Closed double doors suddenly burst open, and two strong stewards skate

in, supporting minister between them. General appearance as of somebody

picked up drunk and incapable, and under conveyance to station-house.

Stoppage, pause, and particularly heavy rolling. Stewards watch their

opportunity, and balance themselves, but cannot balance minister; who,

struggling with a drooping head and a backward tendency, seems determined

to return below, while they are as determined that he shall be got to the

reading-desk in mid-saloon. Desk portable, sliding away down a long

table, and aiming itself at the breasts of various members of the

congregation. Here the double doors, which have been carefully closed by

other stewards, fly open again, and worldly passenger tumbles in,

seemingly with pale-ale designs: who, seeking friend, says ‘Joe!’

Perceiving incongruity, says, ‘Hullo! Beg yer pardon!’ and tumbles out

again. All this time the congregation have been breaking up into

sects,—as the manner of congregations often is, each sect sliding away by

itself, and all pounding the weakest sect which slid first into the

corner. Utmost point of dissent soon attained in every corner, and

violent rolling. Stewards at length make a dash; conduct minister to the

mast in the centre of the saloon, which he embraces with both arms; skate

out; and leave him in that condition to arrange affairs with flock.

There was another Sunday, when an officer of the ship read the service.

It was quiet and impressive, until we fell upon the dangerous and

perfectly unnecessary experiment of striking up a hymn. After it was

given out, we all rose, but everybody left it to somebody else to begin.

Silence resulting, the officer (no singer himself) rather reproachfully

gave us the first line again, upon which a rosy pippin of an old

gentleman, remarkable throughout the passage for his cheerful politeness,

gave a little stamp with his boot (as if he were leading off a country

dance), and blithely warbled us into a show of joining. At the end of

the first verse we became, through these tactics, so much refreshed and

encouraged, that none of us, howsoever unmelodious, would submit to be

left out of the second verse; while as to the third we lifted up our

voices in a sacred howl that left it doubtful whether we were the more

boastful of the sentiments we united in professing, or of professing them

with a most discordant defiance of time and tune.

‘Lord bless us!’ thought I, when the fresh remembrance of these things

made me laugh heartily alone in the dead water-gurgling waste of the

night, what time I was wedged into my berth by a wooden bar, or I must

have rolled out of it, ‘what errand was I then upon, and to what

Abyssinian point had public events then marched? No matter as to me.

And as to them, if the wonderful popular rage for a plaything (utterly

confounding in its inscrutable unreason) I had not then lighted on a poor

young savage boy, and a poor old screw of a horse, and hauled the first

off by the hair of his princely head to “inspect” the British volunteers,

and hauled the second off by the hair of his equine tail to the Crystal

Palace, why so much the better for all of us outside Bedlam!’

So, sticking to the ship, I was at the trouble of asking myself would I

like to show the grog distribution in ‘the fiddle’ at noon to the Grand

United Amalgamated Total Abstinence Society? Yes, I think I should. I

think it would do them good to smell the rum, under the circumstances.

Over the grog, mixed in a bucket, presides the boatswain’s mate, small

tin can in hand. Enter the crew, the guilty consumers, the grown-up

brood of Giant Despair, in contradistinction to the band of youthful

angel Hope. Some in boots, some in leggings, some in tarpaulin overalls,

some in frocks, some in pea-coats, a very few in jackets, most with

sou’wester hats, all with something rough and rugged round the throat;

all, dripping salt water where they stand; all pelted by weather,

besmeared with grease, and blackened by the sooty rigging.

Each man’s knife in its sheath in his girdle, loosened for dinner. As

the first man, with a knowingly kindled eye, watches the filling of the

poisoned chalice (truly but a very small tin mug, to be prosaic), and,

tossing back his head, tosses the contents into himself, and passes the

empty chalice and passes on, so the second man with an anticipatory wipe

of his mouth on sleeve or handkerchief, bides his turn, and drinks and

hands and passes on, in whom, and in each as his turn approaches, beams a

knowingly kindled eye, a brighter temper, and a suddenly awakened

tendency to be jocose with some shipmate. Nor do I even observe that the

man in charge of the ship’s lamps, who in right of his office has a

double allowance of poisoned chalices, seems thereby vastly degraded,

even though he empties the chalices into himself, one after the other,

much as if he were delivering their contents at some absorbent

establishment in which he had no personal interest. But vastly

comforted, I note them all to be, on deck presently, even to the

circulation of redder blood in their cold blue knuckles; and when I look

up at them lying out on the yards, and holding on for life among the

beating sails, I cannot for _my_ life see the justice of visiting on

them—or on me—the drunken crimes of any number of criminals arraigned at

the heaviest of assizes.

Abetting myself in my idle humour, I closed my eyes, and recalled life on

board of one of those mail-packets, as I lay, part of that day, in the

Bay of New York, O! The regular life began—mine always did, for I never

got to sleep afterwards—with the rigging of the pump while it was yet

dark, and washing down of decks. Any enormous giant at a prodigious

hydropathic establishment, conscientiously undergoing the water-cure in

all its departments, and extremely particular about cleaning his teeth,

would make those noises. Swash, splash, scrub, rub, toothbrush, bubble,

swash, splash, bubble, toothbrush, splash, splash, bubble, rub. Then the

day would break, and, descending from my berth by a graceful ladder

composed of half-opened drawers beneath it, I would reopen my outer

dead-light and my inner sliding window (closed by a watchman during the

water-cure), and would look out at the long-rolling, lead-coloured, white

topped waves over which the dawn, on a cold winter morning, cast a level,

lonely glance, and through which the ship fought her melancholy way at a

terrific rate. And now, lying down again, awaiting the season for

broiled ham and tea, I would be compelled to listen to the voice of

conscience,—the screw.

It might be, in some cases, no more than the voice of stomach; but I

called it in my fancy by the higher name. Because it seemed to me that

we were all of us, all day long, endeavouring to stifle the voice.

Because it was under everybody’s pillow, everybody’s plate, everybody’s

camp-stool, everybody’s book, everybody’s occupation. Because we

pretended not to hear it, especially at meal-times, evening whist, and

morning conversation on deck; but it was always among us in an under

monotone, not to be drowned in pea-soup, not to be shuffled with cards,

not to be diverted by books, not to be knitted into any pattern, not to

be walked away from. It was smoked in the weediest cigar, and drunk in

the strongest cocktail; it was conveyed on deck at noon with limp ladies,

who lay there in their wrappers until the stars shone; it waited at table

with the stewards; nobody could put it out with the lights. It was

considered (as on shore) ill-bred to acknowledge the voice of conscience.

It was not polite to mention it. One squally day an amiable gentleman in

love gave much offence to a surrounding circle, including the object of

his attachment, by saying of it, after it had goaded him over two

easy-chairs and a skylight, ‘Screw!’

Sometimes it would appear subdued. In fleeting moments, when bubbles of

champagne pervaded the nose, or when there was ‘hot pot’ in the bill of

fare, or when an old dish we had had regularly every day was described in

that official document by a new name,—under such excitements, one would

almost believe it hushed. The ceremony of washing plates on deck,

performed after every meal by a circle as of ringers of crockery

triple-bob majors for a prize, would keep it down. Hauling the reel,

taking the sun at noon, posting the twenty-four hours’ run, altering the

ship’s time by the meridian, casting the waste food overboard, and

attracting the eager gulls that followed in our wake,—these events would

suppress it for a while. But the instant any break or pause took place

in any such diversion, the voice would be at it again, importuning us to

the last extent. A newly married young pair, who walked the deck

affectionately some twenty miles per day, would, in the full flush of

their exercise, suddenly become stricken by it, and stand trembling, but

otherwise immovable, under its reproaches.

When this terrible monitor was most severe with us was when the time

approached for our retiring to our dens for the night; when the lighted

candles in the saloon grew fewer and fewer; when the deserted glasses

with spoons in them grew more and more numerous; when waifs of toasted

cheese and strays of sardines fried in batter slid languidly to and fro

in the table-racks; when the man who always read had shut up his book,

and blown out his candle; when the man who always talked had ceased from

troubling; when the man who was always medically reported as going to

have delirium tremens had put it off till to-morrow; when the man who

every night devoted himself to a midnight smoke on deck two hours in

length, and who every night was in bed within ten minutes afterwards, was

buttoning himself up in his third coat for his hardy vigil: for then, as

we fell off one by one, and, entering our several hutches, came into a

peculiar atmosphere of bilge-water and Windsor soap, the voice would

shake us to the centre. Woe to us when we sat down on our sofa, watching

the swinging candle for ever trying and retrying to stand upon his head!

or our coat upon its peg, imitating us as we appeared in our gymnastic

days by sustaining itself horizontally from the wall, in emulation of the

lighter and more facile towels! Then would the voice especially claim us

for its prey, and rend us all to pieces.

Lights out, we in our berths, and the wind rising, the voice grows

angrier and deeper. Under the mattress and under the pillow, under the

sofa and under the washing-stand, under the ship and under the sea,

seeming to rise from the foundations under the earth with every scoop of

the great Atlantic (and oh! why scoop so?), always the voice. Vain to

deny its existence in the night season; impossible to be hard of hearing;

screw, screw, screw! Sometimes it lifts out of the water, and revolves

with a whirr, like a ferocious firework,—except that it never expends

itself, but is always ready to go off again; sometimes it seems to be in

anguish, and shivers; sometimes it seems to be terrified by its last

plunge, and has a fit which causes it to struggle, quiver, and for an

instant stop. And now the ship sets in rolling, as only ships so

fiercely screwed through time and space, day and night, fair weather and

foul, _can_ roll.

Did she ever take a roll before like that last? Did she ever take a roll

before like this worse one that is coming now? Here is the partition at

my ear down in the deep on the lee side. Are we ever coming up again

together? I think not; the partition and I are so long about it that I

really do believe we have overdone it this time. Heavens, what a scoop!

What a deep scoop, what a hollow scoop, what a long scoop! Will it ever

end, and can we bear the heavy mass of water we have taken on board, and

which has let loose all the table furniture in the officers’ mess, and

has beaten open the door of the little passage between the purser and me,

and is swashing about, even there and even here? The purser snores

reassuringly, and the ship’s bells striking, I hear the cheerful ‘All’s

well!’ of the watch musically given back the length of the deck, as the

lately diving partition, now high in air, tries (unsoftened by what we

have gone through together) to force me out of bed and berth.

‘All’s well!’ Comforting to know, though surely all might be better.

Put aside the rolling and the rush of water, and think of darting through

such darkness with such velocity. Think of any other similar object

coming in the opposite direction!

Whether there may be an attraction in two such moving bodies out at sea,

which may help accident to bring them into collision? Thoughts, too,

arise (the voice never silent all the while, but marvellously suggestive)

of the gulf below; of the strange, unfruitful mountain ranges and deep

valleys over which we are passing; of monstrous fish midway; of the

ship’s suddenly altering her course on her own account, and with a wild

plunge settling down, and making _that_ voyage with a crew of dead

discoverers. Now, too, one recalls an almost universal tendency on the

part of passengers to stumble, at some time or other in the day, on the

topic of a certain large steamer making this same run, which was lost at

sea, and never heard of more. Everybody has seemed under a spell,

compelling approach to the threshold of the grim subject, stoppage,

discomfiture, and pretence of never having been near it. The boatswain’s

whistle sounds! A change in the wind, hoarse orders issuing, and the

watch very busy. Sails come crashing home overhead, ropes (that seem all

knot) ditto; every man engaged appears to have twenty feet, with twenty

times the average amount of stamping power in each. Gradually the noise

slackens, the hoarse cries die away, the boatswain’s whistle softens into

the soothing and contented notes, which rather reluctantly admit that the

job is done for the time, and the voice sets in again.

Thus come unintelligible dreams of up hill and down, and swinging and

swaying, until consciousness revives of atmospherical Windsor soap and

bilge-water, and the voice announces that the giant has come for the

water-cure again.

Such were my fanciful reminiscences as I lay, part of that day, in the

Bay of New York, O! Also as we passed clear of the Narrows, and got out

to sea; also in many an idle hour at sea in sunny weather! At length the

observations and computations showed that we should make the coast of

Ireland to-night. So I stood watch on deck all night to-night, to see

how we made the coast of Ireland.

Very dark, and the sea most brilliantly phosphorescent. Great way on the

ship, and double look-out kept. Vigilant captain on the bridge, vigilant

first officer looking over the port side, vigilant second officer

standing by the quarter-master at the compass, vigilant third officer

posted at the stern rail with a lantern. No passengers on the quiet

decks, but expectation everywhere nevertheless. The two men at the wheel

very steady, very serious, and very prompt to answer orders. An order

issued sharply now and then, and echoed back; otherwise the night drags

slowly, silently, with no change.

All of a sudden, at the blank hour of two in the morning, a vague

movement of relief from a long strain expresses itself in all hands; the

third officer’s lantern tinkles, and he fires a rocket, and another

rocket. A sullen solitary light is pointed out to me in the black sky

yonder. A change is expected in the light, but none takes place. ‘Give

them two more rockets, Mr. Vigilant.’ Two more, and a blue-light burnt.

All eyes watch the light again. At last a little toy sky-rocket is

flashed up from it; and, even as that small streak in the darkness dies

away, we are telegraphed to Queenstown, Liverpool, and London, and back

again under the ocean to America.

Then up come the half-dozen passengers who are going ashore at Queenstown

and up comes the mail-agent in charge of the bags, and up come the men

who are to carry the bags into the mail-tender that will come off for

them out of the harbour. Lamps and lanterns gleam here and there about

the decks, and impeding bulks are knocked away with handspikes; and the

port-side bulwark, barren but a moment ago, bursts into a crop of heads

of seamen, stewards, and engineers.

The light begins to be gained upon, begins to be alongside, begins to be

left astern. More rockets, and, between us and the land, steams

beautifully the Inman steamship City of Paris, for New York, outward

bound. We observe with complacency that the wind is dead against her (it

being _with_ us), and that she rolls and pitches. (The sickest passenger

on board is the most delighted by this circumstance.) Time rushes by as

we rush on; and now we see the light in Queenstown Harbour, and now the

lights of the mail-tender coming out to us. What vagaries the

mail-tender performs on the way, in every point of the compass,

especially in those where she has no business, and why she performs them,

Heaven only knows! At length she is seen plunging within a cable’s

length of our port broadside, and is being roared at through our

speaking-trumpets to do this thing, and not to do that, and to stand by

the other, as if she were a very demented tender indeed. Then, we

slackening amidst a deafening roar of steam, this much-abused tender is

made fast to us by hawsers, and the men in readiness carry the bags

aboard, and return for more, bending under their burdens, and looking

just like the pasteboard figures of the miller and his men in the theatre

of our boyhood, and comporting themselves almost as unsteadily. All the

while the unfortunate tender plunges high and low, and is roared at.

Then the Queenstown passengers are put on board of her, with infinite

plunging and roaring, and the tender gets heaved up on the sea to that

surprising extent that she looks within an ace of washing aboard of us,

high and dry. Roared at with contumely to the last, this wretched tender

is at length let go, with a final plunge of great ignominy, and falls

spinning into our wake.

The voice of conscience resumed its dominion as the day climbed up the

sky, and kept by all of us passengers into port; kept by us as we passed

other lighthouses, and dangerous islands off the coast, where some of the

officers, with whom I stood my watch, had gone ashore in sailing-ships in

fogs (and of which by that token they seemed to have quite an

affectionate remembrance), and past the Welsh coast, and past the

Cheshire coast, and past everything and everywhere lying between our ship

and her own special dock in the Mersey. Off which, at last, at nine of

the clock, on a fair evening early in May, we stopped, and the voice

ceased. A very curious sensation, not unlike having my own ears stopped,

ensued upon that silence; and it was with a no less curious sensation

that I went over the side of the good Cunard ship ‘Russia’ (whom

prosperity attend through all her voyages!) and surveyed the outer hull

of the gracious monster that the voice had inhabited. So, perhaps, shall

we all, in the spirit, one day survey the frame that held the busier

voice from which my vagrant fancy derived this similitude.

XXXII

A SMALL STAR IN THE EAST

I HAD been looking, yesternight, through the famous ‘Dance of Death,’ and

to-day the grim old woodcuts arose in my mind with the new significance

of a ghastly monotony not to be found in the original. The weird

skeleton rattled along the streets before me, and struck fiercely; but it

was never at the pains of assuming a disguise. It played on no dulcimer

here, was crowned with no flowers, waved no plume, minced in no flowing

robe or train, lifted no wine-cup, sat at no feast, cast no dice, counted

no gold. It was simply a bare, gaunt, famished skeleton, slaying his way

along.

The borders of Ratcliff and Stepney, eastward of London, and giving on

the impure river, were the scene of this uncompromising dance of death,

upon a drizzling November day. A squalid maze of streets, courts, and

alleys of miserable houses let out in single rooms. A wilderness of

dirt, rags, and hunger. A mud-desert, chiefly inhabited by a tribe from

whom employment has departed, or to whom it comes but fitfully and

rarely. They are not skilled mechanics in any wise. They are but

labourers,—dock-labourers, water-side labourers, coal-porters,

ballast-heavers, such-like hewers of wood and drawers of water. But they

have come into existence, and they propagate their wretched race.

One grisly joke alone, methought, the skeleton seemed to play off here.

It had stuck election-bills on the walls, which the wind and rain had

deteriorated into suitable rags. It had even summed up the state of the

poll, in chalk, on the shutters of one ruined house. It adjured the free

and independent starvers to vote for Thisman and vote for Thatman; not to

plump, as they valued the state of parties and the national prosperity

(both of great importance to them, I think); but, by returning Thisman

and Thatman, each naught without the other, to compound a glorious and

immortal whole. Surely the skeleton is nowhere more cruelly ironical in

the original monkish idea!

Pondering in my mind the far-seeing schemes of Thisman and Thatman, and

of the public blessing called Party, for staying the degeneracy, physical

and moral, of many thousands (who shall say how many?) of the English

race; for devising employment useful to the community for those who want

but to work and live; for equalising rates, cultivating waste lands,

facilitating emigration, and, above all things, saving and utilising the

oncoming generations, and thereby changing ever-growing national weakness

into strength: pondering in my mind, I say, these hopeful exertions, I

turned down a narrow street to look into a house or two.

It was a dark street with a dead wall on one side. Nearly all the outer

doors of the houses stood open. I took the first entry, and knocked at a

parlour-door. Might I come in? I might, if I plased, sur.

The woman of the room (Irish) had picked up some long strips of wood,

about some wharf or barge; and they had just now been thrust into the

otherwise empty grate to make two iron pots boil. There was some fish in

one, and there were some potatoes in the other. The flare of the burning

wood enabled me to see a table, and a broken chair or so, and some old

cheap crockery ornaments about the chimney-piece. It was not until I had

spoken with the woman a few minutes, that I saw a horrible brown heap on

the floor in a corner, which, but for previous experience in this dismal

wise, I might not have suspected to be ‘the bed.’ There was something

thrown upon it; and I asked what that was.

‘’Tis the poor craythur that stays here, sur; and ’tis very bad she is,

and ’tis very bad she’s been this long time, and ’tis better she’ll never

be, and ’tis slape she does all day, and ’tis wake she does all night,

and ’tis the lead, sur.’

‘The what?’

‘The lead, sur. Sure ’tis the lead-mills, where the women gets took on

at eighteen-pence a day, sur, when they makes application early enough,

and is lucky and wanted; and ’tis lead-pisoned she is, sur, and some of

them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead-pisoned later,

and some, but not many, niver; and ’tis all according to the

constitooshun, sur, and some constitooshuns is strong, and some is weak;

and her constitooshun is lead-pisoned, bad as can be, sur; and her brain

is coming out at her ear, and it hurts her dreadful; and that’s what it

is, and niver no more, and niver no less, sur.’

The sick young woman moaning here, the speaker bent over her, took a

bandage from her head, and threw open a back door to let in the daylight

upon it, from the smallest and most miserable backyard I ever saw.

‘That’s what cooms from her, sur, being lead-pisoned; and it cooms from

her night and day, the poor, sick craythur; and the pain of it is

dreadful; and God he knows that my husband has walked the sthreets these

four days, being a labourer, and is walking them now, and is ready to

work, and no work for him, and no fire and no food but the bit in the

pot, and no more than ten shillings in a fortnight; God be good to us!

and it is poor we are, and dark it is and could it is indeed.’

Knowing that I could compensate myself thereafter for my self-denial, if

I saw fit, I had resolved that I would give nothing in the course of

these visits. I did this to try the people. I may state at once that my

closest observation could not detect any indication whatever of an

expectation that I would give money: they were grateful to be talked to

about their miserable affairs, and sympathy was plainly a comfort to

them; but they neither asked for money in any case, nor showed the least

trace of surprise or disappointment or resentment at my giving none.

The woman’s married daughter had by this time come down from her room on

the floor above, to join in the conversation. She herself had been to

the lead-mills very early that morning to be ‘took on,’ but had not

succeeded. She had four children; and her husband, also a water-side

labourer, and then out seeking work, seemed in no better case as to

finding it than her father. She was English, and by nature, of a buxom

figure and cheerful. Both in her poor dress and in her mother’s there

was an effort to keep up some appearance of neatness. She knew all about

the sufferings of the unfortunate invalid, and all about the

lead-poisoning, and how the symptoms came on, and how they grew,—having

often seen them. The very smell when you stood inside the door of the

works was enough to knock you down, she said: yet she was going back

again to get ‘took on.’ What could she do? Better be ulcerated and

paralysed for eighteen-pence a day, while it lasted, than see the

children starve.

A dark and squalid cupboard in this room, touching the back door and all

manner of offence, had been for some time the sleeping-place of the sick

young woman. But the nights being now wintry, and the blankets and

coverlets ‘gone to the leaving shop,’ she lay all night where she lay all

day, and was lying then. The woman of the room, her husband, this most

miserable patient, and two others, lay on the one brown heap together for

warmth.

‘God bless you, sir, and thank you!’ were the parting words from these

people,—gratefully spoken too,—with which I left this place.

Some streets away, I tapped at another parlour-door on another

ground-floor. Looking in, I found a man, his wife, and four children,

sitting at a washing-stool by way of table, at their dinner of bread and

infused tea-leaves. There was a very scanty cinderous fire in the grate

by which they sat; and there was a tent bedstead in the room with a bed

upon it and a coverlet. The man did not rise when I went in, nor during

my stay, but civilly inclined his head on my pulling off my hat, and, in

answer to my inquiry whether I might ask him a question or two, said,

‘Certainly.’ There being a window at each end of this room, back and

front, it might have been ventilated; but it was shut up tight, to keep

the cold out, and was very sickening.

The wife, an intelligent, quick woman, rose and stood at her husband’s

elbow; and he glanced up at her as if for help. It soon appeared that he

was rather deaf. He was a slow, simple fellow of about thirty.

‘What was he by trade?’

‘Gentleman asks what are you by trade, John?’

‘I am a boilermaker;’ looking about him with an exceedingly perplexed

air, as if for a boiler that had unaccountably vanished.

‘He ain’t a mechanic, you understand, sir,’ the wife put in: ‘he’s only a

labourer.’

‘Are you in work?’

He looked up at his wife again. ‘Gentleman says are you in work, John?’

‘In work!’ cried this forlorn boilermaker, staring aghast at his wife,

and then working his vision’s way very slowly round to me: ‘Lord, no!’

‘Ah, he ain’t indeed!’ said the poor woman, shaking her head, as she

looked at the four children in succession, and then at him.

‘Work!’ said the boilermaker, still seeking that evaporated boiler, first

in my countenance, then in the air, and then in the features of his

second son at his knee: ‘I wish I _was_ in work! I haven’t had more than

a day’s work to do this three weeks.’

‘How have you lived?’

A faint gleam of admiration lighted up the face of the would-be

boilermaker, as he stretched out the short sleeve of his thread-bare

canvas jacket, and replied, pointing her out, ‘On the work of the wife.’

I forget where boilermaking had gone to, or where he supposed it had gone

to; but he added some resigned information on that head, coupled with an

expression of his belief that it was never coming back.

The cheery helpfulness of the wife was very remarkable. She did

slop-work; made pea-jackets. She produced the pea-jacket then in hand,

and spread it out upon the bed,—the only piece of furniture in the room

on which to spread it. She showed how much of it she made, and how much

was afterwards finished off by the machine. According to her calculation

at the moment, deducting what her trimming cost her, she got for making a

pea-jacket tenpence half-penny, and she could make one in something less

than two days.

But, you see, it come to her through two hands, and of course it didn’t

come through the second hand for nothing. Why did it come through the

second hand at all? Why, this way. The second hand took the risk of the

given-out work, you see. If she had money enough to pay the security

deposit,—call it two pound,—she could get the work from the first hand,

and so the second would not have to be deducted for. But, having no

money at all, the second hand come in and took its profit, and so the

whole worked down to tenpence half-penny. Having explained all this with

great intelligence, even with some little pride, and without a whine or

murmur, she folded her work again, sat down by her husband’s side at the

washing-stool, and resumed her dinner of dry bread. Mean as the meal

was, on the bare board, with its old gallipots for cups, and what not

other sordid makeshifts; shabby as the woman was in dress, and toning

done towards the Bosjesman colour, with want of nutriment and

washing,—there was positively a dignity in her, as the family anchor just

holding the poor ship-wrecked boilermaker’s bark. When I left the room,

the boiler-maker’s eyes were slowly turned towards her, as if his last

hope of ever again seeing that vanished boiler lay in her direction.

These people had never applied for parish relief but once; and that was

when the husband met with a disabling accident at his work.

Not many doors from here, I went into a room on the first floor. The

woman apologised for its being in ‘an untidy mess.’ The day was

Saturday, and she was boiling the children’s clothes in a saucepan on the

hearth. There was nothing else into which she could have put them.

There was no crockery, or tinware, or tub, or bucket. There was an old

gallipot or two, and there was a broken bottle or so, and there were some

broken boxes for seats. The last small scraping of coals left was raked

together in a corner of the floor. There were some rags in an open

cupboard, also on the floor. In a corner of the room was a crazy old

French bed-stead, with a man lying on his back upon it in a ragged pilot

jacket, and rough oil-skin fantail hat. The room was perfectly black.

It was difficult to believe, at first, that it was not purposely coloured

black, the walls were so begrimed.

As I stood opposite the woman boiling the children’s clothes,—she had not

even a piece of soap to wash them with,—and apologising for her

occupation, I could take in all these things without appearing to notice

them, and could even correct my inventory. I had missed, at the first

glance, some half a pound of bread in the otherwise empty safe, an old

red ragged crinoline hanging on the handle of the door by which I had

entered, and certain fragments of rusty iron scattered on the floor,

which looked like broken tools and a piece of stove-pipe. A child stood

looking on. On the box nearest to the fire sat two younger children; one

a delicate and pretty little creature, whom the other sometimes kissed.

This woman, like the last, was wofully shabby, and was degenerating to

the Bosjesman complexion. But her figure, and the ghost of a certain

vivacity about her, and the spectre of a dimple in her cheek, carried my

memory strangely back to the old days of the Adelphi Theatre, London,

when Mrs. Fitzwilliam was the friend of Victorine.

‘May I ask you what your husband is?’

‘He’s a coal-porter, sir,’—with a glance and a sigh towards the bed.

‘Is he out of work?’

‘Oh, yes, sir! and work’s at all times very, very scanty with him; and

now he’s laid up.’

‘It’s my legs,’ said the man upon the bed. ‘I’ll unroll ’em.’ And

immediately began.

‘Have you any older children?’

‘I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son that does

what he can. She’s at her work now, and he’s trying for work.’

‘Do they live here?’

‘They sleep here. They can’t afford to pay more rent, and so they come

here at night. The rent is very hard upon us. It’s rose upon us too,

now,—sixpence a week,—on account of these new changes in the law, about

the rates. We are a week behind; the landlord’s been shaking and

rattling at that door frightfully; he says he’ll turn us out. I don’t

know what’s to come of it.’

The man upon the bed ruefully interposed, ‘Here’s my legs. The skin’s

broke, besides the swelling. I have had a many kicks, working, one way

and another.’

He looked at his legs (which were much discoloured and misshapen) for a

while, and then appearing to remember that they were not popular with his

family, rolled them up again, as if they were something in the nature of

maps or plans that were not wanted to be referred to, lay hopelessly down

on his back once more with his fantail hat over his face, and stirred

not.

‘Do your eldest son and daughter sleep in that cupboard?’

‘Yes,’ replied the woman.

‘With the children?’

‘Yes. We have to get together for warmth. We have little to cover us.’

‘Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see there?’

‘Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, with water.

I don’t know what’s to come of it.’

‘Have you no prospect of improvement?’

‘If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he’ll bring it home. Then we

shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to do something

towards the rent. If not, I don’t know what’s to come of it.’

‘This is a sad state of things.’

‘Yes, sir; it’s a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you go,

sir,—they’re broken,—and good day, sir!’

These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and received

no out-of-door relief.

In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent woman

with five children,—the last a baby, and she herself a patient of the

parish doctor,—to whom, her husband being in the hospital, the Union

allowed for the support of herself and family, four shillings a week and

five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the

Public-blessing Party, lay their heads together in course of time, and

come to an equalization of rating, she may go down to the dance of death

to the tune of sixpence more.

I could enter no other houses for that one while, for I could not bear

the contemplation of the children. Such heart as I had summoned to

sustain me against the miseries of the adults failed me when I looked at

the children. I saw how young they were, how hungry, how serious and

still. I thought of them, sick and dying in those lairs. I think of

them dead without anguish; but to think of them so suffering and so dying

quite unmanned me.

Down by the river’s bank in Ratcliff, I was turning upward by a

side-street, therefore, to regain the railway, when my eyes rested on the

inscription across the road, ‘East London Children’s Hospital.’ I could

scarcely have seen an inscription better suited to my frame of mind; and

I went across and went straight in.

I found the children’s hospital established in an old sail-loft or

storehouse, of the roughest nature, and on the simplest means. There

were trap-doors in the floors, where goods had been hoisted up and down;

heavy feet and heavy weights had started every knot in the well-trodden

planking: inconvenient bulks and beams and awkward staircases perplexed

my passage through the wards. But I found it airy, sweet, and clean. In

its seven and thirty beds I saw but little beauty; for starvation in the

second or third generation takes a pinched look: but I saw the sufferings

both of infancy and childhood tenderly assuaged; I heard the little

patients answering to pet playful names, the light touch of a delicate

lady laid bare the wasted sticks of arms for me to pity; and the

claw-like little hands, as she did so, twined themselves lovingly around

her wedding-ring.

One baby mite there was as pretty as any of Raphael’s angels. The tiny

head was bandaged for water on the brain; and it was suffering with acute

bronchitis too, and made from time to time a plaintive, though not

impatient or complaining, little sound. The smooth curve of the cheeks

and of the chin was faultless in its condensation of infantine beauty,

and the large bright eyes were most lovely. It happened as I stopped at

the foot of the bed, that these eyes rested upon mine with that wistful

expression of wondering thoughtfulness which we all know sometimes in

very little children. They remained fixed on mine, and never turned from

me while I stood there. When the utterance of that plaintive sound shook

the little form, the gaze still remained unchanged. I felt as though the

child implored me to tell the story of the little hospital in which it

was sheltered to any gentle heart I could address. Laying my world-worn

hand upon the little unmarked clasped hand at the chin, I gave it a

silent promise that I would do so.

A gentleman and lady, a young husband and wife, have bought and fitted up

this building for its present noble use, and have quietly settled

themselves in it as its medical officers and directors. Both have had

considerable practical experience of medicine and surgery; he as

house-surgeon of a great London hospital; she as a very earnest student,

tested by severe examination, and also as a nurse of the sick poor during

the prevalence of cholera.

With every qualification to lure them away, with youth and

accomplishments and tastes and habits that can have no response in any

breast near them, close begirt by every repulsive circumstance

inseparable from such a neighbourhood, there they dwell. They live in

the hospital itself, and their rooms are on its first floor. Sitting at

their dinner-table, they could hear the cry of one of the children in

pain. The lady’s piano, drawing-materials, books, and other such

evidences of refinement are as much a part of the rough place as the iron

bedsteads of the little patients. They are put to shifts for room, like

passengers on board ship. The dispenser of medicines (attracted to them

not by self-interest, but by their own magnetism and that of their cause)

sleeps in a recess in the dining-room, and has his washing apparatus in

the sideboard.

Their contented manner of making the best of the things around them, I

found so pleasantly inseparable from their usefulness! Their pride in

this partition that we put up ourselves, or in that partition that we

took down, or in that other partition that we moved, or in the stove that

was given us for the waiting-room, or in our nightly conversion of the

little consulting-room into a smoking-room! Their admiration of the

situation, if we could only get rid of its one objectionable incident,

the coal-yard at the back! ‘Our hospital carriage, presented by a

friend, and very useful.’ That was my presentation to a perambulator,

for which a coach-house had been discovered in a corner down-stairs, just

large enough to hold it. Coloured prints, in all stages of preparation

for being added to those already decorating the wards, were plentiful; a

charming wooden phenomenon of a bird, with an impossible top-knot, who

ducked his head when you set a counter weight going, had been inaugurated

as a public statue that very morning; and trotting about among the beds,

on familiar terms with all the patients, was a comical mongrel dog,

called Poodles. This comical dog (quite a tonic in himself) was found

characteristically starving at the door of the institution, and was taken

in and fed, and has lived here ever since. An admirer of his mental

endowments has presented him with a collar bearing the legend, ‘Judge not

Poodles by external appearances.’ He was merrily wagging his tail on a

boy’s pillow when he made this modest appeal to me.

When this hospital was first opened, in January of the present year, the

people could not possibly conceive but that somebody paid for the

services rendered there; and were disposed to claim them as a right, and

to find fault if out of temper. They soon came to understand the case

better, and have much increased in gratitude. The mothers of the

patients avail themselves very freely of the visiting rules; the fathers

often on Sundays. There is an unreasonable (but still, I think, touching

and intelligible) tendency in the parents to take a child away to its

wretched home, if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus

carried off on a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation,

and who had been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with

exceeding difficulty; but he was a jolly boy, with a specially strong

interest in his dinner, when I saw him.

Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of disease

among these small patients. So nourishment, cleanliness, and ventilation

are the main remedies. Discharged patients are looked after, and invited

to come and dine now and then; so are certain famishing creatures who

were never patients. Both the lady and the gentleman are well

acquainted, not only with the histories of the patients and their

families, but with the characters and circumstances of great numbers of

their neighbours—of these they keep a register. It is their common

experience, that people, sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper

poverty, will conceal it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last

extremity.

The nurses of this hospital are all young,—ranging, say, from nineteen to

four and twenty. They have even within these narrow limits, what many

well-endowed hospitals would not give them, a comfortable room of their

own in which to take their meals. It is a beautiful truth, that interest

in the children and sympathy with their sorrows bind these young women to

their places far more strongly than any other consideration could. The

best skilled of the nurses came originally from a kindred neighbourhood,

almost as poor; and she knew how much the work was needed. She is a fair

dressmaker. The hospital cannot pay her as many pounds in the year as

there are months in it; and one day the lady regarded it as a duty to

speak to her about her improving her prospects and following her trade.

‘No,’ she said: she could never be so useful or so happy elsewhere any

more; she must stay among the children.

And she stays. One of the nurses, as I passed her, was washing a

baby-boy. Liking her pleasant face, I stopped to speak to her charge,—a

common, bullet-headed, frowning charge enough, laying hold of his own

nose with a slippery grasp, and staring very solemnly out of a blanket.

The melting of the pleasant face into delighted smiles, as this young

gentleman gave an unexpected kick, and laughed at me, was almost worth my

previous pain.

An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called ‘The Children’s

Doctor.’ As I parted from my children’s doctor, now in question, I saw

in his easy black necktie, in his loose buttoned black frock-coat, in his

pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, in his eyelashes, in the very

turn of his moustache, the exact realisation of the Paris artist’s ideal

as it was presented on the stage. But no romancer that I know of has had

the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and

young wife in the Children’s Hospital in the east of London.

I came away from Ratcliff by the Stepney railway station to the terminus

at Fenchurch Street. Any one who will reverse that route may retrace my

steps.

XXXIII

A LITTLE DINNER IN AN HOUR

IT fell out on a day in this last autumn, that I had to go down from

London to a place of seaside resort, on an hour’s business, accompanied

by my esteemed friend Bullfinch. Let the place of seaside resort be, for

the nonce, called Namelesston.

I had been loitering about Paris in very hot weather, pleasantly

breakfasting in the open air in the garden of the Palais Royal or the

Tuileries, pleasantly dining in the open air in the Elysian Fields,

pleasantly taking my cigar and lemonade in the open air on the Italian

Boulevard towards the small hours after midnight. Bullfinch—an excellent

man of business—has summoned me back across the Channel, to transact this

said hour’s business at Namelesston; and thus it fell out that Bullfinch

and I were in a railway carriage together on our way to Namelesston, each

with his return-ticket in his waistcoat-pocket.

Says Bullfinch, ‘I have a proposal to make. Let us dine at the

Temeraire.’

I asked Bullfinch, did he recommend the Temeraire? inasmuch as I had not

been rated on the books of the Temeraire for many years.

Bullfinch declined to accept the responsibility of recommending the

Temeraire, but on the whole was rather sanguine about it. He ‘seemed to

remember,’ Bullfinch said, that he had dined well there. A plain dinner,

but good. Certainly not like a Parisian dinner (here Bullfinch obviously

became the prey of want of confidence), but of its kind very fair.

I appeal to Bullfinch’s intimate knowledge of my wants and ways to decide

whether I was usually ready to be pleased with any dinner, or—for the

matter of that—with anything that was fair of its kind and really what it

claimed to be. Bullfinch doing me the honour to respond in the

affirmative, I agreed to ship myself as an able trencherman on board the

Temeraire.

‘Now, our plan shall be this,’ says Bullfinch, with his forefinger at his

nose. ‘As soon as we get to Namelesston, we’ll drive straight to the

Temeraire, and order a little dinner in an hour. And as we shall not

have more than enough time in which to dispose of it comfortably, what do

you say to giving the house the best opportunities of serving it hot and

quickly by dining in the coffee-room?’

What I had to say was, Certainly. Bullfinch (who is by nature of a

hopeful constitution) then began to babble of green geese. But I checked

him in that Falstaffian vein, urging considerations of time and cookery.

In due sequence of events we drove up to the Temeraire, and alighted. A

youth in livery received us on the door-step. ‘Looks well,’ said

Bullfinch confidentially. And then aloud, ‘Coffee-room!’

The youth in livery (now perceived to be mouldy) conducted us to the

desired haven, and was enjoined by Bullfinch to send the waiter at once,

as we wished to order a little dinner in an hour. Then Bullfinch and I

waited for the waiter, until, the waiter continuing to wait in some

unknown and invisible sphere of action, we rang for the waiter; which

ring produced the waiter, who announced himself as not the waiter who

ought to wait upon us, and who didn’t wait a moment longer.

So Bullfinch approached the coffee-room door, and melodiously pitching

his voice into a bar where two young ladies were keeping the books of the

Temeraire, apologetically explained that we wished to order a little

dinner in an hour, and that we were debarred from the execution of our

inoffensive purpose by consignment to solitude.

Hereupon one of the young ladies ran a bell, which reproduced—at the bar

this time—the waiter who was not the waiter who ought to wait upon us;

that extraordinary man, whose life seemed consumed in waiting upon people

to say that he wouldn’t wait upon them, repeated his former protest with

great indignation, and retired.

Bullfinch, with a fallen countenance, was about to say to me, ‘This won’t

do,’ when the waiter who ought to wait upon us left off keeping us

waiting at last. ‘Waiter,’ said Bullfinch piteously, ‘we have been a

long time waiting.’ The waiter who ought to wait upon us laid the blame

upon the waiter who ought not to wait upon us, and said it was all that

waiter’s fault.

‘We wish,’ said Bullfinch, much depressed, ‘to order a little dinner in

an hour. What can we have?’

‘What would you like to have, gentlemen?’

Bullfinch, with extreme mournfulness of speech and action, and with a

forlorn old fly-blown bill of fare in his hand which the waiter had given

him, and which was a sort of general manuscript index to any cookery-book

you please, moved the previous question.

We could have mock-turtle soup, a sole, curry, and roast duck. Agreed.

At this table by this window. Punctually in an hour.

I had been feigning to look out of this window; but I had been taking

note of the crumbs on all the tables, the dirty table-cloths, the stuffy,

soupy, airless atmosphere, the stale leavings everywhere about, the deep

gloom of the waiter who ought to wait upon us, and the stomach-ache with

which a lonely traveller at a distant table in a corner was too evidently

afflicted. I now pointed out to Bullfinch the alarming circumstance that

this traveller had _dined_. We hurriedly debated whether, without

infringement of good breeding, we could ask him to disclose if he had

partaken of mock-turtle, sole, curry, or roast duck? We decided that the

thing could not be politely done, and we had set our own stomachs on a

cast, and they must stand the hazard of the die.

I hold phrenology, within certain limits, to be true; I am much of the

same mind as to the subtler expressions of the hand; I hold physiognomy

to be infallible; though all these sciences demand rare qualities in the

student. But I also hold that there is no more certain index to personal

character than the condition of a set of casters is to the character of

any hotel. Knowing, and having often tested this theory of mine,

Bullfinch resigned himself to the worst, when, laying aside any remaining

veil of disguise, I held up before him in succession the cloudy oil and

furry vinegar, the clogged cayenne, the dirty salt, the obscene dregs of

soy, and the anchovy sauce in a flannel waistcoat of decomposition.

We went out to transact our business. So inspiriting was the relief of

passing into the clean and windy streets of Namelesston from the heavy

and vapid closeness of the coffee-room of the Temeraire, that hope began

to revive within us. We began to consider that perhaps the lonely

traveller had taken physic, or done something injudicious to bring his

complaint on. Bullfinch remarked that he thought the waiter who ought to

wait upon us had brightened a little when suggesting curry; and although

I knew him to have been at that moment the express image of despair, I

allowed myself to become elevated in spirits. As we walked by the

softly-lapping sea, all the notabilities of Namelesston, who are for ever

going up and down with the changelessness of the tides, passed to and fro

in procession. Pretty girls on horseback, and with detested

riding-masters; pretty girls on foot; mature ladies in hats,—spectacled,

strong-minded, and glaring at the opposite or weaker sex. The Stock

Exchange was strongly represented, Jerusalem was strongly represented,

the bores of the prosier London clubs were strongly represented.

Fortune-hunters of all denominations were there, from hirsute insolvency,

in a curricle, to closely-buttoned swindlery in doubtful boots, on the

sharp look-out for any likely young gentleman disposed to play a game at

billiards round the corner. Masters of languages, their lessons finished

for the day, were going to their homes out of sight of the sea;

mistresses of accomplishments, carrying small portfolios, likewise

tripped homeward; pairs of scholastic pupils, two and two, went languidly

along the beach, surveying the face of the waters as if waiting for some

Ark to come and take them off. Spectres of the George the Fourth days

flitted unsteadily among the crowd, bearing the outward semblance of

ancient dandies, of every one of whom it might be said, not that he had

one leg in the grave, or both legs, but that he was steeped in grave to

the summit of his high shirt-collar, and had nothing real about him but

his bones. Alone stationary in the midst of all the movements, the

Namelesston boatmen leaned against the railings and yawned, and looked

out to sea, or looked at the moored fishing-boats and at nothing. Such

is the unchanging manner of life with this nursery of our hardy seamen;

and very dry nurses they are, and always wanting something to drink. The

only two nautical personages detached from the railing were the two

fortunate possessors of the celebrated monstrous unknown barking-fish,

just caught (frequently just caught off Namelesston), who carried him

about in a hamper, and pressed the scientific to look in at the lid.

The sands of the hour had all run out when we got back to the Temeraire.

Says Bullfinch, then, to the youth in livery, with boldness, ‘Lavatory!’

When we arrived at the family vault with a skylight, which the youth in

livery presented as the institution sought, we had already whisked off

our cravats and coats; but finding ourselves in the presence of an evil

smell, and no linen but two crumpled towels newly damp from the

countenances of two somebody elses, we put on our cravats and coats

again, and fled unwashed to the coffee-room.

There the waiter who ought to wait upon us had set forth our knives and

forks and glasses, on the cloth whose dirty acquaintance we had already

had the pleasure of making, and which we were pleased to recognise by the

familiar expression of its stains. And now there occurred the truly

surprising phenomenon, that the waiter who ought not to wait upon us

swooped down upon us, clutched our loaf of bread, and vanished with the

same.

Bullfinch, with distracted eyes, was following this unaccountable figure

‘out at the portal,’ like the ghost in Hamlet, when the waiter who ought

to wait upon us jostled against it, carrying a tureen.

‘Waiter!’ said a severe diner, lately finished, perusing his bill

fiercely through his eye-glass.

The waiter put down our tureen on a remote side-table, and went to see

what was amiss in this new direction.

‘This is not right, you know, waiter. Look here! here’s yesterday’s

sherry, one and eightpence, and here we are again, two shillings. And

what does sixpence mean?’

So far from knowing what sixpence meant, the waiter protested that he

didn’t know what anything meant. He wiped the perspiration from his

clammy brow, and said it was impossible to do it,—not particularising

what,—and the kitchen was so far off.

‘Take the bill to the bar, and get it altered,’ said Mr. Indignation

Cocker, so to call him.

The waiter took it, looked intensely at it, didn’t seem to like the idea

of taking it to the bar, and submitted, as a new light upon the case,

that perhaps sixpence meant sixpence.

‘I tell you again,’ said Mr. Indignation Cocker, ‘here’s yesterday’s

sherry—can’t you see it?—one and eightpence, and here we are again, two

shillings. What do you make of one and eightpence and two shillings?’

Totally unable to make anything of one and eightpence and two shillings,

the waiter went out to try if anybody else could; merely casting a

helpless backward glance at Bullfinch, in acknowledgement of his pathetic

entreaties for our soup-tureen. After a pause, during which Mr.

Indignation Cocker read a newspaper and coughed defiant coughs, Bullfinch

arose to get the tureen, when the waiter reappeared and brought

it,—dropping Mr. Indignation Cocker’s altered bill on Mr. Indignation

Cocker’s table as he came along.

‘It’s quite impossible to do it, gentlemen,’ murmured the waiter; ‘and

the kitchen is so far off.’

‘Well, you don’t keep the house; it’s not your fault, we suppose. Bring

some sherry.’

‘Waiter!’ from Mr. Indignation Cocker, with a new and burning sense of

injury upon him.

The waiter, arrested on his way to our sherry, stopped short, and came

back to see what was wrong now.

‘Will you look here? This is worse than before. _Do_ you understand?

Here’s yesterday’s sherry, one and eightpence, and here we are again two

shillings. And what the devil does ninepence mean?’

This new portent utterly confounded the waiter. He wrung his napkin, and

mutely appealed to the ceiling.

‘Waiter, fetch that sherry,’ says Bullfinch, in open wrath and revolt.

‘I want to know,’ persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, ‘the meaning of

ninepence. I want to know the meaning of sherry one and eightpence

yesterday, and of here we are again two shillings. Send somebody.’

The distracted waiter got out of the room on pretext of sending somebody,

and by that means got our wine. But the instant he appeared with our

decanter, Mr. Indignation Cocker descended on him again.

‘Waiter!’

‘You will now have the goodness to attend to our dinner, waiter,’ said

Bullfinch, sternly.

‘I am very sorry, but it’s quite impossible to do it, gentlemen,’ pleaded

the waiter; ‘and the kitchen—’

‘Waiter!’ said Mr. Indignation Cocker.

‘—Is,’ resumed the waiter, ‘so far off, that—’

‘Waiter!’ persisted Mr. Indignation Cocker, ‘send somebody.’

We were not without our fears that the waiter rushed out to hang himself;

and we were much relieved by his fetching somebody,—in graceful, flowing

skirts and with a waist,—who very soon settled Mr. Indignation Cocker’s

business.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Cocker, with his fire surprisingly quenched by this

apparition; ‘I wished to ask about this bill of mine, because it appears

to me that there’s a little mistake here. Let me show you. Here’s

yesterday’s sherry one and eightpence, and here we are again two

shillings. And how do you explain ninepence?’

However it was explained, in tones too soft to be overheard. Mr. Cocker

was heard to say nothing more than ‘Ah-h-h! Indeed; thank you! Yes,’

and shortly afterwards went out, a milder man.

The lonely traveller with the stomach-ache had all this time suffered

severely, drawing up a leg now and then, and sipping hot brandy-and-water

with grated ginger in it. When we tasted our (very) mock-turtle soup,

and were instantly seized with symptoms of some disorder simulating

apoplexy, and occasioned by the surcharge of nose and brain with lukewarm

dish-water holding in solution sour flour, poisonous condiments, and

(say) seventy-five per cent. of miscellaneous kitchen stuff rolled into

balls, we were inclined to trace his disorder to that source. On the

other hand, there was a silent anguish upon him too strongly resembling

the results established within ourselves by the sherry, to be discarded

from alarmed consideration. Again, we observed him, with terror, to be

much overcome by our sole’s being aired in a temporary retreat close to

him, while the waiter went out (as we conceived) to see his friends. And

when the curry made its appearance he suddenly retired in great disorder.

In fine, for the uneatable part of this little dinner (as

contradistinguished from the undrinkable) we paid only seven shillings

and sixpence each. And Bullfinch and I agreed unanimously, that no such

ill-served, ill-appointed, ill-cooked, nasty little dinner could be got

for the money anywhere else under the sun. With that comfort to our

backs, we turned them on the dear old Temeraire, the charging Temeraire,

and resolved (in the Scotch dialect) to gang nae mair to the flabby

Temeraire.

XXXIV

MR. BARLOW

A GREAT reader of good fiction at an unusually early age, it seems to me

as though I had been born under the superintendence of the estimable but

terrific gentleman whose name stands at the head of my present

reflections. The instructive monomaniac, Mr. Barlow, will be remembered

as the tutor of Master Harry Sandford and Master Tommy Merton. He knew

everything, and didactically improved all sorts of occasions, from the

consumption of a plate of cherries to the contemplation of a starlight

night. What youth came to without Mr. Barlow was displayed in the

history of Sandford and Merton, by the example of a certain awful Master

Mash. This young wretch wore buckles and powder, conducted himself with

insupportable levity at the theatre, had no idea of facing a mad bull

single-handed (in which I think him less reprehensible, as remotely

reflecting my own character), and was a frightful instance of the

enervating effects of luxury upon the human race.

Strange destiny on the part of Mr. Barlow, to go down to posterity as

childhood’s experience of a bore! Immortal Mr. Barlow, boring his way

through the verdant freshness of ages!

My personal indictment against Mr. Barlow is one of many counts. I will

proceed to set forth a few of the injuries he has done me.

In the first place, he never made or took a joke. This insensibility on

Mr. Barlow’s part not only cast its own gloom over my boyhood, but

blighted even the sixpenny jest-books of the time; for, groaning under a

moral spell constraining me to refer all things to Mr. Barlow, I could

not choose but ask myself in a whisper when tickled by a printed jest,

‘What would _he_ think of it? What would _he_ see in it?’ The point of

the jest immediately became a sting, and stung my conscience. For my

mind’s eye saw him stolid, frigid, perchance taking from its shelf some

dreary Greek book, and translating at full length what some dismal sage

said (and touched up afterwards, perhaps, for publication), when he

banished some unlucky joker from Athens.

The incompatibility of Mr. Barlow with all other portions of my young

life but himself, the adamantine inadaptability of the man to my

favourite fancies and amusements, is the thing for which I hate him most.

What right had he to bore his way into my Arabian Nights? Yet he did.

He was always hinting doubts of the veracity of Sindbad the Sailor. If

he could have got hold of the Wonderful Lamp, I knew he would have

trimmed it and lighted it, and delivered a lecture over it on the

qualities of sperm-oil, with a glance at the whale fisheries. He would

so soon have found out—on mechanical principles—the peg in the neck of

the Enchanted Horse, and would have turned it the right way in so

workmanlike a manner, that the horse could never have got any height into

the air, and the story couldn’t have been. He would have proved, by map

and compass, that there was no such kingdom as the delightful kingdom of

Casgar, on the frontiers of Tartary. He would have caused that

hypocritical young prig Harry to make an experiment,—with the aid of a

temporary building in the garden and a dummy,—demonstrating that you

couldn’t let a choked hunchback down an Eastern chimney with a cord, and

leave him upright on the hearth to terrify the sultan’s purveyor.

The golden sounds of the overture to the first metropolitan pantomime, I

remember, were alloyed by Mr. Barlow. Click click, ting ting, bang bang,

weedle weedle weedle, bang! I recall the chilling air that ran across my

frame and cooled my hot delight, as the thought occurred to me, ‘This

would never do for Mr. Barlow!’ After the curtain drew up, dreadful

doubts of Mr. Barlow’s considering the costumes of the Nymphs of the

Nebula as being sufficiently opaque, obtruded themselves on my enjoyment.

In the clown I perceived two persons; one a fascinating unaccountable

creature of a hectic complexion, joyous in spirits though feeble in

intellect, with flashes of brilliancy; the other a pupil for Mr. Barlow.

I thought how Mr. Barlow would secretly rise early in the morning, and

butter the pavement for _him_, and, when he had brought him down, would

look severely out of his study window and ask _him_ how he enjoyed the

fun.

I thought how Mr. Barlow would heat all the pokers in the house, and

singe him with the whole collection, to bring him better acquainted with

the properties of incandescent iron, on which he (Barlow) would fully

expatiate. I pictured Mr. Barlow’s instituting a comparison between the

clown’s conduct at his studies,—drinking up the ink, licking his

copy-book, and using his head for blotting-paper,—and that of the already

mentioned young prig of prigs, Harry, sitting at the Barlovian feet,

sneakingly pretending to be in a rapture of youthful knowledge. I

thought how soon Mr. Barlow would smooth the clown’s hair down, instead

of letting it stand erect in three tall tufts; and how, after a couple of

years or so with Mr. Barlow, he would keep his legs close together when

he walked, and would take his hands out of his big loose pockets, and

wouldn’t have a jump left in him.

That I am particularly ignorant what most things in the universe are made

of, and how they are made, is another of my charges against Mr. Barlow.

With the dread upon me of developing into a Harry, and with a further

dread upon me of being Barlowed if I made inquiries, by bringing down

upon myself a cold shower-bath of explanations and experiments, I forbore

enlightenment in my youth, and became, as they say in melodramas, ‘the

wreck you now behold.’ That I consorted with idlers and dunces is

another of the melancholy facts for which I hold Mr. Barlow responsible.

That pragmatical prig, Harry, became so detestable in my sight, that, he

being reported studious in the South, I would have fled idle to the

extremest North. Better to learn misconduct from a Master Mash than

science and statistics from a Sandford! So I took the path, which, but

for Mr. Barlow, I might never have trodden. Thought I, with a shudder,

‘Mr. Barlow is a bore, with an immense constructive power of making

bores. His prize specimen is a bore. He seeks to make a bore of me.

That knowledge is power I am not prepared to gainsay; but, with Mr.

Barlow, knowledge is power to bore.’ Therefore I took refuge in the

caves of ignorance, wherein I have resided ever since, and which are

still my private address.

But the weightiest charge of all my charges against Mr. Barlow is, that

he still walks the earth in various disguises, seeking to make a Tommy of

me, even in my maturity. Irrepressible, instructive monomaniac, Mr.

Barlow fills my life with pitfalls, and lies hiding at the bottom to

burst out upon me when I least expect him.

A few of these dismal experiences of mine shall suffice.

Knowing Mr. Barlow to have invested largely in the moving panorama trade,

and having on various occasions identified him in the dark with a long

wand in his hand, holding forth in his old way (made more appalling in

this connection by his sometimes cracking a piece of Mr. Carlyle’s own

Dead-Sea fruit in mistake for a joke), I systematically shun pictorial

entertainment on rollers. Similarly, I should demand responsible bail

and guaranty against the appearance of Mr. Barlow, before committing

myself to attendance at any assemblage of my fellow-creatures where a

bottle of water and a note-book were conspicuous objects; for in either

of those associations, I should expressly expect him. But such is the

designing nature of the man, that he steals in where no reasoning

precaution or provision could expect him. As in the following case:—

Adjoining the Caves of Ignorance is a country town. In this country town

the Mississippi Momuses, nine in number, were announced to appear in the

town-hall, for the general delectation, this last Christmas week.

Knowing Mr. Barlow to be unconnected with the Mississippi, though holding

republican opinions, and deeming myself secure, I took a stall. My

object was to hear and see the Mississippi Momuses in what the bills

described as their ‘National ballads, plantation break-downs, nigger

part-songs, choice conundrums, sparkling repartees, &c.’ I found the

nine dressed alike, in the black coat and trousers, white waistcoat, very

large shirt-front, very large shirt-collar, and very large white tie and

wristbands, which constitute the dress of the mass of the African race,

and which has been observed by travellers to prevail over a vast number

of degrees of latitude. All the nine rolled their eyes exceedingly, and

had very red lips. At the extremities of the curve they formed, seated

in their chairs, were the performers on the tambourine and bones. The

centre Momus, a black of melancholy aspect (who inspired me with a vague

uneasiness for which I could not then account), performed on a

Mississippi instrument closely resembling what was once called in this

island a hurdy-gurdy. The Momuses on either side of him had each another

instrument peculiar to the Father of Waters, which may be likened to a

stringed weather-glass held upside down. There were likewise a little

flute and a violin. All went well for awhile, and we had had several

sparkling repartees exchanged between the performers on the tambourine

and bones, when the black of melancholy aspect, turning to the latter,

and addressing him in a deep and improving voice as ‘Bones, sir,’

delivered certain grave remarks to him concerning the juveniles present,

and the season of the year; whereon I perceived that I was in the

presence of Mr. Barlow—corked!

Another night—and this was in London—I attended the representation of a

little comedy. As the characters were lifelike (and consequently not

improving), and as they went upon their several ways and designs without

personally addressing themselves to me, I felt rather confident of coming

through it without being regarded as Tommy, the more so, as we were

clearly getting close to the end. But I deceived myself. All of a

sudden, Apropos of nothing, everybody concerned came to a check and halt,

advanced to the foot-lights in a general rally to take dead aim at me,

and brought me down with a moral homily, in which I detected the dread

hand of Barlow.

Nay, so intricate and subtle are the toils of this hunter, that on the

very next night after that, I was again entrapped, where no vestige of a

spring could have been apprehended by the timidest. It was a burlesque

that I saw performed; an uncompromising burlesque, where everybody

concerned, but especially the ladies, carried on at a very considerable

rate indeed. Most prominent and active among the corps of performers was

what I took to be (and she really gave me very fair opportunities of

coming to a right conclusion) a young lady of a pretty figure. She was

dressed as a picturesque young gentleman, whose pantaloons had been cut

off in their infancy; and she had very neat knees and very neat satin

boots. Immediately after singing a slang song and dancing a slang dance,

this engaging figure approached the fatal lamps, and, bending over them,

delivered in a thrilling voice a random eulogium on, and exhortation to

pursue, the virtues. ‘Great Heaven!’ was my exclamation; ‘Barlow!’

There is still another aspect in which Mr. Barlow perpetually insists on

my sustaining the character of Tommy, which is more unendurable yet, on

account of its extreme aggressiveness. For the purposes of a review or

newspaper, he will get up an abstruse subject with definite pains, will

Barlow, utterly regardless of the price of midnight oil, and indeed of

everything else, save cramming himself to the eyes.

But mark. When Mr. Barlow blows his information off, he is not contented

with having rammed it home, and discharged it upon me, Tommy, his target,

but he pretends that he was always in possession of it, and made nothing

of it,—that he imbibed it with mother’s milk,—and that I, the wretched

Tommy, am most abjectly behindhand in not having done the same. I ask,

why is Tommy to be always the foil of Mr. Barlow to this extent? What

Mr. Barlow had not the slightest notion of himself, a week ago, it surely

cannot be any very heavy backsliding in me not to have at my fingers’

ends to-day! And yet Mr. Barlow systematically carries it over me with a

high hand, and will tauntingly ask me, in his articles, whether it is

possible that I am not aware that every school-boy knows that the

fourteenth turning on the left in the steppes of Russia will conduct to

such and such a wandering tribe? with other disparaging questions of like

nature. So, when Mr. Barlow addresses a letter to any journal as a

volunteer correspondent (which I frequently find him doing), he will

previously have gotten somebody to tell him some tremendous technicality,

and will write in the coolest manner, ‘Now, sir, I may assume that every

reader of your columns, possessing average information and intelligence,

knows as well as I do that’—say that the draught from the touch-hole of a

cannon of such a calibre bears such a proportion in the nicest fractions

to the draught from the muzzle; or some equally familiar little fact.

But whatever it is, be certain that it always tends to the exaltation of

Mr. Barlow, and the depression of his enforced and enslaved pupil.

Mr. Barlow’s knowledge of my own pursuits I find to be so profound, that

my own knowledge of them becomes as nothing. Mr. Barlow (disguised and

bearing a feigned name, but detected by me) has occasionally taught me,

in a sonorous voice, from end to end of a long dinner-table, trifles that

I took the liberty of teaching him five-and-twenty years ago. My closing

article of impeachment against Mr. Barlow is, that he goes out to

breakfast, goes out to dinner, goes out everywhere, high and low, and

that he WILL preach to me, and that I CAN’T get rid of him. He makes me

a Promethean Tommy, bound; and he is the vulture that gorges itself upon

the liver of my uninstructed mind.

XXXV

ON AN AMATEUR BEAT

IT is one of my fancies, that even my idlest walk must always have its

appointed destination. I set myself a task before I leave my lodging in

Covent-garden on a street expedition, and should no more think of

altering my route by the way, or turning back and leaving a part of it

unachieved, than I should think of fraudulently violating an agreement

entered into with somebody else. The other day, finding myself under

this kind of obligation to proceed to Limehouse, I started punctually at

noon, in compliance with the terms of the contract with myself to which

my good faith was pledged.

On such an occasion, it is my habit to regard my walk as my beat, and

myself as a higher sort of police-constable doing duty on the same.

There is many a ruffian in the streets whom I mentally collar and clear

out of them, who would see mighty little of London, I can tell him, if I

could deal with him physically.

Issuing forth upon this very beat, and following with my eyes three

hulking garrotters on their way home,—which home I could confidently

swear to be within so many yards of Drury-lane, in such a narrow and

restricted direction (though they live in their lodging quite as

undisturbed as I in mine),—I went on duty with a consideration which I

respectfully offer to the new Chief Commissioner,—in whom I thoroughly

confide as a tried and efficient public servant. How often (thought I)

have I been forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable

stereotyped pill of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the

worthy magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did, at that

present speaking, dwell in a street or court which no man dared go down,

and how that the worthy magistrate had heard of the dark reputation of

such street or court, and how that our readers would doubtless remember

that it was always the same street or court which was thus edifyingly

discoursed about, say once a fortnight.

Now, suppose that a Chief Commissioner sent round a circular to every

division of police employed in London, requiring instantly the names in

all districts of all such much-puffed streets or courts which no man

durst go down; and suppose that in such circular he gave plain warning,

‘If those places really exist, they are a proof of police inefficiency

which I mean to punish; and if they do not exist, but are a conventional

fiction, then they are a proof of lazy tacit police connivance with

professional crime, which I also mean to punish’—what then? Fictions or

realities, could they survive the touchstone of this atom of common

sense? To tell us in open court, until it has become as trite a feature

of news as the great gooseberry, that a costly police-system such as was

never before heard of, has left in London, in the days of steam and gas

and photographs of thieves and electric telegraphs, the sanctuaries and

stews of the Stuarts! Why, a parity of practice, in all departments,

would bring back the Plague in two summers, and the Druids in a century!

Walking faster under my share of this public injury, I overturned a

wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of

trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other,

pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise and

succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it, but of both sexes,

were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, clamouring,

yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The piece of money I

had put into the claw of the child I had over-turned was clawed out of

it, and was again clawed out of that wolfish gripe, and again out of

that, and soon I had no notion in what part of the obscene scuffle in the

mud, of rags and legs and arms and dirt, the money might be. In raising

the child, I had drawn it aside out of the main thoroughfare, and this

took place among some wooden hoardings and barriers and ruins of

demolished buildings, hard by Temple Bar.

Unexpectedly, from among them emerged a genuine police-constable, before

whom the dreadful brood dispersed in various directions, he making feints

and darts in this direction and in that, and catching nothing. When all

were frightened away, he took off his hat, pulled out a handkerchief from

it, wiped his heated brow, and restored the handkerchief and hat to their

places, with the air of a man who had discharged a great moral duty,—as

indeed he had, in doing what was set down for him. I looked at him, and

I looked about at the disorderly traces in the mud, and I thought of the

drops of rain and the footprints of an extinct creature, hoary ages upon

ages old, that geologists have identified on the face of a cliff; and

this speculation came over me: If this mud could petrify at this moment,

and could lie concealed here for ten thousand years, I wonder whether the

race of men then to be our successors on the earth could, from these or

any marks, by the utmost force of the human intellect, unassisted by

tradition, deduce such an astounding inference as the existence of a

polished state of society that bore with the public savagery of neglected

children in the streets of its capital city, and was proud of its power

by sea and land, and never used its power to seize and save them!

After this, when I came to the Old Bailey and glanced up it towards

Newgate, I found that the prison had an inconsistent look. There seemed

to be some unlucky inconsistency in the atmosphere that day; for though

the proportions of St. Paul’s Cathedral are very beautiful, it had an air

of being somewhat out of drawing, in my eyes. I felt as though the cross

were too high up, and perched upon the intervening golden ball too far

away.

Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey,—fire and

faggot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the

cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral

landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without bringing the stars

quite down upon us as yet,—and went my way upon my beat, noting how oddly

characteristic neighbourhoods are divided from one another, hereabout, as

though by an invisible line across the way. Here shall cease the bankers

and the money-changers; here shall begin the shipping interest and the

nautical-instrument shops; here shall follow a scarcely perceptible

flavouring of groceries and drugs; here shall come a strong infusion of

butchers; now, small hosiers shall be in the ascendant; henceforth,

everything exposed for sale shall have its ticketed price attached. All

this as if specially ordered and appointed.

A single stride at Houndsditch Church, no wider than sufficed to cross

the kennel at the bottom of the Canon-gate, which the debtors in Holyrood

sanctuary were wont to relieve their minds by skipping over, as Scott

relates, and standing in delightful daring of catchpoles on the free

side,—a single stride, and everything is entirely changed in grain and

character. West of the stride, a table, or a chest of drawers on sale,

shall be of mahogany and French-polished; east of the stride, it shall be

of deal, smeared with a cheap counterfeit resembling lip-salve. West of

the stride, a penny loaf or bun shall be compact and self-contained; east

of the stride, it shall be of a sprawling and splay-footed character, as

seeking to make more of itself for the money. My beat lying round by

Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries,—great buildings,

tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being nearly related to the

dock-warehouses at Liverpool,—I turned off to my right, and, passing

round the awkward corner on my left, came suddenly on an apparition

familiar to London streets afar off.

What London peripatetic of these times has not seen the woman who has

fallen forward, double, through some affection of the spine, and whose

head has of late taken a turn to one side, so that it now droops over the

back of one of her arms at about the wrist? Who does not know her staff,

and her shawl, and her basket, as she gropes her way along, capable of

seeing nothing but the pavement, never begging, never stopping, for ever

going somewhere on no business? How does she live, whence does she come,

whither does she go, and why? I mind the time when her yellow arms were

naught but bone and parchment. Slight changes steal over her; for there

is a shadowy suggestion of human skin on them now. The Strand may be

taken as the central point about which she revolves in a half-mile orbit.

How comes she so far east as this? And coming back too! Having been how

much farther? She is a rare spectacle in this neighbourhood. I receive

intelligent information to this effect from a dog—a lop-sided mongrel

with a foolish tail, plodding along with his tail up, and his ears

pricked, and displaying an amiable interest in the ways of his

fellow-men,—if I may be allowed the expression. After pausing at a

pork-shop, he is jogging eastward like myself, with a benevolent

countenance and a watery mouth, as though musing on the many excellences

of pork, when he beholds this doubled-up bundle approaching. He is not

so much astonished at the bundle (though amazed by that), as the

circumstance that it has within itself the means of locomotion. He

stops, pricks his ears higher, makes a slight point, stares, utters a

short, low growl, and glistens at the nose,—as I conceive with terror.

The bundle continuing to approach, he barks, turns tail, and is about to

fly, when, arguing with himself that flight is not becoming in a dog, he

turns, and once more faces the advancing heap of clothes. After much

hesitation, it occurs to him that there may be a face in it somewhere.

Desperately resolving to undertake the adventure, and pursue the inquiry,

he goes slowly up to the bundle, goes slowly round it, and coming at

length upon the human countenance down there where never human

countenance should be, gives a yelp of horror, and flies for the East

India Docks.

Being now in the Commercial Road district of my beat, and bethinking

myself that Stepney Station is near, I quicken my pace that I may turn

out of the road at that point, and see how my small eastern star is

shining.

The Children’s Hospital, to which I gave that name, is in full force.

All its beds are occupied. There is a new face on the bed where my

pretty baby lay, and that sweet little child is now at rest for ever.

Much kind sympathy has been here since my former visit, and it is good to

see the walls profusely garnished with dolls. I wonder what Poodles may

think of them, as they stretch out their arms above the beds, and stare,

and display their splendid dresses. Poodles has a greater interest in

the patients. I find him making the round of the beds, like a

house-surgeon, attended by another dog,—a friend,—who appears to trot

about with him in the character of his pupil dresser. Poodles is anxious

to make me known to a pretty little girl looking wonderfully healthy, who

had had a leg taken off for cancer of the knee. A difficult operation,

Poodles intimates, wagging his tail on the counterpane, but perfectly

successful, as you see, dear sir! The patient, patting Poodles, adds

with a smile, ‘The leg was so much trouble to me, that I am glad it’s

gone.’ I never saw anything in doggery finer than the deportment of

Poodles, when another little girl opens her mouth to show a peculiar

enlargement of the tongue. Poodles (at that time on a table, to be on a

level with the occasion) looks at the tongue (with his own

sympathetically out) so very gravely and knowingly, that I feel inclined

to put my hand in my waistcoat-pocket, and give him a guinea, wrapped in

paper.

On my beat again, and close to Limehouse Church, its termination, I found

myself near to certain ‘Lead-Mills.’ Struck by the name, which was fresh

in my memory, and finding, on inquiry, that these same lead-mills were

identified with those same lead-mills of which I made mention when I

first visited the East London Children’s Hospital and its neighbourhood

as Uncommercial Traveller, I resolved to have a look at them.

Received by two very intelligent gentlemen, brothers, and partners with

their father in the concern, and who testified every desire to show their

works to me freely, I went over the lead-mills. The purport of such

works is the conversion of pig-lead into white-lead. This conversion is

brought about by the slow and gradual effecting of certain successive

chemical changes in the lead itself. The processes are picturesque and

interesting,—the most so, being the burying of the lead, at a certain

stage of preparation, in pots, each pot containing a certain quantity of

acid besides, and all the pots being buried in vast numbers, in layers,

under tan, for some ten weeks.

Hopping up ladders, and across planks, and on elevated perches, until I

was uncertain whether to liken myself to a bird or a brick-layer, I

became conscious of standing on nothing particular, looking down into one

of a series of large cocklofts, with the outer day peeping in through the

chinks in the tiled roof above. A number of women were ascending to, and

descending from, this cockloft, each carrying on the upward journey a pot

of prepared lead and acid, for deposition under the smoking tan. When

one layer of pots was completely filled, it was carefully covered in with

planks, and those were carefully covered with tan again, and then another

layer of pots was begun above; sufficient means of ventilation being

preserved through wooden tubes. Going down into the cockloft then

filling, I found the heat of the tan to be surprisingly great, and also

the odour of the lead and acid to be not absolutely exquisite, though I

believe not noxious at that stage. In other cocklofts, where the pots

were being exhumed, the heat of the steaming tan was much greater, and

the smell was penetrating and peculiar. There were cocklofts in all

stages; full and empty, half filled and half emptied; strong, active

women were clambering about them busily; and the whole thing had rather

the air of the upper part of the house of some immensely rich old Turk,

whose faithful seraglio were hiding his money because the sultan or the

pasha was coming.

As is the case with most pulps or pigments, so in the instance of this

white-lead, processes of stirring, separating, washing, grinding,

rolling, and pressing succeed. Some of these are unquestionably inimical

to health, the danger arising from inhalation of particles of lead, or

from contact between the lead and the touch, or both. Against these

dangers, I found good respirators provided (simply made of flannel and

muslin, so as to be inexpensively renewed, and in some instances washed

with scented soap), and gauntlet gloves, and loose gowns. Everywhere,

there was as much fresh air as windows, well placed and opened, could

possibly admit. And it was explained that the precaution of frequently

changing the women employed in the worst parts of the work (a precaution

originating in their own experience or apprehension of its ill effects)

was found salutary. They had a mysterious and singular appearance, with

the mouth and nose covered, and the loose gown on, and yet bore out the

simile of the old Turk and the seraglio all the better for the disguise.

At last this vexed white-lead, having been buried and resuscitated, and

heated and cooled and stirred, and separated and washed and ground, and

rolled and pressed, is subjected to the action of intense fiery heat. A

row of women, dressed as above described, stood, let us say, in a large

stone bakehouse, passing on the baking-dishes as they were given out by

the cooks, from hand to hand, into the ovens. The oven, or stove, cold

as yet, looked as high as an ordinary house, and was full of men and

women on temporary footholds, briskly passing up and stowing away the

dishes. The door of another oven, or stove, about to be cooled and

emptied, was opened from above, for the uncommercial countenance to peer

down into. The uncommercial countenance withdrew itself, with expedition

and a sense of suffocation, from the dull-glowing heat and the

overpowering smell. On the whole, perhaps the going into these stoves to

work, when they are freshly opened, may be the worst part of the

occupation.

But I made it out to be indubitable that the owners of these lead-mills

honestly and sedulously try to reduce the dangers of the occupation to

the lowest point.

A washing-place is provided for the women (I thought there might have

been more towels), and a room in which they hang their clothes, and take

their meals, and where they have a good fire-range and fire, and a female

attendant to help them, and to watch that they do not neglect the

cleansing of their hands before touching their food. An experienced

medical attendant is provided for them, and any premonitory symptoms of

lead-poisoning are carefully treated. Their teapots and such things were

set out on tables ready for their afternoon meal, when I saw their room;

and it had a homely look. It is found that they bear the work much

better than men: some few of them have been at it for years, and the

great majority of those I observed were strong and active. On the other

hand, it should be remembered that most of them are very capricious and

irregular in their attendance.

American inventiveness would seem to indicate that before very long

white-lead may be made entirely by machinery. The sooner, the better.

In the meantime, I parted from my two frank conductors over the mills, by

telling them that they had nothing there to be concealed, and nothing to

be blamed for. As to the rest, the philosophy of the matter of

lead-poisoning and workpeople seems to me to have been pretty fairly

summed up by the Irishwoman whom I quoted in my former paper: ‘Some of

them gets lead-pisoned soon, and some of them gets lead-pisoned later,

and some, but not many, niver; and ’tis all according to the

constitooshun, sur; and some constitooshuns is strong and some is weak.’

Retracing my footsteps over my beat, I went off duty.

XXXVI

A FLY-LEAF IN A LIFE

ONCE upon a time (no matter when), I was engaged in a pursuit (no matter

what), which could be transacted by myself alone; in which I could have

no help; which imposed a constant strain on the attention, memory,

observation, and physical powers; and which involved an almost fabulous

amount of change of place and rapid railway travelling. I had followed

this pursuit through an exceptionally trying winter in an always trying

climate, and had resumed it in England after but a brief repose. Thus it

came to be prolonged until, at length—and, as it seemed, all of a

sudden—it so wore me out that I could not rely, with my usual cheerful

confidence, upon myself to achieve the constantly recurring task, and

began to feel (for the first time in my life) giddy, jarred, shaken,

faint, uncertain of voice and sight and tread and touch, and dull of

spirit. The medical advice I sought within a few hours, was given in two

words: ‘instant rest.’ Being accustomed to observe myself as curiously

as if I were another man, and knowing the advice to meet my only need, I

instantly halted in the pursuit of which I speak, and rested.

My intention was, to interpose, as it were, a fly-leaf in the book of my

life, in which nothing should be written from without for a brief season

of a few weeks. But some very singular experiences recorded themselves

on this same fly-leaf, and I am going to relate them literally. I repeat

the word: literally.

My first odd experience was of the remarkable coincidence between my

case, in the general mind, and one Mr. Merdle’s as I find it recorded in

a work of fiction called LITTLE DORRIT. To be sure, Mr. Merdle was a

swindler, forger, and thief, and my calling had been of a less harmful

(and less remunerative) nature; but it was all one for that.

Here is Mr. Merdle’s case:

‘At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were known, and of

several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of Light to meet the

demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from infancy, he had

inherited a large estate of water on the chest from his grandfather, he

had had an operation performed upon him every morning of his life for

eighteen years, he had been subject to the explosion of important veins

in his body after the manner of fireworks, he had had something the

matter with his lungs, he had had something the matter with his heart, he

had had something the matter with his brain. Five hundred people who sat

down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the whole subject, believed

before they had done breakfast, that they privately and personally knew

Physician to have said to Mr. Merdle, “You must expect to go out, some

day, like the snuff of a candle;” and that they knew Mr. Merdle to have

said to Physician, “A man can die but once.” By about eleven o’clock in

the forenoon, something the matter with the brain, became the favourite

theory against the field; and by twelve the something had been distinctly

ascertained to be “Pressure.”

‘Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and seemed to

make every one so comfortable, that it might have lasted all day but for

Bar’s having taken the real state of the case into Court at half-past

nine. Pressure, however, so far from being overthrown by the discovery,

became a greater favourite than ever. There was a general moralising

upon Pressure, in every street. All the people who had tried to make

money and had not been able to do it, said, There you were! You no

sooner began to devote yourself to the pursuit of wealth, than you got

Pressure. The idle people improved the occasion in a similar manner.

See, said they, what you brought yourself to by work, work, work! You

persisted in working, you overdid it, Pressure came on, and you were done

for! This consideration was very potent in many quarters, but nowhere

more so than among the young clerks and partners who had never been in

the slightest danger of overdoing it. These, one and all declared, quite

piously, that they hoped they would never forget the warning as long as

they lived, and that their conduct might be so regulated as to keep off

Pressure, and preserve them, a comfort to their friends, for many years.’

Just my case—if I had only known it—when I was quietly basking in the

sunshine in my Kentish meadow!

But while I so rested, thankfully recovering every hour, I had

experiences more odd than this. I had experiences of spiritual conceit,

for which, as giving me a new warning against that curse of mankind, I

shall always feel grateful to the supposition that I was too far gone to

protest against playing sick lion to any stray donkey with an itching

hoof. All sorts of people seemed to become vicariously religious at my

expense. I received the most uncompromising warning that I was a

Heathen: on the conclusive authority of a field preacher, who, like the

most of his ignorant and vain and daring class, could not construct a

tolerable sentence in his native tongue or pen a fair letter. This

inspired individual called me to order roundly, and knew in the freest

and easiest way where I was going to, and what would become of me if I

failed to fashion myself on his bright example, and was on terms of

blasphemous confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was in the secrets of

my heart, and in the lowest soundings of my soul—he!—and could read the

depths of my nature better than his A B C, and could turn me inside out,

like his own clammy glove. But what is far more extraordinary than

this—for such dirty water as this could alone be drawn from such a

shallow and muddy source—I found from the information of a beneficed

clergyman, of whom I never heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, as

I rather supposed I had, lived a life of some reading, contemplation, and

inquiry; that I had not studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate

some Christian lessons in books; that I had never tried, as I rather

supposed I had, to turn a child or two tenderly towards the knowledge and

love of our Saviour; that I had never had, as I rather supposed I had

had, departed friends, or stood beside open graves; but that I had lived

a life of ‘uninterrupted prosperity,’ and that I needed this ‘check,

overmuch,’ and that the way to turn it to account was to read these

sermons and these poems, enclosed, and written and issued by my

correspondent! I beg it may be understood that I relate facts of my own

uncommercial experience, and no vain imaginings. The documents in proof

lie near my hand.

Another odd entry on the fly-leaf, of a more entertaining character, was

the wonderful persistency with which kind sympathisers assumed that I had

injuriously coupled with the so suddenly relinquished pursuit, those

personal habits of mine most obviously incompatible with it, and most

plainly impossible of being maintained, along with it. As, all that

exercise, all that cold bathing, all that wind and weather, all that

uphill training—all that everything else, say, which is usually carried

about by express trains in a portmanteau and hat-box, and partaken of

under a flaming row of gas-lights in the company of two thousand people.

This assuming of a whole case against all fact and likelihood, struck me

as particularly droll, and was an oddity of which I certainly had had no

adequate experience in life until I turned that curious fly-leaf.

My old acquaintances the begging-letter writers came out on the fly-leaf,

very piously indeed. They were glad, at such a serious crisis, to afford

me another opportunity of sending that Post-office order. I needn’t make

it a pound, as previously insisted on; ten shillings might ease my mind.

And Heaven forbid that they should refuse, at such an insignificant

figure, to take a weight off the memory of an erring fellow-creature!

One gentleman, of an artistic turn (and copiously illustrating the books

of the Mendicity Society), thought it might soothe my conscience, in the

tender respect of gifts misused, if I would immediately cash up in aid of

his lowly talent for original design—as a specimen of which he enclosed

me a work of art which I recognized as a tracing from a woodcut

originally published in the late Mrs. Trollope’s book on America, forty

or fifty years ago. The number of people who were prepared to live long

years after me, untiring benefactors to their species, for fifty pounds

apiece down, was astonishing. Also, of those who wanted bank-notes for

stiff penitential amounts, to give away:—not to keep, on any account.

Divers wonderful medicines and machines insinuated recommendations of

themselves into the fly-leaf that was to have been so blank. It was

specially observable that every prescriber, whether in a moral or

physical direction, knew me thoroughly—knew me from head to heel, in and

out, through and through, upside down. I was a glass piece of general

property, and everybody was on the most surprisingly intimate terms with

me. A few public institutions had complimentary perceptions of corners

in my mind, of which, after considerable self-examination, I have not

discovered any indication. Neat little printed forms were addressed to

those corners, beginning with the words: ‘I give and bequeath.’

Will it seem exaggerative to state my belief that the most honest, the

most modest, and the least vain-glorious of all the records upon this

strange fly-leaf, was a letter from the self-deceived discoverer of the

recondite secret ‘how to live four or five hundred years’? Doubtless it

will seem so, yet the statement is not exaggerative by any means, but is

made in my serious and sincere conviction. With this, and with a laugh

at the rest that shall not be cynical, I turn the Fly-leaf, and go on

again.

XXXVII

A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE

ONE day this last Whitsuntide, at precisely eleven o’clock in the

forenoon, there suddenly rode into the field of view commanded by the

windows of my lodging an equestrian phenomenon. It was a fellow-creature

on horseback, dressed in the absurdest manner. The fellow-creature wore

high boots; some other (and much larger) fellow-creature’s breeches, of a

slack-baked doughy colour and a baggy form; a blue shirt, whereof the

skirt, or tail, was puffily tucked into the waist-band of the said

breeches; no coat; a red shoulder-belt; and a demi-semi-military scarlet

hat, with a feathered ornament in front, which, to the uninstructed human

vision, had the appearance of a moulting shuttlecock. I laid down the

newspaper with which I had been occupied, and surveyed the fellow-man in

question with astonishment. Whether he had been sitting to any painter

as a frontispiece for a new edition of ‘Sartor Resartus;’ whether ‘the

husk or shell of him,’ as the esteemed Herr Teufelsdroch might put it,

were founded on a jockey, on a circus, on General Garibaldi, on cheap

porcelain, on a toy shop, on Guy Fawkes, on waxwork, on gold-digging, on

Bedlam, or on all,—were doubts that greatly exercised my mind.

Meanwhile, my fellow-man stumbled and slided, excessively against his

will, on the slippery stones of my Covent-garden street, and elicited

shrieks from several sympathetic females, by convulsively restraining

himself from pitching over his horse’s head. In the very crisis of these

evolutions, and indeed at the trying moment when his charger’s tail was

in a tobacconist’s shop, and his head anywhere about town, this cavalier

was joined by two similar portents, who, likewise stumbling and sliding,

caused him to stumble and slide the more distressingly. At length this

Gilpinian triumvirate effected a halt, and, looking northward, waved

their three right hands as commanding unseen troops, to ‘Up, guards! and

at ’em.’ Hereupon a brazen band burst forth, which caused them to be

instantly bolted with to some remote spot of earth in the direction of

the Surrey Hills.

Judging from these appearances that a procession was under way, I threw

up my window, and, craning out, had the satisfaction of beholding it

advancing along the streets. It was a Teetotal procession, as I learnt

from its banners, and was long enough to consume twenty minutes in

passing. There were a great number of children in it, some of them so

very young in their mothers’ arms as to be in the act of practically

exemplifying their abstinence from fermented liquors, and attachment to

an unintoxicating drink, while the procession defiled. The display was,

on the whole, pleasant to see, as any good-humoured holiday assemblage of

clean, cheerful, and well-conducted people should be. It was bright with

ribbons, tinsel, and shoulder-belts, and abounded in flowers, as if those

latter trophies had come up in profusion under much watering. The day

being breezy, the insubordination of the large banners was very

reprehensible. Each of these being borne aloft on two poles and stayed

with some half-dozen lines, was carried, as polite books in the last

century used to be written, by ‘various hands,’ and the anxiety expressed

in the upturned faces of those officers,—something between the anxiety

attendant on the balancing art, and that inseparable from the pastime of

kite-flying, with a touch of the angler’s quality in landing his scaly

prey,—much impressed me. Suddenly, too, a banner would shiver in the

wind, and go about in the most inconvenient manner. This always happened

oftenest with such gorgeous standards as those representing a gentleman

in black, corpulent with tea and water, in the laudable act of summarily

reforming a family, feeble and pinched with beer. The gentleman in black

distended by wind would then conduct himself with the most unbecoming

levity, while the beery family, growing beerier, would frantically try to

tear themselves away from his ministration. Some of the inscriptions

accompanying the banners were of a highly determined character, as ‘We

never, never will give up the temperance cause,’ with similar sound

resolutions rather suggestive to the profane mind of Mrs. Micawber’s ‘I

never will desert Mr. Micawber,’ and of Mr. Micawber’s retort, ‘Really,

my dear, I am not aware that you were ever required by any human being to

do anything of the sort.’

At intervals, a gloom would fall on the passing members of the

procession, for which I was at first unable to account. But this I

discovered, after a little observation, to be occasioned by the coming on

of the executioners,—the terrible official beings who were to make the

speeches by-and-by,—who were distributed in open carriages at various

points of the cavalcade. A dark cloud and a sensation of dampness, as

from many wet blankets, invariably preceded the rolling on of the

dreadful cars containing these headsmen; and I noticed that the wretched

people who closely followed them, and who were in a manner forced to

contemplate their folded arms, complacent countenances, and threatening

lips, were more overshadowed by the cloud and damp than those in front.

Indeed, I perceived in some of these so moody an implacability towards

the magnates of the scaffold, and so plain a desire to tear them limb

from limb, that I would respectfully suggest to the managers the

expediency of conveying the executioners to the scene of their dismal

labours by unfrequented ways, and in closely-tilted carts, next

Whitsuntide.

The procession was composed of a series of smaller processions, which had

come together, each from its own metropolitan district. An infusion of

allegory became perceptible when patriotic Peckham advanced. So I

judged, from the circumstance of Peckham’s unfurling a silken banner that

fanned heaven and earth with the words, ‘The Peckham Lifeboat.’ No boat

being in attendance, though life, in the likeness of ‘a gallant, gallant

crew,’ in nautical uniform, followed the flag, I was led to meditate on

the fact that Peckham is described by geographers as an inland

settlement, with no larger or nearer shore-line than the towing-path of

the Surrey Canal, on which stormy station I had been given to understand

no lifeboat exists. Thus I deduced an allegorical meaning, and came to

the conclusion, that if patriotic Peckham picked a peck of pickled

poetry, this _was_ the peck of pickled poetry which patriotic Peckham

picked.

I have observed that the aggregate procession was on the whole pleasant

to see. I made use of that qualified expression with a direct meaning,

which I will now explain. It involves the title of this paper, and a

little fair trying of teetotalism by its own tests. There were many

people on foot, and many people in vehicles of various kinds. The former

were pleasant to see, and the latter were not pleasant to see; for the

reason that I never, on any occasion or under any circumstances, have

beheld heavier overloading of horses than in this public show. Unless

the imposition of a great van laden with from ten to twenty people on a

single horse be a moderate tasking of the poor creature, then the

temperate use of horses was immoderate and cruel. From the smallest and

lightest horse to the largest and heaviest, there were many instances in

which the beast of burden was so shamefully overladen, that the Society

for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have frequently interposed in

less gross cases.

Now, I have always held that there may be, and that there unquestionably

is, such a thing as use without abuse, and that therefore the total

abolitionists are irrational and wrong-headed. But the procession

completely converted me. For so large a number of the people using

draught-horses in it were so clearly unable to use them without abusing

them, that I perceived total abstinence from horseflesh to be the only

remedy of which the case admitted. As it is all one to teetotalers

whether you take half a pint of beer or half a gallon, so it was all one

here whether the beast of burden were a pony or a cart-horse. Indeed, my

case had the special strength that the half-pint quadruped underwent as

much suffering as the half-gallon quadruped. Moral: total abstinence

from horseflesh through the whole length and breadth of the scale. This

pledge will be in course of administration to all teetotal

processionists, not pedestrians, at the publishing office of ‘All the

Year Round,’ on the 1st day of April, 1870.

Observe a point for consideration. This procession comprised many

persons in their gigs, broughams, tax-carts, barouches, chaises, and what

not, who were merciful to the dumb beasts that drew them, and did not

overcharge their strength. What is to be done with those unoffending

persons? I will not run amuck and vilify and defame them, as teetotal

tracts and platforms would most assuredly do, if the question were one of

drinking instead of driving: I merely ask what is to be done with them!

The reply admits of no dispute whatever. Manifestly, in strict

accordance with teetotal doctrines, THEY must come in too, and take the

total abstinence from horseflesh pledge. It is not pretended that those

members of the procession misused certain auxiliaries which in most

countries and all ages have been bestowed upon man for his use, but it is

undeniable that other members of the procession did. Teetotal

mathematics demonstrate that the less includes the greater; that the

guilty include the innocent, the blind the seeing, the deaf the hearing,

the dumb the speaking, the drunken the sober. If any of the moderate

users of draught-cattle in question should deem that there is any gentle

violence done to their reason by these elements of logic, they are

invited to come out of the procession next Whitsuntide, and look at it

from my window.

FOOTNOTES.

{188} After this Uncommercial Journey was printed, I happened to mention

the experience it describes to Lord Houghton. That gentleman then showed

me an article of his writing, in _The Edinburgh Review_ for January,

1862, which is highly remarkable for its philosophical and literary

research concerning these Latter-Day Saints. I find in it the following

sentences:—‘The Select Committee of the House of Commons on emigrant

ships for 1854 summoned the Mormon agent and passenger-broker before it,

and came to the conclusion that no ships under the provisions of the

“Passengers Act” could be depended upon for comfort and security in the

same degree as those under his administration. The Mormon ship is a

Family under strong and accepted discipline, with every provision for

comfort, decorum and internal peace.’