Household words, no. 6, May 4, 1850

It was with singular pride that Mr. Thomas Bovington of Long Hornets, Bucks, viewed his first ‘lot’ of fat bullocks as they filed their way out of his stock-yard towards the nearest Station of the North Western Railway. They were so sleek, so well fed, and so well behaved, that they turned out of their stalls with the solemn sobriety of animals attending their own funeral. Except a few capers cut by a lively West Highlander, they sauntered along like beasts who had never had a care in their lives. For how were they to know that the tips of their horns pointed to that bourne from whence few bovine travellers return—Smithfield? Smithfield, the Heart of Mid-London, the flower of the capital—the true, original, London-Pride, always in full bloom! A merciful ignorance blinded them to the fact that, the master who had fed and pampered them with indulgent industry—who had administered their food out of the scientific dietaries of Liebig; who had built their sheds after the manner of Huxtable; who had stalled and herded them in imitation of Pusey; who had littered them out of ‘Stevens’s Book of the Farm’—was about, with equal care and attention to their comfort, to have them converted into cash, and then into beef.

This was Mr. Bovington’s first transaction in bullocks. Since his retirement from Northampton (where he made a small fortune by tanning the hides he now so assiduously filled out), he had devoted his time, his capital, and his energy to stock-farming. His sheep had always sold well; so well indeed, that he had out-stocked the local markets; and, on the previous morning, had driven off a threescore flock to the same destination and on the same tragic errand, as that of his oxen. His success in the production of mutton had given him courage: he had, therefore, soared to beef. Only the Thursday before a neighbouring farmer had pronounced of his herd to his face, that ‘a primer lot of beasts he never see—nowheres.’

Mr. Bovington had several hours to spare before the passenger-train was due in which he intended to follow his cattle. Like a thrifty man he spent a part of it over his stock-book, to settle finally at what figure he could afford to sell. He was an admirable book-keeper; he could tell to an ounce how much oil-cake each ox had devoured, to a root how many beets; and, to a wisp, how much straw had been used for litter. The acreage of pasture was, also, minutely calculated. The result was, that Mr. Bovington could find in an instant the cost price of each stone of the flesh that had just departed of its own motion towards the shambles.

To a mercenary mind; to a man whose whole soul is ground down to considerations of mere profit (considerations which many profound politico-philosophers deplore as entering too largely into the agricultural mind) the result of Mr. Bovington’s comparison of the cost with the present market prices, would have been extremely unsatisfactory. What he had produced at about 3s. 9d. per stone, he found by the ‘Marklane Express’ was ‘dull at 3s. 6d., sinking the offal.’ Neither had the season been favourable for sheep—at least, not for his sheep—and by them, too, he would be a loser. But what of that? Mr. Bovington’s object was less profit than fame. As a beginner, he wanted to establish a first-class character in the market; and, that obtained, it would be time enough to turn his attention to the economics of feeding and breeding. With what pride would he hear the praises of those astute critics, the London butchers, as they walked round and round, pinching and punching each particular ox, enumerating his various good points, and contrasting it with the meaner, leaner stock of the mere practical graziers! With what confidence he could command the top price, and with what certainty he could maintain it for his ‘lots’ in future!

Mr. Bovington was as merciful as he was above immediate gain. He could not trust the stock he had nurtured and fed, to the uncontrolled dominion of drovers. Though hurried to their doom, he would take care that they should be killed ‘comfortably.’ He considered this as a sacred duty, else he—who was a pattern to the parish—would not have thus employed himself on a Sunday. As he took his ticket at the station, the chimes for evening service had just struck out. His conscience smote him. As his eye roved over the peaceful glades of Long Hornets, on which the evening sun was 122lowering his beams, he contrasted the holy Sabbath calm with the scene of excitement into which he was voluntarily plunging himself. As a kind of salve to his troubled mind, he determined to pay extra care and attention to the comfort of his cattle.

His consignment was to remain, till Smithfield market opened at eleven o’clock on the Sunday night, at the Islington lairs. Thither Mr. Bovington repaired—on landing at the Euston Station—in a very fast cab. On his way, he calculated what the cost would be of all the fodder, all the water, and all the attendance, which his sheep and oxen would have received during their temporary sojourn. The first question he put, therefore, to the drover on arriving at the lairs, was:

“Why,” replied the amateur grazier, “for the feed of my sheep since last night!”

“Feed!” repeated the man with staring wonder. “Who ever heerd of feedin’ markit sheep? Why, they’ll be killed on Monday or Tuesday, won’t they?”

As he spoke, he drove the point of his goad into the backs of each of a shorn flock that happened to be passing. He had no business with them, but it was a way he had.

With sorrowful eyes, Mr. Bovington sought out his own sheep. Poor things! They lay closely packed, with their tongues out, panting for suction; for they were too weak to bleat. He would have given any money to relieve them; but relief no money could buy.

Mr. Bovington was glad to find his bullocks in better plight. To them, fodder and drink had been sparingly supplied, but they were wedged in so tightly that they had hardly room to breathe. Their good looks—which had cost him so much expenditure of oil-cake, and anxiety, and for which he had expected so much praise from buyers—would be quite gone before they got to Smithfield.

“It aint o’ no use a fretting,” said the master drover, “your’n aint no worse off nor t’others. What you’ve got to do, is, to git to bed, and meet me in the markit at four.” Naming a certain corner.

“Well,” said Mr. Bovington, seeing there was no help for it, “let it be so; but I trust you will take care to get my lots driven down by humane drovers.”

Mr. Whelter—that was the master-drover’s name—assented, in a manner that showed he had not the remotest idea what a humane driver was, or where the article was to be found.

Mr. Bovington could get no rest, and went his way towards the market, long before the time appointed. Before he came within sight of Smithfield, a din as of a noisy Pandemonium filled his ears. The shouting of some of the drovers, the shrill whistle of others, the barking of dogs, the bleating of sheep, and the lowing of cattle, were the natural expressions of a crowded market; but, added to these, were other sounds, which made Mr. Bovington shudder—something between the pattering of a tremendous hailstorm, and the noise of ten thousand games of single stick played, all at once, in sanguinary earnest.

He was not a particularly nervous man, and did not shudder without reason. When he came into the market, he saw at a glance enough to know that. He stood looking about him in positive horror.

To get the bullocks into their allotted stands, an incessant punishing and torturing of the miserable animals—a sticking of prongs into the tender part of their feet, and a twisting of their tails to make the whole spine teem with pain—was going on: and this seemed as much a part of the market, as the stones in its pavement. Across their horns, across their hocks, across their haunches, Mr. Bovington saw the heavy blows rain thick and fast, let him look where he would. Obdurate heads of oxen, bent down in mute agony; bellowing heads of oxen lifted up, snorting out smoke and slaver; ferocious men, cursing and swearing, and belabouring oxen; made the place a panorama of cruelty and suffering. By every avenue of access to the market, more oxen were pouring in: bellowing, in the confusion, and under the falling blows, as if all the church-organs in the world were wretched instruments—all there—and all being tuned together. Mixed up with these oxen, were great flocks of sheep, whose respective drovers were in agonies of mind to prevent their being intermingled in the dire confusion; and who raved, shouted, screamed, swore, whooped, whistled, danced like savages; and, brandishing their cudgels, laid about them most remorselessly. All this was being done, in a deep red glare of burning torches, which were in themselves a strong addition to the horrors of the scene; for the men who were arranging the sheep and lambs in their miserably confined pens, and forcing them to their destination through alleys of the most preposterously small dimensions, constantly dropped gouts of the blazing pitch upon the miserable creatures’ backs; and to smell the singeing and burning, and to see the poor things shrinking from this roasting, inspired a sickness, a disgust, a pity and an indignation, almost insupportable. To reflect that the gate of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was in the midst of this devilry, and that such a monument of years of sympathy for human pain should stand there, jostling this disgraceful record of years of disregard of brute endurance—to look up at the 123faint lights in the windows of the houses where the people were asleep, and to think that some of them had been to Public Prayers that Sunday, and had typified the Divine love and gentleness, by the panting, footsore creature, burnt, beaten, and needlessly tormented there, that night, by thousands—suggested truths so inconsistent and so shocking, that the Market of the Capital of the World seemed a ghastly and blasphemous Nightmare.

“Does this happen every Monday morning?” asked the horror-stricken denizen of Long Hornets, of a respectable-looking man.

“This?” repeated the stranger. “Bless you! This is nothing to what it is sometimes.” He then turned to a passing drover, who was vainly trying to get some fifty sheep through a pen-alley calculated for the easy passage of twenty. “How many are spoke for to-night, Ned?”

“How many? Why five-and-twenty-thousand sheep, and forty-one-hundred beasts.”

“Ah! no more than an ordinary market, Sir,” said Mr. Bovington’s new friend; “yet you see and hear what’s now going on to wedge these numbers in. And it stands to reason, if you’ve got to jam together a fourth more animals than there is space for, there must be cruelty.”

“There are pens for two-and-twenty-thousand sheep and they can tie up twenty-seven-hundred beasts. Well! you hear; room has already been ‘spoke for,’ or bespoken, for three-thousand more sheep and fourteen-hundred more cattle than there is proper space for.”

“The beasts are formed, in the thoroughfares and in the outskirts of the market, into what we call ‘off-droves;’ and the sheep wait outside, anywhere, till they can get in.”

Here the conversation was interrupted by a sudden increase in the demoniacal noises. Opposite the speakers, was a row of panting oxen, each fastened by a slip-noose to a rail, as closely as their heads could be jammed together. Some more were being tied up, and one creature had just escaped. Instantly a dozen hoarse voices yelled:

A wild hunt followed, and then a shower of blows on the back, horns and sides, of the luckless truant. The concentrated punishment of two dozen drovers’ sticks made the bull too glad to resume its original station. It was then tied up, so tightly, that the swelled tongue protruded. That the poor brute should be rendered powerless for motion for some time to come, it was ‘hocked;’—that is to say, tremendous blows were inflicted on its hind legs till it was completely hobbled.

Mr. Bovington was glad it was not one of his bullocks. “Are many strangled by these tight nooses?” he asked.

“A good many in the course of the year, I should say. All the rails are full now, and the off-droves are beginning.”

The battle raged faster and more furious than ever. In order to make the most of the room, they were forming ‘ring-droves;’ that is, punishing the animals till a certain number had turned all their heads together so as to form the inside of a circle—which at last they did, to avoid the blows inflicted on them. Mr. Bovington’s blood ran cold as he witnessed the cruelty necessary for this evolution. After every imaginable torment had been practised, to get them into the right position, a stray head would occasionally protrude—where a tail should be—on the outside of the ring. Tremendous blows were then repeated on the nose, neck, and horns, till the tortured animal could turn; and when he succeeded, the goad was ‘jobbed’ into his flanks till he could wedge himself in, so as to form his own proper radius of the dense circle.

“I have often seen their haunches streaming with blood,” said Mr. Bovington’s companion, “before they could get into the ring. Why, a friend of mine, a tanner at Kenilworth, was actually obliged to leave off buying hides that came out of this market, because they were covered with holes that had been bored in the live animals by the Smithfield drovers. He called these skins Smithfield Cullanders.”

“Well,” said the stranger, thoughtfully, “I can’t blame them. I have known them forty years——”

“I was; but they worried me out of the market, for trying to get it removed, and for giving evidence against it before Parliament.”

Mr. Brumpton (that was the name of the ousted salesman) did a little fattening, now, on a few acres near London; and came occasionally to Smithfield to buy and sell in a small way,—just, in fact, as Mr. Bovington had begun to do.

“Well,” he continued, “I can’t lay all the blame on the drovers. What can they do? If they have got one hundred beasts to wedge into a space only big enough for seventy, they must be cruel. Even the labour their cruelty costs themselves is terrible. I have often seen drovers’ men lying on the steps of doors, quite exhausted. None of them ever live long.”

A deafening hullabaloo arose again. A new ring-drove was being begun, close by. Bovington threw up his hands in horror, when he saw that some of his cherished cattle were to become members of it. The lively West Highlander was struggling fiercely against his fate; but in vain: he was goaded, beaten, and worried with dogs, till forced into the ring.

“How can I help it!” was that individual’s consolation. “I spoke for all your beasts; but there was only room for seven on ’em to be tied up; so the rest on ’em is in off-droves. Where else can they be?”

“Couldn’t get none on ’em in. They’re a waiting in the ‘Ram’ Yard, till the sales empties some of the pens. You’ll find ’em in the first floor.”

Mr. Bovington elbowed his way to the Ram Inn, to confirm by his eyes what he could not believe with his ears. Sure enough he found his favourite ‘New Leicesters’ a whole flight of stairs above ground. How they had ever been got up, or how they were ever to be got down, surpassed his ingenuity to conjecture.

At length there was pen-room; and sorely were Mr. Bovington’s feelings tried. When his little flock were got into the market, they met, and were mixed with, the sold flocks that were going out. Confusion was now worse confounded. The beating, the goading, the bustling, the shouting; the bleating of the sheep; the short, sharp, snarling of the dogs; above all, the stentorian oaths and imprecations of the drovers,—no human imagination, unaided by the reality, could conceive. Several flocks were intermixed, in a manner that made correct separation seem impossible; but while Mr. Bovington shuddered at all this cruelty and wickedness—SOLELY PRODUCED BY WANT OF SPACE, AND BY THE PREVIOUS DRIVING THROUGH THE STREETS—he could not help admiring the instinct of the dogs, and the ingenuity of the men, in lessening the confusion—the former watching intently their masters’ faces for orders, and flying over the backs of the moving floor of wool, to execute them.

Like lightning the dog belonging to the drover of Bovington’s sheep, dashed over their backs, and he beheld the ear of a favourite wether between its teeth. By some magic, however, this significant style of ear-wigging directed the sheep into the alley that led to the empty pens; and the others were pushed, punched, goaded, and thrashed, till each score was jammed into the small enclosures, as tight as figs in a drum.

“They seem a nice lot,” said Mr. Brumpton, who had followed the new seller; “but how is it possible for the best butcher in London to tell what they are, in a wedge like this. Can he know how they will cut up, after the punishment they have had? Impossible: and what’s the consequence? Why, he will deduct ten or fifteen per cent. from your price for bruised meat. It is the same with bullocks.”

Mr. Bovington, at this hint, reverted to his herd of cattle with a fresh pang. Crammed, rammed, and jammed as they were between raw-boned Lincolnshires and half-fed Herefords—a narrow bristling grove of gaunt shoeing-horns—how could his customers see and appreciate the fine ‘points’ of his fancy stock? He had worked for Fame; yet, however loud her blast, who could hear it above the crushing din of Smithfield?

Mr. Bovington, having returned to the rendezvous, leaned against a cutler’s door-post—where there was an old grindstone outside (which the market-people, by much sharpening of their knives upon it, had worn away, like an old cheese)—in profound rumination. He was at a dead lock. He could not sell all his stock, and he could not withdraw it; for it was so fearfully deteriorated from the treatment it had got, that he felt sure the recovery of many of his sheep and oxen would be very doubtful. The best thing he could wish for them was speedy death; and, for himself, sales at any price.

His reflections were interrupted by the pleasing information, that although some of his beasts that were tied up had been sold at the top price, only a few of those in the off-droves could find customers at the second, because the butchers could not get to see them. “And you see they will have the pull of the market, if they can get it.”

Mr. Bovington looked unutterable despair, and told the salesman emphatically to sell.

“It don’t matter to him,” said Brumpton, who was again at poor Bovington’s elbow, “what the animals fetch. Sold for much or little, the salesman’s profit don’t vary—4s. a head for beasts, and from 10s. to 13s. a score for sheep, at whatever price he sells. That’s the system here, and it don’t improve the profits of the grazier. Why should he care what you get, or lose?”

Towards the close of the market, Mr. Bovington perceived, that if it cost the animals intense torture to be got into their allotted places, it took unmitigated brutality to get them out again. The breaking up of a ring-drove might have made a treat for Nero; but honest Mr. Bovington had had enough. He retired from the arena of innumerable bull-fights in a state of mind in which disgust very much preponderated over personal disappointment. “And mentioning bull-fights,” thought he to himself, “Upon my life! I don’t think we are so much better than those people in Spain after all, while we stand this sort of thing, and eat our dinners, and make our wills.”

Mr. Brumpton and he determined to breakfast together, at the ‘Catherine Wheel,’ in St. John Street.

“But look at the rapidity with which London spreads. How long will you guarantee that any site you may select will remain ‘out of Town?’”

125“Ah, that’s the difficulty,” said Brumpton. “In 1808, it was proposed to remove the market to the ‘open fields’—Clerkenwell-fields; but, twenty years afterwards, there was not a blade of grass to be seen near the place. It was covered with bricks and mortar. Rahere-street—in the midst of a dense neighbourhood—now stands on the very spot that was suggested. Again, only last year a field between Camden-town and Holloway was proposed; but since then, houses have been built up to the very hedge that incloses it.”

“I’ll tell you what I think would be best. Let a good site be fixed upon; and don’t rest contented with that. Fence off, also, a certain space around it with appropriate approaches. Let these be kept sacred from innovating bricks. Deal with a new cattle-market as the Board of Health proposes to deal with cemeteries. Isolate it. Allow of no buildings, except for market purposes—of no encroachments whatever—either upon the area itself or its new approaches.”

Mr. Bovington was about to hazard a remark about abattoirs, when deafening cries again arose in the street.

“Mad bull! mad bull!” was echoed from the uttermost ends of St. John Street.

Bovington looked out of window. A fine black ox was tearing furiously along the pavement. Women were screaming and rushing into shops, children scrambling out of the road, men hiding themselves in doorways, boys in ecstacies of rapture, drovers as mad as the bull tearing after him, sheep getting under the wheels of hackney-coaches, dogs half choking themselves with worrying the wool off their backs, pigs obstinately connecting themselves with a hearse and funeral, other oxen looking into public-houses—everybody and everything disorganised, no sort of animal able to go where it wanted or was wanted; nothing in its right place; everything wrong everywhere; all the town in a brain fever because of this infernal market!

The mad bull was Mr. Bovington’s West Highlander. He was quite prepared for it. When he saw him going round the corner, and at the same moment beheld a nursemaid, a baby, and a baked potato-can, fly into the air in opposite directions, he was horrified, but not surprised. He followed his West Highlander. He followed the crowd tearing after his West Highlander, down St. John Street, through Jerusalem-passage, along Clerkenwell Green, up a hill, and down an alley. He passed two disabled apple-women, a fractured shop-front, an old man being put into a cab and taken to the hospital. At last, he traced the favourite of his herds into a back parlour in Liquorpond Street, into which he had violently intruded through a tripe-shop, and where he was being slaughtered for his own peace and for the safety of the neighbourhood; but not at all to the satisfaction of an invalid who had leaped out of a turn-up bedstead, into the little yard behind. The carcass of the West Highlander was sold to a butcher for a sum which paid about half of what was demanded, from its owner, for compensation to the different victims of its fury.

Mr. Bovington returned to Long Hornets a ‘wiser,’ though certainly not—commercially speaking—a ‘better’ man. His adventures in Smithfield had made a large hole in a 50l. note.

Some of his oxen were returned unsold. Two came back with the ‘foot disease’, and the rest did not recover their value for six months.

Mr. Bovington has never tried Smithfield again. He regards it as a place accursed. In distant Reigns, he says, it was an odious spot, associated with cruelty, fanaticism, wickedness and torture; and in these later days it is worthy of its ancient reputation. It is a doomed, but a proper and consistent stronghold (according to Mr. Bovington) of prejudice, ignorance, cupidity, and stupidity:—

CHAP. I.—THE CHILD’S TRAGEDY.

There is no really beautiful part of this kingdom so little known as the Peak of Derbyshire. Matlock, with its tea-garden trumpery and mock-heroic wonders; Buxton, with its bleak hills and fashionable bathers; the truly noble Chatsworth and the venerable Haddon, engross almost all that the public generally have seen of the Peak. It is talked of as a land of mountains, which in reality are only hills; but its true beauty lies in valleys that have been created by the rending of the earth in some primeval convulsion, and which present a thousand charms to the eyes of the lover of nature. How deliciously do the crystal waters of the Wye and the Dove rush along such valleys, or dales, as they there are called. With what a wild variety do the grey rocks soar up amid their woods and copses. How airily stand in the clear heavens the lofty limestone precipices, and the grey edges of rock gleam out from the bare green downs—there never called downs. What a genuine Saxon air is there cast over the population, what a Saxon bluntness salutes you in their speech!

It is into the heart of this region that we propose now to carry the reader. Let him 126suppose himself with us now on the road from Ashford-in-the-water to Tideswell. We are at the Bull’s Head, a little inn on that road. There is nothing to create wonder, or a suspicion of a hidden Arcadia in anything you see, but another step forward, and—there! There sinks a world of valleys at your feet. To your left lies the delicious Monsal Dale. Old Finn Hill lifts his grey head grandly over it. Hobthrush’s Castle stands bravely forth in the hollow of his side—grey, and desolate, and mysterious. The sweet Wye goes winding and sounding at his feet, amid its narrow green meadows, green as the emerald, and its dark glossy alders. Before us stretches on, equally beautiful, Cressbrook Dale; Little Edale shows its cottages from amidst its trees; and as we advance, the Mousselin-de-laine Mills stretch across the mouth of Miller’s Dale, and startle with the aspect of so much life amid so much solitude.

But our way is still onward. We resist the attraction of Cressbrook village on its lofty eminence, and plunge to the right, into Wardlow Dale. Here we are buried deep in woods, and yet behold still deeper the valley descend below us. There is an Alpine feeling upon us. We are carried once more, as in a dream, into the Saxon Switzerland. Above us stretch the boldest ranges of lofty precipices, and deep amid the woods are heard the voices of children. These come from a few workmen’s houses, couched at the foot of a cliff that rises high and bright amid the sun. That is Wardlow Cop; and there we mean to halt for a moment. Forwards lies a wild region of hills, and valleys, and lead-mines, but forward goes no road, except such as you can make yourself through the tangled woods.

At the foot of Wardlow Cop, before this little hamlet of Bellamy Wick was built, or the glen was dignified with the name of Raven Dale, there lived a miner who had no term for his place of abode. He lived, he said, under Wardlow Cop, and that contented him.

His house was one of those little, solid, grey limestone cottages, with grey flagstone roofs, which abound in the Peak. It had stood under that lofty precipice when the woods which now so densely fill the valley were but newly planted. There had been a mine near it, which had no doubt been the occasion of its erection in so solitary a place; but that mine was now worked out, and David Dunster, the miner, now worked at a mine right over the hills in Miller’s Dale. He was seldom at home, except at night, and on Sundays. His wife, besides keeping her little house, and digging and weeding in the strip of garden that lay on the steep slope above the house, hemmed in with a stone wall, also seamed stockings for a framework-knitter in Ashford, whither she went once or twice in the week.

They had three children, a boy and two girls. The boy was about eight years of age; the girls were about five and six. These children were taught their lessons of spelling and reading by the mother, amongst her other multifarious tasks; for she was one of those who are called regular plodders. She was quiet, patient, and always doing, though never in a bustle. She was not one of those who acquire a character for vast industry by doing everything in a mighty flurry, though they contrive to find time for a tolerable deal of gossip under the plea of resting a bit, and which ‘resting a bit’ they always terminate by an exclamation that ‘they must be off, though, for they have a world of work to do.’ Betty Dunster, on the contrary, was looked on as rather ‘a slow coach.’ If you remarked that she was a hard-working woman, the reply was, ‘Well, she’s always doing—Betty’s work’s never done; but then she does na hurry hersen.’ The fact was, Betty was a thin, spare woman, of no very strong constitution, but of an untiring spirit. Her pleasure and rest were, when David came home at night, to have his supper ready, and to sit down opposite to him at the little round table, and help him, giving a bit now and then to the children, that came and stood round, though they had had their suppers, and were ready for bed as soon as they had seen something of their ‘dad.’

David Dunster was one of those remarkably tall fellows that you see about these hills, who seem of all things the very worst made men to creep into the little mole holes on the hill sides that they call lead-mines. But David did manage to burrow under and through the hard limestone rocks as well as any of them. He was a hard-working man, though he liked a sup of beer, as most Derbyshire men do, and sometimes came home none of the soberest. He was naturally of a very hasty temper, and would fly into great rages; and if he were put out by anything in the working of the mines, or the conduct of his fellow-workmen, he would stay away from home for days, drinking at Tideswell, or the Bull’s Head at the top of Monsal Dale, or down at the Miners’ Arms at Ashford-in-the-water.

Betty Dunster bore all this patiently. She looked on these things somewhat as matters of course. At that time, and even now, how few miners do not drink and ‘rol a bit,’ as they call it. She was, therefore, tolerant, and let the storms blow over, ready always to persuade her husband to go home and sleep off his drink and anger, but if he were too violent, leaving him till another attempt might succeed better. She was very fond of her children, and not only taught them on week days their lessons, and to help her to seam, but also took them to the Methodist Chapel in ‘Tidser,’ as they called Tideswell, whither, whenever she could, she enticed David. David, too, in his way, was fond of the children, especially of the boy, who was called David after him. He was quite wrapped up in the lad, to use the 127phrase of the people in that part; in fact, he was foolishly and mischievously fond of him. He would give him beer to drink, ‘to make a true Briton on him,’ as he said, spite of Betty’s earnest endeavour to prevent it,—telling him that he was laying the foundation in the lad of the same faults that he had himself. But David Dunster did not look on drinking as a fault at all. It was what he had been used to all his life. It was what all the miners had been used to for generations. A man was looked on as a milk-sop and a Molly Coddle, that would not take his mug of ale, and be merry with his comrades. It required the light of education, and the efforts that have been made by the Temperance Societies, to break in on this ancient custom of drinking, which, no doubt, has flourished in these hills since the Danes and other Scandinavians, bored and perforated them of old for the ores of lead and copper. To Betty Dunster’s remonstrances, and commendations of tea, David would reply,—‘Botheration Betty, wench! Dunna tell me about thy tea and such-like pig’s-wesh. It’s all very well for women; but a man, Betty, a man mun ha’ a sup of real stingo, lass. He mun ha’ summut to prop his ribs out, lass, as he delves through th’ chert and tood-stone. When tha weylds th’ maundrel (the pick), and I wesh th’ dishes, tha shall ha’ th’ drink, my wench, and I’ll ha’ th’ tea. Till then, prithee let me aloon, and dunna bother me, for it’s no use. It only kicks my monkey up.’

And Betty found that it was of no use; that it did only kick his monkey up, and so she let him alone, except when she could drop in a persuasive word or two. The mill-owners at Cressbrook and Miller’s Dale had forbidden any public-house nearer than Edale, and they had more than once called the people together to point out to them the mischiefs of drinking, and the advantages to be derived from the very savings of temperance. But all these measures, though they had some effect on the mill people, had very little on the miners. They either sent to Tideswell or Edale for kegs of beer to peddle at the mines, or they went thither themselves on receiving their wages.

And let no one suppose that David Dunster was worse than his fellows; or that Betty Dunster thought her case a particularly hard one. David was ‘pretty much of a muchness,’ according to the country phrase, with the rest of his hard-working tribe, which was, and always had been, a hard-drinking tribe; and Betty, though she wished it different, did not complain, just because it was of no use, and because she was no worse off than her neighbours.

Often when she went to ‘carry in her hose’ to Ashford, she left the children at home by themselves. She had no alternative. They were there in that solitary valley for many hours playing alone. And to them it was not solitary. It was all that they knew of life, and that all was very pleasant to them. In spring, they hunted for birds’-nests in the copses, and amongst the rocks and grey stones that had fallen from them. In the copses built the blackbirds and thrushes: in the rocks the firetails; and the grey wagtails in the stones, which were so exactly of their own colour, as to make it difficult to see them. In summer, they gathered flowers and berries, and in the winter they played at horses, kings, and shops, and sundry other things in the house.

On one of these occasions, a bright afternoon in autumn, the three children had rambled down the glen, and found a world of amusement in being teams of horses, in making a little mine at the foot of a tall cliff, and in marching for soldiers, for they had one day—the only time in their lives—seen some soldiers go through the village of Ashford, when they had gone there with their mother, for she now and then took them with her when she had something from the shop to carry besides her bundle of hose. At length they came to the foot of an open hill which swelled to a considerable height, with a round and climbable side, on which grew a wilderness of bushes amid which lay scattered masses of grey crag. A small winding path went up this, and they followed it. It was not long, however, before they saw some things which excited their eager attention. Little David, who was the guide, and assumed to himself much importance as the protector of his sisters, exclaimed, ‘See here!’ and springing forward, plucked a fine crimson cluster of the mountain bramble. His sisters, on seeing this, rushed on with like eagerness. They soon forsook the little winding and craggy footpath, and hurried through sinking masses of moss and dry grass, from bush to bush and place to place. They were soon far up above the valley, and almost every step revealed to them some delightful prize. The clusters of the mountain bramble, resembling mulberries, and known only to the inhabitants of the hills, were abundant, and were rapidly devoured. The dewberry was as eagerly gathered,—its large, purple fruit passing with them for blackberries. In their hands were soon seen posies of the lovely grass of Parnassus, the mountain cistus, and the bright blue geranium.

Higher and higher the little group ascended in this quest, till the sight of the wide, naked hills, and the hawks circling round the lofty, tower-like crags over their heads, made them feel serious and somewhat afraid.

‘Where are we?’ asked Jane, the elder sister. ‘Arn’t we a long way from hom?’

‘Let us go hom,’ said little Nancy. ‘I’m afeerd here;’ clutching hold of Jane’s frock.

‘Pho, nonsense!’ said David, ‘what are you afreed on? I’ll tak care on you, niver fear.’

And with this he assumed a bold and defying aspect, and said, ‘Come along; there are nests in th’ hazzles up yonder.’

128He began to mount again, but the two girls hung back and said, ‘Nay, David, dunna go higher; we are both afreed;’ and Jane added, ‘It’s a long wee from hom, I’m sure.’

‘And those birds screechen’ so up there; I darna go up,’ added little Nancy. They were the hawks that she meant, which hovered whimpering and screaming about the highest cliffs. David called them little cowards, but began to descend and, presently, seeking for berries and flowers as they descended, they regained the little winding, craggy road, and, while they were calling to each other, discovered a remarkable echo on the opposite hill side. On this, they shouted to it, and laughed, and were half frightened when it laughed and shouted again. Little Nancy said it must be an old man in the inside of the mountain; at which they were all really afraid, though David put on a big look, and said, ‘Nonsense! it was nothing at all.’ But Jane asked how nothing at all could shout and laugh as it did? and on this little Nancy plucked her again by the frock, and said in turn, ‘Oh, dear, let’s go hom!’

But at this David gave a wild whoop to frighten them, and when the hill whooped again, and the sisters began to run, he burst into laughter, and the strange spectral Ha! ha! ha! that ran along the inside of the hill as it were, completed their fear, and they stopped their ears with their hands and scuttled away down the hill. But now David seized them, and pulling their hands down from their heads, he said, ‘See here! what a nice place with the stones sticking out like seats. Why, it’s like a little house; let us stay and play a bit here.’ It was a little hollow in the hill side surrounded by projecting stones like an amphitheatre. The sisters were still afraid, but the sight of this little hollow with its seats of crag had such a charm for them that they promised David they would stop awhile, if he would promise not to shout and awake the echo. David readily promised this, and so they sat down; David proposed to keep a school, and cut a hazel wand from a bush and began to lord it over his two scholars in a very pompous manner. The two sisters pretended to be much afraid, and to read very diligently on pieces of flat stone which they had picked up. And then David became a serjeant and was drilling them for soldiers, and stuck pieces of fern into their hair for cockades. And then, soon after, they were sheep, and he was the shepherd; and he was catching his flock and going to shear them, and made so much noise that Jane cried, ‘Hold! there’s the echo mocking us.’

At this they all were still. But David said, ‘Pho! never mind the echo; I must shear my sheep:’ but just as he was seizing little Nancy to pretend to shear her with a piece of stick, Jane cried out, ‘Look! look! how black it is coming down the valley there! There’s going to be a dreadful starm; let us hurry hom!’

David and Nancy both looked up, and agreed to run as fast down the hill as they could. But the next moment the driving storm swept over the hill, and the whole valley was hid in it. The three children still hurried on, but it became quite dark, and they soon lost the track, and were tossed about by the wind, so that they had difficulty to keep on their legs. Little Nancy began to cry, and the three taking hold of each other endeavoured in silence to make their way homewards. But presently they all stumbled over a large stone, and fell some distance down the hill. They were not hurt, but much frightened, for they now remembered the precipices, and were afraid every minute of going over them. They now strove to find the track by going up again, but they could not find it anywhere. Sometimes they went upwards till they thought they were quite too far, and then they went downwards till they were completely bewildered; and then, like the Babes in the Wood, ‘They sate them down and cried.’

But ere they had sate long, they heard footsteps, and listened. They certainly heard them and shouted, but there was no answer. David shouted, ‘Help! fayther! mother! help!’ but there was no answer. The wind swept fiercely by; the hawks whimpered from the high crags, lost in the darkness of the storm; and the rain fell, driving along icy cold. Presently, there was a gleam of light through the clouds; the hill side became visible, and through the haze they saw a tall figure as of an old man ascending the hill. He appeared to carry two loads slung from his shoulders by a strap; a box hanging before, and a bag hanging at his back. He wound up the hill slowly and wearily, and presently he stopped and relieving himself of his load, seated himself on a piece of crag to rest. Again David shouted, but there still was no answer. The old man sate as if no shout had been heard—immoveable.

‘It is a man,’ said David, ‘and I will make him hear;’ and with that he shouted once more with all his might. But the old man made no sign of recognition. He did not even turn his head, but he took off his hat and began to wipe his brow as if warm with the ascent.

‘What can it be?’ said David in astonishment. ‘It is a man, that’s sartain. I’ll run and see.’

‘Nay, nay!’ shrieked the sisters. ‘Don’t, David! don’t! It’s perhaps the old man out of the mountain that’s been mocking us. Perhaps,’ added Jane, ‘he only comes out in starms and darkness.’

‘Stuff!’ said David, ‘an echo isn’t a man; it’s only our own voices. I’ll see who it is; and away he darted, spite of the poor girl’s 129crying in terror, ‘Don’t; don’t, David! Oh, don’t.’

But David was gone. He was not long in reaching the old man, who sate on his stone breathing hard, as if out of breath with his ascent, but not appearing to perceive David’s approach. The rain and the wind drove fiercely upon him, but he did not seem to mind it. David was half afraid to approach close to him, but he called out, ‘Help; help, mester!’ The old man remained as unconscious of his presence. ‘Hillo!’ cried David again. ‘Can you tell us the way down, mester?’ There was no answer, and David was beginning to feel a shudder of terror run through every limb, when the clouds cleared considerably, and he suddenly exclaimed, ‘Why, it’s old Tobias Turton of top of Edale, and he’s as deaf as a door nail!’

In an instant, David was at his side; seized his coat to make him aware of his presence, and, on the old man perceiving him, shouted in his ear, ‘Which is the way down here, Mester Turton? Where’s the track?’

‘Down? Weighs o’ the back?’ said the old man; ‘ay, my lad, I was fain to sit down; it does weigh o’ th’ back, sure enough.’

‘Th’ foot-track? Why, what art ta doing here, my lad, in such a starm? Isn’t it David Dunster’s lad?’

David nodded. ‘Why, the track ’s here! see;’ and the old man stamped his foot. ‘Get down hom, my lad, as fast as thou can. What dun they do letting thee be upon th’ hills in such a dee as this?’

David nodded his thanks, and turned to descend the track, while the old man adjusting his burden again, silently and wearily recommenced his way upwards.

David shouted to his sisters as he descended, and they quickly replied. He called to them to come towards him, as he was on the track, and was afraid to quit it again. They endeavoured to do this; but the darkness was now redoubled, and the wind and rain became more furious than ever. The two sisters were soon bewildered amongst the bushes, and David, who kept calling to them at intervals to direct their course towards him, soon heard them crying bitterly. At this, he forgot the necessity of keeping the track, and darting towards them, soon found them by continuing to call to them, and took their hands to lead them to the track. But they were now drenched through with the rain, and shivered with cold and fear. David, with a stout heart endeavoured to cheer them. He told them the track was close by, and that they would soon be at home. But though the track was not ten yards off, somehow they did not find it. Bushes and projecting rocks turned them out of their course; and owing to the confusion caused by the wind, the darkness, and their terror, they searched in vain for the track. Sometimes they thought they had found it, and went on a few paces, only to stumble over loose stones, or get entangled in the bushes.

It was now absolutely becoming night. Their terrors increased greatly. They shouted and cried aloud, in the hope of making their parents hear them. They felt sure that both father and mother must be come home; and as sure that they would be hunting for them. But they did not reflect that their parents could not tell in what direction they had gone. Both father and mother were come home, and the mother had instantly rushed out to try to find them, on perceiving that they were not in the house. She had hurried to and fro, and called—not at first supposing they would be far. But when she heard nothing of them, she ran in, and begged of her husband to join in the search. But at first David Dunster would do nothing. He was angry at them for going away from the house, and said he was too tired to go on a wild-goose chase through the plantations after them. ‘They are i’ th’ plantations,’ said he; ‘they are sheltering there somewhere. Let them alone, and they’ll come home, with a good long tail behind them.’

With this piece of a child’s song of sheep, David sat down to his supper, and Betty Dunster hurried up the valley, shouting—‘Children, where are you? David! Jane! Nancy! where are you?’

When she heard nothing of them, she hurried still more wildly up the hill towards the village. When she arrived there—the distance of a mile—she inquired from house to house, but no one had seen anything of them. It was clear they had not been in that direction. An alarm was thus created in the village; and several young men set out to join Mrs. Dunster in the quest. They again descended the valley towards Dunster’s house, shouting every now and then, and listening. The night was pitch dark, and the rain fell heavily; but the wind had considerably abated, and once they thought they heard a faint cry in answer to their call, far down the valley. They were right; the children had heard the shouting, and had replied to it. But they were far off. The young men shouted again, but there was no answer; and after shouting once more without success, they hastened on. When they reached David Dunster’s house, they found the door open, and no one within. They knew that David had set off in quest of the children himself, and they determined to descend the valley. The distracted mother went with them, crying silently to herself, and praying inwardly, and every now and then trying to shout. But the young men raised their strong voices above hers, and made the cliffs echo with their appeals.

Anon a voice answered them down the valley. They ran on as well as the darkness would let them, and soon found that it was David Dunster, who had been in the plantations 130on the other side of the valley; but hearing nothing of the lost children, now joined them. He said he had heard the cry from the hill side farther down, that answered to their shouts; and he was sure that it was his boy David’s voice. But he had shouted again, and there had been no answer but a wild scream as of terror, that made his blood run cold.

‘O God!’ exclaimed the distracted mother, ‘what can it be? David! David! Jane! Nancy!’

There was no answer. The young men bade Betty Dunster to contain herself, and they would find the children before they went home again. All held on down the valley, and in the direction whence the voice came. Many times did the young men and the now strongly agitated father shout and listen. At length they seemed to hear voices of weeping and moaning. They listened—they were sure they heard a lamenting—it could only be the children. But why then did they not answer? On struggled the men, and Mrs. Dunster followed wildly after. Now, again, they stood and shouted, and a kind of terrified scream followed the shout.

‘God in heaven!’ exclaimed the mother; ‘what is it? There is something dreadful. My children! my children! where are you?’

‘Be silent, pray do, Mrs. Dunster,’ said one of the young men, ‘or we cannot catch the sounds so as to follow them.’ They again listened, and the wailings of the children were plainly heard. The whole party pushed forward over stock and stone up the hill. They called again, and there was a cry of ‘Here! here! fayther! mother! where are you?’

In a few moments more the whole party had reached the children, who stood drenched with rain, and trembling violently, under a cliff that gave no shelter, but was exposed especially to the wind and rain.

‘O Christ! My children!’ cried the mother wildly, struggling forwards and clasping one in her arms. ‘Nancy! Jane! But where is David? David! David! Oh, where is David? Where is your brother?’

The whole party was startled at not seeing the boy, and joined in a simultaneous ‘Where is he? Where is your brother?’

The two children only wept and trembled more violently, and burst into loud crying.

‘Silence!’ shouted the father. ‘Where is David, I tell ye? Is he lost? David, lad, where ar ta?’

‘Down where? Oh God!’ exclaimed one of the young men; ‘why it’s a precipice! Down there?’

At this dreadful intelligence the mother gave a wild shriek, and fell senseless on the ground. The young men caught her, and dragged her back from the edge of the precipice. The father in the same moment, furious at what he heard, seized the younger child that happened to be near him, and shaking it violently, swore he would fling it down after the lad.

He was angry with the poor children, as if they had caused the destruction of his boy. The young men seized him, and bade him think what he was about; but the man believing his boy had fallen down the precipice, was like a madman. He kicked at his wife as she lay on the ground, as if she were guilty of this calamity by leaving the children at home. He was furious against the poor girls, as if they had led their brother into danger. In his violent rage he was a perfect maniac, and the young men pushing him away, cried shame on him. In a while, the desperate man torn by a hurricane of passion, sate himself down on a crag, and burst into a tempest of tears, and struck his head violently with his clenched fists, and cursed himself and everybody. It was a dreadful scene.

Meantime, some of the young men had gone down below the precipice on which the children had stood, and, feeling amongst the loose stones, had found the body of poor little David. He was truly dead!

When he had heard the shout of his father, or of the young men, he had given one loud shout in answer, and saying ‘Come on! never fear now!’ sprang forward, and was over the precipice in the dark, and flew down and was dashed to pieces. His sisters heard a rush, a faint shriek, and suddenly stopping, escaped the destruction that poor David had found.

There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity, they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by the greatest of its teachers, Experience!

‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times, not to the younger 131age of the world, such as it was with the ancients. Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless experiences and observations.’

Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and judge.

At the commencement of the present century, when the Novum Organum had been written nearly two hundred years, the examinations at the University of Oxford, so far as they were scientific at all, and not restricted to learned languages, turned entirely on the scholastic logic which the Novum Organum had shown to be a foul obstruction to knowledge. The new and true logic, as explained by Bacon, was never mentioned in the venerable place; and the new discoveries of the laws of nature to which it had led, formed no part of the general course of study, or of the subjects of public examination. It was quite possible for an Oxford man to have brought away a distinguished degree in the sciences, without knowing the truths of universal gravitation, or of the celestial motions, or of the planetary forces, or of any one of the provisions made by nature for the stability of the system we inhabit; and the very highest Oxford degree in the non-scientific departments, did not imply, any more than it does even yet, the remotest knowledge of modern languages or literature, of modern history or philosophy, of whether it might not have been Cromwell who discovered America, or Columbus who fought at Marston Moor. For any interest that the students at Oxford University were required to take in such matters, the past three hundred years might never have existed, or have been utterly annihilated, and all their wondrous burden of experiences melted into air.

It was not till after the nineteenth century had begun, that some sense of what had been going on in the world outside crept into the cloisters at Oxford. Statutes were then passed to recognise the Newtonian improvements in philosophy, and recommending, though not necessitating, their adoption into the course for honours. Honours nevertheless continued to be taken without them; and it is notorious that the soil has been ungenial to their growth, and that they never have flourished in it. Oxford, in effect, continued up to this day no other than it was four centuries ago. Apart from the doubtful discipline of life and manners attainable within its walls, it is still no more than a huge theological school, where the lay youth of England are admitted to participate in such meagre allowance of intellectual training as the clergy think safe for themselves; where Manchester and Birmingham are ignored; where the Greek and Latin authors continue in the same esteem as when they actually contained whatever existed of learning left upon the earth, and no education could proceed without them; and from which there issue into the world yearly reinforcements of the upper classes of society, less able to cope with the wants and duties that surround them, and less acquainted with the laws and operations by which the present is to be guided into the future, than any self-taught merchant’s clerk at Liverpool, or any sharp engineer’s lad at the railway in Euston Square.

Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition, was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’ of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House, to bleat forth ignorant non placets.

As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar 132may now sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes, that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed.

Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, ourselves, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.’

But is the opportunity fairly afforded for this? Is not the attention which ought to be fixed upon Things, to secure any part of the gain thus eloquently set before us, for the most part distracted and occupied by Words, in the system which commonly prevails? Has not the labour to be undergone in obtaining the ready verbal skill exacted in College examinations, a direct tendency to weaken our pleasure in the history, philosophy, or poetry on which we grind and sharpen that verbal skill? We apprehend that this is really the case; and that the old learning which Oxford persists in thinking all-sufficient for the wants of our new and busy life, is taught upon a method which strips it of its noblest lessons, and withers its choicest fruit.

The question is a most serious one for those whom it most immediately concerns, and whom it should warn of the danger of too manifestly lagging behind the time. At this moment power is changing hands, as certainly as in the days of those subtle and eager men who seated the ancient learning on its throne; and who would as surely depose it now, if founding new universities amongst us, and give it but its due and proper place in the expanding circles of knowledge, as, four hundred years ago, they admitted its just predominance, and established its solitary sway. When periods of such vicissitude arrive, it is for those who have been powerful heretofore, to look to their tenures of authority. Upon nothing can they hope to rest, if not upon complete accordance with the spirit of the age, and a thorough aptitude to its necessities and wants. If the education of children is to continue imperfect and bad, as Dean Swift tells us he had found it always in his experience, in exact proportion to the wealth and grandeur of the parents, the next generation of parents will have to look to the continued security of their wealth and grandeur. The Earth is in incessant motion. The time when it was supposed to be permanently fixed in the centre of the universe has passed away for ever, and modes of study only suited to that time will have to share the fate that has befallen it.

‘My son,’ said the wisest of modern men—whose name, of course, it were malicious to mention, and foolish also, the object being to promulgate charity, not to excite rancour—‘My son, if you would go through life easily, I can give you no better rule of conduct than this: Never wear a brown hat in Friesland.’

Now, though this piece of counsel may sound as hieroglyphical and mysterious as the well known precept by Mr. Malaprop administered to his offspring, when the latter was about to quit home, ‘Evil communication is worth two in the bush,’ it is nevertheless susceptible of the clearest and most explicit interpretation. Though the fruits of particular and personal experience, it may be applied to every man who wears a hat under the sun, the moon, the seven stars, or the Seven Dials! let alone the Seven United Provinces!

The Brown Hat whence this saying sprung, was merely a hat of common quality and uncommon comfort; soft to the head, not stiff; a screen for eyes from the sun; a thing taking no place among the traveller’s luggage—claiming no package of its own, and thus offering no wrangling-stock to those most tiresome of Jacks among all Jacks-in-office—to wit, Custom-house officers. It was a hat which the Hatto of hats must have accredited as the very perfection of a quiet, middle-aged traveller’s vade mecum; something dull-looking, it is true, for those whose thoughts are ‘wide-awake;’ something vulgar, for any one troubled by aristocratic fancies as to his covering, and who loves not to be confounded with his butterman; but withal a hat to be defended by every man of sense, to be clung to by every creature capable of headaches; a hat one could be bumped about in during a day of sixteen hours, in carriage, cart, or third-class railway vehicle; a hat one could lie in bed in for nightcap, or sit upon for cushion; a kindly, comforting, unobtrusive hat—brown, because it was of the felt’s natural colour, pliant as a piece of silk, submissive to wind, impervious to rain. What can we say more? A castor, as the Pilgrim’s Pollux put it, ‘fit to be buried in.’

Yet such was the hat, and none other, which—save your nerves be of granite, your cheeks of brass, and your patience the patience of a beaver—you are hereby solemnly warned not to wear in Friesland. In London, when you please and where you please, but not in Meppel, and not in Zwolle, and not in Sneek, and, most of all, not in the market-place at Leenwarden. As wisely might you have tried to walk down a village-street, in Lancashire, on Lifting-Monday (thirty years ago), thinking to escape from the obliging maids and jolly wives, who lurked behind their doors, bent on tossing every passing male in a kitchen chair, as have hoped for ten seconds of peace,—supposing that in Friesland (two autumns since) you took your walks abroad wearing a Brown Hat!

It will be, peradventure, imagined by those who are not strong in their geography, or who have not studied the Book of Dresses, or who entertain little curiosity concerning one of the most noticeable and original districts in Europe,—that these touchy Friesland folk themselves don or doff nothing worth an Englishman turning his head to admire; carry aloft what all the well-bred world carries,—and therefore cannot afford to let any one thrive, save under the shadow of the ‘regulation 134beaver,’ to which all polite Europe subscribes. Yet the case happens to be, that if there be a land in which perpetual wonderment could make the traveller wry-necked, that land is North Holland. Hong-Kong can hardly be stranger, either in its composition or its maintenance. So Sci herself (in Mr. Sealy’s capital Chinese tale) did not boast a head-tire more ‘express and surprising,’ than the gentlewomen of all ages, through whose active decision and passive contempt the Brown Hat had to run the gauntlet.

Let us see if we can sketch this—though by no means catholically sure, that some stratum of use or ornament, may not have been overlooked in our specification. First, it is conceived that the hair upon the head of the Frieslander, must be cut as close as though subject to the pumpkin-shell barbarity of the pilgrim-fathers, when their scissors were intent on shearing off love-locks. Upon this closely cropped poll, comes first a knitted cap (Mrs. Loudon, perhaps, can tell whether there be an aristocratic or established stitch formula for its knitting), over that a silk scull cap. These tightly put on, the serious business of the head-gear begins. The victim is next hooped, bound, lined, circled and otherwise clasped up within gilt metal—various in its cut, provided it only fits close, ‘as some one said,’ for headaches, to throb against. The mistress of Keetje, the maid, is fond of having her kettle-cap made of gilt silver, sometimes—if she be of old family—of pure gold; and you will see her in the market-place, wearing, in addition to this precious piece of trepanning, a metal tiara, such as Grecian Queens wear upon the stage, stuck over with coarse jewels; nay, more, dangling at the sides of her face, a pair of inconceivable gilt pendants, at a distance looking like bunches of queer keys, or that minikin household furniture our English ladies now choose to suspend from their girdles. But this is not all. At the extreme angles of her forehead, Keetje’s mistress—if a person of high fashion—must stick in two little square plots or tufts of frizzled silk, to pass for curls. This done, she may put on her cap of the finest lace, with its deep border or flap behind, fashioned like the brim of the dustman’s hat, but from the costly daintiness of its material, and the creamy whiteness of the throat it lies against, somewhat more picturesque. Finally, if Keetje’s mistress be a Friesland Miss Flamborough of ‘first water’—a lady who knows the world, and has a spirit superior to old-fashioned prejudices—she must have by way of crown, all to her four caps (one of precious metals), a straw bonnet, a huge, heavy, coal-scuttle, festooned with loops and streamers of gaudy ribbon, and thriftily guarded at the edge with a hem or barrier of stout and gaudy printed chintz. Thus canopied are the comely wives and widows (maidens, possibly dispensing with the bonnet), who shrieked, clapped their hands, and, with every other possible demonstration of offence, pursued the wearer of the Brown Hat in Friesland.

On the habiliments of the male moiety of society, tediousness forbids that we should expatiate; the less, as something will thus be left to be treated on a future day, when the grave question of apparel may be more solemnly entered upon. Enough for the moment, to say that it suits the singularities of this critical land: a land in which a Swimming Lion is the ensign, and of which His Majesty Topsy-Turvy might be sovereign; a land in which there is hardly a crooked horizontal line to be found, save among the sand-hills; a land in which, with all its neatness’ care, scarce a building, be it church or market-house, palace or exchange, can be prevailed upon to stand perpendicular; a land in which for air you breathe extract of juniper, turf, tobacco, and stagnant waters, mixed; a land in which people eat cheese with their tea, and where a child that plucks a nest runs great danger of being whipped as an enemy to Church and State—guilty of trying to let in the republican ocean; a land where full-grown babies set up clockwork gentlemen and papier mâche swans, by way of animating their garden, and the weedy ponds in the same; a land where full-grown men undertake and complete some of the most magnificent enterprises which science can contrive for industry to carry out; a land of teeming plenty and of high prices; a land of bad digestions and beautiful complexions. No, the men of this land—the shippers of Dordrecht, the potters of Delft, the gardeners of Broet, and the dairy farmers of Harlingen, decked out for fair or frolic—must be to-day left with all their uncouth and indescribable finery, undescribable, it may be, for some future parable.

But as if in the above there had not been indicated enough of what yet new and strange for Pilgrim to observe and to tolerate, and to smile at, with English supercilious civility in this country, the very names of places, even (as a descendant of Dr. Dilworth inadequately remarked), ‘are neither Christian nor becoming.’ One might bring one’s mind to bear to be jeered at or stared at, in a land resounding with pompous and euphonious words—by the Wissihiccon, for instance, or on the Mississippi, or at Canandaigna, or among the Inscoraras, or when bound for Passamaquoddy. Even the prize-scold at Billingsgate was silenced and rendered meek by being called a Chrononhotonthologos.—There’s much in four syllables! But in Friesland the traveller is handed over from Workum to Higtum, and from Higtum to Midlum; thence perhaps to Boxum, and from Boxum to Hallum, Dokkum, Kollum, &c., &c., &c.; going through the whole alphabet of these ‘make-believe’ names, the very study of which on the map is enough to make properly-brought-up persons disdainful and critical! Yet, so far from feeling any proper sense of 135their own position; so far from the slightest shame or shrinking; so far from one single deprecatory ‘Pray don’t make game of us! We are decent folk after all, and well to do in the world, though some of us do come from Sueek!’—these are the people, so lost to every sense of the ridiculous at home, as to tumble, towzle, and in every other conceivable and contemptuous mode maltreat the useful, comfortable, authentic, and in every respect unobtrusively defensible Brown Hat aforesaid! Did its wearer stop before a shop-window to look wistfully at one of those stupendous jars of pickles, which with a dozen of hard eggs for each guest, form so prominent a feature of the Dutchman’s merry-making suppers; his coat-tails were sure to be pulled by some grinning child, broader than long, and in facture closely resembling Mr. Staunton’s broadly-based new chessman. Did he lean over a gate to admire some magnificent bird, the brilliant cleanlinesss of which on the green carpet, gives us a new idea of the beauty of ox or cow, a head would be picked up from the dyke-side; with a liberal emission of casual slang, and as likely as not, a stone would have been thrown—did Holland contain a single stone for a David’s sling to utter. Did he adventure along the Wall of Zwolle on a glowing autumn evening, or meekly take the second best place on the treckschuit which was to waft him down the canal from Groningen to Delfzel (a water-path in its way, as peculiar and contradictory of all received principles as any railroad ever carried over house-tops at the Minories, or through the great pleasure-gardens and greenhouses of a Sir Timothy Dod), it was always one and the same story—one and the same contempt—one and the same experience. Simple laughed with a most disconcerting and noisy sincerity; and Gentle stuffed their handkerchiefs into their mouths—held both their own sides and poked their neighbours. ‘Driving Cloud’ or other of the Ojibbeway Indians if let loose in Clare-Market, would hardly have been made to feel his conspicuousness more signally than our traveller. There was neither privacy, place, nor pity, for the Brown Hat in Friesland.

Therefore, the wisest of these in advising his son, may have meant to say to him, ‘Never throw your oddity in the teeth of other men’s oddities.’ You cannot expect immunity for your own whims, if you force them upon other people’s whims. Never expect that your ‘ism’ will find quarter among their ‘isms;’ or (to put the adage otherwise) he may have desired to recommend a reading backwards of the old maxim—worn threadbare, rather by trampling upon, than by carrying about, to wit—‘Live, and let live.’

The day-dream of mankind has ever been the Unattainable. To sigh for what is beyond our reach is from infancy to age, a fixed condition of our nature. To it we owe all the improvement that distinguishes civilised from savage life,—to it we are indebted for all the great discoveries which, at long intervals, have rewarded thought.

Though the motives which stimulated the earliest inquiries were frequently undefined, and, if curiously examined, would be found to be sometimes questionable, it has rarely happened that the world has not benefited by them in the end. Thus Astrology, which ascribed to the stars an influence over the actions and destinies of man; Magic, which attempted to reverse the laws of nature, and Alchemy, which aimed at securing unlimited powers of self-reward; all tended to the final establishment of useful science.

Of none of the sciences whose laws are fully understood, is this description truer than of that now called Chemistry, which once was Alchemy. That ‘knowledge of the substance or composition of bodies,’ which the Arabic root of both words implies, establishes a fact in place of a chimera. Experimental philosophy has made Alchemy an impossible belief, but the faith in it was natural in an age when reason was seldom appealed to. The credulity which accepted witchcraft for a truth, was not likely to reject the theory of the transmutation of metals, nor strain at the dogma of perpetual youth and health;—the concomitants of the Philosopher’s Stone.

The Alchemists claim for their science the remotest antiquity possible, but it was not until three or four centuries after the Christian era that the doctrine of transmutation began to spread. It was amongst the Arabian physicians that it took root. Those learned men, through whom was transmitted so much that was useful in astronomy, in mathematics, and in medicine, were deeply tinctured with the belief in an universal elixir, whose properties gave the power of multiplying gold, of prolonging life indefinitely, and of making youth perpetual. The discoveries which they made of the successful application of mercury in many diseases, led them to suppose that this agent contained within itself the germ of all curative influences, and was the basis of all other metals. An Eastern imagination, ever prone to heighten the effects of nature, was not slow to ascribe a preternatural force to this medicine, but not finding it in its simple state, the practitioners of the new science had recourse to combination, in the hope, by that means, of attaining their object. To fix mercury became their first endeavour, and this fixation they described as ‘catching the flying bird of Hermes.’ Once embarked in the illusory experiment, it is easy to perceive how far the Alchemists might be led; nor 136need it excite any wonder that in pursuit of the ideal, they accidentally hit upon a good deal that was real. The labours, therefore, of the Arabian physicians were not thrown away, though they entangled the feet of science in mazes, from which escape was only effected, after the lapse of centuries of misdirected efforts.

From the period we have last spoken of, until the commencement of the eleventh century, the only Alchemist of note is the Arabian Geber, who, though he wrote on the perfections of metals, of the new found art of making gold, in a word, on the philosopher’s stone, has only descended to our times as the founder of that jargon, which passes under the name of ‘gibberish.’ He was, however, a great authority in the middle ages, and allusions to ‘Geber’s cooks,’ and ‘Geber’s kitchen,’ are frequent amongst those who at length saw the error of their ways after wasting their substance in the vain search for the elixir.

A longer interval might have elapsed but for the voice of Peter the Hermit, whose fanatical scheme for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre was the cause of that gradual absorption, by the nations of the West, of the learning which had so long been buried in the East. The Crusaders, or those, rather, who visited the shores of Syria under their protection—the men whose skill in medicine and letters rendered them useful to the invading armies—acquired a knowledge of the Arabian languages, and of the sciences cultivated by Arabian philosophers, and this knowledge they disseminated through Europe. Some part of it, it is true, was derived from the Moors in Spain, but it was all conveyed in a common tongue which began now to be understood. To this era belong the names of Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile; of Isaac Beimiram, the son of Solomon the physician; of Hali Abbas, the scholar of Abimeher Moyses, the son of Sejar; of Aben Sina, better known as Avicenna, and sometimes called Abohali; of Averroes of Cordova, surnamed the Commentator; of Rasis, who is also called Almanzor and Albumasar; and of John of Damascus, whose name has been latinised into Johannes Damascenus. All these, physicians by profession, were more or less professors of alchemy; and besides these were such as Artephius, who wrote alchemical tracts about the year 1130, but who deserves rather to be remembered for the cool assertion which he makes in his ‘Wisdom of Secrets’ that, at the time he wrote he had reached the patriarchal—or fabulous—age of one thousand and twenty-five years!

The thirteenth century came, and with it came two men who stand first, as they then stood alone, in literary and scientific knowledge. One was a German, the other an Englishman; the first was Albertus Magnus, the last Roger Bacon.

Of the former, many wonderful stories are told:—such, for instance, as his having given a banquet to the King of the Romans, in the gardens of his cloister at Cologne, when he converted the intensity of winter into a season of summer, full of flowers and fruits, which disappeared when the banquet was over; and his having constructed a marvellous automaton, called ‘Androïs,’ which, like the invention of his contemporary, Roger Bacon, was said to be capable of auguring all questions, past, present, and to come.

To know more than the rest of the world in any respect, but particularly in natural philosophy, was a certain method by which to earn the name of necromancer in the middle ages, and there are few whose occult fame has stood higher than that of Roger Bacon. He was afraid, therefore, to speak plainly—indeed, it was the custom of the early philosophers to couch their knowledge in what Bacon himself calls the ‘tricks of obscurity;’ and in his celebrated ‘Epistola de Secretis,’ he adverts to the possibility of his being obliged to do the same thing, through ‘the greatness of the secrets which he shall handle.’ With regard to the invention of his greatest secret, we shall give the words in which he speaks of the properties of gunpowder, and afterwards show in what terms he concealed his knowledge. ‘Noyses,’ he says, ‘may be made in the aire like thunders, yea, with greater horror than those that come of nature; for a little matter fitted to the quantity of a thimble, maketh a horrible noise and wonderful lightning. And this is done after sundry fashions, whereby any citie or armie may be destroyed.’ A more accurate description of the explosion of gunpowder could scarcely be given, and it is not to be supposed that Bacon simply confined himself to the theory of his art, when he knew so well the consequences arising from a practical application of it. On this head there is a legend extant, which has not, to our knowledge, been printed before, from which we may clearly see why he contented himself with the cabalistic form in which he conveyed his knowledge of what he deemed a fatal secret.

Attached to Roger Bacon’s laboratory, and a zealous assistant in the manifold occupations with which the learned Franciscan occupied himself, was a youthful student, whose name is stated to have been Hubert de Dreux. He was a Norman, and many of the attributes of that people were conspicuous in his character. He was of a quick intelligence and hasty courage, fertile in invention, and prompt in action, eloquent of discourse, and ready of hand; all excellent qualities, to which was superadded an insatiable curiosity. Docile to receive instruction, and apt to profit by it, Hubert became a great favourite with the philosopher, and to him Bacon expounded many of the secrets—or supposed secrets—of the art which he strove to bring to perfection. He instructed him also in the composition of certain medicines, which Bacon himself believed might be the means of prolonging life, though not to the indefinite extent dreamt of 137by those who put their whole faith in the Great Elixir.

But there never yet was an adept in any art or science who freely communicated to his pupil the full amount of his own knowledge; something for experience to gather, or for ingenuity to discover, is always kept in reserve, and the instructions of Roger Bacon stopped short at one point. He was himself engaged in the prosecution of that chemical secret which he rightly judged to be a dangerous one, and, while he experimented with the compound of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, he kept himself apart from his general laboratory and wrought in a separate cell, to which not even Hubert had access. To know that the Friar had a mysterious occupation, which, more than the making of gold or the universal medicine, engrossed him, was enough of itself to rouse the young man’s curiosity; but when to this was added the fact, that, from time to time, strange and mysterious noises were heard, accompanied by bright corruscations and a new and singular odour, penetrating through the chinks close to which his eyes were stealthily rivetted, Hubert’s eagerness to know all that his master concealed had no limit. He resolved to discover the secret, even though he should perish in the attempt; he feared that there was good reason for the accusation of dealing in the Black Art, which, more than all others the monks of Bacon’s own convent countenanced; but this apprehension only stimulated him the more. For some time Hubert waited without an opportunity occurring for gratifying the secret longing of his heart; at last it presented itself.

To afford medical assistance to the sick, was, perhaps, the most useful practice of conventual life, and the monks had always amongst them practitioners of the healing art, more or less skilful. Of this number, Roger Bacon was the most eminent, not only in the monastery to which he belonged, but in all Oxford.

It was about the hour of noon on a gloomy day towards the end of November, in the year 1282, while the Friar and his pupil were severally employed, the former in his secret cell, and the latter in the general laboratory, that there arrived at the gate of the Franciscan convent a messenger on horseback, the bearer of news from Abingdon that Walter de Losely, the sheriff of Berkshire, had that morning met with a serious accident by a hurt from a lance, and was then lying dangerously wounded at the hostelry of the Chequers in Abingdon, whither he had been hastily conveyed. The messenger added that the leech who had been called in was most anxious for the assistance of the skilful Friar Roger Bacon, and urgently prayed that he would lose no time in coming to the aid of the wounded knight.

Great excitement prevailed amongst the monks on the receipt of this intelligence, for Walter de Losely was not only a man of power and influence, but moreover, a great benefactor to their order. Friar Bacon was immediately sought and speedily made his appearance, the urgency of the message admitting of no delay. He hastily enjoined Hubert to continue the preparation of an amalgam which he was desirous of getting into a forward state, and taking with him his case of instruments with the bandages and salves which he thought needful, was soon mounted on an easy, ambling palfrey on his way towards Abingdon, the impatient messenger riding before him to announce his approach.

When he was gone, quiet again reigned in the convent, and Hubert de Dreux resumed his occupation. But it did not attract him long. Suddenly he raised his head from the work and his eyes were lit up with a gleam in which joy and fear seemed equally blended. For the first time, for months, he was quite alone. What if he could obtain access to his master’s cell and penetrate the mystery in which his labours had been so long enveloped! He cautiously stole to the door of the laboratory, and peeped out into a long passage, at the further extremity of which a door opened into a small court where, detached from the main edifice and screened from all observation, was a small building which the Friar had recently caused to be constructed. He looked about him timorously, fearing lest he might be observed; but there was no cause for apprehension, scarcely any inducement could have prevailed with the superstitious Franciscans to turn their steps willingly in the direction of Roger Bacon’s solitary cell.

Reassured by the silence, Hubert stole noiselessly onward, and tremblingly approached the forbidden spot. His quick eye saw at a glance that the key was not in the door, and his countenance fell. The Friar’s treasure was locked up! He might see something, however, if he could not enter the chamber. He knelt down, therefore, at the door, and peered through the keyhole. As he pressed against the door, in doing so, it yielded to his touch. In the haste with which Friar Bacon had closed the entrance, the bolt had not been shot. Hubert rose hastily to his feet, and the next moment he was in the cell, looking eagerly round upon the crucibles and alembics, which bore witness to his master’s labours. But beyond a general impression of work in hand, there was nothing to be gleaned from this survey. An open parchment volume, in which the Friar had recently been writing, next caught his attention. If the secret should be there in any known language. Hubert knew something of the Hebrew, but nothing yet of Arabic. He was reassured; the characters were familiar to him; the language Latin. He seized the volume, and read the few lines which the Friar had just traced on the last page.

‘Videas tamen utrum loquar in ænigmate vel secundum veritatem.’ And, further (which we translate): ‘He that would see these things shall have the key that openeth and no man shutteth, and when he shall shut no man is able to open again.’

‘But the secret—the secret!’ cried Hubert, impatiently, ‘let me know what “these things” are!’

He hastily turned the leaf back and read again. The passage was that one in the ‘Epistola de Secretis’ which spoke of the artificial thunder and lightning, and beneath it was the full and precise recipe for its composition. This at once explained the strange noises and the flashes of light which he had so anxiously noticed. Surprising and gratifying as this discovery might be, there was, Hubert thought, something beyond. Roger Bacon, he reasoned, was not one to practise an experiment like this for mere amusement. It was, he felt certain, a new form of invocation, more potent, doubtless, over the beings of another world, than any charm yet recorded. Be it as it might, he would try whether, from the materials around him, it were not in his power to produce the same result.

‘Here are all the necessary ingredients,’ he exclaimed; ‘this yellowish powder is the well known sulphur, in which I daily bathe the argent-vive; this bitter, glistening substance is the salt of the rock, the salis petræ; and this black calcination, the third agent—But the proportions are given, and here stands a glass cucurbit in which they should be mingled. It is of the form my master mostly uses—round, with a small neck and a narrow mouth, to be luted closely, without doubt. He has often told me that the sole regenerating power of the universe is heat; yonder furnace shall supply it, and then Hubert de Dreux is his master’s equal!’

The short November day was drawing to a close, when, after carefully tending the wounded sheriff, and leaving such instructions with the Abingdon leech as he judged sufficient for his patient’s well-doing, Roger Bacon again mounted his palfrey, and turned its head in the direction of Oxford. He was unwilling to be a loiterer after dark, and his beast was equally desirous to be once more comfortably housed, so that his homeward journey was accomplished even more rapidly than his morning excursion; and barely an hour had elapsed when the Friar drew the rein at the foot of the last gentle eminence, close to which lay the walls of the cloistered city. To give the animal breathing-space, he rode quietly up the ascent, and then paused for a few moments before he proceeded, his mind intent on subjects foreign to the speculations of all his daily associations.

Suddenly, as he mused on his latest discovery, and calculated to what principal object it might be devoted, a stream of fiery light shot rapidly athwart the dark, drear sky, and before he had space to think what the meteor might portend, a roar as of thunder shook the air, and simultaneous with it, a shrill, piercing scream, mingled with the fearful sound; then burst forth a volume of flame, and on the wind came floating a sulphurous vapour which, to him alone, revealed the nature of the explosion he had just witnessed.

‘Gracious God!’ he exclaimed, while the cold sweat poured like rain-drops down his forehead, ‘the fire has caught the fulminating powder! But what meant that dreadful cry? Surely nothing of human life has suffered! The boy Hubert,—but, no,—he was at work at the further extremity of the building. But this is no time for vain conjecture,—let me learn the worst at once!’

And with these words he urged his affrighted steed to its best pace, and rode rapidly into the city.

All was consternation there: the tremendous noise had roused every inhabitant, and people were hurrying to and fro, some hastening towards the place from whence the sound had proceeded, others rushing wildly from it. It was but too evident that a dreadful catastrophe, worse even than Bacon dreaded, had happened. It was with difficulty he made his way through the crowd, and came upon the ruin which still blazed fiercely, appalling the stoutest of heart. There was a tumult of voices, but above the outcries of the affrighted monks, and of the scared multitude, rose the loud voice of the Friar, calling upon them to extinguish the flames. This appeal turned all eyes towards him, and then associating him with an evil, the cause of which they were unable to comprehend, the maledictions of the monks broke forth.

‘Seize the accursed magician,’ they shouted; ‘he has made a fiery compact with the demon! Already one victim is sacrificed,—our turn will come next! See, here are the mangled limbs of his pupil, Hubert de Dreux! The fiend has claimed his reward, and borne away his soul. Seize on the wicked sorcerer, and take him to a dungeon!’

Roger Bacon sate stupified by the unexpected blow; he had no power, if he had possessed the will, to offer the slightest resistance to the fury of the enraged Franciscans, who, in the true spirit of ignorance, had ever hated him for his acquirements. With a deep sigh for the fate of the young man, whose imprudence he now saw had been the cause of this dreadful event, he yielded himself up to his enemies; they tore him from his palfrey, and with many a curse, and many a buffet, dragged him to the castle, and lodged him in one of its deepest dungeons.

The flames from the ruined cell died out of themselves; but those which the envy and dread of Bacon’s genius had kindled, were never extinguished, but with his life.

In the long years of imprisonment which 139followed—the doom of the stake being averted only by powerful intercession with the Pope—Bacon had leisure to meditate on the value of all he had done to enlarge the understanding and extend the knowledge of his species. ‘The prelates and friars,’ he wrote in a letter which still remains, ‘have kept me starving in close prison, nor will they suffer anyone to come to me, fearing lest my writings should come to any other than the Pope and themselves.’

He reflected that of all living men he stood well nigh alone in the consciousness that in the greatest of his inventions he had produced a discovery of incalculable value, but one for which on every account the time was not ripe.

‘I will not die,’ he said, ‘without leaving to the world the evidence that the secret was known to me whose marvellous power future ages shall acknowledge. But not yet shall it be revealed. Generations must pass away and the minds of men become better able to endure the light of science, before they can profit by my discovery. Let him who already possesses knowledge, guess the truth these words convey.’

And in place of the directions by which Hubert de Dreux had been guided, he altered the sentence as follows:—

The learned have found that these mystical words conceal the anagram of Carbonum pulvere, the third ingredient in the composition of Gunpowder.

‘WANTED, a good plain Cook,’ is hungrily echoed from the columns of the Times, by half the husbands and bachelors of Great Britain. According to the true meaning of the words ‘A good plain Cook’—to judge from the unskilful manner in which domestic cookery is carried on throughout the length and breadth of the land—is a very great rarity. But the conventional and the true meaning of the expression widely differ.

‘What is commonly self-called a plain cook,’ says a writer in the Examiner, ‘is a cook who spoils food for low wages. She is a cook, not because she knows anything about cookery, but because she prefers the kitchen-fire to scrubbing floors, polishing grates, or making beds. A cook who can boil a potato and dress a mutton-chop is one in a thousand.’

Such very plain cooks will always exist for dyspeptic purposes, while those who are in authority over them remain ignorant of an art which, however much it may be slighted, exercises a crowning influence over health and happiness. Eat we must; and it is literally a subject of vital importance whether what we eat be properly adapted for healthful digestion or not.

Medical statistics tell us that of all diseases with which the English are afflicted, those arising directly or indirectly from impaired digestive organs are the most prevalent. We are falsely accused in consequence of over-eating; but the true cause of our ailments is bad cooking. A Frenchman or a German devours much more at one of his own inexhaustible tables-d’hôte than an Englishman consumes at his dining-table—and with impunity; for the foreigner’s food being properly prepared is easily digested. ‘The true difference,’ says a pleasant military writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘between English and foreign cookery is just this: in preparing butcher’s meat for the table, the aim of foreign cookery is to make it tender, of English to make it hard. And both systems equally effect their object, in spite of difficulties on each side. The butcher’s meat, which you buy abroad, is tough, coarse-grained, and stringy; yet foreign cookery sends this meat to table tender. The butcher’s meat which you buy in England is tender enough when it comes home; but domestic cookery sends it up hard. Don’t tell me the hardness is in the meat itself. Nothing of the kind; it’s altogether an achievement of the English cuisine. I appeal to a leg of mutton, I appeal to a beef-steak, as they usually come to table; the beef half-broiled, the mutton half-roasted. Judge for yourself. The underdone portion of each is tender; the portion that’s dressed is hard. Argal, the hardness is due to the dressing, not to the meat: it is a triumph of domestic cookery. Engage a “good plain cook”—tell her to boil a neck of mutton, that will show you what I mean. All London necks of mutton come to table crescents, regularly curled.’

This is but too true: the real art of stewing is almost unknown in Great Britain, and even in Ireland, despite the fame of an ‘Irish stew.’

Everything that is not roasted or fried, is boiled, ‘a gallop,’ till the quality of tenderness is consolidated to the consistency of caoutchouc. Such a thing as a stewpan is almost unknown in houses supported by less than from three to five hundred a year.

These gastronomic grievances are solely due to neglected education. M. Alexis Soyer, with a touch of that quiet irony which imparts to satire its sharpest sting, dedicated his last Cookery-book ‘to the daughters of Albion.’ Having some acquaintance with their deficiencies, he laid his book slyly at their feet to drop such a hint as is conveyed when a dictionary is handed to damsels who blunder in orthography, or when watches are presented to correct unpunctuality. It is to be feared, however, that ‘the daughters of Albion’ were too busy with less useful—though to them scarcely less essential—accomplishments, to profit by his hint. Cookery is 140a subject they have never been taught to regard as worthy of their attention: rather, indeed, as one to be avoided; for it is never discussed otherwise than apologetically, with a simpering sort of jocularity, or as something which it is ‘low’ to know anything about. When a certain diplomatist was reminded that his mother had been a cook, he did not deny the fact; but assured the company, ‘upon his honour, that she was a very bad one.’ People in the best society do not hesitate to bore others with their ailments, and talk about cures and physic; but conversation respecting prevention—which is better than cure—and wholesomely prepared food is tabooed.

Young ladies of the leisure classes are educated to become uncommonly acute critics of all that pertains to personal blandishment. They keep an uncompromisingly tight hand over their milliners and ladies’ maids. They can tell to a thread when a flounce is too narrow or a tuck too deep. They are taught to a shade what colours suit their respective complexions, and to a hair how their coiffure ought to be arranged. Woe unto the seamstress or handmaiden who sins in these matters! But her ‘good plain cook’—when a damsel is promoted to wedlock, and owns one—passes unreproached for the most heinous offences. Badly seasoned and ill assimilated soup; fish, without any fault of the fishmonger, soft and flabby; meat rapidly roasted before fierce fires—burnt outside and raw within; poultry rendered by the same process tempting to the eye, till dissection reveals red and uncooked joints! These crimes, from their frequency and the ignorance of ‘the lady of the house,’ remain unpunished. Whereupon, husbands, tired of their Barmecide feasts—which disappoint the taste more because they have often a promising look to the eye—prefer better fare at their clubs; and escape the Scylla of bad digestion, to be wrecked on the Charybdis of domestic discord. All this is owing to the wife’s culinary ignorance, and to your ‘Good Plain Cooks.’

We do not say that the daughters of the wealthy and well to do should be submitted to regular kitchen apprenticeships, and taught the details of cookery, any more than that they should learn to make shoes or to fit and sew dresses. But it is desirable that they should acquire principles—such principles as would enable them to apply prompt correction to the errors of their hired cooks. It is no very bold assertion that were such a knowing and judicious supervision generally exercised, the stomach diseases, under which half our nation is said to groan, would be materially abated.

Let us take a step or two lower in the ladder of English life, where circumstances oblige the Good Plain Cook and the wife to be one and the same person. Many a respectable clerk, and many a small farmer, is doomed from one year’s end to another to a wearying disproportion of cold, dry, uncomfortable dinners, because his wife’s knowledge of cookery takes no wider range than that which pertains to the roasted, boiled, and fried. Thousands of artisans and labourers are deprived of half the actual nutriment of food, and of all the legitimate pleasures of the table, because their better halves—though good plain cooks, in the ordinary acceptation of the term—are in utter darkness as to economising, and rendering palatable the daily sustenance of their families. ‘If we could see,’ says a writer before quoted, ‘by the help of an Asmodeus what is going on at the dinner-hour of the humbler of the middle class, what a spectacle of discomfort, waste, ill-temper, and consequent ill-conduct, it would be! The man quarrels with his wife because there is nothing he can eat, and he generally makes up in drink for the deficiencies in the article of food. Gin is the consolation to the spirits and the resource to the baulked appetite. There is thus not only the direct waste of food and detriment to health, but the farther consequent waste of the use of spirits, with its injury to the habits and the health. On the other hand, people who eat well drink moderately; the satisfaction of appetite with relish dispensing with recourse to stimulants. Good-humour, too, and good health follow a good meal, and by a good meal we mean anything, however simple, well dressed in its way. A rich man may live very expensively and very ill, and a poor one very frugally but very well, if it be his good fortune to have a good cook in his wife or his servant; and a ministering angel a good cook is, either in the one capacity or the other, not only to those in humble circumstances, but to many above them of the class served by what are self-termed professed cooks, which is too frequently an affair of profession purely, and who are to be distinguished from plain cooks only in this, that they require larger wages for spoiling food, and spoil much more in quantity, and many other articles to boot.’

Great would be the advantage to the community, if cookery were made a branch of female education. To the poor, the gain would be incalculable. ‘Amongst the prizes which the Bountifuls of both sexes are fond of bestowing in the country,’ we again quote the Examiner, ‘we should like to see some offered for the best-boiled potato, the best-grilled mutton-chop, and the best-seasoned hotch-potch soup or broth. In writing of a well-boiled potato, we are aware that we shall incur the contempt of many for attaching importance to a thing they suppose to be so common; but the fact is, that their contempt arises, as is often the origin of contempt, from their ignorance, there not being one person in ten thousand who has ever seen and tasted that great rarity—a well-boiled potato.’

This is scarcely an exaggeration. The importance attached to the point by the highest gastronomic authorities, is shown by what took place, some years since, at the meeting 141of a Pall Mall Club Committee specially called for the selection of a cook. The candidates were an Englishman, from the Albion Tavern, and a Frenchman recommended by Ude. The eminent divine who presided in right of distinguished connoisseurship put the first question to the candidates. It was this:—‘Can you boil a potato?’

Let us hope that these hints will fructify and be improved upon, and that the first principles of cooking will become, in some way, a part of female education. In schools, however, this will be difficult. It can only be a branch of household education; and until it does so become, we shall continue to be afflicted with ‘Good Plain Cooks.’

Travelling in the Bush one rainy season, I put up for the night at a small weatherbound inn, perched half way up a mountain range, where several Bush servants on the tramp had also taken refuge from the downpouring torrents. I had had a long and fatiguing ride over a very bad country, so, after supper, retired into the furthest corner of the one room that served for ‘kitchen, and parlour, and all,’ and there, curled up in my blanket, in preference to the bed offered by our host, which was none of the cleanest; with half-shut eyes, I glumly puffed at my pipe in silence, allowing the hubble-bubble of the Bushmen’s gossip to flow through my unnoting ears.

Fortunately for my peace, the publican’s stock of rum had been some time exhausted, and as I was the latest comer, all the broiling and frying had ceased, but a party sat round the fire, evidently set in for a spell at ‘yarning.’ At first the conversation ran in ordinary channels, such as short reminiscences of old world rascality, perils in the Bush. Till at length a topic arose which seemed to have a paramount interest for all. This was the prowess of a certain Two-Handed Dick the Stockman.

‘Yes, yes; I’ll tell you what it is, mates,’ said one; ‘this confounded reading and writing, that don’t give plain fellows like you and me a chance;—now, if it were to come to fighting for a living, I don’t care whether it was half-minute time and London rules, rough and tumble, or single stick, or swords and bayonets, or tomahawks,—I’m dashed if you and me, and Two-Handed Dick, wouldn’t take the whole Legislative Council, the Governor and Judges—one down ’tother come on. Though, to be sure, Dick could thrash any two of us.’

I was too tired to keep awake, and dozed off, to be again and again disturbed with cries of ‘Bravo, Dick!’ ‘That’s your sort!’ ‘Houray, Dick!’ all signifying approval of that individual’s conduct in some desperate encounter, which formed the subject of a stirring narrative.

For months after that night this idea of Two-Handed Dick haunted me, but the bustle of establishing a new station at length drove it out of my head.

I suppose a year had elapsed from the night when the fame of the double-fisted stockman first reached me. I had to take a three days’ journey to buy a score of fine-woolled rams, through a country quite new to me, which I chose because it was a short cut recently discovered. I got over, the first day, forty-five miles comfortably. The second day, in the evening, I met an ill-looking fellow walking with a broken musket, and his arm in a sling. He seemed sulky, and I kept my hand on my double-barrelled pistol all the time I was talking to him; he begged a little tea and sugar, which I could not spare, but I threw him a fig of tobacco. In answer to my questions about his arm, he told me, with a string of oaths, that a bull, down in some mimosa flats, a day’s journey a-head, had charged him, flung him into a water-hole, broken his arm, and made him lose his sugar and tea bag. Bulls in Australia are generally quiet, but this reminded me that some of the Highland black cattle imported by the Australian Company, after being driven off by a party of Gully Rakees (cattle stealers), had escaped into the mountains and turned quite wild. Out of this herd, which was of a breed quite unsuited to the country, a bull sometimes, when driven off by a stronger rival, would descend to the mimosa flats, and wander about, solitary and dangerously fierce.

It struck me as I rode off, that it was quite as well my friend’s arm and musket had been disabled, for he did not look the sort of man it would be pleasant to meet in a thicket of scrub, if he fancied the horse you rode. So, keeping one eye over my shoulder, and a sharp look-out for any other traveller of the same breed, I rode off at a brisk pace. I made out afterwards that my foot friend was Jerry Jonson, hung for shooting a bullock-driver, the following year.

At sun-down, when I reached the hut where I had intended to sleep, I found it deserted, and so full of fleas, I thought it better to camp out; so I hobbled out old Grey-tail on the best piece of grass I could find which was very poor indeed.

The next morning when I went to look for my horse he was nowhere to be found. I put the saddle on my head and tracked him for hours, it was evident the poor beast had been travelling away in search of grass. I walked until my feet were one mass of blisters; at length, when about to give up the search in despair, having quite lost the track on stony ground, I came upon the marks quite fresh in a bit of swampy ground, and a few hundred yards further found Master Grey-tail rolling in the mud of a nearly dry water-hole as comfortably as possible. I put down the saddle and called him; at that moment I heard a loud roar and 142crash in a scrub behind me, and out rushed at a terrific pace a black Highland bull charging straight at me. I had only just time to throw myself on one side flat on the ground as he thundered by me. My next move was to scramble among a small clump of trees, one of great size, the rest were mere saplings.

The bull having missed his mark, turned again, and first revenged himself by tossing my saddle up in the air, until fortunately it lodged in some bushes; then, having smelt me out, he commenced a circuit round the trees, stamping, pawing, and bellowing frightfully. With his red eyes and long sharp horns he looked like a demon; I was quite unarmed, having broken my knife the day before; my pistols were in my holsters, and I was wearied to death. My only chance consisted in dodging him round the trees until he should be tired out. Deeply did I regret having left my faithful dogs Boomer and Bounder behind.

The bull charged again and again, sometimes coming with such force against the tree that he fell on his knees, sometimes bending the saplings behind which I stood until his horns almost touched me. There was not a branch I could lay hold of to climb up. How long this awful game of ‘touchwood’ lasted, I know not; it seemed hours; after the first excitement of self-preservation passed off, weariness again took possession of me, and it required all the instinct of self-preservation to keep me on my feet; several times the bull left me for a few seconds, pacing suddenly away, bellowing his malignant discontent; but before I could cross over to a better position he always came back at full speed. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, my eyes grew hot and misty, my knees trembled under me, I felt it impossible to hold out until dark. At length I grew desperate, and determined to make a run for the opposite covert the moment the bull turned towards the water-hole again. I felt sure I was doomed, and thought of it until I grew indifferent. The bull seemed to know I was worn out, and grew more fierce and rapid in his charges, but just when I was going to sit down under the great tree and let him do his worst, I heard the rattle of a horse among the rocks above, and a shout that sounded like the voice of an angel. Then came the barking of a dog, and the loud reports of a stockwhip, but the bull with his devilish eyes fixed on me, never moved.

Up came a horseman at full speed; crack fell the lash on the black bull’s hide; out spirted the blood in a long streak. The bull turned savagely—charged the horseman. The horse wheeled round just enough to baffle him—no more—again the lash descended, cutting like a long flexible razor, but the mad bull was not to be beaten off by a whip: he charged again and again; but he had met his match; right and left, as needed, the horse turned, sometimes pivotting on his hind, sometimes on his fore-legs.

The stockman shouted something, leapt from his horse, and strode forward to meet the bull with an open knife between his teeth. As the beast lowered his head to charge, he seemed to catch him by the horns. There was a struggle, a cloud of dust, a stamping like two strong men wrestling—I could not see clearly; but the next moment the bull was on his back, the blood welling from his throat, his limbs quivering in death.

The stranger, covered with mud and dust, came to me, saying as unconcernedly as if he had been killing a calf in a slaughter-house, ‘He’s dead enough, young man; he won’t trouble anybody any more.’

I walked two or three paces toward the dead beast; my senses left me—I fainted.

When I came to myself, my horse was saddled, bridled, and tied up to a bush. My stranger friend was busy flaying the bull.

‘I should like to have a pair of boots out of the old devil,’ he observed, in answer to my enquiring look, ‘before the dingoes and the eagle hawks dig into his carcase.’

We rode out of the flats up a gentle ascent, as night was closing in. I was not in talking humour; but I said, ‘You have saved my life.’

‘Well, I rather think I have’ but this was muttered in an under tone; ‘it’s not the first I have saved, or taken either, for that matter.’

I was too much worn out for thanking much, but I pulled out a silver hunting-watch and put it into his hand. He pushed it back, almost roughly, saying, ‘No, Sir, not now; I shalln’t take money or money’s worth for that, though I may ask something some time. It’s nothing, after all. I owed the old black devil a grudge for spoiling a blood filly of mine; beside, though I didn’t know it when I rode up first, and went at the beast to take the devil out of myself as much as anything,—I rather think that you are the young gentleman that ran through the Bush at night to Manchester Dan’s hut, when his wife was bailed up by the Blacks, and shot one-eyed Jackey, in spite of the Governor’s proclamation.’

‘You seem to know me,’ I answered; ‘pray may I ask who you are, if it is a fair question, for I cannot remember ever having seen you before.’

The scene in the roadside inn flashed on my recollection. Before I could say another word, a sharp turn round the shoulder of the range we were traversing, brought us in sight of the fire of a shepherd’s hut. The dogs ran out barking; we hallooed and cracked our whips, and the hut-keeper came to meet us with a fire-stick in his hand.

‘Lord bless my heart and soul! Dick, is that thee at last? Well, I thought thee were’t never coming;’ cried the hut-keeper, a little man, who came limping forward very fast 143with the help of a crutch-handled stick. ‘I say, Missis, Missis, here’s Dick, here’s Two-handed Dick.’

This was uttered in a shrill, hysterical sort of scream. Out came ‘Missis’ at the top of her speed, and began hugging Dick as he was getting off his horse, her arms reached a little above his waist, laughing and crying, both at the same time, while her husband kept fast hold of the Stockman’s hand, muttering, ‘Lord, Dick, I’m so glad to see thee.’ Meanwhile the dogs barking, and a flock of weaned lambs just penned, ba’aing, made such a riot, that I was fairly bewildered. So, feeling myself one too many, I slipped away, leading off both the horses to the other side the hut, where I found a shepherd, who showed me a grass paddock to feed the nags a bit before turning them out for the night. I said to him, ‘What is the meaning of all this going on between your mate and his wife, and the big Stockman?’

‘The meaning, Stranger; why, that’s Two-handed Dick, and my mate is little Jemmy that he saved, and Charley Anvils at the same time, when the Blacks slaughtered the rest of the party, near on a dozen of them.’

On returning, I found supper smoking on the table, and we had made a regular ‘Bush’ meal. The Stockman then told my adventure, and, when they had exchanged all the news, I had little difficulty in getting the hut-keeper to the point I wanted; the great difficulty lay in preventing man and wife from telling the same story at the same time. However, by judicious management, I was able to gather the following account of Two-handed Dick’s Fight and Ride.

‘When first I met Dick he was second Stockman to Mr. Ronalds, and I took a shepherd’s place there; it was my second place in this country, for you see I left the Old Country in a bad year for the weaving trade, and was one of the first batch of free emigrants that came out, the rest were chiefly Irish. I found shepherding suit me very well, and my Missis was hut-keeper. Well, Dick and I got very thick; I used to write his letters for him, and read in an evening and so on. Well, though I undertook a shepherd’s place I soon found I could handle an axe pretty well. Throwing the shuttle gives the use of the arms, you see, and Dick put into my head that I could make more money if I took to making fences; I sharpening the rails and making the mortice-holes, and a stranger man setting them. I did several jobs at odd times, and was thought very handy. Well, Mr. Ronalds, during the time of the great drought five years ago, determined to send up a lot of cattle to the North, where he had heard there was plenty of water and grass, and form a Station there. Dick was picked out as Stockman; a young gentleman, a relation of Mr. Ronalds, went as head of the party, a very foolish, conceited young man, who knew very little of Bush life, and would not be taught. There were eight splitters and fencers, besides Charley Anvils, the blacksmith, and two bullock drivers.

‘I got leave to go because I wanted to see the country and Dick asked. My missis was sorely against my going. I was to be storekeeper, as well as do any farming; and work if wanted.

‘We had two drays, and were well armed. We were fifteen days going up before we got into the new country, and then we travelled five days; sometimes twenty-four hours without water; and sometimes had to unload the drays two or three times a day, to get over creeks. The fifth day we came to very fine land; the grass met over our horses’ necks, and the river was a chain of water-holes, all full, and as clear as crystal. The kangaroos were hopping about as plentiful as rabbits in a warren; and the grass by the river side had regular tracks of the emus, where they went down to drink.

‘We had been among signs of the Blacks too, for five days, but had not seen anything of them, although we could hear the devils cooing at nightfall, calling to each other. We kept regular watch and watch at first—four sentinels, and every man sleeping with his gun at hand.

‘Now, as it was Dick’s business to tail (follow) the cattle, five-hundred head, I advised him to have his musket sawed off in the barrel, so as to be a more handy size for using on horseback. He took my advice; and Charley Anvils made a very good job of it, so that he could bring it under his arm when hanging at his back from a rope sling, and fire with one hand. It was lucky I thought of it, as it turned out.

‘At length the overseer fixed on a spot for the Station. It was very well for water and grass, and a very pretty view, as he said, but it was too near a thicket where the Blacks would lie in ambush, for safety. The old Bushmen wanted it planted on a neck of land, where the waters protected it all but one side, and there a row of fence would have made it secure.

‘Well, we set to work, and soon had a lot of tall trees down. Charley put up his forge and his grindstone, to keep the axe sharp, and I staid with him. Dick went tailing the cattle, and the overseer sat on a log and looked on. The second day a mob of Blacks came down on the opposite side of the river. They were quite wild, regular myals, but some of our men with green branches, went and made peace with them. They liked our bread and sugar; and after a short time we had a lot of them helping to draw rails, fishing for us, bringing wild honey, kangaroos, rats, and firewood, in return for butter and food, so we began to be less careful about our arms. We gave them iron tomahawks, and they soon found out that they could cut out an opossum from a hollow in half-an-hour 144with one of our tomahawks, while it took a day with one of their own stone ones.

‘And so the time passed very pleasantly. We worked away. The young men and gins worked for us. The chiefs adorned themselves with the trinkets and clothes we gave them, and fished and hunted, and admired themselves in the river.

‘Dick never trusted them; he stuck to his cattle; he warned us not to trust them, and the overseer called him a bloodthirsty murdering blackguard for his pains.

‘One day, the whole party were at work, chopping and trimming weather-boards for the hut; the Blacks helping as usual. I was turning the grindstone for Charley Anvils, and Dick was coming up to the dray to get some tea, but there was a brow of a hill between him and us; the muskets were all piled in one corner. I heard a howl, and then a scream—our camp was full of armed Blacks. When I raised my head, I saw the chief, Captain Jack we called him, with a broad axe in his hand, and the next minute he had chopped the overseer’s head clean off; in two minutes all my mates were on the ground. Three or four came running up to us; one threw a spear at me, which I half parried with a pannikin I was using to wet the grindstone, but it fixed deep in my hip, and part of it I believe is there still. Charley Anvils had an axe in his hand, and cut down the first two fellows that came up to him, but he was floored in a minute with twenty wounds. They were so eager to kill me, that one of them, luckily, or I should not have been alive now, cut the spear in my hip short off. Another, a young lad I had sharpened a tomahawk for a few days before, chopped me across the head; you can see the white hair. Down I fell, and nothing could have saved us, but the other savages had got the tarpaulin off, and were screaming with delight, plundering the drays, which called my enemies off. Just then, Dick came in sight. He saw what was the matter; but although there were more than a hundred black devils, all armed, painted, bloody, and yelling, he never stopped or hesitated, but rode slap through the camp, fired bang among them, killing two, and knocking out the brains of another. As he passed by a top rail, where an axe was sticking, he caught it up. The men in the camp were dead enough; the chief warriors had made the rush there, and every one was pierced with several spears, or cut down from close behind by axes in the hands of the chiefs. We, being further off, had been attacked by the boys only. Dick turned towards us, and shouted my name; I could not answer, but I managed to sit up an instant; he turned towards me, leaned down, caught me by the jacket, and dragged me on before him like a log. Just then Charley, who had crept under the grindstone, cried “Oh, Dick, don’t leave me!” As he said that, a lot of them came running down, for they had seen enough to know that, unless they killed us all, their job would not be half-done. As Dick turned to face them, they gave way and flung spears, but they could not hurt him; they managed to get between us and poor Charley. Dick rode back a circuit, and dropped me among some bushes on a hill, where I could see all. Four times he charged through and through a whole mob, with an axe in one hand and his short musket in the other. He cut them down right and left, as if he had been mowing; he scared the wretches, although the old women kept screeching and urging them on, as they always do. At length, by help of his stirrup leather, he managed to get Charley up behind him. He never could have done it, but his mare fought, and bit, and turned when he bid her, so he threw the bridle on her neck, and could use that terrible left arm of his. Well, he came up to the hill and lifted me on, and away we went for three or four miles, but we knew the mare could not stand it long, so Dick got off and walked. When the Blacks had pulled the drays’ loads to pieces, they began to follow us, but Dick never lost heart’—

‘Nay, mate,’ interrupted Dick, ‘once I did; I shall never forget it, when I came to put my last bullet in, it was too big.’

‘Why, I put the bullet in my mouth, and kept chawing and chawing it, and threatening the black devils all the while until at last it was small enough, and then I rammed it down, and dropped on my knee and waited until they came within twenty yards, and then I picked off Captain Jack, the biggest villain of them all.’

Here Dick, being warmed, continued the story:—‘We could not stop; we marched all evening and all night, and when the two poor creturs cried for water, as they did most of the night, as often as I could I filled my boots, and gave them to drink. I led the horse, and travelled seventy miles without halting for more than a minute or two. Toward the last they were as helpless as worn-out sheep. I tied them on. We had the luck to fall in with a party travelling just when the old mare was about giving in, and then we must all have died for want of water. Charley Anvils had eighteen wounds, but, except losing two fingers, is none the worse. Poor Jemmy, there, will never be fit for anything but a hut-keeper; as for me, I had some scratches—nothing to hurt; and the old mare lost an ear. I went back afterwards with the police, and squared accounts with the Blacks.

‘And so you see, Stranger, the old woman thinks I saved her old man’s life, although I would have done as much for any one; but I believe there are some gentlemen in Sydney think I ought to have been hung for what I did. Anyhow, since that scrimmage in the Bush, they always call me “Two-handed Dick.”’

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 6, MAY 4, 1850 ***

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, No. 6, May 4, 1850

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

THE HEART OF MID-LONDON.

THE MINER’S DAUGHTERS.—A TALE OF THE PEAK.

CHAP. I.—THE CHILD’S TRAGEDY.

NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

THE BROWN HAT.

ALCHEMY AND GUNPOWDER.

“A GOOD PLAIN COOK.”

TWO-HANDED DICK THE STOCKMAN.
AN ADVENTURE IN THE BUSH.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, No. 6, May 4, 1850

HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

THE HEART OF MID-LONDON.

THE MINER’S DAUGHTERS.—A TALE OF THE PEAK.

CHAP. I.—THE CHILD’S TRAGEDY.

NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING.

THE RAILWAY STATION.

THE BROWN HAT.

ALCHEMY AND GUNPOWDER.

“A GOOD PLAIN COOK.”

TWO-HANDED DICK THE STOCKMAN. AN ADVENTURE IN THE BUSH.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

TWO-HANDED DICK THE STOCKMAN.
AN ADVENTURE IN THE BUSH.