well-paved streets, many attractive public buildings and substantial
homes. We stopped but a night, taking train to Portrush, _via_ the
cozy little town of Coleraine. It is a journey of about seventy miles,
leaving daylight enough to direct to the picturesque castle of Dunluce,
which stands on an isolated rock a hundred feet above the sea. The
bridge from the mainland is so narrow as to incline all four of us,
like children, “to take hold of hands.” It is a wild spot, with many
romantic associations, if the head did not swim, gazing down into the
boiling waves that have worn great caves under the walls, so that we
could not stay to hear. We creep back, cautiously as we came, to our
car, a regular bouncing, swaying, Irish jaunting car, and are whirled
on four or five miles further, to see the one thing for which we are
up here on this wild Irish shore—the famous Giant’s Causeway. This
great natural curiosity has been so often described, that it is already
familiar. Its prismatic columns of stone, rising a thousand feet from
the sea, make a promontory of pillars, each fitted so perfectly to its
neighbor that we can not at first recognize the structure as a freak of
nature. As we look over the whole field, it is strangely impressive,
and reminds one of the towers, tombs, spires, and strange shapes taken
at Vesuvius by the fields of lava, and the mind takes kindly to the
wild legends, and does not disturb itself with the various scientific
theories concerning the formation. The legends say that the giant
was Fin M’Coul, who built the causeway quite across the channel to
Scotland, in order to meet in fair fight a boasting Caledonian giant.
The giant well whipped, and the causeway, no longer needed, Fin allowed
it to fall into the sea. It is a pity to hasten here, for the wild
picturesqueness of the spot grows with every hour of wandering upon the
rocks, but we must back to Coleraine, and thence to Londonderry, where,
tired and sleepy, we hide ourselves away in our cabins on the little
steamer, and are carried in our sleep over the channel to Scotland,
breakfasting cozily in McLean’s old-fashioned, quiet hotel in Glasgow.
And now we are in another world. Here is no lack of pure water, for
Loch Katrine, thirty miles away, pours into the city no less than
twenty-four millions of gallons a day. Here is thrift, for around us
is a city whose trade so increased that its import duties multiplied a
thousand times in sixty years. Here is the beautiful Clyde, literally
lined with ships, old and new, ships going and coming, ships in every
stage from hulk and beams to paint. Here is a city alive with honest
work, with staunch and loyal principles, with churches and schools
of the best. Her cathedral ranks next in the kingdom to Westminster
Abbey. Among her philanthropies, one of the latest is specially worthy
of mention. It is an immense depot, with many branches, for furnishing
food to the working classes. They can have a good substantial breakfast
for six cents; a dinner of soup, meat, potatoes and pudding, for about
nine cents. The originator of this work is Mr. Thomas Corbett, who
should find imitators in every city in the world. Is not this a better
work than to scrape a cathedral inch by inch from base to tower?
With so much that is living and practical to interest, strange that
we hurry away to that which is a matter of poetic sentiment and
association with the dead. Yet there are, even in our quartette, those
who cheerfully turn from the living pictures of Scotch prosperity,
to go and dream for a day on the bridges and in the shadow of the
old Wallace tower of Ayr. They want to stroll out to the cottage
where Robbie Burns was born, to visit the “auld kirk-yard,” to grow
sentimental, perhaps, over his snuff-box, and to touch the Bible he
gave his Highland Mary. Well, if they will go, we might as well go
along, for, leaving out the poetry and the poet, what can be lovelier
than to be out of doors in this early September weather in one of the
most picturesque parts of Scotland! The excursion takes only one day
from Glasgow, and when we are safely back, we are only two hours by
rail from Edinburgh.
And here, as we throw wide open the shutters of front rooms in the old
Hotel Royal, and look out upon the deep ravine that divides the city,
and across to the castle-crowned hills, and down upon the monument of
Walter Scott, just over the way, our cool and quiet ones become eagerly
enthusiastic, and the enthusiasts grow wild. We are sure we want to
stay here a month; we want to fly out to the nearest circulating
library and get all of Scott’s novels at once; we want to hurry our
dinner, that we may go and explore this wonderful and picturesque old
place.
The girl whose outcropping desire to buy things was unanimously nipped
in the bud, ventures to say she “must have a plaid—a shawl, a necktie,
something, _anything_, that is plaid,” and receives no unsympathetic
reply. For the moment, struggling Ireland’s forgotten, and all that is
not purely American in us, is altogether and unanimously Scotch. In
this mood we are not slow in finding our way to the streets, believing
that acquaintance with details will enhance our first impression of the
imposing picturesqueness of the place. Our starting point is the foot
of Sir Walter’s marble monument, which rises slender and graceful two
hundred feet in air. The statues in the niches represent characters
in his books, the “Lady of the Lake,” the “Last Minstrel,” and “Meg
Merrilies,” breaking the sapling over Lucy Bertram’s head. We had
thought to pass by Abbotsford, having indulged ourselves with Ayr, but
here we find the question recurring, “Can not we take the time on the
way to London to see the home, especially the study, of Scott—to go to
Dryburgh Abbey and stand beside his grave; and on the same excursion
see the Abbey of Melrose?” Forced to leave the question unanswered, but
secretly resolving to do it, we go as straight as we can, asking many
questions of the guide by the way, to the Castle of Edinburgh, which
frowns down from the precipice on which it stands with a grim aspect
ill-suited to the present time.
The esplanade or parade ground of the castle covers about six acres.
Over the drawbridge, between the low protecting batteries, along the
ramparts we pass to the strong gate that gives us admission to the
inner fort, which contains the older portions of the castle. In this
pile of buildings on the east side are, what we more specially came to
see, the state apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the wall down
which her infant son was lowered in a basket. Here, too, we see the
crown-room containing the regalia of Scotland, the crown, scepter,
and sword of state, and the lord-treasurer’s rod of office. From the
ramparts we are shown northward the magnificent view of the new town,
while to the east lies the old town, backed by Arthur’s Seat. The line
of street eastward from the castle to Holyrood House, contains many
of Edinburgh’s most prominent buildings, both new and old. Near the
foot of the hill is the new Assembly Hall, the meeting place of the
General Assembly of the Established Church of Scotland, and near it the
Church Normal Schools and the extensive buildings of the Free Church
College, and the Parliament House, whose carved, oaken-roofed hall—the
Westminster Hall of Edinburgh—was used by the Parliament before the
union with England. Near at hand is the old Cathedral of St. Giles,
whose space after the Reformation was divided into four churches, in
one of which John Knox was wont to preach. We pass near his house
also, and approach the memorial of Scotland’s ancient splendor, the
ancient palace and abbey of Holyrood. The ruins of the chapel where
Mary Stuart was married to Darnley, and where King Charles the First
was crowned, lie behind the present structure, which was rebuilt after
the destruction of the old palace by Cromwell. The spot abounds in
historical associations. It was a most powerful institution as an
abbey, the abbot holding regular court like other barons: as a royal
refuge it sheltered Charles the Tenth of France during the Revolution,
and as a residence has received at times nearly all the crowned heads
of England, not excepting Queen Victoria, who sometimes stops here
_en route_ to Balmoral, and who held a levee here in 1842. Yet of all
its associations, that with Mary Stuart is the one most familiar, and
perhaps most painfully interesting to the stranger. Here are the rooms
she last occupied, her bed-chamber remaining as she left it, here
the cabinet where Rizzio was murdered. These apartments are in the
northwest corner, and the oldest portion of the present quadrangular
building.
But, interesting as is all that is connected with a historic or
tragic past, we must not overlook the city of to-day. Records of what
Edinburgh has been, as found in ruins, in buildings, in monuments, in
books, would require a volume, and records of her present condition,
another. We can only glance at a few of the more marked evidences
of her material advancement. Formerly she accommodated her growing
population by building higher and higher in the air, but more recently
they have filled up the ravine and extended in every direction on the
ground. Her population increases, though not with the rapidity of
Glasgow, for she has no great trade or manufacture to attract the rural
districts. The women exceed the men by some twenty thousand. Her moral
condition has been of the best, her sanitary condition unfortunately
of the worst, but great improvements have been made in drainage and in
destruction of dilapidated dwellings, ventilation of unhealthy courts,
and especially in cleansing of the streets. In this latter particular
Edinburgh is better cared for then any other large town in the kingdom.
While the city has been, like the rest of the world, wofully behind in
caring for the bodies of the healthful, her numerous hospitals, public
and private, testify her kindness to the ill. Nothing of prevention
and everything in the way of cure seems to be the motto of modern
philanthropy. Churches for souls, university, colleges, every type
of school, free and charitable, for the brain; all stress laid upon
what the people believe, what they learn, what they do, and what they
wear, combined with utter disregard of what they breathe or what they
eat. There is no disregard of what they drink, however, even in this
western Athens, for Edinburgh can boast larger breweries than any other
place in the world. But then she boasts larger printing houses and
more of them than almost any other. Printing is indeed her principal
craft; scholarship flourishes; learning is reckoned at its true value;
philanthropy is active and earnest, and the city abounds in monuments
of all; there is an air of vigorous heartiness in the people that is
tonic in its effect, like the feel of a country morning with the first
crisp frost in the air.
From Edinburgh to London we take the Great Western Railway, one of the
best managed in the kingdom. Already we have learned that we have no
more “baggage,” and how to “own our luggage;” that there are no cars
in this country, but carriages, and “luggage vans.” The man who locks
us in our own compartment is not a conductor, but a “guard;” we hear
nothing of railroads, but a good deal of “ways” and trains. After days
of steady running hither and thither, to see this, to hear that, to
learn the other, it is agreeable to lean back and doze and dream while
the swift train bears us away from the highlands and the heather. We
sleep in England at the quaint old Roman town of Chester, and take time
enough in the morning to visit the cathedral, walk through the queer
streets where the covered sidewalk for foot passengers is on the roofs,
and the carriage-way is sunken several feet below the level of the
road. Anxious as we were to reach London, we could not resist stopping
at Warwick for a couple of days, resting at the Old Warwick Arms, and
crowding every hour with a living interest hardly to be aroused in
any other part of England. For from this point a drive of eight miles
through a charming country takes us to Stratford-on-Avon, and to the
oft-described home and tomb of Shakspere. This is almost always a white
day in the tourist’s memory, for, through all the delightful drive, at
the house of Shakspere, in the room where he was born, by the desk at
which he sat at school, in the cottage of Ann Hathaway, and by his tomb
in the church, one feels in a new world. A crowd of visitors may throng
the cottage and the house, and one hears all sorts of chatter, but they
and we and all modern folk seem strange and out of place. And I doubt
not many minds have found it hard to associate the place with Shakspere
at all. It doesn’t suit our idea of the man or his work, and it is hard
to dispossess the mind of the idea that we are lending ourselves to a
little farce.
We drive slowly back along the Avon at sunset, and give a second day to
Warwick Castle and a drive to the ruins of Kenilworth. In the former
we have the best representation of an old English castle that we shall
see; one all the more impressive because it is the first seen; in
the latter the grandest ruin that England can show. Both have many
historical associations, but we have not yet escaped from the dominion
of Scott, and have just re-read his “Kenilworth,” and naturally look
for traces of Queen Bess, and of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
whose tomb is in the Church of St. Mary in Warwick. So we sit down
under the ivy-crowned battlements, and listen while one reads aloud
the account of the five days of entertainment that Leicester gave the
Queen, and imagination peoples the ruined banquet hall with the knights
and ladies fair who made the place so gay.
Yet, strange to say, such dreams fade as we drive home to dinner, and
find us quite ready, after a refreshing sleep in the queerest and
quaintest of all English inns, to depart for classic Oxford, which
lies direct upon our London route. Time was when no more venerable and
imposing architectural effect could be found in all Europe than that
produced by the groups of buildings along the main street of Oxford,
belonging to the twenty colleges that make the University. But, in
these latter days, so many of the colleges have been remodeled, or
restored, that the air of venerable antiquity is entirely lost. Outside
the college buildings, new hotels, a town hall, savings banks, a corn
exchange, and other mercantile structures materially alter the effect
of the place, which owed its character formerly to the University
alone. Among the colleges themselves, University and Exeter have
new chapels, Jesus College a new Gothic front, Merton’s Library has
been remodeled, and the old gate-house of Brasennose restored. The
new buildings, given at a cost of thirty thousand pounds, by Miss
Brackenbury, the daughter of an old scholar, are very fine, and the new
Gothic building, called the Union Debating and Reading Room, decorated
in part by Rossetti, from the legends of King Arthur, is a great
ornament to the group. The new Keble College, in memory of the author
of “The Christian Year,” is near the University Museum, which is the
principal addition to the group of buildings, which we can not mention
in detail. As the most important of all institutions of learning,
Oxford University must have an interest for every lover of knowledge.
Its origin is not certainly known. Its government is by statutes,
originating with the University authorities, and confirmed by the kings
of England. Its chancellor was formerly an ecclesiastic, and chosen
for three years; now he is chosen for life, and from among nobles of
distinction who have been members of the University. Its professors
are paid partly by the crown, partly from the University chest, and
partly from estates left for this purpose. Both Oxford and Cambridge
have the privilege of choosing two representatives in Parliament.
There is no end to what may be seen and learned if the traveler can
linger a few weeks just here. In that event, leave the hotel, which is
very luxurious, but very dear, and take lodgings in some one of the
many comfortable houses, kept for that purpose, within easy walking
distance of the libraries and museums. There is only one danger, and
that is, that the longer one stays the longer one wishes to stay, and
if we should linger to see one _moiety_ of what we might enjoy, our
trip to London would be indefinitely deferred. So we decide against the
lodging, and take instead—the train.
The one blessed thing about London, especially to travelers who have
rushed through miles of country and crowded the sight with constantly
varying scenes, is that it can not be seen in a day. We might as well
try to eat a life-time’s Thanksgiving banquet at once, or to grow from
youth to age in a night. London is of all places in the world the one
to stay in, and we have come to stay. Not at any so-called American
boarding-house, not even at the great caravansary in Portland Place, or
down by the Alexandra Gate, but in our own hired house. A wee place,
not far from St. James in Piccadilly, whose master was once upon a time
head butler to lord somebody or other, and whose mistress was the maid
to my lady. And butler and maid saved their wages and were wed, and now
there they are living in the basement of this their home, he to wait at
table, with an air that makes our masculine friends feel, as if he were
saying, “Yes, my lord,” and “No, my lord;” and she to keep all tidy
and bright in our tiny parlor and dining room, and the bedrooms above.
Here we can rest until the home letters are written and the books read,
and we are ready to attack the great city with real zest, happy in
the thought of what it has in store. Our life will cost us half what
it would at the great hotels, where we should meet only the American
life we know so well. English life we can see only in the streets, in
church, in making purchases, in books, and in its out of door public
aspects, unless we are indeed so fortunate as to have brought letters
that shall open English homes. Then, indeed, we come to know England
and the English in a way to appreciate its best, and to estimate justly
what seem to us some of its worst characteristics.
To its social life, of any class whatever, introductions are the only
key. To its political movements the ordinary tourist has little access
beyond what the newspapers give, and that he may have at home. To be
an eye-witness of momentous events or of the circumstances that shape
a nation’s destinies is hardly to be hoped. Her history lies all about
in monuments, and ruins, and palaces, and institutions, volumes in
changeless stone. Her general conditions of prosperity, commercial and
other, may be guessed from what one sees, and, reading backward from
effect to cause, the thoughtful observer may determine something of
individual and national character. Something comes to him by intuition,
something by observation, and slowly, by ways he knows and ways he
knows not, he feels that he is coming to a knowledge of England, of
English people, and English life. London of all places seems the spot
to bide. He haunts her galleries and walks her streets, and dreams
in her abbey, and sits in her churches, and finds he is claiming her
history as his own. If Americans must live anywhere out of America,
London, with its teeming varied interests, its thousand worlds in one,
is the place for him to live. What sights he will see there, what
things he will do there, everybody knows. Let art, or literature,
or commerce, or religion, or science be his hobby, he will find
companions enough and to spare. There is room for everything in London,
notwithstanding it is the most crowded place under the sun; room even
for us who, while jogging along together, yet have each cast our nets
in separate streams. What we shall gather, who can tell?
[To be continued.]
FOOTNOTE:
[D] If the careful examination of satisfactory photographs should seem
to show that the darkness (almost blackness) behind the nucleus is
an objective, and not merely a subjective phenomenon, the following
explanation would seem forced upon us. If the particles forming the
envelopes are minute flat bodies, and if anything in the circumstances
under which these particles are driven off into the tail causes them to
always so arrange themselves that the planes in which they severally
lie pass through the axis of the tail (which, if the tail is an
electrical phenomenon might very well happen) then we should find the
region behind the nucleus very dark, or almost black, for the particles
in the direction of the line of sight then would be turned edgewise
toward us, whereas those on either side or in the prolongation of the
envelopes would turn their faces toward the observer.
OUR CHILDREN.
By GENEVIEVE IRONS.
_A Hymn for Teachers._
O Lord our God we thank thee
For little children dear,
Gleams of thy mercy’s rainbow
Which thou dost send us here;
O! teach us how to make them
What thou wouldst have them be,
Teach us to train our children
For heaven and for thee.
The souls of little children
Are vessels for thy grace,
Thy spirit makes their bodies
His chosen dwelling-place.
The minds of little children
Yearn for immortal truth,
And thou hast deigned to make us
The guardians of their youth.
Oh, fill our hearts with wisdom,
With love and tenderness,
And in all Christ-like patience
Let us our souls possess;
So shall the overflowing
Of hearts that own thy grace,
Reflect to little children
Their heavenly Father’s face.
And they shall learn the wisdom
That cometh from above,
Our tenderness shall make them
Obedient to thy love;
Our patience shall encourage
The hope that never faints,
And give them perseverance,
The triumph of the saints.
The simple love of goodness,
The fear to do a sin,
The life that through temptation
Keeps innocence within,
The strength to win the battle,
The knowledge that is might,
Is all we need to teach them
That they may learn aright.
Their souls and minds and bodies
Thus trained and fit for thee,
Shall rise to endless service,
Throughout eternity;
For they will know the Father
Through Jesus Christ his Son,
By God the Holy Spirit,
Eternal Three in One!
MORALS AND SORROWS OF BORROWING AND LENDING.
By A. DENBAR.
Not the borrowing and lending of money, be it understood, but only such
trifling things as books, umbrellas, and little personal belongings
essential to ease. It is questionable whether the loan of these things
does not involve more discomfort than the more costly loan of money.
If you lend money, it is to be assumed that you can afford the loss of
it, or that you see a strong probability of receiving it again. But
your favorite umbrella! What other can possibly accommodate itself so
comfortably to your carrying? Is not its familiar hook exactly the
shape you like? Or perchance you prefer a smoothly rounded knob, and
have made a careful choice, so that any other handle feels strange and
foreign. To some persons these little matters make all the difference
between ease and discomfort. Yet good-nature will not permit you to
see a careless caller start out into the rain umbrellaless, although
the clouds have threatened all the morning, and the least weather-wise
might have foreseen the need of an umbrella. So you say hospitably,
“Oh! you must have one; take mine!” and then, with a prophetic failure
of courage, add entreatingly, “You will be sure to return it, will
you not?” You close the door, after watching your umbrella down the
street—yours no longer, alas! for it never returns.