Household words, no. 9, May 25, 1850
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English literature -- Periodicals

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Title: Household words, no. 9, May 25, 1850

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: March 11, 2026 [eBook #78174]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78174

Credits: Richard Tonsing, Steven desJardins, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 9, MAY 25, 1850 ***

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“Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”—Shakespeare.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 9.]      SATURDAY, MAY 25, 1850.      [Price 2d.

THE SICKNESS AND HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE OF BLEABURN.

IN THREE PARTS.—CHAPTER I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER II.

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

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

“How far do you call it to Bleaburn?”

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

“Indeed I am. Why not?”

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

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

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

“The what?” interrupted the young lady.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A widow, I think you said, ma’am.” And the landlady called to the ostler to ask him if he knew anything of a Widow Johnson, who lived at Bleaburn. Will Ostler said there was a woman of that name who was the mother of Silly Jem. “Might that be she?” Mary had never heard of Silly Jem; but when she found that Widow Johnson had a daughter, some years married, that she had white hair, and strong black eyes, and a strong face altogether, and that she seldom spoke, she had little doubt that one so like certain of her relations was her aunt. The end of it was that Mary went to Bleaburn. She ordered the chaise herself, leaving it to the landlady to direct the post-boy where to set her down; she appealed to the woman’s good feelings to aid her if she should find that wine, linen or other comforts were necessary at Bleaburn, and she could not be allowed to come and buy them: explained that she was far from rich, and told the exact sum which she at present believed she should be justified in spending on behalf of the sick; and gave a reference to a commercial house in London. She did not tell—and indeed she gave only a momentary thought to it herself—that the sum of money she had mentioned was that which she had saved up to take her to Scotland, to see some friends of her family, and travel through the Highlands. As she was driven off from the gateway of the Cross Keys, nodding and smiling from the chaise window in turning the corner, the landlady ceased from commanding the post-boy on no account to go beyond the brow, and said to herself that this Miss Pickard was the most wilful young lady she had ever known, but that she could not help liking her, too. She did not seem to value her life any more than a pin; and yet she appeared altogether cheerful and sensible. If the good woman had been able to see into Mary’s heart, she would have discovered that she had the best reason in the world for valuing life very much indeed: but she had been so accustomed, all her life, to help everybody that needed it, that she naturally went straight forward into the business, without looking at difficulties or dangers, on the right hand or the left.

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

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

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

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

“What do you understand by a cordon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Sir.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she must go and nurse them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPRING-TIME IN THE COURT.

They say the Spring has come again!
There is no Spring-time here;
In this dark, reeking court, there seems
No change throughout the year:
Except, sometimes, ’tis bitter cold,
Or else ’tis hot and foul;
How hard it is, in such a place,
To feel one has a soul!

They say the Spring has come again!
I scarce believe ’tis so;
For where’s the sun, and gentle breeze,
That make the primrose blow?
Oh, would that I could lead my child
Over the meadows green,
And see him playing with the flowers
His eyes have never seen!

His toys are but an oyster-shell,
Or piece of broken delf;
His playground is the gulley’s side,
With outcasts like himself!
I used to play on sunny banks,
Or else by pleasant streams;
How oft—oh, God be thanked! how oft—
I see them in my dreams.

I used to throw my casement wide,
To breathe the morning’s breath;
But now I keep the window close—
The air smells so like death!
Once only, on my window-sill
I placed a little flower,
Something to tell me of the fields—
It withered in an hour.

Why are we housed like filthy swine?
Swine! they have better care;
For we are pent up with the plague,
Shut out from light and air.
We work and wear our lives away,
To heap this city’s wealth;
But labour God decreed for us—
’Tis man denies us health!

They say the Spring has come again
To wake the sleeping seed,
Whether it be the tended flower,
Or poor, neglected weed!
Then Harvest comes. Think you our wrongs
For ever, too, will sleep?
The misery which man has sown,
Man will as surely reap!

THE PLANET-WATCHERS OF GREENWICH.

There is a morsel of Greenwich Park, which has, for now nearly two centuries, been held sacred from intrusion. It is the portion inclosed by the walls of the Observatory. Certainly a hundred thousand visitors must ramble over the surrounding lawns, and look with curious eye upon the towers and outer boundaries of that little citadel of science, for one who finds admission to the interior of the building. Its brick towers, with flanking turrets and picturesque roofs, perched on the side of the gravelly hill, and sheltered round about by groups of fine old trees, are as well known as Greenwich Hospital itself. But what work goes on inside its carefully preserved boundary and under those moveable, black-domed roofs, is a popular mystery. Many a holiday-maker’s wonder has been excited by the fall, at one o’clock, of the huge black ball, high up there, by the weather vane on the topmost point of the eastern turret. He knows, or is told if he asks a loitering pensioner, that the descent of the ball tells the time as truly as the sun; and that all the ships in the river watch it to set their chronometers by, before they sail; and that all the railway clocks, and all the railway trains over the kingdom are arranged punctually by its indications. But how the heavens are watched to secure this punctual definition of the flight of time, and what other curious labours are going on inside the Observatory, is a sealed book. The public have always been, of necessity, excluded from the Observatory walls, for the place is devoted to the prosecution of a science whose operations are inconsistent with the bustle, the interruptions, the talk, and the anxieties of popular curiosity and examination.

But when public information and instruction are the objects, the doors are widely opened, and the press and its attachés find a way into this, as into many other sacred and forbidden spots. Only last week one of ‘our own contributors’ was seen in a carriage on the Greenwich railway, poring over the paper in the last Edinburgh Review that describes our national astronomical establishment, and was known afterwards to have climbed the Observatory hill, and to have rung and gained admission at the little black mysterious gate in the Observatory wall. Let us see what is told in his report of what he saw within that sacred portal.

In the park on a fine day all seems life and gaiety—once within the Observatory boundary, the first feeling is that of isolation. There is a curious stillness about the place, and the footsteps of the old pensioner, who closes the gate upon a visitor, echoes again on the pavement as he goes away to wake up from his astronomical or meteorological trance one of the officers of this sanctum. Soon, under the guidance of the good genius so invoked, the secrets of the place begin to reveal themselves.

The part of the Observatory so conspicuous from without is the portion least used within. When it was designed by Christopher Wren, the general belief was that such buildings should be lofty, that the observer might be raised towards the heavenly bodies whose motions he was to watch. More modern science has taught its disciples better; and in Greenwich,—which is an eminently practical Observatory,—the working part of the building is found crouching behind the loftier towers. These are now occupied as subsidiary to the modern practical building. The ground floor is used as a residence by the chief astronomer; above is the large hall originally built to contain huge moveable telescopes and quadrants—such as are not now employed. Now-a-days, this hall occasionally becomes a sort of scientific counting-house—irreverent but descriptive term—in which, from time to time, a band of scientific clerks are congregated to post up the books, in which the daily business of the planets has been jotted down by the astronomers who watch those marvellous bodies. Another portion is a kind of museum of astronomical curiosities. Flamstead and Halley, and their immediate successors, worked in these towers, and here still rest some of the old, rude tools with which their discoveries were completed, and their reputation, and the reputation of Greenwich, were established. As time has gone on, astronomers and opticians have invented new and more perfect and more luxurious instruments. Greater accuracy is thus obtainable, at a less expenditure of human patience and labour; and so the old tools are cast aside. One of them belonged to Halley, and was put up by him a hundred and thirty years ago; another is an old brazen quadrant, with which many valuable observations were made in by-gone times; and another, an old iron quadrant, still fixed in the stone pier to which it was first attached. Some of the huge telescopes that once found place in this old Observatory, have been sent away. One went to the Cape of Good Hope, and has been useful there. Another of the unsatisfactory, and now unused, instruments had a tube twenty-five feet long, whose cool and dark interior was so pleasant to the spiders that, do what they would, the astronomers could not altogether banish the persevering insects from it. Spin they would; and, spite of dusting and cleaning, and spider-killing, spin they did; and, at length, the savans got more instruments and less patience, and the spiders were left in quiet possession. This has been pleasantly spoken of as an instance of poetical justice. It is but fair that spiders should, at times, have the best of astronomers, for astronomers rob spiders for the completion of their choicest instruments. No fabric of human construction is fine enough to strain across the eye-piece of an important telescope, and opticians preserve a particular race of spiders, that their webs may be taken for that purpose. The spider lines are strained across the best instruments at Greenwich and elsewhere; and when the spinners of these beautifully fine threads disturbed the accuracy of the tube in the western wing of the old Observatory, it was said to be but fair retaliation for the robberies the industrious insects had endured.

A narrow stair leads from the unused rooms of the old Observatory to its leaded roof, whence a magnificent view is obtained; the park, the hospital, the town of Greenwich, and the windings of the Thames, and, gazing further, London itself comes grandly into the prospect. The most inveterate astronomer could scarcely fail to turn for a moment from the wonders of the heavens to admire these glories of the earth. From the leads, two turrets are reached, where the first constantly active operations in this portion of the building, are in progress.

At the present time, indeed, these turrets are the most useful portions of the old building. In one is placed the well-known contrivance for registering, hour after hour, and day after day, the force and direction of the wind. To keep such a watch by human vigilance, and to make such a register by human labour, would be a tedious, expensive, and irksome task; and human ingenuity taxed itself to make a machine for perfecting such work. The wind turns a weather-cock, and, by aid of cog-wheels the motion is transferred to a lead pencil fixed over a sheet of paper, and thus the wind is made to write down the direction which itself is blowing. Not far distant is a piece of metal, the flat side of which is ever turned by the weather-cock to meet the full force of the wind, which, blowing upon it, drives it back against a spring. To this spring is affixed a chain passing over pullies towards another pencil, fixed above a sheet of paper, and moving faithfully, more or less, as the wind blows harder or softer. And thus the ‘gentle zephyr’ and the fresh breeze, and the heavy gale, and, when it comes, the furious hurricane, are made to note down their character and force. The sheets of paper on which the uncertain element, the wind, is bearing witness against itself, is fixed upon a frame moved by clockwork. Steady as the progress of time, this ingenious mechanism draws the paper under the suspended pencils. Thus each minute and each hour has its written record, without human help or inspection. Once a day only, an assistant comes to put a new blank sheet in the place of that which has been covered by the moving pencils, and the latter is taken away to be bound up in a volume. The book might with truth be lettered ‘The History of the Wind; written by Itself,’—an Æolian autobiography.

Close by is another contrivance for registering in decimals of an inch the quantity of rain that falls. The drops are caught, and passing down a tube, a permanent mark is made by which the quantity is determined.

The eastern turret is devoted to the Time Ball and its mechanism. Far out at sea—away from all sources of information but those to be asked of the planets, his compass, his quadrant, his chronometer, and his almanack, the mariner feels the value of time in a way which the landsman can scarcely conceive. If his chronometer is right, he may feel safe; let him have reason to doubt its accuracy, and he knows how the perils surrounding him are increased. An error of a few seconds in his time may place him in danger—an error of a few minutes may lead him to steer blindly to his certain wreck. Hence his desire when he is leaving port to have his time-pieces right to a second; and hence the expenditure of thought, and labour, and money, at the Greenwich Observatory, to afford the shipping of the great port of London, and the English navy, the exact time—true to the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute—and to afford them also a book, the Nautical Almanack, containing a mass of astronomical facts, on which they may base their calculations, with full reliance as to their accuracy. Every day for the last seventeen years, at five minutes before one o’clock, the black ball five feet across and stuffed with cork, is raised halfway up its shaft above the eastern turret of the Observatory;—at two-and-a-half minutes before that hour, it rises to the top. Telescopes from many a point, both up and down the river, are now pointed to this dark spot above the Greenwich trees, and many an anxious mariner has his time-pieces beside him, that their indications may be made true. Watch the Ball as you stand in the Park. It is now just raised. You must wait two minutes and a half, and as you do so, you feel what a minute may be. It seems a long, palpable, appreciable time, indeed. In the turret below, stands a clock telling the true time, gained by a laborious watching of the clock-stars; and beside the clock, is a man with a practised hand upon a trigger, and a practised eye upon the face of the dial. One minute—two minutes pass. Thirty seconds more, and the trigger has released the Ball. As it leaves the top of the shaft, it is one o’clock to the tenth of a second. By the time it has reached the bottom it is some five seconds later.

Leaving the Ball Turret, and the old building which it surmounts, the new Observatory, where the chief work of the establishment is done, claims our notice. This attention would scarcely be given to its outward appearance for it is a long low building, scarcely seen beyond its own boundaries. The Greenwich Observatory is not a show place, but an eminently practical establishment. St. Petersburg and other cities have much more gorgeous buildings devoted to astronomical purposes, and Russia and other countries spend much more money on astronomy than England does, yet the Greenwich Tables have a world-wide reputation, and some of them are used as the groundwork for calculations in all Observatories at home and abroad. The astronomer does not want marble halls or grand saloons for his work. Galileo used a bell-tower at Venice, and Kepler stood on the bridge at Prague to watch the stars. The men, not the buildings, do the work. No disappointment need be felt, then, to find the modern Observatory a range of unadorned buildings running east and west, with slits in the roof, and in some of the walls. Within these simple buildings are the instruments now used, displaying almost the perfection of mechanical skill in their construction and finish—beautifully adapted to the object they have to fulfil, and in perfect order. They are fixed on solid piers of masonry, deeply imbedded in the earth, to secure freedom from vibration—a quality better obtained when the foundations are on sand or gravel than when on rock.

To describe the instruments by their technical names, and to go into any particulars of the instruments they have superseded, would take space, only to do the work of a scientific treatise. Enough, therefore, to say that there are the telescopes best adapted to the chief duty of the place, which is, watching the moon whenever she is visible; watching the clock-stars, by which the true time is calculated more exactly than it could be from observations of the sun alone; and watching other planetary bodies as they pass the meridian. Eclipses, occultations, and other phenomena, of course, have their share of attention, and add to the burden of the observer’s duties.

The staff of the Observatory includes a chief astronomer, Mr. Airy, with a salary of 800l. a year; and six assistants who are paid, 470l., 290l., 240l., 150l., 130l., and 130l., respectively. This does not include the officers of the Meteorological branch of the establishment, to be spoken of hereafter; and which consists of Mr. Glaisher, with 240l. a year, one assistant at 120l., and two additional computers. At times, when these scientific labourers have collected more observations than they are able to work out; additional help is summoned, in shape of the body of scientific clerks before spoken of; who, seated at desks, cast up the accounts the planetary bodies, including such regular old friends as the moon and fixed stars, but not forgetting those wandering celestial existences that rush, from time to time, over the meridian, and may be fairly called the chance customers of the astronomer.

Though the interior of the Observatory seems so still, the life of those employed there has its excitements. Looking through telescopes forms a small part only of their duty—and that duty cannot be done when the weather is unfavourable. On cloudy days the observer is idle; in bright weather he is busy; and a long continuance of clear days and nights gives him more employment than he can well complete. Summer, therefore, is his time of labour; winter his time of rest. It appears that in our climate the nights, on the whole, are clearer than the days, and evenings less cloudy than mornings. Every assistant takes his turn as an observer, and a chain of duty is kept up night and day; at other periods, the busiest portion of the twenty-four hours at the Observatory, is between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. During this time they work in silence, the task being to complete the records of the observations made, by filling in the requisite columns of figures upon printed forms, and then adding and subtracting them as the case requires. Whilst thus engaged, the assistant who has charge of an instrument looks, from time to time, at his star-regulated clock, and when it warns him that his expected planet is nearly due, he leaves his companions, and quietly repairs to the room where the telescope is ready. The adjustment of this has previously been arranged with the greatest nicety. The shutter is moved from the slit in the roof, the astronomer sits upon an easy chair with a moveable back. If the object he seeks is high in the heavens, this chair-back is lowered till its occupant almost lies down; if the star is lower, the chair-back is raised in proportion. He has his note-book and metallic pencil in hand. Across the eye-piece of the telescope are stretched seven lines of spider-web, dividing the field of view. If his seat requires change, the least motion arranges it to his satisfaction, for it rests upon a railway of its own. Beside him is one of the star-clocks, and as the moment approaches for the appearance of the planet, the excitement of the moment increases. ‘The tremble of impatience for the entrance of the star on the field of view,’ says an Edinburgh Reviewer, ‘is like that of a sportsman whose dog has just made a full point, and who awaits the rising of the game. When a star appears, the observer, in technical language, takes a second from the clock face; that is, he reads the second with his eye, and counts on by the ear the succeeding beats of the clock, naming the seconds mentally. As the star passes each wire of the transit, he marks down in his jotting-book with a metallic pencil the second, and the second only, of his observation, with such a fraction of a second as corresponds, in his judgment, to the interval of time between the passage of the star, and the beat of the clock which preceded such passage.’

An experienced observer will never commit an error in this mental calculation, exceeding the tenth of a second, or six hundredth of a minute. When the star has been thus watched over the seven cobweb lines (or wires), the observer jots down the hour and minute, in addition to the second, and the task is done. Stars, not very near the sun, may be seen in broad daylight, but, at night, it is requisite to direct a ray of light from a lamp, so far to enlighten the field of the telescope, as to permit the spider lines to be seen running across the brighter ground on which the expected star is to be visible.

The adjustment of the instruments is a task of great nicety. If they are out of trim only a shadow of a shade of a hair’s-breadth, the desired accuracy is interfered with, and they have to be re-adjusted. Temperature is of course an important element in their condition, and a slight sensibility may do mischief. The warmth of the observer’s body, when approaching the instruments, has been known to affect their accuracy; and to avoid such sources of error, instruments have at times been cased in flannel, that the non-conducting powers of that homely fabric might screen the too-sensitive metal.

Sunday is a comparative holiday at the Observatory, for then, except when any extraordinary phenomena are expected, the only duty done is to drop the Time Ball, and observe the moon’s place. The moon is never neglected, and her motions have been here watched, during the last hundred and seventy years, with the most pertinacious care,—to the great service of astronomy, and the great benefit of navigation.

The library should not pass unnoticed. It is small; but being devoted to works upon astronomy, and the kindred sciences, there is ample room for all that has hitherto been written on the subject, or that can, for many generations, be produced. The observations of a lifetime spent in watching the stars may be printed in marvellously few pages. A glance through the Greenwich Astronomical Library gives a rough general idea of what the world has done and is doing for the promotion of this science. Russia contributes large, imperial-looking tomes, that tell of extended observations made under the munificent patronage of a despot; Germany sends from different points a variety of smaller, cheaper-looking, yet valuable contributions; France gives proofs of her genius and her discoveries; but her forte is not in observation. The French are bad observers. They have no such proofs of unremitting, patient toil in search of facts, as those afforded in the records of the Greenwich Tables of the Moon. Indeed, Greenwich, as we have already said, is a working Observatory; and those who go into its library, and its fire-proof manuscript-room, and see how its volumes of observations have been growing from the small beginnings of the days of Flamstead and Halley, to those of our later and more liberal times, will have good reason to acknowledge that the money devoted to this establishment has been well employed.

One other spot must be noticed as amongst the notable things in this astronomical sanctum. It is the Chronometer-room, to which, during the first three Mondays in the year, the chief watchmakers of London send in their choicest instruments for examination and trial. The watches remain for a good portion of a year; their rates being noted, day by day, by two persons; and then the makers of the best receive prizes, and their instruments are purchased for the navy. Other competitors obtain certificates of excellence, which bring customers from the merchant service; whilst others pass unrewarded. To enter the room where these admirable instruments are kept, suggests the idea of going into a Brobdingnag Watch-factory. Round the place are ranged shelves, on which the large watches are placed, all ticking in the most distinct and formidable way one against another. When they first arrive, in January, they are left to the ordinary atmospheric temperature for some months. Their rates being taken under these circumstances, a large stove in the centre of the apartment is lighted, and heat got up to a sort of artificial East India or Gold Coast point. Tried under these influences, they are placed in an iron tray over the stove, like so many watch-pies in a baker’s dish, and the fire being encouraged, they are literally kept baking, to see how their metal will stand that style of treatment. Whilst thus hot, their rates are once more taken; and then, after this fiery ordeal, such of them as their owners like to trust to an opposite test, are put into freezing mixtures! Yet, so beautifully made are these triumphs of human ingenuity—so well is their mechanism ‘corrected’ for compensating the expansion caused by the heat, and the contraction induced by the cold—that an even rate of going is established, so nearly, that its variation under opposite circumstances becomes a matter of close and certain estimate.

The rates of chronometers on trial for purchase by the Board of Admiralty, at the Observatory, are posted up and printed in an official form. Upon looking to the document for last year, we find a statement of their performances during six months of 1849, with memoranda of the exact weeks during which the chronometers were exposed to the open air at a north window; the weeks the Chronometer-room was heated by a stove, the chronometers being dispersed on the surrounding shelves; and the weeks during which they were placed in the tray above the stove. The rate given during the first week of trial is in every case omitted; like newly entered schoolboys their early vagaries are not taken into account; but after that, every merit and every fault is watched with jealous care, and, when the day of judgment comes, the order of the arrangement of the chronometers in the list is determined solely by consideration of their irregularities of rate as expressed in the columns, ‘Difference between greatest and least,’ and, ‘Greatest difference between one week and the next.’

The Royal Observatory, according to a superstition not wholly extinct, is the headquarters, not only of Astronomy, but of Astrology. The structure is awfully regarded, by a small section of the community which ignorance has still left amongst us, as a manufactory of horoscopes, and a repository for magic mirrors and divining-rods. Not long ago a well-dressed woman called at the Observatory gate to request a hint as to the means of recovering a lost sum of money; and recently, somebody at Brighton dispatched the liberal sum of five shillings in a post-office order to the same place, with a request to have his nativity cast in return! Another, only last year, wrote as follows:—‘I have been informed that there are persons at the Observatory who will, by my enclosing a remittance and the hour of my birth, give me to understand who is to be my wife? An early answer, stating all particulars, will oblige,’ &c.

This sketch descriptive of its real duties and uses are not necessary to relieve the Greenwich Observatory from the charge of being an abode of sorcerers and astrologers. A few only of the most ignorant can yet entertain such notions of its character; but they are not wholly unfounded. Magicians, whose symbols are the Arabic numerals, and whose arcana are mathematical computations, daily foretell events in that building with unerring certainty. They pre-discover the future of the stars down to their minutest evolution and eccentricity. From data furnished from the Royal Observatory, is compiled an extraordinary prophetic Almanack from which all other almanacs are copied. It foretells to a second when and where each of the planets may be seen in the heavens at any minute for the next three years. The current number of the Nautical Almanack is for the Year of Grace 1853.

In this quiet sanctuary, then, the winds are made to register their own course and force, and the rain to gauge its own quantity as it falls; the planets are watched to help the mariner to steer more safely over the seas; and the heavens themselves are investigated for materials from which their future as well as their past history may be written.

SWEDISH FOLK-SONGS.

THE DOVE ON THE LILY.
There sits a pure dove on a lily so white,
On midsummer morning:—

She sang of Christ Jesus from morning to night,

In Heaven there is great joy, O!

She sang, and she sang, ’twas a joy to hear,

Expecting a maiden in Heaven that year.

“And should I reach Heaven ere twelvemonths are o’er,

Sickness and pain I should know never more.”

To her father’s hall the maiden she went,

And through her left side a sharp pain was sent.

“Oh! make my bed, mother, in haste, mother dear,

I shall in the fields no more wander this year.”

“And speak such words, daughter, dear daughter, no more;

Thou shalt wed with a king ere twelvemonths are o’er.”

“Oh! better that I be in Heaven a bride,

Than remain on the earth amid kingly pride.

“And father, dear father, go fetch me a priest,

For I know that, ere long, death will be my guest.

“And brother, dear brother, go get me a bier;

And sister, dear sister, do thou dress my hair.”

The maiden, she died, and was laid on her bier,

And all her hand-maidens they plaited her hair.

They carried her out from her father’s hall door;

And the angels of God with lights went before.

They carried the corpse to the churchyard along,

And the angels of God went before with a song.

They buried the maiden beneath the dark sod,
On midsummer morning:—
And her coming was even well pleasing to God;
In Heaven there is great joy, O!

A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE.

A few Sundays ago, I formed one of the congregation assembled in the chapel of a large metropolitan Workhouse. With the exception of the clergyman and clerk, and a very few officials, there were none but paupers present. The children sat in the galleries; the women in the body of the chapel, and in one of the side aisles; the men in the remaining aisle. The service was decorously performed, though the sermon might have been much better adapted to the comprehension and to the circumstances of the hearers. The usual supplications were offered, with more than the usual significancy in such a place, for the fatherless children and widows, for all sick persons and young children, for all that were desolate and oppressed, for the comforting and helping of the weak-hearted, for the raising-up of them that had fallen; for all that were in danger, necessity, and tribulation. The prayers of the congregation were desired “for several persons in the various wards, dangerously ill;” and others who were recovering returned their thanks to Heaven.

Among this congregation, were some evil-looking young women, and beetle-browed young men; but not many—perhaps that kind of characters kept away. Generally, the faces (those of the children excepted) were depressed and subdued, and wanted colour. Aged people were there, in every variety. Mumbling, blear-eyed, spectacled, stupid, deaf, lame; vacantly winking in the gleams of sun that now and then crept in through the open doors, from the paved yard; shading their listening ears, or blinking eyes, with their withered hands; poring over their books, leering at nothing, going to sleep, crouching and drooping in corners. There were weird old women, all skeleton within, all bonnet and cloak without, continually wiping their eyes with dirty dusters of pocket-handkerchiefs; and there were ugly old crones, both male and female, with a ghastly kind of contentment upon them which was not at all comforting to see. Upon the whole, it was the dragon, Pauperism, in a very weak and impotent condition; toothless, fangless, drawing his breath heavily enough, and hardly worth chaining up.

When the service was over, I walked with the humane and conscientious gentleman whose duty it was to take that walk, that Sunday morning, through the little world of poverty enclosed within the workhouse walls. It was inhabited by a population of some fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant newly born or not yet come into the pauper world, to the old man dying on his bed.

In a room opening from a squalid yard, where a number of listless women were lounging to and fro, trying to get warm in the ineffectual sunshine of the tardy May morning—in the “Itch-Ward,” not to compromise the truth—a woman such as Hogarth has often drawn, was hurriedly getting on her gown, before a dusty fire. She was the nurse, or wardswoman, of that insalubrious department—herself a pauper—flabby, raw-boned, untidy—unpromising and coarse of aspect as need be. But, on being spoken to about the patients whom she had in charge, she turned round, with her shabby gown half on, half off, and fell a crying with all her might. Not for show, not querulously, not in any mawkish sentiment, but in the deep grief and affliction of her heart; turning away her dishevelled head: sobbing most bitterly, wringing her hands, and letting fall abundance of great tears, that choked her utterance. What was the matter with the nurse of the itch-ward? Oh, “the dropped child” was dead! Oh, the child that was found in the street, and she had brought up ever since, had died an hour ago, and see where the little creature lay, beneath this cloth! The dear, the pretty dear!

The dropped child seemed too small and poor a thing for Death to be in earnest with, but Death had taken it; and already its diminutive form was neatly washed, composed, and stretched as if in sleep upon a box. I thought I heard a voice from Heaven saying, It shall be well for thee, O nurse of the itch-ward, when some less gentle pauper does those offices to thy cold form, that such as the dropped child are the angels who behold my Father’s face!

In another room, were several ugly old women crouching, witch-like, round a hearth, and chattering and nodding, after the manner of the monkies. “All well here? And enough to eat?” A general chattering and chuckling; at last an answer from a volunteer. “Oh yes gentleman! Bless you gentleman! Lord bless the parish of St. So-and-So! It feed the hungry, Sir, and give drink to the thirsty, and it warm them which is cold, so it do, and good luck to the parish of St. So-and-So, and thankee gentleman!” Elsewhere, a party of pauper nurses were at dinner. “How do you get on?” “Oh pretty well Sir! We works hard, and we lives hard—like the sodgers!”

In another room, a kind of purgatory or place of transition, six or eight noisy mad-women were gathered together, under the superintendence of one sane attendant. Among them was a girl of two or three and twenty, very prettily dressed, of most respectable appearance, and good manners, who had been brought in from the house where she had lived as domestic servant (having, I suppose, no friends), on account of being subject to epileptic fits, and requiring to be removed under the influence of a very bad one. She was by no means of the same stuff, or the same breeding, or the same experience, or in the same state of mind, as those by whom she was surrounded; and she pathetically complained that the daily association and the nightly noise made her worse, and was driving her mad—which was perfectly evident. The case was noted for enquiry and redress, but she said she had already been there for some weeks.

If this girl had stolen her mistress’s watch, I do not hesitate to say she would, in all probability, have been infinitely better off. Bearing in mind, in the present brief description of this walk, not only the facts already stated in this Journal, in reference to the Model Prison at Pentonville, but the general treatment of convicted prisoners under the associated silent system too, it must be once more distinctly set before the reader, that we have come to this absurd, this dangerous, this monstrous pass, that the dishonest felon is, in respect of cleanliness, order, diet, and accommodation, better provided for, and taken care of, than the honest pauper.

And this conveys no special imputation on the workhouse of the parish of St. So-and-So, where, on the contrary, I saw many things to commend. It was very agreeable, recollecting that most infamous and atrocious enormity committed at Tooting—an enormity which, a hundred years hence, will still be vividly remembered in the bye-ways of English life, and which has done more to engender a gloomy discontent and suspicion among many thousands of the people than all the Chartist leaders could have done in all their lives—to find the pauper children in this workhouse looking robust and well, and apparently the objects of very great care. In the Infant School—a large, light, airy room at the top of the building—the little creatures, being at dinner, and eating their potatoes heartily, were not cowed by the presence of strange visitors, but stretched out their small hands to be shaken, with a very pleasant confidence. And it was comfortable to see two mangey pauper rocking-horses rampant in a corner. In the girls’ school, where the dinner was also in progress, everything bore a cheerful and healthy aspect. The meal was over, in the boys’ school, by the time of our arrival there and the room was not yet quite re-arranged; but the boys were roaming unrestrained about a large and airy yard, as any other schoolboys might have done. Some of them had been drawing large ships upon the schoolroom wall; and if they had a mast with shrouds and stays set up for practice (as they have in the Middlesex House of Correction), it would be so much the better. At present, if a boy should feel a strong impulse upon him to learn the art of going aloft, he could only gratify it, I presume, as the men and women paupers gratify their aspirations after better board and lodging, by smashing as many workhouse windows as possible, and being promoted to prison.

In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night. Divers of them had been there some long time. “Are they never going away?” was the natural enquiry. “Most of them are crippled, in some form or other,” said the Wardsman, “and not fit for anything.” They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyænas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do. The big-headed idiot shuffling his feet along the pavement, in the sunlight outside, was a more agreeable object everyway.

Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs day-rooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in upstairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life, God knows how—this was the scenery through which the walk lay, for two hours. In some of these latter chambers, there were pictures stuck against the wall, and a neat display of crockery and pewter on a kind of sideboard; now and then it was a treat to see a plant or two; in almost every ward, there was a cat.

In all of these Long Walks of aged and infirm, some old people were bed-ridden, and had been for a long time; some were sitting on their beds half-naked; some dying in their beds; some out of bed, and sitting at a table near the fire. A sullen or lethargic indifference to what was asked, a blunted sensibility to everything but warmth and food, a moody absence of complaint as being of no use, a dogged silence and resentful desire to be left alone again, I thought were generally apparent. On our walking into the midst of one of these dreary perspectives of old men, nearly the following little dialogue took place, the nurse not being immediately at hand:

“All well here?”

No answer. An old man in a Scotch cap sitting among others on a form at the table, eating out of a tin porringer, pushes back his cap a little to look at us, claps it down on his forehead again, with the palm of his hand, and goes on eating.

“All well here?” (repeated.)

No answer. Another old man sitting on his bed, paralytically peeling a boiled potato, lifts his head, and stares.

“Enough to eat?”

No answer. Another old man, in bed, turns himself and coughs.

“How are you to-day?” To the last old man.

That old man says nothing; but another old man, a tall old man of a very good address, speaking with perfect correctness, comes forward from somewhere, and volunteers an answer. The reply almost always proceeds from a volunteer, and not from the person looked at or spoken to.

“We are very old, Sir,” in a mild, distinct voice. “We can’t expect to be well, most of us.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“I have no complaint to make, Sir.” With a half shake of his head, a half shrug of his shoulders, and a kind of apologetic smile.

“Enough to eat?”

“Why, Sir, I have but a poor appetite,” with the same air as before; “and yet I get through my allowance very easily.”

“But,” showing a porringer with a Sunday dinner in it; “here is a portion of mutton, and three potatoes. You can’t starve on that?”

“Oh dear no, Sir,” with the same apologetic air. “Not starve.”

“What do you want?”

“We have very little bread, Sir. It’s an exceedingly small quantity of bread.”

The nurse, who is now rubbing her hands at the questioner’s elbow, interferes with, “It ain’t much raly, Sir. You see they’ve only six ounces a day, and when they’ve took their breakfast, there can only be a little left for night, Sir.”

Another old man, hitherto invisible, rises out of his bedclothes, as out of a grave, and looks on.

“You have tea at night?” The questioner is still addressing the well-spoken old man.

“Yes, Sir, we have tea at night.”

“And you save what bread you can from the morning, to eat with it?”

“Yes, Sir—if we can save any.”

“And you want more to eat with it?”

“Yes, Sir.” With a very anxious face.

The questioner, in the kindness of his heart, appears a little discomposed, and changes the subject.

“What has become of the old man who used to lie in that bed in the corner?”

The nurse don’t remember what old man is referred to. There has been such a many old men. The well-spoken old man is doubtful. The spectral old man who has come to life in bed, says, “Billy Stevens.” Another old man who has previously had his head in the fireplace, pipes out,

“Charley Walters.”

Something like a feeble interest is awakened. I suppose Charley Walters had conversation in him.

“He’s dead!” says the piping old man.

Another old man, with one eye screwed up, hastily displaces the piping old man, and says:

“Yes! Charley Walters died in that bed, and—and—”

“Billy Stevens,” persists the spectral old man.

“No, no! and Johnny Rogers died in that bed, and—and—they’re both on ’em dead—and Sam’l Bowyer;” this seems very extraordinary to him; “he went out!”

With this he subsides, and all the old men (having had quite enough of it) subside, and the spectral old man goes into his grave again, and takes the shade of Billy Stevens with him.

As we turn to go out at the door, another previously invisible old man, a hoarse old man in a flannel gown, is standing there, as if he had just come up through the floor.

“I beg your pardon, Sir, could I take the liberty of saving a word?”

“Yes; what is it?”

“I am greatly better in my health, Sir; but what I want, to get me quite round,” with his hand on his throat, “is a little fresh air, Sir. It has always done my complaint so much good, Sir. The regular leave for going out, comes round so seldom, that if the gentlemen, next Friday, would give me leave to go out walking, now and then—for only an hour or so, Sir!—”

Who could wonder, looking through those weary vistas of bed and infirmity, that it should do him good to meet with some other scenes, and assure himself that there was something else on earth? Who could help wondering why the old men lived on as they did; what grasp they had on life; what crumbs of interest or occupation they could pick up from its bare board; whether Charley Walters had ever described to them the days when he kept company with some old pauper woman in the bud, or Billy Stevens ever told them of the time when he was a dweller in the far-off foreign land called Home!

The morsel of burnt child, lying in another room, so patiently, in bed, wrapped in lint, and looking stedfastly at us with his bright quiet eyes when we spoke to him kindly, looked as if the knowledge of these things, and of all the tender things there are to think about, might have been in his mind—as if he thought, with us, that there was a fellow-feeling in the pauper nurses which appeared to make them more kind to their charges than the race of common nurses in the hospitals—as if he mused upon the Future of some older children lying around him in the same place, and thought it best, perhaps, all things considered, that he should die—as if he knew, without fear, of those many coffins, made and unmade, piled up in the store below—and of his unknown friend, “the dropped child,” calm upon the box-lid covered with a cloth. But there was something wistful and appealing, too, in his tiny face, as if, in the midst of all the hard necessities and incongruities he pondered on, he pleaded, in behalf of the helpless and the aged poor, for a little more liberty—and a little more bread.

THE “IRISH DIFFICULTY” SOLVED BY CON Mc Nale.

Con Mc Nale would have been summarily repudiated as an Irishman by our farce-writers and slashing novelists. He neither drank, fought, nor swore; did not make many blunders; and never addressed a friend either as his ‘honey’ or his ‘jewel.’ His cotamore was of stout frieze, and though Con had long attained his full height, the tailor had left him room to grow. The caubeen was not his head-dress, for Con had arrived at the dignity of a silk hat, which had been manufactured, as the mark in the crown declared, by the Saxons in the Borough of Southwark, which locality Con believed to be in the naighbourhood of England. The brogues were also absent, but were favourably represented by shoes of native manufacture laced with stout thongs. In fact, Mr. Mc Nale was a fine specimen of the finest pisantry in the world—without the rags.

People have gone to the Highlands and to Switzerland, and perhaps seen many places not much more grand and picturesque than the district where Con Mc Nale had made a patch of the desert to smile. A long range of blue mountains rising irregularly above each other, looked down on an extensive plain, that lay along the shore of a mighty lake, to the banks of which thick plantations crowded so near that the old Irish called the water Lough-glas, which signifies waters of green. The districts where a short but thick and sweet herbage sprung up among the rocks, were certainly put to the use of feeding cattle, and it was while employed there as a herd-boy, that Con Mc Nale determined to become a farmer. His mind was made up. His earnings were hardly enough to keep life in him, and if he had tried to save the price of a spade out of them to begin business with, the chances are that he would have died prematurely for want of food. But that didn’t matter much; he was determined to be a farmer. This determination was then as likely of fulfilment as that of Oliver Cromwell to become Protector of the Realm, while tending the vats at Huntingdon; or that of Aladdin to become a prince, when he was a ragged boy in the streets of Bagdad. To show, however, what perseverance will do, when I made acquaintance with Mr. Con Mc Nale he had actually got possession of a spade, and was making good use of it in a ditch—his own ditch, on his own land. As he went on, now digging, now resting on the handle, he told me all about his gradual promotion from a herd-boy to a country jontleman.

“My father,” said he, “lived under ould Squire Kilkelly, an’ for awhile tinded his cattle: but the Squire’s gone out iv this part iv the counthry, to Australia or some furrin part, an’ the mentioned house (mansion house) an’ the fine propperty was sould, so it was, for little or nothin’, for the fightin’ was over in furrin parts; Boney was put down, an’ there was no price for corn or cattle, an’ a jontleman from Scotland came an’ bought the istate. We were warned by the new man to go, for he tuk in his own hand all the in-land about the domain, bein’ a grate farmer. He put nobody in our little place, but pulled it down, an’ he guv father a five guinea note, but my father was ould an’ not able to face the world agin, an’ he went to the town an’ tuk a room—a poor, dirty, choky place it was for him, myself, and sisther to live in. The naighbours were very kind an’ good, though. Sister Bridget got a place wid a farmer hereabouts, and I tuk the world on my own showlders. I had nothin’ at all but the rags I stud up in, an’ they were bad enuf. Poor Biddy got a shillin’ advanced iv her wages that her masther was to giv her. She guv it me, for I was bent on goin’ towards Belfast to look for work. All along the road I axed at every place; they could giv it me but to no good, except when I axed, they’d giv me a bowl iv broth, or a piece iv bacon, or an oaten bannock, so that I had my shillin’ to the fore when I got to Belfast.

“Here the heart was near lavin’ me all out intirely. I went wandtherin’ down to the quay among the ships, and what should there be but a ship goin’ to Scotland that very night, wid pigs. In throth it was fun to see the sailors at cross-purposes wid ’em, for they didn’t know the natur iv the bastes. I did. I knew how to coax ’em. I set to an’ I deludhered an’ coaxed the pigs, an’, by pullin’ them by the tail, knowing that if they took a fancy I wished to pull ’em back out of the ship, they’d run might and main into her, and so they did. Well, the sailors were mightily divarted, an’ when the pigs was aboord, I wint down to the place—an’ the short iv it is that in three days I was in Glasgow town, an’ the captain an’ the sailors subschribed up tin-shillins an’ guv it into my hand. Well, I bought a raping hook, an’ away I trudged till I got quite an’ clane into the counthry, an’ the corn was, here and there, fit to cut. At last I goes an’ ax a farmer for work. He thought I was too wake to be paid by the day, but one field havin’ one corner fit to cut, an’ the next not ready, ‘Paddy,’ says he, ‘you may begin in that corner, an’ I’ll pay yees by the work yees do,’ an’ he guv me my breakfast an’ a pint of beer. Well, I never quit that masther the whole harvest, an’ when the raping was over I had four goolden guineas to carry home, besides that I was as sthrong as a lion. Yees would wonder how glad the sailors was to see me back agin, an’ ne’er a farthin’ would they take back iv their money, but tuk me over agin to Belfast, givin’ me the hoighth of good thratemint of all kinds. I did not stay an hour in Belfast, but tuk to the road to look afther the ould man an’ little Biddy. Well, sorrows the tidins’ I got. The ould man had died, an’ the grief an’ disthress of poor little Biddy had even touched her head a little. The dacent people where she was, may the Lord reward ’em, though they found little use in her, kep her, hoping I would be able to come home an’ keep her myself, an’ so I was. I brought her away wid me, an’ the sight iv me put new life in her. I was set upon not being idle, an’ I’ll tell yees what I did next.

“When I was little bouchaleen iv a boy I used to be a head on the mountain face, an’ ’twas often I sheltered myself behind them gray rocks that’s at the gable iv my house, an’ somehow it came into my head that the new Squire, being a grate man for improvin’, might let me try to brake in a bit iv land there, an’ so I goes off to him, an’ one iv the sarvints bein’ a sort iv cousin iv mine, I got to spake to the Squire, an’ behould yees he guv me lave at onst. Well, there’s no time like the prisint, an’ as I passed out iv the back yard of the mentioned (mansion) house, I sees the sawyers cutting some Norway firs that had been blown down by the storm, an’ I tells the sawyers that I had got lave to brake in a bit iv land in the mountains, an’ what would some pieces iv fir cost. They says they must see what kind of pieces they was that I wished for, an’ no sooner had I set about looking ’em through than the Squire himself comes ridin’ out of the stable-yard, an’ says he at onst, Mc Nale, says he, you may have a load iv cuttins to build your cabin, or two if you need it. ‘The Heavens be your honour’s bed,’ says I, an’ I wint off to the room where I an’ Biddy lived, not knowin’ if I was on my head or my heels. Next day, before sunrise, I was up here five miles up the face of Slieve-dan, with a spade in my fist, an’ I looked roun’ for the most shiltered spot I could sit my eyes an. Here I saw, where the house an’ yard are stan’in, a plot iv about an acre to the south iv that tall ridge of rocks, well sheltered from the blast from the north an’ from the aste, an’ it was about sunrise an’ a fine morning in October that I tuk up the first spadeful. There was a spring then drippin’ down the face iv the rocks, the same you see gushin’ through the crockery pipe in the farm-yard; an’ I saw at once that it would make the cabin completely damp, an’ the land about mighty sour an’ water-slain; so I determined to do what I saw done in Scotland. I sunk a deep drain right under the rock to run all along the back iv the cabin, an’ workin’ that day all alone by myself, I did a grate dale iv it. At night, it was close upon dark when I started to go home, so I hid my spade in the heath an’ trudged off. The next mornin’ I bargined with a farmer to bring me up a load iv fir cuttins from the Squire’s, an’ by the evenin’ they were thrown down within a quarter iv a mile iv my place,—for there was no road to it then, an’ I had to carry ’em myself for the remainder of the way. This occupied me till near nightfall; but I remained that night till I placed two upright posts of fir, one at each corner iv the front iv the cabin.

“I was detarmined to get the cabin finished as quickly as possible, that I might be able to live upon the spot, for much time was lost in goin’ and comin’. The next day I was up betimes, an’ finding a track iv stiff blue clay, I cut a multitude of thick square sods iv it, an’ having set up two more posts at the remainin’ two corners iv the cabin, I laid four rows iv one gable, rising it about three feet high. Havin’ laid the rows, I sharpind three or four straight pine branches, an’ druv them down through the sods into the earth, to pin the wall in its place. Next day I had a whole gable up, each three rows iv sods pinned through to the three benathe. In about eight days I had put up the four walls, makin’ a door an’ two windows; an’ now my outlay began, for I had to pay a thatcher to put on the sthraw an’ to assist me in risin’ the rafthers. In another week it was covered in, an’ it was a pride to see it with the new thatch, an’ a wicker chimbley daubed with clay, like a pallis undernathe the rock. I now got some turf that those who had cut ’em had not removed, an’ they sould ’em for a thrifle, an’ I made a grate fire an’ slept on the flure of my own house that night. Next day I got another load iv fir brought, to make the partitions in the winter, an’ in a day or two after I had got the inside so dhry that I was able to bring poor Biddy to live there for good and all. The Heavens be praised, there was not a shower iv rain fell from the time I began the cabin till I ended it, an’ when the rain did fall, not a drop came through,—all was carried off by my dhrain into the little river before yees. The moment I was settled in the house I comminced dhraining about an acre iv bog in front, an’ the very first winter I sowed a shillin’s worth of cabbidge seed, an’ sold in the spring a pound’s worth of little cabbidge plants for the gardins in the town below. When spring came—noticin’ how the early planted praties did the best, I planted my cabbidge ground with praties, an’ I had a noble crap, while the ground was next year fit for the corn. In the mane time, every winther I tuk in more and more ground, an’ in summer I cut my turf for fewel; where the cuttins could answer, in winther, for a dhrain; an’ findin’ how good the turf were, I got a little powney an’ carried ’em to the town to sell, when I was able to buy lime in exchange, an’ put it on my bog, so as to make it produce double. As things went on, I got assistance, an’ when I marrid, my wife had two cows that guv me a grate lift.

“I was always thought to be a handy boy; an’ I could do a turn of mason-work with any man not riglarly bred to it; so I took one of my loads of lime, an’ instead of puttin’ it on the land, I made it into morthar—and indeed the stones being no ways scarce, I set to an’ built a little kiln, like as I had seen down the counthry. I could then burn my own lime, an’ the limestone were near to my hand, too many iv ’em. While all this was goin’ on, I had riz an’ sould a good dale iv oats and praties, an’ every summer I found ready sale for my turf in the town from one jontleman that I always charged at an even rate, year by year. I got the help of a stout boy, a cousin iv my own, who was glad iv a shilter; an’ when the childher were ould enough, I got some young cattle that could graze upon the mountain in places where no other use could be made iv the land, and set the gossoons to herd ’em.

“There was one bit iv ground nigh han’ to the cabin, that puzzled me intirely. It was very poor and sandy, an’ little better than a rabbit burrow; an’ telling the Squire’s Scotch steward iv it, he bade me thry some flax, an’ sure enuf, so I did, an’ a fine crap iv flax I had, as you might wish to see; an’ the stame-mills being beginnin’ in the counthry at that time, I sould my flax for a very good price—my wife having dhried it, beetled it, an’ scutched it with her own two hands. I should have said before, that the Squire himself came up here with a lot iv fine ladies and jontlemen to see what I had done; an’ you never in your life seed a man so well plased as he was, an’ a Mimber of Parlimint from Scotland was with him, an’ he tould me I was a credit to ould Ireland; and sure, didn’t Father Connor read upon the papers, how he tould the whole story in the Parlimint House before all the lords an’ quality: but faix, he didn’t forgit me; for a month or two after he was here, an’ it coming on the winter, comes word for me an’ the powney to go down to the mentioned (mansion) house, for the steward wanted me; so away I wint, an’ there, shure enuf, was an illigant Scotch plough, every inch of iron, an’ a lot of young Norroway pines—the same you see shiltering the house an’ yard—an’ all was a free prisint for me from the Scotch jontleman that was the Mimber of Parliment. ’Twas that plough that did the meracles iv work hereabouts; for I often lint it to any that I knew to be a careful hand; an’ it was the manes iv havin’ the farmers all round send an’ buy ’em. At last I was able to build a brave snug house; and praised be Providence, I have never had an hour’s ill health, nor a moment’s grief, but when poor Biddy, the cratur, died from us. It is thirty years since that morning that I tuk up the first spadeful from the wild mountain side; an’ twelve acres are good labour land, an’ fifteen drained, an’ good grazin’. I have been payin’ rint twinty years, an’ am still, thank God, able to take my own part iv any day’s work,—plough, spade, or flail.”

“Have you got a lease?” said I.

“No, indeed; not a schrape of a pin; nor I never axed it. Have I not my tinnant-rite?”

From that subject, Mr. Mc Nale diverged slightly into politics, touching on the state of the counthry, and untwisting some entanglements of the ‘Irish difficulty’ that might be usefully made known in the neighbourhood of Westminster.

“Troth, Sir,” said Con, “you English are mighty grand in all your doings. You dale wholesale in all sorts iv things; good luck to you—in charity as well as in pigs, praties, an’ sich like. Well you want to improve Ireland by wholesale; you set up illigant schames for puttin’ us all to rights by the million; for clanin’ an’ dranin’ a whole province at onst; for giving labour to everybody; an’ all mighty purty on paper, with figures all as round an’ nate as copybooks, with long rigiments of O’s, after ’em. I’ve heard iv whole stacks of papers piled up an’ handsomely ticketed in tidy big offices—all ‘rules and riglations’ for labourers, which the boys can’t follow, and the inspectors can’t force. Why not,” continued Mr. Con, giving his spade a thrust into the ground that sent it up to the maker’s name, “Why not tache the boys to do as I have done?”

“But all are not so persevering, so knowing, and so fond of work as you.”

Whether Mr. Mc Nale was impressed by his own modesty, or by the force of my suggestion, I know not. But he was silent.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April, 1770; he died on the 23d of April, 1850. His life was prolonged for ten years beyond the space attributed to man by the inspired Psalmist. He lived in an age unprecedented for its social and civil revolutions; for its discoveries in science, and their practical application. He was fourteen years of age when the new North American Republic was finally recognised as one of the brotherhood of nations; he witnessed the French Revolution; the subjection of every monarchy in Europe, except England and Russia, to the absolute will of a French emperor; the instalment and evaporation of the Holy Alliance; the European war of twenty years, and the European peace of thirty-two years; one Pope carried into exile by a foreign conqueror, another driven into exile by his own subjects: and at home, the trials of Hardy and Thelwall; the Bank Restriction Act; the origination of the Bell and Lancaster systems of Education; the visit of the allied monarchs to London; the passing of Peel’s Bill; the introduction of Palmer’s mail-coaches and M‘Adam’s roads; the invention of steam navigation; the pausing of the Reform Bill; the development of the Railway system, and the Electric telegraph. He was the contemporary of Davey, Herschell, Bentham, Godwin, Malthus and Ricardo, Byron, Scott, Wilkie, Chantrey, Fox, Pitt, Canning and Brougham.

Wordsworth’s age was one of stirring events and great changes. The character of his poetry is in startling contrast to that age. It is passionless, a record of the poet’s own mind; simple and austere, emanating from his own independent thoughts and fancies; receiving little of its form and colour from external events, or the feelings and opinions of men. For eighty long years, Wordsworth would almost appear to have lived ‘among men, not of them;’ sympathising as little with the ephemeral pursuits of his contemporaries as the colossal Memnon does with the Copts, Turks, and Arabs who now tenant the banks of the Nile.

William Wordsworth was born in the little county town of Cockermouth; his father was an attorney—not a wealthy man, but in circumstances that enabled him to give his family a fair education. One son entered the merchant service, rose to command a vessel, and perished at sea. Another has acquired a name as master of Harrow, and the author of a delightful book on Greece, full of delicate beauty and fine classical feeling. The allusions by William to his favourite sister are among the most touching passages in his poems; and one or two little pieces of verse, and some extracts from her journals, which he has published, show that she was every way deserving of his love. The poetical dedication of the River Duddon to Dr. Wordsworth, is full of delightful allusions to the boyhood of the brothers, and conveys a pleasing impression of their family relations.

Our poet received the rudiments of his education at the grammar school of Hawkeshead, in Westmoreland, conducted in his time by a master of more than ordinary attainments. In 1787, he matriculated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. Even in his boyhood it was obvious that he possessed superior abilities, but they were not of the showy and ambitious kind which achieve school or college distinction. He was partial to solitary rambles; fond of reading and reciting verses; a boy whom elder men ‘singled out for his grave looks,’ as he has said in the Excursion, and liked to converse with.

It was intended that he should enter the Church, the family circumstances rendering it necessary that he should adopt a profession. But, independently of his wish to devote himself exclusively to literary pursuits, he had caught the prevalent spirit of the time—the aversion to conventional forms and opinions. A moderate income, settled upon him by Raisley Calvert, the victim of a premature decline, enabled him to follow his inclinations. This benefit the poet has gratefully acknowledged:—

‘Calvert, it must not be unheard by them
Who may respect my name, that I to thee
Owed many years of early liberty.

This care was thine, when sickness did condemn

Thy youth to hopeless wasting, root and stem;
That I, if frugal and severe, might stray
Where’er I liked; and finally array
My temples with the Muse’s diadem.’

After leaving College he made extensive tours on foot, in Scotland and on the Continent with a youthful friend. In 1793 he for the first time ventured into print. Two small volumes appeared in that year: “Descriptive Sketches, in verse, taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps;” and “An Evening Walk, an Epistle in Verse, addressed to a young Lady from the Lakes in the North of England.” In these poems we find no traces of the poetical theory which he subsequently adopted. But they are characterised by the same, almost exclusive, preference for lakes, cataracts and mountains, the elementary beauty of external nature, human passions and incidents, and they contain many passages of glaring imagination powerfully expressed.

In 1796 he took up his abode with his sister at Allfaxden, at the foot of the Quantock Hills, in Somersetshire. This was an important era in the development of his intellect and imagination. During his residence at Allfaxden he was in constant and unreserved communication with Coleridge. Totally dissimilar as the two men were in character, they had many sympathies. Upon both, the classical tastes and ecclesiastical opinions inculcated at English schools and colleges, had, without their being aware of it, made a deep and indelible impression. Both had been animated by the vague but ardent longings after an undefined liberty, and perfection of human nature, then prevalent. They were isolated from general sympathy without knowing it; from the revolutionary party by their literary tastes and strong attachment to traditional English morals; from the Church and State party by their freedom from sectarian narrowness. The resolute independence of thought of the young poets is worthy of all admiration; their frank and cordial communication of all their thoughts, equally so. A pleasing though brief sketch of them at that time has been given by Hazlitt, in an essay, entitled, ‘My first Acquaintance with Poets;’ a more petulant and shallow account, which yet contains some valuable information, by Cottle.

The result of this literary alliance was the first volume of the “Lyrical Ballads.” The quiet but perfect melody of Wordsworth’s versification and the depth of the human sentiment in his reflections, the more swelling tone of Coleridge’s verse and his wild unearthly imaginings, might have secured a more favourable reception for his work, had it not been announced as the result of a new theory of poetry. That theory was misapprehended by the critics of the day, and was indeed inadequately expressed by its authors themselves. Coleridge subsequently developed it in more precise and unexceptionable language in his Biographia Literaria. The effect of its premature announcement was, that the Lyrical Ballads were judged, not by their own intrinsic merits, but by the theory upon which they were said to have been constructed.

The insurmountable indolence of Coleridge—always planning works too great for human accomplishment, and resting satisfied with projects—left Wordsworth to pursue his path alone. This he did with characteristic pertinacity of purpose; if criticism had any influence on him at all, it was only to confirm him in his foregone conclusions. After an excursion to Germany, in which he was accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, he returned to his native country, ‘with the hope,’ as he has told us in his Preface to the Excursion, ‘of being enabled to construct a literary work that might live.’

In 1803, Wordsworth married his cousin, Miss Mary Hutchinson, and settled at Grasmere. He removed in a few years to Rydal Mount, where he continued to reside till his death. Subsequently to this time his life is utterly devoid of personal incident, and may be briefly recapitulated before proceeding to chronicle his poetical productions, which are indeed his life. By his wife, who survives him, he had one daughter, who died before him, and two sons, one of whom holds a vicarage in Cumberland, the other is a distributor of stamps. In 1814, Wordsworth, by the patronage of the Earl of Lonsdale, was appointed distributor of stamps for Cumberland and Westmoreland—a recognition of the claims of genius to public support only second in eccentricity to the making of Burns an exciseman. After holding this office for twenty-eight years, he was allowed to relinquish it to his eldest son, and retire upon a pension of 300l. a year. In 1843, he succeeded Southey in the limited emoluments and questionable dignity of the Laureateship. His slender inheritance, the beneficence of Raisley Calvert, his office under Government, his retiring pension, and his emoluments as Laureate, sufficed, with his simple tastes, to enable him to wait the slow pecuniary returns of his literary labours.

While the critical storm awakened by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads was still raging, he composed his Peter Bell and his Waggoner, which were not, however, published till many years later. They are full of fine and deep-felt poetry. Their language is genuine racy English, and their versification unsurpassed for sweetness. It cannot, however, be denied that they are marked by a self-willed, exaggerated adherence to the theory of poetry he had promulgated, the effect of something that is very like a spirit of contradiction. In a playful adaptation of Milton’s sonnet, Tetrachordon, Wordsworth defends his choice of subjects by the admiration felt or professed for Tam o’ Shanter. He overlooks the utter difference between the mode in which Burns conceived and executed that poem, and himself his Benjamin the Waggoner. Burns was for the time the hero himself. In Tam o’ Shanter, and still more in the Jolly Beggars, he expresses the very passions of the characters he presents to us. Wordsworth, constitutionally incapable of the emotions of a boon companion, merely describes and moralises on the waywardness of his Benjamin. We sympathise with the common humanity of Burns’s genial reprobates; we feel the cold shadow of Wordsworth’s Benjamin to be a hideous intruder among the fine poetical imagery and thought with which he is mixed up.

In 1807, Wordsworth published two volumes, containing his own contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, with many additional poems. Minute detached criticism is not the object of this sketch. Suffice it to say that many pieces in these volumes are unsurpassed in English poetry, or in the poetry of any language. The Song at the feast of Brougham Castle has a rich lyrical exuberance of feeling; the Laodamia is as severely beautiful as a Greek statue; Hartleap Well is full of mellow humanity; Rob Roy’s Grave, the Highland Girl, ‘She was a phantom of delight,’—every piece, in short, is replete with delightful sentiment and graphic pictures of rural nature. The objects of some of these poems obviously originate in a mistaken apprehension of the scope and purpose of poetry. Wordsworth was a curious observer of the workings of the human mind, and he sometimes confounded the pleasure derived from such metaphysical scrutiny with the pleasure derived from the presentation of poetical imaginings. Hence, what is questionable in his Idiot Boy, his Harry Gill, and some others.

The Excursion, the most ambitious, and, with all its defects, the greatest of his works, was published in 1814. Here the poet was in his true element. Wordsworth’s genius was essentially moralising and reflective. Incidents and adventure had no charm for him. He arrived at his knowledge of character by an inductive process, not like Shakespeare, by the intuition of sympathy and imagination. He had no power of perceiving those light and graceful peculiarities of men and society, generally designated manners, vivid presentations of which constitute the charm of so many poets; but he was tremulously alive to the charms of inanimate nature.

‘——The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were there to me

An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.’

His soul was full of lofty and imaginative conceptions of moral truths. He, therefore, after severe examination of his own poems, resolved to rest his claims to immortality on his composition of ‘a philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society; and to be entitled The Recluse, as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.’

How far this projected work has been advanced to completion, we have no means of knowing. A preliminary work, descriptive of the growth of his own powers, is, he has informed us, finished. The Recluse was to consist of three parts, the first and third containing chiefly meditations in the author’s own person; the intermediate introducing characters in a semi-dramatic form. It is to be regretted that his second part has alone been published, for Wordsworth’s genius was essentially undramatic. But notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the poet laboured from the selection of an uncongenial form, and his imperfect mastery of blank verse (a measure of which, perhaps. Milton alone among our English poets has developed the full measure, and varied power of modulation), the Excursion is, undoubtedly, a poem in the highest and truest sense of the word. The philosophical musings with which it abounds, are alike profound and elevating. And nothing can surpass the deep pathos of the episodes of Margaret and Ellen.

The subsequent publications of Wordsworth may be briefly enumerated. Peter Bell and the Waggoner appeared within two years after the Excursion; and the White Doe of Rylstone soon followed them. A miscellaneous volume, of which the River Duddon was the most prominent, was published in 1820, and Yarrow Revisited, in 1835. Of all these works, it may suffice to say that they are highly characteristic of the author, and contain many beauties.

Wordsworth’s poetry had long to contend against the conventional prepossessions of the literary world. From the beginning, however, his genius was felt by superior minds, and by a few young unprejudiced enthusiasts. His first admirers were literally a sect, and their admiration was, like the devotion of all sectarians, ardent and indiscriminating. They have, however, served as interpreters between him and the reading public, and thus his merits have come to be generally acknowledged. His writings lent a tone to the works of some who, like Shelley, dissented from his theory; and some who, like Byron, systematically scoffed at them. The public taste was thus insensibly approximated to them. Even yet, however, Wordsworth is probably more praised than liked. But the process will go on, and in time what is really valuable in his poems will take the place that is due to it in the land’s literature.

Of the first writings of Wordsworth little need be said. Though they contain valuable thoughts, they are lumbering and sufficiently unreadable. The once furious controversy about his literary creed as heresy, need not be resuscitated; there were great errors on both sides. If his merits were individually depreciated, there was much in his seemingly supercilious re-assertion, rather than defence and explanation of his views, to extenuate the petulance with which he was often treated. As for his wanderings in the fields of politics and polemics, he is no exception to the general truth, that the warmest admirers of poets must regret their deviations into such uncongenial by-ways.

The man was like his poetry; simple and therefore conservative in his tastes: self-reliant and sometimes repulsive from his austerity, yet with a rich fund of benevolence beneath the hard exterior. His frame was strong and sinewy from his habits of exercise; his look heavy, and, at first sight, unimpressive; but there was an inexpressible charm in his smile. He was the antithesis of the materialist and practical activity of the time. He did not understand, and therefore could not appreciate, the ennobling tendencies of the social and scientific career on which this age has entered—an age into which he had lingered, rather than to which he belonged. He looked out upon the world from his egotistic isolation rather as a critical spectator, than as a sympathiser. His views of it were rusted over with the conservative prejudices of the past. Railways he hated, and against them waged a sonneteering war. Although they were rapidly increasing the commerce, comforts, intercourse, affluence, and happiness of the whole community, they invaded the selfish solitude of the one man; and single-handed he did battle against the armies of invading tourists, who came to share with him the heathful pleasures of the mountain and the lake, in which he would have almost preserved a patent right for the few.

This anti-natural spirit, however, did not always lead him astray from the right path. In the Excursion, were promulgated, for the first time, these views respecting the embruting tendency of the unintermitting toil of our factory labourers, the necessity of universal education by the State, and the vocation of the English race to colonise the earth, which have been so many zealous missionaries. We cannot better conclude these desultory remarks,—an imperfect prelude to the lip of a truly good and great man—than by quoting part of his weighty words in the Excursion, respecting National Education:—

‘Oh! for the coming of that glorious time
When, prizing Knowledge as her noblest wealth
And best protection, this Imperial Realm,
While she exacts allegiance, shall admit
An obligation, on her part, to teach
Them who are born to serve her and obey;
Binding herself by statute to secure
To all her children whom her soil maintains,
The rudiments of Letters, and to inform
The mind with moral and religious truth,
Both understood and practised—so that none,
However destitute, be left to droop
By timely culture unsustained; or run
Into a wild disorder; or be forced
To drudge through weary life without the aid
Of intellectual implements and tools;
A savage horde among the civilised,
A servile band among the lordly free!

·       ·       ·       ·       ·

‘The discipline of slavery is unknown
Amongst us—hence the more do we require
The discipline of virtue; order else
Cannot subsist, nor confidence, nor peace.
Thus duties rising out of good possess’d,
And prudent caution, needful to avert
Impending evil, do alike require
That permanent provision should be made

For the whole people to be taught and trained.

So shall licentiousness and black resolve
Be rooted out, and virtuous habits take
Their place; and genuine piety descend,
Like an inheritance, from age to age.’

These are indeed worthy to become Household words.

FATHER AND SON.

One evening in the month of March, 1798,—that dark time in Ireland’s annals whose memory (overlooking all minor subsequent émeutes) is still preserved among us, as ‘the year of the rebellion’—a lady and gentleman were seated near a blazing fire in the old-fashioned dining-room of a large lonely mansion. They had just dined; wine and fruit were on the table, both untouched, while Mr. Hewson and his wife sat silently gazing at the fire, watching its flickering light becoming gradually more vivid as the short Spring twilight faded into darkness.

At length the husband poured out a glass of wine, drank it off, and then broke silence, by saying—

“Well, well, Charlotte, these are awful times; there were ten men taken up to-day for burning Cotter’s house at Knockane; and Tom Dycer says that every magistrate in the country is a marked man.”

Mrs. Hewson cast a frightened glance towards the windows, which opened nearly to the ground, and gave a view of a wide tree-besprinkled lawn, through whose centre a long straight avenue led to the high-road. There was also a footpath at either side of the house, branching off through close thickets of trees, and reaching the road by a circuitous route.

“Listen, James!” she said, after a pause; “what noise is that?”

“Nothing but the sighing of the wind among the trees. Come, wife, you must not give way to imaginary fears.”

“But really I heard something like footsteps on the gravel, round the gable-end—I wish”—

A knock at the parlour door interrupted her.

“Come in.”

The door opened, and Tim Gahan, Mr. Hewson’s confidential steward and right-hand man, entered, followed by a fair-haired delicate-looking boy of six years’ old, dressed in deep mourning.

“Well, Gahan, what do you want?”

“I ask your Honour’s pardon for disturbing you and the mistress; but I thought it right to come tell you the bad news I heard.”

“Something about the rebels, I suppose?”

“Yes, Sir; I got a whisper just now that there’s going to be a great rising intirely, to-morrow; thousands are to gather before daybreak at Kilcrean bog, where I’m told they’ve a power of pikes hiding; and then they’re to march on and sack every house in the country. I’ll engage, when I heard it, I didn’t let grass grow under my feet, but came off straight to your Honour, thinking maybe you’d like to walk over this fine evening to Mr. Warren’s, and settle with him what’s best to be done.”

“Oh, James! I beseech you, don’t think of going.”

“Make your mind easy, Charlotte; I don’t intend it: not that I suppose there would be much risk; but, all things considered, I think I’m just as comfortable at home.”

The steward’s brow darkened, as he glanced nervously towards the end window, which jutting out in the gable, formed a deep angle in the outer wall.

“Of course ’tis just as your Honour pleases, but I’ll warrant you there would be no harm in going. Come, Billy,” he added, addressing the child, who by this time was standing close to Mrs. Hewson, “make your bow, and bid good night to master and mistress.”

The boy did not stir, and Mrs. Hewson taking his little hand in hers, said—

“You need not go home for half-an-hour, Gahan; stay and have a chat with the servants in the kitchen, and leave little Billy with me—and with the apples and nuts”—she added, smiling as she filled the child’s hands with fruit.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” said the steward hastily. “I can’t stop—I’m in a hurry home, where I wanted to leave this brat to-night; but he would follow me. Come, Billy; come this minute, you young rogue.”

Still the child looked reluctant, and Mr. Hewson said peremptorily—

“Don’t go yet, Gahan; I want to speak to you by and by; and you know the mistress always likes to pet little Billy.”

Without replying, the steward left the room; and the next moment his hasty footsteps resounded through the long flagged passage that led to the offices.

“There’s something strange about Gahan, since his wife died,” remarked Mrs. Hewson. “I suppose ’tis grief for her that makes him look so darkly, and seem almost jealous when any one speaks to his child. Poor little Billy! your mother was a sore loss to you.”

The child’s blue eyes filled with tears, and pressing closer to the lady’s side, he said:—

“Old Peggy doesn’t wash and dress me as nicely as mammy used.”

“But your father is good to you?”

“Oh, yes, Ma’am, but he’s out all day busy, and I’ve no one to talk to me as mammy used; for Peggy is quite deaf, and besides she’s always busy with the pigs and chickens.”

“I wish I had you, Billy, to take care of and to teach, for your poor mother’s sake.”

“And so you may, Charlotte,” said her husband. “I’m sure Gahan, with all his odd ways, is too sensible a fellow not to know how much it would be for his child’s benefit to be brought up and educated by us, and the boy would be an amusement to us in this lonely house. I’ll speak to him about it before he goes home. Billy, my fine fellow, come here,” he continued, “jump up on my knee, and tell me if you’d like to live here always and learn to read and write.”

“I would, Sir, if I could be with father too.”

“So you shall;—and what about old Peggy?”

The child paused—

“I’d like to give her a pen’north of snuff and a piece of tobacco every week, for she said the other day that that would make her quite happy.”

Mr. Hewson laughed, and Billy prattled on, still seated on his knee; when a noise of footsteps on the ground, mingled with low suppressed talking was heard outside.

“James, listen! there’s the noise again.”

It was now nearly dark, but Mr. Hewson, still holding the boy in his arms, walked towards the window and looked out.

“I can see nothing,” he said,—“stay—there are figures moving off among the trees, and a man running round to the back of the house—very like Gahan he is too!”

Seizing the bell-rope, he rang it loudly, and said to the servant who answered his summons:—

“Fasten the shutters and put up the bars, Connell; and then tell Gahan I want to see him.”

The man obeyed; candles were brought, and Gahan entered the room.

Mr. Hewson remarked that, though his cheeks were flushed, his lips were very white, and his bold dark eyes were cast on the ground.

“What took you round the house just now, Tim?” asked his master, in a careless manner.

“What took me round the house, is it? Why, then, nothing in life, Sir, but that just as I went outside the kitchen door to take a smoke, I saw the pigs, that Shaneen forgot to put up in their stye, making right for the mistress’s flower-garden; so I just put my dudheen, lighting as it was, into my pocket, and ran after them. I caught them on the grand walk under the end window, and indeed, Ma’am, I had my own share of work turning them back to their proper spear.”

Gahan spoke with unusual volubility, but without raising his eyes from the ground.

“Who were the people,” asked his master, “whom I saw moving through the western grove?”

“People! your Honour—not a sign of any people moving there, I’ll be bound, barring the pigs.”

“Then,” said Mr. Hewson, smiling, to his wife, “the miracle of Circe must have been reversed, and swine turned into men; for, undoubtedly, the dark figures I saw were human beings.”

“Come, Billy,” said Gahan, anxious to turn the conversation, “will you come home with me now? I am sure ’twas very good of the mistress to give you all them fine apples.”

Mrs. Hewson was going to propose Billy’s remaining, but her husband whispered:—“Wait till to-morrow.” So Gahan and his child were allowed to depart.

Next morning the magistrates of the district were on the alert, and several suspicious looking men found lurking about, were taken up. A hat which fitted one of them was picked up in Mr. Hewson’s grove; the gravel under the end window bore many signs of trampling feet; and there were marks on the wall as if guns had rested against it. Gahan’s information touching the intended meeting at Kilcrean bog proved to be totally without foundation; and after a careful search not a single pike or weapon of any description could be found there. All these circumstances combined certainly looked suspicious; but, after a prolonged investigation, as no guilt could be actually brought home to Gahan, he was dismissed. One of his examiners, however, said privately, “I advise you take care of that fellow, Hewson. If I were in your place, I’d just trust him as far as I could throw him, and not an inch beyond.”

An indolent hospitable Irish country gentleman, such as Mr. Hewson, is never without an always shrewd and often roguish prime minister, who saves his master the trouble of looking after his own affairs, and manages everything that is to be done in both the home and foreign departments,—from putting a new door on the pig-stye, to letting a farm of an hundred acres on lease. Now in this, or rather these capacities, Gahan had long served Mr. Hewson; and some seven years previous to the evening on which our story commences, he had strengthened the tie and increased his influence considerably by marrying Mrs. Hewson’s favourite and faithful maid. One child was the result of this union; and Mrs. Hewson, who had no family of her own, took much interest in little Billy,—more especially after the death of his mother, who, poor thing! the neighbours said, was not very happy, and would gladly, if she dared, have exchanged her lonely cottage for the easy service of her former mistress.

Thus, though for a time Mr. and Mrs. Hewson regarded Gahan with some doubt, the feeling gradually wore away, and the steward regained his former influence.

After the lapse of a few stormy months the rebellion was quelled: all the prisoners taken up were severally disposed of by hanging, transportation or acquittal, according to the nature and amount of the evidence brought against them; and the country became as peaceful as it is in the volcanic nature of our Irish soil ever to be.

The Hewsons’ kindness towards Gahan’s child was steady and unchanged. They took him into their house, and gave him a plain but solid education; so that William, while yet a boy, was enabled to be of some use to his patron, and daily enjoyed more and more of his confidence.

Another Evening, the twentieth anniversary of that with which this narrative commenced, came round. Mr. and Mrs. Hewson were still hale and active, dwelling in their hospitable home. About eight o’clock at night, Tim Gahan, now a stooping, grey-haired man, entered Mr. Hewson’s kitchen, and took his seat on the corner of the settle next the fire.

The cook, directing a silent significant glance of compassion towards her fellow-servants, said:

“Would you like a drink of cider, Tim, or will you wait and take a cup of tay with myself and Kitty?”

The old man’s eyes were fixed on the fire, and a wrinkled hand was planted firmly on each knee, as if to check their involuntary trembling. “I’ll not drink anything this night, thank you kindly, Nelly,” he said, in a slow musing manner, dwelling long on each word.

“Where’s Billy?” he asked, after a pause, in a quick hurried tone, looking up suddenly at the cook, with an expression in his eyes, which, as she afterwards said, ‘took away her breath.’

“Oh, never heed Billy! I suppose he’s busy with the master.”

“Where’s the use, Nelly,” said the coachman, “in hiding it from him? Sure, sooner or later he must know it. Tim,” he continued, “God knows ’tis sorrow to my heart this blessed night to make yours sore,—but the truth is, that William has done what he oughtn’t to do to the man that was all one as a father to him.”

“What has he done? what will you dar say again my boy?”

“Taken money, then,” replied the coachman, “that the master had marked and put by in his desk; for he suspected this some time past that gold was missing. This morning ’twas gone; a search was made, and the marked guineas were found with your son William.”

The old man covered his face with his hands, and rocked himself to and fro.

“Where is he now?” at length he asked, in a hoarse voice.

“Locked up safe in the inner store-room; the master intends sending him to gaol early to-morrow morning.”

“He will not,” said Gahan slowly. “Kill the boy that saved his life!—no, no.”

“Poor fellow! the grief is setting his mind astray—and sure no wonder!” said the cook, compassionately.

“I’m not astray!” cried the old man, fiercely. “Where’s the master?—take me to him.”

“Come with me,” said the butler, “and I’ll ask him will he see you?”

With faltering steps the father complied; and when they reached the parlour, he trembled exceedingly, and leant against the wall for support, while the butler opened the door, and said:

“Gahan is here, Sir, and wants to know will you let him speak to you for a minute?”

“Tell him to come in,” said Mr. Hewson, in a solemn tone of sorrow, very different from his ordinary cheerful voice.

“Sir,” said the steward, advancing, “they tell me you are going to send my boy to prison,—is it true?”

“Too true, indeed, Gahan. The lad who was reared in my house, whom my wife watched over in health, and nursed in sickness—whom we loved almost as if he were our own, has robbed us, and that not once or twice, but many times. He is silent and sullen, too, and refuses to tell why he stole the money, which was never withheld from him when he wanted it. I can make nothing of him, and must only give him up to justice in the morning.”

“No, Sir, no. The boy saved your life; you can’t take his.”

“You’re raving, Gahan.”

“Listen to me, Sir, and you won’t say so. You remember this night twenty years? I came here with my motherless child, and yourself and the mistress pitied us, and spoke loving words to him. Well for us all you did so! That night—little you thought it!—I was banded with them that were sworn to take your life. They were watching you outside the window, and I was sent to inveigle you out, that they might shoot you. A faint heart I had for the bloody business, for you were ever and always a good master to me; but I was under an oath to them that I darn’t break, supposing they ordered me to shoot my own mother. Well! the hand of God was over you, and you wouldn’t come with me. I ran out to them, and I said—‘Boys, if you want to shoot him, you must do it through the window,’ thinking they’d be afeard of that; but they weren’t—they were daring fellows, and one of them, sheltered by the angle of the window, took deadly aim at you. That very moment you took Billy on your knee, and I saw his fair head in a line with the musket. I don’t know exactly then what I said or did, but I remember I caught the man’s hand, threw it up, and pointed to the child. Knowing I was a determined man, I believe they didn’t wish to provoke me; so they watched you for a while, and when you didn’t put him down they got daunted, hearing the sound of soldiers riding by the road, and they stole away through the grove. Most of that gang swung on the gallows, but the last of them died this morning quietly in his bed. Up to yesterday he used to make me give him money,—sums of money to buy his silence—and it was for that I made my boy a thief. It was wearing out his very life. Often he went down on his knees to me, and said: ‘Father, I’d die myself sooner than rob my master, but I can’t see you disgraced. Oh, let us fly the country!’ Now, Sir, I have told you all—do what you like with me—send me to gaol, I deserve it—but spare my poor deluded innocent boy!”

It would be difficult to describe Mr. Hewson’s feelings, but his wife’s first impulse was to hasten to liberate the prisoner. With a few incoherent words of explanation she led him into the presence of his master, who, looking at him sorrowfully but kindly, said:

“William, you have erred deeply, but not so deeply as I supposed. Your father has told me everything. I forgive him freely and you also.”

The young man covered his face with his hands, and wept tears more bitter and abundant than he had ever shed since the day when he followed his mother to the grave. He could say little, but he knelt on the ground, and clasping the kind hand of her who had supplied to him that mother’s place, he murmured;

“Will you tell him I would rather die than sin again.”

Old Gahan died two years afterwards, truly penitent, invoking blessings on his son and on his benefactors; and the young man’s conduct, now no longer under evil influence, was so steady and so upright, that his adopted parents felt that their pious work was rewarded, and that, in William Gahan, they had indeed a son.

Monthly Supplement of ‘HOUSEHOLD WORDS,’
Conducted
By CHARLES DICKENS.
Price 2d., Stamped 3d.,
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF
CURRENT EVENTS.

The Number, containing a history of the present month, will be issued with the Magazines.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 9, MAY 25, 1850 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

- THE SICKNESS AND HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE OF BLEABURN.

- IN THREE PARTS.—CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- SPRING-TIME IN THE COURT.

- THE PLANET-WATCHERS OF GREENWICH.

- SWEDISH FOLK-SONGS.

- A WALK IN A WORKHOUSE.

- THE “IRISH DIFFICULTY” SOLVED BY CON Mc Nale.

- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

- FATHER AND SON.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE