This disinterested and wise movement is fraught with so many wholesome

changes in the lives of the working people, and with so much good in the

way of overcoming that suspicion which our own unconscious impertinence

has engendered, that it is scarcely gracious to criticise details as yet;

the rather, because it is indisputable that the managers of the

Whitechapel establishment most thoroughly feel that they are upon their

honour with the customers, as to the minutest points of administration.

But, although the American stoves cannot roast, they can surely boil one

kind of meat as well as another, and need not always circumscribe their

boiling talents within the limits of ham and beef. The most enthusiastic

admirer of those substantials, would probably not object to occasional

inconstancy in respect of pork and mutton: or, especially in cold

weather, to a little innocent trifling with Irish stews, meat pies, and

toads in holes. Another drawback on the Whitechapel establishment, is

the absence of beer. Regarded merely as a question of policy, it is very

impolitic, as having a tendency to send the working men to the

public-house, where gin is reported to be sold. But, there is a much

higher ground on which this absence of beer is objectionable. It

expresses distrust of the working man. It is a fragment of that old

mantle of patronage in which so many estimable Thugs, so darkly wandering

up and down the moral world, are sworn to muffle him. Good beer is a

good thing for him, he says, and he likes it; the Depôt could give it him

good, and he now gets it bad. Why does the Depôt not give it him good?

Because he would get drunk. Why does the Depôt not let him have a pint

with his dinner, which would not make him drunk? Because he might have

had another pint, or another two pints, before he came. Now, this

distrust is an affront, is exceedingly inconsistent with the confidence

the managers express in their hand-bills, and is a timid stopping-short

upon the straight highway. It is unjust and unreasonable, also. It is

unjust, because it punishes the sober man for the vice of the drunken

man. It is unreasonable, because any one at all experienced in such

things knows that the drunken workman does not get drunk where he goes to

eat and drink, but where he goes to drink—expressly to drink. To suppose

that the working man cannot state this question to himself quite as

plainly as I state it here, is to suppose that he is a baby, and is again

to tell him in the old wearisome, condescending, patronising way that he

must be goody-poody, and do as he is toldy-poldy, and not be a

manny-panny or a voter-poter, but fold his handy-pandys, and be a

childy-pildy.

I found from the accounts of the Whitechapel Self-Supporting Cooking

Depôt, that every article sold in it, even at the prices I have quoted,

yields a certain small profit! Individual speculators are of course

already in the field, and are of course already appropriating the name.

The classes for whose benefit the real depôts are designed, will

distinguish between the two kinds of enterprise.

XXVI

CHATHAM DOCKYARD

THERE are some small out-of-the-way landing places on the Thames and the

Medway, where I do much of my summer idling. Running water is favourable

to day-dreams, and a strong tidal river is the best of running water for

mine. I like to watch the great ships standing out to sea or coming home

richly laden, the active little steam-tugs confidently puffing with them

to and from the sea-horizon, the fleet of barges that seem to have

plucked their brown and russet sails from the ripe trees in the

landscape, the heavy old colliers, light in ballast, floundering down

before the tide, the light screw barks and schooners imperiously holding

a straight course while the others patiently tack and go about, the

yachts with their tiny hulls and great white sheets of canvas, the little

sailing-boats bobbing to and fro on their errands of pleasure or

business, and—as it is the nature of little people to do—making a

prodigious fuss about their small affairs. Watching these objects, I

still am under no obligation to think about them, or even so much as to

see them, unless it perfectly suits my humour. As little am I obliged to

hear the plash and flop of the tide, the ripple at my feet, the clinking

windlass afar off, or the humming steam-ship paddles further away yet.

These, with the creaking little jetty on which I sit, and the gaunt

high-water marks and low-water marks in the mud, and the broken causeway,

and the broken bank, and the broken stakes and piles leaning forward as

if they were vain of their personal appearance and looking for their

reflection in the water, will melt into any train of fancy. Equally

adaptable to any purpose or to none, are the posturing sheep and kine

upon the marshes, the gulls that wheel and dip around me, the crows (well

out of gunshot) going home from the rich harvest-fields, the heron that

has been out a-fishing and looks as melancholy, up there in the sky, as

if it hadn’t agreed with him. Everything within the range of the senses

will, by the aid of the running water, lend itself to everything beyond

that range, and work into a drowsy whole, not unlike a kind of tune, but

for which there is no exact definition.

One of these landing-places is near an old fort (I can see the Nore Light

from it with my pocket-glass), from which fort mysteriously emerges a

boy, to whom I am much indebted for additions to my scanty stock of

knowledge. He is a young boy, with an intelligent face burnt to a dust

colour by the summer sun, and with crisp hair of the same hue. He is a

boy in whom I have perceived nothing incompatible with habits of studious

inquiry and meditation, unless an evanescent black eye (I was delicate of

inquiring how occasioned) should be so considered. To him am I indebted

for ability to identify a Custom-house boat at any distance, and for

acquaintance with all the forms and ceremonies observed by a

homeward-bound Indiaman coming up the river, when the Custom-house

officers go aboard her. But for him, I might never have heard of ‘the

dumb-ague,’ respecting which malady I am now learned. Had I never sat at

his feet, I might have finished my mortal career and never known that

when I see a white horse on a barge’s sail, that barge is a lime barge.

For precious secrets in reference to beer, am I likewise beholden to him,

involving warning against the beer of a certain establishment, by reason

of its having turned sour through failure in point of demand: though my

young sage is not of opinion that similar deterioration has befallen the

ale. He has also enlightened me touching the mushrooms of the marshes,

and has gently reproved my ignorance in having supposed them to be

impregnated with salt. His manner of imparting information, is

thoughtful, and appropriate to the scene. As he reclines beside me, he

pitches into the river, a little stone or piece of grit, and then

delivers himself oracularly, as though he spoke out of the centre of the

spreading circle that it makes in the water. He never improves my mind

without observing this formula.

With the wise boy—whom I know by no other name than the Spirit of the

Fort—I recently consorted on a breezy day when the river leaped about us

and was full of life. I had seen the sheaved corn carrying in the golden

fields as I came down to the river; and the rosy farmer, watching his

labouring-men in the saddle on his cob, had told me how he had reaped his

two hundred and sixty acres of long-strawed corn last week, and how a

better week’s work he had never done in all his days. Peace and

abundance were on the country-side in beautiful forms and beautiful

colours, and the harvest seemed even to be sailing out to grace the

never-reaped sea in the yellow-laden barges that mellowed the distance.

It was on this occasion that the Spirit of the Fort, directing his

remarks to a certain floating iron battery lately lying in that reach of

the river, enriched my mind with his opinions on naval architecture, and

informed me that he would like to be an engineer. I found him up to

everything that is done in the contracting line by Messrs. Peto and

Brassey—cunning in the article of concrete—mellow in the matter of

iron—great on the subject of gunnery. When he spoke of pile-driving and

sluice-making, he left me not a leg to stand on, and I can never

sufficiently acknowledge his forbearance with me in my disabled state.

While he thus discoursed, he several times directed his eyes to one

distant quarter of the landscape, and spoke with vague mysterious awe of

‘the Yard.’ Pondering his lessons after we had parted, I bethought me

that the Yard was one of our large public Dockyards, and that it lay

hidden among the crops down in the dip behind the windmills, as if it

modestly kept itself out of view in peaceful times, and sought to trouble

no man. Taken with this modesty on the part of the Yard, I resolved to

improve the Yard’s acquaintance.

My good opinion of the Yard’s retiring character was not dashed by nearer

approach. It resounded with the noise of hammers beating upon iron; and

the great sheds or slips under which the mighty men-of-war are built,

loomed business-like when contemplated from the opposite side of the

river. For all that, however, the Yard made no display, but kept itself

snug under hill-sides of corn-fields, hop-gardens, and orchards; its

great chimneys smoking with a quiet—almost a lazy—air, like giants

smoking tobacco; and the great Shears moored off it, looking meekly and

inoffensively out of proportion, like the Giraffe of the machinery

creation. The store of cannon on the neighbouring gun-wharf, had an

innocent toy-like appearance, and the one red-coated sentry on duty over

them was a mere toy figure, with a clock-work movement. As the hot

sunlight sparkled on him he might have passed for the identical little

man who had the little gun, and whose bullets they were made of lead,

lead, lead.

Crossing the river and landing at the Stairs, where a drift of chips and

weed had been trying to land before me and had not succeeded, but had got

into a corner instead, I found the very street posts to be cannon, and

the architectural ornaments to be shells. And so I came to the Yard,

which was shut up tight and strong with great folded gates, like an

enormous patent safe. These gates devouring me, I became digested into

the Yard; and it had, at first, a clean-swept holiday air, as if it had

given over work until next war-time. Though indeed a quantity of hemp

for rope was tumbling out of store-houses, even there, which would hardly

be lying like so much hay on the white stones if the Yard were as placid

as it pretended.

Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong,

BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This is, or soon

will be, the Achilles, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve hundred men are

working at her now; twelve hundred men working on stages over her sides,

over her bows, over her stern, under her keel, between her decks, down in

her hold, within her and without, crawling and creeping into the finest

curves of her lines wherever it is possible for men to twist. Twelve

hundred hammerers, measurers, caulkers, armourers, forgers, smiths,

shipwrights; twelve hundred dingers, clashers, dongers, rattlers,

clinkers, bangers bangers bangers! Yet all this stupendous uproar around

the rising Achilles is as nothing to the reverberations with which the

perfected Achilles shall resound upon the dreadful day when the full work

is in hand for which this is but note of preparation—the day when the

scuppers that are now fitting like great, dry, thirsty conduit-pipes,

shall run red. All these busy figures between decks, dimly seen bending

at their work in smoke and fire, are as nothing to the figures that shall

do work here of another kind in smoke and fire, that day. These

steam-worked engines alongside, helping the ship by travelling to and

fro, and wafting tons of iron plates about, as though they were so many

leaves of trees, would be rent limb from limb if they stood by her for a

minute then. To think that this Achilles, monstrous compound of iron

tank and oaken chest, can ever swim or roll! To think that any force of

wind and wave could ever break her! To think that wherever I see a

glowing red-hot iron point thrust out of her side from within—as I do

now, there, and there, and there!—and two watching men on a stage

without, with bared arms and sledge-hammers, strike at it fiercely, and

repeat their blows until it is black and flat, I see a rivet being driven

home, of which there are many in every iron plate, and thousands upon

thousands in the ship! To think that the difficulty I experience in

appreciating the ship’s size when I am on board, arises from her being a

series of iron tanks and oaken chests, so that internally she is ever

finishing and ever beginning, and half of her might be smashed, and yet

the remaining half suffice and be sound. Then, to go over the side again

and down among the ooze and wet to the bottom of the dock, in the depths

of the subterranean forest of dog-shores and stays that hold her up, and

to see the immense mass bulging out against the upper light, and tapering

down towards me, is, with great pains and much clambering, to arrive at

an impossibility of realising that this is a ship at all, and to become

possessed by the fancy that it is an enormous immovable edifice set up in

an ancient amphitheatre (say, that at Verona), and almost filling it! Yet

what would even these things be, without the tributary workshops and the

mechanical powers for piercing the iron plates—four inches and a half

thick—for rivets, shaping them under hydraulic pressure to the finest

tapering turns of the ship’s lines, and paring them away, with knives

shaped like the beaks of strong and cruel birds, to the nicest

requirements of the design! These machines of tremendous force, so

easily directed by one attentive face and presiding hand, seem to me to

have in them something of the retiring character of the Yard. ‘Obedient

monster, please to bite this mass of iron through and through, at equal

distances, where these regular chalk-marks are, all round.’ Monster

looks at its work, and lifting its ponderous head, replies, ‘I don’t

particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’ The solid metal

wriggles out, hot from the monster’s crunching tooth, and it _is_ done.

‘Dutiful monster, observe this other mass of iron. It is required to be

pared away, according to this delicately lessening and arbitrary line,

which please to look at.’ Monster (who has been in a reverie) brings

down its blunt head, and, much in the manner of Doctor Johnson, closely

looks along the line—very closely, being somewhat near-sighted. ‘I don’t

particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’ Monster takes

another near-sighted look, takes aim, and the tortured piece writhes off,

and falls, a hot, tight-twisted snake, among the ashes. The making of

the rivets is merely a pretty round game, played by a man and a boy, who

put red-hot barley sugar in a Pope Joan board, and immediately rivets

fall out of window; but the tone of the great machines is the tone of the

great Yard and the great country: ‘We don’t particularly want to do it;

but if it must be done—!’

How such a prodigious mass as the Achilles can ever be held by such

comparatively little anchors as those intended for her and lying near her

here, is a mystery of seamanship which I will refer to the wise boy. For

my own part, I should as soon have thought of tethering an elephant to a

tent-peg, or the larger hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens to my

shirt-pin. Yonder in the river, alongside a hulk, lie two of this ship’s

hollow iron masts. _They_ are large enough for the eye, I find, and so

are all her other appliances. I wonder why only her anchors look small.

I have no present time to think about it, for I am going to see the

workshops where they make all the oars used in the British Navy. A

pretty large pile of building, I opine, and a pretty long job! As to the

building, I am soon disappointed, because the work is all done in one

loft. And as to a long job—what is this? Two rather large mangles with

a swarm of butterflies hovering over them? What can there be in the

mangles that attracts butterflies?

Drawing nearer, I discern that these are not mangles, but intricate

machines, set with knives and saws and planes, which cut smooth and

straight here, and slantwise there, and now cut such a depth, and now

miss cutting altogether, according to the predestined requirements of the

pieces of wood that are pushed on below them: each of which pieces is to

be an oar, and is roughly adapted to that purpose before it takes its

final leave of far-off forests, and sails for England. Likewise I

discern that the butterflies are not true butterflies, but wooden

shavings, which, being spirted up from the wood by the violence of the

machinery, and kept in rapid and not equal movement by the impulse of its

rotation on the air, flutter and play, and rise and fall, and conduct

themselves as like butterflies as heart could wish. Suddenly the noise

and motion cease, and the butterflies drop dead. An oar has been made

since I came in, wanting the shaped handle. As quickly as I can follow

it with my eye and thought, the same oar is carried to a turning lathe.

A whirl and a Nick! Handle made. Oar finished.

The exquisite beauty and efficiency of this machinery need no

illustration, but happen to have a pointed illustration to-day. A pair

of oars of unusual size chance to be wanted for a special purpose, and

they have to be made by hand. Side by side with the subtle and facile

machine, and side by side with the fast-growing pile of oars on the

floor, a man shapes out these special oars with an axe. Attended by no

butterflies, and chipping and dinting, by comparison as leisurely as if

he were a labouring Pagan getting them ready against his decease at

threescore and ten, to take with him as a present to Charon for his boat,

the man (aged about thirty) plies his task. The machine would make a

regulation oar while the man wipes his forehead. The man might be buried

in a mound made of the strips of thin, broad, wooden ribbon torn from the

wood whirled into oars as the minutes fall from the clock, before he had

done a forenoon’s work with his axe.

Passing from this wonderful sight to the Ships again—for my heart, as to

the Yard, is where the ships are—I notice certain unfinished wooden walls

left seasoning on the stocks, pending the solution of the merits of the

wood and iron question, and having an air of biding their time with surly

confidence. The names of these worthies are set up beside them, together

with their capacity in guns—a custom highly conducive to ease and

satisfaction in social intercourse, if it could be adapted to mankind.

By a plank more gracefully pendulous than substantial, I make bold to go

aboard a transport ship (iron screw) just sent in from the contractor’s

yard to be inspected and passed. She is a very gratifying experience, in

the simplicity and humanity of her arrangements for troops, in her

provision for light and air and cleanliness, and in her care for women

and children. It occurs to me, as I explore her, that I would require a

handsome sum of money to go aboard her, at midnight by the Dockyard bell,

and stay aboard alone till morning; for surely she must be haunted by a

crowd of ghosts of obstinate old martinets, mournfully flapping their

cherubic epaulettes over the changed times. Though still we may learn

from the astounding ways and means in our Yards now, more highly than

ever to respect the forefathers who got to sea, and fought the sea, and

held the sea, without them. This remembrance putting me in the best of

tempers with an old hulk, very green as to her copper, and generally dim

and patched, I pull off my hat to her. Which salutation a callow and

downy-faced young officer of Engineers, going by at the moment,

perceiving, appropriates—and to which he is most heartily welcome, I am

sure.

Having been torn to pieces (in imagination) by the steam circular saws,

perpendicular saws, horizontal saws, and saws of eccentric action, I come

to the sauntering part of my expedition, and consequently to the core of

my Uncommercial pursuits.

Everywhere, as I saunter up and down the Yard, I meet with tokens of its

quiet and retiring character. There is a gravity upon its red brick

offices and houses, a staid pretence of having nothing worth mentioning

to do, an avoidance of display, which I never saw out of England. The

white stones of the pavement present no other trace of Achilles and his

twelve hundred banging men (not one of whom strikes an attitude) than a

few occasional echoes. But for a whisper in the air suggestive of

sawdust and shavings, the oar-making and the saws of many movements might

be miles away. Down below here, is the great reservoir of water where

timber is steeped in various temperatures, as a part of its seasoning

process. Above it, on a tramroad supported by pillars, is a Chinese

Enchanter’s Car, which fishes the logs up, when sufficiently steeped, and

rolls smoothly away with them to stack them. When I was a child (the

Yard being then familiar to me) I used to think that I should like to

play at Chinese Enchanter, and to have that apparatus placed at my

disposal for the purpose by a beneficent country. I still think that I

should rather like to try the effect of writing a book in it. Its

retirement is complete, and to go gliding to and fro among the stacks of

timber would be a convenient kind of travelling in foreign

countries—among the forests of North America, the sodden Honduras swamps,

the dark pine woods, the Norwegian frosts, and the tropical heats, rainy

seasons, and thunderstorms. The costly store of timber is stacked and

stowed away in sequestered places, with the pervading avoidance of

flourish or effect. It makes as little of itself as possible, and calls

to no one ‘Come and look at me!’ And yet it is picked out from the trees

of the world; picked out for length, picked out for breadth, picked out

for straightness, picked out for crookedness, chosen with an eye to every

need of ship and boat. Strangely twisted pieces lie about, precious in

the sight of shipwrights. Sauntering through these groves, I come upon

an open glade where workmen are examining some timber recently delivered.

Quite a pastoral scene, with a background of river and windmill! and no

more like War than the American States are at present like an Union.

Sauntering among the ropemaking, I am spun into a state of blissful

indolence, wherein my rope of life seems to be so untwisted by the

process as that I can see back to very early days indeed, when my bad

dreams—they were frightful, though my more mature understanding has never

made out why—were of an interminable sort of ropemaking, with long minute

filaments for strands, which, when they were spun home together close to

my eyes, occasioned screaming. Next, I walk among the quiet lofts of

stores—of sails, spars, rigging, ships’ boats—determined to believe that

somebody in authority wears a girdle and bends beneath the weight of a

massive bunch of keys, and that, when such a thing is wanted, he comes

telling his keys like Blue Beard, and opens such a door. Impassive as

the long lofts look, let the electric battery send down the word, and the

shutters and doors shall fly open, and such a fleet of armed ships, under

steam and under sail, shall burst forth as will charge the old

Medway—where the merry Stuart let the Dutch come, while his not so merry

sailors starved in the streets—with something worth looking at to carry

to the sea. Thus I idle round to the Medway again, where it is now flood

tide; and I find the river evincing a strong solicitude to force a way

into the dry dock where Achilles is waited on by the twelve hundred

bangers, with intent to bear the whole away before they are ready.

To the last, the Yard puts a quiet face upon it; for I make my way to the

gates through a little quiet grove of trees, shading the quaintest of

Dutch landing-places, where the leaf-speckled shadow of a shipwright just

passing away at the further end might be the shadow of Russian Peter

himself. So, the doors of the great patent safe at last close upon me,

and I take boat again: somehow, thinking as the oars dip, of braggart

Pistol and his brood, and of the quiet monsters of the Yard, with their

‘We don’t particularly want to do it; but if it must be done—!’ Scrunch.

XXVII

IN THE FRENCH-FLEMISH COUNTRY

‘IT is neither a bold nor a diversified country,’ said I to myself, ‘this

country which is three-quarters Flemish, and a quarter French; yet it has

its attractions too. Though great lines of railway traverse it, the

trains leave it behind, and go puffing off to Paris and the South, to

Belgium and Germany, to the Northern Sea-Coast of France, and to England,

and merely smoke it a little in passing. Then I don’t know it, and that

is a good reason for being here; and I can’t pronounce half the long

queer names I see inscribed over the shops, and that is another good

reason for being here, since I surely ought to learn how.’ In short, I

was ‘here,’ and I wanted an excuse for not going away from here, and I

made it to my satisfaction, and stayed here.

What part in my decision was borne by Monsieur P. Salcy, is of no moment,

though I own to encountering that gentleman’s name on a red bill on the

wall, before I made up my mind. Monsieur P. Salcy, ‘par permission de M.

le Maire,’ had established his theatre in the whitewashed Hôtel de Ville,

on the steps of which illustrious edifice I stood. And Monsieur P.

Salcy, privileged director of such theatre, situate in ‘the first

theatrical arrondissement of the department of the North,’ invited

French-Flemish mankind to come and partake of the intellectual banquet

provided by his family of dramatic artists, fifteen subjects in number.

‘La Famille P. SALCY, composée d’artistes dramatiques, au nombre de 15

sujets.’

Neither a bold nor a diversified country, I say again, and withal an

untidy country, but pleasant enough to ride in, when the paved roads over

the flats and through the hollows, are not too deep in black mud. A

country so sparely inhabited, that I wonder where the peasants who till

and sow and reap the ground, can possibly dwell, and also by what

invisible balloons they are conveyed from their distant homes into the

fields at sunrise and back again at sunset. The occasional few poor

cottages and farms in this region, surely cannot afford shelter to the

numbers necessary to the cultivation, albeit the work is done so very

deliberately, that on one long harvest day I have seen, in twelve miles,

about twice as many men and women (all told) reaping and binding. Yet

have I seen more cattle, more sheep, more pigs, and all in better case,

than where there is purer French spoken, and also better ricks—round

swelling peg-top ricks, well thatched; not a shapeless brown heap, like

the toast of a Giant’s toast-and-water, pinned to the earth with one of

the skewers out of his kitchen. A good custom they have about here,

likewise, of prolonging the sloping tiled roof of farm or cottage, so

that it overhangs three or four feet, carrying off the wet, and making a

good drying-place wherein to hang up herbs, or implements, or what not.

A better custom than the popular one of keeping the refuse-heap and

puddle close before the house door: which, although I paint my dwelling

never so brightly blue (and it cannot be too blue for me, hereabouts),

will bring fever inside my door. Wonderful poultry of the French-Flemish

country, why take the trouble to _be_ poultry? Why not stop short at

eggs in the rising generation, and die out and have done with it?

Parents of chickens have I seen this day, followed by their wretched

young families, scratching nothing out of the mud with an air—tottering

about on legs so scraggy and weak, that the valiant word drumsticks

becomes a mockery when applied to them, and the crow of the lord and

master has been a mere dejected case of croup. Carts have I seen, and

other agricultural instruments, unwieldy, dislocated, monstrous.

Poplar-trees by the thousand fringe the fields and fringe the end of the

flat landscape, so that I feel, looking straight on before me, as if,

when I pass the extremest fringe on the low horizon, I shall tumble over

into space. Little whitewashed black holes of chapels, with barred doors

and Flemish inscriptions, abound at roadside corners, and often they are

garnished with a sheaf of wooden crosses, like children’s swords; or, in

their default, some hollow old tree with a saint roosting in it, is

similarly decorated, or a pole with a very diminutive saint enshrined

aloft in a sort of sacred pigeon-house. Not that we are deficient in

such decoration in the town here, for, over at the church yonder, outside

the building, is a scenic representation of the Crucifixion, built up

with old bricks and stones, and made out with painted canvas and wooden

figures: the whole surmounting the dusty skull of some holy personage

(perhaps), shut up behind a little ashy iron grate, as if it were

originally put there to be cooked, and the fire had long gone out. A

windmilly country this, though the windmills are so damp and rickety,

that they nearly knock themselves off their legs at every turn of their

sails, and creak in loud complaint. A weaving country, too, for in the

wayside cottages the loom goes wearily—rattle and click, rattle and

click—and, looking in, I see the poor weaving peasant, man or woman,

bending at the work, while the child, working too, turns a little

hand-wheel put upon the ground to suit its height. An unconscionable

monster, the loom in a small dwelling, asserting himself ungenerously as

the bread-winner, straddling over the children’s straw beds, cramping the

family in space and air, and making himself generally objectionable and

tyrannical. He is tributary, too, to ugly mills and factories and

bleaching-grounds, rising out of the sluiced fields in an abrupt bare

way, disdaining, like himself, to be ornamental or accommodating.

Surrounded by these things, here I stood on the steps of the Hôtel de

Ville, persuaded to remain by the P. Salcy family, fifteen dramatic

subjects strong.

There was a Fair besides. The double persuasion being irresistible, and

my sponge being left behind at the last Hotel, I made the tour of the

little town to buy another. In the small sunny shops—mercers, opticians,

and druggist-grocers, with here and there an emporium of religious

images—the gravest of old spectacled Flemish husbands and wives sat

contemplating one another across bare counters, while the wasps, who

seemed to have taken military possession of the town, and to have placed

it under wasp-martial law, executed warlike manœuvres in the windows.

Other shops the wasps had entirely to themselves, and nobody cared and

nobody came when I beat with a five-franc piece upon the board of custom.

What I sought was no more to be found than if I had sought a nugget of

Californian gold: so I went, spongeless, to pass the evening with the

Family P. Salcy.

The members of the Family P. Salcy were so fat and so like one

another—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, uncles, and aunts—that I

think the local audience were much confused about the plot of the piece

under representation, and to the last expected that everybody must turn

out to be the long-lost relative of everybody else. The Theatre was

established on the top story of the Hôtel de Ville, and was approached by

a long bare staircase, whereon, in an airy situation, one of the P. Salcy

Family—a stout gentleman imperfectly repressed by a belt—took the money.

This occasioned the greatest excitement of the evening; for, no sooner

did the curtain rise on the introductory Vaudeville, and reveal in the

person of the young lover (singing a very short song with his eyebrows)

apparently the very same identical stout gentleman imperfectly repressed

by a belt, than everybody rushed out to the paying-place, to ascertain

whether he could possibly have put on that dress-coat, that clear

complexion, and those arched black vocal eyebrows, in so short a space of

time. It then became manifest that this was another stout gentleman

imperfectly repressed by a belt: to whom, before the spectators had

recovered their presence of mind, entered a third stout gentleman

imperfectly repressed by a belt, exactly like him. These two ‘subjects,’

making with the money-taker three of the announced fifteen, fell into

conversation touching a charming young widow: who, presently appearing,

proved to be a stout lady altogether irrepressible by any means—quite a

parallel case to the American Negro—fourth of the fifteen subjects, and

sister of the fifth who presided over the check-department. In good time

the whole of the fifteen subjects were dramatically presented, and we had

the inevitable Ma Mère, Ma Mère! and also the inevitable malédiction d’un

père, and likewise the inevitable Marquis, and also the inevitable

provincial young man, weak-minded but faithful, who followed Julie to

Paris, and cried and laughed and choked all at once. The story was

wrought out with the help of a virtuous spinning-wheel in the beginning,

a vicious set of diamonds in the middle, and a rheumatic blessing (which

arrived by post) from Ma Mère towards the end; the whole resulting in a

small sword in the body of one of the stout gentlemen imperfectly

repressed by a belt, fifty thousand francs per annum and a decoration to

the other stout gentleman imperfectly repressed by a belt, and an

assurance from everybody to the provincial young man that if he were not

supremely happy—which he seemed to have no reason whatever for being—he

ought to be. This afforded him a final opportunity of crying and

laughing and choking all at once, and sent the audience home

sentimentally delighted. Audience more attentive or better behaved there

could not possibly be, though the places of second rank in the Theatre of

the Family P. Salcy were sixpence each in English money, and the places

of first rank a shilling. How the fifteen subjects ever got so fat upon

it, the kind Heavens know.

What gorgeous china figures of knights and ladies, gilded till they

gleamed again, I might have bought at the Fair for the garniture of my

home, if I had been a French-Flemish peasant, and had had the money!

What shining coffee-cups and saucers I might have won at the turntables,

if I had had the luck! Ravishing perfumery also, and sweetmeats, I might

have speculated in, or I might have fired for prizes at a multitude of

little dolls in niches, and might have hit the doll of dolls, and won

francs and fame. Or, being a French-Flemish youth, I might have been

drawn in a hand-cart by my compeers, to tilt for municipal rewards at the

water-quintain; which, unless I sent my lance clean through the ring,

emptied a full bucket over me; to fend off which, the competitors wore

grotesque old scarecrow hats. Or, being French-Flemish man or woman, boy

or girl, I might have circled all night on my hobby-horse in a stately

cavalcade of hobby-horses four abreast, interspersed with triumphal cars,

going round and round and round and round, we the goodly company singing

a ceaseless chorus to the music of the barrel-organ, drum, and cymbals.

On the whole, not more monotonous than the Ring in Hyde Park, London, and

much merrier; for when do the circling company sing chorus, _there_, to

the barrel-organ, when do the ladies embrace their horses round the neck

with both arms, when do the gentlemen fan the ladies with the tails of

their gallant steeds? On all these revolving delights, and on their own

especial lamps and Chinese lanterns revolving with them, the thoughtful

weaver-face brightens, and the Hôtel de Ville sheds an illuminated line

of gaslight: while above it, the Eagle of France, gas-outlined and

apparently afflicted with the prevailing infirmities that have lighted on

the poultry, is in a very undecided state of policy, and as a bird

moulting. Flags flutter all around. Such is the prevailing gaiety that

the keeper of the prison sits on the stone steps outside the prison-door,

to have a look at the world that is not locked up; while that agreeable

retreat, the wine-shop opposite to the prison in the prison-alley (its

sign La Tranquillité, because of its charming situation), resounds with

the voices of the shepherds and shepherdesses who resort there this

festive night. And it reminds me that only this afternoon, I saw a

shepherd in trouble, tending this way, over the jagged stones of a

neighbouring street. A magnificent sight it was, to behold him in his

blouse, a feeble little jog-trot rustic, swept along by the wind of two

immense gendarmes, in cocked-hats for which the street was hardly wide

enough, each carrying a bundle of stolen property that would not have

held his shoulder-knot, and clanking a sabre that dwarfed the prisoner.

‘Messieurs et Mesdames, I present to you at this Fair, as a mark of my

confidence in the people of this so-renowned town, and as an act of

homage to their good sense and fine taste, the Ventriloquist, the

Ventriloquist! Further, Messieurs et Mesdames, I present to you the

Face-Maker, the Physiognomist, the great Changer of Countenances, who

transforms the features that Heaven has bestowed upon him into an endless

succession of surprising and extraordinary visages, comprehending,

Messieurs et Mesdames, all the contortions, energetic and expressive, of

which the human face is capable, and all the passions of the human heart,

as Love, Jealousy, Revenge, Hatred, Avarice, Despair! Hi hi! Ho ho! Lu

lu! Come in!’ To this effect, with an occasional smite upon a sonorous

kind of tambourine—bestowed with a will, as if it represented the people

who won’t come in—holds forth a man of lofty and severe demeanour; a man

in stately uniform, gloomy with the knowledge he possesses of the inner

secrets of the booth. ‘Come in, come in! Your opportunity presents

itself to-night; to-morrow it will be gone for ever. To-morrow morning

by the Express Train the railroad will reclaim the Ventriloquist and the

Face-Maker! Algeria will reclaim the Ventriloquist and the Face-Maker!

Yes! For the honour of their country they have accepted propositions of

a magnitude incredible, to appear in Algeria. See them for the last time

before their departure! We go to commence on the instant. Hi hi! Ho

ho! Lu lu! Come in! Take the money that now ascends, Madame; but after

that, no more, for we commence! Come in!’

Nevertheless, the eyes both of the gloomy Speaker and of Madame receiving

sous in a muslin bower, survey the crowd pretty sharply after the

ascending money has ascended, to detect any lingering sous at the

turning-point. ‘Come in, come in! Is there any more money, Madame, on

the point of ascending? If so, we wait for it. If not, we commence!’

The orator looks back over his shoulder to say it, lashing the spectators

with the conviction that he beholds through the folds of the drapery into

which he is about to plunge, the Ventriloquist and the Face-Maker.

Several sous burst out of pockets, and ascend. ‘Come up, then,

Messieurs!’ exclaims Madame in a shrill voice, and beckoning with a

bejewelled finger. ‘Come up! This presses. Monsieur has commanded that

they commence!’ Monsieur dives into his Interior, and the last

half-dozen of us follow. His Interior is comparatively severe; his

Exterior also. A true Temple of Art needs nothing but seats, drapery, a

small table with two moderator lamps hanging over it, and an ornamental

looking-glass let into the wall. Monsieur in uniform gets behind the

table and surveys us with disdain, his forehead becoming diabolically

intellectual under the moderators. ‘Messieurs et Mesdames, I present to

you the Ventriloquist. He will commence with the celebrated Experience

of the bee in the window. The bee, apparently the veritable bee of

Nature, will hover in the window, and about the room. He will be with

difficulty caught in the hand of Monsieur the Ventriloquist—he will

escape—he will again hover—at length he will be recaptured by Monsieur

the Ventriloquist, and will be with difficulty put into a bottle.

Achieve then, Monsieur!’ Here the proprietor is replaced behind the

table by the Ventriloquist, who is thin and sallow, and of a weakly

aspect. While the bee is in progress, Monsieur the Proprietor sits apart

on a stool, immersed in dark and remote thought. The moment the bee is

bottled, he stalks forward, eyes us gloomily as we applaud, and then

announces, sternly waving his hand: ‘The magnificent Experience of the

child with the whooping-cough!’ The child disposed of, he starts up as

before. ‘The superb and extraordinary Experience of the dialogue between

Monsieur Tatambour in his dining-room, and his domestic, Jerome, in the

cellar; concluding with the songsters of the grove, and the Concert of

domestic Farm-yard animals.’ All this done, and well done, Monsieur the

Ventriloquist withdraws, and Monsieur the Face-Maker bursts in, as if his

retiring-room were a mile long instead of a yard. A corpulent little man

in a large white waistcoat, with a comic countenance, and with a wig in

his hand. Irreverent disposition to laugh, instantly checked by the

tremendous gravity of the Face-Maker, who intimates in his bow that if we

expect that sort of thing we are mistaken. A very little shaving-glass

with a leg behind it is handed in, and placed on the table before the

Face-Maker. ‘Messieurs et Mesdames, with no other assistance than this

mirror and this wig, I shall have the honour of showing you a thousand

characters.’ As a preparation, the Face-Maker with both hands gouges

himself, and turns his mouth inside out. He then becomes frightfully

grave again, and says to the Proprietor, ‘I am ready!’ Proprietor stalks

forth from baleful reverie, and announces ‘The Young Conscript!’

Face-Maker claps his wig on, hind side before, looks in the glass, and

appears above it as a conscript so very imbecile, and squinting so

extremely hard, that I should think the State would never get any good of

him. Thunders of applause. Face-Maker dips behind the looking-glass,

brings his own hair forward, is himself again, is awfully grave. ‘A

distinguished inhabitant of the Faubourg St. Germain.’ Face-Maker dips,

rises, is supposed to be aged, blear-eyed, toothless, slightly palsied,

supernaturally polite, evidently of noble birth. ‘The oldest member of

the Corps of Invalides on the fête-day of his master.’ Face-Maker dips,

rises, wears the wig on one side, has become the feeblest military bore

in existence, and (it is clear) would lie frightfully about his past

achievements, if he were not confined to pantomime. ‘The Miser!’

Face-Maker dips, rises, clutches a bag, and every hair of the wig is on

end to express that he lives in continual dread of thieves. ‘The Genius

of France!’ Face-Maker dips, rises, wig pushed back and smoothed flat,

little cocked-hat (artfully concealed till now) put a-top of it,

Face-Maker’s white waistcoat much advanced, Face-Maker’s left hand in

bosom of white waistcoat, Face-Maker’s right hand behind his back.

Thunders. This is the first of three positions of the Genius of France.

In the second position, the Face-Maker takes snuff; in the third, rolls

up his fight hand, and surveys illimitable armies through that

pocket-glass. The Face-Maker then, by putting out his tongue, and

wearing the wig nohow in particular, becomes the Village Idiot. The most

remarkable feature in the whole of his ingenious performance, is, that

whatever he does to disguise himself, has the effect of rendering him

rather more like himself than he was at first.

There were peep-shows in this Fair, and I had the pleasure of recognising

several fields of glory with which I became well acquainted a year or two

ago as Crimean battles, now doing duty as Mexican victories. The change

was neatly effected by some extra smoking of the Russians, and by

permitting the camp followers free range in the foreground to despoil the

enemy of their uniforms. As no British troops had ever happened to be

within sight when the artist took his original sketches, it followed

fortunately that none were in the way now.

The Fair wound up with a ball. Respecting the particular night of the

week on which the ball took place, I decline to commit myself; merely

mentioning that it was held in a stable-yard so very close to the

railway, that it was a mercy the locomotive did not set fire to it. (In

Scotland, I suppose, it would have done so.) There, in a tent prettily

decorated with looking-glasses and a myriad of toy flags, the people

danced all night. It was not an expensive recreation, the price of a

double ticket for a cavalier and lady being one and threepence in English

money, and even of that small sum fivepence was reclaimable for

‘consommation:’ which word I venture to translate into refreshments of no

greater strength, at the strongest, than ordinary wine made hot, with

sugar and lemon in it. It was a ball of great good humour and of great

enjoyment, though very many of the dancers must have been as poor as the

fifteen subjects of the P. Salcy Family.

In short, not having taken my own pet national pint pot with me to this

Fair, I was very well satisfied with the measure of simple enjoyment that

it poured into the dull French-Flemish country life. How dull that is, I

had an opportunity of considering—when the Fair was over—when the

tri-coloured flags were withdrawn from the windows of the houses on the

Place where the Fair was held—when the windows were close shut,

apparently until next Fair-time—when the Hôtel de Ville had cut off its

gas and put away its eagle—when the two paviours, whom I take to form the

entire paving population of the town, were ramming down the stones which

had been pulled up for the erection of decorative poles—when the jailer

had slammed his gate, and sulkily locked himself in with his charges.

But then, as I paced the ring which marked the track of the departed

hobby-horses on the market-place, pondering in my mind how long some

hobby-horses do leave their tracks in public ways, and how difficult they

are to erase, my eyes were greeted with a goodly sight. I beheld four

male personages thoughtfully pacing the Place together, in the sunlight,

evidently not belonging to the town, and having upon them a certain loose

cosmopolitan air of not belonging to any town. One was clad in a suit of

white canvas, another in a cap and blouse, the third in an old military

frock, the fourth in a shapeless dress that looked as if it had been made

out of old umbrellas. All wore dust-coloured shoes. My heart beat high;

for, in those four male personages, although complexionless and

eyebrowless, I beheld four subjects of the Family P. Salcy. Blue-bearded

though they were, and bereft of the youthful smoothness of cheek which is

imparted by what is termed in Albion a ‘Whitechapel shave’ (and which is,

in fact, whitening, judiciously applied to the jaws with the palm of the

hand), I recognised them. As I stood admiring, there emerged from the

yard of a lowly Cabaret, the excellent Ma Mère, Ma Mère, with the words,

‘The soup is served;’ words which so elated the subject in the canvas

suit, that when they all ran in to partake, he went last, dancing with

his hands stuck angularly into the pockets of his canvas trousers, after

the Pierrot manner. Glancing down the Yard, the last I saw of him was,

that he looked in through a window (at the soup, no doubt) on one leg.

Full of this pleasure, I shortly afterwards departed from the town,

little dreaming of an addition to my good fortune. But more was in

reserve. I went by a train which was heavy with third-class carriages,

full of young fellows (well guarded) who had drawn unlucky numbers in the

last conscription, and were on their way to a famous French garrison town

where much of the raw military material is worked up into soldiery. At

the station they had been sitting about, in their threadbare homespun

blue garments, with their poor little bundles under their arms, covered

with dust and clay, and the various soils of France; sad enough at heart,

most of them, but putting a good face upon it, and slapping their breasts

and singing choruses on the smallest provocation; the gayest spirits

shouldering half loaves of black bread speared upon their walking-sticks.

As we went along, they were audible at every station, chorusing wildly

out of tune, and feigning the highest hilarity. After a while, however,

they began to leave off singing, and to laugh naturally, while at

intervals there mingled with their laughter the barking of a dog. Now, I

had to alight short of their destination, and, as that stoppage of the

train was attended with a quantity of horn blowing, bell ringing, and

proclamation of what Messieurs les Voyageurs were to do, and were not to

do, in order to reach their respective destinations, I had ample leisure

to go forward on the platform to take a parting look at my recruits,

whose heads were all out at window, and who were laughing like delighted

children. Then I perceived that a large poodle with a pink nose, who had

been their travelling companion and the cause of their mirth, stood on

his hind-legs presenting arms on the extreme verge of the platform, ready

to salute them as the train went off. This poodle wore a military shako

(it is unnecessary to add, very much on one side over one eye), a little

military coat, and the regulation white gaiters. He was armed with a

little musket and a little sword-bayonet, and he stood presenting arms in

perfect attitude, with his unobscured eye on his master or superior

officer, who stood by him. So admirable was his discipline, that, when

the train moved, and he was greeted with the parting cheers of the

recruits, and also with a shower of centimes, several of which struck his

shako, and had a tendency to discompose him, he remained staunch on his

post, until the train was gone. He then resigned his arms to his

officer, took off his shako by rubbing his paw over it, dropped on four

legs, bringing his uniform coat into the absurdest relations with the

overarching skies, and ran about the platform in his white gaiters,

waging his tail to an exceeding great extent. It struck me that there

was more waggery than this in the poodle, and that he knew that the

recruits would neither get through their exercises, nor get rid of their

uniforms, as easily as he; revolving which in my thoughts, and seeking in

my pockets some small money to bestow upon him, I casually directed my

eyes to the face of his superior officer, and in him beheld the

Face-Maker! Though it was not the way to Algeria, but quite the reverse,

the military poodle’s Colonel was the Face-Maker in a dark blouse, with a

small bundle dangling over his shoulder at the end of an umbrella, and

taking a pipe from his breast to smoke as he and the poodle went their

mysterious way.

XXVIII

MEDICINE MEN OF CIVILISATION

MY voyages (in paper boats) among savages often yield me matter for

reflection at home. It is curious to trace the savage in the civilised

man, and to detect the hold of some savage customs on conditions of

society rather boastful of being high above them.

I wonder, is the Medicine Man of the North American Indians never to be

got rid of, out of the North American country? He comes into my Wigwam

on all manner of occasions, and with the absurdest ‘Medicine.’ I always

find it extremely difficult, and I often find it simply impossible, to

keep him out of my Wigwam. For his legal ‘Medicine’ he sticks upon his

head the hair of quadrupeds, and plasters the same with fat, and dirty

white powder, and talks a gibberish quite unknown to the men and squaws

of his tribe. For his religious ‘Medicine’ he puts on puffy white

sleeves, little black aprons, large black waistcoats of a peculiar cut,

collarless coats with Medicine button-holes, Medicine stockings and

gaiters and shoes, and tops the whole with a highly grotesque Medicinal

hat. In one respect, to be sure, I am quite free from him. On occasions

when the Medicine Men in general, together with a large number of the

miscellaneous inhabitants of his village, both male and female, are

presented to the principal Chief, his native ‘Medicine’ is a comical

mixture of old odds and ends (hired of traders) and new things in

antiquated shapes, and pieces of red cloth (of which he is particularly

fond), and white and red and blue paint for the face. The irrationality

of this particular Medicine culminates in a mock battle-rush, from which

many of the squaws are borne out, much dilapidated. I need not observe

how unlike this is to a Drawing Room at St. James’s Palace.

The African magician I find it very difficult to exclude from my Wigwam

too. This creature takes cases of death and mourning under his

supervision, and will frequently impoverish a whole family by his

preposterous enchantments. He is a great eater and drinker, and always

conceals a rejoicing stomach under a grieving exterior. His charms

consist of an infinite quantity of worthless scraps, for which he charges

very high. He impresses on the poor bereaved natives, that the more of

his followers they pay to exhibit such scraps on their persons for an

hour or two (though they never saw the deceased in their lives, and are

put in high spirits by his decease), the more honourably and piously they

grieve for the dead. The poor people submitting themselves to this

conjurer, an expensive procession is formed, in which bits of stick,

feathers of birds, and a quantity of other unmeaning objects besmeared

with black paint, are carried in a certain ghastly order of which no one

understands the meaning, if it ever had any, to the brink of the grave,

and are then brought back again.

In the Tonga Islands everything is supposed to have a soul, so that when

a hatchet is irreparably broken, they say, ‘His immortal part has

departed; he is gone to the happy hunting-plains.’ This belief leads to

the logical sequence that when a man is buried, some of his eating and

drinking vessels, and some of his warlike implements, must be broken and

buried with him. Superstitious and wrong, but surely a more respectable

superstition than the hire of antic scraps for a show that has no meaning

based on any sincere belief.

Let me halt on my Uncommercial road, to throw a passing glance on some

funeral solemnities that I have seen where North American Indians,

African Magicians, and Tonga Islanders, are supposed not to be.

Once, I dwelt in an Italian city, where there dwelt with me for a while,

an Englishman of an amiable nature, great enthusiasm, and no discretion.

This friend discovered a desolate stranger, mourning over the unexpected

death of one very dear to him, in a solitary cottage among the vineyards

of an outlying village. The circumstances of the bereavement were

unusually distressing; and the survivor, new to the peasants and the

country, sorely needed help, being alone with the remains. With some

difficulty, but with the strong influence of a purpose at once gentle,

disinterested, and determined, my friend—Mr. Kindheart—obtained access to

the mourner, and undertook to arrange the burial.

There was a small Protestant cemetery near the city walls, and as Mr.

Kindheart came back to me, he turned into it and chose the spot. He was

always highly flushed when rendering a service unaided, and I knew that

to make him happy I must keep aloof from his ministration. But when at

dinner he warmed with the good action of the day, and conceived the

brilliant idea of comforting the mourner with ‘an English funeral,’ I

ventured to intimate that I thought that institution, which was not

absolutely sublime at home, might prove a failure in Italian hands.

However, Mr. Kindheart was so enraptured with his conception, that he

presently wrote down into the town requesting the attendance with

to-morrow’s earliest light of a certain little upholsterer. This

upholsterer was famous for speaking the unintelligible local dialect (his

own) in a far more unintelligible manner than any other man alive.

When from my bath next morning I overheard Mr. Kindheart and the

upholsterer in conference on the top of an echoing staircase; and when I

overheard Mr. Kindheart rendering English Undertaking phrases into very

choice Italian, and the upholsterer replying in the unknown Tongues; and

when I furthermore remembered that the local funerals had no resemblance

to English funerals; I became in my secret bosom apprehensive. But Mr.

Kindheart informed me at breakfast that measures had been taken to ensure

a signal success.

As the funeral was to take place at sunset, and as I knew to which of the

city gates it must tend, I went out at that gate as the sun descended,

and walked along the dusty, dusty road. I had not walked far, when I

encountered this procession:

1. Mr. Kindheart, much abashed, on an immense grey horse.

2. A bright yellow coach and pair, driven by a coachman in bright red

velvet knee-breeches and waistcoat. (This was the established local idea

of State.) Both coach doors kept open by the coffin, which was on its

side within, and sticking out at each.

3. Behind the coach, the mourner, for whom the coach was intended,

walking in the dust.

4. Concealed behind a roadside well for the irrigation of a garden, the

unintelligible Upholsterer, admiring.

It matters little now. Coaches of all colours are alike to poor

Kindheart, and he rests far North of the little cemetery with the

cypress-trees, by the city walls where the Mediterranean is so beautiful.

My first funeral, a fair representative funeral after its kind, was that

of the husband of a married servant, once my nurse. She married for

money. Sally Flanders, after a year or two of matrimony, became the

relict of Flanders, a small master builder; and either she or Flanders

had done me the honour to express a desire that I should ‘follow.’ I may

have been seven or eight years old;—young enough, certainly, to feel

rather alarmed by the expression, as not knowing where the invitation was

held to terminate, and how far I was expected to follow the deceased

Flanders. Consent being given by the heads of houses, I was jobbed up

into what was pronounced at home decent mourning (comprehending somebody

else’s shirt, unless my memory deceives me), and was admonished that if,

when the funeral was in action, I put my hands in my pockets, or took my

eyes out of my pocket-handkerchief, I was personally lost, and my family

disgraced. On the eventful day, having tried to get myself into a

disastrous frame of mind, and having formed a very poor opinion of myself

because I couldn’t cry, I repaired to Sally’s. Sally was an excellent

creature, and had been a good wife to old Flanders, but the moment I saw

her I knew that she was not in her own real natural state. She formed a

sort of Coat of Arms, grouped with a smelling-bottle, a handkerchief, an

orange, a bottle of vinegar, Flanders’s sister, her own sister,

Flanders’s brother’s wife, and two neighbouring gossips—all in mourning,

and all ready to hold her whenever she fainted. At sight of poor little

me she became much agitated (agitating me much more), and having

exclaimed, ‘O here’s dear Master Uncommercial!’ became hysterical, and

swooned as if I had been the death of her. An affecting scene followed,

during which I was handed about and poked at her by various people, as if

I were the bottle of salts. Reviving a little, she embraced me, said,

‘You knew him well, dear Master Uncommercial, and he knew you!’ and

fainted again: which, as the rest of the Coat of Arms soothingly said,

‘done her credit.’ Now, I knew that she needn’t have fainted unless she

liked, and that she wouldn’t have fainted unless it had been expected of

her, quite as well as I know it at this day. It made me feel

uncomfortable and hypocritical besides. I was not sure but that it might

be manners in _me_ to faint next, and I resolved to keep my eye on

Flanders’s uncle, and if I saw any signs of his going in that direction,

to go too, politely. But Flanders’s uncle (who was a weak little old

retail grocer) had only one idea, which was that we all wanted tea; and

he handed us cups of tea all round, incessantly, whether we refused or

not. There was a young nephew of Flanders’s present, to whom Flanders,

it was rumoured, had left nineteen guineas. He drank all the tea that

was offered him, this nephew—amounting, I should say, to several

quarts—and ate as much plum-cake as he could possibly come by; but he

felt it to be decent mourning that he should now and then stop in the

midst of a lump of cake, and appear to forget that his mouth was full, in

the contemplation of his uncle’s memory. I felt all this to be the fault

of the undertaker, who was handing us gloves on a tea-tray as if they

were muffins, and tying us into cloaks (mine had to be pinned up all

round, it was so long for me), because I knew that he was making game.

So, when we got out into the streets, and I constantly disarranged the

procession by tumbling on the people before me because my handkerchief

blinded my eyes, and tripping up the people behind me because my cloak

was so long, I felt that we were all making game. I was truly sorry for

Flanders, but I knew that it was no reason why we should be trying (the

women with their heads in hoods like coal-scuttles with the black side

outward) to keep step with a man in a scarf, carrying a thing like a

mourning spy-glass, which he was going to open presently and sweep the

horizon with. I knew that we should not all have been speaking in one

particular key-note struck by the undertaker, if we had not been making

game. Even in our faces we were every one of us as like the undertaker

as if we had been his own family, and I perceived that this could not

have happened unless we had been making game. When we returned to

Sally’s, it was all of a piece. The continued impossibility of getting

on without plum-cake; the ceremonious apparition of a pair of decanters

containing port and sherry and cork; Sally’s sister at the tea-table,

clinking the best crockery and shaking her head mournfully every time she

looked down into the teapot, as if it were the tomb; the Coat of Arms

again, and Sally as before; lastly, the words of consolation administered

to Sally when it was considered right that she should ‘come round

nicely:’ which were, that the deceased had had ‘as com-for-ta-ble a

fu-ne-ral as comfortable could be!’

Other funerals have I seen with grown-up eyes, since that day, of which

the burden has been the same childish burden. Making game. Real

affliction, real grief and solemnity, have been outraged, and the funeral

has been ‘performed.’ The waste for which the funeral customs of many

tribes of savages are conspicuous, has attended these civilised

obsequies; and once, and twice, have I wished in my soul that if the

waste must be, they would let the undertaker bury the money, and let me

bury the friend.

In France, upon the whole, these ceremonies are more sensibly regulated,

because they are upon the whole less expensively regulated. I cannot say

that I have ever been much edified by the custom of tying a bib and apron

on the front of the house of mourning, or that I would myself

particularly care to be driven to my grave in a nodding and bobbing car,

like an infirm four-post bedstead, by an inky fellow-creature in a

cocked-hat. But it may be that I am constitutionally insensible to the

virtues of a cocked-hat. In provincial France, the solemnities are

sufficiently hideous, but are few and cheap. The friends and townsmen of

the departed, in their own dresses and not masquerading under the

auspices of the African Conjurer, surround the hand-bier, and often carry

it. It is not considered indispensable to stifle the bearers, or even to

elevate the burden on their shoulders; consequently it is easily taken

up, and easily set down, and is carried through the streets without the

distressing floundering and shuffling that we see at home. A dirty

priest or two, and a dirtier acolyte or two, do not lend any especial

grace to the proceedings; and I regard with personal animosity the

bassoon, which is blown at intervals by the big-legged priest (it is

always a big-legged priest who blows the bassoon), when his fellows

combine in a lugubrious stalwart drawl. But there is far less of the

Conjurer and the Medicine Man in the business than under like

circumstances here. The grim coaches that we reserve expressly for such

shows, are non-existent; if the cemetery be far out of the town, the

coaches that are hired for other purposes of life are hired for this

purpose; and although the honest vehicles make no pretence of being

overcome, I have never noticed that the people in them were the worse for

it. In Italy, the hooded Members of Confraternities who attend on

funerals, are dismal and ugly to look upon; but the services they render

are at least voluntarily rendered, and impoverish no one, and cost

nothing. Why should high civilisation and low savagery ever come

together on the point of making them a wantonly wasteful and contemptible

set of forms?

Once I lost a friend by death, who had been troubled in his time by the

Medicine Man and the Conjurer, and upon whose limited resources there

were abundant claims. The Conjurer assured me that I must positively

‘follow,’ and both he and the Medicine Man entertained no doubt that I

must go in a black carriage, and must wear ‘fittings.’ I objected to

fittings as having nothing to do with my friendship, and I objected to

the black carriage as being in more senses than one a job. So, it came

into my mind to try what would happen if I quietly walked, in my own way,

from my own house to my friend’s burial-place, and stood beside his open

grave in my own dress and person, reverently listening to the best of

Services. It satisfied my mind, I found, quite as well as if I had been

disguised in a hired hatband and scarf both trailing to my very heels,

and as if I had cost the orphan children, in their greatest need, ten

guineas.

Can any one who ever beheld the stupendous absurdities attendant on ‘A

message from the Lords’ in the House of Commons, turn upon the Medicine

Man of the poor Indians? Has he any ‘Medicine’ in that dried skin pouch

of his, so supremely ludicrous as the two Masters in Chancery holding up

their black petticoats and butting their ridiculous wigs at Mr. Speaker?

Yet there are authorities innumerable to tell me—as there are authorities

innumerable among the Indians to tell them—that the nonsense is

indispensable, and that its abrogation would involve most awful

consequences. What would any rational creature who had never heard of

judicial and forensic ‘fittings,’ think of the Court of Common Pleas on

the first day of Term? Or with what an awakened sense of humour would

LIVINGSTONE’S account of a similar scene be perused, if the fur and red

cloth and goats’ hair and horse hair and powdered chalk and black patches

on the top of the head, were all at Tala Mungongo instead of Westminster?

That model missionary and good brave man found at least one tribe of

blacks with a very strong sense of the ridiculous, insomuch that although

an amiable and docile people, they never could see the Missionaries

dispose of their legs in the attitude of kneeling, or hear them begin a

hymn in chorus, without bursting into roars of irrepressible laughter.

It is much to be hoped that no member of this facetious tribe may ever

find his way to England and get committed for contempt of Court.

In the Tonga Island already mentioned, there are a set of personages

called Mataboos—or some such name—who are the masters of all the public

ceremonies, and who know the exact place in which every chief must sit

down when a solemn public meeting takes place: a meeting which bears a

family resemblance to our own Public Dinner, in respect of its being a

main part of the proceedings that every gentleman present is required to

drink something nasty. These Mataboos are a privileged order, so

important is their avocation, and they make the most of their high

functions. A long way out of the Tonga Islands, indeed, rather near the

British Islands, was there no calling in of the Mataboos the other day to

settle an earth-convulsing question of precedence; and was there no

weighty opinion delivered on the part of the Mataboos which, being

interpreted to that unlucky tribe of blacks with the sense of the

ridiculous, would infallibly set the whole population screaming with

laughter?

My sense of justice demands the admission, however, that this is not

quite a one-sided question. If we submit ourselves meekly to the

Medicine Man and the Conjurer, and are not exalted by it, the savages may

retort upon us that we act more unwisely than they in other matters

wherein we fail to imitate them. It is a widely diffused custom among

savage tribes, when they meet to discuss any affair of public importance,

to sit up all night making a horrible noise, dancing, blowing shells, and

(in cases where they are familiar with fire-arms) flying out into open

places and letting off guns. It is questionable whether our legislative

assemblies might not take a hint from this. A shell is not a melodious

wind-instrument, and it is monotonous; but it is as musical as, and not

more monotonous than, my Honourable friend’s own trumpet, or the trumpet

that he blows so hard for the Minister. The uselessness of arguing with

any supporter of a Government or of an Opposition, is well known. Try

dancing. It is a better exercise, and has the unspeakable recommendation

that it couldn’t be reported. The honourable and savage member who has a

loaded gun, and has grown impatient of debate, plunges out of doors,

fires in the air, and returns calm and silent to the Palaver. Let the

honourable and civilised member similarly charged with a speech, dart

into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey in the silence of night, let his

speech off, and come back harmless. It is not at first sight a very

rational custom to paint a broad blue stripe across one’s nose and both

cheeks, and a broad red stripe from the forehead to the chin, to attach a

few pounds of wood to one’s under lip, to stick fish-bones in one’s ears

and a brass curtain-ring in one’s nose, and to rub one’s body all over

with rancid oil, as a preliminary to entering on business. But this is a

question of taste and ceremony, and so is the Windsor Uniform. The

manner of entering on the business itself is another question. A council

of six hundred savage gentlemen entirely independent of tailors, sitting

on their hams in a ring, smoking, and occasionally grunting, seem to me,

according to the experience I have gathered in my voyages and travels,

somehow to do what they come together for; whereas that is not at all the

general experience of a council of six hundred civilised gentlemen very

dependent on tailors and sitting on mechanical contrivances. It is

better that an Assembly should do its utmost to envelop itself in smoke,

than that it should direct its endeavours to enveloping the public in

smoke; and I would rather it buried half a hundred hatchets than buried

one subject demanding attention.

XXIX

TITBULL’S ALMS-HOUSES

BY the side of most railways out of London, one may see Alms-Houses and

Retreats (generally with a Wing or a Centre wanting, and ambitious of

being much bigger than they are), some of which are newly-founded

Institutions, and some old establishments transplanted. There is a

tendency in these pieces of architecture to shoot upward unexpectedly,

like Jack’s bean-stalk, and to be ornate in spires of Chapels and

lanterns of Halls, which might lead to the embellishment of the air with

many castles of questionable beauty but for the restraining consideration

of expense. However, the manners, being always of a sanguine

temperament, comfort themselves with plans and elevations of Loomings in

the future, and are influenced in the present by philanthropy towards the

railway passengers. For, the question how prosperous and promising the

buildings can be made to look in their eyes, usually supersedes the

lesser question how they can be turned to the best account for the

inmates.

Why none of the people who reside in these places ever look out of

window, or take an airing in the piece of ground which is going to be a

garden by-and-by, is one of the wonders I have added to my

always-lengthening list of the wonders of the world. I have got it into

my mind that they live in a state of chronic injury and resentment, and

on that account refuse to decorate the building with a human interest.

As I have known legatees deeply injured by a bequest of five hundred

pounds because it was not five thousand, and as I was once acquainted

with a pensioner on the Public to the extent of two hundred a year, who

perpetually anathematised his Country because he was not in the receipt

of four, having no claim whatever to sixpence: so perhaps it usually

happens, within certain limits, that to get a little help is to get a

notion of being defrauded of more. ‘How do they pass their lives in this

beautiful and peaceful place!’ was the subject of my speculation with a

visitor who once accompanied me to a charming rustic retreat for old men

and women: a quaint ancient foundation in a pleasant English country,

behind a picturesque church and among rich old convent gardens. There

were but some dozen or so of houses, and we agreed that we would talk

with the inhabitants, as they sat in their groined rooms between the

light of their fires and the light shining in at their latticed windows,

and would find out. They passed their lives in considering themselves

mulcted of certain ounces of tea by a deaf old steward who lived among

them in the quadrangle. There was no reason to suppose that any such

ounces of tea had ever been in existence, or that the old steward so much

as knew what was the matter;—he passed _his_ life in considering himself

periodically defrauded of a birch-broom by the beadle.

But it is neither to old Alms-Houses in the country, nor to new

Alms-Houses by the railroad, that these present Uncommercial notes

relate. They refer back to journeys made among those common-place,

smoky-fronted London Alms-Houses, with a little paved court-yard in front

enclosed by iron railings, which have got snowed up, as it were, by

bricks and mortar; which were once in a suburb, but are now in the

densely populated town; gaps in the busy life around them, parentheses in

the close and blotted texts of the streets.

Sometimes, these Alms-Houses belong to a Company or Society. Sometimes,

they were established by individuals, and are maintained out of private

funds bequeathed in perpetuity long ago. My favourite among them is

Titbull’s, which establishment is a picture of many. Of Titbull I know

no more than that he deceased in 1723, that his Christian name was

Sampson, and his social designation Esquire, and that he founded these

Alms-Houses as Dwellings for Nine Poor Women and Six Poor Men by his Will

and Testament. I should not know even this much, but for its being

inscribed on a grim stone very difficult to read, let into the front of

the centre house of Titbull’s Alms-Houses, and which stone is ornamented

a-top with a piece of sculptured drapery resembling the effigy of

Titbull’s bath-towel.

Titbull’s Alms-Houses are in the east of London, in a great highway, in a

poor, busy, and thronged neighbourhood. Old iron and fried fish, cough

drops and artificial flowers, boiled pigs’-feet and household furniture

that looks as if it were polished up with lip-salve, umbrellas full of

vocal literature and saucers full of shell-fish in a green juice which I

hope is natural to them when their health is good, garnish the paved

sideways as you go to Titbull’s. I take the ground to have risen in

those parts since Titbull’s time, and you drop into his domain by three

stone steps. So did I first drop into it, very nearly striking my brows

against Titbull’s pump, which stands with its back to the thoroughfare

just inside the gate, and has a conceited air of reviewing Titbull’s

pensioners.

‘And a worse one,’ said a virulent old man with a pitcher, ‘there isn’t

nowhere. A harder one to work, nor a grudginer one to yield, there isn’t

nowhere!’ This old man wore a long coat, such as we see Hogarth’s

Chairmen represented with, and it was of that peculiar green-pea hue

without the green, which seems to come of poverty. It had also that

peculiar smell of cupboard which seems to come of poverty.

‘The pump is rusty, perhaps,’ said I.

‘Not _it_,’ said the old man, regarding it with undiluted virulence in

his watery eye. ‘It never were fit to be termed a pump. That’s what’s

the matter with _it_.’

‘Whose fault is that?’ said I.

The old man, who had a working mouth which seemed to be trying to

masticate his anger and to find that it was too hard and there was too

much of it, replied, ‘Them gentlemen.’

‘What gentlemen?’

‘Maybe you’re one of ’em?’ said the old man, suspiciously.

‘The trustees?’

‘I wouldn’t trust ’em myself,’ said the virulent old man.

‘If you mean the gentlemen who administer this place, no, I am not one of

them; nor have I ever so much as heard of them.’

‘I wish _I_ never heard of them,’ gasped the old man: ‘at my time of

life—with the rheumatics—drawing water-from that thing!’ Not to be

deluded into calling it a Pump, the old man gave it another virulent

look, took up his pitcher, and carried it into a corner dwelling-house,

shutting the door after him.

Looking around and seeing that each little house was a house of two

little rooms; and seeing that the little oblong court-yard in front was

like a graveyard for the inhabitants, saving that no word was engraven on

its flat dry stones; and seeing that the currents of life and noise ran

to and fro outside, having no more to do with the place than if it were a

sort of low-water mark on a lively beach; I say, seeing this and nothing

else, I was going out at the gate when one of the doors opened.

‘Was you looking for anything, sir?’ asked a tidy, well-favoured woman.

Really, no; I couldn’t say I was.

‘Not wanting any one, sir?’

‘No—at least I—pray what is the name of the elderly gentleman who lives

in the corner there?’

The tidy woman stepped out to be sure of the door I indicated, and she

and the pump and I stood all three in a row with our backs to the

thoroughfare.

‘Oh! _His_ name is Mr. Battens,’ said the tidy woman, dropping her

voice.

‘I have just been talking with him.’

‘Indeed?’ said the tidy woman. ‘Ho! I wonder Mr. Battens talked!’

‘Is he usually so silent?’

‘Well, Mr. Battens is the oldest here—that is to say, the oldest of the

old gentlemen—in point of residence.’

She had a way of passing her hands over and under one another as she

spoke, that was not only tidy but propitiatory; so I asked her if I might

look at her little sitting-room? She willingly replied Yes, and we went

into it together: she leaving the door open, with an eye as I understood

to the social proprieties. The door opening at once into the room

without any intervening entry, even scandal must have been silenced by

the precaution.

It was a gloomy little chamber, but clean, and with a mug of wallflower

in the window. On the chimney-piece were two peacock’s feathers, a

carved ship, a few shells, and a black profile with one eyelash; whether

this portrait purported to be male or female passed my comprehension,

until my hostess informed me that it was her only son, and ‘quite a

speaking one.’

‘He is alive, I hope?’

‘No, sir,’ said the widow, ‘he were cast away in China.’ This was said

with a modest sense of its reflecting a certain geographical distinction

on his mother.

‘If the old gentlemen here are not given to talking,’ said I, ‘I hope the

old ladies are?—not that you are one.’

She shook her head. ‘You see they get so cross.’

‘How is that?’

‘Well, whether the gentlemen really do deprive us of any little matters

which ought to be ours by rights, I cannot say for certain; but the

opinion of the old ones is they do. And Mr. Battens he do even go so far

as to doubt whether credit is due to the Founder. For Mr. Battens he do

say, anyhow he got his name up by it and he done it cheap.’

‘I am afraid the pump has soured Mr. Battens.’

‘It may be so,’ returned the tidy widow, ‘but the handle does go very

hard. Still, what I say to myself is, the gentlemen _may_ not pocket the

difference between a good pump and a bad one, and I would wish to think

well of them. And the dwellings,’ said my hostess, glancing round her

room; ‘perhaps they were convenient dwellings in the Founder’s time,

considered _as_ his time, and therefore he should not be blamed. But

Mrs. Saggers is very hard upon them.’

‘Mrs. Saggers is the oldest here?’

‘The oldest but one. Mrs. Quinch being the oldest, and have totally lost

her head.’

‘And you?’

‘I am the youngest in residence, and consequently am not looked up to.

But when Mrs. Quinch makes a happy release, there will be one below me.

Nor is it to be expected that Mrs. Saggers will prove herself immortal.’

‘True. Nor Mr. Battens.’

‘Regarding the old gentlemen,’ said my widow slightingly, ‘they count

among themselves. They do not count among us. Mr. Battens is that

exceptional that he have written to the gentlemen many times and have

worked the case against them. Therefore he have took a higher ground.

But we do not, as a rule, greatly reckon the old gentlemen.’

Pursuing the subject, I found it to be traditionally settled among the

poor ladies that the poor gentlemen, whatever their ages, were all very

old indeed, and in a state of dotage. I also discovered that the juniors

and newcomers preserved, for a time, a waning disposition to believe in

Titbull and his trustees, but that as they gained social standing they

lost this faith, and disparaged Titbull and all his works.

Improving my acquaintance subsequently with this respected lady, whose

name was Mrs. Mitts, and occasionally dropping in upon her with a little

offering of sound Family Hyson in my pocket, I gradually became familiar

with the inner politics and ways of Titbull’s Alms-Houses. But I never

could find out who the trustees were, or where they were: it being one of

the fixed ideas of the place that those authorities must be vaguely and

mysteriously mentioned as ‘the gentlemen’ only. The secretary of ‘the

gentlemen’ was once pointed out to me, evidently engaged in championing

the obnoxious pump against the attacks of the discontented Mr. Battens;

but I am not in a condition to report further of him than that he had the

sprightly bearing of a lawyer’s clerk. I had it from Mrs. Mitts’s lips

in a very confidential moment, that Mr. Battens was once ‘had up before

the gentlemen’ to stand or fall by his accusations, and that an old shoe

was thrown after him on his departure from the building on this dread

errand;—not ineffectually, for, the interview resulting in a plumber, was

considered to have encircled the temples of Mr. Battens with the wreath

of victory.

In Titbull’s Alms-Houses, the local society is not regarded as good

society. A gentleman or lady receiving visitors from without, or going

out to tea, counts, as it were, accordingly; but visitings or

tea-drinkings interchanged among Titbullians do not score. Such

interchanges, however, are rare, in consequence of internal dissensions

occasioned by Mrs. Saggers’s pail: which household article has split

Titbull’s into almost as many parties as there are dwellings in that

precinct. The extremely complicated nature of the conflicting articles

of belief on the subject prevents my stating them here with my usual

perspicuity, but I think they have all branched off from the

root-and-trunk question, Has Mrs. Saggers any right to stand her pail

outside her dwelling? The question has been much refined upon, but

roughly stated may be stated in those terms.

There are two old men in Titbull’s Alms-Houses who, I have been given to

understand, knew each other in the world beyond its pump and iron

railings, when they were both ‘in trade.’ They make the best of their

reverses, and are looked upon with great contempt. They are little,

stooping, blear-eyed old men of cheerful countenance, and they hobble up

and down the court-yard wagging their chins and talking together quite

gaily. This has given offence, and has, moreover, raised the question

whether they are justified in passing any other windows than their own.

Mr. Battens, however, permitting them to pass _his_ windows, on the

disdainful ground that their imbecility almost amounts to

irresponsibility, they are allowed to take their walk in peace. They

live next door to one another, and take it by turns to read the newspaper

aloud (that is to say, the newest newspaper they can get), and they play

cribbage at night. On warm and sunny days they have been known to go so

far as to bring out two chairs and sit by the iron railings, looking

forth; but this low conduct, being much remarked upon throughout

Titbull’s, they were deterred by an outraged public opinion from

repeating it. There is a rumour—but it may be malicious—that they hold

the memory of Titbull in some weak sort of veneration, and that they once

set off together on a pilgrimage to the parish churchyard to find his

tomb. To this, perhaps, might be traced a general suspicion that they

are spies of ‘the gentlemen:’ to which they were supposed to have given

colour in my own presence on the occasion of the weak attempt at

justification of the pump by the gentlemen’s clerk; when they emerged

bare-headed from the doors of their dwellings, as if their dwellings and

themselves constituted an old-fashioned weather-glass of double action

with two figures of old ladies inside, and deferentially bowed to him at

intervals until he took his departure. They are understood to be

perfectly friendless and relationless. Unquestionably the two poor

fellows make the very best of their lives in Titbull’s Alms-Houses, and

unquestionably they are (as before mentioned) the subjects of unmitigated

contempt there.

On Saturday nights, when there is a greater stir than usual outside, and

when itinerant vendors of miscellaneous wares even take their stations

and light up their smoky lamps before the iron railings, Titbull’s

becomes flurried. Mrs. Saggers has her celebrated palpitations of the

heart, for the most part, on Saturday nights. But Titbull’s is unfit to

strive with the uproar of the streets in any of its phases. It is

religiously believed at Titbull’s that people push more than they used,

and likewise that the foremost object of the population of England and

Wales is to get you down and trample on you. Even of railroads they

know, at Titbull’s, little more than the shriek (which Mrs. Saggers says

goes through her, and ought to be taken up by Government); and the penny

postage may even yet be unknown there, for I have never seen a letter

delivered to any inhabitant. But there is a tall, straight, sallow lady

resident in Number Seven, Titbull’s, who never speaks to anybody, who is

surrounded by a superstitious halo of lost wealth, who does her household

work in housemaid’s gloves, and who is secretly much deferred to, though

openly cavilled at; and it has obscurely leaked out that this old lady

has a son, grandson, nephew, or other relative, who is ‘a Contractor,’

and who would think it nothing of a job to knock down Titbull’s, pack it

off into Cornwall, and knock it together again. An immense sensation was

made by a gipsy-party calling in a spring-van, to take this old lady up

to go for a day’s pleasure into Epping Forest, and notes were compared as

to which of the company was the son, grandson, nephew, or other relative,

the Contractor. A thick-set personage with a white hat and a cigar in

his mouth, was the favourite: though as Titbull’s had no other reason to

believe that the Contractor was there at all, than that this man was

supposed to eye the chimney stacks as if he would like to knock them down

and cart them off, the general mind was much unsettled in arriving at a

conclusion. As a way out of this difficulty, it concentrated itself on

the acknowledged Beauty of the party, every stitch in whose dress was

verbally unripped by the old ladies then and there, and whose ‘goings on’

with another and a thinner personage in a white hat might have suffused

the pump (where they were principally discussed) with blushes, for months

afterwards. Herein Titbull’s was to Titbull’s true, for it has a

constitutional dislike of all strangers. As concerning innovations and

improvements, it is always of opinion that what it doesn’t want itself,

nobody ought to want. But I think I have met with this opinion outside

Titbull’s.

Of the humble treasures of furniture brought into Titbull’s by the

inmates when they establish themselves in that place of contemplation for

the rest of their days, by far the greater and more valuable part belongs

to the ladies. I may claim the honour of having either crossed the

threshold, or looked in at the door, of every one of the nine ladies, and

I have noticed that they are all particular in the article of bedsteads,

and maintain favourite and long-established bedsteads and bedding as a

regular part of their rest. Generally an antiquated chest of drawers is

among their cherished possessions; a tea-tray always is. I know of at

least two rooms in which a little tea-kettle of genuine burnished copper,

vies with the cat in winking at the fire; and one old lady has a tea-urn

set forth in state on the top of her chest of drawers, which urn is used

as her library, and contains four duodecimo volumes, and a black-bordered

newspaper giving an account of the funeral of Her Royal Highness the

Princess Charlotte. Among the poor old gentlemen there are no such

niceties. Their furniture has the air of being contributed, like some

obsolete Literary Miscellany, ‘by several hands;’ their few chairs never

match; old patchwork coverlets linger among them; and they have an untidy

habit of keeping their wardrobes in hat-boxes. When I recall one old

gentleman who is rather choice in his shoe-brushes and blacking-bottle, I

have summed up the domestic elegances of that side of the building.

On the occurrence of a death in Titbull’s, it is invariably agreed among

the survivors—and it is the only subject on which they do agree—that the

departed did something ‘to bring it on.’ Judging by Titbull’s, I should

say the human race need never die, if they took care. But they don’t

take care, and they do die, and when they die in Titbull’s they are

buried at the cost of the Foundation. Some provision has been made for

the purpose, in virtue of which (I record this on the strength of having

seen the funeral of Mrs. Quinch) a lively neighbouring undertaker dresses

up four of the old men, and four of the old women, hustles them into a

procession of four couples, and leads off with a large black bow at the

back of his hat, looking over his shoulder at them airily from time to

time to see that no member of the party has got lost, or has tumbled

down; as if they were a company of dim old dolls.

Resignation of a dwelling is of very rare occurrence in Titbull’s. A

story does obtain there, how an old lady’s son once drew a prize of

Thirty Thousand Pounds in the Lottery, and presently drove to the gate in

his own carriage, with French Horns playing up behind, and whisked his

mother away, and left ten guineas for a Feast. But I have been unable to

substantiate it by any evidence, and regard it as an Alms-House Fairy

Tale. It is curious that the only proved case of resignation happened

within my knowledge.

It happened on this wise. There is a sharp competition among the ladies

respecting the gentility of their visitors, and I have so often observed

visitors to be dressed as for a holiday occasion, that I suppose the

ladies to have besought them to make all possible display when they come.

In these circumstances much excitement was one day occasioned by Mrs.

Mitts receiving a visit from a Greenwich Pensioner. He was a Pensioner

of a bluff and warlike appearance, with an empty coat-sleeve, and he was

got up with unusual care; his coat-buttons were extremely bright, he wore

his empty coat-sleeve in a graceful festoon, and he had a walking-stick

in his hand that must have cost money. When, with the head of his

walking-stick, he knocked at Mrs. Mitts’s door—there are no knockers in

Titbull’s—Mrs. Mitts was overheard by a next-door neighbour to utter a

cry of surprise expressing much agitation; and the same neighbour did

afterwards solemnly affirm that when he was admitted into Mrs. Mitts’s

room, she heard a smack. Heard a smack which was not a blow.

There was an air about this Greenwich Pensioner when he took his

departure, which imbued all Titbull’s with the conviction that he was

coming again. He was eagerly looked for, and Mrs. Mitts was closely

watched. In the meantime, if anything could have placed the unfortunate

six old gentlemen at a greater disadvantage than that at which they

chronically stood, it would have been the apparition of this Greenwich

Pensioner. They were well shrunken already, but they shrunk to nothing

in comparison with the Pensioner. Even the poor old gentlemen themselves

seemed conscious of their inferiority, and to know submissively that they

could never hope to hold their own against the Pensioner with his warlike

and maritime experience in the past, and his tobacco money in the

present: his chequered career of blue water, black gunpowder, and red

bloodshed for England, home, and beauty.

Before three weeks were out, the Pensioner reappeared. Again he knocked

at Mrs. Mitts’s door with the handle of his stick, and again was he

admitted. But not again did he depart alone; for Mrs. Mitts, in a bonnet

identified as having been re-embellished, went out walking with him, and

stayed out till the ten o’clock beer, Greenwich time.

There was now a truce, even as to the troubled waters of Mrs. Saggers’s

pail; nothing was spoken of among the ladies but the conduct of Mrs.

Mitts and its blighting influence on the reputation of Titbull’s. It was

agreed that Mr. Battens ‘ought to take it up,’ and Mr. Battens was

communicated with on the subject. That unsatisfactory individual replied

‘that he didn’t see his way yet,’ and it was unanimously voted by the

ladies that aggravation was in his nature.

How it came to pass, with some appearance of inconsistency, that Mrs.

Mitts was cut by all the ladies and the Pensioner admired by all the

ladies, matters not. Before another week was out, Titbull’s was startled

by another phenomenon. At ten o’clock in the forenoon appeared a cab,

containing not only the Greenwich Pensioner with one arm, but, to boot, a

Chelsea Pensioner with one leg. Both dismounting to assist Mrs. Mitts

into the cab, the Greenwich Pensioner bore her company inside, and the

Chelsea Pensioner mounted the box by the driver: his wooden leg sticking

out after the manner of a bowsprit, as if in jocular homage to his

friend’s sea-going career. Thus the equipage drove away. No Mrs. Mitts

returned that night.

[Picture: Titbull’s Alms-Houses]

What Mr. Battens might have done in the matter of taking it up, goaded by

the infuriated state of public feeling next morning, was anticipated by

another phenomenon. A Truck, propelled by the Greenwich Pensioner and

the Chelsea Pensioner, each placidly smoking a pipe, and pushing his

warrior breast against the handle.

The display on the part of the Greenwich Pensioner of his

‘marriage-lines,’ and his announcement that himself and friend had looked

in for the furniture of Mrs. G. Pensioner, late Mitts, by no means

reconciled the ladies to the conduct of their sister; on the contrary, it

is said that they appeared more than ever exasperated. Nevertheless, my

stray visits to Titbull’s since the date of this occurrence, have

confirmed me in an impression that it was a wholesome fillip. The nine

ladies are smarter, both in mind and dress, than they used to be, though

it must be admitted that they despise the six gentlemen to the last

extent. They have a much greater interest in the external thoroughfare

too, than they had when I first knew Titbull’s. And whenever I chance to

be leaning my back against the pump or the iron railings, and to be

talking to one of the junior ladies, and to see that a flush has passed

over her face, I immediately know without looking round that a Greenwich

Pensioner has gone past.

XXX

THE RUFFIAN

I ENTERTAIN so strong an objection to the euphonious softening of Ruffian

into Rough, which has lately become popular, that I restore the right

word to the heading of this paper; the rather, as my object is to dwell

upon the fact that the Ruffian is tolerated among us to an extent that

goes beyond all unruffianly endurance. I take the liberty to believe

that if the Ruffian besets my life, a professional Ruffian at large in

the open streets of a great city, notoriously having no other calling

than that of Ruffian, and of disquieting and despoiling me as I go

peacefully about my lawful business, interfering with no one, then the

Government under which I have the great constitutional privilege, supreme

honour and happiness, and all the rest of it, to exist, breaks down in

the discharge of any Government’s most simple elementary duty.

What did I read in the London daily papers, in the early days of this

last September? That the Police had ‘AT LENGTH SUCCEEDED IN CAPTURING

TWO OF THE NOTORIOUS GANG THAT HAVE SO LONG INVESTED THE WATERLOO ROAD.’

Is it possible? What a wonderful Police! Here is a straight, broad,

public thoroughfare of immense resort; half a mile long; gas-lighted by

night; with a great gas-lighted railway station in it, extra the street

lamps; full of shops; traversed by two popular cross thoroughfares of

considerable traffic; itself the main road to the South of London; and

the admirable Police have, after long infestment of this dark and lonely

spot by a gang of Ruffians, actually got hold of two of them. Why, can

it be doubted that any man of fair London knowledge and common

resolution, armed with the powers of the Law, could have captured the

whole confederacy in a week?

It is to the saving up of the Ruffian class by the Magistracy and

Police—to the conventional preserving of them, as if they were

Partridges—that their number and audacity must be in great part referred.

Why is a notorious Thief and Ruffian ever left at large? He never turns

his liberty to any account but violence and plunder, he never did a day’s

work out of gaol, he never will do a day’s work out of gaol. As a proved

notorious Thief he is always consignable to prison for three months.

When he comes out, he is surely as notorious a Thief as he was when he

went in. Then send him back again. ‘Just Heaven!’ cries the Society for

the protection of remonstrant Ruffians. ‘This is equivalent to a

sentence of perpetual imprisonment!’ Precisely for that reason it has my

advocacy. I demand to have the Ruffian kept out of my way, and out of

the way of all decent people. I demand to have the Ruffian employed,

perforce, in hewing wood and drawing water somewhere for the general

service, instead of hewing at her Majesty’s subjects and drawing their

watches out of their pockets. If this be termed an unreasonable demand,

then the tax-gatherer’s demand on me must be far more unreasonable, and

cannot be otherwise than extortionate and unjust.

It will be seen that I treat of the Thief and Ruffian as one. I do so,

because I know the two characters to be one, in the vast majority of

cases, just as well as the Police know it. (As to the Magistracy, with a

few exceptions, they know nothing about it but what the Police choose to

tell them.) There are disorderly classes of men who are not thieves; as

railway-navigators, brickmakers, wood-sawyers, costermongers. These

classes are often disorderly and troublesome; but it is mostly among

themselves, and at any rate they have their industrious avocations, they

work early and late, and work hard. The generic Ruffian—honourable

member for what is tenderly called the Rough Element—is either a Thief,

or the companion of Thieves. When he infamously molests women coming out

of chapel on Sunday evenings (for which I would have his back scarified

often and deep) it is not only for the gratification of his pleasant

instincts, but that there may be a confusion raised by which either he or

his friends may profit, in the commission of highway robberies or in

picking pockets. When he gets a police-constable down and kicks him

helpless for life, it is because that constable once did his duty in

bringing him to justice. When he rushes into the bar of a public-house

and scoops an eye out of one of the company there, or bites his ear off,

it is because the man he maims gave evidence against him. When he and a

line of comrades extending across the footway—say of that solitary

mountain-spur of the Abruzzi, the Waterloo Road—advance towards me

‘skylarking’ among themselves, my purse or shirt-pin is in predestined

peril from his playfulness. Always a Ruffian, always a Thief. Always a

Thief, always a Ruffian.

Now, when I, who am not paid to know these things, know them daily on the

evidence of my senses and experience; when I know that the Ruffian never

jostles a lady in the streets, or knocks a hat off, but in order that the

Thief may profit, is it surprising that I should require from those who

_are_ paid to know these things, prevention of them?

Look at this group at a street corner. Number one is a shirking fellow

of five-and-twenty, in an ill-favoured and ill-savoured suit, his

trousers of corduroy, his coat of some indiscernible groundwork for the

deposition of grease, his neckerchief like an eel, his complexion like

dirty dough, his mangy fur cap pulled low upon his beetle brows to hide

the prison cut of his hair. His hands are in his pockets. He puts them

there when they are idle, as naturally as in other people’s pockets when

they are busy, for he knows that they are not roughened by work, and that

they tell a tale. Hence, whenever he takes one out to draw a sleeve

across his nose—which is often, for he has weak eyes and a constitutional

cold in his head—he restores it to its pocket immediately afterwards.

Number two is a burly brute of five-and-thirty, in a tall stiff hat; is a

composite as to his clothes of betting-man and fighting-man; is

whiskered; has a staring pin in his breast, along with his right hand;

has insolent and cruel eyes: large shoulders; strong legs booted and

tipped for kicking. Number three is forty years of age; is short,

thick-set, strong, and bow-legged; wears knee cords and white stockings,

a very long-sleeved waistcoat, a very large neckerchief doubled or

trebled round his throat, and a crumpled white hat crowns his ghastly

parchment face. This fellow looks like an executed postboy of other

days, cut down from the gallows too soon, and restored and preserved by

express diabolical agency. Numbers five, six, and seven, are hulking,

idle, slouching young men, patched and shabby, too short in the sleeves

and too tight in the legs, slimily clothed, foul-spoken, repulsive

wretches inside and out. In all the party there obtains a certain

twitching character of mouth and furtiveness of eye, that hint how the

coward is lurking under the bully. The hint is quite correct, for they

are a slinking sneaking set, far more prone to lie down on their backs

and kick out, when in difficulty, than to make a stand for it. (This may

account for the street mud on the backs of Numbers five, six, and seven,

being much fresher than the stale splashes on their legs.)

These engaging gentry a Police-constable stands contemplating. His

Station, with a Reserve of assistance, is very near at hand. They cannot

pretend to any trade, not even to be porters or messengers. It would be

idle if they did, for he knows them, and they know that he knows them, to

be nothing but professed Thieves and Ruffians. He knows where they

resort, knows by what slang names they call one another, knows how often

they have been in prison, and how long, and for what. All this is known

at his Station, too, and is (or ought to be) known at Scotland Yard, too.

But does he know, or does his Station know, or does Scotland Yard know,

or does anybody know, why these fellows should be here at liberty, when,

as reputed Thieves to whom a whole Division of Police could swear, they

might all be under lock and key at hard labour? Not he; truly he would

be a wise man if he did! He only knows that these are members of the

‘notorious gang,’ which, according to the newspaper Police-office reports

of this last past September, ‘have so long infested’ the awful solitudes

of the Waterloo Road, and out of which almost impregnable fastnesses the

Police have at length dragged Two, to the unspeakable admiration of all

good civilians.

The consequences of this contemplative habit on the part of the

Executive—a habit to be looked for in a hermit, but not in a Police

System—are familiar to us all. The Ruffian becomes one of the

established orders of the body politic. Under the playful name of Rough

(as if he were merely a practical joker) his movements and successes are

recorded on public occasions. Whether he mustered in large numbers, or

small; whether he was in good spirits, or depressed; whether he turned

his generous exertions to very prosperous account, or Fortune was against

him; whether he was in a sanguinary mood, or robbed with amiable

horse-play and a gracious consideration for life and limb; all this is

chronicled as if he were an Institution. Is there any city in Europe,

out of England, in which these terms are held with the pests of Society?

Or in which, at this day, such violent robberies from the person are

constantly committed as in London?

The Preparatory Schools of Ruffianism are similarly borne with. The

young Ruffians of London—not Thieves yet, but training for scholarships

and fellowships in the Criminal Court Universities—molest quiet people

and their property, to an extent that is hardly credible. The throwing

of stones in the streets has become a dangerous and destructive offence,

which surely could have got to no greater height though we had had no

Police but our own riding-whips and walking-sticks—the Police to which I

myself appeal on these occasions. The throwing of stones at the windows

of railway carriages in motion—an act of wanton wickedness with the very

Arch-Fiend’s hand in it—had become a crying evil, when the railway

companies forced it on Police notice. Constabular contemplation had

until then been the order of the day.

Within these twelve months, there arose among the young gentlemen of

London aspiring to Ruffianism, and cultivating that much-encouraged

social art, a facetious cry of ‘I’ll have this!’ accompanied with a

clutch at some article of a passing lady’s dress. I have known a lady’s

veil to be thus humorously torn from her face and carried off in the open

streets at noon; and I have had the honour of myself giving chase, on

Westminster Bridge, to another young Ruffian, who, in full daylight early

on a summer evening, had nearly thrown a modest young woman into a swoon

of indignation and confusion, by his shameful manner of attacking her

with this cry as she harmlessly passed along before me. Mr. CARLYLE,

some time since, awakened a little pleasantry by writing of his own

experience of the Ruffian of the streets. I have seen the Ruffian act in

exact accordance with Mr. Carlyle’s description, innumerable times, and I

never saw him checked.

The blaring use of the very worst language possible, in our public

thoroughfares—especially in those set apart for recreation—is another

disgrace to us, and another result of constabular contemplation, the like

of which I have never heard in any other country to which my uncommercial

travels have extended. Years ago, when I had a near interest in certain

children who were sent with their nurses, for air and exercise, into the

Regent’s Park, I found this evil to be so abhorrent and horrible there,

that I called public attention to it, and also to its contemplative

reception by the Police. Looking afterwards into the newest Police Act,

and finding that the offence was punishable under it, I resolved, when

striking occasion should arise, to try my hand as prosecutor. The

occasion arose soon enough, and I ran the following gauntlet.

The utterer of the base coin in question was a girl of seventeen or

eighteen, who, with a suitable attendance of blackguards, youths, and

boys, was flaunting along the streets, returning from an Irish funeral,

in a Progress interspersed with singing and dancing. She had turned

round to me and expressed herself in the most audible manner, to the

great delight of that select circle. I attended the party, on the

opposite side of the way, for a mile further, and then encountered a

Police-constable. The party had made themselves merry at my expense

until now, but seeing me speak to the constable, its male members

instantly took to their heels, leaving the girl alone. I asked the

constable did he know my name? Yes, he did. ‘Take that girl into

custody, on my charge, for using bad language in the streets.’ He had

never heard of such a charge. I had. Would he take my word that he

should get into no trouble? Yes, sir, he would do that. So he took the

girl, and I went home for my Police Act.

With this potent instrument in my pocket, I literally as well as

figuratively ‘returned to the charge,’ and presented myself at the Police

Station of the district. There, I found on duty a very intelligent

Inspector (they are all intelligent men), who, likewise, had never heard

of such a charge. I showed him my clause, and we went over it together

twice or thrice. It was plain, and I engaged to wait upon the suburban

Magistrate to-morrow morning at ten o’clock.

In the morning I put my Police Act in my pocket again, and waited on the

suburban Magistrate. I was not quite so courteously received by him as I

should have been by The Lord Chancellor or The Lord Chief Justice, but

that was a question of good breeding on the suburban Magistrate’s part,

and I had my clause ready with its leaf turned down. Which was enough

for _me_.

Conference took place between the Magistrate and clerk respecting the

charge. During conference I was evidently regarded as a much more

objectionable person than the prisoner;—one giving trouble by coming

there voluntarily, which the prisoner could not be accused of doing. The

prisoner had been got up, since I last had the pleasure of seeing her,

with a great effect of white apron and straw bonnet. She reminded me of

an elder sister of Red Riding Hood, and I seemed to remind the

sympathising Chimney Sweep by whom she was attended, of the Wolf.

The Magistrate was doubtful, Mr. Uncommercial Traveller, whether this

charge could be entertained. It was not known. Mr. Uncommercial

Traveller replied that he wished it were better known, and that, if he

could afford the leisure, he would use his endeavours to make it so.

There was no question about it, however, he contended. Here was the

clause.

The clause was handed in, and more conference resulted. After which I

was asked the extraordinary question: ‘Mr. Uncommercial, do you really

wish this girl to be sent to prison?’ To which I grimly answered,

staring: ‘If I didn’t, why should I take the trouble to come here?’

Finally, I was sworn, and gave my agreeable evidence in detail, and White

Riding Hood was fined ten shillings, under the clause, or sent to prison

for so many days. ‘Why, Lord bless you, sir,’ said the Police-officer,

who showed me out, with a great enjoyment of the jest of her having been

got up so effectively, and caused so much hesitation: ‘if she goes to

prison, that will be nothing new to _her_. She comes from Charles

Street, Drury Lane!’

The Police, all things considered, are an excellent force, and I have

borne my small testimony to their merits. Constabular contemplation is

the result of a bad system; a system which is administered, not invented,

by the man in constable’s uniform, employed at twenty shillings a week.

He has his orders, and would be marked for discouragement if he

overstepped them. That the system is bad, there needs no lengthened

argument to prove, because the fact is self-evident. If it were anything

else, the results that have attended it could not possibly have come to

pass. Who will say that under a good system, our streets could have got

into their present state?

The objection to the whole Police system, as concerning the Ruffian, may

be stated, and its failure exemplified, as follows. It is well known

that on all great occasions, when they come together in numbers, the mass

of the English people are their own trustworthy Police. It is well known

that wheresoever there is collected together any fair general

representation of the people, a respect for law and order, and a

determination to discountenance lawlessness and disorder, may be relied

upon. As to one another, the people are a very good Police, and yet are

quite willing in their good-nature that the stipendiary Police should

have the credit of the people’s moderation. But we are all of us

powerless against the Ruffian, because we submit to the law, and it is

his only trade, by superior force and by violence, to defy it. Moreover,

we are constantly admonished from high places (like so many Sunday-school

children out for a holiday of buns and milk-and-water) that we are not to

take the law into our own hands, but are to hand our defence over to it.

It is clear that the common enemy to be punished and exterminated first

of all is the Ruffian. It is clear that he is, of all others, _the_

offender for whose repressal we maintain a costly system of Police. Him,

therefore, we expressly present to the Police to deal with, conscious

that, on the whole, we can, and do, deal reasonably well with one

another. Him the Police deal with so inefficiently and absurdly that he

flourishes, and multiplies, and, with all his evil deeds upon his head as

notoriously as his hat is, pervades the streets with no more let or

hindrance than ourselves.

XXXI

ABOARD SHIP

MY journeys as Uncommercial Traveller for the firm of Human-Interest

Brothers have not slackened since I last reported of them, but have kept

me continually on the move. I remain in the same idle employment. I

never solicit an order, I never get any commission, I am the rolling

stone that gathers no moss,—unless any should by chance be found among

these samples.

Some half a year ago, I found myself in my idlest, dreamiest, and least

accountable condition altogether, on board ship, in the harbour of the

city of New York, in the United States of America. Of all the good ships

afloat, mine was the good steamship ‘RUSSIA,’ CAPT. COOK, Cunard Line,

bound for Liverpool. What more could I wish for?

I had nothing to wish for but a prosperous passage. My salad-days, when

I was green of visage and sea-sick, being gone with better things (and no

worse), no coming event cast its shadow before.

I might but a few moments previously have imitated Sterne, and said,

‘“And yet, methinks, Eugenius,”—laying my forefinger wistfully on his

coat-sleeve, thus,—“and yet, methinks, Eugenius, ’tis but sorry work to

part with thee, for what fresh fields, . . . my dear Eugenius, . . . can

be fresher than thou art, and in what pastures new shall I find Eliza, or

call her, Eugenius, if thou wilt, Annie?”’—I say I might have done this;

but Eugenius was gone, and I hadn’t done it.

I was resting on a skylight on the hurricane-deck, watching the working

of the ship very slowly about, that she might head for England. It was

high noon on a most brilliant day in April, and the beautiful bay was

glorious and glowing. Full many a time, on shore there, had I seen the

snow come down, down, down (itself like down), until it lay deep in all

the ways of men, and particularly, as it seemed, in my way, for I had not

gone dry-shod many hours for months. Within two or three days last past

had I watched the feathery fall setting in with the ardour of a new idea,

instead of dragging at the skirts of a worn-out winter, and permitting

glimpses of a fresh young spring. But a bright sun and a clear sky had

melted the snow in the great crucible of nature; and it had been poured

out again that morning over sea and land, transformed into myriads of

gold and silver sparkles.

The ship was fragrant with flowers. Something of the old Mexican passion

for flowers may have gradually passed into North America, where flowers

are luxuriously grown, and tastefully combined in the richest profusion;

but, be that as it may, such gorgeous farewells in flowers had come on

board, that the small officer’s cabin on deck, which I tenanted, bloomed

over into the adjacent scuppers, and banks of other flowers that it

couldn’t hold made a garden of the unoccupied tables in the passengers’

saloon. These delicious scents of the shore, mingling with the fresh

airs of the sea, made the atmosphere a dreamy, an enchanting one. And

so, with the watch aloft setting all the sails, and with the screw below

revolving at a mighty rate, and occasionally giving the ship an angry

shake for resisting, I fell into my idlest ways, and lost myself.

As, for instance, whether it was I lying there, or some other entity even

more mysterious, was a matter I was far too lazy to look into. What did

it signify to me if it were I? or to the more mysterious entity, if it

were he? Equally as to the remembrances that drowsily floated by me, or

by him, why ask when or where the things happened? Was it not enough

that they befell at some time, somewhere?

There was that assisting at the church service on board another

steamship, one Sunday, in a stiff breeze. Perhaps on the passage out.

No matter. Pleasant to hear the ship’s bells go as like church-bells as

they could; pleasant to see the watch off duty mustered and come in: best

hats, best Guernseys, washed hands and faces, smoothed heads. But then

arose a set of circumstances so rampantly comical, that no check which

the gravest intentions could put upon them would hold them in hand. Thus

the scene. Some seventy passengers assembled at the saloon tables.

Prayer-books on tables. Ship rolling heavily. Pause. No minister.

Rumour has related that a modest young clergyman on board has responded

to the captain’s request that he will officiate. Pause again, and very

heavy rolling.