[Illustration:
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART
Fifth Series
ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832
CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)
NO. 131.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, JULY 3, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]
PREHISTORIC MAN.
The early history of man in every country is shrouded in considerable
mystery and uncertainty. Of our own history, we have fairly full
and accurate knowledge as far back as the days of the Saxon kings;
but beyond that period, the light of history gradually fades into
tradition. In seeking to follow the earlier history, even the light
of tradition soon fails us, and we are left in complete darkness. The
history of some other countries reaches further into the gloom of the
past. But even Greece and Egypt have their dim dawn of history, beyond
which the voice of massive ancient Sphinx and temple-ruins of the
one are silent, and the beautiful myths of the other have no further
record. When, however, tradition fails us, we have not by any means
reached the farthest point in the history of the race. At that point,
geology comes to our assistance with revelations of men of the rudest
stage of life living in prehistoric ages under circumstances of great
interest. It is to this early age of which geology speaks, that we here
turn attention.
The peat-mosses of Denmark supply important data for the early history
of man in that country. In these peats are imbedded many relics of
a people who dwelt in that region long before the present race had
migrated thither. These relics consist chiefly of curiously formed
implements and weapons in stone and bronze—hammer, arrow, and spear
heads, hatchets and knives, &c. Now, peat is formed slowly. It is the
result of the annual growth and decay of numerous marsh-plants—each
year’s mass of dead rushes, reeds, and grasses being overgrown by the
vegetation of the succeeding year. The formation takes place in marshy
hollows; and in process of time, consolidates and sinks into the soft
soil on which it rests. The growth of each year, however, adds only a
very thin stratum to the formation, and when this is pressed by the
strata of subsequent years, it sinks into still smaller compass. The
Danish peats attain a thickness of about thirty feet, and they must
therefore have been a very considerable time under formation. Imbedded
in peat are often found the trunks of trees; indeed, in some instances
part of a forest growing in the hollow in which peat was being formed,
has been choked by the rank growth of marsh-plants, and the soil
becoming too moist for the favourable growth of the trees, they, robbed
of their strength from these two causes, have fallen a prey to storms,
and become overgrown with peat. Thus single trees or clusters of trees,
or even whole forests, may be part of a peat-moss.
In these Danish peats occur, at different depths, the remains of three
kinds of trees. At or near the surface, the remains are of beech-trees;
farther down we find remnants of oaks; and still lower and near the
bottom of the moss, are discovered remains of the Scotch fir. This
gives us a provisional chronology. At the present time, firs and oaks
are not found in the country; but beeches attain a perfect growth in
very large numbers. During the time of the Roman empire, Denmark was
famous for its growth of beeches; in all probability, all through the
historic period the characteristic tree-growth of this locality has
been beeches. It is certain that oaks have never been predominant in
Denmark during any period of the historic epoch. The prehistoric period
of man’s life upon the globe is divided into three divisions—the Stone
age, the Bronze age, and the Iron age. These distinctions are based
upon the character of the tools and weapons that he used. Lucretius hit
on what was in reality these divisions when he said:
Man’s earliest arms were fingers, teeth, and nails,
And stones, and fragments from the branching woods;
Then copper next; and last, as later traced,
The tyrant iron.
Now the implements of the prehistoric age found in the upper portion
of the Danish peats, and associated with the remains of beeches, are
made of iron. Those that occur farther from the surface in conjunction
with remains of oaks are of bronze; while those that lie nearer the
bottom of the peat by the side of the ancient firs, are made of stone.
Here is evidence of an early race of men existing in three stages of
antique civilisation. In the first instance, when the plains of Denmark
were clothed with the graceful forms of the _Pinus silvestris_, came
men into the country, who were in a rude state of what can be called
by no other name than barbarism. They had no notion of obtaining or
working the metals, but were content to make their implements of the
rough flints that lay at their feet. They may have been driven westward
by stronger and more powerful tribes, or may have wandered hither and
settled by the mere accident of a gipsy-like life.
As time moved on, and the events in the public and private life of that
antique colony came and went, a change gradually came over the land and
people. The Scotch firs, from some cause or other, passed away, and
in their place grew stalwart oaks. The people developed in many ways,
so that they were now able to carry on rude mining operations, and,
by alloying tin with copper, produce bronze, of which henceforth they
made their implements. All the relics associated in the peats with oaks
are of bronze. It is interesting to remember that the ‘more modern’
ancients procured their tin chiefly from the mines of Cornwall, and it
may have been that the people of this Bronze age found their way in
their rude canoes to the coasts of Cornwall, or, at anyrate, obtained
their tin from other tribes who had done business with the earliest of
the Cornish miners.
In process of time, another change occurred. The conditions favourable
to the growth of the oak ceased to exist, and in place of the defunct
emblems of strength and durability, came a growth of fine beech-trees,
which has continued, as we have seen, to beautify the country down to
the present time. The people, too, improved in their knowledge of the
arts, and were now able to manufacture their various articles out of
the more refractory iron.
We have thus evidence of what, for the sake of clearness, we may term
three distinct ages, though there is no real distinction, because
one period glided into another as imperceptibly as our old year is
followed by the new. First was a time when the land was covered with
beech-trees, and the people worked their implements out of iron.
This period, viewed broadly, joins the historic and the prehistoric
into one. Second was an age when, in place of the present beeches,
stalwart oaks grew in large numbers, and the inhabitants of the
country separated the softer metals from their ores, and, by mixing
them, produced bronze, of which material they then made their tools.
Third was a time reaching still further into the uncertainty of the
prehistoric era, when the graceful form of the _Pinus silvestris_
grew about the sites of the present peat-mosses, and man, with rude
uncultured notions on everything, and devoid of the broader lights
that have cheered and helped him on in later days, with a kind of
superior cunning instinct, shaped his early implements rudely out of
the flints that came readily to his hand. It is easy to understand that
a vast amount of time is necessary to bring about so great a variation
in the conditions that govern the growth of vegetation as to cause
three great changes in the kinds of trees that have grown in the land
to occur in a given locality. Yet, long time as this requires, man has,
in Denmark and in several other countries, been coexistent with the
history of these changes.
In peats of the Bronze age, scarcely any human bones have been
discovered, though they occur in peats of the Iron and Stone ages,
and the other relics of man are about equal in all the three epochs.
Scientists seem to agree in referring this to the probability that
the people of this epoch always burned their dead. It is certain that
cremation is a very ancient custom, and this theory, it is to be
presumed, accounts for us not finding human remains in the deposits of
this period.
The _Kjökken-möddings_, or _Kitchen-middens_, found on the shores of
some of the Baltic islands, tell of the Stone age, and give evidence
of the existence of man at a very remote period. The kitchen-middens
are large refuse-heaps left by the former inhabitants of these islands,
and consist chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle,
periwinkle, and other eatable mollusks. Sir Charles Lyell says of these
remains: ‘No implements of metal have ever been detected. All the
knives, hatchets, and other tools are of stone, horn, bone, or wood.
With them are often intermixed fragments of rude pottery, charcoal,
and cinders, and the bones of quadrupeds on which the rude people fed.
These bones belong to wild species still living in Europe, though some
of them, like the beaver, have long since been extirpated in Denmark.
The only animal which they seem to have domesticated was the dog.’
There is geological evidence that at the time this people were thus
feasting on local mollusks, Denmark was more intersected by fjords
than it is now. In some places, the land has encroached on the sea; in
others, the waves have eaten their way into the old coast-line. This
is further evidence of the antiquity of the race that first lived in
this district. It may also be mentioned that the bones of the Great
Auk, which is now considered quite extinct, occur in these _möddings_
in very large numbers; also that some of the testacea that occur in the
refuse-heaps have since that time partially removed from these shores,
while others have diminished in size.
The Stone age is the oldest prehistoric era we have any evidence of;
but it is subdivided into two periods—the _Palæolithic_ (ancient-stone)
and the _Neolithic_ (new-stone). The flint weapons of the Neolithic
period, manufactured when man had made some _little_ progress in the
art of tool-making, are better finished than those of the Palæolithic
period. Those of the earlier period (the Palæolithic) are so crude
and ill finished that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between
them and pieces of flint worn and chipped by the forces of nature.
The relics of the Danish peats are referable _only_ to the Neolithic
period. Before the earliest immigrants of the rude tribes of the
Neolithic age had made their homes among the prehistoric firs of
Denmark, there had roamed over vast tracts of country, not very far
removed from that locality, a race of men, if possible more simple
in their modes of life and workmanship—the men of the Palæolithic
age. But, between this age and the Neolithic of the Danish peats a
subdivision has been defined. In the caves in the south of France
occur ‘vast quantities of the bones and horns of the reindeer. In some
cases, separate plates of molars of the mammoth, and several teeth of
the great Irish deer (_Cervus magaceros_) and of the cave-lion (_Felis
spelæa_), and an extinct variety of _Felis leo_, have been found mixed
up with cut and carved antlers of the reindeer.’
This period has been named by French geologists the Reindeer age,
because the remains of that animal occur in very great profusion in
these French caves. As a proof of the existence of man at a time when
the reindeer and several other animals, now confined to far higher
latitudes, roamed as far towards the equator as the south of France,
perhaps farther, it is to be noticed that not only are his implements
found side by side with the remains of the reindeer in such a manner
as to show that they were deposited at the same time, but many of
the antlers of that animal are cut and rudely carved, bearing ample
evidence of the work of a more or less intelligent race of men. On
one of the bones found in a cave of the Reindeer age, the outlines
of the great mammoth have been rudely carved by some ingenious hand,
long since laid to rest; and the long curved tusks and shaggy coat of
wool are easily recognisable. M. Laret thinks that this places beyond
all doubt that the early inhabitants of these caves must have seen,
at least, a few specimens of this species of elephant roaming through
these regions. The presence of the mammoth, one of the mammals of
the Tertiary epoch, long ages ago quite extinct, known to have been
clothed with a warm coat of shaggy hair and wool, is evidence at once
of the great antiquity of the age in whose broken monuments we are
able to read fragments of a witching history, and of the prevalence
of a far more severe climate at that period than that which the
southern countries of Europe enjoy now. It is evident that in this
period we approach a time when the winters of the whole of Europe
were much longer and more severe, and accompanied by a short, almost
imperceptible summer; in fact, that we are in the midst of lingering
evidences of a severe climate that the great Glacier age left behind it
for a long time after our valleys were emptied of their snow and our
waters cleared of ice.
But beyond the Neolithic and the Reindeer ages lies the Palæolithic
epoch, reaching back still further into prehistoric times. The tools
and implements of man referable to this epoch are found chiefly in the
_high-level_ gravels of our valleys, and are of the rudest type. They
occur mixed with bones of the horse, bear, tiger, deer, hippopotamus,
rhinoceros, and extinct species of the hyena, in such a manner as
to leave no doubt of their coexistence with these animals. They are
‘always unground, having evidently been brought to their present form
simply by the chopping off of fragments by repeated blows, such as
could be given by a stone hammer.’ The gravels in which these relics
are found flank the modern rivers, but occupy a much higher level,
sometimes being as high as a hundred feet above the bed of the present
river, although there is no doubt they were formed by it. In some
instances there may be three series of these ancient gravels in one
valley, one above the other, forming well-defined terraces, and marking
former levels of the river that now flows at the bottom of the valley.
In such a case, the relics found in the uppermost two terraces, which
would, of course, be the oldest, would probably be of the Palæolithic
age—rudely formed, unpolished, and without any ornamentation. The
remaining gravels of more recent date would probably contain Neolithic
and bronze weapons, the flints being ground, polished, and rudely
ornamented.
It is difficult to form any approximate idea of the vast antiquity of
these Palæolithic gravels. Since they were laid down, and these early
prehistoric men lived in these localities, the rivers over vast tracts
of country have slowly cut their way through, in some instances, over a
hundred feet of hard rock, and spread the sediment around their mouths
or over the bottom of the sea. What a vast amount of time it must have
required to scoop out the valleys of a country to a depth of a hundred
feet! And it is to be remembered that all through the historic period,
to a very large extent, no change has taken place in the relative
position of these rivers and valleys. We quote Sir Charles Lyell again,
who says: ‘Nearly all the known Pleistocene quadrupeds have now been
found accompanying flint knives or hatchets in such a way as to imply
their coexistence with man; and we have thus the concurrent testimony
of several classes of geological facts to the vast antiquity of the
human race. The disappearance of a large variety of species of wild
animals from every part of a wide continent must have required a vast
period of time for its accomplishment; yet this took place while man
existed on the earth, and was completed before that early period when
the Danish shell-mounds were formed. The deepening and widening of
valleys implies an amount of change of which that which has occurred
during the historical period forms scarcely a perceptible part. Ages
must have been required to change the climate of wide regions to such
an extent as completely to alter the geographical distribution of many
mammalia, as well as land and fresh-water shells. The three or four
thousand years of the historical period do not furnish us with any
appreciable measure for calculating the number of centuries which would
suffice for such a series of changes, which are by no means of a local
character, but have operated over a considerable part of Europe.’
In these gravels we gather all that is at present known of that
earliest period on which history sheds no light. This period probably
reaches back into the closing acts of the physical drama of the great
Glacial age, when the valleys and plains of the northern hemisphere,
down to the fortieth parallel of latitude, were groaning beneath the
burden of grinding glaciers and untold depths of snow; while the rivers
were mostly covered with thick ice, and the seas were full of icebergs
floating, with infinite collisions, to the southward, or covered
with hummocked, snow-covered icefloe, as the arctic seas are to-day.
Amid scenes like these, these earliest pioneers of the races of men
struggled through their first experiences of the rough world. Could
these scenes, through the touch of some magic wand, be reconstructed,
and made to pass in dioramic form before our eyes, how interesting
they would be! How closely we should listen to their stories of that
far-gone age, could the men who lived while these gravels were being
formed, spring to life again and tell us what they saw, and knew, and
felt! What problems might thus be satisfactorily solved! But such
cannot be: the past has successfully buried its dead, and what we know
of its history must be through the tortuous course of induction.
But these men were most probably hunters; their business was to live.
And no trapper of modern American fame could want higher or, to us,
more interesting game. Across the snow-clad plains roamed herds of
the gigantic mammoth in search of food; wild savage boars kept cover
under the brushwood of the forests; and packs of hungry wolves, on
the scent of prey, filled the clear frosty air with their dismal cry,
as their modern representatives in Russia and other countries do
to-day. The magnificent Irish deer—not then extinct, and than which
no deer of modern age has antlers half so large, or has half so noble
an appearance—galloped with bounding, graceful step across the plains
of Ireland. Bears hibernated through the greater part of the severe,
almost endless winter; and when the climate became suitable, cunning
beavers followed their life’s work by the side of broad shallow rivers
that drained continents, part of which are now no more. As the climate
became warmer when the age of boulder-drift was past, ferocious tigers
prowled around man’s rude hut in search of sweet morsels—veritable
ancestors of modern ‘man-eaters’—and in the vicinity of the rivers, the
huge hippopotamus and scale-covered crocodile sought their livelihood.
Among this variety of animal life, and in the excitement of a hunter’s
existence, during the latter part of the great Glacial age, lived these
Palæolithic men, clothing themselves from the bitter cold with the warm
furs of the animals their superior intelligence enabled them to trap,
or that came within reach of their curiously flint-barbed arrows, and
living almost entirely on the game they were able to ‘bag.’
The question that should most concern us is not who and what were the
ancestors of the human race, but what men are to-day, and what they
may well become. It is said that ‘history repeats itself;’ probably
it is partially true. The _chief_ business of man in relation to the
question of evolution, which the consideration of this subject may tend
to lead back to, is to see that that part of history which tells of an
early crude barbarism in the ancestry of men does _not_ repeat itself.
It rests with men of to-day whether Macaulay’s savage from southern
climes shall, or shall not, at some future time stand on London Bridge
and contemplate the ruins of a fallen greatness.
IN ALL SHADES.
BY GRANT ALLEN,
AUTHOR OF ‘BABYLON,’ ‘STRANGE STORIES,’ ETC. ETC.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Next day was Tuesday; and to Louis Delgado and his friends at least,
the days were now well worth counting; for was not the hour of the
Lord’s deliverance fixed for eight o’clock on Wednesday evening?
Nora, too, had some reason to count the days for her own purposes,
for on Tuesday night they were to have a big dinner-party—the biggest
undertaken at Orange Grove since Nora had first returned to her
father’s house in the capacity of hostess. Mr Dupuy, while still
uncertain about Harry Noel’s precise colour, had thought it well—giving
him the benefit of the doubt—to invite all the neighbouring planters to
meet the distinguished member of the English aristocracy: it reminded
him, he said, of those bygone days when Port-of-Spain was crowded
with carriages, and Trinidad was still one of the brightest jewels
in the British crown (a period perfectly historical in every English
colony all the world over, and usually placed about the date when the
particular speaker for the time being was just five-and-twenty).
That Tuesday morning, as fate would have it, Mr Dupuy had gone with
the buggy into Port-of-Spain for the very prosaic purpose—let us fain
confess it—of laying in provisions for the night’s entertainment.
In a country where the fish for your evening’s dinner must all have
been swimming about merrily in the depths of the sea at eight o’clock
the same morning, where your leg of mutton must have been careering
joyously in guileless innocence across the grassy plain, and your
chicken cutlets must have borne their part in investigating the
merits of the juicy caterpillar while you were still loitering over
late breakfast, the question of commissariat is of course a far less
simple one than in our own well-supplied and market-stocked England.
To arrange beforehand that a particular dusky fisherman shall stake
his life on the due catching and killing of a turtle for the soup on
that identical morning and no other; that a particular oyster-woman
shall cut the bivalves for the oyster sauce from the tidal branches
of the mangrove swamp not earlier than three or later than five in
the afternoon, on her honour as a purveyor; and that a particular
lounging negro coffee-planter somewhere on the hills shall guarantee
a sufficient supply of black landcrabs for not less than fourteen
persons—turtle and oyster and crab being all as yet in the legitimate
enjoyment of their perfect natural freedom—all this, I say, involves
the possession of strategical faculties of a high order, which would
render a man who has once kept house in the West Indies perfectly
capable of undertaking the _res frumentaria_ for an English army on
one of its innumerable slaughtering picnics for the extension of the
blessings of British rule among a totally new set of black, benighted,
and hitherto happy heathen. Now, Mr Dupuy was a model entertainer,
of the West Indian pattern; and having schemed and devised all these
his plans beforehand with profound wisdom, he had now gone into
Port-of-Spain with the buggy, on hospitable thoughts intent, to bring
out whatever he could get, and make arrangements, by means of tinned
provisions from England, for the inevitable deficiencies which always
turn up under such circumstances at the last moment. So Harry and Nora
were left alone quite to themselves for the whole morning.
The veranda of the house—it fronted on the back garden at Orange
Grove—is always the pleasantest place in which to sit during the heat
of the day in a West Indian household. The air comes so delightfully
fresh through the open spaces of the creeper-covered trellis-work,
and the humming-birds buzz about so merrily among the crimson
passion-flowers under your very eyes, and the banana bushes whisper
so gently before the delicate fanning of the cool sea-breezes in the
leafy courtyard, that you lie back dreamily in your folding-chair and
half believe yourself, for once in your life, in the poet’s Paradise.
On such a veranda, Harry Noel and Nora Dupuy sat together that Tuesday
morning; Harry pretending to read a paper, which lay, however, unfolded
on his knees—what does one want with newspapers in Paradise?—and Nora
almost equally pretending to busy herself, Penelope-like, with a wee
square of dainty crewel-work, concerning which it need only be said
that one small flower appeared to take a most unconscionable and
incredible time for its proper shaping. They were talking together
as young man and maiden will talk to one another idly under such
circumstances—circling half unconsciously round and round the object
of both their thoughts, she avoiding it, and he perpetually converging
towards it, till at last, like a pair of silly, fluttering moths around
the flame of the candle, they find themselves finally landed, by a
sudden side-flight in the very centre at an actual declaration.
‘Really,’ Harry said at length, at a pause in the conversation, ‘this
is positively too delicious, Miss Dupuy, this sunshine and breeziness.
How the light glances on the little green lizards on the wall over
yonder! How beautiful the bougainvillea looks, as it clambers with its
great purple masses over that big bare trunk there! We have a splendid
bougainvillea in the greenhouse at our place in Lincolnshire; but oh,
what a difference, when one sees it clambering in its native wildness
like that, from the poor little stunted things we trail and crucify on
our artificial supports over yonder in England! I almost feel inclined
to take up my abode here altogether, it all looks so green and sunny
and bright and beautiful.’
‘And yet,’ Nora said, ‘Mr Hawthorn told me your father’s place in
Lincolnshire is so very lovely. He thinks it’s the finest country-seat
he’s ever seen anywhere in England.’
‘Yes, it _is_ pretty, certainly,’ Harry Noel admitted with a
depreciating wave of his delicate right hand—‘very pretty, and very
well kept up, one must allow, as places go nowadays. I took Hawthorn
down there one summer vac., when we two were at Cambridge together,
and he was quite delighted with it; and really, it is a very nice
place, too, though it _is_ in Lincolnshire. The house is old, you know,
really old—not Elizabethan, but early Tudor, Henry the Seventh, or
something thereabouts: all battlements and corner turrets, and roses
and portcullises on all the shields, and a fine old portico, added by
Inigo Jones, I believe, and out of keeping, of course, with the rest
of the front, but still, very fine and dignified in its own way, for
all that, in spite of what the architects (awful prigs) say to the
contrary. And then there’s a splendid avenue of Spanish chestnuts,
considered to be the oldest in all England, you know (though, to be
sure, they’ve got the oldest Spanish chestnuts in the whole country at
every house in all Lincolnshire that I’ve ever been to). And the lawn’s
pretty, very pretty; a fine stretch of sward, with good parterres of
these ugly, modern, jam-tart flowers, leading down to about the best
sheet of water in the whole county, with lots of swans on it.—Yes,’ he
added reflectively, contrasting the picture in his own mind with the
one then actually before him, ‘the Hall’s not a bad sort of place in
its own way—far from it.’
‘And Mr Hawthorn told me,’ Nora put in, ‘that you’d got such splendid
conservatories and gardens too.’
‘Well, we have: there’s no denying it. They’re certainly good in their
way, too, very good conservatories. You see, my dear mother’s very
fond of flowers: it’s a perfect passion with her: brought it over from
Barbadoes, I fancy. She was one of the very first people who went in
for growing orchids on the large scale in England. Her orchid-houses
are really awfully beautiful. We never have anything but orchids on
the table for dinner—in the way of flowers, I mean—we don’t dine off
a lily, of course, as they say the æsthetes do. And my mother’s never
so proud as when anybody praises and admires her masdevallias or her
thingumbobianas—I’m sorry to say I don’t myself know the names of half
of them. She’s a dear, sweet, old lady, my mother, Miss Dupuy; I’m sure
you couldn’t fail to like my dear mother.’
‘She’s a Barbadian too, you told us,’ Nora said reflectively. ‘How
curious that she too should be a West Indian!’
Harry half sighed. He misunderstood entirely the train of thought that
was passing that moment through Nora’s mind. He believed she saw in
it a certain _rapprochement_ between them two, a natural fitness of
things to bring them together. ‘Yes,’ he said, with more tenderness
in his tone than was often his wont, ‘my mother’s a Barbadian, Miss
Dupuy: such a grand, noble-looking, commanding woman—not old yet; she
never _will_ be old, in fact; she’s too handsome for that; but so
graceful and beautiful, and wonderfully winning as well, in all her
pretty, dainty, old coffee-coloured laces.’ And he pulled from his
pocket a little miniature, which he always wore next to his heart. He
wore another one beside it, too, but that one he didn’t show her just
then: it was her own face, done on ivory by a well-known artist, from a
photograph which he had begged or borrowed from Marian Hawthorn’s album
twelve months before in London.
‘She’s a beautiful old lady, certainly,’ Nora answered, gazing in
some surprise at Lady Noel’s clear-cut and haughty, high-born-looking
features. She couldn’t for the moment exactly remember where she had
seen some others so very like them; and then, as Harry’s evil genius
would unluckily have it, she suddenly recollected with a start of
recognition: she had seen them just the evening before on the lawn
in front of her: they answered precisely, in a lighter tint, to the
features and expression of Isaac Pourtalès!
‘How proud she must be to be the mistress of such a place as Noel
Hall!’ she said musingly, after a short pause, pursuing in her own
mind to herself her own private line of reflection. It seemed to
her as if the heiress of the Barbadian brown people must needs find
herself immensely lifted up in the world by becoming the lady of such a
splendid mansion as Harry had just half unconsciously described to her.
But Harry himself, to whom, of course, Lady Noel had been Lady Noel,
and nothing else, as long as ever he could remember her, again
misunderstood entirely the course of Nora’s thoughts, and took her
naive expression of surprise as a happy omen for his own suit. ‘She
thinks,’ he thought to himself quietly, ‘that it must be not such a
very bad position after all to be mistress of the finest estate in
Lincolnshire! But I don’t want her to marry me for that. O no, not for
that! that would be miserable! I want her to marry me for my very self,
or else for nothing.’ So he merely added aloud, in an unconcerned tone:
‘Yes; she’s very fond of the place and of the gardens; and as she’s a
West Indian by birth, I’m sure you’d like her very much, Miss Dupuy, if
you were ever to meet her.’
Nora coloured. ‘I should like to see some of these fine English places
very much,’ she said, half timidly, trying with awkward abruptness to
break the current of the conversation. ‘I never had the chance, when I
was last in England. My aunt, you know, knew only very quiet people in
London, and we never visited at any of the great country-houses.’
Harry determined that instant to throw his last die at once on this
evident chance that opened up so temptingly before him, and said with
fervour, bending forward towards her: ‘I hope, Miss Dupuy, when you are
next in England, you’ll have the opportunity of seeing many, and some
day of becoming the mistress of the finest in Lincolnshire. I told you
at Southampton, you know, that I would follow you to Trinidad, and I’ve
kept my promise.—Oh, Miss Dupuy, I hope you don’t mean to say _no_ to
me this time again! We have each had twelve months more to make up our
minds in. During all those twelve months, I have only learned every
day, whether in England or in Trinidad, to love you better. I have felt
compelled to come out here and ask you to accept me. And you—haven’t
you found your heart growing any softer meanwhile towards me? Will you
unsay now the refusal you gave me a year ago over in England?’
He spoke in a soft persuasive voice, which thrilled through Nora’s very
inmost being; and as she looked at him, so handsome, so fluent, so
well born, so noble-looking, she could hardly refrain from whispering
low a timid ‘Yes,’ on the impulse of the moment. But something that was
to her almost as the prick of conscience arose at once irresistibly
within her, and she motioned away quickly, with a little gesture of
positive horror, the hand with which Harry strove half forcibly to
take her own. The image of scowling Isaac Pourtalès as he emerged, all
unexpectedly, from the shadow the night before, rose up now in strange
vividness before her eyes and blinded her vision; next moment, for
the first time in her life, she perceived hurriedly that Isaac not
only resembled Lady Noel, but quite as closely resembled in face and
feature Harry also. That unhappy resemblance was absolutely fatal to
poor Harry’s doubtful chance of final acceptance. Nora shrank back,
half frightened and wholly disenchanted, as far as she could go, in her
own chair, and answered in a suddenly altered voice: ‘Oh, Mr Noel, I
didn’t know you were going to begin that subject again; I thought we
met on neutral ground, merely as friends now. I—I gave you my answer
definitely long ago at Southampton. There has been nothing—nothing of
any sort—to make me alter it since I spoke to you then. I like you—I
like you very much indeed; and I’m so grateful to you for standing up
as you have stood up for Mr Hawthorn and for poor dear Marian—but I can
never, never, never—never marry you!’
Harry drew back hastily with sudden surprise and great astonishment.
He had felt almost sure she was going this time really to accept him;
everything she said had sounded so exactly as if she meant at last to
take him. The disappointment took away his power of fluent speech. He
could only ask, in a suddenly checked undertone: ‘Why, Miss Dupuy? You
will at least tell me, before you dismiss me for ever, why your answer
is so absolutely final.’
Nora took up the little patch of crewel-work she had momentarily
dropped, and pretended, with rigid, trembling fingers, to be stitching
away at it most industriously. ‘I cannot tell you,’ she answered very
slowly, after a moment’s long hesitation: ‘don’t ask me. I can never
tell you.’
Harry rose and gazed at her anxiously. ‘You cannot mean to say,’ he
whispered, bending down towards her till their two faces almost touched
one another, ‘that you are going willingly to marry your cousin, for
whom your father intends you? Miss Dupuy, that would be most unworthy
of you! You do not love him! You cannot love him!’
‘I hate him!’ Nora answered with sudden vehemence; and at the words,
the blood rushed hot again into Harry’s cheek, and he whispered once
more: ‘Then, why do you say—why do you say, Nora, you will never marry
me?’
At the sound of her name, so uttered by Harry Noel’s lips, Nora rose
and stood confronting him with crimson face and trembling fingers.
‘Because, Mr Noel,’ she answered slowly and with emphasis, ‘an
impassable barrier stands for ever fixed and immovable between us!’
‘Can she mean,’ Harry thought to himself hastily, ‘that she considers
my position in life too far above her own to allow of her marrying
me?—O no; impossible, impossible! A lady’s a lady wherever she may be;
and nobody could ever be more of a lady, in every action and every
movement, than Nora, my Nora. She _shall_ be my Nora. I _must_ win her
over. But I can’t say it to her; I can’t answer her little doubt as to
her perfect equality with me; it would be far too great presumption
even to suggest it.’
Well it was, indeed, for Harry Noel that he didn’t hint aloud in the
mildest form this unlucky thought, that flashed for one indivisible
second of time across the mirror of his inner consciousness; if he had,
heaven only knows whether Nora would have darted away angrily like a
wounded tigress from the polluted veranda, or would have stood there
petrified and chained to the spot, like a Gorgon-struck Greek figure in
pure white marble, at the bare idea that any creature upon God’s earth
should even for a passing moment appear to consider himself superior in
position to a single daughter of the fighting Dupuys of Orange Grove,
Trinidad!
‘Then you dismiss me for ever?’ Harry asked quivering.
Nora cast her eyes irresolutely down upon the ground and faltered
for a second; then, with a sudden burst of firmness, she answered
tremulously: ‘Yes, for ever.’
At the word, Harry bounded away like a wounded man from her side, and
rushed wildly with tempestuous heart into his own bedroom. As for Nora,
she walked quietly back, white, but erect, to her little boudoir,
and when she reached it, astonished Aunt Clemmy by flinging herself
with passionate force down at full length upon the big old sofa, and
bursting at once into uncontrollable floods of silent, hot, and burning
tears.
POPULAR LEGAL FALLACIES.[1]
BY AN EXPERIENCED PRACTITIONER.
_LOTTERIES AND ART-UNIONS._
The laws of England relating to lotteries may conveniently be divided
into three classes, according to the objects which are sought to be
attained thereby. (1) The imposition of penalties. (2) The punishment
of offenders as rogues and vagabonds. (3) The legalisation of
art-unions. The inconsistent provisions of the Act of Parliament
relating to the third class, with the tone of legislation within the
first and second classes, have led to some curious misconceptions. For
example, in Wales, especially in South Wales, and to a smaller extent
in some counties of England, it is generally believed that a common
raffle can be made quite legal by advertising it as being conducted
upon art-union principles; although—as we shall presently show—there
is no connection between the two, and therefore no ground for the
supposition that the pretence implied in the words quoted has any real
existence.
The pernicious effects of lotteries appear to have early been a subject
of careful attention on the part of the legislature. To go no farther
back than the year 1698, we find it recited that ‘several evil-disposed
persons for divers years last passed have set up many mischievous
and unlawful games called lotteries, not only in the cities of London
and Westminster and in the suburbs thereof and places adjoining,
but in most of the eminent towns and places in England and in the
dominion of Wales, and have thereby most unjustly and fraudulently
got to themselves great sums of money from the children and servants
of several gentlemen, traders, and merchants, and from other unwary
persons, to the utter ruin and impoverishment of many families, and
to the reproach of the English laws and government, by colour of
several patents or grants under the Great Seal of England for the said
lotteries or some of them, which said grants or patents are against
the common good, trade, welfare, and peace of His Majesty’s kingdoms.’
It was accordingly enacted that any person keeping, &c., any lottery
either by dice, lots, cards, balls, or any other numbers or figures,
should be liable to a penalty of five hundred pounds, one-third part
thereof for the use of His Majesty, his heirs and successors; one other
third part thereof to the use of the poor of the parish where such
offence should have been committed; and the other third part thereof
with double costs to the use of the informer suing for the same. In
the year 1806, the latter part of the preceding enactment was altered
to this extent—the whole of the penalty was to go to the Crown, and
no proceedings were to be taken for recovery of penalties inflicted
by any of the laws concerning lotteries except in the name and by
the authority of the Attorney-general for the time being. Since the
last-mentioned date, the proceedings for recovery of penalties under
the former Act have been very rare, although the law stands thus to the
present day.
It is somewhat remarkable that many of the enactments against lotteries
have been contained in Acts of Parliament by which government lotteries
were authorised, thus leading to the inference that the raising of
money for the service of the state, which must necessarily lead to
the same evils of gambling, &c., as the lotteries set up by the
‘evil-disposed persons’ against whom the former legislation was aimed,
was of more importance than the cause of morality which had been sought
to be served by the imposition of penalties so heavy. The persons
who availed themselves of the advantages offered by the keepers of
unauthorised lotteries were not allowed to go free from the danger of
being proceeded against for penalties; but these penalties were much
more moderate, being only twenty pounds for each offence.
The second branch of our subject—the punishment of keepers of lotteries
as common rogues and vagabonds—had its origin in the year first
mentioned, and has now become an ordinary part of the law applicable
to the punishment of vagrancy, although it must be noted that there
is no necessary connection between vagrancy as universally understood
and this statutory definition. A man who is convicted of an offence
against a certain law is held to be a rogue and vagabond, and is
thereby rendered liable to imprisonment with hard labour for three
calendar months; and if he should commit the offence specified, he is
what the law calls him, although he should be a respectable tradesman,
a clergyman, or a justice of the peace. There is nothing practically
obsolete about this branch of the law. Seldom is Christmas allowed to
pass over without some prosecutions under the Vagrants’ Act for raffles
or some other forms of lotteries in some part of the kingdom or other;
and the effect of this has been to render almost unknown in some towns
and cities the drawings which were so numerous in the days of our
youth. One form of petty lottery which has engaged the attention of the
police at all times of the year is the insertion of small sums of money
in packets of sweets and other articles principally sold to children,
for which there have been several convictions within the last few
years. If the principle be admitted that the moral effects of lotteries
are pernicious, then it follows that this mode of instilling the
gambling spirit into the tender minds of children is its most injurious
manifestation, on account of its tendency to train up the children in
the way in which they should _not_ go; and the probability that the
spirit thus implanted in their minds will be more fully developed as
they grow up.
Besides the penalties and punishments provided for the conductors of
and participants in lotteries, there is a distinct set of enactments
which aim at the prevention of advertising lotteries, whether English
or foreign. So far as the latter class is concerned, the law has no
power to interfere with the persons implicated therein so long as they
are without the jurisdiction of our courts. But if any person in the
United Kingdom should endeavour to spread the knowledge of such schemes
by allowing advertisements to be inserted in his newspaper or other
periodical, or by printing and distributing notices relating thereto,
then the law provides that he shall become liable to a penalty of fifty
pounds besides full costs; and the same penalty applies to private
lotteries which may have been established in this country.
In the year 1846, an Act of Parliament was passed for legalising
art-unions. The following are the requisites for enabling an
Association of individuals interested in the promotion of art to take
advantage of the protection thus afforded. The Association must be
purely voluntary, and must not be established for the acquisition of
pecuniary profit, the subscriptions—beyond the necessary expenses—being
entirely expended in the purchase of drawings, paintings, and other
works of art for distribution amongst the subscribers. The art-union
which is to be protected by the Act must either have been incorporated
by royal charter, or a license must be obtained from the Board of
Trade, after the deed of settlement, or the rules and regulations
of the Association—as the case may be—have been submitted to that
honourable body for approval. Whenever the Association is so conducted
as to become perverted from the purposes contemplated by the Act,
power is reserved to revoke the charter, &c., previously granted to
such Association. It will be observed that the provisions respecting
art-unions are not of an elastic nature; but that the protection
intended to be afforded by the Act is strictly limited to Associations
for artistic purposes, established under government sanction and
supervision. Hence, it should be noted that the advertising of an
intended lottery which has not been so sanctioned, as being on
art-union principles, would be of no avail to protect the managers of
such a lottery from prosecution under the vagrancy laws; or from an
action for penalties at the suit of the Attorney-general for the time
being.
It is not our present purpose to attempt to criticise or to vindicate
the laws in question; we simply explain how the law stands, and leave
to others to reconcile the principles of legislation in the interests
of morality, which appear to place art upon a pedestal outside the
sphere of moral considerations.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] It should be understood that this series of articles deals mainly
with English as apart from Scotch law.
WHERE THE TRACKS LED TO.
IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. I.
I have been often much inclined to write down the particulars of a
remarkable business I was once engaged in, which was not only queer
and full of unexpected turns in itself, but was of unusual interest to
me personally. The account will also be curious, as showing how much,
or how little, of the qualities the public always will assign to us is
required. I had been in the metropolitan police, and, when my story
begins, had just retired on a decent superannuation. While in the
force, I think I had as much experience as many of the men who have
been talked about; but I never before met with anything in the least
like the incident I am going to describe.
I was pensioned off late in the year, in November; so, as Christmas
drew near, I had not yet grown tired of the pleasure of being my own
master, and would sit, after the gas was lighted, by the hour at a time
alone with my pipe, picturing how I would enjoy myself in the holidays,
when some of my friends would be coming up to London; for I had not
much of a family party at home, as I lived with my daughter, the only
one left with me out of four. She was now nineteen years old, and
just like her mother, as I remembered her, some thirty years before.
Winifred—called so after a favourite sister of my wife, who died
young—was a very pretty girl, as many others besides me thought; and
wonderfully steady too. She was a dressmaker; none of your day-workers
or needlewomen, but really an artist—I believe that is now the correct
name; and at the West End would have commanded a high salary. She could
have gone to the West End easily enough; but she would not do this, nor
would she live in the house where she was employed, and where she might
have had, young as she was, full charge of a department. She would not
leave her father, who, she knew, if she went away, would be dull and
mopish in the house without her.