Household words, no. 307, February 9, 1856
Author: Unknown
Date: 2025-06-26T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English literature -- Periodicals

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, no. 307, February 9, 1856

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Title: Household words, no. 307, February 9, 1856

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: June 26, 2025 [eBook #76386]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Office, 1856

Credits: Ed Foster and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 307, FEBRUARY 9, 1856 ***

“Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”—Shakespeare.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1856. No. 307.] Price 2d. Stamped 3d.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THE SULINA MOUTH OF THE DANUBE.

DAY-WORKERS AT HOME.

TWO COLLEGE FRIENDS.

SORROW AND MY HEART.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH STAFF OFFICERS.

CHIPS.

LITTLE SAINT ZITA.

THE SULINA MOUTH OF THE DANUBE.

It was November, and the morrow of our arrival at Sulina dawned a dreary, sunless day, rather cold. We spent it waiting for the boat, which was due from Constantinople. Our pilot, however, surmised that there had been bad weather for many days in the Black Sea, and that no captain in the service of the Austrian Lloyd’s would have ventured to pass the Bosphorus while it lasted. The pilot was a dark, sharp-featured, timorous Greek, of about forty years of age. His name was Birbantaki, a name of high account in every port of the Euxine.

So the long and the short Austrian officer—part of our company from Galatz[1]—very sensibly went out snipe-shooting. They were joined by the Greek consul; who, having no house here, is living on board one of the Danube Company’s vessels, called the Metternich. That consul is driving a very brisk business; for, from the masts of six hundred of the thousand ships detained here by stress of weather, fluttered the gay colours of King Otho. Also, with the shooting-party, goes the agent of the Lloyd Company; a pleasant and influential gentleman, very popular about here. It is said he had five thousand pounds’ worth of property—the hard savings of many thrifty years—destroyed by us. If this be true I shall be surprised to learn it is considered by the authorities as one of the inevitable private wrongs which are wrought by all wars. I cannot quite admit such reasoning, however; for surely, this person is as much entitled to a fair indemnity for the loss of his property, as were the owners of the British merchantman destroyed by the Russians at Sinope. By the way, also, what with Count Zamoïski and Colonel Turr, as well as such little episodes as the agent’s affair, have we not been playing a very strange little game with Austria? Not to put too fine a point upon it, may I be bold enough to hint that we have been soliciting her alliance while slyly tweaking her nose? I wish, sometimes, that our good folks in authority had taken riper counsel in these matters; for we have made many needless and many very bitter enmities. When the shooting party return, therefore, I am not at all surprised to see a Russian officer with them. He is a common-looking-man; awkward, dirty, and, seemingly, of no social importance; but, as he comes on board, two Levantines seize eagerly on an opportunity of offering a loud insult to an Englishman, and then strut, blustering and bowing to the Muscovite, after the manner of their kind.

[1] See “The Show Officer,” page 23, of the present volume.

Mechanically marking these things, and hearing that there was no chance of our departure that day, I determined to go on shore, and visit all that avenging fires have left of Sulina. In truth, our prospect from the steamer was not very cheering. A large timber raft lay alongside us, with a log hut upon it; where its mouldy, amphibious guardians lived. They appeared to be always drying the same pair of calico drawers, on the same stick. Round and round this raft constantly paddled a froggy-looking fellow, seated in a small canoe roughly hewn out of the trunk of a tree. His business was to see that none of the timber drifted away, or was stolen. He was also employed as a sort of messenger, going to and fro among the ships. He used his single paddle—shaped something like a spade—with great skill. Our chief occupation was drowsily watching him. We saw also flocks of wild fowl in great numbers, flying almost out of sight in the air, and a few gulls, which perched, from time to time, about our rigging in the most friendly manner. The only objects of interest were a few Russian boats, fluttering about the harbour. In them sat Cossacks with hessian boots, red breeches, and small red turban-shaped peak-less caps. They were the rude troops of the frontier; clumsy, leaden-faced fellows, who seem to have grown bloated and unhealthy in the air of the marshes. I was glad to land, if only for a change.

Sulina is a wretched place. Russia has ruined it, to build up the trade of Odessa; although it is naturally, perhaps, one of the happiest commercial sites in the world—the natural outlet of Germany and the rich corn-lands of the Principalities. So, the shore, which should be splendid with merchant palaces and populous with busy men from every nation, has been purposely rendered the very abomination of desolation. I say purposely, giving ear to a report current among all sailors in these seas. When the Russian government was reproached with a direct breach of faith in virtually blockading the mouth of the Danube during nine months of the year, they took their own way of clearing themselves from the imputation. It was eminently Russian. A great fuss was made: men and machines were furiously employed to remove the obstructions; but everything that was cleared out on one day, was scrupulously replaced on the next.

The state of the Sulina mouth of the Danube therefore, remains a most notable scandal. Vessels can only get over the bar when lightened of their cargoes, and are subject to all manner of official hindrance and fiscal extortion. They are sometimes detained a whole winter, to the serious loss of owners, to the stoppage of trade, to the increase of the price of food; also to the grave injury of the Moldo-Wallachian ports of Galatz and Ibraila, and the comparative ruin of the navigation of the whole Danube. Wrecks are awfully numerous; the loss of life, appalling, as I had after opportunities of observing.

Sulina is, at this time, a miserable collection of huts hastily run up to meet the pressing exigencies of the moment, being mere temporary erections of dried reeds. Their interiors—of which I visited several—presented no incorrect idea of the very extreme of discomfort in this raw damp climate. In some huts were haggard grisly men asleep, after an ague fit; and withered women, like the dried figs of a bad season with respect to personal appearance, cowering over their smoky fires, and grumbling as they cooked their unsavoury meals, or tore damp sticks for fuel. They had seldom any furniture besides an earthenware pan, or a black pot to stew their food. They had also generally a mat of rushes, dried or undried as the case might be, to sleep on; and they made fires on the bare earth outside their hovels. The central streets—mere muddy lanes—were choked up with sailors; among them, plenty of bad truculent Greeks from the Pirate Islands, seated before the doors of dram booths, gambling with filthy cards, and swearing canting oaths in the pauses of their sneaking debauch. On the face of each skulking rake the stamp of scoundrel was branded, so plainly that a child might read it. It is a pity that we know these rascals too well, to connect one pleasant thought with their fine features and pretty dresses.

These, perhaps, were some of the selfsame revellers who lurked about the seas as buccaneers at the beginning of the war, armed to the teeth, and who bore down one night upon a British merchant ship becalmed; who stabbed the watch; then cut the throats of the sleeping crew; then played ghastly tricks to their mangled remains; then plundered the vessel, and then departed. The ship drifted with her dreadful burden over the beautiful waters of the Ægean, where she was found, some hours afterwards by a man-of-war’s boat, which put off, irate at having hoisted signals to the death-laden bark in vain!

From the open doors of other booths and hovels I heard nasal droning songs, the uncouth sounds of rude instruments, and the shrill tones of wrangling women of no good repute. Here, also, were a crowd of Maltese and Ionians, who bring our name into discredit wherever they are known. Lounging groups of superstitious mariners of the Adriatic added their lazy figures to the heterogeneous mass—a wild company; amongst whom it is never prudent to venture; for their knives gleam on small pretence; and their victims are never heard of more. Human life is held of a strange cheapness by these miscreants, and the law is powerless.

Towards sundown, I returned to the ship; and, after dinner, as the evening closed quite in, a wandering Italian boy came on board. He was one of those itinerant musicians who roam over every country in the world; gathering up a little hoard with many a stern, unchronicled act of self-denial, and passing bitter days enough, poor lads, Heaven help them! This specimen had a hurdygurdy, an ivory whistle, and a rich impudent voice, with which he trolled forth a number of those ballads popular in the Austrian and Neapolitan sea-ports. They were mostly in the form of a dialogue between a young sailor sweetheart, a girl, and her mother, on the old subject of love and ruse, of which the salt is savoured among the people of every land, and the fresh, lively charm is felt from pole to pole. At the end of each verse the singer always lingered on the last note with an arch relish; and, carrying it on through his whistle, trilled out a sparkling impromptu chorus, which had a world of droll life and inuendo in it. Some of the airs he whistled had a dashing, seafaring pathos, quite captivating; and we fairly lay back and had a laugh at his roguish jests, as pleasant and refreshing as is awakened by the airy couplets of a French vaudeville. Yet those ballads seemed to speak aside to me, with a touching and eloquent plea for a race whose children have been taught to solace their captivity with songs, till they have mercifully learned a wondrous cunning in them; and who (knowing that their hopes are a coin with which they can buy but shadows) have courted oblivion so long, that they have found all beauty, freedom, heart-food, their brightest, quickest life, within a dream.

It was very pretty and affecting to see our captain and his wife—a lady from Ragusa—exchange bashful smiles and tell-tale glances, as they both listened to some song which, perhaps revealed their own story, and invested it with the fascination of a romance. Once, the volatile sailor was so moved, by an uncontrollable impulse, that he seized his wife round the waist, and whirled her off in a waltz. It was a fine tribute to the untaught craft of the singer, whose eyes lighted up with a minstrel fire, and his feet beat time as he watched them. When the captain stopped for want of breath, it was but polite to make a bow, and offer to take the lady round and round again; for there she stood, offering irresistible invitation, with foot advanced. Then the other women began to stand up; while the dark-eyed gypsies from Galicia grouped naturally round the dancers in picturesque attitudes, and looked on. So we had quite a little ball.

At nine o’clock the trumpets sounded from an Austrian man-of-war on the station, and the report of a solitary cannon boomed over the sulky waters. After this, the officers went away, and our little festival terminated.

So ended the first day we lay in the port of Sulina; and I noticed, as night came on, that the moon looked veiled and misty; also that light feathery clouds were flitting about in an unsettled way, as if the sky were troubled. About eleven o’clock we heard the wind rising. At first a few sobbing gusts reached us, at intervals, as if they came from afar off, but making our spars rattle, and our cordage whip the masts. I could see also, before I turned in, that the sailing-vessels in the offing had made all taut and trim, and had lowered their yards for rough weather; but the steamers got their steam up and went out to sea. From time to time during the night we heard the mournful sound of distress guns to windward, and now and then a majestic hulk drifted labouring towards us. The winds and the sea-gulls seemed to whoop in derision around her, and the waves reared their heads triumphant and rejoicing.

It was an awful storm. The sea was everywhere convulsed with a pitiless wrath, and the white foam flashed proud and high, as wave rushed upon wave in passionate strife. Of the fifteen sail riding yesterday at anchor yonder, nine broke from their cables, and three lay wrecked in sight of us. Though we were within the bar, our captain was roused thrice during the night, and the voices of our crew sounded in alarm through the darkness; for we were wedged in by shipping, and ever and again some vessel was driven furiously against us by the might of the elements; our vessel danced and rolled like a child’s toy, even in its sheltered place. Our gaunt lean sailors ran to and fro, yelping fears at every fresh collision, and muttering hasty prayers to the Virgin; Jews gasped and gabbled to themselves, clutching the handles of their sea-chests, and keeping always a wary eye upon them; but some Turks who were with us, sat calmly smoking through it all, uttering no sound but “God is great.”

Below, in the cabin were the Christian ladies pale and terrified, and huddled altogether on the sofa by the fire-place. Near them boozed a gang of sharpers, whom no dread or danger could drag from the gambling-table. Their blasphemy and hot disputes mingled with the storm. Perhaps, however, they were impressed equally with us according to their differing natures, by the grand horror of the scene. Let no man judge the depth of another’s feeling by the mode of its expression.

The sky above us was the true old leaden grey Crimean colour, which canopied our sickening armies before Sebastopol last winter. There was a partial fog over the land. On such a sky looked the helpless crew of the fated Prince, when her machinery refused to work, and they were dashed against the iron heights of Balaclava. It was such a fog which closed round gallant Giffard when the Tiger stranded, and he could only flash back a hopeless defiance to the Russian guns. On this low gloomy shore, too—over which the sea-birds swoop and scream so ominously—dwelt the last dying glance of the young and chivalrous Parker.

The gale lasted for three days, raging every hour more rudely. The third day, towards evening, a rain, fine as dust, mingled with the wind. At night the rain changed to snow, and the cold increased. Then we had a fall of mingled rain and snow. The wind abated a little towards morning: but, before noon, there came a perfect hurricane with rain and snow very fierce. The small snow-flakes were whisked about by the wind with incredible violence.

Again we counted the work of the night, and numbered five wrecks. A crowd of Cossacks, assembled round the devoted vessels, were trying to seize two swollen corpses with grappling hooks. As the drowned bodies, however, obviously did not belong to any of the wrecks we saw, they had probably floated to us from some scene of disaster elsewhere. It was a ghastly thing to see the breakers twirling and tossing about them so scornfully. God’s images, who, a few days, or perhaps hours, before, had been like unto ourselves.

Of the wrecked ships the crew of one perished: all hands on board the rest were saved. At night we saw another fated vessel going to inevitable destruction; then the darkness hid her. When morning broke she was among the breakers; but, out of the reach of help, and they swept disdainfully over her shrieking decks. The miserable crew clung wildly on to spar and mast, no boat venturing out to save them. We saw the hungry waves sweep on towards them with a hoarse cry; the keen ice wind palsying their strength. They were, poor fellows, carried away one by one. Their contortions were horrible. They writhed, and twisted, and grappled on to anything they could seize, with despairing energy. For a little while their shrill screams rose even over the cry of the elements,—then all was still. Six only of the crew were saved. These, springing into a boat, dropped over before she struck, and had been carried as witnesses of Almighty mercy, miraculously to land.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth day, the sun peeped coyly and ashamed at us, once or twice. Then came the windgusts again, like the tumultuous sobs of a grief not yet subsided, and the sun was veiled again, and the storm howled on as before.

Something deserving of notice was that, all the time the hurricane lasted, a broad streak of sky was distinctly visible towards the east. It never grew larger or smaller, and its promise of fine weather was altogether illusory.

We lay fifteen days at the Port of Sulina. At length our wine was exhausted, and even our provisions ran short; for the bakers lazily refused to bake us any bread, though the captain himself went to parley with them. We got a little stringy fresh meat now and then, with sometimes a fresh fish; but we lived chiefly on raw ham and ship’s biscuits. The steward—a plump, tight, rich-complexioned Sancho Panza, with sleek black hair and small roguish eyes—having the distribution of these delicacies, became a man of importance, and found it a very good business. Our fore-cabin passengers suffered severely. They watched us of the after cabin with famished and hateful looks as we went down to dinner; for their own meals were infinitely more scanty than ours. The small supply of orthodox food which the Jews also had brought with them being nearly exhausted, the Greeks, who have a traditional hatred of the chosen people, taunted them with offers of pork. It was at once ludicrous and pathetic to see the feverish trembling indignation, and hear the odd anathemas with which the children of Israel garrulously replied.

Upon the whole, our position was not so cheerful and exhilarating as might have been desired by persons fond of comfort and gaiety. To make it the less inviting, cholera gadded about the neighbourhood with great activity, and did not contribute materially to raise our spirits, nor increase our current fund of pleasing anecdote. A guest of our captain, in sound health and with a noticeable appetite, came and sat with us at dinner one day. On the next day we asked whether he was coming to dinner again, and we were told he was buried. One of our passengers died at breakfast in the midst of us. Moreover, it was an awful sort of thing to wake in the small hours of the night and hear a man in the next cabin bemoaning his crimes in a strange tongue; calling on the saints for mercy, under an impression (likely enough to be true) that he was attacked by the swift destroyer, and was hastening with panic-stricken steps on his journey to another world.

Therefore I was truly thankful when the wind at last abated. It was sometime, however, even then, before our troubles were over; for there was such a heavy swell that no boat, with sail or oar, dared venture to convey us from one steamer to the other. A steam-tug would have done our business in half an hour; but there was no steam-tug.

It was not until the seventeenth day after our arrival that we were at length delivered from durance. The sea having then grown calmer (though still running very high) we fired a gun and hoisted signals for the packet that was to convey us to Constantinople, and which had returned to her anchorage. So she stood nearer in towards us about mid-day; then one half of the passengers who had left Galatz with us, nearly three weeks before, on urgent business, returned whence they came, having missed their opportunities. The others—I among the number—went over the bar.

It was a hazardous trip. Our boatmen charged us eighteen ducats, or about nine pounds; every man in it fairly staking his life against our money. It was a large boat and well manned; but it shook and trembled on the waters at the mouth of the river, as if it had been a cockleshell. Once we were carried quite round, and I made up my mind to swim for it, if I should lose my grasp on the boat when she turned over. She righted again, however, and went rearing and pitching forward for some hundred yards till the danger was over. Not a week before, a boat with fifteen souls in it had gone down in the very spot where we met and escaped that peril.

No one knows how long the present infamous condition of the Sulina mouth of the Danube may last; for few, I am sorry to say, seem seriously to interest themselves in such questions. I have written this paper, therefore; not to amuse an idle hour, but with a solemn and earnest hope that it may be the means of calling general attention to a matter of European importance. I have rather understated the case than overstated it; having omitted many things which might have added to the interest of the description, lest any word should creep in that might appear fanciful or exaggerated; for I know that a public writer, who would render any real service to mankind, must simply abide by indisputable facts.

Let me add, then, that, although it is but a very few weeks ago I was on the scene I have endeavoured to describe, I learn by the French papers that no less than sixty vessels have been wrecked since then, and that three hundred human lives have been lost off the Sulina Mouth. I have not dared to trifle with the sympathies of the public in this matter. I have honestly made a plain statement, and venture, with respectful importunity, to press it on their attention. We have taken upon ourselves a grave responsibility in these countries, and whenever Peace is discussed, it behoves us to be mindful of it, so that not in vain and as to a heedless people may have been confided in trust to our generation that immense inheritance—the Empire of the Seas.

DAY-WORKERS AT HOME.

There are two classes of milliners’ girls. In the first class are those who live in the house at which they work, receiving for their labour board, what passes for lodging, and as much pay as a governess—a sum that may be twelve or twenty pounds, or may be even four times that amount, per annum. Girls in this class are stimulated by some prospect of promotion: they may live to be forewomen, or to have shops of their own. The second class consists of day-workers, who go to the milliners, at eight in the morning, after an early breakfast, and (with an allowance of time during which they may depart in search of dinner) work until eight or nine at night; sometimes in the season, until ten or eleven. Work over, the labourers return to their own lodgings. A young woman in this class earns about seven shillings a week, wherewith to pay for lodging, food, and clothes. If she have any relatives in London to whose homes she can betake herself, then it is well; if she be a solitary worker, forced to earn an independent livelihood—a young girl from the country, or an orphan—she goes to her garret; and there, sitting in utter cheerlessness, suffers temptations which there is no poor man, even though a rogue, who would not wish to see his daughter spared.

These workers labour in support of luxury all the day long: their sense of pleasure, love of ornament and colour, is developed, and their honest earnings only suffer them to lodge in dingy garrets chiefly found among back streets. Two shillings a week, or at the utmost, half-a-crown, is all that can be spared, for rent out of an income that is only fourteen pence a working day; at most a penny-farthing for the working hour. Half-a-crown or two shillings is the rent of a dilapidated room, even among the pauperised inhabitants of Bethnal Green. Necessarily it can purchase no very pleasant dwelling, we may be assured, in the purlieus of Regent Street.

To make the position of such young women pleasanter and safer is not difficult; but there is only one way of improving it. The solitary day-worker cannot do much for herself with seven shillings; but, by associating with companions of her own class and adopting some system of combination, her funds may be made sufficient to maintain a tolerably happy little household. How to begin is the question.

Two ladies, thoughtful for their less fortunate sisters—the Lady Hobart, and the Viscountess Goderich—have been endeavouring, during the last few months, to help them in the making of the troublesome first step. Their chief difficulty has lain in the necessity of having one of these associated homes not distant from the places of business, which are most numerous at the west end of London. In extending the experiment which these benevolent ladies have commenced, care must be taken, therefore, to select a house which, for the rent it costs, supplies within its walls space enough for every just want of as many inmates as are necessary to the working of the system. The ladies before mentioned have taken upon themselves the first risk by opening a home of this description at number two, Manchester Street, Manchester Square. It allows ample sleeping space; each dormitory containing four or six single beds. It supplies also a spacious sitting-room, in which there is a hired piano and a little library of cheap and pleasant books; the use of a kitchen-range, light, firing, and all necessary household furnishing—linen, plates and dishes, knives, forks, and spoons—all for the price of a cold, dark garret—two shillings a week. If two persons unite, and pay rent for a double bed, the charge is only eighteenpence to each of them.

Possibly, for accommodation and the quality provided in this instance, the rent ought to be a few pence higher. Be that as it may, the establishers of this nest think, that when it contains its full complement of thirty-five or forty inmates, it will pay its own expenses, even with no higher contribution from each inmate than that now fixed. All they desire is that its existence should be widely known, and that especially the hard-working girls who may be made happier by adopting the suggestion it embodies, may hear of it; may understand the comfort of it; and learn to co-operate with one another not merely in this house, but in a great many others of the kind.

It is entirely their own affair: nothing is meant but to help them through the difficulty of beginning. In the home now established there are at present not more than eleven inmates; and only ignorance of its existence or its meaning could keep out the other five-and-twenty. It means no charity, no intrusion, no meddling supervision; only such help as woman may receive from woman, willingly and thankfully. The house to be self-supporting must indeed be full; but once understood, there will rarely be, in any of these snug little establishments, a vacant bed.

If it be ever the privilege of this journal to cheer during an odd half-hour, the weary heart of a young day-worker, and this page comes to be read by her; and if she be not by happy chance, already well lodged, let her accept our counsel, offered with all cordiality, and with the most sincere good-will: we recommend that she should visit Manchester Street, look at the house, and talk all its arrangements over with the Mrs. Lomas, who, as matron, watches on the spot over the beginnings of the scheme. She will find this matron herself to be young and cheerful, and in earnest with the wish to be of use. She is one who has paid many a friendly visit to day-workers in their garrets, for the purpose of explaining to them what it is so much for their own comfort to understand.

When this house is full, it will belong fairly to the day-workers themselves; and there are no rules but such as they would, with a regard to the economy of their funds, and to their personal respectability, make for their own following. Though few return from duties until nine in the evening the sitting-room fire, in winter-time, is lighted at six o’clock and it is kept alight all day on Sunday; so that the apartment is always warm and comfortable when the inmates use it. At eleven at night it is put out; and any inmate staying out of the house after eleven must give a reason for so doing. A respectable reference is necessarily required with each new-comer (if only to her own employer), and there are no other customs that are not to be found usual in any other private household. The girls buy what they please, and cook it how and when they please for themselves, at their kitchen ranges. If any or all of them like to associate their funds for common meals, it is for them to say and do what they desire.

At Manchester Street, it should be added, there is a free singing-class, and there are evenings of music. Opportunities of self-improvement are also supplied by the warmhearted promoters of the scheme. But in all this the sole desire is, to give a kindly and a hearty lift at starting, to a way—into which those whom it concerns may soon get for themselves—of extracting all the happiness, security, and comfort in their power out of scanty incomes.

TWO COLLEGE FRIENDS.

IN FOUR CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.

In the year seventeen hundred and seventy three, two young men took possession of the only habitable rooms of the old tumble-down rectory-house of Combe-Warleigh, in one of the wildest parts of one of the western counties, then chiefly notable for miles upon miles of totally uncultivated moor and hill. The rooms were not many; consisting only of two wretched little bed-chambers and a parlour of diminutive size. A small building which leaned against the outer wall served as a kitchen to the establishment; and the cook, an old woman of sixty years of age, retired every night to a cottage about a quarter of a mile from the parsonage, where she had occupied a garret for many years. The house had originally been built of lath and plaster, and in some places revealed the skeleton walls where the weather had peeled off the outer coating, and given the building an appearance of ruin and desolation which comported with the bleakness of the surrounding scenery. With the exception of the already-named cottage and a small collection of huts around the deserted mansion of the landlord of the estate, there were no houses in the parish. How it had ever come to the honour of possessing a church and rectory no one could discover; for there were no records or traditions of its ever having been more wealthy or populous than it then was;—but it was in fact only nominally a parish, for no clergyman had been resident for a hundred years; the living was held by the fortunate possessor of a vicarage about fifteen miles to the north, and with the tithes of the united cures made up a stately income of nearly ninety pounds a-year. No wonder there were no repairs on the rectory—nor frequent visits to his parishioners. It was only on the first Sunday of each month he rode over from his dwelling-place and read the service to the few persons who happened to remember it was the Sabbath, or understood the invitation conveyed to them by the one broken bell swayed to and fro by the drunken shoemaker (who also officiated as clerk) the moment he saw the parson’s shovel hat appear on the ascent of the Vaird hill. And great accordingly was the surprise of the population; and pleased the heart of the rector, when two young gentlemen from Oxford hired the apartments I have described—fitted them up with a cart load of furniture from Hawsleigh, and gave out that they were going to spend the long vacation in that quiet neighbourhood for the convenience of study. Nor did their conduct belie their statement. Their table was covered with books and maps, and dictionaries; and after their frugal breakfast, the whole day was devoted to reading. Two handsome intelligent looking young men as ever you saw—both about the same age and height; with a contrast both in look and disposition that probably formed the first link in the close friendship that existed between them.

Arthur Hayning, a month or two the senior, was of a more self relying nature and firmer character than the other. In uninterrupted effort he pursued his work, never looking up, never making a remark, seldom even answering a stray observation of his friend. But when the hour assigned for the close of his studies had arrived, a change took place in his manner. He was gayer, more active and enquiring than his volatile companion. The books were packed away, the writing-desk locked up; with a stout stick in his hand, a strong hammer in his pocket, and a canvas bag slung over his shoulders, he started off on an exploring expedition among the neighbouring hills; while Winnington Harvey arming himself with a green gauze net, and his coat-sleeve glittering with a multitude of pins, accompanied him in his walk—diverging for long spaces in search of butterflies, which he brought back in triumph, scientifically transfixed on the leaves of his pocket-book. On their return home, their after-dinner employment consisted in arranging their specimens. Arthur spread out on the clay floor of the passage the different rocks he had gathered up in his walk. He broke them into minute fragments, examined them through his magnifying glass, sometimes dissolved a portion of them in aquafortis, tasted them, smelt to them, and finally threw them away; not so the more fortunate naturalist: with him the mere pursuit was a delight, and the victims of his net a perpetual source of rejoicing. He fitted them into a tray, wrote their names and families on narrow slips of paper in the neatest possible hand, and laid away his box of treasures as if they were choicest specimens of diamonds and rubies.

“What a dull occupation yours is!” said Winnington one night, “compared to mine. You go thumping old stones and gathering up lumps of clay, grubbing for ever among mud or sand, and never lifting up your eyes from this dirty spot of earth. Whereas I go merrily over valley and hill, keep my eyes open to the first flutter of a beautiful butterfly’s wing, follow it in its meandering, happy flight—”

“And kill it—with torture,” interposed Arthur Hayning, coldly.

“But it’s for the sake of science. Nay, as I am going to be a doctor, it’s perhaps for the sake of fortune—”

“And that justifies you in putting it to death?”

“There you go with your absurd German philanthropies; though, by the bye, love for a butterfly scarcely deserves the name. But think of the inducement, think of the glory of verifying with your own eyes the identity of a creature described in books; think of the interests at stake; and, above all, and this ought to be a settling argument to you, think of the enjoyment it will give my cousin Lucy to have her specimen-chest quite filled; and when you are married to her—”

“Dear Winnington, do hold your tongue. How can I venture to look forward to that for many years? I have only a hundred a-year. She has nothing.” Arthur sighed as he spoke.

“How much do you require? When do you expect to be rich enough?”

“When I have three times my present fortune—and that will be—who can tell? I may suddenly discover a treasure like Aladdin’s, and then, Winnington, my happiness will be perfect.”

“I think you should have made acquaintance with the magician, or even got possession of the ring, before you asked her hand,” said Winnington Harvey with a changed tone. “She is the nicest girl in the world, and loves you with all her heart; but if you have to wait till fortune comes—”

“She will wait also, willingly and happily. She has told me so. I love her with the freshness of a heart that has never loved anything else. I love you too, Winnington, for her sake; and we had better not talk any more on the subject, for I don’t like your perpetual objections to the engagement.”

Winnington, as usual, yielded to the superiority of his friend, and was more affectionate in his manner to him than ever, as if to blot out the remembrance of what he had recently said. They went on in silence with their respective works, and chipped stones, and impaled butterflies till a late hour.

“Don’t be alarmed, Winnington,” said Arthur, with a smile, as he lighted his bed-candle that night. “I am twenty-one and Lucy not nineteen. The genii of the lamp will be at our bidding before we are very old, and you shall have apartments in the palace, and be appointed resident physician to the princess.”

“With a salary of ten thousand a year, and my board and washing.”

“A seat on my right hand, whenever I sit down to my banquets.”

“Good. That’s a bargain,” said Winnington, laughing, and they parted to their rooms.

Geology was not at that time a recognised science—in England. But Arthur Hayning had been resident for some years in Germany, where it had long been established as one of the principal branches of a useful education. There were chairs of metallurgy, supported by government grants, and schools of mining, both theoretic and practical, established wherever the nature of the soil was indicative of mineral wealth. Hayning was an orphan, the son of a country surgeon, who had managed to amass the sum of two thousand pounds. He was left in charge of a friend of his father, engaged in the Hamburg trade, and by him had been early sent to the care of a protestant clergyman in Prussia, who devoted himself to the improvement of his pupil. His extraordinary talents were so dwelt on by this excellent man, in his letters to the guardian, that it was resolved to give him a better field for their display, than the University of Jena could afford, and he had been sent to one of the public schools in England, and from it, two years before this period, been transferred, with the highest possible expectations of friends and teachers to —— College, Oxford. Here he had made acquaintance with Winnington Harvey; and through him, having visited him one vacation at his home in Warwickshire, had become known to Lucy Mainfield, the only daughter of a widowed aunt of his friend, with no fortune but her unequalled beauty, and a fine, honest, open, and loving disposition, which made an impression on Arthur, perhaps, because it was in so many respects in contrast with his own.

For some weeks their mode of life continued unaltered. Study all the day, geology and natural history in the evening. Their path led very seldom through the village of Combe-Warleigh; but, on one occasion, having been a distant range among the wilds, and being belated, they took a nearer course homeward, and passed in front of the dwelling-house of the squire. There was a light in the windows on the drawing-room floor, and the poetic Winnington was attracted by the sight.

“I’ve read of people,” he said, “seeing the shadows of beautiful girls on window-blinds, and dying of their love, though never knowing more of them,—wouldn’t it be strange if Squire Warleigh had returned, and with a daughter young and beautiful, and if I saw her form thrown clearly like a portrait on the curtain, and—”

“But there’s no curtain,” interrupted Arthur. “Come along.”

“Ha, stop!” cried Winnington, laying his hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “Look there!”

They looked, and saw a girl who came between them and the light, with long hair falling over her shoulders, while she held a straw hat in her hand; her dress was close-fitting to her shape, a light pelisse of green silk edged with red ribbons, such as we see as the dress of young pedestrians in Sir Joshua’s early pictures.

“How beautiful,” said Winnington, in a whisper. “She has been walking out. What is she doing? Who is she? What is her name?”

The apparition turned half round, and revealed her features in profile. Her lips seemed to move, she smiled very sweetly, and then suddenly moved out of the sphere of vision, and left Winnington still open-mouthed, open-eyed, gazing towards the window.

“A nice enough girl,” said Arthur coldly; “but come along; the old woman will be anxious to get home; and besides, I am very hungry.”

“I shall never be hungry again,” said Winnington, still transfixed and immoveable. “You may go if you like. Here I stay in hopes of another view.”

“Good night, then,” replied Arthur, and rapidly walked away.

How long the astonished Winnington remained I cannot tell. It was late when he arrived at the rectory. The old woman, as Arthur had warned him, had gone home. Arthur let him in.

“Well!” he enquired, “have you found out the unknown?”

“All about her—but for heaven’s sake some bread and cheese. Is there any here?”

“I thought you were never to be hungry again.”

“It is the body only which has these requirements. My soul is satiated for ever. Here’s to Ellen Warleigh!”—he emptied the cup at a draught.

“The Squire’s daughter?”

“His only child. They have been abroad for some years; returned a fortnight ago. Her father and she live in that desolate house.”

“He will set about repairing it, I suppose,” said Arthur.

“He can’t. They are as poor as we are. And I am glad of it,” replied Winnington, going on with his bread and cheese.

“He has an immense estate,” said Arthur, almost to himself. “Combe-Warleigh must consist of thousands of acres.”

“Of heath and hill. Not worth three hundred a year. Besides, he was extravagant in his youth. I met the shoemaker at the gate, and he told me all about them. I wonder if she’s fond of butterflies,” he added: “it would be so delightful for us to hunt them together.”

“Nonsense, boy; finish your supper and go to bed. Never trouble yourself about whether a girl cares for butterflies or not whose father has only three hundred a year and has been extravagant in his youth.”

“What a wise fellow you are,” said Winnington, “about other people’s affairs! How many hundreds a year had Lucy’s father? Nothing but his curacy and a thousand pounds he got with aunt Jane.”

“But Lucy’s very fond of butterflies, you know, and that makes up for poverty,” said Arthur, with a laugh. “The only thing I see valuable about them is their golden wings.”

The companions were not now so constantly together as before. Their studies underwent no change; but their evening occupations were different. The geologist continued his investigations among the hills; the naturalist seemed to believe that the Papilio had become a gregarious insect, and inhabited the village. He was silent as to the result of his pursuits, and brought very few specimens home. But his disposition grew sweeter than ever. His kindness to the drunken shoemaker was extraordinary. His visits to several old women in the hamlet were frequent and long. What a good young man he was! How attentive to the sick!—and he to be only twenty-one! On the first Sunday of the month he was in waiting at the door to receive the rector. He took his horse from him, and put it into the heap of ruins which was called the stable with his own hands. He went with him into the church. He looked all the time of service at the Squire’s pew, but it was empty. He walked alongside the rector on his return; he accompanied him as far as the village, and told him quite in a careless manner, of the family’s return.

“I have done it,” he said, when he got home again, late at night. “I know them both. The father is a delightful old man. He kept me and the clergyman to dinner—and Ellen! there never was so charming a creature before; and, Arthur, she’s fond of butterflies, and catches them in a green gauze net, and has a very good collection—particularly of night-hawks. That’s the reason she was out so late the night we saw her at the window. They were very kind; they knew all about our being here, and Ellen thanked me so for being good to her poor people. I felt quite ashamed.”

The young man’s eyes were flashing with delight; his voice trembled; he caught the cold gaze of his friend fixed upon him, and blushed.

“You look very much ashamed of yourself,” said Arthur, “and I am sorry you have made their acquaintance. It will interfere with our object in coming here.”

“Ah! and I told her you were a perfect German; and she understands the language, and I said you would lend her any of your books she chose.”

“What!” exclaimed Arthur, starting up excited to sudden anger; “what right had you, sir, to make any offer of the kind? I wouldn’t lend her a volume to save her life, or yours, or any one’s in the world. She shan’t have one,—I’ll burn them first.”

“Arthur!” said Winnington, astonished. “What is it that puts you in such a passion? I’m sure I didn’t mean to offend you. I will tell her you don’t like to lend your books; I’m sorry I mentioned it to her,—but I will apologise, and never ask you again.”

“I was foolish to be so hot about a trifle,” said Arthur, resuming his self-command. “I’m very sorry to disappoint your friend; but I really can’t spare a single volume,—besides,” he said, with a faint laugh, “they are all about metallurgy and mining.”

“I told her so,” said Winnington, “and she has a great curiosity to see them.”

“You did!” again exclaimed Arthur, flushing with wrath. “You have behaved like a fool or a villain,—one or both, I care not which. You should have known, without my telling, that these books are sacred. If the girl knows German let her read old Gotsched’s plays. She shall not see a page of any book of mine.”

Winnington continued silent under this outbreak; he was partly overcome with surprise; but grief was uppermost.

“I’ve known you for two years, I think, Hayning,” he said; “from the first time we met I admired and liked you. I acknowledge your superiority in everything; your energy, your talent, your acquirements. I felt a pleasure in measuring your height, and was proud to be your friend. I know you despise me, for I am a weak, impulsive, womanly-natured fellow;—but I did not know you disliked me. I shall leave you to-morrow, and we shall never meet again.” He was going out of the room.

“I did not mean what I said,” said Arthur, in a subdued voice. “I don’t despise you. I don’t dislike you. I beg your pardon,—will you forgive me, Winnington?”

“Ay, if you killed me!” sobbed Winnington, taking hold of Arthur’s scarcely extended hand. “I know I am very foolish; but I love Ellen Warleigh, and would give her all I have in the world.”

“That’s not much,” said Arthur, still moodily brooding over the incident; “and never will be, if you wear your heart so perpetually on your sleeve.”

“You forget that I don’t need to have any riches of my own,” said Winnington, gaily. “I am to be physician to the Prince and Princess in Aladdin’s palace, and shall sit always on your right hand when you entertain the nobility. So, shake hands, and good night.”

“But Ellen is not to have my books,” said Arthur, sitting down to the table, and spreading a volume before him. “I wouldn’t lend you for an hour,” he said, when he was alone, cherishing the book, “no, not to Lucy Mainfield herself.”

CHAPTER II.

August and September passed away, and October had now begun. Arthur avoided the Warleighs as much as he could; Winnington was constantly at their house. The friends grew estranged. But, with the younger, the estrangement made no difference in the feeling of affection he always had entertained for Arthur. He was hurt, however, by the change he perceived in his manner. He was hurt at his manifest avoidance of the society of the squire and his daughter. He was hurt, also, at the total silence Arthur now maintained on the subject of his cousin Lucy. He saw her letters left unopened, sometimes for a whole day, upon the table instead of being greedily torn open the moment the straggling and uncertain post had achieved their delivery at the door. He was hurt at some other things besides, too minute to be recorded; too minute perhaps to be put into language even by himself, but all perceptible to the sensitive heart of friendship such as his. With no visible improvement in Arthur’s fortune or prospects, it was evident that his ideas were constantly on the rise. A strange sort of contempt of poverty mingled with his aspirations after wealth. An amount of income which, at one time, would have satisfied his desires, was looked on with disdain, and the possessors of it almost with hatred. The last words Winnington had heard him speak about Lucy were, that marriage was impossible under a thousand a-year. And where was that sum to come from? The extent of Lucy’s expectations was fifty,—his own, a hundred—and yet he sneered at the Warleighs as if they had been paupers; although in that cheap country, and at that cheap time, a revenue of three hundred pounds enabled them to live in comfort, almost in luxury.

Winnington took no thought of to-morrow, but loved Ellen Warleigh, with no consideration of whether she was rich or poor. It is probable that Ellen had no more calculating disposition than Winnington; for it is certain her sentiments towards him were not regulated by the extent of his worldly wealth,—perhaps she did not even know what her sentiments towards him were—but she thought him delightful, and wandered over the solitary heaths with him, in search of specimens. They very often found none, in the course of their four hours’ ramble, and yet came home as contented as if they had discovered an Emperor of Morocco on every bush. Baulked in their natural history studies by the perverse absence of moth and butterfly, they began,—by way of having something to do—to take up the science of botany. The searches they made for heath of a particular kind! The joy that filled them when they came on a group of wild flowers, and gathered them into a little basket they carried with them, and took them back to the manor, and astonished Mr. Warleigh with the sound of their Latin names! What new dignity the commonest things took under that sonorous nomenclature! How respectable a nettle grew when called an urtica, and how suggestive of happiness and Gretna Green when a flower could be declared to be cryptogamic.

“See what a curious root this piece of broom has,” said Winnington, one night, on his return from the Manor, and laid his specimen on the table.

Arthur hardly looked up from his book, and made some short reply.

“It took Ellen and me ten minutes, with all our force, to pull it up by the roots. We had no knife, or I should merely have cut off the stalk; but see, now that the light falls on it, what curious shining earth it grows in; with odd little stones twisted up between the fibres! Did you ever see anything like it?” Arthur had fixed his eyes on the shrub during this speech—He stretched forth his hand and touched the soil still clinging to the roots—he put a small portion to his lips—his face grew deadly pale.

“Where did you get this?” he said.

“Down near the waterfall—not a hundred yards from this.”

“On whose land?—on the glebe?” said Arthur, speaking with parched mouth, and still gazing on the broom.

“Does Warleigh know of this?” he went on, “or the clergyman? Winnington! no one must be to told, tell Ellen to be silent; but she is not aware perhaps. Does she suspect?”

“What? what is there to suspect, my dear Arthur? Don’t you think you work too much,” he added, looking compassionately on the dilated eye and pale cheek of his companion. “You must give up your studies for a day or two. Come with us on an exploring expedition to the Outer fell to-morrow; Mr. Warleigh is going.”

“And give him the fruits of all my reading,” Arthur muttered angrily, “of all I learned at the Hartz; tell him how to proceed, and leave myself a beggar. No!” he said, “I will never see him. As to this miserable little weed,” he continued, tearing the broom to pieces, and casting the fragments contemptuously into the fire; “it is nothing; you are mad to have given up your butterflies to betake yourself to such a ridiculous pursuit as this. Don’t go there any more—there!” (here he stamped on it with his foot) “How damp it is! the fire has little power.”

“You never take any interest, Arthur, in anything I do. I don’t know, I’m sure, how I’ve offended you. As to the broom, I know it’s a poor common thing, but I thought the way its roots were loaded rather odd. Ellen will perhaps be disappointed, for we intended to plant it in her garden, and I only asked her to let me show it to you, it struck me as being so very curious. Come, give up your books and learning for a day. We must leave this for Oxford in a week, and I wish you to know more of the Warleighs before we go.”

“I am not going back to Oxford,” said Arthur, “I shall take my name off the books.”

Winnington was astonished. He was also displeased. “We promised to visit my aunt,” he said, “on our way back to college—Lucy will be grieved and disappointed.”

“I will send a letter by you—I shall explain it all—I owe her a letter already.”

“Have you not answered that letter yet? it came a month ago,” said Winnington. “Oh! if Ellen Warleigh would write a note to me, and let me write to her, how I would wait for her letters! how I would answer them from morn to night.”

“She would find you a rather troublesome correspondent,” said Arthur, watching the disappearance of the last particle of the broom as it leaped merrily in sparkles up the chimney. “Lucy knows that I am better employed than telling her ten times over, that I love her better than anything else— and that I long for wealth principally that it may enable me to call her mine. I shall have it soon. Tell her to be sure of that. I shall be of age in three days, then the wretched driblet my guardian now has charge of comes into my hands; I will multiply it a thousand-fold—and then—”

“The palace will be built,” said Winnington, who could not keep anger long, “and the place at your right hand will be got ready for the resident physician—who in the meantime recommends you to go quietly to bed, for you have overstrung your mind with work, and your health, dear Arthur, is not at all secure.”

For a moment, a touch of the old kindness came to Arthur’s heart. He shook Winnington’s hand. “Thank you, thank you,” he said, “I will do as you advise. Your voice is very like Lucy’s, and so are your eyes—good night, dear Winnington.” And Winnington left the room, so did Arthur, but not for bed. A short time before this, a package had arrived from Hawsleigh, and had been placed away in a dark closet under the stairs. He looked for a moment out into the night. The moon was in a cloud, and the wind was howling with a desolate sound over the bare moor. He took down the package, and from it extracted a spade and a pickaxe; and, gently opening the front door, went out. He walked quickly till he came to the waterfall; he looked carefully round and saw a clump of broom. The ground from the rectory to this place formed a gentle declivity; where the river flowed there were high banks, for the stream had not yet been swelled by the rains, and he first descended into the bed, and examined the denuded cliffs. He then hurried towards the broom, and began to dig. He dug and struck with the pickaxe, and shovelled up the soil—weighing, smelling, tasting it, as he descended foot by foot. He dug to the depth of a yard; he jumped into the hole and pursued his work—breathless, hot, untiring. The moon for a moment came out from the clouds that obscured her. He availed himself of her light and held up a particle of soil and stone; it glittered for an instant in the moonbeam. With an almost audible cry he threw it to the bottom of the excavation, and was scrambling out when he heard a voice. It was the drunken shoemaker returning from some distant merrymaking. He lay down at the bottom of the hole, watching for the approaching footsteps. At a little distance from the waterfall the singer changed his path, and diverged towards the village. The song died off in the distance.

“That danger’s past,” said Arthur, “both for him and me. I would have killed him if he had come nearer. Back, back,” he continued, while he filled up the hole he had made, carefully shovelling in the soil—“No eye shall detect that you have been moved.” He replaced the straggling turf where it had been disturbed; stampt it down with his feet, and beat it smooth with his spade. And then went home.

“Hallo! who’s there?” cried Winnington, hearing the door open and shut. “Is that you, Arthur?”

“Yes; are you not asleep yet?”

“I’ve been asleep for hours. How late you are. Weren’t you out of the house just now?”

“I felt hot, and went out for a minute to see the moon.”

“Hot?” said Winnington. “I wish I had another blanket—good night.” Arthur passed on to his own room.

“If he had opened his door,” he said, “and seen my dirty clothes, these yellow stains on my knees, these dabbled hands, what could I have done?” He saw himself in the glass as he said this; there was something in the expression of his face that alarmed him. He drew back.

“He is very like Lucy,” he muttered to himself, “and I’m glad he didn’t get out of bed.”

Meantime Winnington had a dream. He was on board a beautiful boat on the Isis. It seemed to move by its own force, as if it were a silver swan; and the ripple as it went on took the form of music, and he thought it was an old tune that he had listened to in his youth. He sat beside Ellen Warleigh, with his hand locked in hers, and they watched the beautiful scenery through which the boat was gliding—past the pretty Cherwell, past the level meadows, past the Newnham woods,—and still the melody went on. Then they were in a country he did not know; there were tents of gaudy colours on the shore; and wild-eyed men in turbans and loose tunics looked out upon them. One came on board; he was a tall dark Emir, with golden-sheathed scimitar, which clanked as he stept on the seat. Winnington stood up and asked what the stranger wanted: the chief answered in Arabic, but Winnington understood him perfectly. He said he had come to put him to death for having dared to look upon his bride. He laid his grasp on him as he spoke, and tore him from Ellen’s side. In the struggle Winnington fell over, and found himself many feet in front of the fairy boat. The Arab sat down beside Ellen, and put his arm round her waist, and then he suddenly took the shape of Arthur Hayning. The boat seemed to flutter its wings, and come faster on. Winnington tried to swim to one side, but could not. On came the boat, its glittering bows flashed before his eyes—they touched him—pressed him down; he felt the keel pass over his head; and down, down, still downward he went, and, on looking up, saw nothing but the boat above him; all was dark where he was, for the keel seemed constantly between him and the surface, and yet he heard the old tune still going on. It was a tune his cousin Lucy used to play; but at last, in his descent through the darkened water, he got out of hearing, and all was silent. The music had died away—and suddenly he heard a scream, and saw Ellen struggling in the water. He made a dart towards her with arms stretched out—and overturned the candle he had left on the table at the side of his bed.

SORROW AND MY HEART.

To the field where I was lying

Once Sorrow came a-flying,

And bade me bring my heart to mould at her goodwill.

Shudd’ring, I turn’d aside;

“Avaunt! O fiend!” I cried,

“My heart is dear to me, and none shall work it ill!”

“But if thou must!” said she.

“Nay,” said I, “let it be!

’Tis yet so young and tender, and so slight of make,

Ungentle touch would crush it,

Hard word for aye would hush it!”

She smiled, and said, “Hearts sooner turn to stone than break!”

“Yet stay awhile!” I pray’d;
And, frowning, she obey’d;
While I to cast about my sentence to evade.

Then came she near again,

And hover’d o’er the plain

Where I sat listening to my darling’s long love-story.

“Art ready now?” she cried:

“O, no! no!” I replied,

“My heart is now in all its fullest prime and glory!”

A third time came she near:

“Now!” said she, “now prepare!

For I must have thy heart to mould at my good pleasure!”

“Here, take it!” I replied,

And pluck’d it from my side

(For I in sooth was half a-weary of my treasure).

“But what is this?” says she,

And flung it back to me;

“A stone! O traitor! thou shalt rue this jesting turn!”

She wing’d her flight away,

And I to shriek and pray

For that dear angel, who would never more return.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH STAFF OFFICERS.

Louis de Bonfils is a captain in the corps of état-major, or the staff corps of France. I have known him for several years, and always found him an honourable upright soldier; in every sense of the word, a gentleman. According to our insular ideas of decorum, the captain is, perhaps, rather too much given to swaggering about with his hands in the far-down pockets of his red trousers, and is slightly addicted to swearing when ladies are not by. An English cavalry captain might think Louis awfully slow, because he does not know or care anything about racing, is proud of, and wears, his uniform at all times and on all occasions, and has but one suit of plain clothes to his name. Moreover, since he commenced his career in the army, the captain has thought of, and worked for, nothing but his profession, and has, consequently, succeeded in making himself what the state pays him to be—a useful active wheel in the great mass of French military machinery. Not but that my friend has his failings and shortcomings like other men; but he knows full well that unless he keeps pace with—and, to do so, he must strive to outrun—his comrades on the staff in the race for professional pre-eminence, he will be cast aside as a useless encumbrance on the army list of France. Besides his rank of captain in the staff corps, Louis de Bonfils is attached to the depôt général de la guerre at Paris; where he is assisting, together with several others of his own rank and regiment, in completing a magnificent series of military maps of France, on a larger scale than any that have yet been published. The captain lately returned from the Crimea, where he was attached as aide-de-camp to the staff of a general of division; but, being sent to Paris in charge of some valuable topographical papers relating to Russia—which he had compiled when in camp by order of his superiors—the minister of war attached him, for the present, to the aforesaid depôt de la guerre.

I met Captain de Bonfils the other day in Paris, and asked him to tell me what were the qualifications required for a staff officer in his service, and how he had been fortunate enough to obtain employment in so distinguished a corps. This request he complied with at once; assuring me that the career of one officer in the corps d’état-major may be taken as an exact sample of all, and that the same qualifications are required from every one who aspires to the honour of holding a commission in that regiment.

To apply the term regiment to the French staff is perhaps not quite appropriate, as the corps consists entirely of officers. Belonging to this body are thirty colonels, thirty lieutenant-colonels, one hundred chefs d’escadron (who would be termed majors in the English service), three hundred captains, and one hundred lieutenants. No one can join the regiment unless he passes through the special school instituted in eighteen hundred and eighteen for that purpose, and now called L’École Impériale d’Application d’État-Major. This my friend, Captain Louis de Bonfils, of course, did. There are sixty pupils in the establishment, one-half of whom leave it every year; thus creating thirty annual vacancies. Of these thirty, three are selected from the École Polytechnique; the remaining twenty-seven places in the staff-school are filled by competition from amongst fifty-seven candidates, thirty of whom must be sub-lieutenants who have been at least one year in the service, and must be under twenty-five years of age; and twenty-seven from the pupils of the military school of St. Cyr. Captain de Bonfils was one of the latter class. He had already spent his regulated time of three years at St. Cyr; and having passed the required examination for a commission in the line, might have joined a regiment without delay. Being one of the twenty-seven pupils at the head of the list amongst the hundred who had passed in his term, he entered his name as a candidate for admittance into the École d’État-Major, and, as he was successful, joined that institution. Here he remained two years, going through the regular course of instruction in military science; and—although, like the rest of the pupils, he held the rank of a commissioned officer—under almost as strict military and collegiate discipline as any school-boy. Winter and summer, the young men in this college rise at six o’clock, and, with the exception of an hour for breakfast, half-an-hour for recreation in the middle of the day, and the same in the afternoon, work at one or other branch of their studies until five in the afternoon; at which hour they dine, and are then at liberty to go where they like, until ten in the evening. When they want to be out of college later, leave must be asked and obtained from the governor of the establishment. During the two years they remain at the staff-school, their time is divided regularly every day, each hour bringing its allotted task. The course of studies includes all the higher branches of mathematics, topography, geography, and fortification, together with statistics, military history, the English, German, and Italian languages, drawing, and the theory of military manœuvres—artillery, cavalry, and infantry—on a grand scale, and separate as well as combined. One hour every day is devoted to lessons in equitation in the riding-school; and every pupil is provided with an excellent charger at the cost of the state. The young men have each their own room, which is large enough to form, with comfort, a sleeping apartment and a study. They breakfast and dine together in the refectory, the former meal being served at nine, and the latter at five o’clock.

Out of the year, eight months are passed at Paris, and are devoted to hard work at the desk; three are spent in military surveying in various parts of France; and one entire month is required for the annual examinations. On entering the institution, and for twelve months afterwards, the pupils are attached to the second division, or lower school. After a year has elapsed they pass an examination, and, if found qualified, move into the higher, or first class. Any young man who cannot pass this examination is forthwith remanded to one of the regiments of the line. Serious sickness for any length of time is considered the only allowable excuse for any want of proficiency in their studies. At the end of the second year another examination has to be gone through, and is considered the final test of qualification. If passed, the pupil leaves the school with the rank of lieutenant in the staff corps. But, although enrolled as one of that distinguished body, he has yet to go through another and a longer ordeal of learning in practice that which, as yet, he has only been taught in theory. For two years he is attached to a regiment of infantry; after that, for a like time, to a cavalry corps, and then, for one year, to a battery of artillery. With each of these branches of the service he has to do duty as a troop or company-officer for half the period; during the other half he is employed as a supernumerary-adjutant, under the orders of the colonel.

During the five years that he is attached to various regiments, the staff-lieutenant has to prepare and transmit regularly to his own corps, maps, papers, drawings, and surveys, which he is ordered to employ his time upon. My friend, Louis de Bonfils, after leaving the staff-college, was attached for two years to a regiment of infantry in Algiers, after which, he passed a like term with a cavalry corps in France, and then was ordered again to Algiers with a battery of artillery. Having completed his ten years’ military education—viz., three at the College of St. Cyr, two at the staff school, and five attached to regiments of the three arms of the service, Captain de Bonfils commenced his career as a full-blown staff-officer: that is to say, he joined his corps with the rank of captain, and was then eligible for such appointments as officers of his grade can hold. It is from this class—and from this only—that the aides-de-camp of French general officers are selected, and it is amongst the captains of the corps d’état-major, that my friend de Bonfils takes his place. The French staff is not divided, like that of England, into two separate departments of adjutant-general and quarter-master-general. With our neighbours, these form one and the same staff, and every officer belonging to the staff corps is perfectly qualified to fulfil all duties relating to both departments. Nothing whatever is left to chance, or to the hazard of personal selection. The marshals of France alone, have the right to nominate their own aides-de-camp—each having two, one a colonel, the other a lieutenant-colonel of the corps d’état-major. All other officers who are entitled to aides-de-camp must take such as are nominated to their staff by the minister of war; and to ask for a friend or relative being appointed, would in France be thought an unsoldierlike and unpardonable liberty. Louis de Bonfils tells me that in about a year’s time he expects to be promoted to the rank of chef d’escadron in the staff corps, and that he will then probably be sent either to one of the bureaux d’État-Major, which are attached to the various military divisions of France, or to the staff of some general in the Crimea. As I mentioned before, the Corps d’État-Major consists of one hundred lieutenants (who are attached to various regiments of infantry, cavalry, and artillery), three hundred captains, one hundred chefs d’escadron (or majors), thirty lieutenant-colonels, and thirty colonels; so that, without counting the junior rank, here is always in France an effective body of four hundred and sixty officers who have received the most finished military education it is possible to attain in the world, and who are always ready to fill up vacancies in the higher departments, or to form a staff for an army taking the field.

Is there any difference, O my countrymen, and what difference, between this system and the system of the English service! Amongst my friends on this side the Channel, I can also number a staff officer, whom I have known some years. A better fellow, or more honorable man than Charley Benson does not exist; but what there is in him to make a staff officer out of I never could imagine. He entered the service about five years ago, and, having an uncle a general officer in command of an Irish district, was made aide-de-camp to that relative when he had done two years’ duty with his regiment. The war in the Crimea broke out, and his uncle having good interest at the Horse Guards, got Charley named a deputy-assistant quartermaster-general with the army. What the duties of the appointment may be, I don’t exactly know, and I am very certain Charley himself does not. He writes me that he has a lot of paper-work and returns to make out; but that with a good sergeant for a clerk, he manages to make it all serene.

Poor Charley! I can imagine how sorely puzzled he would be if left to his own resources with pen, ink, and paper. He can write a reasonably sensible letter when he likes, (it is not often that he does like,) but is decidedly eccentric in his orthography. As to the higher branches of mathematics, he knows nothing whatever of them. He can add up the various sums of money set down in the fly-leaves of his cheque-book, and so tell whether he has overdrawn his account with Messrs. Cox, the army agents; but beyond this his capabilities for figures does not extend. Topography, fortification, military drawing, military history, and military statistics, he denounces—when they are mentioned in his presence—by the energetic monosyllable—rot! As to military manœuvres on a grand scale, Charley says he got through his drill under the adjutant of his regiment, and what more would you have? Moreover, he is now on the staff, and having good interest, intends to remain there for some time; so what use, to him, would be any further drilling? When the war is over he is to join his uncle, an elderly gentleman, who, after having been thirty years on half-pay, was appointed not long ago to the command of an Irish district, and is now about to proceed out to India as commander-in-chief of an Indian Presidency, where he will reign supreme over a native army, of whose language he does not understand one word, in a country he has never so much as read of. In Bombay or Madras he will enjoy a salary of twelve hundred pounds a-year.

Of what use, therefore, can military education be to my friend Charley Benson? He is one of the fortunate men of this world, who, having good interest, need not trouble his head with the why or the wherefore of this or that science. As aide-de-camp, his chief duties are to dress well, carve well, dance well, ride well, help to do the honors of his uncle’s house, and occasionally attend that relative to the review or inspection of a regiment. His training for the staff consisted in going through a couple of years’ regimental duty with his corps; and, although whilst there he learnt nothing which could be of the slightest advantage to him either as an aide-de-camp or a deputy quartermaster-general, he now finds himself quite on a par with his brother staff-officers as regards any knowledge of his duties.

Nor is he altogether a bad specimen of the English staff-officer. There are some few holding such appointments who have in a certain degree qualified themselves for the post by a couple of years’ study at the senior department of the Military College at Sandhurst; but the certificates obtained by these gentlemen never got them on the staff. Their nominations were coincidences, and would have been equally certain had they no qualification whatever. In a work lately published by an officer of the English army, whose character and accomplishments guarantee the truth of what he asserts, the writer states: “I have reason to believe that from eighteen hundred and fifteen to eighteen hundred and fifty-four—a period of thirty-nine years—not one single appointment on the staff of the army has been made in consequence of the officer having graduated at Sandhurst.”[2] And further, the same author informs us that, according to the Army List for May last, twenty-five officers of the Guards hold staff appointments, of whom only five ever studied at Sandhurst, and not one of whom received a first-class certificate.

[2] Notes on Military Education. By Captain J. Morton Spearman, R.A. London, Parker, 1853.

From another little work on military education,[3] which was published just before the present war commenced, we learn that out of ninety-one officers employed in the general staff of the army in eighteen hundred and fifty-two, seven only had graduated at the senior department of Sandhurst, and that out of one hundred and seventeen staff-officers of pensioners in the same year, three only had obtained certificates. But a stronger instance of the utter inutility of English officers studying to qualify themselves for the staff has yet to be told. According to a parliamentary return called for during the last session, and published early in the month of May, there were then one hundred and thirty-five officers serving on the staff of the army in the Crimea. Of these only nine had obtained certificates at Sandhurst. Not a single assistant quartermaster-general, nor brigade-major, nor aide-de-camp, had ever graduated at that college; whilst of eleven assistant adjutant-generals, one only had passed through that ordeal,—and amongst twenty-nine deputies of the two staff departments (of the adjutant and quartermaster-general), but five had ever obtained certificates of qualification at the senior department of the military college.

[3] The Use and Application of Cavalry in War. By Colonel Beamish, late Royal Irish Dragoon Guards. London, T. and W. Boone, 1855. Page 437.

But what is this Senior Department of the Military College? The establishment of the Military College at Sandhurst is divided into two departments; the junior, intended for the education of lads, from thirteen to sixteen years of age, as preparatory to entering the army. What the military college of St. Cyr is to the French service, the junior department at Sandhurst is to the English, with this slight exception,—that whereas the former institution sends forth annually at least a hundred young men fully qualified for commissions in the line, our British establishment turns out about a dozen or fifteen in the same period. At the last half-yearly Sandhurst examinations—in October or November of the year just ended—the number of cadets who passed for commissions was less than half-a-dozen. The reason for this vast difference is, that in France there are but two doors whereby a candidate can enter the commissioned ranks of the army. The one is by enlisting as a private soldier, and rising through all the various subordinate grades to the distinction of wearing the epaulette; the other by commencing and going through the regular course of studies at the military college of St. Cyr. In order to qualify in the latter method, it is necessary to enter that establishment between the ages of twelve and fourteen, and to remain three years learning the duties of the profession, before the candidate can be admitted to the examination.

But I have gone astray from my intention, which was to point out in what consists the senior department of the Military College at Sandhurst. The pupils of this division are all commissioned officers, and by the rules they must, before entering the establishment, have served with their regiment three years abroad, or four years at home. The number is limited to fifteen, which—considering there are in times of peace upwards of ninety officers employed on the staff of the army, and during the present war there are no less than two hundred and fifty—is rather a small proportion; but even so very short a list is seldom full, and but few officers avail themselves of the privilege. Nor can we wonder at it. The English military man is like his fellow-countrymen who follow other pursuits and employment. If he saw that study or application would advance him in his profession, he would work like a horse. If staff appointments were given to those who had qualified themselves in the senior department of Sandhurst, and if a certificate from that establishment were a sure and certain means of obtaining professional distinction and subsequent promotion, we should in England have in a very few years the best educated staff in the world. When he has an object in view, there is nothing that the Anglo-Saxon will not attempt, and few things he cannot accomplish. Let us not then blame such men as my friend Benson, but rather try all we can to reform a system which is at once a curse to the army and a disgrace to the nation. And here let me relate an anecdote.

Some years ago, the regiment in which I then held a commission, formed part of a very large force, assembled on the North-West frontier of India. For several months this army was together, saw much service, and went through several general actions. Besides a great number of the East India Company’s regiments, there were with us two dragoon corps, and eight or ten battalions of the Queen’s army. There was also a very numerous staff, belonging to which were a dozen or fourteen officers of her Majesty’s service. Of these latter gentlemen, not one had ever been at the senior department of Sandhurst, whilst there were no less than ten officers doing regimental duty with their respective corps in this very force, who had gone through the regular course of study at that establishment, and of these three had taken first-class certificates. Again, I say, let us not blame officers who don’t avail themselves of the senior department at Sandhurst to study, but let us insist upon a reformation of the present system.

We all know how elderly officers cry up, and Young England cries down, the heroes, habits, manners, and customs of our army during the Peninsula war. But in the matter of staff officers and their qualifications, the force under Wellesley in Spain was certainly in advance of that commanded by Codrington in the Crimea. According to a military authority I have already quoted,[4] there was during the Peninsula war “only one officer employed on the quartermaster-general’s staff who was not a graduate of the senior department of the Royal Military College.” And the same gentleman, writing about a year before the war with Russia broke out, says, “It is by many doubted whether, in the event of a new war, there exists in the British army the necessary materials for the construction of an efficient état-major, or corps of staff officers, such as accompanied the troops under Sir John Abercrombie to Egypt and Sir Arthur Wellesley to Portugal.”

[4] Notes on Military Education, by Captain Spearman, page 35, note.

Still stronger evidence against the existing system is afforded us a little farther on in the same pamphlet, where Captain Spearman states that, “as an introduction to staff employment, the officers of the army have long since abandoned the senior department at Sandhurst in hopeless despair.” The writer then asks “to what is the disinclination, not to say repugnance, so generally evinced by British officers to devote themselves to the study of war as a science to be attributed? Clearly to the want of due encouragement—to the practical denial of the usual reward of such devotion and toil.”

“Staff appointments” (in the English army), says Colonel Beamish in his work mentioned above, “are made without any reference to scientific qualification—because the wish of a lord is more potent than the judgment of a professor; and the most distinguished Sandhurst students have been left to look in vain for congenial professional employment, and some reward for their many hours of labour and anxious preparation.... How different,” continues the same writer, “is the practice with our enlightened neighbours! Staff employment in France is the reward of merit alone. It is sought for by the élite of the army, and obtained only by the severest study, and the most indisputable proofs of the possession of the highest degree of professional excellence and general intelligence. Thus are formed those well-instructed officers who constitute the état-major of the French army, and afterwards become their most distinguished generals of division and brigade.”

If more evidence were wanting to show what are considered the necessary qualifications for a staff-officer in the English service, a perusal of the list of lords, honourables, baronets, and sons of wealthy influential commoners, who form the staff of the Crimean army, would be quite enough to set the question at rest. With us interest—as with the French merit—is what the authorities make the sine quâ non for those who aspire to the staff. The consequence to England has been but too visible since the struggle with Russia commenced. With as brave regimental officers and soldiers as ever were sent forth by this or any other country, our army has never been able to effect half what it would have effected with proper organisation and efficient leaders. In France, what the École Impériale d’Application d’État-Major effects in training for the staff, regimental service does in preparing for the command of brigades, divisions, and armies. With a highly-educated staff it is impossible either to want competent generals, or to have every department of the service in that state of utter confusion which has so sadly distinguished our army since it first embarked for the East. Our general officers, commanders of division, brigadiers, adjutants-general, quartermasters-general, aides-de-camp, and others, are only now commencing to learn their various military duties with the army. Should peace be proclaimed to-morrow, and Europe enjoy twenty or thirty years respite from bloodshed, those officers who may then hold commissions in the service will, in the event of war, (our system remaining unchanged: which God forbid!) have in like manner to learn all their duties. In France, on the contrary, the government maintains its officers as we do our muskets or big guns—fit for immediate service in any part of the world.

CHIPS.

THE RUSSIAN BUDGET.

We feel the cost of war, and know that it must be absolutely more expensive to the Russian than it is to our own. How long is the Russian pocket? how strong is the Russian arm? are very natural questions. A German gentleman in the United States, long resident in Russia, has published a report upon the subject not altogether tallying with some other reports that come to us from the Old World by way of the New. The account Mr. Donai gives is nearly to the following effect:

Fifty millions of Russian subjects yield to their Czar not more than a revenue of twenty millions sterling. More cannot be extracted from the people; and, out of this, a large army of soldiers is not, it stands to reason, too liberally paid. Every member of the Russian population, taking one with another, pays eight shillings a year for being ruled imperially, with little or nothing more to pay for local government of any kind. In the same way, every Austrian pays twelve shillings; every Prussian eighteen shillings; every Frenchman forty-four shillings; and every Englishman forty-eight shillings to the resources of the nation, besides considerable sums towards local expenditure. Public expenses suggest, roughly, a nation’s wealth, and Russia, judged by this test, is inhabited by a people manifestly poor. Whenever war arises, therefore, the Czar goes abroad to borrow, and there is, every year, a deficiency in the imperial budget. If all the European money-lenders buttoned up their pockets closely, Russian war must cease. How these loan contractors will ever get back more than interest on capital, it is not easy to see; for, if borrowing continues, even the receipt of interest by them may become precarious.

The only direct tax in Russia is the poll tax, yielding less than three-and-a-half millions sterling; add to it the license-duty paid by merchants and tradesmen, and the sum becomes five millions. We speak only of pounds sterling, because the value of sums stated in silver roubles (the national denomination in which Russian accounts are computed) is less clearly perceived. The customs’ duties yield five millions more to the revenue; and these duties fall entirely on the upper classes; as the Russian peasant does not make any appreciable use of foreign goods. Crown estates yield less than three millions and a half; and under the head crown estates are included mines, forests, and gold-washings, with nearly half the estates in the empire, the real annual profit obtained from each crown peasant being not more than three shillings and fourpence. The rest of the imperial revenue is extracted from the sale of brandy.

The Czar is the great brandy-merchant to his people. The brandy trade is his monopoly, and his chief means of livelihood as a potentate. Before he took to the spirit-trade, licenses for the distillation and retailing of brandy used to be always sold to the same persons, who acquired enormous wealth by their transactions. Government, aware of this, reduced their profits by conditions and changes which at last drove out of the market all but those persons who carried on a wholesale business on the largest scale. A few hundred wholesale distilling firms, too deeply concerned in their trade to bring it to a stand-still, carried on their business at the mercy of the emperor; who soon ordered that all brandy produced by the distillers should be sold to the government, which then doubled its quantity with water, and supplied it to licensed dealers for retail sale—of course, after more dilution—at fixed prices to the public. Licenses are sold by auction, and their prices are often run up by agents of the government; so that speculators in them are almost as likely to be ruined as to thrive.

Much has been said of a mysterious treasure belonging to the crown, yearly augmented by a procession of millions of roubles to the vaults of the fortress of Saint Petersburg. Mr. Donai does not believe in this problematical deposit of wealth; because its sources, being such as have been here detailed including borrowed money, cannot accumulate. Borrowers are not usually people whose coffers overflow with millions. The real truth is that the Russian government gets money as savages get fruit, by cutting down the tree; and lives upon capital as well as interest. The loan of last year may have covered the interest of former loans, and perhaps the cost of arms purchased in Belgium; but even that is not certain, for six issues of paper money have already been forced into currency; private contributions have been claimed and urged upon the people from the pulpit with no very great result; and this reminds us that one source of money to the Czar has not been named in the preceding summary. It is the Russian church. There remains the bag of money in the pocket of the church. When, in eighteen hundred and forty-five, the empress was to go to Italy, the clergy paid a contribution of two millions—the price of the forcible conversion of the peasants in the Baltic provinces. The present war is set forth as a holy war, and the church may be asked fairly to assist in paying for it, and no doubt is asked very perseveringly, and for no small sums. But how heavy is the purse of the Russian church? Its contents used to be valued at twenty-six millions sterling; and, although the holy fathers may contribute even to the last farthing, we unfortunately know that twenty-six millions are soon swallowed up when a great war is being waged.

Thus the case is said to stand as regards money. It is not any better in respect of men. In time of war the Russians do not abhor military service as they do in time of peace; because they are then better treated, and have prospects of advancement. But it appears that the Russians do not make a soldier fit to be led against the enemy until after several years’ drilling. Deduct from the Czar’s million of men four hundred thousand that can form lines only on paper, and three hundred thousand destroyed in the present struggle, only three hundred thousand old soldiers remain to cover the whole frontier, north, south, east, and west. Another campaign will destroy them nearly all, and there will remain nothing but an army of recruits. Fanaticism may be infused into these by abolishing serfdom, and by other home appeals; but their fighting powers will be very low indeed at the end of another campaign. To urge on the war, therefore, without giving time for a recovery of breath, is to destroy the attacking power of the Russian empire; and all the arts and all the diplomacy at its command—and they are both numerous and skilful—ever have been and ever will be to gain time. Time is, with Russia, nearly synonymous with victory.

Its defensive power nobody is disposed to under-estimate. In this matter, its real weakness gives it, in one sense, special strength. Steppes, swamps, and vast regions almost destitute of roads, a bad climate, a thin population barely civilised that vanishes before approaching hosts and leaves only a desert for the enemy to traverse, are obstacles that exist now as they existed in the days of Pultawa and Moscow. Upon this the Czar reposes his last trust. But every condition of the empire is such as to cause its vital parts to be rather upon its western and southern borders than in its more central parts. Drive the people into the inhospitable interior, and their difficulties of subsistence will be only a little less insurmountable than those of an enemy. Indeed, of the prodigious superficies over which the empire extends—including, as it does, nearly one-seventh part of the terrestrial globe—by far the greatest proportion is uninhabitable to friend or foe. The enormous northern provinces, especially, are destined to perpetual sterility, not only on account of the extreme rigour of the climate, but because nearly all the great rivers by which they are traversed fall into the Arctic Ocean; and are therefore inaccessible for the whole or a greater part of the year. We may live to see, therefore, that the Muscovite tradition of defence is quite as vain a trust as most of the traditions blindly followed in these days, unless the peace now in course of negotiation be lasting and secure.

The interruption—nay, the paralysis—of commerce occasioned by the present war is another source of exhaustion. Except for ordinary necessaries of life, Russia draws her supplies from foreign countries in exchange for raw material produced from the estates of the nobles. She has such endless supplies of timber that to give an idea of some of her forests, it is said, as a specimen, that a squirrel might hop from Saint Petersburg to Moscow from tree to tree without touching the ground, and that she could, under a rational system, afford illimitable tallow, hemp, and oil; but these sources of wealth are impeded and crippled very naturally when nearly every port she possesses along her limited sea-board is blockaded.

A SMALL MONKISH RELIC.

No more than a few months have elapsed since the greatest Greek scholar of the day, the Reverend Doctor Gaisford, late Dean of Christchurch, Oxford, was carried to his last resting-place within the walls of the ancient cathedral over which he had presided so many years. The students of the house, clad in white surplices, preceded the remains of their venerated Dean as the procession passed along the east side of the quadrangle, from the deanery to the cathedral. Great Tom had, by tolling every minute (a thing never done except at the death of the sovereign or the dean), announced the decease; and now a small land-bell, carried in front of the procession by the dean’s verger, and tolled every half-minute, announced that the last rites were about to take place.

The cathedral clock struck four; the usual merry peal of bells for evening prayers was silent. We strolled towards the cathedral, and finding a side-door open, walked in. The dull, harsh, and grating sound of the workmen filling up the grave struck heavily on our ears, as it resounded through the body of the church. The mourners were all gone; and alone, at the head of the grave, watching vacantly the busy labourers, stood the white-headed old verger; another hour, the ground would be all levelled, and the stones replaced over the master he had served faithfully so many years.

The verger informed us that the ground now opened had not been moved for two hundred years, and that a dean had not been buried within the precincts of the church for nearly one hundred years. Bearing these facts in mind, we poked about among the earth which had been thrown out of the grave. We found among the brick-bats and rubbish a few broken portions of human bones, which had evidently been buried very many years; but fastened on to one of the brick-bats we discovered a little bone which we at once pronounced not to be human. It was a little round bone, about the size of a large shirt-stud, from the centre of which projected a longish, tooth-like spine, the end of which still remained as sharp as a needle, and the enamel which covered it still resisted a scratch from a knife. The actual body of the bone was very light and brittle, and a simple test we applied showed that it had been under ground very many years.

The question arose, what was our bone, and how did it get to the place where it was found? It was shown to the greatest authority we have in comparative anatomy, and he immediately pronounced it to be a spine from the back of a very large fish, commonly known as the skate or thornback. This creature has, fixed into the skin of his back in a row along the back of his tail, many very sharp prickles of a tooth-like character, and covered with enamel, just like our specimen. If one of these skin-teeth be cut out from a recent fish, the stud-like knob of bone into which the spine is fixed, will be found, serving to keep this formidable weapon (for such it is) in its proper position; and dreadful blows can Mr. Thornback give with his armed tail in his battles, be they submarine, or be they in the fisherman’s boat.

How did the spine of a thornback get into Christchurch Cathedral, into ground that had not been moved for two hundred years? Before the days of Henry the Eighth the precincts, where the college now stands, were occupied by monkish buildings, where monks had many fast-days, and, on these days, were probably great consumers of fish. The supply of fresh-water fish, from the Thames close by, would hardly be equal to the demand. It is therefore probable that they procured salt-water fish, and a thornback is, above all fish, the most likely to have been supplied by the fishmonger.

In an old book on fishes and serpents, we found, unexpectedly, evidence to prove that the skate—a hundred years ago—formed a favourite dish at the high tables of the colleges. The book was published in seventeen hundred and sixty-three, and the passage runs thus: “The skate, or flaire, is remarkably large, and will sometimes weigh above one hundred pounds; but what is still more extraordinary, there was one sold by a fishmonger at Cambridge to St. John’s College, which weighed two hundred pounds, and dined one hundred and twenty people. The length was forty-two inches, and the breadth thirty-one inches.”

The monkish cook—like a cook of the present day—would, probably, skin and cut off the tail of the thornback, when he cooked him for the monks’ dinner, and then he would probably throw both skin and tail, spines and all, into the rubbish-hole outside the kitchen; there they would remain till removed. And, next, when did this removal take place? A curious book—Collectanea Curiosa—published at Oxford in seventeen hundred and eighty-one, tells us. In this book there is an article entitled, “Out of the journal book of the expences of all the buildings of Christ Church College, Oxon, which I had of Mr. Pore, of Blechinton.”

The second item runs thus: “Spent about the femerell of the new kitchen and sundry gutters pertaining to the same, xviijs. viijd.”

Further on we find, “Paid to Thomas Hewister, for carriage of earth and rubble from the fayre gate, and the new stepull to fill the ditches, on the backside of the college, clvj. loads, at a peny the load by computation, xiijs.”

Again: “Paid to Mr. David Griffith, Priest, for his stipend for wages, as well for keeping of the monastery of St. Frideswide, and saying of Divine service after the suppression of the same unto the first stalling of the dean and canons in the said college, as for his labours in overseeing the workmen dayly labouring there in all by the space of thirteen months, vij £.”

From this evidence it will appear that for a considerable space of time (probably about five years) many alterations were made, and much earth removed from place to place. The cathedral, and, in fact, nearly all the quadrangle—as will appear by comparing their levels with that of the street outside—stand upon made ground. It is probable, therefore, that some of the earth from outside the monkish kitchen, or other rubbish hole, was carted to form the floor of the cathedral, and with it, of course, any rubbish that happened to be there.

This, then, was the fate of our thornback’s spine. The thornback was eaten by the monks of St. Frideswide, the spine thrown away, unheeded, unregarded, to be disinterred, after the lapse of more than three hundred years, at the funeral of a college dean, and finally to be honoured by having its history recorded in Household Words.

LITTLE SAINT ZITA.

There is a collection of horrible, though admirably executed etchings, by the “noble Jacques Callott,” extant, called Les Saincts et Sainctes de l’Année. It is a complete pictorial calendar of the Romish martyrology. No amount of indigestion, caused by suppers of underdone pork-chops; no nightmares, piled one on another; no distempered imaginings of topers in the worst state of delirium tremens; no visions of men with guilt-laden consciences; could culminate into a tenth part of the horrors that the noble Jacques has perpetuated with his immortal graver. All the refinements of torture, invented by the ruthless and cruel pagans, and inflicted by them on the early confessors, are here set down in chiaro oscuro; not a dislocated limb is omitted, not a lacerated muscle is passed over. The whole work is a vast dissecting-room—a fasciculus of scarifications, maimings, and dismemberments—of red-hot pincers, scalding oil, molten lead, gridirons, wire scourges, jagged knives, crowns of spikes, hatchets, poisoned daggers, tarred shirts, and wild beasts.

The blessed saints had a bad time of it for certain. How should we, I wonder, with our pluralities, our Easter-offerings, and regium donum, our scarlet hats and stockings, and dwellings in the gate of Flam; our Exeter Hall meetings and buttered muffins afterwards; our first-class missionary passages to the South Seas, and grants of land and fat hogs from King Wabashongo; our dean and chapter dinners, and semi-military chaplains’ uniforms (Oh, last-invented, but not least scorn-worthy of humbugs!); how should we confront the stake, the shambles, and the carnifex, the scourge, the rack, and the amphitheatre? Surely the faith must have been strong, or the legends untrue!

Yet there are more saints than the noble Jacques ever dreamed of in his grim category, crowded as it is. Saint Patrick, if we may credit the Irish legend, had two birthdays; still, the number of saints, all duly canonised, is so great, that the year can scarcely spare them the sixth of a birth-day apiece. Only yesterday, the postman (he is a Parisian postman, and, in appearance, is something between a policeman and a field-marshal in disguise) brought me a deformed little card, on which was pasted an almanac with a whole calendar-full of saints, neatly tied up with cherry-coloured ribbon, accompanying the gift with the compliments of the season, and an ardent wish that the new year might prove bonne et belle to me; all of which meant that I should give him two francs, on pain of being denounced to the concierge as a curmudgeon, to the landlord as a penniless lodger, and to the police as a suspicious character. Musing over the little almanac, in the futile attempt to get two francs’ worth of information out of it, I found a whole army of saints, of whom I had never heard before, and noticed the absence of a great many who are duly set down in another calendar I possess. Would you believe that neither Saint Giles nor Saint Swithin was to be found in my postman’s hagiology—that no mention was made of Saint Waldeburga, or of the blessed Saint Wuthelstan; while on the other hand I found Saint Yon, Saint Fiacre, Saint Ovid, Saint Babylas, Saint Pepin, Saint Ponce, Saint Frisque, Saint Nestor, and Saint Pantaloon? What do we know of these saints in England? Where were Saint Willibald, Saint Winifred, Saint Edward the Confessor, and Saint Dunstan, the nose-tweaker? Nowhere! Yet they must all have their days, their eves, and feasts. Where, above all, was my little Saint Zita?

If one of the best of Christian gentlemen—the kindly humourist, who wrote the Ingoldsby Legends—could tell us, without scandal to his cloth or creed, the wondrous stories of Saint Gengulphus and Saint Odille, Saint Anthony and Saint Nicholas, shall I be accused of irreverence, if, in my own way, I tell the legend of little Saint Zita? I must premise that the first discovery of the saintly tradition is due to M. Alphonse Karr, who has a villa at Genoa, the birth-place of the saint herself.

I have no memory for dates, and have no printed information to go upon, so I am unable to state the exact year, or even century, in which Saint Zita flourished. But I know that it was in the dark ages, and that the Christian religion was young, and that it was considerably more than one thousand five hundred years ago.

Now, Pomponius Cotta (I give him that name because it is a sounding one—not that I know his real denomination) was a noble Roman. He was one of the actors in that drama which Mr. Gibbon of London and Lausanne so elegantly described some centuries afterwards: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It must have been a strange time, that Decline and Fall. Reflecting upon the gigantic, overgrown, diseased civilisation of the wonderful empire, surrounded and preyed upon by savage and barbarous Goths and Visigoths, Vandals, Dacians, and Pannonians, I cannot help picturing to myself some superannuated old noble, accomplished, luxurious, diseased and depraved—learned in bon-mots and scandalous histories of a former age, uselessly wealthy, corruptly cultivated, obsoletely magnificent, full of memories of a splendid but infamous life, too old to reform, too callous to repent, cynically presaging a deluge after him, yet trembling lest that deluge should come while he was yet upon the stage, and wash his death-bed with bitter waters; who is the sport and mock, the unwilling companion and victim unable to help himself, of a throng of rough, brutal, unpolished youngsters—hobbedehoys of the new generation—who carouse at his expense, smoke tobacco under his nose, borrow his money, slap him on the back, and call him old fogey behind it, sneer at his worn-out stories, tread on his gouty toes, ridicule his obsolete politeness, and tie crackers to the back of his coat collar. Have you not seen the decline and fall of the human empire? So men and empires have alike their decadence.

But Pomponius Cotta never recked, it is very probable, of such things. He might have occasionally expressed his belief, like some noble Romans of our own age and empire, that the country was going to the bad; but he had large revenues, which he spent in a right noble and Roman manner; and he laid whatever ugly misgivings he had in a red sea of Falernian and Chiajian (if, indeed, all the stock of those celebrated brands had not already been drunk out by the thirsty Visigoths and Vandals). He had the finest house in Genoa; and you who know what glorious palaces the city of the Dorias and the Spinolas can yet boast of, even in these degenerate days, may form an idea of what marvels of marble, statuary, frescos, and mosaics owned Pomponius Cotta for lord, in the days when there was yet a Parthenon at Athens and a Capitol at Rome.

The noble Pomponius was a Christian, but I am afraid in a very slovenly, lukewarm, semi-pagan sort of way. As there are yet in France some shrivelled old good-for-nothings whose sympathies are with Voltaire and d’Alembert—who sigh for the days of the Encyclopedia, the Esprits-forts, and the Baron d’Holbach’s witty, wicked suppers, so Pomponius furtively regretted the old bad era before creation heard the voice that cried out that the good Pan was dead[5]—the days when there were mysteries and oracles, sacrifices and haruspices, Lares and Penates, and when laziness and lust, dishonesty and superstition, were reduced into systems, and dignified with the name of philosophy. So Pomponius half believed in the five thousand gods he had lost, and was but a skin-deep worshipper of the One left. As for his wife, the Domina Flavia Pomponia, she came of far too noble a Roman family, was far too great a lady, thought far too much of crimping her tresses, perfuming her dress, painting her face, giving grand entertainments, and worrying her slaves, to give herself to piety and the practice of religion; and though Onesimus, that blessed though somewhat unclean hermit, did often come to the Pomponian house and take its mistress roundly to task for her mundane mode of life, she only laughed at the good man; quizzed his hair, shirt, and long thickly-peopled beard; and endeavoured to seduce him from his hermit fare of roots and herbs and spring-water, by pressing invitations to partake of dainty meals and draughts of hot wine.

[5] This is one of the earliest traditions of the Christian era. That at midnight on the first Christmas-Eve a great voice was heard all over the world, crying “The God Pan is dead.” Milton bursts into colossal melody on this key-note in his magnificent Christmas hymn.

I am not so uncharitable as to assume that all the seven deadly sins found refuge in the mansion of Pomponius Cotta, but it is certain that it was a very fortalice and citadel for one of them—namely, gluttony. There never were such noble Romans (out of Guildhall) as the Pomponii for guzzling and guttling, banqueting, junketing, feasting, and carousing. It was well that plate glass was not invented in those times, for the house was turned out of windows regularly every day, and the major part of the Pomponian revenues would have been expended in glaziers’ bills. But there were dinners and suppers and after-suppers. The guests ate till they couldn’t move, and drank till they couldn’t see. Of course they crowned themselves with flowers, and lolled upon soft couches, and had little boys to titillate their noses with rare perfumes, and pledged each other to the sounds of dulcet music; but they were an emerited set of gormandisers for all that, and richly deserved the visitation of the stern Nemesis that sate ever in the gate in the shape of the fair-haired barbarian, with the brand to burn, the sword to slay, and the hands to pillage. Or, like the Philistine lords, they caroused and made merry, unwotting of that stern, moody, blind Samson, sitting apart, yonder, with his hair all a-growing, and soon to arise in his might and pull the house down on their gluttonous heads. Or, like Belshazzar’s feasters, they were drunk in vessels of gold and silver, while the fingers of a man’s hand were writing on the wall, and the Medes and Persians were at the gate.

It may easily be imagined that in such a belly-god temple—such a house of feasting and wassail—the cook was a personage of great power and importance. Pomponius Cotta had simply the best cook not only in Genoa, but in Magna Græcia—not only in Magna Græcia, but in the whole Italian peninsula. But no man-cook had he—no haughty, stately, magister coquinæ, no pedant in Apicius or bigoted believer in Lucullus. Yet Pomponius was proud and happy in the possession of a culinary treasure—a real cordon-bleu, a Mrs. Glasse of the dark ages, a Miss Acton of antiquity, a Mrs. Rumball of Romanity; and this was no other than a little slave girl whom they called Zita.

We have all heard of the cook who boasted that he could serve up a leathern shoe in twenty-seven different phases of sauce and cookery. I never believed in him, and always set him down as a vapouring fanfaroon—a sort of copper-stewpan captain of cookery. But I have a firm belief that little Zita would have made everything out of anything or nothing culinary; that her stewed pump-handles would have been delicious, her salmi of bath-brick exquisite, her croquettes of Witney blanket unapproachable, her back hair en papillote a dish fit for a king. She cooked such irresistible dishes for the noble Pomponius that he frequently wept, and would have given her her freedom had he not been afraid that she would be off and be married: that the noble Domina Pomponia was jealous of her, and would have led her a sorry life, had she dared to cross her husband; that the guests of the Pomponian house wrote bad sapphics and dactylics in her praise, and would have given her necklaces of pearl and armlets of gold for gifts, but that the Roman finances were in rather an embarrassed condition just then, and that poor trust was dead with the Genoese jewellers.

Little Zita was very pretty; she must have been pretty—and she was. She was as symmetrical as one of Pradier’s Bacchantes—as ripe and blooming as the grapes they press; but as pure as the alabaster of which they are made. Her complexion was as delicately, softly tinted as one of Mr. Gibson’s Anglo-Roman statues; her long hair, when she released it from its confining fillet, hung down about her like a king’s mantle; she had wrists and ankles that only gold or gems were worthy to embrace: she had a mouth like a Cupid’s bow, and eyes like almonds dyed in ebony; and teeth that were the gates of ivory of the dreams of love, and nails like mother of pearl. She danced like Arbuscula, and sang like Galeria Coppiola; and she cooked, like an angel—as she is.

None could serve up in such style the great standard dishes of Roman cookery. The wild boar of Troy, with honey, oil, flour and garum; the Campanian sow, fed from golden troughs, stuffed with chestnuts and spices, and brought to table whole with her nine little sucking pigs disposed around her in sweet sauce; the vol au vents of peacocks’ tongues, and ortolans’ eyes, and beccaficos’ brains. Yet, though great in these, she excelled in fanciful, ravishing, gem-like dishes—in what the French call “surprises”—in culinary epigrams, edible enigmas, savoury fables, poems that you could eat and drink. She had sauces, the secrets of which have gone to Paradise with her; she had feats of legerdemain in compounding dishes that no life-long apprenticeship could teach. And, withal, she was so saving, so economical, so cleanly in her arrangements, that her kitchen was like a street in the clean village of Brock (I should not like to pass half an hour even in Velour’s kitchen); and her noble master had the satisfaction of knowing that he gave the mightiest “spreads” in Genoa at anything but an unreasonable or ruinous expense.

She was as honest as a child’s smile, and was as regardless of kitchen stuff, perquisites, Christmas boxes from tradesmen, and the dangerous old crones who hung about the area and cried hare-skins, as your own cook, madam, I hope may be. And, above all, little Zita had no followers, had boxed the major-domo’s ears for offering her a pair of fillagree ear-rings, and was exceeding pious.

Now, a pious cook is not considered, in these sceptical days, as a very great desideratum. A pious cook not unfrequently refuses to cook a Sunday’s dinner, and entertains a serious grenadier on Sunday evening. I have seen many a kitchen drawer in which the presence of a hymn-book, and the “Cook’s Spiritual Comforter” (price ninepence per hundred for distribution) did not exclude the company of much surreptitious cold fat and sundry legs of fowls that were not picked clean. Serious cooks occasionally wear their mistresses’ black silk stockings to go to chapel in; my aunt had a serious cook who drank; and there is a legend in our family of a peculiarly evangelical cook who could not keep her hands off other people’s pomatum. But little Zita was sincerely, unfeignedly, cheerfully, devotedly pious. She did not neglect her duties to pray: she rose up early in the morning before the cock crew, while her masters were sunk in drunken sleep, and prayed for herself and for them, then went to her daily labour with vigorous heart of grace. There are some of us who pray, as grudgingly performing a certain duty, and doing it, but no more—some of us as an example (and what an example!) to others—some through mere habit (and those are in a bad case)—some (who shall gainsay it?) in hypocrisy; but do we not all, Scribes and Pharisees, Publicans and Sinners, number among our friends, among those we know, some few good really pious souls who strike us with a sort of awe and reverent respect; who do their good deeds before we rise, or after we retire to rest; creep into heaven the back way, but are not the less received there with trumpets and crowns of glory?

Such was little Saint Zita. She was, I have said, truly pious. In an age when there was as yet but one Ritual, before dissent and drums ecclesiastic existed, Zita thought it her bounden duty to abide by and keep all the fasts and festivals of the church as ordained by the bishops, priests, and deacons. For she was not book-learned, this poor little cook-maid, and had but these three watchwords for a rule of conduct—Faith, Duty, and Obedience.

It is in the legend that she would decoy the little white-haired, blue-eyed children of the barbarian soldiers into her kitchen, and there, while giving them sweetmeats and other goodies, teach them to lisp little Latin prayers, and tell over the rosary, and kiss the crucifix appended to it. And she would have assuredly have fallen under the grave displeasure of the heaven-born Sir Robert W. Carden, and have been specially pointed at in his proposed Act of Parliament for making almsgiving penal, since she bestowed the major part of her wages in gifts to beggars, unmindful whether they were christian or pagan; and, for a certainty, the strong-minded would have sneered at her, and the wearers of phylacteries would have frowned on her, for she thought it a grave sin to disobey the edict of the church that forbade the eating of flesh on Friday and other appointed fasts. Pomponius Cotta, it must be acknowledged, was troubled with no such scruples. He would have rated his cook soundly, and perchance scourged her, if she had served him up meagre fare on the sixth day of the week; yet I find it in the legend that little Zita was enabled by her own skill, and, doubtless, by celestial assistance, to perpetrate a pious fraud upon this epicurean Roman. The Fridays’ dinners were as rich and succulent, and called forth as loud encomia as those of the other days, yet not one scrap of meat, one drop of carnal gravy, did Zita employ in the concoction thereof. Fish, and eggs, and divers mushrooms, truffles and ketchups, became, in the hands of the saintly cook, susceptible of giving the most meaty flavours. ’Tis said that Zita invented burnt onions—those grand culinary deceptions! And though they were in reality making meagre, as good Christians should do, Pomponius and his boon companions thought they were feasting upon venison and poultry and choice roasts. This is one of the secrets that died with Saint Zita. I never tasted sorrel soup that had even the suspicion of a flavour of meat about it; and though I have heard much of the rice fritters and savoury soups of the Lancashire vegetarians, I doubt much of their ability to conceal the taste of the domestic cabbage and the homely onion.

Now it fell out in the year of redemption—I have not the slightest idea—that P. Maremnius Citronius Ostendius, a great gastronome and connoisseur in oysters, came from Asia to visit his kinsman Pomponius. There was some talk of his marrying the beautiful Flavia Pomponilia, the eldest daughter of the Pomponian house (she was as jealous of Zita as Fleur de Lys was of Esmeralda, and would have thrust golden pins into her, à-la-mode Romaine, but for fear of her father); but at all events Ostendius was come down from Asia to Genoa, and there was to be a great feast in honour of his arrival. Ostendius had an aldermanic abdomen under his toga, had a voice that reminded you of fruity port, bees-wings in his eyes, a face very like collared brawn, and wore a wig. Those adjuncts to beauty were worn, ladies and gentlemen, fifteen hundred years ago. Ay! look in at the Egyptian Room of the British Museum, London, and you shall find wigs older than that. He had come from Asia, where he was reported to have partaken of strange dishes—birds of paradise, gryphons, phœnixes, serpents, elephants—what do I know but he despised not the Persicos apparatus, and was not a man to be trifled with in his victuals! Pomponius Cotta called his cook into his sanctum, and gave her instructions as to the banquet, significantly telling her what she might expect if she failed in satisfying him and his gastronomical guests. Poor Zita felt a cold shudder as she listened to the threats which, in lazy Latin, her noble master lavished upon her. But she determined, less through fear of punishment than a sincere desire of doing her duty, to exert herself to the very utmost in the preparation of the feast. Perhaps there may have been a little spice of vanity in this determination; perhaps she was actuated by a little harmless desire to please the difficult Ostendius, and so prove to him that Pomponius Cotta had a slave who was the best cook in Genoa and in Italy. Why not? I am one who, believing that all is vanity, think that the world as it is could not well get on without some vanity. By which I mean an honest moderate love of and pleasure in approbation. I think we could much easier dispense with money than with this. When I see a conceited man, I think him to be a fool; but when I meet a man who tells me he does not rejoice when he is praised for the good book he has written, or the good picture he has painted, or the good deed he has done, I know him to be a humbug, and a mighty dangerous one to his fellow-creatures.

Flowers, wax torches, perfumes, rich tapestries, cunning musicians—all were ordered for the feast to the guest who was come from Asia. The piscator brought fish in abundance; the lignarius brought wood and charcoal to light the cooking furnaces withal; the venator brought game and venison; the sartor stitched unceasingly at vestments of purple and fine linen; the slaves who fed ordinarily upon salsamentum or salt meat revelled in blithe thoughts of the rich fragments that would fall to their share on the morrow of the banquet. It need scarcely be said that Zita the cook had a whole army of cook’s mates, scullions, marmitons, plate-scrapers, and bottle-washers under her command. These peeled the vegetables, these jointed the meat, these strained the soups and jellies; but to none did she ever confide the real cooking of the dinner. Her spoon was in every casserole, her spatula in every sauce-boat; she knew the exact number of mushrooms to every gratin, and of truffles to every turkey. Believe me—in the works of great artists there is little vicarious handiwork. Asses say that Mr. Stanfield painted the scenery of Acis and Galatea by means of a speaking-trumpet from the shilling gallery, his assistants working on the stage. Asses say that Carême used to compose his dinners reclining on a crimson velvet couch, while his nephew mixed the magic ingredients in silver stewpans. Asses say that all the hammering and chiselling of Praxiteles’ statues were done by workmen, and that the sculptor only polished up the noses and finger tips with a little marble dust. Don’t believe such tales. In all great works the master hand is every where.

On the morning of the banquet, early, Zita went to market, and sent home stores of provisions, which her assistants knew well how to advance through their preparatory stages. Then, knowing that she had plenty of time before her, the pious little cook—though she had already attended matins—went to church to have a good pray. In the simplicity of her heart, she thought she would render up special thanks for all the good dinners she had cooked, and pray as specially that this evening’s repast should be the very best and most succulent she might ever prepare. You see she was but a poor, ignorant, little slave-girl, and she lived in the dark ages.

Zita went to church, heard high mass, confessed, and then, going into a little dark chapel by herself, fell down on her knees before the mother of all virgins, the Queen of Heaven. She prayed, and prayed, and prayed so long, so earnestly, so devoutly, that she quite forgot how swiftly the hours fleet by, how impossible it is to overtake them. She prayed and prayed till she lost all consciousness and memory of earthly things, of earthly ties and duties, till the vaulted roof seemed to open, till she seemed to see, through a golden network, a sky of lapis-lazuli all peopled with angelic beings in robes of dazzling white; till she heard soft sounds of music such as could only proceed from harps played by celestial hands; till the statue of the Queen of Heaven seemed to smile upon her and bless her; till she was no longer a cook and a slave, but an ecstatic in communion with the saints.

She prayed till the mortal sky without, from the glare of noonday took soberer hues; till the western horizon began to blush for Zita’s tardiness; till the great blue Mediterranean sea grew purple, save where the sunset smote it; till the white palaces of Genoa were tinged with pink, as if the sky had rained roses. She prayed till the lazy dogs which had been basking in the sun rose and shook themselves and raised their shiftless eyes as if to wonder where the sun was; till the barbarian soldiers, who had been lounging on guard-house benches, staggered inside, and fell to dicing and drinking; till hired assassins woke up on their straw pallets, and, rubbing their villanous eyes, began to think that it was pretty nearly time to go a murdering; till cut-purses’ fingers began to itch premonitorily; till maidens watched the early moon, and longed for it to be sole sovereign of the heavens, that the trysting-time might come; till the young spendthrift rejoiced that another day was to come, and the old sage sighed that another day was gone; till sick men quarrelled with their nurses for closing their casements, and the birds grew drowsy, and the flowers shut themselves up in secresy, and the frog began to speak to his neighbour, and the glow-worm lighted his lamp.

She prayed till it was dusk, and almost dark, till the vesper bell began to ring, when she awoke from out her trance, and not a dish of the dinner was cooked.

And she hurried home, weeping, ah! so bitterly. For Zita knew her duty towards her neighbour as the road towards Heaven. She knew that there were times for all things, and that she had prayed too much and too long. Punishment she did not so much dread as the reproaches of her own conscience for the neglect of her duty. At length, faltering and stumbling in the momentarily increasing darkness, she reached the Pomponian house, which was all lighted up from top to bottom. “Ah!” thought she, “the major domo has, at least, attended to his business.” She hurried into a small side court-yard where the kitchen was, and there she found all her army of assistants: the cook’s mates, the scullions, the marmitons, the plate-scrapers, and the bottle-washers, all fast asleep, with their ladles, their knives, and their spits on benches and door-steps and in corners. “Ah!” cried little Zita, wringing her hands; “waiting for me, and quite worn out with fatigue!” Then, stepping among them without awakening them, she approached the great folding-doors of the kitchen, and tried the handle; but the doors were locked, and through the keyholes and hinges, the chinks and crannies of the portal, there came a rich, powerful, subtle odour, as of the best dinner that ever was cooked. She thought she understood it all. Enraged at her absence, her master had sent for Maravilla, the corpulent female cook of Septimus Pylorus, his neighbour, to prepare the dinner, or, perhaps, the great P. Maremnius Citronius Ostendius had himself condescended to assume the cook’s cap and apron, and was at that moment engaged within, with locked doors, in blasting her professional reputation for ever. She was ruined as a cook, a servant—a poor little fatherless girl, with nought but her virtue and her cookery for a dower. Unhappy little Zita!

She ran back, through the court-yard to the great banquetting saloon, and there, lo, she found the table decked, and the soft couches ranged, the flowers festooned, the rich tapestries hanging, and the perfumes burning in golden censers. And there, too, she found the proud Domina Pomponia, in gala raiment, who greeted her with a smile of unwonted benevolence, saying:

“Now, Zita, the guests are quite ready for the banquet; and I am sure, from the odour which we can smell even here, that it will be the very best dinner that ever was cooked.”

Then came from an inner chamber the fruity port-wine voice of Ostendius, crying,

“Ay, ay, I am sure it will be the very best dinner that ever was cooked;” and the voice of Pomponius Cotta answered him gaily, that “Little Zita was not the best cook in Genoa for nothing,” and that he would not part with her for I don’t know how many thousand sesterces. Poor Zita saw in this only a cruel jest. For certain another cook had been engaged in her place, and she herself would be had up after the banquet, taunted with its success, confronted with her rival, and perhaps scourged to death amid the clatter of drinking-cups. Her eyes blinded with tears, she descended again to the court-yard, and fervently, though despairingly, breathed one brief prayer to our Lady of the Chapel. She had scarcely done so, when the great folding-doors of the kitchen flew open, and there issued forth a tremendous cloud of ambrosial vapour, radiant, golden, roseate, azure, in which celestial odours were mingled with the unmistakeable smell of the very best dinner that ever was cooked. And lo! hovering in the cloud, the rapt eye of little Saint Zita seemed to descry myriads of little airy figures in white caps and jackets, even like unto cooks, but who all had wings and little golden knives at their girdles. And she heard the same soft music that had stolen upon her ears in the chapel; and as the angelic cooks fluttered out of the kitchen, it seemed as though each little marmiton saluted the blushing cheek of the trembling saint with a soft and soothing kiss.

At the same time the army of earthly cook’s assistants awoke as one scullion, and without so much as yawning, took their places at the dresser-board, and composedly began to dish the dinner. And little Zita, hurrying from furnace to furnace, and lifting up the lids of casserole and bain-marie pan, found, done to a turn, a dinner even such as she with all her culinary genius would never have dreamt of.

Of course it was a miracle. Of course it was the very best dinner ever dressed: what else could it have been with such cooks? They talk of it to this day in Genoa; though I am sorry to say the Genoese cooks have not profited by the example, and do not seek to emulate it. They have the best maccaroni, and dress it worse than any people in Europe.

The legend ought properly to end with a relation of how Pomponius Cotta gave his little cook her freedom, how the guests loaded her with presents, and how she married the major domo, and was the happy mother of many good cooks and notable housewives. But the grim old monkish tradition has it, that little Zita died a virgin, and, alas, a martyr! But she was canonised at her death; and even as St. Crispin looks after the interests of cobblers, and St. Barbe has taken artillerymen under his special patronage, so the patroness of cooks has ever been little Saint Zita.

Now ready, price Five Shillings and Sixpence, cloth boards,

THE TWELFTH VOLUME

OF

HOUSEHOLD WORDS,

Containing from No. 280 to No. 303 (both inclusive) and the extra Christmas Number.

The Right of Translating Articles from Household Words is reserved by the Authors.

Published at the Office, No. 16, Wellington Street North, Strand. Printed by Bradbury & Evans, Whitefriars, London.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

This is from Volume XIII of the series.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Transcriber has generated a Table of Contents.

Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the ends of their paragraphs.

Itemized changes from the original text:

- On page 2, changed “ouside” to “outside”, in “the bare earth outside their hovels.”

- On page 4, changed “broad, streak” to “broad streak”, in “a broad streak of sky”

- On page 6, changed “litle” to “little”, in “two wretched little bed-chambers”

- On page 7, changed “way” to “away”, in “finally threw them away; not so”

- On page 7, changed “acquintance” to “acquaintance”, in “should have made acquaintance with the magician”

- On page 9, changed “couin” to “cousin”, in “on the subject of his cousin Lucy.”

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 307, FEBRUARY 9, 1856 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

- TABLE OF CONTENTS

- THE SULINA MOUTH OF THE DANUBE.

- DAY-WORKERS AT HOME.

- TWO COLLEGE FRIENDS.

- IN FOUR CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- SORROW AND MY HEART.

- FRENCH AND ENGLISH STAFF OFFICERS.

- CHIPS.

- THE RUSSIAN BUDGET.

- A SMALL MONKISH RELIC.

- LITTLE SAINT ZITA.
- THE TWELFTH VOLUME
- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE