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[Illustration: THE GIRL’S OWN PAPER

VOL. XX.—NO. 1019.]       JULY 8, 1899.       [PRICE ONE PENNY.]




[Illustration: “‘A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU.’” (_See page 643._)]

_All rights reserved._]




SHEILA’S COUSIN EFFIE.

A STORY FOR GIRLS.

BY EVELYN EVERETT-GREEN, Author of “Greyfriars,” “Half-a-dozen
Sisters,” etc.


CHAPTER XIV.

CHRISTMAS TIME.

“A merry Christmas, Miss Cossart! Why, you don’t mean to say you are
not coming to church! I thought you’d be sure to make a fresh start on
Christmas Day!”

“Oh, I’m a regular heathen! I haven’t been to church twice the whole
year! I can’t stand stuffy places, and I expect the scent of the
flowers will make it twice as bad as usual to-day.”

“Well, you’re coming anyway, Miss Cholmondeley? Shall we start? It’ll
be hot walking, and I hate that omnibus, and the carros are so slow.
Come along. Miss Cossart will tell them that we’ve started.”

Sheila hung back a moment; she had an instinct that her aunt would be
vexed, but she never knew how to refuse Ronald’s suggestions, made in a
half masterful, half-pleading way. He took her prayer-book and walked
off beside her, whilst Effie looked after them with a rather stormy
light in her eyes.

“Does she really never come to church?” asked Ronald, as they took
their way along the sunny road together.

“She has only been once or twice since I have known her,” answered
Sheila. “She thinks the air might bring on asthma.”

Ronald was silent for a few minutes, swinging his stick. His face was
rather graver than its wont.

“Somehow I don’t like to see people staying away from church like
that. I know it isn’t fashionable to say such things, but I have a
feeling that church is the place to help us to get the better of our
infirmities, bodily and spiritual. My brother Guy will struggle out to
church when he goes nowhere else, and I’m sure he is never the worse
for it. I don’t like to hear a girl call herself a heathen in that
flippant way. She must remember she won’t be judged by the standard of
the heathens!”

It was so unusual for Ronald to speak seriously that Sheila was quite
surprised, yet somehow it seemed to draw them closer together. That
was how Oscar sometimes talked, and upon this Christmas morning her
thoughts were very much with Oscar. It was the first Christmas they had
ever spent apart, and Sheila was a little bit homesick in consequence.

“I should hate not to go to church on Christmas morning,” she said. “It
seems to bring us near to everybody all round the world. It is so hard
to realise that it is Christmas here. A few days ago when it rained
so, and the snow came on the mountains, one could fancy, perhaps, that
it might be winter somewhere; but with this glorious sunshine! It seems
almost ridiculous!”

“Do you like Christmas out here, Miss Sheila?” asked Ronald, who often
called her that, and sometimes “Miss Baby,” “or would you rather be at
home?”

Sudden tears came quite unexpectedly into Sheila’s eyes. She looked
down that Ronald might not see them.

“I don’t think I have a home exactly—now,” she said.

He looked at her quickly, a flash in his eyes.

“But surely your home is with your uncle and aunt?”

“Yes,” answered Sheila a little unsteadily, “in a way it is, but
sometimes it doesn’t seem quite a real home.”

A tear plashed down, but Sheila turned her head away, and then looked
back with a brave smile.

“I oughtn’t to say that, perhaps. It sounds ungrateful, but, of course,
it can’t be the same as one’s own house, and last Christmas we were so
happy, and I never thought of things changing like this!”

Ronald, of course, knew all Sheila’s story by this time. He looked the
sympathy he felt.

“I know, I know. It must have been very hard! But you are happy with
your relations, are you not?”

“Y—yes,” answered Sheila a little doubtfully, adding after a brief
pause; “only sometimes I think my aunt doesn’t much like me now.”

“Oh, don’t think that! Everybody has ups and downs, you know. We all of
us have our cross days.”

“You don’t,” answered Sheila, “nor Miss Adene, nor any of you! But Aunt
Cossart is sometimes very glum and cross with me.”

There was a little gleam in Ronald’s eyes. It is a known fact that
lookers on sometimes see most of the game, and it had not been
unnoticed by the Dumaresq party that Sheila was rather out of favour
with her aunt. They could see the reason plain enough. The hotel was
filling up now, and still Sheila held her place as the favourite,
and small notice comparatively was bestowed upon Effie. There was no
blinking the matter that Effie bored people. Her sprightliness was
not of an engaging kind, it had a contradictious defiance about it
that was irritating, and her shallow theories and self-centred way of
looking at life made her conversation monotonous and tiresome. When she
allowed herself to forget herself, she could be much more agreeable;
but generally she could not get away from herself, and the result was
disastrous for herself.

Some other young girls had come, and Sheila would romp up and down the
house with them, leading them into fun and frolic, teaching them the
Washington Post up and down corridors or verandah, throwing herself
into games of which she was the life and soul, and in which Ronald
was always an able assistant, and in a hundred little ways making
life merry for herself and others, whilst Effie never seemed able to
amalgamate in the merry crowd.

Health might be one cause; but another was a certain quality in
herself. She was so used to being the first thought and consideration
with those about her, that if she was not that, she did not know
how to take any place at all. Her mother would look on anxious and
dissatisfied, utterly perplexed to find the answer to the question
always forcing itself upon her. At last she reached the conclusion that
Sheila was somehow in fault. If Sheila were different and made Effie
welcome, things would go differently. Effie ought not to be sitting
with a book in the drawing-room whilst the young folks were frolicking
outside. It was not right or proper; only if Effie did go out to them,
she speedily returned, not finding any fun in what amused them.

So Sheila got into disgrace with her aunt by imperceptible degrees,
and upon this Christmas morning her heart was rather heavy within her,
though she scarcely knew why.

The service, however, did her good, though she could not always keep
back her tears. The building recalled no associations; it was but
an ugly little place, something between a round and a square, the
authorities refusing to permit a cruciform church to be built. The
flowers, too, did not look at all Christmas-like in spite of a few bits
of holly here and there; arum lilies were the great feature with roses
and poinsettias. But the familiar hymns brought home back, and Sheila
choked once or twice, thinking of Oscar, the father who had left them
so suddenly, and the dear old home she never expected to see again.

She walked home with Miss Adene, who talked kindly and comfortingly to
her. She had seen that the child was in danger of getting in trouble,
and had warned Ronald to be careful; for she half-suspected Mrs.
Cossart’s ambitions for her daughter. Ronald would never think of such
a thing himself, nor would Sheila, who had the mind of a child in all
such matters; but Miss Adene had seen a good deal of the world, and her
kindly eyes were very keen and quick.

“Don’t be downhearted, little girl,” she said, “life is never all
sunshine for any of us. We should not be good for much if it were. We
want our east winds and rainy days, as well as the plants and flowers,
to make us thrive. We should be dry and arid like a desert if we had
nothing but our own way all our lives, and no little crosses to bear.”

“Yes, I suppose so; only it seems hard when people are unjust. Aunt is
vexed with me, and she won’t say why. She calls me rude and forward;
but I don’t think I am, do you? I like fun, and they all play. Why
should I be left out?”

Christmas was a gay day at the New Hotel, and nobody was left out in
the general fun. The whole place was decorated with greenery—trailers
of giant smilax twenty feet long, making the task of decoration easy.
They were wreathed round the balusters of the staircase and festooned
overhead in the dining-room, the waiters and maids got “tips,” and were
more smiling than ever, whilst guests exchanged greetings and little
gifts, and the table reproduced the typical fare of England—turkey,
roast beef, and plum puddings all aflame!

There was tennis in the afternoon, and dancing for the young people
in the evening; and Effie for the first time went down to the
billiard-room, and Miss Adene kindly interested herself in getting
partners for her amongst some of the visitors from the houses on the
island, who had come to join the fun.

Miss Adene had several acquaintances in Madeira, and many persons had
called upon Lady Dumaresq and her husband. Sheila from being much with
them had received invitations to go out with them; and at first the
girl had accepted, not knowing how to refuse. This had been another
cause of offence; and now Miss Adene was good-naturedly seeking to
induce their friends to call upon the Cossarts; and Mrs. Cossart had
been made happy to-night by an invitation for New Year’s Eve to one
of the biggest quintas in the island, where there would be a grand
entertainment, culminating in a giant display of fireworks, which
display, they heard, would be universal all over the island. For it was
the custom in Madeira to welcome in the New Year by a perfect storm of
fireworks. Even the poorest of the people spent their little savings
in a few squibs or crackers. Every child who had a “bit” to spend laid
it out in fireworks. Miss Adene said it was the most curious sight
possible—the whole island, as far as the eye could see, alight and
ablaze; for as the quintas and smaller houses ran right up into the
hills to a considerable height, and extended far on either side, the
panorama of coloured lights was something unique.

“Isn’t it nice that we have been asked to the big party?” asked Effie
that night. “Not that I care so very much about parties, but I like
to see all that is characteristic of a place. I suppose you were asked
too, Sheila?”

“Why, yes,” answered Sheila gleefully; but Mrs. Cossart, who was in the
room, said coldly—

“I am not sure about your going, Sheila.”

“Oh, aunt! Why not?”

“I am not sure that it is suitable; a big party like that, and your
father not a year dead. I don’t know if it is seemly.”

Sheila was silent; she had never thought of that, certainly. It seemed
a long, long time now since her father’s death; and even in the summer,
when her loss was so recent, she had gone about with her cousins to
little friendly gatherings at houses where they were intimate. Now
here, in this far-away country, where nobody knew them, the objection
did sound a little far-fetched; but Sheila did not know how to answer
it, though her face fell.

“I know you don’t think about things as other girls would,” said Mrs.
Cossart with a little asperity; “you go romping and playing and dancing
just as though you had never had a loss of any kind, and I haven’t
checked you, because I don’t want a scene every day, and you are so
self-willed. But this big party is another affair. Why, you have not
even a dress fit for it. I never thought of your going out to regular
parties. No, I don’t think it would do at all.”

For a moment Sheila was tempted to rebel. She had heard so much about
this New Year’s Eve party and she did so want to see it, and she did
like the lights and music and flowers, the little dancing there was
likely to be, and the gay greetings when the New Year came in. It
did seem hard to be left out! But then the remembrance came over her
of the words she had heard spoken in church, of Miss Adene’s kindly
talk, of the resolutions she had made for herself. So gulping down her
disappointment and sense of injury, she answered meekly—

“Very well, Aunt Cossart. I suppose you know best. I will stay at home.”

For a moment Effie looked as though she would like to speak, but
then the impulse passed, and she said nothing. It had flashed into
Effie’s head that it would be nice to go out without Sheila. Effie
had begun to think a good deal about Ronald Dumaresq. Her mother had
unconsciously led her to do this, though not with intention. Effie had
been interested once in Cyril, but she had had her faith in him rather
shaken, and his image was waxing proportionately faint. Ronald was
the leading figure in her little world now, and when the evening came
at last, and she was being dressed for the great party, she was more
particular than ever in her life before, and Sheila’s clever tasteful
fingers were called into requisition again and again before she could
be satisfied.

But at last all was done to her satisfaction. She looked as well as it
was possible for her to look, and Sheila admired her cordially. She
would not let herself be dull; she declared she should sit up and watch
the fireworks from the verandah, where a fine view was to be obtained,
and as there were many people in the hotel who would be staying, she
would not be left alone.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bang! Bang! Bang! Sheila started from her doze in a snug corner of the
verandah, and behold the island was a blaze of coloured lights, whilst
the noise was like that of a bombarded city. She started up and ran
forward, and then gave a little startled cry, for there was Ronald
putting out his hand for hers, whilst he said in merry friendly tones—

“A happy New Year to you, Sheila!”

“Oof, how you startled me! But you are over there!” she cried laughing,
and pointing to the quinta up in the hills, where a splendid show of
rockets marked the exact spot.

“Am I? I thought I was here, but no matter. Here or there, I meant to
be the first to wish you a happy New Year!”

“How nice of you!” cried Sheila, bubbling over with delight at the
beautiful sight before her, and the happy feeling of having a friend at
her side, “but you did go there surely?”

“Oh, yes, I showed up and did my duty; but somehow it seemed dull and
flat. Something was wanting. Then, you know, this is the place of all
others for seeing the whole panorama of the illumination. Up there
you are too much in the middle of it. So I just made my escape, got a
fellow to run me down to the bottom of the hill, and here I am. Are you
glad to see me, Sheila?”

She looked frankly into his eyes, but saw there something that made her
suddenly drop her own. With a new sense of shyness she dropped his arm,
yet her voice had a happy ring in it as she answered—

“I am very glad to see you. I wish you a happy New Year too.”

“And I mean to get one,” said Ronald, suddenly possessing himself of
her hand.

(_To be continued._)




VARIETIES.


GOOD MANNERS.—To be always thinking about your manners is not the way
to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about
yourself.


BE ALWAYS LEARNING.—Of all treasures, knowledge is the most precious,
for it can neither be stolen, given away, nor consumed.


SELFISH PEOPLE.—The more self is indulged the more it demands, and
therefore of all girls the selfish are the most discontented.


INSIGHT.

    The riddle of the world is understood
    Only by him who feels that God is good.

        _Whittier._


MEANING IN MUSIC.—Mendelssohn felt intensely the meaning of music.
Comparing music with words, he said, “Die Worte reichen nicht
hinzu”—“Words do not go as far.”


LIVING.—To live is nothing unless to live be to know Him by Whom we
live.—_Ruskin._




THE HOME OF THE EARLS POULETT.

[Illustration: HINTON ST. GEORGE.]


It is a bright day in early spring—the ash-buds still look quite black
in the front of March—as we mount slowly the steep hill that leads
to the quiet village of Hinton St. George. The fresh air breathes out
vigour, but still we rest near the top to look back over the lovely
browns and purples of the plain below dotted with red-tiled barns and
towers of churches—Lopen, Merriott, South Petherton—built of the soft
Ham stone of the county.

The road we go by has a rare charm, with tall ash-hedges not yet lopped
to the shabby level demanded by the new injunctions. The crescent
bending ash saplings with their ebony tips look to be some guard of
halberdiers ready to marshal whichever earl eventually wins the day and
comes to the old home to claim his heritage.

Primrose buds look out from the hedge-rows, but there is not yet
much cheerful colour in the landscape. After the ash saplings come
elder-bushes, whose boughs are just breaking in a sad green tinged with
purple. The only warm colour that Dame Nature has taken on her brush
is the deep blue of the hills that lie beyond Seavington and Shepton
Beauchamp.

Busy folk tramping through noisy London streets are much exercised
just now about the law-suit that is to be fought over this far-off
spot. What a contrast there is between the distant city and this still
village so remote that no builder has spoiled the quiet street, the
houses with latticed panes and generous bow-windows, the old stone
cross with its mutilated figure, and the long low stone farm with green
palings sparkling in the sunlight!

Yet it was in the London church of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields that
Queen Mary Stuart’s gaoler, Sir Amyas Poulett, was buried in 1588, and
this most remarkable of a long line of Pouletts was not brought to
Hinton—perhaps up this very road—till 1728, when no room could be
found for him in Gibbs’ new church. This transference seems to form a
link between the busy city and the quiet village.

Another bend brings us to the beautiful perpendicular church with its
brightly gilded weather-cock dinted by the shots of a past earl, who
used to practise shooting at the vane from the adjoining gardens.

Very lovely is the old churchyard, with the great cedars in the garden
beyond for a background, and the tall tower, characteristic of the
county, softened into the mellowest greyish yellow and flecked with
lichens. We linger over the grave-stones, of which many have some
link with the Pouletts, and notice the curious Somersetshire name of
Tryphena on the tomb of one old servant who had lived in “exemplary
servitude” with the family for forty-four years, dying in 1801. On an
altar-tomb, with date 1691, is the curious inscription—

    “Elizabeth Powlet lies interred here
    A spotless corpes, a corps from scandal clere.
    Deny her not the trouble of your eye,
    She a saint in Heaven free from misery,” etc.

Over the pretty turf crosses, which are a peculiarity of this
churchyard, a gay peacock walks, very unconscious that he is the old
emblem of that immortality which shall survive “when all that seems
shall suffer shock.”

Through the deep porch we pass into the church where the pallid marble
monuments of many Pouletts go far to overpower the little building,
but are relieved by the warm tones of the pinkish fawn stone roof
of the chancel, the tender yellow of the Ham stone columns, and the
unassuming white plaster of the walls. A beautiful window by Clayton
and Bell sends red and purple lights along the stone floor that rest on
the heads of little Elizabethan Pouletts who kneel in prayerful line
beneath their placid parents in ruff and doublet, seeking—

    “For past transgressions to atone
    By saying endless prayers in stone.”

We do not linger long over the virtues of the earls of last century,
though we are amused at the wire-drawn periods of the epitaph to the
Honourable _Anne_ Poulett, fourth son of the first Earl Poulett, to
whom Queen Anne was godmother. A suite of rooms was prepared for the
Queen in the great house hidden in its cedars, and her bed used to be
shown there; but death called her to follow her eighteen dead babies
before the visit came to pass. She stood sponsor for the fourth son of
the first earl and named him Anne just as she did Lord Anne Hamilton,
the third son of the Jacobite duke who was killed by Lord Mohun in the
famous Hyde Park duel described by Thackeray in _Esmond_. Lord Anne
Poulett’s epitaph tells us that his “sedate fortitude, propriety of
judgment, and universal knowledge, could not avert that death which
tore him from his afflicted family”!

As we mount some steps into the Earl’s great pew, upholstered in red
cloth, we pass a severely simple pulpit which is so in harmony with the
church that it seems to melt into it, and leave all to the eloquence of
the preacher. The low stone rail, bound with fair worked brass, recalls
George Herbert’s words about the reading-desk and pulpit in his church
of Layton Ecclesia, “for he would often say Prayer and Preaching, being
equally useful, might agree like brethren and have an equal honour
and estimation.” The red pew is spoiled by a very ugly window which,
happily, is so far back from the main aisle of the church that it
does not spoil the general effect. A little door leads us down into a
space which was perhaps once the Lady Chapel, and which contains many
monuments of great interest.

Much might be written about the early Paulets from Pawlet, near
Bridgwater, and their descendant who wedded a Deneband, and so came to
Hinton St. George; but in this family the chief interest centres in
the early sixteenth century and the age of Elizabeth. In the mailed
warriors under the north wall with their dames in curious head-dresses
we see probably the warlike Sir Amias, who helped defeat Lambert Simnel
at Newark in the days of Henry VII., built much at Hinton, and left his
mark on the Middle Temple in London, where chiefly he lived. Beyond
lies his son Sir Hugh, who helped Henry VIII. in his French war with
Francis I., and is said to have put Wolsey in the stocks when he was
a youth at Lymington School. This Sir Hugh perhaps helped to bring
misfortune on the house, for he had the ill-fated office laid upon
him of being supervisor of all the manors, etc., lately belonging to
Richard Whiting, last abbot of Glastonbury.

But by far the most interesting monument in the whole church is that in
the west wall of this chapel to the memory of Sir Amyas Poulett, son of
Sir Hugh, and gaoler of Mary Queen of Scots during the last two years
of her life. It is seldom indeed that so much personal character is
expressed in marble as in the curious veins of this pale alabaster. One
would think that many a Londoner must have paused, struck by the stern
even irritable face, before the monument was removed from St. Martin’s,
where it was situate so long under the same roof as Nell Gwynne and
many another notable. How strangely it brings us into touch with past
times to look at this strong face of the man who had so much to put
up with! There he lies motionless in ruff and doublet upon a marble
pillow, and yet he moved in the stirring world we know so well from
Froude’s vivid pages and Alexandre Dumas’ bustling novels. In 1576 he
was sent ambassador by Elizabeth to that frivolous court of Henry III.,
the king of favourites, who lives again in the pages of _Chicot the
Jester_, with his swarms of little spaniels and his effeminate hands
smeared with cream, surrounded by the plots and counter-plots of the
Guises and the aged queen-mother Catherine of Medici.

Whilst Sir Amyas was in Paris, the negotiations were afoot for marrying
Queen Elizabeth, a woman of forty-six, to the French King Henry’s
brother Alençon, Duke of Anjou, a lad of twenty-three, “a small brown
creature, deeply pock-marked, with a large head, a knobbed nose,
and a hoarse croaking voice.” When he came to visit her in 1579,
Elizabeth pretended to like him and called him her “grenouille,” her
frog-prince, but the English nation had not forgotten the massacre of
St. Bartholomew seven short years ago, and would have none of him.
Sir Philip Sidney wrote out his indignation in an honest memorial to
the Queen, and then retired for some time from Court to Wilton, where
he wrote the _Arcadia_. On Stubbs, a Puritan pamphleteer, who opposed
the match, the Queen vented her spleen by having his hand chopped off
by the common hangman. “Long live Queen Elizabeth!” cried the loyal
Englishman as he waved his hat with his left hand. Feeling such as
this proved to the Queen that her Englishmen would have none of the
Italianated foreigner, but with her usual intricate diplomacy she kept
up the negotiations for years, and Sir Amyas Poulett had to bear the
brunt of Parisian indignation. “I have been baited here for a month or
more as a bear at a stake, and had nothing to say,” he writes, “but
stood still at my defence for fear to take hurt.”

[Illustration: HINTON ST. GEORGE.]

We can fancy that the knowledge which Sir Amyas gained of French
stratagems and spoils made him a suitable warder for the resourceful
Scottish queen whom he watched over at Tutbury, Chartley and
Fotheringay with a surly fidelity, for the last two out of her eighteen
years’ captivity. His restless desire to force his own particular
tenets upon her must have added to the trials of her last moments,
though his honest refusal to let her be murdered by any secret
assassin made the last sad pageant of execution possible, in which her
unwavering fortitude won for her the sympathy of posterity. Sir Amyas
liked plain dealing, and seems to have fretted much at the tortuous
policy of Walsingham and Burghley. He discovered a priest in disguise
in the Queen’s household at gloomy Tutbury, but knew not what to do
with him, because Elizabeth, as he said, “so dandled the Catholics.”
Sir Amyas yielded to Walsingham so far as to give in, perhaps
perforce, to the shameful plot which entrapped Mary into a treasonable
correspondence carried on by means of a water-tight box at the bottom
of the ale-casks supplied to her at Chartley by a brewer from Burton,
and then shamelessly copied for Walsingham. This double-dealing must
have been grievous to the old man, and the terrible responsibility
laid upon him, added to the pangs of the gout, shortened his own life.
Poor Queen Mary was so unconscious of the toils she was in that hope
improved her health, her swollen legs healed, and she was able to ride
hunting with the hounds and kill a deer with her cross-bow.

Stand with me in fancy in the little chapel at Hinton, and recall some
of the strange scenes beheld by that marble face.

Think of the sunny August morning in 1586, when Sir Amyas persuaded
the unconscious queen to ride out nine miles to Tixall and kill a
buck in Sir Walter Aston’s park. Mary is in high spirits, perhaps her
many plots have seared her conscience, and if she does know of the
purposed assassination of Elizabeth, it seems to her no high price to
pay for her liberty. Sir Amyas on the other hand knows that Babington’s
conspiracy is discovered, that he has had to flee from the forest of
St. John’s Wood, and that in a few moments Queen Mary will be arrested
for high treason. Deeply as he detests her Popish wiles, a little
sympathy must surely cross his harsh features when the armed men whom
she hails as her deliverers arrest her as a traitor in the Queen’s name.

Again. The fortnight of neglect and hardship at Tixall is over, and the
queen returns to Chartley with her doom upon her to find her treasures
and secrets all torn open, and her favourite attendant Barbara Curle
stricken by terror to a bed of sickness with the new-born baby
unchristened at her side. You can fancy the furrowed forehead of Sir
Amyas as he harshly refuses to christen the poor babe by the traitor’s
name of Mary, and the queen, ever with an instinct for the drama of
history, as she promptly lays the infant on her lap and baptises it
Mary in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The weeks fly past. Elizabeth will not sign the death-warrant, but has
a letter written to Poulett in which she roundly complains of his want
of love and zeal for not having found some way to shorten the life
of the Scottish Queen. The letter reaches Sir Amyas at five in the
evening, and before an hour has passed he has written the letter, which
you may see to this day, to say in hot haste, “God forbid that I should
make so fowle a shipwracke of my conscience or leave so great a blot to
my poor posteritie to shed blood without law or warrant.” Sir Amyas had
to put up with Elizabeth’s angry pacings to and fro, and her words that
he was “a dainty and precise fellow who would promise much and perform
nothing,” but her later letters to him suggest that in the end she was
not sorry that the rough honest man had stood like a rock.

It must have shaken most men’s fortitude to witness the terrible
scene when Queen Mary knelt in the hall at Fotheringay and recited
the penitential psalms in Latin and English in deep tones that
sounded above the Puritan prayers of the men who refused her the last
sacraments of her church and met to see her die. When the last moment
came, she knelt calmly by the block among her black-robed executioners,
herself clothed in blood-red from head to foot, and never flinched when
the blow swerved and fell a second time.

In any case Sir Amyas only lived eighteen months after the Queen’s
execution, and died soon after his return from the negotiations at
Ostend for peace with Spain. Perhaps he endured hardships in that
devastated Netherland country, where partridges were plentiful because
the tilled land had become a wilderness. In any case the negotiations
did not avert the Spanish Armada, and Sir Amyas died in September,
1588, a month after it had perished. He must have breathed more freely
when the waves closed over the Spanish galleons, for in Queen Mary’s
last letter to the Spanish ambassador, Mendoza, she had bidden him tell
King Philip not to forget how she had been used by certain men, and
among their names was that of Sir Amyas Poulett.

Beneath the recumbent figure there is a curious French epitaph to this
quondam Governor of Jersey, in which are some touching lines—

    “Non, non, je ne croy pas qu’un si petit de Terre
    Couvre tant de Virtus, ait esteint tant d’Honneur,
    Que ce preux Chavalier, ce renommé Seigneur,
    Avoit acquis en Paix, avoit acquis en Guerre.”

His widow Margaret contributed a loving Latin epitaph, which may
have been composed by herself in this age when Latin was no uncommon
accomplishment for a lady. Queen Elizabeth puts her royal initials
above a verse on the right hand of the figure—

    “Never shall cease to spread wise Poulet’s fame,
    These will speak and men will blush for shame;
    Without offence to speak what I do know,
    Great is the debt England to him doth owe.”

There are other inscriptions playing upon the characteristic words of
his motto, _Garde la Foy_, and the three swords of his crest; but it
is time for us to leave the stone precincts and mount the old tower,
from which we get an exquisite view of the surrounding country and the
rambling old house.

The most ancient part of the present building was the work of Sir
Amyas’ grandfather. The present front was built by the first Earl
Poulett, Queen Anne’s minister. We cannot help regretting the “right
goodly manor place of free stone with two goodly towers embattled in
the inner court,” which old Leland saw in Henry VIII.’s days; but we
may rejoice that the pretty wings remain in which “the slabs of the
sandstone of the country forming the outer walls are cut in the shape
of the rounded stones of the sea-shore.” When gay flowers again relieve
the long line of stone, and a touch of green is added to the rows of
white jalousies, perhaps a look of home will return to the old mansion.

The quiet park where deer haunt the glades must have looked gay
indeed when the grandson of Elizabeth’s Sir Amyas entertained Mary of
Scotland’s grandson, Charles I., at Hinton in 1644, with a loyalty that
was ready to face much and pay heavily for his allegiance to the King.
It was only fifty-five years from the day of Queen Mary’s execution
when the two grandsons met at Hinton. Five short years were to pass,
and the head of Charles I. fell from the block with a fortitude not
unlike that of his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots.

A few years more, and Hinton is holding high festival again, and
feasting the Duke of Monmouth with junketing in the park. Almost
directly after, the Duke was fleeing from Sedgemoor to be captured in
the Hampshire fields, and travel to London and the headsman’s axe on
Tower Hill.

As we walk back past the closed windows and fancy the treasures inside
of portraits and statues, and frames by Grinling Gibbons, we find a
poor dead thrush, called a “home-screech” in these parts, because its
note is not so tuneful as that of its brother thrushes. The bird and
its empty nest expresses the want we feel about this lovely spot with
its sad memories. The nest is too good and fair to be left untenanted.

    CLOTILDA MARSON.

[Illustration]




[Illustration]

LESSONS FROM NATURE.

BY JEAN A. OWEN, Author of “Forest, Field and Fell,” etc.


PART V.

ADAPTABILITY TO CIRCUMSTANCES.

Many persons look upon plants as still life, forgetting, or ignorant
of, the fact that their existence depends on the movement of the juices
which are embodied in them. This is not even quiet in winter, when all
about the plant would seem dead indeed. There is still motion being
carried on, although it is necessarily of a very feeble or languid
nature. There is perhaps only a very slight enlargement of the buds,
but there it is nevertheless; the almost imperceptible development
preparing for spring’s coming.

If a small part of the cuticle of the _Vallisneria_, an aquatic plant,
is placed under the microscope, there is visible in every one of
its tiny cells a number of little globules coursing in order, round
and round, faster or slower, in a varying degree of motion, until
the portion under observation has exhausted its vitality. And by a
wonderful instinct—as we say—the flowers of this species, male and
female, which grow on different plants, are able to detach themselves
at the right season. That is, the male flowers can leave the plant
stems, and floating about on the stream, they join the female flowers,
and so the reproduction is effected in them by a spontaneous action on
their part which is brought about in many other cases by an outside
agency, the action of bees, for instance.

When the waters of a stream rise, another aquatic plant, the _Kuppia
Maritima_ is able to coil and uncoil its flower stalks, which are
curled in a spiral fashion; and, as the depth of the water in which it
grows changes, its blossoms are always kept on a level with the surface.

In plant as in animal life, there is this wonderful power of
accommodation to circumstances which might otherwise prove entirely
adverse to the continuation of that life. Instinct is the term applied
to vegetable as well as animal life. We use it for want of a better,
although it certainly does not cover all that is implied in innumerable
instances.

A thoughtful writer says that instinct, which belongs to the
physiological expression of life, has no other end or function than
the maintenance of these forms, whence it never operates without
manifesting effects in the organic mechanism. Reason, on the other
hand, has no relation to the body, except as the soul’s body or
instrument; it belongs to the soul purely, and may be exercised without
giving the slightest external token.

“The life whose phenomena are the instincts impels us only to eat,
to drink, to propagate, to preserve our fabric safe and sound; the
spiritual life, the phenomena of which are forms of reason, gives
power, not to do corporeal things, but to think and to rise emotionally
towards the source of life. It is by reason of this supra-instinctive
life that man stands as the universal master.”

The great naturalist Buffon also says, “Man thinks, hence he is master
over creatures which do not think.” And an ancient author writes
finely, “While other animals bend their looks downwards to earth, He
gave to man a lofty countenance, commanded him to lift his face to
heaven, and behold with upturned eyes the stars.”

This has been a digression into which the use of the term instinct
led me. Instinct leads the carnivorous animal to feed on flesh; but
if this is scarce—even if fruit is plentiful, and offers itself in
profusion—the puma will devour wild gooseberries and raspberries; so
will the coyote wolves in the Rocky Mountains. I stayed for some time
in a mountain region in Colorado—the district in which I made my notes
for “Candelaria,” a story some of you have perhaps read in the pages
of this magazine—and there in the autumn the big bears would come in
their heavy rolling gait down the mountain-sides to devour the wild
fruits, “choke cherries” and the like.

The power of accommodation to the exigencies of circumstance is so
great that, as scientists will tell you, species will often develop
through these, in time, an extra member. And again, faculties and
powers, by their non-use, will desert us in time. Our power of
adaptability is in point of fact beyond calculation. “All things are
possible to him that believeth” is a truth too little tested by most of
us.

Could yon slender reed, which is swayed by the slightest breeze, stand
the fierce onslaught of a tempest? No, but it bends gracefully before
it and escapes unhurt where stouter stems have been snapped asunder.

And, to take a simile from the bird world, all the herons, the
different species of the _Ardeidæ_, which have ordinarily a slow and
heavily flapping flight, when alarmed or pursued by their natural
enemies, have a habit of easing themselves. They will disgorge the food
which they have just swallowed in order to lighten themselves for more
rapid flight.

This reminds me of a little incident in my own life. Some years ago
I was in a collision at sea; the bow of a large steamer ran into the
stern of the vessel in which I was, when both were going at top speed,
and both vessels went down beneath the waters almost as soon as we
passengers, most of us in our night clothing, had got free in the small
boats. Over fifty lives, unfortunately, were lost that night, but only
one woman out of very many others perished. That need not have been,
but she was timid, and she would not risk the leap that other women had
had to make down into the boat which waited for her ten feet below. As
soon as the boat in which I was, arrived, a few hours later, alongside
of a rescuing steamer, the women were most of them taken up into this
by means of a rope and band fastened round the waist, but I climbed
up a rope ladder which was overhung on the side of the ship. In order
to grasp this firmly with both hands I had to lose my hold of a bag I
had contrived to save, in which were some valuables very dear to me.
I put it down on the boat seat, and of course I never saw it again.
My precious things were lost, but my life was saved. A poor lady who
was in the same wreck suffered a still greater loss, and she was one
of those conservative sensitive natures who find it so hard to adapt
themselves to changeful circumstances. She has never recovered her
mental balance since that terrible night.

To preserve a trustful, cheerful frame of mind under adverse
circumstances, to be able to adjust one’s resources, one’s capabilities
to the exigencies of a life so liable to changes, is a gift for which
the possessor cannot be too grateful to the Giver of all good gifts.

Science has been defined by someone as “the discovery of the changeless
in the ever-changing.” I was sitting in a weak, fatigued state of mind
once in a train at a great terminus. We were waiting for the moment of
departure, and not being drawn up to the end of the platforms, trains
moved constantly on either side of us. To my tired head—I had lately
come off the sea, which had been a rough one—I did not seem able to
make out whether it was our train or the other that was in motion when
this occurred. Presently my eyes found a refuge in the contemplation of
a massive column within sight. So long as they rested there, all was
simple. I saw it was the others that were in motion, and we were quiet.

God is the changeless amid the ever-changing. If the eye of our soul
is fixed on Him, all else adjusts itself. We have “an anchor sure and
steadfast.”

The conies, says the wise man in the book of Proverbs, “are but a
feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks.” The conies
belong to the same family as do our rabbits, but they have not paws
suitable for burrowing, and their homes are in the clefts of the
immovable rocks. Thither they flee to hide themselves when the enemy
is in pursuit, or when the elements are adverse. They find tiny
fastnesses, where, protected from all stress of weather, they can sleep
in safety, and into which the great birds of prey cannot penetrate.

For some situations our powers of adaptability are all inadequate. The
combat is too great for our forces, and the best course, the wisest,
nay, often the only possible course lies in flight and in seeking
a haven of refuge, until, as the Psalmist says, “the tyranny is
overpast.” “I will flee to the Rock to hide me.” And as “that feeble
folk, the conies” make their houses in the rocks, so we, like the wise
man in the parable, build our house on the Rock, not on the shifting
foundations of sand.

(_To be continued._)




THE COURTSHIP OF CATHERINE WEST.


CHAPTER I.

A hot August day, hot with the heat cherished through a sunny fortnight
of rainless days; in which the earth radiated back to the atmosphere
the warmth bestowed upon her by the cloudless skies, so that a light
haze overhung the broad plains, and lay like a belt around the
dark-foliaged trees and whitewashed villages of the surrounding country.

It was a monotonous and little-varied scene, yet the girl who was
watching it from a railway compartment, as the train sped past it,
found it full of interest and delight. It was all so distinctly
un-English, and poorly as it might compare with the woody slopes and
fruitful orchards of the land she had left behind her, these severe,
hedgeless fields and austere lines of tall poplars had to her a
special beauty of their own. She took little heed of her travelling
companions, so absorbed was she in the novelty of her surroundings. And
she was conscious, too, that this was only the beginning, that better
things were in store for her. One short night and day, and then—the
snowy mountains, hitherto visible only in dreams, the green pastures
and tinkling cattle-bells, the climbing woods and glowing flowers.
Truly, for the realisation of such a vision all past toil and patient
expectation were well worth endurance.

If she had been less occupied with her observations, she might have
noticed that one of her fellow travellers was keenly interested in
her, and that the comic papers that were littered on the seat beside
him received very little of his attention. A slight service rendered
at Dover apparently gave him, at least in his own opinion, some sort
of proprietary interest in this young woman, whose solitary journey
seemed to him a challenge to his attention. Nevertheless, since they
had entered the compartment, he had not been able to obtain so much as
a glance from her. This, to one who was accustomed to think himself
irresistible, was not a little irritating; a brilliant idea struck
him, and he now held out to her one of the gaily-coloured periodicals.
The familiarity of his tone, coupled with the fact that she had been
accustomed to view such productions with disgust, impelled her to
decline it; but remembering the relief she had felt at his help on the
way, she accepted with a shy hesitation. The leaves fluttered in her
hands, but the pictures that caught her eye, as she turned the paper
over, distressed and annoyed her. In another moment she summoned up
courage to hand it back to the owner.

“What—don’t you like ’em?” he asked in surprised accents. “Come, this
is good, don’t you think so?”

He spoke with the assurance of an old friend, and the girl, who had
entered the carriage with him, was seized with a sudden horror lest
the other occupants of the compartment should identify her with this
stranger.

“Thank you, my eyes ache when I read in the train,” answered she,
searching about for some plausible excuse.

“Ah, that’s a pity, they’re much too pretty for that,” responded he
with intended gallantry.

Her eyes swam in a mist of tears. A less diffident girl would have
instinctively known how to rebuke the offender, but she was accustomed
to think humbly of herself, and at once concluded that something in her
own conduct had led the man to think that he might take liberties with
her. Suddenly, to her intense vexation, a large tear splashed on her
lap; but at the critical moment, a voice said to her—

“Pardon me, but I believe you would like a window seat. It is so much
more comfortable. See, let me move your things.”

In another moment, the speaker, who had been sitting beside her, and
next to the window, had changed places with her, and had moved her bag
and rugs so as to make a comfortable barrier round her. She tried to
thank him, and met the eyes of a young lady to whom he had been talking
and who, she supposed, must be his wife.

“You are very tired, I am sure,” said the latter. “Granville, pass me
my bag. Now, do have a little milk, it will be so good for you.”

“Thank you so much, but I really do not need it,” protested the girl.

“Oh, nonsense, you don’t know what is good for you! Come, I insist on
it!”

So she swallowed the milk mechanically, and then went on looking out
of the window, inwardly struggling between gratitude to the unknown
lady and embarrassment at having her confusion noticed. She was angry
with herself too. She had felt so perfectly competent to undertake this
expedition—a High School mistress, living in rooms, she was accustomed
to look after herself—and here was she, Catherine West, who had taken
a high class at Cambridge, actually crying because an under-bred man
had annoyed her! But the truth was that she knew very little of the
world. She had gone straight from school to college, straight from
college to the post that she now held. She had thought little of men
or of their relations to her, for women, whose youth is absorbed in
intellectual interests, are later in development on the emotional side
than others, yet, when the awakening comes, are apt, perhaps because
of the severity of their early training, to feel more strongly and to
suffer more deeply.

The journey passed without further incident. One by one, as
evening came on, the passengers settled themselves, comfortably or
uncomfortably, against air-cushions or feather pillows, and fell
asleep. But sleep was a long time coming to Catherine; she closed her
eyes, but her excitement kept her awake, and when at last she fell into
an uneasy doze, it was only to rouse at every station, where the train
drew up with a jerk and scream, and to stare bewildered at the red
lights that flashed across the darkness.

Morning at last, and the frontier reached! Catherine thought that she
would never forget the breath of cool clear air that swept through the
close compartment like a cleansing touch. The occupants, dishevelled
and unwashed, rushed out for coffee and rolls, then back again, and the
train went steaming on through the early coolness of the Swiss dawn,
while Catherine watched the east growing rosy behind the pines that
fringed the hills, and then, in one rapturous moment, caught sight of
the first snowy peak, all hushed and stainless in the silence of the
morning.

Suddenly her glance met that of the lady opposite.

“How beautiful!” they both exclaimed in one breath.

From that moment the compact of friendship was sealed between the two
women; they began to talk to one another, and found that they had many
interests in common. So the time passed pleasantly, till, arrived at
length at their destination, they found that they were going to the
same hotel.

“Give my brother”—Catherine started at this revelation—“the ticket
for your luggage, and he will see after it for you,” said her friend.
“You and I will go on to the hotel. Oh, the delight of a wash! And
then——”

“Then something to eat would be advisable,” said her brother, who,
having despatched the luggage in the hotel omnibus, now caught them up.

His words came as a shock to Catherine. “Fancy thinking of that when
he has the mountains to look at!” Her opinion of masculine nature,
which was chiefly based on an intimate acquaintance with the poetry of
Shelley, went down a hundred degrees.

In a few minutes more she found herself in the little bare room
allotted to her, where the furniture was of the simplest and the
cleanliness complete. She felt herself, in her dusty dress, a stain on
its exquisite purity. She rushed to her portmanteau and opened it.

“It is extravagant, I know, but I can’t help it!” And she shook out
of its folds a white muslin dress that had hitherto been sacred to
“functions” and festivals. And as she arrayed herself in it before the
glass the conviction came to her that she really looked very nice. Was
she growing vain, she wondered, or why was it that she felt such a
sudden interest in her appearance?

She left her room and came timidly down the corridor. Now that she was
alone in this big hotel, a certain fear came over her. She had boasted
to herself that she was able to take care of herself; she had had no
compunctions in coming alone on this expedition; of course she would
have preferred to have a companion, but since all her efforts to obtain
one had been unavailing, she had determined not to be disappointed of
the anticipated pleasure, and had, therefore, come alone. But now she
felt almost sorry that she had done so; however innocent her intention,
she felt that she had laid herself open to misconstruction; her
experience on the journey had told her that.

“My sister has sent me to see if I could find you,” said a voice beside
her. “The dining-room is this way. She has kept a seat for you—unless,
of course, you prefer to sit somewhere else.” The tone was rather
constrained, as if the speaker had been party to an arrangement of
which he did not altogether approve. Inwardly he was thinking, “She
seems a nice girl enough, and is certainly very pretty, but I wish
Margaret would not rush into these impulsive friendships.”

Catherine felt the coldness, and was glad to sink into the chair that
he placed for her. His sister sat between them, and bravely tried to
keep up a conversation. But Catherine was subdued and nervous, and her
brother was silent and restrained.

Nobody was sorry when dinner was over, and Margaret and Catherine
strolled into the verandah. The days were already drawing in, and
it was nearly dark, but a slender moon hung between the two snowy
peaks that guarded the valley, and in their ears was the murmur of a
torrent, that, slipping from the icy embrace of the mountains, rushed
impetuously from the glacier that was wedged between them.

[Illustration: MENDING THE QUILT.]

“And now let us produce our credentials,” said her new friend. “I am
Margaret Gray. I live by my wits, namely journalism; that is, I write
‘Answers to Correspondents’ for half-a-dozen ladies’ papers. My brother
is also engaged in the pursuit of letters. He is, in fact, Lord Mayne’s
private secretary. He is very clever, as all brothers ought to be, and
took a First in Greats. He is to marry, of course, an heiress, and go
into Parliament, and make a name for himself and the family, the family
being at present comprehended by himself and me. Finally, we are too
poor at present to think of heiresses or even to approach the only
available one, having piles of other people’s debts to pay off. Now for
yours.”

Catherine told her simply and frankly all her short history. How, left
an orphan, with just sufficient money to pay for her education, she had
been brought up at an endowed school, and had then won a scholarship
to Cambridge, and how, on leaving college, she had found a post in a
High School in a large manufacturing town, where she lived by herself
in rooms. She had only been there a short time, and did not know many
people; there were so few people that she could know, except the other
mistresses, living for the most part alone or sharing rooms together.
It was less by what she was told than by her quick imagination, aided
by her knowledge of other professional women, that Margaret was able
to conjure up to herself the long harassing days, the physical fatigue
that could seldom find relief, and then the solitary evenings in a
dreary lodging-house. She contrasted it with her own life spent in
London, among interesting people, and full of change and movement.
Certainly she worked hard, but the possession of some private means and
the knowledge that her future was comfortably provided for took away
the anxiety that haunts the working days of so many women. Her heart
went out in sympathy to this girl, who hardly realised as yet the whole
significance of her position.

“Isn’t it dreadfully monotonous sometimes? Don’t you long to get away?”

“Sometimes I feel as if I could endure it no longer, especially in the
evening, when I have finished my corrections and am too tired even to
read. But then there are the children, and children are so delightful;
though at the end of the term I do feel as if I never wanted to see
another child all my life. But that feeling soon wears off; they are so
innocent and fascinating, and never mind showing what they think. Oh,
yes; of course it is only the children who make things bearable.”

“Now I can understand the apparent absurdity of a girl like you rushing
off on a Swiss tour by yourself. Even I, who am several years older,
and have much more knowledge of the world, and no pretension to beauty,
should hesitate about such a thing. Did it never strike you that people
might misunderstand you, that you were laying yourself out to be
misunderstood?”

“Never! Why should it? I did not think the world so cruel. Must we wait
till we are too old to enjoy things, from fear of what people will
say? In twenty years I shall be too old to climb mountains and travel
cheaply. Then it will be quite proper, I suppose, but quite impossible.”

There was a touch of bitterness in her tone that threw a new light on
her character to Margaret.

“The world is hard on us women,” she answered gently. “We are in a
transition state at present. Only the most enlightened and sympathetic
men understand the independent woman. The very fact of her independence
makes her a prey to men like that cad in the railway carriage, or quite
incomprehensible to chivalrous men like my brother. You understand;
he would do anything to help you out of a difficulty, but would not
understand your preference for all the perils of a solitary tour over
the security and boredom of those dreadful lodgings. Most men still
prefer the clinging trustful girl who claims their protection at
every other step. She makes them so conscious of their own superior
power. But the woman who strikes out for herself and asserts her own
individuality is a challenge to the cad and an unknown quantity to most
men of honour.”

“I suppose that we can only suffer and wait for better things.”

“Yes. Sometimes I think we are suffering vicariously for the good of
generations of unborn women. If we maintain the right of women to live
independently and to think for themselves, a future age will concede it
as a matter of course. And yet one must be very sure of oneself to take
up that independent stand. Are you sure?”

“I don’t quite understand,” answered Catherine.

“Only this, dear”—there was a lingering, protective stress on the last
word that appealed to the lonely girl—“you seem to me one of those
women who are independent by circumstance rather than by choice. One
of those who proclaim aloud their independence at twenty and at thirty
wail privately for the dependence they appear to scorn. One of those,
in fact, who would seem more in her place with her foot on a cradle
rocker than rushing over Europe accompanied only by a travelling trunk
and a green ticket case.”

“Oh, you are mistaken, quite mistaken,” cried Catherine—“quite
mistaken. I am not that kind of woman at all. And besides, if I were,
what would be the good? Surely I am happier struggling by myself than
making myself miserable over some man; for I can never marry, you know.”

“Never marry? But why?”

“I am so poor, and the only kind of man that I could think of would
never look at an insignificant person like me. No, I shall never marry;
and that being so, I would rather school myself to independence.”

“You goose! How little you know of men. But I can assure you that till
you have made yourself miserable—or otherwise—over some man, you will
be an incomplete and, so far, an ineffective character.”

Catherine was unconscious of what Margaret’s intuition led her to
suspect, namely, that her conviction of insignificance and renewed
enthusiasm for independence were due to Mr. Gray’s polite indifference
at dinner. He now joined them, and Catherine immediately said “Good
night” and disappeared. She did not know that his eyes were following
her slim white figure as it disappeared between the festoons of
Virginia creeper that draped the verandah.

“Don’t lecture me!” cried Margaret when she had gone. “I know what you
are going to say.”

“Well?” asked her brother, raising his eyebrows.

“Oh, that I am too impulsive and all that, and that I shall get into
trouble some day by making friends of unknown strangers, who may turn
out after all to be disreputable actresses or anarchists in disguise.”

“Nonsense! But really, Margaret, you can never tell; all sorts of
people come to these hotels.”

“Just as if I didn’t know that! Ah, my dear Granville, you may be very
clever; your head is full of classics and politics, and things I don’t
know anything about, but you’ve ‘no art to find the mind’s construction
in the face,’ and that is just what I have. Now, can you say you have
ever known me wrong in my estimate of people?”

“Not so far, certainly. But doesn’t it strike you as a little odd that
so young a girl should be running about the country by herself?”

“Not at all,” and Margaret poured out Catherine’s story. “Poor little
thing! She is terribly lonely. You and I must do our best to look after
her, and give her a good time while we are here.”

Now this was a very heroic and unselfish resolution on Margaret’s part,
for she did not often get her brother to herself, and this holiday had
been anticipated with all the more pleasure on that account.

“As you will,” he said. “I will do my best to please you. I only hope
that your charity may not be blinding your judgment. You are the only
woman I know who is absurdly susceptible to beauty in her own sex.”

“Susceptible to beauty!” cried Margaret, with laughing eyes. “Just as
if I should have noticed her at all if you had not made her change
places with you. After all, Granville, you see it was you who began the
acquaintance.”

“How absurd! Any fellow would have done that. Didn’t you see that she
was on the point of tears?”

Margaret smiled wisely.

“Oh, you noticed that, too? And yet you suspect her genuineness. Now,
do you think that any girl who wasn’t nice would let an incident like
that trouble her?”

“Oh, well, I give it up. I daresay you are right. At any rate I will do
my best for your _protégée_!”

“Mine? Remember your responsibilities,” she answered, and so they
parted for the night.

(_To be continued._)




THE PLEASURES OF BEE-KEEPING.

BY F. W. L. SLADEN.


PART III.

As the combs get drawn out and filled with brood and honey, more room
will be required by the swarm in the hive. This may at first be given
by putting fresh frames fitted with foundation into the stock-box. When
the stock-box is quite filled with frames and bees, and still more
room is required, it will be time to think of putting on the surplus
honey-chamber, or _super_.

There are two kinds of super, the _rack of sections_, and the _box of
shallow frames_.

The bee-keeper who wishes to work for honey-in-the-comb uses the rack
of sections. This consists of a light wooden rack, usually made to
contain twenty-one little wooden boxes called _sections_, each of which
when finished by the bees will contain about one pound of honey-comb (E
in the illustration). The section (A) is cleverly cut from one strip
of wood, which has three V-shaped cuts across it to form the corners,
and is dovetailed at each end, so that it can be folded up very easily
by the bee-keeper, something after the style of the outer case of a
match-box. In the figure are shown a section in the flat and the same
when folded (A, B).

[Illustration: THE EVOLUTION OF A SECTION OF HONEY-COMB.

    B, C.—The work of the bee-keeper.
    D, E.—The work of the bees in the hive.]

A starter of comb-foundation is as necessary for sections as it is
for frames, otherwise the bees might build the honey-comb across the
sections, joining them all together, and necessitating cutting the
combs to get them apart. For this purpose a saw cut is generally made
in the top bar of each section in which a strip of a specially thin
description of foundation, called super foundation, is inserted (C).

The sections are placed in the section-rack in seven rows, each row
consisting of three sections. Between each row a thin sheet of tin or
wood, called a _separator_, is placed. The object of the separators is
to ensure the face of the combs being flat, the bees leaving a uniform
space of about a quarter of an inch between the separator and the face
of the comb. The sections are held in place by means of a dummy-board
and spring at the end of the last row.

The rack of sections is now ready to be placed upon the stock-box. You
will notice that openings are cut in the edges of the top and bottom
bars of the sections. The openings in the bottom bar are to enable the
bees to gain access to the sections from the frames below. Often the
end bars are similarly cut; when this is so the bees can travel from
section to section in the rack.

[Illustration: RACK OF SECTIONS.]

To prevent the queen bee from going up into the super to deposit
eggs in the combs which are intended to receive honey only, it will
be necessary to place a _queen-excluder_ between the stock-box and
the rack of sections. The queen-excluder is a sheet of zinc which is
perforated all over with holes; these are large enough to admit the
workers, but just too small to let the queen pass through.

Choose a fine warm day for putting on the super. Midday, when the bees
are flying freely, is the best time for the operation.

I will suppose that this is the occasion of the beginner’s first
attempt at examining the interior of the hive, and will therefore go
into the method of procedure somewhat fully.

Several articles will be necessary.

The bee-veil will, of course, be worn on this occasion. A screwdriver
may be useful for prizing up the ends of the frames, the bees having
a habit of fastening down everything inside the hive with a sticky
substance called propolis, which they collect from the buds of certain
trees and plants. This substance is used more freely by the bees
towards the close of the summer than at present.

The most useful appliance employed by the bee-keeper is unquestionably
the smoker, for by its means the bees can be quieted and put into
such a condition that almost anything can be done to them. Smoke for
the bees might be compared to the anæsthetic of the surgeon, but it
is not intended to stupefy them. Experience and judgment are required
in using the smoker, and perfection cannot be attained at once. A few
directions, however, will be useful.

It is very important that the smoker be charged with smouldering
material that will not go out as long as it is wanted. The best fuel
is perhaps a strip of brown paper rolled up loosely in the form of a
cartridge, so that the air may have free circulation through it, but
see that the brown paper is of the right kind, as some sorts are almost
sure to go out in a few minutes’ time, while others again are equally
liable to burst out into flame. Dry touchwood makes very good fuel for
the smoker, seldom going out when once well alight. Old rags, dried
fungus, etc., are also said to be useful, but on no account use any
strong or poisonous smoke, such as would be produced by burning tobacco
or sulphur. When not being used, the lighted smoker should be stood
upright, in the position shown in the figure (see last paper); this
will help to keep it alight by the better circulation of air.

The object of the smoker is to quiet, not to stupefy, the bees; it
should not therefore be used too freely. After the roof of the hive has
been removed, a few light puffs of smoke may be given under the edges
of the quilts, and perhaps another in the entrance, the bees often
replying by a deep low hum. Now wait a minute or two, so that the bees
may prepare for the operation by gorging themselves with some of the
newly-gathered honey, and then, having got them into a good temper, we
may commence work without delay.

If we wish to ascertain the condition of the bees, we may lift a frame
gently out of the hive, examine it, and then replace it speedily so
that the brood shall not get chilled, care being taken not to crush any
bees in so doing.

The bees may now begin to show signs of restlessness, “boiling over”
the tops of the frames. This must be checked by the administration of a
few more puffs of smoke.

[Illustration: SHEET OF QUEEN-EXCLUDING ZINC.]

If, as the result of our investigation, we have found that the colony
is in an advanced enough state to make use of the super, the quilts
must be removed, and the sheet of queen-excluding zinc laid over the
frame in place of them. The rack of sections will then be placed on
the queen-excluder, the quilts being now transferred to the top of the
sections. If the rack of sections does not quite cover the tops of
the frames in the stock-box, any spaces that are left round the sides
should be covered over with strips of stout cloth. The operation is
then completed by putting on the lift and roof.

In doing bee-work like the above, care must be taken not to jar the
hive. Bees do not like vibration of any kind, and nothing upsets them
so easily as rough handling.

Never open the hive with no definite object in view, except just to
see how the bees are “getting on,” but make up your mind beforehand
what has to be ascertained or done, and then carry it out as promptly
and effectively as you can, closing up the hive as soon as your object
has been accomplished. Things that should always be noted in opening a
hive are (1) the presence of plenty of food in the shape of sealed or
unsealed honey, and (2) the presence of healthy brood in all stages,
including eggs; these last, owing to their small size, will require
a little looking for at first. If some of the brood appears to be
rotting, emitting a more or less foul smell, your bees have contracted
a serious infectious disease which, to be successfully dealt with,
requires the immediate assistance of a competent expert. This disease
is known as “foul brood,” and it is now sadly prevalent in many parts
of this country, owing chiefly to the lack of effort on the part of
careless bee-keepers in stamping it out. The symptoms and treatment of
foul brood will be described in a later paper.

Do not let an accidental sting or two interfere with your work; the
pain will go off in a minute or two, but in cases where the whole
colony is allowed to get into an irritated state, the only way of
reducing it to order will be to leave the work in hand and subjugate
them with repeated smoking, but this is hardly good advice to the
beginner.

I know of no really effective remedy for bee-stings. Many things
are recommended as being more or less beneficial, such as blue-bag,
dock-leaf, the juice of the fig-tree, etc. The best thing to do is to
extract the sting at once with the poison-bag attached, taking care not
to compress the latter, and then apply a little strong liquid ammonia;
this will have the effect of somewhat neutralising the poison, which
is acid. Sucking the spot before the poison has time to disseminate
itself in the blood, does good. These measures, if taken promptly,
will considerably alleviate the unpleasant after-effects of swelling
and irritation which sometimes follow. The poison contained in the
bee-sting does not seem to be really harmful to the system; the chief
danger seems to be in excessive swelling, but such cases are so rare
that the beginner has no ground for apprehension.

Though most people like sections of comb-honey, some prefer to have
the extracted honey, which, when put up in bottles or jars, is a more
convenient article for winter use.

In former times the only way of separating the honey from the comb
was by cutting the honeycomb up and letting it drain through a
canvas-strainer in a warm temperature. This process is apt to be a
messy and tedious one, and the honey produced by it is more or less
deep in colour from the large amount of pollen that it contains.

Nowadays, thanks to the invention of the _honey-extractor_, we may
extract the pure, clear honey from the comb without having to cut it
up, and the same frame of comb may be returned to the bees again and
again, to be repeatedly refilled with honey, thus saving the bees a
large amount of labour in comb-building. The details and working of the
honey-extractor will be fully described in the next paper.

Frames of comb intended for extracting are usually not so deep
as the ordinary standard frames in the stock-box: they are then
called _shallow frames_, and the super containing them is called a
_shallow-frame box_. The shallow-frame box is made like the stock-box,
and contains generally ten shallow frames fitted with metal ends.
Each frame must, of course, be fitted with at least a starter of
comb-foundation, and in placing the box of shallow frames on the hive,
a sheet of queen-excluding zinc should be placed under it, as with the
rack of sections.

Those who are going to use shallow frames will also now need to procure
a honey-extractor. A good extractor costs from eighteen to thirty
shillings.

Often a colony is strong enough to take two supers at one time,
one under the other. In this case the second one should be placed
underneath the first, after the latter has been on the hive for about
a week. A rack of sections may be used with a box of shallow frames,
or two racks of sections and two boxes of shallow frames may be
used instead, if desired. A swarm like the one I am describing is,
however, very seldom able to fill two supers at once during its first
year, because it does not commence work until a part of the season
has passed, and the stock-box has to be filled before work can be
undertaken in earnest in the supers.

(_To be continued._)




THE HOUSE WITH THE VERANDAH.

BY ISABELLA FYVIE MAYO, Author of “Other People’s Stairs,” “Her Object
in Life,” etc.


CHAPTER XV.

A MASCULINE STANDPOINT.

“You needn’t go into raptures of gratitude till you hear all about my
suggestion, my love,” said Mrs. Bray; “it’s not all advantage. In fact
the person concerned has been rather on my mind, because I wasn’t at
all sure it would be easy to find her a situation in what she calls
‘this Babylon.’”

“Please tell me about her,” pleaded Lucy.

“To begin with, she is nearly forty years old.”

Lucy at once thought of “Mrs. Morison,” but what she said was, “I think
that is an advantage with me if she has been a good woman and—is
sober.”

“A good woman? My love, she’s one of the unco’ guid! And she’s a total
abstainer—always has been. But she is not what one can call a trained
servant. She has not been in a situation for about twenty years.”

“What has she been doing?” Lucy asked.

“Keeping her father’s house and looking after him,” answered Mrs. Bray,
“and now he’s dead. He had a little farm—a croft, I think they call
it—over the hills and far away, somewhere in a Highland place, which,
because it is not an island, is called the Black Isle.”

The quick, sympathetic old lady caught and understood an expression
which flitted over Lucy’s face.

“Oh, this is all quite genuine,” she said; “that is its one clear
advantage. She’s a friend of my poor Rachel’s—at least, Rachel has
known all about her and ‘her folks’ for years and years. Her brother
was piper in the same regiment with Rachel’s lover. And when Rachel
went North to see that lover’s mother, after he had gone to India, she
was in this woman’s house, and Rachel says that it was most beautifully
kept, and that there were no people in the place more respected than
these Gillespies.”

“One wonders why she left her native place and came so far away,”
observed Lucy.

The old lady shook her head knowingly, and replied, “As poor Rachel
says, ‘there are wheels within wheels.’ It seems there is a married
brother with his wife living near the ‘croft,’ and I understand there
was no love lost between this woman and her sister-in-law. There was
some sort of love-affair mixed up in their animosity. Rachel put me
to sleep one afternoon telling me about it, so you won’t expect me to
remember details. And when the father died, the home had to be broken
up anyhow, for the daughter had nothing to live on. I fancy she didn’t
care to go to service within the range of the sister-in-law, ‘mistress
in her own house.’ There’s a deal of human nature in man, my dear, and
especially in woman. Rachel says her friend doesn’t want to go back,
but if she doesn’t get a place soon, she’s getting so low spirited that
she thinks she will,” continued Mrs. Bray. “You see she has, after
all, only a servant’s recommendation—Rachel’s—and that wouldn’t mean
much to many, but it may to you, who have known Rachel in my house for
so many years, and who understand how faithful and good she is, poor,
silly, sentimental thing.”

Lucy looked up quickly into her old friend’s face. “I would take
your Rachel’s recommendation quite as soon as a ‘character’ from any
mistress,” she said.

“I think you would be wise to do so,” replied Mrs. Bray. “This woman
will be clean and honest, certainly not likely to attract any
troublesome flirtations. She’s got the soft Highland voice with a
pretty little whine in it.”

“Oh, call it a wail!” said Lucy, laughing.

“She’s terribly solemn to look at, and she ends her speeches with
a sigh,” went on Mrs. Bray. “But she’s not bad-looking, and is of
quite superior appearance. Her name is rather a mouthful—Clementina
Gillespie—and she’s not a person whom one could reasonably shorten
into Clem or Tina. No—it wouldn’t do. You might as well call Robert
the Bruce—Bob!”

“Will you send her to see me?” asked Lucy.

“Yes, I will,” said the old lady. “That ridiculous Rachel will be so
pleased! It seems a comfort to her to think of having her dead lover’s
dead old friend’s sister to live near her. To me it seems a far-off cry
of consolation! But everyone to their taste. And now, at last, we’ll
dismiss the kitchen, and you must tell me all about Mr. Challoner.”

Lucy had not only her good news to relate, but she actually had
something to show. The _Slains Castle_ had stayed for a few days at a
certain port, and Charlie had sat for a photograph, which he sent home
in his letter. It might not be much as a work of art or science, for
the posing was all wrong and the chemicals were manifestly bad. Yet
next to Hugh himself it was the very dearest thing in Lucy’s present
possession, so satisfactory was its assurance of the beloved wanderer’s
renewed strength and energy. Where were the wasted form and the wan
countenance which had hitherto haunted Lucy’s memories of her husband?
They had vanished, and thus the poor little photograph had cheered Lucy
as not even Charlie’s letters had done. For in those he might have
been trying “to make the best of things”—to dwell on every trifling
improvement, so as to cheer and uphold her in her loneliness. That fear
had often haunted her, basing itself on her own silence concerning
Pollie’s defection, which silence she had kept intact, “for fear of
worrying him.” The shock which Mrs. Morison’s breakdown had given her,
when on the eve of revelation, had restrained her from any further
attempt at confidence on this matter. This reticence and its motive
naturally made her dread some corresponding reticence on her husband’s
part. The little portrait set that suspicion at rest. So it had its
place in the centre of the dining-room mantelshelf, and was provided
with a dainty little frame—the only “article of luxury” which Lucy had
bought since Charlie’s departure.

Mrs. Bray went off gratified and elate. She loved to play the part
of fairy godmother, though when she was defeated in that—as when
the death of Rachel’s lover prevented her from overwhelming her maid
with marriage gifts—she was apt to turn unsympathetic and cynical.
She prolonged her visit to the little house with the verandah and
had to give up two or three other calls she had arranged in the
same neighbourhood. She drove off saying to herself with a full
consciousness of the humour of the reflection—

“Now I feel good; I could be always good if I was in a world of good
people and was able to straighten out every tangle I saw.”

Lucy had another visitor that evening, Tom Black, who had never failed
to put in his appearance from time to time ever since that memorable
Christmas Day. Tom’s visits were generally of a most cheerful not to
say hilarious description, beginning with games of romps with Hugh and
ending in all sorts of little services to Lucy herself. Thanks to his
aid, she had really given all her books their spring dusting and had
got them correctly restored to their proper places—a thing which could
not have been done by Jane, who though perfectly able to read, would
have stood them upside down, and scattered “sets” most recklessly. Tom
always asked whether there was “anything going on that he could do?”
and Lucy answered him frankly and candidly. She wondered sometimes
whether the inquiry came from humility or pride—from an unnecessarily
humble feeling that his presence might be less than pleasure unless it
was useful, or from a proud masculine consciousness that a feminine
household may often stand in need of a strong arm and a steady hand.

But this evening Tom was in such doleful dumps that Lucy was quite glad
that her own spirits had been somewhat cheered by Mrs. Bray’s visit.

Tom had got to leave his lodgings. He had been placed, on his
first arrival in London, with the elderly widow of a clerk in Mr.
Challoner’s firm. She had a neat little seven-roomed house somewhere
in Barnsbury, and she let two of her bedrooms and one parlour to Tom
Black and another young man. It was a quiet and comfortable though
unpretentious home, wherein a youth who was inclined to good habits
found every influence to help his perseverance therein. Youths who
were not inclined to good habits were not allowed to linger there. In
her earlier and more vigorous days the worthy landlady had wrestled
hard with sundry ill-doers, and not without a certain sort of success,
though she herself was more inclined to regard the results with
cynicism and suspicion than with self-satisfaction. When neighbours
would say to her how proud she must be that So-and-so had profited by
her warnings, disciplines, and encouragements, she was wont to say
“that he was different from what he once was, but she wasn’t so sure
that he was any better.” Being a Scots woman herself she would tell the
story of the Scots minister who was of the opinion that the sight of
one’s “converts” was generally calculated “to keep one humble.”

Of late years, however, she had ceased to struggle with those who
inclined to do evil, and had reserved herself for the upholding of
those who meant to do well.

“I’ve had my time of keeping a reformatory,” she had said in her quaint
way, “now somebody else must take a turn!”

“Mrs. Mott is giving up housekeeping altogether now, Mrs. Challoner,”
Tom explained with a rueful countenance. “She’s got a tenant for the
whole house, and she’s going to live in the country in some little
place which she can manage alone. She says she is ‘weary of her life
because of those daughters of Heth’—meaning the servant girls. You
know the way she speaks, Mrs. Challoner.”

Lucy laughed. She knew Mrs. Mott very well, and she was beginning to
realise the difficulties which must beset such a person.

“I sympathise with her,” she said. “But surely many of her servants
must have been models! I thought the house always looked so bright and
pleasant.”

“She says that’s because she put herself into it,” explained Tom. “Just
whatever they left undone, she says, she did, and she did it all,
when they ran away or gave her notice and went off before she had got
another. Now she says she can’t do so any more; she’s near sixty, and
her feet are weak, and she can’t manage the stairs, and she won’t keep
people in her house if it can’t be kept as it should be. I’m sure she
might let her place go very different from what it is, and yet it would
be a palace of neatness compared with the houses which I’ve seen since
I’ve been looking for lodgings,” added poor Tom ruefully.

“Has she had any special trouble lately?” asked Lucy.

“She says that for the last three years she has only had one girl who
was respectable and willing to learn, and she attended some class or
guild where the ladies told her she was ‘too good for domestic service’
and took her off to be trained as a hospital nurse,” answered Tom.

“Oh, dear, dear!” said Lucy, “as if the work of prevention is not far
better and more honourable than that of mere cure. And it ought to be
more honoured!”

“We have had some very queer customers lately, I must say,” Tom went
on in his blunt boyish way. “Young Hinton—that’s the other fellow who
stays at Mrs. Mott’s—happened to have a good deal of note-paper and
some hundreds of envelopes marked with a handsome H. Well, he never
could understand how that paper went off so quickly. He would take
out a packet, and write a few letters, and then the next time he went
to write he would find the packet almost empty. He used to say it was
bewitched! Well, Mrs. Mott caught that servant in the act of stealing
something—I think it was taking out coal in the big basket she carried
to fetch potatoes. When Mrs. Mott counted over her other things she
found some towels missing. So she told the girl she had better open
her box and show what else she had, and there, along with the towels,
were heaps of Hinton’s paper and envelopes, and what was funniest of
all, an old album of his with a lot of half-faded photos of his aunts
and cousins. Now what could she have wanted with that? The paper, of
course, she meant to use, because her name was Hannah—an H, you see.”

“The stolen photographs make the story look like a genuine case of
kleptomania,” observed Lucy; “yet it may have had some object which
does not readily occur to us. She may have wished to lay claim to
relationship with some nice respectable-looking people, such as Mr.
Hinton’s friends doubtless were.”

“That was what Hinton said,” Tom returned. “He found out Hannah had
been a workhouse child, and didn’t know of anybody belonging to her.
It did seem pathetic in a way. Hinton thought so. He wrote to his
grandmother in the country and got her to take the girl and give her
another chance. But she soon ran away. Some gipsy show-people had been
in the town, and the police said she went off with them. They had seen
her among them.”

“Ah,” thought Lucy, “and who knows what thread of hereditary
lawlessness and vagabondage had been in this poor girl, whose childhood
nobody had been at pains to understand and to discipline? And yet how
impossible it is that such a one could be harboured in a house like
Mrs. Mott’s—nay, it would be wrong, for nobody must voluntarily assume
responsibilities which clash with duties.”

“What decided Mrs. Mott, though,” Tom went on, “was when her last girl
calmly took a candle to see where the gas was escaping. Mrs. Mott just
stepped out of the parlour in time to see her coming with it, alight,
out of the pantry. The gas escape was in the kitchen, and she was on
her way downstairs. If Mrs. Mott had stayed in the parlour, we should
have been all blown up together, for I was in the room overhead. Mrs.
Mott was dreadfully upset; she set open every door and window and then
called me. I turned off the gas, and soon found the leakage. Mrs. Mott
was quite ill with the shock of knowing what might have happened. She
said to me, at once, that she couldn’t stand it any more, she could not
bear the responsibilities that the irresponsible might bring down on
her head at any moment. I thought the feeling might pass off with the
fright; but she’s stuck to it—more’s the pity for me.”

“One wonders at city girls not having yet learned the truth about gas,”
said Lucy. “Certainly I have heard curious stories about country people
coming into town and ‘blowing out’ the light, and wondering much at the
‘nasty smell’ which ensued, compelling them to open the window, though
there might be frost and snow outside. Did this girl come from the
country?”

“Not she,” said Tom; “she belongs to a mews quite close to our place.
And what is more, on our kitchen wall there is a printed placard giving
full instructions about such household matters as breaking pipes,
escaping gas, or street doors left ajar.”

“Everybody can read nowadays,” observed Lucy, “but every now and then
one comes across a person who does not seem to read with any ease or
facility; perhaps she was one of these.”

Tom shook his head. “No,” he said. “Mrs. Mott told me that till that
day she had never had much fault to find with her (she’d only been with
us for about three weeks), but that she had been sorry to see that
she spent all her leisure in reading penny papers, with stories and
pictures of men in evening dress and women with trailing robes, all
dukes and viscountesses, and pretty girls in shops. She must have spent
threepence or fourpence a week on these, Mrs. Mott says, and when she
had read them, she tore them up or burnt them. Mrs. Mott had told her
she ought to settle to one good magazine and collect a nice stock for
bound volumes.

“I don’t wonder Mrs. Mott is rather sick of it,” Tom went on, “only
I wish she didn’t give up out of feeling so responsible for us. All
that we shall gain, as it seems to me, is, most likely, girls quite as
irresponsible, and a landlady equally so. Mrs. Mott’s charges have been
very moderate—I did not realise how moderate—till I have gone about
and seen what is offered for the same money.”

“Then you have begun to make inquiries,” said Lucy.

“Ay,” answered Tom, rather bitterly, “and I don’t know when I shall
leave off or where I shall find myself. I mustn’t go one bit further
from the office than Mrs. Mott’s house is. Indeed, that’s rather too
far, except that I was there from the first, and knew when I was
comfortable. I’ve spoilt two Saturday afternoons going round and asking
questions at every house where I saw ‘Furnished Apartments.’ And oh,
Mrs. Challoner!”—Tom broke off with an indescribably comic expression
of dismay on his good-humoured face.

“Did you have some funny experiences?” Lucy questioned.

“Didn’t I?” echoed Tom. “The very first place to which I went was in
a good street not very far from the office, and the house looked nice
on the outside. The door was opened by such a girl!—I don’t know
whether she belonged to the family, or was a servant—I should think
the former. But she might have been a Fuzzy Wuzzy straight from the
Soudan by the look of her hair. It stood straight up all round her
head. You couldn’t believe it unless you saw it! And her gown might
have been made of dirty dishcloths. The passage looked like a black
cavern. I didn’t want to go in, but I didn’t know how to get away. So I
asked some questions. I said I wanted a bedroom-sitting-room, and the
use of a parlour for meals. She said, ‘There wasn’t no parlour; their
gentlemen mostly took their meals out.’ That gave me excuse to say it
wouldn’t suit, and I got away.”

“Surely that must be a very extravagant arrangement for the gentlemen,”
said Lucy.

“Mustn’t it?” rejoined Tom. “I should be stone-broke in a month!
But I found that was the cry at all of them. The best—the most
decent-looking—would give you your breakfast and ‘something at night,
if you wanted it.’ That last was quite a concession. But they all
turned up their noses at the thought of dinners! ‘There were plenty of
restaurants,’ they said, ‘and they were cheap enough.’

“And the rooms!” continued Tom, with his disgusted voice. “Those which
I could have for my price were always at the back, with a brick wall
within an arm’s length from the window. And, ugh! there was a feeling
about them as if one could smell and taste all the fellows who had ever
used them! Lots of the bedrooms had nailed-down carpets, whose very
pattern had disappeared. And the curtains and chair-covers looked as if
they had not been washed since they were made.”

“I daresay they were not washable,” explained Lucy. “Cretonnes have
replaced dimities and chintz, and none but the very best cretonnes will
bear washing. This is so much the case that I hear the trade of the
‘calenderer’ who used to make chintz as good as new, has gone almost
out of existence.”

“Most of them told me that all my washing would be ‘put out,’ and
I should get my own bill from the laundry,” said Tom, who seemed
considerably puzzled by all these domestic ins and outs, but not
without some sound conviction that they tended neither to his comfort
nor his prosperity.

“I did not find one house where they were willing to give me dinner
daily,” Tom went on, “except boarding houses with a lot of people
in them. I don’t like the idea of those at all. It is very tiring
and worrying to sit down every evening at a dining-table packed with
strangers, most of whom will be replaced in a week or two by another
set of strangers. And the very lowest fee of these, for a top back
room, so small, and with a roof so sloping, that I could not use my
Indian clubs without upsetting the furniture, is as much as I gave
Mrs. Mott for all my peace and comfort—and then it doesn’t include the
washing! Yet I expect I’ll have to come to this,” added Tom ruefully.

“I suppose the lodging-house keepers can’t cook themselves, and can’t
get servants who can,” said Lucy. “And oh, Mr. Black, many of the old
style lodging-house servants were terribly overworked and underpaid and
ill-treated. I once went to get lessons from a lady who had apartments
in one of these houses. She told me that there was only one servant—an
undersized creature who had opened the door to me. There were four sets
of apartments in that house, apart from her mistress’s family of four
people, and the girl got no help, except a little in the cooking, from
the mistress’s aged mother. The washing was done at home there, and the
servant did it all! My teacher told me that the girl was on her feet
and hard at work from six o’clock in the morning till after ten o’clock
at night, and ‘the worst of it was,’ she added, ‘the girl was learning
nothing, and getting so used to scamped and slovenly work, that she
could never rise to anything better than the same drudgery.’ She had
very low wages. A week’s illness would mean the hospital. Her life’s
sole resting-place would be the workhouse. We can’t be sorry for any
changes which end such a state of things, can we, Mr. Black?”

“Well, no, certainly not,” he said, “but are they ending? By the look
of the servants I saw in the big boarding-houses, I shouldn’t think
their lives are much easier or better. They may have higher wages.
Mrs. Mott’s girls certainly had a better time. They were comfortable
and happy when they chose to be so. She paid them a very fair wage,
considering that she taught them housework thoroughly. She says that
some of the girls she had long ago went from her place to the very best
situations. One of them afterwards married a young farmer, and when she
visits London she always comes to see Mrs. Mott.”

“As for getting meals at restaurants,” pursued poor Tom, “I can’t do
it. I can’t afford it. I know they are very cheap; but somehow there
doesn’t seem much ‘bite’ in their platefuls. And there’s such a noise,
and such a hurry, and such a horrid smell of food. If fellows really
have to come to that, I don’t wonder they take to drinking and smoking.
There’s something unreasonable about the whole thing. Here are girls
nowadays ready to do men’s work for half men’s wages, so that fellows
can scarcely get work at all. When I was in the City the other day I
saw a great crowd of men round an office. They were pushing right up
the stairway and half across the road. I thought there must have been
a murder. I said to a commissionaire who was standing by, ‘What’s up?’
‘Oh,’ says he, ‘these people are applying for a clerk’s place that’s
advertised.’ ‘Anything specially good?’ I asked. ‘No, sir, only a
pound a week,’ he answered. And I know it’s always so. Yet our ways
of living are all getting dearer, and no woman is ready to be well
paid for doing what we can’t do for ourselves. It’s inconsistent! It’s
abominable!”

Lucy could not help laughing. “Don’t say ‘Women won’t do what men
can’t do,’” she answered. “Don’t you know it is a favourite masculine
reflection on feminine inferiority that all the great cooks are men! If
that be so, then men are also likely to be the best average cooks. If
they are so hard pressed for work, why do not some of them turn towards
work which is crying for workers, and in which we always hear they
could excel? A cook with a wage of eighteen or twenty pounds a year,
and a thoroughly good home provided, is far better off than the earner
of a weekly wage of a pound.”

“Oh, well,” said Tom, “I can well believe that. But why can’t women
stick to cooking themselves? It’s women’s work.”

“Not if they can’t do it so well as we hear men can,” persisted Lucy.

“Well, you see, it would seem a come-down for a man,” Tom candidly
confessed. “A clerkship—domestic service; they have a different sound.”

“Just so,” said Lucy, “and that being the man’s standpoint, the
girls have naturally adopted it too. What reason is there in
such a standpoint? On the face of it, which work is the more
honourable—securing and maintaining the comfort of homes, or entering
figures in a ledger and addressing envelopes? Which sphere gives
the more scope for individual talent and character? And until this
perverted standpoint is changed, all our present miseries will continue
and increase. I have got my share, and you are finding yours. What is
your housemate, Mr. Hinton, going to do?”

“He’s one of the lucky ones!” said Tom. “His married sister and her
husband are coming into London, and they mean to let him have their
spare room.”

A sudden idea flashed upon Lucy’s mind.

(_To be continued._)




ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.


STUDY AND STUDIO.

T. R. A. M. A.—We think you must be confusing two poems. The lines—

    “O Mother Ida! many-fountained Ida,
      Dear Mother Ida, hearken ere I die!”

recur frequently in “Œnone,” a poem by Tennyson; they may have been
confused by someone with the extract from Macaulay’s “Horatius,” which
you quote—

    “O Tiber, Father Tiber,
      To whom the Romans pray,”

or may, of course, be foolishly introduced into a parody upon the “Lay”
in question.

DAFFODIL (Portugal).—Thank you very much for your interesting letter
from Oporto. We like to hear about your life. Your information is
published elsewhere.

BLUEBELL.—The extract you give is from Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing
the Bar.” You will find it in the last volume of his works, and it
begins thus—

    “Sunset, and evening star,
      And one clear call for me.”

AGATHA.—We are pleased to have your letter from the Sea-Bathing
Hospital and hope you will soon be stronger. As for your quotation from
Longfellow—

    “We should dread the desert behind us
      Worse than the dark before,”

it is true that in one sense one cannot “dread” what is behind; and
yet it seems to us the poet’s meaning is clear. The world—life’s
experience, life’s memories—deprived of the presence of children,
would be more desolate and dreadful even than “the dark” or the unknown
future. One must not be too strict in criticising poetical expressions,
and “to dread” may mean to feel distress or horror, as well as
apprehension.

MISS R. M. JACOB, 8, Waldenshaw Road, Forest Hill, London, S.E., sends
us particulars of Correspondence Lessons in the cane basket-work.
The method is her own and original, and she seems already to be very
successful in teaching. Girls who need some fresh occupation will do
well to apply to Miss Jacob for particulars.

B. E. M.—1. There are a number of reading societies you could
join:—The National Home Reading Union, Surrey House, Victoria
Embankment, London; “The Queen” Reading Club, Miss Isabel G. Kent, Lay
Rectory, Little Abington, Cambridge; and one conducted by Mrs. Walker,
Litlington Rectory, Berwick, Sussex, besides many others mentioned in
this column from time to time.—2. You might consult _Our Sketching
Club: Letters and Studies in Landscape Art_, by Rev. R. St. John
Tyrwhitt, M.A. (Macmillan); _Brushwork_, first book, by Miss Yeats,
published by Philip & Son, 32, Fleet Street; or _Brushwork, or Painting
without Pencil Outline_, by D. Pearce, published by Charles Dible, 10,
Paternoster Square. Two questions are our limit.

PERI.—We have pleasure in telling you that the poem you wish to find
is called “The Man at the Gate,” and is contained in a small volume
entitled “Ezekiel and other Poems, by B. M.” The book was published
some time ago by Nelson & Sons at 3s. 6d., net price 2s. 7½d.

NELL BELL.—Dear girl, your letter is so disfigured by enormous blots
and erasures that we really cannot ask a French girl to correspond with
you. Your writing is good, and we are sure you could send us a neat
letter if you liked.

CARNATION (Australia).—Write direct to Mademoiselle Louise François,
Anzin, Nord, France.

We have again much pleasure in noticing the Sketching and Copying
Clubs of Miss H. E. Grace, 54, York Road, Brighton. The subjects for
the fourteenth year, 1899-1900, seem chosen and named in a felicitous
manner. We thank Miss Grace for her pleasant letter and enclosure.

ANCIENT BRITON.—Will Carleton’s “The First Settler’s Story” is
published in his book of _Farm Ballads_ and also appeared in _Our Own
Gazette_ for February, 1893.

AMÉDÉE.—1. The building depicted in the frontispiece to THE GIRL’S OWN
PAPER for February is, doubtless, the Parthenon (literally the virgin’s
chamber), or temple to the Goddess Athênê on the Acropolis at Athens.
This wonderful edifice was built under the superintendence of Phidias,
who wrought in ivory and gold a colossal statue of the goddess for the
interior. The temple consisted of an oblong central building flanked
on all sides by a peristyle of pillars. It is a little difficult to
say precisely what religious festival is here depicted; but all the
Greek religious festivals were intermingled with the idea of gladness,
procession, and public rejoicing. We observe the lyre (Greek, phorminx)
as well as other instruments more familiar. You might be interested in
consulting Smith’s _Student’s Greece_.—2. Without seeing the picture
you name we cannot explain it. Art that makes the beauty of the past
real to us has its own value, even without any precise lesson.

DAFFODIL.—Your sonnet, “The Soul’s Awakening,” is decidedly above the
average of lines sent us for criticism. The thought is very good. There
are a few defects in the working out; the last two lines do not rhyme
with each other, or with any line, and the accent on “sepulchre” is
forced. But we can on the whole give you sincere praise.

SOPHIA.—We fear your description is not full enough to enable us to
help you as to the story you wish to find. Is it by any chance _The
Giant Killer; or, the Battle that all must Fight_, by A. L. O. E.?
That opens with the sons of a clergyman (Mr. Roby) quarrelling. Your
outline reads rather like A. L. O. E.’s style. Thanks for your reply to
DOUBTFUL.

MAB (Scotland).—Your story is far too sentimental, and shows a lack
of knowledge of real life. A complexion cannot be at once “tanned by
exposure” and “delicately tinted as a pink wild rose.” At the same time
your writing is not devoid of force, and it is quite possible that with
time and study you might do better. There is no presumption whatever in
your sending to us; we are always glad to advise our readers.


OUR OPEN LETTER BOX.

DOUBTFUL has again several answers for which we thank COPPER
BEECH, “TARLIE,” PHYLLIS, FLORENCE E. ROGERS, META, two anonymous
correspondents, MISS F. BARTRAM, AMY HUMPHRIES, PUGGY, M. S. HAMMETT,
ANNIE STANDING, FLORRIE WALLING, and J. M. BAYNE. The last three
correspondents kindly enclose a copy of the poem in question, “A Noble
Boy.” One says it is by G. R. Sims, another attributes it to Mary D.
Brine.

“PUGGY” asks for the words to the “Rowan Tree,” by Lady Nairne.

MARGUERITE is glad to be able to tell “HOPE” that “Trouble in Amen
Corner” occurs in _The Thousand Best Poems in the World_, published by
Hutchinson & Co., 34, Paternoster Row.

M. J. M. asks for two recitations, “Lucky Jim” and “Pennaby Mine.”

“DAFFODIL” writes from Portugal to inform A. MARTIN that “The Child and
the Seraph” begins thus—

    “A little, meek-faced, quiet village child
    Sat singing by her cottage door at eve
    A low sweet Sabbath song.”

DAFFODIL thinks this poem must be identical with “Voices at the
Throne,” for which A. MARTIN inquires. It is to be found in _The
Children’s Harp; or, Select Poetry for the Young_, Frederick Warne &
Co., Bedford Street, Strand.

M. D. JORDAN kindly informs “WINTON” that the verse for which she
inquires is in a hymn by Bishop Bickersteth, beginning—

    “Come ye yourselves apart and rest awhile.”

It is No. 597 _Hymnal Companion_, new edition.

IRENE PETERKIN wishes to obtain a monologue called “Mr. Gutteridge’s
Great-Grandmother.” Can any reader help her?


INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENCE.

JOYCE, sixteen years of age, asks for a French and also an Italian girl
correspondent. JOYCE should write direct to Miss Adelina Grillo, whose
address we gave, if she wishes to correspond with her.

AGNES M. FORD, 49, Trinity Road, Birchfield, Birmingham, would like to
correspond with a French girl about seventeen or eighteen years of age.

MISS ELSIE SHAW, Crescent Villa, Tettenhall Road, Wolverhampton, wishes
to correspond with a French girl, about nineteen, of good family, each
to write in the other’s language, correcting and returning letters.

A Canadian girl is desirous of corresponding with a girl of about
seventeen in some European country (France or Spain preferred).
Address, Ethel Millar, 70, Elmwood Avenue, London, Ontario, Canada.

ROSE J. ARCH, Roseleigh, Chadwick Road, Wallwood Park, Leytonstone,
would like to correspond with some young English ladies in South
Africa, Japan, or Australia. We thank Miss Arch, and also Miss Hepper,
for their pleasant letters telling of the enjoyment and profit derived
by means of this column.

HILDA LEAKE, care of W. H. Shields, Esq., Stuart Street, Cottesloe
Beach, Western Australia, would like to correspond with “MISS
INQUISITIVE.”

FRÄULEIN GERTRUD OETTIG desires to exchange “view postcards,” English
or French. Address, Breslau, Schlesien, Ohlauer Stadtgraben 27, II.
étage.

GERTRUDE HUNT, Manukau Road, Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand, asks if “O
MIMOSA SAN” will exchange pictorial postcards with her.

MARIA DE VÁRADY, Fridau a/Drau, Steiermark, wishes to exchange
illustrated cards with a Russian girl, and asks if there are Indian
illustrated cards? (We may add, in response to her inquiry, that we
believe some preparations of petroleum are good for the hair, but she
must not set herself alight.)

“KOMURASAKI SAN,” who is a collector of stamps, would like to
correspond and exchange with other collectors. She will send a written
list of her duplicates to anyone who would like to exchange with her.
Her collection numbers 1000.

MISS E. LESLIE MELVILLE, Welbourn Rectory, Lincoln, wishes to say that
she has a number of Kashmiri stamps which she would like to sell to “G.
O. P.” readers. The prices vary from 2d. to 10s. each, and some of the
stamps are very old and rare. All the money goes to a C. M. S. school
in Sirinagur, which is kept by the friend who gave her the stamps.

[Illustration: RULES.

_I. No charge is made for answering questions._

_II. All correspondents to give initials or pseudonym._

_III. The Editor reserves the right of declining to reply to any of the
questions._

_IV. No direct answers can be sent by the Editor through the post._

_V. No more than two questions may be asked in one letter, which must
be addressed to the Editor of_ THE GIRL’S OWN PAPER, _56, Paternoster
Row, London, E.C._

_VI. No addresses of firms, tradesmen, or any other matter of the
nature of an advertisement, will be inserted._]


MEDICAL.

A. B. C.—Writer’s cramp is a name given to a peculiar form of nervous
disease of the right arm and hand met with, almost exclusively, in
writers. The disease belongs to that class of afflictions called
“habit spasms,” other examples of which are histrionic spasm, commonly
called “stage strike,” “musical stammering,” and some forms of true
stammering. Of the cause of writer’s cramp we know this much, that it
occurs mainly in writers; that it is far more common in men than in
women; that it sometimes occurs in persons who are run down in health;
that it is more common among the members of neurotic families, and
that it is most frequent in those writers who use their wrists and
little fingers as the “fulcrum” when writing. It is very uncommon among
type-writers. There are many types of the complaint. In some forms
weakness or paralysis of the muscles of the right hand is the most
marked feature; in other cases twitchings, cramps, or numbness are the
leading symptoms. The treatment for the affection is perfectly simple,
but, like most simple treatments, it is very rarely that it is carried
out. It is absolute rest from writing. The disease is cured by absolute
rest. Where this treatment is impossible, rest till all symptoms have
subsided, and then gradually taking to writing again, is the next best
thing. But the complaint is exceedingly likely to recur. Learning to
write with the left hand, nothing like such a difficult proceeding as
you would think, has frequently been tried for the trouble; sometimes
with great success, but not infrequently the disease attacks the left
hand also. Massage, galvanism, and other such measures are sometimes
used, but their effects are doubtful, and they appear to have but
little action. The same may be said of strychnine and other nervine
tonics. Of drugs the most useful are malt, cod-liver oil, and suchlike
foods. Writer’s cramp is a serious disease to writers, and, moreover,
it is one which they can never escape from if they must still continue
in their employment. It is far better to throw over their writing at
once, than wait till they are obliged to do so by the disease crippling
them.

POOR HUMPBACK.—The deformity resulting from tubercular disease of the
spine cannot be remedied. Indeed, the deformity is the remedy for the
effects of the mischief. For in this condition the tubercle germs have
destroyed some of the bones of the back, and the only way by which
the strength of the backbone is maintained is by the falling together
of the bones above and below the seat of the trouble, and this, of
necessity, produces shortness and deformity.

PINK MAY.—You should not wash your hair too often; if it is healthy,
once a month is quite sufficiently frequent.

MURIEL.—It is indeed a difficult matter to clear a complexion
“disfigured by innumerable freckles,” but still we can do a little
to render the marks less noticeable. Freckles are small patches of
pigment. We know there are fair and dark complexions, and a freckled
complexion is one which is both fair and dark in patches. One of the
greatest causes of excess of pigment in the skin is light, and we all
know how likely we are to get freckled or browned after being in a
strong sun. It is not the heat, but the light of the sun which forms
the pigment in the skin, and the bluer the light the more rapidly it
will form pigment. Light reflected from water is especially potent in
the formation of both browning and freckles. If you want to escape
freckles you must therefore keep out of the light, and you can do
this by wearing a red veil or using a red parasol. It is _said_ that
freckles can be bleached with peroxide of hydrogen, but we have not
seen much benefit from its use. Glycerine and lime-water is also said
to remove freckles.

A MOTHERLESS LASS.—Although all drugs are injurious when taken
regularly, if the reason why they are taken is persistent, it is
necessary to take them regularly. It is taking drugs without reason
which is so dangerous, or taking them to combat a complaint which is
cured. Aloes is the best habitual laxative we possess, and in most
cases it is the safest to employ, but in your case we do not advise you
to continue it, but to take a teaspoonful of liquorice powder instead.
For your anæmia we advise bone-marrow tabloids or the peptonate of
iron. The tabloids are often exceedingly useful, but they must be
taken with care. Begin by taking one tabloid crushed up in milk twice
a day, after food. After a week take two tabloids twice a day. Do
not exceed this amount. If headache, dizziness, or trembling occurs,
drop the tabloids for a week, then take to them again gradually. Most
of your troubles are due to anæmia, but this again is connected with
what you tell us in the latter part of your letter. Unfortunately we
cannot enter at length into the subject. We can only encourage you to
persevere and never to give up the struggle, however often you may
fail. You cannot expect to have good health unless you improve your way
of living. As regards the medical part of the question, you should take
plenty of healthy exercise and seek the companionship of others. Above
all, be careful of what you read. Frivolous literature is a terrible
evil which must be shunned without ceasing. And above all, do not
despair; we are all weak and fail sometimes, but if we do our best and
strive to do better, we may in time overcome our failings.

PRIMROSE.—There are certain soaps which “won’t wash clothes,” and
there are others which will not wash faces—or rather, will not wash
them without injury. Girls should always be careful not to use coarse
or strong soaps for toilet use. A soap made to scrub floors or soiled
clothes is not suitable to wash a face. For floors, etc., you want a
strong, coarse soap. But the human face is a delicate article, and
should be cleaned with soap made with great care, with no coarse or
biting principles to spoil the complexion. All soaps sold for the
toilet, except patent ones, are made of refined materials carefully
selected and blended; and it is these soaps, and these only, which
should be used for toilet purposes. Patent soaps should never be used,
not because they are impure, but because their preparation is secret,
and nobody knows from what they are made.

A HOTHOUSE ROSE.—Read the answer to “Poor Humpback.” Tuberculosis
of the spine is distinctly a curable disease, though usually some
deformity, more or less slight, is left after the disease has ceased.
The treatment is chiefly a question of absolute rest.

ANXIOUS ONE.—We cannot tell you what causes the pain in your left side
without any information about it. It is probably indigestion.

ANOTHER ANXIOUS ONE.—You are very wrong to go about untreated.

MYALL.—Coal gas is an intensely poisonous vapour. Unlike the
“choke-damp” of miners, which is carbonic acid gas, coal gas is not
only irrespirable, but is actually poisonous. A very small quantity
of gas in the air of a room may produce alarming results in anybody
sleeping in the room. We are all familiar, at all events through the
newspaper, with the immense danger of gas escaping into a bedroom. “How
the body of —— was found in bed, and an escape of gas noticed,” etc.
But few people are aware of the danger of a little gas escaping from a
defective bracket or burner. Yet many cases of chronic failing health
can be traced to this cause—gas escaping into the bedroom, often in
such small quantities as to be undetected till searched for. Coal gas
acts directly on the blood and destroys its function. When a person
is found unconscious in a room in which gas is escaping, she should
be immediately taken out into the open air and artificial respiration
employed at once. But only too frequently no effort is of any avail.
Charcoal burned with a limited supply of air gives out the same gas as
the poisonous factor in coal gas, namely, carbon monoxide. This gas has
no smell, and therefore it is not the poisonous constituent of coal gas
which gives it the characteristic odour. Amongst the symptoms which
may be met with in persons who sleep in a room into which a minute
quantity of coal gas escapes, are headache, lassitude, especially in
the morning, worrying dreams and anæmia.

OLD MOTHER HUBBARD.—1. Sallowness of the complexion is one of the
commonest symptoms met with in ill-health. Practically any form of
illness may cause it. It is almost invariably present in chronic
constipation.—2. Yes. One decayed tooth may injure every other tooth
in the head, just as one rotten apple will spoil a whole sackful.
Decayed teeth are not the least good to anybody; they cannot be used
for mastication, and they are not beautiful. But they are exceedingly
dangerous, and there are more deaths due to carious teeth than you
would ever have suspected! The moral of this is obvious: decayed teeth
should be removed or stopped at once.

LADY DISDAIN.—To ask us what natural mineral waters are advised for
chronic rheumatism is a very large order. The action of most waters is
profoundly obscure, and chronic rheumatism is an equally profoundly
obscure disease, so, of course, it is for chronic rheumatism that
most mineral springs come into existence. The mere mention of the
names of all the waters used for this complaint would occupy a volume.
And, moreover, we do not know the names of more than about one in
six. But we think that we know the most important of those that have
really any value. The sulphur waters are decidedly useful in chronic
rheumatism. The best are Harrowgate and Aix-la-Chapelle. All the vast
horde of alkaline waters have been advised for rheumatism. Seltzers,
Vals, Vichy, Contréxeville, and Alet waters are those chiefly in use.
Kreuznach and Woodhall, both of which contain iodine, and Royat,
which contains chlorides, are often of great value in chronic joint
affections.

DISTRESSED MOTHER.—In cases where children cannot digest milk—which
is almost always due to using milk badly prepared—and in the far
more common cases of children requiring extra nourishment, either
as the result of wasting disease or just before their taking a more
solid diet, do not supplement their food with the patent foods
sold for the purpose. These are never what is wanted, and they are
frequently exceedingly injurious. A very excellent supplemental food
for such cases is the following. It is difficult to make and is rather
expensive, but it is in its way almost a perfect food. Follow the
directions carefully:—Take four ounces of stale bread without crust
(it is better that the bread be made with “seconds” flour); soak
the bread for eight hours, squeeze it dry and then boil it in fresh
water. Strain it, and rub it through a hair sieve, and allow it to
cool. This forms a sort of jelly, and is called “bread jelly.” It is
frequently ordered by physicians, and is the first ingredient of this
excellent food. The second ingredient is meat juice. To make this, take
four ounces of the best rump steak, obtained from a very trustworthy
butcher, and shred it up fine. To it add one ounce (two tablespoonfuls)
of cold water, previously sterilised by boiling, and squeeze the
meat and the water through a muslin bag. Now to proceed. Take five
teaspoonfuls of the bread jelly, six of the meat juice, two of fresh
cream, and half a teaspoonful of white sugar. Two ounces of this food
makes an excellent meal for an infant. You must be very careful to see
that everything used in the making of this food is scrupulously clean.
The bread jelly and the meat juice must be prepared fresh every day,
and the cream must be obtained from a thoroughly reliable source.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Transcriber’s Note—the following changes have been made to this text:

Page 655: maens to means—“means of this column”.]