tide, which she imagined was receding, to be rising fast, and had
proceeded for two miles before she noticed that she was cut off from
the sandhills by a broad, deep, rapidly increasing sheet of troubled
water. For a moment she hesitated, yet not from fear, for familiarity
since early childhood with rocks and tides had saved her more than
once from a similar predicament, and had made her an expert in
rock-scrambling; but from the fact that her absence of mind had caused
her to miss the right path. However, she quickly decided; and in spite
of being heavily handicapped by the burden of two baskets, struck
straight up a ledge of fantastic rock which, she seemed to remember,
communicated even at high tide with the shore. But, to her horror and
dismay, when she arrived at the summit, she beheld a fast running,
angry current separating her from the sand, upon which, not a quarter
of a mile away, stood her father’s house. There was nothing to be done
but to make for the rocks which towered above her on her right hand,
and which she could see were never touched by the waves. Once up there,
and she was safe; but the getting there was a problem even for her with
her youthful strength and activity. As the rising water was already
lapping at her heels and would advance to a level some inches above
her head, there was no time for delay. Before starting, she shouted,
in order to attract the attention of some one in the house; but the
wind was blowing in her teeth, and she knew that she would need all her
breath for the climb before her.
It was a quarter of an hour’s race with the tide. At each one of
Bertha’s upward steps, the green water seemed to make a step. More than
once she slipped back, and was over her ankles in water; but at length
she reached her haven, and sank down on a table of dry rock, utterly
exhausted, her hands torn and bleeding, her dress in tatters and
drenched with water, safe from a fearful death, but face to face with
the prospect of having to pass long dark hours in a wild desolate spot,
and at the risk of being discovered by some of the lawless characters
who made the rocks their homes, their castles, and their storehouses.
It was some time before she was sufficiently recovered to examine her
place of refuge. When she did so, she found that she was on the very
edge of one steep cliff, and at the foot of another as high, but not
so inaccessible. She was well above the water, for, clinging to the
sides of the cliff and springing up between the clefts of the rocks,
were thick stunted bushes, and even here and there the tinted head of a
hardy flower. But suddenly her attention was drawn from the geography
of her surroundings to the mark of a boot on the patch of bright sand
behind the rock. A tremor seized her at first, for she imagined that
she must have chosen a smugglers’ haunt as her place of refuge; but her
fear turned into joy when she noticed that there was but the impression
of a left foot, and that the spot the right foot would have occupied
was marked by a hole such as the ferrule of a thick stick would make,
and she knew that the traces were those of her father. The marks came
up from below, and stopped abruptly at a thick bush. Something prompted
the girl to stir this bush with her foot, and, to her surprise, it
came away in a mass, and displayed an orifice in the rock just large
enough to admit of one man passing. Her curiosity was now aroused,
and overruling all considerations concerning her personal safety, and
the advisability of getting home as soon as possible, she entered the
opening, and found herself in a tolerably large cavern, the sandy floor
of which was covered with marks corresponding to those outside, but
which were especially numerous about a large round stone which, from
its dissimilarity to the material of the cavern, seemed to have been
brought from the beach below. Exerting all her strength, she moved the
stone, and staggered back with an expression of amazement. On a wooden
shelf placed in a hollow she beheld a dozen canvas bags, which, when
she lifted them, clinked with the unmistakable sound of coin. But what
startled her even more than the discovery itself was that each bag bore
upon it, in half-effaced letters, the words, ‘Faraday & Co., Saint
Quinians.’
A terrible light now broke upon her. Faraday & Co. were the bankers in
whose employ Harry Symonds had been when they were robbed four years
previously of three thousand pounds in sovereigns; and she too well
understood now what her father meant when he called himself a rogue,
and what was the nature of the influence which Jasper Rodley had over
him. She stood for some moments irresolute, sick at heart, her brain
in a whirl, and every limb trembling. How should she act? Nothing that
she could do would remove the fact that during the past four years her
father had been making use of coin which belonged to other people,
although, by taking the money away, she could screen him from the
public shame of having it in his possession. Oh! she thought, if Harry
could be with her but for five minutes to decide for her!
Daylight was fast fading away, so that every moment was of value. She
decided that she would get home as soon as possible, tell her father of
her discovery, persuade him to return the money to the bankers, making
up the deficit which he had used, and informing them how and where he
had found it. If this could be done without attracting the notice of
Jasper Rodley, she might defy him to do his worst, and clear her father
of all suspicion. So she replaced the stone, covered up the entrance to
the cave with the bush, and followed the marks on the thin sand-path,
which, to her joy led, over a ridge of rocks hitherto invisible to her,
to the shore. Scarcely had she passed along, when the figure of Jasper
Rodley rose from behind a rock close by the cavern entrance, his eyes
bright with malignant satisfaction at having watched all her movements
unseen.
Bertha found her father in a terrible state of anxiety, and she had to
explain how she had been overtaken by the tide on her homeward journey,
before she could broach the topic uppermost in her mind; and then,
just as she was about to tell the captain of her discovery, Mr Jasper
Rodley walked into the room, and announced his intention of staying the
night, so that she would have no opportunity of speaking to her father
in private until the next day.
WONDERS OF MEMORY.
If ‘all great people have great memories,’ as Sir Arthur Helps declares
in his delightful book entitled _Social Pressure_, it by no means
follows that all those who are possessed of great memories are ‘great
people.’ Many an instance might be cited to show that men of very
moderate intellectual capacity may be endowed with a power of memory
which is truly prodigious. In addition to this, there are plenty of
well-authenticated examples of the extraordinary power of memory
displayed even by idiots. In the Memoirs of Mrs Somerville there is a
curious account of a most extraordinary verbal memory. ‘There was an
idiot in Edinburgh,’ she tells us, ‘of a respectable family who had a
remarkable memory. He never failed to go to the kirk on Sunday; and on
returning home, could repeat the sermon, saying: “Here the minister
coughed; here he stopped to blow his nose.”—During the tour we made
in the Highlands,’ she adds, ‘we met with another idiot who knew the
Bible so perfectly, that if you asked him where such a verse was to be
found, he could tell without hesitation and repeat the chapter.’ These
examples are sufficiently remarkable; but what shall be said of the
case cited by Archdeacon Fearon in his valuable pamphlet on _Mental
Vigour_? ‘There was in my father’s parish,’ says the archdeacon, ‘a man
who could remember the day when every person had been buried in the
parish for thirty-five years, and could repeat with unvarying accuracy
the name and age of the deceased, with the mourners at the funeral.
But he was a complete fool. Out of the line of burials, he had but one
idea, and could not give an intelligible reply to a single question,
nor be trusted to feed himself.’
These phenomenal instances may be matched by the Sussex farm-labourer
George Watson, as we find recorded in Hone’s _Table Book_. Watson could
neither read nor write, yet he was wont to perform wondrous feats of
mental calculation, and his memory for events seemed to be almost
faultless. ‘But the most extraordinary circumstance,’ says Hone, ‘is
the power he possesses of recollecting the events of every day from an
early period of his life. Upon being asked what day of the week a given
day of the month occurred, he immediately names it, and also mentions
where he was and what was the state of the weather. A gentleman who had
kept a diary put many questions to him, and his answers were invariably
correct.’
Of a similar kind is the memory for which Daniel M‘Cartney has
become famous in the United States. The strange story of this man’s
achievements is told by Mr Henkle in the _Journal of Speculative
Philosophy_. M‘Cartney, in 1869, declared that he could remember the
day of the week for any date from January 1827, that is, from the time
when he was nine years and four months old—forty-two and a half years.
He has often been tested, and, so far as Mr Henkle’s account goes,
had not failed to tell his questioner ‘what day it was,’ and to give
some information about the weather, and about his own whereabouts and
doings on any one of the fifteen thousand or more dates that might be
named. When Mr Henkle first met this man of marvellous memory, he was
employed in the office of the Honourable T. K. Rukenbrod, editor of the
_Salem Republican_, where nothing better could be found for M‘Cartney
to do than ‘turn the wheel of the printing-press on two days of each
week.’ On the first formal examination this man underwent, his answers
were tested by reference to the file of a newspaper which gave the
day of the week along with the date. In one case his statement was
disputed, for the day he named was not the same as that given by the
paper; but on further inquiry, it was found that the newspaper was
wrong, for the printer had made a mistake. Short-hand notes of the
conversation were taken at subsequent interviews. The report of these
is very curious reading. Take the following as a sample. ‘_Question._
October 8, 1828? _Answer_ (in two seconds), Wednesday. It was cloudy
and drizzled rain. I carried dinner to my father where he was getting
out coal.—_Question._ February 21, 1829? _Answer_ (in two seconds),
Saturday. It was cloudy in the morning, and clear in the afternoon;
there was a little snow on the ground. An uncle who lived near sold a
horse-beast that day for thirty-five dollars.’ And so the conversation
ran on for hours, ranging over forty years of M‘Cartney’s personal
history. Mr Henkle tells us that if he went over some of the dates
again, after a few days’ interval, the answers, although given in
different terms, were essentially the same, ‘showing distinctly that he
remembered the facts, and not the words previously used.’ M‘Cartney’s
memory is not confined to dates and events; he is a rare calculator,
can give the cube root of such numbers as 59, 319; or 571, 787, &c.;
can repeat some two hundred and fifty hymns, and start about two
hundred tunes; has a singularly extensive and accurate knowledge of
geography, and never forgets the name of a person he has once seen or
read of. With all this singular power of memory, however, he is not a
man whose general grasp of mind is at all noteworthy.
The same may be said of scores of men whose one rich gift of memory has
brought them into prominence. No one has claimed any high intellectual
rank for the renowned ‘Memory Corner Thompson,’ who drew from actual
memory, in twenty-two hours, at two sittings, in the presence of
two well-known gentlemen, a correct plan of the parish of St James,
Westminster, with parts of the parishes of St Marylebone, St Ann, and
St Martin; which plan contained every square, street, lane, court,
alley, market, church, chapel, and all public buildings, with all
stable and other yards, also every public-house in the parish, and
the corners of all streets, with all minutiæ, as pumps, posts, trees,
houses that project and inject, bow-windows, Carlton House, St James’s
Palace, and the interior of the markets, without scale or reference to
any plan, book, or paper whatever; who undertook to do the same for
the parishes of St Andrew, Holborn, St Giles-in-the-Fields, St Paul’s,
Covent Garden, St Mary-le-Strand, St Clement’s, and St George’s; who
could tell the corner of any great leading thoroughfare from Hyde Park
corner or Oxford Street to St Paul’s; who could ‘take an inventory
of a gentleman’s house from attic to ground-floor and write it out
afterwards. He did this at Lord Nelson’s at Merton, and at the Duke of
Kent’s, in the presence of two noblemen.’
Turning, now, from examples like the foregoing, which have been given
to show that a great memory does not argue in all cases any unusual
mental power in other directions, let us look at some of the ‘great
people’ whose ‘great memories’ illustrate the correctness of Sir
Arthur Helps’s dictum. Running over a long list of examples, which the
writer has prepared for his own use in the study of this subject, he
has been struck with the fact, that the last three or four centuries
appear to much greater advantage in this review than any similar period
which preceded them. This, after all, is not surprising, when the
circumstances of modern life are carefully considered; but it is not in
accordance with common opinion. There is a notion abroad that the power
of memory has declined since the invention of writing, and especially
since the invention of printing and the universal spread of cheap books
and newspapers. Nothing could be more mistaken than such a supposition.
If we do not nowadays use the memory as the only registry of facts
within our reach, we _do_ use the memory even more than the ancients,
for the simple reason that our knowledge travels over an immeasurably
wider area, we have more to remember, and, as civilisation and culture
advance, a good memory becomes more and more needful for the work of
life; the general level of intelligence is being raised, and mental
power is developed from age to age. In this general advancement and
growth, memory has its share.
The verbal memory displayed by the old Greek rhapsodists and bards, or
the Icelandic scalds, was undoubtedly remarkable, and is often held up
to the envy of these degenerate days. Yet the modern Shah-nama-Khans,
Koran Khans, and other singers and reciters of Persia, who ‘will recite
for hours together without stammering,’ and the Calmuck national bards,
whose songs and recitations ‘sometimes last a whole day,’ cannot surely
be a whit behind, if indeed they do not far surpass the prodigies of
early ages. We are often reminded of Greek gentlemen who knew their
Homer by heart, in the days when Homer occupied the field almost alone
and there was little else to learn. But what are their exploits by
the side of men like Joseph Justus Scaliger, who ‘committed Homer to
memory in twenty-one days, and the whole Greek poets in three months?’
Casaubon says of Scaliger: ‘There was no subject on which any one could
desire instruction which he was not capable of giving. He had read
nothing which he did not forthwith remember. So extensive and accurate
was his acquaintance with languages, that if during his lifetime he had
made but this single acquisition, it would have appeared miraculous.’
Since the revival of learning in Europe, there have been scores,
yea, hundreds of scholars who have known ‘their Homer’ by heart and
a thousand other things besides. Bishop Saunderson, old Isaac Walton
tells us, could repeat all the odes of Horace, all Tully’s _Offices_,
and the best part of Juvenal and Persius. Euler the mathematician
and Leibnitz the philosopher could recite the _Æneid_ from beginning
to end. In their day, Porson, Elmsley, Parr, and Wakefield, held the
foremost place as scholars, and all, of course, had rare memories; but
the palm must be given to Porson, of whom endless stories are told.
Before he went to Eton, he was able to repeat almost the whole of
Horace, Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Livy. When, as a practical joke, a
school-fellow slipped the wrong book into Porson’s hand, just as he was
about to read and translate, the boy was not disconcerted, but went on
to read from his memory, as if nothing had occurred. In later life, his
performances approached the miraculous. It would require all our space
to give any fair idea of them; for he not only knew all the great Greek
poets and prose writers pretty well by heart, but could recite whole
plays of Shakspeare, or complete books from _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s
_Rape of the Lock_, Barrow’s sermons, scenes from Foote, Edgeworth’s
_Essay on Irish Bulls_, scores of pages from Gibbon or Rapin. He is
also said to have been able to repeat the whole of the _Moral Tale of
the Dean of Badajoz_, and Smollett’s _Roderick Random_ from the first
page to the last.
Gilbert Wakefield’s memory was also of the gigantic order, but it will
not bear comparison with Porson’s. There were few passages in Homer
or Pindar which he could not recite at a moment’s notice; Virgil and
Horace he knew perfectly; and he could recite entire books from the
Old and New Testaments without halting or failing in a single verse.
There was also John Wyndham Bruce, whose leisure time was devoted to
classical studies. His chief favourite was Æschylus, the whole of whose
plays he had learnt by heart, including the twelve hundred lines of
the _Agamemnon_ collated by Robertellus. He knew his Horace in the
same way, and was quite content, until one day he met with an old
fellow-student at Bonn, who, when he made a quotation, would mention
book, ode, and verse, remarking, that he did not regard any one as
knowing Horace properly unless he could do that. Mr Bruce accordingly
set to work at Horace again, and was not long before he could name the
exact place occupied by a line in any of the famous odes. It would
be hard to believe that Athenian lads could beat the English lads of
fourteen years and under, of whom Archdeacon Fearon tells us in the
pamphlet referred to above. It was the custom in the school to which
he went for the boys to repeat at the end of one of the terms all the
Latin and Greek poetry they had learnt during the year. The usual
quantity for a boy to go in with was from eight to ten thousand lines,
and it took about a week to hear them. ‘One boy in my year,’ he says,
‘repeated the enormous quantity of fourteen thousand lines of Homer,
Horace, and Virgil. I heard him say it.’
Ease in learning foreign languages is sometimes regarded as a mere
matter of memory; while, however, this is not exactly true, it must
be allowed, of course, that skilful linguists are endowed with powers
of memory beyond the average. Here, also, we find that there are no
examples in ancient times that will stand comparison with our great
modern linguists. Our modern facilities for travel and study place us
at an immense advantage. Crassus, when prætor in Asia, was so familiar
with the dialects of Greek, that he was able to try cases and pronounce
judgment in any dialect that might chance to be spoken in his presence.
‘Mithridates, king of twenty-two nations, administered their laws in as
many languages,’ and could harangue each division of his motley array
of soldiers in its own language or dialect.
But what are such linguists as these by the side of the best examples
of recent times? Keeping within the limits of the last hundred years,
we have examples that have never been surpassed or even approached
in former times. Sir William Jones knew thirteen languages well, and
could read with comparative ease in thirty others. John Leyden, a very
inferior man to his great contemporary, had a good acquaintance with
fifteen of the leading European and Asiatic languages. Within the last
few years we have lost two men who could have travelled from the hills
of Connemara or the mountains of Wales to the Ural Mountains, or from
Lisbon or Algiers to Ispahan or Delhi, and hardly met with a language
in which they could not converse or write with ease. The reader will
most likely have anticipated the names of two of the most remarkable
linguists this country has produced—George Borrow and Edward Henry
Palmer. When Borrow was at St Petersburg, he published a little book
called _Targum_, in which he gave translations in prose and poetry from
thirty different languages. Besides speaking the native tongue of every
European nation, Palmer was so perfect a master of Arabic, Persian,
Hindustani, Turkish, and the language of the gipsies, that even natives
were sometimes deceived as to his nationality. Mr Leland says that, one
day in Paris, Palmer ‘entered into conversation with a Zouave or Turco,
a native Arab. After a while the man said: “Why do you wear these
clothes?”—“Why, how should I dress?” exclaimed Palmer.—“Dress like what
you are!” was the indignant reply—“like a _Muslim_!”’
Viscount Strangford may be placed in the same category with these; and
the ‘learned blacksmith’ Elihu Burritt, whose friends claim for him
that he knew all the languages of Europe and most of those of Asia,
must not be left out of sight. But even these do not touch the highest
limit of linguistic skill and power of memory. The most scientific
linguist we have to name, and one of the most remarkable for the
extent of his acquisitions, is Von der Gabelentz, who seems to have
been equally at home with the Suahilis, the Samoyeds, the Hazaras, the
Aimaks, the Dyaks, the Dakotas, and the Kiriris; who could translate
from Chinese into Manchu, compile a grammar or correct the speech of
the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands, New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands,
or New Caledonia. When we come to Cardinal Mezzofanti and Sir John
Bowring, we find the ‘highest record’ as regards the mere number and
variety of tongues that men have been known to acquire. No one can
speak with absolute certainty as to the number of languages Mezzofanti
could converse in with ease. Mrs Somerville says that he professed only
fifty-two.
This brief review of the subject necessarily leaves out of account a
vast number of the most extraordinary and interesting examples. Artists
like Horace Vernet; mathematicians and calculators like Dr Wallis
and Leonard Euler, or G. P. Bidder and young Colburn; musicians like
Mozart; newspaper reporters like the unequalled ‘Memory Woodfall;’
literary men like Lord Macaulay and T. H. Buckle; chess-players like
Paul Morphy and J. H. Blackbourne, have accomplished feats of memory as
marvellous as any of those which have been mentioned.
A TRICK AT THE HELM.
DEAR BOB,—Come and lend me a hand, like a good fellow. The regatta
here takes place the day after to-morrow, and the _Redbreast_ is
entered for it. There will be a very fair show of other crack
‘Fives’ for her to try her speed against, and I am more eager than
usual to carry off the first prize. I think I ought to do it, if
I can get a first-rate hand like yourself to come and help. You
recollect my telling you how that crack-brained Irishman O’Gorman
offered to bet me a hundred pounds that he would carry off as
many first prizes as I would this season, and how, in a moment
of irritation, I took the bet? Well, it has come to this—that we
have each won nine prizes, and that Dartmouth Regatta is the last
of the season. He can’t possibly be here in the _Cruiskeen Lawn_,
and consequently, the regatta represents considerably more to me
than the twenty pounds which they offer for the winning boat. The
_Redbreast_ is out and away the best five-tonner here at present;
and unless some wonderful crack arrives between this and then, my
first prize and my bet ought to be a certainty, bar accidents. But
I want you. Your experience of this part of the coast is greater
than mine, and will be invaluable to me; and though Phipps is with
me, and is a right good fellow in a race, still, he has not your
skill and knowledge. Besides these weighty reasons, I want very
much to show you my new little craft, and to enjoy a good dusting
down together once more. So, just pack your bag, and come for three
days at least, if you can’t spare more, to your old chum,
JACK HETHERINGTON.