be amused; but alas! not having been gifted with invention, by the fairy
presiding at my birth, I can offer you nothing but an historical fact: I
can vouch, however, for its fidelity, as I had it from the lips of the
person to whom it occurred.
“When Sir Charles W. was ambassador at the court of St. Petersburg, he
found that the intrigues of a party in the Russian cabinet were all
directed against our interests; and, with his usual promptness, he wrote
despatches to communicate the circumstance to his own government. These
despatches were treacherously obtained by the Russians; but as they were
found to be in a secret cipher, they were incomprehensible. By the most
culpable want of fidelity, however, in some of Sir Charles’s household,
it was discovered that the _key_ to this cipher was pasted on a screen,
which he kept carefully locked up in a closet, within his own bed-room;
yet in spite of this precaution, some artful person contrived to get in
there, and was thus enabled to decipher his dispatches.
“The following night, he was awakened by his friend General Rostopchin,
who, with the courage and fidelity of real friendship, risked every
thing to warn him of his danger.
“‘Fly my, friend,’ he exclaimed, ‘your despatches have been read--the
council is now sitting, and it is resolved that you shall be seized and
sent to Siberia. Every moment’s delay increases your danger. I have
prepared every thing for your escape; the British fleet is off
Cronstadt, and now only can you get on board.’
“The friendship of this generous Russian had even triumphed over the
fidelity which he owed his own sovereign. But Sir Charles, though full
of gratitude, refused to take his advice.
“‘I am here,’ said he, ‘as the representative of the British King; and
never can I so forget his Majesty’s dignity, as to fly from danger. They
may send me to Siberia, at their peril; but I never will voluntarily
quit my post. I will immediately appear at the council, and assume my
place as the ambassador of England.’
“With the utmost expedition he arose, and prepared to appear at the
Russian council; but with a presence of mind, like Lord Nelson’s, when
he waited to seal his letter with wax, that it might not appear written
with precipitation, Sir Charles dressed himself with the utmost
precision, in full court dress, to shew that he felt perfectly at ease.
When he entered the council chamber, all his enemies seemed to
shrink--no one ventured to intercept him as he advanced to the Empress.
She received him graciously, and, extending her hand to him, looked
contemptuously at those around her, saying, ‘I wish I might possess such
a minister as this British ambassador; on him, indeed, his master can
justly rely for courage and fidelity.’”
Wentworth guessed the particular word in this interesting anecdote; and
a new one having been whispered to him, he begged leave to tell us a
traveller’s story:--
“Mr. Scouler, in his voyage up the Columbian river, came to a curious
rocky hill, called Mount Coffin by Captain Vancouver. These rocks
appeared to be the burial place for the natives of an extensive
district; who from dread, as well as respect, the Indians are in the
habit of depositing at a considerable distance from their dwellings. The
bodies were placed on the rocks in canoes, which served as coffins, and
which were covered by boards and secured by great stones. Into these
canoes, or more properly speaking coffins, their disinterested
relations, unlike hungry heirs in more civilized countries, had crammed
all the valuable property of the deceased. Mr. Scouler mentions as a
remarkable circumstance, that a large serpent, which you know is the
emblem of immortality, issued from one of the coffins as if to warn off
all intruders from that sacred spot. Perhaps,” continued Wentworth,
“the Indians have some confused idea of the river Styx, and think their
deceased friends will be the more readily ferried over to paradise from
being placed in a canoe instead of a coffin.”
Mr. Lumley was very much pleased with the manner in which Wentworth had
performed his part, and having of course guessed the coffin, he was next
brought forward.
“My mother,” he said, “had a dream soon after I was born, which she
afterwards told me, and which still remains fresh in my memory. She
imagined that an angel appeared and told her that her new born son might
possess all the qualities of both heart and understanding for which she
had so ardently prayed; ‘but,’ added he, ‘you have omitted in your
petitions to ask for one power of the mind, without which all
acquirements lose their value, and even the best feelings of the heart
will be rendered useless. Now is the time to repair your error--ask
quickly for that essential blessing for your boy, and you shall have
it.’
“My mother’s heart beat high; her thoughts became so much confused that
it was some time before she could command them sufficiently to decide
upon what this nameless treasure could be. She fancied she heard the
quivering of the angel’s wings, as he rose into the air to depart; and,
in an agony of despair lest she should lose for ever this precious gift,
she struggled to utter the wish which now was uppermost, but in her
effort to speak, she awoke.
“Now tell me, my friends, what was the wish that trembled on her lips,
and you will have my word.”
I guessed it, and told some dull story which is not worth repeating; the
rest of the company told theirs; but as I have not time for all, I will
go on at once to Caroline, who, with a pretty little blush, thus
began:--
“Three young children were coming down the Mississippi with their father
in a sort of a boat which they call there a pirogue. They landed on a
desert island in that wide river, in a bitter snowy evening in the month
of December; their father left them on the island, promising to return
after he had procured some brandy at a house on the opposite bank. He
pushed off in his little boat to cross the river, but the wind was high,
and the water rough.--The children watched him with tears in their eyes,
struggling in his pirogue against the stream, till about half way
across, when they saw the boat sink--and never more saw their father.
Poor children! they were left alone, exposed to the storm, without fire,
shelter, or even food, except a little corn.
“As the night came on, the snow fell faster, and the eldest, who was a
girl of only six years old, but very sensible and steady for her age,
made her little sister and her infant brother creep together close to
her, and she drew their bare feet under her clothes. She had collected a
few withered leaves and branches to cover them, and in this manner they
passed the long winter’s night. Next morning she tried to support her
poor weeping companions by giving them corn to chew, and sometimes she
made them run about with her to keep themselves warm.
“In this melancholy state you may imagine what was her joy, when, in the
course of the day, she discovered a vessel--no--a boat approaching the
island. It happily contained some good-natured Indians, who took
compassion on the children, shared their food with them, and safely
conveyed them to New Madrid in their own boat.”
The mistake that poor Caroline made in saying vessel for boat, and then
correcting herself with a little confusion, betrayed her; so that the
moment she ended her story, every one exclaimed “Boat,” “Boat.”
_19th._--In the morning we had a shower of hail, and since seven o’clock
it has been snowing constantly the whole day. I am delighted with its
pure, beautiful, feathery appearance; besides, it has brought back to
my mind little shadows of things that happened before we left England.
The ground all white, and the large blazing fire, remind me of the time
when we were at Montague Hall, when my grandfather used to employ me to
gather the crumbs at breakfast, to put out of the windows for the poor
little starving birds. I believe it was that circumstance that gave me
such a love of birds; for I am sure I can recollect the happiness I used
to feel when feeding them along with good grandpapa, and watching all
their little motions.
My uncle was amused with my exclamations of delight at the snow, and he
was good enough to shew me that each flake has a star-like appearance,
consisting of five or six rays that diverge from the centre; and that
from each of these rays little _spicula_ shoot out, which by crossing
each other form a beautiful net-work. He says that when clouds are
formed at such a height in the air as that the temperature there is
below 32°, the particles of moisture become congealed or frozen. If the
particles are small, or if they are slowly frozen, they become snow,
which gradually descends to the earth; but it often happens that the
atmosphere near the earth is so warm as to re-dissolve the snow while
falling, so that it comes down in the shape of rain. “This,” he added,
“cannot take place with hail, because it is so much more solid, and
falls so rapidly, that the warmth of the lower atmosphere has not time
to melt it, before it reaches the ground. In summer, therefore, snow may
be formed at a great elevation, as people who have ascended in balloons
have more than once witnessed, but it again becomes rain in its descent;
whereas, hail, for the reason I have given you, has been known to come
down in the hottest months of the year.”
I reminded him that he had not told me why the moisture should sometimes
freeze into flakes of snow, and sometimes into the pretty little round
balls of hail.
“I waited,” he replied, “till you asked that question; for information
is always best remembered when the want of it is felt. If the particles
of moisture in the atmosphere are small, and if they are _slowly_
congealed, they form themselves into flakes of snow, as I have already
mentioned; but when the moist vapour rapidly collects into large drops
of rain, and when these are _suddenly_ frozen, they become hail.”
“So that in fact,” said I, “hailstones are nothing more than little
balls of ice.”
“They are ice, but not common transparent ice,” my uncle said, as he
opened the window and picked out a few hailstones from under the snow;
“you see that they have an opaque whiteness very different from the
appearance of ice. The upper regions of the air are not only always
colder, but also less _dense_ than those near the surface of the earth;
and the white porous nature of hail is owing to the _rarity_ of the
atmosphere where they were congealed. Professor Leslie has proved this
by the simple experiment of freezing small quantities of water in the
reservoir of an air pump from which the air had been considerably
exhausted. Hailstones, however, are not always globular like these; I
have seen a shower of irregular lumps of ice of a great size, some of
them weighing even three or four ounces, and producing dreadful
mischief, killing the lambs and destroying all the crops. Last summer
there was a partial hailstorm near London, which broke thirty thousand
panes of glass in the green-houses of one nursery-ground.”
I am sorry to add, mamma, that every body says it is going to thaw; and
there will be an end of all the amusement I have had to-day in looking
at the beautiful feathery flakes as they blew against the windows.
_20th._--After dinner this gloomy evening, we had another edition of our
story-play. Though very much amused by all I heard, I will only mention
two or three little circumstances which may perhaps be interesting to
you or Marianne.
The word telescope was whispered to my aunt; and in the course of her
story she contrived to introduced the tube through which Prince Ali, in
the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, saw his distant friends. She said,
she had very little doubt that this must have alluded to some optical
instrument, and even that the carpet by which Prince Houssain
transported himself through the air was of the nature of a balloon. Both
these inventions are generally ascribed to the moderns, but she thinks
they must have been formerly known in the East, where, indeed, all
knowledge seems to have begun.
Mr. Lumley was so good as to join our circle; and having been given the
word elephant, he mentioned a laughable anecdote of a man who took hold
of an elephant’s tail lately in the streets of London. The animal was so
displeased by this indignity, that he turned suddenly round, and
grasping the man with his trunk, placed him against the iron rails where
he kept him prisoner for some time. The keeper at last prevailed on the
elephant to let the offender go, but not till after he had received some
hard squeezes, for which he complained to a magistrate, who of course
gave him no redress, as he was the first aggressor.
Mr. L. also told us that a friend of his in India, when riding on an
elephant through a rice field, observed that the sagacious creature
plucked a considerable quantity of the ears and carried them behind his
trunk till the party stopped, when he ate them at leisure.
_21st._--The expected thaw arrived--yesterday was odious, half snow,
half rain, and everything dirty and dreary. My uncle and Frederick went
this afternoon to the poor man’s garden, where you know we saw the
carrots raised up by the little icy pillars; but this thaw has made the
roads so wet, that I could not possibly go with them.
Frederick tells me that all the fairy colonnades which supported the
earth about the carrots are now melted, the earth has fallen down, and
the tops of the roots are to be seen, quite bare, but above the ground,
and appearing as if they had been half pulled up by hand.
I asked my uncle if frost pushes up any other kind of root in that
way,--and he said that these columns have a quite different effect on
fibrous roots, particularly the grasses. In consequence of the strong
matting together of their roots, a whole piece of sward between two
cracks is sometimes lifted up by these pillars, so as to separate it
from the earth underneath. When the columns dissolve, the sward sinks
into its former place, and the earth, which has been loosened and
minutely divided by the frozen columns, affords a fine bed for the roots
to strike into, so that it is rather an advantage than an injury to them
to have been thus loosened. After the frost is melted, he says, he has
seen patches of the sward lifted up with nearly as much ease as if they
had been separated by a parting-spade.
Frederick asked what effect frost had upon soils which are not spongy.
My uncle told us that in clay soils the water forms small detached
crystals, so thickly interspersed through the whole mass, that when a
clod is broken, the fractured part looks as if covered by hoar frost;
but they are too small for the naked eye to distinguish their shape.
They help, however, to divide and loosen the clay in those stiff lumps;
and after a frost the blow of a spade will almost reduce them into
powder. Farmers sometimes, in expectation of this effect of frost, sow
their wheat in very rough ground in autumn, in order that the clods,
being pulverised by it, may close round the roots of the young plants;
and these benefit by it as drilled corn does by _landing_--that is,
having the earth laid up by the plough against the little seedlings when
they have grown to some height. In mild winters farmers are disappointed
in this; but my uncle says it is but a lazy mode of farming, and
deserves to be disappointed.
Do you know, mamma, that I think it is colder and more uncomfortable
than during the frost. The birds, however, seem to be rejoiced: I hear
them chirping their satisfaction--and all the robins that we had in the
house (we had seven at one time) have left their good shelter, and
flown off to their companions, by whom I hear they are not likely to be
welcomed: I suppose they are despised for not bearing the hardships of
the season as well as the others.
_22nd, Sunday._--My uncle read the Ten Commandments to us to-day, and
afterwards addressed us on the subject; and though I know that I cannot
do justice to all he said, I will try and note down a little of it.
“‘And God spake all these words.’ The Hebrews emphatically called these
commandments the ‘Ten words;’ and the same term having been adopted in
Greek, they have obtained the name of _Decalogue_ in every modern
language. Though all mankind were bound to obey the precepts contained
in these important laws, yet, as they were more especially addressed to
the Israelites, the tables on which they were engraven were preserved in
the ark with great solemnity, and were distinguished from the rest of
God’s ordinances by a peculiar veneration, as containing the covenant of
the Lord. The Mosaic dispensation is at an end, but these commandments
continue in full force; for we find that our Saviour and his apostles
quoted them as matter of perpetual obligation to Christians; who are
now, as the Jews were formerly, ‘the Israel of God.’
“In order to understand their full extent, it is necessary, my dear
children, that you should _study_ them attentively: for though they are
contained in a few brief precepts, they really comprehend a complete
code of morality. You must consider that there is much more implied than
is expressly ordained; and that each commandment is to be understood as
a concise text, reminding mankind of the whole sum of their duty on that
particular head. For instance, when any one sin is forbidden, it is
evident that every offence of the same nature, though of a lower degree,
is also forbidden; and that as we well know how easily we are seduced
step by step, so we are bound to abstain from every indulgence which may
act as a temptation to violate the principle of that law. We are not to
be contented with a cold and literal obedience to this divine code.
Whatever virtues are enjoined to us, it is equally our duty to induce
others to practise them; whatever is prohibited, becomes a double crime
in us if we tempt others to commit it; and observe, that for this
enlarged sense in which we are to view these commandments, we have the
direct authority of our Saviour.
“The introduction to the commandments states the grounds on which God
required the obedience and adoration of the Jews; 1st, that he was the
Lord their God; and 2dly, that he had triumphantly delivered them from
Egyptian bondage. And let it be ever impressed on your minds that these
reasons apply to us Christians, no less than they did to the Jews; for
He is the Lord _our_ God by a more excellent covenant than he was
theirs. He has relieved us from that slavery, of which the Egyptian
bondage was but a type; and instead of the land of Canaan, he has
prepared for us an inheritance in heaven.
“The first and second commandments, in which we are forbidden, under a
dreadful penalty, to swerve from the worship of the one true God, or to
kneel to any created being, seem to have been framed in allusion to the
gross idolatry of Egypt, where all manner of living creatures were
adored; and this allusion must have strongly reminded the Israelites of
the want of power in those mock deities, who could neither prevent the
plagues which they had just witnessed, nor could they enable Pharaoh,
though backed by a mighty army, to detain them in that country.”
My uncle then went through all the other commandments, and said a great
deal to us about the divine institution of the Sabbath; but when he came
to the tenth, “This,” said he, “stamps the seal of divinity upon the
whole Mosaic code, of which the Decalogue is the summary. No such
restrictions are to be found in the laws of the most famous heathen
legislators; neither Lycurgus, nor Solon, nor Justinian, interfere with
the desires of the heart; they knew that human thoughts are not
cognizable by human tribunals; but it was a command which naturally came
from Him who both can and will ‘bring every work into judgment, with
every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.’ How
finely,” continued my uncle, “has our Saviour commented on this
commandment, in his Sermon on the Mount! It is not the mere outward
observance of the law that he inculcates, but the inward principle of
obedience; it is the word of the law written in our hearts.”
_23rd._--The circumstance that Caroline told us lately, of the children
on the desert island, in the Mississippi, naturally led to some
conversation about that prodigious river, and the countries through
which it flows.
We looked at its course to-day, in my uncle’s large maps of North
America. He shewed us an account of it in Morse’s Geography, and he made
us observe, that taking in all its windings, it is upwards of a thousand
leagues in length; that it passes over twenty degrees of latitude; and,
after joining with the Missouri, and receiving a multitude of smaller
streams, though many of them are navigable for hundreds of miles, it
pours its united waters into the Gulf of Mexico.
It is evident, he says, that the country through which it runs, was
formerly inhabited by a more intelligent race than the natives now
appear to be; for large mounds of earth are frequently met with near the
banks of the river, within which are found the remains of pottery and
other articles of a superior kind to those now in use amongst the
Indians, who are in a very low state of civilization, and but thinly
spread over that immense valley.
The Mississippi rises, as he shewed us, in a region of lakes and swamps,
which are scattered over a table-land extending from that great ridge
called the Rocky Mountains, nearly to Lake Superior, between the 48th
and 49th parallel of latitude. In the first division of its course, it
passes slowly and smoothly through _savannahs_, or low plains, covered
with wild rice, rushes, and other aquatic plants, the rank growth of
which is so great, that travellers say, that as they sat in their
canoes, the adjoining forests were completely hid from their view by the
lofty fields of waving grass.
In the second division, begins the granite country, with forests of elm,
oak, and other lofty trees. Then come the dry _prairies_, which are the
great resort of the buffalo and deer; and in which sycamore and black
walnut begin to appear.
In the third division, which extends above 800 miles, the river
increases vastly in breadth; flows through lime-stone rocks, and
receives several tributary rivers, by some of which, boats may
communicate, with short interruptions, between the Gulfs of St. Lawrence
and Mexico.
Lastly begins the extensive tract of land, known by the name of the
_Great Swamp_, or, as it is sometimes called, the Dismal
Swamp.--Scarcely a tree or bush is to be seen for 300 miles, except the
deciduous cypress, which gives a peculiar and gloomy aspect to this
unhealthy region; and, to add to its horrors, it is subject to frequent
earthquakes. Lower down, the banks of the river consist of clay, sand,
and gravel; almost every flood undermines some parts of them, which fall
in, and carry away whole fields and plantations into the stream.--From a
place called Baton Rouge, which is about 140 miles above New Orleans, to
the sea, they are scarcely elevated above the level of the river, and
would be overflowed during the floods, but for artificial embankments,
called _levées_, by which the long narrow line of plantations is
defended. All beyond these embankments, is one vast level, swampy
surface, covered with reeds and rushes, and totally destitute of trees.
The inundations are said to have sometimes risen to the height of fifty
or sixty feet.
The breaking down of a levée, with the tremendous rush of such a body of
water, brings certain destruction on the neighbouring plantations. At
those times, the whole surface beyond the sloping banks appears, for
thousands of square miles, as one vast ocean; and only four or five
years since, upwards of three hundred plantations were overwhelmed with
water, and their crops totally destroyed. Very strict regulations have,
therefore, been established for the prevention of this misfortune.