A PRETTY QUEEN.
"Any letter for me this morning, Brightie?"
Hazel is leaning rather perilously over the banisters, trying to catch a
glimpse of the old woman coming slowly up the stairs far below.
"Yes--one. Don't come for it, I'm coming up. And pray, child, don't hang
over those rickety rails like that."
Miss Bright, or "Brightie," as Hazel Deane had grown affectionately to
call her, is a heavy, strongly-made woman of sixty-three years. She
finds the stairs in this house in Union-square, where she and Hazel
lodge, rather trying; they are many and steep, so she pauses half-way to
recover breath. Looking up she sees Hazel, a white, dark-eyed face, and
a form so slender that even those unsafe rails could hardly give way
under so slight a weight. "More than ever like one of my Cape jasmine
stars," thinks old Brightie. She has always mentally compared the girl
to one of those pure, white stars, which she used so specially to love,
shining on their invisible stems, amidst the dark green leaf-sprays at
her sister's home. Oh, how the poor, lonely old woman's heart had ached
for that country home of her younger days, as she sat wearily at her
business of plain sewing day after day in her attic in Union-square!
And Hazel, looking down, saw her one friend in the world. A ray of
sunlight streamed in through the narrow staircase window on to Miss
Bright. It makes the black cap which covers her whole head, with strings
flying back over her shoulders, look very rusty. It makes her old alpaca
gown, patched and repatched, and the little black silk apron that she
wears, look more than ever shiny. It strikes upon the large,
old-fashioned white pearl buttons down the front of her bodice, and upon
the glasses of her spectacles, till she looks like some strange, black
creature staring all over with big, round eyes. To Hazel's affectionate
mind, however, there is nothing in the least ludicrous in the sight. She
only notes the panting breath, and says, with a touch of impatience in
her anxiety--
"Why will you persist in toiling up and down those horrid stairs,
instead of sending me, Brightie? It is really very unkind of you."
When Brightie has delivered up Hazel's envelope, with its scrawled
direction, she retires into her own room, next door, and shuts herself
in. She is filled with an unwonted excitement, for she holds a second
letter in her hand, and it is her own. The rarest thing it is for her to
have a letter, and the post-mark is "Firdorf," the very same beautiful
country place for which she had pined; there she and Janie, her only
sister, had lived together, and Janie had died there. The hands, aged
with work and deprivation more than with time, shake as they break the
seal, the aged eyes grow dim again and again as they read.
It is fully three parts of an hour before Brightie has got through the
letter--not that the words are many or hard to understand; but rather
that the hindrances are many. The glasses of the large spectacles grow
so misty from time to time that they require polishing. Then, too, Miss
Bright's mind exhibits foolish tendencies, refusing to grasp the meaning
of the words, and causing her to explain that she must be dreaming; and
still further she is carried back in mind to days long since vanished,
and scenes long unvisited, and these detain her long. But at last she
rouses herself--has at length fairly accepted the astonishing good news
her letter contains, and, with it open in her hand, hastens off to
communicate the same to her young friend.
Hazel's door is locked, and Miss Bright has to wait a moment before it
is unfastened. Hazel has been crying, and the tears must have been both
plentiful and bitter, for unmistakable traces exist, in spite of hurried
efforts to efface them. For once, though, Brightie is thoroughly
self-engrossed, and fails to notice even Hazel's face.
"I have such wonderful news, my dear!" she exclaims, the moment she is
admitted into the room.
Hazel expresses her interest, and, with her loving smile and tender way,
ensconces her friend in the one attempt at an easy chair her room
possesses, and then kneels beside her to listen.
"Well, my dear, you have heard me speak of my sister's house at
Firdorf?"
"Of course! Often. Where you used to live, and the flowers were so
lovely."
"Yes! and where the sweet white jasmine used to blossom, filling the air
with its delicious fragrance when we sat in the summer evenings beneath
the trellis work, in front of the dear old home."
As she speaks of the jasmine, old Miss Bright's hand is laid caressingly
on Hazel's hair, and her eyes--happily not too keen without her glasses,
or they would detect the tear marks--rest with softened look, full of
tender memories, on the girl's sympathetic, upturned face.
"There were always we three there--I, and my sister and her boy. You
have heard how the home was broken up, how Tom ran away, and how we lost
our money, and how Janie's spirit broke down under it, till at length
she gave up praying for Tom's return, and drooped and died?"
Miss Bright is making a long pause. Her large, rough face is heavy and
sorrowful. She has quite forgotten her good news for the moment, has
forgotten her friend kneeling beside her, has forgotten all save the
memory of the sorrow which seemed to have terminated all of joy the
world held for her. Hazel steals a gentle arm round the bowed neck, and
kisses the worn, absent face as softly and soothingly as though it were
some beautiful child's. The touch recalls the wandering thoughts,
Brightie clasps the hand that she is holding in her own more tightly,
and goes on:--
"Well, to be sure, and I haven't told you the news after all, dearie! It
is that Tom has come back. He has made a great deal of money, and got
quite reformed and come back. And he has bought back the old house, and
now has just found out my address and wants me to go down and live with
him; wants me to forgive him, he says, and let him be a comfort to me. I
have, of course, nothing to forgive, except for Janie's sake."
"Oh, Brightie, what good, good news it is! I am so very glad. You will
at last have some rest, and not be obliged to try your eyes over that
fine sewing, and be taken proper care of, and have all sorts of nice
things. I am so glad! How soon can you go, dear?--to-morrow? I should
like you to go to-morrow."
Hazel began very bravely, went on unsteadily, and finally ended by
laying her head down on Brightie's broad shoulder, fairly sobbing.
"I should like you to go to-morrow! Why, Hazel, Hazel, my tender-hearted
little pet, are you crying, then? Because you are sure I am not going
to-morrow? Neither to-morrow nor any other time. Don't you know I could
not leave you without a friend in this great, careless world?"
Brightie's words are news to herself as she speaks them. She had not
considered the possibility of such a thing before. Here was the
longed-for home open to her, waiting to receive her again. Her one
relation, her own nephew, the same merry-faced Tom of old, dear days,
writing to her begging her to show her forgiveness and go to him to be
cherished all the days of her life. And all this must be
foregone--renounced. She must give it all up, and when Tom comes in two
days, as he said he should, to fetch her, she must withstand his
pleading and send him back alone, and never see the sweet garden and
fresh sea again.
It is one of the cruellest days of bitter March weather. Yet early in
the day after the talk with Brightie, Hazel goes out in spite of the
cutting east wind. Wearily she drags herself about, making one more
effort to dispose of the manuscript of a story she has written, which
was ignominiously returned to her as useless this morning. Hour after
hour she struggles on in a kind of desperation, trying every possible
chance of getting rid of her laborious production. She is fully assured
in her own mind that she will have no opportunity of getting out of
doors, even to try and dispose of it, after to-day for many days to
come. Her growing illness makes that certain. But all efforts are worse
than useless. It is nearing seven o'clock, and growing quite dark, when
she reaches Union-square and stumbles up those endless stairs at length.
For the first two flights the stairs are comparatively broad and
handsome, and they are thickly carpeted; but above they grow narrow and
bare and steep. As she begins to ascend, Hazel meets a lady in a rich
dress. There are preparations, too, in the lower rooms, which betoken
the commencement of some festivity. Hazel is heartsick and footsore, and
these slight matters intensify her loneliness and sadness, till as she
enters her own dark, desolate room her swelling heart finds vent in a
stifled sob. There has been no scarcity of trouble in the
five-and-twenty years of Hazel Deane's life.
And now the trouble that weighs upon her this dreary night is the
rejection all round of the treasured writing, offered everywhere with
diffidence and hope, received back always with mortification and
despair. It is now finally flung aside. Then there is the trouble of
losing her friend--her one friend, Miss Bright--for Hazel's delicate
little body holds a resolute mind and strong will, and she is determined
her friend shall not forego the so long needed rest on her account.
The moon is looking in through the uncurtained window, looking into the
cold, bare room, where only two or three cinders glow a dull red in the
grate. Beside it Hazel leans back in her chair, musing bitterly on all
the gladness gone out of her life. "I am one of those who have none to
love them," she thinks, and the tears gather in her eyes again.
She is quoting from Mr. Ruskin's "Queen's Gardens," the book which
enabled her to bear patiently a long delay at one of the publishers she
had tried that day. She had found it lying upon the table beside her as
she waited, and picking it up, had become engrossed in it.
"And I am a woman, and I suppose, therefore, a queen--at least a
possible queen," she muses--"a pretty queen!"
(_To be concluded._)
[1] Sesame and Lilies. By John Ruskin, LL.D. 1. Of King's Treasuries.
2. Of Queen's Gardens.
THE WEATHER AND HEALTH.
BY MEDICUS.
We have all heard tell of the "Clerk of the Weather." What a poor,
ill-used, roundly-rated, over-worked individual he must be! His whole
life must be spent in an impossible endeavour to please everybody. We
may imagine the poor man going of a morning towards his office with
languid steps and weary, wondering all the while to himself what sort of
weather he ought to give the public to-day.
Arrived in front of his desk, he must stagger back with dismay at the
piles on piles of letters heaped thereon. To read them all is out of the
question; so he sits down and draws one forth, just as you would draw a
card from the hand of someone who pretended to tell fortunes.
He opens the letter. It isn't a pleasant one by any means. There is a
tone of growling impatience in every line of it. How long, the writer,
who is an invalid, wants to know, are these horrible east winds going to
prevail down in Devonshire? She has come here for her health's sake; she
has been here for three weeks, and all that time it has never ceased to
blow, and she has never ceased to cough and ache.
The clerk throws this epistle into the Balaam box and listlessly draws
out another. "Don't you think," the writer says, "that a blink of
sunshine would be a blessing--and a drop or two of warm rain to bring
the fruit on, and the garden stuff? What is the good of having a Clerk
of the Weather at all if he cannot attend better to his duties?"
That letter is also pitched into the Balaam box, and a third drawn--a
delightful little cocked-hat of a letter, written on delicately-perfumed
paper, probably with a dove's quill. She--of course it is a she!--is
going to a garden-party on Tuesday week; would he, the Clerk of the
Weather, kindly see that not a drop of rain falls on that day? Only
bright sunshine, and occasional cloudlets to act as awnings and temper
its heat.
The Clerk with a smile places that letter aside for further
consideration, and goes on drawing. All and everyone of them either
demand impossibilities or merely write to abuse the poor Clerk for some
fancied dereliction of duty. One wants rain, another growls because
there has been too much wet. This one is grumbling at the fogs, this
other at the sunshine; this one suggests snow for a change, and this
other begs for a thunderstorm to clear the atmosphere.
And so on and so forth. No wonder the bewildered Clerk jumps up at last
and over-turns the table, letters and all, and audibly expresses a
desire to let all the winds loose upon the world at once, to revel and
tear and do as they like, to bring blinding snow from the far north and
drenching rains from the torrid zone, to order a select assortment of
thunderstorms from the Cape of Good Hope, and a healthy tornado from the
Indian Ocean. But he thinks better of it, burns all the letters, and
goes quietly on with his day's duty.
We see, then, that no matter what state of body of mind we may be in, we
cannot get weather to order. We really commit an error, if nothing
worse, in asking for weather to suit us.
We cannot alter our climate. December and January will bring their
frosts and snows without asking our permission; easterly or
nor'-easterly winds will prevail in the spring months; March will
bluster, April will weep; May will smile through her tears by day and
freeze us with her frosts at night, and July will stupefy us with
thunderstorms, and August scorch us with heat one day and drench us to
the skin the next.
Now I am happy to say that a very large percentage of the readers of THE
GIRL'S OWN PAPER are so healthy in lungs and in nerves, and so
stout-hearted and strong-limbed, that it is, as a rule, a matter of
entire indifference to them how the wind blows or how the weather is.
But all are not so, and it will seem a matter of surprise for the really
robust to be told that many girls are so delicately constituted that
they actually can tell if the wind is from the east before they draw the
blind and look out. It is for this section of our girls that I am
writing to-day. They may not be invalids, but may simply labour under a
great susceptibility to atmospheric changes.
Such as these will be glad to be told that there is every possibility of
their growing out of this disagreeable susceptibility, much depending
upon how they use and treat themselves when young. Spring winds are very
hard upon those who are subject to chest or throat irritation--in other
words, to common colds--and I must take this opportunity of entreating
girls of this class never to neglect a cold. Why? Because one cold on
top of another, as the saying is, will certainly result in the end in
thickening of the delicate mucous membrane that lines the lungs, and if
this takes place you may look forward to being in time a confirmed
invalid the greater part of the year through winter cough.
It is not a very difficult thing to get clear of a cold if taken in
time. Confinement to the house for a day, or even two, a lowered diet, a
mixture of the solution of acetate of ammonia and spirits of sweet nitre
the first day, some aperient medicine and an ordinary cough mixture the
second or third day, warmer clothing and avoidance of exposure to high
winds; this treatment will be found successful in nine cases out of ten.
Sudden changes in temperature are apt to induce illness in the delicate.
Mild weather may have prevailed for some days, when all at once the wind
veers round to the north-east and at the same time it blows high.
Exposure to weather of this kind may induce whatsoever kind of ailment
an individual is subject to.
Well, there is one way and only one, to avoid it, and that is to dress
in proportion to the cold. No need for the clothing to be thick or
heavy. It should rather be the reverse, only soft and warm. Heavy
clothing is sure to cause fatigue in walking, and also perspiration, and
both states of body lay open the pores for trouble to enter.
No need, either, for even the delicate to confine themselves to the
house during the cold spring weeks or days. Confinement to the house
means want of exercise, want of an abundance of fresh air, and very
often want of appetite. Well, the strong may exist intact for a long
time without much exercise or ozone, but, mind you, the delicate cannot.
On wet days a mackintosh may be worn, though a good large umbrella is
far better. But if you will have a waterproof, let it be a cloth one,
one that will admit of ventilation, and not an india-rubber article.
This last is only fit for a Scottish cabman, with muscles of iron and
sinews of steel.
Here is an extreme case by way of example. A lady goes out to take a
walk on a damp day thus accoutred: An extraordinary bulk and weight of
clothes, and over all an india-rubber mackintosh; on her feet are those
abominations called goloshes; over her mouth she has stuck a respirator,
and over her head and shoulders she carries an enormous umbrella. The
windows and doors of this lady's house are always kept shut, and
rendered hermetically sealed by woollen sand-bags and other
oxygen-banishing contrivances. Is it any wonder that she is pale and
flabby in face, that her very hands are sickly, soft, and puffy, and
that she is continually at war with the cook?
Be warned, dear reader; take all reasonable precautions against catching
cold, but do not render your body unwholesome from over-clothing, nor
your lungs sickly for want of the pure air of heaven that you can no
more live well without than a fish can survive in a muddy stream. Sore
throat and tic doloreux, or face-ache, are very common complaints in
cold weather with high winds. But I really think they are more easily
prevented than cured. Both may be produced in the same way--namely, from
exposure to cold. It is a draught blowing directly on the face and into
the eyes or upon the neck that brings on these distressing complaints.
Beware of such a draught, and beware of damp or wet feet. Beware, also,
when walking out, of having too thick a muffle around the neck, for this
is apt to sweat it.
Whenever you feel the slightest touch of sore throat, examine it at the
glass, and if there be any redness, do it over with your camel's-hair
pencil dipped in a mixture of glycerine two parts and tincture of iron
one part.
As for tic, you protect yourself against cold and damp, but you ought
also to take an occasional tonic, and there is nothing I know better
than the citrate of iron and quinine. If, however, this medicine should
produce a disagreeable feeling of fulness in the head, it had better be
avoided and some other tonic substituted. Well, there is cod-liver oil
in conjunction with the extract of malt. This is the only form in which
cod-liver oil can be taken by many.
I should mention that an occasional aperient pill will do good, but that
the habit of taking medicine of this kind as a regular thing should be
avoided.
In cold weather the feet should be kept very comfortable, but you must
avoid sitting too much by the fire. I have already said that sudden
atmospheric changes are dangerous, but girls often manufacture these
changes for themselves, quite independent of the weather, by keeping
themselves too warm indoors and hugging the fire too much.
In cold weather the food should be more nourishing, and soups are good
for the health. Soups should be avoided when the weather changes to
warm.
Sugar, sweets, puddings, and fatty foods are all good in cold, bleak
weather, but in summer these do harm, if used to any great extent, by
heating the blood.
The change in this country from cold with high winds and perhaps frosts
at night to warmth and even scorching heat is often very sudden. Even
the delicate are then very apt to throw off their winter or spring
clothing. But to do so suddenly is highly injudicious. Girls who are not
strong should wear some woollen material all the year round. This should
of course be of a lighter texture in summer, but woollen it ought to be,
without doubt.
It is, I believe, a fact that there are fully as many disagreeable colds
caught in summer as in winter, and this can only be owing to the greater
recklessness with which people expose themselves to the influence of the
weather.
During sultry and thundery weather, as it is called, many of the
delicate suffer from languor, listlessness, and headache. These symptoms
usually go away suddenly when the weather breaks or the storm comes on
and rolls over. Exertion in cases of this kind should be avoided, as
well as anything like heavy meals. The sufferer is better out of doors
than in, and better reclining in a hammock or easy-chair out of a
draught than standing or walking about.
Hot weather greatly depresses the vital energy, because it usually comes
on so suddenly. On very warm days the delicate should avoid the
sunshine's glare during the heat of the day. But exercise must be taken
if health is to be retained, so in summer even girls that are not strong
should get out of bed soon and take a tepid if not cold bath. About
half-an-hour after breakfast is the best time for exercise, and again
about an hour before sunset, just when the day is cooling down, but
before the chill, night air has begun to blow.
I have no intention at present to take up the subject of food in its
relation to weather, but I must be permitted to say that in our country,
as a rule, summer dinners are served on mistaken principles. Why, they
differ but little, if at all, from the same meals as placed before us in
the winter season--soup, fish, and great joints, pastry and cheese.
To the robust I have nothing to say. Let them eat what they choose; in
time they will find out their mistake. But I do seriously advise
delicate girls to live rather abstemiously and on light, easily digested
dishes during the hot weather. Salads (and fruit, if good and ripe) may,
however, be taken with great benefit.
We constantly hear young folks complaining of thirst during very warm
weather. The reason is not so much to be sought in the heat itself as in
the way they live. Overloading the stomach with strong meats in the
summer season not only induces thirst but positively enfeebles the body
and hurts the digestion.
Ice and ices should be avoided as much as possible; at the best their
use is but a very artificial way of cooling the overheated body. A
mixture of ice and stimulants is worse ten times. A cup of good tea is
one of the most wholesome beverages one can take in warm weather. It
exhilarates, it cools, and while it cools the body it calms the mind.
Lime or lemon juice and water make a good drink. It should be sipped.
Ginger beer is somewhat too gassy for a delicate stomach. Raspberry
syrup in water, acidulated to taste with a little citric acid, is very
refreshing, and the same may be said of many other of the fruit syrups.
Raspberry vinegar is made by placing three pounds of the picked fruit
into a glass vessel and pouring over them a pint and a half of white
wine vinegar. It should stand for a fortnight and then be strained
without pressure.
Buttermilk is as good for a drink in summer as it is for the complexion.
Whey is also an excellent drink in summer, and I cannot refrain from
suggesting as a summer dish curds and cream.
Ripe fruit may be eaten during hot weather with great benefit, only it
must be ripe and not over ripe.
To conclude, I shall give a prescription for a summer drink which is
worth making a note of. Take the thin peel and the juice of a good-sized
lemon and add a small teaspoonful of citric acid and a wine-glassful of
fruit syrup, then pour on of boiling water one quart. Let it stand till
cold, and then strain.
GIRLS' FRIENDSHIPS.
By the Author of "Flowering Thorns."