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Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Jerome K. Jerome

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Title: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Author: Jerome K. Jerome

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THE IDLE THOUGHTS

AN IDLE FELLOW.

by JEROME K. JEROME.

THE VERY DEAR AND WELL-BELOVED

FRIEND

OF MY PROSPEROUS AND EVIL DAYS--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, THOUGH IN THE EARLY STAGES OF OUR ACQUAINTANCESHIP

DID OFTTIMES DISAGREE WITH ME, HAS SINCE

BECOME TO BE MY VERY WARMEST COMRADE--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, HOWEVER OFTEN I MAY PUT HIM OUT, NEVER (NOW)

UPSETS ME IN REVENGE--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, TREATED WITH MARKED COOLNESS BY ALL THE FEMALE

MEMBERS OF MY HOUSEHOLD, AND REGARDED WITH SUSPICION

BY MY VERY DOG, NEVERTHELESS SEEMS DAY BY

DAY TO BE MORE DRAWN BY ME, AND IN RETURN

TO MORE AND MORE IMPREGNATE ME WITH

THE ODOR OF HIS FRIENDSHIP--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO NEVER TELLS ME OF MY FAULTS, NEVER WANTS TO

BORROW MONEY, AND NEVER TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF--

TO THE COMPANION

OF MY IDLE HOURS, THE SOOTHER OF MY SORROWS,

THE CONFIDANT OF MY JOYS AND HOPES--

MY OLDEST AND STRONGEST

ads:

PIPE,

THIS LITTLE VOLUME

GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED.

PREFACE

One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having

observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having

promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right

to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public

demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle

thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of

the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should

improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I

cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever.

All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best

hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a

change.

CONTENTS.

IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW.

ON BEING IDLE

ON BEING IN LOVE

ON BEING IN THE BLUES

ON BEING HARD UP

ON VANITY AND VANITIES

ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD

ON THE WEATHER

ON CATS AND DOGS

ON BEING SHY

ON BABIES

ON EATING AND DRINKING

ON FURNISHED APARTMENTS

ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT

ON MEMORY

The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow.

ON BEING IDLE.

Now, this is a subject on which I flatter myself I really am _au

fait_. The gentleman who, when I was young, bathed me at wisdom's

font for nine guineas a term--no extras--used to say he never knew a

boy who could do less work in more time; and I remember my poor

grandmother once incidentally observing, in the course of an

instruction upon the use of the Prayer-book, that it was highly

improbable that I should ever do much that I ought not to do, but that

she felt convinced beyond a doubt that I should leave undone pretty

well everything that I ought to do.

I am afraid I have somewhat belied half the dear old lady's prophecy.

Heaven help me! I have done a good many things that I ought not to

have done, in spite of my laziness. But I have fully confirmed the

accuracy of her judgment so far as neglecting much that I ought not to

have neglected is concerned. Idling always has been my strong point.

I take no credit to myself in the matter--it is a gift. Few possess

it. There are plenty of lazy people and plenty of slow-coaches, but a

genuine idler is a rarity. He is not a man who slouches about with

his hands in his pockets. On the contrary, his most startling

characteristic is that he is always intensely busy.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of

work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to

do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting

one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.

Many years ago, when I was a young man, I was taken very ill--I never

could see myself that much was the matter with me, except that I had a

beastly cold. But I suppose it was something very serious, for the

doctor said that I ought to have come to him a month before, and that

if it (whatever it was) had gone on for another week he would not have

answered for the consequences. It is an extraordinary thing, but I

never knew a doctor called into any case yet but what it transpired

that another day's delay would have rendered cure hopeless. Our

medical guide, philosopher, and friend is like the hero in a

melodrama--he always comes upon the scene just, and only just, in the

nick of time. It is Providence, that is what it is.

Well, as I was saying, I was very ill and was ordered to Buxton for a

month, with strict injunctions to do nothing whatever all the while

that I was there. "Rest is what you require," said the doctor,

"perfect rest."

It seemed a delightful prospect. "This man evidently understands my

complaint," said I, and I pictured to myself a glorious time--a four

weeks' _dolce far niente_ with a dash of illness in it. Not too much

illness, but just illness enough--just sufficient to give it the

flavor of suffering and make it poetical. I should get up late, sip

chocolate, and have my breakfast in slippers and a dressing-gown. I

should lie out in the garden in a hammock and read sentimental novels

with a melancholy ending, until the books should fall from my listless

hand, and I should recline there, dreamily gazing into the deep blue

of the firmament, watching the fleecy clouds floating like

white-sailed ships across its depths, and listening to the joyous song

of the birds and the low rustling of the trees. Or, on becoming too

weak to go out of doors, I should sit propped up with pillows at the

open window of the ground-floor front, and look wasted and

interesting, so that all the pretty girls would sigh as they passed

by.

And twice a day I should go down in a Bath chair to the Colonnade to

drink the waters. Oh, those waters! I knew nothing about them then,

and was rather taken with the idea. "Drinking the waters" sounded

fashionable and Queen Anne-fied, and I thought I should like them.

But, ugh! after the first three or four mornings! Sam Weller's

description of them as "having a taste of warm flat-irons" conveys

only a faint idea of their hideous nauseousness. If anything could

make a sick man get well quickly, it would be the knowledge that he

must drink a glassful of them every day until he was recovered. I

drank them neat for six consecutive days, and they nearly killed me;

but after then I adopted the plan of taking a stiff glass of

brandy-and-water immediately on the top of them, and found much relief

thereby. I have been informed since, by various eminent medical

gentlemen, that the alcohol must have entirely counteracted the

effects of the chalybeate properties contained in the water. I am

glad I was lucky enough to hit upon the right thing.

But "drinking the waters" was only a small portion of the torture I

experienced during that memorable month--a month which was, without

exception, the most miserable I have ever spent. During the best part

of it I religiously followed the doctor's mandate and did nothing

whatever, except moon about the house and garden and go out for two

hours a day in a Bath chair. That did break the monotony to a certain

extent. There is more excitement about Bath-chairing--especially if

you are not used to the exhilarating exercise--than might appear to

the casual observer. A sense of danger, such as a mere outsider might

not understand, is ever present to the mind of the occupant. He feels

convinced every minute that the whole concern is going over, a

conviction which becomes especially lively whenever a ditch or a

stretch of newly macadamized road comes in sight. Every vehicle that

passes he expects is going to run into him; and he never finds himself

ascending or descending a hill without immediately beginning to

speculate upon his chances, supposing--as seems extremely

probable--that the weak-kneed controller of his destiny should let go.

But even this diversion failed to enliven after awhile, and the

_ennui_ became perfectly unbearable. I felt my mind giving way under

it. It is not a strong mind, and I thought it would be unwise to tax

it too far. So somewhere about the twentieth morning I got up early,

had a good breakfast, and walked straight off to Hayfield, at the foot

of the Kinder Scout--a pleasant, busy little town, reached through a

lovely valley, and with two sweetly pretty women in it. At least they

were sweetly pretty then; one passed me on the bridge and, I think,

smiled; and the other was standing at an open door, making an

unremunerative investment of kisses upon a red-faced baby. But it is

years ago, and I dare say they have both grown stout and snappish

since that time. Coming back, I saw an old man breaking stones, and

it roused such strong longing in me to use my arms that I offered him

a drink to let me take his place. He was a kindly old man and he

humored me. I went for those stones with the accumulated energy of

three weeks, and did more work in half an hour than he had done all

day. But it did not make him jealous.

Having taken the plunge, I went further and further into dissipation,

going out for a long walk every morning and listening to the band in

the pavilion every evening. But the days still passed slowly

notwithstanding, and I was heartily glad when the last one came and I

was being whirled away from gouty, consumptive Buxton to London with

its stern work and life. I looked out of the carriage as we rushed

through Hendon in the evening. The lurid glare overhanging the mighty

city seemed to warm my heart, and when, later on, my cab rattled out

of St. Pancras' station, the old familiar roar that came swelling up

around me sounded the sweetest music I had heard for many a long day.

I certainly did not enjoy that month's idling. I like idling when I

ought not to be idling; not when it is the only thing I have to do.

That is my pig-headed nature. The time when I like best to stand with

my back to the fire, calculating how much I owe, is when my desk is

heaped highest with letters that must be answered by the next post.

When I like to dawdle longest over my dinner is when I have a heavy

evening's work before me. And if, for some urgent reason, I ought to

be up particularly early in the morning, it is then, more than at any

other time, that I love to lie an extra half-hour in bed.

Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: "just for

five minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero

of a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up willingly? There

are some men to whom getting up at the proper time is an utter

impossibility. If eight o'clock happens to be the time that they

should turn out, then they lie till half-past. If circumstances

change and half-past eight becomes early enough for them, then it is

nine before they can rise. They are like the statesman of whom it was

said that he was always punctually half an hour late. They try all

manner of schemes. They buy alarm-clocks (artful contrivances that go

off at the wrong time and alarm the wrong people). They tell Sarah

Jane to knock at the door and call them, and Sarah Jane does knock at

the door and does call them, and they grunt back "awri" and then go

comfortably to sleep again. I knew one man who would actually get out

and have a cold bath; and even that was of no use, for afterward he

would jump into bed again to warm himself.

I think myself that I could keep out of bed all right if I once got

out. It is the wrenching away of the head from the pillow that I find

so hard, and no amount of over-night determination makes it easier. I

say to myself, after having wasted the whole evening, "Well, I won't

do any more work to-night; I'll get up early to-morrow morning;" and I

am thoroughly resolved to do so--then. In the morning, however, I

feel less enthusiastic about the idea, and reflect that it would have

been much better if I had stopped up last night. And then there is

the trouble of dressing, and the more one thinks about that the more

one wants to put it off.

It is a strange thing this bed, this mimic grave, where we stretch our

tired limbs and sink away so quietly into the silence and rest. "O

bed, O bed, delicious bed, that heaven on earth to the weary head," as

sang poor Hood, you are a kind old nurse to us fretful boys and girls.

Clever and foolish, naughty and good, you take us all in your motherly

lap and hush our wayward crying. The strong man full of care--the

sick man full of pain--the little maiden sobbing for her faithless

lover--like children we lay our aching heads on your white bosom, and

you gently soothe us off to by-by.

Our trouble is sore indeed when you turn away and will not comfort us.

How long the dawn seems coming when we cannot sleep! Oh! those

hideous nights when we toss and turn in fever and pain, when we lie,

like living men among the dead, staring out into the dark hours that

drift so slowly between us and the light. And oh! those still more

hideous nights when we sit by another in pain, when the low fire

startles us every now and then with a falling cinder, and the tick of

the clock seems a hammer beating out the life that we are watching.

But enough of beds and bedrooms. I have kept to them too long, even

for an idle fellow. Let us come out and have a smoke. That wastes

time just as well and does not look so bad. Tobacco has been a

blessing to us idlers. What the civil-service clerk before Sir

Walter's time found to occupy their minds with it is hard to imagine.

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men

entirely to the want of the soothing weed. They had no work to do and

could not smoke, and the consequence was they were forever fighting

and rowing. If, by any extraordinary chance, there was no war going,

then they got up a deadly family feud with the next-door neighbor, and

if, in spite of this, they still had a few spare moments on their

hands, they occupied them with discussions as to whose sweetheart was

the best looking, the arguments employed on both sides being

battle-axes, clubs, etc. Questions of taste were soon decided in

those days. When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take

three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too

beautiful to live. He said he would step outside and see about it.

And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head--the other

man's head, I mean--then that proved that his--the first

fellow's--girl was a pretty girl. But if the other fellow broke _his_

head--not his own, you know, but the other fellow's--the other fellow

to the second fellow, that is, because of course the other fellow

would only be the other fellow to him, not the first fellow who--well,

if he broke his head, then _his_ girl--not the other fellow's, but the

fellow who _was_ the-- Look here, if A broke B's head, then A's girl

was a pretty girl; but if B broke A's head, then A's girl wasn't a

pretty girl, but B's girl was. That was their method of conducting

art criticism.

Nowadays we light a pipe and let the girls fight it out among

themselves.

They do it very well. They are getting to do all our work. They are

doctors, and barristers, and artists. They manage theaters, and

promote swindles, and edit newspapers. I am looking forward to the

time when we men shall have nothing to do but lie in bed till twelve,

read two novels a day, have nice little five-o'clock teas all to

ourselves, and tax our brains with nothing more trying than

discussions upon the latest patterns in trousers and arguments as to

what Mr. Jones' coat was made of and whether it fitted him. It is a

glorious prospect--for idle fellows.

ON BEING IN LOVE.

You've been in love, of course! If not you've got it to come. Love

is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the

measles, we take it only once. One never need be afraid of catching

it a second time. The man who has had it can go into the most

dangerous places and play the most foolhardy tricks with perfect

safety. He can picnic in shady woods, ramble through leafy aisles,

and linger on mossy seats to watch the sunset. He fears a quiet

country-house no more than he would his own club. He can join a

family party to go down the Rhine. He can, to see the last of a

friend, venture into the very jaws of the marriage ceremony itself.

He can keep his head through the whirl of a ravishing waltz, and rest

afterward in a dark conservatory, catching nothing more lasting than a

cold. He can brave a moonlight walk adown sweet-scented lanes or a

twilight pull among the somber rushes. He can get over a stile

without danger, scramble through a tangled hedge without being caught,

come down a slippery path without falling. He can look into sunny

eyes and not be dazzled. He listens to the siren voices, yet sails on

with unveered helm. He clasps white hands in his, but no electric

"Lulu"-like force holds him bound in their dainty pressure.

No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid spends no second arrow on

the same heart. Love's handmaids are our life-long friends. Respect,

and admiration, and affection, our doors may always be left open for,

but their great celestial master, in his royal progress, pays but one

visit and departs. We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond

of--but we never love again. A man's heart is a firework that once in

its time flashes heavenward. Meteor-like, it blazes for a moment and

lights with its glory the whole world beneath. Then the night of our

sordid commonplace life closes in around it, and the burned-out case,

falling back to earth, lies useless and uncared for, slowly smoldering

into ashes. Once, breaking loose from our prison bonds, we dare, as

mighty old Prometheus dared, to scale the Olympian mount and snatch

from Phoebus' chariot the fire of the gods. Happy those who,

hastening down again ere it dies out, can kindle their earthly altars

at its flame. Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome

gases that we breathe, but before it is choked out we may use it as a

torch to ignite the cozy fire of affection.

And, after all, that warming glow is more suited to our cold little

back parlor of a world than is the burning spirit love. Love should

be the vestal fire of some mighty temple--some vast dim fane whose

organ music is the rolling of the spheres. Affection will burn

cheerily when the white flame of love is flickered out. Affection is

a fire that can be fed from day to day and be piled up ever higher as

the wintry years draw nigh. Old men and women can sit by it with

their thin hands clasped, the little children can nestle down in

front, the friend and neighbor has his welcome corner by its side, and

even shaggy Fido and sleek Titty can toast their noses at the bars.

Let us heap the coals of kindness upon that fire. Throw on your

pleasant words, your gentle pressures of the hand, your thoughtful and

unselfish deeds. Fan it with good-humor, patience, and forbearance.

You can let the wind blow and the rain fall unheeded then, for your

hearth will be warm and bright, and the faces round it will make

sunshine in spite of the clouds without.

I am afraid, dear Edwin and Angelina, you expect too much from love.

You think there is enough of your little hearts to feed this fierce,

devouring passion for all your long lives. Ah, young folk! don't rely

too much upon that unsteady flicker. It will dwindle and dwindle as

the months roll on, and there is no replenishing the fuel. You will

watch it die out in anger and disappointment. To each it will seem

that it is the other who is growing colder. Edwin sees with

bitterness that Angelina no longer runs to the gate to meet him, all

smiles and blushes; and when he has a cough now she doesn't begin to

cry and, putting her arms round his neck, say that she cannot live

without him. The most she will probably do is to suggest a lozenge,

and even that in a tone implying that it is the noise more than

anything else she is anxious to get rid of.

Poor little Angelina, too, sheds silent tears, for Edwin has given up

carrying her old handkerchief in the inside pocket of his waistcoat.

Both are astonished at the falling off in the other one, but neither

sees their own change. If they did they would not suffer as they do.

They would look for the cause in the right quarter--in the littleness

of poor human nature--join hands over their common failing, and start

building their house anew on a more earthly and enduring foundation.

But we are so blind to our own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of

others. Everything that happens to us is always the other person's

fault. Angelina would have gone on loving Edwin forever and ever and

ever if only Edwin had not grown so strange and different. Edwin

would have adored Angelina through eternity if Angelina had only

remained the same as when he first adored her.

It is a cheerless hour for you both when the lamp of love has gone out

and the fire of affection is not yet lit, and you have to grope about

in the cold, raw dawn of life to kindle it. God grant it catches

light before the day is too far spent. Many sit shivering by the dead

coals till night come.

But, there, of what use is it to preach? Who that feels the rush of

young love through his veins can think it will ever flow feeble and

slow! To the boy of twenty it seems impossible that he will not love

as wildly at sixty as he does then. He cannot call to mind any

middle-aged or elderly gentleman of his acquaintance who is known to

exhibit symptoms of frantic attachment, but that does not interfere in

his belief in himself. His love will never fall, whoever else's may.

Nobody ever loved as he loves, and so, of course, the rest of the

world's experience can be no guide in his case. Alas! alas! ere

thirty he has joined the ranks of the sneerers. It is not his fault.

Our passions, both the good and bad, cease with our blushes. We do

not hate, nor grieve, nor joy, nor despair in our thirties like we did

in our teens. Disappointment does not suggest suicide, and we quaff

success without intoxication.

We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few

majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a

less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently

adapts itself to circumstances. And love--love dies. "Irreverence

for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our

hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and

withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the

world there is left but a sapless stump.

My fair friends will deem all this rank heresy, I know. So far from a

man's not loving after he has passed boyhood, it is not till there is

a good deal of gray in his hair that they think his protestations at

all worthy of attention. Young ladies take their notions of our sex

from the novels written by their own, and compared with the

monstrosities that masquerade for men in the pages of that nightmare

literature, Pythagoras' plucked bird and Frankenstein's demon were

fair average specimens of humanity.

In these so-called books, the chief lover, or Greek god, as he is

admiringly referred to--by the way, they do not say which "Greek god"

it is that the gentleman bears such a striking likeness to; it might

be hump-backed Vulcan, or double-faced Janus, or even driveling

Silenus, the god of abstruse mysteries. He resembles the whole family

of them, however, in being a blackguard, and perhaps this is what is

meant. To even the little manliness his classical prototypes

possessed, though, he can lay no claim whatever, being a listless

effeminate noodle, on the shady side of forty. But oh! the depth and

strength of this elderly party's emotion for some bread-and-butter

school-girl! Hide your heads, ye young Romeos and Leanders! this

_blase_ old beau loves with an hysterical fervor that requires four

adjectives to every noun to properly describe.

It is well, dear ladies, for us old sinners that you study only books.

Did you read mankind, you would know that the lad's shy stammering

tells a truer tale than our bold eloquence. A boy's love comes from a

full heart; a man's is more often the result of a full stomach.

Indeed, a man's sluggish current may not be called love, compared with

the rushing fountain that wells up when a boy's heart is struck with

the heavenly rod. If you would taste love, drink of the pure stream

that youth pours out at your feet. Do not wait till it has become a

muddy river before you stoop to catch its waves.

Or is it that you like its bitter flavor--that the clear, limpid water

is insipid to your palate and that the pollution of its after-course

gives it a relish to your lips? Must we believe those who tell us

that a hand foul with the filth of a shameful life is the only one a

young girl cares to be caressed by?

That is the teaching that is bawled out day by day from between those

yellow covers. Do they ever pause to think, I wonder, those devil's

ladyhelps, what mischief they are doing crawling about God's garden,

and telling childish Eves and silly Adams that sin is sweet and that

decency is ridiculous and vulgar? How many an innocent girl do they

not degrade into an evil-minded woman? To how many a weak lad do they

not point out the dirty by-path as the shortest cut to a maiden's

heart? It is not as if they wrote of life as it really is. Speak

truth, and right will take care of itself. But their pictures are

coarse daubs painted from the sickly fancies of their own diseased

imagination.

We want to think of women not--as their own sex would show them--as

Lorleis luring us to destruction, but as good angels beckoning us

upward. They have more power for good or evil than they dream of. It

is just at the very age when a man's character is forming that he

tumbles into love, and then the lass he loves has the making or

marring of him. Unconsciously he molds himself to what she would have

him, good or bad. I am sorry to have to be ungallant enough to say

that I do not think they always use their influence for the best. Too

often the female world is bounded hard and fast within the limits of

the commonplace. Their ideal hero is a prince of littleness, and to

become that many a powerful mind, enchanted by love, is "lost to life

and use and name and fame."

And yet, women, you could make us so much better if you only would.

It rests with you, more than with all the preachers, to roll this

world a little nearer heaven. Chivalry is not dead: it only sleeps

for want of work to do. It is you who must wake it to noble deeds.

You must be worthy of knightly worship.

You must be higher than ourselves. It was for Una that the Red Cross

Knight did war. For no painted, mincing court dame could the dragon

have been slain. Oh, ladies fair, be fair in mind and soul as well as

face, so that brave knights may win glory in your service! Oh, woman,

throw off your disguising cloaks of selfishness, effrontery, and

affectation! Stand forth once more a queen in your royal robe of

simple purity. A thousand swords, now rusting in ignoble sloth, shall

leap from their scabbards to do battle for your honor against wrong.

A thousand Sir Rolands shall lay lance in rest, and Fear, Avarice,

Pleasure, and Ambition shall go down in the dust before your colors.

What noble deeds were we not ripe for in the days when we loved? What

noble lives could we not have lived for her sake? Our love was a

religion we could have died for. It was no mere human creature like

ourselves that we adored. It was a queen that we paid homage to, a

goddess that we worshiped.

And how madly we did worship! And how sweet it was to worship! Ah,

lad, cherish love's young dream while it lasts! You will know too

soon how truly little Tom Moore sang when he said that there was

nothing half so sweet in life. Even when it brings misery it is a

wild, romantic misery, all unlike the dull, worldly pain of

after-sorrows. When you have lost her--when the light is gone out

from your life and the world stretches before you a long, dark horror,

even then a half-enchantment mingles with your despair.

And who would not risk its terrors to gain its raptures? Ah, what

raptures they were! The mere recollection thrills you. How delicious

it was to tell her that you loved her, that you lived for her, that

you would die for her! How you did rave, to be sure, what floods of

extravagant nonsense you poured forth, and oh, how cruel it was of her

to pretend not to believe you! In what awe you stood of her! How

miserable you were when you had offended her! And yet, how pleasant

to be bullied by her and to sue for pardon without having the

slightest notion of what your fault was! How dark the world was when

she snubbed you, as she often did, the little rogue, just to see you

look wretched; how sunny when she smiled! How jealous you were of

every one about her! How you hated every man she shook hands with,

every woman she kissed--the maid that did her hair, the boy that

cleaned her shoes, the dog she nursed--though you had to be respectful

to the last-named! How you looked forward to seeing her, how stupid

you were when you did see her, staring at her without saying a word!

How impossible it was for you to go out at any time of the day or

night without finding yourself eventually opposite her windows! You

hadn't pluck enough to go in, but you hung about the corner and gazed

at the outside. Oh, if the house had only caught fire--it was

insured, so it wouldn't have mattered--and you could have rushed in

and saved her at the risk of your life, and have been terribly burned

and injured! Anything to serve her. Even in little things that was

so sweet. How you would watch her, spaniel-like, to anticipate her

slightest wish! How proud you were to do her bidding! How delightful

it was to be ordered about by her! To devote your whole life to her

and to never think of yourself seemed such a simple thing. You would

go without a holiday to lay a humble offering at her shrine, and felt

more than repaid if she only deigned to accept it. How precious to

you was everything that she had hallowed by her touch--her little

glove, the ribbon she had worn, the rose that had nestled in her hair

and whose withered leaves still mark the poems you never care to look

at now.

And oh, how beautiful she was, how wondrous beautiful! It was as some

angel entering the room, and all else became plain and earthly. She

was too sacred to be touched. It seemed almost presumption to gaze at

her. You would as soon have thought of kissing her as of singing

comic songs in a cathedral. It was desecration enough to kneel and

timidly raise the gracious little hand to your lips.

Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and

pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of

truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble

longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when

we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we

believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no

living creature but ourselves!

ON BEING IN THE BLUES.

I can enjoy feeling melancholy, and there is a good deal of

satisfaction about being thoroughly miserable; but nobody likes a fit

of the blues. Nevertheless, everybody has them; notwithstanding

which, nobody can tell why. There is no accounting for them. You are

just as likely to have one on the day after you have come into a large

fortune as on the day after you have left your new silk umbrella in

the train. Its effect upon you is somewhat similar to what would

probably be produced by a combined attack of toothache, indigestion,

and cold in the head. You become stupid, restless, and irritable;

rude to strangers and dangerous toward your friends; clumsy, maudlin,

and quarrelsome; a nuisance to yourself and everybody about you.

While it is on you can do nothing and think of nothing, though feeling

at the time bound to do something. You can't sit still so put on your

hat and go for a walk; but before you get to the corner of the street

you wish you hadn't come out and you turn back. You open a book and

try to read, but you find Shakespeare trite and commonplace, Dickens

is dull and prosy, Thackeray a bore, and Carlyle too sentimental. You

throw the book aside and call the author names. Then you "shoo" the

cat out of the room and kick the door to after her. You think you

will write your letters, but after sticking at "Dearest Auntie: I find

I have five minutes to spare, and so hasten to write to you," for a

quarter of an hour, without being able to think of another sentence,

you tumble the paper into the desk, fling the wet pen down upon the

table-cloth, and start up with the resolution of going to see the

Thompsons. While pulling on your gloves, however, it occurs to you

that the Thompsons are idiots; that they never have supper; and that

you will be expected to jump the baby. You curse the Thompsons and

decide not to go.

By this time you feel completely crushed. You bury your face in your

hands and think you would like to die and go to heaven. You picture

to yourself your own sick-bed, with all your friends and relations

standing round you weeping. You bless them all, especially the young

and pretty ones. They will value you when you are gone, so you say to

yourself, and learn too late what they have lost; and you bitterly

contrast their presumed regard for you then with their decided want of

veneration now.

These reflections make you feel a little more cheerful, but only for a

brief period; for the next moment you think what a fool you must be to

imagine for an instant that anybody would be sorry at anything that

might happen to you. Who would care two straws (whatever precise

amount of care two straws may represent) whether you are blown up, or

hung up, or married, or drowned? Nobody cares for you. You never

have been properly appreciated, never met with your due deserts in any

one particular. You review the whole of your past life, and it is

painfully apparent that you have been ill-used from your cradle.

Half an hour's indulgence in these considerations works you up into a

state of savage fury against everybody and everything, especially

yourself, whom anatomical reasons alone prevent your kicking.

Bed-time at last comes, to save you from doing something rash, and you

spring upstairs, throw off your clothes, leaving them strewn all over

the room, blow out the candle, and jump into bed as if you had backed

yourself for a heavy wager to do the whole thing against time. There

you toss and tumble about for a couple of hours or so, varying the

monotony by occasionally jerking the clothes off and getting out and

putting them on again. At length you drop into an uneasy and fitful

slumber, have bad dreams, and wake up late the next morning.

At least, this is all we poor single men can do under the

circumstances. Married men bully their wives, grumble at the dinner,

and insist on the children's going to bed. All of which, creating, as

it does, a good deal of disturbance in the house, must be a great

relief to the feelings of a man in the blues, rows being the only form

of amusement in which he can take any interest.

The symptoms of the infirmity are much the same in every case, but the

affliction itself is variously termed. The poet says that "a feeling

of sadness comes o'er him." 'Arry refers to the heavings of his

wayward heart by confiding to Jimee that he has "got the blooming

hump." Your sister doesn't know what is the matter with her to-night.

She feels out of sorts altogether and hopes nothing is going to

happen. The every-day young man is "so awful glad to meet you, old

fellow," for he does "feel so jolly miserable this evening." As for

myself, I generally say that "I have a strange, unsettled feeling

to-night" and "think I'll go out."

By the way, it never does come except in the evening. In the

sun-time, when the world is bounding forward full of life, we cannot

stay to sigh and sulk. The roar of the working day drowns the voices

of the elfin sprites that are ever singing their low-toned _miserere_

in our ears. In the day we are angry, disappointed, or indignant, but

never "in the blues" and never melancholy. When things go wrong at

ten o'clock in the morning we--or rather you--swear and knock the

furniture about; but if the misfortune comes at ten P.M., we read

poetry or sit in the dark and think what a hollow world this is.

But, as a rule, it is not trouble that makes us melancholy. The

actuality is too stern a thing for sentiment. We linger to weep over

a picture, but from the original we should quickly turn our eyes away.

There is no pathos in real misery: no luxury in real grief. We do not

toy with sharp swords nor hug a gnawing fox to our breast for choice.

When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to

keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain

to them. However they may have suffered from it at first, the

recollection has become by then a pleasure. Many dear old ladies who

daily look at tiny shoes lying in lavender-scented drawers, and weep

as they think of the tiny feet whose toddling march is done, and

sweet-faced young ones who place each night beneath their pillow some

lock that once curled on a boyish head that the salt waves have kissed

to death, will call me a nasty cynical brute and say I'm talking

nonsense; but I believe, nevertheless, that if they will ask

themselves truthfully whether they find it unpleasant to dwell thus on

their sorrow, they will be compelled to answer "No." Tears are as

sweet as laughter to some natures. The proverbial Englishman, we know

from old chronicler Froissart, takes his pleasures sadly, and the

Englishwoman goes a step further and takes her pleasures in sadness

itself.

I am not sneering. I would not for a moment sneer at anything that

helps to keep hearts tender in this hard old world. We men are cold

and common-sensed enough for all; we would not have women the same.

No, no, ladies dear, be always sentimental and soft-hearted, as you

are--be the soothing butter to our coarse dry bread. Besides,

sentiment is to women what fun is to us. They do not care for our

humor, surely it would be unfair to deny them their grief. And who

shall say that their mode of enjoyment is not as sensible as ours?

Why assume that a doubled-up body, a contorted, purple face, and a

gaping mouth emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks point to a

state of more intelligent happiness than a pensive face reposing upon

a little white hand, and a pair of gentle tear-dimmed eyes looking

back through Time's dark avenue upon a fading past?

I am glad when I see Regret walked with as a friend--glad because I

know the saltness has been washed from out the tears, and that the

sting must have been plucked from the beautiful face of Sorrow ere we

dare press her pale lips to ours. Time has laid his healing hand upon

the wound when we can look back upon the pain we once fainted under

and no bitterness or despair rises in our hearts. The burden is no

longer heavy when we have for our past troubles only the same sweet

mingling of pleasure and pity that we feel when old knight-hearted

Colonel Newcome answers "_adsum_" to the great roll-call, or when Tom

and Maggie Tulliver, clasping hands through the mists that have

divided them, go down, locked in each other's arms, beneath the

swollen waters of the Floss.

Talking of poor Tom and Maggie Tulliver brings to my mind a saying of

George Eliot's in connection with this subject of melancholy. She

speaks somewhere of the "sadness of a summer's evening." How

wonderfully true--like everything that came from that wonderful

pen--the observation is! Who has not felt the sorrowful enchantment

of those lingering sunsets? The world belongs to Melancholy then, a

thoughtful deep-eyed maiden who loves not the glare of day. It is not

till "light thickens and the crow wings to the rocky wood" that she

steals forth from her groves. Her palace is in twilight land. It is

there she meets us. At her shadowy gate she takes our hand in hers

and walks beside us through her mystic realm. We see no form, but

seem to hear the rustling of her wings.

Even in the toiling hum-drum city her spirit comes to us. There is a

somber presence in each long, dull street; and the dark river creeps

ghostlike under the black arches, as if bearing some hidden secret

beneath its muddy waves.

In the silent country, when the trees and hedges loom dim and blurred

against the rising night, and the bat's wing flutters in our face, and

the land-rail's cry sounds drearily across the fields, the spell sinks

deeper still into our hearts. We seem in that hour to be standing by

some unseen death-bed, and in the swaying of the elms we hear the sigh

of the dying day.

A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light

our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and

cheese--ay, and even kisses--do not seem the only things worth

striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in

upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome,

we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with

those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop,

but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in

the dimness his groping hands touch God's.

ON BEING HARD UP.

It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the full intention of

writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't

think of anything clever and original--at least, not at this moment.

The only thing I can think about now is being hard up. I suppose

having my hands in my pockets has made me think about this. I always

do sit with my hands in my pockets except when I am in the company of

my sisters, my cousins, or my aunts; and they kick up such a shindy--I

should say expostulate so eloquently upon the subject--that I have to

give in and take them out--my hands I mean. The chorus to their

objections is that it is not gentlemanly. I am hanged if I can see

why. I could understand its not being considered gentlemanly to put

your hands in other people's pockets (especially by the other people),

but how, O ye sticklers for what looks this and what looks that, can

putting his hands in his own pockets make a man less gentle? Perhaps

you are right, though. Now I come to think of it, I have heard some

people grumble most savagely when doing it. But they were mostly old

gentlemen. We young fellows, as a rule, are never quite at ease

unless we have our hands in our pockets. We are awkward and shifty.

We are like what a music-hall Lion Comique would be without his

opera-hat, if such a thing can be imagined. But let us put our hands

in our trousers pockets, and let there be some small change in the

right-hand one and a bunch of keys in the left, and we will face a

female post-office clerk.

It is a little difficult to know what to do with your bands, even in

your pockets, when there is nothing else there. Years ago, when my

whole capital would occasionally come down to "what in town the people

call a bob," I would recklessly spend a penny of it, merely for the

sake of having the change, all in coppers, to jingle. You don't feel

nearly so hard up with eleven pence in your pocket as you do with a

shilling. Had I been "La-di-da," that impecunious youth about whom we

superior folk are so sarcastic, I would have changed my penny for two

ha'pennies.

I can speak with authority on the subject of being hard up. I have

been a provincial actor. If further evidence be required, which I do

not think likely, I can add that I have been a "gentleman connected

with the press." I have lived on 15 shilling a week. I have lived a

week on 10, owing the other 5; and I have lived for a fortnight on a

great-coat.

It is wonderful what an insight into domestic economy being really

hard up gives one. If you want to find out the value of money, live

on 15 shillings a week and see how much you can put by for clothes and

recreation. You will find out that it is worth while to wait for the

farthing change, that it is worth while to walk a mile to save a

penny, that a glass of beer is a luxury to be indulged in only at rare

intervals, and that a collar can be worn for four days.

Try it just before you get married. It will be excellent practice.

Let your son and heir try it before sending him to college. He won't

grumble at a hundred a year pocket-money then. There are some people

to whom it would do a world of good. There is that delicate blossom

who can't drink any claret under ninety-four, and who would as soon

think of dining off cat's meat as off plain roast mutton. You do come

across these poor wretches now and then, though, to the credit of

humanity, they are principally confined to that fearful and wonderful

society known only to lady novelists. I never hear of one of these

creatures discussing a _menu_ card but I feel a mad desire to drag him

off to the bar of some common east-end public-house and cram a

sixpenny dinner down his throat--beefsteak pudding, fourpence;

potatoes, a penny; half a pint of porter, a penny. The recollection

of it (and the mingled fragrance of beer, tobacco, and roast pork

generally leaves a vivid impression) might induce him to turn up his

nose a little less frequently in the future at everything that is put

before him. Then there is that generous party, the cadger's delight,

who is so free with his small change, but who never thinks of paying

his debts. It might teach even him a little common sense. "I always

give the waiter a shilling. One can't give the fellow less, you

know," explained a young government clerk with whom I was lunching the

other day in Regent Street. I agreed with him as to the utter

impossibility of making it elevenpence ha'penny; but at the same time

I resolved to one day decoy him to an eating-house I remembered near

Covent Garden, where the waiter, for the better discharge of his

duties, goes about in his shirt-sleeves--and very dirty sleeves they

are, too, when it gets near the end of the month. I know that waiter.

If my friend gives him anything beyond a penny, the man will insist on

shaking hands with him then and there as a mark of his esteem; of that

I feel sure.

There have been a good many funny things said and written about

hardupishness, but the reality is not funny, for all that. It is not

funny to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny to be thought

mean and stingy. It isn't funny to be shabby and to be ashamed of

your address. No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty--to the

poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man; and many a brave

gentleman who would have faced the labors of Hercules has had his

heart broken by its petty miseries.

It is not the actual discomforts themselves that are hard to bear.

Who would mind roughing it a bit if that were all it meant? What

cared Robinson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers? Did he wear

trousers? I forget; or did he go about as he does in the pantomimes?

What did it matter to him if his toes did stick out of his boots? and

what if his umbrella was a cotton one, so long as it kept the rain

off? His shabbiness did not trouble him; there was none of his

friends round about to sneer him.

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the

sting. It is not cold that makes a man without a great-coat hurry

along so quickly. It is not all shame at telling lies--which he knows

will not be believed--that makes him turn so red when he informs you

that he considers great-coats unhealthy and never carries an umbrella

on principle. It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No;

if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It's a blunder, though, and

is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over;

despised as much by a Christian as by a lord, as much by a demagogue

as by a footman, and not all the copy-book maxims ever set for ink

stained youth will make him respected. Appearances are everything, so

far as human opinion goes, and the man who will walk down Piccadilly

arm in arm with the most notorious scamp in London, provided he is a

well-dressed one, will slink up a back street to say a couple of words

to a seedy-looking gentleman. And the seedy-looking gentleman knows

this--no one better--and will go a mile round to avoid meeting an

acquaintance. Those that knew him in his prosperity need never

trouble themselves to look the other way. He is a thousand times more

anxious that they should not see him than they can be; and as to their

assistance, there is nothing he dreads more than the offer of it. All

he wants is to be forgotten; and in this respect he is generally

fortunate enough to get what he wants.

One becomes used to being hard up, as one becomes used to everything

else, by the help of that wonderful old homeopathic doctor, Time. You

can tell at a glance the difference between the old hand and the

novice; between the case-hardened man who has been used to shift and

struggle for years and the poor devil of a beginner striving to hide

his misery, and in a constant agony of fear lest he should be found

out. Nothing shows this difference more clearly than the way in which

each will pawn his watch. As the poet says somewhere: "True ease in

pawning comes from art, not chance." The one goes into his "uncle's"

with as much composure as he would into his tailor's--very likely with

more. The assistant is even civil and attends to him at once, to the

great indignation of the lady in the next box, who, however,

sarcastically observes that she don't mind being kept waiting "if it

is a regular customer." Why, from the pleasant and businesslike

manner in which the transaction is carried out, it might be a large

purchase in the three per cents. Yet what a piece of work a man makes

of his first "pop." A boy popping his first question is confidence

itself compared with him. He hangs about outside the shop until he

has succeeded in attracting the attention of all the loafers in the

neighborhood and has aroused strong suspicions in the mind of the

policeman on the beat. At last, after a careful examination of the

contents of the windows, made for the purpose of impressing the

bystanders with the notion that he is going in to purchase a diamond

bracelet or some such trifle, he enters, trying to do so with a

careless swagger, and giving himself really the air of a member of the

swell mob. When inside he speaks in so low a voice as to be perfectly

inaudible, and has to say it all over again. When, in the course of

his rambling conversation about a "friend" of his, the word "lend" is

reached, he is promptly told to go up the court on the right and take

the first door round the corner. He comes out of the shop with a face

that you could easily light a cigarette at, and firmly under the

impression that the whole population of the district is watching him.

When he does get to the right place he has forgotten his name and

address and is in a general condition of hopeless imbecility. Asked

in a severe tone how he came by "this," he stammers and contradicts

himself, and it is only a miracle if he does not confess to having

stolen it that very day. He is thereupon informed that they don't

want anything to do with his sort, and that he had better get out of

this as quickly as possible, which he does, recollecting nothing more

until he finds himself three miles off, without the slightest

knowledge how he got there.

By the way, how awkward it is, though, having to depend on

public-houses and churches for the time. The former are generally too

fast and the latter too slow. Besides which, your efforts to get a

glimpse of the public house clock from the outside are attended with

great difficulties. If you gently push the swing-door ajar and peer

in you draw upon yourself the contemptuous looks of the barmaid, who

at once puts you down in the same category with area sneaks and

cadgers. You also create a certain amount of agitation among the

married portion of the customers. You don't see the clock because it

is behind the door; and in trying to withdraw quietly you jam your

head. The only other method is to jump up and down outside the

window. After this latter proceeding, however, if you do not bring

out a banjo and commence to sing, the youthful inhabitants of the

neighborhood, who have gathered round in expectation, become

disappointed.

I should like to know, too, by what mysterious law of nature it is

that before you have left your watch "to be repaired" half an hour,

some one is sure to stop you in the street and conspicuously ask you

the time. Nobody even feels the slightest curiosity on the subject

when you've got it on.

Dear old ladies and gentlemen who know nothing about being hard

up--and may they never, bless their gray old heads--look upon the

pawn-shop as the last stage of degradation; but those who know it

better (and my readers have no doubt, noticed this themselves) are

often surprised, like the little boy who dreamed he went to heaven, at

meeting so many people there that they never expected to see. For my

part, I think it a much more independent course than borrowing from

friends, and I always try to impress this upon those of my

acquaintance who incline toward "wanting a couple of pounds till the

day after to-morrow." But they won't all see it. One of them once

remarked that he objected to the principle of the thing. I fancy if

he had said it was the interest that he objected to he would have been

nearer the truth: twenty-five per cent. certainly does come heavy.

There are degrees in being hard up. We are all hard up, more or

less--most of us more. Some are hard up for a thousand pounds; some

for a shilling. Just at this moment I am hard up myself for a fiver.

I only want it for a day or two. I should be certain of paying it

back within a week at the outside, and if any lady or gentleman among

my readers would kindly lend it me, I should be very much obliged

indeed. They could send it to me under cover to Messrs. Field & Tuer,

only, in such case, please let the envelope be carefully sealed. I

would give you my I.O.U. as security.

ON VANITY AND VANITIES.

All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are

men--more so, if possible. So are children, particularly children.

One of them at this very moment is hammering upon my legs. She wants

to know what I think of her new shoes. Candidly I don't think much of

them. They lack symmetry and curve and possess an indescribable

appearance of lumpiness (I believe, too, they've put them on the wrong

feet). But I don't say this. It is not criticism, but flattery that

she wants; and I gush over them with what I feel to myself to be

degrading effusiveness. Nothing else would satisfy this

self-opinionated cherub. I tried the conscientious-friend dodge with

her on one occasion, but it was not a success. She had requested my

judgment upon her general conduct and behavior, the exact case

submitted being, "Wot oo tink of me? Oo peased wi' me?" and I had

thought it a good opportunity to make a few salutary remarks upon her

late moral career, and said: "No, I am not pleased with you." I

recalled to her mind the events of that very morning, and I put it to

her how she, as a Christian child, could expect a wise and good uncle

to be satisfied with the carryings on of an infant who that very day

had roused the whole house at five AM.; had upset a water-jug and

tumbled downstairs after it at seven; had endeavored to put the cat in

the bath at eight; and sat on her own father's hat at nine

thirty-five.

What did she do? Was she grateful to me for my plain speaking? Did

she ponder upon my words and determine to profit by them and to lead

from that hour a better and nobler life?

No! she howled.

That done, she became abusive. She said:

"Oo naughty--oo naughty, bad unkie--oo bad man--me tell MAR."

And she did, too.

Since then, when my views have been called for I have kept my real

sentiments more to myself like, preferring to express unbounded

admiration of this young person's actions, irrespective of their

actual merits. And she nods her head approvingly and trots off to

advertise my opinion to the rest of the household. She appears to

employ it as a sort of testimonial for mercenary purposes, for I

subsequently hear distant sounds of "Unkie says me dood dirl--me dot

to have two bikkies [biscuits]."

There she goes, now, gazing rapturously at her own toes and murmuring

"pittie"--two-foot-ten of conceit and vanity, to say nothing of other

wickednesses.

They are all alike. I remember sitting in a garden one sunny

afternoon in the suburbs of London. Suddenly I heard a shrill treble

voice calling from a top-story window to some unseen being, presumably

in one of the other gardens, "Gamma, me dood boy, me wery good boy,

gamma; me dot on Bob's knickiebockies."

Why, even animals are vain. I saw a great Newfoundland dog the other

day sitting in front of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in Regent's

Circus, and examining himself with an amount of smug satisfaction that

I have never seen equaled elsewhere outside a vestry meeting.

I was at a farm-house once when some high holiday was being

celebrated. I don't remember what the occasion was, but it was

something festive, a May Day or Quarter Day, or something of that

sort, and they put a garland of flowers round the head of one of the

cows. Well, that absurd quadruped went about all day as perky as a

schoolgirl in a new frock; and when they took the wreath off she

became quite sulky, and they had to put it on again before she would

stand still to be milked. This is not a Percy anecdote. It is plain,

sober truth.

As for cats, they nearly equal human beings for vanity. I have known

a cat get up and walk out of the room on a remark derogatory to her

species being made by a visitor, while a neatly turned compliment will

set them purring for an hour.

I do like cats. They are so unconsciously amusing. There is such a

comic dignity about them, such a "How dare you!" "Go away, don't touch

me" sort of air. Now, there is nothing haughty about a dog. They are

"Hail, fellow, well met" with every Tom, Dick, or Harry that they come

across. When I meet a dog of my acquaintance I slap his head, call

him opprobrious epithets, and roll him over on his back; and there he

lies, gaping at me, and doesn't mind it a bit.

Fancy carrying on like that with a cat! Why, she would never speak to

you again as long as you lived. No, when you want to win the

approbation of a cat you must mind what you are about and work your

way carefully. If you don't know the cat, you had best begin by

saying, "Poor pussy." After which add "did 'ums" in a tone of

soothing sympathy. You don't know what you mean any more than the cat

does, but the sentiment seems to imply a proper spirit on your part,

and generally touches her feelings to such an extent that if you are

of good manners and passable appearance she will stick her back up and

rub her nose against you. Matters having reached this stage, you may

venture to chuck her under the chin and tickle the side of her head,

and the intelligent creature will then stick her claws into your legs;

and all is friendship and affection, as so sweetly expressed in the

beautiful lines--

"I love little pussy, her coat is so warm,

And if I don't tease her she'll do me no harm;

So I'll stroke her, and pat her, and feed her with food,

And pussy will love me because I am good."

The last two lines of the stanza give us a pretty true insight into

pussy's notions of human goodness. It is evident that in her opinion

goodness consists of stroking her, and patting her, and feeding her

with food. I fear this narrow-minded view of virtue, though, is not

confined to pussies. We are all inclined to adopt a similar standard

of merit in our estimate of other people. A good man is a man who is

good to us, and a bad man is a man who doesn't do what we want him to.

The truth is, we each of us have an inborn conviction that the whole

world, with everybody and everything in it, was created as a sort of

necessary appendage to ourselves. Our fellow men and women were made

to admire us and to minister to our various requirements. You and I,

dear reader, are each the center of the universe in our respective

opinions. You, as I understand it, were brought into being by a

considerate Providence in order that you might read and pay me for

what I write; while I, in your opinion, am an article sent into the

world to write something for you to read. The stars--as we term the

myriad other worlds that are rushing down beside us through the

eternal silence--were put into the heavens to make the sky look

interesting for us at night; and the moon with its dark mysteries and

ever-hidden face is an arrangement for us to flirt under.

I fear we are most of us like Mrs. Poyser's bantam cock, who fancied

the sun got up every morning to hear him crow. "'Tis vanity that

makes the world go round." I don't believe any man ever existed

without vanity, and if he did he would be an extremely uncomfortable

person to have anything to do with. He would, of course, be a very

good man, and we should respect him very much. He would be a very

admirable man--a man to be put under a glass case and shown round as a

specimen--a man to be stuck upon a pedestal and copied, like a school

exercise--a man to be reverenced, but not a man to be loved, not a

human brother whose hand we should care to grip. Angels may be very

excellent sort of folk in their way, but we, poor mortals, in our

present state, would probably find them precious slow company. Even

mere good people are rather depressing. It is in our faults and

failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find

sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in

our follies that we are at one. Some of us are pious, some of us are

generous. Some few of us are honest, comparatively speaking; and

some, fewer still, may possibly be truthful. But in vanity and

kindred weaknesses we can all join hands. Vanity is one of those

touches of nature that make the whole world kin. From the Indian

hunter, proud of his belt of scalps, to the European general, swelling

beneath his row of stars and medals; from the Chinese, gleeful at the

length of his pigtail, to the "professional beauty," suffering

tortures in order that her waist may resemble a peg-top; from

draggle-tailed little Polly Stiggins, strutting through Seven Dials

with a tattered parasol over her head, to the princess sweeping

through a drawing-room with a train of four yards long; from 'Arry,

winning by vulgar chaff the loud laughter of his pals, to the

statesman whose ears are tickled by the cheers that greet his

high-sounding periods; from the dark-skinned African, bartering his

rare oils and ivory for a few glass beads to hang about his neck, to

the Christian maiden selling her white body for a score of tiny stones

and an empty title to tack before her name--all march, and fight, and

bleed, and die beneath its tawdry flag.

Ay, ay, vanity is truly the motive-power that moves humanity, and it

is flattery that greases the wheels. If you want to win affection and

respect in this world, you must flatter people. Flatter high and low,

and rich and poor, and silly and wise. You will get on famously.

Praise this man's virtues and that man's vices. Compliment everybody

upon everything, and especially upon what they haven't got. Admire

guys for their beauty, fools for their wit, and boors for their

breeding. Your discernment and intelligence will be extolled to the

skies.

Every one can be got over by flattery. The belted earl--"belted earl"

is the correct phrase, I believe. I don't know what it means, unless

it be an earl that wears a belt instead of braces. Some men do. I

don't like it myself. You have to keep the thing so tight for it to

be of any use, and that is uncomfortable. Anyhow, whatever particular

kind of an earl a belted earl may be, he is, I assert, get-overable by

flattery; just as every other human being is, from a duchess to a

cat's-meat man, from a plow boy to a poet--and the poet far easier

than the plowboy, for butter sinks better into wheaten bread than into

oaten cakes.

As for love, flattery is its very life-blood. Fill a person with love

for themselves, and what runs over will be your share, says a certain

witty and truthful Frenchman whose name I can't for the life of me

remember. (Confound it! I never can remember names when I want to.)

Tell a girl she is an angel, only more angelic than an angel; that she

is a goddess, only more graceful, queenly, and heavenly than the

average goddess; that she is more fairy-like than Titania, more

beautiful than Venus, more enchanting than Parthenope; more adorable,

lovely, and radiant, in short, than any other woman that ever did

live, does live, or could live, and you will make a very favorable

impression upon her trusting little heart. Sweet innocent! she will

believe every word you say. It is so easy to deceive a woman--in this

way.

Dear little souls, they hate flattery, so they tell you; and when you

say, "Ah, darling, it isn't flattery in your case, it's plain, sober

truth; you really are, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the

most good, the most charming, the most divine, the most perfect human

creature that ever trod this earth," they will smile a quiet,

approving smile, and, leaning against your manly shoulder, murmur that

you are a dear good fellow after all.

By Jove! fancy a man trying to make love on strictly truthful

principles, determining never to utter a word of mere compliment or

hyperbole, but to scrupulously confine himself to exact fact! Fancy

his gazing rapturously into his mistress' eyes and whispering softly

to her that she wasn't, on the whole, bad-looking, as girls went!

Fancy his holding up her little hand and assuring her that it was of a

light drab color shot with red; and telling her as he pressed her to

his heart that her nose, for a turned-up one, seemed rather pretty;

and that her eyes appeared to him, as far as he could judge, to be

quite up to the average standard of such things!

A nice chance he would stand against the man who would tell her that

her face was like a fresh blush rose, that her hair was a wandering

sunbeam imprisoned by her smiles, and her eyes like two evening stars.

There are various ways of flattering, and, of course, you must adapt

your style to your subject. Some people like it laid on with a

trowel, and this requires very little art. With sensible persons,

however, it needs to be done very delicately, and more by suggestion

than actual words. A good many like it wrapped up in the form of an

insult, as--"Oh, you are a perfect fool, you are. You would give your

last sixpence to the first hungry-looking beggar you met;" while

others will swallow it only when administered through the medium of a

third person, so that if C wishes to get at an A of this sort, he must

confide to A's particular friend B that he thinks A a splendid fellow,

and beg him, B, not to mention it, especially to A. Be careful that B

is a reliable man, though, otherwise he won't.

Those fine, sturdy John Bulls who "hate flattery, sir," "Never let

anybody get over me by flattery," etc., etc., are very simply managed.

Flatter them enough upon their absence of vanity, and you can do what

you like with them.

After all, vanity is as much a virtue as a vice. It is easy to recite

copy-book maxims against its sinfulness, but it is a passion that can

move us to good as well as to evil. Ambition is only vanity

ennobled. We want to win praise and admiration--or fame as we prefer

to name it--and so we write great books, and paint grand pictures, and

sing sweet songs; and toil with willing hands in study, loom, and

laboratory.

We wish to become rich men, not in order to enjoy ease and

comfort--all that any one man can taste of those may be purchased

anywhere for 200 pounds per annum--but that our houses may be bigger

and more gaudily furnished than our neighbors'; that our horses and

servants may be more numerous; that we may dress our wives and

daughters in absurd but expensive clothes; and that we may give costly

dinners of which we ourselves individually do not eat a shilling's

worth. And to do this we aid the world's work with clear and busy

brain, spreading commerce among its peoples, carrying civilization to

its remotest corners.

Do not let us abuse vanity, therefore. Rather let us use it. Honor

itself is but the highest form of vanity. The instinct is not

confined solely to Beau Brummels and Dolly Vardens. There is the

vanity of the peacock and the vanity of the eagle. Snobs are vain.

But so, too, are heroes. Come, oh! my young brother bucks, let us be

vain together. Let us join hands and help each other to increase our

vanity. Let us be vain, not of our trousers and hair, but of brave

hearts and working hands, of truth, of purity, of nobility. Let us be

too vain to stoop to aught that is mean or base, too vain for petty

selfishness and little-minded envy, too vain to say an unkind word or

do an unkind act. Let us be vain of being single-hearted, upright

gentlemen in the midst of a world of knaves. Let us pride ourselves

upon thinking high thoughts, achieving great deeds, living good lives.

ON GETTING ON IN THE WORLD.

Not exactly the sort of thing for an idle fellow to think about, is

it? But outsiders, you know, often see most of the game; and sitting

in my arbor by the wayside, smoking my hookah of contentment and

eating the sweet lotus-leaves of indolence, I can look out musingly

upon the whirling throng that rolls and tumbles past me on the great

high-road of life.

Never-ending is the wild procession. Day and night you can hear the

quick tramp of the myriad feet--some running, some walking, some

halting and lame; but all hastening, all eager in the feverish race,

all straining life and limb and heart and soul to reach the

ever-receding horizon of success.

Mark them as they surge along--men and women, old and young, gentle

and simple, fair and foul, rich and poor, merry and sad--all hurrying,

bustling, scrambling. The strong pushing aside the weak, the cunning

creeping past the foolish; those behind elbowing those before; those

in front kicking, as they run, at those behind. Look close and see

the flitting show. Here is an old man panting for breath, and there a

timid maiden driven by a hard and sharp-faced matron; here is a

studious youth, reading "How to Get On in the World" and letting

everybody pass him as he stumbles along with his eyes on his book;

here is a bored-looking man, with a fashionably dressed woman jogging

his elbow; here a boy gazing wistfully back at the sunny village that

he never again will see; here, with a firm and easy step, strides a

broad-shouldered man; and here, with stealthy tread, a thin-faced,

stooping fellow dodges and shuffles upon his way; here, with gaze

fixed always on the ground, an artful rogue carefully works his way

from side to side of the road and thinks he is going forward; and here

a youth with a noble face stands, hesitating as he looks from the

distant goal to the mud beneath his feet.

And now into sight comes a fair girl, with her dainty face growing

more wrinkled at every step, and now a care-worn man, and now a

hopeful lad.

A motley throng--a motley throng! Prince and beggar, sinner and

saint, butcher and baker and candlestick maker, tinkers and tailors,

and plowboys and sailors--all jostling along together. Here the

counsel in his wig and gown, and here the old Jew clothes-man under

his dingy tiara; here the soldier in his scarlet, and here the

undertaker's mute in streaming hat-band and worn cotton gloves; here

the musty scholar fumbling his faded leaves, and here the scented

actor dangling his showy seals. Here the glib politician crying his

legislative panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding

aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and

there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the

shoe-back; here the poet and here the water-rate collector; here the

cabinet minister and there the ballet-dancer. Here a red-nosed

publican shouting the praises of his vats and there a temperance

lecturer at 50 pounds a night; here a judge and there a swindler; here

a priest and there a gambler. Here a jeweled duchess, smiling and

gracious; here a thin lodging-house keeper, irritable with cooking;

and here a wabbling, strutting thing, tawdry in paint and finery.

Cheek by cheek they struggle onward. Screaming, cursing, and praying,

laughing, singing, and moaning, they rush past side by side. Their

speed never slackens, the race never ends. There is no wayside rest

for them, no halt by cooling fountains, no pause beneath green shades.

On, on, on--on through the heat and the crowd and the dust--on, or

they will be trampled down and lost--on, with throbbing brain and

tottering limbs--on, till the heart grows sick, and the eyes grow

blurred, and a gurgling groan tells those behind they may close up

another space.

And yet, in spite of the killing pace and the stony track, who but the

sluggard or the dolt can hold aloof from the course? Who--like the

belated traveler that stands watching fairy revels till he snatches

and drains the goblin cup and springs into the whirling circle--can

view the mad tumult and not be drawn into its midst? Not I, for one.

I confess to the wayside arbor, the pipe of contentment, and the

lotus-leaves being altogether unsuitable metaphors. They sounded very

nice and philosophical, but I'm afraid I am not the sort of person to

sit in arbors smoking pipes when there is any fun going on outside. I

think I more resemble the Irishman who, seeing a crowd collecting,

sent his little girl out to ask if there was going to be a row

--"'Cos, if so, father would like to be in it."

I love the fierce strife. I like to watch it. I like to hear of

people getting on in it--battling their way bravely and fairly--that

is, not slipping through by luck or trickery. It stirs one's old

Saxon fighting blood like the tales of "knights who fought 'gainst

fearful odds" that thrilled us in our school-boy days.

And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too.

There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the

golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in

the story-books. There, Algernon takes one long, last look at the

ancestral hall, dashes the tear-drop from his eye, and goes off--to

return in three years' time, rolling in riches. The authors do not

tell us "how it's done," which is a pity, for it would surely prove

exciting.

But then not one novelist in a thousand ever does tell us the real

story of their hero. They linger for a dozen pages over a tea-party,

but sum up a life's history with "he had become one of our merchant

princes," or "he was now a great artist, with the world at his feet."

Why, there is more real life in one of Gilbert's patter-songs than in

half the biographical novels ever written. He relates to us all the

various steps by which his office-boy rose to be the "ruler of the

queen's navee," and explains to us how the briefless barrister managed

to become a great and good judge, "ready to try this breach of promise

of marriage." It is in the petty details, not in the great results,

that the interest of existence lies.

What we really want is a novel showing us all the hidden under-current

of an ambitious man's career--his struggles, and failures, and hopes,

his disappointments and victories. It would be an immense success. I

am sure the wooing of Fortune would prove quite as interesting a tale

as the wooing of any flesh-and-blood maiden, though, by the way, it

would read extremely similar; for Fortune is, indeed, as the ancients

painted her, very like a woman--not quite so unreasonable and

inconsistent, but nearly so--and the pursuit is much the same in one

case as in the other. Ben Jonson's couplet--

"Court a mistress, she denies you;

Let her alone, she will court you"--

puts them both in a nutshell. A woman never thoroughly cares for her

lover until he has ceased to care for her; and it is not until you

have snapped your fingers in Fortune's face and turned on your heel

that she begins to smile upon you.

But by that time you do not much care whether she smiles or frowns.

Why could she not have smiled when her smiles would have filled you

with ecstasy? Everything comes too late in this world.

Good people say that it is quite right and proper that it should be

so, and that it proves ambition is wicked.

Bosh! Good people are altogether wrong. (They always are, in my

opinion. We never agree on any single point.) What would the world

do without ambitious people, I should like to know? Why, it would be

as flabby as a Norfolk dumpling. Ambitious people are the leaven

which raises it into wholesome bread. Without ambitious people the

world would never get up. They are busybodies who are about early in

the morning, hammering, shouting, and rattling the fire-irons, and

rendering it generally impossible for the rest of the house to remain

in bed.

Wrong to be ambitious, forsooth! The men wrong who, with bent back

and sweating brow, cut the smooth road over which humanity marches

forward from generation to generation! Men wrong for using the

talents that their Master has intrusted to them--for toiling while

others play!

Of course they are seeking their reward. Man is not given that

godlike unselfishness that thinks only of others' good. But in

working for themselves they are working for us all. We are so bound

together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he

strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe. The stream in

struggling onward turns the mill-wheel; the coral insect, fashioning

its tiny cell, joins continents to one another; and the ambitious man,

building a pedestal for himself, leaves a monument to posterity.

Alexander and Caesar fought for their own ends, but in doing so they

put a belt of civilization half round the earth. Stephenson, to win a

fortune, invented the steam-engine; and Shakespeare wrote his plays in

order to keep a comfortable home for Mrs. Shakespeare and the little

Shakespeares.

Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They

form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted

against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent,

audience for the active spirits of the age to play before. I have not

a word to say against contented people so long as they keep quiet.

But do not, for goodness' sake, let them go strutting about, as they

are so fond of doing, crying out that they are the true models for the

whole species. Why, they are the deadheads, the drones in the great

hive, the street crowds that lounge about, gaping at those who are

working.

And let them not imagine, either--as they are also fond of doing--that

they are very wise and philosophical and that it is a very artful

thing to be contented. It may be true that "a contented mind is happy

anywhere," but so is a Jerusalem pony, and the consequence is that

both are put anywhere and are treated anyhow. "Oh, you need not

bother about him," is what is said; "he is very contented as he is,

and it would be a pity to disturb him." And so your contented party

is passed over and the discontented man gets his place.

If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble

with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal.

Because if you don't you won't get any. In this world it is necessary

to adopt the principle pursued by the plaintiff in an action for

damages, and to demand ten times more than you are ready to accept.

If you can feel satisfied with a hundred, begin by insisting on a

thousand; if you start by suggesting a hundred you will only get ten.

It was by not following this simple plan that poor Jean Jacques

Rousseau came to such grief. He fixed the summit of his earthly bliss

at living in an orchard with an amiable woman and a cow, and he never

attained even that. He did get as far as the orchard, but the woman

was not amiable, and she brought her mother with her, and there was no

cow. Now, if he had made up his mind for a large country estate, a

houseful of angels, and a cattle-show, he might have lived to possess

his kitchen garden and one head of live-stock, and even possibly have

come across that _rara-avis_--a really amiable woman.

What a terribly dull affair, too, life must be for contented people!

How heavy the time must hang upon their hands, and what on earth do

they occupy their thoughts with, supposing that they have any?

Reading the paper and smoking seems to be the intellectual food of the

majority of them, to which the more energetic add playing the flute

and talking about the affairs of the next-door neighbor.

They never knew the excitement of expectation nor the stern delight of

accomplished effort, such as stir the pulse of the man who has

objects, and hopes, and plans. To the ambitious man life is a

brilliant game--a game that calls forth all his tact and energy and

nerve--a game to be won, in the long run, by the quick eye and the

steady hand, and yet having sufficient chance about its working out to

give it all the glorious zest of uncertainty. He exults in it as the

strong swimmer in the heaving billows, as the athlete in the wrestle,

the soldier in the battle.

And if he be defeated he wins the grim joy of fighting; if he lose the

race, he, at least, has had a run. Better to work and fail than to

sleep one's life away.

So, walk up, walk up, walk up. Walk up, ladies and gentlemen! walk

up, boys and girls! Show your skill and try your strength; brave your

luck and prove your pluck. Walk up! The show is never closed and the

game is always going. The only genuine sport in all the fair,

gentlemen--highly respectable and strictly moral--patronized by the

nobility, clergy, and gentry. Established in the year one, gentlemen,

and been flourishing ever since--walk up! Walk up, ladies and

gentlemen, and take a hand. There are prizes for all and all can

play. There is gold for the man and fame for the boy; rank for the

maiden and pleasure for the fool. So walk up, ladies and gentlemen,

walk up!--all prizes and no blanks; for some few win, and as to the

rest, why--

"The rapture of pursuing

Is the prize the vanquished gain."

ON THE WEATHER.

Things do go so contrary-like with me. I wanted to hit upon an

especially novel, out-of-the-way subject for one of these articles.

"I will write one paper about something altogether new," I said to

myself; "something that nobody else has ever written or talked about

before; and then I can have it all my own way." And I went about for

days, trying to think of something of this kind; and I couldn't. And

Mrs. Cutting, our charwoman, came yesterday--I don't mind mentioning

her name, because I know she will not see this book. She would not

look at such a frivolous publication. She never reads anything but

the Bible and _Lloyd's Weekly News_. All other literature she

considers unnecessary and sinful.

She said: "Lor', sir, you do look worried."

I said: "Mrs. Cutting, I am trying to think of a subject the

discussion of which will come upon the world in the nature of a

startler--some subject upon which no previous human being has ever

said a word--some subject that will attract by its novelty, invigorate

by its surprising freshness."

She laughed and said I was a funny gentleman.

That's my luck again. When I make serious observations people

chuckle; when I attempt a joke nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one

last week. I thought it so good, and I worked it up and brought it in

artfully at a dinner-party. I forget how exactly, but we had been

talking about the attitude of Shakespeare toward the Reformation, and

I said something and immediately added, "Ah, that reminds me; such a

funny thing happened the other day in Whitechapel." "Oh," said they,

"what was that?" "Oh, 'twas awfully funny," I replied, beginning to

giggle myself; "it will make you roar;" and I told it them.

There was dead silence when I finished--it was one of those long

jokes, too--and then, at last, somebody said: "And that was the

joke?"

I assured them that it was, and they were very polite and took my word

for it. All but one old gentleman at the other end of the table, who

wanted to know which was the joke--what he said to her or what she

said to him; and we argued it out.

Some people are too much the other way. I knew a fellow once whose

natural tendency to laugh at everything was so strong that if you

wanted to talk seriously to him, you had to explain beforehand that

what you were going to say would not be amusing. Unless you got him

to clearly understand this, he would go off into fits of merriment

over every word you uttered. I have known him on being asked the time

stop short in the middle of the road, slap his leg, and burst into a

roar of laughter. One never dared say anything really funny to that

man. A good joke would have killed him on the spot.

In the present instance I vehemently repudiated the accusation of

frivolity, and pressed Mrs. Cutting for practical ideas. She then

became thoughtful and hazarded "samplers;" saying that she never heard

them spoken much of now, but that they used to be all the rage when

she was a girl.

I declined samplers and begged her to think again. She pondered a

long while, with a tea-tray in her hands, and at last suggested the

weather, which she was sure had been most trying of late.

And ever since that idiotic suggestion I have been unable to get the

weather out of my thoughts or anything else in.

It certainly is most wretched weather. At all events it is so now at

the time I am writing, and if it isn't particularly unpleasant when I

come to be read it soon will be.

It always is wretched weather according to us. The weather is like

the government--always in the wrong. In summer-time we say it is

stifling; in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find

fault with it for being neither one thing nor the other and wish it

would make up its mind. If it is fine we say the country is being

ruined for want of rain; if it does rain we pray for fine weather. If

December passes without snow, we indignantly demand to know what has

become of our good old-fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been

cheated out of something we had bought and paid for; and when it does

snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall

never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to

himself.

If that cannot be arranged, we would rather do without it altogether.

Yet I think it is only to us in cities that all weather is so

unwelcome. In her own home, the country, Nature is sweet in all her

moods. What can be more beautiful than the snow, falling big with

mystery in silent softness, decking the fields and trees with white as

if for a fairy wedding! And how delightful is a walk when the frozen

ground rings beneath our swinging tread--when our blood tingles in the

rare keen air, and the sheep-dogs' distant bark and children's

laughter peals faintly clear like Alpine bells across the open hills!

And then skating! scudding with wings of steel across the swaying ice,

making whirring music as we fly. And oh, how dainty is spring--Nature

at sweet eighteen!

When the little hopeful leaves peep out so fresh and green, so pure

and bright, like young lives pushing shyly out into the bustling

world; when the fruit-tree blossoms, pink and white, like village

maidens in their Sunday frocks, hide each whitewashed cottage in a

cloud of fragile splendor; and the cuckoo's note upon the breeze is

wafted through the woods! And summer, with its deep dark green and

drowsy hum--when the rain-drops whisper solemn secrets to the

listening leaves and the twilight lingers in the lanes! And autumn!

ah, how sadly fair, with its golden glow and the dying grandeur of its

tinted woods--its blood-red sunsets and its ghostly evening mists,

with its busy murmur of reapers, and its laden orchards, and the

calling of the gleaners, and the festivals of praise!

The very rain, and sleet, and hail seem only Nature's useful servants

when found doing their simple duties in the country; and the East Wind

himself is nothing worse than a boisterous friend when we meet him

between the hedge-rows.

But in the city where the painted stucco blisters under the smoky sun,

and the sooty rain brings slush and mud, and the snow lies piled in

dirty heaps, and the chill blasts whistle down dingy streets and

shriek round flaring gas lit corners, no face of Nature charms us.

Weather in towns is like a skylark in a counting-house--out of place

and in the way. Towns ought to be covered in, warmed by hot-water

pipes, and lighted by electricity. The weather is a country lass and

does not appear to advantage in town. We liked well enough to flirt

with her in the hay-field, but she does not seem so fascinating when

we meet her in Pall Mall. There is too much of her there. The frank,

free laugh and hearty voice that sounded so pleasant in the dairy jars

against the artificiality of town-bred life, and her ways become

exceedingly trying.

Just lately she has been favoring us with almost incessant rain for

about three weeks; and I am a demned damp, moist, unpleasant body, as

Mr. Mantalini puts it.

Our next-door neighbor comes out in the back garden every now and then

and says it's doing the country a world of good--not his coming out

into the back garden, but the weather. He doesn't understand anything

about it, but ever since he started a cucumber-frame last summer he

has regarded himself in the light of an agriculturist, and talks in

this absurd way with the idea of impressing the rest of the terrace

with the notion that he is a retired farmer. I can only hope that for

this once he is correct, and that the weather really is doing good to

something, because it is doing me a considerable amount of damage. It

is spoiling both my clothes and my temper. The latter I can afford,

as I have a good supply of it, but it wounds me to the quick to see my

dear old hats and trousers sinking, prematurely worn and aged, beneath

the cold world's blasts and snows.

There is my new spring suit, too. A beautiful suit it was, and now it

is hanging up so bespattered with mud I can't bear to look at it.

That was Jim's fault, that was. I should never have gone out in it

that night if it had not been for him. I was just trying it on when

he came in. He threw up his arms with a wild yell the moment he

caught sight of it, and exclaimed that he had "got 'em again!"

I said: "Does it fit all right behind?"

"Spiffin, old man," he replied. And then he wanted to know if I was

coming out.

I said "no" at first, but he overruled me. He said that a man with a

suit like that had no right to stop indoors. "Every citizen," said

he, "owes a duty to the public. Each one should contribute to the

general happiness as far as lies in his power. Come out and give the

girls a treat."

Jim is slangy. I don't know where he picks it up. It certainly is

not from me.

I said: "Do you think it will really please 'em?" He said it would

be like a day in the country to them.

That decided me. It was a lovely evening and I went.

When I got home I undressed and rubbed myself down with whisky, put my

feet in hot water and a mustard-plaster on my chest, had a basin of

gruel and a glass of hot brandy-and-water, tallowed my nose, and went

to bed.

These prompt and vigorous measures, aided by a naturally strong

constitution, were the means of preserving my life; but as for the

suit! Well, there, it isn't a suit; it's a splash-board.

And I did fancy that suit, too. But that's just the way. I never do

get particularly fond of anything in this world but what something

dreadful happens to it. I had a tame rat when I was a boy, and I

loved that animal as only a boy would love an old water-rat; and one

day it fell into a large dish of gooseberry-fool that was standing to

cool in the kitchen, and nobody knew what had become of the poor

creature until the second helping.

I do hate wet weather in town. At least, it is not so much the wet as

the mud that I object to. Somehow or other I seem to possess an

irresistible alluring power over mud. I have only to show myself in

the street on a muddy day to be half-smothered by it. It all comes of

being so attractive, as the old lady said when she was struck by

lightning. Other people can go out on dirty days and walk about for

hours without getting a speck upon themselves; while if I go across

the road I come back a perfect disgrace to be seen (as in my boyish

days my poor dear mother tried often to tell me). If there were only

one dab of mud to be found in the whole of London, I am convinced I

should carry it off from all competitors.

I wish I could return the affection, but I fear I never shall be able

to. I have a horror of what they call the "London particular." I

feel miserable and muggy all through a dirty day, and it is quite a

relief to pull one's clothes off and get into bed, out of the way of

it all. Everything goes wrong in wet weather. I don't know how it

is, but there always seem to me to be more people, and dogs, and

perambulators, and cabs, and carts about in wet weather than at any

other time, and they all get in your way more, and everybody is so

disagreeable--except myself--and it does make me so wild. And then,

too, somehow I always find myself carrying more things in wet weather

than in dry; and when you have a bag, and three parcels, and a

newspaper, and it suddenly comes on to rain, you can't open your

umbrella.

Which reminds me of another phase of the weather that I can't bear,

and that is April weather (so called because it always comes in May).

Poets think it very nice. As it does not know its own mind five

minutes together, they liken it to a woman; and it is supposed to be

very charming on that account. I don't appreciate it, myself. Such

lightning-change business may be all very agreeable in a girl. It is

no doubt highly delightful to have to do with a person who grins one

moment about nothing at all, and snivels the next for precisely the

same cause, and who then giggles, and then sulks, and who is rude, and

affectionate, and bad-tempered, and jolly, and boisterous, and silent,

and passionate, and cold, and stand-offish, and flopping, all in one

minute (mind, I don't say this. It is those poets. And they are

supposed to be connoisseurs of this sort of thing); but in the weather

the disadvantages of the system are more apparent. A woman's tears do

not make one wet, but the rain does; and her coldness does not lay the

foundations of asthma and rheumatism, as the east wind is apt to. I

can prepare for and put up with a regularly bad day, but these

ha'porth-of-all-sorts kind of days do not suit me. It aggravates me

to see a bright blue sky above me when I am walking along wet through,

and there is something so exasperating about the way the sun comes out

smiling after a drenching shower, and seems to say: "Lord love you,

you don't mean to say you're wet? Well, I am surprised. Why, it was

only my fun."

They don't give you time to open or shut your umbrella in an English

April, especially if it is an "automaton" one--the umbrella, I mean,

not the April.

I bought an "automaton" once in April, and I did have a time with it!

I wanted an umbrella, and I went into a shop in the Strand and told

them so, and they said:

"Yes, sir. What sort of an umbrella would you like?"

I said I should like one that would keep the rain off, and that would

not allow itself to be left behind in a railway carriage.

"Try an 'automaton,'" said the shopman.

"What's an 'automaton'?" said I.

"Oh, it's a beautiful arrangement," replied the man, with a touch of

enthusiasm. "It opens and shuts itself."

I bought one and found that he was quite correct. It did open and

shut itself. I had no control over it whatever. When it began to

rain, which it did that season every alternate five minutes, I used to

try and get the machine to open, but it would not budge; and then I

used to stand and struggle with the wretched thing, and shake it, and

swear at it, while the rain poured down in torrents. Then the moment

the rain ceased the absurd thing would go up suddenly with a jerk and

would not come down again; and I had to walk about under a bright blue

sky, with an umbrella over my head, wishing that it would come on to

rain again, so that it might not seem that I was insane.

When it did shut it did so unexpectedly and knocked one's hat off.

I don't know why it should be so, but it is an undeniable fact that

there is nothing makes a man look so supremely ridiculous as losing

his hat. The feeling of helpless misery that shoots down one's back

on suddenly becoming aware that one's head is bare is among the most

bitter ills that flesh is heir to. And then there is the wild chase

after it, accompanied by an excitable small dog, who thinks it is a

game, and in the course of which you are certain to upset three or

four innocent children--to say nothing of their mothers--butt a fat

old gentleman on to the top of a perambulator, and carom off a ladies'

seminary into the arms of a wet sweep.

After this, the idiotic hilarity of the spectators and the

disreputable appearance of the hat when recovered appear but of minor

importance.

Altogether, what between March winds, April showers, and the entire

absence of May flowers, spring is not a success in cities. It is all

very well in the country, as I have said, but in towns whose

population is anything over ten thousand it most certainly ought to be

abolished. In the world's grim workshops it is like the children--out

of place. Neither shows to advantage amid the dust and din. It seems

so sad to see the little dirt-grimed brats try to play in the noisy

courts and muddy streets. Poor little uncared-for, unwanted human

atoms, they are not children. Children are bright-eyed, chubby, and

shy. These are dingy, screeching elves, their tiny faces seared and

withered, their baby laughter cracked and hoarse.

The spring of life and the spring of the year were alike meant to be

cradled in the green lap of nature. To us in the town spring brings

but its cold winds and drizzling rains. We must seek it among the

leafless woods and the brambly lanes, on the heathy moors and the

great still hills, if we want to feel its joyous breath and hear its

silent voices. There is a glorious freshness in the spring there.

The scurrying clouds, the open bleakness, the rushing wind, and the

clear bright air thrill one with vague energies and hopes. Life, like

the landscape around us, seems bigger, and wider, and freer--a rainbow

road leading to unknown ends. Through the silvery rents that bar the

sky we seem to catch a glimpse of the great hope and grandeur that

lies around this little throbbing world, and a breath of its scent is

wafted us on the wings of the wild March wind.

Strange thoughts we do not understand are stirring in our hearts.

Voices are calling us to some great effort, to some mighty work. But

we do not comprehend their meaning yet, and the hidden echoes within

us that would reply are struggling, inarticulate and dumb.

We stretch our hands like children to the light, seeking to grasp we

know not what. Our thoughts, like the boys' thoughts in the Danish

song, are very long, long thoughts, and very vague; we cannot see

their end.

It must be so. All thoughts that peer outside this narrow world

cannot be else than dim and shapeless. The thoughts that we can

clearly grasp are very little thoughts--that two and two make

four-that when we are hungry it is pleasant to eat--that honesty is

the best policy; all greater thoughts are undefined and vast to our

poor childish brains. We see but dimly through the mists that roll

around our time-girt isle of life, and only hear the distant surging

of the great sea beyond.

ON CATS AND DOGS.

What I've suffered from them this morning no tongue can tell. It

began with Gustavus Adolphus. Gustavus Adolphus (they call him

"Gusty" down-stairs for short) is a very good sort of dog when he is

in the middle of a large field or on a fairly extensive common, but I

won't have him indoors. He means well, but this house is not his

size. He stretches himself, and over go two chairs and a what-not.

He wags his tail, and the room looks as if a devastating army had

marched through it. He breathes, and it puts the fire out.

At dinner-time he creeps in under the table, lies there for awhile,

and then gets up suddenly; the first intimation we have of his

movements being given by the table, which appears animated by a desire

to turn somersaults. We all clutch at it frantically and endeavor to

maintain it in a horizontal position; whereupon his struggles, he

being under the impression that some wicked conspiracy is being

hatched against him, become fearful, and the final picture presented

is generally that of an overturned table and a smashed-up dinner

sandwiched between two sprawling layers of infuriated men and women.

He came in this morning in his usual style, which he appears to have

founded on that of an American cyclone, and the first thing he did was

to sweep my coffee-cup off the table with his tail, sending the

contents full into the middle of my waistcoat.

I rose from my chair hurriedly and remarking "----," approached him at

a rapid rate. He preceded me in the direction of the door. At the

door he met Eliza coming in with eggs. Eliza observed "Ugh!" and sat

down on the floor, the eggs took up different positions about the

carpet, where they spread themselves out, and Gustavus Adolphus left

the room. I called after him, strongly advising him to go straight

downstairs and not let me see him again for the next hour or so; and

he seeming to agree with me, dodged the coal-scoop and went, while I

returned, dried myself and finished breakfast. I made sure that he

had gone in to the yard, but when I looked into the passage ten

minutes later he was sitting at the top of the stairs. I ordered him

down at once, but he only barked and jumped about, so I went to see

what was the matter.

It was Tittums. She was sitting on the top stair but one and wouldn't

let him pass.

Tittums is our kitten. She is about the size of a penny roll. Her

back was up and she was swearing like a medical student.

She does swear fearfully. I do a little that way myself sometimes,

but I am a mere amateur compared with her. To tell you the

truth--mind, this is strictly between ourselves, please; I shouldn't

like your wife to know I said it--the women folk don't understand

these things; but between you and me, you know, I think it does a man

good to swear. Swearing is the safety-valve through which the bad

temper that might otherwise do serious internal injury to his mental

mechanism escapes in harmless vaporing. When a man has said: "Bless

you, my dear, sweet sir. What the sun, moon, and stars made you so

careless (if I may be permitted the expression) as to allow your light

and delicate foot to descend upon my corn with so much force? Is it

that you are physically incapable of comprehending the direction in

which you are proceeding? you nice, clever young man--you!" or words

to that effect, he feels better. Swearing has the same soothing

effect upon our angry passions that smashing the furniture or slamming

the doors is so well known to exercise; added to which it is much

cheaper. Swearing clears a man out like a pen'orth of gunpowder does

the wash-house chimney. An occasional explosion is good for both. I

rather distrust a man who never swears, or savagely kicks the

foot-stool, or pokes the fire with unnecessary violence. Without some

outlet, the anger caused by the ever-occurring troubles of life is apt

to rankle and fester within. The petty annoyance, instead of being

thrown from us, sits down beside us and becomes a sorrow, and the

little offense is brooded over till, in the hot-bed of rumination, it

grows into a great injury, under whose poisonous shadow springs up

hatred and revenge.

Swearing relieves the feelings--that is what swearing does. I

explained this to my aunt on one occasion, but it didn't answer with

her. She said I had no business to have such feelings.

That is what I told Tittums. I told her she ought to be ashamed of

herself, brought up in at Christian family as she was, too. I don't

so much mind hearing an old cat swear, but I can't bear to see a mere

kitten give way to it. It seems sad in one so young.

I put Tittums in my pocket and returned to my desk. I forgot her for

the moment, and when I looked I found that she had squirmed out of my

pocket on to the table and was trying to swallow the pen; then she put

her leg into the ink-pot and upset it; then she licked her leg; then

she swore again--at me this time.

I put her down on the floor, and there Tim began rowing with her. I

do wish Tim would mind his own business. It was no concern of his

what she had been doing. Besides, he is not a saint himself. He is

only a two-year-old fox-terrier, and he interferes with everything and

gives himself the airs of a gray-headed Scotch collie.

Tittums' mother has come in and Tim has got his nose scratched, for

which I am remarkably glad. I have put them all three out in the

passage, where they are fighting at the present moment. I'm in a mess

with the ink and in a thundering bad temper; and if anything more in

the cat or dog line comes fooling about me this morning, it had better

bring its own funeral contractor with it.

Yet, in general, I like cats and dogs very much indeed. What jolly

chaps they are! They are much superior to human beings as companions.

They do not quarrel or argue with you. They never talk about

themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep

up an appearance of being interested in the conversation. They never

make stupid remarks. They never observe to Miss Brown across a

dinner-table that they always understood she was very sweet on Mr.

Jones (who has just married Miss Robinson). They never mistake your

wife's cousin for her husband and fancy that you are the

father-in-law. And they never ask a young author with fourteen

tragedies, sixteen comedies, seven farces, and a couple of burlesques

in his desk why he doesn't write a play.

They never say unkind things. They never tell us of our faults,

"merely for our own good." They do not at inconvenient moments mildly

remind us of our past follies and mistakes. They do not say, "Oh,

yes, a lot of use you are if you are ever really wanted"--sarcastic

like. They never inform us, like our _inamoratas_ sometimes do, that

we are not nearly so nice as we used to be. We are always the same to

them.

They are always glad to see us. They are with us in all our humors.

They are merry when we are glad, sober when we feel solemn, and sad

when we are sorrowful.

"Halloo! happy and want a lark? Right you are; I'm your man. Here I

am, frisking round you, leaping, barking, pirouetting, ready for any

amount of fun and mischief. Look at my eyes if you doubt me. What

shall it be? A romp in the drawing-room and never mind the furniture,

or a scamper in the fresh, cool air, a scud across the fields and down

the hill, and won't we let old Gaffer Goggles' geese know what time o'

day it is, neither! Whoop! come along."

Or you'd like to be quiet and think. Very well. Pussy can sit on the

arm of the chair and purr, and Montmorency will curl himself up on the

rug and blink at the fire, yet keeping one eye on you the while, in

case you are seized with any sudden desire in the direction of rats.

And when we bury our face in our hands and wish we had never been

born, they don't sit up very straight and observe that we have brought

it all upon ourselves. They don't even hope it will be a warning to

us. But they come up softly and shove their heads against us. If it

is a cat she stands on your shoulder, rumples your hair, and says,

"Lor,' I am sorry for you, old man," as plain as words can speak; and

if it is a dog he looks up at you with his big, true eyes and says

with them, "Well you've always got me, you know. We'll go through the

world together and always stand by each other, won't we?"

He is very imprudent, a dog is. He never makes it his business to

inquire whether you are in the right or in the wrong, never bothers as

to whether you are going up or down upon life's ladder, never asks

whether you are rich or poor, silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are

his pal. That is enough for him, and come luck or misfortune, good

repute or bad, honor or shame, he is going to stick to you, to comfort

you, guard you, and give his life for you if need be--foolish,

brainless, soulless dog!

Ah! old stanch friend, with your deep, clear eyes and bright, quick

glances, that take in all one has to say before one has time to speak

it, do you know you are only an animal and have no mind? Do you know

that that dull-eyed, gin-sodden lout leaning against the post out

there is immeasurably your intellectual superior? Do you know that

every little-minded, selfish scoundrel who lives by cheating and

tricking, who never did a gentle deed or said a kind word, who never

had a thought that was not mean and low or a desire that was not base,

whose every action is a fraud, whose every utterance is a lie--do you

know that these crawling skulks (and there are millions of them in the

world), do you know they are all as much superior to you as the sun is

superior to rushlight you honorable, brave-hearted, unselfish brute?

They are MEN, you know, and MEN are the greatest, and noblest, and

wisest, and best beings in the whole vast eternal universe. Any man

will tell you that.

Yes, poor doggie, you are very stupid, very stupid indeed, compared

with us clever men, who understand all about politics and philosophy,

and who know everything, in short, except what we are and where we

came from and whither we are going, and what everything outside this

tiny world and most things in it are.

Never mind, though, pussy and doggie, we like you both all the better

for your being stupid. We all like stupid things. Men can't bear

clever women, and a woman's ideal man is some one she can call a "dear

old stupid." It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than

ourselves. We love them at once for being so. The world must be

rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them,

and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.

But there, the clever people are such a very insignificant minority

that it really doesn't much matter if they are unhappy. So long as

the foolish people can be made comfortable the world, as a whole, will

get on tolerably well.

Cats have the credit of being more worldly wise than dogs--of looking

more after their own interests and being less blindly devoted to those

of their friends. And we men and women are naturally shocked at such

selfishness. Cats certainly do love a family that has a carpet in the

kitchen more than a family that has not; and if there are many

children about, they prefer to spend their leisure time next door.

But, taken altogether, cats are libeled. Make a friend of one, and

she will stick to you through thick and thin. All the cats that I

have had have been most firm comrades. I had a cat once that used to

follow me about everywhere, until it even got quite embarrassing, and

I had to beg her, as a personal favor, not to accompany me any further

down the High Street. She used to sit up for me when I was late home

and meet me in the passage. It made me feel quite like a married man,

except that she never asked where I had been and then didn't believe

me when I told her.

Another cat I had used to get drunk regularly every day. She would

hang about for hours outside the cellar door for the purpose of

sneaking in on the first opportunity and lapping up the drippings from

the beer-cask. I do not mention this habit of hers in praise of the

species, but merely to show how almost human some of them are. If the

transmigration of souls is a fact, this animal was certainly

qualifying most rapidly for a Christian, for her vanity was only

second to her love of drink. Whenever she caught a particularly big

rat, she would bring it up into the room where we were all sitting,

lay the corpse down in the midst of us, and wait to be praised. Lord!

how the girls used to scream.

Poor rats! They seem only to exist so that cats and dogs may gain

credit for killing them and chemists make a fortune by inventing

specialties in poison for their destruction. And yet there is

something fascinating about them. There is a weirdness and

uncanniness attaching to them. They are so cunning and strong, so

terrible in their numbers, so cruel, so secret. They swarm in

deserted houses, where the broken casements hang rotting to the

crumbling walls and the doors swing creaking on their rusty hinges.

They know the sinking ship and leave her, no one knows how or whither.

They whisper to each other in their hiding-places how a doom will fall

upon the hall and the great name die forgotten. They do fearful deeds

in ghastly charnel-houses.

No tale of horror is complete without the rats. In stories of ghosts

and murderers they scamper through the echoing rooms, and the gnawing

of their teeth is heard behind the wainscot, and their gleaming eyes

peer through the holes in the worm-eaten tapestry, and they scream in

shrill, unearthly notes in the dead of night, while the moaning wind

sweeps, sobbing, round the ruined turret towers, and passes wailing

like a woman through the chambers bare and tenantless.

And dying prisoners, in their loathsome dungeons, see through the

horrid gloom their small red eyes, like glittering coals, hear in the

death-like silence the rush of their claw-like feet, and start up

shrieking in the darkness and watch through the awful night.

I love to read tales about rats. They make my flesh creep so. I like

that tale of Bishop Hatto and the rats. The wicked bishop, you know,

had ever so much corn stored in his granaries and would not let the

starving people touch it, but when they prayed to him for food

gathered them together in his barn, and then shutting the doors on

them, set fire to the place and burned them all to death. But next

day there came thousands upon thousands of rats, sent to do judgment

on him. Then Bishop Hatto fled to his strong tower that stood in the

middle of the Rhine, and barred himself in and fancied he was safe.

But the rats! they swam the river, they gnawed their way through the

thick stone walls, and ate him alive where he sat.

"They have whetted their teeth against the stones,

And now they pick the bishop's bones;

They gnawed the flesh from every limb,

For they were sent to do judgment on him."

Oh, it's a lovely tale.

Then there is the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, how first he

piped the rats away, and afterward, when the mayor broke faith with

him, drew all the children along with him and went into the mountain.

What a curious old legend that is! I wonder what it means, or has it

any meaning at all? There seems something strange and deep lying hid

beneath the rippling rhyme. It haunts me, that picture of the quaint,

mysterious old piper piping through Hamelin's narrow streets, and the

children following with dancing feet and thoughtful, eager faces. The

old folks try to stay them, but the children pay no heed. They hear

the weird, witched music and must follow. The games are left

unfinished and the playthings drop from their careless hands. They

know not whither they are hastening. The mystic music calls to them,

and they follow, heedless and unasking where. It stirs and vibrates

in their hearts and other sounds grow faint. So they wander through

Pied Piper Street away from Hamelin town.

I get thinking sometimes if the Pied Piper is really dead, or if he

may not still be roaming up and down our streets and lanes, but

playing now so softly that only the children hear him. Why do the

little faces look so grave and solemn when they pause awhile from

romping, and stand, deep wrapt, with straining eyes? They only shake

their curly heads and dart back laughing to their playmates when we

question them. But I fancy myself they have been listening to the

magic music of the old Pied Piper, and perhaps with those bright eyes

of theirs have even seen his odd, fantastic figure gliding unnoticed

through the whirl and throng.

Even we grown-up children hear his piping now and then. But the

yearning notes are very far away, and the noisy, blustering world is

always bellowing so loud it drowns the dreamlike melody. One day the

sweet, sad strains will sound out full and clear, and then we too

shall, like the little children, throw our playthings all aside and

follow. The loving hands will be stretched out to stay us, and the

voices we have learned to listen for will cry to us to stop. But we

shall push the fond arms gently back and pass out through the

sorrowing house and through the open door. For the wild, strange

music will be ringing in our hearts, and we shall know the meaning of

its song by then.

I wish people could love animals without getting maudlin over them, as

so many do. Women are the most hardened offenders in such respects,

but even our intellectual sex often degrade pets into nuisances by

absurd idolatry. There are the gushing young ladies who, having read

"David Copperfield," have thereupon sought out a small, longhaired dog

of nondescript breed, possessed of an irritating habit of criticising

a man's trousers, and of finally commenting upon the same by a sniff

indicative of contempt and disgust. They talk sweet girlish prattle

to this animal (when there is any one near enough to overhear them),

and they kiss its nose, and put its unwashed head up against their

cheek in a most touching manner; though I have noticed that these

caresses are principally performed when there are young men hanging

about.

Then there are the old ladies who worship a fat poodle, scant of

breath and full of fleas. I knew a couple of elderly spinsters once

who had a sort of German sausage on legs which they called a dog

between them. They used to wash its face with warm water every

morning. It had a mutton cutlet regularly for breakfast; and on

Sundays, when one of the ladies went to church, the other always

stopped at home to keep the dog company.

There are many families where the whole interest of life is centered

upon the dog. Cats, by the way, rarely suffer from excess of

adulation. A cat possesses a very fair sense of the ridiculous, and

will put her paw down kindly but firmly upon any nonsense of this

kind. Dogs, however, seem to like it. They encourage their owners in

the tomfoolery, and the consequence is that in the circles I am

speaking of what "dear Fido" has done, does do, will do, won't do, can

do, can't do, was doing, is doing, is going to do, shall do, shan't

do, and is about to be going to have done is the continual theme of

discussion from morning till night.

All the conversation, consisting, as it does, of the very dregs of

imbecility, is addressed to this confounded animal. The family sit in

a row all day long, watching him, commenting upon his actions, telling

each other anecdotes about him, recalling his virtues, and remembering

with tears how one day they lost him for two whole hours, on which

occasion he was brought home in a most brutal manner by the

butcher-boy, who had been met carrying him by the scruff of his neck

with one hand, while soundly cuffing his head with the other.

After recovering from these bitter recollections, they vie with each

other in bursts of admiration for the brute, until some more than

usually enthusiastic member, unable any longer to control his

feelings, swoops down upon the unhappy quadruped in a frenzy of

affection, clutches it to his heart, and slobbers over it. Whereupon

the others, mad with envy, rise up, and seizing as much of the dog as

the greed of the first one has left to them, murmur praise and

devotion.

Among these people everything is done through the dog. If you want to

make love to the eldest daughter, or get the old man to lend you the

garden roller, or the mother to subscribe to the Society for the

Suppression of Solo-Cornet Players in Theatrical Orchestras (it's a

pity there isn't one, anyhow), you have to begin with the dog. You

must gain its approbation before they will even listen to you, and if,

as is highly probable, the animal, whose frank, doggy nature has been

warped by the unnatural treatment he has received, responds to your

overtures of friendship by viciously snapping at you, your cause is

lost forever.

"If Fido won't take to any one," the father has thoughtfully remarked

beforehand, "I say that man is not to be trusted. You know, Maria,

how often I have said that. Ah! he knows, bless him."

Drat him!

And to think that the surly brute was once an innocent puppy, all legs

and head, full of fun and play, and burning with ambition to become a

big, good dog and bark like mother.

Ah me! life sadly changes us all. The world seems a vast horrible

grinding machine, into which what is fresh and bright and pure is

pushed at one end, to come out old and crabbed and wrinkled at the

other.

Look even at Pussy Sobersides, with her dull, sleepy glance, her

grave, slow walk, and dignified, prudish airs; who could ever think

that once she was the blue-eyed, whirling, scampering,

head-over-heels, mad little firework that we call a kitten?

What marvelous vitality a kitten has. It is really something very

beautiful the way life bubbles over in the little creatures. They

rush about, and mew, and spring; dance on their hind legs, embrace

everything with their front ones, roll over and over, lie on their

backs and kick. They don't know what to do with themselves, they are

so full of life.

Can you remember, reader, when you and I felt something of the same

sort of thing? Can you remember those glorious days of fresh young

manhood--how, when coming home along the moonlit road, we felt too

full of life for sober walking, and had to spring and skip, and wave

our arms, and shout till belated farmers' wives thought--and with good

reason, too--that we were mad, and kept close to the hedge, while we

stood and laughed aloud to see them scuttle off so fast and made their

blood run cold with a wild parting whoop, and the tears came, we knew

not why? Oh, that magnificent young LIFE! that crowned us kings of

the earth; that rushed through every tingling vein till we seemed to

walk on air; that thrilled through our throbbing brains and told us to

go forth and conquer the whole world; that welled up in our young

hearts till we longed to stretch out our arms and gather all the

toiling men and women and the little children to our breast and love

them all--all. Ah! they were grand days, those deep, full days, when

our coming life, like an unseen organ, pealed strange, yearnful music

in our ears, and our young blood cried out like a war-horse for the

battle. Ah, our pulse beats slow and steady now, and our old joints

are rheumatic, and we love our easy-chair and pipe and sneer at boys'

enthusiasm. But oh for one brief moment of that god-like life again!

ON BEING SHY.

All great literary men are shy. I am myself, though I am told it is

hardly noticeable.

I am glad it is not. It used to be extremely prominent at one time,

and was the cause of much misery to myself and discomfort to every one

about me--my lady friends especially complained most bitterly about

it.

A shy man's lot is not a happy one. The men dislike him, the women

despise him, and he dislikes and despises himself. Use brings him no

relief, and there is no cure for him except time; though I once came

across a delicious recipe for overcoming the misfortune. It appeared

among the "answers to correspondents" in a small weekly journal and

ran as follows--I have never forgotten it: "Adopt an easy and

pleasing manner, especially toward ladies."

Poor wretch! I can imagine the grin with which he must have read that

advice. "Adopt an easy and pleasing manner, especially toward

ladies," forsooth! Don't you adopt anything of the kind, my dear

young shy friend. Your attempt to put on any other disposition than

your own will infallibly result in your becoming ridiculously gushing

and offensively familiar. Be your own natural self, and then you will

only be thought to be surly and stupid.

The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture

it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate

his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him.

He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits

become in his presence depressed and nervous.

This is a good deal brought about by misunderstanding. Many people

mistake the shy man's timidity for overbearing arrogance and are awed

and insulted by it. His awkwardness is resented as insolent

carelessness, and when, terror-stricken at the first word addressed to

him, the blood rushes to his head and the power of speech completely

fails him, he is regarded as an awful example of the evil effects of

giving way to passion.

But, indeed, to be misunderstood is the shy man's fate on every

occasion; and whatever impression he endeavors to create, he is sure

to convey its opposite. When he makes a joke, it is looked upon as a

pretended relation of fact and his want of veracity much condemned.

His sarcasm is accepted as his literal opinion and gains for him the

reputation of being an ass, while if, on the other hand, wishing to

ingratiate himself, he ventures upon a little bit of flattery, it is

taken for satire and he is hated ever afterward.

These and the rest of a shy man's troubles are always very amusing to

other people, and have afforded material for comic writing from time

immemorial. But if we look a little deeper we shall find there is a

pathetic, one might almost say a tragic, side to the picture. A shy

man means a lonely man--a man cut off from all companionship, all

sociability. He moves about the world, but does not mix with it.

Between him and his fellow-men there runs ever an impassable

barrier--a strong, invisible wall that, trying in vain to scale, he

but bruises himself against. He sees the pleasant faces and hears the

pleasant voices on the other side, but he cannot stretch his hand

across to grasp another hand. He stands watching the merry groups,

and he longs to speak and to claim kindred with them. But they pass

him by, chatting gayly to one another, and he cannot stay them. He

tries to reach them, but his prison walls move with him and hem him in

on every side. In the busy street, in the crowded room, in the grind

of work, in the whirl of pleasure, amid the many or amid the

few--wherever men congregate together, wherever the music of human

speech is heard and human thought is flashed from human eyes, there,

shunned and solitary, the shy man, like a leper, stands apart. His

soul is full of love and longing, but the world knows it not. The

iron mask of shyness is riveted before his face, and the man beneath

is never seen. Genial words and hearty greetings are ever rising to

his lips, but they die away in unheard whispers behind the steel

clamps. His heart aches for the weary brother, but his sympathy is

dumb. Contempt and indignation against wrong choke up his throat, and

finding no safety-valve whence in passionate utterance they may burst

forth, they only turn in again and harm him. All the hate and scorn

and love of a deep nature such as the shy man is ever cursed by fester

and corrupt within, instead of spending themselves abroad, and sour

him into a misanthrope and cynic.

Yes, shy men, like ugly women, have a bad time of it in this world, to

go through which with any comfort needs the hide of a rhinoceros.

Thick skin is, indeed, our moral clothes, and without it we are not

fit to be seen about in civilized society. A poor gasping, blushing

creature, with trembling knees and twitching hands, is a painful sight

to every one, and if it cannot cure itself, the sooner it goes and

hangs itself the better.

The disease can be cured. For the comfort of the shy, I can assure

them of that from personal experience. I do not like speaking about

myself, as may have been noticed, but in the cause of humanity I on

this occasion will do so, and will confess that at one time I was, as

the young man in the Bab Ballad says, "the shyest of the shy," and

"whenever I was introduced to any pretty maid, my knees they knocked

together just as if I was afraid." Now, I would--nay, have--on this

very day before yesterday I did the deed. Alone and entirely by

myself (as the school-boy said in translating the "Bellum Gallicum")

did I beard a railway refreshment-room young lady in her own lair. I

rebuked her in terms of mingled bitterness and sorrow for her

callousness and want of condescension. I insisted, courteously but

firmly, on being accorded that deference and attention that was the

right of the traveling Briton, and at the end I looked her full in the

face. Need I say more?

True, immediately after doing so I left the room with what may

possibly have appeared to be precipitation and without waiting for any

refreshment. But that was because I had changed my mind, not because

I was frightened, you understand.

One consolation that shy folk can take unto themselves is that shyness

is certainly no sign of stupidity. It is easy enough for bull-headed

clowns to sneer at nerves, but the highest natures are not necessarily

those containing the greatest amount of moral brass. The horse is not

an inferior animal to the cock-sparrow, nor the deer of the forest to

the pig. Shyness simply means extreme sensibility, and has nothing

whatever to do with self-consciousness or with conceit, though its

relationship to both is continually insisted upon by the poll-parrot

school of philosophy.

Conceit, indeed, is the quickest cure for it. When it once begins to

dawn upon you that you are a good deal cleverer than any one else in

this world, bashfulness becomes shocked and leaves you. When you

can look round a roomful of people and think that each one is a mere

child in intellect compared with yourself you feel no more shy of them

than you would of a select company of magpies or orang-outangs.

Conceit is the finest armor that a man can wear. Upon its smooth,

impenetrable surface the puny dagger-thrusts of spite and envy glance

harmlessly aside. Without that breast-plate the sword of talent

cannot force its way through the battle of life, for blows have to be

borne as well as dealt. I do not, of course, speak of the conceit

that displays itself in an elevated nose and a falsetto voice. That

is not real conceit--that is only playing at being conceited; like

children play at being kings and queens and go strutting about with

feathers and long trains. Genuine conceit does not make a man

objectionable. On the contrary, it tends to make him genial,

kind-hearted, and simple. He has no need of affectation--he is far

too well satisfied with his own character; and his pride is too

deep-seated to appear at all on the outside. Careless alike of praise

or blame, he can afford to be truthful. Too far, in fancy, above the

rest of mankind to trouble about their petty distinctions, he is

equally at home with duke or costermonger. And valuing no one's

standard but his own, he is never tempted to practice that miserable

pretense that less self-reliant people offer up as an hourly sacrifice

to the god of their neighbor's opinion.

The shy man, on the other hand, is humble--modest of his own judgment

and over-anxious concerning that of others. But this in the case of a

young man is surely right enough. His character is unformed. It is

slowly evolving itself out of a chaos of doubt and disbelief. Before

the growing insight and experience the diffidence recedes. A man

rarely carries his shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if his

own inward strength does not throw it off, the rubbings of the world

generally smooth it down. You scarcely ever meet a really shy

man--except in novels or on the stage, where, by the bye, he is much

admired, especially by the women.

There, in that supernatural land, he appears as a fair-haired and

saintlike young man--fair hair and goodness always go together on the

stage. No respectable audience would believe in one without the

other. I knew an actor who mislaid his wig once and had to rush on to

play the hero in his own hair, which was jet-black, and the gallery

howled at all his noble sentiments under the impression that he was

the villain. He--the shy young man--loves the heroine, oh so

devotedly (but only in asides, for he dare not tell her of it), and he

is so noble and unselfish, and speaks in such a low voice, and is so

good to his mother; and the bad people in the play, they laugh at him

and jeer at him, but he takes it all so gently, and in the end it

transpires that he is such a clever man, though nobody knew it, and

then the heroine tells him she loves him, and he is so surprised, and

oh, so happy! and everybody loves him and asks him to forgive them,

which he does in a few well-chosen and sarcastic words, and blesses

them; and he seems to have generally such a good time of it that all

the young fellows who are not shy long to be shy. But the really shy

man knows better. He knows that it is not quite so pleasant in

reality. He is not quite so interesting there as in the fiction. He

is a little more clumsy and stupid and a little less devoted and

gentle, and his hair is much darker, which, taken altogether,

considerably alters the aspect of the case.

The point where he does resemble his ideal is in his faithfulness. I

am fully prepared to allow the shy young man that virtue: he is

constant in his love. But the reason is not far to seek. The fact is

it exhausts all his stock of courage to look one woman in the face,

and it would be simply impossible for him to go through the ordeal

with a second. He stands in far too much dread of the whole female

sex to want to go gadding about with many of them. One is quite

enough for him.

Now, it is different with the young man who is not shy. He has

temptations which his bashful brother never encounters. He looks

around and everywhere sees roguish eyes and laughing lips. What more

natural than that amid so many roguish ayes and laughing lips he

should become confused and, forgetting for the moment which particular

pair of roguish ayes and laughing lips it is that he belongs to, go

off making love to the wrong set. The shy man, who never looks at

anything but his own boots, sees not and is not tempted. Happy shy

man!

Not but what the shy man himself would much rather not be happy in

that way. He longs to "go it" with the others, and curses himself

every day for not being able to. He will now and again, screwing up

his courage by a tremendous effort, plunge into roguishness. But it

is always a terrible _fiasco_, and after one or two feeble flounders

he crawls out again, limp and pitiable.

I say "pitiable," though I am afraid he never is pitied. There are

certain misfortunes which, while inflicting a vast amount of suffering

upon their victims, gain for them no sympathy. Losing an umbrella,

falling in love, toothache, black eyes, and having your hat sat upon

may be mentioned as a few examples, but the chief of them all is

shyness. The shy man is regarded as an animate joke. His tortures

are the sport of the drawing-room arena and are pointed out and

discussed with much gusto.

"Look," cry his tittering audience to each other; "he's blushing!"

"Just watch his legs," says one.

"Do you notice how he is sitting?" adds another: "right on the edge

of the chair."

"Seems to have plenty of color," sneers a military-looking gentleman.

"Pity he's got so many hands," murmurs an elderly lady, with her own

calmly folded on her lap. "They quite confuse him."

"A yard or two off his feet wouldn't be a disadvantage," chimes in the

comic man, "especially as he seems so anxious to hide them."

And then another suggests that with such a voice he ought to have been

a sea-captain. Some draw attention to the desperate way in which he

is grasping his hat. Some comment upon his limited powers of

conversation. Others remark upon the troublesome nature of his cough.

And so on, until his peculiarities and the company are both thoroughly

exhausted.

His friends and relations make matters still more unpleasant for the

poor boy (friends and relations are privileged to be more disagreeable

than other people). Not content with making fun of him among

themselves, they insist on his seeing the joke. They mimic and

caricature him for his own edification. One, pretending to imitate

him, goes outside and comes in again in a ludicrously nervous manner,

explaining to him afterward that that is the way he--meaning the shy

fellow--walks into a room; or, turning to him with "This is the way

you shake hands," proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with the

rest of the room, taking hold of every one's hand as if it were a hot

plate and flabbily dropping it again. And then they ask him why he

blushes, and why he stammers, and why he always speaks in an almost

inaudible tone, as if they thought he did it on purpose. Then one of

them, sticking out his chest and strutting about the room like a

pouter-pigeon, suggests quite seriously that that is the style he

should adopt. The old man slaps him on the back and says: "Be bold,

my boy. Don't be afraid of any one." The mother says, "Never do

anything that you need be ashamed of, Algernon, and then you never

need be ashamed of anything you do," and, beaming mildly at him, seems

surprised at the clearness of her own logic. The boys tell him that

he's "worse than a girl," and the girls repudiate the implied slur

upon their sex by indignantly exclaiming that they are sure no girl

would be half as bad.

They are quite right; no girl would be. There is no such thing as a

shy woman, or, at all events, I have never come across one, and until

I do I shall not believe in them. I know that the generally accepted

belief is quite the reverse. All women are supposed to be like timid,

startled fawns, blushing and casting down their gentle eyes when

looked at and running away when spoken to; while we man are supposed

to be a bold and rollicky lot, and the poor dear little women admire

us for it, but are terribly afraid of us. It is a pretty theory, but,

like most generally accepted theories, mere nonsense. The girl of

twelve is self-contained and as cool as the proverbial cucumber, while

her brother of twenty stammers and stutters by her side. A woman will

enter a concert-room late, interrupt the performance, and disturb the

whole audience without moving a hair, while her husband follows her, a

crushed heap of apologizing misery.

The superior nerve of women in all matters connected with love, from

the casting of the first sheep's-eye down to the end of the honeymoon,

is too well acknowledged to need comment. Nor is the example a fair

one to cite in the present instance, the positions not being equally

balanced. Love is woman's business, and in "business" we all lay

aside our natural weaknesses--the shyest man I ever knew was a

photographic tout.

ON BABIES.

Oh, yes, I do--I know a lot about 'em. I was one myself once, though

not long--not so long as my clothes. They were very long, I

recollect, and always in my way when I wanted to kick. Why do babies

have such yards of unnecessary clothing? It is not a riddle. I

really want to know. I never could understand it. Is it that the

parents are ashamed of the size of the child and wish to make believe

that it is longer than it actually is? I asked a nurse once why it

was. She said:

"Lor', sir, they always have long clothes, bless their little hearts."

And when I explained that her answer, although doing credit to her

feelings, hardly disposed of my difficulty, she replied:

"Lor', sir, you wouldn't have 'em in short clothes, poor little

dears?" And she said it in a tone that seemed to imply I had

suggested some unmanly outrage.

Since than I have felt shy at making inquiries on the subject, and the

reason--if reason there be--is still a mystery to me. But indeed,

putting them in any clothes at all seems absurd to my mind. Goodness

knows there is enough of dressing and undressing to be gone through in

life without beginning it before we need; and one would think that

people who live in bed might at all events be spared the torture. Why

wake the poor little wretches up in the morning to take one lot of

clothes off, fix another lot on, and put them to bed again, and then

at night haul them out once more, merely to change everything back?

And when all is done, what difference is there, I should like to know,

between a baby's night-shirt and the thing it wears in the day-time?

Very likely, however, I am only making myself ridiculous--I often do,

so I am informed--and I will therefore say no more upon this matter of

clothes, except only that it would be of great convenience if some

fashion were adopted enabling you to tell a boy from a girl.

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair, dress, nor conversation

affords the slightest clew, and you are left to guess. By some

mysterious law of nature you invariably guess wrong, and are thereupon

regarded by all the relatives and friends as a mixture of fool and

knave, the enormity of alluding to a male babe as "she" being only

equaled by the atrocity of referring to a female infant as "he".

Whichever sex the particular child in question happens not to belong

to is considered as beneath contempt, and any mention of it is taken

as a personal insult to the family.

And as you value your fair name do not attempt to get out of the

difficulty by talking of "it."

There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame.

By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward

depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will

gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even

robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the

vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of

scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you,

let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

Your best plan is to address the article as "little angel." The noun

"angel" being of common gender suits the case admirably, and the

epithet is sure of being favorably received. "Pet" or "beauty" are

useful for variety's sake, but "angel" is the term that brings you the

greatest credit for sense and good-feeling. The word should be

preceded by a short giggle and accompanied by as much smile as

possible. And whatever you do, don't forget to say that the child has

got its father's nose. This "fetches" the parents (if I may be

allowed a vulgarism) more than anything. They will pretend to laugh

at the idea at first and will say, "Oh, nonsense!" You must then get

excited and insist that it is a fact. You need have no conscientious

scruples on the subject, because the thing's nose really does resemble

its father's--at all events quite as much as it does anything else in

nature--being, as it is, a mere smudge.

Do not despise these hints, my friends. There may come a time when,

with mamma on one side and grand mamma on the other, a group of

admiring young ladies (not admiring you, though) behind, and a

bald-headed dab of humanity in front, you will be extremely thankful

for some idea of what to say. A man--an unmarried man, that is--is

never seen to such disadvantage as when undergoing the ordeal of

"seeing baby." A cold shudder runs down his back at the bare

proposal, and the sickly smile with which he says how delighted he

shall be ought surely to move even a mother's heart, unless, as I am

inclined to believe, the whole proceeding is a mere device adopted by

wives to discourage the visits of bachelor friends.

It is a cruel trick, though, whatever its excuse may be. The bell is

rung and somebody sent to tell nurse to bring baby down. This is the

signal for all the females present to commence talking "baby," during

which time you are left to your own sad thoughts and the speculations

upon the practicability of suddenly recollecting an important

engagement, and the likelihood of your being believed if you do. Just

when you have concocted an absurdly implausible tale about a man

outside, the door opens, and a tall, severe-looking woman enters,

carrying what at first sight appears to be a particularly skinny

bolster, with the feathers all at one end. Instinct, however, tells

you that this is the baby, and you rise with a miserable attempt at

appearing eager. When the first gush of feminine enthusiasm with

which the object in question is received has died out, and the number

of ladies talking at once has been reduced to the ordinary four or

five, the circle of fluttering petticoats divides, and room is made

for you to step forward. This you do with much the same air that you

would walk into the dock at Bow Street, and then, feeling unutterably

miserable, you stand solemnly staring at the child. There is dead

silence, and you know that every one is waiting for you to speak. You

try to think of something to say, but find, to your horror, that your

reasoning faculties have left you. It is a moment of despair, and

your evil genius, seizing the opportunity, suggests to you some of the

most idiotic remarks that it is possible for a human being to

perpetrate. Glancing round with an imbecile smile, you sniggeringly

observe that "it hasn't got much hair has it?" Nobody answers you for

a minute, but at last the stately nurse says with much gravity:

"It is not customary for children five weeks old to have long hair."

Another silence follows this, and you feel you are being given a

second chance, which you avail yourself of by inquiring if it can walk

yet, or what they feed it on.

By this time you have got to be regarded as not quite right in your

head, and pity is the only thing felt for you. The nurse, however, is

determined that, insane or not, there shall be no shirking and that

you shall go through your task to the end. In the tones of a high

priestess directing some religious mystery she says, holding the

bundle toward you:

"Take her in your arms, sir." You are too crushed to offer any

resistance and so meekly accept the burden. "Put your arm more down

her middle, sir," says the high-priestess, and then all step back and

watch you intently as though you were going to do a trick with it.

What to do you know no more than you did what to say. It is certain

something must be done, and the only thing that occurs to you is to

heave the unhappy infant up and down to the accompaniment of

"oopsee-daisy," or some remark of equal intelligence. "I wouldn't jig

her, sir, if I were you," says the nurse; "a very little upsets her."

You promptly decide not to jig her and sincerely hope that you have

not gone too far already.

At this point the child itself, who has hitherto been regarding you

with an expression of mingled horror and disgust, puts an end to the

nonsense by beginning to yell at the top of its voice, at which the

priestess rushes forward and snatches it from you with "There! there!

there! What did ums do to ums?" "How very extraordinary!" you say

pleasantly. "Whatever made it go off like that?" "Oh, why, you must

have done something to her!" says the mother indignantly; "the child

wouldn't scream like that for nothing." It is evident they think you

have been running pins into it.

The brat is calmed at last, and would no doubt remain quiet enough,

only some mischievous busybody points you out again with "Who's this,

baby?" and the intelligent child, recognizing you, howls louder than

ever.

Whereupon some fat old lady remarks that "it's strange how children

take a dislike to any one." "Oh, they know," replies another

mysteriously. "It's a wonderful thing," adds a third; and then

everybody looks sideways at you, convinced you are a scoundrel of the

blackest dye; and they glory in the beautiful idea that your true

character, unguessed by your fellow-men, has been discovered by the

untaught instinct of a little child.

Babies, though, with all their crimes and errors, are not without

their use--not without use, surely, when they fill an empty heart; not

without use when, at their call, sunbeams of love break through

care-clouded faces; not without use when their little fingers press

wrinkles into smiles.

Odd little people! They are the unconscious comedians of the world's

great stage. They supply the humor in life's all-too-heavy drama.

Each one, a small but determined opposition to the order of things in

general, is forever doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, in the

wrong place and in the wrong way. The nurse-girl who sent Jenny to

see what Tommy and Totty were doing and "tell 'em they mustn't" knew

infantile nature. Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it

doesn't do something it oughtn't to a doctor should be called in at

once.

They have a genius for doing the most ridiculous things, and they do

them in a grave, stoical manner that is irresistible. The

business-like air with which two of them will join hands and proceed

due east at a break-neck toddle, while an excitable big sister is

roaring for them to follow her in a westerly direction, is most

amusing--except, perhaps, for the big sister. They walk round a

soldier, staring at his legs with the greatest curiosity, and poke him

to see if he is real. They stoutly maintain, against all argument and

much to the discomfort of the victim, that the bashful young man at

the end of the 'bus is "dadda." A crowded street-corner suggests

itself to their minds as a favorable spot for the discussion of family

affairs at a shrill treble. When in the middle of crossing the road

they are seized with a sudden impulse to dance, and the doorstep of a

busy shop is the place they always select for sitting down and taking

off their shoes.

When at home they find the biggest walking-stick in the house or an

umbrella--open preferred-of much assistance in getting upstairs. They

discover that they love Mary Ann at the precise moment when that

faithful domestic is blackleading the stove, and nothing will relieve

their feelings but to embrace her then and there. With regard to

food, their favorite dishes are coke and cat's meat. They nurse pussy

upside down, and they show their affection for the dog by pulling his

tail.

They are a deal of trouble, and they make a place untidy and they cost

a lot of money to keep; but still you would not have the house without

them. It would not be home without their noisy tongues and their

mischief-making hands. Would not the rooms seem silent without their

pattering feet, and might not you stray apart if no prattling voices

called you together?

It should be so, and yet I have sometimes thought the tiny hand seemed

as a wedge, dividing. It is a bearish task to quarrel with that

purest of all human affections--that perfecting touch to a woman's

life--a mother's love. It is a holy love, that we coarser-fibered men

can hardly understand, and I would not be deemed to lack reverence for

it when I say that surely it need not swallow up all other affection.

The baby need not take your whole heart, like the rich man who walled

up the desert well. Is there not another thirsty traveler standing

by?

In your desire to be a good mother, do not forget to be a good wife.

No need for all the thought and care to be only for one. Do not,

whenever poor Edwin wants you to come out, answer indignantly, "What,

and leave baby!" Do not spend all your evenings upstairs, and do not

confine your conversation exclusively to whooping-cough and measles.

My dear little woman, the child is not going to die every time it

sneezes, the house is not bound to get burned down and the nurse run

away with a soldier every time you go outside the front door; nor the

cat sure to come and sit on the precious child's chest the moment you

leave the bedside. You worry yourself a good deal too much about that

solitary chick, and you worry everybody else too. Try and think of

your other duties, and your pretty face will not be always puckered

into wrinkles, and there will be cheerfulness in the parlor as well as

in the nursery. Think of your big baby a little. Dance him about a

bit; call him pretty names; laugh at him now and then. It is only the

first baby that takes up the whole of a woman's time. Five or six do

not require nearly so much attention as one. But before then the

mischief has been done. A house where there seems no room for him and

a wife too busy to think of him have lost their hold on that so

unreasonable husband of yours, and he has learned to look elsewhere

for comfort and companionship.

But there, there, there! I shall get myself the character of a

baby-hater if I talk any more in this strain. And Heaven knows I am

not one. Who could be, to look into the little innocent faces

clustered in timid helplessness round those great gates that open down

into the world?

The world--the small round world! what a vast mysterious place it must

seem to baby eyes! What a trackless continent the back garden

appears! What marvelous explorations they make in the cellar under

the stairs! With what awe they gaze down the long street, wondering,

like us bigger babies when we gaze up at the stars, where it all ends!

And down that longest street of all--that long, dim street of life

that stretches out before them--what grave, old-fashioned looks they

seem to cast! What pitiful, frightened looks sometimes! I saw a

little mite sitting on a doorstep in a Soho slum one night, and I

shall never forget the look that the gas-lamp showed me on its wizen

face--a look of dull despair, as if from the squalid court the vista

of its own squalid life had risen, ghostlike, and struck its heart

dead with horror.

Poor little feet, just commencing the stony journey! We old

travelers, far down the road, can only pause to wave a hand to you.

You come out of the dark mist, and we, looking back, see you, so tiny

in the distance, standing on the brow of the hill, your arms stretched

out toward us. God speed you! We would stay and take your little

hands in ours, but the murmur of the great sea is in our ears and we

may not linger. We must hasten down, for the shadowy ships are

waiting to spread their sable sails.

ON EATING AND DRINKING.

I always was fond of eating and drinking, even as a child--especially

eating, in those early days. I had an appetite then, also a

digestion. I remember a dull-eyed, livid-complexioned gentleman

coming to dine at our house once. He watched me eating for about five

minutes, quite fascinated seemingly, and then he turned to my father

with--

"Does your boy ever suffer from dyspepsia?"

"I never heard him complain of anything of that kind," replied my

father. "Do you ever suffer from dyspepsia, Colly wobbles?" (They

called me Colly wobbles, but it was not my real name.)

"No, pa," I answered. After which I added:

"What is dyspepsia, pa?"

My livid-complexioned friend regarded me with a look of mingled

amazement and envy. Then in a tone of infinite pity he slowly said:

"You will know--some day."

My poor, dear mother used to say she liked to see me eat, and it has

always been a pleasant reflection to me since that I must have given

her much gratification in that direction. A growing, healthy lad,

taking plenty of exercise and careful to restrain himself from

indulging in too much study, can generally satisfy the most exacting

expectations as regards his feeding powers.

It is amusing to see boys eat when you have not got to pay for it.

Their idea of a square meal is a pound and a half of roast beef with

five or six good-sized potatoes (soapy ones preferred as being more

substantial), plenty of greens, and four thick slices of Yorkshire

pudding, followed by a couple of currant dumplings, a few green

apples, a pen'orth of nuts, half a dozen jumbles, and a bottle of

ginger-beer. After that they play at horses.

How they must despise us men, who require to sit quiet for a couple of

hours after dining off a spoonful of clear soup and the wing of a

chicken!

But the boys have not all the advantages on their side. A boy never

enjoys the luxury of being satisfied. A boy never feels full. He can

never stretch out his legs, put his hands behind his head, and,

closing his eyes, sink into the ethereal blissfulness that encompasses

the well-dined man. A dinner makes no difference whatever to a boy.

To a man it is as a good fairy's potion, and after it the world

appears a brighter and a better place. A man who has dined

satisfactorily experiences a yearning love toward all his

fellow-creatures. He strokes the cat quite gently and calls it "poor

pussy," in tones full of the tenderest emotion. He sympathizes with

the members of the German band outside and wonders if they are cold;

and for the moment he does not even hate his wife's relations.

A good dinner brings out all the softer side of a man. Under its

genial influence the gloomy and morose become jovial and chatty.

Sour, starchy individuals, who all the rest of the day go about

looking as if they lived on vinegar and Epsom salts, break out into

wreathed smiles after dinner, and exhibit a tendency to pat small

children on the head and to talk to them--vaguely--about sixpences.

Serious men thaw and become mildly cheerful, and snobbish young men of

the heavy-mustache type forget to make themselves objectionable.

I always feel sentimental myself after dinner. It is the only time

when I can properly appreciate love-stories. Then, when the hero

clasps "her" to his heart in one last wild embrace and stifles a sob,

I feel as sad as though I had dealt at whist and turned up only a

deuce; and when the heroine dies in the end I weep. If I read the

same tale early in the morning I should sneer at it. Digestion, or

rather indigestion, has a marvelous effect upon the heart. If I want

to write any thing very pathetic--I mean, if I want to try to write

anything very pathetic--I eat a large plateful of hot buttered muffins

about an hour beforehand, and then by the time I sit down to my work a

feeling of unutterable melancholy has come over me. I picture

heartbroken lovers parting forever at lonely wayside stiles, while the

sad twilight deepens around them, and only the tinkling of a distant

sheep-bell breaks the sorrow-laden silence. Old men sit and gaze at

withered flowers till their sight is dimmed by the mist of tears.

Little dainty maidens wait and watch at open casements; but "he cometh

not," and the heavy years roll by and the sunny gold tresses wear

white and thin. The babies that they dandled have become grown men

and women with podgy torments of their own, and the playmates that

they laughed with are lying very silent under the waving grass. But

still they wait and watch, till the dark shadows of the unknown night

steal up and gather round them and the world with its childish

troubles fades from their aching eyes.

I see pale corpses tossed on white-foamed waves, and death-beds

stained with bitter tears, and graves in trackless deserts. I hear

the wild wailing of women, the low moaning of little children, the dry

sobbing of strong men. It's all the muffins. I could not conjure up

one melancholy fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.

A full stomach is a great aid to poetry, and indeed no sentiment of

any kind can stand upon an empty one. We have not time or inclination

to indulge in fanciful troubles until we have got rid of our real

misfortunes. We do not sigh over dead dicky-birds with the bailiff in

the house, and when we do not know where on earth to get our next

shilling from, we do not worry as to whether our mistress' smiles are

cold, or hot, or lukewarm, or anything else about them.

Foolish people--when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way I

mean people who entertain different opinions to mine. If there is one

person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not

think exactly the same on all topics as I do--foolish people, I say,

then, who have never experienced much of either, will tell you that

mental distress is far more agonizing than bodily. Romantic and

touching theory! so comforting to the love-sick young sprig who looks

down patronizingly at some poor devil with a white starved face and

thinks to himself, "Ah, how happy you are compared with me!"--so

soothing to fat old gentlemen who cackle about the superiority of

poverty over riches. But it is all nonsense--all cant. An aching

head soon makes one forget an aching heart. A broken finger will

drive away all recollections of an empty chair. And when a man feels

really hungry he does not feel anything else.

We sleek, well-fed folk can hardly realize what feeling hungry is

like. We know what it is to have no appetite and not to care for the

dainty victuals placed before us, but we do not understand what it

means to sicken for food--to die for bread while others waste it--to

gaze with famished eyes upon coarse fare steaming behind dingy

windows, longing for a pen'orth of pea pudding and not having the

penny to buy it--to feel that a crust would be delicious and that a

bone would be a banquet.

Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavor-giving sauce. It is well

worth while to get hungry and thirsty merely to discover how much

gratification can be obtained from eating and drinking. If you wish

to thoroughly enjoy your dinner, take a thirty-mile country walk after

breakfast and don't touch anything till you get back. How your eyes

will glisten at sight of the white table-cloth and steaming dishes

then! With what a sigh of content you will put down the empty beer

tankard and take up your knife and fork! And how comfortable you feel

afterward as you push back your chair, light a cigar, and beam round

upon everybody.

Make sure, however, when adopting this plan, that the good dinner is

really to be had at the end, or the disappointment is trying. I

remember once a friend and I--dear old Joe, it was. Ah! how we lose

one another in life's mist. It must be eight years since I last saw

Joseph Taboys. How pleasant it would be to meet his jovial face

again, to clasp his strong hand, and to hear his cheery laugh once

more! He owes me 14 shillings, too. Well, we were on a holiday

together, and one morning we had breakfast early and started for a

tremendous long walk. We had ordered a duck for dinner over night.

We said, "Get a big one, because we shall come home awfully hungry;"

and as we were going out our landlady came up in great spirits. She

said, "I have got you gentlemen a duck, if you like. If you get

through that you'll do well;" and she held up a bird about the size of

a door-mat. We chuckled at the sight and said we would try. We said

it with self-conscious pride, like men who know their own power. Then

we started.

We lost our way, of course. I always do in the country, and it does

make me so wild, because it is no use asking direction of any of the

people you meet. One might as well inquire of a lodging-house slavey

the way to make beds as expect a country bumpkin to know the road to

the next village. You have to shout the question about three times

before the sound of your voice penetrates his skull. At the third

time he slowly raises his head and stares blankly at you. You yell it

at him then for a fourth time, and he repeats it after you. He

ponders while you count a couple of hundred, after which, speaking at

the rate of three words a minute, he fancies you "couldn't do better

than--" Here he catches sight of another idiot coming down the road

and bawls out to him the particulars, requesting his advice. The two

then argue the case for a quarter of an hour or so, and finally agree

that you had better go straight down the lane, round to the right and

cross by the third stile, and keep to the left by old Jimmy Milcher's

cow-shed, and across the seven-acre field, and through the gate by

Squire Grubbin's hay-stack, keeping the bridle-path for awhile till

you come opposite the hill where the windmill used to be--but it's

gone now--and round to the right, leaving Stiggin's plantation behind

you; and you say "Thank you" and go away with a splitting headache,

but without the faintest notion of your way, the only clear idea you

have on the subject being that somewhere or other there is a stile

which has to be got over; and at the next turn you come upon four

stiles, all leading in different directions!

We had undergone this ordeal two or three times. We had tramped over

fields. We had waded through brooks and scrambled over hedges and

walls. We had had a row as to whose fault it was that we had first

lost our way. We had got thoroughly disagreeable, footsore, and

weary. But throughout it all the hope of that duck kept us up. A

fairy-like vision, it floated before our tired eyes and drew us

onward. The thought of it was as a trumpet-call to the fainting. We

talked of it and cheered each other with our recollections of it.

"Come along," we said; "the duck will be spoiled."

We felt a strong temptation, at one point, to turn into a village inn

as we passed and have a cheese and a few loaves between us, but we

heroically restrained ourselves: we should enjoy the duck all the

better for being famished.

We fancied we smelled it when we go into the town and did the last

quarter of a mile in three minutes. We rushed upstairs, and washed

ourselves, and changed our clothes, and came down, and pulled our

chairs up to the table, and sat and rubbed our hands while the

landlady removed the covers, when I seized the knife and fork and

started to carve.

It seemed to want a lot of carving. I struggled with it for about

five minutes without making the slightest impression, and then Joe,

who had been eating potatoes, wanted to know if it wouldn't be better

for some one to do the job that understood carving. I took no notice

of his foolish remark, but attacked the bird again; and so vigorously

this time that the animal left the dish and took refuge in the fender.

We soon had it out of that, though, and I was prepared to make another

effort. But Joe was getting unpleasant. He said that if he had

thought we were to have a game of blind hockey with the dinner he

would have got a bit of bread and cheese outside.

I was too exhausted to argue. I laid down the knife and fork with

dignity and took a side seat and Joe went for the wretched creature.

He worked away in silence for awhile, and then he muttered "Damn the

duck" and took his coat off.

We did break the thing up at length with the aid of a chisel, but it

was perfectly impossible to eat it, and we had to make a dinner off

the vegetables and an apple tart. We tried a mouthful of the duck,

but it was like eating India-rubber.

It was a wicked sin to kill that drake. But there! there's no respect

for old institutions in this country.

I started this paper with the idea of writing about eating and

drinking, but I seem to have confined my remarks entirely to eating as

yet. Well, you see, drinking is one of those subjects with which it

is inadvisable to appear too well acquainted. The days are gone by

when it was considered manly to go to bed intoxicated every night, and

a clear head and a firm hand no longer draw down upon their owner the

reproach of effeminacy. On the contrary, in these sadly degenerate

days an evil-smelling breath, a blotchy face, a reeling gait, and a

husky voice are regarded as the hall marks of the cad rather than or

the gentleman.

Even nowadays, though, the thirstiness of mankind is something

supernatural. We are forever drinking on one excuse or another. A

man never feels comfortable unless he has a glass before him. We

drink before meals, and with meals, and after meals. We drink when we

meet a friend, also when we part from a friend. We drink when we are

talking, when we are reading, and when we are thinking. We drink one

another's healths and spoil our own. We drink the queen, and the

army, and the ladies, and everybody else that is drinkable; and I

believe if the supply ran short we should drink our mothers-in-law.

By the way, we never eat anybody's health, always drink it. Why

should we not stand up now and then and eat a tart to somebody's

success?

To me, I confess the constant necessity of drinking under which the

majority of men labor is quite unaccountable. I can understand people

drinking to drown care or to drive away maddening thoughts well

enough. I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak

themselves in drink--oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of

course--very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the

graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp

cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into

the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a

brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin.

But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their

ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means.

Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from

year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in

sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children

scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse,

and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the

house around is a bedlam of riot and stench.

Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them,

devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay

and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel

blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy

fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand.

But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of

light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to

the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one

moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know

not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship,

longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their

baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with

an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of

sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to

a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the

God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats

and feel for one brief moment that they live!

Ah! we may talk sentiment as much as we like, but the stomach is the

real seat of happiness in this world. The kitchen is the chief temple

wherein we worship, its roaring fire is our vestal flame, and the cook

is our great high-priest. He is a mighty magician and a kindly one.

He soothes away all sorrow and care. He drives forth all enmity,

gladdens all love. Our God is great and the cook is his prophet. Let

us eat, drink, and be merry.

ON FURNISHED APARTMENTS.

"Oh, you have some rooms to let."

"Mother!"

"Well, what is it?"

"'Ere's a gentleman about the rooms."

"Ask 'im in. I'll be up in a minute."

"Will yer step inside, sir? Mother'll be up in a minute."

So you step inside and after a minute "mother" comes slowly up the

kitchen stairs, untying her apron as she comes and calling down

instructions to some one below about the potatoes.

"Good-morning, sir," says "mother," with a washed-out smile. "Will

you step this way, please?"

"Oh, it's hardly worth while my coming up," you say. "What sort of

rooms are they, and how much?"

"Well," says the landlady, "if you'll step upstairs I'll show them to

you."

So with a protesting murmur, meant to imply that any waste of time

complained of hereafter must not be laid to your charge, you follow

"mother" upstairs.

At the first landing you run up against a pail and a broom, whereupon

"mother" expatiates upon the unreliability of servant-girls, and bawls

over the balusters for Sarah to come and take them away at once. When

you get outside the rooms she pauses, with her hand upon the door, to

explain to you that they are rather untidy just at present, as the

last lodger left only yesterday; and she also adds that this is their

cleaning-day--it always is. With this understanding you enter, and

both stand solemnly feasting your eyes upon the scene before you. The

rooms cannot be said to appear inviting. Even "mother's" face betrays

no admiration. Untenanted "furnished apartments" viewed in the

morning sunlight do not inspire cheery sensations. There is a

lifeless air about them. It is a very different thing when you have

settled down and are living in them. With your old familiar household

gods to greet your gaze whenever you glance up, and all your little

knick-knacks spread around you--with the photos of all the girls that

you have loved and lost ranged upon the mantel-piece, and half a dozen

disreputable-looking pipes scattered about in painfully prominent

positions--with one carpet slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box

and the other perched on the top of the piano--with the well-known

pictures to hide the dingy walls, and these dear old friends, your

books, higgledy-piggledy all over the place--with the bits of old blue

china that your mother prized, and the screen she worked in those far

by-gone days, when the sweet old face was laughing and young, and the

white soft hair tumbled in gold-brown curls from under the

coal-scuttle bonnet--

Ah, old screen, what a gorgeous personage you must have been in your

young days, when the tulips and roses and lilies (all growing from one

stem) were fresh in their glistening sheen! Many a summer and winter

have come and gone since then, my friend, and you have played with the

dancing firelight until you have grown sad and gray. Your brilliant

colors are fast fading now, and the envious moths have gnawed your

silken threads. You are withering away like the dead hands that wove

you. Do you ever think of those dead hands? You seem so grave and

thoughtful sometimes that I almost think you do. Come, you and I and

the deep-glowing embers, let us talk together. Tell me in your silent

language what you remember of those young days, when you lay on my

little mother's lap and her girlish fingers played with your rainbow

tresses. Was there never a lad near sometimes--never a lad who would

seize one of those little hands to smother it with kisses, and who

would persist in holding it, thereby sadly interfering with the

progress of your making? Was not your frail existence often put in

jeopardy by this same clumsy, headstrong lad, who would toss you

disrespectfully aside that he--not satisfied with one--might hold both

hands and gaze up into the loved eyes? I can see that lad now through

the haze of the flickering twilight. He is an eager bright-eyed boy,

with pinching, dandy shoes and tight-fitting smalls, snowy shirt frill

and stock, and--oh! such curly hair. A wild, light-hearted boy! Can

he be the great, grave gentleman upon whose stick I used to ride

crosslegged, the care-worn man into whose thoughtful face I used to

gaze with childish reverence and whom I used to call "father?" You

say "yes," old screen; but are you quite sure? It is a serious charge

you are bringing. Can it be possible? Did he have to kneel down in

those wonderful smalls and pick you up and rearrange you before he was

forgiven and his curly head smoothed by my mother's little hand? Ah!

old screen, and did the lads and the lassies go making love fifty

years ago just as they do now? Are men and women so unchanged? Did

little maidens' hearts beat the same under pearl-embroidered bodices

as they do under Mother Hubbard cloaks? Have steel casques and

chimney-pot hats made no difference to the brains that work beneath

them? Oh, Time! great Chronos! and is this your power? Have you

dried up seas and leveled mountains and left the tiny human

heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes! they were spun by a Mightier than

thou, and they stretch beyond your narrow ken, for their ends are made

fast in eternity. Ay, you may mow down the leaves and the blossoms,

but the roots of life lie too deep for your sickle to sever. You

refashion Nature's garments, but you cannot vary by a jot the

throbbings of her pulse. The world rolls round obedient to your laws,

but the heart of man is not of your kingdom, for in its birthplace "a

thousand years are but as yesterday."

I am getting away, though, I fear, from my "furnished apartments," and

I hardly know how to get back. But I have some excuse for my

meanderings this time. It is a piece of old furniture that has led me

astray, and fancies gather, somehow, round old furniture, like moss

around old stones. One's chairs and tables get to be almost part of

one's life and to seem like quiet friends. What strange tales the

wooden-headed old fellows could tell did they but choose to speak! At

what unsuspected comedies and tragedies have they not assisted! What

bitter tears have been sobbed into that old sofa cushion! What

passionate whisperings the settee must have overheard!

New furniture has no charms for me compared with old. It is the old

things that we love--the old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New

furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a

home. Not merely old in itself--lodging-house furniture generally is

that--but it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections.

The furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in

reality, is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get

on with it. As, too, in the case of all fresh acquaintances, whether

wooden or human (and there is very little difference between the two

species sometimes), everything impresses you with its worst aspect.

The knobby wood-work and shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair

suggest anything but ease. The mirror is smoky. The curtains want

washing. The carpet is frayed. The table looks as if it would go

over the instant anything was rested on it. The grate is cheerless,

the wall-paper hideous. The ceiling appears to have had coffee spilt

all over it, and the ornaments--well, they are worse than the

wallpaper.

There must surely be some special and secret manufactory for the

production of lodging-house ornaments. Precisely the same articles

are to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they

are never seen anywhere else. There are the two--what do you call

them? they stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where they are

never safe, and they are hung round with long triangular slips of

glass that clank against one another and make you nervous. In the

commoner class of rooms these works of art are supplemented by a

couple of pieces of china which might each be meant to represent a cow

sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of Diana at

Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you like to fancy. Somewhere

about the room you come across a bilious-looking object, which at

first you take to be a lump of dough left about by one of the

children, but which on scrutiny seems to resemble an underdone cupid.

This thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is a "sampler"

worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the

"Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly framed and

glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated,

or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.

You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the

rent is.

"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.

"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden

burst of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal in

excess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (a

still higher figure).

What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one

shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed

of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she

used to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young men

lodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class

than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have

had to live in an attic.

Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higher

you get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings. On

the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man

underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the

first floor.

A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.

Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and

the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one

time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its

deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will

tell truths that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the

world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and

Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets.

Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully

in them, sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon their

trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was,

inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his

youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a drunken, premature old

age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath

their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head

upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the

wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a

doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the

engineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were

reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.

No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of

acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to

the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its

art--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it

has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into

heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths

were flashed forth in the brilliant _salon_ amid the ripple of light

laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was

dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely

down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the

crowded street; and that to the daisied field--the heap that would

tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the

one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of

all--these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet

words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and

fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city

garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed

below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their

flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through

the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there,

from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their

thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.

Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and

turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them

fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there

to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their

hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass

them by, forgotten.

But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the

fabled phoenix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they

spit venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you

cannot seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can

lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and

call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded

wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and

jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a

hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and

civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his

voice.

As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as

residences they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and

down stairs connected with them to please me. It puts one

unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling

offers too many facilities for bumping your head and too few for

shaving. And the note of the tomcat as he sings to his love in the

stilly night outside on the tiles becomes positively distasteful when

heard so near.

No, for living in give me a suit of rooms on the first floor of a

Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let

me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of

the city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics.

There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease

and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull

murmur of the human tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the

narrow streets and lanes below. How small men seem, how like a swarm

of ants sweltering in endless confusion on their tiny hill! How petty

seems the work on which they are hurrying and skurrying! How

childishly they jostle against one another and turn to snarl and

scratch! They jabber and screech and curse, but their puny voices do

not reach up here. They fret, and fume, and rage, and pant, and die;

"but I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."

The most extraordinary attic I ever came across was one a friend and I

once shared many years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, from

Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that room was the most

eccentric. The architect who designed it must have been a genius,

though I cannot help thinking that his talents would have been better

employed in contriving puzzles than in shaping human habitations. No

figure in Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. It contained

seven corners, two of the walls sloped to a point, and the window was

just over the fireplace. The only possible position for the bedstead

was between the door and the cupboard. To get anything out of the

cupboard we had to scramble over the bed, and a large percentage of

the various commodities thus obtained was absorbed by the bedclothes.

Indeed, so many things were spilled and dropped upon the bed that

toward night-time it had become a sort of small cooperative store.

Coal was what it always had most in stock. We used to keep our coal

in the bottom part of the cupboard, and when any was wanted we had to

climb over the bed, fill a shovelful, and then crawl back. It was an

exciting moment when we reached the middle of the bed. We would hold

our breath, fix our eyes upon the shovel, and poise ourselves for the

last move. The next instant we, and the coals, and the shovel, and

the bed would be all mixed up together.

I've heard of the people going into raptures over beds of coal. We

slept in one every night and were not in the least stuck up about it.

But our attic, unique though it was, had by no means exhausted the

architect's sense of humor. The arrangement of the whole house was a

marvel of originality. All the doors opened outward, so that if any

one wanted to leave a room at the same moment that you were coming

downstairs it was unpleasant for you. There was no ground-floor--its

ground-floor belonged to a house in the next court, and the front door

opened direct upon a flight of stairs leading down to the cellar.

Visitors on entering the house would suddenly shoot past the person

who had answered the door to them and disappear down these stairs.

Those of a nervous temperament used to imagine that it was a trap laid

for them, and would shout murder as they lay on their backs at the

bottom till somebody came and picked them up.

It is a long time ago now that I last saw the inside of an attic. I

have tried various floors since but I have not found that they have

made much difference to me. Life tastes much the same, whether we

quaff it from a golden goblet or drink it out of a stone mug. The

hours come laden with the same mixture of joy and sorrow, no matter

where we wait for them. A waistcoat of broadcloth or of fustian is

alike to an aching heart, and we laugh no merrier on velvet cushions

than we did on wooden chairs. Often have I sighed in those

low-ceilinged rooms, yet disappointments have come neither less nor

lighter since I quitted them. Life works upon a compensating balance,

and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another. As our

means increase, so do our desires; and we ever stand midway between

the two. When we reside in an attic we enjoy a supper of fried fish

and stout. When we occupy the first floor it takes an elaborate

dinner at the Continental to give us the same amount of satisfaction.

ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT.

They say--people who ought to be ashamed of themselves do--that the

consciousness of being well dressed imparts a blissfulness to the

human heart that religion is powerless to bestow. I am afraid these

cynical persons are sometimes correct. I know that when I was a very

young man (many, many years ago, as the story-books say) and wanted

cheering up, I used to go and dress myself in all my best clothes. If

I had been annoyed in any manner--if my washerwoman had discharged me,

for instance; or my blank-verse poem had been returned for the tenth

time, with the editor's compliments "and regrets that owing to want of

space he is unable to avail himself of kind offer;" or I had been

snubbed by the woman I loved as man never loved before--by the way,

it's really extraordinary what a variety of ways of loving there must

be. We all do it as it was never done before. I don't know how our

great-grandchildren will manage. They will have to do it on their

heads by their time if they persist in not clashing with any previous

method.

Well, as I was saying, when these unpleasant sort of things happened

and I felt crushed, I put on all my best clothes and went out. It

brought back my vanishing self-esteem. In a glossy new hat and a pair

of trousers with a fold down the front (carefully preserved by keeping

them under the bed--I don't mean on the floor, you know, but between

the bed and the mattress), I felt I was somebody and that there were

other washerwomen: ay, and even other girls to love, and who would

perhaps appreciate a clever, good-looking young fellow. I didn't

care; that was my reckless way. I would make love to other maidens.

I felt that in those clothes I could do it.

They have a wonderful deal to do with courting, clothes have. It is

half the battle. At all events, the young man thinks so, and it

generally takes him a couple of hours to get himself up for the

occasion. His first half-hour is occupied in trying to decide whether

to wear his light suit with a cane and drab billycock, or his black

tails with a chimney-pot hat and his new umbrella. He is sure to be

unfortunate in either decision. If he wears his light suit and takes

the stick it comes on to rain, and he reaches the house in a damp and

muddy condition and spends the evening trying to hide his boots. If,

on the other hand, he decides in favor of the top hat and

umbrella--nobody would ever dream of going out in a top hat without an

umbrella; it would be like letting baby (bless it!) toddle out without

its nurse. How I do hate a top hat! One lasts me a very long while,

I can tell you. I only wear it when--well, never mind when I wear it.

It lasts me a very long while. I've had my present one five years.

It was rather old-fashioned last summer, but the shape has come round

again now and I look quite stylish.

But to return to our young man and his courting. If he starts off

with the top hat and umbrella the afternoon turns out fearfully hot,

and the perspiration takes all the soap out of his mustache and

converts the beautifully arranged curl over his forehead into a limp

wisp resembling a lump of seaweed. The Fates are never favorable to

the poor wretch. If he does by any chance reach the door in proper

condition, she has gone out with her cousin and won't be back till

late.

How a young lover made ridiculous by the gawkiness of modern costume

must envy the picturesque gallants of seventy years ago! Look at them

(on the Christmas cards), with their curly hair and natty hats, their

well-shaped legs incased in smalls, their dainty Hessian boots, their

ruffling frills, their canes and dangling seals. No wonder the little

maiden in the big poke-bonnet and the light-blue sash casts down her

eyes and is completely won. Men could win hearts in clothes like

that. But what can you expect from baggy trousers and a monkeyjacket?

Clothes have more effect upon us than we imagine. Our deportment

depends upon our dress. Make a man get into seedy, worn-out rags, and

he will skulk along with his head hanging down, like a man going out

to fetch his own supper beer. But deck out the same article in

gorgeous raiment and fine linen, and he will strut down the main

thoroughfare, swinging his cane and looking at the girls as perky as a

bantam cock.

Clothes alter our very nature. A man could not help being fierce and

daring with a plume in his bonnet, a dagger in his belt, and a lot of

puffy white things all down his sleeves. But in an ulster he wants to

get behind a lamp-post and call police.

I am quite ready to admit that you can find sterling merit, honest

worth, deep affection, and all such like virtues of the

roast-beef-and-plum-pudding school as much, and perhaps more, under

broadcloth and tweed as ever existed beneath silk and velvet; but the

spirit of that knightly chivalry that "rode a tilt for lady's love"

and "fought for lady's smiles" needs the clatter of steel and the

rustle of plumes to summon it from its grave between the dusty folds

of tapestry and underneath the musty leaves of moldering chronicles.

The world must be getting old, I think; it dresses so very soberly

now. We have been through the infant period of humanity, when we used

to run about with nothing on but a long, loose robe, and liked to have

our feet bare. And then came the rough, barbaric age, the boyhood of

our race. We didn't care what we wore then, but thought it nice to

tattoo ourselves all over, and we never did our hair. And after that

the world grew into a young man and became foppish. It decked itself

in flowing curls and scarlet doublets, and went courting, and

bragging, and bouncing--making a brave show.

But all those merry, foolish days of youth are gone, and we are very

sober, very solemn--and very stupid, some say--now. The world is a

grave, middle-aged gentleman in this nineteenth century, and would be

shocked to see itself with a bit of finery on. So it dresses in black

coats and trousers, and black hats, and black boots, and, dear me, it

is such a very respectable gentleman--to think it could ever have gone

gadding about as a troubadour or a knight-errant, dressed in all those

fancy colors! Ah, well! we are more sensible in this age.

Or at least we think ourselves so. It is a general theory nowadays

that sense and dullness go together.

Goodness is another quality that always goes with blackness. Very

good people indeed, you will notice, dress altogether in black, even

to gloves and neckties, and they will probably take to black shirts

before long. Medium goods indulge in light trousers on week-days, and

some of them even go so far as to wear fancy waistcoats. On the other

hand, people who care nothing for a future state go about in light

suits; and there have been known wretches so abandoned as to wear a

white hat. Such people, however, are never spoken of in genteel

society, and perhaps I ought not to have referred to them here.

By the way, talking of light suits, have you ever noticed how people

stare at you the first time you go out in a new light suit They do

not notice it so much afterward. The population of London have got

accustomed to it by the third time you wear it. I say "you," because

I am not speaking from my own experience. I do not wear such things

at all myself. As I said, only sinful people do so.

I wish, though, it were not so, and that one could be good, and

respectable, and sensible without making one's self a guy. I look in

the glass sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so picturesquely

rugged about the knees), my stand-up collar and billycock hat, and

wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then

wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good

and respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't

matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored tights, with red velvet

breeches and a green doublet slashed with yellow; to have a light-blue

silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume waving from my

hat, and a big sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing horse,

so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why

should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust-heap? Why

shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be

happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and

what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let

philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let

me be a butterfly.

Women, at all events, ought to dress prettily. It is their duty.

They are the flowers of the earth and were meant to show it up. We

abuse them a good deal, we men; but, goodness knows, the old world

would be dull enough without their dresses and fair faces. How they

brighten up every place they come into! What a sunny commotion

they--relations, of course---make in our dingy bachelor chambers! and

what a delightful litter their ribbons and laces, and gloves and hats,

and parasols and 'kerchiefs make! It is as if a wandering rainbow had

dropped in to pay us a visit.

It is one of the chief charms of the summer, to my mind, the way our

little maids come out in pretty colors. I like to see the pink and

blue and white glancing between the trees, dotting the green fields,

and flashing back the sunlight. You can see the bright colors such a

long way off. There are four white dresses climbing a hill in front

of my window now. I can see them distinctly, though it is three miles

away. I thought at first they were mile-stones out for a lark. It's

so nice to be able to see the darlings a long way off. Especially if

they happen to be your wife and your mother-in-law.

Talking of fields and mile-stones reminds me that I want to say, in

all seriousness, a few words about women's boots. The women of these

islands all wear boots too big for them. They can never get a boot to

fit. The bootmakers do not keep sizes small enough.

Over and over again have I known women sit down on the top rail of a

stile and declare they could not go a step further because their boots

hurt them so; and it has always been the same complaint--too big.

It is time this state of things was altered. In the name of the

husbands and fathers of England, I call upon the bootmakers to reform.

Our wives, our daughters, and our cousins are not to be lamed and

tortured with impunity. Why cannot "narrow twos" be kept more in

stock? That is the size I find most women take.

The waist-band is another item of feminine apparel that is always too

big. The dressmakers make these things so loose that the hooks and

eyes by which they are fastened burst off, every now and then, with a

report like thunder.

Why women suffer these wrongs--why they do not insist in having their

clothes made small enough for them I cannot conceive. It can hardly

be that they are disinclined to trouble themselves about matters of

mere dress, for dress is the one subject that they really do think

about. It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly interested in,

and they talk about it all day long. If you see two women together,

you may bet your bottom dollar they are discussing their own or their

friends' clothes. You notice a couple of child-like beings conversing

by a window, and you wonder what sweet, helpful words are falling from

their sainted lips. So you move nearer and then you hear one say:

"So I took in the waist-band and let out a seam, and it fits

beautifully now."

"Well," says the other, "I shall wear my plum-colored body to the

Jones', with a yellow plastron; and they've got some lovely gloves at

Puttick's, only one and eleven pence."

I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire once with a couple of

ladies. It was a beautiful bit of country, and they enjoyed

themselves immensely. They talked dressmaking the whole time.

"Pretty view, that," I would say, waving my umbrella round. "Look at

those blue distant hills! That little white speck, nestling in the

woods, is Chatsworth, and over there--"

"Yes, very pretty indeed," one would reply. "Well, why not get a yard

of sarsenet?"

"What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is?"

"Certainly. What place d'ye call this?"

Then I would draw their attention to the fresh beauties that kept

sweeping into view, and they would glance round and say "charming,"

"sweetly pretty," and immediately go off into raptures over each

other's pocket-handkerchiefs, and mourn with one another over the

decadence of cambric frilling.

I believe if two women were cast together upon a desert island, they

would spend each day arguing the respective merits of sea-shells and

birds' eggs considered as trimmings, and would have a new fashion in

fig-leaves every month.

Very young men think a good deal about clothes, but they don't talk

about them to each other. They would not find much encouragement. A

fop is not a favorite with his own sex. Indeed, he gets a good deal

more abuse from them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing and

it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has no foppery at twenty will

be a slatternly, dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A little

foppishness in a young man is good; it is human. I like to see a

young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the

whole world belonged to him. I don't like a modest, retiring man.

Nobody does--not really, however much they may prate about modest

worth and other things they do not understand.

A meek deportment is a great mistake in the world. Uriah Heap's

father was a very poor judge of human nature, or he would not have

told his son, as he did, that people liked humbleness. There is

nothing annoys them more, as a rule. Rows are half the fun of life,

and you can't have rows with humble, meek-answering individuals. They

turn away our wrath, and that is just what we do not want. We want to

let it out. We have worked ourselves up into a state of exhilarating

fury, and then just as we are anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous

set-to, they spoil all our plans with their exasperating humility.

Xantippe's life must have been one long misery, tied to that calmly

irritating man, Socrates. Fancy a married woman doomed to live on

from day to day without one single quarrel with her husband! A man

ought to humor his wife in these things.

Heaven knows their lives are dull enough, poor girls. They have none

of the enjoyments we have. They go to no political meetings; they may

not even belong to the local amateur parliament; they are excluded

from smoking-carriages on the Metropolitan Railway, and they never see

a comic paper--or if they do, they do not know it is comic: nobody

tells them.

Surely, with existence such a dreary blank for them as this, we might

provide a little row for their amusement now and then, even if we do

not feel inclined for it ourselves. A really sensible man does so and

is loved accordingly, for it is little acts of kindness such as this

that go straight to a woman's heart. It is such like proofs of loving

self-sacrifice that make her tell her female friends what a good

husband he was--after he is dead.

Yes, poor Xantippe must have had a hard time of it. The bucket

episode was particularly sad for her. Poor woman! she did think she

would rouse him up a bit with that. She had taken the trouble to fill

the bucket, perhaps been a long way to get specially dirty water. And

she waited for him. And then to be met in such a way, after all!

Most likely she sat down and had a good cry afterward. It must have

seemed all so hopeless to the poor child; and for all we know she had

no mother to whom she could go and abuse him.

What was it to her that her husband was a great philosopher? Great

philosophy don't count in married life.

There was a very good little boy once who wanted to go to sea. And

the captain asked him what he could do. He said he could do the

multiplication-table backward and paste sea-weed in a book; that he

knew how many times the word "begat" occurred in the Old Testament;

and could recite "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" and Wordsworth's

"We Are Seven."

"Werry good--werry good, indeed," said the man of the sea, "and ken ye

kerry coals?"

It is just the same when you want to marry. Great ability is not

required so much as little usefulness. Brains are at a discount in

the married state. There is no demand for them, no appreciation even.

Our wives sum us up according to a standard of their own, in which

brilliancy of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady and mistress is

not at all impressed by your cleverness and talent, my dear

reader--not in the slightest. Give her a man who can do an errand

neatly, without attempting to use his own judgment over it or any

nonsense of that kind; and who can be trusted to hold a child the

right way up, and not make himself objectionable whenever there is

lukewarm mutton for dinner. That is the sort of a husband a sensible

woman likes; not one of your scientific or literary nuisances, who go

upsetting the whole house and putting everybody out with their

foolishness.

ON MEMORY.

"I remember, I remember,

In the days of chill November,

How the blackbird on the--"

I forget the rest. It is the beginning of the first piece of poetry I

ever learned; for

"Hey, diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,"

I take no note of, it being of a frivolous character and lacking in

the qualities of true poetry. I collected fourpence by the recital of

"I remember, I remember." I knew it was fourpence, because they told

me that if I kept it until I got twopence more I should have sixpence,

which argument, albeit undeniable, moved me not, and the money was

squandered, to the best of my recollection, on the very next morning,

although upon what memory is a blank.

That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is

complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I

remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I

have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if

memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I

was there still.

At another time--some years later--I was assisting at an exceedingly

interesting love scene; but the only thing about it I can call to mind

distinctly is that at the most critical moment somebody suddenly

opened the door and said, "Emily, you're wanted," in a sepulchral tone

that gave one the idea the police had come for her. All the tender

words she said to me and all the beautiful things I said to her are

utterly forgotten.

Life altogether is but a crumbling ruin when we turn to look behind:

a shattered column here, where a massive portal stood; the broken

shaft of a window to mark my lady's bower; and a moldering heap of

blackened stones where the glowing flames once leaped, and over all

the tinted lichen and the ivy clinging green.

For everything looms pleasant through the softening haze of time.

Even the sadness that is past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very

merry to us now, all nutting, hoop, and gingerbread. The snubbings

and toothaches and the Latin verbs are all forgotten--the Latin verbs

especially. And we fancy we were very happy when we were hobbledehoys

and loved; and we wish that we could love again. We never think of

the heartaches, or the sleepless nights, or the hot dryness of our

throats, when she said she could never be anything to us but a

sister--as if any man wanted more sisters!

Yes, it is the brightness, not the darkness, that we see when we look

back. The sunshine casts no shadows on the past. The road that we

have traversed stretches very fair behind us. We see not the sharp

stones. We dwell but on the roses by the wayside, and the strong

briers that stung us are, to our distant eyes, but gentle tendrils

waving in the wind. God be thanked that it is so--that the

ever-lengthening chain of memory has only pleasant links, and that the

bitterness and sorrow of to-day are smiled at on the morrow.

It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its

highest and best, so that as our little lives sink back behind us into

the dark sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and the

most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands above the waters, long

in sight, when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep

below the waves and trouble us no more.

It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that makes old folk talk so

much nonsense about the days when they were young. The world appears

to have been a very superior sort of place then, and things were more

like what they ought to be. Boys were boys then, and girls were very

different. Also winters were something like winters, and summers not

at all the wretched-things we get put off with nowadays. As for the

wonderful deeds people did in those times and the extraordinary events

that happened, it takes three strong men to believe half of them.

I like to hear one of the old boys telling all about it to a party of

youngsters who he knows cannot contradict him. It is odd if, after

awhile, he doesn't swear that the moon shone every night when he was a

boy, and that tossing mad bulls in a blanket was the favorite sport at

his school.

It always has been and always will be the same. The old folk of our

grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden;

and the young folk of to-day will drone out precisely similar nonsense

for the aggravation of the next generation. "Oh, give me back the

good old days of fifty years ago," has been the cry ever since Adam's

fifty-first birthday. Take up the literature of 1835, and you will

find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as

did the German Minnesingers long before them and the old Norse Saga

writers long before that. And for the same thing sighed the early

prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece. From all accounts,

the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created.

All I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place

when it was first opened to the public, for it is very pleasant even

now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the

rain good-temperedly.

Yet there is no gainsaying but that it must have been somewhat sweeter

in that dewy morning of creation, when it was young and fresh, when

the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust,

nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away.

Life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed

fathers of the human race, walking hand in hand with God under the

great sky. They lived in sunkissed tents amid the lowing herds. They

took their simple wants from the loving hand of Nature. They toiled

and talked and thought; and the great earth rolled around in

stillness, not yet laden with trouble and wrong.

Those days are past now. The quiet childhood of Humanity, spent in

the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers, is gone

forever; and human life is deepening down to manhood amid tumult,

doubt, and hope. Its age of restful peace is past. It has its work

to finish and must hasten on. What that work may be--what this

world's share is in the great design--we know not, though our

unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it. Like the tiny coral

insect working deep under the dark waters, we strive and struggle each

for our own little ends, nor dream of the vast fabric we are building

up for God.

Let us have done with vain regrets and longings for the days that

never will be ours again. Our work lies in front, not behind us; and

"Forward!" is our motto. Let us not sit with folded hands, gazing

upon the past as if it were the building; it is but the foundation.

Let us not waste heart and life thinking of what might have been and

forgetting the may be that lies before us. Opportunities flit by

while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness

that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.

Years ago, when I used to wander of an evening from the fireside to

the pleasant land of fairy-tales, I met a doughty knight and true.

Many dangers had he overcome, in many lands had been; and all men knew

him for a brave and well-tried knight, and one that knew not fear;

except, maybe, upon such seasons when even a brave man might feel

afraid and yet not be ashamed. Now, as this knight one day was

pricking wearily along a toilsome road, his heart misgave him and was

sore within him because of the trouble of the way. Rocks, dark and of

a monstrous size, hung high above his head, and like enough it seemed

unto the knight that they should fall and he lie low beneath them.

Chasms there were on either side, and darksome caves wherein fierce

robbers lived, and dragons, very terrible, whose jaws dripped blood.

And upon the road there hung a darkness as of night. So it came over

that good knight that he would no more press forward, but seek another

road, less grievously beset with difficulty unto his gentle steed.

But when in haste he turned and looked behind, much marveled our brave

knight, for lo! of all the way that he had ridden there was naught for

eye to see; but at his horse's heels there yawned a mighty gulf,

whereof no man might ever spy the bottom, so deep was that same gulf.

Then when Sir Ghelent saw that of going back there was none, he prayed

to good Saint Cuthbert, and setting spurs into his steed rode forward

bravely and most joyously. And naught harmed him.

There is no returning on the road of life. The frail bridge of time

on which we tread sinks back into eternity at every step we take. The

past is gone from us forever. It is gathered in and garnered. It

belongs to us no more. No single word can ever be unspoken; no single

step retraced. Therefore it beseems us as true knights to prick on

bravely, not idly weep because we cannot now recall.

A new life begins for us with every second. Let us go forward

joyously to meet it. We must press on whether we will or no, and we

shall walk better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast

behind.

A friend came to me the other day and urged me very eloquently to

learn some wonderful system by which you never forgot anything. I

don't know why he was so eager on the subject, unless it be that I

occasionally borrow an umbrella and have a knack of coming out, in the

middle of a game of whist, with a mild "Lor! I've been thinking all

along that clubs were trumps." I declined the suggestion, however, in

spite of the advantages he so attractively set forth. I have no wish

to remember everything. There are many things in most men's lives

that had better be forgotten. There is that time, many years ago,

when we did not act quite as honorably, quite as uprightly, as we

perhaps should have done--that unfortunate deviation from the path of

strict probity we once committed, and in which, more unfortunate

still, we were found out--that act of folly, of meanness, of wrong.

Ah, well! we paid the penalty, suffered the maddening hours of vain

remorse, the hot agony of shame, the scorn, perhaps, of those we

loved. Let us forget. Oh, Father Time, lift with your kindly hands

those bitter memories from off our overburdened hearts, for griefs are

ever coming to us with the coming hours, and our little strength is

only as the day.

Not that the past should be buried. The music of life would be mute

if the chords of memory were snapped asunder. It is but the poisonous

weeds, not the flowers, that we should root out from the garden of

Mnemosyne. Do you remember Dickens' "Haunted Man"--how he prayed for

forgetfulness, and how, when his prayer was answered, he prayed for

memory once more? We do not want all the ghosts laid. It is only the

haggard, cruel-eyed specters that we flee from. Let the gentle,

kindly phantoms haunt us as they will; we are not afraid of them.

Ah me! the world grows very full of ghosts as we grow older. We need

not seek in dismal church-yards nor sleep in moated granges to see the

shadowy faces and hear the rustling of their garments in the night.

Every house, every room, every creaking chair has its own particular

ghost. They haunt the empty chambers of our lives, they throng around

us like dead leaves whirled in the autumn wind. Some are living, some

are dead. We know not. We clasped their hands once, loved them,

quarreled with them, laughed with them, told them our thoughts and

hopes and aims, as they told us theirs, till it seemed our very hearts

had joined in a grip that would defy the puny power of Death. They

are gone now; lost to us forever. Their eyes will never look into

ours again and their voices we shall never hear. Only their ghosts

come to us and talk with us. We see them, dim and shadowy, through

our tears. We stretch our yearning hands to them, but they are air.

Ghosts! They are with us night and day. They walk beside us in the

busy street under the glare of the sun. They sit by us in the

twilight at home. We see their little faces looking from the windows

of the old school-house. We meet them in the woods and lanes where we

shouted and played as boys. Hark! cannot you hear their low laughter

from behind the blackberry-bushes and their distant whoops along the

grassy glades? Down here, through the quiet fields and by the wood,

where the evening shadows are lurking, winds the path where we used to

watch for her at sunset. Look, she is there now, in the dainty white

frock we knew so well, with the big bonnet dangling from her little

hands and the sunny brown hair all tangled. Five thousand miles away!

Dead for all we know! What of that? She is beside us now, and we can

look into her laughing eyes and hear her voice. She will vanish at

the stile by the wood and we shall be alone; and the shadows will

creep out across the fields and the night wind will sweep past

moaning. Ghosts! they are always with us and always will be while the

sad old world keeps echoing to the sob of long good-bys, while the

cruel ships sail away across the great seas, and the cold green earth

lies heavy on the hearts of those we loved.

But, oh, ghosts, the world would be sadder still without you. Come to

us and speak to us, oh you ghosts of our old loves! Ghosts of

playmates, and of sweethearts, and old friends, of all you laughing

boys and girls, oh, come to us and be with us, for the world is very

lonely, and new friends and faces are not like the old, and we cannot

love them, nay, nor laugh with them as we have loved and laughed with

you. And when we walked together, oh, ghosts of our youth, the world

was very gay and bright; but now it has grown old and we are growing

weary, and only you can bring the brightness and the freshness back to

us.

Memory is a rare ghost-raiser. Like a haunted house, its walls are

ever echoing to unseen feet. Through the broken casements we watch

the flitting shadows of the dead, and the saddest shadows of them all

are the shadows of our own dead selves.

Oh, those young bright faces, so full of truth and honor, of pure,

good thoughts, of noble longings, how reproachfully they look upon us

with their deep, clear eyes!

I fear they have good cause for their sorrow, poor lads. Lies and

cunning and disbelief have crept into our hearts since those

preshaving days--and we meant to be so great and good.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of

fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

I like to sit and have a talk sometimes with that odd little chap that

was myself long ago. I think he likes it too, for he comes so often

of an evening when I am alone with my pipe, listening to the

whispering of the flames. I see his solemn little face looking at me

through the scented smoke as it floats upward, and I smile at him; and

he smiles back at me, but his is such a grave, old-fashioned smile.

We chat about old times; and now and then he takes me by the hand, and

then we slip through the black bars of the grate and down the dusky

glowing caves to the land that lies behind the firelight. There we

find the days that used to be, and we wander along them together. He

tells me as we walk all he thinks and feels. I laugh at him now and

then, but the next moment I wish I had not, for he looks so grave I am

ashamed of being frivolous. Besides, it is not showing proper respect

to one so much older than myself--to one who was myself so very long

before I became myself.

We don't talk much at first, but look at one another; I down at his

curly hair and little blue bow, he up sideways at me as he trots. And

some-how I fancy the shy, round eyes do not altogether approve of me,

and he heaves a little sigh, as though he were disappointed. But

after awhile his bashfulness wears off and he begins to chat. He

tells me his favorite fairy-tales, he can do up to six times, and he

has a guinea-pig, and pa says fairy-tales ain't true; and isn't it a

pity? 'cos he would so like to be a knight and fight a dragon and

marry a beautiful princess. But he takes a more practical view of

life when he reaches seven, and would prefer to grow up be a bargee,

and earn a lot of money. Maybe this is the consequence of falling in

love, which he does about this time with the young lady at the milk

shop aet. six. (God bless her little ever-dancing feet, whatever size

they may be now!) He must be very fond of her, for he gives her one

day his chiefest treasure, to wit, a huge pocket-knife with four rusty

blades and a corkscrew, which latter has a knack of working itself out

in some mysterious manner and sticking into its owner's leg. She is

an affectionate little thing, and she throws her arms round his neck

and kisses him for it, then and there, outside the shop. But the

stupid world (in the person of the boy at the cigar emporium next

door) jeers at such tokens of love. Whereupon my young friend very

properly prepares to punch the head of the boy at the cigar emporium

next door; but fails in the attempt, the boy at the cigar emporium

next door punching his instead.

And then comes school life, with its bitter little sorrows and its

joyous shoutings, its jolly larks, and its hot tears falling on

beastly Latin grammars and silly old copy-books. It is at school that

he injures himself for life--as I firmly believe--trying to pronounce

German; and it is there, too, that he learns of the importance

attached by the French nation to pens, ink, and paper. "Have you

pens, ink, and paper?" is the first question asked by one Frenchman of

another on their meeting. The other fellow has not any of them, as a

rule, but says that the uncle of his brother has got them all three.

The first fellow doesn't appear to care a hang about the uncle of the

other fellow's brother; what he wants to know now is, has the neighbor

of the other fellow's mother got 'em? "The neighbor of my mother has

no pens, no ink, and no paper," replies the other man, beginning to

get wild. "Has the child of thy female gardener some pens, some ink,

or some paper?" He has him there. After worrying enough about these

wretched inks, pens, and paper to make everybody miserable, it turns

out that the child of his own female gardener hasn't any. Such a

discovery would shut up any one but a French exercise man. It has no

effect at all, though, on this shameless creature. He never thinks of

apologizing, but says his aunt has some mustard.

So in the acquisition of more or less useless knowledge, soon happily

to be forgotten, boyhood passes away. The red-brick school-house

fades from view, and we turn down into the world's high-road. My

little friend is no longer little now. The short jacket has sprouted

tails. The battered cap, so useful as a combination of

pocket-handkerchief, drinking-cup, and weapon of attack, has grown

high and glossy; and instead of a slate-pencil in his mouth there is a

cigarette, the smoke of which troubles him, for it will get up his

nose. He tries a cigar a little later on as being more stylish--a big

black Havanna. It doesn't seem altogether to agree with him, for I

find him sitting over a bucket in the back kitchen afterward, solemnly

swearing never to smoke again.

And now his mustache begins to be almost visible to the naked eye,

whereupon he immediately takes to brandy-and-sodas and fancies himself

a man. He talks about "two to one against the favorite," refers to

actresses as "Little Emmy" and "Kate" and "Baby," and murmurs about

his "losses at cards the other night" in a style implying that

thousands have been squandered, though, to do him justice, the actual

amount is most probably one-and-twopence. Also, if I see aright--for

it is always twilight in this land of memories--he sticks an eyeglass

in his eye and stumbles over everything.

His female relations, much troubled at these things, pray for him

(bless their gentle hearts!) and see visions of Old Bailey trials and

halters as the only possible outcome of such reckless dissipation; and

the prediction of his first school-master, that he would come to a bad

end, assumes the proportions of inspired prophecy.

He has a lordly contempt at this age for the other sex, a blatantly

good opinion of himself, and a sociably patronizing manner toward all

the elderly male friends of the family. Altogether, it must be

confessed, he is somewhat of a nuisance about this time.

It does not last long, though. He falls in love in a little while,

and that soon takes the bounce out of him. I notice his boots are

much too small for him now, and his hair is fearfully and wonderfully

arranged. He reads poetry more than he used, and he keeps a rhyming

dictionary in his bedroom. Every morning Emily Jane finds scraps of

torn-up paper on the floor and reads thereon of "cruel hearts and

love's deep darts," of "beauteous eyes and lovers' sighs," and much

more of the old, old song that lads so love to sing and lassies love

to listen to while giving their dainty heads a toss and pretending

never to hear.

The course of love, however, seems not to have run smoothly, for later

on he takes more walking exercise and less sleep, poor boy, than is

good for him; and his face is suggestive of anything but wedding-bells

and happiness ever after.

And here he seems to vanish. The little, boyish self that has grown

up beside me as we walked is gone.

I am alone and the road is very dark. I stumble on, I know not how

nor care, for the way seems leading nowhere, and there is no light to

guide.

But at last the morning comes, and I find that I have grown into

myself.

THE END.

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