Read Ebook: Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature Science and Art No. 736 February 2 1878 by Various Chambers Robert Editor Chambers William Editor

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"In Elder Street." "In Elder Street! that seems to me rather an expensive part of the town for a person in your circumstances."

"It is but a garret, sir, up four pair of stairs."

"Are any of your children at school?" "No, sir; but the eldest is in Provost Manderson's shop, who has been very kind to him, and ta'en him aff my hand. And the second is a prentice to a tobacconist; and the rest are in the house, for I have neither decent claes to put upon them, nor siller to send them to the schule; and this is Saturday night, and no sae muckle meat within the door as put by the Sabbath day."

"I am sorry for you, and grieved to see Sandy Reid's daughter come to this; but you must be sensible, that for a person in your situation, your present dress is rather too showy and extravagant." "That's true, Sir William; but gentle servants are no' civil to poor folk when they come ill-dressed."

"I believe, indeed, that is too true, but your dress is quite unsuitable." "Indeed, Sir William, I borrowed this bonnet and shawl from a gentleman's housekeeper, just for the purpose of waiting upon you, for I am in great want."

"Well, there is half-a-crown to help you in the meantime; and I will inquire at Provost Manderson about you on Monday, and if you be speaking the truth, I will see and get your children into some of the Hospitals."

'Here the party broke out from behind the curtains'--and we may suppose that Sir William was a good deal amazed as well as amused at the adroit way he had been taken in.

Blessed shades of the past, In the future I see ye, so fair! Ties that were nearest, Forms that were dearest, The truest and fondest are there.

They are flowerets of earth, That are blooming in heaven, so fair: And the stately tree, Spreading wide and free, The sheaves that were ripened are there.

The tear-drop that trembled In Pity's meek eye; and the prayer, Faith of the purest, Hope that was surest, The love all-enduring are there.

And the loved, the beloved, Whose life made existence so fair! The soft seraph voice Bade the lowly rejoice, Is heard in sweet harmony there.

W. C.

HELENA, LADY HARROGATE.

'She be coming for sure. Carriage, with second coachman, just getting ready for a start to Dundleton, to meet the down train at 9.17,' said a pink-faced youth, whose stature and chest measurement would have procured for him the interested admiration of a sergeant-major in Her Majesty's Brigade of Guards, but who was as yet but imperfect in his domestic drill as third footman at Carbery Chase.

'What's 9.17?' demanded the mature female addressed, with some asperity, as she dredged flour over some cunningly compounded mess simmering beside the fire in the back-kitchen. 'Can't you give a body the time o' the day? They didn't cut it so fine when I was your age, young chap!'

And indeed it is marvellous to note how the junior population throughout Western Christendom appears to have learned to think and speak by railway time, and to have been, as it were, inoculated by Bradshaw.

'Anyhow, this Miss Whatshername 'll be here soon after eleven.'

'Willis is her name, and she comes from the Ingees,' put in a tart young town-made house-maid. 'I wonder if she's black?' This quasi-witticism provoked a titter among the rest of the under-servants there collected; for anything was welcome that could excuse a laugh; and besides, a new recruit to the aristocracy of the waited-upon is sure to be smartly criticised by the plebs of those who wait.

'The captain knows too well on which side his bread is buttered,' pronounced the gaunt house-maid-in-chief, an invaluable female, lynx-eyed for spiders' webs, and vigilant as to the minutest details of bedroom duty.

Opinions at Carbery Chase were very much divided as to the new-comer's exact status and claims to consideration. There were those who invidiously described her as 'Sir Sykes's charity child,' and appeared to regard her as a species of genteel mendicant most foolishly invited down to Devonshire. There were others who were not sorry for the arrival of any one considered capable of lending animation to a house where the regular routine of every-day life ran on with somewhat sluggish flow. And there were a few philosophers in plush or white aprons, much flouted by the rest, who held that Sir Sykes was himself the best judge as to what guests, permanent or temporary, should be allowed to share the shelter of his roof at Carbery.

That there was enough and to spare in that opulent mansion which acknowledged Sir Sykes Denzil for its master, was patent to all. Large as was Sir Sykes's household and handsome his expenditure , he was known to live within his income; and was rumoured by his inferiors to be guilty of the offence, never mentioned otherwise than with a resentful reverence, of 'putting by.' Sir Sykes's men and maids were probably not students of Dean Swift's ironical advice to their order; but we may rely on it that the servants of Dives himself had strongly defined ideas as to the proportion of high feasting that should accompany the purple and fine linen of their patron.

Meanwhile, in spite of the early training which is supposed to make an Englishman of Sir Sykes Denzil's degree as outwardly impassive as a Red Indian, no one at Carbery appeared to think so much about the arrival of Miss Willis as did the baronet himself. Her coming did not now at anyrate partake of the character of a surprise, for weeks had naturally elapsed between the incoming of the late and that of the new mail, and there had been time enough for preparations, if such were necessary. Sir Sykes, however, on the morning of his ward's arrival could not avoid, not merely the being nervous and anxious, but the exhibiting to all who cared to look of his inexplicable nervousness and unreasonable anxiety. He went and came at frequent and irregular intervals between his own traditional apartment the library, and that morning-room where his daughters usually sat over their sketches and lacework and china-painting, and all those laborious trifles on which young ladies employ their taper fingers.

That their father was undignified in his apparently uncalled-for agitation as to the Indian orphan's arrival, was too evident not to be recognised by even the most dutiful of daughters. But both Blanche and Lucy willingly accounted for the baronet's restlessness on the ground of the revival of early associations, acting on the nerves of one whose health was no longer robust.

'Let her only come here and quietly drop into her place among us,' said the elder sister to the younger; 'and depend upon it, papa will find her presence at Carbery as unexciting as though she were a supplementary daughter returning "for good," as the girls call it, from a boarding-school.'

'I never,' said Jasper to himself musingly, as he knocked about the balls on the billiard-table, 'heard a word against the governor. He was awfully needy and that sort of thing once, of course; but I never knew there to be a whisper of any sharp practice either at ?cart? or with the bones. Had there been such, some good-natured fellow or other about the clubs would have let fall a hint of it before now in my hearing, or some servant would have tattled, when I wore a jacket and was Master Jasper. He's not much liked, my father, but respected he is. I doubt if many, who fluked by a lucky chance upon a great fortune, get so civilly spoken of behind their backs.'

Jasper was not one to have cherished those tender recollections of infantine joys and sorrows, which with some men remain green and fresh to the last. He had, to use his own expression, to 'hark back' with painful effort and purpose, ere he could reproduce before his mental vision the long past of his early boyhood. 'I have a vague notion,' said he, after an interval of this appeal to memory, 'that my mother gave me more sweetmeats than were good for me, and that she, and I too, seemed to stand in awe of my father. I'm sure I don't know why, unless it were because he was serious and silent--a grave Spanish Don, as I used to think. But she said too that he had been of a livelier mood once, and something about his high spirits having deserted him just when the world began to smile. My old nurse--what was her name, I wonder?--Wiggins, Priggins--all nurses are named something of the sort, and all combine to dote over the little wretches that torment them--used to talk about the governor's sad looks dating from the loss of that young sister of mine. She would have been younger than Lucy, older than Blanche, I take it. But why, in the name of common-sense, a man of the world should never forget the loss of a chit in the nursery--that is, if it was all on the square--but then, again, the motive!' And the captain's arching eyebrows and the compression of his thin lips were very expressive of his readiness to believe the very worst that could be believed as to his nearest and dearest, if only a plausible reason for such villainy could be alleged. 'If it had been myself now,' he muttered, as he sent the red ball, with a mechanical precision that proved him a dexterous pool-player, into pocket after pocket of the green table; 'but even then the governor, who had Apollyon's own luck, did not need to cut off the entail by illegal methods. He's no life-tenant of Carbery, as he makes me feel whenever our views don't exactly coincide; could leave it to my sisters; or back again, if he chose, to the De Vere lot; and so, what interest he could have had in spiriting away little Mabel Denzil, is a question that I defy OEdipus, or a modern racing prophet, to answer.' Having said which, the captain rang the bell for something to drink, drank that something, and immersed his fine faculties in the delightful study of a sporting newspaper.

Jasper had not had leisure to thread his way very far through the labyrinth of darkling vaticinations, so dear to men who like himself are of the horse, horsey, as to probable or certain winners of important events to come off, or to discriminate with sufficient nicety between the inherent truth or falsehood of the reports that made the barometer of the betting world oscillate so wildly between panic and exultation, before the grinding of wheels on the smooth gravel announced the arrival of the carriage, and that Sir Sykes's ward was at the threshold of Carbery Court, her future home.

'I'd give a trifle,' thought Jasper, 'to know how many throbs to the minute the governor's pulse is giving just now. I suppose, like a pattern guardian, he will receive her in the hall. I'll wait till the first disjointed welcomes are over, and then drop in and inspect the new importation. I wonder if she drinks rum, like her brother?'

The captain had drawn, mentally, a fancy portrait of Hold's sister, and had marvelled how Blanche and Lucy would be likely to get on with such a one as she could scarcely fail to be. But at the very first glance Jasper abandoned as untenable the conjecture that Miss Willis could drink rum, and he owned to himself, with the candour which men of his stamp exhibit in self-communing alone, how very wide of the mark was the likeness which his imagination had traced.

Miss Willis was very short and slight, and the deep mourning which she wore made her look even slighter and shorter than she really was. She had jet black hair that curled naturally, which, as if in ignorance or defiance of fashion, she wore in a crop, and which made the whiteness of her skin seem more conspicuous than it would otherwise have done. A pale little face, lit up by a pair of fine dark eyes, that drooped modestly to the carpet, as suitable to her shy, timid air. Whether she were pretty or the reverse, was not to be so summarily settled as is the case with most of her sex.

It was the eyes, and the eyes alone, that lent a marked peculiarity to the countenance of Sir Sykes's ward. Look at them, and the verdict that Miss Willis was charming would have been pronounced by many women and most men. Confine the scrutiny to the other features, and the judgment that the Indian orphan was a plain, pale little creature, would as inevitably have resulted. She looked young, quite a girl. The delicate smoothness of her cheek suggested that her age might be under twenty; but there was a subdued thoughtfulness in her aspect that might have harmonised well with her years, had she been older by a lustrum.

'I was talking of OEdipus,' such was Jasper's soliloquy after a half-hour spent in the new arrival's company; 'but here is the Sphynx herself, by Jove!'

It was with an inexpressible sentiment of relief that the baronet saw what style of person his ward appeared to be. Here were no solecisms in breeding, no coarseness of tone, or affectations more painful than honest roughness ever is, to wince at, to gloss over, to excuse on the ground of a youth spent in a far country, and often in stations where European society was scarce, and perhaps not always choice as regarded its quality. Sir Sykes had reckoned, at best, on a probationary period during which he should have had to play the irksome part of an apologist for the shortcomings of her whom he had invited to be the companion of his own daughters.

And then there were more tears and more kissing; and the Misses Denzil took complete possession of their new friend, and bore her off to be installed in her room, and to learn to be at home at Carbery. Nothing could have gone off better than the orphan's reception; and even Jasper felt this, and forbore to sneer. His own heart was as hard as the nether millstone; but he accepted the fact that his sisters possessed organs of a different degree of sensibility, precisely as he owned that roses had perfume, and that the thrushes and nightingales sang sweetly in the garden.

'She's no more the sister of yonder pirate fellow,' such was the captain's conclusion, 'than the last Derby winner was a drayhorse. I thought the rascal spoke mockingly of the relationship between her and him. No; she's not Hold's sister. I wonder whether she is mine?'

Lord Harrogate, when introduced to the baronet's ward, experienced one of the oddest sensations that he had ever felt, and akin to that tantalising, nameless thrill with which we all sometimes fancy that we have seen some place which we know ourselves to visit for the first time, or witnessed some scene which never before met our eyes. He had started, when first he saw Miss Willis, and had eyed her in the inquiring fashion in which we scan a face familiar to us. But it was evident that Miss Willis did not know him, as indeed it was impossible that she, Indian born and bred, and now in England for the first time, should know him. And yet, long after he had left Carbery, the perplexing thought occurred to him again and again that he remembered the face, which, as all could aver, he had beheld for the first time on that day.

LIFE AT NATAL.

The road to Maritzburg from Port Durban, at which travellers to Maritzburg land from the steamer which conveys them to Cape Town, is very tedious to travel by the government mule wagon, which bumps about in ruts, and sticks in mud after a fashion that renders the prospect of the railway now in course of construction very attractive to the expectant colonists; but it is also very beautiful. 'Curved green hills, dotted with clusters of timber exactly like an English park, and a background of distant ranges rising in softly rounded outlines, with deep violet shadows in the clefts, and pale green lights on the slopes,' form its principal features. Nestling amid this rich pasture-land are the kraals of a large Kaffir 'location;' and it is satisfactory to learn that in our South African colony at least, the native population has not been entirely sacrificed to the white man.

At Durban there is a funny little railway between the town and the 'Point;' 'a railway,' says Lady Barker, 'so calm and stately in its method of progression, that it is not at all unusual to see a passenger step deliberately out when it is at its fullest speed of crawl, and wave his hand to his companions as he disappears down the by-path leading to his little home. The passengers are conveyed at a uniform rate of sixpence a head, which sixpence is collected promiscuously by a small boy at odd moments during the journey.'

If the Kaffirs would work with even moderate application, the formation of a luxuriant garden of fruit, flowers, and vegetables would be easily within the reach of any dweller on the soil. The grass is always cleared away for a considerable distance round the house, because snakes are unpleasantly numerous, and grass affords cover for them; in the instances of fine gardens, a broad walk of a deep rich red colour intervening between the house and the gardens, contrasts beautifully with the flower-beds, which are as big as small fields.

The red soil is very destructive to clothing, but it adds to the beauty of the landscape. 'Green things,' says the author, describing a Natal garden, 'which we are accustomed to see in England in small pots, shoot up here to the height of laurel bushes. In shady places grow many varieties of fern and blue hydrangea, and verbena of every shade flourish. But the great feature of this garden is roses, of at least a hundred different sorts, which grow untrained, unpruned, in enormous bushes covered by magnificent blossoms; each bloom of which would win the prize at a rose-show. Red roses, white roses, tea roses, blush roses, moss roses, and the clear old-fashioned cabbage rose, sweetest and most sturdy of all; there they are at every turn--hedges of them, screens of them, and giant bushes of them on either hand.' Add to this a bright swift brook trickling through the garden, the constant sweet song of the Cape canary, and crowds of large butterflies of 'all glorious hues,' which are quite fearless and familiar, perching on the flowers and on the walks, and one gets a delightful notion of a Natal garden.

This is, however, the bright side of the picture of life in our South African colony; its practical aspects are less enticing, though the drawbacks are chiefly such as will be removed in most cases, and modified in all, when railway traffic shall be established in the country; a devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, not very distant. At present, we are told, the necessaries of life are very expensive and difficult to procure; the importation of English servants is almost always a failure; and the Kaffirs, though they have many good qualities, are difficult to teach, very lazy, and given to starting off to their native kraals for an improvised holiday of uncertain duration, without the smallest regard to domestic exigences or the convenience of their employers.

The soil is wonderfully prolific but under-cultivated, and the cost of transport is enormous. Here is a statement which will no doubt in a few years be looked back upon with wonder by the author herself, and read with self-gratulatory retrospective compassion by settlers in Natal under the railway regime: 'The country' 'is beautiful; but except for a scattered homestead here and there, not a sign of a human dwelling is there on its green and fertile slopes. All along the road, shrill bugle-blasts warned the trailing ox-wagons, with their naked "forelooper," at their head, to creep aside out of the way of the open brake in which we travelled. I counted one hundred and twenty wagons that day on fifty miles of road. Now, if one considers that each of these wagons is drawn by a span of thirty or forty oxen, one has some faint idea of how such a method of transport must use up the material of the country. Something like ten thousand oxen toil over this one road summer and winter; and what wonder is it not only that merchandise costs more to fetch up from Durban to Maritzburg than it does to bring out from England, but that beef is dear and bad?

As transport pays better than farming, we hear on all sides of farms thrown out of cultivation; and in the neighbourhood of Maritzburg it is esteemed a favour to let you have either milk or butter at exorbitant prices and of most inferior quality. When one looks round at these countless acres of splendid grazing-land, making a sort of natural park on either hand, it seems like a bad dream to know that we have constantly to use preserved milk and potted meat, as being cheaper and easier to procure than fresh.'

We have been told wonders of the salubrity and delightfulness of the climate of Natal; but Lady Barker does not indorse the statements in which we have hitherto placed confidence. The alternations of heat and cold are very trying; the rains are sudden and violent; and thunder-storms are of almost daily occurrence and great severity. After one very grand storm she found a multitude of beautiful butterflies dead on the garden paths; their plumage was not dimmed nor their wings broken; they might have been ready prepared for a collection, quite dead and stiff.

Amongst the fauna of Natal, birds, reptiles, and insects abound. The natives suffer much from snake-bites, and white new-comers from mosquitos; all classes from 'ticks,' which also persecute the dogs and horses. The native language is very melodious and easily learned; and the Kaffirs pick up a little English readily enough. They are indeed a clever race and very home-loving. One genius of the author's acquaintance, called 'Sixpence,' had actually accompanied his master to England, whence he returned with a terrible recollection of an English winter, and a deep-rooted amazement at the boys of the Shoe Brigade who wanted to clean his boots. That astonished him, Sixpence declares, more than anything else. Lady Barker is emphatic in her advice to all colonists that they should make up their minds from the first to have Kaffir servants. One 'Tom,' a nurse-boy, figures in her book most amusingly; he is a capital fellow; and it is to be hoped he has abandoned the intention, which he confided to his mistress, of resigning his position after 'forty moons,' because by that time he should be in a position to buy plenty of wives, who would work for him and support him for the rest of his life. A Kaffir servant usually gets a pound a month, his clothes, and food. The clothes consist of a shirt and trousers of coarse check cotton, and a soldier's cast-off greatcoat for winter--all the old uniforms of Europe find their way to South Africa; and the food is plenty of 'mealies'--or maize meal for 'scoff,' the native name for a mixture which probably resembles porridge. If a servant be worth making comfortable, one gives him a trifle every week to buy meat. The only effectual punishment and the sole restraint which can be placed on the Kaffir propensity to break things, is a system of fines.

A native kraal consists of a cluster of huts which exactly resemble huge beehives. There is a rude attempt at sod-fencing round them, and a few head of cattle graze in the neighbourhood. Women roughly scratch the earth with crooked hoes to form a mealy-ground. Cows and mealies are all the Kaffirs require, except blankets and tobacco. The latter is smoked out of a cow's horn. 'They seem a very gay and cheerful people,' says the author, 'to judge by the laughter and jests I hear from the groups returning to their kraals every day by the road just outside our fence. Sometimes one of the party carries an umbrella; and the effect of a tall Kaffir clad in nothing at all, and carefully guarding his bare head with a tattered "Gamp," is very ridiculous. Often one of the party walks first, playing upon a rude pipe; whilst the others jig after him, laughing and capering like boys let loose from school, and all chattering loudly.'

No man, except he be a white settler's servant, ever carries a burden. When an 'induna' or chief is 'on the track,' he rides a sorry nag, resting only the point of his great toe in the stirrup, like the Abyssinians. He is followed by his 'tail' or great men, who carry bundles of sticks and keep up with the ambling steed. Then come the wives, bearing heavy loads on their heads; but walking with firm erect carriage, their shapely arms and legs bare, their bodies, from shoulder to knee, clothed in some coarse stuff, which they drape in exquisite folds. Lady Barker describes the Kaffir women as looking neither oppressed nor discontented, but healthy, happy, jolly, lazy, and slow to appreciate any benefit from civilisation, except the money, concerning which they, in common with most savages, display a keenness of comprehension hardly to be improved upon.

A dozen miles from Maritzburg, on the road which forms the first stage of the great overland journey to the Diamond Fields, is the little town of Hawick, on the river Umgeni, which widens down just beneath it to an exquisitely beautiful fall. Over the brink goes the wide, smooth, waveless sheet of water, in an absolutely straight descent of three hundred and twenty feet. From the highest point of the road above the river, the Drakensberg Mountains, snow-covered, except in the hottest summer, are visible, and though majestic, they are disappointing. They are a splendid range of level lines, far up beyond the floating clouds. 'I miss,' says the author, 'the serrated peaks of the Southern Alps and the grand confusion of the Himalayan range. This is evidently the peculiarity of the mountain formation of South Africa; I noticed it first in Table Mountain at Cape Town; it is repeated in every little hill between Durban and Maritzburg, and carried out on a gigantic scale in this splendid range.'

A PERILOUS POSITION.

'Now, look here, Fred; you've exactly an hour and a half to get back in,' said Mr Middleton after luncheon. 'I shall be at the mill by three precisely. Are you sure you can manage it?'

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