1886 ***





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CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

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LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

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NO. 120.—VOL. III.       SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1886.       PRICE 1½_d._]




WHAT IS BI-METALLISM?


One of the great troubles of the commercial and financial world is the
growing scarcity and dearness of gold, concurrently with a growing
abundance and cheapness of silver. That gold is not merely a form of
money, but is also a valuable and useful commodity in itself, goes
without saying. What is true of gold is true also of silver. These two
metals are called ‘precious’ because, of all other metals, the desire
to possess them in a crude form is universal. Let us put it in another
way. All nations do not desire to possess pig-iron, or ingot copper,
or block-tin, because all nations cannot utilise these metals in such
form, however ready they may be to purchase articles made from them.
But all nations above the lowest rank of savagery do desire to possess
gold and silver in the state of bullion, because they can all utilise
these metals in some mode of ornament or in purposes of exchange.
But for obvious reasons the desire for silver is not so large and so
general as the desire for gold.

From an early period in the history of civilisation, gold and silver
have been used as money, and the reason they are valuable as money is
because they have a high intrinsic value. Now, value is a quality which
has been variously defined, but which for our purposes can best be
explained as of two kinds. That is to say, there is exchange value and
intrinsic value. It is a common thing to say that an article is worth
just what it will bring, or sell for. In a certain sense, this is true;
but the ‘worth,’ or value, in such cases is market or exchange value
only. Take, for instance, the value in the book market of some scarce
book or pamphlet for which an extravagant price will be paid by a
bibliomaniac, wholly regardless of its literary merits. Books which are
intellectually worthless will often attain a very high ‘market value.’
_Per contra_, a copy of the Bible may be obtained for sixpence.

In speaking of value, therefore, one must always understand whether
market value or intrinsic worth be meant. The two do not always
coincide. A thing is very often intrinsically worth a great deal more
than it will sell for; and, on the other hand, a thing will often
sell for a great deal more than it is intrinsically worth. No better
examples of the latter can be mentioned than the extravagant prices
which are sometimes paid for pieces of old china, or the extraordinary
sums which were given for bulbs in the days of the Dutch tulip mania.

Now, the peculiar virtue of gold is that it combines the highest
exchange value with the highest intrinsic value. It possesses qualities
which no other substance has; some of these qualities adapt it for
use as money, while it possesses at the same time a value independent
of its worth as money—namely, its intrinsic value. That is to say, a
sovereign is valuable not merely because it will exchange for twenty
shillings, or purchase a pound’s worth of goods, but also because it
can itself, by re-melting it or otherwise, be made an article of use.
The same is true only in a modified degree of silver money. A shilling
can be utilised in the same way as bullion-silver can; but a shilling
does not contain a shilling’s-worth of the metal. This is why silver
coins in this country are called only ‘token-money.’ Their intrinsic
value is not equal to their ‘face’ or exchange value, and therefore
you cannot at law compel a man to receive payment of a debt from you
in silver if the amount be greater than forty shillings sterling.
Silver beyond forty shillings is not what is termed a ‘legal tender.’
A creditor may take silver from you if he likes, just as he may take
a cheque from you if you have a banking account; but you can no more
compel him to receive payment in silver over forty shillings than you
can compel him to take your cheque.[1]

This has been the law of England since 1816; and it is this law
which makes England what is called a mono-metallic country—that is,
possessing one sole standard of value. That standard, as we know, is
gold. But India is also a mono-metallic country, and silver is there
the sole standard, gold not being now minted at all, although gold
coins, such as mohurs, circulate to some extent, and are hoarded as
‘treasure.’ Indeed, in all the Asiatic countries it may be said that
silver is the circulating medium of exchange—that is to say, the actual
form of money. Yet, in all Asiatic countries, gold is more highly
prized than silver, and is more readily taken in payment of a debt,
even if of Western coinage; and this fact is another illustration of
the high intrinsic value of gold in all parts of the world. Strictly
speaking, gold is not ‘money’ in Asia, but it is held more precious
than official money.

Now, there are certain persons who contend that it is a great mistake
on the part of any nation to have a standard of value confined to a
single metal, be it gold or silver, and who further contend that the
existing universal depression of trade is principally due to England
and one or two other countries rejecting silver for purposes of legal
money. These persons are what it is usual to call Bi-metallists, and
they desire to see adopted a universal dual, or, more correctly,
alternative standard.

The theory of bi-metallism is one of French origin. In 1865, certain
European states formally adopted it. These states were France, Belgium,
Italy, and Switzerland; and their combination is known as the ‘Latin
Union.’ The agreement they made among themselves was that each of them
should coin both gold and silver in unrestricted quantities and of
defined fineness, and that both gold and silver money should be ‘legal
tender’ in each state for all debts. That is to say, in the Latin Union
a man may pay a debt of a thousand pounds, or any amount, in silver—if
he likes—instead of being confined to forty shillings-worth of silver,
as with us. In practice, he does not do so, because it is inconvenient
to carry and to count large sums in silver coins. The purpose of
that agreement was to increase the amount of coined currency without
causing an addition to the market value of one metal by concentrating
the demands of mints upon one alone. It necessitated fixing a ratio
of value between the two metals, and the ratio was taken by the Latin
Union to be fifteen and a half parts of silver to one of gold. That is
to say, one ounce of gold was declared by law to be ‘worth’ fifteen and
a half ounces of silver, and _vice versâ_.

It would take too long and too much technicality to follow the
operations of the Latin Union; but it is necessary to explain that one
branch of the agreement had to be departed from after the close of the
Franco-German war. The Germans demanded payment of the whole of the two
hundred millions of the war indemnity _in gold_, and they then adopted
for themselves a gold standard. This is what is meant by saying that
Germany demonetised silver; she became mono-metallic, like England.
The effect of this action on the part of Germany was to cause an extra
demand for gold for mint purposes, and at the same time to throw upon
the markets of the world a vast quantity of silver which was no longer
wanted for coinage. Consequently, the price of silver measured in gold
fell so considerably that the Latin Union could no longer maintain the
ratio of fifteen-and-a-half to one, which they had established. They
therefore agreed among themselves not to coin any more silver—or to
coin only such small quantities as were needed for the convenience of
the people—while, however, they retained the principle of silver money
being ‘legal tender’ as well as gold.

Some years later, the United States government resumed specie
payments—that is to say, they called in the ‘greenbacks,’ or notes for
small amounts which were issued during the war, when coin was scarce,
and began to pay all their debts in gold. In order to do this, they had
to purchase and mint a large quantity of that metal. Between 1873 and
1883, it is estimated that no less than two hundred millions sterling
worth of gold were taken up for coinage over and above the normal
consumption in that way. Thus, the United States required one hundred
millions; Germany, eighty-four millions; and Italy, sixteen millions.
This meant an average extra demand on the ten years of twenty millions
annually.

We must bear these figures in mind in endeavouring to see how gold has
become scarce, and, as it is termed, ‘appreciated in value.’ Besides
the coinage for these and the other states which have to put a certain
quantity of gold through the mints every year in order to keep up their
normal currency, there is the large demand for the metal for employment
in the arts and manufactures. M. de Levaleye estimated a few years
ago that the amount of gold thus used is about ten millions sterling
annually; but in a former article we took fifteen millions sterling as
the figure. The latter we believe to be nearer the mark, and it is the
fact that the use of gold for purposes other than coinage is annually
increasing.

A thing may increase in market value—which, as we have said, is
different from intrinsic value—in two ways—namely, by reason of
enlarged demand, or by reason of diminished supply. Both forces have
operated in the case of gold; for, while the demand has increased in
the manner just shown, the supply has been steadily falling off. In
1852, after the discoveries in California and Australia, the production
of gold was to the value of thirty-six and a half millions sterling;
but now, it is only about half that amount. The decrease in yield is
shown in a very interesting manner by comparing successive periods of
five years. Thus:

    Period.  | Total Production. |  Annual Average.
    1852-56  |  £150,000,000     |  £30,000,000
    1857-61  |   123,200,000     |   24,600,000
    1862-66  |   114,000,000     |   22,750,000
    1867-71  |   109,000,000     |   21,753,000
    1871-75  |    77,000,000     |   19,200,000

Between 1875 and 1882 the average remained a little over nineteen
millions annually; but in 1883 the production was only about eighteen
and a quarter millions; and in 1884 it was rather under eighteen
millions sterling. At the close of last year, Mr Samuel Smith, M.P.—a
leading bi-metallist—said that the present production could not be
estimated at much over sixteen millions annually. If our estimate
is correct, that fifteen millions annually are used in the arts and
manufactures, it will be seen what a narrow margin is now left for
coinage.

This is bad enough from a bi-metallist point of view; but worse
remains. Silver has been all the time increasing in amount of
production. We have not the figures for precisely the same periods as
for gold, but the following will suffice to show the growth in the
yield of silver:

    Period.  | Total Production. |  Annual Average.
    1852-62  |    £90,760,000    |    £9,076,000
    1863-73  |    124,530,000    |    12,453,000
    1874-80  |    110,400,000    |    15,771,428
    1881     |        ...        |    18,800,000
    1882     |        ...        |    20,500,000
    1883     |        ...        |    21,400,000
    1884     |        ...        |    21,400,000

The broad inference from these figures is that the production of
silver has about doubled within the last twenty years. The increase
is mainly, if not entirely, from the development of the mines in the
western States of America; and an American authority estimates that the
production will probably double itself again within the next twenty
years.

Now, the curious fact is, that while the world at once and greedily
absorbs the annual production of gold, it is in present circumstances
unable to utilise all the silver. This metal is actually decreasing
in employment in the arts; and indeed, it is within the observation
of every one that silver-plate is no longer the highly coveted
possession which it once was in middle-class families. One meets now
with ‘solid-silver’ appliances comparatively seldom in general use,
electro-plate having taken their place. Its disuse as money has been
already mentioned.

The result is remarkable. In 1848, the metallic money, current or
hoarded in the world, was estimated at one thousand millions sterling,
of which four hundred millions were gold, and six hundred millions were
silver. In 1870, the metallic money was estimated at fourteen hundred
millions, of which seven hundred and fifty millions were gold, and
six hundred and fifty millions were silver. At present, the metallic
money of the world is estimated at about fifteen hundred and seventy
millions sterling, of which about eight hundred millions are gold, and
seven hundred and twenty millions are silver. It is to be remembered
also that a very small proportion of the gold which is withdrawn for
manufactures and ornaments ever finds its way back into the circulating
arena, because the labour expended on the finished ornament gives it
a higher value than can be obtained out of the melting-pot. In this
connection another interesting point may be noticed, which is, that
it has been ascertained that out of every three thousand sovereigns
coined, one sovereign represents the annual loss by friction; and in
half-sovereigns the annual loss in the same way is one in eighteen
hundred. It may not be generally known that our gold coins circulate
very much in some parts of the East and in South America, and are only
returned to this country when they have lost in weight by friction.
This loss reduces the intrinsic value; but when sent to London, they
are exchangeable at face value, if not excessively abraded.

The effect of this change in the actual production and employment
of gold and silver is to materially alter their relative values.
The value of silver measured in gold has fallen so enormously, that
instead of the ratio being, as was fixed by the Latin Union, fifteen
and a half parts of silver to one of gold, the actual ratio in the
markets of the world is now only about twenty parts of silver to one
of gold. It is estimated that a sovereign will now purchase as much
as thirty shillings would do fifteen years ago; and this is what is
meant by saying that the appreciation of gold is the cause of the
depreciation of prices of commodities. But all this time silver has
remained the legal standard of value of India, and a rupee is still
worth two shillings in that country. That is to say, a rupee has still
the purchasable power of two shillings in India; but in England it is
worth only about one shilling and sevenpence. Therefore, upon every
pound which the Indian remits to this country he must lose twenty per
cent., or about four shillings, for exchange. This is a very serious
loss not only on merchants—many of whom, however, can to some extent
counteract it by sending home goods instead of money, goods which they
buy for silver in Calcutta and sell for gold in London—but also on the
government, which has to send home something like fifteen millions
sterling, gold value, every year, to meet the interest on the public
debts, and the like.

The position, then, is this—that the supply of gold-money is now too
small for the world’s needs, and that all commerce and international
intercourse is being hampered by the restriction of the medium
of exchange. At present, the sole practical medium is gold; and
gold-money, as Mr Goschen has remarked, has three functions to
perform: it has to supply the pocket and till-money of the people;
it has to remain in the vaults of bankers as security for the notes
issued against it; and it has to serve in settling the balances
between nations. The larger the amount of trade which is being done,
the larger must these balances necessarily be—although not in direct
proportion—and the more gold must be required to adjust them. By
analogy of reasoning, the less gold there is in the form of circulating
money, the more must the trade be restricted. If the restriction does
not operate on volume, it must operate on prices, and this in effect is
what has happened.

The subject of concern, then, in the circles of finance throughout the
world is how to rehabilitate silver, as it is termed—that is, how to
replace it in the position which it is claimed the metal should occupy
as money. If the supply of gold is too small for the world, then the
only alternative is to utilise silver more largely, and to give it an
official value in relation to gold. That value cannot now be placed in
the ratio of fifteen-and-a-half to one; but it is thought that common
agreement among the nations might enable the ratio to be fixed at
something like seventeen to one.

The object of the bi-metallists is to bring about an arrangement
between all the nations of Europe and the United States of the same
principle and effect as that adopted by the Latin Union, which we have
described. That is to say, they seek to have the free concurrent
coinage of both gold and silver in a fixed ratio of value, and to have
both metals everywhere decreed unlimited legal tender. The effect of
this would be, they claim, to provide a supply of metallic coinage
amply sufficient for the world’s present and increasing requirements,
while it would prevent those violent fluctuations in exchange which
do so much to disturb our trade with the silver-using countries of
the East and of South America (where the Mexican silver dollar is the
standard). Unless this be done, they assert, gold will become the sole
currency of the world, and will have to perform the work of two metals.
The effects of the consequent depreciation of silver upon India will be
ruinous, and the effects of the consequent appreciation of gold will
be to reduce the value of property in all commodities in this country
still further. The final result, say some, must be panic and revolution.

The arguments _pro_ and _con._ involve technicalities not quite
suitable for our pages. It may be mentioned, however, that those
opposed to bi-metallism say that there is no reason to conclude that
the supply of gold has _permanently_ fallen off; that fresh discoveries
may be made any day; that the effects of the fluctuations of exchange
on trade are exaggerated, and do not, in practice, prevent free
commercial intercourse between countries of quite different currencies;
and that the diminishing use of silver in the arts is an argument
against its use as money. If silver becomes comparatively valueless as
a commodity, how, it is asked, can the ratio of value as money between
it and gold be maintained? The metal would be placed in the anomalous
position of having two values—one at the mints, and another in the
markets—and the consequence would be that the market value would rule,
and people would refuse to take the silver money. This is the case at
present in the United States, where the government is compelled by law
to buy for coinage some five hundred thousand pounds-worth of silver
every month, which silver money lies dead in the treasury because the
people don’t want it.

On the other hand, it may be contended that the very fact of silver
being legalised by all the great nations of the world would impart to
it a value which might re-create a demand for it for other employment.
It may be possible, too, to arrange not a permanent but an adjustable
ratio, to be altered from time to time by joint agreement among the
nations, according as the relative values of the metals are affected by
supply and demand.

Be this as it may, it would seem that all the nations concerned,
including even Germany, who acknowledges having made a mistake in
demonetising silver, are more or less in favour of bi-metallism, and
that all wait for the concurrence of England. In the United States,
the present efforts of the government are directed towards repealing
the law which compels them to coin a certain amount of silver—not that
they do not want a dual currency, but simply because they cannot work
it as long as England persists in adhering to the gold standard. Thus
it would appear that in the great silver question England is, rightly
or wrongly, not as yet prepared to come to a decision. In England,
moreover, counsels are very much divided among experts, while the
general public gives almost no attention to the question whatever. It
is in the hope of stimulating the interest of our readers in a great,
almost a vital matter, that we place this article before them.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] The only other legal tender are Bank of England notes. They are a
legal tender for sums above five pounds. The Bank of England itself
must, however, if desired, pay gold.




IN ALL SHADES.


CHAPTER XX.

There was great excitement in the District Court at Westmoreland one
sunny morning, a few days later, for the new judge was to sit and
hear an appeal, West Indian fashion, from a magistrate’s decision in
the case of Delgado _versus_ Dupuy. The little courthouse in the low
parochial buildings of Westmoreland was crowded with an eager throng of
excited negroes. Much buzzing and humming of voices filled the room,
for it was noised abroad among the blacks that Mistah Hawtorn, being a
brown man born, was likely to curry favour with the buckras—as brown
men will—by giving unjust decisions in their favour against the black
men; and this was a very important case for the agricultural negroes,
as it affected a question of paying wages for work performed in the
Pimento Valley cane-pieces.

Rosina Fleming was there among the crowd; and as Louis Delgado, the
appellant in the case, came into court, he paused for a moment to
whisper hurriedly a few words to her. ‘De med’cine hab effeck like I
tell you, Missy Rosina?’ he asked in an undertone.

Rosina laughed and showed her white teeth. ‘Yes, Mistah Delgado, him
hab effeck, sah, same like you tell me. Isaac Pourtalès, him lub me
well for true, nowadays.’

‘Him gwine to marry you, missy?’

Rosina shook her head. ‘No; him can’t done dat,’ she answered
carelessly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘Him
got anudder wife already.’

‘Ha! Him got wife ober in Barbadoes?’ Delgado muttered. ‘Him doan’t
nebber tell me dat.—Well, Missy Rosy, I want you bring Isaac Pourtalès
to me hut dis one day. I want Isaac to help me. De cup ob de Dupuys is
full dis day; an’ if de new judge gib decision wrongfully agin me, de
Lard will arise soon in all him glory, like him tell de prophets, an’
make de victory for him own people.’

‘But not hurt de missy?’ Rosina inquired anxiously.

‘Yah, yah! You is too chupid, Miss Rosy, I tellin’ you. You tink de
Lard gwine to turn aside in de day ob vengeance for your missy? De
Dupuys is de Lard’s enemy, le-ady, an’ he will destroy dem utterly, men
and women.’

Before Rosina could find time to reply, there was a sudden stir in the
body of the court, and Edward Hawthorn, entering from the private door
behind, took his seat upon the judge’s bench in hushed silence.

‘Delgado _versus_ Dupuy, an appeal from a magistrate’s order, referred
to this court as being under twenty shillings in value.—Who heard the
case in the first instance?’ Edward inquired.

‘Mr Dupuy of Orange Grove and Mr Henley,’ Tom Dupuy, the defendant,
answered quietly.

Edward’s forehead puckered up a little. ‘You are the defendant, I
believe, Mr Thomas Dupuy?’ he said to the young planter with a curious
look.

Tom Dupuy nodded acquiescence.

‘And the case was heard in the first instance by Mr Theodore Dupuy of
Orange Grove, who, if I am rightly informed, happens to be your own
uncle?’

‘Rightly informed!’ Tom Dupuy sneered half angrily—‘rightly informed,
indeed! Why, you know he is, of course, as well as I do. Didn’t we both
call upon you together the other day? I should say, considering what
sort of interview we had, you can’t already have quite forgotten it!’

Edward winced a little, but answered nothing. He merely allowed the
plaintiff to be put in the box, and proceeded to listen carefully
to his rambling evidence. It wasn’t very easy, even for the sharp,
half-Jewish brown barrister who was counsel for the plaintiff, to get
anything very clear or definite out of Louis Delgado with his vague
rhetoric. Still, by dint of patient listening, Edward Hawthorn was
enabled at last to make out the pith and kernel of the old African’s
excited story. He worked, it seemed, at times on Orange Grove estate,
and at times, alternately, at Pimento Valley. The wages on both
estates, as frequently happens in such cases, were habitually far in
arrears; and Delgado claimed for many days, on which, he asserted,
he had been working at Tom Dupuy’s cane-pieces; while Tom Dupuy had
entered a plea of never indebted on the ground that no entry appeared
in his own book-keeper’s account for those dates of Delgado’s presence.
Mr Theodore Dupuy had heard the case, and he and a brother-magistrate
had at once decided it against Delgado. ‘But, I know, sah,’ Delgado
said vehemently, looking up to the new judge with a certain defiant
air, as of a man who comes prepared for injustice, ‘I know I work dem
days at Pimento Valley, becase I keep book meself, an’ put down in him
in me own hand all de days I work anywhere.’

‘Can you produce the book?’ Edward inquired of the excited negro.

‘It isn’t any use,’ Tom Dupuy interrupted angrily. ‘I’ve seen the book
myself, and you can’t read it. It’s all kept in some heathenish African
language or other.’

‘I must request you, Mr Dupuy, not to interrupt,’ Edward Hawthorn said
in his sternest voice. ‘Please to remember, I beg of you, that this
room is a court of justice.’

‘Not much justice here for white men, I expect,’ Tom Dupuy muttered to
himself in a half-audible undertone. ‘The niggers’ll have it all their
own way in future, of course, now they’ve got one of themselves to sit
upon the bench for them.’

‘Produce the book,’ Edward said, turning to Delgado, and restraining
his natural anger with some difficulty.

‘It doan’t no good, sah,’ the African answered, with a sigh of
despondency, pulling out a greasy account-book from his open bosom, and
turning over the pages slowly in moody silence. ‘It me own book, dat I
hab for me own reference, an’ I keep him all in me own handwriting.’

Edward held out his hand commandingly, and took the greasy small volume
that the African passed over to him, with some little amusement and
surprise. He didn’t expect, of course, that he would be able to read
it, but he thought at least he ought to see what sort of accounts the
man kept; they would at anyrate be interesting, as throwing light upon
negro ideas and modes of reckoning. He opened the book the negro gave
him and turned it over hastily with a languid curiosity. In a second,
a curious change came visibly over his startled face, and he uttered
sharply a little sudden cry of unaffected surprise and astonishment.
‘Why,’ he said in a strangely altered voice, turning once more to the
dogged African, who stood there staring at him in stolid indifference,
‘what on earth is the meaning of this? This is Arabic!’

Rosina Fleming, looking eagerly from in front at the curious
characters, saw at once they were the same in type as the writing in
the obeah book Delgado had showed her the evening she went to consult
him at his hut about Isaac Pourtalès.

Delgado glanced back at the young judge with a face full of rising
distrust and latent incredulity. ‘You doan’t can read it, sah?’ he
asked suspiciously. ‘It African talk. You doan’t can read it?’

‘Certainly, I can,’ Edward answered with a smile. ‘It’s very
beautifully and clearly written, and the entries are in good and
accurate Arabic.’ And he read a word or two of the entries aloud, in
proof of his ability to decipher at sight the mysterious characters.

Delgado in turn gave a sudden start; and drawing himself up to his full
height, with newborn pride and dignity, he burst forth at once into
a few sentences in some strange foreign tongue, deep and guttural,
addressed apparently, as Tom Dupuy thought, to the new judge in
passionate entreaty. But in reality the African was asking Edward
Hawthorn, earnestly and in the utmost astonishment, whether it was a
fact that he could really and truly speak Arabic.

Edward answered him back in a few words, rapidly spoken, in the fluent
colloquial Egyptian dialect which he had learned in London from his
Mohammedan teacher, Sheik Abdullah. It was but a short sentence, but it
was quite enough to convince Delgado that he did positively understand
the entries in the account-book. ‘De Lard be praise!’ the African
shouted aloud excitedly. ‘De new judge, him can read de book I keep for
me own reckonin’! De Lard be praise! Him gwine to delibber me!’

‘Did ever you see such a farce in your life?’ whispered Tom Dupuy to
his uncle Theodore. ‘I don’t believe the fellow understands a single
word of it; and I’m sure the gibberish they were talking to one another
can’t possibly be part of any kind of human language even in Africa.
And yet, after all, I don’t know! The fellow’s a nigger himself,
and perhaps he may really have learned from his own people some of
their confounded African lingoes. But who on earth would ever have
believed, Uncle Theodore, we’d have lived to hear such trash as that
talked openly from the very bench in a Queen’s court in the island of
Trinidad!’

Edward coloured up again at the few words which he caught accidentally
of this ugly monologue; but he only said to the eager African: ‘I
cannot speak with you here in Arabic, Delgado; here we must use English
only.’

‘Certainly,’ Tom Dupuy suggested aloud—colonial courts are even laxer
than English ones. ‘We mustn’t forget, of course, Mr Hawthorn, as you
said just now, that this room is a court of justice.’

The young judge turned over the book to conceal his chagrin, and
examined it carefully. ‘What are the dates in dispute?’ he asked,
turning to the counsel.

Delgado and Tom Dupuy in one breath gave a full list of them. Counsel
handed up a little written slip with the various doubtful days entered
carefully upon it in ordinary English numbers. Edward ticked them off
one by one in Delgado’s note-book, quietly to himself, smiling as
he did so at the quaint Arabic translations of the Grove of Oranges
and the Valley of Pimento. Every one of Delgado’s dates was quite
accurately and carefully entered in his own account-book.

When they came to examine Tom Dupuy and his Scotch book-keeper,
their account of the whole transaction was far less definite, clear,
and consistent. Tom Dupuy, with a certain airy lordly indifference,
admitted that his payments were often in arrears, and that his modes of
book-keeping were often somewhat rough and ready. He didn’t pretend to
keep an account personally of every man’s labour on his whole estate,
he said; he was a gentleman himself, and he left that sort of thing, of
course, to his book-keeper’s memory. The book-keeper didn’t remember
that Louis Delgado had worked at Pimento Valley on those particular
disputed mornings; though, to be sure, one naturally couldn’t be quite
certain about it. But if you were going to begin taking a nigger’s word
on such a matter against a white man’s, why, what possible security
against false charges could you give in future to the white planter?

‘How often do you post up the entries in that book?’ Delgado’s counsel
asked the Scotch book-keeper in cross-examination.

The book-keeper was quite as airy and easy as his master in this
matter. ‘Well, whiles I do it at the time,’ he answered quietly, ‘and
whiles I do it a wee bit later.’

‘An’ I put him down ebbery evening, de minute I home, sah, in dis
note-book,’ Delgado shouted eagerly with a fierce gesticulation.

‘You must be quiet, please,’ Edward said, turning to him. ‘You mustn’t
interrupt the witness or your counsel.’

‘Did Delgado work at Pimento Valley yesterday?’ the brown barrister
asked, looking up from the books which Tom Dupuy had been forced to
produce and hand in, in evidence.

The book-keeper hesitated and smiled a sinister smile. ‘He did,’ he
answered after a moment’s brief internal conflict.

‘How is it, then, that the day’s work isn’t entered here already?’ the
brown barrister went on pitilessly.

The book-keeper shuffled with an uneasy shuffle. ‘Ah, well, I should
have entered it on Saturday evening,’ he answered evasively.

Edward turned to Delgado’s note-book. The last day’s work was entered
properly in an evidently fresh ink, that of the previous two days
looking proportionately blacker and older. There could be very little
doubt, indeed, which of the two posted his books daily with the greater
care and accuracy.

He heard the case out patiently and temperately, in spite of Delgado’s
occasional wild outbursts and Tom Dupuy’s constant sneers, and at the
end he proceeded to deliver judgment as calmly as he was able, without
prejudice. It was a pity that the first case he heard should have been
one which common justice compelled him to give against Tom Dupuy, but
there was no helping it. ‘The court enters judgment for the plaintiff,’
he said in a loud clear voice. ‘Delgado’s books, though unfortunately
kept only in Arabic for his own reference, have been carefully and
neatly posted.—Yours, Mr Dupuy, I regret to say, are careless,
inadequate, and inaccurate; and I am also sorry to see that the case
was heard in the first instance by one of your own near relations,
which circumstance, it would have been far wiser, as well as more
seemly, to have avoided.’

Tom Dupuy grew red and pale by turns as he listened in blank surprise
and dismay to this amazing and unprecedented judgment. A black man’s
word taken in evidence in open court against a white gentleman’s! It
was too appalling! ‘Well, well, Uncle Theodore,’ he said bitterly,
rising to go, ‘I expected as much, though it’s hard to believe it. I
knew we should never get decent justice in this court any longer!’

But Delgado stood there, dazed and motionless, gazing with mute wonder
at the pale face of the new judge, and debating within himself whether
it could be really true or not that he had gained his case against the
powerful Dupuy faction. Not that he understood for a moment the exact
meaning of the legal words, ‘judgment for the plaintiff;’ but he saw
at once on Tom Dupuy’s face that the white man was positively livid
with anger and had been severely reprimanded. ‘De Lard be praise!’ he
ejaculated at last. ‘De judge is righteous judge, an’ him lub de black
man!’

Edward would have given a great deal just then if Delgado in the moment
of his triumph had not used those awkward words, ‘him lub de black
man!’ But there was no use brooding over it now; so, as the court was
clearing he merely signed with his finger to Delgado, and whispered
hastily in his ear: ‘Come to me this evening in my own room; I want to
hear from you how and where you learned Arabic.’


CHAPTER XXI.

When Edward made his way, wearied and anxious, into his own room
behind the courthouse, Delgado was waiting for him there, and as the
judge entered, he rose quickly and uttered a few words of customary
salutation in excellent Arabic. Edward Hawthorn observed at once that
a strange change seemed to have come over the ragged old negro. He had
lost his slouching, half-savage manner, and stood more erect, or bowed
in self-respecting obeisance, with a certain obvious consciousness
of personal dignity which at once reminded him of Sheik Abdullah.
He noticed, too, that while the man’s English was the mere broken
Creole language he had learned from the other negroes around him, his
Arabic was the pure colloquial classical Arabic of the Cairo ulemas.
It was astonishing what a difference this change of tongue made in
the tattered old black field-labourer: when he spoke English, he was
the mere ordinary plantation negro; when he spoke Arabic, he was the
decently educated and perfectly courteous African Moslem.

‘You have quite surprised me, Delgado,’ Edward said, still in
colloquial Arabic. ‘I had no idea there were any Africans in Trinidad
who understood the language of the Koran. How did you ever come to
learn it?’

The old African bowed graciously, and expanded his hands with a
friendly gesture. ‘Effendi,’ he answered, ‘Allah is not wholly without
his true followers in any country. Is it not written in your own
book that when Elijah, the forerunner of the Prophet, cried in the
cave, saying: “I alone am left of the worshippers of Allah,” the Lord
answered and said unto him in his mercy: “I have left me seven thousand
souls in Israel which have not bowed the knee to Baal?” Even so, Allah
has his followers left even here among the infidels in Trinidad.’

‘Then you are still a Mussulman?’ Edward cried in surprise.

The old African rose again from the seat into which Edward had politely
motioned him, and folding both his hands reverently in front of him,
answered in a profoundly solemn voice: ‘There is no God but Allah, and
Mohammed is his prophet.’

‘But I thought—I understood—I was told that you were a teacher and
preacher up yonder in the Methodist chapel.’

Delgado shrugged his shoulders with African expressiveness. ‘What can
I do?’ he said, throwing open his hands sideways. ‘They have brought
me here all the way from the Gold Coast. There is no mosque here, no
ulema, no other Moslems. What can I do? I have to do as the other
negroes do.—But see!’ and he drew something carefully from the folds of
his dirty cotton shirt: ‘I have brought a Book with me. I have kept it
sacredly all these years. Have you seen it? Do you know it?’

Edward opened the soiled and dog-eared but carefully treasured volume
that the negro handed him. He knew it at once. It was a copy of the
Koran. He turned the pages over lightly till he came to the famous
chapter of the Seven Treasures; then he began to read aloud a few
verses in a clear, easy, Arabic intonation.

Delgado started when he heard the young judge actually reading the
sacred volume. ‘So you, too, are a Moslem!’ he cried excitedly.

Edward smiled. ‘No,’ he answered; ‘I am no Mussulman. But I have
learned Arabic, and I have read the Koran.’

‘Mussulman or Christian,’ Delgado answered fervently, throwing up his
head, ‘you are a servant of Allah. You have given judgment to-day like
Daniel the Hebrew or like Othman Calif, the successor of the Prophet.
When the great and terrible day of the Lord arrives, Allah will surely
not forget the least among his servants.’

Edward did not understand the hidden meaning of that seemingly
conventional pious tag, so he merely answered: ‘But you haven’t yet
told me, remnant of the faithful, how you ever came to learn Arabic.’

Thus encouraged, Delgado loosed the strings of his tongue, and poured
forth rapidly with African volubility the whole marvellous story of
his life. The son of a petty chieftain on the Guinea coast, he had
been sent in his boyhood by his father, a Mohammedan convert, to the
native schools for the negroes at Cairo, where he had remained till he
was over seventeen years old, and had then returned to his father’s
principality. There, he had gone out to fight in some small war between
two neighbouring negro chieftains, the events of which war he insisted
on detailing to Edward at great length; and having been taken prisoner
by the hostile party, he had at last been sold in the bad old days,
when a contraband ‘ebony-trade’ still existed, to a Cuban slaver. The
slaver had been captured off Sombrero Rock by an English cruiser, and
all the negroes landed at Trinidad. That was the sum and substance
of the strangely romantic story told by the old African to the young
English barrister in the Westmoreland courthouse. Couched in his
childish and ignorant negro English, it would no doubt have sounded
ludicrous and puerile; but poured forth in classical Arabic almost as
pure and fluent as Sheik Abdullah’s own, it was brimful of pathos,
eloquence, interest, and weirdness. Yet strange and almost incredible
as it seemed to Edward’s mind, the old African himself apparently
regarded it as the most natural and simple concatenation of events that
could easily happen to anybody anywhere.

‘And how is it,’ Edward asked at last, in profound astonishment,
lapsing once more into English, ‘that you have never tried to get back
to Africa?’

Delgado smiled an ugly smile, that showed all his teeth, not
pleasantly, but like the teeth of a bulldog snarling. ‘Do you tink,
sah,’ he said sarcastically, ‘dat dem fightin’ Dupuy is gwine to help
a poor black naygur to go back to him own country? Ole-time folk has
proverb; “Mongoose no help cane-rat find de way back to him burrow.”’

Edward could hardly believe the sudden transformation. In a single
moment, with the change of language, the educated African had vanished
utterly, and the plantation negro stood once more undisguised before
him. And yet, Edward thought curiously to himself, which, after all,
was the truest and most genuine of those two contrasted but united
personalities—the free Mussulman, or the cowed and hopeless Trinidad
field-labourer? Strange, too, that while this born African could play
as he liked at fetichism or Christianity, could do obeah or sing psalms
from his English hymn-book, the profoundly penetrating and absorbing
creed of Islam was the only one that had sunk deep into the very
inmost marrow of his negro nature. About that fact, Edward could not
for a moment have the faintest hesitation. Delgado—Coromantyn or West
Indian—was an undoubting Mussulman. Christianity was but a cloak with
which he covered himself outwardly, to himself and others; obeah was
but an art that he practised in secret for unlawful profit: Islam, the
faith most profoundly and intimately adapted to the negro idiosyncrasy,
was the creed that had burnt itself into his very being, in spite of
all changes of outer circumstance. Not that Delgado believed his Bible
the less: with the frank inconsistency of early minds, he held the two
incompatible beliefs without the faintest tinge of conscious hypocrisy;
just as many of ourselves, though Christian enough in all externals,
hold lingering relics of pagan superstitions about horseshoes, and
crooked sixpences, and unlucky days, and the mystic virtues of a
cornelian amulet. Every morning he spelt over religiously a chapter in
the New Testament; and every night, in the gloom of his hut, he read to
himself in hushed awe a few versicles of the holy Koran.

When story and comment were fully finished, the old African rose to go.
As he opened the door, Edward held out his hand for the negro to shake.
Delgado, now once more the plantation labourer, hesitated for a second,
fearing to take it; then at last, drawing himself up to his full
height, and instinctively clutching at his loose cotton trousers, as
though they had been the flowing white robes of his old half-forgotten
Egyptian school-days, he compromised the matter by making a profound
salaam, and crying in his clear Arabic gutturals: ‘May the blessing of
Allah, the All-wise, the merciful, rest for ever on the effendi, his
servant, who has delivered a just judgment!’

In another moment, he had glided through the door; and Edward, hardly
yet able to realise the strangeness of the situation, was left alone
with his own astonishment.




INSTINCT AND REASON.


In the following paper we propose to discard entirely the word
mind as an expression of the faculty of reflection, since it is
frequently misapplied or misunderstood, and its employment is vague
and unsatisfactory. We prefer using a term denoting the receptivity
of ideas through an organic medium by an immaterial force having
the power of acting on the ingestion of ideas, and diffusing its
action through the corresponding media of the nervous system: this we
shall call the intellectual force, and its action is the sequence of
conscious or unconscious cerebration. It is not our purpose to enter
upon a consideration of the higher relations of intellectual action
with so-called spiritual forces, as this would necessarily tend to the
contemplation of an extra element than that more particularly implied
in the attributes of instinct and reason; for by these words, in their
ordinary acceptation, we recognise two separate faculties, independent,
yet coexistent, and capable of harmonious co-operation, but not
necessarily co-ordinate nor coexistent, since the one we contend to be
the natural property of all animated beings; while the other is in part
the result of transmitted intelligence, education, and enlightenment,
conveyed from a higher to a lower power.

Instinct, as the more universally diffused and common endowment, is
to be found throughout the whole range of the animal kingdom; and to
deny its existence in one class of creation and grant it in another
is illogical and contrary to the recognised and established plan of
creation; it is rather a general inheritance; in some forms of life
the chief or sole guide to voluntary action; while in other or higher
forms, partially overlaid, and in a measure superseded, by the faculty
of reason. Yet we should be, we think, altogether wrong in supposing
it non-existent, because, through the cultivation and development of
reasoning power, it is less easily discerned, and less fully exercised
in man, than in the lower animals; for, by inquiry in the lives of
uncivilised humanity, we shall find undoubted proofs of instinct in
the ordinary passages of savage life, as in the choice of food; the
selection of certain herbs for medicinal purposes; the capacity of
tracking a path from one point to another in great distances; the
avoidance of poisonous articles of diet; casual injuries; and, above
all, the clinging to life which is common to all mankind. And even in
civilised beings, we may discern evident traces of the same property
underlying the more ostensible gift of reason, and instinctive, though
otherwise unaccountable, motives leading to definite conclusions.
These may take the forms of likes or dislikes towards outer objects;
impulses, frequently and truly termed unreasonable, because they arise
apart from reason, and are purely instinctive; hence actions that are
simply the outcomes of instinct, not reconcilable to the written laws
of reason or the mandates of civilisation.

In some rare instances of humanity run wild, only a few of which have
been recorded, where, by some accident, a human offspring has grown
up as a denizen of the forest and the companion of wild beasts, the
gift of instinct serves the same purpose it fulfils in the rest of the
creation; and when first brought into contact with civilisation, these
outcasts have apparently evinced few, or none, of the actual attributes
of reason, though these have become perceptible later on through human
companionship and attention. But even centuries of cultivation and the
highest hereditary advantages fail utterly to eliminate or destroy the
inherent property of instinct in man; for not only, as above stated,
is it displayed in the common shrinking from death and the avoidance
of injury and suffering, but it manifests itself in countless other
instances in daily life. Let us regard the union of sexes as one: how
frequently is the choice of a partner in life made through nothing
less than a blind instinct, often apart from any reasoning process, so
much so, that the fact has passed into a proverb that ‘Love is blind.’
And in the common affairs of life, it is often possible to trace an
independent course of action pursued without reference to a reasoning
faculty, rather by a blind adherence to an unseen hidden principle,
which is undoubtedly instinct guiding rather than reason. And this
obedience to an unknown faculty has doubtless, in the history of the
world, played important parts; especially when, in prehistoric times,
man was essentially a predatory animal. On his instinctive love of
fighting for personal aggrandisement, and his instinctive love of the
chase for providing food and clothing, his very existence in a great
measure depended. Indeed, the motives which influence and direct men’s
lives are only, after all, the attributes of instinct, as we commonly
observe portrayed in civilised society; thus, in one, the instinct
of commercial enterprise pushes towards speculation; in another, the
instinct of self-preservation induces precautions of benefit to the
community; again, the instinct of need prompts measures for procuring
supplies of food and clothing. On all hands, human instinct is an
active agent and irrepressible.

And further, we may find the instinct of an unseen yet overruling power
dominant in one form or another among the whole human race; even where,
degraded by numberless superstitions, it exists among the dusky tribes
of Africa, the Red American Indians, or in the countless mythological
legends of nations long passed away, the instinctive belief in a
God holds universal sway. In the common affairs of life, too, the
teaching of instinct is displayed, as in presentiments, which, like
impulses, have frequently no rational basis, but by the observance of
which, our lives are not uncommonly modified in their effects and made
subservient to the unseen. It is indeed possible, were the chapters of
human lives actually recorded, it would be found in how many important
instances and numberless occasions the exercise of instinct prevails
above that of reason. It is, however, to be noted, that in proportion
as the exercise of intellectual force is stimulated by education and
strengthened by practice, instinctive action becomes more and more
influenced by reason; and just as particular muscles, by long use,
increase in bulk, so the repeated receptivity of ideas by the higher
organism of the brain leads to the reflective powers being increased;
and, as a natural consequence, the actions thus performed betoken
the connection of ideas from which they spring, and are consequently
attributed to reason.

Reason may thus be regarded, in the abstract, as the result of ideas
received by the sensory ganglia, and transmitted by them to the higher
organs of perception, reflected thence on the motory system by which
the actions of animal life are governed, the repeated discharge of
these functions constituting processes of thought or reflection.

Admitting this to be a rough outline of reasoning with its outcome
action, we have a familiar example of this process displayed by members
of the animal kingdom that are habitually brought into the society
and companionship of man. Daily usage supplies experience, which, by
the receptivity of ideas, constitutes a reasoning faculty, such as is
constantly manifested in the actions of various animals, and which as
much overrules mere instinct in them as it does in the higher animal
man. For example, in my dog the predatory instinct is very strongly
marked; but it daily passes and frequently enters butchers’ shops,
sniffing under the carcases and joints for any scraps of meat, however
small, yet never attempting to take advantage of a piece that is
offered for sale. We have also frequently noticed, when driving on our
rounds in a country practice, the horse would voluntarily slacken its
speed as it approached the house of a patient, and scarcely require
a check to draw up at the door. Why some human beings should betray
a jealous disapproval of the recognition of reason in animals, seems
to us utterly unaccountable. It is surely no insult to the Creator
of all things if we grant the attribute of reasoning powers to His
creatures; while it savours strongly of narrow and limited views of His
beneficence to deny it.

It is the object of this paper to claim recognition and respect
for the reasoning faculties of animals, particularly the class of
domestic animals that are brought into daily intercourse with man.
In them, more especially, we note habits of thought and traits of
intelligence, apart from and above the mere prompting of instinct,
that entitle them to our best consideration. But in the dog, as the
friend of man, we shall naturally find the examples most ready to
hand, not only of emotions akin to those of his master, but sentiments
of honour, love, watchfulness, trust, duty, and obedience, courage,
forbearance, self-denial, overcoming the mere instinct of hunger; also
sensitiveness, shame, and jealousy, with self-devotion surpassing
even the fear of death. In the horse, too, we find obedience, trust,
eagerness to please, and affection. Even in cattle, we may notice
attachment to home and persons, courage, patience, and docility.

We do not here propose to enter on a list of the attributes of reason
to be observed in all animals; it is needless to relate the numberless
authenticated instances recorded of elephants, tamed deer, gazelles,
monkeys, and birds. To the thoughtful observer, proofs of intelligence
and reflection, with experience, judgment, and conscientiousness are
readily found, and even in the wild animals, as the rat, the fox,
lions, and tigers, remarkable facts are recorded, which evidence
powers of reflection and the exercise of judgment and reason. A lion,
for instance, has been seen to drive away a cow from the herd, not
rending it at once, but urging it by menaces, so as to secure its prey
in a more convenient spot. Tigers watch in the jungle for the passing
post-carriers, recognising their approach by the jingling sound of
their ornaments, and knowing from experience that the wearers will
afford them the necessary meal. The stories of foxes are legion; their
cunning in eluding pursuit, and their prompt recognition of such chance
advantages as the occasion may afford, evince a reasoning power beyond
the mere impulse of instinct. Again, in rats, who has not witnessed
countless proofs of intelligence, denoting forethought, prudence,
and care, not only in their search for food, avoidance of snares,
and concealment, but also exemplified in their mutual intercourse? A
regimental officer once stationed at Aden described to the writer the
skill of a party of rats in purloining every day the bread placed on
the dinner-table. The servant who laid the table could not account for
the disappearance of the several portions of bread placed ready beside
the napkin and glasses, till, after watching some time, a small party
of rats was seen to enter the room, and while some of them held the
lower border of the table-cloth, another rapidly ascended, and mounting
the table, dislodged the pieces of bread, which, falling off, were
speedily appropriated by those below. The beaver has been often cited
as exhibiting an almost human aptitude in the construction of dams and
the formation of its lodge, and this appears more as the result of
deductive reasoning, taught, no doubt, by experience, and transmitted
by hereditary descent. In birds, the Corvidæ afford striking instances
of the exercise of judgment and reflection, especially in the habits of
rooks and ravens; we might add also magpies. But space prevents us from
enlarging on this point.

The common wild bee constructs its nest in a mossy bank, and the
comb is formed of rude circular cells arranged in a small group. The
hive-bee, whose thickly peopled home affords but a limited space,
constructs its comb of closely packed hexagonal cells, an arrangement
which gives the greatest room for each cell in a circumscribed area.
It accidentally occurred to the writer, many years since, to put
aside a large box of pills closely packed, and left, without being
opened, through the summer. When at last examined, it was found that
the pills had become closely impacted together, and each individual
pill was compressed in the form of a hexagon, remarkably resembling in
outline the waxen cells of the hive-bee. The conduct of ants, in their
communications by signalling to each other, evinces something more than
blind instinct; otherwise, how can we explain the deliberate action
which results from information conveyed by signals, and the plan of
operations conducted on a scale beyond all relation to the size of the
insignificant insects by which they are performed?

Mankind is too apt to monopolise the claim to reason, and allows to
the lower animal world the gift of instinct as a kind of compromise;
whereas, it has been abundantly shown that he shares also in the gift
of instinct, and they likewise have a fair claim to the exercise of
reason. There is nothing inconsistent in this view with the great
plan of creation, for all classes of animals partake of the elements
of the human frame in their general physical construction adapted to
particular requirements, as anatomists have shown that man in his
development from the ovum passes through the several grades of the
animal kingdom by different homologies to the perfect human frame.
And though in him reason assumes its highest condition, yet in the
various types of his race there are as widely differing degrees of
reasoning power, from the tree-dwelling tribes of Central India and
the Lilliputian inhabitants of the forests of Borneo, to the highly
educated and more amply endowed members of European and transatlantic
society; and as, in the human race, reason exercises a paramount and
prevailing sway, under which all other forces are subject, so instinct
remains behind, still an element of humanity, though less conspicuous
in the higher culture of civilisation than in the primitive savage,
and more evident still in the lower animal world; though even here
subjected to reasoning power, according, in a manner, to the amount
of education and enlightenment received by these at the hand of man.
Instinct belongs no more to the brute beast than to man, and reason is
the heritage of both.




THE WILL OF MRS ANNE BOWDEN.


IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAP. I.

‘Tipsy!’ I muttered to myself with a scornful glance, and a strong
feeling of disgust, as I hurriedly passed him by. Such would be,
I suppose, the almost invariable exclamation of a young man whom
circumstances combined with taste to keep in the path of strictest
temperance, on seeing an elderly and prosperous-looking gentleman
lurching unevenly along a street in the City between four and five
o’clock one damp February afternoon. ‘Tipsy!’ I said, and passed on;
yet, though so sad a spectacle had neither pleasure nor interest for
me, I turned, after I had gone a few steps, to look once more at the
supposed inebriate. That one glance showed me that my hasty judgment of
his condition had been as unjust as it was uncharitable. That look of
pain and distress, those starting eyes, the heavy beads of perspiration
on the brow, were due not to intoxication, but to illness. As I looked
at him, he stumbled, tottered on a step or two, and would have fallen,
had I not, in two hasty strides, reached his side and caught him in my
arms. A large envelope, apparently containing some heavy document, fell
from his nerveless hand at the moment of his collapse. I picked it up,
and hastily thrust it into the pocket of my overcoat, still supporting
my helpless burden. The act was instinctive, almost unconscious, and
no sooner done than forgotten; and the next moment my mind was wholly
occupied with an appeal to one of the many young men who were hurrying
by, as I myself had been, to catch the train at Broad Street, to expend
a few minutes in calling a cab for me and the unfortunate man who had
so suddenly become my charge.

I drove him to the nearest hospital, and left him there, stating in a
few words the little I knew of his sudden attack, and the chance which
had thrown him on my protection.

‘It is apoplexy,’ said the house-surgeon, in whose care I left him.
‘Doubtless, he is some speculator who has risked too much in a shaky
Company, and whose head has given way under the shock of losing his
money. We have cases like that here pretty often, especially in times
of long-continued depression of trade. Will you wait and see if he has
on him a visiting card or anything bearing his name and address?’

I declined to stay longer than was necessary, for I had promised to
spend that evening with my fellow-clerk Atherton, and did not want
to be late for my engagement with the lad, for whom I had a sort of
elder-brotherly affection. But I promised to call at the hospital next
day and inquire for my protégé; and departed, the richer by what I
suppose would be regarded as a virtuous action, and the poorer by the
eighteenpence I had paid for the cab-fare.

It now seems to me to have been despicably, ludicrously selfish to
have thought so little of the fate of the man I had left in such
dangerous plight at the hospital, and so much of that expenditure of
eighteenpence. I hope that I am not naturally a miser, yet I fear some
niggardly instincts were dawning in me at that time, as, indeed, is
almost inevitable in a young man who, having passed his early years
under the shadow of that most wearing of sorrows—debt, is desirous of
not merely living within, but effecting some savings from, an income of
a hundred and twenty pounds a year. I recall now that I determined to
do without tobacco for a week; and with this resolution in my mind, I
hurried to the Broad Street station, _en route_ for Atherton’s lodgings
in Camden Town.

I could not have told at that time what attracted me so strongly
to Gerald Atherton, any more than Olivia could have explained the
prophetic fascination which drew her to Viola. But there was an
atmosphere of youth and freshness about the boy—he was the youngest of
all the clerks in our office, a bright-eyed lad, not yet eighteen—that
had a refreshing influence on me. I was not old myself—just
twenty-four—but eight years’ life in a City office, coming after a
boyhood which had had many of the anxieties of middle age, made me feel
almost patriarchal compared with my joyous and inexperienced junior.
There was, too, a similarity in the circumstances of our lives which
tended to friendship.

‘Only, you know, Langham,’ said the boy one day, early in
our acquaintance, when we were speaking on the subject, ‘my
responsibilities are greater than yours; I have May to look after. A
sister is a great anxiety, and when she happens to be your twin-sister,
you feel that you are in a special way bound to take care of her.’

‘Where is your sister now?’ I asked.

‘Not far away. She is companion to an old lady at Hampstead. That’s why
I live in Camden Town, because it is comparatively near; and I can go
occasionally to see May, and even sometimes have a visit from her at my
lodgings.’

‘Companion to an old lady!’ I repeated. ‘That’s a dreary life for a
young girl.’

‘May doesn’t seem to dislike it; and Mrs Bowden treats her very
kindly. The plague of her life is the continual espionage of the old
lady’s relations—or rather her dead husband’s relations; she seems
to have none of her own—who are quite convinced that my poor little
sister’s courtesy to her employer—she hasn’t it in her to be uncivil
to a boa-constrictor, the little darling!—is inspired by mercenary
motives. That annoys her; but as we are two young people alone in
the world, without a penny except what we earn, we must put up with
disagreeables—May, with the suspicions of those greedy waiters on dead
men’s shoes; and I, with getting the blame of everybody else’s blunders
as well as my own. Really, the undeserved or only half-deserved
scoldings I get, sometimes irritate me fearfully—and then at times I
feel I’d do anything for a good game at cricket. I don’t think I could
bear it all, if you didn’t stand by me, Langham.’

‘Who wouldn’t stand by a manly boy like you, Gerald!’ I protested,
laughing.

‘Boy, my friend!’ cried Gerald with one of those bright merry glances,
accompanied with an upward toss of the head, which always came upon me
with the effect of a sunbeam—‘boy, indeed! I am a City man, sir, and
demand to be spoken to with respect!’

‘Moreover,’ I went on, ‘the circumstances of your early life are so
similar to those of my own childhood, that I felt interested in you as
soon as I knew them. My widowed mother, like yours, wore out her life
in a long struggle with poverty, and died just when I was about to
cease being a burden to her. The only difference is that my mother was
doubly overweighted by having to pay off debts of my father’s youth,
contracted before he ever met her.’

‘Did not your father’s family take the responsibility even of those?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘My grandfather, after bringing up his son to no
profession, and encouraging him in extravagance, cast him off on his
marriage with a penniless girl, and left him to sink or swim as best
he could. I imagine that my father cannot have been possessed of much
moral courage, or he would not have submitted to live on the earnings
of my mother’s music-teaching. But he had never been accustomed to
work, and his health was bad. He died when I was three years old. Then
my mother made an appeal to my grandfather to do something for me, if
not for her, or at least take the responsibility of those few hundred
pounds of debt which he could have paid without feeling himself a whit
poorer, but which formed a millstone round her neck. But the rich
Liverpool merchant, who was ready to subscribe lavishly to ostentatious
charities, refused to help his daughter-in-law by a penny, and refused
in _such_ a letter! My mother never showed it to me, but I found it in
her desk after her death. I keep it still, and to this day my blood
boils if I read its insulting words.’

‘And did your grandfather never soften?’

‘He gave no sign of it; and on his death, he left all he possessed to
my aunt, my father’s half-sister.’

‘And she?’

‘I confess,’ said I, ‘that she did make some advances towards me, but
they came at an unlucky moment. My mother had just died; and from the
letters I found after her death, I had learned for the first time with
what cruelty she had been treated. Besides, I had lately obtained my
first situation, and was disposed to be aggressively independent. So I
declined my aunt’s invitation to visit her with a rudeness which no one
would be guilty of but an inexperienced boy at the age when he is most
desirous of being thought a man.’

‘I suppose that was the end of it all?’

‘Not quite. Six months later, after I had come to London, I received
another letter from my aunt, in which she stated that she had intended
to adopt me and make me her heir, if I had not so insolently rejected
her friendly overtures; but that I need no longer hope for anything
from her, as she was about to be married shortly. And she added—rather
vindictively, I thought—that as her future husband was considerably
younger than herself, he would probably survive her and inherit
all her property. I fancy she thought to excite in me an avaricious
regret for my previous coldness; but in truth my only idea was that
in making her become the wife of a man much her junior, spite and
loneliness were combining to lead her into a great folly; for, as she
was considerably older than my father, she must by that time have been
quite a middle-aged woman, and I suspected the youthful husband of
fortune-hunting. That was the last I ever heard of my only surviving
relative. I don’t know what name she bore after her marriage, nor even
if she still lives. I stand quite alone.’

‘Poor old man!’ said the boy affectionately. ‘Rich as you are—from my
point of view, for your salary is twice as large as mine—I am better
off than you. I don’t stand alone; I have May.’

‘I should think a sister was only an additional anxiety,’ I replied.

‘True; but still there’s a selfish comfort in the thought that somebody
cares for you. At least, I like it. I’m a sentimental sort of animal,
who likes being petted—not a calm, self-contained creature like you.’

I doubt if I deserved Atherton’s epithets. I felt very lonely at times,
and the boy’s affection—for he was sincerely attached to me, and
had a refreshing un-English readiness to display his attachment—was
charming. I told him more of my history and feelings than I had ever
before confided to any one; for he was as sympathetic as a woman, while
possessing a discretion reputed to be rare among feminine creatures.

In truth I was greatly attached to Gerald, and I was quite distressed
this afternoon at the thought of being late for my engagement with him.
It was his birthday, and we were to take tea together at his lodgings,
and then go to the theatre, and I feared that my delay might interfere
with our plans.

But it was another and more cheerful accident than that of being late
that was to prevent our occupying the pit at the Lyceum that night.
I had expected to see Gerald’s face looking for me from the window
of his sitting-room, as I approached the little street with the long
name—Mount Edgcumbe Terrace—where he resided; but I was surprised, and
for the moment bewildered, to find _two_ faces gazing with interest
at my approaching figure—two faces so alike in feature and colouring,
that though a moment’s reflection convinced me that they must belong
to Gerald Atherton and his twin-sister, I could not have said which of
them was my friend’s. Each had the same bright, laughing, dark-blue
eyes, the same short, curling, dark-brown hair, the same contour and
expression, and at this moment the same merry and mischievous smile.
I thought I had never in my life seen a prettier sight than these two
joyous, youthful figures standing side by side.

‘Confess, Langham, that you didn’t know which was who, when you saw us
just now,’ cried Gerald as I entered the room.

I admitted that I had been puzzled for the moment; ‘though,’ I added,
‘I am sure that a longer glimpse would have enabled me to distinguish
Miss Atherton from you.’

‘Yes,’ returned Gerald, ‘I know that my poor little sister is only a
plain-looking likeness of my bewitching self, that could not deceive
any one for more than a moment.’

Miss Atherton made a little _moue_ of protest at her brother as she
said: ‘Mr Langham only means that the stool on which I was standing, to
make me look as tall as you, was so shaky, that I shouldn’t have been
able to keep on it a minute longer.’

Then I tried again to utter a complimentary remark, which Gerald again
appropriated, whereupon we all laughed and were friends at once.

I had known nothing of the effect of a woman’s presence in the house
since I had been old enough to appreciate it; it was therefore a
revelation to me to note how May Atherton glorified that dingy parlour
in Camden Town. As she moved to and fro, making the tea-table in some
nameless way a thousand times more attractive than the landlady knew
how to do, my eyes followed her with a persistence which would have
been embarrassing to her had she been troubled with the least degree
of self-consciousness; but of all the women I have ever known, May
Atherton was the most completely free from vanity and all the faults
that accompany it. At present her thoughts were occupied solely with
the pleasure of being in her brother’s society, and the desire to make
things brighter for him and his friend, whom, for Gerald’s sake, she
accepted as her friend also.

‘I really feel as if I knew you quite well, Mr Langham,’ she said, ‘for
Gerald has spoken to me often of you; and I am so glad to feel that my
boy has a good thoughtful friend, older than himself, to advise and
help him.’

The motherly air with which May uttered the last words sat prettily
if strangely on her extreme youth, and indeed between the pair of
children there were a hundred touches of reciprocal tenderness and
protection, which were very pleasant to look at, though they made me
feel very lonely and a little envious. Not that I had any cause to feel
neglected; for Gerald and his sister united in making much of me—he for
my own sake, she for her brother’s sake. Only for your brother’s sake,
were you so kind to me then, sweet May; afterwards, it was, I hope, for
a more personal reason!

I could spend much time in describing that happy evening; but perhaps,
repeated to less sympathetic ears, the wit might not seem so witty nor
the wisdom so wise as they did to us. At last, however, May said with
a sigh that she must go home; and Gerald proposed that I as well as he
should escort her to the door of the ‘ogress’s castle.’

‘But you must not call Mrs Bowden an ogress,’ protested May, laying
a hand upon her brother’s shoulder; ‘she is very kind to me. Was it
not thoughtful of her to let me come and spend this evening with you,
because I had mentioned a week ago that it was our birthday? She is
always so much interested in what I say of you—and she likes to hear
about you too, Mr Langham,’ added the girl, turning to me.

‘About me!’ I repeated. ‘How does she know of my existence?’

‘Oh, I have mentioned your name often, in speaking of Gerald and his
friends, and she frequently questions me about you. I suppose she
likes you for Gerald’s sake, and Gerald for mine.’

‘Don’t deceive yourself, mademoiselle,’ interrupted the irrepressible
Gerald. ‘Her liking for you is the mere anticipation of the passion
that will fill her when she sees me. She cares for you only as Olivia
did for Viola before she saw Sebastian.’

How had the boy hit upon that comparison? I had conversely been
thinking for three hours past that my liking for Sebastian had been the
mere anticipation of my love for Viola!

At her brother’s words, May laughed and shook her head. ‘Don’t _you_
deceive yourself, dear. There is no rival to “dear Henry” in Mrs
Bowden’s heart.’

‘Who is “dear Henry?”’ I asked.

‘The late Mr Bowden, and the one vexation of my life.’

‘How can that be, if he is dead?’

‘Alas! he has left innumerable relatives, who haunt his widow and sing
his praises. They profess to be actuated only by exceptional devotion
to his memory and by affection for his widow; and I suppose it is only
the natural perversity of my soul that reminds me of the fact that
Mrs Bowden is very rich and has no relatives of her own. Perhaps it
is their strong and very plainly displayed jealousy of my supposed
influence over my employer that makes me think so uncharitably of them.’

‘And does Mrs Bowden believe in their professions?’

‘I don’t know; but she is a very shrewd old lady; and I suspect her of
finding some pleasure in giving each of “dear Henry’s” relatives in
turn the impression that he or she is to be her heir, and then dashing
their hopes to the ground. To-day, she has delighted her husband’s
brother, and will doubtless drive all the other relatives to despair,
by giving him Mr Bowden’s favourite seal, a thing she cherishes
greatly. This is supposed to be almost equivalent to making a will
in his favour. I suppose it’s malicious,’ said May with one of her
brightest smiles, ‘but I can’t help getting some fun out of it too. You
see, she has expressly stated that she has no intention of dividing her
property; one individual is to inherit all, so the anxiety of each is
intense, though concealed. I really think the only relief they all have
from their dissimulated hatred of each other is their open hatred of
me.’

‘Poor little girl! How can even the most prejudiced of fortune-hunters
hate you? It is hard to bear,’ said Gerald tenderly, taking his
sister’s hand in his.

But the shade which had for a moment darkened her face vanished as
she saw it reflected in his. ‘That is only a little trouble, dear,’
she said gently, ‘so little, that if I had any harder ones, I should
not notice it; and by way of compensation, I am sure that Mrs Bowden
herself really loves and trusts me.’

We were very merry as we walked up to the old house in Well Walk,
Hampstead, where Miss Atherton lived. A pretty, picturesque place it
seemed in the dim spring moonlight; and May grew quite animated in
telling me of the quaint relics of past centuries which survived beside
the modern comfort of its furnishing. The path between the garden door
and that of the house had been covered with glass and made into a
conservatory, where even at this early time of the year flowers and
rare ferns spread their leaves. Gerald and I watched May pass within
the door, feeling—at least I did—like Moore’s unfortunate Peri to whom
the doors of heaven were shut. At the inner door she turned and waved
her hand, sending a smile of farewell down the flowery vista. Then she
disappeared, and suddenly the night grew darker.

I had all this time—so selfish a thing is pleasure!—forgotten the
unfortunate gentleman whose sudden illness I had witnessed; but as
Gerald and I were walking down Haverstock Hill, after parting with May,
the thought of him suddenly came to my mind, and at the same moment I
recollected the packet I had picked up and put in my pocket. I narrated
the incident of the afternoon to my friend, and went back with him to
his rooms to examine the thickly-filled envelope which had come into my
possession. There was on it neither address nor other superscription;
one side was soiled by falling in the mud of the street; on the other
was a large seal in red wax, on which I deciphered, in old English
characters, the letters H. L. B., below a mailed hand holding a dagger,
and above the motto, ‘What I hold, I hold fast.’

I determined to take the packet to the hospital next day, when I should
go to inquire for the invalid, and either give it to him, or, if his
condition rendered him incapable of taking care of it, intrust it to
the house-surgeon. It was not permitted to me to fulfil my intention.
When, after my day’s work, I went to the hospital, I found that the
patient in whom I was interested had been removed.

‘We found out his name and address from some letters in his pocket,’
said the house-surgeon, ‘and sent a message to his family. His son came
immediately and removed him.’

‘What is the name?’ I asked.

‘I forget. Collins or Cotton, or something like that; but I can’t speak
with any certainty. He was a solicitor, I remember.’

‘Is not his name on the hospital books?’

‘No. He was here so short a time, that it was never entered.’

‘How very unfortunate!’ I exclaimed.

‘Why? Was it of importance that you should see him?’ asked the
house-surgeon, an easygoing and careless youth, who had evidently felt
hitherto that my interrogatories were tiresome and unnecessary, but was
now roused to attention by the fervour of my tone.

‘It may be of considerable importance to him. He dropped a packet,
apparently containing documents, when he fell yesterday. I picked it
up, and forgot to deliver it to you when I left him in your charge. It
may be essential to him to regain immediate possession of it.’

The young doctor was sufficiently interested now, but he could do
nothing; he had no certain recollection of anything connected with his
patient. I was forced to content myself with leaving with him my name,
Richard Langham, and the address of Messrs Hamley and Green, in whose
employ I was, that he might refer to me if any inquiry was made about
the packet.

I doubted not that I should within a few days be relieved of the
charge of it; but days and weeks passed into months, and that sealed
envelope remained in my possession, and lay like an undeserved burden
on my conscience.




THE OLD PRIORY GARDEN.


The whispering May wind stirs the hawthorn and lilac in the old priory
garden, and brings great gushes of delicious scent past the window, and
fills the room with sweetness. All the last month the weather has been
fitful and changeable—rain and storm, sunshine and cloud, dust and east
winds; but after two days of soaking downpour and wild west wind, the
morning of the last day of May has dawned in the full glorious beauty
of late spring. Thrushes and blackbirds vie with each other in song,
sweet and shrill, clear and inspiring; a modest siskin whistles its
little monotonous roulade; now and then, a few notes of the shy linnet
are heard; a robin is feeding its brood close by; swallows and martins
are darting about in all directions; in the apple blossoms are hundreds
of bees, making a dense dreamy music; while their compatriot the
humble-bee booms along with his big velvety body shining and gleaming
in the sun.

What a splendid creature! See, it settles close at hand. Turn it over
with a grass bent. With a surprised buzz, it rights itself. Again and
yet again it turns over, seemingly staring to see the cause of its
overthrow. Draw the bent lightly across its back—two legs are instantly
raised to brush off the unwelcome touch. A second time the same; a
third, and the bent is fairly clutched by all the gummy legs, and
retained under its body. It crawls up a stick, and with angry bustle,
goes booming off.

One does not realise summer is so close upon us, when May is such
a capricious maiden, till a morning like this wakes one up to the
conviction that in twenty-four more days the sun will have reached its
altitude, and soon will begin the shortening days again. The garden
here is quaint, and quite unlike the generality of town gardens. From
the square of paved court rises one step, and then a stretch of grass,
an oval flower-bed each side, a path up the centre; sloping grass banks
supported with large stones, where huge bunches of primroses spring
from the niches. Along the sides are rockeries with hardy trailing
plants—stonecrop, periwinkle both major and minor, white and blue, with
variegated foliage; sweet woodruff, violets, and a mass of ferns, whose
delicate light silver green fronds are daily uncurling into beauty.
The wallflowers are in full bloom. Later on, the germander speedwell
will open its bright evanescent flowers, that, though only a wild
plant, makes such splendid masses of colour when cultivated, with the
silver-foil in bunches near it.

Up a short flight of stone steps, with ferns on each side, under
an ivy-covered archway, and on another plat of grass, with a long
flower-bed, with trellis-work at the back, covered with the red and
yellow honeysuckle, and a huge mass of climbing roses, the rare
delicate ‘maiden blush,’ which in a fortnight will be heavy with bloom.
More rockeries and ferns, lilies of the valley and forget-me-nots
under the syringa bushes, and sweet-brier. In another corner are tall
irises and great white lilies, with here and there a bunch of orange
tiger lily. Southernwood, lavender, and rosemary, variegated balm in
profusion. Soon the fragrant pinks, and their aristocratic relations
the carnations, will be in bloom; and the rich velvety pansies, that
are now so large and perfect, will dwindle as the sun gains more power,
and the strawberries begin to crimson on the sunny south beds; and
the geraniums and verbenas and purple heliotropes take the place of
auriculas and the narcissus.

Round the square of vegetable garden is a wide path, with beds sloping
to the walls, one of which is of good brick, with plum, cherry, and
other fruit-trees trained along it. The other is the real old stone
wall belonging to the ‘antient’ priory, that formerly stood close
by. At one time, this wall was covered with a dense mass of ivy, in
which colonies of sparrows built their nests, reared their young, and
flourished mightily. Snails, slugs, and wood-lice swarmed, and beetles
in endless variety. One wild day in a wet February, part of the old
wall came down, breaking up the trees, and cutting up the borders and
turf. It was patched up again; and just as the spinach was fit to cut
and lettuce planted out, there was a soaking rain one night, and in the
morning the old wall was again prostrate over all our spring plantings.
Such a wreck it was, and disturbed our equilibrium for days. It was
soon set straight as regards the stonework; but it was weeks before the
place looked itself again; and that crumbling old wall was watched with
suspicion all summer. Then outdoor life coming to an end, we ceased to
think on the subject.

October following was mild and balmy for the first few days; then
the wind shifted suddenly to the east, and four or five nights of
sharp frost came, that turned all the foliage into a golden glory, a
steady downpour of a week culminating with a tremendous wind-storm.
It blew and whistled and stormed till every leaf was swept away into
space, going no one knew whither, howling and whistling round the
chimney-stacks till night was made terrible. During the worst of the
storm, in the early morning, down came the old wall again from end to
end, cutting up turf, breaking down the fruit-trees, and overwhelming
the shrubs and rockeries in a general wreck. For many weeks did the
state of chaos continue; wretched drenched fowl made themselves at
home in the flower-beds, and forlorn-looking ducks wandered across,
and feasted on the host of slugs and fat snails and beetles that the
pouring rain had tempted out of the nooks and crevices of the stones
and mass of ivy. It was built up at last; but little or nothing could
be done to repair the ravages done to the garden till the end of March,
except making a general clearance of the rubbish, and one of the
quaintest of shady corners seemed lost for ever.

But after a few fine balmy days and a spell of sunshine, curious things
happened under the rebuilt wall: stray snowdrops appeared in places
where none had been heretofore; a bunch of pure white crocuses unfolded
their blossoms to the sun in one place; two or three stray ‘stars
of Bethlehem’ in another. Later on, a single stem shot up of yellow
Lent lilies; bunches of tormentilla with double yellow blooms, and
clover with deep red-brown leaves and big snowy balls of flowers; the
mouse-ear, hawkweed, and trailing moneywort. Down amongst the remains
of the common turf came a thick growth of parsley-piert with its close
fine-edged leaves, and cuckoo-pint with delicate pinky-white flowers.
On the wall between the new mortar and old stones came little fibres
of crimson-tipped moss, stonecrop (_Sedum_), sandwort, pellitory of
the wall, and in one place a single plant of flax, with its pale-blue
flowers and long spear-like leaves; without mentioning the more common
chickweed, groundsel, wild feverfew and plantain, yellow wallflowers,
and many different sorts of grass and mosses. There is no doubt most
of these plants had come from seeds brought to the nests in the ivy
by the birds, and had lain there in the dry rubble for years, some,
perhaps, for generations, simply because there was not moisture enough
to cause the seeds to sprout and germinate. ‘If a grain of wheat
fall to the ground and _live_, it abideth alone; but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit,’ which seems enigmatical till pondered over
and thought out. How often have the gray-cowled monks strolled round
this old garden, marking how this tree promised a bounteous crop of
cherries, luscious morrellas, that, when ‘cunninglie steeped in spirits
with due proportion of mace, cloves, cinnamon, and sugar,’ makes a
liqueur fit for the drink of princes; or noting how the gnarled old
apple-trees—then young and in full bearing—were covered with garlands
of pink-and-white blossoms, that promised later in the autumn a rich
harvest of golden fruit: ladies’-fingers, Ribstone pippins, codlings,
golden russets, Blenham orange, with sourings for winter keeping; also
the frail blooms of the pear-trees, jargonelle, Marie Louise, baking
pears of enormous size, with the rich, juicy ‘bishop’s thumbs’ and
brown burées.

Now, a young lay-brother will come to pick dainty bits of herbs for
flavouring the soups and stews, with their accompaniment of esculent
vegetables, for, in those old palmy days, seldom did their genial faces
have ‘anchorite’ written on them. Go to the extreme end of the garden,
and turn round; what a delightful view meets the gaze! Down in the
hollow lies the sleepy little town, with its quaint gabled houses, and
nearly imbedded in a wealth of lime-trees. Far away, when the wind is
high and the atmosphere clear, are seen ranges of fertile hills for
miles, or the distance is wrapped in a soft purple haze that is still
more lovely; and over all this, the deep blue sky with fleecy white
clouds, and the blessed sunshine pouring down over all the wealth of
buds and blossoms, singing birds, and busy humming bees.

I came across, the other day, an account of what a naturalist found in
a square of backyard nearly uncultivated. Why, such a place as this
old priory garden would give him pleasure and profit for months, nay,
years, for not a tenth part of all the natural lovelinesses has been
exhausted yet. Some other time, perhaps, I shall tell something more of
what I find here as the years glide onward.




A POSSIBLE LEGAL REFORM.


Counsel and solicitors have never been so friendly as brother
professionals should be, and never will be until ‘amalgamation’ is an
accomplished fact. They have many causes of difference—some real, many
fancied. In all of them, jealousy is a great factor; for, whatever may
be thought to the contrary, each branch of the legal profession _is_
jealous of the privileges of the other. The barrister wants personal
relations with his client, which would mean very great loss to the
solicitor; and the solicitor wants to be allowed a right of audience
before the Supreme Court, which would certainly rob the barrister of
half his fees. Hence, there is a straining between the two limbs of the
law, which causes many hard things to be said of both.

One of the most real grievances of solicitors is in the matter of
fees. Two solicitors brief counsel to appear in two cases. Both cases
come on for hearing at the same time in different courts. Obviously,
the chosen advocate cannot attend to both, and so one is left to the
tender mercies of a half-fledged junior, whose well-meant efforts
often result in the loss of his client’s case. That such should be the
fact is inevitable, so long as the public will persist in preferring
the possible services and slight attention of an ‘eminent’ counsel,
obtained at a fancy price, to the certain attention and careful study
bestowed upon his case by a less eminent, but often equally able,
counsel at a fair price. But the real ground of complaint is that when
a case is thus murdered through its conductor’s inability to attend
to it, that conductor still retains his fee. He has never, in fact,
the smallest idea of disgorging a fee, even when paid on a brief upon
which he has never appeared. Why should he? It was not his fault that
he could not do the work he was retained for; he _has_ given valuable
time to getting up the case (though he certainly need not have done
so, as it turned out); and—strongest argument of all—he does not
lose custom by thus publicly fattening on the unearned increment. So
he has continued to ‘unearn’ it; and the solicitor—whose interests
are of course his client’s—has continued to writhe under the open
injustice thus sanctioned by the etiquette of that most honourable of
professions, the Bar of England.

But at last a ray of hope has found its way into the long-suffering
solicitor’s breast. The chink through which the welcome ray has come
has been pierced by a certain Mr Norton, a solicitor. It happened in
this wise: Mr Norton briefed and feed ‘an eminent leading counsel’ in
a certain case; but the retained one failed to appear upon the trial.
Mr Norton felt hurt; but, being a practical man, an idea struck him. He
wrote to the eminent one, pointing out that it would not be altogether
an iniquitous proceeding if his fees were returned. The eminent one
made courteous reply that ‘he would be happy to return the fees if he
could find any precedent for doing so.’ This would have ‘stumped’ most
solicitors; but Mr Norton rose to the occasion. He at once laid the
whole matter before the Attorney-general; and that luminary expressed
his ‘views and usage’ to be ‘to return so much of the brief fee as
exceeds the amount which would have been proper if the brief had been
simply a case for opinion.’ This means the return in such cases of by
far the greater portion of the fees; and such return will, if it become
a ‘precedent,’ be most acceptable not only to solicitors, but to the
public at large. In this particular case, the counsel referred to,
having found a precedent, and being unable to eat his own words, at
once sent Mr Norton a ‘cheque for the difference;’ and Mr Norton has
certainly done well to make the matter public. All barristers now have
a sound precedent for doing an act of justice; and it is to be hoped
that they, as a body, will not neglect to follow it. So the profession
will escape a certain amount of ill repute which has long tarnished, in
the eyes at least of envious persons, its very honourable ’scutcheon.




DEAD FLOWERS.

BY ALEXANDER ANDERSON.


    Those simple daisies which you view,
      Last year, when summer winds did wave,
    And clouds were white with sunshine, grew
      Upon the Ettrick Shepherd’s grave.

    But not of him they speak, nor draw
      My thoughts back to that early time
    When, rapt in that one dream, he saw
      The shadows lift from fairy clime.

    Nor yet of Ettrick, as it goes
      To join the Yarrow’s haunting tone,
    That each may murmur as it flows
      A music something like his own.

    Nor even of Saint Mary’s Lake,
      Amid those hills from which he drew
    The legendary Past, to wake
      Its far-off melodies anew.

    No; not of these I think, though each
      Is rich in spells of magic song;
    These daisies touch a chord to which
      All sadder thoughts of death belong.

    And so I turn, and for a space
      Within the sacred Past I stand,
    To feel the sunshine of a face,
      The kindly pressure of a hand.

    All just the same as when she[2] gave
      These dead flowers as a welcome thing.
    Alas! and now upon her grave
      The grass is thinking of the spring.

    It seems but yesterday since then—
      How slow, yet swift, the days have sped—
    And here, beside the streets of men,
      She slumbers with the holy dead.

    She should have lain among the hills,
      In some old churchyard, where each sound
    Is of the wind, the tinkling rills,
      And cry of lonely things around;

    Or where old ballads grew to life,
      Far back within the shadowy years,
    That sang of rugged Border strife,
      Or passions born of love and tears.

    For loyal to their old-world chords,
      She felt her heart in unison
    With all their rich but simple words,
      That took new music from her own.

    True woman of the faithful heart,
      And kindly as the summer air;
    A nature such as could impart
      Its genial presence everywhere.

    In her the friend was friend indeed;
      A larger sense of sympathy,
    That overstepped the pales of creed,
      Drew her to all in charity.

    And now this death that waits for each,
      An unseen shade by all, has come;
    The Scottish music of her speech
      So sweet, is now for ever dumb.

    So pass the leal ones of this earth,
      To leave with us a holier claim;
    To touch us with their spirit-birth,
      And whisper they are still the same.

    These simple flowers of withered hue,
      Last year, when summer winds did wave,
    Were plucked by her because they grew
      Upon the Ettrick Shepherd’s grave.

    This year, when summer pours her light,
      And daisies are to beauty blown,
    Some hands will pluck their blossoms white,
      Because they grow upon her own.


FOOTNOTES:

[2] Jean Logan Watson, author of _Bygone Days in our Village, Round the
Grange Farm_, and other books full of quaint simplicity and freshness,
and breathing on every page the delightful personality of the writer.
Her sudden death was deeply felt by a large circle of friends, and has
left a blank that can never be filled up. She died 7th October 1885,
and sleeps in the Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh.—A. A.




EASTER SUNDAY.


It is not perhaps generally known that Easter Sunday falls this year on
the latest possible date on which it can fall—April 25. It is only once
in every century that Easter falls on so late a date as this; the last
year on which it did so was in 1734, and the next occasion will be in
1943. The earliest date for Easter is March 22, and this has occurred
once only in this century—in 1818; and it may safely be said that none
now living will see the next similar occurrence, for it will not take
place until the year 2000. In fixing Easter, the general rule is, that
Easter Sunday is always the first Sunday after the full moon on or next
after 21st March.

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Printed and Published by W. & R. CHAMBERS, 47 Paternoster Row, LONDON,
and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.

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