sixteen pairs of stones at work here, one pair of which is from Belgium.

All the upper rooms in the mill look picturesque, with posts, supports, and crosspieces. We are struck, however, with little doors here and there in these square beams; little buttons, grooves, and other mysteries; and it turns out that these are all spouts, through which the meal and flour are carried up and down, and round, and all manner of ways. Anything can fall down of itself; but every thing here, from dust to dough, has to be carried up by main force. The dust is easily managed. A tall chimney exhausts the air, and the dust is carried out, to powder the birds of the air. It is carried out so regularly and completely, that the men in the mill work in a clear atmosphere, and the machinery does not get choked. If wheat or flour must be carried aloft, it is by what is called in breweries a Jacob’s ladder – a system of little cups or jars, revolving, like the chambers of a waterwheel, and catching up their cargo, conveying, and finally spilling it, in their incessant revolution. Down one spout comes wheat to be purified for grinding. So bad are the threshing floors of the world, that much dirt comes in with wheat, and even such an amount of stones as would astonish a novice. The wheat, therefore, is made to fall smartly upon an inclined plane of wire, through which the pure grain falls in one direction, and small dirt in another, while the stones hop, skip, and jump into a trough at the lower end. Down another spout comes the meal from the Russian wheat; down another from the Hungarian; and so on. The spouts end in boxes; which, when a valve is opened, spill their contents upon a strip of felt, that is perpetually moving on towards a drum. It passes round this drum, spilling its little heaps of flour, and returning empty below, to turn round another drum at the other end of the row, and to come back under the boxes, to receive another burden, and carry it away.

This mixing process is pretty; but there is another process, which is prettier, and quite as new; being a recent invention of Mr Lucy. A very long and wide sheet of cloth is stretched horizontally, about three feet from the ground, and boarded round, so as to make it keep its contents to itself. At each end, the cloth slopes down into a pit. Flour of various kinds dribbles down upon the sheet from spouts above, making little heaps, which are to be swept into one receptacle. A wooden scraper, lodged upon wheels, which run in grooves along the sides of the sheet, is perpetually running backwards and forwards, from one end of the expanse to the other, knocking down the little heaps of flour, carrying them all before it, and driving the mass into the pit at either end. This scraper is worked, like everything else in the mill, by the steam engine. The engine itself shows us more of Mr Lucy’s ingenuity. He has contrived some apparatus, by which he dispenses with the flywheel of his engine, and yet obtains a perfect regulation of the power. This is a low pressure engine, of forty horsepower, in connexion with a high-pressure one of twenty-five, which spares its steam to its neighbour. In connexion with the bakehouse, there are two smaller engines. It is a new and strange idea – that of overcoming the tenacity of dough by steam power, instead of by the battery of the cook’s limbs. We shall see presently how this is done. The large upper room, where the mixing of the flour goes on, is called the Pestry – nobody knows why. We have no ideas in connexion with the word; but we put it down because it is rather pretty than otherwise.

We are now to see the bread making; we wish we could say the baking too; but that work is done in the small hours of the night, when it would be in no way convenient or agreeable, to ourselves or others, that we should make an expedition to any bakehouse, however eminent and curious.

We come down through a remarkably picturesque room, joined at right angles, so that the light falls well upon an intricacy of spouts on the one hand, and on regiments of sacks on the other. One more stepladder conducts us to the yard, where there is a pit, with one side very fiery. The mouths of the furnaces open into that pit, because the heat is economised by the furnaces being under ground. The two small engines may, of course, be found at home in their apartments, close at hand.

Everybody knows that one of the housewife’s cares in life, is yeast. Every passing year gives birth to receipts for securing good yeast, or to suggestions for doing without it. It is found in London that there is great comfort in doing without yeast, when the baker is enough of a chemist to set his bread to ferment properly by other methods. The great Birmingham millers would be very glad to ferment their bread by some agency less capricious than that of yeast; but the Birmingham bread eaters like their own old ways. They like their old-fashioned bitter bread, and complain of London bread for being insipid. The Londoners, on their part, make faces at the bitterness of Birmingham bread. The great bread makers do what they can. They deal with the best brewers, and keep close watch over the yeast. Mr Lucy’s dough house is protected from cold by the engine house on the north, and the bakehouse on the south; and the thermometer is for ever in hand. If frosty weather hurts the working of the beer, and spoils the yeast, and if the customers will have yeast bread, there is no help for it: the eaters must put up with a bad batch in bad weather. Of adulteration there seem to be no complaints; and we are assured that there is scarcely any such thing in the town. Happy Birmingham! If bakers’ customers will have extraordinarily white fancy bread, the bakers must use some alum instead of salt.

In a corner, is a pile of blocks of salt – powdery blocks, neat oblong squares, like excessively white bricks. On the other hand are the boiler and tank. Before us is the great curiosity of the place, the dough machine; and we can see at once that the flour is to be poured into it from the long hopper above. Here we have the water, the salt, and the flour. Where is the yeast? O! here it comes, in that tall tin measure, which would nearly hold a man. A fat boy of fourteen would about fill it. Now for the bread making!

The engines turn two axles in a large trough. These axles are set with crooked steel bars, which make a sort of chevaux-de-frise, an apparatus for pulling the dough all manner of ways when the axles are set revolving, with some range, moreover, along the trough. Flour is rained, in a short deluge, from the hopper into the trough: two men, who have been mixing warm and cold water by the guidance of a thermometer, in a monstrous bucket, sling a hook to the handle, and crane the bucket to the edge of the trough (which is about as high as their heads), tilt it over, and souse the water among the flour.

Then, bowlful after bowlful of yeast is poured into a sieve, held over more water of the due warmth. A man takes up a block of salt, whirls his arm round in the great pail, mixing the yeast and water, and salting them by the same operation. The frothing bucket is hauled to the trough, in like manner with the first; and so on till the yeast is used up, to the last rinsings, and the proper quantity of water is supplied. Then the trough is boarded up, to prevent the escape of flour; the axles are put in gear; the chevaux-de-frise revolves; the dough is pulled and torn; and, in return for its torment, it gives out a seething, hissing sound, very pleasant to healthy eaters of wholesome bread. More flour is rained down as it is wanted. The kneading is soon done; such a force as this being thus regularly applied.

Perhaps the oddest sight of all is the removal of the dough. Little vats, on wheels, are run under the trough; a board at the bottom of the trough is shifted, and the dough oozes down, in grotesque masses. The thing is on so large a scale, that we were reminded at once of a scene on the stage. We saw before us a cave, with a roof of stalactites – only the stalactites were oozing down like a waterfall. The men help the descent of the dough, and then scrape the chevaux-de-frise perfectly clean. The trough is shut up, and the little vats are wheeled away to warm corners, where the dough is to rise at its leisure. It rises in about an hour and a half; is allowed to fall three times; and, at the end of two hours and a quarter, is craned up in its vat to the floor above, and let drop through the hopper into the trough, to be there mixed with as much more water and salt, and flour, as it needs.

The room where it is worked into loaves is like what one fancies the kitchen of a great old monastery. The place is large, rather low and dark, with prodigious boards, sprinkled with flour, and eight ovens ranged along one side – ovens of a marvellous capacity. They stretch far away into the wall; and very long are the poles, with spade like ends, called “peels,” which are used for transacting business at the further extremity of these warm, arched caverns, where the crickets, in a crowd, are chirping merrily. When baked, the loaves are ranged in racks, in another chamber, to part with their steam. Each shelf contains a hundred loaves; and the room may contain two thousand, which can be handed into the wagons, and despatched in twenty minutes.

It really is a pleasant thing to take up the wholesome new twopenny loaf – retailed at twopence halfpenny – and think from how many parts of the world grain has been contributed to make it, and see and feel what a goodly portion the buyer has for his money. It is not exactly pleasant to see lumps and crusts of bread lying in the gutters, and kicked about on the pavement, as one may now see at Birmingham; because it is never pleasant to see sheer waste, while it is certain that there are always some who have not enough to eat. But the evidences of plenty are very cheerful throughout the place; and (as seems to be a natural consequence) there is very little crime – so little, that the spirits of the moralist and the lover of his kind might rise to an unprecedented point, if it were not too certain that, with the next visitation of adversity, want and crime will recur. The open-hearted and light-headed workpeople will not, as a body, take warning from past trials. Some – many – lay by a portion of their present earnings; but the greater number are as childish in pleasing themselves today, without thought of tomorrow, as if they had never known what it was to hunger themselves, or to shudder at a neighbour’s crimes. Rich spendthrifts are visited with curses for the social injury that they inflict. Cursing does no good, against high or low; but a remonstrance – now – in the day of prosperity – when it cannot be mistaken for a taunt, may be worth trying; and, to begin with a small particular, we would suggest to the buyer of bread, that it would save many a shilling, and much indigestion, if he would eat his loaf, not steaming hot, but one day old; and that the loaf should be fairly devoured up, and not thrown into corners and channels where even the pigs are not the better for it. There are creatures of a higher order than pigs who would gladly scrape off the mud and dust for the mouthful within; and who shall say which of us may not have to stoop to the gutter for our loathsome dinner, if we will not take measures to secure ourselves from being brought to such a pass? If we all spent, day by day, whatever we have, we should be fighting in the gutters for existence; and why should that recklessness be excused in any which would be fatal in all? So let all Birmingham pay down for its loaf, and, however large the loaf, eat up the crusts.

An Account

of Some Treatment

of Gold and Gems

Household Words, Volume 4, page 449

Those who visit the metal works of Birmingham naturally desire to know where the metals come from; and especially the precious metals. Among the materials shown to the visitor, are drawers full of the brightest and cleanest gold; and ingots of silver, pure, or slightly streaked with copper. We have handled today an ingot which contains, to ninety-two ounces ten pennyweights of silver, seven ounces ten pennyweights of copper. We ask whether the gold comes from California; but we find that it has just arrived – from a much nearer place – from a refinery next door. We hear high praise of the Californian gold. It is so pure that some of it can be used, without refining, for second-rate articles. Some small black specks may be detected in it, certainly, though they are so few and so minute, that the native gold is wrought in large quantities. But what is this neighbouring refinery? Whence does it obtain the metals it refines? Let us go and see.

It is a strange murky place; a dismal enclosure, with ugly sheds, and yards not more agreeable to the eye. Its beauties come out by degrees, as the understanding opens to comprehend the affairs of the establishment. In the sheds, are ranges of musty-looking furnaces; some cold and gaping, others showing, through crevices, red signs of fire within. There are piles of blocks of coal, of burnt ladles and peels, and rivulets of black refuse, which has flowed out from the furnaces into safe beds of red sand. In a special shed, is a black moist-looking heap of what appears to be filth, battened into the shape of a large compost bed. A man is filling a barrow with this commodity, and smoothing it down with loving care. And well he may; for this despicable-looking dirt is the California of the concern! Here is their gold mine, and their silver mine, and their copper mine. In another shed, is a millstone on edge, revolving with the post to which it is fixed, to crush the material which is to be calcined. In the yard, we see heaps of scoriae – the shining, heavy, glassy-looking fragments, which tell tales of the prodigious heat to which they have been subjected. We see picks, and more ladles, and lanterns, and a most sordid-looking bonfire. A heap of refuse is burning on the stones; old rags, fragments of shoes, cinders, dust and nails – the veriest sweepings that can be imagined. Something precious is there; but the mass must be burned to become manageable. The ashes will be swept up for the refinery.

But what is it that yields gold, and silver, and copper, and brass? What is that heap of dirt in the special shed? It is the sweepings of the Birmingham manufactories.

What economy! In all goldsmiths’ shops every effort is made to save all the filings, and ther minutest dust of the metals used. The floors are swept, and everything recoverable is picked up. Yet the imperceptible loss is so valuable to the refiners, that they pay, and pay high, for the scrapings, sweepings, and pickings of the workrooms. A cart load of dirt is taken from a fork and spoon manufactory to the refinery, and paid for on the instant; and the money thus received is one of the regular items in the books of the concern. Perhaps it pays the wages of one of the workmen. Another establishment receives two hundred pounds a year for its sweepings. It is worth noting these methods in concerns which are flourishing, and which have been raised to a prosperous condition by pains and care; less flourishing people may be put in the way of similar methods. For instance, how good it would be for farmers if, instead of thinking there is something noble in disregard of trifling economy, they could see the wisdom and beauty of an economy which hurts nobody, but benefits everybody! It would do no one any good to throw away these scattered particles of precious metal, while their preservation affords a maintenance to many families. In the same way, the waste of dead leaves, of animal manure, of odds and ends of time, of seed, of space in hedges, in the great majority of farms, does no good, and gives no pleasure to anybody; while the same thrift on a farm that we see in a manufactory would sustain much life, bestow much comfort, narrow no hearts, and expand the enjoyments of very many.

We must take care of our eyes when the ovens are opened – judging by the scarlet rays that peep out, here and there, from any small crevice. Prodigious! What a heat it is, when, by the turn of a handle, a door of the furnace is raised! The roasting, or calcining, to get rid of the sulphur, is going on here. The whole inside – walls, roof, embers and all – are a transparent salmon-colour. As a shovel, inserted from the opposite side, stirs and turns the burning mass, the sulphur appears above – a little blue flame, and a great deal of yellow smoke. We feel some of it in our throats. We exclaim about the intensity of the heat, declaring it tremendous. But we are told that it is not so; that, in fact, “it is very cold – that furnace;” which shows us that there is something hotter to come.

The Refiner’s Test is pointed out to us – a sort of shovel, with a spout, lined throughout with a material of burnt bones, the only substance which can endure unchanged the heat necessary for testing the metals. Of this material are made the little crucibles that we see in the furnaces, which our conductor admits to be “rather warm.” There they are, ranged in rows, so obscured by the mere heat which confounds everything in one glow, that their circular rims are only seen by being looked for. Yet, one little orifice, at the back of this furnace, shows that even this heat can be exceeded. That orifice is a point of white heat, revealed from behind. We do not see the metal in the crucibles; but we know that it is simmering there.

One more oven is opened for us – the assay furnace, which is at a white heat. As the smallest quantities of metal serve for the assay, the crucibles here on the scale of dolls’ tea things. The whole concern of that smallest furnace looks like a pretty toy: but it is a very serious matter – the work it does, and the values it determines.

The metals, which run down to the bottom, in the melting furnaces, are separated (the gold and silver by aquafortis), and cast, in moulds, coming out as ingots; or, in fragments, of any shape they may have pleased to run into. Some of the gold fragments are of the cleanest and brightest yellow. Others, no less pure, are dark and brownish. They are for gilding porcelain. Lastly, we see a pretty curiosity. In the counting house, a little glass chamber is erected upon a coin with an apparatus of great beauty – a pair of scales, thin and small to the last degree, fastened by spider-like threads to a delicate beam, which is connected with an index, sensitive enough to show the variation of the hundredth part of a grain. The glass walls exclude atmospheric disturbance. Behind the rusty-looking doors were the white glowing crucibles; within the drawers was the yellow gold; and, hidden in its glass house, was the fairy balance.

Now, we will follow some of the gold and silver to a place where skilled hands are ready to work it curiously.

First, however, we may as well mention, in confidence to our readers, that our feelings are now and then wounded by the injustice of the world to the Birmingham manufacturers. We observe with pain that the very virtues of Birmingham manufacture are made matters of reproach. Because the citizens have at their command extraordinary means of cheap production, and produce cheap goods accordingly, the world jumps to the conclusion, that the work must be deceptive and bad. Fine gentlemen and ladies give, in London shops, twice the price for Birmingham jewellery that they would pay, if no middlemen stood, filling their pockets uncommonly fast, between them and the manufacturer; and they admire the solid value and great beauty of the work; but, as soon as they know where the articles were wrought, they undervalue them with the term “Brummagem.” In the Great Exhibition there was a certain case of goldwork and jewellery, rich and thorough in material and workmanship. The contents of that case were worth many hundred pounds. A gentleman and lady stopped to admire their contents. The lady was so delighted with them that she supposed they must be French. The gentleman reminded her that they were in the British department. After a while, they observed the label at the top of the case, and instantly retracted their admiration. “Oh!” said the gentleman, pointing to the label, “these are Brummagem ware – shams!” Whatever may have been Brummagem gold-beating in ancient times, and in days of imperfect art, when long wars impeded the education of English taste, it is mere ignorance to keep up the censure in these times. It is merely accepting and retailing vulgar phrases without any inquiry, which is the stupidest form of ignorance. Perhaps some of the prejudice may be removed by a brief account of what a Birmingham manufacture of gold chains is at this day.

Twenty years ago, the making of gold chains occupied a dozen or twenty people in Birmingham. Now, the establishment we are entering, alone, employs probably eight times that number. Formerly, a small master undertook the business in a little back shop: drew out his wire with his own hands; cut the devices himself; soldered the pieces himself; in short, worked under the disadvantage of great waste of time, of effort, and of gold. Into the same shop more and more machinery has been since introduced as it was gradually devised by clever heads. This machinery is made on the spot, and the whole is set to work by steam. Few things in the arts can be more striking than the contrast between the murky chambers where the forging and grinding – the Plutonic processes of machine making – are going on, and the upper chambers, light and quiet, where the delicate fingers of women and girls are arranging and fastening the cobweb links of the most delicate chain work. The whole establishment is most picturesque. While in some speculative towns in our island great warehouses and other edifices have sprung up too quickly, and are standing untenanted, a rising manufacture like this cannot find room. In the case before us, more room is preparing. A large steam engine will soon be at work, and the processes will be more conveniently connected. Meantime, house after house has been absorbed into the concern. There are steps up here, and steps down there; and galleries across courts; and long ranges of low-roofed chambers; and wooden staircases, in yards – care being taken, however, to preserve in the midst an isolated, well-lighted chamber, where part of the stock is kept, where some high officials abide, and where there are four counters or hatches, where the people present themselves outside, to receive their work. All this has grown out of the original little back-shop.

Below, there is a refinery. It is for the establishment alone; but, just like that we have already described – only on a smaller scale. First, the rolling mill shows us its powers by a speedy experiment – it flattens a halfpenny, making it oblong at the first turn, and, by degrees, with the help of some annealing in the furnace, drawing it out into a long ribbon of shining copper, which is rolled up, tied with a wire, and presented to us as a curiosity. Next, we see coils of thick round wire, of a dirty white, which we can hardly believe to be gold. It is gold, however, and is speedily drawn out into wire. Then, there are cutting, and piercing, and snipping machines – all bright and diligent; and the women and girls who work them are bright and diligent too. Here, in this long room, lighted with lattices along the whole range, the machines stand, and the women sit, in a row – quiet, warm, and comfortable. Here we see sheets of soft metal (for solder) cut into strips or squares; here, again, a woman is holding such a strip to a machine, and snipping the metal very fine, into minute shreds, all alike, These are to be laid or stuck on little joins in the chain-work, or clasps, or swivel hinges, where soldering is required. Next, we find a dozen workwomen, each at her machine, pushing snips of gold into grooves, where they are pierced with a pattern, or one or two holes of a pattern, and made to fall into a receiver below. Each may take about a second of time. Farther on, slender gold wire is twisted into links by myriads. At every seat the counter is cut out in a semicircle, whereby room is saved, and the worker has a free use of her arms. Under every such semicircle hangs a leathern pouch, to catch every particle that falls, and to hold the tools. On shelves everywhere are ranges of steel dies; and larger pieces of the metal, for massive links or for clasps, or for watch keys and other ornaments, are stamped from these. On the whole, we may say, that in these lower rooms the separate pieces are prepared for being put together elsewhere.

That putting together appears to novices very blinding work; but, we are assured that it becomes so easy, by practice, that the girls could almost do it with their eyes shut. In such a case we should certainly shut ours; for they ache with the mere sight of such poking and picking, and ranging of the white rings – all exactly like one another. They are ranged in a groove of a plate of metal, or on a block of pumice stone. When pricked into a precise row, they are anointed, at their points of junction, with borax. Each worker has a little saucer of borax, wet, and stirred with a camel hair pencil. With this pencil she transfers a little of the borax to the flattened point of a sort of bodkin, and then anoints the links where they join. When the whole row is thus treated, she turns on the gas, and, with a small blowpipe, directs the flame upon the solder. It bubbles and spreads in the heat, and makes the row of links into a chain. There would be no end of describing the loops and hoops, and joints and embossings, which are soldered at these gas pipes, after being taken up by tiny tweezers, and delicately treated by all manner of little tools. Suffice it, that here everything is put together, and made ready for the finishing. In the middle of one room is a counter, where is fixed the machine for twisting the chains – with its cog wheels, and its nippers, whereby it holds one end of a portion of chain, while another is twisted, as the door handle fixes the schoolboy’s twine, while he knots or loops his pattern, or twists his cord. Here, a little girl stands, and winds a plain gold chain, into this or that pattern, which depends upon the twisting.

These ornaments of precious metal do not look very ornamental at present; being of the colour of dirty soapsuds, and tossed together in heaps on the counters. We are now to see the hue and brightness of the gold brought out. We take up a chain, rather massive, and reminding us of some ornament we have somewhere seen; but it is so rough! and its flakes do not appear to fit upon each other. A man lays it along the length of his left hand, and files it briskly; as he works, the soapy white disappears, the polish comes out, the parts fit together, and it is, presently, one of those flexible, scaly, smooth, glittering chains that we have seen all our lives. Of course, the filings are dropped carefully into a box, to go to the refinery. There is, here, a home-invented and home-made apparatus for polishing and cutting topazes, amethysts, bloodstones and the like, into shield shapes, for seals, watch keys, and ornaments of various kinds. The strongest man’s arm must tire; but steam and steel need no consideration – so there go the wheels and the emery, smoothing and polishing infallibly; with a workman to apply the article, and a boy to drop oil when screw or socket begins to scream. This polishing and filing was such severe work, in the lapidary department, in former days, that the nervous energy of a man’s arm was destroyed – a serious grief to both worker and employer. At this day, it is understood that the lapidary is past work at forty, from the contraction of the sinews of the wrist, consequent on the nature of his labour. The period of disablement depends much on the habits of the men; but, sooner or later, it is looked for as a matter of course. Here, the wear and tear is deputed to that which has no nerve. As the proprietor observes, it requires no sympathy.

It may be asked how there comes to be any lapidary department here? Do we never see gold chains the links whereof are studded with turquoises, or garnets, or little specks of emerald? Are there no ruby drops to ladies’ necklaces? – no jewelled toys hanging from gentlemen’s watch guards? We see many of these pretty things here; besides cameos for setting.

After the delicate little filings (which must be done by hand) are all finished, the articles must be well washed, dried in boxwood sawdust, and finally hand polished with rouge. The people in one apartment look grotesque enough – two women powdered over with rouge, and men of various dirty hues, all dressed alike, in an overall garment of brown holland. A washerwoman is maintained on the establishment expressly to wash these dresses on the spot – her soapsuds being preserved, like all the other washes, for the sake of the gold dust contained in them. Her washtubs are emptied, like everything else, into the refinery.

In the final burnishing room, we observe a row of chemists’ globes – glass vases filled with water, ranged on a shelf. A stranger might guess long before he would find out what these are for. They are to reflect a concentrated blaze from the gaslights in the evening, to point out specks and dimnesses, to the eyes and fingers of the burnishers. What curious finger ends they have – those women who chafe the precious metals into their last degree of polish! They are broad – the joint so flexible that it is bent considerably backwards when in use; and the skin has a peculiar smoothness: more mechanical, we fancy, than vital. However that may be, the burnish they produce is strikingly superior to any hitherto achieved by friction with any other substance.

In departing, the sense of contrast comes over us once more. We have just seen all manner of elegancies in ornament, from the classical and dignified to the minute, fanciful, and grotesque; in going out, we give a look to the unfinished engine house, and the smiths’ shop. All this hard work; all these many dwellings thrown into one establishment; all these scores of men, and women, and children, busy from year’s end to year’s end; all those diggers far away in California; all those lapidaries in Germany; all those engineers in their studies; all those ironmasters in their markets; all those miners in the bowels of the earth – all are enlisted in making gold chains; and some of us have no more knowledge and no more thought than to call the product “Brummagem shams”! Well! the price charged for them in London shops, where they are as good as French, is something real; and it is a real comfort to think how swingingly some fine folks pay, though the bulk of the profit comes, not to the manufacturer, but to the middlemen. Of these middlemen there are always two – the factor and the shopkeeper – often more. Their intervention is very useful, of course, or they would not exist; but somebody or other makes a prodigious profit of Birmingham jewellery, after it has left the manufacturer’s hands. It was only yesterday that we saw, among a rich heap of wonderful things, a pair of elegant bracelets – foreign pebbles, beautifully set. We were told the wholesale price they were to be sold for; which was half the shop price. The transference to the London shop was to cost as much as the whole of the previous processes: from the digging of the silver and the collecting of the pebbles, through all the needful voyages and travels, to the burnishing and packing at Birmingham!

We have seen, however, something which may throw a little light on the prejudice against Birmingham jewellery. It is not conceivable that any one should despise such an establishment as we have been describing. But, we found ourselves, the other day, passing through a little dwelling, where the housewife, with a baby on her arm, and where more than half a dozen children were housed; and then crossing a little yard, and mounting a flight of substantial brick steps with a stout handrail, and entering the most curious little workroom we ever were in. It would just hold four or five people, without allowing them room to turn round more than one at a time. In one corner, was a very small stove. A lattice window ran along the whole front, and made it pleasant, light, and airy. A workbench or counter was scalloped out, in the same way as in larger establishments, so as to accommodate three workers in the smallest possible space. The three workers had each his stool, his leathern pouch on his knees, and his gas pipe. A row of tools bristled along the whole length of the lattice; and there was another row on a shelf behind. The principal workman was the father of those many children below. One son was at work at his elbow, and the remaining workman was an apprentice. This working jeweller was as thorough a gentleman, according to our notions, as anybody we have seen for a long time past. Tall, stout, and handsome; collar white and stiff; apron white and sound; his whole dress in good repair; his voice cheerful as his face; his manner open and courteous; his information exactly what we wanted. We could not help wishing that some rural grandee, who avows that he hates all manufacturers, could see this fair specimen of an English handicraftsman. As for his work, he told us that he supplies the factors to order. It would not answer to him to keep a stock. The factors would not buy what he should offer, but dictate to him what he shall make. Fashions change incessantly, and he has only to keep up with them as well as he can. It is not for him to invent new patterns and get steel dies made for them; but to get the same steel dies that other makers are procuring. These dies are, of course, for the metallic part of his work. The boxes of lockets and hair brooches (now vehemently in fashion), and devices, and coloured stones, he procures at “the French shops” in the town; and he showed us some variety of these, ready for setting. Then came out the “Brummagem” feature of the case; showing us how the gold setting that he was preparing – perforating and filing – was to be backed by a blue stone. He observed that it was not thought worth while to get costly stones for a purpose like that; for blue glass would do as well. I certainly thought so, considering that the stone was to be only the background of his work. Of the specimens I saw in that airy little workshop, some were in excellent taste, and all, I believe, of good workmanship. These small masters are as punctilious about employing only regularly qualified workmen, as any members of any guild in the country. Their journeymen must all have served an apprenticeship; not only because they are thus best fitted for their business, but because the value of apprenticeship is thus kept up; and these small capitalists will not part with the advantage of having journeymen, under the name of apprentices, completely under their command during the last two or three years of their term.

One of the most remarkable sights, to those who knew Birmingham a quarter of a century ago, is such a manufacture as that of Messrs Parker and Acott’s ever-pointed pencils. Those of us whose fathers were in business in the days of the war, when the arts were not flourishing, may remember the bulky pocketbook, with its leather strap (always shabby after the first month), and its thick cedar pencil, which always wanted cutting; always blackening whatever came near it; always getting used up; the lead turning to dust at the most critical point of a memorandum. There was a fine trade in cedar pencils at Keswick in those days. It seemed a tale too romantic to be true, when we were told of ever-pointed pencils. First, we, of course, refused to believe in their existence – what improvement have we not refused to believe in? Then, when we found there was a screw in the case, and that the pencil was not ever-pointed by a vital action of its own, we were sure we should not like it. We grew humble, and were certain we could never learn to manage it. And now, what have we not arrived at? We are so saucy as to look beyond our improved pencils; beyond pen and ink; beyond our present need of a cumbrous apparatus to carry about with us – ink that will spill and spot; leads that will break and use up; pens, paper, syllables, letters, pot-hooks, dots and crossings, and all the process of writing. Perhaps the Electric Telegraph has spoiled us: enabling us to imagine some process by which thoughts may record themselves; some brief and complete method of making “mems,” without the complicated process of writing down hundreds of letters, and scores of syllables, to preserve one single idea. All this, however, is as romantic now as ever-pointed pencils seemed to be at first; and instead of dreaming of what is not yet achieved, let us look at the reality before our eyes.

Here is something wonderful enough, on our very entrance. Here is a silver pencil case – neat and serviceable, though not of the most elegant form – handsome enough to have been praised for its looks, thirty years ago. This pencil case carries two feet of lead. It is intended to be the commercial traveller’s joy and treasure. It will last him his life, unless he take an unconscionable amount of orders. Unscrewing the top, we see that the upper end of the tube is divided into compartments, which look like the mouth of a revolver; and here, protected from each other, the leads are bestowed, safe – despite their great length – through their owner’s roughest travelling.

Some drawers in a counter are pulled out. One is divided into compartments, each of which holds a handful of something different from all the rest. This drawer contains one hundred gross of pencil cases in parts – the tube, the rack and barrel, the propelling wire. the slide, the top, the various chambers, and screws, and niceties. In another drawer, there is a dazzling and beautiful heap of pure amethysts and topazes from far countries, of vast aggregate value: and, farther on, we see the elegant onyx and white cornelian from South America (a very recent importation), and the sardonyx, now in high favour for seals and the tops of pencil cases. Its delicate layer of white upon red, (or the reverse,) the undermost colour coming out in the engraving, makes it singularly fit for the purpose. Then, there is a paperful of small turquoises, which are poured out and handled like a sample of lentils. These are from Persia; and they have to be re-cut in England, the Persian tools being of the roughest. Then, there are bloodstones, and pebbles out of number, and pints of glittering fragments of Californian gold – rich materials tossed together, to be drawn out for use at the bidding of capricious fashion; for, fashion seems to be as capricious here, among these stones and ores that have required cycles of ages to compose, as in the milliner’s shop, where the materials are drawn from the pods of a season and the insects of a summer. On shelves against the walls, are ranged rows and piles of steel dies – that pretty and cosily piece of apparatus, which we find in almost all these manufactories – together with the inexhaustible stamping and cutting machines, the blowpipe, the borax, and soft metal for solder, the pumice stone and wire bed, the turning wheel, the circular saw, and the bath of diluted aquafortis, and the pan of boxwood sawdust, in which the pretty things are dried when they come out of “pickle.” From buttons to epergnes, we find this apparatus everywhere. The steel dies are an everlasting study: the block, like the conical weight of a pair of warehouse scales, seeming very large for the little figure indented in the upper surface. Here, in this manufactory, the figures are of the bugle, a favourite form of watch key – the deer’s foot, (a pretty study for the same purpose,) and a large variety of patterns – the tulip, the acanthus, and other foliage, flowers or fruit, climbing up the summit of the pencil case, as if it were a little Corinthian capital.

And now for the process. The silver or goId comes from the rolling mill, and is passed in slips through a series of draw-plates, each smaller than the last, and finally through the one which is to give it its fluted or other pattern. Soldering at the join, filing away the roughness left by the solder, washing in an aquafortis bath, come next. A slit for the slide is then made; the rims and screws and slides are added, and you have a pencil case complete. We observed that a large proportion of the tops are hexagonal, or of some angular form, to prevent their rolling off the table.

Some of the pencil cases are so small, and some of the watch keys are so elaborate, that it requires a moment’s consideration to decide which is which; and again, ladies’ crochet needles, of gold, diversely ornamented, are very like pencil cases. Sorne of each kind are specked over with turquoise or garnets; and all appear to be designed for ornament, rather than for use. It is quite a relief to turn the eye upon a shovelful of the yellow sawdust, where substantial pencil cases, fit for manly fingers are drying. On the whole, perhaps, the most striking feature is the prodigious extent of the production. We ask where all these can possibly go; for a pencil case is a thing which lasts half a century, as the manufacturer himself observes. These do not go to America; for, in such things, the Americans are our chief rivals. They supply their own wants, and a good deal more. We send our pencil cases and trinkets over a good part of the world, however; and the caprice of fashion causes a great adventitious demand at home. In reply to our remark about this vast production, the manufacturer observes, “Yes, we cut up gold and silver as the year comes in and as the year goes out.” Something of a change, this, since the old days of cedar pencils!

Here is a steel die with an elegant pyramidal pattern; the half of a watch key. We see the inch of metal stamped; and then another inch, for the other half: and then the filing and snipping of the edges; and then the laying in of the solder inside; and the binding together of the two halves with wire; and the repose on the bed of wire on the pumice-stone, to be broiled red hot; and the neat cleaning when cool; the polishing, and the leaving certain parts of the pattern dead, while others are burnished; and the fixing of the steel cylinder at the point, and the turning of the rims. All this for a watch key! But we are shown another, which does not look like anything very studied; and we are told, and are at once convinced, that it consists of no less than thirteen parts. Other keys which look more fanciful, consist of ten, eight, or seven. None are the simple affair that a novice would suppose, now that we require the convenience of being able to wind up our watches without twisting the chain or ribbon with every turn of the key.

But we must leave these niceties; the little pistols, the deer’s feet, the buglehorns, and all the dainty fancies embodied in watch keys and knickknacks. Here, as elsewhere, every atom is saved, of sweeping and wash; and we now find ourselves, writer and readers, like the materials of which we have been speaking, brought back, after all these various processes, to the refinery from which we set out.

Rainbow Making

Household Words, Volume 4, page 485

It is a great idea – too large to be arrived at but by degrees – that the fleeces of sheep can clothe nations of men. The fleece of a sheep, when pulled and spread out, looks much larger than while covering the mutton; but still it is with a sort of despair that we think of the quantity required, and of the dressing and preparation necessary, for clothing fifteen million of men in one country, and double the number in another (to say nothing of the women), and of the number of countries, each containing its millions, which are incessantly demanding the fleeces of sheep to clothe their inhabitants. We remember the hillsides of our own mountainous districts; and the wide grassy plains of Saxony; and the boundless table lands of Tibet, and the valleys of Cashmere, all speckled over with flocks: we think of the Australian sheep walks, where there are flocks of such unmanageable size, that the whole sheep is boiled down for tallow: we think of Prince Esterhazy’s reply to the question of an English nobleman, when shown vast flocks, and asked how his sheep in Hungary would compare in number with these – that his shepherds outnumbered the Englishman’s sheep; we think of these things, and by degrees begin to understand how wool enough may be produced to furnish the broadcloths and flannels of the world. But the most strong and agile imagination is confounded when the material of silk is considered in the same way. Compare a caterpillar with a sheep; compare the cocoon of a silkworm (the achievement of its life) with the annual fleece of a sheep; and the supply of silk for the looms of Europe, Asia, and America, seems a mere miracle. The marvel is the greater, not the less, when one is in a silk growing region, attending to the facts and appearances, than when trying to conceive of them at home. In Lombardy, we travel, from day to day, during the whole month of May, between rows of mulberry trees, where the peasants are busy providing food for the worms; a man in the tree stripping off the leaves, and two women below with sacks, to carry home the foliage. We see what tons of leaves per mile must be thus gathered daily for weeks together; we go into houses in every village to inspect the worms; we mount to the flat roofs of the dwellings, and find in each countless multitudes of the worms; we pass on, from country to country, till we mount to the hamlets, perched on the rocky shelves of the Lebanon; and we find everywhere the insect secreting its gum, or spinning it forth as silk; we remember that the same process is going forward in the heart of our Indian Peninsula, and throughout China: we look at the broad belt round the globe where the little worm is forming its cocoons; and still we find it impossible to imagine how enough silk is produced to supply the wants of the world, from the brocade of the Asiatic potentate to the wedding ribbon of the English dairymaid. Nowhere is the speculation more difficult than in a dye house at Coventry.

Probably there was as much wonder excited by the same thought, when King Henry VIII wore the first pair of silk stockings brought to England from Spain; and when Francis I looked after the mulberry trees in France, and fixed some silk weavers at Lyons; and when our Queen Mary passed a law forbidding servantmaids to wear ribbon on bonnets; and when monarch after monarch passed acts to teach how silk should be boiled, and whence it should be brought, and who should, and who should not, wear it when wrought; but the perplexity and amazement of king, lords, and commons could hardly, at any time, have exceeded that of the humblest visitor of today in any dye house at Coventry. We know something of the fact of this astonishment; for we have been noting the wonders that are to be found on the premises of Messrs Leavesley and Hands at Coventry.

On entering, we see, ranged along the counters, half round the room, bundles of glossy silk, of the most brilliant colours. Blues, rose colours, greens, lilacs, make a rainbow of the place. It is only two days since this silk was brought in in a very different condition. The throwster (to throw, means to twist or twine), after spinning the raw silk, imported from Italy, Turkey, Bengal, and China, into thread fit for the loom, sent it here in bundles, gummy, harsh, dingy; except, indeed, the Italian, which looks, till washed, like fragments of Jason’s fleece. If bundles, and regiments of bundles, like these, come into one dye house every few days, to be prepared for the weaving of ribbons alone, and for the ribbon weaving of a single town, it is overwhelming to think of the amount of production required for the broad silk weaving of England, of Europe, of the world. Of the silk dyed at Coventry, about eighty per cent, is used for the ribbon weaving of the city and neighbourhood; and the quantity averages six tons and a half weekly. Of the remaining twenty per cent., half is used for the manufacture of fringes; and the other half goes to Macclesfield, Congleton, and Derby.

The harsh gummy silk that comes in from the throwing mills is boiled, wrung out, and boiled again. If it wants bleaching, there is a sort of open oven of a house; a vault in the yard, where it is “sulphured.” The heat, and the sensation in the throat, inform us in a moment where we have got to. When the hanks come forth from this process, every thread is separated from its neighbour, and the whole bundle is soft, dry, and glossy. Then follows the dyeing. To make the silk receive the colours, it is dipped in a mordant, in some diluted acid, or solution of metal, which enables the colour to bite into the fibre. To make pinks of all shades, the silk is dipped in diluted tartaric acid for the mordant, and then in a decoction of safflower for the hue. To make plum colour or puce, indigo is the dye, with a cochineal. To make black, nitrate of iron first; then a washing follows; and then a dipping in logwood dye, mixed with soap and water. For a white, pure enough for ribbons, the silk has to pass through the three primary colours, yellow, red, and blue. The dipping, wringing, splashing, stirring, boiling, drying, go on vigorously, from end to end of the large premises, as may be supposed, when the fact is mentioned that the daily consumption of water amounts to one hundred thousand gallons. A reservoir, in the middle of the yard, formerly supplied the water; but it proved insufficient, or uncertain; and now it is about to be filled up, and an Artesian well is opened to the depth of one hundred and ninety-five feet. The dyeing sheds are paved with pebbles or bricks, crossed with gutters, and variegated with gay puddles. Stout brick-built coppers are stationed round the place. Above each copper are cocks, which let in hot and cold water from the pipes that travel round the walls of the sheds. There are wooden troughs for the dye; and to these troughs the water is conveyed by spouts. The silk hangs down into the dye from poles, smoothly turned and uniform, which are laid across the troughs by the dozen or more at once. These staves are procured from Derby. They cost from six shillings to twenty-four shillings per dozen, and constitute an independent subsidiary manufacture. The silk hanks being suspended from these poles, two men, standing on either side the trough, take up two poles, souse, and shake, and plunge the silk, and turn that which had been uppermost under the surface of the liquor, and pass on to the next two. When done enough, the silk is wrung out and pressed, and taken to the drying house. The heat in that large chamber is about one hundred degrees. On entering it, everybody begins to cough. The place is lofty and large. The staves, which are laid across beams, to contain the suspended silk, make little moveable ceilings here and there. This chamber contains five or six hundred-weights of silk at once. Our minds glance once more towards the spinning insects on hearing this; and we ask again, how much of their produce may be woven into fabrics in Coventry alone? We think we must have made a mistake in setting down the weekly average at six tons and a half. But there was no mistake. It is really so.

While speaking of weight, we heard something which reminded us of King Charles I’s opinions about some practices which were going forward before our eyes. It appears, that the silk which comes to the dye house is heavy with gum, to the amount of one fourth of its weight. This gum must be boiled out before the silk can be dyed. But the manufacturers of cheap goods require that the material shall not be so light as this process would leave it. It is dipped in well-sugared water, which adds about eight per cent, to its weight. Many tons of sugar per year are used as (what the proprietor called) “the silk dyer’s devil’s dust.” It was this very practice which excited the wrath of our pious King Charles, in all his horror of double-dealing. A proclamation of his, of the date of 1630, declares his fears of the consequences of “a deceitful handling” of the material, by adding to its weight in dyeing, and ordains that the whole shall be done as soft as possible; that no black shall be used but Spanish black, “and that the gum shall be fair boiled off before dyeing.” He found, in time, that he had meddled with a matter that he did not understand, and had gone too far. Some of the fabrics of his day required to be made of “hard silk;” and he took back his orders in 1638, having become, as he said, “better informed.”

From trough to trough we go, breathing steam, and stepping into puddles, or reeking rivulets rippling over the stones of the pavement; but we are tempted on, like children, by the charm of the brilliant colours that flash upon the sight whichever way we turn. What a lilac this is! Is it possible that such a hue can stand? It could not stand even the drying, but for the alkali into which it is dipped. It is dyed in orchil first, and then made bluer, and somewhat more secure, by being soused in a well-soaped alkaline mixture – That is a good red brown. It is from Brazil wood, with alum for its mordant – This is a brilliant blue – indigo, of course? Yes, sulphate of indigo, with tartaric acid. – Here are two yellows: how is that? One is much better than the other; moreover, it makes a better green; moreover, it wears immeasurably better – But what is it? The inferior one is the old-fashioned turmeric, with tartaric acid. And the improved yellow? – O! we perceive. It is a secret of the establishment, and we are not to ask questions about it. But among all these men employed here, are there none accessible to a bribe from a rival in the art? There is no saying; for the men cannot be tempted. They do not know, any more than ourselves, what this mysterious yellow is. But why does it not supersede the old-fashioned turmeric? – It will, no doubt; and it is gaining rapidly upon it; but it takes time to establish improvements. The improvement in greens, however, is fast recommending the new yellow – This deep amber is a fine colour. We find it is called California, which has a modern sound in it. – This Napoleon blue (not Louis Napoleon’s) is a rich colour. It gives a good deal of trouble. There is actually a precipitation of metal, of tin, upon every fibre, to make it receive the dye; and then it has to be washed; and then dipped again, before it can take a darker shade; and afterwards washed again, over and over, till it is dark enough; when it is finally soused in water which has fuller’s earth in it, to make it soft enough for working and wear – What is doing with that dirty-white bundle? It is silk of a thoroughly bad colour. Whether it is the fault of the worm, or of the worm’s food, or what, there is no saying – that is the manufacturer’s affair. He sent it here. It is now to be sulphured, and dipped in a very faint shade of indigo, curdled over with soap. This will improve it, but not make it equal to a purer white silk. Next, the wet hanks have to be squeezed in the Archimedean press, and then hung up in that large, hot drying room.

One serious matter remains unintelligible to us. Plaid ribbons – that is, all sorts of checked ribbons – have been in fashion so long now, that we have had time to speculate (which we have often done) on how they can possibly be made. About the colours of the warp (the long way of the ribbon) we are clear enough. But how, in the weft, do the colours duly return, so as to make the stripes, and therefore the checks, recur at equal distances? We are now shown how this was done formerly, and how it is done now. Formerly, the hanks were tied very tightly, at equal distances, and the alternate spaces closely wrapped round with paper, or wound round with packthread. This took up a great deal of time. We were shown a much better plan. A shallow box is made, so as to hold within it the halves of several skeins of silk; these halves being curiously twisted, so as to alternate with the other halves when the hanks are shaken back into their right position for winding. One half being within the box, and the other hanging out, the lid is bolted down so tight that the dye cannot creep into the box; and the out-hanging silk is dipped. So much can be done at once, that the saving of time is very great, and, judging by the prodigious array of plaid ribbons that we saw in the looms afterwards, the value of the invention is no trifle. The name of this novelty is the Clouding Box.

We see a bundle of cotton. What has cotton to do here? It is from Nottingham – very fine and well twisted. It is a pretty pink, and it costs one shilling and sixpence per pound to dye. But what is it for? – Ah! that is the question! It is to mix in with silk, to make a cheap ribbon. Another pinch of devil’s dust!

There is a calendering process employed in the final preparation of the dried silk, by which, we believe, its gloss is improved; but it was not in operation at the time of our visit. We saw, and watched with great curiosity, a still later process – more pretty to witness than easy to achieve – the making up of the hanks. This is actually the most difficult thing the men have to learn in the whole business. Of course, therefore, it is no matter for description. The twist, the insertion of the arm, the jerk, the drawing of the mysterious knot, may be looked at for hours and days, without the spectator having the least idea how the thing is done. We went from workman to workman – from him who was making up the blue, to him who was making up the red – we saw one of the proprietors make up several hanks at the speed of twenty in four minutes and a half, and we are no more likely to be able to do it, than if we had never entered a dye house. Peeping Tom might spy for very long before he would be much the wiser: when done, the effect is beautiful. The snaky coils of the polished silk throw off the light like fragments of mirrors.

Another mysterious process is the marking of the silk which belongs to each manufacturer. The hanks and bundles are tied with cotton string; and this string is knotted with knots at this end, at that end, in the middle, in ties at the sides, with knots numbering from one to fifteen, twenty, or whatever number may be necessary; and the manufacturer’s particular system of knots is posted in the books with his name, the quantity of silk sent in, the dye required, and all other particulars.

We were amused to find that there is a particular twist and a particular dye for the fringe of brown parasols. It is desired that there should be a claret tint on this fringe, when seen against the light; and here, accordingly, we find the claret tint. The silk is somewhat dull, from being hard twisted; it is to be made more lustrous by stretching, and we accompany it to the stretching machine. There it is suspended on a barrel and moveable pin; by a man’s weight applied to a wheel, the pin is drawn down, the hank stretches, and comes out two or more inches longer than it went in, and looking perceptibly brighter. A hank of bad silk snaps under this strain; a twist that will stand it is improved by it.

Looking into a little apartment, as we return through the yard, we find a man engaged in work which the daintiest lady might long to take out of his hands. He is making pattern cards and books. He arranges the shades of all sorts of charming colours, named after a hundred pretty flowers, fruits, and other natural productions – his lemons, lavenders, corn flowers, jonquils, cherries, fawns, pearls, and so forth; takes a pinch of each floss, knots it in the middle, spreads it at the ends, pastes down these ends, and, when he has a row complete, covers the pasted part with slips of paper, so numbered as that each number stands opposite its own shade of colour. A pattern book is as good as a rainbow for the pocket. This looks like woman’s work; but there are no women here. The men will not allow it. Women cannot be kept out of the ribbon weaving; but in the dye house they must not set foot, though the work, or the chief part of it, is far from laborious, and requires a good eye and tact, more than qualities less feminine. We found many apprentices in the works, receiving nearly half the amount of wages of their qualified elders. The men earn from ten shillings to thirty shillings a week, according to their qualifications. Nearly half of the whole number earn about fifteen shillings a week at the present time.

And, now, we are impatient to follow these pretty silk bundles to the factory, and see the weaving. It is strange to see, on our way to so thoroughly modern an establishment, such tokens of antiquity, or reminders of antiquity, as we have to pass. We pass under St Michael’s Church, and look up, amazed, to the beauty and loftiness of its tower and spire – the spire tapering off at a height of three hundred and twenty feet. The crumbling nature of the stone gives a richness and beauty to the edifice, which we would hardly part with for such clear outlines as those of the restored Trinity Church, close at hand. And then, at an angle of the marketplace, there is Tom, peeping past the corner – looking out of his window, through his spectacles, with a stealthy air, which, however ridiculous, makes one thrill, as with a whiff of the breeze which stirred the Lady Godiva’s hair, on that memorable day, so long ago. It is strange, after this, to see the factory chimney, straight, tall, and handsome, in its way, with its inlaying of coloured bricks, towering before us, to about the height of a hundred and thirty feet. No place has proved itself more unwilling than Coventry to admit such innovations. No place has made a more desperate resistance to the introduction of steam power. No place has more perseveringly struggled for protection, with groans, menaces, and supplications. Up to a late period, the Coventry weavers believed themselves safe from the inroads of steam power. A Macclesfield manufacturer said, only twenty years ago, before a Committee of the House of Commons, that he despaired of ever applying power looms to silk. This was because so much time was employed in handling and trimming the silk, that the steam power must be largely wasted. So thought the weavers, in the days when the silk was given out in hanks or bobbins, and woven at home, or, when the work was done by handloom weavers in the factory – called the loom shop. The day was at hand, however, when that should be done of which the Macclesfield gentleman despaired. A small factory was set up in Coventry by way of experiment, in the use of steam power, in 1831. It was burned down during a quarrel about wages – nobody knows how or by whom. The weavers declared it was not their doing; but their enmity to steam power was strong enough to restrain the employers from the use of it. It was not till everybody saw that Coventry was losing its manufacture – parting with it to places which made ribbons by steam – that the manufacturers felt themselves able to do what must be done, if they were to save their trade. The state of things now is very significant. About seventy houses in Coventry make ribbons and trimmings, (fringes and the like). Of these, four make fringes and trimmings, and no ribbons; and six or eight make both. Say that fifty-eight houses make ribbons alone. It is believed that three fourths of the ribbons are made by no more than twenty houses out of these fifty-eight. There are now thirty steam power loom factories in Coventry, producing about seven thousand pieces of ribbons in the week, and employing about three thousand persons. It seems not to be ascertained how large a proportion of the population are employed in the ribbon manufacture: but the increase is great since the year 1838, when the number was about eight thousand, without reckoning the outlying places, which would add about three thousand to the number. The total population of the city was found, last March, to amount to nearly thirty-seven thousand. So, if we reckon the numbers employed in connexion with the throwing-mills and dye-houses, we shall see what an ascendancy the ribbon manufacture has in Coventry.

At the factory we are entering, the preparatory processes are going forward at the top and the bottom of the building. In the yard is the boiler fire, which sets the engine to work; and, from the same yard, we enter workshops, where the machinery is made and repaired. The ponderous work of the men at the forge and anvils contrasts curiously with the delicacy of the fabric which is to be produced by the agency of these masses of iron and steel. Passing up a stepladder, we find ourselves in a long room, where turners are at work, making the wooden apparatus required, piercing the “compass boards,” for the threads to pass through, and displaying to us many ingenious forms of polished wood. While the apparatus is thus preparing below, the material of the manufacture is getting arranged, four stories overhead. There, under a skylight, women and girls are winding the silk from the hanks, upon the spools, for the shuttles. Here we see, again, the clouded silk, which is to make plaid ribbons, and the bright hues which delighted our eyes at the dyeing-house. This is easy work – many of the women sitting at their reels; and the air is pure and cool. The great shaft from the engine, passing through the midst of the building, carries off the dust, and affords excellent ventilation. Besides this, the whole edifice is crowned by an observatory, with windows all round; and no complete ceilings shut off the air between this chamber and the rooms of two stories below. In clear weather, there is a fine view from this pinnacle, extending from the house, gardens, and orchard of the Messrs Hamerton below, over the spires of Coventry, to a wide range of country beyond.

Descending from the long room, where the winding is going on, we find ourselves in an apartment which it does one good to be in. It is furnished with long narrow tables, and benches, put there for the sake of the workpeople, who may like to have their tea at the factory, in peace and quiet. They can have hot water, and make themselves comfortable here. Against the door hangs a list of books, read, or to be read, by the people: and a very good list it is. Prints, from Raffaelle’s Bible, plainly framed, are on the walls. In the middle of the room, on, and beside, a table, are four men and boys, preparing the “strapping” of a Jacquard loom for work. The cords, so called, are woven at Shrewsbury. We next enter a room where a young man is engaged in the magical work of “reading in from the draught.” The draught is the pattern of the intended ribbon, drawn and painted upon diced paper – like the patterns for carpets that we saw at Kendal, but a good deal larger, though the article to be produced here is so much smaller. The young man sits, as at a loom. Before him hangs the mass of cords he is to tie into pattern, close before his face, like the curtain of a cabinet piano. Upreared before his eyes is his pattern, supported by a slip of wood. He brings the line he has to “read in” to the edge of this wood, and then, with nimble fingers, separates the cords, by threes, by sevens, by fives, by twelves, according to the pattern, and threads through them the string which is to tie them apart. The skill and speed with which he feels out his cords, while his eyes are fixed on his pattern, appear very remarkable: but when we come to consider, it is not so complicated a process as playing at sight on the piano. The reader has to deal thus with one chapter, or series, or movement, of his pattern. A da capo ensues: in other words, the Jacquard cards are tied together, to begin again; and there is a revolution of the cards, and a repetition of the pattern, till the piece of ribbon is finished. In the same apartment is the press in which the Jacquard cards are prepared – just in the way which may be seen wherever silk or carpet weaving, with Jacquard looms, goes forward.

All the preparations having been seen – the making of the machinery, the filling of the spools, the drawing and “reading in” of the pattern, and the tying of the cords or strapping, we have to see the great process of all – the actual weaving. We certainly had no idea how fine a spectacle it might be. Floor above floor is occupied with a long room in each, where the looms are set as close as they can work, on either hand, leaving only a narrow passage between. It may seem an odd thing to say; but there is a kind of architectural grandeur in these long lofty rooms, where the transverse cords of the looms and their shafts and beams are so uniform, as to produce the impression that symmetry, on a large scale, always gives. Looking down upon the details, there is plenty of beauty. The light glances upon the glossy coloured silks, depending, like a veil, from the backs of the looms, where women and girls are busy piercing the imperfect threads with nimble fingers. There seems to be plenty for one person to do; for there are thirteen broad ribbons, or a greater number of narrow ones, woven at once, in a single loom; yet it may sometimes be seen that one person can attend the fronts, and another the backs of two looms. In the front we see the thirteen ribbons getting made. Usually, they are of the same pattern, in different colours. The shuttles, with their gay little spools, fly to and fro, and the pattern grows, as of its own will. Below is a barrel, on which the woven ribbon is wound. Slowly revolving, it. winds off the fabric as it is finished, leaving the shuttles above room to ply their work.

The variety of ribbons is very great, though in this factory we saw no gauzes, nor, at the time of our visit, any of the extremely rich ribbons which made such a show at the Exhibition. Some had an elegant and complicated pattern, and were woven with two shuttles (called the double batten weaving) which came forward alternately, as the details of the rich flower or leaf required the one or the other. There were satin ribbons, in weaving which only one thread in eight is taken up – the gloss being given by the silk loop which covers the other seven. On entering, we saw some narrow scarlet satin ribbons, woven for the Queen. Wondering what Her Majesty could want with ribbon of such a colour and quality, we were set at ease by finding that it was not for ladies, but horses. It was to dress the heads of the royal horses. There were bride-like, white-figured ribbons, and narrow flimsy black ones, fit for the wear of the poor widow who strives to get together some mourning for Sundays. There were checked ribbons, of all colours and all sizes in the check. There were stripes of all varieties of width and hue. There were diced ribbons, and speckled, and frosted. There were edges which may introduce a beautiful harmony of colouring – as primrose with a lilac edge – green with a purple edge; rose-colour and brown; puce and amber; and so on. The loops of pearl or shell edges are given by the silk being passed round horsehairs, which are drawn out when the thing is done. There are belts – double ribbons – which have other material than silk in them; and there are a good many which are plain at one edge, and ornamented at the other. These are for trimming dresses. One reason why there are so few gauzes, is that the French beat us there. They grow the kind of silk that is best for that fabric: and labour is cheap with them; so that any work in which labour bears a large proportion to the material, is particularly suitable for them.

We have spent so much time among the looms, that it is growing dusk in their shadows, though still light enough in the counting house for us to look over the pattern book, and admire a great many patterns, most, till we see more. Young women are weighing ribbons in large scales; and a man is measuring off some pieces, by reeling. He cuts off remnants, which he casts into a basket, where they look so pretty that, lest we should be conscious of any shoplifting propensities, we turn away. There is a glare now through the window which separates us from the noisy weaving room. The gas is lighted, and we step in again, just to see the effect. It is really very fine. The flare of the separate jets is lost behind the screens of silken threads, which veil the backs of the looms, while the yellow light touches the beams, and gushes up to the high ceiling in a thousand caprices. Surely the ribbon manufacture is one of the prettiest that we have to show.

If the Coventry people were asked whether their chief manufacture was in a flourishing state, the most opposite answers would probably be given by different parties equally concerned. Some exult, and some complain, at this present time. As far as we can make out, the state of things is this. From the low price of provisions, multitudes have something more to spare from their weekly wages than formerly, for the purchase of finery: and the demand for cheap ribbons has increased wonderfully. As always happens when any manufacture is prosperous, the operatives engage their whole families in it. We may see the father weaving; his wife, on the verge of her confinement, winding in another room, or, perhaps, standing behind a loom, piecing the whole day long. The little girls fill the spools; the boys are weaving somewhere else. The consequences of this devotion of whole households to one business, are as bad here as among the Nottingham lace makers, or the Leicester hosiers. Not only is there the misery before them of the whole family being adrift at once, when bad times come, but they are doing their utmost to bring on those bad times. Great as is the demand, the production has, thus far, much exceeded it. The soundest capitalists may be heard complaining that theirs is a losing trade. Less substantial capitalists have been obliged to get rid of some of their stock at any price they could obtain: and those ribbons, sold at a loss, intercept the sales of the fair dealing manufacturer. This cannot go on. Prosperous as the working classes of Coventry have been, for a considerable time, a season of adversity must be within ken, if the capitalists find the trade a bad one for them. We find the case strongly stated, and supported by facts, in a tract on the Census of Coventry, which has lately been published there. It might save a repetition of the misery which the Coventry people brought upon themselves formerly – by their tenacity about protective duties, and their opposition to steam power – if they would, before it is too late, ponder the facts of their case, and strive, every man in his way, to yield respect to the natural demand for the great commodity of his city; and to take care that the men of Coventry shall be fit for something else than weaving ribbons.

Needles

Household Words, Volume 4, page 540

We have been to Redditch, that remarkable little Worcestershire town, to see needles made. While on that perch – for Redditch crowns a high hill – while looking abroad, in all directions, over a true English country scene of hill and dale, orchard and sloping fallow, humble church tower, and comfortable farmstead, we were compelled, by our errand, to contrast this with some very different places in which we had studied needles. People who invent and use such articles of convenience as needles must have a good deal in common, however widely different they must appear on the whole. How many wants and wishes, designs and plans, efforts and achievements, must be common to the minds of all sorts of persons who sew things together to make garments, and do it by means of the same invention – of an instrument which shall pierce the material, and draw a thread after it, to tie two edges together! We could not but think, while on the tableland of Redditch, of the odd places in which, at intervals of years, we had observed this process, or the records of it.

In the Lebanon, high up among the defiles and rocky platforms, which succeed each other till the celebrated cedars are reached, there is a village, nestling among mulberry groves and orchards, called Eden, and believed by many people in the East to be the real first home of Adam and Eve. We did not, when we were there, see anybody sewing figleaves together; but we mention that place, not only because it is a widespread belief that the first sewing ever done was done there, but because we had, a little while before going there, seen a piece of sewing, of extremely old date. The work that we saw was a piece of darning, with the threaded needle still sticking in it, after the lapse of several thousand years. The old Egyptians had a custom of burying in their handsome, roomy rock tombs, specimens of the works and possessions of the deceased; and the cotton fabric that we saw, with the pretty unfinished darn (more like herringbone stitch than our ordinary darning), and the needle sticking in it, was, no doubt, the property and the handiwork of the lady in whose tomb it was found. It may be seen in Dr Abbott’s collection of curiosities at Cairo. Those old Egyptians seem to have known the use of steel. They used it for armour; but not, we suppose, for needles; for this needle – the one remaining needle from the world of above five thousand years ago, is of wood. The wood is hard, and the needle is made as small, probably, as it can be, but it is sadly clumsy – harder to use, no doubt, than the sailmakers’ needles we saw under the file at Redditch. It is a curious thing, however, to glance back, through all those thousands of years, to the Egyptian lady, sitting in her elegant chair, mending her muslin garment (whatever it might be), while surrounded by her children – one of whom was playing with her doll (still in mummified existence), with a face and hair uncommonly like the Sphinx – and another, a baby, handling – not a woolly bow-wow dog like those that yelp in our nurseries – but a little snapping crocodile, of wood, with a loose under jaw. And then – what a long step it is over space and time! – to the place where we have seen another sort of needle, with its thread – no more to be compared with the Redditch needles than the Egyptian one – the green shores of Mackinaw, in Lake Michigan, where, in some of the long row of wigwams, there are, at this day, Indian women, sewing with a needle of stout porcupine quill, and thread of the sinews of the deer. Again, among those that we have not seen, there are the fish bones that the Greenlanders and the South Sea Islanders use – the women of the one race sitting in their snow burrow, stitching by the light of their oil lamps; and the women of the other race wearing, while at work, a great palm leaf on their heads for shade; and cooling themselves occasionally by a swim in the calm water within the coral reefs. Again – but we must not stop to tell of all the different kinds of needles used in the world – though the list would now be a short one. It would be a short list, because our English needles of today are spreading all over the known world, wherever exchange of commodities is going on.

Some of us may feel uncomfortable at this thought – uncomfortable at the recollection of a sad story about that. Do we not know of certain purchases, made of certain simple Africans – the purchase money on our side being needles – “Whitechapel sharps,” duly gilded at the head – which were found, after the departure of the traders, to be without eyes? It is a sad story. The Redditch makers, who used to prepare gilt “Whitechapel sharps” for the African market, say that they don’t believe it; that the needles were of a coarse and ill-finished kind; but that they were never “blind.” Yet the testimony is so strong, and the effects of the cheat were so serious in damaging our commercial character among the savages, that we fear there can have been no mistake. It was, no doubt, a parallel case with that of the Anglo-Saxons, who sold a handful of gunpowder for a bale of furs, to the Red Indians, instructing their customers to sow the gunpowder in furrows, to get valuable crops next summer; and with that of the Dutch traders, who used their own hands and feet for weight – the hand for half a pound, and the foot for a pound, and eternally astonished the Indians at the quantity of furs they had to heap up, and squeeze into the scale, to weigh down the Dutchman’s pound. If we laugh at such stories, it is with a weeping heart; for tricks like these, done in any corner where new races are found, are a grave misfortune to the whole human race.

How is it that “Whitechapel sharps” are, or were, made at Redditch? It is supposed to be because Elias Krause lived in Whitechapel; giving a good name to needles, which they long preserved. And who was Elias Krause? He was a German, who came over in 1565, and was the first maker of needles in this country – that is, of course, of the modern kind of needle. And who taught the Germans? The Spaniards – if we may judge by the importation of “Spanish needles” into England and other countries before the Germans made them. And who taught the Spaniards? Nobody seems to know; so it is reported that they invented the true needle – made of steel, with a point at one end, and an eye at the other.

What pains Elias Krause took with his work, we may judge by what some living persons could tell us of needle making in their young days. Cyclopaedias of the present century – within the last thirty years, even – give such an account of the formation of a needle, as appears quite piteous to one who was at Redditch yesterday. We read of such hammering, and rolling, such heating and cooling, such filing and punching, of each separate needle, that we wonder how any sempstress ever dared to break an eye, or turn the point, of a thing which had cost so much pains. And the needles of thirty, twenty, ten, five years ago, cost something much more serious than pains and toil. They cost human life, too, at a terrible rate. It never was true, as it is often said to have been, that needle makers rarely lived beyond thirty years of age; but it was, for a long time, true that every needle that was pointed helped to shorten some man’s life.

The facts were these. Needle pointers lived, while at their work, in an atmosphere thick with stone dust and steel dust, generated by the dry grinding of the needles upon the wheel just under their noses. Instead of windows, there were many little doors in the places where they worked, in order to carry off as much dust as possible; and one consequence of this was that the men sat in a thorough draught. Their only precaution was to go out about once in an hour, and rinse their mouths; a poor device enough, while their noses, throats and windpipes were infested, like their dress and their skin, with myriads of sharp points of cruel steel. They died of consumption in a few years. If boys tried the work, they were gone before twenty. If men, with a consolidated frame, and good appetites, (for the largest eaters lived longest,) set to this work, they might possibly hold on to forty – a case here and there occurring of a needle pointer who reached forty-five. Bad morals always attend a permanent state of insecurity of life and bad health; and so it was in this case. Very high wages were given. Some men earned a guinea a day; none less than two guineas a week. It became an established fact, that the needle pointers (then about forty men, in a population of one thousand five hundred, in Redditch; and in a similar proportion, as the population increased) were a set of debauched young men, who, tempted by the high wages, braved their doom, and entered upon the business at twenty, or soon after – counting the years they supposed they might live, and declaring their desire for “a short life and a merry one.” They married, and always left their widows and children to the parish. Following their notion of a merry life, they would at times drink ale, day and night, for two or three weeks together. Then, they would go back to their benches, raise a prodigious dust, and choke over it, almost without pause, for three weeks or a month, to clear off scores; then, they would have another drinking bout. This was a sight which no humane employer could endure; and many were the consultations and attempts entered upon by the masters to save or prolong life. All such attempts exasperated the victims themselves. They insisted upon their right to die early, if they chose; and they were sure their employers were in reality wanting to lower their wages. A good man invented a wire-gauze mask; which, being magnetised, must prevent the steel dust from entering the mouth. The men would not wear it. This mask could be little or no protection against the dust from the grindstone. Another device was therefore joined with that of the mask; – a canvas cylinder, brought down close over the grindstone, up which, it was hoped, the dust would make its way, and be carried off. In one night, the canvas cylinders, throughout Redditch, were cut into strips, and the needle pointers declared themselves under intimidation from their fellow workers, about wearing the mask. It was pretty clear at the time, that the men agreed among themselves to cut one another’s cylinders, and to threaten each other – that it was a matter of collusion from end to end.

Other inventions were devised from time to time; but were never got into use. The new generation of needle pointers (and an employer of fifty years old has seen four generations of them) was less ignorant, and somewhat less vicious than their predecessors; but still the sacrifice of life went on. It had become a point of honour, or of self-will, with the men, besides their dread of a lowering of wages, not to use any means of self-preservation; and on they went to their early graves, as fast as ever, until four years ago. Then there was a strike among the Redditch needle makers. It lasted three months; at the end of which time the men became very hungry, very sad, and very humble. They made no objection to the terms offered by the employers; and the employers saw that now was the time to save the needle pointers from their own folly; and they made it a prime condition of renewed connexion between masters and men, that a certain sanitary apparatus should be faithfully used. The promise was given; the trial was made; the men soon found the comfort and advantage of it; they seem, now, likely to live as long as other people; and the stranger observes that they seem to show off the arrangement with a certain complacency and pride, which prove that it works in excellent accordance with their will. What this arrangement is, we shall tell hereafter, when we have carried our commodity up to the need of being pointed. The number of needle pointers in Redditch, now, is about one hundred and ten; a large company to be saved from an early and painful death!

It is not so very long since every needle of every size was made separately, from beginning to end, as sailmakers’ needles and packing needles are made still. It is hard to say which is most perplexing to the imagination: the old method, by which nails, hooks and eyes, and needles, were separately fashioned by hand: or the present amount of production by machinery. We saw, the other day, hooks and eyes made by a machine, which gave us a strong impression of its being alive (some one said it could do everything but speak), by which one manufactory sends out a ton per week of hooks and eyes. No comment can add to the marvel of the thought – a ton of hooks and eyes per week! In needle making there is no such marvellous machinery: the marvel consisting chiefly of the dexterity attainable by human fingers; but the monstrous numbers made are simply overwhelming. We saw, on a counter of a warehouse yesterday, a set of little parcels, such as a lady might carry home all at once in a handbasket, and found that they contained a quarter of a million of needles! Comparing that set of parcels with what else the room contained, we gave up the attempt to comprehend what we saw. The room was surrounded by compartments, each of which was filled with similar packets. The effort to imagine their contents, when in use, was like undertaking to count the grains of a square yard of sea beach. Yet this was only one room of one manufactory of one little town!

Needle making is now, however, almost gone out everywhere else. There was, once, a famous manufacture at Long Crendon, in Oxfordshire; but it has languished so long that it has nearly expired. The people intermarried with remarkable exclusiveness; exchanged ideas with nobody else; heard, or would hear, of no improvement; chose to remain as they were; therefore, of course, they sank. The population of Redditch has, meantime, increased from fifteen hundred to nearly five thousand; of whom almost every man, woman, and child lives by needles. The neighbouring villages contain a population of from four thousand to five thousand more: a large proportion of whom are employed by the Redditch manufacturers. The lawyers’ and doctors’ fees were once needles; and the shopkeepers’ profits, and the maidservants’ wages, and the houses, and the schools, and the land allotments, and the flower show prizes, and all the good things that may be found there now, were once needles too. Finding such things come of needles, let us see now how the needles come into being.

We are allowed to go over the Victoria Works, the manufactory of Mr John James; and, moreover, into any of the houses of his workpeople who carry on their business at home: which is the case with about three fourths of them. Those who work on Mr James’s premises are well off for air, light, and cheerfulness. Some of the rooms overlook his pretty garden, and all have plenty of windows. When once we have left the furnaces and boilers, all the rest is clean and there is no sign of ill health in any of the intelligent faces. Intelligent they are; for these people have had a good school education. Mr James admits no children under ten years of age to his employment. He cannot prevent some of his people from hiring the help of children under that age; but his rule is enforced to the utmost of his power. Of the workpeople, thirty-eight can read and write; fourteen read, but do not write; and only three can do neither. Those three are – a boy, just arrived from elsewhere; a man, of great natural intelligence, who earns two guineas a week; and a halfwit, who can turn a wheel, but cannot learn his letters.

In going over the premises, we must pass hither and thither, and walk into the next street and back again, and even take a drive to a certain country mill and return, in order to present in their natural order the processes of needle making.

The best wire comes from Yorkshire; the inferior from Birmingham. There is a small chamber, really pretty in its way, from being hung round with coils of bright wire, suspended from hooks. This wire is of all thicknesses, from the stout kind required for fish hooks for Newfoundland cod, and for packing and sailmaking needles, to the finest for cambric needles. In the dark and dingy rooms below, bits of wire, each the length of two needles, are cut by a pair of vast shears, well fixed to the wall. The “measure” is a steel instrument, furnished with a screw, which determines the length of the bundle of wires cut at once. Two iron rings, about five inches in diameter, are placed on edge, and nearly filled with the cut wires, of which there is thus a pretty large faggot before us. These wires, having come off coils, are curved, and they must be straightened. A sort of hooked poker is thrust into the rings, and transports the faggot to the furnace, where it is presently heated red-hot. It is taken out; a curved iron bar is laid between the rings, and the bundle is rolled backwards and forwards on a table until the wires are straight. This is called “rubbing straight.”

We now find ourselves in a mill in the country – a pretty place, with its pond, its unceasing gush of water, its little ravine, its cheerful farmstead, its fields with cows grazing, even at this season. There is a miller peeping out at us. What does he do here? One end of the mill is let for grinding flour; the other, for grinding needles. We go down some steps to a basement-room, where straps are revolving with all possible zeal. The waterwheel is under our feet; and round us are placed four grindstones. Each grindstone is furnished with a cap or cover, like a collapsing Dutch oven. It does not fit closely, but leaves a space, through which the deadly dust is blown. Here is the secret of the salvation of the dry-grinders. A comfortable-looking needle pointer is seated on his bench. He takes up two dozen or so of wires, and applies the ends to the grindstone. While doing this, he has to roll every wire between his finger and thumb. Backwards and forwards he makes them revolve, in contact with the wheel; and off flies a shower of sparks. One end being done, he presents the other; for it must be remembered that these wires are of the length of two needles. As he works, we see the dust rushing under the cover, quite away from the workman’s face; and we are invited to go and see what becomes of it. There is a covered fan wheel in the middle of the chamber, turned by water power; and this it is which sucks away the dust from all the four grindstones at once. We pass outside to the end of the building, and go down some more steps, to the brink of the stream which is flowing away down the little ravine. We observe that a patch of the opposite bank, some way down, is whitened – crusted over with dust; and, looking carefully, we see puffs, as of a thin smoke, coming from behind a grey stone on our side of the bank. Behind that stone is the outlet from the fan-wheel, and the whitening on the grass and brambles is the dust which would have hung about the men and within the men, if they had not consented to this saving measure.

It is a plan which costs a little money in the first instance; although it saves a vast deal in the end. That fan-wheel uses up a third of the water power appropriated to this chamber. The men have, nominally, the same wages as of old; but they pay their share of this loss, at the rate of about a shilling a-week. This is their toll for life and health. The masters bear a much larger share, and with extreme content. It may be mentioned here, that from the nominally high – extremely high – wages of this class of men, must be deducted the mill-rents they pay, and the cost of their tools – amounting altogether to ten or twelve shillings a-week.

We now have the wires straight, and pointed at both ends. We next find ourselves in a workshop, in the next street to Mr James’s. Here, we see a stamping machine and die, which flattens and prints a space precisely in the middle of each bit of wire. The print shows where the eye is to be, and at the same time the “guttering” is done – the forming the little channel seen in the heads of all needles. The workman strikes off five thousand of these in an hour; that is, he flattens and “gutters” the heads of ten thousand needles per hour – rather an advance upon the old method of doing each one by hand! Then comes the punching of the eyes. The punch is double, of course; and the boy who works it, perforates four thousand wires, or eight thousand needles per hour. This is dexterous work, the wires being laid and removed almost faster than the eye can follow.

The next boy we noticed was seven years old; a little fellow hired by the woman under whom he worked. “ This boy,” we were told, “earns his living by spitting. He is not an American; yet he passes his days in spitting.” Before him lay bits of wire almost as fine as hairs: and these wires he was running through the eyes of the twin needles which had come from the punch. He ran a wire through each line of eyes, “spitting” two dozen or so on his two wires. A woman, whose wrists and arms were obviously of unusual strength, received these spitted needles, laid them on a prepared steel plate, and filed off all roughness on both sides. The twin needles had yet to be separated, and the fragments of flattened steel surrounding the heads to be removed. This was done by a woman close at hand, who sat before her little anvil, filing with precision between the rows of heads, so that they separated easily; and then, by another movement, clearing away all extraneous bits and sharp edges, delivering her spitsful of needles complete in form.

They are still rough and rusty-looking; and, what is worse, they are soft – so soft as to bend with a touch. The hardening comes next. They are heated, in batches, in the furnace, and, when red hot, are soused into a pan of cold water. – Next, they must be tempered; and this is done by heaping them (all lying the same way) on a very hot metal plate, where a man with a metal slice, called “a knife,” in each hand, shifts them incessantly backwards and forwards, upon each other, taking care that all get, as nearly as possible, an equal quantity of heat. If any get too little, they bend in the using; if too much, they break. As they turn blue upon this plate, they are removed, the shade of blueness showing when they are tempered enough.

The polishing remains to be done. The best needles are polished no less than six times; and there are three stages of polishing for all. The final scouring is the most emphatic affair. To see it, we must find ourselves at the mill again. The water power there appears to be moving half a dozen mangles: and very like mangling the process is. On a very coarse cloth, which lies upon another coarse cloth, needles are spread, to the number of forty or fifty thousand. Emery dust is strewed over them: oil is sprinkled upon them, and soft soap is daubed by spoonfuls on the cloth. The whole precious mess is then rolled up compactly, and tied at both ends, and round and round, as tight as pack-thread can bind it; and we have before us a disgusting black “roly-poly” dumpling. Several of these are put into one of the mangles, where they roll to and fro for eight hours. By that time, the emery is worn smooth, the packets are taken out, and the needles are dressed with fresh emery, oil, and soap; and another eight hours’ mangling succeeds. From this, the needles come out dirty enough, and smelling horribly; but they are capable now of showing their brightness.

They are washed with hot water and cleansing materials in iron pans, by boys, who seem to enjoy the shaking and boulting of the needles with real zest. When clean, the needles are tossed into sawdust, and tossed about in it, until they are dry, and then the sawdust is tossed out from them; they are tossed into bundles, and sent to the manufactory, to be sorted and put up for sale.

We shall not come back to the unsavoury mill any more; so we will ask what that boy is doing; and how any stone-breaking can be necessary to the making of needles? He is breaking into smaller pieces those not large white stones, from which emery powder comes. We follow his barrowful of pieces into a little shed, and find that the water power is working. up and down, the pestle of a great mortar, where the boy’s fragments are broken into dust. A man is sifting what comes out of the mortar, and returning whatever will not go through his sieve.

Once more in the manufactory, we find the faulty needles separated from the perfect. Among so many, some must be broken, some bent, some with bad eyes or dull points. We inquire what becomes of the refuse, which is called “scrap;” and the answer appears to us so curious that we are glad we did not miss the information. The bright needles, which happen only to have lost their heads, are eagerly bought by picture-frame makers and cabinet-makers. They are invaluable for delicate fastenings, for veneering, and where a nail is wanted of extreme fineness and without a head. The rest of the “scrap” is equally prized for another object, – for making gun barrels. It is sold by cartloads, as the finest-tempered steel that gun barrels can be made of. What an idea this gives – or would give, if we could receive it – of the extent of the manufacture!

The manufacture is now complete; but the making ready for sale exhibits a miracle of dexterity; at least, to unpractised eyes.

A handful of needles, lying all manner of ways, is put into a tray, which is shaken backwards and forwards, until the needles lie all one way. Those whose points lie left, from those whose points lie right, are separated. A little girl spreads a heap on her counter into a rough row, wraps a bit of cloth round the forefinger of her right hand, shakes the needles a little, and brings out a batch, with their points sticking lightly in the cloth, and their heads supported by her other forefinger. These she lays aside, and does the same thing again, until all are separated. A heap is thus separated more quickly than we can tell how it is done. But these needles are of different lengths. How should we set about sorting them? Certainly not in the actual way. The operation just described is called “heading.” This is called “handling.” A narrow piece of wood, like a thick flat ruler, is heaped with as many needles as will lie upon it, almost from end to end. A woman feels along both sides with the lower edge of her hands, and lifts from the rest, with her little fingers and the palms of her hands, the longest needles, which she places on one side. Then follow the next longest, which she places on the other side. It is altogether an affair of tact; and fine must be the touch, and long the experience, required to do such sorting with accuracy.

Then, we arrive at the seat of another wonderful woman, who is pronounced by her employer the most rapid worker he has ever seen. Her business is to count the needles into quarter hundreds, and paper them up. The squares of paper lie ready; the needles are before her. She separates twenty-five of them, whips them into a paper, and counts again with incredible rapidity; folding the filled papers when about half a dozen are ready. We are so persuaded that our readers could never believe how many packets this woman folds in a day, that we will not say how many thousands they number. That so many should go forth into the world from one house, is wonderful enough; that one woman should put them up for their journey, is more than any readers, not needle makers, could be expected to believe on the declaration of an anonymous writer.

Next, we come among boys and girls. One little boy is cutting out the printed labels, which have had their figures neatly filled in by an older lad. A third is spreading the cut labels on a board smeared with paste. A girl is putting them on the packets of needles. Another is putting on the warranty ticket, in like manner. Another is “tucking;” slipping one end of the needle paper into the other. A lad is looking to the drying of the papers in the warm drying closet, in the same room, where they remain about two hours; and he and another are tying up the papers into packets. Finally, we return into the warehouse, and see the piles of gay boxes, which are to be filled with an assortment of needles for presents, or for foreign sale. These boxes are a branch of industry in themselves; with their portraits of the Queen and Prince, and their copies from popular pictures, such as Raffaelle’s Madonna in the Chair. As a further temptation, these pictures in the lids are so fitted as to be disengaged and hung up. They are probably to be seen on the walls of many a log cabin in America, and chalet in Switzerland, and bungalow in India, and home of exiles in Siberia. It seems as if all the world of needlewomen, of every clime, were supplied by England. One man has gone from among us to set up the business in the United States; but the Americans are not known yet to be making for themselves. In all directions, our hundredweights and tons of this delicate article are going forth.

We should have liked to know what the consumption of sailmakers’ needles is at home: but this we could not learn. These formidable affairs are separately forged, as their finer companions once were. The flattening, and guttering, and filing of the heads, is done on grooved anvils; and so is the hammering of the lower half into a three-sided surface. The pointing is done by one at a time being held to a revolving cylinder of a grit-stone brought from Bristol; and then there is another rubbing against a “buff,” – a cylinder covered with leather dressed with emery. The eyes are punched separately, and by repeated strokes; and pains are given to the finishing of the head, by flattening its sides, and filing all smooth. The process is nearly the same with packing-needles; but, as we know, their pointed ends are considerably flattened and bent.

We must deny ourselves the pleasure of describing the other manufacture which goes on in the same place – that of fish hooks. The pattern-books of the concern show specimens of all sorts, from the strong cod-hook, for the Newfoundland Banks, and the salmon-hook for the Norway cataracts, to the most delicate little barb that can be hidden under a streak of feather, to dance in the insidious character of a fly on the surface of an English rivulet. We find here sail hooks, too – like very large buttonhooks. Without these the sailmaker could not hold together the edges of the uncommonly heavy fabric he has to sew.

The women and girls in this establishment are rather more numerous than the men and boys. Their employer accounts for the superiority of all in health, understanding, and morals, to the last generation, by citing the results of the Sunday schools of Redditch, and the good free school there. He may be quite right: but there is something in the tone of the intercourse between himself and everybody on his premises, which convinces a stranger that there is also somebody else to thank for the improvement, which drives out all the stranger’s preconceptions of the wretchedness of needle makers. For our own part, we must say that a load has been removed from our mind – a burden of sorrow and commiseration – by our visit to the Victoria Needle Works at Redditch.

Time and the Hour

Household Words, Volume 4, page 555

Proud as we are apt to be of our achievements in science and art, it sometimes strikes some people that we do not reverence and admire enough the results of the sagacity, patience, and courage of men of a former generation. For instance – what an achievement is the discovery that the earth is not flat – the discovery of its actual form – the discovery of its relation to other parts of the system – discoveries clenched by the fact, that we can predict future starry occurences, account for apparent planetary errors in our own days, and explain, by means of the history of the solar system, some dubious incidents in the ancient history of man! It seems inexpressibly astonishing that men, on their little anthill, should be able to make out the facts of regions which they can never reach, and where they could not live to draw a single breath: that such imperceptible insects as they must appear, if heard of, in the sun and moon, should lay down, without mistake, and to demonstration, the laws of the sun and moon in their external relations. It is as if the aphids on a rose bush under a window in the Isle of Wight, were to make out, by means of some wise aphis dwelling under a vein in a leaf, the mathematical facts of the Edinburgh and Perth Railway. When we think of it, our minds reel under the burden of this knowledge.

Somewhat in the same way, but less eminently, we cannot but marvel at the perfection that men have reached in recording the passage of time. There are natural helps to this which diminish the wonder: but still it is a wonder of great magnitude. When we look at the matter on one side, we see that time is given out, as it were, from the magnitudes and motions of the stars; and in that view, it seems a deed almost beyond estimate, that man should have caught this product, and made it record its own lapse from moment to moment. When we look at the other side, and see how the sun presents man with a natural clock, by simply shining where a shadow can be cast, whether of a sapling or an Egyptian pyramid, our wonder lessens to an endurable degree. We know that, in fact, the sick man measures his bitter hours by the sunshine or shadow on the wall of his chamber; and the shepherd in the wilds by the ellipse he has drawn for the hours round the solitary tree; and that the old Egyptians are said to have learned much more than the time of day by measuring the sharp line of shadow drawn on the glaring sands of the desert, by the mute and immovable Pyramid of Cheops, under compulsion from the relentless sun, which there never withdraws behind clouds but by some rare caprice. Between the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon, the great dial may rest; but only then may it refuse to show the hours. From making dials, in imitation of these natural ones, to making clocks, in which the circumstance of the shadow is dropped altogether, is, however, a long stride: and there is room for rational admiration when we consider what a true and lasting relation and accord man has established between the jog of the wheels in his pocket watch and the spinning of the planets in space; between the tick which amuses the baby ear leaning against his breast, and the harmonies of the stars in their courses. This appears a great thing to us when we meditate upon it in a walk, or when the tick of the watch tells upon the ear in the darkness of the night. But, to receive the full impression, we should go into the workshop where scores of men and boys are busy in making and arranging the materials – the hard, dead mineral materials – which are to give out something intangible, unutterable, as real as themselves, yet purely ideal in its connexion with us. That men by putting together brass and steel, and a jewel or two, and some engraved marks, should present to us, as in a mirror, the simultaneous doings of the stars in the sky, seems to raise the workroom into a place of contemplation or eloquent discourse.

Thus did it appear to us yesterday, when we entered a fine range of rooms, where a great number of men and boys were occupied in the business of watchmaking for the Messrs Rotherham. There was no resisting the sense of the seriousness of their work in comparison with that (though equally delicate and intently pursued) by which baubles are produced. There is something serious about the whole business. It is a serious thing that it is science and labour which gives its high value to a watch, and not the costliness of the material. A cable was put into our hands, the steel of which was worth nothing that could be specified; whereas, in its present form, it was worth two shillings. Each link, almost too small to be seen by the naked eye, is composed of five parts, each of which is made and placed for a purpose. The mere metal of the whole interior of a watch is worth, we were told, perhaps sixpence; whereas, the labour and skill worked up in it raise its value to many pounds. All is very quiet in these large apartments, where scores of men and boys are poring over their work. The quadrangle of rooms has windows completely round both sides. Under the windows a counter extends, completely round also. Almost every workman has a small magnifying glass, which he fits to the right eye, for the finest part of his work. Of course, the right eye fails, sooner or later. One man was spoken of as having worked for this house between forty and fifty years; but this was a remarkable case. The eye is usually worn out in a much shorter time than that. Besides the long rows of poring craftsmen here, we were told that there were two hundred more in their own homes, employed for the same firm. Having heard of their house as the largest watch manufactory in the inland counties, if not in the kingdom, it was with great interest that we received the details of the history and extent of their business.

It appears that somewhere about 1783, one Vale saw that there was an opening in Coventry for the making of watches; and he set up the business now conducted by the Messrs Rotherham. From that day to this, great difficulty has arisen from the prejudice against countrymade watches. If there ever was, as some say, good reason for this distrust of Coventry watches, there is not now; yet the difficulty exists, and occasions some curious embarrassments. Ten years ago, the annual production of watches by this firm was about six thousand; it is now nearly nine thousand. If we consider the durable character of a watch – that a single one generally serves us for a lifetime – this will be seen to be a large production. But there seems to be no doubt that the demand would be larger, but for the prejudice against Coventry watches, which is akin to that against Birmingham jewellery. The dispute lately pending between a great Coventry house and the Assay Office at Birmingham, is a curious illustration of the way this prejudice works. There is an Act of Parliament, about thirty years old, which obliges manufacturers to send their gold productions to the Assay Office at Birmingham, if they reside within thirty miles of it. Messrs Rotherham send the greater part of their watch cases to the Birmingham office; but they feel it hard, while labouring under the disadvantage of the old prejudice, to be prevented from getting their gold assayed at any office they prefer. Their alternative is between having their watches despised on account of the local mark, and buying their cases in London. They are obliged to buy so many cases in London, that it makes the difference of thirty pounds a week in the wages of labour that they pay in Coventry.

While we are speaking of legislative impediments which annoy the manufacturer, we may as well mention two or three more, which would be scarcely credible in our day, if they did not happen to be true. There seems to be a natural relation between the English and the Swiss, in regard to watchmaking. Though the law does all it can to part them, they are perpetually at work in combination; a combination which it would be convenient to make honest and easy. The tools – various and most delicate – used by watchmakers, are purchased chiefly from Warrington in Lancashire; but the best of them are fashioned in Switzerland. Iron is sent over from England, and returned by the Swiss in the shape of tools so exquisite, that we cannot rival them. Swiss watchmakers live in Clerkenwell, to make the faces of our watches; an article in which fashion is as capricious as in any department whatever. Now, it would be much easier and pleasanter for these Swiss to live at home, and work in their own beloved dwellings, as numbers of their countrymen, and many more of their countrywomen, are always doing. But, while Swiss watches are admitted entire into England, at a duty of ten per cent., the importation of parts of watches is totally prohibited. Swiss watches, as a whole, are not to be compared with English; but in the making of some parts, the Swiss excel us. By this absurd prohibition, we must either buy entire watches, to help us to the parts we want, or we must try to smuggle; or skilled Swiss must come and live here. We need not say that the one thing which we never think of, is going without anything which is proved to be the best of its kind. We, on the other hand, are excluded altogether from the European trade in watches. The prohibition, as regards all Europe, is complete; while we trade with Asia, Africa, and America. In the United States, again, there is a duty which so affects the importation of watches, as to give rise to a whimsical state of things. Our watches go “in the frame,” packed naked, as it were, and they are clothed with cases there. The Americans cannot compete with us in making the works; but the making of the cases is now an important business with them. What confusion, and trouble, and waste, are caused by all these legislative meddlings!

It is painful to see that further difficulties are made by the selfishness of certain persons at home, concerned in the making of watches. One cause of the cheapness of Swiss watches, which preserves their popularity, in spite of their inferiority to ours, is the comparative cheapness of their production. Throughout the valleys of Switzerland, there are multitudes of women busy in their own homes, about the delicate processes of watchmaking. No work can be more suitable for women. The fineness of sight and touch required seems to mark it out as a feminine employment; and it can be pursued at home, if that is desired, just like needlework, or any other feminine business. But the men of Coventry will not allow women to be employed. The employers desire it; the women desire it; all rational observers desire it; but the men will not allow it. The same man who sends his wife and daughter to weave at the factory, will not hear of their engraving “brass work” at home. It is a curious thing to pass in forty minutes from Birmingham to Coventry, and to mark the difference between the two places in this matter. In the one, we see hundreds of neatly dressed and well behaved women, doing work suitable to their faculties and their strength, and earning the means of support for themselves, and education for their children, by making screws, gold chains, and many other things; while, in Coventry, the workmen will not allow a woman to paste bits of floss silk upon a card, or to mark the figures upon the face of a watch. With regard to the ribbon manufacture, they have had to give way. At the reels and looms we see women employed by hundreds. The rest will follow. The women will obtain whatever liberty of occupation is reasonable, because whatever is reasonable becomes practicable, sooner or later. We know of a beginning made, no matter where, or by whom. The respectable and educated wife of a superior mechanic chooses to aid her husband’s earnings, by employing her leisure in a process of watchmaking – that of “engraving” the “brass work” in the interior of a watch. As soon as it was discovered that she was thus employed, an outcry was raised. Every opposition was made, but she has persevered. A sort of case of apprenticeship has been made out, by witnesses having affirmed that, in their presence, she had seen her father do the work she had undertaken. She would have preferred another branch of the work; but she found there was no chance of her being permitted to do the same thing that her husband wrought at. She is instructing her two daughters, however, in her own branch; and there can be no doubt that her example will be followed. At present, hers is considered a singular case.

The watchmakers are now supposed to be to the ribbon manufacturers, in Coventry, as one to ten. The proportion will, probably, have changed before the next census. It should be considered, however, that the ribbon weavers are distributed over neighbouring districts, while the watchmakers live within the city.

Various parts of the watch come hither from widely distant places. We have said that the most delicate tools are made in Switzerland, and the ornamented faces of the watches in London. The jewels come from Holland. The diamonds are cut abroad, but their framing in steel is done at home. We saw many hundreds of them in a little box. We saw some rubies, rough and some cut, round and very small; some chrysolites, also. The cutting can be done only with diamond dust. The engine turning of the cases is done in private houses, in Coventry; and so is the making of enamelled faces. The glasses come chiefly from the neighbourhood of Dublin, where they are made more cheaply than anywhere else. No place, but Newcastle-upon-Tyne, can compete with the Irish glasses. The smallest wheels are made at Prescot, in Lancashire. All the other parts of the watch, if we remember right, are made in the establishment.

We saw the strip of stout brass out of which the “frames” were to be cut. The cutting these brass circles, piercing them with the necessary holes, joining them, inserting the jewels into the holes, fitting on the wheels and the chain, inserting the spring, engraving the brasses and the gold, making the cases, and finishing off the whole – this is the work done here. One boy may be seen fitting the pinions into the frames; another polishing the pinion with his small fiddlestick – for such his tool appears to be; another delicately handling the escapement; another showing to us a hairspring, as an instance of the value given by labour to a material of low cost – this almost imperceptible string of steel being “more valuable than gold,” as he says. The careful workman covers his work from dust (such of it as is finished, or waits) with a little inverted tumbler. The apprentice lads earn about four shillings and threepence a week; the higher order of workmen average twenty-eight shillings, or thirty shillings. We were curious to know how low and how high the price of watches goes, here in the wholesale establishment. The lowest we heard of was three pounds; the highest thirty-five pounds; but few are sold of a higher value than twenty pounds, wholesale price; which mounts up to a good deal more in London shops.

The most interesting class of watches, to us, was that of the agricultural labourers. We were glad to hear that agricultural labourers bought watches; a fact which we should hardly have suspected. The number demanded is rapidly decreasing. If one hundred and fifty watches are made weekly, eight or nine of them may be for agricultural labourers; and the proportion was formerly much larger. They are of a wondrous size; about two inches thick. There is silver to the value of two pounds in a watch which costs four pounds. The thing looks us if it could never be lost – hardly broken; and it is inconceivable that damp or soil could get in. On its broad face is painted a gay picture – Speed the Plough, or the Foresters’ or the Odd Fellows’ Arms. Next in bulk to these are the watches for the Scotch market. The Scotch seem to like to feel that they have a watch in their pocket. In remarkable contrast with them are the watches, scarcely bigger than one’s thumbnail, which are intended for presents to very little ladies. As little ladies’ time is not supposed to be very valuable, it is not insisted that these should go well. From these the article reaches in value to the thirty pounds watch, exquisitely chased, back and face, and of beautiful form and proportions. Of the watches for exportation, those made for the market of Alexandria are perhaps the most remarkable. They are, in form, hunting watches; the marking of the hours is Arabic; and there is no ornament whatever. No figures of any living thing must be looked at by a Mohammedan; and it appears as if, to make all safe, the Arabs would not countenance any graven image of fruit or flower, leaf, or tendril. While talking of the wide transmission of this delicate article of manufacture, we were surprised to find how many watches are sent about the kingdom by post – not for cheapness, but for security. It is an expensive method, but a convenient one. This house sends out by post sometimes thirty in a week.

Having never seen engine turning, and having, in truth, not the least idea how it was done, we gladly accepted an invitation to a neighbouring dwelling, where an elderly man and a boy were busy about the process. The neat apartment, the shining machine, the courteous old gentleman in his spectacles and clean apron, anxious to show us whatever we wished to see, made a very pleasant impression upon us. The principle of the process is understood at a glance; but not the less wonderful does it appear to us that any man should ever have thought of it. The invention is French, and nearly a century old; but it is only lately that it has reached its present perfection. The machine is expensive, costing about one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Fieldhouse is admitted to be the best maker. The main part of the machine, to the eye of the novice, at least, is a barrel, which is bound round with strips of copper of various patterns, sinuous, or undulating, or other. The revolution of this barrel, with one of the strips pressing against a steel tip or bolt, causes a vibratory motion, in accordance with the copper pattern, in whatever is connected with the vibrating steel. The watch case is so connected. It is fastened at the end of a bar; and, while it is vibrating there, a graver is brought up to it, on a sort of miniature railway; and it peels off the gold in the pretty pattern required. We saw a ribbon like circular pattern; concentric rings, and vertical ornamentation; and we were told that by the combination of the patterns provided for by the machine before us, as endless a variety might be obtained as of changes from a peal of a dozen bells.

With all its prettiness, this process, and every other connected with the ornamenting of the watch, was less interesting to us than those which relate to its time showing properties. We were not sorry that the last stage of our sightseeing was the preparation of the enamel face, with its indices of hours and minutes.

We went to the little workshop of a superior artisan, who works here, but lives in the country. His intelligent daughters help him in the lettering department of his little business; and very pretty work it is for them. The affair is simple enough. Round pieces of copper are cut, with scissors, out of a strip which comes from the rolling-mill; the size being determined by a brass pattern. The edges are slightly turned up, in order to hold the enamel, when melted; and the necessary hole in the middle has its edges turned up, on the same side, for the same reason. The enamel is made of putty powder, and several other materials. In its unground state it looks just like a bit of thick earthenware – the white very white; the cream colour very pure. This is ground down in a mortar extremely fine, mixed with water, to about the consistence of soft clay, and spread smoothly over the copper ground. Half a dozen of these faces are put down before the open mouth of the little furnace, to heat gradually, in order to avoid the irremediable mischief of a crack. When they have done reeking, they are ready for further cooking. With a little pair of tongs, one at a time is carefully placed upon a stand in the furnace. Presently it begins to shine. It is turned round and round, that the whole may be equally done. When it is all one white heat, it is brought out, and another is put in. When cool, the surface is rubbed smooth with sand; inequalities are filled up; another coating is given; it is “fired” again, and then polished to the degree we are accustomed to see.

Then comes the part which the novice must be extremely shy of undertaking, so very important as it is – the marking the hour figures. The face is throughout placed on a little wooden platter, which revolves with a touch. On this platter it receives its polishing and all other treatment. It is now turned round, to be ruled with the utmost exactness, with as many radiations from the centre as are wanted. Thick strokes are laid on where the figures are to be, of a metallic paint, composed of copper, iron, and other ingredients, prepared in a peculiar manner. The decisive figure strokes are then cut in with the help of an essential oil; and the surplus paint brushes off with a touch of the brush. There is a mystery in most houses of business. The secret here is how the minute face is sunk in the hour face. We could understand, however, how the excessively small figures were done, though hardly how human eyes could stand such a trial. Our host proved to us what the faculty of sight becomes capable of, by relating an achievement of his own. Some years ago he wrote, in enamel, “the Lord’s Prayer, with every i dotted, and every t crossed, in the space of half the wing of a housefly.” He keeps it framed as a locket; and it is the wonder of all strangers who see it. He was advised to send it up to the Exhibition; but he dreaded its being lost. He paid very dear for his enterprise, as we should think; but he seems rather to glory in the result than regret it. By working in a blaze of sunlight he “aged” his sight thirty years in a single fortnight. He now requires strong magnifiers to work at all.

We observed here the glass globe of water, whereby the gaslight is concentrated for evening work, which is seen among the Birmingham burnishers. It is sad to think how the senses and faculties of some are overstrained to minister to the luxuries of others. If we could reconcile ourselves to this at all, it would not be in the case of any toys, be their beauty and the money value of them what they may; but in the production of this exquisite talisman, the watch, which can tell us, in the intervals of tides and sunsets, where the stars are, and what they are doing, behind the veil of the noonday light and the midnight cloud.

Guns and Pistols

Household Words, Volume 4, page 580

Would it not be a strange thing if – old as the world is, and countless as are the generations of men who have quarrelled and fought – we should now find ourselves coming round to the use of the same sort of weapons – the same in principle – as were used in the earliest warfare!

We do not mean that we are coming to fisticuffs with our enemies. It may be said, that the first arms used by fighters were the arms that grew from their own shoulders. No doubt, the first men who quarrelled about wells, or camels, or anything else, on the plains of the East, might, and probably did, knock one another down; though the people who live in those places now are more fond of making a show of such a thing than of doing it in reality – throwing themselves about in a desperate way, and seeming dreadfully angry, but somehow producing no terrible results. Such boxing might be the first fighting; but we are speaking now of weapons which are not bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. It is commonly agreed that the first weapons we know of were bows and arrows; and the next, the sling and stone. The bow was probably used first against beasts, and turned to homicidal uses on occasion of some human quarrel. Its use in warfare, conducted in deserts or on plains, where there was room for escape, or among mountains, where archers could defend a pass below them, and where cavalry were concerned, is obvious enough; it therefore remained in use and in favour, not only until the invention of gunpowder, but for two centuries or more after gunpowder became one of the main resources of war, even till the lighter sorts of firearms became common. The cutting and thrusting instruments of battle took their turn, when men fought hand to hand. We must think that the most terrible kind of fighting of any yet tried – the most terrible to human feelings (the most glorious, also, if you will), though by far less destructive of life than weapons that kill from a distance. Men who fought in pairs, with the valour and obstinacy of a Falstaff, “a long hour by Shrewsbury clock,” or with the endless devices of Homer’s heroes, could not be killed off at a rate nearly approaching that which was seen at Cressy, when King Edward’s archers made such a clearance of the foe in double quick time. It was upon her archers that our Queen Elizabeth relied; though, as visitors to Dover Castle are aware, she had her own “pocket pistols” – the sixty-pounder at Dover Castle, which carries a ball seven miles, being so called. Gunpowder had then been in use in war, on our own soil, full two centuries; yet was the bow the favourite weapon, from the sovereign to the peasant. Names of honour, or of fondness, were lavished on cannon. The Portuguese named theirs after their saints; Louis the Twelfth, of France, christened his after peers of his realm; the Emperor Charles the Fifth had a dozen choice pieces, which he called his Twelve Apostles. At Bremen, there are two named Messengers of Bad News; others are called the Thunderer, the Terrible, the Devil, and, as we have seen, the Queen’s Pocket Pistol. But the yearnings of warrior hearts were still towards the bow.

These firearms were so dreadfully unwieldy! – not only the cannon, but the musket. In 1520, and onwards – when the musket was first used – the soldier who had to wield it must often have wished it had never been devised. It was all very well to rest it on the wall of a town, and fire it at leisure against the foe beneath; but when it came to such an arm being carried into the field, it might easily be found that only men of extraordinary size and strength could manage it. The gun itself was so heavy, that the soldier could not raise and point it; he must have something to rest it upon. That something was a “fork,” the handle of which was shod with iron, and pointed, that it might stand firm in the ground; and, when it was found that the soldier was liable to attack while reloading, the “rest” was armed with a spike, either projecting from one prong, or thrown out from the staff by a spring – these “Swedish Feathers,” as they were called, keeping the enemy from charging till the gun was ready for another explosion. This “rest” had to be carried by the musketeer, or an attendant; and the match must be looked to. The match was not heavy, but it was a rather anxious affair. It was a piece of prepared hemp, loosely twisted, and with a creeping and smouldering fire always in it. Sometimes it was carried in a tin tube, bored with holes; but oftener in the pocket, and oftenest between the head and its covering, which was the place most strongly recommended by those who had not to carry it themselves. Then, there was the ammunition. A soldier was usually furnished with twelve charges of powder; and these were put into twelve little boxes, of wood, tin, or leather, which were fastened to the belt that crossed his left shoulder. There was nothing very feather like in this load; and this is the burden that was carried by the soldiers of Charles the First and Cromwell.

There was a stronger objection to the use of these muskets than even their weight. Good aim was out of the question with them; and in this was the arrow again regretted. It was not only that firing off this musket was such slow work that an enemy – whether in siege or battle – was sure to have moved before he could be hit; it was also that it would have been difficult to hit him if he had stood stock-still to be shot. The objection belonged, and it belongs still, to muskets of every sort, however much improved in the firelock in lightness, and by the introduction of cartridge boxes in the place of bandoleers. The difficulty is this. It is found impossible to fit any ball so precisely to any musket barrel, as that it shall not, in passing out, rub more against one side of the barrel than the other. It thus leaves the muzzle with some inclination, however little, to the right or left, or up or down; and the impulse is sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Moreover, the divergence increases at a vast rate with every foot of distance. Thus, there seems to be no great use in taking aim with a musket; and the mischief done by it in war, is pretty much a matter of chance. It was found that a musket properly charged, as far as the powder was concerned, but with a bullet too small for the bore, made quite noise enough, but shot nothing; light being thus thrown on the secret by which certain cunning persons successfully pretended to be invulnerable. It was also ascertained that of all rare things, the rarest was, to find a ball and a bore that so accurately fitted each other, as that the ball went where it was meant to go. It followed that the thing to be attended to was to make the bore and the ball fit each other. Out of this question arose the rifle, of which at present we are hearing so much talk. It was known that an arrow feathered in a spiral line, whirls as it flies, and goes straight and strong to its mark. It was considered that if this quality of the arrow could be imparted to the balls of firearms, such a weapon would be the best ever devised for warfare with an enemy anywhere within sight. This has been done; not to perfection, by any means, but so far as to change essentially the character of warfare. What the method is, will appear in the course of our account of what we have just been seeing of the manufacture and proving of firearms at Birmingham – at Birmingham, where, during the last war, muskets were made at the rate of more than one in a minute, every working day. The rate of manufacture was a thousand a day of finished muskets, and two thousand a week of muskets made in parts, and sent to be finished in London and Dublin.

One day last week we took shelter from a shower, under the gateway of a timber yard, which at once struck us as being unlike any other timber yard we remembered to have seen. There were some few squared trunks of trees; but most of the wood was cut into odd shaped blocks for seasoning. Carrying our eye down from the larger to the smaller blocks, it struck us, that these last were gun-stocks, set on end, or piled in airy heaps, to season. The value of such stocks, when brought to the gunmaker’s, is from twenty-one shillings to thirty-five shillings apiece. We saw piles of them at the manufacturer’s, mounting up to the value of many thousands of pounds. They are of walnut, almost exclusively; and, when possible, of English walnut. The stock of a gun must bear cutting without the slightest splintering or cracking; and walnut, grown in England, is almost the only wood which answers to this condition. It seems almost a pity that it should be so, when one thinks of the numbers of walnut-trees in the Kentucky and Canadian woods, arid how the people of Damascus live upon walnuts more than on any other food; and how thousands upon thousands of the tree overshadow the Pharpar and Abaua – the streams beloved by Naaman the leper. But the foreign wood is not of so good a grain as is necessary for such close fittings as those of the furniture of guns to the stocks. A little ash is used, and also maple. They are harder than the walnut, but not so tough. Perhaps more American maple might be used if the wood was not so spoiled in the felling as it is. The backwoodsmen hack and hew away with their axes, without any idea of the nicety required; and thus lose a good deal of prime custom. Beech is used only for an inferior article – for the African trade; that is, for the arms ordered by the Kaffirs, the rifles which are now picking off our soldiers. It is an inferior article from Birmingham which has been slaughtering our soldiers at the Cape for months past. One wonders whether they know the fact, and whether it aggravates the pain of their wounds and their shame. Traders on the African Coast ascertain the wants of the inhabitants, in regard to firearms among other things: they send their orders to London merchants; London merchants order the article of the Birmingham manufacturers, and, after a time, if a Kaffir is disarmed, his piece is found to bear the name or mark of a Birmingham gunmaker. “We make firearms for both parties, in all wars,” said a manufacturer to us yesterday. As such is and must be the fact, we like the plain avowal of it; but it is a strange-sounding truth.

The stock is brought in rough – merely hewn into a resemblance to what it is to be. It is dressed smooth, as we see it finally; and a workman cuts in it, with anxious care, the recesses and holes where the steel “furniture” is to be inserted. Then it is “chequered” by the steady chisel of a spectacled old man, who pores over his work, dicing the wrought part of the stock into the minutest squares; at once ornamenting it, and affording a hold rougher than the varnished part. Then it is varnished and polished by the hands of girls; and then the finisher inlays it with any little plates of silver or carved steel with which it is to be adorned. So much for the stock – a much less important affair than the barrel.

The barrel is made from stub nails, the refuse of the farriers’ shops, and of “scrap,” the refuse of the needle manufactory, where the steel is very finely tempered. A ball of “bloom” is a curious affair – a handful of nails fused together, in preparation for being melted down for the barrel. After the steel and iron are rolled into thin plates in the rolling-mill, the plates are cut into strips; and alternate strips of iron and steel compose the bar of which the barrel is to be made. They are welded together by heat and a powerful steam hammer; they are beaten and twisted, and melted and tortured, till they mix thoroughly; and then they are coiled in a spiral line round a “core,” as closely as possible, and the edges of the coil are welded together. The outside of the barrel is afterwards carefully treated; but infinitely greater is the care required for the inside. The outside has to be corroded by a diluted acid (after being hammered and filed as smooth as hammer and file can make it), and then polished to the brightness which attracts the eye of the youthful sportsman. The acid brings out a pattern which indicates, pretty accurately, the value of the article. The iron and steel are marbled, – veined very beautifully, when properly wrought together: and so much is this veined appearance prized, that inferior barrels are actually stained to look like the better sort. As for the inside of the barrel, it requires more care than any other part of the gun. It must be mathematically straight, and it must be of the most perfect smoothness throughout, or the ball will go in some wrong direction or other. The execution done by balls of all sorts in action is said to be only one in eighty-five; and yet our muskets have been considered as nearly perfect as the weapon could be made. If there was any relaxation from the great conditions of the straightness and smoothness of the bore, there would be an end to all encouragement to use the gun. The price of a barrel rises from twelve shillings to six guineas; but all will be found to be straight and smooth in the inside. What firearms could do before there was machinery to render these proesses unerring, it is difficult to imagine. The finest machinery and the extremest care will not content us now. We must have rifles: and our muskets, and our cannon themselves, must be rifled.

We looked closely into this rifling. We saw a barrel grooved in the inside with two shallow grooves, running the whole length. The grooves twist round, to the extent of three quarters of a turn in a length of three feet. On the ball is a belt, answering to the grooves, by which it fits into them. Thus, it must turn three quarters round before it quits the barrel, and must spin in its subsequent flight, through the impulse thus received. It is the principle of the arrow, spirally feathered; and the result is the same – the missile goes straight and strong to its mark. We saw a more formidable device still – terrible as the belted ball looked under the idea of its crashing into human bones and flesh. We saw a specimen of the Minié ball (of which we are now hearing so much), and learned how the barrel was to be fitted for it. The barrel is to have four grooves instead of two; but shallower. The ball is hollow, and of sugar loaf form, with three rims round its larger end. An iron capsule fits into the hollow. By the pressure of the discharge, the rims of the bullet will be forced to fit the grooves. Half a turn in a length of three feet is enough of a twist in this case. As we are told, this ball reaches its mark at a distance of sixteen hundred yards. On a recent occasion of trial of Birmingham rifles, on a common a few miles off, a bit of wood, seven inches in diameter, painted white, was placed against a bank, and was perforated by five balls in eight, at a distance of eight hundred yards. This looks like knowing what we are about; and it looks very little like the musket execution we have been satisfied with hitherto. It is no wonder that muskets are sent in large numbers to be rifled at Birmingham; and that the newspapers are teeming with letters on the subject of the two weapons. We peeped into a variety of barrels, admiring the smoothness of all, and perceiving how the groove of the rifle twists round in curious perspective – more curious in the case of two grooves, perhaps, than of many.

Then we turned to the pistols. The most ordinary pair costs six shillings; and it is probably much the same sort of harmless affair that silly lads brandish when they shoot at Queens in the streets – pistols that make novices shudder, but are not likely ever to kill anybody. From this price, we saw pistols of various dignities, mounting up to twelve guineas; or twice twelve guineas, if inlaid expensively with silver, adorned with engraving. A gentleman may contrive to spend a great deal of money on firearms, if he will order ornament enough; and we could understand the temptation, the engraving is so beautiful. Every bit of metal left visible, except the barrel, bears engravings, in the most expensive pistols and fowling pieces. Not only graceful arabesques, but figures of game, wild beasts, hunters, &c., are beautifully executed by men who make from four to five hundred pounds a year by their art; that is, three guineas a week as wages, and apprentice fees to a large amount. The lowest order of engravers earn about fifteen shillings a week. One little landscape, engraved on a small steel plate of a fowling piece, was admirable for spirit and finish – a tiger in a jungle, watching the approach of an elephant, bearing a howdah, with two men in it. The designer and engraver of this is one of the artists who are making a handsome income by their skill. They are so far from trying to concentrate gas-light in water-bottles, that they find gas-light too strong, and work by the light of a candle sheltered from draughts. There is a foreign gun on the premises, which might excite the emulation of the most skilful. Nobody knows where it comes from. There is a tradition of its being Persian; but this can hardly be true, the owners think. It is inlaid with ivory, whereever the wood can be made to admit the ivory; and the arabesque patterns are beautiful. The carving, along the upper ridge of the barrel, is the wonder, however; it could not be excelled, we were told, anywhere at this day.

Among the pistols, we saw Colt’s revolver; and we compared it with the best English revolver. The advantage of Colt’s over the English is, that the user can take a sight; and the disadvantage is, that the weapon requires both hands. The American has one barrel, with a revolving chamber behind it, that does not interfere with the eye. The English consists of six (or fewer) barrels, which revolve in the act of shooting; so that the ball issues, not from the uppermost barrel, but the next. Thus, if the user could take a sight (which he cannot), the ball would baffle his aim, by coming out on one side. But then the advantage is great – for instance, to an Irish land agent on horseback, or to a farmer riding or driving home, and attacked by footpads – to have the left hand at liberty for bridle or rein, while the enemy is near enough to demand no very nice aim.

It was amusing to observe, in this manufactory, how small a proportion of warlike ideas was involved in the discussion of weapons. We were told that the parts made on the premises were those of the best guns: the locks and other furniture of “the rest” were made elsewhere, and principally in villages round Birmingham. We found that “the best” meant fowling pieces, and “the rest,” weapons of war. This is natural enough. The purchaser of a gun thinks more of precision of aim in hitting a pheasant than in going out against Sikhs and Kaffirs; or he has done so till now, when we hear, on a sudden, so very much of the rifle practice and skill of the French soldier and the Kaffir skulker. We were, indeed, shown some duelling pistols; and instructed in the mild and prudent law of honour by which pistols with the hair trigger, and on full cock, are decreed as the only admissible weapons, because they are pretty certain to go off before the duellist can take aim; especially if they are to fire together. And, to be sure, they do pop off so easily, that they shall certainly be our weapon when we next go out – so very little vigour is necessary for the discharge, and so strong is the probability that we shall escape hitting anything, or being hit. But now, like the manufacturer, we turn with relish to the weapons which are not made for manslaughter, in any form.

Here is a walking stick. It looks heavy. Let us feel it. Heavy, indeed! What does it mean? It is a walking stick which is in high favour with anglers, who have good opportunity for fowling. You seldom see an angler who has not a passion for remarkable birds. This stick is a disguised fowlingpiece, which can lie, loaded, on the bank beside the basket, and be caught up in a moment, if waterfowl appear among the sedges, or any rare wading bird is seen carrying on a rival fishing in the stream. The piece is also curved a little, towards the stock end, so as to be convenient for carrying the basket. Then, there is a “whip gun,” the handle of which is a gun. And there is a “plantation gun,” for the detection of poachers: not for their destruction, for the law no longer allows it; but just to show where they are. It is somewhat like a little steel Pan’s pipe, with four holes. A spring is set: on a string being touched, the spring snaps, and up goes a blue rocket, or a detonating ball, or both. The English have lately been pointed out as well fitted for self-defence by their sporting and poaching habits; and such a spectacle as this room, with its cases of sporting weapons, makes us fancy that the English have not been untruly characterised.

Leaving this armoury, we go over the premises, on either side of the yard where the target is placed, affording an aim of forty-five yards. We see processes which we need not describe in detail, as the hardening and tempering of steel, and the grinding, polishing, and engraving of metal are much, alike, in whatever manufactory they are seen. It will answer a better purpose to show what goes to the making of a gun. We saw, in the proprietor’s books, that when an order for military arms arrives, twenty-four items of manufacture have to be attended to, involving thirty-two trades, at the least. A brief glance at these will give the best idea of the process.

1. The barrel, of which we have said quite enough, except that the managing of the iron and the welding are separate trades.

2. The lock. Locks, varying in cost from half-a crown to three guineas, are made in the neighbourhood of Birmingham.

3. The stock: already discussed.

4. The furniture: the various metal parts, made by almost as many artificers.

5. The platina, and,

6. The silver, for ornamenting.

7. The rod; and the tip, of ivory; separate trades.

8. The ironwork.

9. The finishing: the putting the parts together.

10. The bag: to contain it.

11. The stocking: preparing the stock to receive the metal work.

12. The polishing: of the steel portions.

13. The engraving.

14. The browning: bringing out the veining of the barrel, with diluted acid, and polishing with a brush of fine steel wire.

15. Ribbing: connecting the barrels of a double-barrelled gun with a rib of steel.

16. Varnishing: the stock.

17. Percussioning: opening the screw holes, and connecting the barrel and lock.

18. Break-off fitting: connecting the stock with the fore part of the gun.

19. Hair trigger.

20. Shooting: trying the weapon.

21. The bayonet.

22. The mould: for making the bullets.

23. Sights and swivels. The sight is a brass frame, about three inches by one, which lies down or stands up before the eye of the soldier, and is traversed by a slide which enables him to estimate distance in taking his aim. All our muskets are henceforth to be furnished with sights.

24. Rifling: of which enough has been said.

Add to these, the carriage of the article, and we have twenty-five items of separate charge for a gun; and the dispersion of the work among thirty-two orders of artificers, accounts for so few people having witnessed the, manufacture of a gun.

We are not going home yet. There is the Government Proof House to be seen before we can feel that we have done with guns. To this place every barrel must be sent to be proved, under a penalty of ten pound per barrel. To forge the Proof House mark is a serious offence, punishable by high fines, and imprisonment in default. At present, the proving is going on at such a rate that it requires some management to step in at an hour when the establishment is open, and escape the explosion. Guests at a house two miles from the place are apt to announce thunder in all seasons, and all sorts of weather, till taught to distinguish the explosions of the Proof House from those of the sky. It may well be a striking sound to strangers; for no fewer than one hundred and thirty-seven gun barrels are discharged at once. The place in which this is done is a room, partly underground, cased in iron plates, strongly bolted together. The door is iron; and towards the yard the side of the room is closed by massive iron shutters, which are fastened up before the train is fired. A great heap of black sand, a thick bank of it, faces the muzzles, and receives the balls. The barrels are laid in a row, separated by bars of lead, and all their touch holes communicating with a train of gunpowder. The train is lighted at one end; everybody draws off from the spot, and then comes the boom and bang, which is heard, through all the iron casings, miles off. In a minute or two, when the smoke is supposed to have subsided a little, the shutters and door are opened, and the barrels are examined. Two or three in that long row may have burst, but the proportion of unsound barrels is very small. Some that have given way in the strangest manner are hung up against the walls as curiosities. One has its torn half doubled in two; one gapes with a ragged wound; one is split into ribbons; and one has its spiral strip unwound for a good part of its length. It was badly welded.

In the centre of the establishment stands the magazine, isolated and blank looking. In one apartment, three persons are handling powder and balls – loading the barrels for proof, with a charge many times greater than they will have to carry. In another, an old man is casting bullets – with his simmering lead in the copper, and his ladle, and his bullet moulds, and the bright rows of clean balls he turns out of them. Elsewhere, we see piles and faggots of musket barrels – innumerable, rusty, and ugly at present – both those that have undergone proof, and those that are waiting for it. And again, we see elsewhere the punching of the Government mark on the proved barrels. It is a strange and dismal sort of place, inhabited by civil and intelligent people, who do their best to make a stranger interested in this sidelong peep at the horrors of war.

Government thinks it right to examine bayonets too. Some military authorities say that our great reliance, in regard to self-defence at least, must be on the bayonet; and others aver that no living soldier has seen two lines of infantry come to close quarters with bayonets, actually pushing and thrusting. Both these accounts may be true, considering how terror-striking a weapon the bayonet is, and how much of modern warfare has been vague explosion; sanguinary enough upon occasion, but not always very much so, and wholly different in character, and in its requirements from the soldier, from the hand-to-hand fighting of old times. It seems to be supposed, by some qualified judges of our case, that the increased precision of aim conferred by modern rifle operations, will necessitate a closer hand-to-hand fighting, as sharpshooters are not good at a close combat, and are not fitted, either by training or the arms they carry, to meet a charge; while the greater their proficiency in their own style, the more eager will their adversaries be to stop their fire. However this may be, and whatever attention it behoves us to give to weapons which will be wanted in places and situations in which rifles cannot be used, it is clear that the British mind is at present animated with a desire to overtake the proficiency of foreign soldiery and colonial savages in the use of the rifle; and the tamest citizen cannot go through a Birmingham gun manufactory without a certain thrill of the nerves, and animation of spirits, which indicate that hearts will not be wanting to the defence of the principles of liberty, if there be but due and timely training of hand and eye, under the guidance of military discipline.

Birmingham Glassworks

Household Words, Volume 5, page 32

Little children are sometimes as much puzzled as older people, about how the world got on before they and other wise moderns were born; about how men lived without the conveniences and comforts afforded by our arts of life. We are not quite so conceited now as we were a century ago, in regard to our superiority to the ancients; for, the farther we go back among ancient monuments, the more evidence we find, that some of our most recent inventions and luxuries were in common use before old Troy was founded, and before the venerable Abraham set out on his travels a young man. About one thing, however, little children are right enough, as far as we know. They are not absurd in asking, how people, in old times, ever got on without glass windows? We knew a little child, who was fond of looking out of the window in bad weather, when there was no getting a walk: and the same child had to go a long journey in a post-chaise, day after day, before railroads were made; and how any child could have borne the being boxed up in a post-chaise so long, without a window to look out of when it was windy, and the raindrops to watch on the pane during the showers, there is no saying. She was so far aware of this, that she asked everybody likely to answer her, what people did when there were no windows? The more she was told of wooden shutters, that were closed in bad weather, or of horn or parchment panes, which let in a dim, dirty light, but could not be seen through, the more she pitied the ancients, who knew nothing of the amusement of watching the jerking, capricious drops on a window, which seem never to be able to make up their minds which way they shall run, in their inevitable general direction from top to bottom. And what groping work, trying to read, write, or sew, behind parchment panes! and how cold, most days of the year, if the wooden shutters were opened to let in light! Something of this may be seen now, in the homes of some people who speak our language, and otherwise live pretty much as we do   the settlers in the wilder parts of the American woods, where the glazier has not yet found his way.

When the mail drives up at night, with its load of hungry passengers, there shines the settler’s dwelling – the yellow light, and the scent of broiling ham or venison, diffusing themselves at once through the square holes, which will be closed by shutters when the mail drives off. The light streams out, and strikes red upon the stems of the pines, or yellow upon those of the beeches; the fragrance streams out upon the fainting senses of travellers, and unto the nostrils of the negroes, who gather about the door, as the heavy coach jolts up to the threshold, and the chill night air rushes in upon the cooking dame and her “help,” and makes the lamp flare; or, if the air be not chilly, swarms of mosquitoes invade the dwelling, and amply prove the curse of the want of glass windows. Yet this – if we leave out the mosquitoes, and aggravate the dulness and dampness of the air – was what our forefathers had to put up with, not so very long ago. Three centuries since – when Alnwick Castle was in its glory, and had all manner of conveniences that ordinary dwellings were without – the glass windows of the Duke of Northumberland were put up only when the family were at home, and taken down immediately on their departure, for fear of accident. So lately as two centuries ago, the only glazed windows in Scotch dwellings were those of the upper rooms in palaces; the lower windows being still furnished simply with wooden shutters. It is true, this was one thousand years after some of our churches and abbeys had been graced, and kept warm and dry, by the use of glass windows. At least, we know that artists were brought from the Continent to glaze the windows of a church and monastery at Wearmouth, in the county of Durham, in the year 674; and the mention of the subject brings before us the beautiful painted windows that the pious put up in our cathedrals, and other churches, long before that Duke of Northumberland was born, whose “casements” were taken such care of whenever he left Alnwick.

Suppose any one had mentioned, at any of these dates, such a thing as a whole house made of glass – what a romance the notion would have appeared! Some say, indeed, that old Chaucer did imagine such a thing; and in his “House of Fame” there is a description of a dream of a temple of glass, with metal pillars, stretching far away, and crowds of people from all regions roaming about within it: but Chaucer’s readers received this as a dream. The chimera has come among us, and sat down in our midst, in solid reality. Most of us can testify to it on the evidence of our own senses. But so few have visited the awful birthplace of this chimera – so few have any idea of the fire caverns, the dim vaults, the scorching air, the rush, roar, glare, and appalling handicraft from amidst which that light and graceful creation came forth to lie down on the grass in Hyde Park, that we must tell a little of what we saw when we went hunting out its birthplace.

In plain words, we have been permitted to see the glassworks of the Messrs Chance, near Birmingham. In old reports of the glass manufacture, we find Birmingham low in the list of places in England where the process is going forward. It can never be so again. The establishment which produced the Crystal Palace must stand first in the world until something greater has been done. It is only within three centuries that the manufacture has been heard of at all in the district; and a century ago it was not known in the town of Birmingham. Messrs Chance’s works are not in the town, but at Smethwick – half an hour’s drive from it: and, indeed, they would take up too much room in any town. The buildings occupy many acres; and the canal has to stretch out various branches among them. The number of men, women, and children employed, are twelve hundred or upwards. The schools on the estate contain from four hundred to five hundred children (not all connected with the works, however); and the consumption of coal is – but we will excuse any reader from believing it, without seeing the coal heaps – from eight hundred to one thousand tons per week. To those of us who consider and calculate about buying ten or twenty tons of coal per year, it is a marvellous thought – that of the coal bill for an establishment which consumes nearly one thousand tons in a week, and in every week of the year – say forty-seven thousand tons in a year. Visitors to the works may pass hither and thither for four or five hours together without entering the same place twice; and they may go again and again, without coming upon many traces of their former visits. The vastness of the buildings is as striking as their number; and the passage through lofty, dim, cool, vault-like sheds, is an admirable preparation for entrance among the furnaces and kilns.

In one of these sheds we see, heaped up against the walls, masses of sulphate of soda. This portion of the material is brought from the alkali works of the same firm, not very far off. In another shed there are millstones, revolving on edge, for grinding to dust the small proportion of coal required hereafter. Elsewhere, we see heaps of chalk; and, in one shed, the greatest quantity of fine sand we ever saw in one place, except on the seashore. St Helens, near Liverpool, yields very fine sand for glassmaking; but this roomful is from Leighton-Buzzard, where there is a sandpit belonging to this firm. As it is silted, wreaths of it rise, like white smoke, and curl under the rafters. Thus, we have seen the materials; and must next observe the apparatus for the cooking of them.

It is a desperately rainy day; and the roads which lead from one place to another are inches deep in black mud and puddles. Of course, the canal does not look very engaging; and the procession of boats on it, laden with coal, is about as wet as everything else. There are carts in the alleys filled with broken glass; and there are heaps of broken glass piled up against the walls. Women are at the cart’s tail, or under sheds, picking the glass; that is, separating whatever is stained with iron in the process of glassmaking, or otherwise coarse, to be made into coarse glass again, while the clear and fine is set apart for higher purposes. A cartload of rubbish and sweepings is about to be shot into a canal boat. Being drawn across our path, the cart is ordered away, but the man in charge calls out from the other side, that we must wait our turn. Shocked at such a speech, men within hearing rush to turn the horse, and spill the rubbish on the wharf, which afflicts the strange-looking carter. The poor fellow is not quite sane. One of the pleasant incidents often observable in these large establishments is the employment of poor creatures who would otherwise be sadly desolate. Where there is a will there is a way, in such large concerns, of finding something that the foolish or the partially infirm can do; and it seems as if the will was never wanting.

Up an inclined plane we go now, under heavy drops from the eaves, and take shelter in a place curiously furnished. The large floor is almost wholly occupied with great cauldrons of ash-grey clay – very handsome cauldrons, round, smooth inside and out, with a thick smooth rounded edge, and each standing on its own platform. These are the “pots” in which the “metal” is to be melted in the furnace. There are three pot makers in the establishment; each of whom makes three pots in a week. One of them is busy now, with a labourer and a girl to help him. The labourer is treading the clay. He has a watering pot in his hand: his feet are bare, and his trousers turned up; and he tramps about on his platform with a squashing tread, which is not pleasant to us, and can hardly be more so to him. Everybody says there is no way but this of making the clay fit for pots; but we cannot help fancying that one will soon be found. The girl is at a table, with a mass of clay at her right hand. She is making it into sausage-like rolls; and her employer is building up his pot, by laying these rolls in order round the edge, and squeezing them down smooth, so as to exclude the air, and make the whole of as close a grain as possible. The bottom is no less than five inches thick, and the sides nearly as much; and five or six months are required for the drying of a pot – passing, as it does, through various degrees of heat, from that of the room in which it is built (seventy degrees when we were there) to that which is to cause its destruction. Inquiring when this catastrophe was likely to happen, we found that a pot may last any time between one day and three months. Few last so long as three months. It must be a grief to see a pot fall to pieces in one day, after having been watched in the drying for half a year; but there may be some little consolation in its not being wholly lost. The fragments are ground down to powder, and mixed with four times the amount of fresh clay, to make new pots. The clay is from Stourbridge. The pots hold thirty-five hundredweights each of molten metal.

And now we must go and look at the molten metal in the pots, and see how it is treated. We find ourselves on a sort of platform, in front of six furnace mouths, which disclose such a fire within as throws us into a secret despair; despair for ourselves, lest we should lose our senses, and for the men, because it seems impossible to live through the day in such a heat. Looking into one of the openings, as well as we can from behind a screen, we see that the spectacle is one of exquisite beauty. There are the great pots, transparent with heat, and of the palest salmon colour, just distinguishable by their rims from the fire which surrounds them. Rising on tiptoe, we can see the metal – a calm surface, somewhat whiter than the pots. Turning to the men, we observe that they work over a row of troughs of water. We should like to plunge our head in, if the water were not so dirty. It is for cooling the pipes. The workman dips one end of his pipe into the metal, taking up a portion which is of the consistence of honey. He lays his pipe across the trough, and laves it with water, while a boy blows into the end, swelling the metal into a small globe. The effect of the breath is seen in a paler central bubble, spreading itself through the red mass, and expanding it. When more metal has been taken up, enough for a sheet of glass, it is to be carried to the next shed, where there are more furnaces, and the globe is to become a cylinder. Before we follow it there, we are offered the privilege of blowing through a pipe. We empty our lungs into it, again and again, but without producing the slightest effect. Our breath goes away easily enough, but no bubble ensues; we look rather foolish; so we hasten away, to see what becomes of the globe we have seen created.

We pass a man who is hewing out, with a small hatchet, a hollow in a block of wood, large enough for the globe to be rolled about in. In the next shed, each workman has one of these blocks to himself. It contains some water; and as he rolls his red-hot globe in it, a boy sprinkles more water upon it. The water seethes and bubbles, but does not reek. The heat is actually too great to permit evaporation. The globe is tossed about, and blown into again. If the pipe is raised in the air while blown into, the metal becomes cheese shaped: if held horizontally, the form produced is a globe: if pointed downwards, the globe is elongated. This particular mass is elongated. In a moment it must be heated again. Between the range of blocks and the furnace, there are bridges across a deep chasm; a bridge to each furnace mouth. The workman runs along his particular bridge, holds his metal into the furnace, withdraws it for another toss, heats it again, with another puff through the pipe, and at last has blown a hole through the further end. The whole expands, the edges retreat, and we now see the cylinder form arranging itself. There he stands on his bridge – as half a dozen more men are standing on their respective bridges, swinging the cylinder at arm’s length, even swinging it completely round in the maddest way; the scarlet colour at the further end shading off beautifully into soberer reds up to the point of the pipe, where the central knot is still scarlet. When it is of the right length (that is, for the Crystal Palace panes, somewhat above forty-nine inches), the cylinder must be detached from the pipe. For this purpose it is laid upon a wooden rest; a touch of cool iron breaks off the pipe; with pincers, a strip of red-hot glass is drawn off from the end of the pipe, and laid like a ribbon round the cylinder, near its closed end. After this, a gentle tap severs the closed end, and we have the cylinder complete.

While it lies cooling for a minute or two, we observe the making of a glass shade, large enough to cover a timepiece, or a statuette on its pedestal. Stopping short of blowing a hole in his cul-de-sac, the workman deposits his red bubble in a wooden mould which stands in the chasm below his bridge. The sides are flattened, while the top and ends remain round; and thus, amidst a little rush of sparks, the shade receives its form. The work done on these bridges is, perhaps, the most imposing to a novice of any part of the business. Some of the men have bare feet and legs; some have no clothing but drawers and a blue shirt; one or two, indeed, add the article of gold earrings, being Frenchmen. All have glistening faces; and all swing their glowing cylinders as if they were desperate or demented; a condition which we suspect we are approaching, under the pressure of the heat, and the strangeness and the hurry of incessantly getting out of the way of red-hot globes, long pipes, and whirling cylinders.

If we are to follow our own particular pane of glass, we must be off; for the cylinder is cool enough to be carried in a man’s arms to the annealing, in preparation for the splitting. How this round thing is ever to grow flat, we cannot conceive. Supposing it split, the inside must have a more contracted surface than the outside. Well; we shall see. It has to be annealed, before anything more can be done to it, and for this purpose, it is carried to the kiln, where it is to be well baked, and gradually withdrawn into a lesser and lesser heat, until it will bear what else it has to undergo. As we cannot stand here for a day or two till it is done, we must transfer our attentions to another cylinder, to see how the splitting is effected.

The diamonds, for cutting, are shown to us. One is mounted as on one point of a pair of pincers, the diamond looking inwards. The pincers are mounted upon wheels. This is for cutting off the edge of the cylinder, which is more or less jagged. The little carriage runs round under the upright cylinder, the diamond marking the glass as it travels; and a gentle tap severs the jagged end at the mark. Next, the cylinder is laid along upon a table, and another mounted diamond is run through the inside of it, from end to end, guided by a ruler. Another tap, and there is a split along the line, and the edges actually overlap. The glass is seen to be thicker than it is to remain. It will lose one fifth, or one sixth of its thickness in the grinding. A curious fact is observed here. Looking at the edge of a piece of red glass, we see that it is not red throughout – that, in fact, the glass, seen sideways, is greenish; but how this happens we cannot divine. It is done by taking up first a little of the red honey from the ruby glass-pot, and afterwards white – again and again, in proportion to the intended paleness of the hue. Thus, the red, while completely incorporated in substance with the rest, is spread over only the inner surface; and thus, when cut, the sheet can be embossed with white figures. Red or white, the cylinder is now to become a sheet of glass.

We adjourn to the mouth of a kiln, where we see that a slab of stone, moveable, forms the floor. On this slab lies a sheet of glass; and our cylinder is to be unrolled upon it, or its lower side would be made rough by contact with the stone. A little lime or chalk is sprinkled on the sheet, and then the cylinder is laid down upon it. As it heats, it begins to gape at the slit. The process is aided by the man at the kiln. He takes up a pole which has a wooden block at the end of it, thrusts in the block, and proceeds to iron out the relaxing cylinder. His block begins to smoke, and presently throws out sparks, more and more; but he perseveres until every corner is levelled; the sheet lies as flat as a pancake, and its two surfaces are equalised, in its semi-fluid condition. By observing the reflection of the fire on its surface, we see that it is rapidly melting. But it is not to melt away; so the slab is drawn away backwards, by a stout chain; and another is to take its place from one side.

We go round to see what becomes of the sheet. We find it in a somewhat cooler part of the kiln, about to be removed, that the stone slab may go back to its proper work. A boy is to effect the removal. He lifts up the sheet with a long “fork,” as he calls it, and gently lays it on the top of a pile of predecessors, which are gradually cooling. When nearly cooled, they are to be transferred, in the iron box which now contains them, and where they are to stand on edge, separated by iron bars, to a sort of railway truck, where they stand, shut up in their box, until they have become accustomed to a natural temperature, and may be carried on to the grinding. There we must leave them, while we take a look at the treatment of two other kinds of glass – flint glass, or crystal, and crown glass.

There is no flint now really used in the manufacture, though there was when crystal glass was called after it. Flints were, in those days, heated red-hot, and thrown into cold water, when they fell to pieces, so far as to be easily reducible to powder. It is still easier, however, to pick up the sand ready powdered at Lynn and in the Isle of Wight. Red lead is added, to give density to the glass; but in what proportions we did not inquire here, having learned elsewhere that that is the one question which a stranger ought not to ask. It is the grand secret of most glasshouses. Red lead also promotes the melting of the sand; it gives a greater refracting power, and a higher lustre; and it is some protection against fracture from sudden changes of temperature. It renders the glass more ductile in the working also; but there must not be too much of it, or the material will be too soft. In these works, the flint glass has a furnace to itself – built for it. It is melted in crucibles, or small pots, over and over again, until it is pure. It is left in the pots, and the furnace is shut up, and allowed to cool very slowly; when the pots fall away, and leave the glass in masses. A man holds each mass between his eye and the light; and, if he sees any speck, he splits the glass, and removes the offending particle. Peeping into the annealing oven, we see flat cakes of flint glass, about an inch thick; and it is with a sort of veneration that we look upon them. They have grand work to do soon. They are to bring down to us much that is too high, and up to us much that is too small, for our discovery without their help. They are to open to us the spectacle of starry systems – reach beyond reach, until our faculties can endure no more. They are to show us (what we could not believe without seeing) how every drop of water in a stagnant pond is thickly peopled with living animals, and how whole quarries and sea beaches are composed of the remains of dead animals. They are to separate the rays of the sun into parts for us; and to enable the aged to read and work, forgetting their years; and to repair many a mischief of imperfect sight; and to improve the beacon – lights upon our coasts, saving many a seaman from the snares of the ocean, and giving him years more of life. It is this particular glass of which all kinds of lenses are made; and when we think of what is included in this set of uses, we feel that all the wonders of windows and glass palaces are of small consequence in comparison with them.

Passing from thoughts of telescopes, microscopes, spectacles, and lighthouse lenses, we go to see some more window glass – the very best kind – namely, Crown Glass. We cannot in the least comprehend how and why the “metal” we saw treated, becomes the great and beautiful disc that we beheld it grow into; we can only relate what the process is, as we witnessed it. It is considered the most striking and wonderful of all the spectacles of this fire-palace. The same sort of tube that we had tried to blow through, now took up the same kind of material, in the same manner as in the case of sheet glass; a globe was formed in just the same way, and rolled on a metal table. After many heatings, and much blowing, the farther side of the globe was somewhat flattened, by pressing it against an upright surface; and then a boy brought a solid rod, with a dab of the fiery honey upon it, and fixed it in the middle of the flattened side. As soon as the rod is safely fixed, the original tube is detached by a touch of cold iron, and comes away, leaving a small hole. The workman throws down his tube, takes the rod, and twirls the globe like a mop, thrusting it into the furnace very often, to prevent its cooling. It swells and spreads, and reflects the flames on its film like surface; the hole enlarges, and the edge curls back, till the globe looks like a vast lampshade. As the twirling continues, the edge folds backwards, more and more, till it makes a tubular ring all round. Suddenly, this ring bursts, and its substance melts into the flattening material which it surrounds, and the whole becomes a disc, or circular plate, of from fifty to sixty inches in diameter, of the same thickness throughout, except just round the rod in the centre. The plate is carried to the annealing kiln, and there is tilted with a “fork,” until it stands on its edge – the foremost of a regiment of discs, separated from each other by bars. Windowpanes are to be cut out of it, by and by; and the thick part, in the centre, is to glaze outhouses and the like.

The heat from these last seen furnaces is tremendous. The men do what they can to shield themselves from it. They wear masks – gauze, fastened to the rim of an old hat. One holds a wooden screen before the face of another, and all are as quick as possible, both for their own sakes and that of the glass. Still, it is a marvel how they can bear it. We are told that it is by their working very moderately, as to time – four or five days (of seven hours) in a week. Thirty-five hours in a week are considered a fair share of work for glass-blowers; but, if a pot breaks, they must work until another is put in. Thus, their time is spent between arduous toil and leisure; and this circumstance points to the expediency of furnishing them with amusement which may make their leisure harmless. The public house used to be a terrible temptation to men so tired, heated, and thirsty; and to many it is so still. Of late, reading rooms have been opened, which appear to be an inestimable resource. There the workman may enter at any hour during the day, and find a good fire, a table covered with newspapers and other periodicals, and some comrades reading the news. There is a good and increasing library; and the men may take the books home, and are encouraged to do so, that they may spend the evenings with their families.

We have still to see how the sheet glass becomes smooth and polished. It has to undergo three processes more – grinding, smoothing, and polishing. Probably the first thing every stranger does on entering the grinding room is to burst out laughing – the machinery is so grotesque – so like being alive and full of affectations. It is patent machinery: the exclusive possession of this house. One sheet is moved about upon another with a movement like that by a human arm, scrubbing and grinding; and the repetition of this, by scores of machines in rows, produces a most ludicrous effect. The sheets have been properly squared before by being cut with a glazier’s diamond. The grinding now, with sand between the sheets, takes three hours for each side; and they come out of the process opaque, but without seams or serious blemishes. They must be smoothed by hand; and this is done by women, who rub them with fine emery, and remove any remaining specks. From forty to fifty women are employed in this work at long tables, where their action is very graceful, as they bend over their work, and use the steady and equable pressure required. The polishing is done by machinery, in the same sort of red apartment, filled with red machines, tended by red workpeople, which was described in the account of Plate glass making, at page 433, of our second volume. The noise here is horrible. Noise and rouge, and the tyranny of the rolling presses over the tortured sheets, bound down immovable, give an infernal aspect to the place, very unlike some things that remain to be seen.

We pass through more and more of these vast rooms, each of which would contain a house. One is full of glass shades, of all sizes, from that which would cover a life-size statue, to such as would preserve butterflies from dust. In a closet, opening out of this room, a man is plying the wheeled diamond with a weight and measure, carefully cutting the bottom of shades true and even. Here are bell glasses for fern houses, and some with a trough for water round the edge. Here, too, are shades made to order, for particular objects – as a group of statuary – where the back of the shade is wider than the front. In another room, boys are cutting little squares of glass on marked counters, with rulers and glaziers’ diamonds. These are to cover miniatures and daguerreotypes; but where they can all go to – many thousands in a week – we cannot conceive. The demand from America is very great, we are told: but it seems to us, that if all American and English children were to amuse themselves with breaking the glasses of miniatures, what we now see in this room would repair the damage. If such be the quantity of glass in bits, it may be conceived what the amount must be in sheets. We pass hundreds and thousands set on edge. Handfuls of straw are thrust between the plates to keep them apart; and in rooms near there is a vast packing always going on.

The conclusion of our survey is charming. We find men, women, and boys painting and enamelling glass. A sheet is covered smooth with a white enamel, which has itself much of the character of glass. Slips of brass, with patterns cut out, are laid oh the enamel, and rubbed over, so as to leave the pattern clear. It is, in fact, stencilling; only, instead of laying on paint through the holes in the pattern, the enamel beneath is rubbed off there. A woman is covering a sheet all over, except a border, with some thick black substance. This sheet is to be embossed. The border is to be corroded by an acid, and she is protecting all the rest of the surface by this covering. An artist is painting a broad border with the blue iris – as beautiful as life – and convolvulus and poppies. The panes of lanterns are almost as astonishing for quantity as the miniature glasses; and extremely various in patterns. But we should never have done, if we told what pretty things we saw; or if we entered into details about the schools; or described the life and condition of the twelve hundred workpeople connected with this vast establishment.

There was a certain fountain in the centre of a certain Exhibition which need not be described, because everybody knows it. We have been to see how that fountain was made, and have had the honour – a somewhat laborious one – of lifting some of its portions; a shell, a spike, an ornament or two, each of which required the whole strength of an unpractised person to raise from the ground. The weight of the fountain, before the trimming and dressing, was upwards of four tons. Mr Osler engaged three railway carriages (passenger train) to convey it to London, he taking his own seat in a fourth. A wall was built in the centre of the transept for the foundation of this beautiful structure; and the building up was done slowly and carefully. When the Queen and Prince Albert walked round the screen which surrounded the work which Mr Osler was superintending within, they could not have imagined – for none but the artificer could – what would be the beauty of this transparent shaft, with its streams of water falling like a veil around it, when the slanting sunlight from the roof touched it, and sent thousands of gleams and sparkles through it. It could be, and it was, removed in one night; but many were the anxious nights and weary days which passed over the making of it. If the Messrs Osler could have devoted their works and their people wholly to the making of this fountain, it would have been pleasant enough; but it had to be done in addition to their ordinary business; and desperately hard work it was.

We saw how some of its parts were made, in seeing how ornamental glass – vases, pitchers, decanters, chandeliers, and many fancy articles, come out of the hands of the workmen. Of the earlier processes of the art we need not speak, as they resemble those which were described long ago; but there is one circumstance which ought to be noted; the form of the great chimney of the glasshouse. Mr Osler knows what he is about in matters of science; and he perceived that the prejudice in favour of a chimney with a narrow top was a mistake. He determined to build his the same width, inside, all the way up. Perhaps, if he had to do it over again, he might even make it wider at the top, as the heated air requires plenty of room for expansion and escape. Some people thought the plan a very odd one, and said there could be no proper draught. Everything else about this carefully planned glasshouse was capital; but who ever heard of such a chimney for a glasshouse? There it is, however, resting upon strong pillars; and with such a draught, that at times the business is to moderate it.

Passing the mixing rooms, the pots, the melting, the blowing, we give a moment’s attention to the method of forming a decanter or pitcher. The workman sits in a “chair” – a bench with two long arms to it – and rolls his iron pipe or tube, with the left hand on these arms, to keep the soft glass in shape, while with the right he applies a pair of tongs to fashioning the neck of his decanter, or claret jug, or whatever it may be. It is a pretty sight; and so are the long vistas of glass, in the kiln first, and then in the “lear” – the milder oven, in which the annealing of the smaller articles is done. We leave the glasshouse, and travel to the manufactory, where we see how the drops for chandeliers, and all manner of arms and branches, are made, and how the cuttings, and polishings, and putting together are done. Here is a deaf and dumb man casting drops and “spangles,” as small square drops are called. Why not? Hearing and speech are not required for this work; and there he sits diligent and still. One wonders what he thinks about, all the while. He tosses a bit of coal into his little furnace, every minute or so. The coal is on his right hand, and on his left are the “lumps” of flint glass he is to use. He pushes forward one at a time into the heat before the fire, that it may be warming for its work. With his left hand lie holds the rod, on the end of which is the “lump” he is using; and in his right is the mould in which the drops are to be formed. He melts his lump, and lays a yellow trail into his mould, and shuts down the lid upon it. Out comes the drop, three-sided, rough, and attached to the lump. He knocks it off, pushes it on one side, and begins another. When he comes near the end of his lump, he makes smaller drops and “spangles,” until only enough remains to fasten on the new lump which has been roasting in preparation. The place is lighted only by the furnace fires. The glare is intense to the workman on his stool; and his sight would suffer if the daylight were mixed with it: so he darkens the window.

We find women at work in the next place we enter. Wheels are whirling and whizzing, and the drops are first ground smooth, and then polished. The most wonderful thing is, the skill with which the facets of a drop or spangle are ground by the eye. Ridges meet at the top; planes slope away to the side, with a regularity truly mysterious to the novice. Out come the drops, smooth in their edges, polished in their sides, and with the obtuse angles at their ends all without a fault. It is a wonderful education of eye and touch.

In the moulding of the pendants, holes were made, by wires standing up in the mould. Hooks and eyes have to be inserted in these holes, and in the plates to which they are to hang. Girls insert these, and put the parts together.

There is a long and peopled apartment, called the metal room, where the metallic parts of chandeliers, &c., are prepared. But more interesting, because more unlike other manufactures, is the glass-cutting, which proceeds in a vast right-angled room, where whole rows of iron mills, as they are called, are at work. Above each wheel or “mill” is a funnel, which drops sand and water on the edge of the wheel. It is, in fact, the sand which cuts the pattern – the mill being the means of applying it. Down dribbles and drips the sand; whizz goes the wheel; the glass held to the edge vibrates and seethes; and, after being dipped in the tub of water at each man’s elbow, it shows the desired form and pattern; the curve, or the facet; the star, or the Greek border, or the flower and leaf garland. To save some kinds of articles which are slender, or much curved, from too strong a vibration, clay is plastered into hollows or angles. Some of the work is, necessarily, “underhand,” though everybody prefers the “overhand” process: that is, it is more convenient and easy, and catches more sand, to hold the article to the upper part of the wheel, than to the under. In the one case, the glass is thrust against the wheel; in the other, it is lifted against it, which involves the holding the whole weight of the article, while much less sand finds its way to the right place. The work is both laborious and anxious. One article may require a succession of mills; and it may be spoiled in any one stage of the manufacture. Here is the anxiety of the case. In metalworking, all is pretty secure when once the model is obtained, and the first casting is found to succeed. In the glass manufacture, each article must stand on its own merits, and the thousandth reqiiires as much pains as the first. Those pains have their reward, however, as some of our readers may be aware, if they have overheard remarks on the collection of graceful and brilliant glassware, in the Messrs Osler’s rooms in London. Another kind of tribute arrived lately from a very distant place. The Messrs Osler had sent to Egypt, by order of the Viceroy, two pairs of crystal glass candelabra, ten feet high. The Viceroy is so delighted with them, that he has sent them – who would guess where? – to the tomb of the Prophet, at Medina; where, as his Highness’s Secretary observes, they will be the admiration of hundreds of thousands of pilgrim worshippers. It is a singular destination of Birmingham products – to keep watch over the pair of genii, who are keeping watch over the Prophet in his tomb; reminding him of his good and evil deeds, and balancing the account which his resurrection is to settle. How very far have they travelled over sea and land, to stand within those iron rails, and under the charge of the forty eunuchs who keep guard there! It is a symbolic incident, indicating the spread of British arts among the remotest regions, and the strangest races and faiths on earth.

The New School for Wives

Household Words, Volume 5, page 84

We have a good deal of sympathy with persons – and they are many – who look with regret on the women employed in factories. It is, undeniably, a sad sight to see women, young and middle-aged, come pouring out of workrooms into the street, at mealtimes – some dirty, some fine, some in an anxious hurry to get home to their children, some disposed rather to romp and talk and to laugh loud in the hearing of the citizens. It is a dreary thought – how few of them can make bread or boil a potato properly; how few can make a shirt, or mend a gown; how few can carry an intelligent and informed mind to their own firesides, and amuse their children with knowledge, and satisfy their husbands with sympathy.

Again, we agree largely with another set of observers, who point out that many processes of manufacture seem to demand the handiwork of women, and that it is fair and right that employments should be opened to them, in an age when the position of women is rapidly altering. There are more people, in proportion to employments, than there used to be; and there is less marriage. Very large numbers of women must, in our day, earn their own maintenance: and, this being the case, it is. clearly fair and right – even necessary – that whatever women can do well, they should be encouraged to do. Accordingly, we are sorry when we find the men in a rather small manufacturing town tyrannising over the women, so as to prevent their undertaking work that can be pursued at home, while the baby is asleep in the cradle, and the stew is simmering on the fire: and we find it a pleasant thing to see, in a very large manufacturing town, lofty and well lit rooms filled with women, busy at their work of burnishing, stamping, and punching, painting, or varnishing, or making up packets of goods. It is pleasant to think that of these some may be supporting aged parents; others earning an education for their children, or maintenance for a sick husband; and all, probably, an honourable subsistence for themselves. We see that much may be said on both sides of the question of female factory work. And the more we see this, the stronger is our sympathy with certain other observers – as yet sadly few – who, accepting female factory labour as an established fact, are hastening to remedy as much as they can of the evils which hang about it.

Four years and a half since the first Evening School for Women was opened at Birmingham. It was planned and opened and has been conducted by ladies, who did not lose time in arguing whether it was a good or a bad thing that women should be employed in manufactures but offered means of improvement in mind and in ways to such as were so employed. They offered at once to teach reading, writing, arithmetic; sewing – including the cutting out and mending of clothes; and to give instruction in the contents of the Bible, and of the other great book – the world we live in – as far as means would allow. They hoped, and still hope and intend, to teach the most important of the domestic arts of life – and first, Cookery. In time, vocal music, and other softening and sweetening arts, may be attempted. Time will show that. Meanwhile, time has shown that good has been done, which ought to be made known for other reasons than the pleasure of it; that such things may be done elsewhere.

It may not be seen, at a glance, what an undertaking this was. Everybody may not know what factory women – some factory women, at least – are. They are women, and not children, in the first place. The class contemplated had grown up in ignorance; they had not lived among home influences, but in the rough independence of factory life. Their prejudices were in proportion to their ignorance; and their pride was in proportion to their ignorance; prejudices, age, habits, and class jealousy, all together. Some who knew of the scheme prophesied that no woman would come: others, that they would be too disreputable to be kept in order, but by policemen: others, again, that it would be impossible to teach them, if they did come, and that there would be an incessant change of scholars. These prophecies were so many warnings to the ladies what to anticipate, and how to act. They would ask no questions about character, nor look to see who had wedding rings, and who had none. What they offered was knowledge; and every woman who came for knowledge should be welcome to it, as long as she pursued her object decently and quietly. They would admit no policeman – no man whatever, happen what might. They would stand or fall by their object of making this a woman’s affair altogether. They would be careful, above everything, to treat every person within the walls with the respect due to womanhood under any provocation whatever. They reminded each other of the vast difference – now to be first practically experienced – between the manners in which they had been reared, and those which were habitual with their pupils; that offensive things would be said and done which must pass unnoticed, while there was a possibility of no offence being meant. It would be hard to understand and remember this sometimes; but it must be understood and remembered. As to whether the women would come for instruction that was a thing to be ascertained by experiment – and not otherwise. The experiment was tried.

The history of the beginning of this enterprise reminds one of the excellent Wilderspin’s account of the opening of the first Infant School. He and his wife, supported by the promoters of the scheme, agreed, after much hesitation, to try what they could do with a schoolful of infants. They dreaded the day; and they found it truly dreadful. When the mothers were gone, it was arduous work to keep the little things entertained and beguiled at all. At last, one child cried aloud; two or three more caught up the lamentation, which spread, by infection, till every infant of the whole crowd (we forget how many there were) was roaring as loud as it could roar. After vain attempts to pacify them, in utter despair about the children, and horror at the effect upon the whole neighbourhood, the worthy couple rushed from the schoolroom into the next chamber, when the wife sank in tears upon the bed. Her husband was no less wretched: this din of woe was maddening; something must be done – but what? In the freakishness of despair, he seized a pole, and put on the top of it a cap of his wife’s which was drying from the wash-tub. He rushed back into the schoolroom, waving his new apparatus of instruction – giving, as he found, his first lesson on Objects. The effect which ensued was his lesson. In a minute not a child was crying. All eyes were fixed upon the cap; all tears stood still and dried up on all cheeks. The wife now joined him; and they kept the children amused, and the neighbours from storming the doors, till the clock struck twelve. A momentary joy entered the hearts of the Wilderspins at the sound; but it died away as they sank down exhausted, and asked each other, with faces of dismay, whether they were to go through this again in the afternoon, and every day.

For something as bad as this, though of a different kind, did the little band of Birmingham ladies prepare themselves. Almost without means, they began one evening in September, 1847. A room was kindly lent them by a merchant. The counter was their table, and for seats they had packing cases covered with meal sacks. Much time must be lost at the beginning and end of each evening, from the necessity of putting away everything and leaving the room as they found it, for the daily use of the workmen. But to have any room at all was something. Thirty-six women appeared the first night, all unused to being taught, and the teachers were no more familiar with the sort of teaching they had undertaken to give. The first thing done was writing down their names, and their reasons for wishing to learn this and that. The eagerness to learn to write was the most remarkable indication that night; as, perhaps, it has remained since. One young woman undertook to give reasons for another’s wish to learn. “Hur wants to write to hur chap.” The “chap” was gone “to Australia;” how and why there was no occasion to inquire. There were plenty of reasons for others having the same wish; and there is something strange and very impressive, to this day, in the patience with which these women sit at their pot-hook making – sometimes in the knowledge of what they are undertaking, and sometimes in simple faith that they are going through a necessary process. One woman made O’s in her copybook for weeks; and then being set to join on an l, was delighted to find that she had made a d, and could write the first letter of her own name. Some are less humble; and there is more conceit about the reading than about writing. One woman complained that she was treated like a child, in having to learn o, x, ox, and in being asked what it meant; “as if,” said she, “everybody didn’t know that a hox is a cow!” Owing to a curious local circumstance writing is remarkably difficult to one class of the scholars – those who polish papier mâché articles by hand. The palm must be kept perfectly smooth; and, in the act of constantly preserving it from contact with whatever would roughen it, the fingers become stiff, and of an unusual form, which, though favourable to the use of the needle, is much otherwise to that of the pen. Yet the learners stick to their writing, as if nothing could discourage them.

Of the thirty-six who first presented themselves many were married and had families; yet there were only three – and they were dressmakers – who could cut out or fix any one article of their own clothing. About three-fifths did not know how to hem or seam, when the prepared work was put into their hands. It must be understood, too, that many declare and believe themselves able to sew who cannot do it passably. One woman was surprised at being asked to hem a sleeve; a thing which she made very light of. The sleeve was presented in five minutes – finished. At a single pull, the thread came out from end to end, and she was shown how to do it properly; when she was more surprised than ever to find that her work was unfinished when school was over. It is still difficult to induce them to learn what is most important in the sewing way. They will not bring clothes to mend; and they prefer making gowns to all humbler work. A variety of work is provided through the help of a benevolent draper, who gives his contribution to the school in the form of whole pieces, at the lowest cost price, of calico, flannel, prints, &c. The garments cut out and made, for instruction, at the school, are bought by the women at the cost of the material; and this may tend to strengthen the disinclination to bring mending work from home. There can be no question of the good done by the sewing lessons; of the pride and comfort introduced at home by somebody there being dressed in clothes of the wife’s or sister’s “own making;” and it may be hoped that the same happy consequences may follow from the instruction in cookery, whenever the kitchen is opened; though the women are as certain that they can cook as they ever were that they could sew.

Poor things! Penalties do visit them, from their ignorance of household business, which might open their eyes to their own position, one would think. What a story we heard, the other day, of a first matrimonial quarrel! A young couple married on a Tuesday, all love and gaiety. On the next Sunday, the bridegroom was to be introduced to his wife’s family. The bride was so anxious that he should look his best, that she spent all Friday and Saturday (to the neglect of her own finery) in making ready his one white shirt (his weekly wear being check). She learned that starched cambric fronts were “all the go,” so she starched and starched away, and finished late on Saturday night – tired and happy. On Sunday morning, her husband found his shirt starched all over, stiff enough to stand alone; and, of course, unwearable. He cursed her for a good-for-nothing slattern; terrified her with oaths; and so was broken up, thus early, their matrimonial peace. Neither of them knew how to get the starch out again; and this did not mend the matter. This is but one case in a million. Young men see girls – very respectable steady workers – with coral necklaces, neat hair, well braided, and with some pretty net or tie upon it, gowns well made, and, on Sundays, a handsome shawl. They marry these girls; find that the shawl is at the pawnbroker’s all the week, and redeemed every Saturday night; that the gown is made by the dressmaker; that the headdress is bought; that all the other clothes are mean and slatternly; that the wife cannot make bread; that the broth she attempts to make is bits of hard meat and vegetables floating in warm water, probably smoked; and that her idea of comfort is warm new bread, and an expensive dish of ham from the huckster’s; and that she cannot keep accounts.

These are terrible discoveries; and, as children come into the world, the chances of family peace are not improved. It is surely worth some trouble, and some exercise of courage, to improve these chances; and this is why a few ladies – some of them governesses, who toil all day and every day with other pupils – brave dark nights, and pelting rain, and frost and thaw, to make some hundred women and girls somewhat more fit to be wives and mothers than they have hitherto been.

It has required no little courage. Prepared as they were for rude manners, the ladies did not know what accidents might happen; and certainly they did not dream of being left in the dark, with a set of noisy women. This happened, however, one evening, early in the experiment. The men outside put out the gas, leaving only the glimmer of the fire within; and the scholars responded to the joke with loud and coarse mirth. The teachers kept their nerve. One went out to keep off the police; candles were procured; and soon, by firmness, good humour, and patience, quietness was restored. On one occasion, the young minister’s wife who chiefly originated this school, climbed the counter, as the only way of making herself seen; clapped her hands to make herself heard, and gave a lesson on order and quietness. No such appeals are necessary now. It was found that the workmen left their work half an hour earlier, that they might fall in with the women as they left school. By arrangement, the men were kept to their work till the proper time, that the women might get home. These things are remembered as difficulties long past; but, for the sake of future enterprises, they should not be forgotten. It is difficult now to believe that such things could have been; so earnestly as the scholars knit their brows over their sums, and gaze at their teacher, as she expounds their Bible lesson. For the most part, the individuals are not the same; but some are. For the first two months there were many changes. Those who were too proud to spell o, x, ox, went away; and so did some who disliked the order and quietness. The husband of one of the ladies feared that the change was greater than it was. On one occasion (not the regular school evening, when none but ladies attend) he told his wife that what he feared was happening; that the class most in need of help were falling away, and a higher one coming in. She asked him to point out some of this higher order. The first he indicated had been one of the attendants on the opening night, and ever since. It was the improved respectability that had misled him.

In half a year, there was more convenience, and a saving of time, by the kindness of the Messrs Osler, who lent a room, furnished with benches and desks; and here the work went on till the room was wanted for the Crystal Fountain. The schoolrooms belonging to a neighbouring Chapel are now the place of meeting for the original school, three evenings in the week; while another is opened elsewhere. More are to follow. There is a paid superintendent, and one paid teacher besides; and it would be well if there were more. As the experienced observe, “voluntary teaching is a broken staff to lean upon.” The paid teachers will, of course, be persons who can undertake to be always present – which is more than most ladies, however well disposed, can answer for. It is of the utmost consequence to the scholars to know that at least one person in authority will be regularly at her post. The irregularity of the voluntary visitors (from circumstances of domestic engagements, health, weather, &c., if there were no unsteadiness of purpose,) is a serious evil at best; and it would be fatal if the attendance of one, two, or more teachers were not absolutely secured. It has happened that the superintendent, when prepared to meet her own class, has found herself charged with the management of thirty, or even forty, women, whose teachers have not appeared. Considering that the most irregular of the visitors are those who come, at times, the most smartly dressed – thus doing mischief by their mere appearance when they do come, it is much to be wished that, in all such schools, there may be funds to afford the engagement of educated ladies – governesses, whose hearts are in their work – who understand the peculiarities of the case, and can make the best use of them.

As to the matter of dress. There can be nothing but good in telling the plain fact, that the most earnest and devoted of the ladies have found it their duty to wear no stays, in order to add the force of example to their efforts to save the young women who are killing themselves with tight-lacing. One poor scholar died, almost suddenly, from tight-lacing alone. Another was, presently after, so ill, from the same abuse, that she could do nothing. A third could not stoop to her desk, and had to sit at a higher one, which suited the requirements of her self-imposed pillory. In overlooking those who were writing, we were struck by the short-breathing of several of them. We asked what their employments were, supposing them to be of some pernicious nature. It was not so: all were cases of evident tight-lacing. The ugly walling-up of the figure is a painful contrast to the supple grace of some of the teachers. The girls see this grace, but will not believe, till convinced by the feel, that there are no stays to account for it.

“And what have you got on?” said one of the ladies, feeling in like manner. “Why, you are perfectly walled-up. How can you bear it?”

“Why,” answered the girl, “I have got only six-and-twenty whalebones.”

The lady obtained some anatomical plates, and formed a class of the older women, apart from the rest, to whom she displayed the consequences, in full, of this fatal practice. At the moment, they appear to disbelieve the facts; but a little time shows that they have taken the alarm: – to what extent, the dress of their daughters, as they grow up, will probably indicate.

The number on the books of this school is about one hundred; the average attendance is about fifty. The eagerness to attend is remarkable; and the dread of losing their place through non-attendance is testified in the strongest ways. Many are detained late at their work on Friday evenings; but they come, if only for a quarter of an hour; or if prevented, perhaps send a supplicating note that their place may not be filled up. Some few, who work in overheated rooms all day, really cannot give their minds to study at night. These may be expected to go off to parties and balls at the public houses; and the younger ones, perhaps, to take dancing lessons at such houses, at half a crown a quarter, instead of what they can get at these schools for thirteen-pence, and a penny for the copybook. But there is one woman who, too weary to learn much, comes for the solace of seeing cheerful faces in a warm, bright room. She toils to support a sick husband, whom she is always nursing, when not earning his bread. She is welcome here; and she must hear many things interesting and amusing to her mind. The eagerness to learn is beyond description – not only the preliminaries of reading and writing, but the facts of the world. “What is this?” “What is that?” “Tell us this;” “Tell us that,” is forever the cry, on the discovery that they are ignorant of the commonest things that are before their eyes; – on the belief, too, that their teachers know everything. What a change from the days when they were saucy and rude, in their inability to conceive of their being treated with respect and politeness by ladies, whom they had supposed to be, somehow, “against” them! While one class is fixed in attention to the superintendent, their eyes moving only from their Bibles to her face, and from her face to their Bibles; while there is a strange sight to be seen (of which more presently) in the arithmetic class; while a dozen more are writing at the desks with an earnestness perfectly desperate – who are those two – the pair sitting with their backs to the rest, and holding a book between them? They are sisters; workers at the steel pen manufactory. The younger, herself not young, is teaching the elder to read – the one patient, the other humble, over the syllables they have arrived at: – both much too earnest to be ashamed. It is a pretty sight.

The oddity about the arithmetic is, that the scholars have to admit two sorts, or to unlearn one. They have a good deal of reckoning to do every day – most of them. They reckon their work by “grosses;” and they are quick in calculating their wages: but all the slower are they for this in doing sums on the slate. That beautiful girl, who makes a perpetual tat-tat on her slate, has to multiply four figures by nine. By the long rows of little strokes, we imagine that she has made nine marks many times over, and that she proposes to count them. She will thus learn, at all events, the convenience of the multiplication table. And so will that other – untidy but absorbed – who is counting her fingers, from one five minutes to another, with many a knitting of the brows, and many a sigh the while. They do learn arithmetic to some purpose: and they learn something else by means of it: – nothing less than that it answers better to some of them to stay at home and keep house, than to earn wages in the manufactory. Some of the hucksters, from whom household articles are bought, are themselves very ill-educated; and it may often happen that, without any evil intention, they may set down a penny in the shilling column of their books, and so on. With great satisfaction, a wife here and there now finds herself able to check such mistakes. When, added to this, she has become a reasonable thinker and planner, can understand her business – can make and mend, and buy and economise, and suit her ways to her means; she may easily find that it answers better, as regards mere money, to stay at home, than to work at the factory. The great truth will be more evident still when the kitchen is opened, and the world of economy and comfort belonging to that department is revealed to minds at present wholly dark in regard to it. The women think they can cook, as before they thought they could reckon and could sew. They will soon see.

Here, then, we find ourselves brought round, through our sympathy with one order of observers, into sympathy with the other two. We see what the demand for female workers is, and how it has sprung up; and, when we learn that, owing to this demand, women’s wages have risen of late twenty per cent., we are not disposed to try to counteract the natural tendencies of things by declamation. Again, we share the recoil with which others see young girls trooping through the streets to the factories, and wives locking their doors – every morning turning their backs upon their homes. And now, we have a right to claim the sympathy of both, in regard to this new movement, by which, without the slightest interference with the rights of labour, or with the liberty of a single individual, women are led back to their own homes, and the good old-fashioned seat by their own firesides. After sympathy, or with it, comes help. Those who think well of what has been done, should, and will, go and do the same thing. There should, and will, be more evening schools for women employed in manufactures.

What there is in a Button

Household Words, Volume 5, page 106

It is a serious thing to attempt to learn about buttons at Birmingham. What buttons are we thinking of? we are asked, if we venture an inquiry. Do we want to see gilt, or silvered buttons? or electroplated? or silk, or Florentine buttons? or mother-of-pearl, or steel, or wood, or bone, or horn buttons? All these are made here. Before we have made up our minds what to see first, we hear somebody say that button dies are among the highest objects of the die-sinkers, and medallists’ art. This not only suddenly raises our estimate of buttons, but decides us to follow the production of the button from the earliest stage – if Messrs Allen and Moore will kindly permit us to see what their artists and workmen are doing. This is not the first time that we have had a hankering after this spectacle. When we saw electroplating – when we saw the making of pencil cases and trinkets – we observed and handled many steel dies, and wondered how they were made. Now we are to learn.

It was not a little surprising to see, in other manufactories, ranges of shelves, or pigeonholes, covering whole sides of rooms, filled with dies, worth from ten shillings to twenty-four shillings each. It was rather sad, too, to be told that a large proportion of these might never again be of any use – the fashion of a few weeks, or even days, having passed away. Much more surprising is the sight of the dies arranged along the shelves of the makers of this curious article. Messrs Allen and Moore have made three thousand dies within the last three years: and upon each one, what thought has been spent – what ingenuity – what knowledge – what taste – what skill of eye and hand! A single die will occupy one man a month, with all his faculties in exercise; while another, with more natural aptitude, or courage, or experience, will do the same thing in two or three days. To think of one thousand in a year, produced with this effort and ability, and then to remember that button dies are among the highest productions of the art, cannot but elevate our respect for buttons very remarkably.

First, what is this steel die, which is so much heard of, and so seldom seen, except by those who go to seek it? It is a block of metal, round or square, as may happen, about four or five inches in height, and rather smaller at the top than the bottom. It consists of a piece of soft steel in the centre, surrounded by iron, to prevent its cracking by expansion, under the treatment it is to be subjected to. The bar of iron is wound round the steel when hot, and welded to it; and thus it comes from the forge, rough and dirty. The steel surface at the top is then polished; and if it is intended for a medal, it is turned in the lathe. The artist sketches his subject upon it, from the drawing before him, with a pencil. When he has satisfied himself with his drawing, he begins to engrave. He rests his graver (a sharp point of steel) across another graver, and cuts away – very gently; for it is always easy to cut away more, but impossible to restore the minutest chip when the stroke has gone too deep. He keeps beside him a lump of red clay, which he now and then lays upon his work, knocking it down smartly through a frame, which keeps it in shape; and thus he has presented to him his work in relief, and can judge of its effect so far. Little brushes in frames are also at hand, wherewith to brush away particles of steel, oil, and all dirt. When the engraving is done, the most anxious process of all succeeds. The steel must be hardened. All has been done that could be done to prevent fracture by the original surrounding of the steel with iron; but cracks will happen sometimes, and they spoil the work completely. The block is heated to a crimson heat – not to “a scaly heat,” but a more moderate degree; and then a dash of cold water hardens the steel. This dash of cold water is the nervous part of the business. In medals representing heads, there is usually only a narrow line left between the top of the concave head and the edge of the steel; and this is where the fracture is to be first looked for. When the Jenny Lind medal was to be struck at this house, no less than four dies were spoiled in succession. It was vexatious; but the artists went to work again, and succeeded. The Queen’s head is less mischievous than Jenny Lind’s, as the shallow work about the top of the crown intervenes between the deeper concavity and the rim. If the steel stands the hardening, the die is ready for use, except only that the plain surface must be well polished before the medal or button is struck.

Before we go to the medal press, we must look round this room a little. Ranged on shelves, and suspended from nails, are casts of limbs, of whole figures, of draperies, of foliage – of everything that is pretty. This art comes next to that of the sculptor; and it requires much of the same training. When partially draped figures are to be represented, the artist engraves the naked figure first, and the drapery afterwards; and to do this well, he must have the sculptor’s knowledge of anatomy. He must be familiar with the best works of art, because something of a classical air is required in such an article as a medal. The personifications of virtues, arts, sciences – of all abstract conceptions which can thus be presented – must be of the old classical types, or in close harmony with them. And then, how much else is required! Think of the skill in perspective required to engrave the Crystal Palace in the space of two or three inches! Think of the architectural drawing that an artist must be capable of who engraves public buildings by the score – endowed grammar schools, old castles, noblemen’s seats, market houses, and so forth! Think of the skill in animal drawing required for the whole series of sporting buttons – from the red deer to the snipe! Think of the varieties of horses and dogs, besides the game! For crest buttons, the lions and other animals are odd and untrue enough; but, out of the range of heraldry, all must be perfect pictures. And then, the word “pictures” reminds us of the exquisite copies of paintings which the die-sinker makes. Here is the “Christus Consolator”of Scheffer reproduced, with admirable spirit and fidelity, within a space so small, that no justice can be done to the work unless it is viewed through a magnifying glass.

So much for the execution. We have also not a little curiosity about the designing. The greater number of the designs are sent hither to be executed – coats of arms; livery buttons; club buttons; service buttons – buttons for this or that hunt; foreign buttons – the Spanish one sort, the French another. Sometimes a suggestion comes, or a rough sketch, which the artist has to work out. But much is originated on the premises. There is a venerable man living at Birmingham, who has seen four generations, and watched their progress in art; and he it is, we are told – Mr Lines, now above eighty, who has “furnished”(that is, discovered and trained) more designers than anybody else. It must be pleasant to him to see what Birmingham has arrived at since lamps were made with a leopard’s foot at the bottom, expanding into a leaf at the top, and so on, through a narrow circle of grotesque absurdities. Now, one cannot enter a manufactory, or pass along the streets of this wonderful town, without being impressed and gratified by the affluence of beauty, with good sense at the bottom of it, which everywhere abounds: and, to one who has helped on the change, as Mr Lines has done, the gratification ought to be something enviable.

The variety of dies is amusing enough. Here is a prize medal for the Queen’s College at Cork: on one side, the Queen’s head, of course; on the other, Science – a kneeling figure, feeding a lamp; very pretty. Next, we see General Tom Thumb – his mighty self on one side, and his carriage on the other. This medal he bought here at a penny apiece; and he sold it again, with a kiss into the bargain, to an admiring female world, at the low price of a shilling. Then, we have the Duke of Cambridge, and the Governesses’ Institution; and Prince Albert, and the Crystal Palace; and, on the same shelf, the late Archbishop of Paris, on the barricade; and, again, the medal of the Eisteddfod – the eagle among clouds, above which rises the mountain peak: on the other side, Cardiff Castle; and for the border, the leek. But we must not linger among these dies, or we shall fill pages with accounts of whom and what we saw there – the Peels and the Louis Napoleons; the Schillers and the Tom Thumbs; the private school and public market medals; royal families, free trade, charities, public solemnities, and private vanities, out of number. We will mention only one more fact in this connexion. We saw a broken medal press – a press which was worth one hundred pounds, and which broke under the strain of striking off seventy thousand medals for the schoolchildren who welcomed the Queen to Manchester last autumn. Yes, there is another fact that we must give. Many thousands of “ national boxes “ are required for exportation, especially to Germany. These boxes contain four counters, intended for the whist table. These counters are little medals, containing the portraits of the Queen, of Prince Albert, of the Prince of Wales, and of the other royal children. The Germans decline all invitations to suggest other subjects. They prefer these, which are interesting to all, and which can cause no jealousy among the various states of Germany. So these medals are struck everlastingly.

The medal press is partly sunk in the earth, to avoid the shock and vibration which would take place above ground, and injure the impression from the die. Its weight is three tons; the screw and wheel alone weighing fifteen hundredweight. The screw is of an extraordinary size, being six inches in diameter. One die is fixed to the block, which rises from the ground; and the other is fastened to the end of the screw, which is to meet it from above. Of course the medal must lie between them. This medal, called a “blank,” is (if not of gold, silver, or copper) of pure tin, cut out by one machine, cleaned and polished by another, and now brought here to be stamped by a third, and the greatest. This “blank” is laid on the lower die, and kept in its place, and preserved from expansion, when struck, by the collar, a stout circle of metal which embraces the die and blank. As the heavy horizontal wheel at the top revolves, the screw descends; so two or three men whirl the wheel round, with all their force; down goes the screw, with its die at its lower end, and stamps smartly upon the blank. A second stroke is given, and the impression is made. The edges are rough; but they are trimmed off in a lathe, and then the medal is finished. Button blanks are stamped in a smaller machine; some on these premises, but many in the manufactories of the button makers. To those manufactories we must now pass on.

When little children are shown old portraits, they are pretty sure to notice the large buttons on the coats of our forefathers. Those buttons were, no doubt, made at Birmingham; for few were, in old days, made anywhere else in the kingdom. Those buttons were covered by women, and by the slow process of the needle. Women and girls sat round tables, in a cosy way, having no machinery to manage; and there was no clatter, or grinding, or stamping of machinery to prevent their gossiping as much as they liked. Before the workwomen lay moulds of horn or wood, of various shapes, but most commonly round, and always with a hole in the middle. These moulds were covered with gold or silver thread, or with sewing silk, by means of the needle. One would like to know how many women were required to supply, at this rate, the tailors who clothed the gentlemen of England? At last, the tailors made quicker work, by covering the moulds with the material of the dress. So obvious a convenience and saving as this might have been expected to take its place, as a matter of course, among new arrangements; but there were plenty of people who thought they could put down such buttons by applying to Parliament. A doleful petition was sent up, showing how needle wrought buttons had been again and again protected by Parliament, and requesting the interposition of the Legislature once more against the tailoring practice of covering moulds with the same material as the coat or other dress. What would the petitioners have said, if they had been told that, in a century or so, one establishment would use metal for the manufacture of buttons to the amount of thirty-seven tons, six hundredweight, two quarters, and one pound weight in one year! Yet this is actually the state of things now in Birmingham. And this is exclusive of the sort of button which, a few years ago, we should have called the commonest – the familiar gilt button, flat and plain.

As for the variety of kinds, William Hutton wrote about it as being great in his day; but it was nothing to what it is now. He says, “We well remember the long coats of our grandfathers, covered with half a gross of high-tops; and the cloaks of our grandmothers, ornamented with a horn button, nearly the size of a crown piece, a watch, or John-apple, curiously wrought, as having passed through the Birmingham press. Though the common round button keeps in with the pace of the day, yet we sometimes find the oval, the square, the pea, the pyramid, flash into existence. In some branches of traffic the wearer calls loudly for new fashions; but in this, fashions tread upon each other, and crowd upon the wearer. We do not see the square at present; but the others, with a long list of new devices, are still familiar to us.”

Some grandmother, who reads this, may remember the days when she bought horn button moulds by the string, to be covered at home. Some middle-aged ladies may remember the anxieties of the first attempts to cover such moulds – one of the most important lessons given to the infant needlewoman. How many stitches went to the business of covering one mould! what coaxing to stretch the cover smooth! what danger of ravelling out at one point or another! what ruin if the thread broke! what deep stitches were necessary to make all secure! And now, by two turns of a handle, the covering is done to such perfection, that the button will last twice as long as of old, and dozens can be covered in a minute by one woman. The one house we have mentioned sends out two thousand gross of shirt buttons per week; the gross consisting of twelve dozens.

"But what of metal?” the reader may ask. “Have shirt buttons anything to do with metal? except, indeed, the wire rim of those shirt buttons which are covered with thread and which wear out in no time? When you talk of thirty-seven tons of metal, do you include wire?” No, we do not. We speak of sheet iron, and copper, and brass, used to make shirt buttons, and silk, and satin, and acorn, and sugar loaf, and waistcoat buttons, and many more, besides those which show themselves to be metal.

Here are long rooms, large rooms, many rooms, devoted to the making an article so small as to be a very name for nothingness. “I don’t care a button,” we say: but, little as a button may be worth to us, one single specimen may be worth to the manufacturer long days ot toil and nights of care, and the gain or loss of thousands of pounds. We can the better believe it for having gone through those rooms. There we see range beyond range of machines – the punching, drilling, stamping machines, the polishing wheels, and all the bright and compact, and never tiring apparatus which is so familiar a spectacle in Birmingham workrooms. We see hundreds of women, scores of children, and a few men; and piles of the most desultory material that can be found anywhere, one would think – metal plates, coarse brown pasteboard, Irish linen, silk fringes, and figured silks of many colours and patterns.

First, rows of women sit, each at her machine, with its handle in her right hand, and a sheet of thin iron, brass, or copper, in the other. Shifting the sheet, she punches out circles many times faster than the cook cuts out shapes from a sheet of pastry. The number cut out and pushed aside in a minute is beyond belief to those who have not seen it done. By the same method, the rough pasteboard is cut; and linen (double, coarse and fine) for shirt buttons; and silk and satin – in short, all the round parts of all buttons. The remains are sold – to the foundries, and the ragman, and the paper makers. Very young children gather up the cut circles. Little boys, “just out of the cradle,” range the pasteboard circles, and pack them close, on edge, in boxes or trays; and girls, as young, arrange on a table the linen circles, small and larger. Meantime, the machines are busily at work. Some are punching out the middle of the round bits of iron, or copper, or pasteboard, to allow the cloth or linen within to protrude, so as to be laid hold of by the needle which is to sew on the button. This makes the back or under part of the button. Another machine wraps the metal top of the button in cloth, turns down the edges, fixes in the pasteboard mould, and the prepared back, and closes all the rims, so as to complete the putting together of the five parts that compose the common Florentine button which may be seen on any gentleman’s coat. It is truly a wonderful and beautiful apparatus; but its operation cannot well be described to those who have not seen it. Black satin waistcoat buttons, and flat and conical buttons covered with figured silks, are composed of similar parts, and stuck together, with all edges turned in, by the same curious process. Shirt buttons are nearly of the same make; but, instead of two pieces of metal, for the back and front, there is only one; and that is a rim, with both edges turned down, so as to leave a hollow for the reception of the edges of all the three pieces of linen which cover the button. A piece of fine linen, lined with a piece very stout and coarse, covers the visible part of the button, and goes over the rim. A piece of middling quality is laid on behind: and, by the machine, all the edges are shut fast into the hollow of the rim – the edges of which are, by the same movement, closed down nicely upon their contents, leaving the button so round, smooth, compact, and complete, that it is as great a mystery where the edges are all put away, as how the apple gets into the dumpling. No one would guess how neat the inside of the button is, that did not see it made. The rims are silvered as carefully as if they were for show. When struck from the brass or copper, and bent, they are carried to the yard, where an earnest elderly man, dressed in an odd suit of green baize, stands at a stone table, with a bucket of stone ware, pierced with holes, in his hand, and troughs before him, containing – the first, diluted aquafortis, and the others, water. The bucket, half full of button rims, is dipped in the aquafortis bath, well shaken there, and then passed through successive waterings, finishing at the pump. The rims, now clean and bright, must be silvered. They are shaken and boulted (as a miller would say), covered with a mysterious silvering powder, the constitution of which we were not to inquire into; and out they come, as white as so many teaspoons. Thus it is, too, with the brace-buttons, on which the machines are at work all this time. Each has to be pierced with four holes; necessary, as we all know, for sewing on buttons which have to bear such a strain as these have. This piercing with four holes can be inflicted, by one woman, on fifteen gross per hour. The forming the little cup in the middle of the button, where the holes are, in order to raise the rim of the button from the surface of the dress, is called countersinking; and that process has a machine to itself; one of the long row of little engines which look almost alike, but which discharge various offices in this manufacture, at once so small and so great. These buttons go down to the burnisher’s department in company with some which make a prodigious show at a very small cost – the stage ornaments which are professionally called “spangles.” Let no novice suppose that these are the little scales of excessively thin metal which are called spangles on doll’s dresses and our grandmothers’ embroidered shoes. These stage spangles are nearly an inch in diameter, cut out in the middle, and bent into a rim, to reflect light the better. In the Hippodrome they cover the bodices of princesses, and stud the trappings of horses at a tournament; and in stage processions they make up a great part of the glitter. Of these, twenty-five thousand gross in a year are sent out by this house alone; a fact which gives an overwhelming impression of the amount of stage decoration which must always be exhibiting itself in England.

In our opinion, it was prettier to see these “spangles” burnished here than glittering on the stage; and, certainly, the brace buttons we had been tracing out would never more be so admired as when they were brightening up at the wheel. The burnisher works his lathe with a treadle. The stone he uses is a sort of bloodstone, found in Derbyshire, which lasts a lifetime in use. Each button is picked up and applied: a pleasant twanging, vibrating tune – very like a Jew’s harp – comes from the flying wheel; the button is dropped – polished in half a second; and another is in its place, almost before the eye can follow. Six or eight gross can thus be burnished in an hour by one workman. If the brace buttons are to have rims, or to be milled, or in any way ornamented, now is the time; and here are the lathes in which it is done. The workmen need to have good heads, as well as practised hands; for, even in an article like this, society is full of fancies, and there may be a hundred fashions in a very short time – a new one almost every week. These harping lathes, in a row, about their clean and rapid work, are perhaps the prettiest part of the whole show. At the further end of the apartment sits a woman with heaps of buttons and spangles, and piles of square pieces of paper before her. With nimble fingers she ranges the finished articles in rows of half a dozen or more, folds in each row, and makes up her packets as fast, probably, as human hands can do it. But this is a sort of work which one supposes will be done by machinery some day.

Still, all this while, the long rows of machines on the counters, above and below, and on either hand, are at work, cutting, piercing, stamping, countersinking. We must go and see more of their work. Here is one shaping in copper the nut of the acorn: another is shaping the cup. Disks of various degrees of concavity, sugar loaves, and many other shapes, are dropping by thousands from the machines into the troughs below. And here is the covering or pressing machine again at work – here covering the nut of the acorn with green satin, and there casing the cup with green Florentine; and finally fitting and fastening them together, so that no ripening and loosening touch of time shall, as in the case of the natural acorn, cause them to drop apart. This exquisite machinery was invented about eleven years ago, and is now patented by the Messrs Elliott, in whose premises we are becoming acquainted with it.

We have fastened upon the acorn button, because it is the prettiest; and, just now, before everybody’s eyes, in shop, street, or drawing room: but the varieties of dress button are endless. Some carry a fringe; and the fringes come from Coventry. To ornament others, the best skill of Spitalfields is put forth. In a corner of an upstairs room there is a pile of rich silks and other fabrics, which seem to be out of place in a button manufactory, till we observe that they are woven expressly for the covering of buttons. They have sprigs or circles, at regular distances. One woman passes the piece under a machine, which chalks out each sprig; and the next machine stamps out the chalked bit. This, again, is women’s and children’s work; and we find, on inquiry, that of the three or four hundred people employed on these premises, nearly all are women and children. We saw few men employed, except in the silvering and burnishing departments.

The most interesting and beautiful kind of button of all, however, depends upon the skill of men employed elsewhere – the die-sinkers, of whom we have already given some news. There is a series of stamped buttons, gilt or silvered, which one may go and see, as one would so many pictures – that sort of badge called sporting buttons. Members of a hunt, or of any sporting association, distinguish themselves by wearing these pretty miniature pictures; here, a covey of partridges, with almost every feather indicated in the high finish – there, a hound clearing a hedge – now, a group of huntsman and pack – and again, a fishing-net meshing the prey; or the listening stag or bounding fawn. In these small specimens of art, the details are as curious, the composition as skilful, the life of the living as vivid, and the aspect of the dead as faithful, as if the designer were busy on a wine cup for a king, instead of a button for a sporting jacket. Here there must be a dead ground; there a touch of burnish; here a plain ground; there a plaided or radiating one; but everywhere the most perfect finish that talent and care can give. There is surely something charming in seeing the smallest things done so thoroughly, as if to remind the careless, that whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well. We no longer wonder as we did, that the button branch is one of the most advanced in the business of the die-sinker and medallist.

Pearl buttons have their style of “ornamentation” too; but the die-sinker and professional designer have nothing to do with it. There is something more in the ornamenting of pearl buttons than the delicate work done with the turning tools – the circles, and stars, and dots, and exquisite milled edges, with which our common pearl buttons are graced. At the manufactory we are shown drawers full of patterns; and among those in favour with working men are some with pearl centres, on which are carved, with curious skill, various devices – a dog, or a bird, or some such pretty thing. These designs are notions of the workmen’s own.

The pearl button manufacture is the prettiest, after all – the prettiest of that family of production. Perhaps the charm is in the material – the broad shell, which we know to have been, a while ago, at the bottom of the Indian seas. The rainbow light, which gleams from the surface, seems to show to us the picture of where this shell once was, and what was done about it. This is not from the Gulf of Mexico – this shell. Many come from thence; but this is of too good a quality for those western seas. Nor is it from Manilla, though the Manilla shells are very fine. This comes from Singapore, and is of the best quality. To get it, what toil and pains, what hopes and fears, what enterprises and calculations have been undertaken and undergone! What boats full of barbarians went out, amidst the muttering and chanting of charms, to the diving for the shells for our handling! How gently were they paddled over those deep clear seas, where the moon shines with a golden light, and sends her rays far down into the green depths which the diver is about to intrude upon! As the land breeze came from stirring the forest, and breathing over the rice grounds, to waft the boats out to sea, the divers prepared for their plunge, each slinging his foot on the heavy stone which was to carry him down, nine fathoms deep, to where his prey was reposing below. Then there was the plunge, and the wrenching of the shells from the rocks, and putting them into the pouch at the waist; and the ascent, amidst a vast pressure of water, causing the head to seethe and roar, and the ears to ache, and the imprisoned breath to convulse the frame; and then there was the fear of sharks, and the dread spectacle of wriggling and shooting fishes, and who knows what other sights! And then, the breath hastily snatched; and the fearful plunge to be made again! And then must have followed the sale to the Singapore merchant; and the packing and shipping to England; and the laying up in London, to gather an enormous price – the article being bought up by a few rich merchants – and the journey to Birmingham, where the finest part of the shell is to be kept for buttons, and the coarser part sent on to Sheffield, to make the handles of knives, paper cutters, and the like.

Through such adventures has this broad shell gone, which we now hold in our hand. In the middle is the seamed, imperfect part, from which the fish was torn. From that centre; all round to the thin edge, is the fine part which is to be cut into buttons. From that centre back to the joint is the ridgy portion which, with its knots, will serve for knife handles. There is, perhaps, no harder substance known; and strong must be the machine that will cut it. It is caught and held with an iron grip, while the tubular saw cuts it in circles, a quarter of an inch (or more) thick. Some of the circles are an inch and a half in diameter; others as small as the tiny buttons seen on baby clothes. They are, one by one, clutched by a sort of pincers, and held against a revolving cylinder, to be polished with sand and oil. Then, each is fixed on a lathe, and turned, and smoothed; adorned with concentric rings, or with stars, or leaves, or dots; and then corded or milled at the edges, with streaks almost too fine to be seen by the naked eye. The figures in the middle are to mask the holes by which the button is to be sewn on. In a small depression, in the centre of the pattern, the holes are drilled by a sharp hard point which pierces the shell. The edges of the holes are sharp, as housewives well know. But for the cutting of the thread, in course of time, by these edges, pearl buttons would wear for ever. Now and then, the thin pierced bit in the middle breaks out; but, much oftener, the button is lost by the cutting of the thread. They last so long, however, as to make us wonder how there can be any need of the vast numbers that are made. Birmingham supplies almost the whole world. A very few are made at Sheffield; and that is all. In the United States, where the merchants can get almost any quantity of the shell, from their great trade with Manilla and Singapore, the buttons are not made. The Americans buy an incredible quantity from Birmingham. Many thousands of persons in this town are employed in the business; and one house alone sends out two thousand gross per week, and very steadily; for fashion has little or nothing to do with pearl buttons. The demand is steady and increasing; and it would increase much faster but for the restriction in the quantity of the material. The profit made by the manufacturer is extremely small – so dear as the shell is. The Singapore shell was sold not many years ago at sixty-five pounds per ton; now, it cannot be had under one hundred and twenty-two pounds, ten shillings, per ton. The manufacturer complains of monopoly. If this be the cause of the dearness, the evil will, in the nature of things, be lessened before long. Time will show whether the shells are becoming exhausted, like the furs of polar countries. We ventured to suggest, while looking round at the pile of shell fragments, and the heaps of white dust that accumulate under the lathes, that it seems a pity to waste all this refuse, seeing how valuable a manure it would make, if mixed with bone dust or guano. The reply was, that it is impossible to crush a substance so hard; that there is no machine which will reduce these fragments to powder. If so, some solvent will probably be soon found, which will act like diluted sulphuric acid upon bones. While we were discussing this matter, and begging a pint or quart of the powder from under the lathes, to try a small agricultural experiment with, a workman mentioned that when he worked at Sheffield, a neighbouring farmer used to come, at any time, and at any inconvenience to himself, to purchase shell powder, when allowed to fetch it, declaring it to be inestimable as a manure. In a place like Birmingham, where the sweepings and scrapings of the floors of manufactories are sold for the sake of the metal dust that may have fallen, we venture to predict that such heaps and masses of shell fragments as we saw, will not long be cast away as useless rubbish. If one house alone could sell two hundred and fifty tons of shell refuse per year, what a quantity of wheat and roots might be produced from under the counters, as it were, of Birmingham workshops! And we were told that such a quantity would certainly be afforded. Such a sale may, in time, become some set-off against the extreme dearness of the imported shell. While the smallest pearl button goes through nine or ten pairs of hands before it is complete, the piece from which it is cut may hereafter be simmering in some dissolving acid; and sinking into the ground, and rising again, soft and green, as the blade of wheat, or swelling into the bulb of the turnip. Will not some one try?

While this dust was bubbling out from under the turning tools, and flying about before it settled, we had misgivings about the lungs of the workmen. But it seems there was no need. The workman who was exhibiting his art in the dusty place, told us he had worked thus for nine-and-twenty years, and had enjoyed capital health; and truly, he looked stout and comfortable enough; and we saw no signs of ill health among the whole number employed. The proprietor cares for them – for their health, their understandings, their feelings, and their fortunes; and he seems to be repaid by the spectacle of their welfare.

The white pearl buttons are not the only ones made of shells from the Eastern seas. There is a sort called black, which to our eyes looked quite as pretty, gleaming as it did with green and lilac colours, when moved in the light. This kind of shell comes from the islands of the Pacific. It is plentiful round Tahiti, and Hawaii, (as we now call Otaheite and Owhyhee). It is much worn by working men, in the larger forms of buttons. We remember to have often seen it; but never to have asked what it was.

The subsidiary concerns of these large manufactories strike us by their importance, when on the spot, though we take no heed to them in our daily life. When the housewife has taken into use the last of a strip of pearl buttons, she probably gives to the children the bit of gay foil on which they were tacked, without ever thinking where it came from, or how it happened to be there. The importation of this foil is a branch of trade with France. We cannot compete with the French in the manufacture of it. When we saw it in bundles – gay with all gaudy hues – we found it was an expensive article, adding notably to the cost of the buttons, though its sole use is to set off their translucent quality, to make them more tempting to the eye.

We saw a woman, in her own home, surrounded by her children, tacking the buttons on their stiff paper, for sale. There was not foil in this case between the stiff paper and the buttons, but a brilliant blue paper, which looked almost as well. This woman sews forty gross in a day. She could formerly, by excessive diligence, sew fifty or sixty gross; but forty is her number now – and a large number it is, considering that each button has to be picked up from the heap before her, ranged in its row, and tacked with two stitches.

Here we had better stop, though we have not told half that might be related on the subject of buttons. It is wonderful, is it not? that on that small pivot turns the fortune of such multitudes of men, women, and children, in so many parts of the world; that such industry, and so many fine faculties, should be brought out and exercised by so small a thing as the Button.

Tubal-cain

Household Words, Volume 5, page 192

That is a curious old question – puzzling to others than children – “Where did the first brewer get the first yeast?” We should like to know how some other useful things were first made, without any pattern or precedent – brass, for instance. We may easily fancy how the wandering men of the East might light upon lumps of copper, as some Australian shepherds have lately struck their feet against masses of gold, or found that a great stone, on which they had often sat down to rest, was composed of the precious metal. There is more copper in the world than any other metal – than even iron, we are told; or, at any rate, it appears so to men now. It peeps up, and lies about, and draws attention by its colours, when mixed with other matters, in all quarters of the globe; and there is no reason why the roving tribes of old Asia should not have found it, and observed how easily it can be hammered, as naturally as the Red Indians in North America have done. But it is less easy to imagine how it came into their heads to melt and mix it with other metal, to make brass. One would like to know where the first fire was that made the first brass; and also what was the metal mixed with copper by Tubal-cain, when he taught artificers to make utensils of brass. It is mentioned that he worked in iron, too; but it is so difficult to make iron and copper unite, that no extensive manufacture of brass could have gone on in that way in any age or part of the world. The old Greeks used to make their brass with tin. Perhaps the Patriarchs did the same. Or they might light upon some ores of zinc, though they had not the zinc itself, which is a very modern affair. One might just fancy how the ancient men might make a huge fire in some of the limestone caverns which abound in their part of Asia; those caverns, where all operations were carried on, which required a better shelter than a goat’s-hair tent; and how the metalworkers might be heating some copper, to work it more easily; and how a bit of calamine, or other ore of zinc, might be accidentally thrown on among the copper; and how a wonderful and beautiful light – one of the most beautiful lights in the world – might bubble up, and blaze, and suddenly reveal every crevice and projection of the cavern; and alarm the people yet more by its horrid smell; and how they might find, when the fire was out, some pieces or streaks of brass among their copper. They would naturally examine these, and find out that this mixture was harder than mere copper, and would bear a better edge. Such a discovery made, they would easily get on in the preparation and use of it, till they had master workmen, like Tubal-cain. In old Egypt, the artificers were the lowest order in society but that of the shepherds, poulterers, and fishermen; but that they were skilful in brass working, among other arts, we know by Moses having so much brass about the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, which, no doubt, the Egyptians who went with him helped to make, after having taught their art to the Hebrew bondsmen. The fastenings of the curtains were of brass; and so were the sockets of the pillars, – as we read in the thirty-sixth and thirty-eighth chapters of Exodus; and the great laver or reservoir was also of brass. Considering all this, and the use the Greeks made of brass, and after them the Romans, who actually got the tin for the mixture from our own island; it does appear strange that no brass should have been made in England till two hundred years ago. In Germany, it had been made for centuries; and we must suppose that we got from thence what we wanted; for there was none made here till 1649, when a German came over, and settled at Esher in Surrey, and there began to show us how to melt copper and zinc (or spelter, as the merchants call it) together, to produce that beautiful, yellow, glittering metal, with which we make our chandeliers and door plates, and bed castors, and statues, and cast our bells, and mount our telescopes. Ah! none but those who have seen it wrought can tell how beautiful it is, before it is spoiled with the varnish we are obliged to put on, to prevent its tarnishing! If its virgin tint could be preserved, it would be the most beautiful, perhaps, of all metals.

From the time of that German, who settled at Esher, to our own, our artificers have been prevented from making our brass work so good, or so cheap, as it might naturally have been. The good man and his successors got from abroad most of the copper they wanted; this led to our searching out what we had at home. It was found that we had plenty; so much, that we could send a great deal abroad. Heavy duties were laid on foreign copper, and we were thus compelled to use our own. It is very good; but it is made very much better by being mixed with other kinds from abroad. By free trade, we now have this advantage. We get copper from Australia and from South America; and zinc, or spelter, from Siberia; and mix in our own copper, and make an article so good as to command a great foreign sale. The cost of producing it is, as far as the metal is concerned, equalised with that of foreign countries; and thus we have at once a better and a cheaper article, and an extending trade abroad.

There are few of our manufactures prettier to the eye of a visitor than brass-founding. The name does not promise much; and the greater, therefore, is the pleasure. There is so much variety in it, that little notion of it can be given in the space of half a dozen pages; but what we can tell in that space we will. As we like having the best of everything, when it can be fairly had, we were thankful to be permitted to go over the establishment of the present Mayor of Birmingham, with the honour of having the Mayor himself for our guide – the hardest-worked man in Birmingham just now, probably, but as patient in explaining and informing as if he had nothing else to do.

The mixing of the metals tells itself, for the most part. The mould for the ingots stands at our feet, in a shed where the copper is melted in the furnace, in pots of Stourbridge clay. As there is no night work here, no keeping up the heat continuously, as is done in glasshouses, these pots do not last as their larger and more important brethren do. They are creatures of a day; tomorrow but a heap of sherds, to help to make a new generation. The spelter does not need to be melted in pots: it melts, like sugar in tea, by being merely stirred in the hot liquid. This is because a lower degree of heat will melt zinc than is required by copper. Here comes the flaming hot jar of copper, carried by a man well armed with the necessary tongs; another man stands ready with the piece of spelter. He puts it in, stirs it round to mix it thoroughly, and is not, as we are surprised to see, suffocated on the spot by the fumes. There is the beautiful flame! and we have more of it, flickering and sparkling as the mixture flows, red-hot, into the moulds, whence it will come out as ingots. Those light grey flakes in the air are the sublimated zinc. After a whirl or two towards the rafters, out they go at window and door! We ask, what are the proportions of the two metals? and we find that the mixture is varied, according to its destination. The particular ingots at our feet are two parts of copper to one of zinc, because the brass is intended for common articles. If for finer purposes, there would be more copper. If particular hardness or toughness is required, or if the metal must be sonorous, or of a specified, colour, tin, lead, iron, or other metals, must be mixed with the copper. For hinges, drawer handles, brass nails, and, we suppose, warming pans, and kitchen candlesticks, this mixture of two to one is the right thing. We must remember that the brass we see made here is only for castings. The tubing for chandeliers, &c., and the plates for stamping and pressing, are prepared elsewhere, by those who make metal tubing, and have an establishment of rolling mills. We see here plenty of sheets of brass, and abundance of tubing; and there are stamping, and punching, and drilling machines, and very pretty work turned out by them; but these things have been described before, and we now, therefore, apply ourselves to the study of the castings.

For ornamental works, the process begins in a very different place from a raftered shed, among furnaces and clay pots. It may be in a country churchyard, under an ivied porch; or in the church itself; or under a tree in a park, where deer are browsing within sight; or on a mossy and fern clad wall; or lying on the grass, or even in bed; or in the British Museum; or in a quiet study, where the light is taken great care of. The design is the first step; and the designer may have derived ideas from altar railings, or from great men’s tombs, or from beasts, birds, and flowers; or from antique sculpture; or from his own memory and imagination. Young artists seek money, and give a chance to their ambition, by offering designs to eminent brass-founders; designs for chandeliers, and other articles of ornamental furniture; and for railings, gates, &c. Specific pieces of work, such as monumental railings, statuettes, and brass plates for particular purposes, are done from designs forwarded with the order.

Next to the design comes the model. An account has been given elsewhere of modelling in wax, in preparation for stamping, pressing, and chasing. Therefore we will not tell what pretty things of that kind may be seen here, but mention only the wooden model made from the drawing, for instance, of a tomb. The wood is pear. It is carved after the design, and in the same separate pieces, fitting into each other, that will be required by the casting process. Here we have in wood the knobs, sockets, fluting, angles, that are to be reproduced in brass. From this wooden model a cast is taken in lead, which must be, of course, its reverse, as the cast is to produce a brass copy of the wooden model. The leaden cast is chased a little; then it is cast in brass, and well finished by chasing. Here is the pattern complete, ready to take its place with – how many others, does the reader think? In this establishment there are ten tons of patterns. They are numbered, and the number reaches one hundred thousand. Those whose business it is, are so familiar with this multitude of details, that they can almost instantly lay their hand on the one wanted, or direct their eyes to the pigeonhole in the warehouse where it is deposited. At a counter in that warehouse stands a woman whose life is passed in sorting the patterns as they come in from the casting. Hinges, screws, knobs, bolts, buttons, nails, hooks, in vast variety, lie before her in trays, and she puts them by in their proper places. The walls are studded with them; drawers are filled with them; shelves are piled with them; pigeonholes are stuffed with them. In short, one hundred thousand of them have to be stowed away in such a manner, as that they may be immediately found when wanted.

With these models is laid by a great wealth of steel dies. These are a large investment, and a very uncertain property. An ordinary-looking die may prove to be worth its weight in gold; while a pair which has cost fifty guineas may not be required to give out as many copies. And while there may be a dead loss on such an article, a batch of the commonest brass-headed nails, requiring the labour of thirteen pairs of hands, may sell at Calcutta with a profit of eighteen pence to each person.

Next comes the casting. For the material required, we must look to the cemetery. It is a beautiful cemetery, with dark ivy spreading over the face of red sandstone rock, in which below are vaults hewn out, dry, dim, and solemn, with niches in which ranges of coffins are deposited, while the outer face presents Egyptian forms and symbols. Below, where there was once this rock, there are green nooks and platforms, where shrubs and flowers enclose flat gravestones, and monuments of many forms and devices. On either side there is undulating ground, with pleasant walks, well kept, and adorned with more shrubs and flowers, which again enclose green spaces, set apart by families for their dead. Amidst all the clearance required for the interment of such a population as is brought here for its rest, there are no unsightly débris, no heaps of rubbish. As the red rock retires, there is no difficulty in disposing of the fragments scooped out or hewn down. They go to help the convenience and luxury of the living: to help to make the chandeliers under which the young and gay will dance, and the fire grates at which the aged will warm their old blood, and the household articles which will spread the conveniences of home through cities and mountain retreats in another hemisphere. The cost of this cemetery is largely defrayed by the sale of its red sand to the metal-founders of the town. It is a very fine sand, remarkably free from impurities. When wetted and flattened, it looks as smooth as can well be; but for facings, and when a very fine surface is required, it is mixed with coal dust and flour, and its bed is smoked with a torch.

The mould consists of two boxes, which, when filled, are bolted together, the sand on their faces meeting, except in the hollow made by the pattern, and the channel through which the metal is to flow. The moist sand is firmly rammed down in each, round the pattern. Wherever there are recesses in the pattern, they are filled in with sand. If the article is to be hollow, it is “cored” by the pattern being filled with sand. There are, in fact, four methods of casting. Common articles, like drawer handles, bolts, knobs, and hinges, are cast solid. In such a case, we see the face of the mould stuck all over with patterns, as close as they will properly lie, which are to leave their hollow impression to be filled up by the molten metal. This is “common casting.” The next is called “common-face casting;” and that is when flat ornamented pieces are required, as for door plates. The third is “cored” casting, as for gas fittings, or other articles required to be hollow. In these a mould is taken from the inside of the pattern, as well as the outside, and carefully inserted in the great mould, so as to leave a hollow of the right thickness, to be filled up with the metal. The fourth is the “false-cored” casting. This is used for irregular figures which must be cast in one piece. If, for instance, a wreath of leaves is to be cast, the ins and outs are carefully taken off the pattern in masses of pressed sand, which are cautiously transferred to the mould, and pinned down in their right places. “False coring” is practised also in the casting of figures of men and animals, as it is on a larger scale in the case of bronze statues. Of course, much metal is saved by this, and the inconvenience of excessive weight is avoided. It may be added, that duty is charged by weight, on such articles as these, in foreign countries; and the utmost reduction of their weight is therefore desirable. The cores of sand are built up, like bricks, before the casting, and are removed afterwards by pushing out the sand through holes left for the purpose.

When the pattern has made its complete impression, and is removed, a channel is scooped in the sand, from the impression to the marginal hole in the mould; and the one box, containing one side of the impression, is screwed down upon the other, containing the other half. When eight moulds are thus prepared, – one containing, perhaps, a single figure, and another as many as a hundred, – there is enough for “a heat.” Men bring the molten metal from the furnace in ladles, and pour it into the holes in the mould, till there is a brimming over of the red stream at the mouth of each channel. Before we turn our backs on the casting process, we must observe how the brass hook of a screw is fastened on; for this is an article in such extensive use that any saving of time and labour in the production of it is of importance. Formerly, the joining was done by hand, – each screw being heated and hammered, and attended to individually, as nails once were. Now, the only thing necessary is to lay the screw, prepared with a “nick,” to dovetail, as it were, the brass to itself, in a running stream of molten brass. The figure of the hook is impressed in the sand, and the screw is laid so as to join it: then, when the metal enters, the article makes itself, to the great saving of time, and convenience of the manufacturer.

When the articles are cool, there is easy work for the boys; breaking off the cast articles from the metal in the channels, and then poking out the sand from the “cored” articles. They poke away, as if they liked the business. The sand requires more removing than this, however. There is a churn in the yard, in which the articles are whirled round, till all the sand is shaken out of them.

Here we have articles, and parts of articles, rough, dull, and so dark that one would hardly know them to be brass. The ornamental brasses have their edges smoothed by the file; and the commoner articles are delivered over altogether to the file and the turning-lathe, to be smoothed and made neat and clean. The higher order of productions are to be more respectfully treated; they are to be pickled and dipped. This is one of the prettiest processes of all. Heads of animals, wreaths of flowers, statuettes, figured plates of various sorts and sizes, may be beautiful in form and device; but all are dark, with oxidation, as well as oil and dirt. They are put into a bath of acids and water. The acids are nitric and sulphuric, which, mixed, are aquafortis. In this diluted aquafortis they lie, till the outer surface, with all impurities, is eaten off. Then they are dipped in a succession of tubs, till, coming at last out of pure aquafortis, they are of the prettiest colour that can be seen. It is a sad pity that they cannot so remain; for, to change their hue is really to half-spoil them. But it cannot be helped. They would tarnish immediately, if not secured against it by a process which we shall see presently.

We must not tell all we witnessed of the turning, and soldering, and polishing, because we have described the same things before: and though one sees the processes with fresh pleasure, when applied to new kinds of articles, that pleasure cannot be communicated in print. For instance, it was like something new to us to see holes drilled in a gas burner, and understand how the flame of the jet is made twenty per cent. better by these holes being drilled in the burner; but, to the reader, the process is just the same as the drilling of the four holes in a brace button. Again, if we were to describe the magnum candlesticks which stood about like pillars, it would merely put people in mind of the Electroplating establishment; as the cutting the links of brass chains would of the gold chain manufactory. But, oh! the beauty of those candlesticks, and of the ornamented parts of the gas fittings, and of the most massive of the chains! And the ingenuity too! – the cleverness with which the tubing is concealed in gas furniture, and with which the swinging of chandeliers is provided for, by the rolling of the ball to which the chain is fastened within another ball, so as to allow perfect freedom without permitting the least escape! And again, the endless variety of lamps, and especially of solar lamps, which are in great demand from foreign countries, where oil of various qualities abounds! On these things we must not enlarge, but rather observe the finishing of the articles.

The technical term “finishing” means putting together the parts to make the article complete; but as the word slips from our pen, it means putting the last finish of beauty. The technical “finishing” is done by the soldering with which we are familiar. As for our meaning of the word, it leads us to the counters of the burnishers. The burnishers here are not women, as at some establishments near. This work, of burnishing brass, is too hard for women. The strongest men look as if it was enough for them. They rub away with their hard steel burnishers, or with bloodstones; they rub away at a veining of a leaf here, at the swelling of an acorn or a grape there, at the niceties of a pattern, of which a part is to be left “dead.” Such common things as hinges and door handles are polished by a brush and rottenstone. While seeing these things, we have been passing from room to room, from counter to counter; moving among scores of machines, till the place appears a labyrinth of unknown extent. The gas fitting stock, and the preparation of it, seems like a great establishment in itself. But we are coming to the end of the business. We are to see the final process of lacquering.

This is the process which we alluded to as being such a pity, spoiling as it does the beauty of the hue of the metal. But this lacquering is essential to its preservation. If it could be dispensed with, it certainly would, for out of this process come the greatest annoyance and expense of the manufacturer. The coating consists of seed-lac and spirit of wine. Now, the duty on spirit of wine is so high that the cost of the lacquer amounts, in an establishment employing three hundred people, to no less than two thirds of the rent. In many large establishments, the cost of this raw material, essential to the manufacture, is not less than from ten shillings to twenty shillings per day; while foreigners obtain for four shillings and sixpence articles which we have to pay eighteen shillings or nineteen shillings for. In order to compete with the French and Germans under such a disadvantage as this, the manufacturer has to lower his own profits, and his people’s wages; so that the operation of this pernicious duty is truly disastrous on a large working class. Here, again, we meet, as everywhere, complaints of the paper duty; and it is proved, to our conviction, that the wrapping up of some of the commoner articles in this manufacture costs more than the finished article itself. This is very ridiculous and very sad; hard upon the maker at home, and the purchaser abroad. Another thing ridiculous enough, but tending to lessen sadness when discovered, is a mistake made by the statistical calculators, who have been alarming us all about the deadly amount of spirit drinking in England. Gentlemen sitting at desks, to calculate from Excise and Customs returns, without being familiar with the processes of our manufactures, may easily fall into such mistakes; but it is a great comfort to have them cleared up. Such an enormous error, for instance, as the negligent supposition that all the spirit of wine used in lacquering here, and everywhere else, is the sort of spirit that may go down somebody’s throat! If three hundred or four hundred pounds a year is charged against this establishment, and as much to a dozen or two of other brassfounders in the town, as spirituous liquors, what a libel it is upon the place! and how comforting it is to discover that, instead of our people spending seventy millions per year in intoxicating drinks, some gentlemen in London have something to learn about the application of distilled spirits in the arts of life! We, as a nation, tax ourselves dismally enough for strong drinks: but we are not yet such a nation of sots as to drink all the spirits of wine on which duty is paid.

After talking this over, we almost fear to enter the rooms where the lacquering is going on, lest we should be drunk with the fumes, and so have to take our place among the sots who lie under this spirituous censure. But, though the air is sufficiently loaded, it is not in an intoxicating way. There sit companies of women, looking sober enough. One wonders that they can be healthy, sitting in such a heat, and in such a smell. They earn good wages. The demand for female handiwork, in Birmingham, has so increased, that women’s wages have risen lately about twenty per cent. Here, some are earning eleven shillings per week, under the disadvantage, we must remember, of the duty on lacquer. The lacquer is laid on with a brush, while the article is hot; so that the spirit evaporates, leaving a coating of the gum. Sometimes the lacquer is coloured. We saw some green; an imitation of bronze, not very successful, but in some demand, or it would not be there. We need not say that the commonest lacquer gives simply a deeper yellow to the brass.

Next, and lastly (as the farthest way about is the nearest way home), we step into Bohemia. We have only to say we are there, and there is evidence, all about us, of the fact. Rows and layers of exquisite glass fill the chamber, and everybody who enters it is subject to a fever about lamp stands. We must not go into any raving about them, as our subject is brass; but we may just mention one solid fact, that the dark-red lamp-stands, so splendidly produced in Bohemia are to be eschewed, as they absorb the light.

Now, thought we – as we came away, with some of the beautiful designs we had seen, lodged in certain of the best chambers of our brain – what are we about, that we do not offer our reverence to the spirit of Art in Birmingham, as we do in old Italy, or any other place, that is only far enough off in space or time? Why do we dare to talk of Benvenuto Cellini, and other divine craftsmen, with reverence, while giving no heed to the extraordinary progress of popular Art in our own towns, and our own day? It must be from ignorance, for it is impossible to despise some things that are done among us now; but that ignorance makes our talk about ancient Art, and foreign Art, look very like affectation. We should like to know how many British travellers – who rush into enthusiasms about fountains in Germany and Italy – will trouble themselves to go and look at the fountain just opened in the Market House, at Birmingham? And, if they go, what will they say? How will they bring in the word “Brummagem?” Will they venture to apply it to the four bronze boys who represent Birmingham? There they are: the one shouldering his musket; and another blowing his bubble of glass – boy-fashion; and the third – thoughtful one – with his sextant in his hand, and a cogwheel by his side; and the fourth, proud and careful of his charge of an elegant vase! Will no charm be found here, because these symbols are of native conception? Will the bronzes below be slighted, while sure of admiration if fancied to be ancient? the four groups and garlands – the fish, the poultry, the vegetables, and the flowers and fruit? These things will not, at least, be despised by those who see most of them. The Birmingham people seem to enjoy their vocation, more than any townful of people we ever remember to have seen. Their taste, and their scientific faculties, find a constant gratification in the pursuit of their ordinary business. It is on behalf of persons who know little of the place, that one forms the wish that we could all relish beauty, wherever it is to be found, and honour Art, whatever may be the name of its dwelling-place. Tubal-cain has always been an interesting person, from his having begun his hard work so extremely early in human life. It is absurd to despise his later and prettier doings, because the roar of his furnace and the whiz of his tools are among not only the imagery of books, but the common sounds of every day.

The Forbidden Land

Household Words, Volume 5, page 431

It is natural to men to have a strong curiosity about the least known parts of the world they live in. There are thousands of children in every country in Europe – to say nothing of America – whose hearts beat as they read the story of the first voyage of Columbus; and, when these children grow up to be men and women, they read the story with more and more interest; with not less sympathy with the spirit of adventure of those ancient mariners, and with a more experienced sense of the perseverance and heroism which accomplished the acquisition of a hemisphere. The time for such curiosity to be felt and indulged is not over yet; for there are large spaces of our globe which are still almost unknown to us. There are some, the existence of which is a matter of little more than suspicion. There are some which have been seen only as a faint but distinct outline against the pale skies of the Southern Pole. There are some which we know only on the testimony of a ship’s crew or two, who have seen at night, miles off across a surging sea, volcano fires lighting up vast plains of snow. And there is one great country; which, having been familiarly talked of two or three centuries before Columbus looked abroad over the Atlantic, has since been shut up from observation, and has by degrees become the profoundest secret of its kind that is shrouded from every eye but that of heaven. Its inhabitants are compelled to let the sun and stars know about their country, but they have taken all possible care that nobody else shall. Tibet is the very Bluebeard’s closet of the great round house we live in. For several centuries the certain penalty for peeping and prying into it has been death. It is supposed, indeed, that Russia knows more than she chooses to tell; but whatever she may know is of no use to anybody else.

When Indian officers repair to the skirts of the Himalaya mountains for coolness in the summer months, they look up, as generations before them have done, to the vast snowy peaks towering in the sky, and feel how provoking it is to be unable to learn anything of what lies on the other side. Now and then a botanist, wandering on and on through a pass, has found himself a prisoner for going beyond the boundary; and here and there such a man as the German physician who attended Prince Waldemar of Prussia, ventures to proceed, with the most innocent air imaginable, as if he never dreamed of trespassing, and so pleases and amuses the people he meets that they seem sorry to turn him back, and go some way with him, to see that he comes to no harm. Then, with what glee he tells in India, on his return, of the people he has seen with sheepskins on their backs, and Chinese caps on their heads, and their hair twisted into tails; and perhaps of some Lama dwelllings about a Buddhist temple on some hill within view! Still, there has ever remained the mystery – what any country can be like which is formed in such a way as Tibet. To ascend the Himalayas is a tremendous effort. The peaks, rising to twenty-four thousand feet from the plains of India, are, of course, out of reach; the passes are quite formidable enough, some being about half that height, and some more. Now, the strange thing is that the traveller, having climbed these twelve or fifteen thousand feet, finds Tibet lying just below him – within a stone’s throw, one might almost say, and at the bottom of a mere slope. It is, in fact, a high tableland, with a temperature and productions like those of a cool country. If he could get leave to cross this tableland, he would arrive at another range of mountains, with another high tableland on the other side. And again, there is a third; so that in the heart of Asia, between the third range of mountains and the borders of Siberia, there is a region of the wildest country, bristling with glaciers, with frozen torrents in the ravines, and plains covered with snow for a considerable part of the year. If ever we gain access to this centre of Asia, there will be a new realm for the descriptive traveller, in this grandest of the cold regions of the earth.

So, for centuries now, Europeans have gazed up at this high tableland from the plains of India, with a stronger desire to know what was doing there than in the moon but with little more chance. There is one circumstance, however, which the inhabitants of Tibet have contrived to make known, for the gratification of their national pride. They are proud of their origin, and think that it accounts for their being the cleverest people in the world; of which fact they entertain no doubt. They say that God sent down upon their mountains the king of the monkeys, who was so wise a monkey that he lived in a cave, and let nobody in, that he might meditate undisturbed. A female demon, however, had a mind to live on the earth; and she assumed a beautiful form, and appeared in the cave one day, and asked the monkey king to marry her. He pleaded that he was too busy with his meditations; but the demon prevailed at last; and their offspring peopled Tibet, in the form of men more cunning and imitative than any others.

It happens, however, that the Roman Catholic Church has a disrespectful opinion that even the Tibetians may be capable of improvement, and formerly, there was a French mission in China – actually established at Peking, under sufferance of the Emperors. One Emperor, however, could not abide the “Christian infidels,” as the Orientals call Europeans, and killed or drove away all he could find. This was about half a century ago. Some of the Chinese converts made their escape beyond the Great Wall, and settled in the Land of Grass, as Tartary is called in China. The Tartars allowed them to cultivate patches of ground: and there they were found by some French missionaries. No sooner did these priests become acquainted with the Tartars, than, as they say, they loved them – loved their simplicity, their hospitality, their freedom from trickery and selfishness. They longed to make Christians of them; and they were allowed to try. Orders were received from headquarters for two of them – Messrs Hue and Gabet – to travel further into the country wherever they could penetrate, and see how large a new region might be annexed to their Church. These gentlemen have published their adventures, and it is to their book that our readers are indebted for this article.

On the receipt of this order, the missionaries sent a young convert, who had been a Buddhist priest, to bring up some camels which they had sent out to graze, while they finished preparing their catechisms and tracts in the language of the country – the Mongol. At best, the season was rather late for such a journey; but, moreover, the days passed on, and the camels did not appear. The missionaries were on the point of starting alone (for they would not take any Chinese with them) into the deserts of Tartary, at the beginning of winter, when their convert and his camels appeared. Great was the joy, and noisy the bustle among the Christians of the place. The blue linen tent was patched; the copper kettle was tinkered; one man cut wooden tent pegs; another put new legs to the joint-stool; others made ropes, and rolled up the goatskins which were to serve as beds. At length the trio set forth; the two priests on a camel and a white horse, and their convert, whose very inconvenient name was Samdadchiemba, on a black mule. (Having given his name once at length, we will henceforth write him down S.) S. led two other camels, which carried the baggage.

Sometimes the travellers slept in their tent, which was apt to be very cold; and sometimes in a house, which was apt to be extremely hot; in fact, they slept on a furnace when in a native house. The entire household was in one large room, where all the cooking, eating, sleeping, talking, and scolding went on – to say nothing of smoking and gambling. In the midst of the apartment, there is always a large raised counter, on which everybody sits and lies down to sleep. In one end of this counter boilers are inserted for the cooking; and the heat from the furnace passes into the interior of the “kang,” as the counter is called, affording a warm bed to everybody. A reed matting, or a floor of planks, is spread under the sleeper; but if he do not accurately understand how to place the reeds, or the planks, he is likely to be “done brown” on one side, while the other may chance to be stiff with cold. If this is cleverly managed, there is still much which is not exactly conducive to sleep; for instance, swarms of vermin, clouds of tobacco, and the fumes of burning dung, of garlic, and rancid oil, such as the cotton-wick is floating in. Then there is the gossip of one party, who may like to lie awake very late, chatting over their tea; or of another, who may prefer having their tea in the middle of the night; or of a third, who may want it before they go out at daybreak. On the whole, we feel that whenever we travel there, we shall prefer the tent, if we can but keep up any vital warmth in us at all. In a tent, one can at least have a choice of posture; whereas, in a Tartar inn, the sleepers on a kang, if numerous, must lie in a circle, with their feet all together in the middle. It must be a curious sight to the spiders just over their heads. On the first night the priests slept in their tent – a peculiar piece of business being to be done in the morning, to which they did not wish to draw attention from heathens. They found they were not yet out of reach of Chinese customs, for they were roused from their first doze by a horrible noise, such as scarcely anything but a Chinese gong could produce. It was the Inspector of Darkness, who made such a din with his tam-tam, that the tigers and wolves all made off at the top of their speed. One would put up with any noise for such a result.

The business which the priests had to do in the morning was to change their appearance. The Christians at the inn knew it, and were very unhappy about it: but the missionaries were determined to assume a priestly dress. In China, they had been compelled to dress like the laity. Now, they chose to dress like the priests of Buddha, to secure respect to their vocation. So S. flourished his razor, and cut off the long tails that hung down behind, and shaved their crowns. Then they dressed themselves all in yellow and red, sent away the hot wine and the chafing dish, declaring that good Lamas renounced drinking and smoking; took each a roll, steamed in the furnace, and ate it beside a rivulet, indulging in the luxury of the wild currants that grew on the banks.

They were now to leave all Christians behind, and enter on the wilds. Off they set, in their yellow gowns, up a tremendous mountain, infested with wild beasts, and robbers, and frosts, and pitfalls. Of all these horrors, the thieves appear to be the worst – they are such abominable hypocrites, with all their cruelty! They speak very sweetly to the traveller, telling him that they are tired, and find it rather cold, and have need of his horse, his cloak, and so on, till he is absolutely stripped of everything. If he comply at once, he is humbly thanked, and left to die in the frost. If he refuse, he is at once murdered, which seems the milder fate of the two. The priests saw nothing of them, happily, and arrived at the very singular place which may be found at the top of that mountain; a platform, which is a whole day’s journey in length and breadth, and from which the traveller can see, far in the deserts of Tartary, the tents of wandering tribes – beehives in form, black in colour, and ranged in crescents on the slopes of rising grounds. Here must the party encamp for the night; the first really wild encampment. They were desperately afraid of the robbers, so they chose a retired nook where tall trees grew, and there pitched their tent, and set their great dog Arsalan to watch. Somebody had given them a stock of paste – like vermicelli – which, boiled with parings of bacon, was to make a savoury supper. When the pot bubbled, each drew forth his wooden cup from his girdle, and helped himself: but the food was absolutely uneatable; so, as in the morning, the priests carried each a roll, and went for a walk; and this time, they found some wild cherries, and a scarlet apple of a pleasant acid. As we go on, we find that their commonest food was tea, thickened with oatmeal. The tea is a strong coarse kind, left over when the finer leaves are prepared for European sale. The leaves are pressed into masses, called bricks, and thus carried all over Central Asia, and into Russia. The Tartars knead oatmeal into their bowl of tea, with the knuckle of the forefinger; and on this mess they seem able to live for any length of time. When they can butter their tea – present a bowl to a guest with half an inch of butter floating on the surface – that is very fine hospitality indeed. The fuel used is “argols” – dried dung, which always abounds, of course, in a pastoral country. The argols of goats and sheep burn with so intense a heat as to bring a bar of iron to a white heat, and leave, instead of ashes, a sort of pumice stone. Next come the argols of camels, and then those of oxen. Those of horses and other non-ruminating animals, are the worst fuel. Our travellers were at times half-suffocated with the volumes of smoke they sent out, while there was little heat; so they kept this kind for tinder.

On the plateau where they now were, stands an Obo; a pile of stones, where the Tartars come to worship the spirit of the mountain.

Some devotees hang therefrom bones and strips of cloth, with inscriptions. Other pious souls deposit money in an urn set for the purpose. Very soon after, comes some other pious soul – Chinese, however – who bends and kneels, and is very busy about the urn, after which it is found empty by the next wayfarer. After descending from the plateau, the travellers journeyed through a region desolated by the possession of gold and silver mines. The Chinese are very apt at gold discovery. The form of a hill tells them whether or not to look for gold. A hill was found here, consisting mainly of rich ore. Tradition asserts that at the news, twelve thousand outcasts and bandits assembled; and besides reducing the value of gold in China one half, they laid waste the whole country by their violence. Having robbed a Queen, on pilgrimage, of her jewels, she made such bitter complaints, that the Tartar soldiery were called out. They found the miners a formidable foe, but they drove them in at last. The survivors were blocked up in their mine, where they had taken refuge; and there the starving wretches howled and screamed for some days, before their misery ceased in death. What a spectacle that gold mine must be – with the skeletons peopling its rich recesses! The few miners who escaped death by the sword and hunger, had their eyes put out, and were driven forth to take their chance. This story may seem to some people to show that the discovery of a gold field is not always a very happy thing. In the present case, it is not easy to see who was the better for it.

On the missionaries went, now and then entering a town, but, for the most part, encamping in the wildest places imaginable. To enter a town was no easy matter, the streets being such a mass of putrid mud that the soft feet of the camel can take no hold, and there is every danger of its falling on its side; in which case suffocation is almost inevitable. As for smaller beasts of burden, they may be expected to sink and be swallowed up; in which case the carcase remains, to aggravate the perpetual stench; and the baggage does not remain, if dexterous Chinamen are at hand to help themselves to it. In towns admitting of commerce, the articles are horses, oxen, and camels on the one hand, and brick tea, tobacco, linen, and some common fabrics on the other. If any Chinese who happened to be in town heard of the arrival of the Lamas of the West, as the priests were called, they came about the strangers, uttering the most charming sentiments about men being all brothers, and so forth, the consequence of which was usually some outrageous cheating, or other treachery. The travellers much preferred seeing a rough Tartar ride up to their tent in the wilds, to ask them to cure his child or his mother, or to draw his horoscope, that he might know who had carried off his horses; or, possibly, to bring a prodigiously fat sheep for sale; or to beg some meal to knead into his tea. Throughout the narrative the priests speak with affection of the kindly simplicity of the roving races, and with indulgence of their wild passions, which, it must be owned, are less disagreeable to hear of than the mean faults attributed to the Chinese. It must also be owned, however, that the Chinese can hardly do anything worse than some Tartar acts that we hear of – for instance, the ceremonial of a funeral in the case of a chief. The expensive edifice, adorned with figures of the Buddhist mythology, and stored with treasure, all ready for the next life, may be no matter of quarrel; but when we read how the great man is to be attended, we certainly think the plan as bad as any ever made in China. The most beautiful young people that can be found, youths and maidens, are made to swallow mercury till they are suffocated – the idea being that people who die in that way look fresher than any other corpses; and the defunct company are then placed in attitudes round the bier all standing, and one holding the snuff phial, another the pipe, and another the fan. In their zeal to guard the dead, the Tartars, for once, are found to excel the Chinese in ingenuity. They have invented a bow, which may be called a cluster of bows, so formidable as a defence of treasure, that Chinamen come and buy it. A series of bows have their arrows on the string, ready to fly. The opening of the door of the tomb or cavern discharges the first arrow, which causes the discharge of the second, and so on, till the intruder becomes a very pincushion. It is only the greatest men that may be buried in this way. The next richest are burned in furnaces, and their bones, powdered, are worked up with meal into cakes, which are piled into a heap in the tomb. It is to be inferred that it is only the very greatest men who may take snuff and smoke in the next life. The poorest are carried up to the tops of mountains, or cast down into ravines, with wolves and carrion birds for their undertakers. The very best burial in the whole world, we are told, is in the Lamasery (Buddhist temple) of the Five Towers. Any one buried there is sure of a happy transmigration; The reason of the sanctity of the Five Towers is that Buddha himself has chosen to reside, for the last few centuries, in the interior of a mountain close by. A man who carried thither the bones of his father and mother, in 1842, told the missionaries that he had himself seen Buddha there. He peeped through a very small spyhole near the top of the mountain, but, for a time, could see nothing. At length he became able to discern, in the dim shadow, the face of Buddha, who was sitting cross-legged, doing nothing, but receiving the worship of his priests from all countries.

On they went – these good men – meeting with strange disasters, which, however, they endured cheerfully always, and joyfully when the good nature of the Tartars was brought out by pressure of circumstances. One day, they were in great delight, at entering thickets of fir and birch, on a mountain side: but lo! before them, in attitude of attack, were three enormous wolves. S. wrung the noses of the camels, which were pierced to hold the bridle pegs: the camels sent forth horrible screechings, which scared the wolves: and M. Gabet, rushing after them, to save the dog, made so brave a hubbub as to put the foe to flight. Great was their joy one day at meeting a hunter, who carried behind him a fine roebuck. They were tired of oatmeal and mutton fat, and their stomachs were out of order for want of better food. They bought the roebuck for two shillings and a penny, which is a third of the price of a sheep. With glee, they stopped at noon, at a grassy spot, beside a fountain of sweet water; and there, under the scattered pine trees, set up their tent, determined to make holiday; and there did S. cut up the deer, and cook some delectable venison steaks. Down sat the three on the grass, with the boiler lid for their dish, in the middle, hungry and happy, when they heard a prodigious noise overhead, and a swooping eagle pounced upon their meat, and carried it off, dealing a smart box on the ear to S. as a final insult. S. was furious: but, happily, there was plenty more venison hanging on a tree behind them.

At the great city called Blue Town, they lodged at the hotel of the Three Perfections, which they did not relish so well as the hotel of Providence, as they themselves named a cavern which they discovered when in extreme danger of being destroyed by a hurricane. They carried so little money – vowed to poverty as they were – that there was occasion, for all their shrewdness, and for all their contentment and cheerfulness, when their safety – to say nothing of their comfort – depended on their making purchases by the way. They went forth from the Hotel of the Three Perfections, to buy winter clothing, and there is something charming in the merriment with which they tell of their sheepskin garments, greasy, ill-fitting, and sordid, and their fox skin caps, which were all that they could afford themselves as a defence against the wintry storms that they were about to encounter. The landlord of this triply-perfect hotel was proud of his guests, and made a merely nominal charge, stipulating only for their good word on behalf of his new establishment.

When they had travelled above a month, Arsalan, the great dog, was missing. This was a terrible loss. S. could account for it only by saying that Arsalan was Chinese, and that therefore it was natural to him to sneak out of hardship. The priests comforted each other with the consideration that Arsalan was so heavy a sleeper at night that he might not be so good a protection as he appeared: but they long missed his companionship by day, though the loss of his excellent appetite afforded each of them a better meal.

On they went, to the great Yellow River, which was in a state of overflow, but which must be crossed now, and again further on – for it makes a vast loop here – a great scoop into the heart of Tartary. They found a broad sea where the river should have been. Having vowed to reach Lla-Ssa, the centre of Buddhism, and set up the cross there, they would not go back. Going round was out of the question; and they had not funds to enable them to pause. So they prayed, and resolved to commit themselves to mud and marsh. They bought fodder, and rolls fried in mutton fat, and plunged into the slime. That evening they told their beads on a dike which they had managed to reach; and they had eyes and hearts for the beauty of the broad moonshine on the vast river on which their lives were to be in peril on the morrow. Instead of sleeping, they were shivering with cold all night; and, in the morning, they found the marshes sheeted with ice. They reached a pasturage at last; but so exhausted, half drowned, and plastered with mud, that they could not proceed for several days. They spent their time in freeing their clothes from swarms of lice, which had been to them a far severer trial than wolves and hurricanes, hunger or cold, fatigue or frequent terror of death. The inhabitants of the country, believing that the meanest insect may contain the soul of the greatest man, kill nothing that they can leave alive; and this imposes a terrible amount of vermin killing on travellers who are not Buddhists. When this was done by our priests, and they saw their linen drying on the grass, they looked at each other, “radiant with satisfaction.” They took some sleep at noon, for midnight was so beautiful that they could not tear themselves from the observation of it. By day all was hushed in these desert solitudes. By night, a concourse of aquatic birds arrived from all parts of the heavens, and, as they descended upon the moonlit pools, “tilled the air with wild harmony.” Some would have found only discord in the shrill cries of these passionate creatures, battling for the tufts of marsh grass; but wherever there was harmony, however latent, these missionaries were sure to hear it. It is observable too, that they tell us as much about these birds as if they were only naturalists, and had nothing but birds to attend to.

And now came the cold. The camels licked the ice on the river, when no water could be had. The men would have been frozen with their clothes into statues, if one had not watched while the others slept, to keep up a great fire. The tent-nails snapped like glass; the sand of the desert had suddenly become sandstone, and would not receive the pegs, or, when in, let them out, without the application of boiling water. On went the travellers, over bare, frozen mountains, whose summits were in the clouds. The beasts dragged on with bleeding feet. The men were too rnuch occupied with the fantastic scene to care for their toil! They crossed the Yellow River again, and dipped into China, resting now at the Hotel of Justice and Mercy, and again at the Inn of the Five Felicities, to obtain strength to proceed at all. Then again through the Great Wall, which stretched out and away over the hills, and on to the brink of the Blue Sea – the vast expanse, three hundred miles in circumference, whose waters are like those of the sea, and exhibit tides with the same regularity, sequestered as it is in the heart of the largest continent of our globe. Our travellers have leisure for a joke at the “fiddle-faddle shepherds of Virgil,” twining flowers and piping through reeds, in contrast with the bearded, well armed, stalwart shepherds who guard their flocks from the brigands on the margin of the Blue Sea.

The signs of Buddhist worship multiply as the priests advance towards Lla-Ssa, where they hope to see the Grand Lama, and to do great things. There are mountains to cross which can be attempted only in company with a caravan; so they dwell in a Lamasery, among priests and students, till the great caravan arrives; and every day the likeness between their own faith and that which they are come to overthrow grows upon them, and fills them with hope and new courage. And they have need of all the courage that can be had. Their track over the huge mountain chain is strewn as they go with frozen beasts, and with not a few bodies of men, who cannot be warmed, and must die as they fall. M. Gabet survived with difficulty, and only by the incessant care of his comrades. Brigands were on the watch, and there was a battle. There was a region of foul air among the mountains, which it required the most determined courage to get through; and the same may be said of the snowdrifts which overtook the caravan. As soon as they got down to the grass again, there was a fire in the camp; and in the first town there was a population of thieves, which left no hope of repose to the traveller. The hearts of the missionaries do not appear to have drooped; but that of the reader does, till he finds that Lla-Ssa is now not far off.

They did get there at last, then? Yes, they did. And how was it with them when they had reached their goal? They did not see the Grand Lama. The fear was that – (the priests have written it, so we may) – this god incarnate should catch the smallpox, which was known to have been in the caravan. But all else seemed to go well. The missionaries were protected and honoured by the Tibetian authorities, and the priests of Buddha, high and low. They set up their crucifix, and dressed their altar, and put on their sacred garments, and felt that their work was so well begun as to be half done. Their hearts were singing for joy when the devil overthrew their work – the devil in the shape of our old enemy, the Chinese Commissioner, Ki-Chan, who was Viceroy of Canton when the war broke out, and who failed in his negociations for peace with the English. This able man was recovering from his disgraces in 1846, and was envoy at Lla-Ssa when the missionaries arrived there. In order to please his Emperor, who could not relish having Europeans beyond his frontier in the heart of Asia, Ki-Chan determined that the strangers should leave Lla-Ssa. The grieved Tibetians had no power to resist. They could only testify their goodwill by every method, open or secret (but especially secret), that they could devise. The missionaries could not obtain leave to shape their journey by the way of Calcutta; but they were conveyed with as much convenience and honour as could be commanded by the long route to China and through it. For the sake of their faith and its future prospects (they say), they battled stoutly for their dignity and convenience: and when they had obtained it, they enjoyed it with the glee of a couple of schoolboys, out on a half-holiday. The first part of the journey, over the mountain region which guards the Chinese frontier, was necessarily formidable – full of danger and hardship. Once in China, they called for their palankeens, and travelled luxuriously, at the public expense, across the whole breadth of China.

They never gave up – never thought of this interruption as more than a suspension of their mission. And they were right. They are gone back to their work, after having sent a spirited appeal to their own government, and undergone an examination before the Grand Mandarins of the Celestial Empire.

Household Scenery

Household Words, Volume 5, page 513

Most people amuse themselves, at one time or other of their lives, by fancying what sort of house they would like to live in; what sort of house they would build for themselves, if they had opportunity for that very charming amusement. But the last thing that people seem to have any thought about is the walls of their rooms. Yet, what is there that we see so much of as the walls of the rooms we live in? Even those who have the blessing of a country residence – those even who dwell in one of the very few remaining parsonages in the North of England, where a spacious porch shelters the house door from draughts and driving rains, and who resort to that porch, looking out upon a meadow or a flower garden – even these have to sit between four walls for at least three fourths of the year; and certainly always to sleep within them. It is all very well to revel in fine views from terrace or window; but it is well, also, to consider what our eyes shall rest upon in all times of sickness, of bad weather, and when the sun is below the horizon. It is a charming speculation to a man about to build a house for his own residence, to plan what it shall look like externally – how many rooms it shall have, and how they shall be most conveniently arranged; but the aspect of the four walls of each room is worth mature consideration too. In old times, people thought more of this matter than we do, if we may judge by the pains taken to decorate the interior of ancient buildings; and those who attend to the signs of civilisation assure us that there will be a revival of such thought and pains – and very soon. Let us hope that this is true.

There could scarcely, at any former time, have been a greater variety in the walls of human abodes than there is now. High up in the north there are the Esquimaux, huddled together within a circular wall made of snow, built up in slabs, inclining inwards, so as to form a dome – a house of beehive shape. Our English feelings would be put to a severe trial in such a place. If the walls remain solid, it is only because the temperature is below freezing point. If we should begin to flatter ourselves with any notion of warm feet – of ceasing to ache and shiver with cold – at once the walls begin to steam and run down, and the wretched chill of thaw brings back despair. Much the same may be said of such palaces of ice as we read of in Russia. Translucent, glittering with a bluish starlike light, there is still the terrible alternative of frost or thaw within doors; each alike excluding all hope of wholesome warmth. Much pleasanter to our feelings is the South Sea Island dwelling, where the walls are nothing more than poles of bamboo; through which the morning and evening breeze may blow freely. To be sure, if privacy is desired, something more is requisite; for such an edifice seems to be designed for a community of that kind of stupid people, of whom the Americans say that they “cannot see through a ladder.” However broad may be the eaves, however prolonged the thatch of palm leaves, the sun must peep into the abode when he is low in the sky; and there is no hour of the day in that climate when the sun is a welcome visitor within doors. To meet these cases, there are mattings made of grass, which may be hung up where wanted. These simple hangings have a grace and charm about them which no others, however gay and costly, can boast: they are deliciously fragrant, especially when moistened. As the night dews descend, and when the breeze from the sea comes to shake these primitive curtains, a sweet scent charms the watcher, and spreads luxuriously through the dreams of the sleeper.

There are houses even now in civilised countries, which let the stars be seen through their walls. We have ourselves been entertained in a dwelling where the drawing room was full of couches, easy chairs, boots and musical instruments; where the dining room was set out with an array of plate; but where, being wakeful in the night, we enjoyed the singular amusement of observing the stars passing over chinks in the walls, shining full into our eyes in the transit. How could this be ? Why, the house was a log house, on a plantation in a hot region. Perhaps from want of leisure, perhaps for the sake of coolness, the logs had been left rough, and the spaces between were not filled up with clay and moss, as is the practice further north. So the mosquitoes swarmed in and out, and hummed all night long; not to our annoyance, for we were safe within a “mosquito bar,” or muslin curtain, completely enveloping the bed; not to our annoyance, therefore, and we may hope to their own satisfaction, unless they were hungry, and tantalized by our inaccessible presence. Poets compare human eyes to stars. It struck us that we preferred those real stars, shining through the wall, to certain glittering human eyes which a lady once saw shining from her wall. As the story goes, this poor lady – destined to a terrible fright – was sitting alone before the fire, opposite a mirror which rested on the mantelpiece, and taking off her jewelled necklace and bracelets before retiring to rest, when she looked up accidentally and saw in the, mirror – what must have made a tapestried room terrible to her as long as she lived – for it was in a room hung with tapestry that she was sitting. She saw shining eyes rolling in the head of one of the woven figures, a sight which we, safe from all ambush of the kind, can never think of without a quiver of sympathetic dread. She knew that a thief was watching her, and that there must be some accomplice in the house who had cut out the eyes of the figure to enable him to do so. She did not go into hysterics, nor do anything else that was not to the purpose. She took no notice, sat awhile longer without looking into the mirror – no doubt with a deadly horror of being approached from behind. She unfastened some part of her dress, yawned, put on a natural appearance of sleepiness, lighted her chamber candle, locked her jewel case, and – the only suspicious proceeding – left it on the table, walked steadily towards the eyes, the door being in that direction, quickly took the key from the lock, left the room, locked the door on the outside, and quietly went to seek help which she could better trust than that of her own servants. Such is one of the horrible stories which belong to the days of tapestry hangings, those curtain-coverings for walls which are perhaps the most objectionable of all modes of decorating apartments.

This is downright heresy, no doubt, in the eyes of those who make the pursuit of tapestry an idolatry. Nobody doubts the vast amount of pains and care spent on tapestry as an art. Nobody doubts the skill which so directed the shuttle or the needle as that they rivalled the pencil and the brush in their delineations. In fact, no art could be despised which employed the talents of the greatest painters; and while the cartoons of Raffaelle are associated in our minds with tapestry hangings, it is impossible to speak with disrespect of such a representative of the art of a past century. But we may be glad that it belonged to a past century, and that the present has done with tapestry. It might be necessary, in the days of imperfect building, to keep out draughts. King Alfred might have been glad of it before he invented his lantern, and when his candles were flaring and wasting so as to baffle him in his measurement of time by their burning; but we, in our tight houses, whose walls have no chinks and cracks, may better hang our apartments with clean, and light, and wholesome paper, which harbours no vermin, screens no thieves, and scares no fever patient with night visions of perplexity and horror.

It does not appear, however, that tapestry was invented to cover defects in the building of walls. From the little we know, it may rather be inferred that it was first used as a convenient imitation of the more ancient decoration of painted walls. The first tapestries which are seen fluttering amidst the shadows of remote history, were in the East, and of the same monstrous order of delineation with the Egyptian decorations, which so many travellers have described for a thousand years past. The Egyptians used to paint the scenes of their lives and deaths – their occupations, amusements, their funerals, and their mythology, upon the massive walls of their temples and tombs. There seems to be no doubt that the convenience of making these pictures moveable gave rise to the manufacture of woven hangings. One striking instance of this is on record, in the case of the hangings of the Tabernacle which Moses caused to be made in the desert. The description of the animals wrought on that tapestry answers exactly to that of the walls of an Egyptian temple; and it is the opinion of learned men that the Greeks, as well as the Hebrews, thence derived their notions of fantastic composite creatures – griffins, centaurs, and the like, which certainly were wrought in tapestries for the Greeks by Oriental workmen. After a time, the Greeks substituted prettier objects in the centres of their hangings, and drew off all the monstrosities into the borders. In like manner, during the Middle Ages, when tapestries were gifts for kings to bestow and to receive, there was great beauty of design and infinite delicacy of execution in the finer tapestries, on which artists spent their best pains, and kings spent a vast amount of money.

We must not suppose that all hangings were like those that our Henry the Eighth fostered, or the French Henry the Fourth and Louis the Fourteenth. While the royal and the rich hung their palaces and their mansions with such fabrics as the Gobelin tapestry, the less wealthy were content with plain velvet, with worsted stuff, with any thing that would hide their unsightly walls, and keep them warm in their ill built houses. The best and the worst were alike a nuisance in a dwelling house. They imbibed the smoke; they grew mouldy with damp; and, in hot weather, they gave out a worse plague (if there be a worse) than the mosquitoes of tropical countries. It appears to us, in our cleanly times, that our grandfathers knew nothing about this kind of delicacy. After the rushes on the floor, (which were offensive with filth,) came the tapestries, which were almost as bad; and, while this was the – condition of men’s abodes, their persons were worthy of their dwellings – powder, pomatum, wigs, and other unnatural devices, rendering a pure state of skin impossible.

It was a great day when a Frenchman, bethought himself that, instead of hangings of wrought carpeting, or of velvet-flock, or stuff, a covering for walls might be made of figured paper – cheaper, lighter, cleaner – preferable in every way. It is said that this invention was made known in 1632, and that the first blocks used in making paper hangings are preserved in Paris. England followed so soon that there was some dispute as to which ought to have the credit of the invention, but it was doubtless due to France. James the First had lately given two thousand pounds – a large sum in those days – to encourage a manufacture of fine tapestry at Mortlake; but it was in a drawing room of the Royal Palace at Kensington that the first specimen of English paper hanging was seen. If anybody is curious to know whether that paper was like any that we see now, we can tell nothing more than that it was an imitation of the “velvet-flock”; then in common use.

The “flock” order of paper seems to be: coming into fashion, more and more, after a long interval. Perhaps the truth is, that the reduction of the duty on paper hangings puts a higher class of papers within reach of a greater number of householders. Sir Robert Peel took off tenpence out of the shilling a yard duty on French paper hangings, which, before 1842, kept good decorations out of the reach of all but the wealthy. We remember the time – somewhere about 1818 – when stencilling came into fashion, and was thought a great, popular boon. Stencilling was done by splashing walls with colour through the interstices of tin patterns. The result was, a very coarse and untidy decoration of whitewashed walls; the colours being bad, and the pattern never accurately made out for many consecutive feet of wall. But the work was so much cheaper than paper hangings, that people of small means were very glad of it; and, even in gentlemens’ houses, the attics and servants’ rooms were often thus coloured. Now, we seldom hear of stencilling; for papers of a tolerable quality and really good pattern may be had for less than a penny a yard, so that the abodes of the humble present a very different appearance now from any thing that could be seen even ten years ago. As for the taking off the duty, the story is the same that Free-traders are almost tired of telling about other articles. There were dismal prophecies that the French, who much excel us in the designs and preparations of paper hangings, would destroy the manufacture in England: and the wealthy did supply themselves – and perhaps do so still – almost exclusively from Paris; but, so much more extensively are paper hangings used, and so great is the improvement continually taking place through the emulation of the French by our manufacturers, that the manufacture is largely and steadily increasing. It only remains now to get the duty removed from the raw material, the paper, to give every body a fair chance of a neat set of walls to his dwelling rooms, decorated according to his means.

Perhaps there are no gayer walls to be seen anywhere – in our country at least – than those we saw yesterday, on the premises of Her Majesty’s Paper-stainer for Scotland, Mr Wm McCrie. This gentleman’s walls – even the rough walls in the yards and passages – are as good as a rainbow for colours. The boys empty their brushes on the space next at hand, to save the trouble of washing them; and the result is a show which would make a little child – with its love of brilliant colours – scream for joy. There are things to be seen at Mr McCrie’s, which may please elderly people as much as rainbow hues can gratify a child. By means of studying there the process of paper staining from beginning to end, glimpses are obtained into all classes of homes, from the Queen’s palace, and the student’s library, and aristocratic clubhouses, down to the humble abode of two or three rooms in town or country.

The paper used in this manufacture is made in Scotland, whence it is sent to England and Ireland, where more of the staining goes on than in Scotland. Mr McCrie’s establishment near Edinburgh, and one in Glasgow, are the only ones north of the Tweed. For ordinary patterns, the Scotch paper is about two feet wide. The French are narrower – a circumstance which should be remembered, when the cost of hangings is reckoned by the piece. Some of the granite papers for halls and staircases, and panel papers are of greater and various width. The pieces, of twelve yards, are tied up in bundles of ten; so that a bundle contains one hundred and twenty yards. The first thing that is done with the contents of a bundle, when it is untied, is to fit it for receiving a pattern by covering it smoothly and evenly with a coat of Paris white, or tint, for the ground, made of sulphate of lime and water, with size, which forms in fact a cement, and sets the pattern. This Paris white arrives from Hull and Leith: the size is made on the premises, as the observer’s nose informs him; and in the yard, he sees the bundles of buffalo skins from which it is made, and the cauldron in which they are boiled. No part of the business is more serious than that of the preparation of the size – both for making the pattern on the paper, and for attaching the hanging to the wall. The size made in hot weather is never good; it runs, and the pattern is blotchy in places; and for this mischief there is no remedy. If the production must go on, without waiting for cooler weather, the patterns must suffer, and the sellers must have patience. A much more serious consideration for householders and decorators is, that none but the best size should be used for attaching the paper to the walls. Many a fever has been caused by the horrible nuisance of corrupt size used in paper hanging in bedrooms. The nausea which the sleeper is aware of on waking in the morning, in such a case should be a warning needing no repetition. Down should come the whole paper at any cost or inconvenience; for it is an evil which allows of no tampering. The careless decorator will say that time will set all right – that the smell will go off – that airing the room well in the day, and burning some pungent thing or other at night, in the meantime, will do very well. It will not do very well; for health, and even life may be lost in the interval. It is not worth while to have one’s stomach impaired for life, or one’s nerves shattered, for the sake of the cost and trouble of papering a room, or a whole house, if necessary. The smell is not the grievance, but the token of the grievance. The grievance is animal putridity, with which we are shut up, when this smell is perceptible in our chambers. Down should come the paper; and the wall behind should be scraped clear of every particle of its last covering. It is astonishing that so lazy a practice as that of putting a new paper over an old one should exist to the extent it does. Now and then an incident occurs which shows the effect of such absurd carelessness.

Not long ago, a handsome house in London became intolerable to a succession of residents, who could not endure a mysterious bad smell which pervaded it when shut up from the outer air. Consultations were held about drains, and all the particulars that could be thought of, and all in vain. At last, a clever young man, who examined the house from top to bottom, fixed his suspicions on a certain room, where he inserted a small slip of glass in the wall. It was presently covered, and that repeatedly, with a sort of putrid dew. The paper was torn down; and behind it was found a mass of old papers, an inch thick – stuck together with their layers of size, and exhibiting a spectacle which we will not sicken our readers by describing. A lesser evil, but still a vexatious one, may be mentioned here: that when there is not alum enough in the size, it will not hold. A family, sitting around a table, at dinner or at work, does not relish the incident of the entire papering of the room coming down at once, with a tearing, crashing sound, and a cloud of dust. Worse still is the trouble, when it is the pattern of the paper that is affected. A room was very prettily hung, not long ago, with a paper where a bright green trail of foliage was the most conspicuous part of the pattern. Day after day everything in the room was found covered with a green dust; and the pattern on the wall faded in proportion. The size had, in fact, been insufficient to fix the green powder, one ingredient of which, by the way, was arsenic. The decorator, being sent for, saw at once what was the matter, and, with expressions of shame and concern, pulled down the pretty paper, and put up another without charge. While on the subject of the mistakes that may be made in paper hanging, we may mention one for which the householder is answerable, and not the manufacturer or decorator. While we are well, we ought to remember that we, and those belonging to us, shall some time or other be ill: and it is just as well to arrange the sleeping rooms of our houses so as to give every advantage to invalids, when the day of sickness comes. It is of no consequence to the healthful, perhaps, how their beds stand; but it may make the difference to a sick person, of fever or tranquillity, of sleep or no sleep, whether his bed stands, as it should do, north and south, or east and west; and whether the window is opposite the foot of the bed, or in some less annoying direction. In the same way we may never think of the pattern on the wall of our room, while we go to bed only to sleep and rise the moment we awake; but it is certain that delirium in fever cases has been precipitated, and that frightful visions, or teasing images, have been excited by fantastic patterns on chintz bed curtains, or on the hangings of the walls. The paper for bedrooms should be of a rather light colour, and of a pattern as indefinite as can be had. For our part, we like nothing so well as a blank paper of some pleasant hue, with a dark border for a relief: but there are many papers now which do not present any of the everlasting forms and varieties of the square, the circle, and the diamond. A watered paper, or any trailing pattern is objectionable, because the eye of the invalid will trace human profiles in them. There are patterns in abundance which are pretty enough in a humble way – consisting of an aggregate of various small figures – so small and so various as to create nothing to the eye but a pleasantly broken colour.

Having delivered our conscience of this admonition, out of the doctoring and sick nursing part of our experience, we may return to our paper staining.

The laying on the Paris white is done by a machine. The wet whiting is thrown into a trough, where it is licked up by a cylinder, which daubs it on a cylindrical brush, which transfers it to another cylinder, under which the paper is drawn, receiving the plaster as it goes. A wide brush, like a fringe of soft bristles, is fixed before the last cylinder, and sweeps the paper as the long sheet passes on, distributing the coating evenly, and smoothing the surface. The paper, in lengths of twelve yards, is drawn out by little boys, who carry it over little heaps of sticks, lifting up a stick, and of course the wet paper with it, and hoisting both on a pole, so that the paper can be carried to the drying place without being touched by human hands. Two boys thus carry away a piece in four folds, which of course do not touch each other. The lads, with their poles, lay the sticks across horizontal poles at some height from the ground; and there, still untouched, hangs the paper to dry.

If a polished ground is wanted, the paper – duly prepared by a chemical process in the open air – is rubbed with a lump of French chalk; then, with a surface of felt or flannel, and finally with a polishing brush; and from this treatment it comes out with a burnish like satin. The paper, with a polished or a dead ground, is now ready to receive the pattern.

There are three ways of giving it a pattern – by a printing machine, by block printing, and by marbling by hand. It appears that one machine does the work of about four block printers; that two persons may prepare the paper for fifteen printing tables; and that fifty workmen can, by great diligence, turn out three thousand pieces (of twelve yards each) per week. They are paid by the piece – from twenty-pence to two shillings per score, and a workman can easily earn from thirty to thirty-five shillings per week. The business is carried on in large airy rooms, and although much activity and strength of eye, foot, and hand are required for joining the pattern, lifting the heavy block, and stamping it, there is no pernicious fatigue, or perilous liability of any kind. It is altogether a favourable and fortunate kind of employment for a good workman.

In one part of the premises abides the designer, educated now, generally speaking, at one of our schools of design. He watches the French; he watches the English; he watches nature; and draws ideas from all for his patterns. Star patterns are eternal in popular favour; and so are lobby patterns – granites and marbles; but beyond these, all is uncertainty. A new set of designs must be made every year; and if a pattern does not pay its cost the first year, it never will. It may not be utterly lost, but it will never be remunerative. In one of the lower rooms at Mr McCrie’s, we trod upon wealth in a truly magnanimous manner. The floor was laid with obsolete blocks; and thus we trampled on many hundred pounds’ worth of property.

The blocks are a pretty sight, from the beginning, when the block-cutter traces his pattern from oil paper upon the wood, and taps his chisel, sending it down to a certain depth in the wood (pine), and then clears out the spaces, up to the funeral ceremony of laying these memorials of departed fashions in the ground; that is, in the floor. Where little bits of the wood are broken away, they are supplied with brass or copper. The blocks for granite papers are stuck all over “with everything that will make a mark,” as we were told; with odds and ends of copper and brass, and with common nail heads. For the printing machine, the block is cylindrical, the process being just that of cylinder printing of any kind. For the printing tables, the blocks are furnished with a strap at the back, to receive the workman’s hand, and they are pressed down on the paper by a mallet driven by the workman’s foot. Every time that he applies the block, he dips it on the surface of a stiff liquid in a trough by his side – the liquid being either the colour he wants to impress, or the oil which is to catch and retain the colour to be afterwards shed over it. For the best sort of gilding, gold leaf is applied: for the commoner gilding, bronze powder; for flock papers, the flock which is brought from the wool districts. The flock is wool, dyed of various colours, and reduced to powder, If the size or oil on which it is deposited be good, the flock cannot be rubbed off, or removed by any means short of scratching. The array of crimson flock papers is really superb in our day. One never tires of gazing at them in an establishment like this, and fancying how each would look in one’s own study or dining room. Of all charming rooms in a middle class house, the most bewitching, perhaps, is a library lined almost throughout with books, with the spaces between papered with a rich crimson flock paper, and affording room, between the book-cases, for a pedestal here and there, with a bust, or a good cast upon it, surmounted by a very few choice prints. The crimson makes a glorious ground for prints.

The workman has not always dismissed his piece when he has printed it from end to end. It may be a pattern of two colours, or of six, or even of twelve; and for each colour a fresh block and a fresh process are required, each repetition of course reckoning as a new piece in regard to his wages. The workman who does his work wholly by hand, he who marbles papers for lobbies and stair walls, has also to go over it several times. The yellow polished ground is supplied to him ready for his brush. He veins it with a camel hair brush, dipped in a dark colour. One cannot but admire the decision with which he makes his strokes, and groups his veinings. We should stand hesitating which way to make our pencil wander, doubting whether we were making anything like marble; but the accustomed stainer wields his brush with as much purpose and decision as we do the pen, knowing as well where to go and wherefore. When he has thus veined a certain portion, he sprinkles, by jerking a brush, little drops of soap and turpentine, which make blotches, and give a marbled appearance to the whole surface. The coloured streaks, being diluted, spread into a perfect resemblance of the veins of marble; and nothing remains but to daub some white blotches into the centres of the groups of streaks. Of all the imitation papers this appeared to us the most perfect. The granite was good, with its glittering “frosting” which frosting is done by scattering, very sparingly, particles of the thinnest possible glass from the glass-houses. The graining of oak papers is done by putting an iron comb in the place of the smoothing brush, when the paper receives its first coat.

Among the papers shown in the warehouse, where the completed goods are deposited, the most beautiful in our eyes was a broad panelled paper of white, watered with a panel border of roses. We looked in vain for the sort of hanging which we must think will be in demand ere long; a hanging which, being dark near the floor, becomes gradually lighter towards the ceiling. At present, decorators depend on a dark carpet and a light ceiling to give the effect indicated by decorative principle and required by a trained eye, some aid being given by a dark skirting board, and a cornice of light and bright colours; but there seems to be no reason why the hangings on the walls should not do their part, and there can be no doubt that a wide new range of design would be opened by following out this principle.

What we owe to the designers of good paper hangings can hardly be estimated by those who have not travelled in countries which assume to be highly civilised, but have no time to get things done in the best manner. Even at home, and in good houses, one meets occasionally with a mistake in the choice of a pattern: a mistake which causes irritation and annoyance to the visitor, from hour to hour; as when a pattern, which is everything that could be wished in the single breadth, gives birth to an imperfect form when joined with the next breadth; a diamond, for instance, which turns out a little smaller on one side than the other, or a curve which is not freely carried out. But in some parts of the United States, among other places, where money is not spared in decorating dwellings, but workmen are scarce and ill-qualified, one sees extraordinary spectacles on the walls of good houses. We were once standing in perplexed contemplation of our chamber wall, when our hostess entered, and told us how vexed she had been about it. She had employed an emigrant paperhanger, who had passed himself off as a first-rate workman. She gave him the papers, and left him to his work. In a wonderfully short time, he came to her, exulting: he had done the job – capitally – he would say that for himself; he had “made every crease show.” And so he had – with the most perverse ingenuity – by now spoiling the pattern, and now leaving a white thread of space between the breadths. There was no upholsterer’s store within many miles, and therefore no remedy. Our hostess was English, and annoyed accordingly. The Americans care less for such things, or do not even discover them, unless the blemish is very flagrant. We remember a curious instance of this difference between the American, and the English eye, which met our notice as far off as Lexington in Kentucky. We were taken, of course, to the Senate Chamber at Lexington – merely our own party – to see the room. A picture over the President’s chair hanging awry, we naturally stepped upon a bench which stood below, and set it right with a touch; after which the party went home, to one of the best houses in the neighbourhood, where a young Englishman of rank and a Mr Clay were to join us at dinner. Our hostess and her guests fell into conversation about furnishing drawing rooms, and attention was drawn to the paper of the handsome room we were sitting in. All admired it; but we observed on the oddity of the workman having put up two breadths, in different parts of the room, upside down. The hostess laughingly doubted it, had never heard of it, could not see it now: would ask the young Englishman, and see if anybody thought so but ourselves. Presently came a Mr Moat with Mr Clay. Mr Moat was asked to look round the room, and say if he saw any blemish anywhere. He glanced round, and pointed to the two breadths that were topsy-turvy, to the amusement of the good-humoured hostess, who said the English eye was something past her comprehension. Upon this, Mr Clay related that he had just been taking Mr Moat to see the Senate Chamber, and that he had mounted a bench to set straight a map which he declared to be hung awry, though nobody else could see it. The laugh was now louder than ever; and then followed a discussion whether it was a privilege or a misfortune to be so particular as we English had proved ourselves. Perhaps we should suffer more from our particularity in a new country than the thing is worth; but we should be sorry to lay it aside at home.

The omnipresent gutta-percha is among the paper hangings already. It presents itself in the form of consolation to the owners of houses which are cursed with a damp wall or corner. As for a generally damp house, one has only to quit it, if one has ever been foolish enough to go into it. But there are many excellent houses with some faulty bit – some corner or projection which got wet in the building, and could never be got dry; and here comes in the gutta-percha paper most consolingly. The housewife may have rubbed, and warmed, and dried, with toil and pain, every summer; but in winter, the stains come again, and, towards spring, the green moss. She may have battened that end or corner; but then, there was the uneasy thought that the damp and the moss were growing behind the screen. In case of damp from driving rains, in exposed situations, it may be true that there is nothing like a mantle of ivy, under whose leaves dry dust may be found at the end of the wettest winter. But, if the damp be incurred in the process of building, the ivy is not the appropriate cure; and besides, it takes some years to cover the end of a house. The gutta-percha paper confines the damp within the wall, at least, and compels it to evaporate externally, if at all. It thoroughly intercepts, if it cannot cure, a very great evil; and it will, no doubt, be in extensive use till all men are too sensible to have any damp corners in their houses at all.

News of an Old Place

Household Words, Volume 5, page 537

If any friend of ours be sad and sorry, and desire to improve the occasion by solemn meditation on human life amidst vast rural solitudes, we advise him to take a journey by the Caledonian Railway, from Carlisle to Edinburgh. We have seen no tracts so unpeopled since we emerged from the deserts of Arabia. The banks of the Nile in Nubia, the valleys of the Lebanon, the plain of Damascus, are populous in comparison. There is something very striking in being carried, easily and rapidly, through that great district of green hills, almost bare of trees, and quite bare of houses for miles together. There is something striking in seeing wide tracts of oats, barley, and turnips spreading in the levels, without discovering who can have sown them, or who in the world is to reap them. Here and there the angle of a house roof peeps out from behind the profile of a hill. Now and then, when there is a long vista into the mountains, a small dark island is to be seen, far away amidst the ocean of green – an oasis in this verdant desert, in which are collected the little kirk and manse, a farmstead, and half a dozen cottages, under the cover of as many trees. Where people are seen at work, awaiting the ripening of their barley and oats, it is a rather piteous kind of work. There is hay in nooks, and on any strip otherwise useless; and such hay! – overripe, long ago, yet never mellowed by true ripening – with sour water standing in among the clumps, and so many weeds, that the grass part can hardly be seen. In some of these dank and dreary enclosures (one wonders why they were ever enclosed), three or four men are mowing (one wonders why in the world they mow) their bog hay, rushes, and ragwort, and all together, and tie up the crop in sheaves, and set up the sheaves in shocks – just as if they were the finest wheat grown in the Lincolnshire beds. On the top of the railway banks stand large cocks of this hay, which looks like damp straw. The stranger wonders what species of animal is to eat it. If he inquire, he is told that it is a welcome and needful resource for the sheep, in time of snowdrifts. One is glad that the sheep have something better to eat now. There they are, clean from a late shearing, scattered over the brown and purple fells, or thrusting themselves into any hand’s breadth of shade that may be afforded by a broken sandbank, or any little quarry on the hillside. There are patches of vivid green among the purple heather, where ewes and lambs are browsing tranquilly today, without a thought of the snowdrifts which, six months hence, will doom them to emaciation on the coarse fodder which is in preparation for them below. Here and there, a few cattle are seen, and a young horse, in some distant field, may fling up his heels at the train. A group of bareheaded and barefooted children may be at play on some tiny bridge over a pretence of a burn or rivulet, and a hen and her chickens may scratch up the sand below in defiance of the intrusion of the strangers from the south, with their steam and their noise. But this is nearly all that is seen, between station and station, unless where the hills have been laid open for stone, slate, or ore.

The most obvious thought suggested by this scene – so strange in our busy islands – is, that it will not long be to be seen. If our capitalists and labourers are emigrating to new lands for the sake of more space, a district of this extent will not remain so scantily peopled. Along the railway, at least, there will be a fringe of producers and traffickers, who will essentially alter the character of the landscape. The next consideration which will occur to most people is, that they here see – what is not a very common thing to see – a large district which must be, in the main, very much like what it was hundreds or thousands of years ago. One of the railway stations is at Abington, a rather pretty hamlet, with one or two good houses near; and more wood, more cultivation, a more modern aspect than many of the stations before and after it. From this place, a valley runs up among the hills, away from the sound of the railway whistle, and of the din of human life altogether. In this valley the Romans certainly were, once upon a time. A military road of theirs passes near; and in, and near this valley, are the tokens of their encampment. Whether the valley was wooded then and cleared by them, we cannot undertake to say. but the probability seems to be, that it must have looked to the Roman eye, on entering, much as it now looks to the eye of any modern foreigner. Its hills, green and bare, with metallic indications, showing themselves in places, with heather on the higher slopes, and bog in the bottoms – these features appear to be about as primitive as any natural scenery can well be. That it was much like what it now is, midway between the Roman period and ours, is known.

At the time when Edward the Third of England was watching his son, the Black Prince, winning his spurs, or was trying to make his way safely out of some very difficult and dangerous valleys in France – at the time when Scotland was mourning her David Bruce, a prisoner in the Tower; or, perhaps, rejoicing at the sight of him, returned on his parole – at that time, when the nations were so busy with war as not to be able to look closely after what lay round about them at home – a foreigner was poking about in this valley to see what he could find. A German, named Bulmer, was looking for gold amidst these Scottish hills; and he came into this valley, and found something else besides gold. He found LEAD; and the fate of the valley has been ruled by that discovery of his, ever since. The valley we speak of is that which contains the curious village of Leadhills, at its highest end; a settlement six miles from Abington, and as wild a place as can well be seen in our islands.

Having a fancy to see so odd a place, and having heard much, twenty years ago, of the intelligence and other good qualities of the inhabitants, we recently determined to go. At Abington, a carriage was to have met us; but there was a mistake about it, and no carriage was forthcoming. The morning was hot, and the hours were precious; so that we were glad to obtain any sort of vehicle that would save our strength and our time. The vehicle proposed was a cart – such as had probably conveyed in its day more pigs and calves than human beings. It was half filled with straw, on which was laid a bolster, and over the bolster was laid a clean plaid. Off we went, under the care of an intelligent labourer, whose Scotch dialect was of so moderate a character that conversation would have been easy, but for the slow trot of the horse, which made our words come out like puffs of steam from the engine which had just left us behind. By a gradual ascent, on a good road, we penetrated the recesses of the hills, seeing nobody but two men eating oatcake and drinking milk at the mouth of their little quarry, and two women at the cottage beside the toll bar where the carts of coke pay toll on their way up to the mines. During the journey of six miles we saw three trees; one in a field on the upland, looking rather sad, all by itself; and two more down in a field at the bottom, marking the spot where Bulmer found his gold five hundred years ago. A woman, down in the bog, had her arms full of what appeared to be rushes; and a solitary man, high up on the steep, was cutting heather – no doubt to mend his own or some neighbour’s thatch. Grass, and groundsel, and hemlock grew to the height of a foot along the ridge, and down the sides of two or three of the first cottages we saw. We inquired why, as slate was quarried (under the name of Edge metal, from the layers standing on edge) in this very valley, the cottages were so wretchedly roofed. The answer was, that there had never been any thought of using so good a material as even this very poor slate. Without this remark, we should have discovered that the people at Leadhills were very very poor.

From far below, we had seen smoke hanging about an opening before us. This was from the smelting-houses, the driver informed us; and the village lay a mile and a half further on. The road crossed the valley near the smelting-houses; and they lay below us on the right – the turbid little stream, oozing away from the works, and men and boys, with hoes, spades, and scrapers, washing the soil, on stage below stage, so that what escaped from one set of channels might run into the one below. It seemed a piece of unnecessary toil to place the square tower of the smelting-house – the tower whence the smoke belched forth – so high up the steep and stony breast of the hill. It afterwards appeared that nobody had occasion to go up there. The smoke was driven, by the blast of the furnace, through the interior of the hill, to issue forth from that top of its chimney which looks like a tower from below.

A succeeding ascent hid from us what we were now looking for with some anxiety, as our ride had occupied nearly an hour and three quarters, and we had been churned enough for one day. The village, we were told, was “just behind there,” and there it was – the strangest of British villages. The valley suddenly opens out into an area of undulating character, bounded by more distant hills. Rows of cottages stand on all available platforms, turned in all directions. Many – sadly too many – are dismantled and ruinous, roofless and grass grown – the first evidence that meets the eye of the mischief wrought by the protracted litigation which has half ruined a place even so remote as this. Beside one of these ruins may be a roof just fresh thatched with heather; and, on the other hand, may be a roof bristling with weeds, and with grass that sways in the wind. Scattered about, amidst the wild vegetation of the moorland, up and down, turned this way and that, are little oblong patches of cabbages, turnips, or potatoes. Formerly, in the better days of the settlement, the miners were allowed to appropriate from the moorland as much as they could cultivate with the spade in overhours. This is no longer permitted; but the extent of ground thus under tillage is nearly four hundred acres.

Glancing over the neighbouring slopes, we saw a man mowing some most unpromising grass. Another was coming up from a boggy place with an enormous bundle of rushes on his head. High up on a ridge, a man’s figure was seen, digging peat. Three sheep were within sight, and several cows. It was a comfort to see so good a supply of cows for the number of persons. The number of persons is perpetually diminishing, under the curse of the litigation before spoken of.

There are some old books on the shelves of the agent’s office, which give the information that in the early half of the last century the population at Leadhills amounted to upwards of fourteen hundred. Twenty years ago, it was about eleven hundred; it is now between eight and nine hundred. Of these, one hundred and ten are able-bodied men. There are some old men able to do some work, or none. Such as these were formerly maintained by their sons; but, under the present rate of wages (which average nine shillings per week) the reluctance to look to the parish for an ultimate support is fast diminishing. There is a baker in the place, of course, and there are no less than three tailors. Some few men are employed in blanket weaving. Here and there we saw some old men sitting in the sun, smoking and chatting; and one or two were returning from their morning’s task, who were still capable, at the age of seventy and upwards, of doing some hours’ work in the day at washing the ore. But a man who can do this at such an age, may be safely supposed not to have worked under ground in his earlier days. There are no less than from eighty to ninety cows in this village – a very large proportion for the number of people. It is explained by the fact, that the customary diet of the population is that which we saw the two quarrymen enjoying by the roadside – oatcake and milk. Meat is an almost unknown luxury, even in the form of bacon. We had not before – nor have we now – a high opinion of the wholesomeness of oatmeal diet; but it is certainly the fact, that the people of Leadhills, living on a poor soil, in the midst of metallic works, at a height of one thousand two hundred and eighty-six feet above the level of the sea, have a remarkably healthy appearance, notwithstanding the presence of the fumes of the smelting, and the absence of a meat diet. There is a tombstone in the cemetery, which is shown with pride to the stranger, recording as it does the death of a man, a miner, who had lived one hundred and thirty-seven years. He must have been a brave old fellow; for he used to go a fishing among the hills, all alone, when he was one hundred and twenty years old. What a strange meditation must his have been, in such a solitude – supposing him to have retained his faculties – which he seems to have done. As he walked slowly along playing his line, as men do in those mountain streams, was he tired of life, looking back on a succession of generations, with whom he ought, in natural course, to have gone to the grave? Did he fear in his heart, as an aged woman once did openly, that God had forgotten him? Or did it seem to him, as it does to some who have outlived all they once knew, a perfectly natural thing that they should have died, and that he should be there to tell the history of their deaths? Did he think of the armies that had come that way marching over the hills with music and shouts, every man of whom had become dust? What did he think of the greybeards of the village, getting past their work, when he remembered that he had dandled some of them as infants after he himself had reached threescore years and ten? The everlasting hills, with their inexhaustible streams, were the same as ever; and he probably thought himself the same as ever. But, what a mere procession he must have considered all the rest of human life – a procession of companies – now a set of proprietors of the mines, and a chaplain, and an Earl of Hopetoun, and a population of grandparents, working men and women, and children; and presently, another set of proprietors, another chaplain, another Earl of Hopetoun, another population of old, middle-aged, and young; and he, at first walking with them in the procession, but long ago standing by to see them pass, as naturally as if it was his business to observe them, and theirs to pass on towards their graves.

Perhaps it was all less striking to him than to us; the grass, and the rocks, and the sky, being what he had already known them, and the fish leaping to his bait as they had done in his youth. One day, when he was one hundred and twenty years old, the snows came upon him when he was up in the hills, and blocked up his way on every side. He gave himself up for lost. Perhaps he felt it hard to be thus cut off untimely, instead of dying in his bed. He stuck his fishing-rod upright in the snow, and made another struggle for life. He struggled through to a place where he was found. When he had recovered, he went back, plucked his rod out of the snow, and returned to begin his new lease of seventeen years of life. To us, all this seems very sad and fearful. We feel that we had rather die tonight, than run the risk of living so long; but, we may have found, in the course of our lives, that some things which we would rather have died than encounter, have turned out very endurable, after all; and so may this John Taylor, of the Leadhills, have found it with his burden of years. There must be some who remember John Taylor; for he died about seventy years ago. And he must have remembered something of the trouble in Scotland, when Charles the First afflicted the church, and went to war with his Scottish subjects. He must have heard of the fearful death of that king; and of the pious soldier who ruled in his place, without the name of king. Strange rumours of the Fire of London and of the great Plague must have floated up to the head of his valley when he was a well grown young man. And what a succession of sovereigns – Stuarts, William of Orange, Anne of Denmark, and one, two, three Georges – George the Third having become a familiar king when the old man stuck his rod in the snow, and thought he was going to be cut off by an accident! It is almost bewildering, so we will see what younger people are about.

Old as he lived to be, John Taylor had been a miner – had worked under ground. In his day, as now, the gallows like apparatus erected over the shafts of the mines stood up against the sky, on a ridge here, on the summit of a knoll there. Down the ladders he went, fathoms deep, to a resting place; and then, turning aside a little, down many more – ten times as many – to where he had to work six hours a day, hewing away at the vein of ore, sending up the rubbish, sending up the ore, toiling in darkness, heat, damp, and often up to the knees in the turbid water of the mine.

The men work, as in Cornwall, on tribute – sharing the success or failure of their enterprises with the proprietors. They change the name of a mine, quaintly enough, according to their approbation or displeasure towards it. We saw one which had, till lately, been called the “Labour in Vain Vein.” After a lucky turn which disclosed new riches (more lead with a little gold), it was called California, which is its present title – a title, by the way, which shows that some tidings from the world without reach this secluded spot. The residents say, that even fewer strangers come now than before the opening of the Caledonian Railway; but, on the other hand, we find reason to believe that there has been enough of intercourse with the navvies of that railway, to work anything but good to the habits of the miners, who must be very like children in their impressibleness, and in the precarious character of the innocence which has been maintained in the absence of temptation. One other kind of intercourse is provided by the annual arrival of Lord Hopetoun, or his sporting friends, in August and onwards. We saw an elegant moorhen moving tamely on in the heather, not far from the smelting-houses; and this game so abounds on the hills, that the sportsmen come home to dinner at “the Ha’” with their thirty or forty brace each. Looking round on the very small cabbage patches of the miners, remembering their oatmeal diet, without even a smell of bacon to their bread, pondering also the average of nine shillings a week, which leaves so many with only six, we inquired whether poaching could, in such a wild scene, be kept within bounds. The answer was, that poaching is a thing never heard of; and the reason given was, that the poacher would forfeit everything, if detected. It is wonderful, and must be the result of strong compulsion of circumstance, that hungering men can see wild creatures fluttering in the herbage on far spreading moors, away from every human eye but their own, and can abstain from taking what can hardly appear like property, and can never be missed. If there is something fine – as there certainly is – in the obedience to law, there is something mournful, too, in the subservience, so customary as to have become a second nature, which secures the grouse and the sport to the aristocracy, and keeps the labourer, who has no sport, within the arbitrary limit of his oat bread and milk.

Perhaps we should not say that the labourer has no sport, for we heard of a novelty in that way having been lately introduced – an occasional game at quoits. There is a library, supported by seventy miners, paying two shillings a year each. The works seemed to be chiefly Scotch divinity, with a very few voyages, and a volume of narrative, or fiction, here and there. What a blessing it would be to these people if some kind person would send them a good assortment, and a plentiful one, of works of fiction! What a new world it would open to them during the long snows of winter, and in the light evenings of summer, when the men are exhausted by their hot toil under ground, or at the furnaces; and the women and girls are stooping over their “hand sewing,” and wearing their eyes out, ay, even little children, with embroidering for twelve hours every day!

This embroidery is done for sale in Glasgow. The muslin, ready stamped for working, and the cotton are sent from Glasgow, and the women have it in hand wherever they go – the bit that they are at work upon being stretched in a little hoop of wood, to prevent its curling and puckering. You see a woman standing in her doorway, a child sitting with her back against the house wall (the poor back, which, in a growing child, needs not this monotonous needlework for twelve hours a day to weaken it!) sewing away, at skilled work, for what? The dexterous woman could once, when such work was at the highest, earn a shilling a day. She earned that for a little while last year, when the Exhibition induced the Glasgow people to send a vast quantity of goods to London. Now she earns by the same labour, sixpence, or at most, sevenpence. Her little girl, aged nine, but so small as to look younger, earns, by her daily twelve hours’ work, twopence halfpenny. On inquiring whether the little creature has the comfort of laying by twopence, or even a penny a week on her own behalf, we find that this has never been thought of; that there is no opportunity or inducement to do it, and thus to the child is her whole young life, with its repressed activities, devoted to toil, she does not know why, nor for what aim. She fulfils her destiny, as the French would say.

There is a school, and there are girls in it younger than this little needlewoman. Boys and girls looked thoroughly healthy; the room was airy, and the master intelligent looking and kind, though his appearance did not lessen our impression of the melancholy poverty of the place. The members of the school have fallen off sadly, more than in proportion to the diminished population of the place. The average attendance is eighty in summer, and one hundred in winter. The scholars pay from one shilling and sixpence to two shillings and sixpence per quarter; and it is a proof of the value that the parents set upon education that, out of a population which falls short of nine hundred, earning, on an average, nine shillings per week, there should be one hundred children paying for their schooling at this rate. Some of the oldest boys could show arithmetical exercises which justify their hopes of getting to be clerks in Glasgow warehouses, and two have learned a little Latin – that darling pride of the humble Scotch! They think, and talk of Allan Ramsay, who was a native of these hills; and somebody has painted outside the library something which is called a portrait of the poet. Whatever may be the taste of the painting, we like the taste of putting it there.

At the very top of the settlement, when we have passed all the cottages, and “the Ha’,” and the potato patches, and the heaps of lead ore, we come to a place which takes all strangers by surprise: a charming house, embowered in trees, with honeysuckle hanging about its walls, flowers in its parterres, and a respectable kitchen garden, where the boast is that currants can be induced to ripen, and that apples have been known to form, and grow to a certain size, though not to ripen. This is the agent’s house, and here are the offices of the Mining Company. The plantation is really wonderful, at such an elevation above the sea; and it is a refreshing sight to the stranger arriving from below. There may be seen, growing in a perfect thicket, beech, ash, mountain ash, elm, plane, and larch, shading grass-plats, and enclosed walks, so fresh and green that, on a hot day, one might fancy oneself in a meadow garden, near some ample river. In this abode there is a carriage, and a servant in livery – a great sight, no doubt, to the people, who can hardly have seen any other, except when sportsmen come to “the Ha’,” with all their apparatus of locomotion and of pleasure. In connexion with this abode is the office of the Company, where the books are preserved as far back as 1736. There may be seen specimens of the ores found in the valley; and, among other curiosities, a small phial of water, about half filled with gold from the Californian vein before-mentioned. There it is, in rough morsels, just like the specimens from California and Australia, which may be seen everywhere now. The water in the phial is to make the gold look brighter; and, for the same purpose, the owner lays it upon some dark surface – as the sleeve of a coat – that strangers may see it to the best advantage. Here is only about ten pounds’ worth; so there is no fear of the miners choosing the wrong casket, out of the three that Nature has placed before them.

Our cart had been dismissed long ago; and we were to return to Abington in the carriage, and driven by the servant in whom the worldly splendour of the place is concentrated. We were to stop by the way and see the smelting; and we saw it accordingly. Descending from the successive platforms where the bruised ore is washed, till it is almost pure dust of lead, we put our heads into the noisy vault, where the great waterwheel was revolving and letting fall a drip which filled the place with the sound of mighty splashings. The blast of the furnaces roared under our feet, and all around about us, every light substance, such as coal dust and shreds of peat, was blown about like chaff. At the furnace were men, enduring the blaze of the red heat on this sultry day. They work for five or six hours; but only for five days in the week. They were piling up the glowing coals upon the bruised and washed ore in its receptacle in the furnace; and from under the front of the fire, we saw the molten lead running down its little channels into its own reservoir, leaving behind the less heavy dross, which was afterwards to be cast out in a heap in the yard. The mould for the pig stood close by, at a convenient height from the floor. We waited till there was lead enough in the reservoir to make a pig. One man ladled out the molten metal into the mould, while another skimmed off the ashes and scum with two pieces of wood. It was curious to see this substance, which looked exactly like quicksilver, treated like soup. It was curious to see the process of cooling begin from the edges, and the film spreading slowly towards the centre, till all was solid. It was curious to see the pigs set on end against the wall, looking light and moveable from their lustre, when just out of the mould, and to remember that one might as well try to lift up the opposite mountain as to move one of them unaided.

It was curious, too, in travelling down the valley again, to be more than ever struck with its deep solitude. The peat cutter on the ridge, the mower on the slope, the two women at the toll gate, and the two quarrymen, were again all whom we saw. The two trees below, and the one tree before us, seemed more forlorn than before, when we remembered what a cluster of people, and what a plantation of forest trees we had left up in the wilds. No visitor to the Leadhills can help speculating on what will become of that singular colony; whether its numbers will continue to diminish, and its poverty to increase, till the long-standing quarrel shall have caused complete ruin all round; or whether, by making up matters, the proprietors will invite prosperity to return. Whether the whole concern dies out, or the other issue is decided upon in time, and the ruined cottages are destined to be rebuilt, forsaken works resumed, and the people cheered with improved earnings; it seems that the settlement cannot long be any thing like the spectacle that it is now. In the one case, some wayfarer, exploring his course over the hills, may, in another century or two, come upon the grass grown ruins of the abodes and labours of a thousand people; he may stumble over the weedy gravestones, and mark a household vegetable growing here and there among the rushes; and the yawning jaws of the mines may warn him to look well to his footing: and, at his next stage, he may inquire for some tradition of what this strange place may be. In the other and better case, the seclusion of the settlement cannot, one would think, be preserved. The railway whistle has told of the outer world to some ears there already. Improved production and traffic will bring people up and down the valley; and the time may come when the inhabitants of Leadhills will talk of the present as of the primitive days of their settlement, when manners were simple and rude; and, if that time should come, the commonest names of today will have taken a saintly sound to the ears of descendants, as ancestral names are apt to do; and it will be said, that those were privileged travellers who went out of their way to visit Leadhills, in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Shawls

Household Words, Volume 5, page 552

In that part of Asia where some of our brave countrymen have penetrated only to die – in that country where Charles Stoddart and his friend Conolly, whose faces will never be forgotten by some of us, and whose voices still sound in our ears, consoled each other through a loathsome imprisonment, and went out together to lose their heads in the marketplace of the capital; in that distant and impracticable country of Bokhara, which we are ready to say we will never have any connexion with – there are people always employed in our service. We are not now thinking of the Bokhara clover, which is such a treat to our cows and horses. We owe that, and lucerne, and others of our green crops, to the interior of Asia; but we are thinking of something more elaborate. In Bokhara, the camel is watched while the fine hair on the belly is growing: this fine hair is cut off so carefully that not a fibre is lost; it is put by until there is enough to spin into a yarn, unequalled for softness; and then it is dyed all manner of bright colours, and woven in strips eight inches wide of shawl patterns such as – with all our pains and cost, with all our Schools of Design and study of nature and art – we are not yet able to rival. These strips are then sewn together so cunningly that no European can discover the joins. The precious merchandise is delivered to traders who receive it on credit. On their return from market they pay the price of the shawls at the Bokhara value, with 30 per cent. interest: or, if they cannot do this in consequence of having been robbed, or of any other misfortune, they stay away, and are never seen again in their native land.

Where is this market? So far away from home that the traders wear out their clothes during their journey; and their fair skins become as brown as mulattoes. On, on, on they go, day after day, month after month, on their pacing camels, or beside them, over tablelands, mounting one above another; over grass, among rocks, over sand, through snows; now chilled to the marrow by icy winds; now scorched by sunshine, from which there is no shelter but the flat cotton caps, with which they thatch their bare crowns: on, on, for fifteen thousand miles, to the borders of Russia, to sell the shawls which are to hang on ladies’ shoulders in Hyde Park, and where beauties most do congregate in Paris and Vienna.

The passion for shawls among all women everywhere is remarkable. In one country, the shawl may flow from the head, like a veil; in another, it hangs from the shoulders; in another, it is knotted round the loins as a sash; in yet another, it is swathed round the body as a petticoat. Wherever worn at all, it is the pet article of dress. From a time remote beyond computation, the sheep of Cashmere have been cherished on their hills, and the goats of Thibet on their plains, and the camels of Tartary on their steppes, to furnish material for the choicest shawls. From time immemorial, the patterns which we know so well have been handed down as a half sacred tradition through a Hindoo ancestry, which puts even Welsh pedigrees to shame. For thousands of years have the bright dyes, which are the despair of our science and art, been glittering in Indian looms, in those primitive pits under the palm tree where the whimsical patterns grow, like the wild flower springing from the soil. For thousands of years have Eastern potentates made presents of shawls to distinguished strangers, together with diamonds and pearls.

At this day, when an Eastern prince sends gifts to European sovereigns, there are shawls, to the value of thousands of pounds, together with jewels, perfumes, and wild beasts, and valuable horses; just as was done in the days of the Pharaohs, as the paintings on Egyptian tombs show us at this day. And the subjects of sovereigns have as much liking for shawls as any queen. At the Russian Court, the ladies judge one another by their shawls as by their diamonds. In France, the bridegroom wins favour by a judicious gift of this kind. In Cairo and Damascus, the gift of a shawl will cause almost as much heart burning in the harem as the introduction of a new wife. In England, the daughter of the house spends the whole of her first quarter’s allowance in the purchase of a shawl. The Paris grisette, and the London dressmaker go to their work with the little shawl pinned neatly at the waist. The lost gin drinker covers her rags with the remnants of the shawl of better days. The farmer’s daughter buys a white cotton shawl, with a gay border, for her wedding; and it washes and dyes until, having wrapped all her babies in turn, it is finally dyed black to signalise her widowhood. The maiden aunt, growing elderly, takes to wearing a shawl in the house in midwinter; and the granny would no more think of going without it at any season than without her cap. When son or grandson comes home from travel, far or near, his present is a new shawl, which she puts on with deep consideration; parting with the old one with a sigh. The Manchester or Birmingham factory girl buys a gay shawl on credit, wears it on Sunday, puts it in pawn on Monday morning, and takes it cut again on Saturday night, for another Sunday’s wear, and so on, until she has wasted money that would have bought her a good wardrobe. Thus, from China round the world to Oregon, and from the queen down to the pauper, is the shawl the symbol of woman’s taste and condition. Whence come all these shawls? For it is clear that the supply which arrives from Asia over bleak continents and wide oceans, can be only for the rich and great. Some of the shawls from Bokhara sell, in the market on the Russian frontier, for two thousand four hundred pounds each. Whence come the hundred thousand shawls that the women of Great Britain purchase every year?

Some of the richest that our ladies wear are from Lyons; and the French taste is so highly esteemed that our principal manufacturers go to Lyons once or twice a year, for specimens and patterns. Some of our greatest ladies of all, even the Queen and certain duchesses and countesses, offer to our chief manufacturers a sight of their treasures from India, their Cashmeres, and other shawls, from a patriotic desire for the improvement of our English patterns. From these, the manufacturers of Norwich and Paisley devise such beautiful things that, but for the unaccountable and unrivalled superiority of the Orientals in the production of this particular article, we should be all satisfaction and admiration. The common cotton shawls, continually lessening in number, worn by women of the working classes, are made at Manchester, and wherever the cotton manufacture is instituted. In order to study the production of British shawls in perfection, one should visit the Norwich or Paisley manufactories.

If any article of dress could be immutable, it would be the shawl; designed for eternity in the unchanging East; copied from patterns which are the heirloom of a caste, and woven by fatalists, to be worn by adorers of the ancient garment, who resent the idea of the smallest change. Yet has the day arrived which exhibits the manufacture of three distinct kinds of shawls in Paisley. There is the genuine woven shawl, with its Asiatic patterns; and there is that which is called a shawl for convenience, but which has nothing Asiatic about it: the tartan – which name is given not only to the checks of diverse colours which signify so much to the Scottish eye, but to any kind of mixed or mottled colours and fabric – woven in squares or lengths to cover the shoulders. The third kind is quite modern; the showy, slight and elegant printed shawl, derived from Lyons, and now daily rising in favour. The woven kind is the oldest in Paisley. The tartan kind was introduced from Stirlingshire – without injury to Stirlingshire – which makes as many as ever, but to the great benefit of Paisley. The printed kind has been made about six years; and it is by far the greatest and most expanding manufacture. The most devoted worshippers of the genuine shawl can hardly wonder at this, considering the love of change that is inherent in ladies who dress well, and the difference of cost. A genuine shawl lasts a quarter of a lifetime. Ordinary purchasers give from one pound to ten pounds for one, and can give more if they desire a very superior shawl: a process which it is not convenient to repeat every two or three years. The handsomest printed shawls, meantime, can be had for two pounds, and they will last two years; by the end of which time, probably, the wearer has a mind for something new. The time required for the production answers pretty accurately to these circumstances. It takes a week to weave a shawl of the genuine sort; in the same time ten or twelve of the tartan or plaid, and twenty or thirty of the printed can be produced.

The processes employed for these three kinds of shawls are wholly different; and we will therefore look at them separately, though we saw them, in fact, under the same roof. As for the tartan shawls, there is no need to enlarge upon them, as their production is much like that of any other kind of variegated cloth. We need mention only one fact in regard to them, which is, however, very noticeable; the recent invention of a machine by which vast time and labour are saved. As we all know, the fringes of cloth shawls are twisted some threads being twisted together in one direction, and then two of these twists being twisted in the opposite direction. Till a month ago this work was done by girls, in not the pleasantest way, either to themselves or the purchaser, by their wetting their hands from their own mouths, and twisting the threads between their palms. The machine does, in a second of time, the work of fourteen pairs of hands: that is, as two girls attend it, there is a saving of twelve pairs of hands and some portion of time, and the work is done with thorough certainty and perfection: whereas, under the old method, for one girl who could do the work well, there might be several who did it indifferently or ill. The machine, invented by Mr Hutchison, must be seen to be understood: for there is no giving an idea, by description, of the nicety with which the brass tongues rise to lift up the threads and to twist them; then throw them together, and rub them against the leather-covered shafts; which, instead of human palms, twist them in the opposite direction. In seeing this machine the old amazement recurs at the size, complication, and dignity of an instrument contrived for so simple a purpose. The dignity, however, resides not in the magnitude of the office, but in the saving of time and human labour.

Of the other two kinds of shawls, which shall we look at first? Let it be the true and venerable woven shawl.

The wool is Australian or German – chiefly Australian. It comes, in the form of yarn, from Bradford, in hanks which are anything but white, so that they have first to be washed Of the washing, dyeing, and warping we need not speak, as they are much the same to the observer’s and therefore to the reader’s, eye as the preparation of yarns for carpets in Kendal, and of silk for ribbons in Coventry. While the washing and drying, and the dyeing and drying again are proceeding, the higher labour of preparing the pattern is advancing.

But how much of the lower kind of work can be done during the slow elaboration of the higher! It really requires some patience and fortitude even to witness the mighty task of composing and preparing the pattern of an elaborate shawl. Let the reader study any three square inches of a good shawl border; let the threads be counted, and the colours, and the twists and turnings of the pattern; and then let it be remembered that the general form has to be invented, and the subdivisions, and the details within each form, and the filling up of the spaces between, and the colours – as a whole, and in each particular; and that, before the material can be arranged for the weaving, every separate stitch (so to speak) must be painted down on paper in its right place. Is it not bewildering to think of? Much more bewildering and imposing is it to see. As for the first sketch of the design, that is all very pretty; and, the strain on the faculties not being cognisable by the stranger, is easy enough. There goes the artist pencil – tracing waving lines and elegant forms, giving no more notion of the operations within than the hands of a clock do of the complication of the works. Formerly, the employers put two or three good foreign patterns into the artists’ hands, and said, “Make a new pattern out of these.” Now that we have Schools of Design, and more accessible specimens of art, the direction is given without the aids. “Make a new pattern;” and the artist sits down with nothing before him but pencil and paper – unless, indeed, he finds aids for himself in wild flowers, and other such instructors in beauty of form and colour. By degrees, the different parts of the pattern shape themselves out, and combine – the centre groups with the ends, and the ends grow out into the sides with a natural and graceful transition. Then the portions, properly outlined, are delivered to the colourers; who cover the drawing with oiled paper, and begin to paint. It would not do to colour the outlined drawing, because there are no outlines in the woven fabric. It is dazzling only to look upon. Much less minute is the transferring to the diced paper which is the real working pattern. The separate portions of the finished pattern of a single shawl, when laid on the floor, would cover the carpet of a large drawing room. The taking down such a pattern upon paper occupies four months.

The weaving is done either by “lashing,” or from Jacquard cards. The Jacquard loom answers for the eternal patterns, and the “lashing” method suffices for those which are not likely to be repeated. The man seated at the “piano machine,” playing on a sort of keys, from the coloured pattern stuck up before his eyes, is punching the Jacquard cards, which are then transferred, in their order, to the lacing machine, where they are strung together by boys into that series which is to operate upon the warp in the weaving, lifting up the right threads for the shuttle to pass under to form the pattern, as in other more familiar manufactures. The “lashing” is read off from the pattern, too, in the same way as with carpet patterns at Kendal; so many threads being taken up and interlaced with twine for a red stitch, and then so many more for a green, and so on. Boys then fasten each symbol of a hue to a netting of whipcord, by that tail of the netting which, by its knots, signifies that particular hue: so that, when the weaving comes to be done, the boy, pulling the symbolic cord, raises the threads of the warp – green, blue, or other – which are required for that throw of the shuttle. Thus the work is really all done beforehand, except the mere putting together of the threads; done, moreover, by anybody but the weaver, who is, to say the truth, a mere shuttle throwing machine. The poor man does not even see and know what he is doing. The wrong side of the shawl is uppermost; and not even such a wrong side as we see, which gives some notion of the pattern on the other. Previous to cutting, the wrong side of a shawl is a loose surface of floating threads of all colours; of the threads, in fact, which are thrown out of the pattern, and destined to be cut away and given to the papermakers to make coarse grey paper. One pities the weaver, who sits all day long throwing the shuttle, while the boy at the end of his loom pulls the cords which make the pattern, and throw up nothing but refuse to the eye. He has not even the relief of stopping to roll up what he has done; for a little machine is now attached to his loom, which saves the necessity of stopping for any such purpose. It is called “the uptaking motion.” By it a few little cogwheels are set to turn one another, and, finally, the roller, on which the woven fabric is wound as finished.

The bundles of weaving strings and netting which regulate the pattern, are called “flowers.” From the quantity of labour and skill wrought up in their arrangement, they are very valuable. A pile of them, on a small table, were, as we were assured, worth one thousand pounds. We may regard each as the soul or spirit of the shawl – not creating its material, but animating it with character, personality, and beauty. We have said that it takes a man a week to weave a shawl: but this means a “long” shawl, and not a “square.” The square remain our favourites; but the female world does not seem to be of our mind. It is true the symmetry of the pattern is spoiled when the white centre hangs over one shoulder. It is true, the “longs” are heavy and very warm, from being twice doubled. But they have one advantage which ladies hold to compensate for those difficulties; they can be folded to any size, and therefore to suit any figure – tall or short, stout or thin. We are assured that, for one square shawl that is sold, there are a hundred “longs.”

A capital machine now intervenes, with its labour-saving power; this time, of French invention. Formerly, it took two girls a whole day to cut off the refuse threads from the back of a shawl. But this machine, superintended by a man, does it in a minute and a half. A horizontal blade is traversed by spiral blades fixed on a cylinder, the revolving of which gives to the blades the action of a pair of scissors. The man’s office is to put in the shawl, set the machine going, and to beat down the refuse as fast as it is cut off.

The upper surface of the shawl remains somewhat rough – rough enough to become soon a rather dirty article of dress, from the dust which it would catch up and retain. It is therefore smoothed by singing. This very offensive process is performed by a man who must have gone through a severe discipline before he could endure his business. He heats his iron (which is like a very large, heavy knife, turned up at the end) red hot, spreads the shawl on a table rather larger than itself, and passes the red-hot iron over the surface, with an even and not very rapid movement. What would that Egyptian dragoman have said, who, being asked to iron out an English clergyman’s white ducks, burned off the right leg with the first touch of his box iron? That box iron was not red hot, nor anything like it; yet there is no such destruction here. There is only the brown dust fizzing. Pah! that’s enough! let us go somewhere else.

In a light, upper room, women and girls are at work, sitting on low stools, each with a shawl stretched tightly over her knees. Some of these are darning, with the utmost nicety, any cracks, thin places, or “faults” in the fabric; darning each in its exact colour. Some are putting silk fringes upon the printed shawls, tacking them in with a needle, measuring each length by eye and touch, and then knotting, or, as it is called, “netting” the lengths by cross ties. One diminutive girl of nearly ten, is doing this with wonderful quickness, as she sits by her mother’s knee. The girls do not come to work before this age; nor the boys before twelve. In other rooms, women are seated at tables, or leaning over them, twisting the fringes of plaid shawls, or picking out knots and blemishes with pincers, and brushing all clean, and then folding them, with sheets of stiff pasteboard between, ready for the final pressure in the hydraulic press, which makes them fit for the shop.

The fabric for the printed shawls is light and thin, in comparison with the woven. The thinness is various; from the barège to the lightest gossamer that will bear the pressure of the block. The whole importance of the production consists in the printing; for the fabric is simple and common enough. A man can weave ten yards per day of the barège; and the silk gauze, striped or plain, requires no particular remark.

The designing is done with the same pains and care as for the genuine shawl, but the range of subjects is larger. While something of the Oriental character of the shawl patterns must be preserved, much of the beauty of French figured silks and brocades and embroidery may be admitted. Thus the designing and colouring rooms contain much that pleases the eye, though one does not see there the means and appliances which fill some apartment or another of Birmingham factories – the casts from the antique, the volumes of plates, the flower in water, and so on. The preparation of the blocks for printing, and yet more the application of them, reminded us of the paper staining, which we had certainly never thought of before in connexion with shawls. The wood used is lime wood. Some of the blocks are chiselled and picked out, like those of the paper stainer. The cast blocks are more curious. A punch is used, the point or needle of which is kept hot by a flame, from which the workman’s head is defended by a shield of metal. He burns holes by puncturing with this hot needle along all the outlines of the block he holds in his hands, much as a little child pricks outlines on paper on a horsehair chair bottom. There is a groove along the face of each block, to allow the metal to run in. The burned blocks are screwed tight in a press, their joined tops forming a saucer, into which the molten metal (composed of tin, bismuth and lead) is poured. In it goes, and down the grooves, penetrating into all the burnt holes; and, of course, when cool, furnishing a cast of the patterns desired, in the form of upright thorns or spikes on a metallic ground or plate. These plates are filed smooth at the back, and fixed on wood, and you have the blocks ready to print from; one representing one colour, another another, and so on, till the plates for a single shawl of many colours may mount up in value to a very large sum.

Before printing, the fabric has been well washed; the barège being passed, by machinery, over cylinders which apply and squeeze out a wash of soap, soda and glue. All roughnesses had previously been removed by a “cropping” machine. After drying, it comes to the printing table, where it is treated much like a paper hanging. This is all very well; but what is to be done in case of a shower of rain? a not improbable incident in the life of a shawl. A paper hanging would not stand a driving rain. Are ladies imposed upon in this matter, when they are offered a gay printed shawl as wearable out of doors? By no means. Nobody knows how it is, but the fact is certain, that a good steaming, at a tremendous heat, fixes the colours by some chemical action, without in the least hurting their lustre: so the shawls go into the steaming box, and come out of it able to bear as many washings as you please, without any change of colour. After drying, in a heat of one hundred and ten degrees, they go upstairs to be surveyed, fringed, folded and pressed.

It seems a pity that the fat, easy, lazy Bokharian, and the slim, lithe, patient Hindoo, should not come to Paisley, and see how shawls are made there. To the one, shaving his camel on the plain, and the other, throwing his antique shuttle under the palm, how strange would be the noise, and the stench, and the speed, and the numbers employed, and the amount of production! To the one, it may be the work of years to furnish to the travelling merchant strips of eight inches wide, enough to make a shawl; and to the other, the production of such an article is an event in life; while here, at Paisley, if the pattern requires months, the weaving of the most genuine and venerable kind occupies only a week. We do not believe that the simple and patient Oriental will be driven out of the market by us, because there is no promise, at present, of our overtaking their excellence. We hope there will be room in the world of fashion for them and us for ever – (the “for ever” of that world). We shall not go back to their methods, and it is not very likely that they should come up to ours; so we shall probably each go on in our own way, which is what everybody likes best.

The Life of a Salmon

Household Words, Volume 5, page 606

No creature can well have a quieter birthplace than the trout which is spawned in the Bann. The Bann is not, on the whole, a quiet river, for it has a prodigious deal of work to do, and it does its work in a prodigious bustle at times; though occasionally it relaxes somewhat, and seems to remember the great truth, that nothing is worth the loss of composure. The work that the Bann has to do is to carry away into the sea all the water that other rivers pour into the largest lake of our three kingdoms – Lough Neagh. This lake measures eighty miles round; and several rivers pour their waters into it, while there is only this one river Bann to carry them away. So it must move quickly to get its work done; and it does push on, and drive between its banks, and fume and splash at a grand rate, where rocks are obstinate in refusing to get out of its way. In other spots, whence the rocks got rolled away ages ago, and where thick woods overhang the stream, its current becomes not less rapid but more still. Clear, deep, and dark, it there flows on swiftly and silently. There it is that the salmon, if they are wise, look about them for some little cove – some recess in the banks – which is seldom violently flooded, but which receives a gentle ripple as the stream sweeps by. In such a little cove, with a floor of pure sand, the eggs of the salmon may lie unharmed by any disturbance till they are hatched. Some of the fish deposit their spawn where the waters lash the sand, or where animals like to drink, and there the eggs come to nothing and are lost. This is now so well understood, that in some places (in one place in France particularly) fishermen are making fortunes by looking in good time to the eggs and milt, and seeing that they are deposited in favourable places. Hundreds of thousands, aye, countless millions of fish may be provided for human food by this simple precaution, for want of which some of our Scotch and English rivers are supplying less and less salmon every year.

In such a quiet pool, with its clean sandy bottom, does the fish pass its earliest days. From its first wriggle as a minute insect (as we should call it if we could see it at that stage of its life) to its first use of its fins and tail, that little pool is its world. Its world is quite big enough for it, and altogether beyond its comprehension. Even there it is not wholly beyond the reach of the tides – not shut out from the influences of the moon, and the laws which keep a universe full of firmaments in their due place and order: but the little fish is very like us in being frightened, and fancying that everything is out of order when any commotion happens that it did not foresee. If it suppose that the universe was made for the sake of infant trout, it may well be alarmed when a strong ripple spreads over its pool, and the water makes a bubble or two against the bank – just as men used to take for granted that the world was coming to an end when there was an eclipse; or when an unusual aurora borealis turned the calm, cool night sky into a blood red dome. Mankind has grown wiser with experience, and is learning that all goes on in the noblest and most regular and steadfast way under laws which never change; so that the wise man fears nothing: and even the infant trout grows bolder and happier as it learns more of its own world of waters. It wields its fins, it practises with its tail; it finds it can rise to the surface, and drop down to the sand, and get into the shade at noon under the roots of some water loving tree, or make new glancing lights in the shallows by playing off its scales in the sunshine. By degrees, it goes out further into the current, and delights in being swept along by it, even though it is whirled away from its own native cove. It may not be for ever. In a year or two it may come up the stream again – as so many do every season.

Meantime, down it goes; not all at once, but as may suit its growing strength and size, and the provision of food it finds. Towards the end of winter the waters grow cold. The melting snows make them chilly. The salt water will be warmer; and the young creature is strong enough now to bear a saltwater life. So down it goes, faster and faster. It does not know why, but it is carried on faster and faster, under banks where the hazels are hanging out their catkins, and the willow-palm its velvet tufts. Here and there a well sheltered primrose puts forth a pale bud, in some hollow of the bank, and the wild ducks are making a splutter among the ripening reeds. But now the river rushes so fast that the sun gleams are like lightning, and there is a rumbling roar like thunder, and a splash like a deluge. On shoots the little creature, setting its rudder – that is, its tail – steady, like the older fish that go before, and in a trice it is over the Falls of the Bann, and beginning to feel what the salt water is like. Still the old fish promise that it shall see its native cove again. It must be done by leaping this barrier of rocks; but thousands of salmon do that every year. What fish has done, fish may do.

And now, a shroud of mystery encloses the life of the salmon. During the first year its age is known by the state of its scales; and its generation is then called grilse, or grailse, or grawls. After that, its mode of living is so completely lost sight of that there is not a naturalist, nor a fisherman, along the whole north coast of Ireland who can tell when or how the trout passes into the salmon, (if indeed it be the trout which certainly becomes the salmon,) or how old the salmon may live to be; or at what age its savoury flakes make the best eating; or, in short, anything whatever beyond this: – that the same fish return every season to the same river; the salmon of the Bann being short and thick, and those of the Bush river long and slim in comparison; and so on. So we must treat salmon as we do ladies – neglect all considerations of age – make no inquiries on that obscure point, and sympathise in their activities and pleasures without asking whether they had a beginning, or will ever come to an end.

It is the fashion to talk of every body’s “sphere.” What a sphere is that of the salmon of the Bann! What a coast has it to range, whether, when carried out to sea with the rush of waters, it turns to the right hand or to the left! That it does range along the coast is certain, as the watcher on many a promontory can avouch. Let the observer stand on the precipice of Fairhead – the salient point of the Antrim coast. At first, he will be curious about the little lake which discharges its waters by a fissure in the rock, making a waterfall down that steep – more than six hundred feet above the busy surge. Already, on the face of this rock, are there traces of that strange architecture of Nature which comes out to more perfection further to the west. If the observer looks out to sea, his eye will be fixed by the outlines of the Scotch islands, as they lie calmly anchored in the deep blue sea, or the Mull of Cantire closing in the eastern horizon. He sees more than their outlines. In clear weather he sees the bright eminences and dark ravines on the mountain sides. Now let him look below – sheer down into the transparent waters. Are there not silvery flickerings, bright glancings, which show that the salmon are there at play? There they are; and near a great danger. A rock stands out, an islet separated by sixty feet of roaring tide from the shore, directly in the path that the salmon take off the coast. Not knowing that enemies may come there and waylay them, the fish do not make a good sweep out to sea, but just swim unsuspiciously round Carrick-a-rede. For a good part of the year, they may do this safely; during the months when salmon are not allowed to be taken; but, when the doom day comes, the bold fishermen do a great feat. They sling two ropes from the shore to the islet, at a height of ninety feet above the tossing waves; and, by laying short planks across, they make a bridge – a suspension bridge with a vengeance – with no guard but a single rope for a handrail. The stranger usually declines being swung in mid air on such a bridge as this: but the fisherman – who lives, during the salmon season, in a cottage on the islet – runs backwards and forwards as tranquilly as if he were passing London Bridge; and so do his comrades. If the salmon did but know their own case, they would glance up from amidst the waters, and, warned by that great inverted arch in their sky, would strike off – well out to the north, and not approach the coast again for miles. But all that the salmon know of their own case is that they want to go up the rivers, to deposit their spawn and milt; so they hug the shore, in search of the rivers’ mouths.

Soon they come to that strange place, where, as we are informed, the great giant, Fin McCoul, had a mind to make a path for himself and his wife to pass over to Scotland, without getting their feet wet. Were any salmon present to see that causeway begun? and did they fear that it would bar them out from the Bush and the Bann? There are the wonderful paving stones at this day – cut so neatly to fit into one another, like the cells in a beehive, and built in so firmly that the winter surge, in all these thousands of years, has never washed them asunder. Were there any salmon to see the accident by which those stones were spilled, which are now seen lying, all in a heap, toppled all manner of ways. Giantesses who act as masons’ labourers to their husbands, should see, before they go out to work, that they have strong strings to their aprons. Fin McCoul’s wife forgot this. She brought him plenty of stones in her apron, and he paved them in; jammed them firm into the bottom of the sea with a stamp of his heel. But, one day, her apron string broke, and her load of stones fell out – where they now lie. Whether her husband was put out of humour by so small an accident as this, as does happen to husbands sometimes, or whether his attention was called off by some pressure of business elsewhere, we cannot say; but the causeway certainly never was finished. A beginning was made at the opposite end – at Staffa – that Scotch islet where the giant had a cave where he liked to be cool at noonday (and a green, cool cave it is); but the path never stretched very far out, at either end; and the salmon get round, quite easily, at this day.

Some salmon seem to have no eye for cork floats. They swim in among them, without a thought of a trap. But they find themselves in one; and, after floundering among ropes and cords, perhaps from Monday to Saturday, they find themselves drawn to shore, whether they will or no, and seized by the hot, cruel hands of man. If our trout of the Bann kept outside, or were alert enough to spring over at the last moment, it is on its way to its own river, rejoicing. The Bush river comes first, and there the Bush salmon take leave of all the rest for a season, and part off to their country seats for the autumn and Christmas. When the mouth of the Bann is reached, so do the Bann fish, whisking up stream, under Coleraine bridge, and onwards another mile, to where the salt water meets the fresh.

Here is a point of such danger, that we pause to take breath. There are some few chances of escape; but the perils are awful. All that the poor fish has any doubt about is as to whether it can leap up those rocks, over which the fresh waters are pouring like a cataract. It can make the leap, no doubt. Every salmon does. And it will no doubt keep at the top when it has got there – which is the most wonderful part of the business to the human observer. How it is that the rush of the stream over the natural weir does not carry back the fish in a moment is a mystery to us: but the salmon would probably despise us if we asked any questions, even as old women despise kings who inquire how the apple gets into the dumpling. So we will merely say that the young salmon obeys instructions as it did in going down; sets its rudder straight, stiffens its body, and shoots forward with all its might, against the rush of waters.

And is it safe, after all? There are so many perils that it knows not of! There are buildings in the bed of the river, every stone and every brick of which was laid in malice prepense against the salmon of the Bann. There are half a dozen stout stone walls or piers, built backwards from the rocky weir, enclosing spaces which are (all but the middle one) as many traps for the fish. At the upper end, there are iron gratings to each trap – doors which open and shut: and at the lower end there are also iron gratings which are nearly closed, but not quite. A space of a few inches is left between the gratings, which incline backwards so as to direct, as it were, the approaching fish to the little gap. When they have once leaped in, they can never more get out. For a few moments, amidst the dash and roar of the descending waters, they are unconscious of their fate. They are whirled back; they shoot across the pool; and at length they dash themselves madly against the upper gratings: but it is all in vain. If they could pass this one grating, they would be safe for this year; for there is no net – no salmon fishing above the weir. The Irish Society, to whom the fishery belongs, take care of that: and if, as at present, they let the fishery to an individual, he is no less careful. One of the two neat red-brick cottages which are built on the outermost piers, is for the watchman who looks to the poachers. The other has the great scales for weighing the fish, and other apparatus. It is somewhat piteous to see the silvery scales of many a fish sticking to the balance, while the seething traps below are tempting more to their fate. As for the other cottage, it contains a little bed, where the watchman takes his sleep in the daytime, amidst such a din of waters as would make a fierce lullaby to most of us. By night, while his solitary candle burns within, throwing a feeble gleam from the lattice upon the surrounding foam, he is stealing about along the piers, and across the shaking planks, which make bridges from one to another. He peeps and pries and peers about, to see if any improper nets be in the water. Perhaps while he is doing so, the poachers may be watching his dim form from under the shadow of the solemn woods which come down to the river banks. Perhaps they may be actually in the river – up to their waists in water, under the shadow of the piers. If caught, their punishment is a fine of about six pounds for each offence; in default of payment, six months imprisonment.

The flapping and frightened fish remain in their trap till the next Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday morning, when the men fish them out with landing nets. Last Thursday morning there were seventy-three salmon: this morning, there were sixty-one. The youngest and smallest weigh four pounds: the greater number rise from twelve pounds to twenty pounds; and even twenty-five pounds is not an uncommon weight. The price of salmon in the towns along the coast is about sixpence per pound – unless where hotelkeepers impose on inexperienced travellers. But, the fish from these traps are packed in boxes, and forwarded by cart to Port Rush for export. When the railway to Londonderry is finished, they will, no doubt, be sent there too, on their way to many new places. The ice in which they are packed is supplied, in hard winters, from Irish lakes and ponds: but the last two winters have been too mild to supply the requisite quantity; so that the fish from the green depths of this solemn coast have been preserved in ice from the still, unfathomable lakes, freezing below the black pine forests of Norway.

Our subject has grown sombre and somewhat too pathetic. Let us take a brighter view.

Our young salmon was certainly not caught on this, its first ascent; for it is known to have revisited the haunts of its infancy. We have said that there was one space (it is the centre one) between the piers which is not a trap. It is called the Queen’s Gap; and any fish which are lucky or discreet enough to go straight up midstream, pass here without impediment. It is wide open at both ends. The same may be said of all on Sundays, except that any fish that have entered between the drawing on Saturday morning and the opening of the traps that night, are turned into a special little dungeon, railed off on one side, there to pass their Sunday. For all others, the way is completely clear from Saturday night to six o’clock on Monday morning. Whether our young fish went up by the Queen’s Gap, or on the Sunday, it got through, and without knowing anything of the perils it had escaped. How sweet the lapse of the fresh waters was, after the incessant roll and crash of the surge on the iron-bound coast of the Atlantic; how the autumnal woods contrasted with the black basaltic precipices above the main; how the wildflowers on the banks appeared after so many miles of tangled and floating seaweeds; which looked best, the little column of blue peat-smoke from the peasant’s cabin under the woods, or the brown smoke clouds from the kelp fires in the stony amphitheatres of the coast? – which was the most loveable, the swallow skimming the meadows, and brushing the blue waters with the tip of its wing, or the red legged crow throwing the drops about in the little salt pools in the rock, poking its red bill into salt crevices; or, again, the cormorant perched on its solitary basaltic pillar amidst the translucent green waters: now rearing its head to survey the whole land and sea, and then intent once more on its fishing? Which of these varieties may be most charming to a salmon, we will not undertake to decide. We only assert that the salmon has the opportunity of judging, as it lives and moves among them all.

Having found the tranquil cove it hoped for, and deposited its spawn where itself first began to move in the universe; having done that great duty of the year, and somewhat replenished its strength with alternate repose under the banks, and pleasure excursions among the windings and inlets of the great river, the salmon set about its descent. There was no fear of molestation now. The descending salmon are too poor in flesh and condition to be a desirable prize. So, once more, in the midst of spring, it found itself again with its comrades in the deep. Perhaps it is because the eastern coast is somewhat too sombre, that our fish now turns its head westward. Ah! there are perils there, too. Wherever there is a cluster of black rocks near the shore, and therefore in the path of the salmon, there may the white cottage of the fisherman be seen, niched into some recess. There may one great net be drying on poles or gibbet on the rocks, while the buoy out yonder, and the line of corks, show where the other is. Everywhere in the path of salmon, may the drawing of the net on Saturdays be seen, from May Day till the 20th of August. But it is certainly only by experience, if even so, that our young salmon, or any young salmon, can learn how dangerous the path of life is, through its whole course. So, on it went, merrily, in its first cruise along that cheerful shore; past the arches of limestone through which the railway is to run; past that wondrous verdant slope, from the white beach up and up for 1000 feet to the crest of rocks which crown the Coleraine heights; that slope where frost and snow and blight and tempest never come; where fairies resorted to their very latest day, as everybody remembers; where miles of trailing roses, and blue bells and periwinkles and heaths, with sweet berries enough to feed the whole fairy race, might tempt them back to their flowery tents, if the myriads of rabbits were not too formidable, and if, alas! the fairies were not dead, cold, and gone; where the few dwellings peep out from thickets of blossoms, and gardens are so many little wildernesses of sweets; where turfy paths girdle the steeps, that watchers may sit on a heather cushion, and look out for the silvery spangling of the sea where the salmon are at play – by this cheerful shore went our young fish; and it swept by the turning of the great plain which spreads from those heights to Lough Foyle; and into Lough Foyle it went, and up and down in it – up to where old Derry stands on its hill; and where on a high pillar stands her hero-pastor, Walker, with the Bible in one hand, while the other points to the Lough where the ships are passing the boom, and bringing food to the starving citizens to whose fortitude Queen Victoria owes her crown. Up to the woods near the town, and down and away among the labyrinth of stake nets, roves our young salmon; but not to stay, for it is a salmon of the Bann, and therefore without any intention of becoming an immigrant of Lough Foyle. As a salmon of the Bann, it will live and die.

And when and how did the dying happen? As to the when, there is no saying. How should there be, while salmon are so resolute against telling their ages? Whether our fish made many voyages or few, whether years or generations passed, whether watchers, poachers, and lessees remained the same, or were superannuated and buried away, while our salmon’s eye was still clear, and its flesh firm and flaky, and its scales brilliant and flexible – its day of doom came at last. The victim came up the Bann – not on a Sunday; and it entered the wrong gap. Neither was it on a Saturday that it came; for it certainly did not pine and waste in a state of panic during a long Sabbath day. It was spared that. Its pain was short. One wild attempt to leap – one frantic rush round the place – and it was fished out, and presently flapped its last in the scale where its value was sure to be duly estimated. For its shroud, it had ample folds of the purest powdered ice, gathered in far lands, by foreign hands, for the purpose. Its burial service was the grace said by the chaplain of a great London company; and its tomb was one which was not devoid of outward ornament of some richness – since over it was hung a massive civic chain, a token of honours to be domestically remembered through an illimitable future.

This is, as far as we know, all that can be told, with veracity and honour, of the LIFE OF A SALMON.

Peatal Aggression

Household Words, Volume 6, page 13

Once upon a time, no one can say how long ago, there were, if wise men say time, broad, shining lakes and smaller ponds in the middle of Ireland, where now there are no such lakes at all. The middle of Ireland is a mass of limestone, with heights and hollows, which vary its surface in all manner of ways, from sea to sea; from the Irish Channel to the Atlantic. How this stone foundation is covered now, we may see by and by. Let us first look at it under its ancient aspect, as far as our very scanty knowledge enables us to do so.

First – some thousands of years ago – we see, from such a point of view as Kildare, ridge behind ridge of hills retiring to the north-west; and on these hills, thick forests of oaks, beeches, elms, ash, and fir. These woods are terrible places for wolves. In the vales there are fresh green pastures lying between the lakes and ponds; and here cattle are seen grazing by day, and swine come out from the woods at evening, to pass the night near the dwellings of men. These dwellings are a sort of box, open at one side. They are made of oak logs or thick planks; with the roof flat, and a sort of shelf laid all through the middle, dividing the house of nine feet high into two rooms, each four feet high. Nothing being known of nails as yet, grooves and holes are made with a stone chisel; and the pieces of wood are fitted together, so as to make a strong box of twelve feet square, where the people may sleep, and find shelter in bad weather. It is not a place for cooking; and that is the reason why we see a little path, paved with stones, leading away from the dwelling to some place behind, where a smoke is rising from the ground. This place is the family hearthstone, made of freestone slabs, nicely laid. There are logs of wood burning; and in the ashes are roasting, if we are not mistaken, acorns, and chesnuts, and roots. And what a quantity of nutshells one may see scattered about! It is late autumn, and the people are in a hurry, evidently, to get on with that strange work that they are doing in the middle of the water. What are they about, those strange little men, with their very small heads, and their dress of skins of beasts merely strapped about them, and their mallets – mere stones, with a wooden handle run through any accidental hole? Look at those two getting into their boat. Can one call it a boat – a mere skin stretched over a frame? Off they drift, like a couple of witches in a sieve. And what for? Are they beavers making a dam? They are driving in stockades, and plastering them with mud. They are certainly making an island: and there is a second artificial island! and far away, in the middle of that river to the north, there is a third. When they have made their circle of piles, they bale out the water and put in stones, and wood, and earth, till they have an island high and dry. Very odd! when they have hills and green pastures ready made to their hands! Winter is coming, and they are afraid of the wolves by night, and, perhaps, of foes by day. See how they settle themselves, huddled together on the island, with their boats hung up to dry on the stockades!

What now? Music? A procession? It is either a wedding, or a royal feast, or something of that kind. What a glittering of gold! Look at the diadems of gold, and the curious round plates as large as the palms of my hands, fitting close to the cheek-bones. It is a becoming headdress, is it not? And so is the circle – like a twisted cord – of gold round the men’s heads, and round their waists. Those ornaments, like cymbals, hung round their necks, and the heavy finger rings of the same shape, and the neck plates are all very well to show how much gold people can hang about them; but they are not very pretty. But you see these people have got hold of at least one metal. Of more than one? True! That man has a sword – a bronze sword – just like the old Greek. Their bronze will not bear an edge that will split or saw wood, I suppose; but it may give a very ugly thrust in a hand-to-hand fight. Has that little child got one? He seems to be flourishing a sword about. No; it is only a toy – a wooden sword; but it is just like the bronze one, at this distance. Now, they are going to feast. There are the roasted animals steaming away! To think that the smell should be wafted to our nostrils across this great space of centuries! What a pity they have no salt, though! They do not seem to miss it. They might find some, not so very far off, if they had any longing for it. Hark! how the wild beasts howl from the forest, as the scent of the feast is borne on the evening breeze, and the fires from the islands shine broad and red over the surface of the waters. See by that light how the revellers are making a clearance, throwing the bones and refuse into the water over the stockade. That is one convenience, to be sure, of living on an artificial island. But I should be afraid that something useful – tools, arms, utensils, even people – would slip over now and then, and go to the bottom.

Look at that long string of wild fowl winging their way to the south, showing clear against the last red light of the western sky. Listen to the bustle of the wild swans in the sedgy creeks of the lake. Is that the raven’s night cry, ringing hard, as from a solid firmament? Peep into the covert, and see what is doing there. Here are deer crouched down in the withering fern. I wonder they can sleep, with foes so near. What shakes the ground, as with the tread of Goliath? It is not a giant, with a pine tree for his staff, that is coming from between the hills, but, as it were, a branching oak moving towards the water? Heaven and earth! What a creature! The elk of fable, beside which the cattle show like dogs, and the young fawns like mice. As it bends to the brink, what a shadow it casts far into the lake; and how the fishing boats draw off to the further shore! Something humbler is it that you want me to see – something very small and mean? Is it the snake under the fallen leaves, or … It is under the water, you say. Is it the salmon, come up from, the sea, lurking in its sandy cove under the shadow of the bank? Is it … Nothing of that kind, you say, but a very small thing, with a very small movement, which is destined to outlast and to bury all the living creatures we have seen, with their posterity, and even these oaks of a thousand years, rooted firm in the everlasting hills. And what is this very small thing? That little moss? – that tiny plant which the child with the wooden sword could pluck up with his finger and thumb? O yes; we will watch it; for two or three thousand years, if you please.

Small and silent as it is, I see it does grow and work diligently. Here is where it began – here, where this waterhen’s nest stopped the flow of this little drip into the cove. Here sprang the moss; and see how its filaments are now spread among all the vegetation on the bank, and how it is stealing out all along the margin of the lake, even covering its bottom for some way in. Already it intercepts and soaks up the smaller tributaries that feed the lake. Already it holds, as in a sponge, the water of the lake itself. By absorbing its supplies, and at the same time encroaching upon its bed, it is actually starving the lake. See, in half a century, it is perceptibly smaller; and, instead of the sandy and pebbly beach, which was so pretty and convenient, there is now a margin of wet sponge, which it is not easy to cross. There is a natural bridge that fallen tree: it was the little moss that gave us that bridge. That yew stood firm, a few years since. The soaking of the sour water about its roots loosened them, and down it sank by its own weight. Yes – you promised me that the moss should bury everything; and I see that it is creeping about the fallen yew growing up among its branches. At the rate of an inch and a half a year, is it growing? Then the poor yew will be soon covered up – away from human sight for ever. Not so? Are we to see it again? Well, time will show. But I see no oaks down, as you promised. Their turn is by and by, is it? Ay, I see that they are rooted differently from the firs and other inferior trees; they stand rooted each in its own hillock of gravel and firm soil: they may resist the moss for a good while.

But what is to become of this whole district, if the moss goes on unchecked? It is higher now than the surface of the lake. It is rising in the middle, and sending back the waters where there is no channel for them; so that they soak and loosen the soil far and wide. The cushion is climbing the stockade, and will quite cover the island soon; and nobody will resist this, for the place has long been deserted there being no approach to it now but over a shaking bog, which is neither land nor water. The live cushion is creeping over the green sward where the cattle used to graze. Some of those strange old cattle, unwilling to give up their pasture, venture to pick their meals there still. There! there goes one poor animal, down to death! She was deceived by the greenness of that knoll, and, committing her weight to it, down she went – the deeper, the more she struggled in the slough, till the black mud closed over her horns. I am certain I saw that heavy oak shake. See! down it goes, with a snap and crash, and a plunging sound as it buries itself in the wet moss. Its roots are still firm, you see: it was the trunk that snapped, and now it lies along on its bed of sponge, ten feet thick. Now that one has gone, more will quickly follow. I see now how the little moss may lay low, and bury the mighty forest.

What now? What is all this? The little moss grows very greedy and impatient. What a slide there was! Half an acre of parasitic soil pushing on over what was once the track of the royal boats; and from the cracks and chasms a bubbling up of hideous black mud, rolling on and actually surrounding that old house that we saw building. The bog had long ago begun to grow up about it, but now it is to be buried in this pitchy stream of decayed vegetation. See how the mud fills up the house, and how it flows on to the hearthstone, and covers up everything, leaving only a level black surface, on which vegetation will soon again sprout and spread.

A century passes away, and the house is covered deep; and the oak is hidden, both the scraggy root and the fallen trunk. The mossy surface is strong enough now to bear the tread of small animals; and some one of them has dropped an acorn in a favourable spot, where it sprouts and grows; so that an oak strikes root on a level considerably higher than the old one, even directly over it. There is a new layer of firs, and more are tumbled down from their places on the hills. There is a new race of people in the land, who do not suspect that there was ever a lake occupying the space usurped by the ambitious and devouring moss. These people wear steel arms and curious dresses, and have come from abroad; and those unaccountable round towers which appear here and there must, one would think, have been built by them. Then comes in another race, with iron armour and utensils, and new wars and ways. How generation after generation, race after race, comes to the edge of the moss, and tries to set foot on it, and draws back, because it is a treacherous slough! And how they pursue their enemies to the shelter of the forest, and slay them and the wolves together! And how, when this is found dangerous and troublesome, they fell whole acres of the woodland, to destroy the harbourage of man and beast; and the moss grows and spreads, and rises all the while, to receive whatever falls from the hills, and swallow up all that lies at their base! Ah! there is to be a new prey for the cruel moss in consequence of this felling of the woodland. Fugitives, outlaws, rebels, must have a place of refuge. The limestone hills are laid bare, and a rough grass, which affords no shelter, is soon the only covering of the ridges. See how the hunted fugitives learn by necessity to walk where wolf and wild-cat would not venture! First, they shoe themselves with light boards, or plates of wicker-work, and go fearfully into the swamp; but soon they learn how to pick their way from clump to clump of moss and heath, and can go best barefoot. They find out dry spots where they can hide their heads and kindle a sod to warm themselves, secure from being followed by armed men whose weight would sink them. One has ventured, and presently sunk, stifled in black mud: there sticks his body, without other burial. Another has tried, and perished at once – drowned in dark brown water. Day by day, for scores of years, must their bones dissolve in the juices of the bog – the skull melting and evaporating, and the brain and muscle shrivelling up, and the skin turning to leather in this natural tanpit. The antique cattle are lying far below, the modern men near the surface, the hazel with its nuts, the oak with its acorns, the yews and firs in successive layers, all tanning together in this mighty tanpit of four thousand acres, without break.

And what is to be the end of it? Is the moss to go on growing, till it has swallowed up all Ireland? Oh no; for a wall is enough to stop its growth; and there are strong rivers to stop it in more directions than one. This bog will not outgrow its four thousand acres; and indeed, if that space does not satisfy the ambition of the little moss, it is hard to say what would. The change is sad and dreary enough. Instead of forests, we see hills, carpeted, it is true, with oats and grass, but without a single tree. We see, instead of gleaming lakes and bright alluvions between, a dingy, brown expanse, tufted with hillocks, and … But what is this? What are these people doing?

What are they doing? They are visiting the little moss with retribution. It is very late, after thousands of years: but the hour of retribution has come at last. There are plenty of people engaged in undoing the work of so many ages, and beginning a new era on this spot which has seen so many changes. Which corner shall we look at first?

Here are men probing the bog, to find a good place to dig in on their own account. They trench deep; and, having pared away the loose fibrous sponge near the top, find beneath a brown peat, which they know will be worth digging out. But below that again is a black peat of a closer grain; and this goes down and down, blacker and denser with every foot, from having borne the weight of more centuries, and the pressure of a thicker overgrowth. Into the trench dribbles and drips the black water which has been imprisoned so long – too far below the sunshine to be evaporated, and too far away from any natural channel to flow down into any stream. It is hardly like water now – salt, astringent, and spirituous; but it will still reflect the blue sky from its surface, and it can run away down hill, as fast as ever. As it dribbles out and runs away, the banks of the trench sink, and the soil becomes more compact. The poor come to slice the peat away, and cut it into oblong pieces like bricks, and set the pieces on end in little groups to dry; and when they are dry, pack them into a sort of large hamper, which is fastened on a truck drawn by an ass or pony – the whole being dignified with the name of a car. There goes the train of cars along the road – the burial procession of the little moss, which is being carried to its funeral pile.

What is that group of buildings at the edge of the bog – the tall chimney – the brick houses – the curious range of metal pipes, dripping and splashing with water – and the yards, with sheds, and tubs of black liquor, and spirituous and pungent smells hanging all about, and men, bearded and begrimed, flitting about the place?

Why, this is the very centre of retribution, whence vengeance goes forth against the usurping moss. This is the headquarters of those who have pledged themselves to the utter annihilation of the destroyer. These are the premises of the Irish Peat Company, of whose enterprise we have given some account before. They undertake so to deal with the peat moss as that it shall be utterly decomposed, and every part turned to use. They have taken in hand five hundred acres of this bog; and there, scattered as far as one can see, are one hundred labourers – men, women, and children. The trenches are so wide and deep as to be like little canals. The depth is already fourteen feet; and it is understood that it is to go down to thirty-two feet. To the eye, the mass of peat appears inexhaustible. There are the men, barelegged in the trenches, slicing the vegetable earth, and throwing it up, to be caught by the “catchers” above, who, for sixpence a day, receive and deliver the sods. There are the women who, for sixpence a day, place or set up the sods, and turn them to dry. There is something picturesque in the wild scene; the brown waste in clear contrast with the blue hills; the lines and patches of sunlight, catching a bunch of yellow weeds or purple heather here – a little pool there – a group of women or of diggers elsewhere. These people say that it was quite another sight last February, when the scene was wrapped in flame. They say it was a frightful sight; but it must have been, as a mere spectacle, very grand. A man had carried out a live sod into the bog with him, to light his pipe. It was far away from the Company’s land: but fire observes no boundaries. The man piled up his little heap of fuel about his sod, and blew up the spark. It was a windy day; and the heap burst into flame, and the flame burst away to seize upon anything that would burn. The spikes of fire shot up the slopes of the turf stacks of the Company. The stacks (called clamps) were burned from the top downwards – no less than sixty-eight of them. The flame went leaping, running, and dancing towards the buildings, and threatened to devour them; but they were saved. It was the river that stopped the mischief at last, and not till six hundred pounds’ worth of damage had been done. This was a great blow to the Company; though no triumph to the little moss. Fewer people have been employed since; the tone of the establishment is relaxed, and its spirits are lowered. But its demolition of the works of the little moss is as thorough as ever, within the scope of its operations. There is the great furnace, into which air is perpetually blown by the steam engine. If we peep within certain slits in the furnace door, we see the gases alight, fuming and dancing – blue and yellow – keeping everything within reach at a mighty heat. Elsewhere there is the tar, oozing hither and thither: and the oils in casks, scenting the air; and the paraffine, of which candles are to be made, but which now is seen in the form of yellow waxy cakes, blistered and unshapen, and lying between oily woollens. It has had some of its oil pressed out; but it is to be steamed and bleached, and squeezed in the hydraulic press, before it is fit to make such candles as those which were lighted, as a specimen, on the table of the House of Commons. And there lies a lump of salt – salt got out of the vegetable decay of the spot where the ancient inhabitants ate their food without salt. There is not much in this salt, however, that would give a relish to food. It is worse than the flakes that whiten the shores of the Dead Sea. The minutest grain poisons the palate and throat for many hours. And there is a great heap of slag – the black, light, shining refuse of the small part of the peat that is actually burnt. Here is the little moss so treated as to come out, for human use, in the forms of sperm, oils, salt, spirit, and gases. This is being used up, with a vengeance. The work, however, seems not to be carried on with altogether so much activity as the little moss used in building up its vast structure. It is said on the spot that all the declarations of the chemists have been made good; that the most sanguine anticipations have been proved reasonable: and there is talk of building more furnaces, which will employ more men; of employing forty or fifty men upon the Works (exclusive of the peat digging) instead of the fifteen who are at work there now. We hope that all this may prove soberly and accurately true; and that the success of this one only establishment of the Irish Peat Company may lead to the opening of others, and to the employment of plenty of Irish labour, and the creation of plenty of Irish wealth. But, at present, the impression on the mind of a visitor is not encouraging. The few people employed look as if they did not know what hearty work was. It appears that little or nothing of the matter is known in Ireland, and that the products are not sold in Dublin, but all go to London. It seems strange that there should be only one languid establishment among the three millions (nearly) of acres of Irish bog, if the bog itself be such a mine of wealth as the first estimates of this process led us to expect. Time will prove the facts. The furnaces once set up, and the products once in the market, the case is fairly on its trial, and must establish its own merits. It has everybody’s good will meanwhile.

What is doing in that far corner of the bog, quite out of sight of the Peat Works? A man digging for fuel is carefully extracting sundry logs of wood. The scraggy roots and lighter branches he puts aside to dry; they are fir, and their fate is to be burnt, as people burn cannel coal in England for the sake of the cheerful blaze in the autumn evenings. Why are the digger and his wife covering up so carefully those blocks of black wood? They are oak, those blocks, and worthy of so careful and gradual a drying as will prevent their splitting. If they split and crack, they will be good for nothing but the fire: if carefully and successfully dried, they will sell at a good price to the carvers. So yonder log is covered with damp sods; and the wife will come pretty often and look to it – turning it, and shading it, and, at last, sunning it, till it is absolutely dry, and so tough that it will not splinter under any treatment. And then it will go into the bare garret in Dublin, and some of it into the comfortless prison where the reckless artist who can make his two guineas a day is confined lor debt. In such places, breathed upon by many sighs, will this Irish ebony be carved, and perforated, and beautifully wrought into forms of the extinct Irish wolf dog, and the national oak, and shamrock, and round tower, and harp, and whatever is Irish. Beautiful inkstands, and paperknives, and snuffboxes, and little trays come out of these long drowned oak logs; and they are of an everlasting wear. A great number of wood carvers make from ten shillings to two guineas a day as their share of the profits from the destruction of the fabric of the little moss.

But what now? See the people running from far and near, and clustering round the ditch in the bog! On they come, in a sort of huddled procession, carrying something. A mummy! actually a mummy! but not swathed like those of Egypt, nor embalmed, except in the primitive antiseptics of the place. He is clad in the skin of a beast, and has a sort of sandal on his feet. He is a man of an ancient race. But we must not judge of the stature of his race by his. He is almost as light as a doll, and as small as a child of ten years old. Well he may be, for his bones were all gone, centuries ago – dissolved in the juices of the bog. His head is just as hard as the rest of him. He is a piece of stiff leather, through and through, from his wasted foot to his shrunk crown. He was one of the first persons murdered by the little moss – probably as he was coming home to his hearthstone from fishing in the narrowing lake, or hunting on the wooded hills. His lot now is to be made a show of in a Dublin museum; and there, alas! to have his leather limbs filched, bit by bit, by persons who believe mummy to be a fine cure for the falling sickness; till at length, to preserve any remains of this antique citizen, he is locked up carefully under the charge of learned men.

This is not the last of the treasures which the moss is compelled to yield up – not by many. Again and again, the surveyors and their men, who are exploring the land and deepening the rivers, gather about some new mystery or marvel. “What is this brown floor on which the spades strike, at a depth of twenty feet from where the surveyor is looking down? The surveyor scrambles down to see. The edge of the floor is found, and they dig down nine feet further, declaring that they have found a cupboard twelve feet square. It is the old house, to be sure, that stood so prettily upon the green. They are finding the paved pathway to the hearthstone, and now the hearthstone; and now they are picking up the charred nuts that were gathered to be eaten thousands of years ago. Instead of being eaten, the destiny of those nuts was to lie in tan for tens of centuries, and then to lie on the shelves of a cabinet for successive generations to wonder at. Something more touching than that is going on at some distance. What can be a more transitory affair than a child’s toy? We talk of childhood itself as transient, gone while we are admiring it; and its toys are childhood’s experience of transience. Yet here is the toy – the wooden sword – that was wielded by a little hand hundreds of generations back. That hand, probably hardened in war and the chase, was dissolved ages ago; and here is the wooden sword, brown, polished, entire, singular in its antique shape, and mysterious as to a certain knob upon it, but otherwise fit to be made a toy again. No child is to have it, however. It has become a grave affair by lapse of time, and it is to lie among the treasures of the Royal Irish Academy for the consideration of the learned. Truly, here the great and the small have lain down together. The mock sword lay lightly, as if put down upon a cushion. Here is something so firmly bedded in, that it seems to be rooted in the rock below. Here are bones, but they are like gnarled limbs of a great tree. It takes a dozen men, with ropes and strong arms, to move the mass. Then up it comes – an awful head of an unknown beast. Can it be the head of a beast? Feel for the spine; dig down along the expanse of shoulder, and the depth of limb. It is the skeleton of an animal. When a naturalist sees a bone or two, he pronounces it an extinct elk; and when it is set up, men gaze up from below, and walk between its legs, and talk wonderingly of the days when the earth contained such gigantic creatures as these. The sea has them still; and in far climes there is the elephant; but that little Ireland should have been trodden by these hoofs – how eloquent it makes our philosophers about the olden time, when the elk came to drink at the margin of our lakes!

At different stages of the cuttings, the woods reveal themselves – some growing (as may be calculated) a hundred years under the roots of others. The compactness of the lowest soil may be judged of by this. In this compact soil lies a stem, its wood of the closest grain. It is the yew that we saw fall one of the first victims of the moss. Where is it last seen in the block? In a garret, where a young artist lays it across his bench, and saws a slice off it laboriously, and indents it with his chisel to show a stranger from over the sea how fine is the chocolate coloured grain, and how well tempered are the tools required to carve such a rare piece of ancient yew.

If the natural lake and woods have been absorbed and devoured, it is no wonder that the artificial islands are dissolved. The stream is to flow here again, and the people are deepening the channel. In doing so, they come upon a curious variety of old treasures, scattered abroad. The more modern iron and steel weapons have been found on a higher level – such as were light enough to be borne up by the little moss. The heavier ones, and the most ancient bronze weapons are found the last – sunk in the soil under the bog. Around are picked up bones the bones of the cattle and game eaten at the ancient feasts; and skins which may have covered boats, or served as clothing. Last of all – down in the sand, half buried in the clay, there is a shining of gold. Those old ornaments are there, once more glancing to the sun now that it is too late ever to know what was the race that wore them, and why they were shaped and worn as they were. Here are the cheek plates, and the diadems, and the gorgets, and the heavy cymbals, and the strange rings, and the twisted coronals and belts. Here they are! and when they too are locked up in a metropolitan museum, we may consider the little moss pulled up by the roots, and visited with its full retribution.

The long series of ages is past; the valleys have been filled up with sponge, four thousand acres large; and they are in course of being cleaned out again. What then? Will the lakes and ponds be brought back, and the woods made to spring afresh upon the hills? Will all things be as they were before, except the men who live there? No: such a restoration as that is a thing that never happens. We should like to see some woods in the hollows, and on the ridges; but there are none planted yet. Where the lake was, the soil is ploughed up, and drained, and fertilised; and the valley will in time be smiling with waving corn and green pastures. Where there were fish, there will be flocks. Where there were perishable islands, there will be human dwellings. Where there was the howling of wolves, there is already the lowing of herds. Where there were murderous conflicts with barbaric swords, there will be reaping and binding by men armed with nothing worse than the peaceful sickle. So we may hope it will be in the end; but there are hundreds of acres of desolation to clear away first. It is only in prospect and in purpose that we have yet plucked up the little moss by the roots.

The English

Passport System

Household Words, Volume 6, page 31

About thirteen years ago, a Quaker was walking in a field in Northumberland, when a thought struck him.

Well! what of that? There are men walking in fields in Northumberland every day; and there are Quakers walking in fields everywhere in England, at all times, and all with some thought or another in their heads. What is the wonder of that particular case, thirteen years ago?

Why, the idea was a noticeable one. It has produced some rather important results – results which make that walk in the field a matter of considerable consequence to everybody who reads this page.

The man who was walking was named Thomas Edmondson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in life. He was a man of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself now as a railway clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot in the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he wished might be done by a machine: – how tickets might be printed with the names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the month, and all of them, from end to end of the kingdom, on one uniform system. Most inventors accomplish their great deeds by degrees – one thought suggesting another from time to time; but, when Thomas Edmondson. showed his family the spot in the field where his invention occurred to him, he used to say that it came into his mind complete, in its whole scope and all its details. Out of it has grown the mighty institution, of the Railway Clearing House; and with it the grand organisation by which the railways of the United Kingdom act, in regard to the convenience of individuals, as a unity. We may see at a glance the difference to every one of us of the present organised system – by which we can take our ticket from almost any place to any other, and get into a carriage on almost any of our great lines, to be conveyed without further care to the opposite end of the kingdom – and the unorganised condition of affairs from which Mr Edmondson rescued us, whereby we should have been compelled to shift ourselves and our luggage from time to time, buying new tickets, waiting while they were filled up, waiting at almost every joint of the journey, and having to do with divers Companies who had nothing to do with each other but to find fault and be jealous. If we remember what the Railway Clearing House is, and what it does; if we remember that what it does is precisely what it saves travellers and merchants the trouble of doing; if we remember that the two hundred clerks of that establishment dispose of above fifty millions of matters of detail in the course of a year, we shall see that Mr Edmondson’s idea has saved a good deal of trouble to a good many people besides himself.

It was thought a fine thing, and justly, when one railway was complete, for a short distance. It was thought a splendid thing that railways should be opened in various parts of the country; and when it was arranged that some of them should meet at certain points, people asked whether so grand a thing was ever heard of before. But there was something grander to come: a plan by which a dozen Companies should unite to carry a passenger and his carpet bag as far as he wanted to go, and save him the trouble of dividing the fare among them by doing it themselves. In the central spot at the Euston Square Station where the Clearing House may be found, the railway Companies have their mutual charges computed and the balances struck and cleared, day by day, from the twelfth part of a schoolboy and his box to the charges on “horses, carriages, and corpses,” which, the orders declare, “are not to be included in the parcels” transmitted during the day. It would be cruel to torture the reader’s imagination with a precise account of what the business is that is accomplished by that courageous band – the two hundred clerks of the Clearing House. It is enough to say that they examine and record the business of (we believe by this time) a thousand stations, with all their complications. Now, if we consider what these complications are – that, for instance, for passengers alone, without regarding the transmission of goods, the changes on a single line of thirty stations may amount to six thousand nine hundred and sixty, we shall shrink from looking more closely into the bewildering business of the Clearing House. The letters received and sent off amount to many thousands per day, and there is a staff of lads whose business it is to open and sort them.

Some of us who have travelled on very short, or very insignificant out of the way lines may have seen, up to yesterday, paper tickets – yellow, blue, or pink – printed in ordinary printing presses. There are a few such; but they are now quite exceptional. The little cards blue, for the most part which gentlemen stick in their hats and ladies carry in their gloves, are Mr Edmondson’s tickets; and they are now well-nigh universal in the United Kingdom, and familiar in France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, the West Indies, and Peru. It is rather confounding to the imagination, in the first instance, to see, as we did the other day at the patentee’s office in Dublin, the boxes of cards that had arrived from Delarue’s, to be printed. A square deal box, such as would nicely hold a lady’s bonnet and be light enough to be carried by the lady herself, is, when packed with these cards, a heavy load for a porter, and a fatiguing sight for unaccustomed eyes. It is fatiguing to think of the crowd that would be formed by the railway passengers who will be transmitted by means of this one boxful of cards. Assembled in Hyde Park or on Salisbury Plain, they would be very alarming in the eyes of the Pope or Louis Napoleon. There are cards of six colours; and of a few more devices. It would be convenient to the printers to have them all alike; and it is no matter of rejoicing to them when any Company fall in love with some parti-coloured device, requiring double printing, or other special management. There is so much convenience, however, in certain cases, in the tickets being distinguishable at a glance – as the Scotch by a thistle at the back, and different Scotch lines by a different grouping of the thistle – that the pattern book of the patentee will probably always have, as now, a few pages filled with specimens of devices.

We are now to see these tickets printed. But we have first to dispose of our surprise at seeing how circumscribed and quiet is the agency by which so vast a work is accomplished as the providing of the passports of all Ireland. We would not, for all the benefits of travel, exchange our passport system for that of any country on the continent. Here is no staring in one’s face, as if one were a criminal, to note the colour of hair and eyes, and the shape of one’s visage. Here is no dismal anticipation of future annoyances, of bearded inspectors, of dirty fisted hirelings, who will turn over one’s clothes in one’s trunks, and inspect a washing bill, as if it contained treason and insurrection. Here we have a moderate sized apartment, fitted up with little besides the apparatus, and tenanted by two neatly dressed, cheerful faced, kind spoken Friends – young brothers, who quietly work out here the invention of their honoured relative. It is in this one room, and by that bright, clean, handsome apparatus, that millions of railway passports are prepared. There is a larger establishment at Manchester; but here this modest one is all-sufficient, as it is easy for one pair of hands to print two hundred tickets per minute, and possible to print three hundred.

The first thing about the machine which catches the eye is an upright mahogany shaft, about two feet high, large enough in the inside to contain a pile of blank tickets, laid flat upon each other. Hidden within the machine is a little form of type, containing the names of the places to be printed, and the class of carriage. The practice of printing the fare is now nearly abolished, it being found to occasion great loss and inconvenience in case of the fare having to be altered; which must now and then happen. The type is inked by a saturated ribbon, which travels over a wheel, and is brought into contact with the form. A feeder withdraws the blank tickets incessantly, one by one, from the bottom of the pile, and passes them under the form of type, which is pressed down upon each as it proceeds to the opening where it presents itself, face uppermost, to the printer who is working the lever, so that he can see that each is right and complete, before it falls into its place in the receptacle below. As we have said, two or three hundred can pass under his eye every minute that he is at work. But each one of these tickets bears a different number, from 0 up to 10,000. Two brass-banded wheels, so close to each other as to look like one, and each bearing raised figures, revolve at different rates with the working of the rest of the apparatus, the distance of one figure at a time for the units, and the second wheel, the distance of one figure at a time for the hundreds: so that the tickets present a numbered end to the eye of the printer, as he works his lever. Lest there should be any mistake, however, through a moment’s lapse of attention on the part of the workman, there is a Checking Machine – also the invention of Mr Edmondson – by which the printed tickets are finally tested. They are piled in a shaft, and dropped, one by one, by the turning of a handle which turns also an index, numbered; so that the number turned up and the ticket dropped should correspond. This process is so easy that six hundred per minute can be disposed of.

There are specimens in this room of all the receptacles for tickets invented by Mr Edmondson; the Issue Cases, of various prices and constructions, from the small one needed at a little rural station or on board a steamer, to the great cupboard required at any central railway station. There are the shafts or columns which are to be kept supplied with tickets, the undermost of which tickets is to be drawn out by the touch of a fingertip; and there are the slips of slate on which the clerk is to note down the number of the ticket with which he begins his issue for the train then in hand. There are drawers or cases, with compartments, with similar slips of slate for humbler uses. There is also a more important little machine than any other but the printing machine – the Dating press. We are all familiar with the click of the sort of bottle jack which stands on the counter of every booking office; that machine into which the clerk pushes one end of the ticket he is selling, and from which it comes out dated. This is Mr Edmondson’s convenient dating press, which does its work without any further trouble to the clerk than his changing the type the last thing at night for the next day, and seeing now and then that the ribbon is duly saturated with the mixture which is to ink the type. Let us see – what is there besides in this quiet little Dublin office? There is the box of type, in the slits of which are the arranged types – the names of the stations, all ready to be transferred to the form in the machine. And there is a neat mahogany slide or case, in which the printed tickets are marshalled, to be tied in packets of two hundred and fifty; and whence they are taken to be packed in their proper drawers, in readiness for the orders which will certainly be coming in soon. In the general directions issued, in the form of a pamphlet, to all clerks in charge on railways, it is the first order that they are to be incessantly careful to keep a sufficient provision of tickets from their own station to every other to which passengers are booked: and especially when fairs, or other incidents, are likely to cause an increased demand; and next, that the tubes are to be duly replenished with tickets, the lowest number being at the bottom. Each clerk had need be careful to watch lest any of his stock should be misplaced; for, if too high a number gets abroad, he must account for all below it. The rule is, that the clerk must make good all deficiencies, and pay over all surplus money. This is no hardship to an able and honest clerk, who will not get wrong in his accounts; and it is a necessary rule, if the vast host of railway clerks is to be kept in any order at all. But it renders a sharp lookout a matter of indispensable self-defence to the official who lives under such an ordinance. After the closing of the hatch in the booking office, the account of the passengers just despatched has to be made out; and this is done by means of the numbering on the ticket. The closing number that went away by the preceding train is booked; and at the bottom of the tube is the lowest number remaining; the number between the two is that which has now to be accounted for – that, of course, of the passengers who are now whirling away to their several destinations. The clerk has to record twice the closing number of the tickets for each train; that is, in the compartments at the station, and in the proper column in the passengers’ ticket book, which is ruled and printed for the purpose. There are returns, in a puzzling number, to be filled up daily, several of which are connected, more or less, with the records involved in the delivery of these wonderful tickets. We will not perplex ourselves with them now, but merely glance at the trouble occasioned by any passenger omitting to supply himself with a ticket, or to deliver it up on leaving the platform at any intermediate station; and again, at the business – no trifle – of tying up in one mass the tickets of every arrival train, after the passengers are off and away, into a hundred homes, or inns, or new trains. These used up tickets are marked with the numbers of each class from every other station, and transmitted to the check clerk’s office by the first through train the following morning. Thus it is seen that these tickets are the currency by which the bargain of travel is carried on, and without which the business would be as clumsy as a state of barter is in comparison with one of established monetary arrangements.

And how did the invention of Mr Edmondson reach this extent of perfection?

On his machines may be seen the name of Blaylock; Blaylock was a watchmaker, an acquaintance of Edmondson’s, and a man whom he knew to be capable of working out his idea. He told him what he wanted; and Blaylock understood him, and realised his thought. The third machine that they made was nearly as good as those now in use. The one we saw had scarcely wanted five shillings’ worth of repairs in five years; and, when it needs more, it will be from sheer wearing away of the brass work, by constant hard friction. The Manchester and Leeds Railway Company were the first to avail themselves of Mr Edmondson’s invention; and they secured his services at their station at Oldham Road, for a time. He took out a patent; and his invention became so widely known and appreciated, that he soon withdrew himself from all other engagements, to perfect its details and provide tickets to meet the daily growing demand. He let out his patent on profitable terms – ten shillings per mile per annum; that is, a railway of thirty miles long paid him fifteen pounds a year for a license to print its own tickets by his apparatus; and a railway of sixty miles long paid him thirty pounds, and so on. As his profits began to come in, he began to spend them; and it is not the least interesting part of his history to see how. It has been told that he was a bankrupt early in life. The very first use he made of his money was to pay every shilling he had ever owed. He was forty-six when he took that walk in the field in Northumberland. He was fifty-eight when he died, on the twenty-second of June, last year.

When we glance over the Railway Reports of the United Kingdom for a single year, it may strike us that a vast deal of riding has come out of one solitary walk – a prodigious machinery of convenience out of one turn of a sagacious man’s thought. It is not an exaggeration to attribute a considerable proportion of the existing passenger traffic to the skilful administration of tickets, any more than it is to ascribe much of the increase of commercial business to the institution of a convenient currency. The present number of travellers could not have been forwarded if their tickets must still have been torn off printed sheets or books, and filled up with pen and ink. If it be said that this is one of the inventions which is sure to come because it is so much wanted, and that Thomas Edmondson happened to be the man: we may safely say that he was the man who conceived a vast idea with the true sagacity of genius, and worked it out with industry and patience, and enjoyed its honours with modesty, and dispensed its fruits with honour and generosity. We do not know what his best friends need claim for him more.

Triumphant Carriages

Household Words, Volume 6, page 121

After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that there is less wear of shoe leather in Ireland than in any Christian country in the world. In Ireland, when a man ceases to go barefoot, he somehow or other rides. This is a curious and a rather serious matter, which may be looked at in more ways than one. The deficiency of a middle class in Ireland is a solemn and mournful truth, on which it is not now our business to enlarge. We do not mean, of course, that there is no middle class; nor that it is much smaller in the half-dozen chief towns of Ireland than in considerable towns elsewhere. In fact, a town is impossible without a broad middle class stratum on which to found its institutions. What we mean is, that over the greater part of the surface of Ireland there is spread a thin population of uncomfortable people (as we should think), with a noblemans seat, and the mansions of a few gentry somewhere near; and very few shopkeepers, or farmers, or merchants, to transact the business of those above and below them. My lord’s family and the gentry ride and drive, of course, as lords and gentry are wont to do: and the poor people walk – without shoe leather. They are, no doubt, less uncomfortablable than they look to English eyes; for in good looks, in health, strength, and merriment, they seem to beat the English and Scotch all to nothing – that is, between June and the new year, when they have their potato crops to feast on (and they do consider it feasting to eat potatoes, in comparison with all other food). How it may be with their looks and spirits during the rest of the year we cannot say from personal observation; but it is well known that they have never, under any circumstances, any desire to be plagued by the consideration of shoe leather. They like a cast in a vehicle very well; but they excuse themselves from wearing shoes, even when there is a handful of banknotes in the thatch, or a handsome litter of pigs under the bed, or half a dozen sleek cows wading among the ragwort and thistles in the field. You may see the fishermen’s wives walking barefoot on the sharp rocks and rough shingle, looking for bait, or bringing up the lobsters. You may see the peasant women, with stout red petticoats and blue cloaks, or gay yellow and red shawls, trotting and skipping barefoot over the bogs, finishing with a grand hop over the last ditch into the road, on the way to chapel, market, or fair. If the last, they are probably carrying stockings and shoes in their hands, to be put on when within sight of the spot: but the same pair may last a lifetime, if worn only at such times, and in such a manner.

If you travel near a bog in autumn – and that is a thing sure to happen to the tourist in Ireland – you will occasionally see a dingy procession on the road before you, which looks, from a distance, like a small brown funeral. When you come nearer, you see a dozen or so of large hampers, without lids, filled and piled up with dried peat, in the shape of bricks; each hamper being mounted on a rude sort of truck, and each truck being drawn by a small donkey. On the truck is somewhere perched a boy, man, or woman. Time seems to be of small value; for these cars are proceeding as slowly as possible, exactly in the middle of the road, till your driver calls out that if the people do not clear the way, he will bring the Police upon them. Then heads pop up from behind the hampers, and voices shout and scream, and donkeys scramble, and the way is cleared, half a dozen children catch hold of your carriage, and run for half a dozen miles, begging for a halfpenny. This is, we believe, the lowest order of Irish carriage. Then comes the superior sort of turf car, made of upright slips of wood, sloping outwards, so as to look like a square basket of rails upon wheels. This is light and pretty, and serves well for carrying peat, hay, animals, and whatever the farmer has to convey that is solid. Our substantial country carts and waggons are rarely seen – and still more rarely the farmers’ gigs which abound on English roads. Besides that, there are few men in Ireland answering to our farmers; they prefer their “outside car” to our gig and very reasonably. That “outside car” is the most delightful vehicle we know of – so light and well balanced, that a horse can draw a greater load for a longer distance than an Englishman can believe, until he sees it: so safe, that it is scarcely possible to apprehend an accident: so convenient, that it has been praised till people are tired of hearing of it; wherefore we will say no more about it. After this come the handsome carriages, made in Dublin, which are much like the handsome carriages seen in London and Paris, and New York, and other places where an aristocracy has to please itself about its means of conveyance.

Made in Dublin, we say. Thereby hangs a tale, which has, for years, interested us, whenever we have thought of Dublin and the Irish, and which may, therefore, interest others. So we will briefly tell it.

In the last century, we must remember, Ireland did not belong to England as she does now. She was yoked to England, but not incorporated with her. There was then no United Kingdom, such as we speak of now. Ireland was subject to our monarchs, and had a Viceroy living in Dublin, as representative of the Sovereign; but she had her own Parliament, managed her own affairs, and had much less claim on the aid, fellow feeling, and co-operation of England than now, when the representatives of the whole people of our islands sit in the same legislature, and become more united in their real interests, year by year. In those days it was all-important to Ireland to have flourishing branches of industry of her own. One of the best illustrations of the wisdom and folly of that day is the coach making business, for which the Messrs Hutton have made Dublin famous.

In 1779, Mr John Hutton, a worthy citizen of Dublin, set up a coach manufactory in Great Britain Street. All that we know of his business during the first ten years is that it was successful. There was no doubt about that: but his friends believed his success to be owing in part to the central situation of his factory, while he knew it to be owing to the goodness of the work done there. When, in 1789, he removed to Summerhill, where the factory now is, he was told that he was going out of the way of the great thoroughfares, and that the citizens would desert him. His reply was, that if his carriages were good, people would come to Summerhill for them; and so they did, for the business became a very fine one, employing a large number of men. It was easier to make carriages then than now. That is, there was less variety: less science was put into the business: people did not think so much of securing lightness, of consulting speed, of economising room, and so on. We can judge of the carriages of those days by the pictures of them. We remember the heavy coaches that George the Third and his family used to ride about in; and it strikes us with a kind of grief, even at this day, to remember how different might have been the issue of events if, at the time of Mr John Hutton’s removal to Summerhill, one of the carriages that may be seen there now, had been in waiting, with the same Count Fersen to drive it, for Louis the Sixteenth and his family, on the occasion of their attempt to escape to the frontier. When they left their own carriage, at a little distance from Paris, it was to enter a berline, which was so heavy, and went so slowly, that they were not out of sight of people who knew them when daylight came. To be sure, they blundered so dreadfully that they had but a poor chance anyway: but a lighter carriage would have incalculably improved their case; and then, if they had got away, how different would have been the fate of Europe, ever since, and at this day! The gallant Count Fersen drove well and did his utmost; but what could be the speed of a coach half as big as a drawing-room, filled with a stout gentleman and ladies in hoops, and drawn by horses jogtrotting like those which, in our day, convey our old-fashioned squires to church, in all the leisure of Sunday morning? So the unhappy family were caught; and all but one lost their lives in consequence. The surrounding nations made war, and the fate of Europe and the world was changed for evermore.

Meantime, Mr Hutton’s workmen went on making carriages, without thinking much of changes, or dreaming that they should have to learn anything new; although the whole world was changing, and finding itself obliged to learn. The Irish rebellion – one of the most mournful events in history – took place; and then the flag with the united arms of Great Britain and Ireland, floated from the Tower of London and the Castle at Dublin, on the first day of the century; and Mr John Hutton went on growing rich, and his men went on making coaches in the old way, never imagining that anything could be better. The coaches were eminently good, certainly; and Mr Hutton chose that they should continue to be so. More Irish gentry now went to London, and they saw and valued all recent improvements in carriages. In 1806, one young son came into the business, and in 1811, another; and it may fairly be supposed that these young men might introduce some new ideas, and infuse fresh spirit into the business. However this may be, it is clear that the men – some few of them – at this time made up their minds to manage the business in their own way, and allow none but friends of their own to be employed.

One April afternoon in that year (1811), they waylaid and cruelly beat a fellow workman, named Davis, on the ground that he had been a saddler originally, whereas he was now foreman of the harness makers in the factory. The folly of this act presently appeared. Owing to Davis’s ability, the firm had been able to make some harness at home which had before been imported from England. When Davis was disabled, the importation was renewed, and several men lost their employment – none of them being qualified to fill the place of the injured man. On the twenty-seventh of the same month, some of the malcontents concealed themselves in the factory, instead of going home from work; and in the course of the night they destroyed the linings of several new carriages, and cut and defaced the panels, carving on them the names of obnoxious persons, and threats to their employers.

It was now time for Government to interfere. A reward of two hundred pounds was offered for the apprehension of each of the first three persons who should be convicted of either of the offences which signalised that unhappy month. As for the Messrs Hutton, they were fully aware of the importance to their country of sustaining such a manufacture as theirs; and they knew that it could be done only by their conducting their own business in their own way. They reasoned kindly with their men, even affectionately, showing them the true state of the case, while they declared that they would submit to no dictation, but conduct their manufacture in their own way, or retire from business. By this time, the manufacture was so large, that the whole city was interested in its continuance.

In 1812, it was found to be desirable to bring over an accomplished coach painter from London. No man was removed to make way for this Richard Couchman. The benevolent employers hoped to provide work for new men by every improvement they introduced; but some few of their people were rather muddle-headed – confounding the employment of an Englishman in Ireland with sending over Irish work to be done in England; which last was exactly the misfortune which the Messrs. Hutton were striving to avert. They knew that the Irish gentry would buy carriages in London (now that every body was frequently going to London), unless they could have them at least as good for the same money in Dublin. Richard Couchman gave a supper to his fellow workmen on his arrival, according to custom. On that night (in December, 1812), one of his guests, Arthur Conolly, told him that the Irishmen did not want any Englishmen among them, and that he, for one, would not have his work found fault with. This man had been originally a labourer in the yard, at eight shillings a week. He had been taught a branch of the business by Mr Hutton; and was now receiving excellent wages as a painter. After this supper, he became so morose and sullen, that his employers, at the suggestion of Couchman himself, raised his wages to twenty-eight shillings per week, to remove from his mind any notion that he was supplanted, or out of favour. Nothing would do, however; and he so conducted himself, that it was necessary to discharge him the next June.

On the twenty-seventh of August, as Couchman and another workman were going home in the evening, and just as they had parted, Couchman was felled by a blow on the head. He was not at once perfectly insensible. He felt many more blows, “as a sort of jar,” saw many legs, the glittering of weapons, and the ends of bludgeons. He saw also the face of Conolly and of one Kelly; and so did the comrade he had just parted with, who was also struck, and had a narrow escape. It seems to carry us back to a very old time, to read that these two men – Conolly and Kelly – were pilloried. They were imprisoned for two years, and pilloried three times.

And now came out the civic heroism of the benevolent employers. They were very rich, and they might have withdrawn from business. But they knew the worth, both of the principle for which they were contending, and of the maintenance of such a manufacture as theirs. They knew themselves to be in peril of their lives. They went out to their country houses every evening well armed. But they issued addresses to their men, brave as benevolent – in which they avowed that they knew the guilty ones among their people, and had their eye upon them; that they would not yield a single point on any compulsion whatever; and that they preserved their sincere attachment to the faithful among their workpeople, to whom they would be faithful in return. They escaped attack. The two sons are living now. If it had been otherwise, all Ireland would have rung with the shame; for their munificence was too great to be kept secret by their modesty.

In 1824, there was another conflict; but it was much less serious. The coach smiths of the city of Dublin complained of the importation, by the firm, of certain articles of wrought iron, different from what they were accustomed to make; which was, of course, the reason of the importation. The firm declined corresponding with any but their own men; but pointed out to them that not a forge or a man in Ireland was thrown out of work by their importation, while there was increased employment for everybody else engaged in coach making. The business had grown prodigiously within forty years, and this was owing to the liberty the firm had so carefully guarded, of improving their manufacture to the utmost; a liberty which they meant to keep. Their men, however, had not yet grown wise. Some of them refused to touch the iron work imported from England. This stopped the manufacture, of course, as far as the new material was meant to be applied. The firm issued an admirable address to the rest of their people, promising to employ them as long as it was possible to do so; but showing that this could be but for a short time, if the carriages could not be finished. They had already offered to set up in business two of their own smiths, to copy the English patterns, supplying them with capital, material, and apparatus, and paying the same price as in England: but the refusal of the offer showed that the aim of the men was to preclude recent improvements, and compel their employers to make coaches in the old way, and in no other. On this occasion, there appeared to be very great danger that the firm would be obliged to close their manufactory. This, though it would have thrown several hundreds of persons out of bread, would have been a smaller evil than allowing the business to perish under the ignorant dictation of a small proportion of the workpeople; but it would have been a wide spreading misfortune – how serious can hardly be fully understood but by those who have seen that factory as it is at this day, when there is but one mind among all who are busy within its walls.

It will have been observed that none of the conflicts, during all this long course of years, had been about wages, or hours of working. There had been no possible ground for it; for the firm had never been in combination with other employers against the men; although the men had been in combination with others against the introduction of English improvements. The practice of the firm had always been to pay liberal wages, in order to secure the best work. They hired the labour which suited them – which was always of the highest order that could be obtained. If the men were satisfied, they supported them against all encroachment and injury. If the men were not satisfied, they let them go in all good will, and, if it was possible, helped them to settle themselves more to their minds. There was little of this parting, however; for the best men knew when they were well off. They were maintained in sickness, pensioned after long service, watched over with vigilant goodwill; and wise men were in no hurry to throw away friends who would do this.

The time came when the advantage of such an understanding was put to the proof. In times of distress, the carriage is the first luxury laid down by those who must economise, and it is the last thing to be purchased by those who can do without it. We all remember the years of distress from 1836 to 1843. At that time the younger of the two brothers was alone in the business – the father having died long before, and the elder brother being at that time the member for Dublin, with O’Connell for his colleague. It had long been foreseen that there must be some decline in the business from the increase of railroads. To this was added the seven years’ distress. Mr Hutton stood between his men and utter ruin as long as possible. His large capital enabled him to allow his stock to accumulate: but the time came, towards the close of 1842, when he was compelled, in order to keep on his men, to reduce their work and wages slightly. There were persons who endeavoured to make mischief between him and his people on this occasion; but he easily made himself understood by giving his reasons, and the facts of the case. After that came the famine, and with it, of course, a prodigious falling off of business. The Irish gentry could not buy carriages while the people were starving, and the rates were heavier than many could pay. And when affairs began to come round, and there seemed to be a prospect of better days, a terrible accident happened. His family being absent, Mr Hutton was sleeping in town, when a servant rushed into his room in the middle of the night, crying out, “O, sir! the factory is on fire!” He was on the spot instantly, in time to save the Lord Mayor’s grand carriages, which were wanted the next day, and which were worth many hundred pounds. The timber yard was safe, happily; a circumstance of great importance, as it takes some years to season the wood properly. But the loss was very great – many thousands of pounds over and above the insurance. It was a melancholy sight to the gazing crowd, to see the carriages brought out – some of them on fire inside, and others cracking and warping, and to know how many more were destroyed. And there was the fear that Mr Hutton would now retire. He was rich; his brother had retired; and he might be supposed to have had enough of it, considering what the last few years must have been. Happily, he has not retired. He has rebuilt his factory, and very nearly brought everything round to its former state of order; and, as there are sons in the business, it may be hoped that the establishment may continue to be the blessing to Dublin that it has been for nearly three quarters of a century.

The timber yard is a picturesque spectacle, of itself. It is a sort of field, attached to the property when Summerhill was “out of town.” The wood is of various kinds. Every wheel is made of three sorts – the spokes of oak, the nave of elm, and the rim of ash. Beech is used for some purposes, but it does not wear so well as ash. The panels are made of mahogany; and some of the upper parts, which are least subject to strain, are of pine, accurately covered with leather. Some of the bent and finely curved pieces, which have to bear a great strain, and on which the beauty of the carriage much depends, are of witch hazel elm. The wood is bent by steam – the stocks actually boiled, to make them flexible. For all this, the wood can hardly be too old: and a great capital is always locked up in that timber yard.

The great showplace of the establishment is, of course, the department where the finished carriages are kept. The variety is quite marvellous to a spectator who, not being worth a carriage of any sort, has never given any particular attention to the diversity out of which a purchaser may choose. But, after all, one may see finished carriages abundantly in the streets, while it is a novelty to, see their skeletons and their separate parts. So we rushed gladly into the upper rooms, which look like an hospital for carriages.

Bodies lay on the ground, bare of covering and of lining, without door or window; every stock and frame and panel staring one in the face, and all the iron strips and bolts open to examination; and the curious little wooden bolts – square morsels studding the inside of the roof and sides, to divide and equalise the strain, and prevent “springing.” To have caught a family of carriages thus en deshabille was quite an event. Then we saw them dressed. There was lining upon lining, before the last silk and lace were put in. We felt the curly, elastic hair with which the cushions are stuffed. We noted the windows: how the inner edge of the frame is made higher than the outer, to prevent the rain oozing in, as it used to do in the days of our grandmothers for want of this simple precaution.

Other changes there are since the days of our grandmothers – one of which we think very striking. Formerly, the keeping a carriage signified the keeping a certain number of servants; and the servants were considered the most important part of the equipage and exhibition. Now, it is plain that carriages are kept, much more than of old, for their mere convenience: and some of the most valued improvements in a coach manufactory are those which enable the occupant of the carriage to dispense with all service but that of the driver. There are newly-invented handles, to open the door from within with a touch; and the opening of the door lets down the step, which is folded under the carriage when the door is shut. There are various screens of recent invention, for keeping the entire doorway and window clear of mud. The medical man in moderate practice, the elderly lady of moderate income, – various people of moderate means – may now have a carriage who could not formerly dream of such a thing. Carriages cost much less than of old; they wear longer; and they can be used without the attendance of a footman. This increased use of carriages may set against their increased durability and lessened cost. Such has been the faith of this firm, while paying high for the best work, and exercising all possible ingenuity in strengthening the structure, and bringing down the cost of its carriages. In its showrooms may be seen from forty to fifty different kinds of carriages, at prices rising from thirty pounds (if we remember right) to one hundred and thirty pounds. There were no Lord Mayor’s equipages, nor great lumbering vehicles, such as old prints show us, with room for several grand footmen behind; but there were some as handsome as any carriages of our own time; and a gradual descent from these to the useful, humble, neat family car – the genuine Irish car, which may, according to tradition, carry the parson and his wife and thirteen children. Against the walls of these workrooms hang large black boards, whereon are chalked ideal carriages, as new notions enter any brain on the premises. Some suggestions obtained in this way have been honoured by the testimony of successive Lord Lieutenants, as may be seen by the diplomas which adorn the walls of the room appropriated to them. From the Exhibition there could be no testimonial, as Mr Hutton was one of the jurors.

We saw here, applied to carriage windows, the curved and bent plateglass which is oftener seen used for lamps. This comes from London. The plated work is chiefly purchased; as are the laces and fringes. One room is gay with the colours used by the painters; and many were the polishers whom we saw at work. The diversity of employments is indeed very great, though Mr Hutton declines making railway carriages; and the public cars, now so numerous in Ireland and so great a blessing to her population, are made by the successors of the inventor, the late Mr Bianconi. There are, on Mr Hutton’s premises, about one hundred and eighty men employed, besides the women who make the carriage linings: and their wages are high for Ireland. The labourers in the yards have eight shillings per week; and the highest wages paid are three pounds per week. These are the two extremities of the scale.

There are no heartburnings there now – no dispute – no mistrust. The principle of the firm is, at length, understood, so as never to be mistaken again. To make the best possible carriages, in order to secure this fine business to Dublin, is the aim; and to use their own judgement as to how this is to be done, is the determination of these gentlemen. Their fellow townsmen now see what a blessing it is that they have been so resolute in holding to their determination. Any stranger in Dublin, who mentions their names, is sure to hear what is now thought of them and their kindly victory.

Hope with a Slate Anchor

Household Words, Volume 6, page 156

Almost everybody knows Killarney – knows about it, at all events, by book or newspaper, if not by the actual sight of it – but scarcely anybody has either seen or heard of Valencia. “Valencia! why I thought that was in Spain,” some one will cry out. “What can Valencia and Killarney have to do with each other?” Why, simply that they are about forty miles apart, and that everybody who sees Killarney should go on to Valencia. It is true, there is a Valencia in Spain; and it is probable that this island is named after that city; for there were Spaniards here, once upon a time, when there was a great trade between Galway and Spain. There were, probably, Spaniards living on the island when the Grand Armada sailed by – fated to lose the great ship, Our Lady of the Rosary, close by, and two more presently after near Kilkee, on the coast of Clare, and more still near the Giant’s Causeway in the north. All Ireland was supplied with wine from Spain between two and three centuries ago; and it is natural to suppose that merchants or agents from the Spanish Valencia might give its name to the Irish island and port – the most westerly port in Europe.

It is a glorious place for scenery; and it might be a glorious one for trade. Perhaps it was once; I am confident it will be, some time or other. There it lies, just within a great bay, spreading out its arms, as if to guard the lake-like sea within; and rearing up mountains, as if to prevent the winds of heaven from visiting its face too roughly. The winds do find their way in at times, however; and they are so very rough with that smooth sound as to prevent the ferry boat passing, and then the people on the island cannot get their letters and newspapers, though they are near enough to the mainland to see the post-bags arrive at the ferry house. The English residents say this is a hardship in winter, for they depend so much more than English people can suppose on their letters and newspapers, in a situation so wild as their island. Last winter, however, there was not a day in which the sound was impassable.

If those waters could tell what has happened on them, and if those mountains on the mainland could echo to our ears the things that have been said in their recesses, we should hear some curious stories. There is one inlet of the sea, which can be overlooked from the island, flowing in among the mountains, turning and winding, round many a promontory, and past many an old dwelling now in ruins; and among the rest, the ivy-grown gable, and roofless front of the house where O’Connell was born. It was up that inlet that smugglers used to steal by night – as the pirates of the olden time had done before them. They used to slip in on one side of the island, while the Government cruiser was watching the other; and up they came, in the shadow of the mountains, and behind the screen of the promontories, lying hid in some chasm of the rocks if the enemy came by; and always winning their way up, sooner or later, to the still dark cove, on whose brink stands that ivied ruin. We must remember that smuggling was then and there considered rather an act of patriotism than an offence. The inhabitants of these coasts were some of the most disaffected of the Irish; and they amazingly enjoyed depriving England, and the English part of their own Government, of the produce of the Customs, while carrying on a good trade with their dear friends, the French and Spaniards, and making their own fortunes at the same time. Not small, therefore, was the amount of smuggling that went forward – if the local histories are true – at that ivied house, and, in a somewhat more genteel and disguised manner, at Derrynane Abbey, the residence formerly of an uncle of O’Connell, and then his own. And the rocks of Valencia itself afford great facilities for the same practice, which used to go on almost unchecked by the coastguard who were, and still are, stationed on the island. I saw their flag, the other day, floating half mast high, in mourning for Wellington. The men have little to do now but to learn and tell the news, when their routine duty is done; for France, Spain, and Ireland are no longer the foes of England, and the reduction of Customs duties has made smuggling no longer worth while; so that the coastguard have but a dull life of it. And so have the constabulary. Poor fellows! there is scarcely anything for them to do, now that industry, bringing regular good wages, has succeeded to the gambling of an illicit trade, with its occasional frays and drunken bouts.

I saw them making the most of a small incident, last Sunday, for want of any more serious employment. In general, they look out, yawning, from the barred windows of their barrack; or rub away at their brass plates and buckles, which are already as bright as the Queen’s dinner service; or lean over a wall peeling an apple, or rush out to see a traveller pass by. On Sunday last, a dozen or so of half drunk young men came over, in a high wind, from the mainland to Valencia, raced to the little inn in a staggering sort of way, took possession of a parlour, where all smoked and talked together; peeped into another parlour where two ladies were sitting – invaded the kitchen and lent a hand to the cooking, shutting up the oven, so as to spoil the apple pie that was baking for the ladies’ dinner – and presently burst away again, declaring that they would have a sail in the sound. The wind was now in a roaring state, and the waves were curling with foam, while Neptune’s sheep jumped up most pertinaciously against the black rocks. Out went everybody to see how the silly fellows would manage: the old landlady, with her shawl over her head, in her little front garden; the neighbours on points which overlooked the sound; and the gallant soldierly constabulary showing themselves on the road and the little pier. Boats were in readiness, and everybody on the watch, with all their clothes fluttering in the wind. There it was presently – that crowded boat – flying along with all its sails out, desperately awry, as if it must fill the next moment. It did not, however. The fellows had better luck than they deserved. They struck the ferry pier at the right place, tumbled out, toppled over each other upon a car, and dashed off upon the Cahirciveen road. The adventure was over; and the constabulary had only to go home again.

Despairing of any higher order of romance than this, I was disposed to see what the industry of Valencia now is. So a comrade and I begged the favour of a resident to let his car to us, on Monday morning, that we might see something that we had heard of – something better than smuggling – up among the hills. We saw that, and a good deal more, in the course of our remarkable drive.

There are two main roads in Valencia – the upper and lower – running nearly its whole length, which is about five Irish miles; that is, nearly seven English. We went by the lower, and returned by the upper. Besides the well known spectacle of the Irish cabin – that sad spectacle, too well known to need to be described again – we saw some curious indications of the ways of the inhabitants. To save the trouble of putting up gates to the fields, each man who had a cart had put it in the gateway. This kept out the cow, but it let in the pigs and fowls; and it did not matter much to the cow after all. She had only the additional trouble of getting over the low earthen fence – which every cow did to get out of the way of our car. One woman had taken her two cows into the potato plot with her – to help her to dig potatoes, no doubt. At a distance, the thatched roofs (weedy, and without eaves) and the walls by the roadside appeared to be vandyked with some pattern of a dirty white colour. On coming near, we found this to be a row of split fish, drying. Fresh fish may be had every day, for the catching; but the people prefer their fish salt. We looked abroad over the sound, but there was not one single fishing boat nor any sort of vessel; but on some high land lay a boat on the grass, the only one we saw. Its being there seemed rather like an Irish bull, while the water below looked so blank for want of it. Next, we were stopped for some minutes. A young farmer had thought proper to choose the middle of the high road for winnowing his crop of oats. There was plenty of high and dry ground at hand; but he preferred the middle of the road: so he had to bundle up his cloth, and shove away his oats, spilling the grain at every move, and turning in despair from us to a cartful of people who came up at the moment on the other side. To complete his embarrassment, the horse in the cart was blind, and could not be made aware of the concessions required of him. After a loss of much time and oats, we were all at our proper business again – the farmer actually dragging back his apparatus to the middle of the road, as soon as it was clear.

Besides the cabins and cottages, we saw, near this road, one solitary, dreary looking white house. It was tall and rather large, with no garden or field belonging to it. Its windows looked as if they had never been opened; its woodwork as if it had not been painted for a century; and its whitewash was grey with weather stains. It was the Cholera Hospital. Not a token of a dwelling was near, but the remains of a mud hut, melted down by the rains. The sight of the place is enough to give the cholera to a nervous person. Before the famine there were three thousand inhabitants on the island. Now, though the intervening years have settled many new residents there, there are only two thousand five hundred. I wonder how many died in that house, whether scores or hundreds! As the country people say, “The cholera found them weak from the hunger,” and carried them off with wonderful rapidity. Of the three thousand residents of Valencia, at the time of the famine, two thousand two hundred received relief in food, as their only chance for life. But no more of this now. I am speaking of a scene of health, and industry, and plenty, for all who choose to seek it.

All the way from the port, our eyes have been fixed on a tower, high up and afar, with a vast green upland between us and it. We want to reach that tower, for the sake of a gaze over the Atlantic. Arriving at a hamlet of cabins, set down one right before another, with a manure heap and puddle between each, we are told that we must walk the rest of the way; and very tempting looks the long green ascent, with a broad green road just distinguishable in the midst. My comrade asks an old woman how far it is to the tower. No answer. She understands nothing but Irish. We try a funny-looking boy; but to every sort of question he answers only – “I know;” and this is evidently the only English he can speak. There is a girl, pelting the cows with peat, to send them out of our way: she speaks English. My comrade asks, “Is there anybody up at the tower?” “Yes, Miss.” “Who is there?” “Only the cows, Miss.” We go to see. There is, indeed, a green road, and it must once have been a fine one, judging by the strength of the little bridges over the water-courses, which look as good as ever. Up we go, up and up, amidst the wondering cattle, some of which lie in our path till the last moment, while others flee, and others again stick out their four legs, and stand fast, as if they thought we wanted to knock them down. One calm-looking munching cow looks benignly at us, as if wishing us a pleasant walk; another, a nervous heifer, seems to prick up her horns as a horse pricks up his ears, and looks disposed to run at us in sheer fright. She scampers off when we look at her, and turns, and approaches as we proceed; and then scampers off again. We find none at the tower. It is too high. For some time we have seen nothing alive but a black caterpillar in the grass, and a wagtail see-sawing its body on a warm stone. Up at the tower, on the topmost stone of its ruined walls, sits a jackdaw, immensely solemn and important, believing himself no doubt the lord of the scene. But we cannot attend to him now. We can see daws elsewhere; but nowhere else is there anything like this scene.

We sit down on the stones which were once the wall, and look down – not, if the truth were told, without some of the aching of the bones which is the miserable pain of those who peep down a precipice, or dream that they are thrown down one. At the same instant, by an odd coincidence, we ask each other whether there is anything whiter than snow, because the foam, rushing and weltering about that rock in the sunshine below, looks to our eyes whiter than any snow we ever saw. We will tell no more of this view from Bray Head, in Valencia. There is no describing the Skellig Rocks, or the black nearer crags, or the dreamy beauty of the inland view of receding mountains, with glittering sounds and bays running in among them. Far out at sea, there are smoke-like showers; but, turning the other way, or looking below, the water is, where not a true Mediterranean blue, a deep green or bright lilac. This ruined tower was erected when invasion was expected; and the green track was the military road, up which went the soldiers and the cannon. There were once two forts below – north and south of Bray Head. They were built by Cromwell. If anything remains of them, they are, with this tower, the property of this melancholy daw, which now is on the move to show us the way down. We must go; for we have not yet seen what we came out for.

We return by the upper road; and my comrade points out that, while there is a well marked foot track on the hard road, there is no trace of wheels. It seems as it our car were the first wheeled carriage that had ever been here.

We observe a stranger thing than this. While the dwellings are so wretchedly thatched as to look like the huts of savages, the fences are patched with slates – the roads are mended with slates – the broken windows of houses that have windows are blocked up with slates. There are slates everywhere but where they ought to be. These slate symptoms show that we are approaching the object of our drive.

After a steep descent, we turn up a left hand road which shows abundant marks of wheels – of wheels broad enough for an ancient Pickford’s waggon. This is the road which ascends to the slate quarries, and down which come those enormous blocks of slate – some of them weighing fifteen tons – of which the world is beginning to hear, and, in fact, has heard a good deal since the Great Exhibition.

A few years ago, people who knew nothing of slate but as a material to roof houses with and do sums upon, were charmed to find it could be made to serve for so large a thing as a billiard table. For billiard tables there is nothing like slate, so perfectly level and smooth as it is. Then, fishmongers found there was nothing like slate for their slabs (till they are rich enough to afford marble); and farmers’ wives discovered the same thing in regard to their dairies. Plumbers then began to declare that there was nothing like slate for cisterns and sinks: and builders, noticing this, tried slate for the pavement of wash houses, pantries, and kitchens, and for cottage floors; and they have long declared that there is nothing like it; it is so clean, and dries so quickly. If so, thought the ornamental gardener, it must be the very thing for garden chairs, summer houses, sundials, and tables in arbours; and it is the very thing. The stone mason was equally pleased with it for gravestones. “Then,” said the builder again, when perplexed with complaints of a damp wall in an exposed situation, “why should not a wall be slated as well as a roof, if it wants it as much?” So he tried; and in mountain districts, where one end of a house is exposed to beating rains, we see that end as scaly as a fish – slated like its own roof. Thus it is with the small houses erected for business at the quarry in Valencia; and the steps leading up to them are of slate; and the paths before the doors are paved with slate. We look in upon the steam engine; and we observe that the fittings of the engine house are all of slate, so that no dust can lodge, and no damp can enter.

It is the quarry that we care most to see; and up to it we go, under the guidance of the overlooker, as soon as he has measured a block of slate with the marked rod he carries in his hand. He is a Welshman – from Bangor – the only person among the hundred and twenty about the works who is not Irish. Is it really so? we ask, when we are in the quarry. There is nobody there – not one man or boy among all those groups – who can properly be called ragged. Many have holes in their clothes; but all have clothes – real garments, instead of flapping tatters, hung on, nobody knows how. Another thing.

These people are working steadily and gravely. If spoken to, they answer calmly, and with an air of independence – without vociferation, cant, flattery, or any kind of passion. Yet these people are all Irish; and they speak as they do because they are independent. They have good work; and they do their work well. They earn good wages; and they feel independent. These are the people who, in famine time, formed a middle class between the few proprietors in the island and the many paupers. The receivers of relief, we have said, were two thousand two hundred. The proprietors and their families were two hundred. These workpeople and their families were the remaining six hundred. They look like people who could hold their ground in a season of stress. This quarry was their anchorage.

What a noble place it is! We climb till we find ourselves standing on the upper tramway, or the verge of a precipice of slate, with a rough wall of slate behind us – of all shades of grey, from white to black, contrasting well with the orange line of the iron mould caused by the drip from the roof upon the tramway; but the ceiling is the most prodigious thing about the place. It is, in sober truth, in its massiveness, greyness, smoothness, and vastness, somewhat like the granite roof in the great chamber of the great Pyramid. It takes away one’s breath with something of the same crushing feeling. And then, look at the groups clustered or half hidden in this enormous cavern. How small every one looks – the men with the borers and mallets, making holes for the blasting; the men with the wedges and mallets, splitting off great blocks: some on shelves high up over head; some in cupboards far within; some in dark crevices in the mighty walls! Knock, knock, knock go the mallets, with an echo following each knock – far, near, incessant; and the echo of the drip heard through all – an echo for every plash.

What are they doing below – those two men with the chain and hooks, that they can scarcely shift? They are fixing the hooks in crevices under that horizontal mass of slate. It rises, and as it rises they shift the hooks further into the cracks, till the block breaks off. When the hooks are in the middle of its weight it rises steadily – why and how? Look at that waggon on that tramway in the air overhead, the waggon way supported on those enormous beams, which are themselves upheld by clamps fixed in the slate walls of the cavern. On each side of that airy truck there is a stage, and in each stage is a man working a windlass, which turns a cogwheel, by which the truck is moved forward or backward. The chains and hooks which are raising the block hang down from this machinery; and as the men in the air work their cog wheel, the men on the ground stand away from under the block, and see it moved and deposited on the truck which is to convey it to the saw mill. That truck is on the tramway below, and a horse draws it to the saw mill, where the block will be raised again by more airy machinery, and placed in the right position for the saws. It weighs only about three tons. A single horse can draw a weight of five tons. The largest size is, as has been said, fifteen tons.

We go down to the sawmills – down, among, and round, hillocks of refuse. The noise in the mill is so horrid – in kind as well as degree – that we cannot stay: but a glance is enough. The engine works the great saws, which here do not split the blocks, but square them, and smooth their sides and ends. The rest is done at the works below – at the port. The grating and rasping can be better conceived than described or endured. Above the blocks are suspended a sort of funnel, from which sand and water drip, in aid of the sawing process. We see this, glance at the curious picture of grey blocks – perpendicular saws, apparently moving up and down by their own will – and superintending men – and thinking how good a spectacle it would be, but for the tremendous noise, hasten away.

On the road down hill is one of the broad-wheeled trucks, laden with an enormous block. We wonder how we shall pass it. We do so, by favour of a recess in the road, and jog on. On the left, opens a charming narrow lane, overhung with ash and birch, gay with gorse, and bristling with brambles. We jump off our car, dismiss it, plunge down the lane, waste a vast deal of time in feasting on blackberries – the dessert to our biscuit-lunch – and at last sit down on some stones to say how good Valencia blackberries are, and how gaudy a Valencia lane is with gorse and heather; and then we talk over, and fix in our memories what we have seen; and finally emerge from the bottom of the lane, explore the dairy and old house of the Knight of Kerry, and proceed on our way to the works at the port, heedless of how the time slips away while we gaze at the lighthouse, and the opposite shore, and far away over Dingle Bay, to the faint blue Dingle mountains. We do, however, at length reach the gate of the works.

We miss the terrible noise of which we had been warned, and which had made itself heard in our inn. The works are, in fact, stopped for the repair of the machinery; and as they will not be going again while we are in Valencia, we can only look round and see what we can. We see on every hand noble slabs of slate, many feet long and broad, and from half an inch to three inches in thickness. Scores of them are standing on edge, leaning against each other, as if they could be lifted up, and carried away like sheets of pasteboard. By picking up a bit that has been cut off, one finds the difference. It is very heavy; and this, I suppose, is the impediment to its adoption for many domestic purposes for which it is otherwise remarkably fit. One boy was at work on a great piece that we could make nothing of without explanation. It had large round holes cut out, as if with a monstrous cheese taster, the slab being an inch thick: and the boy was cutting out pieces of what was left between the circles. It was for the ridge of a house; and in a moment we saw that the pattern was like that of many bargeboards of ornamented cottages. We found that the carving, turning, and ornamental manufacture of slate articles does not proceed far in Valencia, as the London houses do not like rivalship in that part of the business; but in the abode of the proprietor we saw, in an amusing way, what might be done by any one who has a mind to furnish his house with slate.

On entering the garden door, we found, as might be expected, a pavement of slate, smooth and close fitted, leading up to the house. The borders of the parterres were of upright slates; and there was a little gravestone in the grass – in memory, doubtless, of some domestic pet – of the same material The narrow paths between the vegetable beds were paved with slate, and reasonably, considering how wet the climate is, and how quickly slate dries. The sundial and garden seats followed of course. Entering the house, we found, not only the pavement of the hall, but its lower panels, of slate; and this reminded us of the excellence of granaries and barns which are flagged instead of boarded, and have a skirting board of slate, which keeps out rats and mice altogether, supposing the door to be in good order. The saving in grain soon pays the difference between such a material and wood, which rats always can and do gnaw through, sooner or later.

In the hall were an umbrella and hatstand, a slab, and a standard lamp, all of slate. The weight is a favourable quality in the first and last of these articles; but, great as is the advantage of the lamp not being liable to be upset, the colour of slate is too dark. Dark lampstands absorb too much light. In the dining room was a very handsome round table of slate – variegated somewhat like marble, and delightfully clean looking, smooth, and level. Its weight makes it all but immoveable; and this may be an objection: but there is no doubt of its beauty – with its moulded rim, its well-turned stem, and finished pedestal. At the Knight of Kerry’s house we had seen a carved mantelpiece, with fluted pillars of slate; and here we saw other mantelpieces, variously carved. The fenders were delightful; – smoothly turned slopes, which invited the feet to rest and be warmed; – simple, effectual, and so neat as to be really pretty. There was nothing that we liked so well as the fenders – unless it was the paperweights, simply ornamented; or the bookshelves – perfectly plain, with their rounded edges, and their evident capacity to bear any weight. No folios, however ancient – no atlasses, however magnificent, can bend a shelf of slate; and I very much doubt whether the spider can fasten her thread to its surface. No insect can penetrate it; and this indicates the value of slate furniture in India, and in our tropical Colonies, where ants hollow out everything wooden, from the foundation of a house to its roof-tree. Hearthstones of slate were a matter of course in this house; and we wished they had been so in some others, where there has been repeated danger of fire from sparks or hot ashes falling between the joins of the stones composing the hearth. Then, there were a music stand, a whatnot, a sofa table – and probably many more articles in the bed rooms, kitchen, and offices, which we did not see.

It seems to us that we have heard so much of new applications of slate, within two or three years, as to show that the world is awakening to a sense of its uses; but such a display as this was a curious novelty. I believe it is only recently that it has been discovered how well this material bears turning and carving, and how fit it, therefore, is to be used in masses where solidity is required, together with a capacity for ornament. If its use become as extensive as there is reason to suppose, the effect upon many a secluded mountain population will be great. The slate quarrymen of our islands are, for the most part, a primitive, and even semi-barbarous set of people – Valencia being one of the excepted cases. In Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Wales, very important social changes must take place, in whole districts, through an increased demand for slate – better wrought out of the mountain than at present. As for Valencia, not only is its slate far finer, and more skilfully obtained than any we have seen elsewhere; but the workmen are a body of light to the region they inhabit. They marry, when they can, English girls, or girls who have had English training in household ways. Their dwellings are already superior to those of their neighbours; and, if the works increase, through an increased demand, so as to become the absorbing interest of Valencia, the island may become a school of social progress to the whole west of Ireland, where such a school is sorely needed.

The Irish Union

Household Words, Volume 6, page 169

There was a time – even until very lately – when almost any child in Ireland would understand the parable of the house built upon the sand better than an English reader of the New Testament; for, until lately, houses as fragile as any mud dwelling in Palestine, and far more wretched than Jew or Arab ever lives in, were exceedingly common in Ireland. There are some now, but so few that travellers point them out to one another as they pass. I do not mean – I wish I did – that wretched dwellings are few in Ireland. They are fearfully common still; but that particular sort of house – the mud hovel of the lowest order – has nearly disappeared. Wrecks and ruins of such huts, not quite melted away, remain, as mournful objects in the landscape; and it is but too well known what would be found under the rubbish of some of them, the bones of families who died in the famine, and who were buried – no other burial being possible – by tumbling down the roof upon them. But to scores of these there may be only one such now tenanted. I remember one in Connemara made with very little trouble. In a bank or dyke a passage was cut; a bit more bank was heaped up at the further end, and some sticks and straw were laid over the top for a roof. It was in a heavy rain that we saw this, and the shower was washing the yellow mud of the bank smoothly down into the dwelling, almost quenching the peat sods, which sent their smoke out in front. Another, in Kerry, was scarcely like a house; so many furze bushes were growing straight out from the side walls, and the roof was so green with weeds, among which the hens were scrabbling: yet there was a family lodged within, with the pig in the midst of them. A third, in Clare, was down in a sort of pit by the roadside, once a little quarry. The inhabitants had to leap and climb down to it and up from it, and had to live in a pond after every shower, for there was no outlet for the gathered waters. A penthouse of straw and rushes leaned from the side of the quarry, and the front was a pile of clay. There was just room for a great chest, and a litter of straw to sleep on; and the mother and her little children, and the pig, were huddled within the enclosure, when they were not dabbling in the puddle of manure and thick water. On the whole, I think this was the worst I ever saw.

Where do the people live who once lived by thousands in hundreds of such hovels?

They live in the handsomest, and certainly the very cleanest abodes in Ireland; so clean that one might eat one’s dinner off the floors, and look long for a speck on the windowpanes, or a spider in the sleeping rooms; mansions of greystone, of the domestic-gothic style of architecture, with lofty ceilings, vast kitchens, and some acres of ground round the walls; and usually, a blooming garden in front, with bushes of roses and fuchsias, and plots of balsams, with tall evergreens intermixed.

What can this mean? It means that, set down thickly all over Ireland, there are now refuges for the poor, called Workhouses.

The time is past for all argument as to whether there ever should have been these workhouses in Ireland. There they are: and if they had not been there, the greater part of the poor of Ireland would have gone, long ago, into the narrowest house of all – underground. No one foresaw the famine when those houses were decreed, planned, and built. They were decreed in 1838; begun in 1839, and first inhabited in 1841; whereas, the famine, as we all know, did not happen till 1846. The houses never were like English workhouses, nor the inmates like English paupers. In Ireland, working for wages never was the rule among the poorer classes, while subsistence upon charity always was encouraged by the old custom of society, and by the popular religion, which makes almsgiving, without stint and without inquiry, a duty and privilege of religion. There were other influences, too, which made destitution something very unlike what it is elsewhere – less of a fault and a disgrace than it is usually esteemed. The workhouse class, therefore, never was an outcast class. If it was not so before the famine, much less could it be so afterwards. When millions of the population were in want of food, and could have it only there, any line of distinction that might have existed before between the people within the workhouses and those outside must be at once effaced.

At first, the people objected vehemently to go into the house. The large class of roaming beggars, accustomed to whiskey, tobacco, gossip, and idleness, could not bear the confinement to a settled home, where there was work to do, and no pipe or grog; and they cursed the system which drew off so much charity as to compel them to work for their whiskey and tobacco, if they must have them. One such personage would tell a Poor Law Commissioner that he would not know what to do for business but for such as she; but that she would have nothing to say to his big house. And another would declare that he would never enter those doors on any persuasion; – he would work first. Some were sure they could not live upon any diet but potatoes; and all shrank from the necessity of being washed on entering the place. The bath was the grand horror. It was a warm bath; pleasant and comfortable, one would think; but the inmates said – and say to this hour – that the washing is like stripping them of a skin, or a suit of clothes; the feel of the air directly meeting their skins is so new and strange!

All balancing between begging and the workhouse was, however, put an end to when the potatoes failed. In one district, where the workhouse was either unfinished or not large enough for the pressure, there stands a large and lofty mansion near the seashore. It is in a part of Ireland where two or three ancient families have lived in feudal pride, for centuries. The mansion belonged to the representative of one of those ancient families. Encumbered before, this gentleman could not pay the rates required from him in famine time. He offered his mansion for a workhouse. It was hired for the purpose; and it is an auxiliary workhouse still. He could not touch the rent, for it was the due of his creditors.

He petitioned to be made the master of the workhouse and the office was given to him, and in that capacity he presided in that old family mansion. No one can wonder that he died very soon; and it is a sort of relief that his widow and daughters are not now in the house. I saw a crowd of boys’ faces at the windows, and a son of his was there; but I saw also a cottage – a common labourer’s cottage – where his widow and daughters live. They have the rent of the house, and some earnings of their own; and, humble as is their home, it is a comfort to think that they have one to themselves. In such a state of things, it is evident that the Irish workhouses are not a depôt for an outcast class, but a home for those who have been stripped of everything by a calamity which has swept over the length and breadth of their country.

Everywhere in Ireland there are landmarks of different kinds which notify to the traveller what kind of neighbourhood he is in. In one place, he sees a mast with its tackle on a hill, and he knows that he shall presently encounter the coastguard station and the men – some cleaning their arms, some looking out to sea, and some busy about the boats on the beach. Elsewhere, in the wildest places, on the moorlands, beside some little lake – or on a knoll in a valley – glittering white amidst the landscape, is the police barrack; and there may be seen some of the constabulary looking out from behind the grating of the windows; and others lolling over the walls, gossipping, or eating, or smoking – and others, again, stalking about, with their soldierly bearing, as if to show their broad chests and flat backs, and how well they can hold up their heads. When the traveller sees a palace of grey stone, which might be a college, or a national museum – with an edifice in front, and another at hand or behind, of the same stone, connected with the larger building by walls – he knows that he is not far from a town; for this is a Union Workhouse. He feels some wish to explore the interior of this vast mansion; and he probably employs his first leisure hour – if he is stopping at the town – in walking up to it. At least, I did; and, finding a ready and ever eager admission everywhere, I inspected a good many, and found each more interesting than the last.

What a pleasant flower garden this is! gay and bright with flowers. Everybody in the house has access to this garden; and it is plain that nobody does any harm. Ring the bell. The porter opens to us; and when we ask whether we can see the house, replies eagerly, “O yes, to be sure!” He takes our cards to the Master, but intimates that we are welcome anyway; and that perhaps we will write our names in the Visitors’ Book before we leave. On one side of the entrance hall is a room where applicants are received and first spoken to; and on the other, is the room where the surgeon examines them, to ascertain their state of health; and especially, whether they have any infectious disease. If they are healthy, they have only to cleanse themselves thoroughly in the warm bath in the next room, and put on the dress of the house; and then they are ready for admission. Their clothes are seldom worth preserving – being mere strings or bundles of tatters, hung upon them in some incomprehensible way. They could not be taken off and put on in the ordinary way; hence the puzzle about how the poor Irish get into their clothes. The fact is, they are not taken off at all – day nor night. Being off now, they will never be on any shoulders again. They are too flimsy and too filthy to be done anything with even as rags; so they are burnt in the yard. If really garments, and not mere tatters, they are cleansed and laid by, to be claimed by the owner on leaving the house. If he be in anyway diseased, he goes no further at present, but is lodged in a ward at hand, which opens into an airy yard; and there he stays till he is well.

The Master appearing, we exchange greetings and ask him how he is satisfied with the state of the house now. He tells us that it is a very different affair now from what it was. There are not, at present, many more inmates than the house was built for, and two out of five auxiliary houses are closed. In two of the wards, they are still obliged to put two in a bed; but it will be not be for long. At one time, when all the auxiliary houses were open, and the deaths were twenty-five in a day, it yet was necessary to put three into a bed; and, in regard to the children, even four.

Twenty-five deaths in a day! They took place in the infirmary, of course?

Why yes, the greater number did; but it was no uncommon thing to find corpses among the sleepers when they were called in the morning; and several died where we are now standing – died almost before they had entered the doors; and several dropped and died on the gravel walk between this entrance hall and the house. Some had waited too long before applying, hoping that potatoes would rise up from somewhere or other.

It was observable that these poor creatures had always kept one article of property, through their uttermost destitution. They all had their pot, wherein to boil their hoped-for potatoes. If evicted, the peasant goes out with his pot upon his arm. If the family huddle under a hedge for warmth, their pot is in the midst. When they come to the workhouse, they deposit their pot with their dearest friend, looking forward to the day when they shall once more boil potatoes of their own. Some of those who died thus immediately had applied a week or two before, and had received relief while waiting until room could be made for them; but they were too far sunk to bear the removal; and a place had to be made for them in the dead house, instead of beside the fire. Too many of them had fancied that they could not live on the diet of the house, and had held out until they sank for want of any kind of food whatever. Those who thus died, actually within the walls of the house, were usually adults, and chiefly elderly people. The children remained, orphaned at the moment of their delivery into the care of society at large. In 1849, there were eight hundred girls in one workhouse – that at Cavan.

They are the girls and boys that we see next – the boys on the right hand, and the girls on the left, as we proceed to the house. How healthy they look! Their hair, how glossy; their eyes, how clear and bright! But there are several who have lost an eye. That was from the ophthalmia of last year. Alas! is it even worse this year.

How comes that? Nobody seems to know very well; but it spreads most among those who have lived in a crowded and dirty state, and have sunk into a bad bodily condition. Of the girls, as they walk in the sun, or sit together in the shade of the wall, some are knitting, but more are doing crochet work. That sort of work is a good maintenance for a woman in Ireland now. It is an excellent resource, no doubt; but the fashion is hardly likely to last very long; and it is to be supposed that the greater number of these girls will emigrate. Their art will not be of much use to them in an American wood, or on an Australian sheep walk. I hope they are taught cooking, and washing, and plain sewing too. Yes! – and spinning and weaving? Good! – and the boys? The little ones are romping, as the younger girls are – and as both should, at their years. Some of the lads are gardening; and we shall see others in the house. There is no pauper appearance about any of these children. Children could not be more clean and wholesome.

Mounting the steps of the house, we see on the right hand a pleasant parlour, with the remains of dinner on the table. These are the apartments of the master and mistress. Their rooms open into the schoolrooms – the lofty, light, spacious apartments, with their rows of benches, and the platform at one end for the teacher, and the great black board, with its bit of chalk lying ready at hand. These schools are under the system of the National Board, and here may be seen the pleasant sight of Catholic and Protestant children sitting side by side, without any thought of quarrelling on theological subjects. However it may be hereafter, one cannot but suppose that they will be the happier and the more amiable for having thus sat together now.

At an angle of the boy’s schoolroom is the workroom. A steady-looking man is walking about, from loom to loom, seeing how his pupils get on. That little fellow, who is leaning so anxiously over his web, has learned weaving only four days.

The women and girls bring their crochet work up to the likeness of point lace with very little teaching; finding out for themselves how to execute any pattern that may have met their eye. One of these girls, who had puzzled over such a pattern, saw in a dream how to do it, and got up in the night to put it down, that she might not lose it again. And these novices are weaving – rather slowly, perhaps – but without fault, as far as we can see.

What is this furthest room? Oh! here are the aged men sitting in a room which is not a thoroughfare, and where there is no draught. They cower over the fire, even in warm weather. But, these are only a few of them; more are out in the sun, and some are in bed upstairs. The aged women are in a corresponding apartment at the other end; and we go to see them. On our way we find the nursery. It answers to the boys’ workroom. What a strange sight it is – such a crowd of infants. Some can run alone; and they play bo-peep behind the old women’s aprons. Some sit on the floor sucking their thumbs; two or three dozens are in cradles, asleep, or staring wide awake. What is the age of that wonderfully flexible infant, sitting up, and looking all red and brown? About eleven hours! Do children sit up at eleven hours old in Ireland? We never heard of such a thing before, and we cannot fancy that it can be right; but it is to be sure a very fine child. It is a pleasant thing for the old women to have the infants so near at hand. The infirm need not be troubled with them, but the hardier ones seem to enjoy playing granny, and having a rosy cheek pillowed on their withered arms, or watching beside the cradle, or letting bo-peep be played behind their aprons.

We have now seen the whole width of this ground floor. Next, we must see the length. We pass through a yard, and glance into the wash house, where women and girls are busy and merry among the suds, and managing the great boilers. In the adjoining laundry, there are large hot closets, where heaps of clothes are drying in a trice. Answering to these places are the kitchen and shed. In the kitchen, there are large boilers to manage, and a girl, mounted on a stool, is wielding – not the washing staff – but a kind of oar. That is soup she is stirring, with such an exertion of strength. It is the soup that the people have every day for dinner. No – there is no meat in it. They have never been meat eaters. Milk is their only animal food – now, as always. The soup is made of meal, with a variety of vegetables shredded in, and salt and pepper. This, with a loaf of bread made of mixed Indian meal and rye, is their dinner. It is near four o’clock now; and we may see them at dinner presently. Four is their dinner hour; and they have nothing more, unless they like to keep some of their bread for supper: but they go to their beds at seven. Their other meal is breakfast, at nine. For this they have porridge made of Indian meal, very thick and nourishing. The delicate ones certainly grow strong upon this diet, however they may be prejudiced against it at first. The Indian meal that came over when it was first introduced into Ireland was not as good as what we get now; but, if the people now had to live on potatoes alone, there is no doubt they would like to have some meal also. At least, so it has been found, out of the house. They are soon to have potatoes again – just twice a week; and greatly they are reckoning on this: but they may find themselves more fond of the meal than they are aware of. They are now entering the dining hall. Let us see them take their places.

This room is the chapel as well as the dining hall. It is spacious and lofty, and the tables and benches standing across the room instead of lengthwise, give a sociable appearance to the dining. This arrangement is necessary for chapel purposes, no doubt; but it seems an improvement on the old long board. What a change it must be to most of these people to sit down to a clean table, on a clean bench, and with clean hands; instead of huddling round the pot, on a clay floor, half full of stinking puddles.

To us there looks something sad in the uniform meal – the same every day, and for everybody, and served out like the food of domestic animals – the soup poured out from the boiler like wash, and ladled into hundreds of tin pans, all alike. But, besides that this is unavoidable, it is so superior an affair to the former feeding of all this company, and to what they would have, if they were not here, that Sentiment on the subject would be quite misplaced.

This seems a free and easy personage enough; this girl who runs up to us, crying out, in the immediate presence of the matron, “Give me a halfpenny!” She looks uncommonly merry, I must say. The poor thing is crazy. The matron takes her by the shoulders, and makes her sit down to table, where she munches her bread and drinks her soup with great satisfaction, calling to us between every mouthful, “Give me a halfpenny!” That was probably the first thing she was taught to say, and the most earnest prayer she was ever trained to utter. That stout woman of thirty looks merry, too; is she crazy? No, she has not that excuse. She is incorrigibly idle. She has been set up in life many times; last time she showed such horror of the workhouse, that this lady at my elbow collected a little money and set her up with a fruit stall, with the necessary baskets and stock, and had supposed to this moment that she was doing well. But here she is, stall and stock and baskets all gone, and she laughing at being found out.

What a strange company it is! – what odd infirmities, and what a gradation of ages brought together! Did you ever see a clumsier or shorter dwarf than she who is filling the pans? And the young man without a coat, who has lost his right arm – he is not a pauper, surely – seeing his moustache. No, he is employed in the yards; that is all; though he looks as if he fancied himself the master of all and everybody. Looking along the tables, however, and passing over the cases of personal injury from disease or accident, a fine state of health seems to be the rule.

Let us walk forward, and see the boys at their meal. While standing there, a stifled, giggle is heard behind us, and then a clink, which the matron does not hear while talking with that boy. Glancing back, we see the women grinning, the dwarf running as fast as her little legs will carry her after the long-limbed gentleman with the moustache, who is fond of a romp, it seems. She throws a tin pan after him: the clatter rouses the matron; the youth escapes into the yard, and the dwarf is bidden to sit down to her dinner instantly; in the midst of all which, the crazy girl stands up, and cries after us incessantly, “Give me a halfpenny!”

We are to go next to the infirmary – the women’s workroom being empty at dinner time. The infirmary is at the further end of this hall, divided from it only by a vestibule, so that the convalescent may attend chapel without going out of doors. At first we see only a sprinkling of sick people; a room where the extremely aged are in their comfortable beds; their palsied heads shaking on their pillows, and their half-closed eyes looking as if the sleep of death were visibly creeping over them: and another room where three or four young mothers are recovering from their confinement. These, we are told, are, like many whom we saw below, “deserted women.” Their “desertion,” however, turns out to be a smaller affair than the sad word would convey. These women are all wives; and they are, for aught that anybody knows, loved by their husbands. The husbands are gone to earn money for them, and will come back, or send money for their families to follow them. Some who are in England for the harvest, will return, with the funds for winter subsistence: but more will spend the money in going to America, from Liverpool or Bristol, where they will earn more money still, and send for their wives, after a year or two. Meantime, the women seem to make very light of their “desertion.” The whole thing was planned by them and their husbands, no doubt; and they are looking forward to better days, in a home beyond the sea.

And now we come to the strangest suite of rooms of all. At the first glimpse, it is like entering an arbour. The walls are coloured green, and all the window blinds (which are down, although the windows are open), are green also. There is a green tinge, from the reflection, on all the white pillows and sheets, and on the faces of all the patients, who are lying in precisely the same posture, and as if asleep, – all those scores and hundreds of them, from end to end of all the wards. They are all “down in the ophthalmy.” The only difference, except in age, in any wardfull of patients is, that some have wet rag laid across their eyes, and others have the rag on the pillow ready to be put on at any moment. It is a very mournful sight. That little boy of four years, admitted into the female ward for convenience – the beautiful child with the long lashes lying on his blooming cheeks, – is he to be blind? Or the delicate looking girl of twelve, with her bright hair lying all about her head in thick waves; or those mothers who listen for their children’s voices from the playground, and will soon have them in their arms, but may never see their faces again – are these likely to be blind? The medical officer, who approaches our party, makes a sign, to intimate that although all eyes are closed, these people are not asleep. We are not likely to forget that. The thoughtful expression of the patient faces, the hand quietly put up to shift the rag, the slight uneasy movement of the head mutely telling of pain, are all-sufficient signs of wakefulness. As soon as we are in a white light again, the surgeon says that he hopes he has turned the corner now: he is dismissing his patients by fifties at a time, and fewer are falling into the disease.

The proportion of those who lose both eyes is very small. Of the forty-six thousand cases of ophthalmia which occurred in the Irish workhouses last year, only two hundred and sixty-three resulted in total blindness; and above forty thousand were cured. Six hundred and fifty-six lost one eye each. These facts seem to show that there must be a lamentable amount of disease of the eyes out of the workhouses; for the large number of one- eyed persons whom we met in all the towns makes such a number as the above appear a mere trifle among the whole population. The doctor cannot at all explain the prodigious extent of the disease. Dirt, crowding, and foul air will account for a good deal of it. May not the glare of the whitewash in some of the auxiliary workhouses, and in some of the better villages, have something to do with it? This white dazzling glare may be trying to eyes already weak, perhaps. And the peat smoke in cabins that have no windows or chimney? That may aggravate a tendency. And is it, can it be, true that the people give themselves the disease – rub their eyes with irritating matters, to obtain a berth in the infirmary? Yes: it is true with regard to some of the slighter cases. There are always some who would suffer a good deal to avoid work, or to obtain the superior diet necessary in ophthalmia. It is strange and sad; but we are comforted by hearing from the doctor that the little boy, and the young girl, and those indispensable mothers, are likely to be as well as we are, very soon.

The idiot wards have been taken for these ophthalmic patients. They can be well spared. The three or four idiots in the establishment are quite inoffensive, and may be allowed to bask in the sun, or to cower over the fire. At first, when it was proposed to bring the poor creatures here, the neighbours were shocked, not only at the cruelty, but at the impiety of the notion. Regarding the disease as a sort of sanctity, they could not endure the thought of any confinement – of any “prison” – for these helpless beings who would be sure to pine within stone walls. There is no pining, however; nothing but more warmth and cleanliness, and better air, and greater security of food than elsewhere. Most of them are now cared for, in lunatic asylums; but in every workhouse, there may be found one or more idiots, as if to complete the character of the place as a refuge.

The Matron produces a key. We are to see the dormitories, which are kept locked after the morning sweeping and airing. They are curious places; long rooms, with an aisle or gangway along the middle, left by platforms on either hand, about ten inches high. On each platform lies a row of bundles, each bundle being a bed for one person – unless a pressure of numbers compels crowding. The mattress is tied in the form of an arch; and resting upon it is a smaller arch, composed of the rug and blankets neatly folded and set up in that form. The beauty of the platform is that it can be kept perfectly and constantly clean, which is more, I believe, than can be said of any bedstead whatever, liable to promiscuous use. The beds being lifted away, the platform can be swept and scoured like a floor, and it everywhere looks like a new deal table. In three hours’ time the people below will come up in detachments, be told off into their wards, untie each his or her bedding, and go into a bed as clean as in a gentleman’s house. Ah! how unlike the sleeping accommodation I have seen in many a better cabin than these people came from – bedsteads standing in a slough of mud, with potatoes stowed away underneath, the turf stack within reach, the hens perched on the tattered counterpane, and little pigs rubbing their snouts against the ricketty headboard!

As we are about to leave the room, somebody bursts in, crying, “Give me a halfpenny!” and is instantly turned out. Nobody – not even the crazy girl – is allowed to enter the dormitories after they have been locked for the day. To divert the girl’s attention, we ask her the way to the womens’ workroom; which she shews, saying the same thing the whole time, even in the midst of the whirr of the spinning wheels, and the clack of the looms, where women are singing at their work.

What do I spy on one post of the loom? A horseshoe nailed on. I saw the same thing on the sink, when we passed through the kitchens. The matron is deaf when I ask what it means; then she says it means nothing; and, finally, that she does not know. I am told, aside, that she knows as well as anybody. The horseshoe is there for luck – to keep away evil beings. The matron says, also, that she does not know why so many of the girls and women wear rings – of zinc, apparently, and, for the most part, on the middle finger of the right hand: but it is believed that the matron knows that the girls would part with anything rather than these rings, because they have been blessed by the priest. Some of these rings will be worn in places very far away. These girls are petitioning the guardians – tens and twenties of petitioners at a time – to enable them to emigrate. There is nothing to stay for here; for a workhouse is not a home for life, for anybody who can get a better; and in Australia they are so pressingly wanted – both to spread comfort through existing homes, and to make new homes. The thing will be done. All difficulties will disappear in time, before the reasonableness of the petition.

Before departing, we go to the Boardroom, where the guardians meet. It is in the entrance building, over the hall. Here was planned that strange proceeding, the clearing of the workhouse of the able-bodied, or a certain number of them, without distinction of sex, whereby upwards of twenty girls were thrust out into the world without protection or resource. And here were received the indignant rebukes of a nobleman and a clergyman who did not at all approve of such a method of lowering the rates. As if by mutual agreement, the guardians of several unions did this; and all have been visited with such censure from the Poor Law Commissioners, as well as their neighbours, that such a piece of profligate tyranny is not likely to occur again. We look at the very instructive documents which stud the walls of this solemn room, where the fates of so many human beings are decided; we receive the statistical memoranda we petitioned for, and in return write our names, addresses, and a remark or two in the Visitors’ Book.

As we go away, we stop a minute to see the boys at work in the sloping fallow which descends to the meadow. That bit of ground – somewhere about two acres – has been all dug by the boys, and now they are trenching it, in a style of thoroughness which one would like to see throughout their country. They are regularly taught by a qualified agricultural instructor; and certainly that field of turnips, and the mangold wurzel beyond, clean and strong, do credit to his teaching. It is incredible that the agriculture of Ireland can long remain in its present disgraceful state, when thousands of boys like these go out into the world as able-bodied labourers; and it is incredible that the many thousands of orphan girls who are brought up in habits of cleanliness, thrift, and industry in these refuges, should not produce some effect upon the comfort and household virtue of the next generation. They may not be having the best possible education, but they are receiving one which is wonderfully good for their original position and circumstances. The impression on my own mind is, that those boys are Ireland’s best guarantee against famine, and those girls against fever, in the next generation. If any reader stares at such a saying, let him tell us what better security against these woes he can point out, than a generation of men able and inclined to produce a variety of foods; and of women trained to make the cheapest abode in the land the cleanest and wholesomest. If there is something going on even better than this, we shall be delighted to hear of it. The training is about external things, we grant; but the evils we speak of – famine and fever – are external, in the same degree.

So, this is not a very bad kind of Union that we have visited; and perhaps another Union of which we have heard some angry words, may have its advantages for Ireland after all.

The Famine Time

Household Words, Volume 6, page 214

I was looking, with some amusement, into a backyard in a little Irish town, from the window of a house next to that to which the yard belonged, when my hostess explained to me that the beggarman whom I was watching was irremoveable. He had been turned out by the shoulders again and again, and always came back, refusing to work, and preferring to lean against the corner of the wall, to beg. There was in the yard a more active beggar – the pig. Two stout, merry girls, barelegged and untidy, were sitting on the ground, before a great heap of potatoes and a mighty iron pot. They were sorting potatoes; the better sort for human eaters, the worse for the black pig. The pig was in a hurry, poked in his nose, and had to be driven away. There was a third girl sitting on some steps with her arms crossed, looking idle, and provoking the others – one of whom got into a passion, and showed it, as Irish people do when they get angry.

“Ah!” said my hostess, “we see strange people and strange doings in that yard; and it is not the pleasantest place to overlook. But we are glad enough to see anything like those potatoes and that pig, and people who can laugh, after what we saw in the famine time. For months together that yard was crowded – so crowded, that you could not have thrust in a hand among them – with people groaning and wailing day and night; some dying, and others bringing their dead, till our hearts were almost broken.”

“I wonder how you lived through it,” said I.

“So do we. But we had to rouse ourselves, and do our duty. There were only my husband and Mr Zachariah (the clergyman) to give out the relief by which the whole country side was kept alive. I was often at home, with that yard full of people before my eyes, while my husband was absent – gone to see to the landing of the meal – and I uneasy about him – the people grew so violent! There was always an escort of constabulary to guard the meal from the ship hither; but the people were ready to tear them to pieces to get at the meal. It was bad enough at first, when the Government insisted that the men should work on the roads, to earn their share. The poor fellows could no more work on the roads than my baby could; and they were dropping and fainting by the roadside as soon as they tried. We thought that the worst sight we had ever seen till we saw worse. We knew that the Government could not be aware of the real need, if they could make such a condition; and we were afraid to look forward. It was just then that Mr Yarding – a gentleman of one of the most ancient families in Ireland – brought home his bride to his estate, close by the town. He drove her through the town in as pretty a turn out as you could see; and a neighbour said to my husband, when he looked from the carriage to the people in the street, ‘Mr Yarding will repent that pair of horses before six months are over.’ And so, no doubt, he did. The value of his land sank to nothing: he could not meet the calls upon him, nor pay his rates; and now he is shut up in his own place, the gates locked day and night (Sundays and all), and he dares not look through the bars into the road.”

“And how did you get food for yourselves?” I asked; “and how did you eat it, with that multitude of groaning people before your window?”

“We never enjoyed a meal during that year. There seemed to be a poison over everything. There was no flour to be had good enough for us to give the children; and the officers, and agents, and servants employed in the distribution, were forbidden to buy any of the meal that was sent. This was hard and unjust, and, in fact, it could not be carried out. They got it by sending their servants and buying for one another; and, paying properly for it, they did not feel it was wrong. There were no vegetables to be had but the black, rotting potatoes. We could get a sheep for five shillings, because there was nothing to feed sheep with; and for that reason the mutton was hardly eatable. Nothing seemed to have its proper taste or to be real food at that time or for long after. You were laughing today at the flocks of geese along the road, spreading their wings and straddling away before the car. Well, among all those deserted villages that you passed through, there was not a goose in those days. There was not a pig, not a donkey in all the district, from sea to sea.”

“What became of the donkeys? The people did not eat them, I suppose.”

“Indeed but they did. My husband saw the meat hanging out of their pockets. And worse creatures than donkeys disappeared in the same way. There was, after a time, not a living creature but human beings to be seen from sea to sea, except the horses that brought the meal from the ships. The second time that we thought we had seen the worst was when the meal was sold at half a crown the stone. Think what a price that was! But it was paid as long as there was any money in the district. That yard was as crowded then as afterwards. My husband and his men could not get through the business of serving it, though, to save time, every buyer must tie up his half-crown in the corner of the bag he handed in. It was astonishing the number of bad half-crowns we took in the course of a few weeks: there was no time to look whether the money was good or bad; but my husband had to account for it, of course, as if it was all good. The men would begin at daylight (what a sight it was to open the shutters, and see the people who had been waiting all night!), and they went on kindly all day. Towards evening the men would grow silent, and sigh; and at eleven or twelve o’clock they would say, ‘Sir, you can’t get more out of me than is in me: I can’t do it, sir. I have had no refreshment all this day, and I’m done up. I am willing to stand by the people as long as I can, but I can’t do more than I am equal to.’ Then my husband would say, ‘Well, go to your supper, and my wife and I will turn to again for an hour, lest some of these people should die before morning. But we will shut up in an hour: by that time the worst will be served.’ We did shut up in an hour, leaving, perhaps, sixty or seventy people outside. But when the men had sat down for awhile, and had had their supper and their pipe, they would cheer up; and then they agreed to what my husband said: ‘There are only sixty or seventy. Let us send them away, and then we can perhaps go to sleep, having done our best.’ So we opened again, and went on till two or three in the morning. But that, you see, was while people were still able to pay.”

“How could things be worse when the money was gone?”

“Why, it was almost worse to know where hunger was, without being told, than to have it come before our eyes. We knew pretty well how matters were with some good many people who ceased to send for meal, and who were never to be seen in the daylight: people who lived in good houses, full of good furniture, which of course they could not sell. My husband mentioned this to the Friends’ Relief Committee, and they immediately desired him to do what was necessary for such persons, in the way in which they could receive it. So, when the day’s work was done, we used to put up bags of meal, and my husband would have the horse put into the cart, and he would go round and drop these bags at the proper doors in the dark. A difficulty came out of this, however. They supposed they owed these gifts to my husband; and it was not an easy matter to explain at the time. But – I don’t know – perhaps some sights were worse than knowing things that we did not see. People would come to that window with two baskets, one before and one behind, and – and – a dead child in each.”

After a pause she went on –

“My husband and I used to think that it was the people’s way – they thought it right, of course – to sacrifice one child to give a chance to the rest. We used to observe that one child was particularly petted – always in its mother’s arms – and that one was always excessively emaciated, and died presently; and we used to think its share was given to the others, and –”

“This is unbearable!” I exclaimed. But in a moment I considered what it must have been to see it, and was ashamed. I asked her to go on. She did. It was a relief to her.

“It was a terrible thing to have to go out at that time, and afterwards, when the fever and cholera followed the famine. The dead and dying used to lie in one’s path. One lady, crossing a field through the long grass, found a child – a little girl – hidden there, alive but insensible. She was saved; and so was a little orphan creature of two years old, who had strayed away by himself to a dunghill on the road, where a pig seized him, and would have destroyed him but for a car happening to come up at the moment. There were cases every day of little creatures being found among the nettles, or squatted under turf stacks, or asleep at the door of a cabin where the last of their relations lay dead within. One of those saw the old roof tumbled in on his mother’s corpse. Some neighbour who had just strength to do that did it, because there was nobody to bury her.”

“Has not the lowest class of cabins disappeared since that time, or nearly so?” I inquired.

“Yes. The unroofed cottages, with their stone gables standing up bare – a sight which you think so sad and forlorn – were houses of a better order than the mud cabins you have read so much about. These stone cottages were inhabited by tenants who have gone to America and elsewhere, as well as by people who died of fever and famine. The mud cabins have melted away. Some which you suppose to be dunghills or mud heaps, are plainly ruined cabins to our experienced eyes. No doubt many of them are graves of un-coffined corpses. The bones will be turned up by the plough or the spade some day; and then, when they are found, singly or in families, men will say, ‘ These are people who died in the famine.’ There are many children now in the orphan school who, the last survivors of their families, know that one parent was just hidden in the ground in a bag, and the other without any covering at all, while the brothers and sisters lie under the ruins of the cabin. But, dreadful as is the reason and fearful the way, it is true that the lowest order of dwellings has nearly disappeared: and may they never be seen more.”

“Never, indeed! “ I replied. “Those that remain are wretched enough. And when you used to shut the shutters at night,” said I, “were you able to think at all of other things – to sleep – to cheer one another?”

“Why,” replied she, “I cannot say we were, during the worst – the latter – part of that dreadful year. There were reasons why, with our house full of good children, home was worst of all. There was a fine young man – an excellent fellow indeed he was, and very clever – an officer in the commissariat department, who had been for some time engaged to our eldest daughter. She was very young, to be sure – only eighteen that year: but they knew one another very well; and, in short, everything was ready, and we were getting the license – for we did not like to make them wait longer – when he took the fever. Nothing could keep her from him. He was in a lodging in the town, and lay in a close inner room. I did not know which way to turn myself; but her aunt went with her; and there she nursed him, very quietly, saying little to any body. One day Dr A. came to my husband, and said, if she remained in that inner room with a fever patient, so closely as she nursed him, she would be down in it presently. So her father and I went, and brought her away home to dinner. She made no particular objection when we had once got her away, and we said no more about it, but kept on talking as cheerfully as we could; and she seemed reconciled, and ate some dinner. Soon after, she had disappeared; and we knew where she was. But, by that time, her aunt had taken the fever.”

“And did the young man die!”

“O yes, he died. Her father and I were there; and we brought her away – she, in fact, not knowing at the moment that he was dead. She had to pass the bed, too; but we took her between us, and got her past without her looking in. You would hardly think what happened afterwards.”

I was in no condition for anything but receiving what I was told.

“At first, she seemed to take it quietly; whether because of her aunt being very bad in the fever, or what, I don’t know. But, after a little while, she suddenly went mad – perfectly mad – for nine days. And there were we, with the people in the yard, as usual; and her aunt in the fever at one end of the house, and she mad at the other. That was a time to go through!”

“And did they die too?” I asked.

“They! O no! She is the daughter who was married, nearly two years ago, to the curate of X. She recovered by degrees, till she was quite well. And her aunt recovered too; but it was a great struggle.”

“And how cheerful you look now!”

“O yes. You see, we have always so much to do; that is a great thing for people who have had to go through such a season. The poor creatures who had to die are out of their pain, and buried away; and those who had to emigrate are gone. You observed this morning how healthy the country people look: and so they do. The women have careworn faces; some of them thinking of their dead children, perhaps; and if you were to see them in June, before the cropping begins, you would not think quite so well of their looks as you do now. And it is sad to see the grass-grown roads to depopulated villages; and to see brambles choking up the doors where neighbours used to go in and out; and nettles growing tall where many a woman that I knew used to sit and spin, with her children playing round her – half of them now dead, and the rest in the orphan school or the workhouse.”

“I saw potatoes growing on the floor of one roofless house, and cabbages in another.”

“Very likely. There is no want of heart among the Irish, as I am sure I need not tell you. But, if the hungry can get food out of a dead neighbour’s hearthstone, they must do it, without too much refining. I dare say the cheerfulness of our house may grate a little on your feelings, after all I have told you: but –”

“Do not say a word about that,” I exclaimed; “ I am too glad to see it; I know too well how natural it is, to have one critical thought, to presume –”

“It is natural,” replied she, in her sprightly tone. “Our children are going out into the world – marrying, or otherwise settling, very happily. And there is no very pressing misery about us now, though there is more distress than you see, and the prospects of the district are far from being even what they were before the famine. But it is harvest tune now; and we are gay at harvest time. My husband and I say, however, now and then, that we hope there will be no more famines while we are here; for we do not think we could go through it again.”

Butter

Household Words, Volume 6, page 344

Before our great chemists had told us that an infusion of oil into the human frame was necessary to life, and why, there must have been something puzzling to thinkers, as well as amusing to travellers, in the inclination of all nations for some kind of butter, which must be had, it seems, through all obstacles of climate and productions. We should say, at the first glance, that nobody can get butter of any sort in the Polar regions, nor keep butter for five minutes at the Equator; and there are many regions of the earth besides, which are either burning or frozen, parched or wet, to a degree which excludes the English idea of a dairy altogether. What can the Greenlander do, for instance – living in a country where July is the only month without snow (and not always that); where turnips reach the size of pigeons’ eggs, for a great wonder; and where, in the cold months, the rocks split with the sound of a cannon shot, and the sea reeks as if it was boiling? What does the Greenlander do? Why, he finds oil, thickened by the frost, a delicious butter. He lives in a room where even spirit freezes; and he would freeze too, but for his beloved whale oil, which feeds in him the interior combustion that is always going on in all of us, and that keeps the temperature of the human frame nearly equable in all climates and positions. Then there is the African under the line: what does he do for butter? If we gave him cattle, they would presently hang out their tongues, and conduct themselves very like mad dogs, till, stung into fury by hosts of insects, and panting for breath in an atmosphere like a furnace, they would rave, lie down bellowing, and die. We can hardly suppose that he can milk the lioness or the tigress, which are almost his only animal neighbours. He milks something rather less dreadful – his herd of trees! The next wood is his dairy, and the shea tree is his cow. When he was clearing a space for his hut, he left the shea tree standing. Its spreading shade is welcome for itself; but the fruit, (the African olive) is the most precious merchandise, and the most delicious food to be found in those interior provinces. The white kernel is boiled, beaten, and pressed; and the oil oozes out and flakes into a firm white butter, which Mungo Park liked better than our finest dairy butter. The making, and eating, and selling this substance fills up a great part of the life of the Bambarra peasant, who thus is in strong sympathy, if he did but know it, with our clever neighbour – Paddy on the Kerry Hills.

There is no drier country than the Arabian desert; and no shea tree grows there, nor any other fruit-bearing tree; nor are there oily fish, nor cattle. How then do the Bedouins get on for butter? Why, there is the goat; and the goat’s milk is uncommonly rich and creamy; and the Bedouins steal along all day – in the shade of rocks, where possible – following their goats, which spring from rock to rock, and clamber into all sorts of inaccessible places, to get at every aromatic shoot and every tender spray and green blade that grows in virtue of the night dews. The owner is busy with goats-hair all the while, not making wigs, which is the use we put that hair to, but twisting it into threads and cords, or preparing it for weaving into tent covers. When the shadows lengthen, telling him the hour, he collects the flock, and the kids come bounding to him, and the dams follow more slowly and munch sprouts from his hand while wife or daughter milks them. Some of the milk is drunk fresh; but more is kept. It becomes sour at once, of course; and then there is the oily part to be eaten with lentils, and the curd for a sort of cheese, and the whey for a very favourite drink. Very different are the measures taken in the wettest country – Holland – and none in the world are so successful. Holland supplies more butter to the rest of the world than any country whatever; while, certainly, the Dutch keep up their interior combustion, in the midst of external damp, admirably, by the quantity of butter they swallow. We make the best butter in the world – at least we are pleased to say so – we modest English. We eat all we make, and then look round for more – for the best we can get; and out of every one hundred and thirty-four thousand cwts. that we import, one hundred and seven thousand cwts. are Dutch.

Certainly, if one condition of good butter is that the dairies should be moist and cool, the Dutch have the advantage of most nations. Their dairies, which a breach in the dykes would place at once at the bottom of the sea, are moist and cool as a sea cave. They have other advantages. Their water meadows – level cavities between green dykes – are as soft as a Turkey carpet, with thick, juicy grass; and their milch cows show their fine feeding by being at once, unlike others, fat and good milkers. And then, they are not driven about to be milked, so that the cream at the top of their udders is not half churned before it can be got at, as is the case in places where the cows are driven home to a farmyard, and milked immediately, and, moreover, in the midst of dungheaps and puddles and bad smells. Far otherwise is it with the Dutch kine. As soon as they begin to wish for the relief of being milked, and raise their patient heads to see whether anybody is coming, they may be sure that somebody is on the way. There they come – the milkmaid and the boy. The boy is towing a little boat along the canal, and the maid, with her full blue petticoat and her pink jacket or bed gown, walks beside him. Now they stop: she brings from the boat her copper milk pails, as bright as gold, and, with a cooing greeting to her dear cows, sets down her little stool on the grass, and begins to milk. The boy, having moored his boat, stands beside her with the special pail, which is to hold the last pint from each cow; the creamy pint which comes last because it has risen to the top in the udder. Not a drop is left to turn sour and fret the cow. The boy fetches and carries the pails, and moves as if he trod on eggs when conveying the full pails to the boat. When afloat, there is no shaking at all. Smoothly glides the cargo of pails up to the very entrance of the dairy, where the deep jars appropriate to this “meal” of milk are ready – cooled with cold water, if it is summer, and warmed with hot water if the weather requires it. When the time for churning comes, the Dutch woman takes matters as quietly as hitherto. She softly tastes the milk in the jars till she finds therein the due degree of acidity; and then she leisurely pours the whole – cream and milk together – into a prodigiously stout and tall upright churn. She must exert herself, however, if she is to work that plunger. She work it! – not she! She would as soon think of working the mills on the dykes with her own plump hands. No – she has a servant under her to do it. She puts her dog into a wheel which is connected with the plunger; and, as the animal runs round, what a splashing, wolloping, and frizzing is heard from the closed churn! The quiet dairymaid knows by the changes of the sound how the formation ot the butter proceeds: when she is quite sure that there are multitudes of flakes floating within, she stops the wheel, releases the dog, turns down the churn upon a large sieve, which is laid over a tub, and obtains a sieveful of butter, in the shape of yellow kernels, while the buttermilk runs off, for the benefit of the pigs, or of the household cookery.

In the precisely opposite country – Switzerland, which rises to the clouds, while Holland squats below the sea level – the dairy people go after the cows, like the Dutch, instead of bringing them home. They have much further to go, however. Most of us who have travelled in Switzerland have missed one characteristic beauty of the Alps by going too late. We are wont to say that the awful stillness and steadfastness of the Alps are broken by no motion but that of the torrents, leaping or lapsing from the steeps. In spring there is quite another kind of motion visible to those who have good sight – the passage of the wind, shown by the waving of the grass on the upland slopes. The mower may be invisible at such a height, unless he be attended by a wife or daughter in a red petticoat, making a speck of colour which may fix the eye: but the silvery stoop of the tall grass as the breeze passes over it is a beautiful thing to see, and a charming alternation with the leap of the waterfall. When these patches of pasture are known, the cows are sent up for the summer to graze and live under the open sky: and the daily people, who go up too and live in sheds and huts, follow the kine, morning and evening, and milk them wherever they may happen to be, whether in a grassy hollow, or on a fearful shelf of rock, or by some pool in a ravine. The cows would come if called; they always do when the Alp horn is blown to collect them; but the Alp horn is blown after they are milked, and not before, lest they should make more haste than good speed, and leap down rocky places, and prance homewards, shaking the milk in their udders. If there is the slightest conceivable curdling in the milk before the cream is separated, the butter is spoiled, though the fresh cream may taste very well. The way in which the butter is brought down to the valleys, when the party return for the winter, is curious. All the butter of the season is melted over the fire in large pans, which are shifted the moment before their contents would boil up. They are kept simmering till the watery particles have all gone off in steam, and the curdy particles, which are mixed more or less with all butter, have fallen to the bottom. The butter is then, poured out, like clear virgin honey, into earthen jars, which are filled to the brim and thoroughly closed as soon as the butter is cold. This is one way of preserving butter, and salting it, as the Dutch and Irish do, is another. The choice is between too little flavour and too much salt; and most people who want the butter for culinary purposes, prefer the more insipid to the over salted.

In India, the people can no more do without butter than elsewhere; indeed they want more than most other people, from the evaporation of the liquids of the human frame by the heat. They are a thin race. The sun of India makes war against fat. How, then, can there be butter? There is no butter to eat; but there is plenty to drink, and the people drink it by the coffee cup full at a time. Are you grimacing, reader? Are you saying, like the child who was reading to mamma about a land flowing with milk and honey – “La! how nasty!” Just hear what this butter is, which the natives call ghee, and then judge whether you could drink it. If not, there is an alternative which may save your manners; if anybody should offer you a cup full of ghee, you can anoint your body with it, and pour it over your hair, to preserve you from a coup-de-soleil, or prevent your being shrivelled up like an autumn leaf thrown with the log on one’s Christmas fire. The ghee is not purified from curd; quite the contrary. After the milk has been boiled it is artificially curdled. It is the curd that is churned, and the churning is done simply by turning a split bamboo in both hands, as if it were a chocolate mill. The cry is not for coolness, but for more heat. Hot water is added, and on goes the milling till the butter comes. The hope is next that the butter will become rancid; a hope which is justified in a day or two. Then it is boiled again to get rid of the water, and a little more sour curd is shut up with it, and also a little salt, in jars which go all over India, spreading a horrid smell wherever they are opened, but commanding a constant sale, and a good one, from all who can indulge in the luxury of reclining in shed or verandah, quaffing ghee.

And how is it with the other great, continent – America? Why, in South America there are those vast plains, the Llanas and Pampas, stretching from the base of the Andes to the sea, and from the Orinoco to the Straits of Magellan, on which uncountable millions of cattle are for ever grazing. There can be no want of butter there, surely? So thought people in England till thirty years ago, when it became known, on inquiry, that there was no butter in Buenos Aires. In the season of universal mad speculation which followed, it was resolved to supply the destitution of the Spanish Americans. Science had not then taught us that if any people had not butter like ours, they must have some other sort of their own. So a company was formed, and a shipload of Scotch dairymaids was sent out to manage those fine cows that grazed in that noble pasture. But the poor women were sadly puzzled when they wanted to go to work, as were their employers. Those fine cows were wild. They were caught by violence, and tied neck and legs, in which the milk must have become considerably curdled. The perplexed damsels churned very diligently, but the butter disgraced them sadly, and would not keep; and if it had been as good as at home, it would not have sold, for alas! the natives like oil better. They take olive oil almost as profusely as the Hindoos take ghee. As for our brethren in the United States and the West India Islands, they have the true Anglo-Saxon liking for butter. But it has not yet suited their convenience to graze much, or to set up dairies to any extent, even where the climate is favourable. They import largely from Europe, especially from Holland and from Ireland. The West Indies rank third among the customers of Ireland for butter – Portugal being the first, and Brazil the second.

Here, then, are we brought round to so near home as the Kerry Hills and the pastures of Cork and Limerick. Let us take a run over those hills, and see what is doing.

We suppose we shall find the cows tenderly cared for, judging by the solicitude shown for yonder pig. His owner’s dwelling is a mud cabin, dark except where the decayed thatch lets in the light, and all going to melt into a slough, apparently, with the first rain: whereas, the pig’s house is a truly comfortable affair. It is built against the cabin – in the very middle – for show. Its stone walls are whitewashed; its roof is slated; its entrance is arched. Piggie himself is allowed great liberty. He may roam where he will, with the one condition that he will wear a man’s hat – not on his head, but over his face – the crown being out to allow him to feed. Thus veiled below the eyes, he may wander where he will, unable as he is to root up the potatoes or poke his snout in where he has no business. If such is the care taken of the pig, what may we not look for in regard to the cows? On we go to see. Who is this that wants us to stop? Why does he leave his flock of sheep, and hang upon our car, and rain a shower of brogue upon us passing travellers? – for he is no beggar. He entreats us, and will not take a refusal, to buy, then and there, on our car and on the instant, thirty-four lambs, which he declares we shall have cheap. We have refused, in our time, to purchase and carry away, in the High Street of a town, a barrel of red herrings; also, a mattress. It seems to us even more inconvenient to carry away thirty-four sheep on an Irish car, especially as we want no sheep, and live across the Channel; but the farmer does not agree with us. He presses his bargain on us till compelled by want of breath to drop behind. As we advance, we see a cow here and there stepping into a cabin, as if taking refuge from the evening air in good time while the sun is yet declining. The family receive her affectionately, milk her tenderly by the fireside, and let her retire into the corner to sleep when she likes. How good must the butter be, from a cow so treated! Further on, however, we perceive that all cows – most cows – are not pampered in this way. Early in the mornings, we see them getting up from their beds on the hillsides, the dry space where they have lain being darker and greener than the dewy grass around. They have certainly been out all night. And why not? our driver wonders: the Kerry breed is hardy; and where would they go, if there were not the hills for them to roam over? In which question we join, when we see how many there are.

Here we come to spruce roads, well fenced and arched over with trees; and we meet cars full of gay gentry; and we see the gleam of waters through the woods. Those waters are the lower lake of Killarney; and we are going to cross the lake, and take our time before visiting the dairy farm on the opposite side. Landing to see O’sullivan’s Cascade, we find a man, scantily clothed, and so thin and pale as to appear only half fed, and so eager in showing off the waterfall, as to make us fancy that the pence he expects are of the greatest importance to him. He presents us with ferns and mosses with a trembling hand; he flings his stick into the fall, and scrambles down to catch it in a strange place; he gives a painful impression of going through an antic task for his day’s bread; and he looks delighted at his fee. As soon as we have pushed off, and are out of his heaving, we find that he is the owner of a herd of cows on the mountain; that he drives a good trade in cattle; and has many a firkin of butter to sell to the agent from Cork, when he comes this way. Well! we have seen no one less like a butter manufacturer than the pale showman of O’sullivan’s Cascade. What next!

The next thing is very strange. Two sober, quiet, sensible men are rowing us, and are ready to talk. Finding that one of us has been in Africa, they ask if we saw any enchantment there, as enchantment is said to come from Africa. Luckily, we did; and our story is received with eager interest. The men told us, in the most straightforward way, that they did not believe a word of the stories of the enchantment of the lake we are upon till they saw O’Donoghue himself, in a way which could not be mistaken. Seeing is believing, they said repeatedly; and there is no doubt that they believed what they told us. The well known legend of Killarney is that O’Donoghue and his people, and the city in which they lived, were overwhelmed by the waters of an enchanted fountain, some hundreds of years ago; and that the chieftain appears, once in seven years at least, in the first week of May, traversing the lake as if it were solid glass. Our boatmen had been rowing some workmen over to an island, where they were repairing a cottage of Mrs Herbert’s, and were returning, at a quarter past six in the morning of the second of May – a fine, bright morning – when they saw O’Donoghue come out from the shore of the mainland. He passed close by them, looked at them well as he passed, with his very bright eyes, walked on to the opposite shore, and disappeared in the rock. He wore a scarlet coat, breeches, and a “three-cocked” (three-cornered) hat, with a white feather. The men were so awestruck that they could not speak to him, though they had abundant opportunity. One would like to know what scarlet thing these men could have seen in broad daylight on a fine May morning – Ireland not being a land of flamingoes, or other red waterbirds. But there are other marvellous things seen on the shores of Killarney, having more relation to Butter than this apparition of O’Donoghue. When a hare is found among the cows on May Day, it is a very melancholy enchantment; for, if she be not killed, there will be no butter all summer. The hare is a witch. You may prove that by letting your dogs bite her, and then looking about the neighbourhood, when you will find some old woman ill in bed with wounds in the same places. If you do not kill the hare she will milk your cows in the night, or at least carry off all the cream that is in the milk. The same may be said of the hedgehog. There is another bit of trouble that must be taken to save the butter. The well must be watched till the sun is high on May morning, or some witch will come with a wooden dish in her hand, and skim the surface, mumbling. “Come, butter, come.” If she is allowed to do this, you will lose your labour in churning all that season. If the farmer has not sheds in which to house all his cattle on May eve, he must see that they are carefully fastened into a paddock, and that the four corners of the paddock, and all the beasts, are sprinkled with holy water blessed on Easter Sunday, that nothing evil may be able to get at them. They will be the safer if you give them each a necklace of straw for the night, and also slightly singe each beast with lighted straw, or pass a live coal completely round their bodies. To clear the ground perfectly for a favourable season, there must be a churning, with closed doors, before sunrise on May morning, with an old ass’s shoe nailed to the bottom of the plunger. A branch of mountain ash, gathered the night before, must be bound round the churn before the milk is poured in; and when the milk begins to break, it is well to put a live coal and a little salt under the churn. If the owner wishes to save his best cow from the thefts of witches, he must follow her in the first walk she takes from the paddock or shed, and gather up the soft earth marked by her four feet. If he does she is safe for the season. If he leaves it for the witch to do, the creature will be a dead loss to him, for this season at least. These things are troublesome to attend to, it is true; but if a man wishes to conduct business with a Cork butter merchant, he had better clear the ground thoroughly for the operations of the summer. And here we are at the farm, to see how he does it.

The farm consists of forty acres. One acre is occupied by the house, dairy, yard, and garden; twenty acres are under tillage, and nineteen remain for grazing ground, including bog to the extent of about half an acre. There are ten cows, several pigs, and ducks, chickens, and geese in plenty. Of the twenty acres, a considerable portion is devoted to the growth of green crops – swedes, mangold wurzel, &c. – for the winter food of the cows. The rest is grain – wheat, barley. and oats – which all go to market, the family being fed on the cheaper diet of Indian meal. The bog is not the least useful part of the ground. It yields all the fuel wanted – not only in the shape of peat, but in abundance of firewood of the finest quality. Heaps of blackened, scraggy wood may be seen drying in the sun, and when dry, they burn like kennel coal. Moreover, of the logs of oak found in the bog, the dairy utensils are all made; and the people on the spot ascribe the best qualities of their butter to the use of this bog oak – a persuasion which is regarded as a mistake by the butter merchants of the ports. The keelers, or shallow tubs, various in size, in which the milk stands, are made of inch thick bog oak; and so is the churn. It certainly appears to be completely secure from warping, and from the attacks of insects. Its seasoning has been rather long – some thousands of years, probably; so that the taste of the wood must have gone out of it some time ago. The question is whether that of the seasoning has not succeeded to it?

The dairy is a large shed, with a flagged floor. Along two sides stand the keelers, with their “meals” of milk in order. They stand strangely long before they are skimmed – till the milk is sour and thick: and then the cream stands from two days to a week before it is churned. The people insist that the sourness of the milk does not in the least affect the butter, and that it is great waste to use the milk before all the cream is got out of it; on which point, as on every other in the whole business, the people of Kerry are flatly contradicted by the people of Waterford; both being famous exporters of butter. The milk is not sour enough for the popular taste in winter. With the first hot weather comes the delicacy; and then the dairymaids clap their hands for joy, and exclaim “Now we shall have thick milk.” In the marketplace is the same jubilation; for the milk is sent there for sale, after enough has been reserved for the pigs; and the people relish it with their potatoes far more than sweet – in like manner as they prefer salt fish to fresh. Possibly it might be the same with us, if either article were the only animal food we ever tasted.

As soon as a keeler is emptied, it is scalded with hot water, well laid on with a broom of heather; and then with cold water, in the open air. The churning seems an easy affair enough – the butter coming in half an hour, and never keeping the people waiting more than an hour. Little does that dairymaid know her own bliss, unless she has known what it is to stand churning three, four, five hours, obtaining nothing but froth, fancying she feels the thickening of the milk, and finding, like Dr Johnson, “ nothing ensue,” till she hopes that nobody will speak to her because, hot, tired, worried as she is, she does not think she could speak without crying. Happy is the Kerry maiden, who, having no dog menial, like her Dutch sister, plays the part of machine for no more than an hour at furthest. The butter never fails to be good. she says: a marvel full as great as the gliding of a scarlet coat and a “three-cocked hat” over the lake. It is washed three times. Others say that it takes five washings to leave the water perfectly clear. It is salted in the proportion of half a stone (seven pounds) of salt to fifty pounds of butter. The Dutch exceed the Irish, and everybody else, in the care they take to have good salt. They use only that which is obtained by slow evaporation, and perfectly crystallised. Other people are not so particular. They use salt which may have some mixture of inferior qualities – bitter, or apt to melt; and they must not wonder if their butter is inferior to the Dutch. Our housewives say that the Irish butter is not nearly so good as it used to be. Whether the Kerry women of a former generation were more despotic about their requirements than now, we cannot say; but it struck us that the doors of certain dairies stood too wide open for the entrance of whatever chose to come in, and that the pig’s home was somewhat too near at hand. Some were secluded enough, and as fresh as running water; and we should have liked to be able to compare the produce of the two. When “made,” the butter is pressed down into a firkin (still of bog-oak) salted over the top, and covered close with a cloth. When more is ready to be put into the firkin the salted surface is scraped off, and the butter below so broken up as that the new portion may mix well with it. The ten cows yield a firkin of butter – that is, half a hundredweight – per week. We were told that the merchant pays five guineas per hundredweight (the hundredweight being about one hundred and twelve pounds). We did not believe this at the moment, as the price of Irish butter does not admit of such a payment as nearly one shilling per pound to the maker; and we found afterwards that the payment is rarely higher than three guineas and a half per hundredweight. The closed firkins are conveyed by carts to some neighbouring port or railway, or, failing both, are carted all the way to Cork. Every traveller in Kerry and the neighbouring counties, is familiar with the sight of the barrel laden carts which frequent all the roads; and in every marketplace may be seen, during the summer, an expanse of firkins, filling up more or less of the area. The largest sales are effected in another manner than by bringing the produce to market or to port, to fetch the market price. The needy among the dairy farmers sell their butter beforehand, by contract, to the travelling agents of the butter merchant, who visits them twice a year. They take the price he offers, and are too often glad of the money in advance, and thus subject themselves to bondage. Poor people like these are aground in the winter, when their cows are dry. Less needy farmers manage their stock so as to have milk all the year round, though not enough for the making of butter for sale. The season for that is only five or six months from Mayday. We inquired, at this Killarney farm, whether, in rearing calves, the milk of the best cows is spent upon their calves, or whether the more saving plan is ever resorted to of “ buying a nurse” – providing the calf with an inferior nurse, to save the mother’s better milk. This is a pitch of economy which has not been reached in these parts; and we were amused at the way in which our question was received by one of those Killarney guides, who think it a disgrace not to have an answer ready for every possible question. He was kind enough to inform us that, in Kerry, there is always a person to milk the cows – the cows never milking each other. The cost of a calf, for the three years before she produces, is said to be twopence a day. The food of the whole stock in winter is partly hay, and partly boiled vegetables and bran. A great deal of the profit of the dairy farms of Kerry is derived from the pigs – the exportation of bacon being almost as valuable as that of butter, and the dairies yielding plenty of the best food that can enter a piggery. About one hundred thousand firkins – that is fifty thousand hundredweight – of butter go to the ports annually from Kerry; and in Cork alone there are now twenty-six butter merchants. In Waterford and Wexford there are many; and these give a different recipe for making the article; different with regard to the length of time the milk and cream should stand, and to the methods of washing and salting. But it does not appear that one county excels another in the quality of its butter.

The firkins are emptied on their arrival at the warehouse in the port. Turned upside down after the head is removed, and well slapped, the cask yields up its contents. The butter, as it stands, is then scraped with a wooden knife, its soiled corners and seams removed, and put away to make ointment for sheeps’ backs, and its hollows filled up with fresh butter. It is then powdered with salt of the purest kind, the firkin is replaced over it, it is raised on its right end, and the other is scraped and salted, and when the hoops are put on and the firkin ready for closing, covered with a piece of muslin, which is made to fit accurately, and finally salted. When the head is knocked in, and the weight is proved, there remains nothing but the branding. This is done by stencilling. A metal plate is perforated with the trade marks, and with the name and address of the exporter. Then the number of the firkin is affixed. The metal plate is smeared over with an ink made of lampblack, turpentine, and wax, and the brand stands clear and ineffaceable.

All this is interesting; but there is one thing more left to see. In the office, where the importer has taken us to ascertain some figures, and see the form of entry in the hieroglyphic filled books in which his purchases are recorded, we were shown the largest bundles of banknotes we ever saw. There were two, containing the corresponding halves of severed one pound notes, to the amount of five hundred pounds. One of these bundles was to go by post, and the other by public car, to the agent, to pay the country makers, at the latter end of the season.

Where does all this butter go? Much of it to London; much to Liverpool; much to the Continent. The greater part will find its way to Portugal, unless there should be a quarrel about the Portuguese tariff, which would be a sad thing for the Kerry dairymen. They have sold, this season, thirty-eight thousand three hundred and eighty-nine firkins more than in the season of last year; and it is curious that the Dutch have sold about as much less to us. The reason of the increased production in Ireland – which is felt in all the other ports, beside Cork – is no mystery. The farmer now cannot pay for labour as he used to do, by letting potato grounds to the labourers. Many of the labourers have emigrated, and the rest must have better wages, paid in cash; and they eat meal, instead of potatoes, now that grain is cheap. The farmer finds it safer and cheaper to produce butter than grain for the market. If this goes on long, one may hope that some cheese will be made, somewhere or other among the rich pastures of Ireland. At present, the innkeepers in the remotest districts complain that they have to get every ounce of cheese from London. It seems as if this must be mended soon; and we should not wonder if we have to report, after our next visit to Ireland, as its latest bull, its offer to the stranger of a native Welsh rabbit.

The Deaf Playmate’s Story

Household Words, Volume 6, page 599

Christmas issue

This was one of ‘A round of stories by the Christmas fire‘ told by members of a large family.

I don’t know how you have all managed, or what you have been telling. I have been thinking all this time, what I could tell that was interesting; and I don’t know anything very particular that has happened to me, except all about Charley Felkin, and why he has asked me to go and stay there. I will tell you that story, if you like.

You know Charley is a year younger than I am, and I had been at Dr Owen’s a year when he came. He was to be in my room; and he did not know anything about school; and he was younger, and uncomfortable at first; and altogether, he fell to my share; and so we saw a great deal of each other. He soon cheered up, and could stand his ground; and we were great friends. He soon got to like play, and left off moping; and we used to talk a great deal in wet weather, and out on long walks. Our best talks, though, were after we were gone to bed. I was not deaf then; and we used to have such talks about home, and ghosts, and all sorts of things; and nobody ever overheard us that we know of, but once; and then we got nothing worse than a tremendous rap at the door, and the Doctor bidding us go to sleep directly.

Well; we went on, just so, for a good while, till I began to have the earache. At first, Charley was very kind to me. I remember his asking me, once, to lean my head on his shoulder, and his keeping my head warm till the pain got better; and he sat quite still the whole time. But perhaps he got tired; or – I don’t know – perhaps I grew cross. I used to try not; but sometimes the pain was so bad, and lasted so long, that I used to wish I was dead; and I dare say I might be cross enough then, or dismal, which boys like worse. Charley used to seem not to believe there was anything the matter with me. I used to climb up the apple tree, and get on the wall, and pretend to be asleep, to get out of their way; and then the boys used to come running that way, and say, “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall;” and one day when I heard Charley say it, I said “Oh, Charley!” and he said, “Well, why do you go dumping there?” and he pretended that I made a great fuss about nothing. I know he did not really think so, but wanted to get rid of it all. I know it, because he was so kind always, and so merry when I got well again, and went to play with the rest. And then, I was pleased, and thought I must have been cross, to have thought the things I had; and so we never explained. If we had, it might have saved a great deal that happened afterwards. I am sure I wish we had.

When Charley came, he was a good deal behind me – being a year younger, and never having been to school. I used to think I could keep ahead of all but three boys in my class; and I used to try, hard, to keep ahead of them. But, after a time, I began to go down. I used to learn my lessons as hard as ever; still, somehow the boys were quicker in answering, and half a dozen of them used to get my place, before I knew what it was all about. Dr Owen saw me, one day, near the bottom of the class; and he said he never saw me there before; and the usher said I was stupid; and the Doctor said, then I must be idle. And the boys said so too, and gave me nicknames about it; I even thought so myself, too, and I was very miserable. Charley got into our class before I got out of it; and indeed I never did get out of it. I believe his father and mother used to hold me up to him – for he might easily speak well of me while he was fond of me. At least, he seemed bent upon getting above me in class. I did try hard against that; and he saw it, and tried his utmost. I could not like him much then. I dare say I was very ill-tempered, and that put him out. After I had tried till I was sick, to learn my lesson perfect, and then to answer questions, Charley would get the better of me; and then he would triumph over me. I did not like to fight him, because he could not have stood up against me: and besides, it was all true – he did beat me at lessons. So we used to go to bed without speaking. We had quite left off telling stories at night, some time before. One morning, Charley said, when we got up, that I was the most sulky fellow he ever saw. I had been afraid, lately, that I was growing rather sulky, but I did not know of any particular reason that he had for saying so just then (though he had a reason, as I found out afterwards). So, I told him what I thought – that he had grown very unkind, and that I would not bear with it if he did not behave as he used to do. He said that whenever he tried to do so, I sulked. I did not know, then, what reason he had to say that, nor what this was all about. The thing was, he had felt uncomfortable, the night before, about something in his behaviour to me, and he had whispered to me, to ask me to forgive him. It was quite dark, and I never heard him: he asked me to turn and speak to him; but I never stirred, of course; and no wonder he supposed I was sulking. But all this is very disagreeable; and so I will go on to other things.

Mrs Owen was in the orchard one day, and she chanced to look over the hedge, and she saw me lying on my face on the ground. I used often to be so then, for I was stupid at play, where there was any calling out, and the boys used to make game of me. Mrs Owen told the Doctor, and the Doctor said there must be something wrong, and he should be better satisfied if Mr Pratt, the surgeon, saw me. Mr Pratt found out that I was deaf, though he could not tell what was the matter with my ears. He would have put on blisters, and I don’t know what else; but the Doctor said it was so near the holidays, I had better wait till I got home. There was an end to taking places, however. The Doctor told them all, that it was clear now why I had seemed to go back so much; and that he reproached himself, and wondered at everybody – that the reason had not been found out before. The top of the class was nearest to the usher, or the Doctor, when he heard us; and I was to stand there always, and not take places with the rest. After that, I heard the usher very well, and got on again. And after that, the boys, and particularly Charley, were kinder again; and if I had been good-tempered, I dare say all would have gone right. But, somehow, everything seemed to go wrong and be uncomfortable, wherever I might be, and I was always longing to be somewhere else. I was longing now for the holidays. I dare say every boy was longing for the holidays; but I was particularly, because everything at home was so bright, and distinct, and cheerful, compared with school, that half-year. Everybody seemed to have got to speak thick and low; most of the birds seemed to have gone away; and this made me long more to see my turtle doves, which Peggy had promised to take care of for me. Even the church bell seemed as if it was muffled; and when the organ played, there were great gaps in the music, which was so spoiled that I used to think I had rather there had been no music at all. But all this is disagreeable too; so I will go on about Charley.

His father and mother asked me to go home with him, to stay for a week; and father said I might; so I went – and I never was so uncomfortable in my life. I did not hear what they said to each other, unless I was quite in the middle of them, and I knew I looked stupid when they were all laughing, and I did not know what it was about. I was sure that Charley’s sisters were quizzing me – Kate particularly. I felt always as if everybody was looking at me; and I know they talked about me sometimes. I know it because I heard something that Mrs Felkin said one day, when there was a noise in the street, and she spoke loud without knowing it. I heard her say, “He never told us the poor child was deaf.” I don’t know why, but I could not bear this. And, after that, some of them were always telling me things in a loud voice, so that everybody turned and looked at me; and then I made a mistake sometimes about what they told me; and one mistake was so ridiculous that I saw Kate turn her back to laugh, and she laughed for ever so long after. Altogether, I could not bear it, and so I ran away. It was all very silly of me, and I know I was very ill-tempered, and I know how Mr and Mrs Felkin must have found themselves mistaken about me, as a friend for Charley; but I did not see any use in staying longer, just to be pitied and laughed at, without doing any good to anybody; so I ran away at the end of three days. I did so long to come home; for I never had any doubt that everything would be comfortable at home. I knew where the coach passed – a mile and a half from Mr Felkin’s – very early in the morning, and I got out of the study window and ran. Nobody was up, though, and I need not have been afraid. I had to ask the gardener for the key of the back gate, and he threw it to me from his window. When I was outside, I called to him to bid him ask Charley to send my things after me to my father’s house. By the roadside, there was a pond, under a high hedge, and with some dark trees bending over it. It just came into my head to drown myself there, and I should be out of every body’s way, and all this trouble would be at an end. But ah! when I saw our church steeple, I was happy! When I saw our own gate, I thought I should go on to be happy.

But I did not. It was all over directly. I could not hear what my mother whispered when she kissed me; and all their voices were confused and everything else seemed to have grown still and dull. I might have known ail that; but somehow I did not expect it. I had been vexed that the Felkins called me deaf; and now I was hurt at the way in which my brothers and sisters used to find fault with me for not hearing things. Ned said once “none are so deaf as those that won’t hear;” and my mother told me, every day, that it was inattention; that if I were not so absent, I should hear as much as anybody else. I don’t think I was absent. I know I used to long and to try to hear till I could not help crying; and then I ran and bolted myself into my own room. I think I must have been half crazy then, judging by what I did to my turtle doves. Peggy had taken very good care of them; and they soon knew me again, and used to perch on my head and my shoulder, as if I had never been away. But their cooing was not the least like what it used to be. I could not hear it at all, unless I put my head against the cage. I could hear some other birds very well; so I fancied it must somehow be the fault of the doves that they would not coo to me. One day I took one of them out of the cage, and coaxed her at first, and tried every way; and at last I squeezed her throat a little. I suppose I got desperate because she would not coo as I wanted; and I killed her – broke her neck. You all remember about that – how I was punished, and so on: but nobody knew how miserable I was. I will not say any more about that: and I would not have mentioned it but for what it led to.

The first thing that it led to, was, that the whole family were, in a way, afraid of me. The girls used to slink away from me; and never let me play with the baby – as if I should strangle that! I used to pretend not to care for being punished; and I know I behaved horridly. One thing was – a very disagreeable thing – that I found father and mother did not know everything. Till now, I had always thought they did: but, now, they did not know me at all; and that was no great wonder, behaving as I did then. But they used to advise things that were impossible. They used to desire me to ask always what everybody said: but we used to pass, every Sunday, the tombstone of old Miss Chapman; and I remembered how it used to be when anybody saw her coming in at the gate. They used to cry out “O dear, here comes Miss Chapman! What shall we do? She will stay till dinner time, and we shall not get back our voices for a week. Well! don’t tell her all she asks for. She is never satisfied. Really it is a most dreadful bore,” and so on, till she was at the room door. This was because she would know everything that everybody said. I could not bear to be like her; and I could not bear now to think how we all used to complain of her. It was only from a sort of feeling then that I did not do what my father and mother told me, and that I was sure they did not understand about it: but now, I see why, and so do they. One can’t tell what is worth repeating and what is not. If one never asks, somebody always tells what it is best to tell; but if one is always asking and teasing, people must get as tired of one as we were of poor Miss Chapman.

So, I had to get on all alone. I used to read in a corner, great part of the day; and I used to walk by myself – long walks over the common, while the others used to go together to the meadows, or through the lanes. My father commanded me to go with the rest; and then I used to get another ramble by myself. There was a pond on the common, so far like that one in the lane I spoke of, that it put me in mind of what I mentioned. I used to sit and look into the pond and throw stones in. I began to fancy, now, that I should be happier when I got back to school again. It was very silly when I had once been so disappointed about home; but, I suppose everybody is always hoping for something or other – and I did not know what else to hope. But I keep getting into disagreeable things and forgetting Charley.

One night when the elder ones were just thinking of going to bed, I came down in my nightclothes, walking in my sleep with my eyes wide open. The stone hall, so cold to my bare feet, awoke me; but yet I could not have been quite awake, for I went into the kitchen instead of up to bed again, and I remember very little about that night. They say I stared at the candles the whole time; but I remember Dr Robinson being there. I seldom slept well then. I was always dreaming and starting – dreaming of all sorts of music, and of hearing the wind, and people talking; and then of all sorts of trouble from not being able to hear anybody; and it always ended with a quarrel with Charley, and my knocking him down. But my mother knew nothing of this, and she was as frightened that night as if I had been crazy. The Doctor advised them to send me to school again for one half-year, and see how I got on after some experiments had been tried with my ears. But I want to get on about Charley.

Charley arrived at school, two hours after me. He seemed not to like to shake hands, and he walked away directly. I saw he did not mean to be friends; and I supposed he felt his father’s house insulted by my running away. But, I did not know all the reason he had – neither then, nor for some time after. When we became friends again, I found that Kate had seen how hurt I was at her laughing at me, and that she was so sorry that she went up to my room door several times, and knocked, and begged that I would forgive her; or that I would open my door, and speak to her, at least. She knocked so loud that she never doubted my hearing her; but I never did, and the next thing was that I ran away. Of course, Charley could not forgive this; he was my great enemy now. In school, he beat me, of course; every body might do that: but I had a chance in things that were not done in class, – such as the Latin essay for a prize, for instance. Charley was bent upon getting that prize, and he thought he should, because, though he was younger than I, he was a good deal before me in school. However, I got the prize; and some of the boys said it was a shame. They thought it was through favour, because I had grown stupid. They said so, and Charley said so; and he provoked me all he could – more on Kate’s account than his own, though, as he told me afterwards. One day, he insulted me so in the playground, that I knocked him down. There was no reason why I should not now; for he had grown very much, and was as strong as I had ever been, while I was nothing like so strong as I had been, or as I am now. The moment he was up, he flew at me in the greatest rage that ever you saw. I was the same: and we were hurt enough, I can tell you – both of us – so much, that Mrs Owen came to see us, in our own rooms (for we had not the same room this half-year). We did not want to tell her anything, or to seem to make a party. But she somehow found out that I felt very lonely, and was very unhappy. I am sure it was her doing that the dear, considerate, wise Doctor was so kind to me when I went into the school again – being very kind to Charley too. He asked me, one afternoon, to go for a drive with him in his gig. The reason he gave was, that his business took him near the place where my father and he used to go to school together; but I believe it was more that we might have a long talk, all by ourselves.

We talked a good deal about some of the fine old heroes, and then about some of the martyrs; and he said, what to be sure is true, that it is an advantage for any one to know clearly, from beginning to end, what his heroism is to be about, that he may arm himself with courage and patience, and be secure against surprises. I began thinking of myself; but I did not suppose he did, till it came out by degrees. He thought that deafness and blindness were harder to bear than almost anything. He called them calamities. I can’t tell you all he said: he never meant that I should: but he told me the very worst; and he said that he did it on purpose. He told me what a hopeless case he believed mine to be, and what it would cut me off from; but, he said that nothing of the sort could cut a person off from being a hero, and here was the way wide open for me: not for the fame of it, but for the thing itself. I wondered that I had never thought of all that before; but I don’t think I shall ever forget it.

Well! When we came back, there was Charley loitering about – looking for us, clearly. He asked me whether we should be friends. I was very willing, of course: and it was still an hour to supper; so we went and sat on the wall under the apple tree, and talked over everything. There, we found how much we had both been mistaken, and that we did not really hate one another at all. Ever since that, I have liked him better than ever I did before, and that is saying a great deal. He never triumphs over me now; and he tells me fifty things a day that he never used to think of. He says I used to look as if I did not like to be spoken to; but that I have chipped up wonderfully. And I know that he has given up his credit and his pleasure, many a time, to help me, and to stay by me. He will not have that trouble at school again, as I am not going back; but I know how it will be at Charley’s home, this time. I know it, by his saying that Kate will never laugh at me again. I believe she might, for that matter. At least, I think I could stand most people’s laughing, now. Father and mother, and everybody, know that the whole thing is quite altered now, and that Charley and I shall never quarrel again. I shall not run away from that house again – nor from any other house. It is so much better to look things in the face! How you all nod, and agree with me!

Mr Wiseman in Print

Household Words, Volume 8, page 339

Mr Wiseman is one of those inestimable personages who have a “view.” As the world cannot go on, nor society be governed, but by means of somebody’s “views,” surely such men as Mr Wiseman are the world’s benefactors – furnishing views without fee or reward – asking nothing, in short, but appreciation. Mr Wiseman, however, has found the world ungrateful. It gives him no appreciation: neither is it possible that it should; for it has thus far given him no hearing. Mr Wiseman thinks he can prove to demonstration that, if only society could be taught to attend to this “view” of his for one single hour, all minds must necessarily embrace it, and the total regeneration of society would follow of course. Mr Wiseman modestly declines to say how soon this would occur – how long precisely it would take to annihilate the very last and most tenacious of social evils; but, a few months more or less are of no great consequence in comparison with the centuries of human woe that lie behind us; and he, for one, will have patience with some slight postponements of social perfection when once his view is universally admitted.

He thought himself fairly on the way to success when, twenty-five years ago, a letter explanatory of his “view,” and signed with his name at full length, appeared in a local newspaper in Cornwall; but the world was not so struck with it as he expected, and it took no effect. This he ascribed at the time to the very small print in which the letter appeared, and to the editor not having in any way directed particular attention to it.

He was sure the Americans would be less torpid, and he made sail for New York, to see what could be done there. He found, indeed, that the Americans were anything but torpid; but there were two difficulties which destroyed his hopes in that hemisphere – most of the Americans were too busy to sit down quietly for the one hour which was necessary for making disciples of them; and again, the few who were willing to undertake the regeneration of society had, every one of them (it is a curious circumstance, but so it was), a “view” of his own, and of course each man’s view was wholly incompatible with every other. Nearer home Mr Wiseman’s disappointments were no less signal. In Italy, he found there was no press or free speech. In Spain, nobody had any social ideas at all. In Germany, there seemed a flattering prospect of success; but his disciples rose into such ecstasies of delight at their own prodigious amplifications of his view, that he trembled lest his solid scheme should go off in vapour, and disperse in thin air; which it presently did. In Holland his failure was clearly owing to his inability to express himself fluently in Dutch; for he could, on his side, make nothing of the objections proposed by solid friends at Amsterdam. He ventured into Russia, conceiving that, whenever Russia should become mistress of Europe his view would pervade Europe, if only he could get it established in Russia first; but after the very first opening of his mouth to empty his heart, he was glad to take a certain little hint from a certain official personage, and to quit European Russia by the western frontier instead of the north-eastern. France was the great land of promise after America, and he went to Paris. He had nearly concluded a negotiation (I may be excused from saying of what nature, for the sake of certain citizens who might be endangered by further disclosure), when the coup d’état occurred; bringing forward very prominently another social view, not entirely reconcileable with Mr Wiseman’s. He decided that on the whole, it would be best to give another chance to dear Old England – a chance of distinguishing herself by taking the first great step in the regeneration of the destiny of mankind; and he honoured her shores by setting foot on them (at Folkstone) on the tenth of February, eighteen hundred and fifty-one.

I shall be silent on what has occurred since, up to this very week. Posterity will know, Mr Wiseman says, by a fitting record, the labours, sacrifices, and sufferings through which its benefactor has passed in its service; and to posterity I will leave his eulogium, for which I am sure he will show abundant cause. I proceed at once to the eventful Monday evening which disclosed to the great man’s vigilant eye a bright and glorious prospect. He told me in my car, as we came away together from that evening party, that Monday would henceforth be the day of the week to him.

Mr Wiseman was standing in his usual dignified isolation – now lost in reverie, and now contemplating the surrounding countenances in the speculative mood of propagandism – when he was impressed and deeply moved by the aspect of one head in the crowd in which he discerned tokens of all the qualities that do honour to human nature: and his emotion was increased when he was informed that this was the very head which edited a morning newspaper. To obtain an introduction was the work of a moment; and it was necessary that we should be quick, as the hour had arrived for the editor to vanish to his duties. I shall ever bear testimony, happen what may, to the good nature of that gentleman’s countenance and voice, and to the suavity of his manner. When he heard that Mr, Wiseman was a gentleman who had a “view,” he did not change countenance; and when informed that Mr Wiseman’s wish was to communicate that view, he at once invited that gentleman to send him a leader or two; which, if consonant with the principles of his paper, might be of public benefit. I discovered, when too late, that the editor had mistaken Mr Wiseman’s name; calling him by one which, though much less deserving of celebrity, was better known in editorial circles. The mistake, however, was no fault of Mr Wiseman’s. What it behoved him to do he did. He instantly returned home, had his lamp replenished, and spent the night in preparing that lucubration which he felt to be the most important emanation of his life.

As I was posting the packet in the morning, having left Mr Wiseman to enjoy a few hours of sleep, brightened by dreams of hope, it struck me that it would be highly agreeable to him to see his “leader” in process of preparation for the public eye; and by diligence and some importunity, I obtained from an acquaintance a promise that he would accompany me at night to the office of the paper in question, that I might see that important institution in full operation. So, Mr Wiseman and I presented ourselves at the office door at ten o’clock that evening.

When we entered the editor’s room our eager glances descried the very manuscript on the editor’s own desk, close by his elbow. We had before agreed that, in the pressure of such critical business, it was no time to engage the editor in the discussion of any view, even Mr Wiseman’s. We had agreed to preserve a respectful silence; and to do that now was easy, for the article was not only there, but the editor’s imprimatur was discernable in the corner. I saw the thrill which pervaded Mr Wiseman’s frame as these initials met his view. From that moment his cares were at rest, and mine for him; and we could devote ourselves to the spectacle before us with free minds, at full leisure for observation, and in that happy mood which is the natural result of success after long protracted effort.

As the editor did not refer to the “leader,” we did not. He courteously pointed out to us the peculiarities of his position, among documents gathered, as it were, from all parts of the world. At his right were several piles of manuscript: and he was in the act of reading one when we entered. At his left was a great heap of unopened letters, showing a vast diversity of postmarks. There were letters aspiring to publication; sheets full of tabular statements, which had to be sent elsewhere for arrangement and condensation; reports of markets and of companies, opera tickets, and much besides. Next to these lay a pile of proof sheets – leaders kept waiting for a suitable opportunity, like shotted guns, to be discharged when there was a mark to be hit. I had a momentary apprehension that Mr Wiseman’s might be thus delayed; but I need not have feared. There were four mouthpieces at the editor’s right hand, belonging to tubes which communicated with different parts of the establishment. One, we were told, was carried under the floor of the room we stood in, and down to the ground and out into the street, and up the outside of the printing office wall, into the room where the types are composed. Through this tube the editor uttered his order that Mr Wiseman’s article should be printed as soon as possible: and immediately a boy appeared, and the file that was handed to him was that which contained Mr Wiseman’s leader. It was a proud moment for Mr Wiseman. Having glanced at the row of new books waiting on the editor’s desk to be reviewed, and all shining in green, red, blue and gilding; and having noted that there were among them some French, some Italian, several American, and a few German works, we took our leave of the editor. Another gentleman engaged at another desk in the same apartment, had the courtesy to accompany us into the next room, and to give us some interesting information. He told us of the arrangements for having some one always on the spot, to receive telegraphic messages, and all kinds of sudden communications. A gentleman sleeps there, who is roused at five in the morning, to receive early dispatches – there being just time to insert any remarkable news before the final printing off for the morning mails. If there is anything worthy of insertion, he must rise and prepare it for press; if not, he may turn round and have another sleep. I own I should not much like to have such an act of judgement to go through on first waking as to decide whether any rumour of war or political change be wild or substantial, silly or serious – the credit of the paper and one’s own continuance in office hanging on the wisdom of the conclusion. Such is the functionary’s duty, however. In the after part of the day, his business is to select and arrange the matter for the evening issue of the same paper under another name.

In the next room, which is well lighted and ventilated, we found two gentlemen comfortably established at a table under a lamp; another table containing a pleasant looking tea service. One was writing a notice of a concert – musical criticism being his department. The other was busy compiling and abridging law reports; and in the next apartment was an editor surrounded by provincial newspapers, from which he was compiling country news. No great deal is gathered in this way, as everything of importance, or worthy of any particular notice at all, is specially sent to the office from the different towns whence the local journals are sent.

Leaving these gentlemen to their quiet labours, we mounted a long flight of stairs leading to that very interesting apartment, the reporters’ room. It was quiet enough, compared with what it is during the parliamentary session. Then, there is a perpetual rush during any important night of debate. Cabs are dashing backward and forward between the House and the office, the whole night. The first reporter, who has plenty of time before him, sits for three quarters of an hour taking notes. These notes occupy three or four hours to write out; the next in succession sit half an hour; and the later ones twenty minutes – they having less time for writing out the speeches. Each must be punctually on the spot to relieve his predecessor, and must afford precise notice to him who is to follow. Arrived in the room, they sit at the desks which extend round three sides of the apartment, and begin to copy from their shorthand on slips of paper, each of which is headed by the writer’s name, and numbered, thus, for instance: – “Smith follows Jones. 1.” The next slip is headed “Smith, 2;” the next, “Smith, 8,” and so on. At the foot of the last is written the name of the reporter who is to follow: as, for instance, “Brown;” and he heads his first slip with “Brown follows Smith. 1.” The wonder is what is done with the speeches which are delivered last in a long debate. If the paper has to be printed to be dispatched by the morning trains before five o’clock, what can be done with the speeches that are not concluded at three or four? – a thing which happens pretty often. They are, to say the truth, most marvellously condensed – those latest speeches. For a master in the art of condensation, commend me to a newspaper reporter at four in the morning. What a scene that room must be at such an hour, with its hot atmosphere where the gas has been burning all night, and the haggard faces, and the scrawled papers! As we saw it, it was pleasant enough – airy and spacious, with only two reporters at work – one returned from a great dinner and now copying out the speeches; the other from a public meeting he had been attending in the country, whence he had just arrived by the express train.

In another room were persons employed in matters of various detail; one putting the numbers to the share list of the day, another arranging the law notices for the next day, and a third dealing with “flimsy.” Flimsy is the thin paper used in the manifold writer, and employed by penny-a-liners, who communicate their facts to various papers, and save labour and time by writing all their copies at once.

By this time we began to be rather awestruck with the sense of the quantity of wit, energy, and toil on the part of many, to supply the matter of one day’s newspaper. We had seen many gentlemen, and heard of many more, diligently busy in intellectual labour, which we knew to be continued for six nights per week throughout the year, with the exception of the short autumn holiday allowed to each. We knew that every night, except Saturday, they were to be found here thus employed till very late into the night, and the editors until from three to four in the morning: and we were deeply impressed.

To us the aspect of the composing room was even more striking; for we could trace the progress of Mr Wiseman’s leader. Here we met it, cut up into no less than thirteen pieces, and distributed among as many compositors. Bringing their little contributions of type to the “galley,” or long tray in which it was collected, they joined their respective morsels together, numbering each with chalk on the margin as it was deposited. Mr Wiseman was evidently congratulating them in his mind on the honour of having a hand in publishing his great “view.” There were above half a hundred compositors; and the only cause of concern was that so few could share that honour. One was composing the list of births, marriages, and deaths; another a report of a trial, and so on: but our attention was engrossed by the larger type in which leaders are printed. When the whole of Mr Wiseman’s precious document was set, two or three slips were “pulled off;” one for the “reader,” of course, and one, at my respectful request, for Mr Wiseman, who buckled it into his pocketbook with a countenance expressive of intense satisfaction. He had now seen his leader in print, and was happy. He was at liberty to admire the ingenuity of one of the compositors, to whom belongs the honour and glory of having achieved the perfect ventilation of the composing room, when many doctors in the art had failed. With fifty or sixty men in it, and gaslights in profusion, the air was fresh and cool as need be; and the healthful and cheerful appearance of the compositors was very striking. Nearly all of them have been employed many years at this office; and there was nothing in their aspect to occasion a doubt of their remaining for as many years longer.

Next, we visited the “readers” – three pairs in as many rooms: one of each pair reading aloud from the manuscript, while the other corrected the press. I had seen a boy carefully collect the pieces of Mr Wiseman’s manuscript in the composing room, and put them into a basket hung in a corner. We now found them again in the hands of a reader. I saw that the monotonous loud tone of the reader jarred somewhat upon the nerves of Mr Wiseman, who would doubtless have enjoyed a style of elocution susceptible of more emphasis, sympathy, and perhaps pathos: but he could now afford to let this pass, and even to make allowances on account of this kind of work being certainly as onerous as any that was going forward on the premises. Not only is the work far from being merely mechanical; but, as the hero of the night observed, much of it must be frivolous, and in every way uninteresting; as, for instance, the report of a cause about a patent, upon which the second pair of readers were engaged.

One remarkable apartment remained to be visited – a large room, in which the advertisements are ranged in type; those which are ordered for insertion so many times a week for a year, being deposited in long lines across the whole width of the room. One advertiser, we were told, pays to this office alone eight shillings and sixpence a day for every weekday of the year. Here we saw the standing title of the paper engraved on brass; and this was, as far as I remember, the last peculiarity of the establishment. We looked into the boiler room under the engine, and saw the engine and printing presses; but there was nothing very peculiar about them, and they were not at work. The first batch of newspapers must be ready, as I said, for the morning trains, at a quarter before five; and another for the mails at seven, after an interval which permits the insertion of any fresh news. The types then stand till the afternoon; the evening version of the paper being printed off at three, and the whole type broken up at five.

When we were about to leave the establishment, and were once more admiring the fresh and cheerful appearance of the corps, it suddenly occurred to us, that though we now, at midnight, too sensibly felt that the end of our day was come, that of the compositors was only half over. They did not rise till four in the afternoon. When their work was done, those who live in the suburbs (which some of them do) would not reach home till eight, when they would go straight to bed for seven or eight hours’ sleep; thus hardly ever seeing daylight in midwinter. Mr Wiseman’s great work had been done the night before. He knew something about vigils for the benefit of mankind; and now, he might go home, and taste of the sleep of the successful benefactor of mankind.

So we believed; and such sleep he enjoyed; and I am glad he did, as it enabled him the better to sustain the shock of the next morning. I was with him when the newspaper was brought in, and I caught his smile of triumph when his first glance assured him that his leader was there. But the second glance! To my latest day, I shall never lose the impression of that moment. Mr Wiseman’s statement of some social evils was preserved; that is, in a manner, with some omissions and changes of phrase: but the main part – all that contained Mr Wiseman’s “view” – was cut out! Not one syllable was left that could convey the slightest idea of the real object of the article. In fact the remnant – for it was a mere remnant – occupied little more than half a column!

As soon as I had satisfied myself that Mr Wiseman could sustain the shock, and might be left alone with his heroism, I snatched my hat and repaired to the editor’s residence. He was not up; and his wife was evidently annoyed at the vehemence of my knock and pull at the bell. There was no use in waiting, as he would not rise for two or three hours. Late in the afternoon, I caught him at one of the clubs. His explanation was given with all courtesy; but it was inexpressibly vexatious. I have already mentioned a mistake in the name, when his introduction to Mr Wiseman took place. It appears, that supposing the leader to be written by the gentleman for whom he had mistaken Mr Wiseman in the first instance, he had sent it to the composing room before reading it. The “view” was one which, he said, could not be reconciled with the principles of his journal: yet he had virtually promised its admission. There was therefore but one thing for him to do; to use the part which was, as he expressed it, “harmless,” and to omit the rest. One thing more he did. He referred me to the cashier of the journal for a cheque to the amount usually paid for a leader; and with this I returned to my friend.

I found him deriving, as usual, consolation from his own indomitable energies. He was stooping over some maps, exploring the route to the Great Salt Lake. He is so persuaded that, of all existing societies, the Mormons are the most likely to appreciate his “view,” that he has nearly made up his mind to go among them and ascertain the real amount of their intelligence. The only doubt indeed is (as he assured me, after contemptuously flinging the cheque into the fire) whether to make trial first of the Mormons, or of the new Chinese Christians. The reformation now going forward in China appears to afford a fine opening. My advice on the whole however is – as Mr Wiseman does me the honour to desire my opinion – to begin with the Mormons. In case of failure there – which is however not rationally to be anticipated – the route to China by California will be practicable enough; and in California itself, perhaps – But I am apt to preach against the indulgence of a too sanguine disposition; and I will not – nor shall Mr Wiseman if I can help it – look beyond the Great Salt Lake till we are on its shores.

Deaf Mutes

Household Words, Volume 9, page 134

We live in a highly educational age. Although we have not yet got a system of national education, we are always talking about it, and we mean to have it, and no doubt shall have it some day. Whenever we get it, it will be in consequence of our having become freshly and deeply impressed with the importance and the duty of doing the best that can be done with and for every human being born into the world. We seem to have plenty of help in such a business, to judge by the number of books written, and always in course of publication, about the education of the young. But, it is remarkable, all these books consider children to be all alike; or so nearly so as to make general advice sufficient for all. These books conclude all children to have four limbs, and (according to the popular notion) five senses, and a straight spine, and a perfectly formed brain. Of the great multitude who are blind, deaf, deformed, lame, defective in intellect – who have, in short, some natural infirmity – we hear nothing, in an educational sense. We hear of charities for them; and education goes on in the asylums, where a good many are sent. But the asylums contain only a very small proportion indeed of the whole number in any country; and there are so many families who cannot send their infirm members to such places, or who do not choose to send them there, that it appears quite as necessary to treat of their education at home as to treat of home education at all, in distinction from that of school.

It is very possible that some readers may be amazed at such a thing being said about a class of people so very small. They may be like an old clergyman – a very benevolent man, too – who said, a few years since, that he had never known more than two deaf and dumb persons in all his life. Now we have a thing or two to say about this.

First, if the number of persons suffering under natural imperfections were the smallest ever imagined – if, for instance, there were only one in a hundred thousand persons who had any natural infirmity whatever, those very few cases ought to be carefully studied, and the means of education tried, in order to improve our knowledge of the human being, body and mind. We have gained what we know of the laws of health by the study of disease. It is the disorder of any organ of the body, or function of the mind, which discloses to us the true structure and action. In the same way we learn to understand the fully endowed human being by the study of the imperfect one. For this purpose, then – not the highest, but still very important – we ought to attend to the whole case of the blind, deaf and dumb, deformed, and deficient.

In the next place, though it is most necessary for the general good that the ordinary run of children should be trained, because they are to do the business of life, and be the parents of the next generation, yet it is a clear duty of humanity and of social justice to do the best that can be done for those whose lives and action can hardly spread beyond themselves. Here they are, in the midst of life at a great disadvantage. What can be clearer than that it is the business of their happier neighbours to make life as good and pleasant to them as it can be made? If it were a matter ever so difficult, it ought to be done. But it happens to be by far the easiest way. As a well-trained child gives far less trouble in the long run than a spoiled one, so does an imperfect being give infinitely less pain and anxiety if made rational, and morally disciplined, than if mismanaged, or left without management at all.

But, again, the number of these imperfect beings. Will any one guess how many deaf and dumb persons, for instance, there are in the kingdom? The benevolent old clergyman knew of two; and extreme was his astonishment when he was told how many there were. We have no very recent accounts; for that department of the Census Report of eighteen hundred and fifty-one is not out yet; but we know the proportion to the total population ten years before. One in sixteen hundred is the proportion in our own country. In Europe generally there is one deaf mute in fifteen hundred; and in the United States there is one in two thousand white persons, a smaller proportion among persons of colour, and only one in six thousand among the slaves. If the proportion remains what it was ten years since (and there is no reason to suppose it altered), we have in our own country about fourteen thousand deaf and dumb persons. Imagine these fourteen thousand persons collected as the population of a town, or as a crowd to see the soldiers march for embarkation, and it will be seen that there are quite enough of this one class to make it a matter of importance in ten thousand of the homes of our country how these beings are treated and trained. And these, we must remember, are the deaf mutes alone; persons so deaf as to be altogether excluded from the world of sound. Very far greater is the number of persons partially deaf – able to speak, and to profit more or less by sound – but still subject to disadvantages, and moral danger, and suffering, which should make them the objects of very tender and studious care.

If there is reason to fear hereditary deafness, or if there is already a deaf child in the family, how anxiously the parents watch the new-born infant, and make all sorts of noises to ascertain whether it is startled by them or not! This is not quite so easily discoverable at first as inexperienced persons might suppose; for every considerable noise occasions vibration in solid bodies that stand in the way of it; and the sensitiveness of the deaf to vibration and concussion is excessive. There was a house, some years since (we hope it is not there now), a damp house, where two children out of three were born totally deaf. When the family left it, a young couple came in, and lived there till they had eight children, five of whom were deaf and dumb. What a dreadful watching it must have become at last, when the fate of two or three was known! Of course the parents must have been unaware of the cause of the mischief; and, not knowing that prevention lay within their own power, what a horrible visitation it must have seemed to them!

In the case of a deaf infant, the truth may be completely evident in a few months; though we have known a case of a child who was a year old before any discovery of his total deafness was made, and before, therefore, any medical opinion was obtained. There is no part of the human body about which we are so helpless as the ear. So very little is known of its interior structure, and it is so very easy to do mischief, that medical men do not much like to be consulted in cases of deafness; and the wisest of them say candidly that the cases are extremely rare in which they can do any good. These, the wisest of their class, can usually tell where the mischief resides, and whether there is any hope of benefit from medical or surgical skill. If not, as is most probable, the parents must next consider what is best to be done.

Almost everything depends on whether the deafness is partial or total. By total, we mean the popular sense of the expression – that the child cannot hear sounds well enough to learn to speak, and does not often hear any at all. As for that perfect deafness which is wholly insensible to all sounds under all circumstances, it is extremely rare. In an asylum of a hundred inmates, there may not be above two or three such; not above two or three, for instance, who cannot imagine what you mean by putting a musical snuffbox on their heads, which is about the best test there is. Where the apparatus of the ear is useless, the brain-organ may be right, and then the music may reach it through the skull. We have known an instance of a deaf person fainting under the delicious sensation of feeling the music perfectly, distinct and precise, and (as it appeared) quivering down the spine. Well, if the deafness be practically total, the case is clear so far as this: that the child must be brought up as if destined (as it really is) to a life with four senses instead of five. There are, in fact, as is now generally admitted by the learned, more than five senses; but, making the case as disadvantageous as possible, it amounts to this – that your child has a body and brain like other people’s, with four limbs, and all his faculties, but with four senses instead of five. The question is, how to enable him to manage best with four senses instead of five.

It is clear that, as far as happiness is concerned, he will be far better off among those who are like himself, than in a world where he is on equal terms with nobody. A more forlorn creature than a deaf mute among people who cannot converse with him, does not exist. As soon as he gets into an institution where all are like himself, and can use the modes of communication established there, he becomes as merry as other people; and the difficulty is only how to bring him away when he can remain there no longer. The best educated deaf mutes mope, more or less, after coming out into the world; and not all the care of their families to use their language familiarly can compensate to them for the society of their comrades; for the simple reason that the companionship of mind is wanting. Inferior as the minds of deaf mutes must inevitably be, they are peculiar; and they can never be in full sympathy with the thoughts and feelings of better endowed people. There can be no doubt of the immense advantage of training in a deaf and dumb school, though there may be still a few persons who fancy that imperfect beings must thrive best among their superiors, and point to an instance here and there of a deaf mute who goes through life in an orderly way, busy and quiet, without ever having been specially trained. The truth of such cases is, that the imitative faculties of the child (always strong, from exercise, in the deaf mute) have enabled him to go through the external acts of life like other people, and to learn some art, probably, some mechanical business, by which he may get his bread. But there is no mind underneath in such a case. There is no thought, properly so called; nothing but perception of what is visible, and imitation of it. It will be found, too, that the temper is probably passionate, and certainly arrogant and selfish. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, seeing that the moral part of his nature, his affections, his sentiments, and his conscience, in the deep sense of the term, have never been reached at all. It is easy to see how this must be, if we look at the case from an early stage.

If he is so fortunate as to be destined to good special school training, still he must spend his first years at home. Now, how is he to be taught anything? He can be taught, of course, to wash and dress himself, and behave properly at table; to imitate, in short, what he sees. But how can he get any real knowledge? He can draw, if shown how, what is before his eyes; and he can draw the letters of the alphabet, and words, as easily as anything else. But how is he to learn what letters and words mean? Some words, nouns signifying what he sees, he presently learns. The cat, papa’s hat, the table, a spoon, and the like, he can soon join with the written word; and he may even get so far as to fit the word table to all tables, and the word spoon to all spoons. But how will you teach him the days of the week? It is no easy matter to make him attend to what a day is; for it is a sort of abstract idea; and when you come to separating the days by name, when to the child they are all alike; and when the separation ends at seven, and the same names then begin again, how can you make such a complicated affair understood by a child to whom you cannot explain it? Before he can get any true notion of it, he must have some idea of what time means; and how can you give him that? The only way of beginning is to use the external appearance of a day – Sunday, for instance – as a starting point, and let constant repetition teach the rest. There are no church bells for him; but he sees papa at home that day; and that people are dressed differently from other days; and that they go out at a particular hour, in a grave sort of way; and that no sewing is done, and so on. The word Sunday is shown him, and he probably writes it every morning when he sees these appearances. The next day, he writes Monday, and is aware in his own mind that it comes next to Sunday. In course of time he knows all the seven; but it is only knowing names, after all. The thousand associations that cluster round the idea of a day do not exist for him whose mind has never really communicated with any other. What, then, can be about such abstract ideas as truth, justice, or nine tenths of the matters we talk about? Without agreeing with Aristotle, that the deaf and dumb are and must be altogether brutish, or with Condillac, that they have no memory or reasoning power, we have no doubt whatever, that the impossibility of ever giving them the ordinary access to abstractions renders them necessarily and always the lowest class of rational beings. Their case is infinitely worse than that of the born blind, on this ground: the blind have to go without an immense deal of knowledge; but they are not precluded from thought as deaf mutes are. This view of the case may be surprising to some people, who are rather romantic, and who have not watched the life of any deaf and dumb person with an open mind. It was a sad misfortune to the class that the attempts – noble and most glorious attempts – to retrieve their condition, were first made when men’s minds were in a highly metaphysical condition, and they saw everywhere whatever they looked for, and could believe whatever they imagined. Hence arose the popular notion – the very opposite of Aristotle’s – that deaf mutes were a kind of sacredly-favoured class, cut off from vulgar associations, but endowed with an infinite soul, working purely in a kind of retreat from the world. The delusion was confirmed by the pretty poetical sort of things that the first pupils in the schools used to write, in pretty broken language. But, if the benevolent visionaries who repeated these things had lived five years with deaf mutes, seeing what was the arrogance and violence of their tempers, the childishness of their moods, and the astounding ignorance of the commonest things, and most necessary ideas, that now and then peeped out from amidst the flowers of their expression, the spectacle would have been a most bewildering one. Their whole notion of the case is, in fact, a wrong one. That interior power, supposed to be so active and blessed, has never been awakened, and the highest part of the human being is as if it did not exist. There have been a few cases of cure, of hearing being obtained, and, of course, language and mental training, after the best deaf mute education had apparently succeeded. What those persons have told of the state of their minds – of their ideas of God, in particular – is too sad and too terrible to be cited here. It is enough to say that they had no ideas whatever on any abstract subjects till they were expressly communicated at school, and then they were at once so low and so wild, that they will not bear quotation. Yet, because the pupils use pretty similes, and write down pretty sentiments, they are supposed to mean what we should mean by the same similes and sentiments. The difference is tremendous: no less than this – that in their case there is the sign without the thing signified, and the sentimental phrase without the radical feeling under it. We must not grow too abstract. What we have said may be enough to show the depth of the misfortune that deaf mutes labour under. One fact in their case may be cited as an illustration of what we mean.

In large educational establishments for the deaf and dumb, it is found that a vast majority of the pupils who must have a vocation, wish to be artists. It is found that this will not do at all. Most of them can draw to a certain extent, and some with considerable skill; but as artists they fail utterly (though they themselves do not think so!) All the really artistic qualities of mind are wanting in them. Where the power to represent is greatest, they still have nothing to represent but what is lowest and most obvious. It is like a blind poet attempting to describe a sunrise, or the aspect of the sea, or the desert. We know at once in his case, that there can be nothing in his description at once original and true. Deaf mutes can know no more of the deepest things in the human mind and life (as these deepest things are for social man, and are awakened only by human intercourse), than the blind man knows of golden and crimson clouds, and gleams upon the water, and the blaze and blackness of the desert.

Though we are naturally apt to overrate what education can do in the case of deaf mutes, it is not the less true that what is actually done for them in the best institutions is marvellous. It is not only that they are made happy – that their habits are carefully formed, their tempers controlled, and social qualities largely developed – but so much communication of minds with each other and with the external world is established that those who are aware of the difficulties of the case know not how sufficiently to admire. The pupils not only have a language of signs, but one of words, as copious as ours, however defective in the meanings conveyed; and the pupils now not only write this letter language and speak it with the fingers, but actually utter it with the organs of speech – not, of course, because they can hear themselves or anybody else but that they may the better comprehend the nature, and enjoy the uses of language. It is no uncommon thing now for advanced pupils to know what people say by the motion of their mouths, and to converse by speech, more or less odd and disagreeable, but intelligible. From these institutions they go forth fitted for various employments, and capable of various pleasures which they could never have become qualified for at home. As for their occupations, they make good copying clerks, accountants, woodcarvers, ordinary engravers, and the like: and the girls are admirable at dressmaking and household arts. Their grand difficulty in life is a moral one. They have such a prodigious opinion of themselves and their order. Most other sufferers are depressed and humbled; but these are mightily exalted. From their asylum they look down on the outer world with great compassion for those who can hear and speak. It is rather difficult to make out the grounds of this compassion, although it is easy to see how the conceit must grow by the absence of collision and comparison with other minds. The parents of an existing member of Parliament (a fair speaker), were both deaf and dumb; and they made a great lamentation over each child as it was found to be able to hear. They were themselves so very happy, they said, and their poor children would, after all, be only like everybody else!

By this time the totally deaf child ought to be trained in a special school. If this is impossible, the parents and family should learn his language of natural gestures, and should teach him the finger speech. They can at least form his habits well, and, it is to be hoped, train him to govern his temper and passions. They cannot make him wise, intellectually or morally; but they may make him harmless, and happy to the extent of his small moral capability. It will require incessant vigilance, good sense, self-command, and self-sacrifice on the part of his guardians: but this much may be done.

For the same reason that the totally deaf should go to school, the partially deaf should remain at home; that is, should be least exposed to isolation and forlornness. The partially deaf have, it is true, no class to belong to; for there are all possible gradations of defective hearing, so that no special method of education will suit any number. The partially deaf child must stay at home and be there enabled to make the best of a very terrible misfortune and grief. The misfortune is not for a moment to be compared to that of the deaf mute; but the grief is infinitely greater. The sufferer has no class to belong to. He is expected to be, and to learn, and to do like others without having the means. He has the inestimable advantage of the use of language, with all the mental, moral, and social benefits it involves: but he can learn by it only what is expressly communicated to himself. For him there is no public speaking or preaching – no learning in class, where minds stimulate each other – no general conversation, with the vast amount of knowledge and variety of ideas thence arising. It is a serious thing to him, though less important, that he loses a vast amount of the most ordinary pleasures, from the grandest music to the humblest and slightest natural sounds which fall pleasantly upon the sense.

But the mere privation is his smallest grievance. His life is rendered laborious by so chief a sense serving him so ill. He is apt to brood over painful and unamiable thoughts, so solitary and still as his life for the most part is. From being driven in upon himself, he is self-conscious, shy, and too generally irritable and suspicious. While these tendencies are universally recognised and pitied, it seems strange that parents should do so little as they do to save the infirm child from the effects of his infirmity. They are constantly surprised, when it is too late, at his not knowing all manner of things that he has never been told, and which everybody else learned by general conversation. They are amazed and pained at various faults and deficiencies that early care might have obviated. By care, we do not mean indulgence. No creature has more need of the self-control obtained from steady discipline at home, than the deaf boy or man, girl or woman. The trial to temper and self-respect is as great as well can be, and it should be timely prepared for.

The first requisite is thorough confidence between the parents (the mother especially) and the child. The mother should steady his little mind, and enter into his feelings, good or bad, and win him to confide to her all his peculiar experience. Then she will know how to give him the knowledge that he cannot get for himself. She will patiently and privately teach him whatever will best obviate any needless peculiarity. She will correct his pronunciation – accustom him to regulate his voice – take pains to find out what way of speaking best suits his ear, so as to make him hear with the least noise and disturbance. She will find that he hears worse instead of better when people shout, or make faces; and better in proportion as people speak rationally, however much they may have to raise their voices; and her example will regulate other people’s ways with him. She will take care that his nerves, always in such cases quite sensitive enough, are not heedlessly pained, and that his life, always irksome enough, is made as cheerful as good sense, courage, and family affection can make it.

Above all, it is her business to warn him in time against moroseness, the unreasonableness, and the suspicious temper that will inevitably poison his life if this timely care be not taken. She will help him against them. When she sees the suspicion spring up, she will root it out by instant explanation, and lead him after a time to see how, in suspecting, he always turns out to be wrong. It is not only possible but easy, when there is good sense, courage, and love in the parent, to turn the selfish and chafing temper into one of love, trust, and repose. It is impossible to compensate for such an imperfection; but its evils and pains may be reduced to something much less than is supposed by careless observers, or by those who stand too near, and love and grieve too much to rouse their own faculties to their proper duty. It is a painful truth, but it ought to be spoken – that the family treatment of personal infirmity in any member is usually bad. Between the inexperience and small power of reflection in some – the lack of good sense in others – false tenderness here, and hardness, through reluctance to face the truth, there – the sufferer has too often but a poor chance. Among the whole order of these sufferers, none, after the idiotic or deficient, is so sure of failure, and misery if left to himself, as the deaf child. The blind, the lame, the deformed, have much to go through; but their intellectual development and moral growth and satisfaction do not depend, as in the case of the deaf, precisely upon that part of them which is defective.

Perhaps we may, on a future occasion, go further into the proof of this point, in considering those cases, as we have that of the deaf.

Idiots Again

Household Words, Volume 9, page 197

People whose ancestors came in at the Conquest, are apt to have one idea overruling all others – that nobody is worthy of their alliance whose ancestors did not come in at the Conquest. Of course, this has been an idea ever since the Conquest began to be considered an old event; and, of course, there have been fewer and fewer families who had a right to it. Of course, also, those families have intermarried, and the intermarriage has been more and more restricted. Another “of course” follows, on which we need not enlarge. Everybody knows the consequences of prolonged intermarriages between any sort of people who are few enough to be almost all blood relations. The world was shocked and grieved, some years since, at the oldest baronage in England “going out at the ace of diamonds” – expiring in the disgrace of cheating at cards. The world ought to be quite as much shocked and grieved at seeing – what has been seen, and may be seen again – the honours of the same ancient birth being extinguished in a lunatic asylum.

It used to be thought a very religious and beautiful thing (it certainly was the easiest thing) to say that it pleased God to send idiots, and other defective or diseased children, to try and discipline their parents by affliction, and so on; but religious physicians now tell us (showing reason for what they say) that there is something very like blasphemy in talking so – in imputing to Providence the sufferings which we bring upon ourselves, precisely by disobedience to the great natural laws which it is the best piety to obey. It is a common saying, that families who intermarry too often, die out; but no account is taken of the miseries which precede that dying out. Those miseries of disease of body and mind are ascribed to Providence, as if Providence had not given us abundant warning to avoid them! Dr Howe, the wise and benevolent teacher of Laura Bridgman,[1] says, in his Report on idiocy in Massachusetts, that “the law against the marriage of relatives is made out as clearly as though it were written on tables of stone.” He gives his reasons for saying so; and of those reasons, the following sample will, we think, be enough. When the tables of health and disease were compiled for Massachusetts, a few years ago, the following was found to be the state of seventeen families, where the father and mother were related by blood.[2] Some of the parents were unhealthy, and some were intemperate – but to set against this disadvantage to begin with, there is the fact, that the evil consequences of such intermarriage very often do not appear until the second generation, or even later. However in these seventeen households there were ninety-five children. What were these children like? Imagine a school of ninety-five children, of all ages, or the children of a hamlet at play, and think what the little crowd would look like; and then read this! Of these ninety-five children, one was a dwarf. Well, that might easily be. One was deaf. Well, no great wonder in that. Twelve were scrofulous. That is a large number, certainly; but scrofula is sadly common, and especially in unhealthy situations. Well, but FORTY-FOUR were IDIOTS.

Of all the long and weary pains of mind to which the unselfish can be subject, we know of none so terrible as that of the mother attaining the certainty that her child is an idiot. Reviewing the whole case as we have ourselves observed it, it seems to us an affliction made tolerable only by its gradual growth, and the length of years over which it is spread. How sweet was the prospect of the little one coming – not only in the sacred anticipations of the parents, but when the elder children were told, in quiet, joyful moments of confidence, that there would be a baby in the house by and by! And when it came, how amiable, and helpful, and happy everybody was – keeping the house quiet for the mother’s sake, and wondering at the baby, and not minding any irregularity or little uncomfortableness while the mother was upstairs. Perhaps there was a wager that baby would “take notice,” turn its eyes to a bright watch, or spoon, or looking glass, at the end of ten days or a fortnight, and the wager was lost. Here, perhaps, was the first faint indication. But it would not be thought much of, the child was so very young! As the weeks pass, however, and still the child takes no notice, a sick misgiving sometimes enters the mother’s mind – a dread of she does not know what, but it does not last long. You may trust a mother for finding out charms and promise of one sort or another in her baby – be it what it may. Time goes on; and the singularity is apparent that the baby makes no response to anything. He is not deaf. Very distant street music probably causes a kind of quiver through his whole frame. He sees very well. He certainly is aware of the flies which are performing minuets and reels between him and the ceiling. As for his other senses, there never was anything like his keenness of smell and taste. He is ravenous for food – even already unpleasantly so; but excessively difficult to please. The terrible thing is his still taking no notice. His mother longs to feel the clasp of his arms round her neck; but her fondlings receive no return. His arm hangs lax over her shoulder. She longs for a look from him, and lays him back on her lap, hoping that they may look into each other’s eyes; but he looks at nobody. All his life long nobody will ever meet his eyes; and neither in that way nor any other way will his mind expressly meet that of anybody else. When he does at length look at anything, it is at his own hand. He spreads the fingers, and holds up the hand close before his face, and moves his head from side to side. At first, the mother and the rest laugh, and call it a baby trick; but after a time the laughter is rather forced, and they begin to wish he would not do so. We once saw a child on her mother’s lap laughing at the spinning of a half-crown on the table, when, in an instant, the mother put the little creature down almost threw her down – on the carpet, with an expression of anguish in her face perfectly astonishing. The child had chanced to hold up her open hand before her face in her merry fidget; and the mother, who had watched over an idiot brother from her youth up, could not bear that terrible token, although in this case it was a mere accident.

The wearing uncertainty of many years succeeds the infancy. The ignorant notions of idiocy that prevailed before we knew even the little that we yet know of the brain, prevent the parents recognising the real state of the case. The old legal accounts of idiocy, and the old suppositions of what it is, are very unlike what they see. The child ought not, according to legal definition, to know his own name, but he certainly does; for when his own plate or cup is declared to be ready, he rushes to it. He ought not to be able, by law, “to know letters;” yet he can read, and even write, perhaps, although nobody can tell how he learned, for he never seemed to attend when taught. It was just as if his fingers and tongue went of themselves, while his mind was in the moon. Again, the law declared anybody an idiot “who could not count twenty pence;” whereas, this boy seems, in some unaccountable way, to know more about sums (of money and of everything else) than anybody in the family. He does not want to learn figures, his arithmetic is strong without them, and always instantaneously ready. Of course we do not mean that every idiot has these particular powers. Many cannot speak; more cannot read. But almost every one of the thousands of idiots in England has some power that the legal definition declares him not to have, and that popular prejudice will not believe. Thus does the mother go on from year to year, hardly admitting that her boy is “deficient,” and quite sure that he is not an idiot – there being some things in which he is so very clever!

The great improvement in the treatment of idiots and lunatics since science began to throw light on the separate organisation of the human faculties, is one of the most striking instances in all human experience of the practical blessedness induced by knowledge. In a former paper of this journal an account was given[3] of the way in which, by beneficent training; the apparent faculties of idiots are made to bring out the latent ones, and the strong powers to exercise the weaker, until the whole class are found to be capable of a cultivation never dreamed of in the old days when the name IDIOT swallowed up all the rights and all the chances of the unfortunate creature who was so described. In those days the mother might well deny the description, and refuse the term. She would point to the wonderful faculty her child had in some one direction, and admit no more than that he was “not like other children.” Well, this is enough. She need not be driven further. If her Harry is “not like other children,” that is enough for his own training, and that of the rest of the household.

A training it may be truly called for them all, from the father to the kitchen maid. The house that has an idiot in it can never be like any other. The discipline is very painful, but, when well conducted and borne, it is wonderfully beautiful. Harry spoils things, probably: cuts with scissors whatever can be cut – the leaves of books, the daily newspaper, the new shirt his mother is making, the doll’s arm, the rigging of the boat his brother has been fitting up for a week, the maid’s cap ribbon, his father’s silk purse. It would be barbarous to take scissors from him, and inconvenient too; for he spends hours in cutting out the oddest and prettiest things! – symmetrical figures, in paper; figures that seem to be fetched out of the kaleidoscope. Lapfuls of such shapes does he cut out in a week, wagging his head, and seeming not to look at the scissors; but never making a wrong snip. The same orderliness of faculty seems to prevail throughout his life. He must do precisely the same thing at precisely the same moment every day: must have always the same chair, wailing or pushing in great distress if anybody else is using it: and must wear the same clothes, so that it is a serious trouble to get any new clothes put on. However carefully they may be changed while he is asleep, there is no getting him dressed in the morning without sad distress. One such Harry, whom we knew very well, had a present one day of a plaything most happily chosen – a pack of cards. There was symmetry in plenty! When he first took them into his hands; they happened to be all properly sorted, except that the courtcards were all in a batch at the top, and one other – the ten of spades – which had slipped out, and was put at the top of all. For all the rest of his life (he died at nineteen) the cards must be in that order and no other; and his fingers quivered nervously with haste to put them in that order if they were disarranged. One day while he was out walking, we took that top card away and shuffled the rest. On his return, he went to work as usual. When he could not find the ten of spades, he turned his head about in the way which was his sign of distress, gave that most pathetic sort of sigh – that drawn-in, instead of breathed-out sigh, which is so common among his class, and searched everywhere for the card. When obliged to give the matter up, he mournfully drew out the ten of clubs, and made that do instead. We could hold out no longer, and gave him his card: and he seized upon it as eagerly as any digger on any nugget, and chucked and chuckled, and wagged his head, and was perfectly happy. We once poured some comfits into his hand. They happened to be seven. At the same moment every day after, he would hold out his hand, as if by mechanism, while his head was turned another way. We poured six comfits into his palm. Still he did not look, but would not eat them, and was restless till we gave him one more. Next day, we gave him nine; and he would not touch them till he had thrust back two upon us.

In all matters of number, quantity, order and punctuality, Harry must be humoured. It is a harmless peculiarity, and there will be no peace if he is crossed. If he insists upon laying his little brother’s tricks only in rows, or only in diamonds or squares, he must be coaxed into another room, unless the little brother be capable of the self-denial of giving up the point and taking to some other play. It is often a hard matter enough for the parents to do justice among the little ones: but we can testify because we have seen what wonders of magnanimity may be wrought among little children, servants and everybody, by fine sense, and sweet and cheerful patience on the part of the governing powers of the household. They may have sudden occasion for patience on their own account too. Perhaps the father comes home very tired, needing his coffee. His coffee is made and ready. So they think: but lo! poor Harry, who has an irresistible propensity to pour into each other all things that can be poured, has turned the coffee into the brine that the hams have just come out of; and then the brine and the coffee and the cream all back again into the coffee pot, and so on. Such things, happening every day, make a vast difference in the ease, cheerfulness and economy of a household. They are, in truth, a most serious and unintermitting trial. They make the discipline of the household: and they indicate what must be the blessing of such institutions for the care and training of idiots as were celebrated in the paper we have referred to.

As for the discipline of Harry himself, it must be discipline; for every consideration of humanity, and, of course, of parental affection, points out the sin of spoiling him. To humour, in the sense of spoiling, an idiot, is to level him with the brutes at once. One might as well do with him what used to be done with such beings – consign him to the stye, to sleep with the pigs, or chain him up like the dog, as indulge the animal part of a being who does not possess the faculties that counteract animality in other people. Most idiots have a remarkable tendency to imitation: and this is an admirable means of domestic training – for both the defective child and the rest. The youngest will smother its sobs at the soap in its eye, if appealed to, to let poor Harry see how cheerfully everybody ought to be washed every morning. The youngest will take the hint not to ask for more pudding, because Harry must take what is given him, and not see anybody cry for more. Crying is conquered – self-conquered throughout – the house, because Harry imitates everything; and it would be very sad if he got a habit of crying, because he could not be comforted like other people. As the other children learn self-conquest from motive, in this way Harry will be learning it from imitation. He will insist upon being properly washed and combed, and upon having no more than his plateful – or his two platesful – at dinner: and so on. The difficult thing to manage at home is the occupation: and this is where lies the great superiority of schools or asylums for his class. His father may perhaps get him taught basketmaking, or spinning with a wheel, or cabinetmaking, in a purely mechanical way; but this is less easily done at home than in a school. Done it must be, in the one place or the other, if the sufferer and his companions in life are to have any justice, and any domestic leisure and comfort. The strong faculty of imitation usually existing among the class, seems (as we said just now, in reference to the faculties of idiots in general,) a sort of miracle before the nature of the brain-organisation was truly conceived of. How many elderly people now remember how aghast they were, as children, at the story of the idiot youth, not being able to do without the mother, who had never left him while she lived: and how, when everybody supposed him asleep, and the neighbours were themselves asleep, he went out and got the body, and set it up in the fireside chair, and made a roaring fire, and heated some broth, and was found, restlessly moaning with distress, while trying to feed the corpse. And that other story – a counterpart to which we know of our own knowledge – of the idiot boy who had lived close under a church steeple, and had always struck the hours with the clock; and who, when removed into the country, far away from church, clock, and watch, still went on striking the hours, and quite correctly, without any visible means of knowing the time. What could we, in childhood, and the rest of the world in the ignorance of that day, make of such facts, but that they must be miraculous? The most marvellous, to our mind, is a trait which, again, we know of our own knowledge. An idiot, who died many years ago at the age of thirty, lost his mother when he was under two years old. His idiocy had been obvious from the earliest time that it could be manifested; and when the eldest sister took the mother’s place, the child appeared to find no difference. From the mode of feeling of the family, the mother was never spoken of; and if she had been, such mention would have been nothing to the idiot son, who comprehended no conversation. He spent his life in scribbling on the slate, and hopping round the playground of the school kept by his brother-in-law, singing after his own fashion. He had one special piece of business besides, and one prodigious pleasure. The business was – going daily, after breakfast, to speak to the birds in the wood behind the house: and the supreme pleasure was turning the mangle. Most of us would have reversed the business and pleasure. When his last illness – consumption – came upon him at the age of thirty, the sister had been long dead; and there were none of his own family, we believe, living; certainly none had for many years had any intercourse with him. For some days before his death, when he ought to have been in bed, nothing but a too distressing force could keep him from going to the birds. On the last day, when his weakness was extreme, he tried to rise – managed to sit up in bed, and said he must go – the birds would wonder so! The brother-in-law offered to go and explain to the birds; and this must perforce do. The dying man lay, with his eyes closed, and breathing his life away in slower and slower gasps, when he suddenly turned his head, looked bright and sensible, and exclaimed in a tone never heard from him before, “Oh! my mother! how beautiful!” and sank round again – dead.

There are not a few instances of that action of the brain at the moment before death by which long-buried impressions rise again like ghosts or visions; but we have known none so striking as this, from the lapse of time, the peculiarity of the case, and the unquestionable blank between.

There are flashes of faculty now and then in the midst of the twilight of idiot existence – without waiting for the moment of death. One such, to the last degree impressive, is recorded by the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder. in his account of the great Morayshire floods, about a quarter of a century since. An innkeeper, who, after a merry evening of dancing, turned out to help his neighbours in the rising of the Spey, carelessly got upon some planks which were floated apart, and was carried down the stream on one. He was driven against a tree, which he climbed, and his wife and neighbours saw him lodged in it before dark. As the floods rose, there began to be fears for the tree: and the shrill whistle which came from it, showed that the man felt himself in danger, and wanted help. Everybody concluded help to be out of the question, as no boats could get near; and they could only preach patience until morning, to the poor wife, or until the flood should go down. Hour after hour, the whistle grew wilder and shriller; and at last it was almost continuous. It suddenly ceased; and those who could hardly bear it before, longed to hear it again. Dawn showed that the tree was down. The body of the innkeeper was found far away – with the watch in his fob stopped at the hour that the tree must have fallen. The event being talked over in the presence of the village idiot, he laughed. Being noticed, he said he would have saved the man. Being humoured, he showed how a tub, fastened to a long rope would have been floated, as the plank with the man on it was floated, to the tree. If this poor creature had but spoken in time, his apparent inspiration would have gone some way to confirm the Scotch superstition, which holds – with that of the universal ancient world of theology – that “Innocents are favourites of Heaven.”

It is for us to act upon the medium view sanctioned alike by science and morals – neither to cast out our idiots, like the savages who leave their helpless ones to perish; nor to worship them, as the pious Egyptians did, and other nations who believed that the gods dwelt in them, more or less, and made oracles of them – a perfectly natural belief in the case of beings who manifest a very few faculties in extraordinary perfection, in the apparent absence of all others. Our business is, in the first place, to reduce the number of idiots to the utmost of our power, by attending to the conditions of sound life and health; and especially by discountenancing, as a crime, the marriage of blood relations; and, in the next place, by trying to make the most and the best of such faculties as these imperfect beings possess. It is not enough to repeat the celebrated epitaph on an idiot, and to hope that his privations here will be made up to him hereafter. We must lessen those privations to the utmost, by the careful application of science in understanding his case; and of skill, and inexhaustible patience and love, in treating it. Happily, there are now institutions, by aiding which any of us may do something towards raising the lowest, and blessing the most afflicted, members of our race.

Three Graces

of Christian Science

Household Words, Volume 9, page 317

Has any one of our readers ever seen a mind locked up in a case, the key of which cannot be found? Such is the condition of a human being without senses.

But are there such beings? it may be asked. There has been at least one, of which this dreadful conception is nearly a faithful account. There is a girl in Switzerland born blind and deaf, and almost entirely without the senses of smell and taste, and, originally, even that of touch. Such at least was her state when first examined by the benevolent persons who wished to improve her condition. Her parents, who were poor, concluded she was an idiot; and, while sufficiently attached to her to desire not to expose her to observation, and the trouble of being meddled with, left her to nature, as they said – which in her case, meant everything that was dreadful and disgusting. At nine years old, when the family were at their meal, she stood near, and a piece of bread being put into her hand, she ate it: and when, instead of bread, a piece of iron was given her, she put it into her mouth, tried to chew it, and after a time let it drop out. When left alone, she lay huddled up, with her fists upon her eyes, and the thumbs closing her ears. It was not easy to make her walk, and she clung to the person next her, uttering shrill cries. Her skin was nearly insensible. On looking further into the case, however, the physician was of opinion that sight might possibly be obtained, sooner or later, by operation for cataract. It appeared also that she was not totally deaf. Sharp sounds, close at hand, evidently gave her great pain, but none were heard at the distance of a few feet. Her hearing had originally been somewhat better than this; and she had even shown some disposition to speak, which, however, seemed to be lost in total deafness (practically speaking) at two years old or under. The parents let her go at last to an asylum, though shedding many tears at the parting.

In three months she took walks. By bathing, fresh air, and exercise, her skin had become nearly as sensitive as other people’s: so here was one sense obtained, to proceed upon. For a time, this was rather a grief than a satisfaction to everybody; for she was continually hurting herself, even knocking her head against the bedstead in the night, and uttering the most lamentable cries. The strangest thing she did was dealing with her food like a ruminating animal. She bolted it first, and then, in ten minutes stretched her neck forward, brought up what she had swallowed, and chewed it for an hour. It took a month to cure her of this. It was done by watching the moment, and compelling her to throw her head and body back, and open her mouth. Once conquered, the strange propensity never re-appeared. When the circulation and digestion were brought into a healthy state, her sleep became quiet. She left off knocking her head against the bedstead and screaming in the night. The poor child was now brought into a state of bodily ease. Still, however, her nervous condition was such as to make the surgeon decline operating on the eyes. She showed terror when any effort whatever was required of her; and her sounds of satisfaction were made only in connection with eating; – not on account of the taste; for she was insensible to that, but after a meal, when the satisfaction of her hunger was felt. It must have been a happy moment to her guardians when she first laughed. It was in answer to caresses. She soon learned to shake hands, and she hugged the friend who so greeted her, and laughed. But it was still doubtful whether she knew one person from another – even her own particular nurse from a stranger. It was a whole year before she could be taught to feed herself with a spoon; though before that time her voice had become more human – several notes of the scale having, as it were dropped in between the primary sounds she made when admitted. Her ability to feed herself was accompanied by other improvements, even of the deficient senses themselves, and especially of hearing She soon followed a voice calling to her at several feet distance. This was her state seven years ago: and, if such progress as this were made in one year, we may hope that now, at the age of nineteen (if she still live) her case may have passed from being that of a human being without senses, to that of one being born to them very late, and having them in an imperfect condition at last.

The earliest case of supposed extreme deficiency of the senses which was fully and properly recorded was that of which Dugald Stewart was the historian; that of James Mitchell, the son of a Scotch clergyman. The boy was born in seventeen hundred and ninety-five, totally deaf, but far from totally blind. He was fond of the light, though he could not distinguish objects; and his custom was to shut himself up in a dark stable, and stand for hours with his eye close to any hole or chink which let in a ray of sunshine. He bit pieces of glass into a proper shape, and held them between his eye and the sunshine, and got a candle all to himself in a dark corner of a room. Moreover, his senses of smell and taste were uncommonly acute, and he obtained a great amount and variety of knowledge by means of them. The vast conception of communication between people and things at a distance was conveyed to him at once by smell (if not even by such light as he was sensible of), and there is nothing so difficult to convey to those who have not his comparative advantages. He knew his family and friends some way off by his sense of smell; could tell whether they came home with wet feet or dry, and, no doubt, whether they had been gathering sweet herbs in the garden, or dressing the horse in the stable yard. Yet this boy, who had only one sense absolutely deficient, and was cared for and tended with the utmost assiduity by educated people, and visited by philosophers, remained unspeakably ignorant and undeveloped in comparison with several persons who instead of being totally deficient in only one sense are possessed of only one. He used his small means very actively for amusement; but no one seems to have thought of using them for his education. It was a period when metaphysics were flourishing more than science, and especially in his neighbourhood; and poor James Mitchell accordingly never learned to read or write, or to speak any language at all. He taught those about him a limited language by signs; but they taught him none. When we read the philosopher’s account of him, of the guardian sister’s language of taps on the head, or hand (which then appeared very clever); and of his utterance being only “uncouth bellowing and boisterous laughter,” we think of the three, far happier cases of Edward, Laura, and Oliver half a century later, and bless the science that has brought, out so much of the statue from its quarry – so much of living mind from its apparently impervious tomb. The night when Edward Meystre’s guardian, hearing his uncouth voice, went to his room, and found him with folded hands, saying aloud, “I am thinking of God – I am thinking of God” – his first spontaneous prayer – must have been the sweetest in which ever the lover of his kind laid his head on his pillow.

This case of Meystre is the first of three to which our title applies. Here the total absence of each sense was not from birth. Edward, of whom we are speaking, had a deaf and dumb brother, but heard very well himself, as an infant, and began to say “papa” and “mama,” when the smallpox deprived him of his hearing, utterly and absolutely, at the age of eleven months. There was fear for his eyes at the same time; but they escaped, and he saw perfectly well till the age of eight – an immense advantage in regard to his future development. It was a cruel accident that deprived him of sight; and we pity the perpetrator of the carelessness perhaps more than the sufferer. A boy of eleven, Edward’s cousin, playing with his father’s loaded gun, aimed it at the door of the room, and, at the precise moment when Edward was coming in, discharged the piece, lodging the shot in the poor child’s face and eyes. The sufferer rent his mother’s heart by clinging to her for long afterwards, saying, in his language of signs, that it was always night. He wanted to have his cousin killed; and his mother, strangely enough, pacified him by telling him the boy was dead and buried. He wanted to be certain, and she took him to a new-made grave. He stamped upon it with his feeble little foot; and such was his moral education! Happily he was taken under a wiser care; and the time arrived, and before very long, when he loved and consoled his poor cousin, and was always glad to meet him while informing other people who visited him that he had had two eyes, and now had none, adding, turning pale as he made the signs, that it is very pleasant to be able to see.

At this time, his employment was handling and cutting wood in his father’s shop – his father being a carpenter. When his father left business, the lad cut wood for the neighbours. It was sad that the one sense which was now to be relied on should be impaired by his hands being hardened and roughened in this way; and, though he was taken into the excellent Blind Asylum at Lausanne (maintained by one beneficent English gentleman) at the age of eighteen, his fingers never acquired the delicacy of touch of the other pupils. There is no evidence that his senses of smell and taste were turned to particular account in his education; but they were not deficient, and James Mitchell’s case seems to show that much might have been done by means of them.

In his education there were some marked stages which it is highly interesting and important to know of. His enterprising and benevolent teacher, M. Hirzel, taught him words, by means of raised print – beginning, of course, with nouns. He was made to touch a file, and the word file (in French); and the word was given him now in larger and now in smaller letters, that he might find out that it was the shape of the letters, and not the size that was important.

The next word given was saw, and a saw – a thing he was familiar with – was put into his hand. Then came the discovery – during the fourth lesson. His face lighted up. He had found it out! He showed everybody that the one word meant a saw, and the other a file; and it was some days before he recovered his composure. He now went to his lessons with pleasure, and began to want to know the printed names of things, and to like to pick out from the case the letters composing those he knew. It was a joke of his to put together the letters at random, and ask what they meant. Such were his early lessons. His favourite amusement was at the turning-lathe, where he became so expert that he quizzed the new pupils (all blind) for any irregularity in their work: plaiting straw, or whatever it might be.

The indefatigable teacher actually thought he would try to teach him to speak. To speak! A person totally deaf and blind! How could it be set about? It was accomplished, with infinite trouble, in which the teacher was sustained by the hope of success, and the pupil by the only inducement found strong enough – the promise of cigars – a luxury which, we trust, no one will think of grudging to a creature so bereaved. By feeling the teacher’s breath, his chest, his throat, his lips, and by having his own mouth put into the proper form for the vowels, by prisms and rings of different sizes, the art of articulation was learned; and it brought on the next great event in Edward’s experience. Being taught the easy name (Arni) of one of the blind pupils, he found that that boy always came to him when he called the name. He found that he could communicate with people at a distance by means of speech, and now knew what speech was for. No doubt Arni was wanted very often indeed, till more names were learned; and probably Arni was glad when the others had their turn to be called. This happened soon, for Edward now spoke a good deal, uttering aloud, of his own accord, the words he learned to read. He went on pretty easily through “The mason makes the wall,” “The baker makes the bread,” and so forth, and to know that the word wall may mean walls in general; and it was not very difficult to teach him “Today,” “Yesterday,” and “Tomorrow.” By that time, the third great event was at hand. The weather, from being very cold, had become mild, and Edward’s tutor took him out to feel the buds, leaves, and blossoms of plants, and made him observe the warmth of the sunshine, and that there was no snow, and gave him the name “Spring,” and then taught him, “Leaves come out in spring.” He caught a glimpse of the use of the abstract term, and in great agitation turned the phrase to “In spring, leaves come out.” He looked brighter than ever when, he said with his fingers that “One word means many things,” and he actually capered with joy. It was curious to watch his apprehension of another abstraction. He told a falsehood once – said he had had no wine, when the housekeeper had given him a glass, pleading that she ought to have been questioned and blamed, as she gave him the wine. Great pains were taken to impress him with the meaning and consciousness of the lie; but it was uncertain with what effect. A few days after, the pupils told him at bed time that there was snow. In the morning, he went out to ascertain for himself, being fond of verifying statements. The snow was melted; whereupon he cried out very loud, “Lie! no snow.” Thus it was clear enough that he knew his fault, and the name of it.

The fourth great event was the clear formation of the religious ideas that were presented to him; and this kind of teaching began as soon as the affair of the lie showed him to be capable of moral training. It is probable that his recollections of light and all the beauties that it reveals determined his first superstition. While strongly disposed to fetishism, in general – venerating the wind, for instance, because it was not tired after blowing strongly for several days – his particular disposition was to worship the sun. The first religious sentiment that he expressed was that it does not do to shake one’s fist at the sun. He was deeply impressed, when told by his companions, that the Maker of the sun was like a man, only so wise and powerful as men cannot imagine. As a necessary consequence of this way of teaching him, he was uneasy about what might become of everything when God was asleep. To remedy this, his teacher took him quietly round the house when the inmates were asleep, and made him softly touch their heads, and told him (by the finger speech) that they were now as if they were dead, being unable to think: whereas, God was always thinking. He now, of course, took up the idea that the dead could dream; but he became deeply impressed with the dignity of being able to think. When he wanted to play with the pupils whom he found at prayers, and then to know why they joined their hands, he was told that they prayed, and that praying was thinking of God. It was after this that his teacher heard that strange and heart-moving sound from the dark bedside, the loud uncouth voice saying over and over, “I am thinking of God!” One consequence of his new notion of the dignity of thought was his feeling about the deaths of persons of different ages. He felt the corpse of a child of two years old, and asked a woman in the room if she cried for its death; but, without waiting for an answer, he added that that was not possible, for the child was too young to be able to think much, or therefore to be worth crying for.

These results are surely wonderful for a period of eighteen months. This desolate creature could, in that time, speak, read, think, and inquire; he was a subject of moral discipline, and was capable of an energetic industry. His work at the turning-lathe was excellent, and he had employments enough to fill up his time innocently and cheerfully. A cheering thought and image to all who had heard of him, what must he have been to his guardian, the patient M. Hirzel! His family were proud of him, even to the deaf and dumb brother, and he lost none of his attachment to them.[4]

Even greater progress has been made in the development of the American girl, Laura Bridgman, whose case is happily so well known as not to need to be here detailed at length. In her case, too, the sense of touch was the only resource at first; and in her case, too, there was the advantage (how great we cannot know) of her having enjoyed sight and hearing till she was two years old. At the age of eight, Dr Howe, who was to her what M. Hirzel was to Edward Meystre, took her under his charge in the Blind Asylum, at Boston, Massachusetts, and taught her as much as Edward was taught, except that actual speech was not attempted. Poor child! When informed that the sounds she made were too loud and frequent, she asked, “Why, then, has God given me so much voice?” The pathetic, unconscious hint was taken, and she was then permitted for a certain time everyday to exercise her lungs freely – making as much noise as she pleased, in a room where she could disturb nobody. When alone and watched without her knowing it, she soliloquises in the finger speech; and, what appears still more strange, she uses it in her dreams. The governess who visits her bedside, can tell, by watching the motions of the hand, what she is dreaming about. She writes freely now, and her mind communicates very largely with others. Her diary, which she writes in a clear free hand, without the guidance of lines, tells how her days pass – among books and work – books in raised print, and neat sewing or knitting of her own, and lessons in geography, history, and algebra, among other things; and about her walks, her visitors, the letters she receives and writes, and the news from all parts of the world that her friends report to her. She is regular in all her doings, neat in her dress, always busy in one way or another, exceedingly inquiring and intelligent, and remarkably merry. Her turn has come – even hers – for benefiting a fellow-being. Oliver, a boy in her own plight was brought to the institution as she had been, and she assists materially in his education, and must be an inestimable companion to him.

There was once seen, we believe in France, an awful and heartbreaking spectacle, when, for purposes of philosophical observation, the inmates of a blind school and a deaf and dumb asylum were brought together. At first, they tried to communicate – the deaf and dumb being permitted to feel the lips and throats of the blind; but a dreadful scene ensued. Their strong and scarcely disciplined passions became furiously excited by the difficulty of communication, which each supposed to be the fault of the other, and they sprang at each other’s throats like wild beasts, and fought so desperately that there was great difficulty in parting them. The two classes spoke of each other afterwards with bitter hatred. How different is now the scene, when the merely blind pupils help and serve Laura and Edward, and are beloved by them; and when Laura, with flushed cheeks and trembling fingers, labours to convey some of her knowledge and her intellectual pleasures to Oliver, and succeeds, and he is happy in consequence! How are times changed since the helpless were cast out to perish!

Blindness

Household Words, Volume 9, page 421

It is a curious speculation why so much more compassion and sympathy are shown to the blind than to any other class of sufferers from personal imperfection or infirmity. Their case is sad enough, no doubt, and their privations are great and constant. But their disadvantages are not to be compared with those of persons of deficient intellect, or with those of the deaf, while their personal suffering is much less than that of the deformed or maimed. Those who suppose blindness to be a worse misfortune than deafness, are thinking, we suspect, of total blindness in comparison with partial deafness; whereas we must have both total or both partial, in order to a true comparison. The full power of communication with other minds enjoyed by the blind gives them all that is necessary for the development of every essential faculty; while the deaf and dumb must remain radically deficient in mental power and training all their lives, for reasons which have been assigned in our former account of that class.[5] Accordingly, no deaf and dumb person has ever yet excelled in any matter in which intellectual power, a vigorous and sound mind, was required; while there is scarcely anything that some blind person or other has not excelled in, except painting and decoration. Yet the blind obtain by far the readiest and most genial sympathy. They are picturesque and affecting on the stage, where the deaf are made simply ridiculous. The deaf are abundantly quizzed; their mistakes being eminently quizzable. But who quizzes the blind? The commonest remark in the world is that the blind are cheerful and agreeable in company, while the deaf are morose and unhappy; yet it does not seem to occur to observers that, to make the comparison complete, they should follow the two into solitude. If they could peep through the keyhole, they would see the counterpart of the contrast; the deaf busy, unembarrassed and happy; and the blind, not necessarily idle or unhappy, but without the animation, inspired by social pleasures, which are the delight of their lives. Now this superior sympathy in the case of the blind must be natural, or it would not be so general. It is no doubt owing to the smaller essential differences between the blind and the generality of persons, together with the very evident and appreciable nature of their privations. In proportion as the case of the deaf becomes better understood, the sympathy will be more equally balanced; and, we imagine, will finally transcend all that is felt for any other imperfect beings, except the mentally deficient. The blind are, on the whole, pretty well aware of their own case. Not only those who have become blind know what they lose, but those who are born blind, gather enough from the people about them to be in a great degree sensible of their privations; and the thing to be looked to in their case is to keep them cheerful and happy; whereas the deaf and dumb are so oddly complacent, so conceited and flippant, so given to joke and quiz, that their guardians have rather to repress their levity, and take down their complacency. And here again is another natural and general reason why the blind inspire the readier and more general sympathy. They are the superior and the more consciously suffering order; although their case is infinitely the less really unfortunate of the two.

With all this sympathy, however, the case of the blind never even began to be truly considered until the structure and functions of the brain began to be understood. Certain powers and acts of the blind seemed as like a miracle, up to a quarter of a century ago, as the idiot striking the hours in the absence of all clocks and watches. When the blind Dr Saunderson was dying, he said, in answer, to the astonishment of a friend at his remark about some matter of measurement, “Ah! this is one of the many things we blind people can do, that seem to surprise you very much, but are very simple and natural to us.” During Dr Saunderson’s life, which lasted fifty-seven years, his abilities were the amazement of one king after another, one philosopher after another, and doctors, scholars, and common people out of number; yet nobody seems to have learned a lesson from him. He was only a year old when he lost his sight by smallpox; so that he could not be supposed to be qualified for his subsequent attainments by anything he had seen in that time. No doubt, even that much experience of light, form, and colour, was of high value to him. When we consider how an infant of a year old knows father and mother, and the cat, and the moon, and likes flowers and gay colours, and tries to catch flies and birds, we may understand that, whether Dr Saunderson was conscious of it or not, his notions of persons and things must have been very different from those of one who had never received any impressions through the eye at all. The general action of his mind must have been aided by the brief glimpse of light that was allowed him; but his peculiar attainments were precisely those in which sight is least needed; though observers at the time, and his biographers since, have noted as a sort of miracle his achievement of much that they are accustomed to use their eyes about, and therefore suppose to be impossible of accomplishment without eyes. They are not so much astonished at his telling more accurately than anybody else the size of a room by the sound of the voices and footsteps in it; nor at his telling by the feel in the open air when the smallest fleece of cloud passed over the sun. Whatever he could learn by nicety of sense they can believe in at once. And his classical learning – so great that he lectured in admirable Latin, with plenty of Greek citation – they can easily admit, understanding how oral instruction might serve his turn. It was his geography, mathematics, and astronomy that amazed them. That a man who could hardly be said ever to have seen earth or heaven should be the friend and commentator of Newton, should announce discoveries about the equator and the poles, should describe the solar system, with its motions, and its forms, and its spaces, without ever seeing sun, moon, or star; these were the things that seemed marvellous to other people, but very simple and natural to himself. Whereas, now that we know what separate faculties we have for these things, they seem almost as simple and natural to us. Mental arithmetic is a common exercise, in most good schools. The shapes of things are as readily known, by touch as by sight, by all who practise going about in the dark; and the blind pupils of every asylum show that this is quite as easy without ever having seen the form. The difference between them and us, is, that if they were to see the objects they would probably not know them before touching them; though even this turns out to be not quite so certain as it was supposed some time ago. More of that when we have done with Dr Saunderson. As for his geographical knowledge, why should he not have it as well as we? When once he had learned in his walks how much a mile was, why should he not extend the conception to one hundred miles or one thousand, as well as we? And when he had learned any form at all, why not the form of a continent, or a river-course, or a chain of mountains? What he did not know was, what they all looked like; which is not precisely the question in geography. Accordingly, in all good schools for the blind, there are globes and maps with an embossed surface, instead of black, white, and coloured marks. In a foreign country where we travelled several thousand miles, twenty years ago, we met with a blind boy, who was much interested in hearing of our travels. He got his embossed map, and traced our route, without a single mistake, up one river and down another; over the mountains, now south, now west; there was not a town, nor any chief stage of that great journey, that he did not put his finger on. To him, as to Dr Saunderson and all his class when educated, this thing seemed very simple and natural. Dr Saunderson learned his Greek and Latin at a Yorkshire school, where he took his chance among other boys.

His father, who was an exciseman, took great pains in exercising him in arithmetic; and the success was so remarkable that two gentlemen undertook, when he was about eighteen, to have him taught algebra and geometry. He made his own signs – an excellent system of them – on a board which had sets of pinholes, and pins with large and small heads. His geometrical figures he made with pins and threads. One fact worthy of notice is, that he found great difficulty in understanding a demonstration of Dr Halley’s which appeared not very difficult to other geometricians; but when he had got a notion of what was wanted, he worked out the same problem in his own way, so as to make it clear to others as well as to himself. Dr Halley’s statement, in fact, involved a visual idea, of which probably no one concerned, except the blind man, was aware. This blind man succeeded Whiston, by Newton’s recommendation, in the mathematical professorship at Cambridge. Queen Anne made him Master of Arts for the purpose; and George the Second made him Doctor of Laws. A higher honour than all, his commentary on Newton’s Principia was published simply on the ground of its value, nearly twenty years after his death. Surely the case of a man who, so long ago, used to sit with his board before him, listening to the reading of Euclid and Archimedes in Greek, should have prepared us much sooner than it did to recognise and train the faculties of the blind. How was it that we went on for above a century gaping and staring at this learned man, without setting to work to see what other blind people could do? Some say it was because Dr Saunderson’s temper was very bad. He was extremely quarrelsome, certainly; but, so are some persons who can see; and we are rather accustomed to suppose that education will mend their tempers, than that it can possibly make them worse. The good exciseman who took such pains with his boy may have indulged him too much, and may have treated that temper of his with false tenderness; but we presume it would have been worse if so energetic and industrious a nature had been left without object and employment.

As to the difference between the blind and the seeing about knowing form by the eye, there are some curious facts on record. It is, we believe, a very ancient puzzle whether a person born blind and obtaining sight, would know by the eye a cube from a globe. However ancient it may be, the question was revived when the great surgeon, Cheselden, couched a boy who was born blind, and observed what he could do with his new sense; and again, when, a quarter of a century ago, a great stir was made about educating the blind. We ourselves were fond of putting the question to all manner of persons, and comparing the answers. Take a blind boy, who has handled a globe all his life, and who knows it perfectly well from his mother’s square workbox of the same size: restore his sight, as Cheselden did, and show him the globe (taken out of its frame) and the box set side by side on the table. Don’t let him touch either; and then see if he can tell which is the globe and which is the box. Can he tell? Ignorant and thoughtless persons say offhand, “Tell! To be sure he can. If he can see, how can he help knowing?” Metaphysicians say (what we, in our metaphysical years, used to say very confidently), “Certainly not. The ideas of one sense are in their very nature different from those of another sense, and need to be combined by association. Here, no association has been permitted, and the sense is wholly new, and therefore he cannot possibly tell the cube from the globe.” Now that we know more about the brain and its faculties, men of science speak much less confidently. They wish to try a case before pronouncing; but they would not be surprised at finding that the express faculty of recognising form might serve for the purpose, without the help of touch. In this uncertainty, what facts have we? That same boy was very fond of pears. He was shown a pear and an apple lying side by side, and told: “Now you know an apple from a pear, by feeling it. Tell us, with your hands behind your back, which is the pear, and you shall have it.” He looked and looked again, his mouth watering all the time, and he could not make it out. In an instant, he darted out his hand, with his eyes shut, knew the pear by the first touch, and ate it in a trice. So we learn little by that, and that little seems to show that he did not recognise form by the eye.

The first feeling after the restoration of sight, is, that everything seen touches the eye, and when the person wants to lay hold of any object, he lays hold of his own eye. These bewildering impressions may well confuse and confound the brain-action of the sense. One of the most curious perplexities of this same boy, came out of the clasp of a bracelet. That clasp contained the miniature of his father. He knew the portrait, but was excessively distressed to know how it could come there. Measuring it by his father’s face he could not make them agree; and he said it was as unaccountable to him as putting a quart of anything into a pint measure. And yet it is said that Dr Saunderson could converse learnedly – really with perfect correctness – on the laws of perspective; a proof, if the assertion be a fact, that some things which seem most to depend on sight are really independent of the eye, as others are of the visual faculty itself.

We now know something of the latent capacities in the blind. If ever we thought that they could only make baskets, and mats, and ropes, and play the organ passably, we now perceive how much we were mistaken, and our sense of duty towards that class of sufferers must be exalted in proportion). This same sympathy that we are all so prone to feel on their behalf is often very mischievous to them, instead of being any solace. The commonest – let us say boldly, the vulgarest – shows itself first in taking excessive care that the blind child does not hurt itself. Pray observe, we say excessive care. In its home, we see the mother, and everybody else, removing every thing out of its way, opening all doors, catching hold of its petticoats, or never leaving hold of them, never letting it alone, to do what it can and likes. It is tender-spirited, timid, and excessively cross or passionate. Put the same child into a good school for the blind, and what is it like in a month’s time? Why, it runs up and down stairs, scuds along the passages with merely the fingertips touching the wall, lays a hand precisely on the knob of every door, washes and dresses with perfect neatness, swings, runs races – even playing blind man’s buff by the ear – says lessons, dines quite cleverly by the aid of the blind man’s fork – so made as to hold just a proper mouthful – laughing instead of crying, at any tumbles, blunders, or little difficulties not yet surmounted. The mother, coming to visit her child, is all amazement. Can this merry, active, dexterous, agile child be the same that was so lately fretting in her arms, the constant anxiety of the entire household?

Next, when there must be addresses spoken, or hymns sung, on anniversary or other charity occasions by the children, the address and the hymn will always be found stuffed full of the very things the children know nothing about, and would not naturally speak of. They tell the audience precisely what the audience knows, and they themselves do not know – how much they lose by not seeing sun or star, how beauteous are the hues of the flowers and the rainbow that they shall never behold – that to them nature is a blank, and so on; whereas, if they speak or sing at all, it should be what they can feel, about what they have gained, and not about what they lose. It was bad enough that Dr Blacklock, in Scotland, and a blind lady, in England, wrote descriptive poems. They had a mind to do it, and they did it; and of course the descriptions were merely wonderful as a matter of memory, and not good as descriptions; but it is far worse to put such things into children’s mouths as genuine utterance, and, above all, as religious sentiment. We were once behind the scenes in such a case. There was to be a public meeting for the benefit of a Blind Asylum. An address, in verse, was asked for in various directions, and several were sent in, and thought very beautiful. But a bystander observed that they were all crammed with stars, beams, gleams, hues, and so forth, and suggested that trial should be made to produce one without a single direct visual image in it – nothing but what some inmate or another of that very school had felt or thought. This seemed a new idea to the managers; but they acted upon it, and with clear success. We do not relish such addresses and public hymn singing (we mean by a body of sufferers exhibiting themselves to raise money, by means of their privations and devotions together); but, if such utterance must be for a time permitted, at least let it be true.

Next, we object to the false sensibility which would keep the blind (or indeed any other imperfect) persons from “a knowledge of what they lose,” as the expression commonly is, Surely they lose quite enough, after the utmost has been done for them; and what right have we to keep from them anything that they are able to learn? We do not mean, of course, that we are to bemoan their lot – to sit down in the dust with them, like Job’s comforters, and enumerate all the blessings they may wish for in vain. All that may be left to the consciousness of the blind. What we mean is, that we do not see the kindness of being silent to a lame person about the view from a mountain top, or to a deaf person about the echoes at Killarney, or to a blind person about a sunrise at sea, or a sunset among the mountains. If the blind person ever saw sunsets, he will be eager to have the impression revived by descriptions. We know one who gets read to him all the critiques upon the picture galleries from the newspapers; as we know a person become deaf, who once was musical, who reads with vast pleasure all accounts of new oratorios, and London concerts. If the blind have never seen, they ought to know as much as they can of what interests other people. Really, one might as well caution young people against dancing in the presence of the old. For that matter, we might as well put our finger in our eye, when a sailor or traveller tells us of the beauties of Batavia, or the glories of the Himalayas. How many of us will see those beauties and glories? The less chance there is of our going to see them, the more important it is that we should learn from those who can describe them to us. A bedridden old lady likes to hear, when her daughter comes in from her walk, about the dew on the hedges, and the purple light upon the hill: and we ought to take for granted that the stricken blind will enjoy the rousing of old visual memories, as we all enjoy reviving the stories of our youth. The fact is, it is now too late to prevent this happy process of participation. The blind can now read – a good many of them – and all will, by and by; and when our literature is opened to them, none shall say them nay, as to any matter that is contained in books. Their nice sense of touch, which used to be little more than an empty marvel to us, we have now learned to make use of in unbarring the doors which shut them out from literature. We now print books for them, in a type which they feel, instead of see; an embossed type which they learn to run over with their fingers with great readiness. We know a rich lady who spends many of her lonely hours in reading in this way; and we know a poor old washerwoman become blind who has got over the difficulty of the thickened skin of her finger, and, with eyes upraised, sits enjoying the Pilgrim’s Progress during the time that her family are out at work. In our blind schools, the children read in classes, as quickly as, and far more intelligibly than, pupils in most schools: where the custom is to poke over the book, and stop the harsh voice between every two words. A monthly Magazine for the Blind has been recently published by Chapman and Hall, which will be a daily blessing to finger-readers. In Saunderson’s time, who would have listened to a prophecy that the blind would be educated much like other people; that the girls would sew and dress their hair as nicely as anybody else – and that there would be other Saundersons, men learned in mathematics and classics; that all would read and write to amuse their leisure; read books in a raised type, and write on desks so made that they can scribble private letters in all privacy, and fold, and fasten them without help? Yet all this we now see done; and who shall say how much more amelioration may grow out of it?

This embossed printing is tried on various plans, each of which has some merit of its own: but we feel no doubt about sticking to the ordinary alphabet.[6] We have no doubt that several changes would be desirable if we now had to introduce the whole art of printing; but, as it is only printing for the blind that has to be practised, we think that no advantage can compensate for the hardship to the recently blind of losing their accustomed alphabet, or for the difficulty of preparing good literature for the use of the blind, instead of sending our ordinary books direct to press. We look about us and see – first, tens of thousands of blind persons who want to read next – a whole literature of noble books, which it would illumine the life of the blind to read – then, a printing press, and its types ready to bring the other two together; and we say, Do not stand speculating, and inventing, and devising, and keeping all that multitude waiting. Give them what you have ready for them now, and see about improvements afterwards.

The press is Mr John Edward Taylor’s, at 10, Little Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. And either he or his friend, the Reverend William Taylor, 73, Oxford Terrace, Hyde Park, London, will give any information about this new magazine, or receive any subscribers’ names. The monthly numbers are only sixpence each. Six shillings a year will give that great pleasure and benefit to some who said, when the films were gathering over their eyes, and when no straining of their sight would avail any longer, that they should never read again. How pleasant to ask them now whether that was not a little mistake of theirs!

Freedom, or Slavery?

Household Words, Volume 9, page 537

It is a curious inquiry how long it takes to make familiar acts and objects, dignified or sublime, by incorporating them with history. A fly, or a straw, in amber, would become something grand if we could be sure it had been there for a thousand years: and we have ourselves examined, with a beating heart, a piece of darning, unfinished, and with the wooden needle stuck in it – a piece of Egyptian darning, begun before Abraham was born, it is thought, and not finished yet. The romp of a Spartan king with his children, the geese of the Capitol, the drift weed that Columbus saw, Newton’s apple, and such every day matters have become sacred through the noble associations with which they are eternally linked: and thus in all American minds, there is something soul-stirring in the mention of certain tea, stamped paper and snowballs, which seem undignified things enough to persons ignorant of their historical significance. Why not tea as well as geese? Why not snowballs as well as drift-weed, or an apple? So say the Americans of Boston, to any ill-informed foreigner who smiles at the smallness of the subject: and the Boston people are right. That tea was worth more to the world than all the spices of the East. That stamped paper carries to this day more value than all notes of all banks: and not all the cannon now pointed against Russia can send out balls so weighted with results as those few snowballs, flung against a house eighty-four years ago. The Boston people are right enough about the dignity of those familiar things. The pity is that some among them cannot see that the like of what happened about the year ’seventy may happen again; that objects and subjects that appear to them common, vulgar, low (as they are pleased to say), may turn out to be more dignified and sublime than all the gentility in the world.

Ninety years ago, every face in Boston was invoking with one passion or another about where to put a bundle of paper. Most of the inhabitants were talking vehemently: some were preaching calmly and solemnly; and many were dumb with fear and anxiety; and all about where to put a bundle of paper. This paper was stamped, and had just arrived from England. To admit it freely into the colony and use it, would be to admit that the British Parliament has the right to tax the colonies without their consent. It would be to give up the constitution of the province of Massachusetts, under which the inhabitants had lived, and desired still to live. It had come to this: – that either that bundle of stamps, or the Constitution of Massachusetts should be waste paper; and the choice must be made, which it should be. The choice would be declared by the stamps being received at the office, or deposited in the Castle, to await advice from London, or be torn and trampled, in declaration of war. The stamp office was found closed, the distributor having resigned his office, in token of his individual opinion. The Governor applied to both Houses of the Legislature, and the upper referred him to the lower, while the lower refused to take any notice of the arrival of the bundle. So there was nothing for it but to lay up the bundle in the Castle. The matter did not end there, even for the hour. No business could be transacted without stamps, in which written contracts were concerned; the Courts of Justice were suspended; and the legislature refused to pay for the escort and guard which had been set over that wonderful bundle of paper. Thence came burning in effigy, processions and preparations for a struggle, until obstinate King George had been told that he must give way; and the Stamp Act was repealed. The question was (it must be observed), whether the constitution of Massachusetts was to be overruled by a distant parliament or not; in other words, whether the constitution under which the people were living was worth anything or not. The citizens of Boston addressed the King in a respectful and dutiful way, assuring him that they earnestly desired the continuance of the union with England, but that they must maintain their rights under that union.

Meantime, as King George and his ministers chose to do some very offensive and illegal things – so many that we cannot stop to describe them here – the merchants and other citizens pledged themselves not to import or use British goods; and knowing that, among so many, some frail members would be tempted to make large gains by smuggling, they appointed a watch from the body of merchants to see who was faithful, and whether any attempted to violate their pledge. In spite of prohibition from the governor, the citizens met when they thought proper about this business, and refused to disperse when required to do so. So the governor sent his British soldiers into the streets, where the inhabitants, already in no good humour with them, were exasperated by the rudeness and downright grossness of some of them. The very sight of arms was enough to provoke a riot in the street. One February day, in seventeen hundred and seventy, when the snow lay thick in the streets, some boys were carrying about caricatures of the merchants who had been importing English goods. A man, well known as an informer, met them, and tried to persuade a farmer who was passing to destroy the pictures. The countryman refused, and the informer did the act himself, and was hooted by the boys all the way home. The first thing he did was to snatch up a gun, and threaten the boys, to which they replied by snowballing his house. He fired from a window and killed a boy – an innocent little fellow, who had never dreamed of being a martyr so early, if at all, and who was declared not to have been concerned in throwing the snowballs – no harm if he had. Boys would be no boys if they were too timid or proper behaved to snowball a fellow who destroyed their pictures, and then took up a gun when they told him their minds about it. But here was a martyr already; and so stands this young fellow in history. He was the first person slain in the American revolution, which instituted a new order of government and a new method of social existence in the world. Not all Boston only, but a great number of citizens from the country attended his funeral. All were aware of something portentous in the solemnity of the funeral of that boy; and not a few said to each other that another great act in the world’s history had opened over his grave. Snowballs immediately became significant, as every incident becomes typical in times of strong popular excitement. Eleven days after the death of the first victim the first great riot occurred, and it began with snowballing a sentinel. The more soldiers gathered, or were marched to the spot, the more snowballs were thrown, till, their patience being exhausted, they fired, in consequence of some unknown person having uttered the word “fire!” Three persons were killed, several were wounded; and the revolution was begun. It is a marked feature of that time that the soldiers went about with bludgeons, when not allowed to carry other arms, threatening and using overbearing language to every citizen who looked them in the face. We shall find a parallel to this, as well as to other incidents, when we glance over the events of the present summer.

Next came the curious affair of the tea. It was hoped in England, and by the royalists in America, that tea would be admitted when other articles were not, because it was sent by the East India Company; but tea was taxed without the consent of the colonists, like other articles; and it was therefore forbidden, after a public meeting of the citizens, to be landed. The merchants to whom it was consigned refused to say that they would not receive it; but, alarmed by sundry tokens that this was to be the occasion of conflict, they proposed to advise their British correspondents to take back the tea. This was not enough. The tea should not even pass the custom house, it was decided; and twenty-five men were set to watch over it to prevent its being touched by friend or foe. A public meeting was held, which disowned the governor’s order to disperse, and at which it was avowed that they must fight for their rights and liberties, or lose them. Summonses were sent through the state for the citizens of outlying places to come into Boston, and witness the existing state of things, and see what should be done. There would have been a battle about the tea, if a company of unknown men had not ventured upon a curious proceeding to render it unnecessary. The watch consisted, as we have said, of twenty-five men. Double that number retired from the meeting, turned their coats, and some say otherwise disguised themselves, quietly went on board in the dusk, and emptied out all the tea into the dock. This was the true declaration of war against Great Britain by her North American colonies. This was the act by which some fifty gentlemen of Boston put their necks in peril, and committed themselves and their families to the dire chances of a great revolution. Tender wives and discreet children in fifty houses forbore to ask, that late autumn night, where the head of the house had been. One such wife there was, who, thinking her husband’s shoes might be damp, took them up, when he had put on his slippers, to dry them, and found in them a quantity of tea. She concealed her consternation, emptied and wiped them carefully, shook the rest of his clothes, and asked no questions till the King of England ceased to have power in the United States.

A great and memorable revolution was that, ushered in by these incidents. Incidents more solemn and more striking seem now, in this summer of eighteen hundred and fifty-four, to indicate that a change not less weighty is at hand. Massachusetts is now a sovereign State, and Boston is a metropolis. The inhabitants have now been trained in political action for eighty years; and that action has made them so proud of their nationality, such devout worshippers of their Federal Union, that any great and general commotion, political or social, must proceed from some prodigious cause, and involve vast consequences. What has just been, and is still, happening at Boston, does indeed deserve the most earnest attention of all who are interested in human welfare and social wisdom.

After Massachusetts became a sovereign State, her people abolished negro slavery – chiefly, it may be observed, through the sensible, persevering, and most virtuous efforts of a negro woman, called Mum Bett,[7] to obtain her own freedom. She got it; and that of all her race followed. Many years after, Massachusetts made a law like that of England, whereby every slave that touches her soil becomes free. Other of the New England States made a similar law; and the inhabitants fondly believed that they had done with negro slavery for ever. But, alas! they were in federal union with slave States, which have found means, through the apathy or timidity, or worse, of the free States, to control the action of the whole in regard to slaves, or free blacks whom any fellow may choose to call slaves. For many years, the slaves have run away, by hundreds and thousands, to Canada; and the slave catchers, who are paid according to the number they capture, have for some time been kidnapping more and more free persons of colour, and running them down to places whence it is difficult to recover them, and where many have been hidden for a long course of miserable years. This is an evil and crime which the Boston people could withstand without much difficulty before the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill, but that measure is now driving the matter fast to an issue. It is enough to say in this place (where our business is with the social aspects of politics), that the Fugitive Slave Law is considered by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Massachusetts an unconstitutional act. It overbears the constitution of the state, and requires of the citizens – or may require of them at any moment – acts which are illegal according to the constitution under which they live. By that constitution, there can be no slave within their bounds; whereas, by the new law, they are punishable for treating a negro fugitive otherwise than as a slave, and for not delivering him up to his owner. Such a contrariety cannot go on; and the hour for decision – the hour for a choice between the two contradictory constitutions – is obviously approaching. How it has been hastened within a few weeks we will now see.

Ever since the bill passed which compels the giving up of every fugitive who is claimed unless he can prove his freedom on the spot, it has been known that the kidnappers sent by the owners, use very little scruple about identifying the persons sought. A letter, addressed to a kidnapper under arrest, and intercepted by that accident, explains the matter very fully. It avows that the loss occasioned by the running away of slaves is so serious that the owners must make up for it by catching any negroes they can get hold of; and this is done so often that no man, woman, or child with a dark skin feels safe, although legally as free as our readers and ourselves. The kidnappers get into the confidence of the negro shopman, waiter, or mechanic, who has no suspicion of their quality. They learn their personal marks, and the leading points of their history; they draw out their affidavits and descriptions; they arrest the man or woman at some helpless moment, and too often carry him or her away before the abolitionists and lawyers of the place know of the circumstances. One result of this outrageous abuse is, that the populations of the towns and villages are become more awake and ready, and more excitable when an arrest takes place. Every newspaper from the northern states now contains paragraphs, pointing out districts where kidnappers are supposed to be prowling; and the capture is becoming more difficult every season. This state of things can no more be borne for a continuance than the neighbourhood of hostile Indians. Another result of the abuse is, that the negroes are becoming cautious; and more than cautious – cunning. There is a man named Jones, a market gardener, at Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania, whose cunning wits have been much sharpened by the persecution of his race. Not long ago, two gentlemen (for these infamous dogs hunt in couples) made acquaintance with Jones, and were so very polite and kind as to lead him to suspect what sort of gentry they were. Following their lead, he let them know of some scar or mole or something under his clothes – your real fugitive is known by the weals of the whip – and looked mysteriously and talked evasively when they wanted to hear his story. Without having said so, he left them in the belief that he had come from Old Virginny within a year. As he expected, he was arrested that night by his new friends; and a very strong case they made of it next morning. Nothing could be more complete than their story and their proofs; and there were many in that crowded court – for in this case secrecy was out of the question – who believed that the poor fellow before them would never be his own man again.

“Well, Jones,” said the commisioner, when the claim was complete, “this seems a very clear case. Have you anything to say against your being delivered to your old master?”

“Why yes, sir,” said Jones, “ I should like to call somebody to speak for me.”

“Call away, then. Whom will you call?”

“I thought I saw Mr A. in court.”

Mr A. instantly stepped forward.

“You know me, sir, I think?”

“Yes, Jones, I do.”

“Swear him, then,” said Jones; and Mr A. was sworn.

“How long have you known me, Mr A.?”

“About thirty years – as long as I have lived in Pittsburg.” And then Mr A. told what he knew of Jones. He was followed by Mr B., an eminent citizen who had known Jones for thirty-one years. Everybody except the claimants began to cheer up now, and some suspected a joke.

“Anybody else, Jones?” asked the Commissioner.

“Why, sir, there’s one I should like to ask a question or two of – the Mayor of Pittsburg.” The mayor was sent for, and presently appeared, and took the oath.

“You know me, Mr Mayor?”

“Yes, Jones, I should think so. Why, my wife and I have bought our vegetables of you every week for thirty years.”

A loud laugh rang through the court, and presently through the city. The kidnappers slunk away; but they were arrested at the door for an attempt at abduction, and carried to jail.

Escaped slaves, however, have not often the cunning of Jones; and it is not to be wished that they should. Or, if cunning be, as it is, the vice of slaves (of all complexions and in all latitudes), it is less able in the ignorant slave than in the man who has tilled his own ground, and managed his own trade for thirty years.

Anthony Burns[8] – the sufferer who has unconsciously brought old Massachusetts to its present pass – has ruined himself by a step which has no cunning in it at all. He had run away from Virginia last winter, it is believed. It is proved that he was earning his living in Boston, on the first of last March. Wishing to let his family know of his safety, he wrote, or got written (for many slaves cannot read or write) an account of himself and his whereabout, and got the letter sent round by Canada. In his simplicity he supposed that was security enough; but all communications addressed to slaves are intercepted, and his master learned where he was. The master’s name, be it known and remembered, is Suttle, – Charles F. Suttle; and his comrade in his heroic enterprise, is called William Brent. Charles Suttle and William Brent set out immediately, and clapped Anthony Burns on the shoulder when he was cleaning clothes for his employer in Brattle Street, Boston, on the morning of Friday, the twenty-sixth of May last. Knowing that by the law of the state they could not, without inconvenient controversy, claim him as a slave, they charged him with pretended felony – an accusation which was dropped as soon as an offer was made to purchase his freedom.

He was taken to the courthouse, where he remained all day, knowing nothing of what was doing outside. It was a busy day in Boston – some of the citizens providing for the federal law being observed, and others for the older Massachusetts constitution not being infringed. Messrs Suttle and Brent were arrested for attempted abduction; but, foreseeing this move, they were provided with bail, and were at once released. The largest building but one, we believe, in Boston (the exception being the Melodeon, where Theodore Parker, a man of great reputation, preaches) is Faneuil Hall, wherein the revolutionary meeting and councils were held, and which is therefore called the Cradle of Liberty. In that place, a meeting was held that night, and such speaking was heard as is hardly heard twice in a century by any nation. It was as if the trumpet of their memorable war hung by the gate, and some bold hand had raised it, and made it sound among all the lulls of the old granite state. But the citizens were not prepared with any practical measure. Some were for fighting at once. Others were for a different kind of struggle: some for one thing – some for another, and none for submission to an infringement – and such an infringement as was threatened – of their state laws. In the midst, the cry arose that the coloured people were breaking into the court house, and off went the meeting to see. It was so; the black citizens were battering away at the court house door with a beam, which they used as a battering ram. Several whites rushed to get hold of the beam, and wrought well with the negroes, till the door gave way. A pistol shot had been heard from within the hall: it was followed by more in the streets; and a shower of brickbats brought down the court house windows in shivers. Amid the rattle of glass, the roar of the crowd, and the popping of pistols, the heavy bang of the beam was heard till the door crashed down, and yet louder was the steady cry, repeated every minute by a group of leaders, “Rescue him!” Above all, just at half-past nine of that May night, was heard the clang of the alarm bell.

The first who entered the Court House were received with shots, and a waving of clubs from a posse of city officers, who were mustered on the stairs. Rushing back for the moment, the leaders were intercepted by a body of police who gained the steps, and successfully held the place. A special constable named Batchelder, was killed in the entry by a pistol shot. For want of a plan, and some sort of organisation, and because many of Burns’s best friends were averse to violence when they believed law to be on their side, nothing more was done that night. The police made some arrests; and, by midnight, the military were posted in the square. The affrighted slave owner now offered to sell his slave – aided in his resolution, probably, by finding that there was a serious mistake in his affidavit. He had sworn that Burns ran away on the twenty-fourth of March, whereas there was abundant evidence of his being at work at Boston on the first of March. The money was instantly raised: but when it was brought to Suttle, he had changed his mind, and refused to sell his man for any price. There is no doubt that this was in consequence of directions from Washington; for the President sent letters under his own hand, desiring that no expense should be spared in carrying out the law of the United States. Thus the revolutionary character of the transaction was avowed by the President of the Republic himself.

On the Saturday the courthouse was found to be guarded, within and without, by the whole military force of the district – even the soldiers from the fort, the cadets, and the marines from the Navy yard, had been summoned in the night. The poor slave was handcuffed and strongly guarded. His countenance was wistful and sad in the extreme. He no doubt knew that the last fugitive who had been carried back had been flogged every day with the greatest number of lashes that human patience could endure without death, for an example to runaways. Alas! it may too probably be so with himself, even now.

His counsel obtained a delay until Monday to prepare his defence; and the rest of Saturday was occupied with the coroner’s inquest on Batchelder, and the committal of the ringleaders.

On Sunday, that largest place in Boston, mentioned above, was crowded – clustered with people wherever they could hang on; and if we ever did copy sermons into this publication, we would give Mr Parker’s discourse of that day, with the past and coming week for his text. It reads like a Lutheran denunciation of the times of the Reformation; and if we could say anything stronger in description of it, we would. Among the audience were two leading abolitionists, whom their townsmen were glad to see in safety. Their houses, and that of Mr Parker, were saved, by a strong police muster, from destruction by the partisans of the kidnappers. In every pulpit in Boston that day lay a slip of paper, requesting, in the name of Burns, the prayers of the congregation on behalf of one in sore distress. This was done at Burns’s special request, in his tribulation. On this day, too, the people of colour held a secret meeting, and afterwards put out a handbill, imploring that nobody would believe the report that Burns would be purchased; and entreating that his release might not be prevented by belief in such a lie. They were but too right. All that day handbills were circulating in the furthest part of the state, requesting all who loved the liberties of Massachusetts to come into Boston, armed only with the arms that God gave them, to see what was doing there; and on Monday they came pouring in, these sons of the pilgrims, and sons of the declarers of independence. Some were there already from a distance of eighty miles. The summons reads like a solemn call to vigilance over national liberties; and as such, we have no doubt, it will stand in history hereafter; and a future generation will emphasise the last line: “Come – but, this time, with only such arms as God gave you.” The yeomanry who did not come, staid to hold meetings in all the townships; and the excitement immediately rose to a pitch never before witnessed since the grave closed over Washington.

The pleadings were protracted by every possible device till Wednesday evening; when the commissioner promised judgment on the Friday morning. Every one knew but too well what that decision would be; for the misstatement of date was slurred over as an incident of no consequence. A steamer stole up, and was refused a place at one wharf after another, when it was whispered that this was the vessel that was getting up its steam to carry away Burns. A wharfinger at last let a wharf without communicating the knowledge thereof to the owners, who immediately discharged him; but he was soon snugly harboured in a good post in the Custom House.

Other preparations for the verdict were made. The court square was cleared, and cannon were planted. The military lined the way to the harbour, and gathered about the door, to receive the slave within their hollow square.

Other preparations were also made. Twenty thousand people filled the side pavements, besides those who thronged every wharf but one, and the multitude who clustered to the very topmasts of every ship in the harbour.

When the doom was pronounced, down dropped the flags of the Union and of the State, hung with black. The shops were shut. The balconies and windows were filled with women dressed in mourning. One of the hardest things for the citizens to bear was the volunteer offer of an artillery troop of seventy-five Irishmen to come into the city and control the inhabitants by force of arms. For our part, we are not very sorry that our ex-patriots have thus shown to all sympathisers how they carry their practice of making bulls into their social conduct. Throughout the townships of the interior, the bells were tolled as for a great public calamity.

The moment came. Burns appeared on the steps, a slave. Not often has the dignity of that misfortune been so blazoned. Before him went dragoons, marines, guards, artillery, the gun of the latter being the only carriage in the streets; and the ear-piercing hiss, and the wary execration, went on rising and redoubling from street to street. Nowhere was it louder than at the Exchange, where the great merchants of the city stood. That this book of Wrong and Infamy will end here, we think no one can believe who has studied the incidents of the first American Revolution, or the character of the Sons of the Pilgrims; a character which lies deep and firm under all such accretions of a less noble quality as have concealed it for a time. It is well that for one while the oppressor had his own way – a complete enjoyment of law and order, as he calls it. Can there be a doubt that, next time, Massachusetts will be ready; every man convinced in his own mind what law he is living under; every citizen prepared to sustain that law; and all good men agreed as to the action to be taken? Meanwhile, the free blacks are flying to Canada, feeling that there is no safety for them in Massachusetts, freeborn citizens of that so-called free state though they be!

But let them take courage, and be of good heart. If there were men, once, who refused to harbour King George’s stamped paper, and who emptied the India Company’s tea into the dock, and who supported those acts at Lexington and Bunker’s Hill, there are descendants of those men, now, who will refuse to be made the slave catchers of the planters, and will insist on the practical working of their own noble law, that every slave who touches the soil of Massachusetts becomes free.

Cheshire Cheese

Household Words, Volume 10, page 52

The scene of the Cheshire cheese making which I have just been witnessing is in Flintshire. This is something like a bull to begin with; but it is not my bull. I relate what I find; and what I find is a manufacture of Cheshire cheese, on a farm celebrated for that article, just within the borders of Flintshire. I remember being much amused, when a child, at a little bit of little Flintshire being separated from the rest, and packed in between Cheshire, Shropshire, and Denbighshire. It is just within that little bit, and near the winding Dee, that this celebrated cheese farm lies. Very different is its Flint cheese from the flint cheese of a more northernly county. In Cumberland the common cheese made in the moorland has been literally used as flint. I have been gravely assured on the spot that a soldier, being out of the way of a flint for his musket, actually used a bit of cheese- rind for the purpose. Moreover, when the clogs worn by the peasants lose their iron (just like a donkey’s shoe), it is no uncommon thing to tip the clog with a cheese-paring. The farmer cuts his cheese for the table with an axe; and, in the dusk, a succession of sparks is seen to fly, if the cheese be in proper economical condition. Perhaps the strangest thing that ever happened through a cheese was in Cumberland, when one rolled off a cart that was ascending a steep road. The cheese bounded down into the valley, striking the crags, and sending out sparks as it went, and at the bottom it set the heather on fire so effectually that it burned for two days. As for how such a delicacy is relished in farmhouses, that is a matter in which testimony differs according to taste. My own private speculation is that I might like it very much indeed if I could once get at it; but there would be the difficulty. If, indeed, one could get a grater that could stand the friction, one might try. I will see about it the next time I go into Cumberland. Meanwhile, here I am on the banks of the Dee.

Among its other windings, the Dee winds round a stretch of pasture land so green after the haymaking as really to dazzle the eye. The river sweeps round, under a very high bank, forming a horse-shoe; and when the waters seem disposed to meet again at the narrow part, they change their minds, and wander off on either hand, to form new circuits and enclose more green meadows. The semicircular ridges in the pasture show how much smaller and shallower the curve once was; and there are people living whose parents remembered the planting of an oak by the waterside, which grew some way inland, where it was cut down. The bank above the river tells the same tale. Its red soil is riven, and so heaped and tumbled as to show that it was brought down roughly by the action of water below. Some of these heaps and promontories are old enough, however, to be covered with well-grown trees. The gazer above observes that the whole valley of which this is a nook is formed precisely in the same manner. It is walled in semicircularly with wooded banks, whence charming-looking houses peep forth, with their green clearings, or sloping gardens. As for what is seen beyond, through the open part, it is a level and richly-fertile and wooded country, as far as the Welsh mountains, which enclose the whole. At sunset, when the entire view is at its brightest, there is one spot to which the eye is attracted infallibly and at once. At one end of the horseshoe, where the bank is subsiding towards the levels, there is a spreading farmhouse, with a low, long, diversified face, and a terraced garden, sloping to the south. In the basin below there are fields which look as soft as velvet, some with a monstrous haystack in the middle, and others with large companies of cows, all at that hour tending towards the gate, to go home for the night. That most tempting place is Widow S.’s cheese farm. I proceeded to my call on her, satisfied that in point of residence she might be the envy of almost all England.

The place did not disappoint me in the least on closer examination. The farmyard front is neat, spacious, and somewhat picturesque,from its antiquity, if not particularly beautiful. There is a little green in front, kept inviolate by a sunk fence; and the area of the yard is so large that the outhouses are no inconvenience or eyesore. There run scores of pigs, which feed on whey and buttermilk. There the large teams turn round without interfering with anybody; and there the whole dairy of seventy cows can move about without crowding.

Inside the house, the first thing that catches the eye is the Welsh carpet – not in the parlours, but the passage-rooms, pantries, and kitchen. This Welsh carpet is a pattern produced on the brick floor by staining the brick squares in figures with dockleaf juice. The prettiest pattern is perhaps produced by nibbing half of each square diagonally with dock leaves. The diced appearance is really very pretty. The best parlour is well furnished; but the uneven floor must wear out the carpet very soon. The lattice windows do not open, either in or out; but in a better way, which keeps out rain as well as a sash window. One compartment slides in grooves; and large, and bright as air, all those windows are, except in the cheesemaking rooms, where they are bedewed as if it were brewing that was going on. The widow’s own little parlour looks to the farmyard, across the green. It looks somewhere else too. There are two old-fashioned peepholes in the door, through which she can spy at pleasure into the industrial department; while she can, by turning the brass plates, secure herself from being watched in return. I don’t know that I ever saw this device before, except in prisons, lunatic asylums, and hospitals; and it looks very odd, pleasant only as a relic of ancient days and customs, when the master’s eye was supposed to be really constantly over his household. The upper rooms are spacious and airy, and as clean as the dairy itself – a thing which is especially commendable in a house which is wainscoted throughout its chambers, and all hill and dale in regard to its floors. Within the widow’s room there is a most remarkable place, called Paul’s closet. It is a small room, now appropriated to the shower bath, which stands in one corner, and lighted by a high window. It is vaulted, and the only door is a double one. Over the door it may be seen, after some calculation, that there must be a cavity. Such a recess there is; and it is closed by a sliding panel. Paul, whoever he might be (and that is what nobody knows) was concealed in this room for a long time (nobody knows when), and has left curious traces of his imprisonment. In the vaulted part of the roofing there are drawings done with soot or blacking of some sort, of churches (one of which looks like a lighthouse), with the ecclesiastical doors and their elaborate hinges and locks represented faithfully, and on a grand scale, in proportion to the rest of the edifice. In the opposite angles are marks which seem to show that Paul was a Catholic. In one is the IHS, and in the other the MRI (only with N instead of M), which tell of his catholicism. Poor Paul was, or believed himself, in danger of being caught, one day, and he crept into his cupboard over the door. Being found there dead, and mere skin and bone, he was supposed to have fastened the panel only too well, and thus to have died a horrible death. Judging by the present state of things, there could have been no want of air. It is to be feared that he died of sheer starvation, all alone and nobody knowing. Who could Paul have been?

The gardens are delightful, and the vine-covered house on that side. Where the upper storey projects, hanging its vine tendrils above the recess below, there is a clean white bench where one might sit all day and admire the garden. There is a smooth green all hedged in with old-fashioned flowers. The espaliers are knobbed all over with apples and pears; and the great pear tree beside the green shows myriads of the fruit. The high brick wall which surrounds this garden is covered – actually covered – with wall-fruit, golden apricots, and plums of all colours. The more delicate vegetables are here – asparagus beds, artichokes, peas, and beans. Passing through a door in the wall, one finds oneself in the terraced garden, seen from afar; and of course commanding the landscape before described – from the bank above the Dee to the Welsh mountains. Here are the potatoes, the cabbages, and common fruits; and, again, apricots and plums, as many as within. The pastures may hence be measured by the eye. The land held by Mrs S. is two hundred and eighty-three acres, very nearly the whole of which is in pasture. Her seventy cows eat nothing but grass and hay. Modern methods of management have not reached this valley yet. It is the notion here that it must be extravagant work ploughing the ground for roots, because it would be necessary to employ husbandmen; so only eight acres of this farm are under the plough, while ninety-eight are mown for hay this year. Hedgerow timber is in full luxuriance here; because, as the people say, what would become of the cows without the shade? Stall-feeding is of course a thing yet unheard of; or, if heard of, dreaded as the sure and certain end of all fame founded on Cheshire cheese. In the dairy I found the old-fashioned leads, with the ancient spigot, or bung of wood and rag. No zinc has as yet been propounded here. The manure yet awaits its due exaltation. It lies neglected in the open air; and in the pastures gives a sad lumpy appearance to the grass, when one comes near enough to see the blemish. The manure in the stalls is sometimes spread over the pasture. Guano has been heard of and used; and the name of bone dust is not altogether strange. But, as to bestowing serious thought on the great subject of manure, the time for that has not arrived. Whenever it does, I am rather disposed to think that the Cheshire cheese will be no worse, and the cows, the grass, the widow, and her dairymaidens very much the better.

By this time, my visit was quite long enough. I had obtained leave to come at seven in the morning to see the whole process of cheesemaking. The maidens, of whom there are always three, and sometimes four, rise at five o’clock. There is the milking and the breakfast; and by seven they are ready to begin upon the cheese.

The meal of milk of the evening before was put into tubs, except what is wanted for butter, and for domestic use. The tubs which receive the milk for cheese are two; and there are two more to contain the whey of the preceding batch. When the evening’s and morning’s meal were poured (mixed) into the two tubs, there were about fifty gallons in each, the yield of sixty cows, ten of the seventy cows on the farm being dry, or calving at the time.

There are two things to be put into this deluge of milk, one for show, and the other for use. For show, a tablespoonful of arnotta is mixed in. The arnotta is a thick, viscid, dark red substance, thicker than treacle, and quite as dark. It is made from the lining of the seed pod, and from the pressed seeds of a South American and West Indian plant of the Bixa kind; and it is used merely to colour the cheese. There cannot be too little of it put in, for its taste is nauseous to the last degree; and its properties are purgative. There is a constant tendency among the cheesemakers to put in more and more, to make the cheese rich, as they say, which means merely highly coloured. Mrs S., however, allows only one spoonful to a tub of fifty gallons; and that cannot well hurt anybody.

The other substance put in is the rennet. Irish rennet is found to be the best. Some of the farmers in the cheese districts bargain with the butchers, in selling their calves, to have the stomachs back again; but they must, for the most part, use them for their own cheesemaking; for the regular cheese dairies are provided with the stomachs of Irish calves, brought by travelling agents. Mrs S. buys enough in the spring for the whole year. She keeps it in a basket on a shelf in the cheese house, cuts off a few small pieces of the long dead stomach (which looks half-way between tripe and parchment) and soaks them in a pipkin with cold water for a few minutes. Some people pour boiling water on them, and let it stand till cold; but the cold water does quite as well, and causes no delay. There is some appearance of mystery in a cup fall of water, in which a bit of calf’s stomach has been washed, turning fifty gallons of milk into curd in a quarter of an hour: and till lately it was a mystery what the gastric juice of all stomachs was composed of, and how it acted. Now the chemists have ascertained what are the constituents of this wonderful secretion, this juice which is in all stomachs, which has no effect on living creatures, but reduces all dead substances that are swallowed into one uniform pulp, the best part of which goes to nourish the frame. But how it acts there is no knowing, any more than how any of the changes of the living frame are produced. There it is, in the stomach of the calf when killed; and the coats of the stomach are dried; and, after many months, the juice is as good as ever for turning milk into curd, in Cheshire in the autumn, just as it did in the stomach of the living calf, down in County Kerry in spring. While the process is going on, a wooden bowl, with hot water, floats on the surface of the milk, and some people put into the tub a pint, or so, in summer, and more in winter.

The maids are not idle while the curd is setting. One stout wench draws several pails full of buttermilk from a copper in one corner, for the pigs: and next, she sets about skimming the whey of yesterday. A thick cream has risen, and makes that great tub look exceedingly rich. She skims it, and deposits the cream in an earthen jar, ready for the churn; and then she empties the whey by pails full into what seems a great copper in another corner; but, as the whey vanishes, it is clear the copper is a funnel. The whey runs off through a pipe to the piggery. She is a clever girl who does this. She wears a blue bib like a child’s, up to her collarbones, and her gown is short, to a most sensible degree, as is that of the other dairymaids. They do not go slopping and draggling about, as ladies do in London streets; but have their dress no lower than the ankle, and shoes thick enough to keep them out of the damp of the moist brick floor. This girl wants to tilt the tub when she gets near the bottom. She begs no help, but hoists her stout apron through one of the handles, and while she hoists it, kicks a log of wood under the tub. When emptied, the tub is well scalded, and left to hold the evening’s milk.

The head dairymaid is meantime looking to the cheeses made on Thursday, Wednesday, and Tuesday, today being Friday. In the two rooms now under observation there are six presses, more being in other parts of the premises. These presses look like any first stone that any prince is going to lay for a public building – a square mass which ascends and descends by a screw. The two cheeses made on Tuesday are taken out and examined. They are pressed into keelers – tubs made of substantial oak, lessening in size to suit the lessening bulk of the cheese as it dries. The cheese is now turned out of its keeler, and the damp binder which bandaged it is thrown aside. It is put into the keeler again, the other end up, and the part which does not go in (for the keeler holds only about two thirds of it yet) is bound round with a broad strip of tin pierced with holes, and called a fillet. This fillet is bandaged round the cheese with a linen binder about three inches broad; then a cloth is thrown over the top, and the whole is pushed under the block of the press, which is screwed down upon it. The Wednesday’s cheeses are bigger and moister, and some whey is still oozing from the holes of the fillet. The Thursday’s cheeses are very soft and yellow, and only beginning to have a rind. The whey runs out with a touch of your thumb. The maid reaches for a handful of long skewers from the shelf. She stabs the cheese through and through in all directions, and throws aside the cloth in which it was wrapped, and which is wringing wet. It is now wrapped in a dry cloth, put, the other end up, into its keeler, bound with a fillet like the others, but with the difference that half a dozen of the long skewers are stuck into the holes of the fillet. Then the binder goes on, the cloth is closed over the whole, and it is set aside – not under the press today, but with a weight upon it, a slate cover, which has a wooden handle to lift it by. These newer cheeses are more or less wet with whey: they are seamed and marked with the creases of the binders and cloths, and knobbed in a rather pretty way with buttons answering to the holes of the fillet. These marks are all to be ironed out, before the cheeses get quite dry, with a tailor’s goose. The goose stands on the stove in the middle of the room, beside the flat irons used to smooth the cloths and binders. The ironing of cheeses strikes one as a curious sort of laundry business.

Now for today’s cheeses. In a trice everything else is put away, the dressers wiped down, and the coast made clear for the great operation. I stand between fifty gallons of thick custard (to all appearance) on the one hand and fifty gallons on the other. A very long, blunt knife is handed to the widow, who this morning does the honours with her own hands. She scores the curd in all directions, calls for a spoon, and invites me to taste the curd. It is very good indeed – to one who has as yet had no breakfast, though kindly invited to the widow’s well-spread table an hour ago. The breaker is next handed. The breaker is like a round gridiron, delicately made of thick wire, and fastened to the end of a slender broomstick. With a graceful and slow motion, Mrs S. plunges in the breaker, and works it gently up and down, and hither and thither, searching every part of the great tub, that no lump of curd may remain unbroken. When she turns – in ten minutes or so – to the second tub, the curd of the first all sinks to the bottom. Then comes the dairymaid, and fishes and rakes among the whey with a bowl till she brings the greater part of the curd to her side of the tub. Then she throws aside the bowl; and, while she retains the mass with one arm, she sweeps the whey with the other for all the curd that is yet abroad. There seems to be such a quantity that one can hardly believe that it all goes to make one cheese. Some of the cheeses, however, weigh one hundred weight, or even more, while those made in winter dwindle to sixty pounds or less.

Two clean white baskets, like round washing baskets, only slighter, are ready on the dresser. A cloth being put into one of these as a lining, the curd is heaped into it when the last morsel that can be caught is fished out. The basket is put into a tub to drain, and the whey is left where it is to send up cream for tomorrow’s skimming and churning. In two or three hours the curd will be dry enough for the final making into cheese. It is broken up by hand as fine as possible and salted. The salt is worked in very thoroughly. Mrs S. can only say she salts it to her taste. The head dairymaid thinks that she puts about two pounds of salt to the largest of their cheeses. The salting done, the cheese is fit for the treatment described in the case of the Thursday’s production; and it will come out tomorrow morning oozing whey through the holes of the fillet and wherever pressed; and it will be stabbed and impaled with those long skewers like its predecessor of yesterday. Meantime, the main business of the day is done. If the girls are skilful and diligent, they can get everything out of the way before dinner, at half past twelve. There is plenty of hot water in the kitchen copper, which holds one hundred gallons. The keelers are scoured, the utensils all scalded, the cloths and binders washed, and every place wiped and swept and made tidy before dinner. There is no reason why the girls should not sit down to their sewing, or their own employments of any sort, till the cows come home for the evening milking. Some awkward ones do not get through their work till four in the afternoon; but if they get tired it is nobody’s fault but their own. At nine everybody is off to bed.

The worst thing about the employment is that it cannot stop on Sundays, except in establishments large enough to have a double set of apparatus, and great command of labour. A landowner in the district I am writing of, offered, some time since, a prize for the best cheese, deferred on account of Sunday; and it is found that the milk may be set on Saturday night, and treated on Monday morning, without injury; and the servants do not complain of the Monday’s hard work, as the price of the free Sunday. But it is a serious matter that there must be duplicates of those huge tubs, and of everything else that is used, including double space to move about in. Remembering that the work may always be over soon after twelve at noon, I inquired whether the girls could not set to it two hours earlier on Sundays, so as to be in time for church – taking rest in the afternoon. But there is a strange obstacle to that plan. In Wales, and on the borders, the ancient custom remains which, if I remember right, used to be called bundling. The servants receive their lovers on Saturday nights, which is the sanctioned season for courtship. The master and family go to bed, and leave the key of the house with the maids, whose lovers come to sup, and stay much too late to admit of unusual early rising on Sundays. So, cheesemaking is continued as on other days, on all but the wealthiest forms.

As for the cheeses which had been pressed enough, that is, for four days, they are stored in the cheese room on the opposite side of the yard at the widow’s. She took the largest key I ever saw. The key of the Bastille, which hangs in Washington’s hall at Mount Vernon, in Virginia, is nothing to it; and the keyhole of the cheese room is in the very middle of the door. In fact, it is not a common lock bolt that the key draws back, but a heavy bar. The apparatus is bar and lock in one. More presses appear along the wall of this great upstairs room. Cheeses stand on end as close as they can without touching. There is a stove in the middle, and a thermometer hangs opposite the presses. The cheeses, which are turned and wiped very frequently, may stand here six months, though that seldom happens; and the temperature of the room must be regulated in winter. The demand is constant; and the only difference between good and bad times is that prices and profits are higher or lower. Every cheese is always sold. Factors come round and buy, chiefly to supply the Manchester and London markets. It is a capital business. From May to October, two cheeses per day, of near one hundredweight each, is a great creation of commodity. After October, the size of the cheeses begins to dwindle; then the number; until the spring calving of the cows, and springing of the grass, bring round the season of plenty again.

Much more cheese must and will be made yet. In Ireland there is next to none, though the Kerry hills are covered with herds of singularly productive milch cows. Every ounce of cheese eaten in the west of Ireland comes from London. When the trade in cheese is made entirely free, it will be otherwise; for in this case, as in others, what is called protection is mere impediment to native industry. There is an indomitable taste for cheese in our people; and sooner or later it will throw off the incubus of all duty, and enlarge the demand, according to the usual principle and practice of free trade. The widow need not dread such an event, either for herself or for her young son after her. She occupies a vantage ground by reason of the goodness and high reputation of her cheese. It will not be superseded by any that can come in from abroad, or is made at home. It is pleasant to see so much prosperity surrounding the widow, and in the shape, not of brick warehouses, or of iron safes at the bank – but of green pastures, mighty haystacks, sleek herds breathing fragrance, a little paradise of blushing fruits, and vats of yellow cream. May her shadow never be less!

How to get Paper

Household Words, Volume 10, page 241

There never was such a country for variety as the United States. In all the great commercial countries of the world there is a collection of representatives from all nations who trade; but each country has a kind of uniformity about it which makes the various people collected within it appear – what indeed they are – foreigners. In the United States, the variety is, in addition to the aggregation of strangers, in the country itself, and in the people who inhabit it. To apprehend fully what the diversity is, perhaps no way is better than to survey the whole area, and see what the inhabitants are doing in any one particular, or how they are faring with regard to any one article of general use or convenience. We might observe on the nature of the dinner provided on any one day, from fishy Maine to sugary Louisiana, or the deserts where nothing is to be had but beef; or the forest clearings which yield nothing but corn. We might look in upon all the needlewomen of that continent, and see what dresses they are making, from the gossamer ball dress in Broadway to the leather fringes of the Potawatamies. But our attention happens to have been fixed – in the existing crisis of difficulty about the dearth of paper in England – on what the American people are writing and printing on, all through their thirty-one states and bordering territories. If we are not mistaken, the variety of method and substance is very remarkable. Sweeping the circumference first, this is what we find.

On the northern limit, where the general trader never comes, and where the alphabet is unknown, people want to convey their minds by marks, as people always do and always did. These particular people, the Red Indians, have a “medicine man” – a wise man – to do it for them. He may not know the alphabet, but he can make signs. To furnish him with a surface on which to draw his hieroglyphics, the women are preparing the bark of trees. We do not mean that he is going to carve a name upon a tree. Mankind do not wait for “medicine men” to do that; for, in one fashion or another, all do that for themselves, in all countries and ages. In this case, the women are stripping off the bark of the birch, separating the light brown inner bark, coaxing the sheets to lie flat, and rubbing them smooth with stones until they almost acquire the satin like surface of French notepaper. They pick out, from their fish heaps, the strongest and sharpest bone to write with: and there is the wise man set up with the means of making marks as curious as any that Colonel Rawlinson has ever deciphered among the mounds of Persia.

Coming round to the coast – that granite coast where the Pilgrim Fathers found freedom of worship – there are nooks and corners, and especially islands, where the conveniences of life are rarely attainable. The story goes there, that a fisherman once brought his son from one of those bare sea beaten islands to the mainland; that the boy was amazingly struck with the barberry bushes which grow plentifully among the granite; but that his highest enthusiasm was excited by an apple tree. “Oh father!” he cried, “what is that wonderful thing? Is it a tree? And what are those beautiful things upon it? Are they lemons?” In a region where such a story could spring up, it is certain that wise men do not write upon birch bark. And yet in such places where the schoolmaster has found his way, though the merchant seldom or never comes there must be something to write on. Slates abound; and when the stock of paper is exhausted, the slates come abroad from the schoolhouse, and carry messages along the shore.

Passing down the seaboard to the south, we come at length to those other islands which are not granite, but which produce the famous Sea island cotton – the finest in the world. There, within those islands off the South Carolina shore, the waves make a wide sweep, leaving broad expanses of the smoothest sand. Who is that, at the hour of dusk, when the sand is smoothest – now looking round, to see if she is observed, and then stooping down, with a cane in her hand from the nearest brake? Who is that figure, dusky as the night? And what is she doing on the shore? She is drawing. That is a bird which she is drawing, in bold strong lines; and the bird’s head is to the north. The negro slave suspects that husband, brother, sister, or friend, will be coming by tonight; and she is leaving a direction to the land of freedom, for the fugitive to read in the moonlight, and for the waves to efface before morning. Farther round, even as far as the Mississippi, there is a curious local method of writing. A pretty lady reclines on a couch, under a mosquito-bar – a complete enclosure of muslin. As her little slave fans her with a feather fan, she comes to a stand with her fancy work. She has lent the pattern to Mrs A., on the next plantation. She must send for it; but, if she rises to write a note, it will let in the mosquitos, and be fatiguing, this hot day; and there is no use in sending messages by negroes. She bids the child bring her a magnolia blossom. On that broad, smooth, juicy petal she writes with her needle. She asks for her pattern, and proposes an evening drive. On a similar petal, comes back the acceptance of the invitation. In the certainty that negroes cannot read, very curious jokes and domestic stories travel on these snowy tablets from neighbour to neighbour. The messengers meantime look on with awe; though not quite in the spirit of fetish worship rendered by certain South Sea islanders, who trembled before a shaving, when a missionary had written on it. He wanted his chisel; and he wrote for it, with his pencil, on a shaving. When the messenger saw his wife rise and go to the tool chest, and take out the right tool, the perspiration ran off his face: he thought the chip had told the lady what was wanted, in a voice too fine for unenchanted ears to hear. So he and his fellows worshipped it. The Louisiana negroes know a little better than that; but they carry the delicate missives, without seal or envelope, in entire ignorance what those pale green marks may mean. The ladies on couches would tell us that here we may see the convenience of servants who cannot read.

Further up that great river, in the wild parts where settlers live miles from each other, paper is yet wanted for copybooks. But, however much wanted, it cannot be had. The Catholic priest is there, and the nun, going from house to house, in all weathers, through the wild forest: the priest offering worship on Sundays, and the nun offering schooling on week days. But here is no paper! The travelling glazier does not come so far; and the last sheet of paper was greased and put up as a window pane: and, now that another pane is broken, the boys are planning to fill it up with bladder or snakeskin. How is the writing lesson to be managed, in the evenings or bad weather, when there can be no writing on clay or sand before the door? Priest and nun know what is done in Arab villages, where the sacred command of the Koran, to teach all children, is observed, under difficulties; and they now do the like. They get wax – not so easily obtainable as in eastern countries; but they get it. The boys track the wild bees home to their hollow tree; the father fells the tree; half a dozen such operations provide wax for several tablets. Melted, purified, and smoothly spread over a framed piece of wood, this wax serves well – long after all paper is consumed, slates broken, and sand or clay unattainable.

Within the wide circle of these shifts, there are more expedients; but, from different causes, and of a totally different kind. The reason why people are put to shifts in the more thickly inhabited parts of the United States is, that the inhabitants use three times as much paper per head as we British do – three times as many pounds weight per head, even though the three millions of slaves are included, who cannot write or read. Except idiots, the blind, and slaves, everybody in that country reads and writes; and more persons appear in print than in any country since the alphabet was made. There, every child has its copybook in its place at school. There, every log house on the prairie has its shelf of books. Next to the church and the tavern, the printing press is set up in every raw settlement; and a raw newspaper appears; probably on whity-brown paper, and in mixed type, with italics and Roman letters, capitals and diphthongs thrown together very curiously; but still – a newspaper. Books are printed in the great cities, not by the thousand or fifteen hundred, but by the five or ten thousand; for the readers are reckoned by millions. The Americans have cheapened their postage, as we have done; and the increase of correspondence is in yet larger proportion, because families are more widely separated, and all are able to write. There is another reason for their larger consumption of paper (of a coarser kind than writing paper) which is truly mortifying to us in England. There are manufactures in which we and they run so exactly abreast that neither can afford the slightest disadvantage in the sale without losing the market: our paper duty is a disadvantage; and we lose the market. The cost of the mere wrappers of a multitude of articles made at Birmingham and Sheffield precisely absorbs the profits to be obtained in African and Asiatic markets; and the Americans nearly sweep that market from us. Wanting all this paper, what do the Americans do to get it? This is a question of immense importance to us, because we cannot, by any means yet tried, get anything like enough paper; and the scarcity and dearness of it now constitute what may be called, without exaggeration, a national calamity. Our supply was short, the quality of our paper poor, and the price high, before the last doubling of our population; before the penny postage so immensely multiplied our population; before free trade expanded our commerce; before the advertisement duty was taken off. Now, while all this new demand is pressing upon us, and even the modified duty on paper remains, the injury to a multitude of minds and to a host of fortunes is so serious that we are impelled to the inquiry how it is that the Americans, with their threefold demand, get thoroughly well supplied.

We should add that we understate the truth when we call the consumption per head threefold. It is threefold by weight: but the Americans use a great deal of very thin paper, such as is rarely used by us. Consequently the threefold by weight could amount to hardly less than fourfold by surface. How is this vast quantity obtained?

Here again, in finding the answer to this question, we meet new evidence of the extraordinary variety of people and ways existing in the United States. A glance at the papermakers of that country shows things as striking as our glance at the scribes round its outer circle. First, there is the great, the grand paper manufacturer. His steam engine puffs and pants like any other; his mills cover large spaces of ground; and his machinery is of the newest and best. One great difference between him and our manufacturers is, that he has the command of the world’s rags, as far as they go, and of many substitutes, when there are no more rags. Our excise duty is such a burden on the manufacture that we cannot compete with him in the purchase of foreign rags; and he even comes here and buys up our precious tatters before our eyes. Another great difference between him and us is, that he can make any experiments he likes with new materials, at no other cost, in case of failure, than the partial loss of labour and material: whereas, we cannot try such experiments, because the excise authorities must claim the duty of from one hundred to three hundred per cent on all paper that is made, whether it turns out saleable or not. Our manufacture cannot improve, our mills cannot multiply, and the price of paper cannot come down, but must continue to rise, while that duty goes on to be levied. While our papermakers are scolded by booksellers, authors, editors, printers, packers, and manufacturers, for the exorbitant price of their article, they are not growing rich, but very much the contrary. They are, in fact, the first victims of a monopoly which they have no desire whatever to preserve. Not only the duty makes the manufacture a monopoly, but the restrictions which attend the duty leave no freedom to any man’s ingenuity or enterprise. So our manufacturers sink into low spirits, instead of rising into high fortunes, under the enormous prices of eighteen hundred and fifty-four. They are stormed by correspondents whom they cannot supply; they are scolded by customers for the amounts charged in their invoices; they pay a high price for material every month; the best kind of material becomes deficient; and if an inferior kind is used, down comes a deluge of complaints, to add to the sorrows of the involuntary monopolist, who is growing poor himself while giving satisfaction to nobody. He grows silent at his meals; he looks grave in the mill; he can hardly be civil to the excise collector; and he tells his wife after a vexatious day at the works, that he shall go to America. His American rival, meantime, is buying land, building houses, setting up his carriage; perpetually adorning his pattern room with fresh specimens of paper of all colours; and often gratifying his customers with offers of a new article which makes a good substitute for one which is growing dearer.

What else do we see over there? Away from towns and steam engines, on some rapid near a new settlement in Ohio or Illinois, we see a humbler mill, worked by water-power. Here are no roods of drying rooms for snow white paper. There is not much snow white paper made here, because the owner has not command of much material that will bear bleaching. In the sheds we see overhead all sorts of dingy hues; and in the packing room a wide range of browns and yellows, with plenty of grays, and some greens and pinks. We never see such an assortment of tinted papers in England; where coloured paper is so little used that the Chancellor of the Exchequer might, as well as not, take off the duty from coloured papers.

This would cost the revenue a mere trifle, while it would be a vast boon to the public. Our American newspapers come to us in wrappers of brown and yellow, so tough, as never, by any accident, to arrive with the smallest rent in the edge, and bearing the ink as well as any paper whatever. This is made from the refuse of the Indian corn plant. Our letters come to us in envelopes of pale yellow, gray, or green, – perfectly serviceable, and rather pretty than not. They are made of any one of half a dozen substances which have every good quality but that they will not bleach. The British manufacturers complain that we, their customers, are saucy about paper, and that we will use none but the whitest. We must have white envelopes, they say, a white surface for our washing bills, and snowy missives for the butcher and fishmonger. We, on the other hand, declare that we have never had a chance of showing a preference. Give us the option between white envelopes and tinted, at a difference of a few pence in the hundred, and see whether we do not buy the cheaper sort! But they are not to be had, and the reason why they are not to be had is that the excise will not allow experiments to be made, on fair conditions. We do not hesitate to say that the Chancellor of the Exchequer must repeal the duty on coloured papers at least, at the first possible moment. Prices are rising to an unendurable point; and so simple a palliative as setting free a portion of material that will bleach by a free use of that which will not, cannot be refused under the existing stress.

Let the government bear in mind that the increase in paper made in the kingdom within the last two years, under all the existing difficulties, is twenty-three million pounds; and that it would require, even at this rate, a dozen new average mills to be set up every year to meet the demands of the mere increase of our population; and they will see that the paper duty cannot be sustained.

What other variety do we see in our American survey? Is that a paper mill on the banks of the Penobscot, in the midst of the forest clearings, far up in Maine? Yes, indeed, it is: and to whom do you suppose it belongs? An Englishman would never guess. It belongs to four or five lumberers (fellers and sellers of timber), who have put a part of their earnings into this form, and they believe they will not repent it. But why this form? Because paper is in increasing demand, and water power and material are at hand. Here is the rushing river; here is the wood to build the mill of, and keep up the fires; and the metal work is easily got from the towns below; and the river is as good as a railway for carrying the paper to market. Well: but where are the rags? They do not use rags, except the few woollen ones that are bought up from Irish immigrants. Those, and some cotton waste from the town mills, are the only fibrous material of that sort used. The bulk of the substance required is on the spot, in the shape of marsh hay and wood shavings. Where there are clearings there are presently marshes; and where there are marshes, there is hay, too bad for the food of animals that are carefully treated. From this, from straw, from maize stalks, from the shavings in the lumberers’ sheds, together with a few Connaught tatters and sweepings of cotton mills, our little company of speculators are making their fortunes. If they had not succeeded it would not have mattered much, because they put only as much of their earnings as they could well spare into the enterprise; for there is no unlimited liability of partnership there, to make a man risk his whole fortune in a partnership if he adventure the smallest fraction of it. And there is no exciseman, coming down upon them for eighty or ninety pounds a week, as his charge upon the six tons of paper which they send down the river weekly. If the English law and the English exciseman were there, there would be no mill on that spot on the Penobscot; there would be six tons of paper per week less in the market; and the partners would be making their fortunes at a much slower rate.

Turning from the extreme north to the south – even to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico – what do we find? There are negroes poking about in the swamps at the mouths of some of the great rivers. They twist about like water snakes in the channels among the flowering reeds, gathering bundles of fibrous stalks; and they make themselves a way through acres of cane-brake, cutting the canes on either hand, to carry them to the paper mill. The demand for paper must be pressing indeed to induce any one to set up a manufacture of it under the conditions of slave labour. But, before us lies at this moment a specimen of paper made from canebrake. In colour it is a pretty good white, and in quality it is fair enough for all ordinary purposes. It would not do for the Queen’s Speech. Macaulay would not write his History on it, nor Tennyson his lyrics; nor shall we order a stock of it for our next novel. But we should be glad to know that there was a supply of it in the next stationer’s shop in the form of envelopes, large and small, and letter and note paper, so that we might do our part in saving the rags of the world.

About that saving – can none of us help in that way? Do any of us burn rags, or allow anybody under our roof to burn them? Never let such a thing happen again. Let the maids know that rags now fetch a pretty penny; and let them have a ragbag as a regular part of the kitchen establishment. As for the parlour, the shop, the office – from the humblest tradesman’s to the government bureau – do we not waste paper unconscionably? Is it not thought genteel and liberal to send as many blank pages as possible in an envelope? – to make our manuscript a rivulet of ink in wide banks of margin? This is foolish, and worse than foolish, when the evil is not merely dearness but scarcity. In a scarcity of flour, noblemen retrench their puddings and pastry, not because flour is dear, but because there is not enough, and the poor will be starved if the rich do not eat less of flour and more of other things. Thus it is with the present scarcity of rags. It is not meanness, but only justice to great social interests, if public men and rich men will enforce economy in the use of paper on all whom they can influence, until a remedy for the scarcity shall be found.

We do not insist very vehemently, or at great length, on this, because it is a minor matter. Any palliation from that method must be wholly insufficient for the occasion. It is good as far as it goes; but we must direct our exertions to obtain emancipation from two restrictions which are fatal to a fair supply of paper. Now that we are relieved of the soap and window duties, we must get rid of the paper duty – of the duty on coloured paper at all events, and of the whole if we can. We must also get rid of that unlimited liability in partnership which prevents ingenious men who are not rich, from placing their ingenuity at the public service; and which prevents men who are rich from devoting a sufficient portion of their capital, and no more, to rendering available the talent of the ingenious man.

Endnotes and Annotations

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bridgman

[2] Dr [Samuel Gridley] Howe’s Report on idiocy, 1848. p90.

[3] Volume 6 p313-317 [The article in Household Words Volume 6 page 313 is ‘Some Compliments of the Season’ by George Sala and William Thomas]

[4] This youth is an old acquaintance of mine, and I presented him with the cigars he smoked – he has a great delight in smoking – for some months, when I lived at Lausanne. For a long time after I left that place, he always associated my name with a cigar. Being there, last October, after an absence of five or six years, I went to see my old friend. M. Hirzel could not then, by any means, induce him to associate me in the right manner with a cigar, though Edward was painfully anxious to understand. I left some money for him, to be expended in the old way; and I believe he has gradually smoked me back into his remembrance. “C. D.”

[5] See page 134 of the present volume. [Deaf Mutes]

[6] See Volume 7, p421, “Books for the Blind.”

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Freeman

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burns

[Anthony Burns’ story is outlined in Civil Disobedience and Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau in the MobileRead library.]

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Table of Contents

Cover page

Title page

Copyright notice

About this ebook

The Sickness and Health of the People of Bleaburn

The Home of Woodruffe the Gardener

The Ghost that appeared to Mrs Wharton

The Marsh Fog and the Sea Breeze

A New Plea for a New Food

A Real Sister of Charity

The Highest House in Wathendale

The Fortunes of the Reverend Caleb Ellison

Malvern Water

Flower Shows in a Birmingham Hot-house

The Magic Troughs at Birmingham

The Wonders of Nails and Screws

Kendal Weavers and Weaving

The Bobbin Mill at Ambleside

What Christmas is in Country Places

The Miller and His Men

An Account of Some Treatment of Gold and Gems

Rainbow Making

Needles

Time and the Hour

Guns and Pistols

Birmingham Glassworks

The New School for Wives

What there is in a Button

Tubal Cain

The Forbidden Land

Household Scenery

News of an Old Place

Shawls

The Life of a Salmon

Peatal Aggression

The English Passport System

Triumphant Carriages

Hope with a Slate Anchor

The Irish Union

The Famine Time

Butter

The Deaf Playmate's Story

Mr Wiseman in Print

Deaf Mutes

Idiots Again

Three Graces of Christian Science

Blindness

Freedom, or Slavery?

Cheshire Cheese

How to get Paper

End notes and Annotations

Colophon