Household words, No. 23, August 31, 1850
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English literature -- Periodicals

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Title: Household words, No. 23, August 31, 1850

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: March 11, 2026 [eBook #78193]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78193

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. 23, AUGUST 31, 1850 ***

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

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 23.]      SATURDAY, AUGUST 31, 1850.      [Price 2d.

A PAPER-MILL.

Down at Dartford in Kent, on a fine bright day, I strolled through the pleasant green lanes, on my way to a Paper-Mill. Accustomed, mainly, to associate Dartford with Gunpowder Mills, and formidable tin canisters, illustrated in copper-plate, with the outpourings of a generous cornucopia of dead game, I found it pleasant to think, on a summer morning when all living creatures were enjoying life, that it was only paper in my mind—not powder.

If sturdy Wat Tyler, of this very town of Dartford in Kent (Deptford had the honour of him once, but that was a mistake) could only have anticipated and reversed the precept of the pious Orange-Lodges; if he could only have put his trust in Providence, and kept his paper damp—for printing—he need never have marched to London, the captain of a hundred thousand men, and summarily beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury as a bad adviser of the young king, Richard. Then, would William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London (and an obsequious courtier enough, may be) never have struck him from his charger, unawares. Then, might the “general enfranchisement of all bondmen”—the bold smith’s demand—have come, a long time sooner than it did. Then, might working-men have maintained the decency and honour of their daughters, through many a hazy score of troubled and oppressive years, when they were yet as the clods of the valley, broken by the ploughshare, worried by the harrow. But, in those days, paper and printing for the people were not; so, Wat lay low in Smithfield, and Heaven knows what became of his daughter, and the old ferocious wheel went driving round, some centuries longer.

The wild flowers were blowing in these Dartford hedges, all those many summertimes; the larks were singing, high in air; the trees were rustling as they rustle to-day; the bees went humming by; the light clouds cast their shadows on the verdant fields. The pleasant little river Darent ran the same course; sparkled in the same sun; had, then as now, its tiny circles made by insects; and its plumps and plashes, made by fish. But, the river has changed, since Wat the Blacksmith, bending over with his bucket, saw his grimy face, impatient of unjust and grievous tribute, making remonstrance with him for his long endurance. Now, there are indeed books in the running brooks—for they go to feed the Paper-Mill.

Time was, in the old Saxon days, when there stood a Mill here, “held in ferm by a Reve,” but that was not a Paper-Mill. Then, came a Nunnery, with kings’ fair daughters in it; then, a Palace; then, Queen Elizabeth, in her sixteenth year, to sojourn at the Palace two days; then, in that reign, a Paper-Mill. In the church yonder, hidden behind the trees, with many rooks discoursing in their lofty houses between me and it, is the tomb of Sir John Spielman, jeweller to the Queen when she had grown to be a dame of a shrewd temper, aged fifty or so: who “built a Paper-Mill for the making of writing-paper,” and to whom his Royal Mistress was pleased to grant a license “for the sole gathering for ten years of all rags, &c., necessary for the making of such paper.” There is a legend that the same Sir John, in coming here from Germany, to build his Mill, did bring with him two young lime-trees—then unknown in England—which he set before his Dartford dwelling-house, and which did flourish exceedingly; so, that they fanned him with their shadows, when he lay asleep in the upper story, an ancient gentleman. Now, God rest the soul of Sir John Spielman, for the love of all the sweet-smelling lime-trees that have ever greeted me in the land, and all the writing-paper I have ever blotted!

But, as I turn down by the hawthorn hedge into the valley, a sound comes in my ears—like the murmuring and throbbing of a mighty giant, labouring hard—that would have unbraced all the Saxon bows, and shaken all the heads off Temple Bar and London Bridge, ever lifted to those heights from the always butchering, always craving, never sufficiently-to-be-regretted, brave old English Block. It is the noise of the Steam Engine. And now, before me, white and clean without, and radiant in the sun, with the sweet clear river tumbling merrily down to kiss it, and help in the work it does, is the Paper-Mill I have come to see!

It is like the Mill of the child’s story, that ground old people young. Paper! White, pure, spick and span new paper, with that fresh smell which takes us back to school and school-books; can it ever come from rags like these? Is it from such bales of dusty rags, native and foreign, of every colour and of every kind, as now environ us, shutting out the summer air and putting cotton into our summer ears, that virgin paper, to be written on, and printed on, proceeds? We shall see presently. Enough to consider, at present, what a grave of dress this rag-store is; what a lesson of vanity it preaches. The coarse blouse of the Flemish labourer, and the fine cambric of the Parisian lady, the court dress of the Austrian jailer, and the miserable garb of the Italian peasant; the woollen petticoat of the Bavarian girl, the linen head-dress of the Neapolitan woman, the priest’s vestment, the player’s robe, the Cardinal’s hat, and the ploughman’s nightcap; all dwindle down to this, and bring their littleness or greatness in fractional portions here. As it is with the worn, it shall be with the wearers; but there shall be no dust in our eyes then, though there is plenty now. Not all the great ones of the earth will raise a grain of it, and nothing but the Truth will be.

My conductor leads the way into another room. I am to go, as the rags go, regularly and systematically through the Mill. I am to suppose myself a bale of rags. I am rags.

Here, in another room, are some three-score women at little tables, each with an awful scythe-shaped knife standing erect upon it, and looking like the veritable tooth of time. I am distributed among these women, and worried into smaller shreds—torn cross-wise at the knives. Already I begin to lose something of my grosser nature. The room is filled with my finest dust, and, as gratings of me drop from the knives, they fall through the perforated surface of the tables into receptacles beneath. When I am small enough, I am bundled up, carried away in baskets, and stowed in immense bins, until they want me in the Boiling-Room.

The Boiling-Room has enormous cauldrons in it, each with its own big lid, hanging to the beams of the roof, and put on by machinery when it is full. It is a very clean place, “coddled” by much boiling, like a washer-woman’s fingers, and looks as if the kitchen of the Parish Union had gone into partnership with the Church Belfry. Here, I am pressed, and squeezed, and jammed, a dozen feet deep, I should think, into my own particular cauldron; where I simmer, boil, and stew, a long, long time. Then, I am a dense, tight mass, cut out in pieces like so much clay—very clean—faint as to my colour—greatly purified—and gradually becoming quite ethereal.

In this improved condition, I am taken to the Cutting-Room. I am very grateful to the clear fresh water, for the good it has done me; and I am glad to be put into some more of it, and subjected to the action of large rollers filled with transverse knives, revolving by steam power upon iron beds, which favour me with no fewer than two million cuts per minute, though, within the memory of man, the functions of this machine were performed by an ordinary pestle and mortar. Such a drumming and rattling, such a battering and clattering, such a delight in cutting and slashing, not even the Austrian part of me ever witnessed before. This continues, to my great satisfaction, until I look like shaving lather; when I am run off into chambers underneath, to have my friend the water, from whom I am unwilling to be separated, drained out of me.

At this time, my colour is a light blue, if I have indigo in me, or a pale fawn, if I am rags from which the dyes have been expelled. As it is necessary to bleach the fawn-coloured pulp (the blue being used for paper of that tint), and as I am fawn-coloured pulp, I am placed in certain stone chambers, like catacombs, hermetically sealed, excepting the first compartment, which communicates with a gasometer containing manganese, vitriol, and salt. From these ingredients, a strong gas (not agreeable, I must say, to the sense of smell) is generated, and forced through all the chambers, each of which communicates with the other. These continue closed, if I remember right, some four-and-twenty hours, when a man opens them and takes to his heels immediately, to avoid the offensive gas that rushes out. After I have been aired a little, I am again conveyed (quite white now, and very spiritual indeed) to some more obliging rollers upstairs.

At it these grinders go, “Munch, munch, munch!” like the sailor’s wife in Macbeth, who had chesnuts in her lap. I look, at first, as if I were the most delicious curds and whey; presently, I find that I am changed to gruel—not thin oatmeal gruel, but rich, creamy, tempting, exalted gruel! As if I had been made from pearls, which some voluptuous Mr. Emden had converted into groats!

And now, I am ready to undergo my last astounding transformation, and be made into paper by the machine. Oh what can I say of the wonderful machine, which receives me, at one end of a long room, gruel, and dismisses me at the other, paper!

Where is the subtle mind of this Leviathan lodged? It must be somewhere—in a cylinder, a pipe, a wheel—or how could it ever do with me the miracles it does! How could it receive me on a sheet of wire-gauze, in my gruel-form, and slide me on, gradually assuming consistency—gently becoming a little paper-like, a little more, a little more still, very paper-like, indeed—clinging to wet blankets, holding tight by other surfaces, smoothly ascending Witney hills, lightly coming down into a woolly open country, easily rolling over and under a planetary system of heated cylinders, large and small, and ever growing, as I proceed, stronger and more paper-like! How does the power that fights the wintry waves on the Atlantic, and cuts and drills adamantine slabs of metal like cheese, how does it draw me out, when I am frailest and most liable to tear, so tenderly and delicately, that a woman’s hand—no, even though I were a man, very ill and helpless, and she may nurse who loved me—could never touch me with so light a touch, or with a movement so unerring! How can I believe, even on experience, that, being of itself insensible, and only informed with intellect at second hand, it changes me, in less time than I take to tell it, into any sort of paper that is wanted, dries me, cuts me into lengths, becomes charged, just before dismissing me, with electricity, and gathers up the hair of the attendant-watcher, as if with horror at the mischiefs and desertions from the right, in which I may be instrumental! Above all, how can I reconcile its being mere machinery, with its leaving off when it has cut me into sheets, and NOT conveying me to the Exciseman in the next room, whom it plainly thinks a most unnatural conclusion!

I am carried thither on trucks. I am examined, and my defective portions thrown out, for the Mill, again; I am made up into quires and reams; I am weighed and excised by the hundredweight; and I am ready for my work. Of my being made the subject of nonsensical defences of Excise duty, in the House of Commons, I need say nothing. All the world knows that when the Right Honourable the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the time being, says I am only the worse by a duty of fifteen shillings per hundredweight, he is a Wrong Honourable, and either don’t know, or don’t care, anything about me. For, he leaves out of consideration all the vexatious, depressing, and preventing influences of Excise Duty on any trade, and all the extra cost and charge of packing and unpacking, carrying and re-carrying, imposed upon the manufacturer, and of course upon the public. But we must have it, in future, even with Right Honourables as with birds. The Chancellor of the Exchequer that can sing, and won’t sing, must be made to sing—small.

My metempsychosis ends with the manufacture. I am rags no more, but a visitor to the Paper-Mill. I am a pleased visitor to see the Mill in such beautiful order, and the workpeople so thriving; and I think that my good friend the owner has reason for saying with an agreeable smile, as we come out upon the sparkling stream again, that he is never so contented, as when he is in rags.

Shining up in the blue sky, far above the Paper-Mill, a mere speck in the distance, is a Paper Kite. It is an appropriate thing at the moment—not to swear by (we have enough of that already) but to hope by, with a devout heart. May all the Paper that I sport with, soar as innocently upward as the paper kite, and be as harmless to the holder as the kite is to the boy! May it bring, to some few minds, such fresh associations; and to me no worse remembrances than the kite that once plucked at my own hand like an airy friend. May I always recollect that paper has a mighty Duty, set forth in no Schedule of Excise, and that its names are love, forbearance, mercy, progress, scorn of the Hydra Cant with all its million heads!

So, back by the green lanes, and the old Priory—a farm now, and none the worse for that—and away among the lime-trees, thinking of Sir John.

CHEERFUL ARITHMETIC.

“Competition is fast crushing us!” the tradesman exclaims as he drives you out to his elegant villa behind his seventy-guinea gelding. “Wheat at forty shillings a quarter is ruin!” groans the farmer, while dallying with his champagne glass. “We are all going to the workhouse.”—“A diamond necklace, my dear?” replies the mill-owner to a lovely Lancashire witch, whose smile is on other occasions law—“What? two hundred pounds for a bauble, while calico is only three farthings a yard, and cotton-spinning on the brink of bankruptcy. Impossible!” Should these gentlemen ever meet it is ten to one that on comparing notes they resolve unanimously that the whole country is going to the dogs; but it is also ten to one that this resolution is passed at a public dinner to which they have each cheerfully contributed one-pound-one: besides another guinea to the occasion of the feast:—some plethoric, bloated, routine charity.

Considering their patriotic despondency in regard to the utterly hopeless condition of the nation, it is wonderful to observe the contented complacency with which these gentlemen eat their filberts and sip their claret. Neither is this stoic philosophy confined to them alone. All sorts of predicted want and impending misery are borne with exemplary fortitude by all sorts of Englishmen. The skilful artisan seldom allows a week to pass without deploring the inadequacy of wages; but, although he manages to get a good Sunday’s dinner some fifty times a year, and once or twice in the twelvemonth indulges his family with a healthful pleasure trip in the country, he is able to scrape up a few pounds in the savings’ bank. Yet if you ask him touching the state of things in his particular line, he will tell you that “Times never were so bad.” So universally is the propensity to depreciate things as they are, that if a commission were appointed to inquire into the state of the nation, their report, if derived solely from the evidence of well-to-do witnesses, would be lugubrious in the extreme. It is only the very poor who gaze cheerfully into the future; for their existence is a condition of hope. They apprehend nothing, for they have nothing to lose; whatever change fortune may bring, must be, they believe, for the better.

Happily, better testimony, to the real condition of the industrious classes is producible than that dark cloud of witnesses who speak out of the fulness of an Englishman’s privilege—grumbling. That testimony has been lucidly sifted, and was adduced by Mr. G. R. Porter at the recent meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh. It consisted—in proof of the well-being and continued progress of our country—of a comparison between the income tax returns in respect of incomes derived from trades and professions in 1812, and the like returns in 1848, excluding from the former period the incomes below one hundred and fifty pounds; which, under the existing law, are allowed to pass untaxed. The total amount thus assessed, after deducting exemptions, was, in 1812, about twenty-one millions and a quarter; while, in 1848, the amount was nearly fifty-seven millions; showing an increase, in thirty-six years, of about thirty-five millions and three-quarters, or one hundred and sixty-eight per cent.; being at the rate of upwards of four and a half per cent., yearly:—an increase very nearly three-fold greater than the increase during the same period of the population of Great Britain; where, alone, the income tax flourishes in full bloom.

But how has this three-fold prosperity been distributed? Have the rich grown richer, and the poor, poorer; or has Fortune taken off her bandage and rewarded honest industry, with a discriminating hand? Have the bulk of the people shared in the productive wealth which thirty-six years have accumulated? In order to answer these questions, Mr. Porter entered into a series of elaborate and interesting calculations, which prove the pleasing fact that the great progressive wealth has been shared among the middle and working classes.

He found that the returns of 1812 as well as those of 1848 gave the sums assessed to Income Tax in various classes; and, for the purpose of his examination, he distinguished the incomes thus given:—those between one hundred and fifty pounds and five hundred pounds; those between five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds; incomes between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds; incomes between two thousand pounds and five thousand pounds; and those above five thousand pounds. Adhering strictly to these distinctions, Mr. Porter perceived, in 1848, a positive increase in incomes between one hundred and fifty and five hundred pounds per annum, of thirteen millions seven hundred thousand pounds, over the incomes assessed in 1812. Between five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds per annum, the increase since 1812 has been five millions. On incomes between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds, and incomes between two thousand pounds and five thousand pounds, there is an increase of upwards of four millions respectively; while in the highest class, which includes all incomes above five thousand pounds per annum, the increase is found to be no more than eight millions and three-quarters. Comparing the highest with the lowest class, the increase has been greater in the lowest by nearly five millions—or fifty-six per cent.

This improvement in circumstances, however, descends to no lower a class of society than persons in the receipt of at least one hundred and fifty pounds per annum. It was necessary to dig a little lower in the strata of private circumstances, in order to show the progress of wealth among the working classes; and Mr. Porter had recourse to the returns from savings’ banks; these being chiefly used by the humbler orders. From data thus derived it was ascertained, that, while the deposits in England, Wales, and Ireland, proportioned to the whole population, amounted in 1831 to twelve shillings and eightpence per head; in 1848 they had risen to twenty shillings and eleven-pence per individual. The largest amount of these savings occurred in 1846; when they reached, in England alone, to more than twenty-six millions and three-quarters, and in the three Kingdoms, to more than thirty-one millions seven hundred thousand pounds, being equal to twenty-four shillings per head on the population of England, Wales, and Ireland, and ten shillings and one penny per head on that of Scotland.[1]

1. The comparative smallness of the deposits in Scotland arises from two causes: first, the system of allowing interest upon very small sums deposited in private and joint-stock banks; and, secondly, the more recent connexion of savings’ banks with the Government in that division of the kingdom. Hence, there is no reason for supposing that the labouring-classes of Scotland are less saving than those of England or Ireland.

The exceeding moderation of this estimate will be observed when we mention another description of savings’ banks which Mr. Porter has taken no account of—we mean Friendly Societies. Of these, there are fourteen thousand in Great Britain, regularly enrolled according to Act of Parliament, consisting of one million six hundred thousand members, with a gross annual revenue of two millions eight hundred thousand, and accumulated capital amounting to six millions four hundred thousand pounds sterling. To this must be added the capital belonging to unenrolled benefit societies (exclusive of those in Ireland), which has been estimated at a greater amount than those which exist “as the Act directs;” namely, at nine millions sterling, belonging to two millions and a half of members. It is indeed a most gratifying proof of the prudential, and therefore moral, as well as pecuniary advance which this country has made during the past thirty years, that half our labouring male population belong to Friendly Societies. The operative classes of Great Britain alone possess, at this moment, capital in savings’ banks and friendly societies, the total of which reaches the enormous sum of forty-two millions of money. How very like national ruin this looks!

In further proof of the greater distribution of means among the humbler than the higher orders, we can turn once more to Mr. Porter, who assures us that in proportion as the savings of the industrious poor have augmented, the dividends received at the Bank by the “comfortable” and the rich have decreased.

The test of the dividend-books of the Bank of England, to which Mr. Porter next brought his calculations, varies essentially from that afforded by the progress of savings’ banks; inasmuch as it excludes all evidence of actual saving or accumulation, while it offers a strictly comparative view of such saving as between different classes of the community. The accounts furnished to Parliament by the Bank of the number of persons entitled to dividends upon portions of the public debt, divide the fund-holders into ten classes, according to the amount of which they are so entitled. Mr. Porter contrasted the numbers in each class as they stood on the 5th of April and 5th of July of the years 1831 and 1848, respectively. He then went on to show, that there has been a very large addition between 1831 and 1848 to the number of persons receiving under five pounds at each payment of dividends, and a small increase upon the number receiving between five pounds and ten pounds, while, with the exception of the largest holders—those whose dividends exceed two thousand pounds at each payment, and of whom there has been an increase of five—every other class has experienced a considerable decrease in its numbers. There has been a diminution of more than Eight per cent. in the numbers receiving between three hundred pounds and five hundred pounds; of Twelve and a half per cent. of those receiving between five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds; and of more than Twenty per cent. among holders of stock yielding dividends between one thousand pounds and two thousand pounds; this would seem conclusively to prove that, at least as respects this mode of disposing of accumulations, there is not any reason to believe that the already rich are acquiring greater wealth at the expense of the rest of the community.

All evidence proves, then, that the great accession of wealth which has been accumulated in this country during the past thirty years, has been most distributed amongst the middle classes. The natural effect of a change from agricultural to manufacturing industry—a change which has come over this country during the roll of a single century—is to increase the wealth of the manufacturing and trading elements of the community, in proportion as these are called into activity. The “great fortunes” of the old time were nobles and land-holders; the millionaires of to-day are merchants, bankers, and mill-owners. Forty years ago a rich retail tradesman was a rarity; his dealings with the wholesale trade were chiefly carried on by means of bills at long dates, in which large sums were included for risk and interest; charges which decreased his profits, and increased the price of all articles to the consumer. Now the more frequent rule amongst retailers is prompt payment, discounts in their own favour, and affluence. In our “nation of shopkeepers,” it is industry which has prospered and had its reward.

Turning from the British Association to the Poor-Law Board—from Mr. Porter to Mr. Baines—we shall see that in the scramble for wealth, pauperism itself has benefited; that, in fact, the highest grades in the scale of society have benefited as little as the very lowest. It is true that in the progress of accumulation by manufactures, the necessity of bringing large masses of operatives into confined foci, and of providing work for them at all times and seasons, has caused temporary spasms of poverty, that have occasionally almost defied relief; but despite the rapid increase of the population, the ranks of what may be called permanent pauperism have not been augmented. Consequently the increased wealth of the country has descended even to the lowest ranks of the people. In the year 1813, when the population of England and Wales was only ten millions, the sum expended for the relief of the poor amounted to six millions and a half sterling. From the return of the Poor-Law Board, now before us, it appears that during the year which ended on Lady Day, 1849, and with a population in England and Wales of one-third more—or nearly fifteen millions—the exactions for poors’-rates amounted to no more than five millions, seven hundred and ninety-two thousand, nine hundred and sixty-three pounds—three-quarters of a million less than was drawn for the pauperism of 1813. The poor have ceased to regard the rich, as a class, as their natural enemies. We hear no more, now, of a “grinding oligarchy.”

Besides the decrease of poor rates, other taxes have diminished. Let the three grumblers with whom we started be pleased to remember that, no longer ago than 1815, when war had done its worst on the lives and fortunes of our fathers, they were taxed at the enormous rate of five pounds four shillings and ten pence a head to each individual of the population, from the centegenarian to the latest born baby; while we, in this day and generation of “ruin,” pay per head, only fifty shillings and eleven-pence, or scarcely one-half.

It is the strength and safeguard of the English nation, that its most prominent elements are industry and commerce; for, tending as they do, to the general dissemination, as well as to the general accumulation of wealth, they effect a fusion of interests—a union of classes, and a dependence of each upon the others—which is true national power. At the moment at which we write, we learn from local sources of information, the accuracy of which we have never had occasion to question, that skilled labour of nearly every kind is in demand in the manufacturing districts; and that all sorts of capable “hands” can have work. Everything indicates improvement. If, indeed, our friends the Croakers will only look their phantom “Ruin” boldly in the face, his gaunt form will soon assume the smiling semblance of Prosperity.

AN EMIGRANT AFLOAT.

I knew very little of the sea when I determined to emigrate. Like most emigrants, I thought beforehand more of the dangers than of the disagreeables of this voyage; but found, when actually at sea, that its disagreeables seemed more formidable than its dangers. I shall describe the voyage, in order that those who follow me may know precisely what it is that they have to encounter, satisfied as I am, that nothing will tend more to conduce to the comforts of the emigrant at sea, than his being able to take a full and accurate measure of its disagreeable as well as its agreeable accompaniments, before stepping on board.

It was late in the afternoon of a bright May day, when the Seagull, 480 tons register, and bound for Quebec, spread her wings to the wind, after having been towed out of the harbour of Greenock. A gentle breeze carried her smoothly by the point of Gourock, the Holy Loch, Dunoon, and other places familiar to the tourist on the noble Frith of Clyde. We were off the neat little town of Largs, when the shadows of evening thickened around us. I was one of more than a hundred steerage passengers, most of whom soon afterwards went below for the night, many with heavy hearts, thinking that they had seen the last glimpses of their native land.

I remained long enough on deck to perceive the approach of a marked change in the weather. We were still landlocked, when the wind veered round to the west, directly ahead of us. It increased so rapidly in violence, that by the time we were off Brodick, in the Island of Arran, it was blowing more than half a gale. As we tacked to and fro to gain the open sea, the vessel laboured heavily, and I soon felt sufficiently squeamish to descend and seek refuge in my berth. Here a scene awaited me for which I was but little prepared. With very few exceptions, all below were far advanced in sea-sickness. Some were groaning in their berths; others were lying upon the floor, in a semi-torpid state; and others, again, were retching incessantly. What a contrast was the Seagull then, to the neat, tempting picture she presented when lying quietly in dock, and when, as I paced her white, dry, warm, sunny decks, visions filled my mind of the pleasant days at sea before me, when, reclining on the cordage, beneath the shelter of the bulwarks, I could read the live-long day, whilst the stout ship sped merrily on her voyage. Delightful anticipations! Let no one be extravagant in forming them, unless he has a preference for disappointment. My faith in the romance of the sea was greatly shaken by my first night’s experiences on board, and it soon received a fatal blow from the commotion which was being gradually engendered within my own frame, and which, at length, resulted in a catastrophe. I could not sleep, for as the gale increased, so did the noises within and without. I could hear the heavy wind whistling mournfully through the damp, tight-drawn cordage, and the waves breaking in successive showers on the deck overhead. It made my flesh creep, too, to hear the water trickling by my very ear, as it rushed along outside the two-inch plank which (pleasing thought) was all that separated me from destruction. As the storm gained upon us, the ship laboured more and more heavily, until, at length, with each lurch which she made, everything moveable in the steerage rolled about from side to side on the floor. Pots and pans, trunks, boxes, and pieces of crockery kept up a most noisy dance for the entire night, their respective owners being so ill as to be utterly indifferent to the fate of their property. In the midst of the horrid din, I could distinguish the distressing groan of the strong man prostrated by sea-sickness, the long-drawn sigh and scarcely audible complaint of the woman, and the sickly wail of the neglected child; and, that nothing might be wanting to heighten the horrors of the scene, we were all this time in perfect darkness, every light on board having been extinguished for hours.

Morning was far advanced as I fell into a fitful and feverish sleep. On awaking, I found all as still as before leaving port. My fellow-passengers were all on deck; and I hurried up after them to ascertain the cause of the change. It was soon explained. The gale had, at length, become so violent, that the ship had put back for shelter, and was now lying quietly at anchor in the beautiful bay of Rothesay.

But what a change had, in the meantime, taken place in the appearance of my fellow-passengers. The buoyant air of yesterday had disappeared; and those who were then in ruddy health, now looked pale and woebegone. Such was the effect of our night’s prostration.

For my own part, I began to feel that I had already had enough of the sea, and heartily wished myself safe ashore on the banks of the St. Lawrence. I had formerly experienced a sort of enthusiasm in listening to such songs, as “The sea, the sea, the open sea!” “A life on the ocean wave!” &c., &c. But had anyone on board now struck up either of them, I should assuredly have set him down for a maniac. We remained for two days in Rothesay Bay, waiting for a change of wind, during which time we recruited our spirits—and water, a fresh stock of which we shipped. It was not, therefore, without some of the lightness of heart, which had characterised our first start, that, on the morning of the third day, we made way again for the New World. But it seemed as if we were never to get rid of the coast, for we were overtaken by a dead calm off Ailsa, causing delay for ten days more sweltering under a hot sun, within half a mile of that lonely and stupendous rock. On the evening of the second day a gentle breeze from the northeast carried us out of the Channel, and next morning found us with all sail set, speeding westward, with the Irish coast on our lee.

We were a very mixed company in the steerage. Some had been farmers, and were going out to try their hands at agriculture in the wilds of Canada. Others had been servants, predial and domestic, and were on their way in search of better fortunes in the New World, although they had not yet made up their minds as to the precise manner in which they were to woo the fickle dame. We had a brace of wives on board who were proceeding to join their husbands in Canada, who had prudently preceded their families, and prepared for their advent, by constructing a home for them in the woods. There was an old man with a slender capital, who was emigrating at an advanced period of life, that he might make a better provision for his grandson, a lusty youth of about seventeen, of whom he seemed doatingly fond. We had also amongst us a large family from Edinburgh, of that class of people who have “seen better days,” who were hurrying across the Atlantic in the hope of at least catching a glimpse of them again. Besides the father and mother, there were several sons and two daughters, the eldest son having duly qualified himself for the honour of writing W. S. after his name—a nominal appendage which he would find of far less value to him than a good axe in the woods. We had a clergyman, too, of the poorer class, in worldly circumstances, who had been accredited as a missionary to the Canadian wilds. I must not overlook four or five infants, the precise ownership of which I never thoroughly traced, they were so tumbled about from one to another; and which generally of nights favoured us with prolonged choruses of the most enlivening description.

Thus mixed and assorted, the first few days passed off agreeably enough to such as were proof against a relapse of sea-sickness. When it was not blowing too strong, the deck was a pleasant place for exercise, which is necessary to comfort, as it is generally cold and disagreeable at sea, except when calm, and then one is annoyed, whilst being broiled, at the thought of making no progress. The chief occupation on board, seemed to be that of cooking and eating. The cooking apparatus for the steerage was on deck; each family, and each individual who had no family, was continually cooking for themselves. As the accommodation for cooking was not very ample for upwards of a hundred passengers, there was scarcely an hour of the day between sunrise and sunset, that was not witness to the progress of some culinary operations—men, women, and children were constantly appearing and disappearing at the hatchways with pots, saucepans, kettles, and other utensils; and it was not long ere some began to fear, having made but little account of the voracity of appetite engendered by convalescence after sea-sickness, that their stock of provisions would prove rather scanty for the voyage.

Perhaps the greatest privation to which the poor steerage passenger is subjected, is in connection with the water which he uses for drinking and in some of his cooking processes. As the voyage may be protracted beyond reasonable calculation, an extra supply of fresh water is or should be laid in to meet such an emergency. To preserve this extra stock from becoming impure, different devices are resorted to,—such as impregnating it with lime, large quantities of which are thrown into each cask. Were this the case only with the extra stock, the comfort of the passenger might, for a time at least, be unimpaired in this respect; but the misfortune is, that all the water for steerage consumption, immediate and contingent, is treated in the same way; so that the emigrant is scarcely out of harbour, when he finds the water of which he makes use not only extremely unpalatable to drink, but in such a state as to spoil every decoction into which it enters. Fancy a cup of tea without cream, but with sugar and coarse lime, in about equal proportions, to flavour it. The most unquestionable sloe leaves might, under such circumstances, pass for young hyson, and the worst of chicory for the best of coffee. This sorely discomfited the more elderly of the females on board, whose cup of life was poisoned by very thin mortar.

On the fifth day out, after gaining the open sea, we were overtaken by a tremendous gale, which did us considerable damage. I was standing near the forecastle, when a heavy block dropped from aloft with terrific force at my feet. I had scarcely recovered from my fright, when crash after crash over head, making me run under the jolly boat in terror. For a moment afterwards all was still, and then arose a tremendous uproar on board, officers giving all sorts of directions at once, and sailors running about, and jumping over each other to obey them. When I ventured to peep out from my place of safety, a sad spectacle of wreck and ruin presented itself to me. On our lee, masts, ropes, spars, and sails were floating alongside on the uneasy waters. Our fore-top-mast had given way, and in falling overboard, had dragged the maintop-gallant mast and the greater part of our bowsprit along with it. Sails and rigging went of course with the wreck, which was provoking, as the wind was a-beam and so far favourable. We soon hauled the wreck on board, however, and in the course of two or three days, with the aid of the carpenter, the dismantled ship was re-rigged in a very creditable manner.

We had scarcely yet put to rights, when a vessel made up to us bound westward like ourselves. What a sight to the lonely wanderers on the ocean is a ship at sea!—it seems like a herald coming to you from the world, from which you are seemingly cut off for ever. It is a sight which must be seen to be appreciated. She was labouring heavily on our lee, and every now and then her whole keel became visible to us. To this, one of the passengers very innocently directed attention, much to the horror of the second mate, who smartly rebuked the offender; it being, he said, not only indelicate, but perilous to own having seen the keel of any ship under canvas. We all, of course, admitted the reasonableness of this caution, and strictly observed it.

The ship was no sooner repaired, than the wind, which had abated a little, seemed to redouble its fury. We were now in the midst of a terrible storm, and great was the commotion in the steerage. Some moaned in pain—others screamed occasionally in terror—whilst one old lady was constantly inquiring in a most piteous voice, if there was not one good man on board, for whose sake the rest might be saved. On making the inquiry of a rough, but good-natured tar, he rebuked her scepticism, and referred her to the minister. We had two sailors on board, named Peter. One was an ordinary looking mortal, from whom the other was distinguished by the appellation of Peter the Leerer, a name having reference to the extraordinary facial phenomena which he exhibited. On the point of his nose was an enormous wart, the counterpart of which had taken possession of his chin. He had likewise one, but of smaller dimensions, on either cheek, only wanting one on his forehead, to complete the diagram; a want, which, for most of the voyage, was providentially made up by a large pimple, which underlay his bump of benevolence. Add to this an enormous quantity of wiry red hair, and a portentous squint, and you may form some conception of the goblin in question. He was the terror of all the children on board, and came regularly into the steerage in the morning, begging a “toothful” from the passengers. We never saw his tooth, but it must have been very large, as what he meant by the term was a glass of raw spirits, to the strength of which he was stoically indifferent, so that it was above proof. It appeared that he now thought that the time had come for making some sort of return for sundry gifts of this nature. He appeared amongst us, as the storm was at its height, and confidentially informed us that, unless some of the “canvas” were immediately taken down, the ship “had not another hour’s life in her.” To describe the confusion and dismay occasioned by this announcement is impossible. Nobody questioned Peter’s judgment, who stood looking at us as if he thought that one good turn deserved another. But every one was too much frightened to think of rewarding him for his kindness. Some ran at once upon deck to take immediate advantage of the boats—the women all screamed together—and we had a pretty tolerable taste of the horrors to be witnessed on the eve of a shipwreck. The hubbub at length ended in the appointment of a deputation to wait upon the captain, and solicit him to shorten sail. The deputation went upon its mission, but soon afterwards returned from the cabin to their constituents with the report that they had been politely requested by the functionary in question to mind their own business. The storm, however, gradually abated, and things and persons resumed their ordinary aspect.

Great was the anxiety evinced every time the log was thrown, to ascertain our rate of sailing, and at noon of each day, to know our daily run, and our precise locality on the terraqueous globe. It is difficult for an emigrant to reconcile himself to less than eight or nine knots an hour. He may put up with seven, or even six, provided the ship is in her direct course, but he regards everything below that as a justifiable ground of murmuring and complaint. Sometimes it is the ship that is wrong, and sometimes the captain, sometimes the rigging, and at other times, all is wrong together. But to do the emigrant justice, if he is in the surly mood when he is making but little progress, he makes amends for his ill-humour when the vessel is making a good run. We, one day, made but about twenty miles, and I apprehended a mutiny. On another we made two hundred, and nothing could exceed the hilarity and good-humour of those on board. At one time, the Seagull was the merest tub, a disgrace to her owners, and to the mercantile navy of the kingdom. At another, she was one of the best vessels afloat; the captain one of the best sailors on the sea; and the crew the cleverest set of fellows in the world. But all this time it was the same ship, the same captain, and the same crew. The diversity of opinion was the result of extraneous circumstances which caused us at different times to take different points of view. If the weather was favourable, and we made good way, the ship, captain, and crew, got all the honour and glory; if it was adverse and our progress was retarded, the ship, captain, and crew, had to bear all our sinister glances and ill humours. One morning, after we had been about ten days out, our minds were all made up that we were pretty near the banks of Newfoundland, when a fellow-passenger, evidently not very deeply versed in human nature, had the hardihood to inform us that he had, but the day before, seen the mate’s log book, from which it appeared that we were as yet but five hundred miles to the westward of the Irish coast. I can scarcely understand to this day, how it was that he escaped being thrown overboard.

We had two men on board, the very antipodes of each other. The one was a colossal bachelor, who was never ill; the other a diminutive member of a large family, who was never well. They resembled each other only in one point—that they both ate prodigiously. The only account the bachelor could give of himself was that he was going out to Canada to saw the big trees. He had, in fact, been engaged as a sawyer to proceed to the banks of the Ottawa, there to prosecute his avocation in connection with some of the large timber establishments, which are situated far up that noble river. He was so powerful a fellow, that a Yankee passenger declared “he would have only to look at a tree to bring it down.” He lived, whilst on board, on nothing but oatmeal porridge, a large goblet-full of which, after first making it himself, he devoured regularly on deck four times a day. As to the little man, he lived, as regularly, on mashed potatoes, enriched with butter and melted cheese; and his meals were invariably followed by fits of sea-sickness which he considered quite unaccountable. His habits became at length such a scandal to all on board, that the doctor was compelled, by the force of public opinion, to order him to eat less. He had remained below from our time of starting, until the day we made land, when he appeared on deck for the first time, and was for the first time seen without his nightcap.

When we had been about three weeks at sea an incident occurred which appalled us all, and elicited the sympathies of everyone for one of the unfortunate sufferers. I have already alluded to the old man, who was emigrating with his only grandson, whom he wished to see comfortably settled in life, ere his eyes were sealed in death. The youth was one of several on board who were fond, after having been a few days at sea, of climbing the rigging, and exposing themselves to a variety of unnecessary risks. He had been frequently warned, with the rest, against the consequences which might ensue, but disregarded the advice. One day, whilst out upon the bowsprit, he missed his hold and dropped into the water. The alarm of “man overboard” was instantly raised, and, to save him, the ship was immediately hove to; but he had disappeared, and although we remained for an hour upon the spot, we never caught a glimpse of him again. One of the men near him at the time said that, on reaching the water, he was struck on the head by the cut-water of the ship, which was then running about eight knots an hour. The blow stunned him, and he sank like a stone. The poor old man was inconsolable, and gradually sank into a state of vacant imbecility; and, on landing, found a home in the Lunatic Asylum at Quebec.

Let no one dream that the sea, particularly on board an emigrant ship, is the place for reading or study. It is either too cold, when there is the slightest breeze, or too hot when it is calm: it is too noisy at all times. Happy is he who, under such circumstances, has a resource against ennui in his own reflections. Having a clergyman on board, we had divine service regularly on the Sundays. When it was rough, the assemblage took place between decks in the steerage; but when fine we were convened upon deck. Sailors have a dread, not exactly of clergymen in the abstract, but of clergymen on board. A blackbird on the rigging as the ship is about to start, or a clergyman on board, is equally, in their estimation, a token of ill luck; and some of the crew pitied us for anticipating anything else, under the circumstances.

If there is one thing more disagreeable than a storm at sea, it is a calm. It is all very well for a steamer, which can then make her way nobly over the waters; but, the annoyance and tedium on board a sailing vessel are indescribable. In all our calms we were surrounded by sea-gulls and other marine birds. Some of them ventured so close as to be shot; others we endeavoured to catch by means of baited hooks tied to a stick, which was attached to a long cord; but they were too wary for us, for, after closely examining it, they fought shy of the temptation.

On nearing the banks of Newfoundland we were constantly immersed in fogs. One morning, whilst thus situated, the temperature of the sea suddenly lowered, which the captain interpreted into an indication of icebergs not being far off, and a sharp look out was ordered to be kept. It was scarcely noon ere we were in imminent peril of running at full speed against one. We owed our escape to a passenger, who was on the lookout, and who called the attention of one of the sailors to something ahead of us. “Starboard—starboard hard!”—cried he at once to the man at the wheel. The helm was scarcely turned ere we glided rapidly by the frozen mass, which gleamed like a huge emerald in the faint and struggling sunlight. We passed so close to it that I could have leaped upon it with ease. We might as well have run against a whinstone rock as encountered this floating peril, at the rate at which we were then gliding through the water.

Whilst crossing the banks the ship was frequently hove to for soundings. We took advantage of such occasions to fish for cod; nor were we unsuccessful, for we, altogether, hauled on board several dozen fish of a large size. The delight with which we feasted upon our prey, after some weeks’ experience of nothing but salt meat, I leave the reader to imagine. It was during one of our angling attempts that an incident occurred, which would have seemed as incredible to me as it may now do the reader, had I not been an eye-witness of it. One of the crew, whilst fishing for a few minutes, with a line belonging to a passenger, hooked a very large fish, which dropped into the water in the act of being hauled on board. The man, determined on securing his prize, without a moment’s hesitation, leaped overboard after it; and, seizing the half insensible fish in his arms, held it there until he was hauled on board, with his extraordinary booty. In explanation of this, it should be known that the gills of a cod-fish, when out of the water, swell considerably, so as to prevent it from properly performing their functions when restored, even alive, to its native element. It was whilst the fish in question was in the act of thus “coming to” that the man seized and secured it.

On the banks, when the night was clear, we witnessed magnificent exhibitions of the aurora-borealis. It was generally between midnight and ten in the morning that the phenomenon attained the greatest splendour. When the whole northern sky was enveloped in a trellis-work of flashing wavy light, of a mingled golden, silvery pink, and blood-red hue.

The first land we made, was Cape Breton, an island off the northern extremity of Nova Scotia; and between which and Newfoundland, is the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The bold shore of the island was more picturesque than inviting; but for the live-long day every passenger strained his eyes upon this, the first positive revelation of the New World to him. The delight imparted by the first sight of land, can only be appreciated by those who have been for weeks at sea, with nothing to meet the eye, day after day, but the same monotonous and dreary circle of waters, in the midst of which the ship seems to rest immoveable. From Cape Breton we stood up the Gulf, and being favoured by the wind, soon made the Island of Anticosti, not far from the mouth of the St. Lawrence. It looked like a mass of petrified guano; an illusion which was not disturbed by the myriads of water-fowl which hovered about its precipices.

The Gulf of St. Lawrence has not been inaptly designated, the “vilest of seas.” It was our lot to have ample experience of its capricious humours. When almost at the mouth of the river, which expands into a magnificent estuary of from seventy to ninety miles in width, we were becalmed for two whole days. Between us and the rocky shore on our left, to which we were very close, lay a vessel from Belfast, crowded with emigrants. There was music and dancing on board; and so near were we to each other, that we, too, sometimes danced to the sound of her solitary violin. On the evening of the second day, we were suddenly overtaken by a furious squall, which descending the river, came upon us so unprepared, that much of our canvas was cut to pieces ere it could be taken in. In about half an hour all was comparatively tranquil again, but on looking for our comrade, not a vestige of her was to be seen. It was not for three weeks afterwards, when we heard of her total loss, with upwards of three hundred and fifty souls on board, that our dreadful suspicions respecting her, were confirmed. Next morning it blew very fresh; and although it was the 3rd of June, we had several heavy falls of snow.

After beating about for two days longer in the mouth of the river, we were boarded by a pilot, and made way for Quebec, about four hundred miles up. The ascent of the stream is sometimes exceedingly tedious; as, when the wind is adverse, it is necessary to come to anchor at every turn of the tide. Thus as much time is sometimes consumed in ascending the river, as in crossing the Atlantic. We were more fortunate, for we made the quarantine ground, thirty miles below the city, in ten days. Under such circumstances, the sail up the river is interesting and agreeable. For the first hundred miles or so, it is so wide, that land on either side is but dimly visible. But, as the estuary narrows, objects on either side become more distinct. The northern shore, which is bold and mountainous, is replete with scenes of the most romantic grandeur. The southern bank being much tamer in its character, and more adapted for human habitations. The channel too, some distance up, is occasionally studded with islands, which add greatly to the interest of the sail.

The quarantine ground of Canada is Gros Isle, between which and Quebec stretches the long Island of Orleans. We had scarcely dropped anchor when we were boarded by an officer of the Board of Health. Whilst ascending the river, the ship had been thoroughly cleaned, and the berths in the steerage white-washed. We were all passed in review before the functionary in question, and could have been at once permitted to proceed to our destination, but for one old lady, who was not exactly ill, but ailing; on her account we were detained until every piece of clothing on board had undergone a thorough ablution. We landed immediately in boats, and, after having been for about six weeks at sea, it was with inexpressible joy that I sprang ashore, for the first time, in the New World.

Gros Isle! With what melancholy associations have the events of 1847 encircled the name of the Canadian lazaretto! On our arrival, in a year when the tide of emigration was not strong, there was a little fleet anchored along side of it. Some of the vessels (they were all from Ireland), with their overloaded cargoes of human beings, had been already there for a month, nor was there any prospect of their being relieved for some weeks to come. There was an hospital for the sick; the accommodation ashore for such as were well, consisted of several large open sheds, tolerably well covered and floored. In these, meals were taken during the day, and beds were made for the night. Outside, the scene presented was picturesque, and even gay; there were nearly three thousand people ashore, and a universal washing of clothes of all kinds was going on; the water being heated by hundreds of wood fires, which were blazing and smoking amongst the rocks in the open air. When there were families, the families belonging to them washed for them; such as were alone had to hire the services of professional washerwomen. The appliances of washing are rather peculiar. Between high and low water-mark the island was very rocky, and the action of the water had here and there scooped out bowls of various sizes from the rock. Into them, for the most part, the hot water was poured, and in them, between tides, the clothes were washed. They were then spread upon the rocks, or hung upon the trees to dry, which gave the island a holiday look. It was anything, however, but a holiday time for hundreds, who were forced to tenant it.

To our great satisfaction, we were permitted, after but one day’s detention, to resume our course. With wind and tide in our favour, we soon dropped up to the city. It was a clear and brilliant morning in June when we left Gros Isle, and as we made our way up the narrow channel between the Island of Orleans and the southern bank of the river, nothing could exceed the beauty of the scene, the great basin, into which the city juts, being visible in the distance, directly ahead of us, whilst the precipitous bank on either side, particularly that on our left, was covered with the most luxuriant vegetation, in the shade of which we could, every here and there, discover foaming torrents, dashing headlong from the country above into the river, like those which, after heavy rains, rush with such fury down the western bank of Loch Ness. On opening one of the points of the Isle Orleans, the cataract of Montmorency burst suddenly upon our view, looking in the distance like a long streak of snow amid the rich green foliage which imbedded it. Considerably higher up, Point Levy still projected between us and the city, but long before we turned it, we could see over it the British flag floating in the distance from the lofty battlements of Cape Diamond. On turning the point, the change of scene was as sudden and complete as any ever effected by the scenic contrivances of the stage. The city was at once disclosed to view, skirting the fort and crowning the summit of the bold rocky promontory on which it stands, its tinned roofs and steeples gleaming in the sunlight, as if they were cased in silver. Very few vessels were at the wharves, but abreast of the city hundreds were anchored in the middle of the stream, some getting rid of their ballast, and others surrounded by islands of timber, with which they were being loaded. The clearness of the air, the brightness of the sky, the merry tumble of the water, slightly ruffled by a fresh easterly breeze, the singular position and quaint appearance of the town, with its massive battlements, its glistening turrets, and its break-neck looking streets, zigzagging up the precipice, with the rich greenery of the Heights of Abraham beyond, and that of Point Levy right opposite, and with hundreds of vessels lying quietly at anchor on the broad expanse of the river, whilst the echoes reverberated to the merry choruses of their busy crews,—all conspired to form a picture calculated to make an impression upon the imagination too deep to be ever effaced.

The anchor had scarcely dropped, terminating our long and weary voyage, when we were boarded by a Custom-House officer, and by an officer of the Board of Health. After another inspection, we were permitted to land; and it was not without many anxious reflections upon the novelty of my situation, that I found myself retiring that night to rest within a stone’s throw of the monument raised to the joint memories of Wolf and Montcalm.

Such were the incidents of my voyage. I have set them down simply, and exactly as they occurred, for the purpose of presenting a true picture of the emigrant’s life afloat. I have since learned that, in all respects, ours was an average journey across the wide waste. Intending emigrants, therefore, who picture to themselves in bright colours the glories of a sea voyage, will, by reading these pages, have their dreams modified by some touches of reality and truth, if not entirely dispelled. If, however, they are adapted for success in the other hemisphere, they will not be daunted by the trials and inconveniences I have pictured.

THE SISTER’S FAREWELL.

Dear Sister, sit beside my bed,
And let me see your gentle smile,
And let me lay my aching head
Upon your kindly arm awhile;
I shall not long be with you now,
My time is drawing to an end:
May we our spirits meekly bow,
And He release from suffering send.

The longed-for summer’s drawing near;
The wind is softer, and the sun
Streams down so brightly on me here,
It almost seems already come.
But now—I never more shall see
The fields and lanes, all gay with flowers,
Nor hear the murmur of the bee,
Nor song of birds among the bowers.

For here, no beauteous change we see
In nature, as the year rolls on;
No green bursts forth on bush and tree
When winter’s chilling frosts are gone.
No gentle flowers or odours sweet,
In summer cheer us as we go;
Nought see we but th’ unchanging street,
And weary passing to and fro.

The summer, though ’tis summer still,
Seems not the same while we are here.
How sweet the thought of that clear rill,
That trembled from the hillock near
To our old house! I sometimes think,
With my eyes closed, and half-asleep,
That I am lying on the brink
Of the old fish-pond, still, and deep.

Methinks in one of those sweet nooks,
Beneath the hanging willow-trees,
I listen to the cawing rooks
And busy humming of the bees.
And, moodily, I watch the trout
Make circles in the tranquil pool;
And watch the swallows skim about,
And feel the breeze so fresh and cool.

Let me awake—the dream was brief—
Be thankful for my sufferings here;
Be thankful, too, for Heaven’s relief,
E’en though I leave thee, sister dear.
Yet let me once more see you smile;
A Vision opens on me bright!
Lay your hand by me for a while—
And now, God bless you, love—Good Night!

THE HOME OF WOODRUFFE THE GARDENER.

IN EIGHT CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER IV.

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

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

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

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

“Well: I suppose I must.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A child in the fever,” replied Fleming.

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

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

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

“Not any. But I will send for some.”

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

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

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

“But, do you like him?”

“No, I can’t say I do.”

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

CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I shall work to-morrow, Sir. My mother and my brother-in-law were buried to-day.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LINES TO A DEAD LINNET.

BY A SOLITARY STUDENT.

Sweet little friend in hours of lonely thought,

And studious toil thro’ the unresting day,

Why hast thou left me to the sullen hours,

So dull and changeless now? Thy light-heart song,

And fluttering plume of joy, beguile no more
My weary mind, happy when so estranged,
From books, which are the bane of all repose.

The secret bustle of thy frequent meal,
Like elfin working mischief, all unseen
At bottom of thy cage; thy dipping bill,
Oft splashing sportive o’er the learned tome,
And rousing my ’rapt soul to homelier themes;
The tuning twitter, snatch’d and interrupt—
The timorous essay, low and querulous—

The strain symphonious—and the full burst of song,

That made my study-walls re-echo sweet,

The harmonious peal, while all its tatter’d maps

And prints unframed, responsive tremblings gave;—

All these are past, and joy takes wing with thee.

Nor less, when in the dreary night, far spent,

Still was I pondering o’er the murky page,
Hast thou attracted notice by thy bill
Battling along the wires; and in the twinkle—

The clos’d—and then, bright little eye, half-oped.

Well have I read thy meaning, and full soon,
Thus warned of needful slumber, borne away
The wasted lamp, and sought my lonely couch.

Thy empty cage now hangs against the wall!
No one inhabits it—nothing is there—
Thy seed-box is half full of dust and film;
A spider weaves within thy water-glass:
The wretchedness of silence—no response

To calls and questionings of the heart—the mind—

All show me thou art dead—for ever gone!

I stand and gaze on thy perplexing cage—

Like a friend’s house—deserted!—one we have loved—

And before which, returning after years,
We pause, and think of hours enjoyed within;
And gaze upon the dusty shutters—closed!

THE GOOD GOVERNOR.

In a region where favourable latitude and tempering sea-breezes combine to produce perpetual summer, lie “the still vexed Bermoothes,” the Bermuda of modern navigators, where one-half of the year is the fitting seedtime for plants of the tropical, and the other half of the temperate zones. These islands, discovered to us by a shipwreck, with one exception, our oldest colony, offer a miniature copy of the institutions of the parent state.

About twenty square miles of surface, consisting of one island thirty miles long by two broad, and a half-dozen aide-de-camp sort of islets, support a population rather less numerous, and considerably less wealthy, than that of the City of Canterbury; and enjoy the dignity of a capital, with two thousand inhabitants; of a Governor and Commander-in-Chief, who takes his seat on “the throne” when opening the Bermoothean Parliament; of a Council, or miniature House of Lords, and a Representative Assembly of thirty-six members, forming a miniature House of Commons. They had formerly an Archdeacon, but, by one of those extraordinary decisions that occasionally originate in high quarters, the Archdeacon has been metamorphosed into a Bishop of Newfoundland, whom the Bermudians never see, although they still have the honour of paying the salary of the late Archdeacon.

Formerly Bermuda, like Virginia, from which it was an offshoot, was a slave colony, and grew tobacco. But tobacco would not pay, and every Bermudian, being born within a mile of the water, was bred amphibious. Capital cedar for ship-building grows on the hills, and harbours are all around to receive the craft when built. So it came to pass, that the “‘Mudian” clippers became plentiful all over the neighbouring seas, and took a large share of the carrying trade between our American colonies and the West Indies. Even when a large slice of these said colonies had struggled into the Republic of the United States, the ’Mudians continued to do a good stroke of sea-faring business.

Then whales abounded in the neighbouring seas, and every ’Mudian took to handling the oar, the lance, or the harpoon, at a time of life when other children were driving hoops, or riding rocking-horses.

It was the natural result of these handy occupations in so limited a space, that the whole population, with the exception of that supported by the expenditure of the garrison, was occupied in building, or rigging, or manning, or loading, vessels of some kind, if not whaling or fishing. White or black, they were all sailors and sea-faring to a man, almost to a woman. The real mermaid still lingers round Bermuda’s coast. Breechless babies swaggered along with a mixture of long and short steps in true jack-tar style. Bermudian young ladies directed their maids to let out a reef in a petticoat, and officers driving tandem were bid “put yer helm down,” by native guides.

There are no records to show when first in Bermuda sea-faring arts began to devour all others; certain it is that just as the manufacture of glass and porcelain, purple dye, and other signal utilities and ornaments have been more than once discovered, lost, and re-discovered, so were agriculture and horticulture in the year 1839 of the islands of perpetual spring, among the lost arts. If in that year some convulsion had for ever separated them from external communications, the process of food-growing among a British race would have been left as rude in theory, more imperfect in practice, than among the New Zealanders or South Sea Islanders.

There were in that year two persons in the islands who could plough, but they did not. Haymaking and mowing was a theory learned in books, just as curious inquirers in Lancashire may have read of cotton cultivation. As for the state of gardening, it was about parallel with British gardening in the time of Queen Bess, who used to send to Holland for a salad.

So there was neither corn nor hay, and very little fruit, of the worst quality. A sort of bitter orange-tree abounded through the islands. Inquisitive strangers asked “Why not graft or bud sweet oranges on these luxuriant stocks, or why not sow sweet seeds?” But the natives were positive that buds would not take, and seeds would not grow.

Such was Bermuda in 1839; somewhat depressed in its fishing, whaling, ship-building, sea-carrying commerce, by the competition of New Brunswick and the United States. Although less affected than the sugar-growing islands by negro emancipation, still whites, who had lived easily although barely by hiring out a few black artisans, were reduced to sore straits.

It was in this year there arrived a new Governor. He travelled the length and breadth of his islands, and found all green and all barren; a light, but fertile soil, bearing fine timber, and luxuriant weeds. Round the government house was a waste of eight acres, within sight a great swamp. According to popular opinion, Colonial Governors are gentlemen of broken fortunes, and strong political connections, who endure temporary evils for the sake of future ease and dignity.

At any rate, among military martinet Governors; naval bashaw Governors; didactic despatch-writing Governors; Governors landing with crotchets all ready-cut and dry; Governors who support the Royal Prerogative by quarrelling with all their subjects, and Governors whose whole soul is in quiet and domestic economy, the popular Governor, the wise, conciliating Governor, is indeed a rare bird. According to stereotyped precedent, our Bermoothean Governor ought to have first sat down and written a flaming despatch home, painting the misery of the island, detailing his plans, and asking for money. Next he should have filled up a scheme on a scale large enough to satisfy the ideas of a Paxton in horticulture, or a Smith of Deanston in agriculture, and applied to his little parliament for a vote, in order to make a garden for himself, and a model farm for his own amusement and the benefit of the islanders.

But it happened that our “good” Governor as he was afterwards called with good reason, was not a stereotyped Governor, so that the people he was sent to rule became happy and prosperous. He cared not to become either rich or famous. Therefore, all his proceedings were on a humble, commonplace scale. Seeing that the climate was admirably adapted for oranges; which, if of good quality, would afford a valuable export, he sent for slips and seeds of the best kinds.

In front of Government House stands a bitter citron-tree: on this, with his own hands, he budded a sweet orange. The bud, contrary to all Bermudian opinions, sprouted, and grew, and flourished. After the living example of the Governor’s tree, it became a fashion—a rage—to bud sweet oranges; so by this simple and short cut an horticultural revolution was effected. Still working out the maxim that example is better than precept, our good Governor beat up for gardener recruits, accepting those who knew a little as well as those who knew nothing, but were willing to learn. With their aid, and at his own expense, the eight acres of waste round his residence, Mount Langton, were converted into a pleasure-ground, adorned with plants and shrubs of the tropical and temperate zones, which he threw open freely to the inhabitants without distinction of colour.

The next step was to drain the great marsh, the Langton Marsh, and grow hay upon it, so as to give the Bermudians a hint on the oddness of importing hay, while fine grass land lay waste. Two men who could plough were discovered, and pupils put under their hands; at the same time ploughs were imported. Having, out of his own pocket, offered prizes for garden flowers and vegetables, for corn and hay, for the best ploughman, and the best scytheman, the performances of these two being as wonderful to the islanders as skating to an Indian prince, or wine-making to a Yorkshireman, the Local Parliament willingly voted other prizes for the same purpose.

It would take up too much time to detail all the good Governor’s efforts—by example, by instruction, by rewards, by distribution of books, and by the promotion of industrial schools, to educate the rising generation of Bermuda in useful, civilising arts.

A grand holiday, held in May, 1846, showed that these efforts had not been without pleasant and practical results.

Mount Langton and all the pleasure-grounds created under the personal inspection and at the expense of the good Governor, were crowded with a noisy happy population, of all ranks, all ages, and all colours, black, white, and brown, assembled to enjoy and celebrate the taking stock of the revived Industry of the islands. Not equal in variety to the great Parisian Exposition, or in quality to the Royal Agricultural Shows, it was still an era in the history of the colony.

The Queen’s representative did not grudge to give up for the occasion his private domain, as that was the best site in the Island. Amid the luxuriant shrubs and gorgeous tropical flowers, the gay groups wandered; sweetly the sounds of the regimental band intermingled with the shouts and whip-crackings of the contending ploughmen as they turned up the brown furrows of long neglected soil, and with the switching of twenty-five scythe-men exhibiting their newly acquired skill on the drained pasture of Langton Marsh. Below lay the shipping in harbour, and far beyond the golden purple ocean was dotted over with the cloud-like canvas of the famous ’Mudian craft. Almost at once—one glance—it was possible to take in a view of the pursuits of old and young Bermuda. Government House was closed;—to have entertained the thousands who had assembled (beyond the needful supply of cold water found in huge jars and tubs in every shady place, a provision so grateful under a tropical sun,) was impossible; to have entertained a part—an exclusive few—on such an occasion, would have been contrary to the Governor’s principles; so for that day all personal attendants were enabled to share in the universal holiday.

In due time after the ploughing and mowing matches, came the competition in turnips, strawberries, potatoes, dahlias, barley, potherbs, flax, and cabbages, and the parading and comparison of horse-colts, ass-colts, calves, heifers, bulls, sows, and boars.

Now, before the advent of this reforming Governor, the Bermudians had been accustomed to no other competition than that of sailing or cricket matches or steeple-chases; to no other exhibitions than military reviews; all excellent in their way, but now usefully varied by a kind of competition that brought new comforts to every cottager.

Years have elapsed since the day of this well-remembered fête. But the good Governor is still affectionately remembered. The Bermudians love to show passing strangers the sweet orange-tree on Mount Langton which still blooms a green and golden monument of plain, practical, kind-hearted common sense. And this sketch of a remote and insignificant dependency has been thought worth telling for the benefit, not only of colonial Governors, but of well-meaning reformers in all parts of the world. If we would do good we must not be content with mere talk; we must not disdain to commence at our own doors by budding—a sweet orange on a bitter citron.

LONDON PAUPER CHILDREN.

High and dry upon a pleasant breezy hilltop about seven miles south of London stands a house worthy of a visit. Far enough away to be quite free from the cloud of smoke, yet near enough for easy access from London; it is a large house in the country, in and out of which a large family of essentially London tenants are perpetually going. Walk round the hill it stands upon, and a succession of charming views present themselves for admiration. A far distant horizon bounds a country made up of purple woods, rich golden brown stripes of corn-fields, and bright green meadows. Here young plantations; there stately single timber trees; with villas nestling under fringes of woods on pleasant slopes, whilst in the valley below runs the Croydon Railway, linking this charming, quiet country round Norwood, to the smoky, busy, useful London.

The place we speak of is the Pauper-School at Norwood, which may be called a factory for making harmless, if not useful subjects, of the very worst of human material—a place for converting those who would otherwise certainly be miserable, and most likely vicious, into rational, reasonable, and often very useful members of society;—in short, a house for training a large and wretched class in habits of decency, regularity, and order, and leading a pitiable section of the great two-million-strong family of London from the road to crime into that of honest industry and self-respect.

The exterior of the building has no trace of the architectural display that won for the school near Manchester the title of a Pauper Palace. The exterior of the Norwood house is as dingy and ugly as a small brewhouse. In shape it reminds one of the old cities, built upon no definite plan, but enlarged from time to time as the population found it most convenient. It is neither square, nor round, nor triangular; but then, when we go over it, we shall find that the lack of straight lines and right angles does not prevent the presence of much good, and of a fair amount of comfort and happiness within its confines.

The irregularity of its construction is explained by the fact that the place was established twenty-seven years ago, not by a public body, but by a private individual, Mr. Aubin, the present superintendant. The commencement of such a place was an epoch in the history of pauperism in this country. Before the time of the benevolent Jonas Hanway, no regard was paid to the destitute children of the poor, and those young children, whose ill-fate it was to be born of pauper parents, in town, were condemned to a life that began in the gutters of back lanes, and usually ended in the gaol, by fever, or more suddenly, on the gallows. Hanway secured the passing of a law empowering the parishes to collect the juvenile paupers and send them into the country for nurture and maintenance. It was a step in advance to get the children away from the dens in which they had previously been confined, but the nurture was of a very unsatisfactory kind. When an old woman applied for parish relief, she had two or three children given to her to keep, and out of their allowance she was to help to keep herself. She usually set them to collect firewood for her; or to watch sheep, or to scare crows; and, in their search for fuel, they were often taught to rob hedges, or fences, or trespass on plantations. At seven years’ old they were sent back to finish their education in the workhouses, and frequently remained there for six or seven years without even learning their letters. Indeed, to teach them at all was regarded as a kind of small treason. “Teach paupers to read! What next?” was a common exclamation. Reading was, by a great many people, considered to be a mere premium for laziness—whilst writing was thought to be a temptation to forgery, and its then certain result—the gallows. To collect the pauper children, and “farm them out” to persons who would teach as well as feed them, was the next step in advance. The fruit of this plan was the growth of various places where large numbers of the pauper rising generation were gathered together in houses, the proprietors of which often realised large profits upon the moneys allowed for maintaining this class of the population.

Taking advantage of the generally and loudly expressed public opinion, that “something must be done,” the Poor-Law Board succeeded in establishing some school districts near the metropolis. The first step taken was to purchase Mr. Aubin’s place at Norwood, and thus take it into their own hands. This school had long been regarded as the best of its class, and as one where many steps of great practical value had been taken for the improved treatment of youthful paupers. The purchase-money of this school is said to have been about eleven thousand pounds, and the authorities wisely retained the aid of the man who had originated it, to carry out still further into effect their improved plans. This step was soon followed by others. In the publication of the Poor-Law Board, just issued—the promoters of our present poor-law system long ago saw the mischiefs of this plan, and after some years’ consideration, and many difficulties, succeeded in procuring an Act of Parliament for the establishment of district pauper Industrial Schools. But though the law was made, it was found impossible to overcome the objections raised by parish authorities, and it was not carried out to any extent, until the terrible calamity of Tooting startled all England with the spectacle of hundreds of deaths by cholera, in an establishment where the little unfortunates were “farmed out.”

In the Second Annual Report of the Poor-Law Board, Mr. Baines, its President, says, that three very important school districts have, within the year, been formed in and near the metropolis. These are:—

“1st. The Central London School District, comprising the City of London Union, the East London Union, and the St. Saviour’s Union. The Board of Management of this district have completed all their arrangements and hold their regular meetings. They have purchased of Mr. Aubin his premises at Norwood for the district school, retaining him in the capacity of steward or superintendant of the establishment, and have appointed an efficient staff of teachers in every department. The school is now in full activity, upon an improved footing, and nearly eight hundred children (nine hundred) are maintained and educated in it.

“2nd. The South Metropolitan School District comprised, as originally formed, the Union of St. Olave’s, and the large parishes, not in Union, of Bermondsey, Camberwell, and Rotherhithe.

“3rd. The North Surrey School District includes the Unions of Wandsworth and Clapham, Kingston, Croydon, Richmond, and Lewisham. The managers have purchased fifty acres of land near Norwood, and have commenced the erection of a building capable of accommodating six hundred children.

“It will thus be seen that provision has been made in and around London for the proper education and training of more than two thousand poor children. We have, moreover, sanctioned arrangements whereby, when completed, the state of the children of other metropolitan parishes will be very materially improved.”

About nine hundred children are congregated at Norwood, and out of the whole number there is not perhaps a dozen the offspring of decent parents. Many are foundlings, picked up at the corners of streets, or at the doors of parish officers. The names of some of them suggest an idea of how they began life. Thus, one owned the name of Olive Jewry, whilst another was called Alfred City. Others have lost both parents by death, and been left puling living legacies to the parish, but the majority are the children of parents living in workhouses. When able-bodied paupers claim relief, they are “offered the house.” They are received into the Union, and their children are sent up to this out-of-town school, that fresh air, cleanliness, good food and the schoolmaster, may try what can be done to lift them up from the slough of pauperism. Let us examine the process through which they go.

The children, on their first appearance at this Norwood School, are usually in the most lamentable plight. Ignorance and dirt, rags and vermin, laziness and ill health, diseased scalps, and skins tortured by itch, are their characteristics. They are the very dregs of the population of the largest city in the world—the human waifs and strays of the modern Babylon; the children of poverty, and misery, and crime; in very many cases labouring under physical defects, such as bad sight or hearing; almost always stunted in their growth, and bearing the stamp of ugliness and suffering on their features. Generally born in dark alleys and back courts, their playground has been the streets, where the wits of many have been prematurely sharpened at the expense of any morals they might have. With minds and bodies destitute of proper nutriment, they are caught, as it were, by the parish officers, like half-wild creatures, roaming poverty-stricken amidst the wealth of our greatest city; and half-starved in a land where the law says no one shall be destitute of food and shelter. When their lucky fate sends them to Norwood, they are generally little personifications of genuine poverty—compounds, as somebody says, of ignorance, gin, and sprats.

A number of pauper children having been owned as chargeable upon the Central London District, to whom the Norwood School now belongs, and the requisite papers having been filled up, they are sent to Weston Hill. Arrived there, and their clothes having been steamed, if worth preservation, or burned if mere rags,—the new comers are well washed, have their hair cut, and are newly clad in clean and wholesome, but homely, garments. According to their ages, they are then drafted into a class; those between two and six years pass to the infant school; those of greater age are enrolled on the industrial side of the establishment. Now the training begins. They are all sent before the doctor, who usually finds them sallow and sickly; but by aid of Nature’s physic,—fresh air,—and Nature’s rule of exercise and regularity, assisted by extra diet, and with the occasional aid of some good London beef and porter, very few drugs are wanted, and their looks change for the better. Early in August, this year,—the period of our visit,—there were but two children confined to bed out of more than nine hundred; and those two were poor little scrofulous shadows of humanity, such as may be found in the top wards of hospitals, labouring under disease of the hip and spine,—paying the penalty of sins committed by their parents before them. There had recently been an epidemic of measles in the place, when that disease destroyed eight of the sickliest out of ninety cases. But for this, the mortality would not have gone beyond one in a hundred through the year. The summer is their healthiest season; for winter brings chilblains, a disease of poor blood, and ophthalmia, to which pauper children seem to be especially liable.

After their introduction to the doctor, the bath, the wardrobe, and the pantry, they are handed over to the schoolmaster or mistress, as the case may be. On the day of our visit, two hundred and forty boys were receiving instruction in one large new school-room; two hundred (infants between two and six years old) were being taught in another room; two hundred girls were reading, writing, and sewing in a third apartment; the rest of the occupants being at work, or at drill, or at play, in other parts of the establishment. The boys are kept four days a week at school, and two days at work in shops which we shall presently see and describe: the girls have three days’ schooling and three days’ training in household occupations,—such as cleaning the house, washing, ironing, mangling, and needlework. The way these portions of the establishment are arranged may possibly furnish materials for a future paper.

The school for the eldest boys is a long room newly built, with an enormous dormitory above it. The ventilation has been provided for in a way that seems very satisfactory. By day the boys are divided into six classes, ranged on forms with desks before them, each class being separated from the others by a curtain which hangs from the ceiling, and is sufficiently wide to separate the sections of scholars from each other, and to deaden the sounds of so large a seminary, but yet not wide enough to prevent the master as he stands on the side opposite his pupils, from getting a view of the entire school. Black boards and large slates are amongst the tools employed for conveying instruction, but the more advanced pupils are supplied with paper copy-books for writing lessons. The school is under the charge of a chief-master, far more competent than those usually found in schools beyond the pale of Government inspection. He is a B.A. of the University of London, is author of a small English grammar; and enjoys, as he deserves, a liberal salary. Under his hands the pupils appear to make excellent progress. The upper classes write well to dictation, are ready at figures, and are practised in the grammatical construction of English words and sentences. Twelve of the boys are in training as teachers, and six of these are now what is called “pupil-teachers,” and are entitled to an allowance of money by way of reward from the Privy Council. This allowance is set aside for them till they display, on examination, a sufficient proficiency to entitle them to admission to the training-school at Knellar Hall or Battersea. Whilst in these higher schools they receive the money set aside for them in the earlier stages of their school progress, and when, by successive examinations, their efficiency is sufficiently tested, they pass from the grade of pupil to that of master: the boys from Knellar Hall being appointed schoolmasters to Workhouses; the boys from Battersea to be masters of National Schools in various parts of the country. A boy gets this promotion in life by his own merits. For instance, at the Norwood Pauper-School, the most apt pupil becomes, as elsewhere, the monitor of his form or class. When the day of examination arrives, he distinguishes himself before the Government Inspector of Schools. This official is empowered thereupon to select him as a “pupil-teacher,” &c.; he becomes an apprentice to the art of instruction. To encourage the chief-master of the school to help on his boys to this reward, an allowance of three pounds a year is made to the master for each boy who thus distinguishes himself, and thus gains promotion. Thus, there being twelve boys at Norwood so in training, Mr. Imeson, their instructor, gains thirty-six pounds a year for his success in bringing forward that number of his scholars.

In appearance, the boys have little to recommend them, and it is tolerably evident, that if not raised a little in the social scale—if not taught to do something and know something—they would inevitably belong to the class of incurable paupers, who burden poor’s-rates and hang about workhouses all their lives. Society must educate such boys, if only in self-defence. Some of them are at first most turbulent, but by patient management they gradually subside into the orderly arrangements of the place, and often those at first most unruly become the quickest boys in the school. The energy that would make them nuisances, when rightly directed makes them most useful.

When the hours of teaching are over, the boys are assembled in one of the large open yards belonging to the establishment, and are there exercised by the drill-master. This official is an ex-non-commissioned officer of Guards, who in a short time makes the metamorphosis seen on parade. The ungainly, slouching, slow lout, is taught to march, wheel right or left, in concert with others, punctually and accurately. They answer the command, “left wheel,” “right form, four deep,” and so on, like little soldiers, and seem to like the fun. This gives them at once exercise in the fresh air, notions of regularity and prompt attention, and a habit of obedience to discipline.

There is also a naval class. Behind the school is a playground, two acres in extent, and in the centre of this stands a ship. True, its deck is of earth, but there are bulwarks, real bulwarks all round, and rising up above are genuine lofty masts, with rigging complete. Up these ropes the boys swarm with great delight. At a given signal they “man the yards,” give three miniature cheers, and then, all in chorus, sing God save the Queen. They evidently like the fun, pride themselves, boy-like, upon their feline power of climbing, and one or two of them show their expertness and bravery by disdaining the rope-ladder—pardon us, the shrouds—and slide down the main-stay from the top of the foremast to the bowsprit. All these things are evident sources of enjoyment; for running, and climbing, and shouting in the open air, are natural to the human animal in a normal state of existence. Of the climbing, there is a story told which illustrates the character of a very worthy man now passed away. Dr. Stanley, the late Bishop of Norwich, paid many visits to this school, and always looked on with evident pleasure whilst the lads were enjoying themselves with their ship. One day the good-natured dignitary was looking on, when he began to rub his hands together, and presently turning to an officer of the place who stood by, said in a genial, half confidential tone, “If I were not a bishop I’d join in and climb that pole myself!”

Besides this drill, or parade, and this exercise aloft, the boys, on two days of the week, are employed in the Industrial training of the place. The smaller boys, in classes of about thirty-five, are ranged on benches round a large tailor’s shop. Patterns decorate the walls, and “corduroys” in all stages, from the huge bale to the perfect breeches, are seen all round the room. The boys stitch and sew, and make and mend, under the instruction of a master tailor, a large part of the clothes worn in the place. When each boy grows bigger he is drafted into a neighbouring shop, where, also, under a competent master, he learns the craft of St. Crispin. It is curious to see thirty or forty little cobblers, all in rows, waxing and stitching, and hammering on lap-stones, and entering con amore into the mysteries of sole and upper leathers, brads, pegs, and sparrowbills. When they have learned all these things, some of the lads pass into a third shop, where they are made acquainted with the forge, and anvil, and sledge hammer, and where they help to shoe horses, construct iron bedsteads, and make and mend all the iron-work (and there is a great deal of it) required by this family party of nearly a thousand souls—pauper children, masters, and servants, together. After going through all these stages of training, with the incidental knowledge picked up in the stables with the horses, in the playground with the dogs, when helping to feed the pigs, and whilst aiding the operation of milking the twenty-five cows which supply milk for the house, the boys have acquired a great amount of useful knowledge. The place is indeed a little colony in itself, and if its inmates had not often to pass from it back to the sinkholes of London, they might leave Norwood almost with the certainty of becoming good and prosperous citizens.

Monthly Supplement of “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,”
Conducted by Charles Dickens.
Price 2d., Stamped, 3d.,
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF
CURRENT EVENTS.

The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with the Magazines.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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

- Renumbered footnotes.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 23, AUGUST 31, 1850 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

- A PAPER-MILL.

- CHEERFUL ARITHMETIC.

- AN EMIGRANT AFLOAT.

- THE SISTER’S FAREWELL.

- THE HOME OF WOODRUFFE THE GARDENER.

- IN EIGHT CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER THE FIFTH.

- CHAPTER THE SIXTH.

- LINES TO A DEAD LINNET.

- THE GOOD GOVERNOR.

- LONDON PAUPER CHILDREN.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE