Household words, No. 2, April 6, 1850

There was once a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.

They used to say to one another, sometimes, Supposing all the children upon earth were to die, would the flowers, and the water, and the sky, be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hill-sides are the children of the water; and the smallest bright specks, playing at hide and seek in the sky all night, must surely be the children of the stars; and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men, no more.

There was one clear shining star that used to come out in the sky before the rest, near the church spire, above the graves. It was larger and more beautiful, they thought, than all the others, and every night they watched for it, standing hand in hand at a window. Whoever saw it first, cried out, “I see the star!” And often they cried out both together, knowing so well when it would rise, and where. So they grew to be such friends with it, that, before lying down in their beds, they always looked out once again, to bid it good night; and when they were turning round to sleep, they used to say, “God bless the star!”

But while she was still very young, oh very very young, the sister drooped, and came to be so weak that she could no longer stand in the window at night; and then the child looked sadly out by himself, and when he saw the star, turned round and said to the patient pale face on the bed, “I see the star!” and then a smile would come upon the face, and a little weak voice used to say, “God bless my brother and the star!”

And so the time came, all too soon! when the child looked out alone, and when there was no face on the bed; and when there was a little grave among the graves, not there before; and when the star made long rays down towards him, as he saw it through his tears.

Now, these rays were so bright, and they seemed to make such a shining way from earth to Heaven, that when the child went to his solitary bed, he dreamed about the star; and dreamed that, lying where he was, he saw a train of people taken up that sparkling road by angels. And the star, opening, showed him a great world of light, where many more such angels waited to receive them.

All these angels, who were waiting, turned their beaming eyes upon the people who were carried up into the star; and some came out from the long rows in which they stood, and fell upon the people’s necks, and kissed them tenderly, and went away with them down avenues of light, and were so happy in their company, that lying in his bed he wept for joy.

But, there were many angels who did not go with them, and among them one he knew. The patient face that once had lain upon the bed was glorified and radiant, but his heart found out his sister among all the host.

His sister’s angel lingered near the entrance of the star, and said to the leader among those who had brought the people thither:

She was turning hopefully away, when the child stretched out his arms, and cried “O, sister, I am here! Take me!” and then she turned her beaming eyes upon him, and it was night; and the star was shining into the room, making long rays down towards him as he saw it through his tears.

From that hour forth, the child looked out upon the star as on the Home he was to go to, when his time should come; and he thought that he did not belong to the earth alone, but to the star too, because of his sister’s angel gone before.

There was a baby born to be a brother to the child; and while he was so little that he never yet had spoken word, he stretched his tiny form out on his bed, and died.

Again the child dreamed of the opened star, and of the company of angels, and the train of people, and the rows of angels with their beaming eyes all turned upon those people’s faces.

As the child beheld his brother’s angel in her arms, he cried, “O, sister, I am here! Take me!” And she turned and smiled upon him, and the star was shining.

He grew to be a young man, and was busy at his books, when an old servant came to him, and said:

Again at night he saw the star, and all that former company. Said his sister’s angel to the leader:

A mighty cry of joy went forth through all the star, because the mother was re-united to her two children. And he stretched out his arms and cried, “O, mother, sister, and brother, I am here! Take me!” And they answered him “Not yet,” and the star was shining.

He grew to be a man, whose hair was turning grey, and he was sitting in his chair by the fireside, heavy with grief, and with his face bedewed with tears, when the star opened once again.

And the man who had been the child saw his daughter, newly lost to him, a celestial creature among those three, and he said “My daughter’s head is on my sister’s bosom, and her arm is round my mother’s neck, and at her feet there is the baby of old time, and I can bear the parting from her, God be praised!”

Thus the child came to be an old man, and his once smooth face was wrinkled, and his steps were slow and feeble, and his back was bent. And one night as he lay upon his bed, his children standing round, he cried, as he had cried so long ago:

And he said, “I am. My age is falling from me like a garment, and I move towards the star as a child. And O, my Father, now I thank thee that it has so often opened, to receive those dear ones who await me!”

One winter’s evening, when the snow lay as thick as a great feather-bed all over the garden, and was knee-deep in the meadow-hollows, a family circle sat round a huge fire, piled up with blocks of coal of that magnitude and profusion which are only seen at houses in the neighbourhood of a coal-mine. It appeared as if a tram-waggon had been ‘backed’ into the room, and half its load of great loose coal shot out into the enormous aperture in the wall which lies below the chimney and behind the fire-place in these rural abodes. The red flames roared, and the ale went round.

The master of the house was not exactly a farmer, but one of those country personages who fill up the interval between the thorough farmer and the ’squire who farms his own estate,—a sort of leather-legged, nail-shoed old gentleman, whose elder sons might easily be mistaken for gamekeepers, and the younger for ploughboys, but who on Sundays took care to ‘let un see the difference’ at church. Their father was therefore never called Farmer Dalton, but old Mr. Dalton, and almost as frequently Billy-Pit Dalton—the coal-mine in which he held a share being named the ‘William Pitt.’ His lands, however, were but a small matter; his chief property was a third share he had in this coal-mine, which was some half a mile distant from the house. His eldest son was married, and lived close to the mine, of which he acted as the chartermaster, or contractor with proprietors for the work to be done.

Among the family group that encircled the huge coal fire was one visitor,—a young man from London, the nephew of old Dalton. He had been sent down to this remote coal country by his father, in order to separate him from associates who dissipated his time, and from pursuits and habits that prevented his mind settling to any fixed occupation and course of life. Flashley was a young man of kindly feelings and good natural abilities, both of which, however, were in danger of being spoiled.

Various efforts were made from time to time to amuse the dashing young fellow ‘from town.’ Sometimes the old gentleman related the wonders of the coal-mines, and the perilous adventures of the miners; and on more than one occasion the curate of the village endeavoured to interest him in the grand history of the early world, and especially of the period of antediluvian forests, and their various transmutations. All in vain. He paid no attention to them. If anything they said made any impression at all, it was solely due to the subtle texture of the human mind, which continually receives much more than it seeks, or has wit enough to desire.

‘You don’t find the coal countries quite so bright and merry as London town, do ye, [Pg 27]Flashley?’ said old Dalton, with a good-natured smile.

‘I can’t say I do, uncle,’ answered the youth, frankly. ‘As to merriment, that is all very well at the present moment, in front of that great family bonfire; but all the rest of the day—’ and here Flashley laughed with easy impudence and no small fun; ‘the house and garden are in a state of dingy mourning, so are all the roads, and lanes, and hedges,—in fact, the passage of lines of little black waggons to and fro, rumbling full of coals, or rattling by, empty, seems like the chief business of life, and the main purpose for which men came into the world.’

‘And so they be!’ ejaculated old Dalton, jocosely; ‘so far as these parts are concerned. You know, Flashley, the world is made up of many parts, and this be the coal part. We be the men born to do the world’s work of this sort; and we can’t very handsomely pass all our time a-sitting before a shiny fire, and drinking ale,—though, that’s good o’ nights, after the work’s done.’

With this laconic homily, old Billy-Pitt Dalton rose smiling from his chair, emptied his mug of ale, and, shaking the young man kindly by the hand, trudged off to bed. With much the same sort of smiling ‘good night,’ the sons all trudged after him. The good dame and her daughter went last. Flashley remained sitting alone in front of the great fire.

He sat in silence for a long time, watching the fire decline into great dark chasms, black holes, and rugged red precipices, with grim smouldering chaotic heaps below.

A word or two about this young man. Flashley Dalton had some education, which he fancied was quite enough, and was very ambitious without any definite object. His father had proposed several professions to him, but none of them suited him, chiefly because, to acquire eminence in any of them, so long a time was needed. Besides, none seemed adequate to satisfy his craving for distinction. He looked down rather contemptuously on all ordinary pursuits. The fact was, he ardently desired fame and fortune, but did not like to work for either. One of the greatest injuries his mind had sustained, was from a certain species of ‘fast literature,’ which the evil spirit of town-life has squirted into the brains of our young men during the last three or four years, whereby he had been taught and encouraged to laugh at everything of serious interest, and to seek to find something ridiculous in all ennobling efforts. If a great thing was done, he endeavoured to prove it a little one; if a profound truth was enunciated, he sought to make it out a lie; to him a new discovery in science was a humbug; a generous effort, a job. If he went to see an exhibition of pictures, it was to sneer at the most original designs; if to see a new tragedy, it was only in the hope of its being damned. If a new work of fiction were admirable, he talked spitefully of it, or with supercilious patronage; and as to a noble poem, he scoffed at all such things with some slang joke at ‘high art;’ besides, he wrote himself, as many a young blade now attempts to do, instead of beginning with a little study and some decent reading. To Flashley all knowledge was a sort of absurdity; his own arrogant folly seemed so much better a thing. He therefore only read books that were like himself, and encouraged him to grow worse. The literature of indiscriminate and reckless ridicule and burlesque had taught him to have no faith in any sincere thing, no respect for true knowledge; and this had well-nigh destroyed all good in his mind and nature, as it unfortunately has done with too many others of his age at the present day.

After sitting silently in front of the fire for some half an hour, Flashley gradually fell into a sort of soliloquy, partaking in about equal degrees of the grumbling, the self-conceited, the humorous, and the drowsy.

‘So, they’re all snoring soundly by this time—all the clodpole Billy Pittites. Uncle’s a fine old fellow. Very fond of him. As for all the rest!—Wonder why the mine was called the William Pitt? Because it is so black and deep, I suppose. Before my time. Who cares for him now, or for any of the bygones! Why should we care for anybody who went before us? The past ones give place to the fast ones. That’s my feather.

‘But a pretty mess I’ve made of my affairs in London! My father does not know of half my debts. Hardly know of half of them myself. Incontinent contractions. Tavern bills, sixty or seventy pounds—maybe a hundred. Tailors? can’t calculate. Saloons and night-larks, owing for—don’t know how much, besides money paid. Money borrowed, eighty or ninety pounds. Books—forget—say sixpence. Like Falstaff’s ha’pennyworth of bread to all that quantity of sack! Think I paid ready money for all the light reading, and young gent’s books.’

The fire sank lower and lower, and so did the candles, one of which had just gone out, and began to send up a curdling stream of yellow smoke.

‘What a place this is for coals. What a smutty face Nature wears! From the house upwards, all alike,—dull, dusky, and detestable. Pfeu! Smell of fried mutton fat! Now, then, old Coal fire, hold up your head. I’m sleepy myself. This house is more like a hearse than a dwelling-place for live stock. The roadway in front of the house is all of coal-dust; the front of the house is like a sweep’s, it only wants the dangling sign of his “brush.” The window-ledges have a constant layer of black dust over them; so has the top of the porch; so have the chimney-pieces inside the house, where all the little china cups and gimcracks have a round black circle of coal-dust at the bottom. There is always a dark scum over the water of the jug in my bedroom. How I detest this life among the coals! Where’s the great need [Pg 28]of them? Why don’t the stupid old world burn wood?’

The fire had by this time sunk to dull red embers and grey ashes, with large dark chasms around and behind. The shadows on the wall were faint, and shifting with the flickering of the last candle, now dying in the socket. Flashley’s eyes were closed, and his arms folded, as he still continued to murmur to himself. Sooth to say, the ale had got into his head.

‘Margery, the housemaid, has large black eyes, with dark rings of coal-grime round them. Her hair is also black—her cap like a mourning mop—and she has worn a black patch on one side of her nose since last Friday, when I gave her a handful from the coal-scuttle for comparing me to the lazy young dog that lay asleep before the fire. Margery Daw!—you shall slide down to the lower regions,—on an inclined plane, as the Useful Knowledge books would say.

‘Ale is a good thing when it is strong; but a coal-mine is all nonsense. Still, they seem to make money by it, and that’s some excuse—some reason for men wasting in work lives which ought to be passed in pleasure. Human time—human——I thought something touched my elbow.

‘Human time should not be passed——why there it came again! I must be dreaming.

‘Old Billy-Pitt Dalton understands brewing. But human time should not be passed in digging and groping, and diving and searching—whether to scrape up coals, or what folks call “knowledge.” For the fuel of life burns out soon enough of itself, and, therefore, it should not be wasted over the baser material; because the former is all for one’s self, while coal-fuel, and the search after it, is just working for other people. Something did touch my elbow! There’s something astir in the room out in the darkness! It was standing at my side!’

Flashley made an effort to rise; but instead of doing so, he fell sideways over one arm of the chair, with his arms hanging down. Staring up helplessly from this position, he saw a heavy dwarfed figure with shining eyes, coming out of the darkness of the room! He could not distinguish its outline; but it was elf-like, black, and had a rough rocky skin. It had eyes that shot rays like great diamonds; and through its coal-black naked body, the whole of its veins were discernible, not running with blood, but filled with stagnant gold. Its step was noiseless, yet its weight seemed so immense, that the floor slowly bent beneath it; and, like ice before it breaks, the floor bent more and more as the figure came nearer.

At this alarming sight, Flashley struggled violently to rise. He did so; but instantly reeling half round, dropped into the chair, with his head falling over the back of it. At the same moment the ponderous Elfin took one step nearer; and the whole floor sank slowly down, with a long-drawn moan, that ended in a rising and rushing wind, with which Flashley felt himself borne away through the air, fleeter than his fast-fleeing consciousness.

In the progress of generations and cycles—in that wealth and dispensation of Time ordained by Him, before whose sight ‘one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day’—mere grains of sand running through the glass that regulates the operations of never-ending work—the bodies of all living things, whether animal or vegetable, fulfil their destinies by undergoing a gradual transmutation into other bodies and things of the most opposite kind to their own original being. Original being, accurately to speak, there is none; but we must call that thing original to which some other thing is traced back as to its ultimate point, or starting place, and at which we are obliged to stop, not because it is the end, but because we can go no further; nevertheless, up to that antediluvian period, and during a great part of it, we are moving in the dusky yet demonstrable regions and tracts of substantial facts, and scientific knowledge.

Not daring to unclose his eyes, Flashley gradually returned to consciousness, and heard a voice speaking near to him, yet in tones that seemed like the echoes of some great cavern or deep mine.

‘Man lives to-day,’ said the voice—and the youth felt it was the black Elfin, with the diamond eyes and golden veins, that was speaking—‘man lives to-day, not only for himself and those around him, but also that by his death and decay fresh grass may grow in the fields of future years,—and that sheep may feed, and give food and clothing for the continuous race of man. Even so the food of one generation becomes the stone of another. And the stone shall become a fuel—a poison—or a medicine. Awake, young man!—awake from the stupor of an ignorant and presumptuous youth—and look around you!’

The young man, with no little trepidation, opened his eyes. He found he was alone. The strange being that had just spoken was gone. He ventured to gaze on the scene that surrounded him.

The place in which he found himself seemed to partake, not in distinct proportions, but altogether, so far as this was possible, of a wild forest of strange and enormous trees—a chaotic jungle—a straggling woodland, and a dreary morass or swamp, intersected by a dark river, that appeared to creep towards the sea which embraced a part of the distant horizon with a leaden arm. The moist mound whereon he stood was covered with ferns of various kinds—the comb-fern, the wedge-fern, the tooth-fern, the nerve-fern—and of all sizes, rising from a crumpled crest bursting through the earth, to plants of a foot high, of several feet, and thence up to lofty trees of forty or fifty feet in height, with great stems and [Pg 29]branching crowns. The green-stemmed and many-pointed mare’s-tail was also conspicuous in number and in magnitude; not merely of two or three feet high, as in the present period of the earth, but large green-jointed trees, shooting up their whisking spires to fourteen or fifteen feet. Thickly springing up in wild and threatening squadrons over the morass, they bent their heads in long rows after rows over the edge of the muddy river, with sullen, moveless, and interminable monotony. Here and there, enormous sombre shrubs oppressed the scene. The collective clumps resembled the inextricable junction of several of our thickest-foliaged trees, as though several oaks had agreed to unite their trunks, and make one—several beeches, the same—several poplars—several limes—though not one of them bearing likeness in trunk or foliage to oak, or beech, or poplar, or lime, or any known tree of present date.

Clumps also were there, of a rank undergrowth, out of which limp bare stems shot up to a great height, covered with a sickly white mealy powder, and terminating, for the most part, in coarse brown swollen heads, or gigantic black fingers, varied with dull red bosses at the tops of the great stems, broken cups, or red and grey forks and spikes,—a sort of monstrous club-moss and cup-moss, with lichens, coarse water-weeds, and water-grasses at the base.

Uncouth and terrible as were the forms to the young man’s eyes, there were some things not without grace. Large trees, having their entire trunks and boughs elegantly fluted, bearing leaves at regular intervals on each fluting upwards and along every bough, rose up amidst the disordered vegetation. Where the leaves had fallen from the lower part of the trunk, marks were left, like seals, at regular intervals on the flutings.⁠[A]

In many places, close to the trees just described, huge tortuous succulent roots⁠[B] protruded from the ground, as if anxious to exchange their darkness and want of air for the light, and for the warm atmosphere, attracted by the strong gases with which it was impregnated.

Round the feet of the young man lay intertangled bunches and bundles of wood-weeds, river-weeds, and other weeds that seemed to partake equally of the river and the sea; long rank grasses, sword-like, spear-like, or with club-like crowns of seeds, and fungi of hideous shapes, gross, pulpy, like giants’ heads, hairy and bearded, and sometimes bursting and sending forth steamy odours that were scarcely to be borne, and which the youth felt to be a deadly poison, but that for the time he, somehow, was endowed with a ‘charmed life.’

Spell-bound, he turned from these dismaying sights, to trees that rose to altitudes of from sixty to eighty feet, having leaves in long rows upon all the boughs, from which they shot forth direct, and without the intervention of any small twigs or other usual connecting medium of foliage. The same course of leaves had existed on the trunk, from which they had fallen as the tree rose up to maturity, and had left scars or scales, like a Mosaic ornament, and a sign of their progressive years.⁠[C]

Gazing through and beyond all these lofty trunks, Flashley beheld in the distance a sort of palm-like and pine-like trees, standing against the pale blue sky, which far transcended all the rest in altitude, and seemed indeed, here and there, to rise to a hundred feet above the whole range of other lofty trees! His eyes ached as he stared at them. It was not their altitude alone that caused a painful impression, but the feeling of their unbroken solitude—a loneliness unvisited by a single bird, and with nothing between them and the heavens, to which they seemed to aspire for ever, and in vain.

No flowers on any of the trees and shrubs around him were to be seen—and no fruits. The tone of colour was grave, sullen, melancholy. It was a solitude that seemed to feel itself. Not only no bird was visible, but no quadruped, insect, creeping thing, or other form of animal life. The earth was devoted solely to the production of enormous vegetation.

To complete the pregnant solemnity of the scene, there were no sounds of life or motion in the air; all was silence.

Looking round with a forlorn and overawed yet enquiring face, he discerned something like two keen stars of arrowy light at the foot of a gigantic fern-tree, at some distance from him. The darting rays seemed directed towards him. They were eyes; they could be nothing else! He presently perceived that the rough black elfin figure, with the veins of stagnant gold, was seated there, and that its eyes were fixed upon him!

‘The scene amidst which you stand,’ said the Elfin in his echo-like voice, and without moving from his seat beneath the tree, ‘is the stupendous vegetation of the elder world. The trunks and stems of the antediluvian earth erect their columns, and shoot up their spires towards the clouds; their dull, coarse foliage overhangs the swamps, and they drink in, at every pore, the floating steam impregnated with the nutriment of prodigies. No animal life do you behold, for none is of this date, nor could it live amidst these potent vapours which feed the vegetation. And yet these vast trees and plants, this richly poisoned atmosphere, this absence of all animal life of man, and beast, and bird, and creeping thing, is all arranged in due order of progression, that man may hereafter live, not merely a savage life, but one civilised and refined, with [Pg 30]the sense of a soul within—of God in the world, and over it, and all around it—whereof comes man’s hope of a future life beyond his presence here. Thus upward, and thus onward ever.

‘And all this monstrous vegetation above ground shall be cast down and embedded deep in the dark bowels of the earth, there under the chemical process of ages to become a fuel for future generations of men, yet unborn, who will require it for their advance in civilisation and knowledge. Yes; these huge ferns, these trunks, and stems, and towering fabrics of trees, shall all crash down—sink deep into the earth with all the rank enfolding mass of undergrowth—there to be jammed and mashed up between beds of fiery stone and grit and clay, and covered with oozy mud and sand, till stratum after stratum of varied matter rises above them, and forms a new surface of earth. On this surface the new vegetation of the world will commence, while that of the old lies beneath,—not rotting in vain, nor slumbering uselessly in darkness, but gradually, age after age, undergoing transmutation by the alchemy of Nature, till verdure becometh veriest blackness, and wood is changed to coal.

‘Then man is born, appearing on the earth only when the earth is ready to receive him, and minister to his wants. At first he useth wood for his fuel; but as his knowledge expands and deepens he penetrates far below the surface, and there finds forests of fuel almost inexhaustible, made ready for his various needs and arts. And when, in far-off ages, these vast stores become exhausted, others will be discovered not only of the same date, but which have been since accumulated; for the same process of transmutation is constantly going on. Thus present time always works for future ages.

‘Slowly as moves the current in my veins,’—the Elfin rose up as he said this—‘veins which seem to your eye to contain a stagnant gold, but whose metallic current, in its appointed period of years, performs each several circulation within me,—yea, slowly as this, or any other invisible progression, move these mighty forest trees towards their downward course, to rise again in coals,—in fire,—and thence ascend to air. Yes, this invisible motion is as certain withal, as that immediate action which mortal nature best can comprehend.’

As the Elfin uttered these last words, the great trees around sank with crashing slant one over the other!—then came rushing, like a sudden tempest, down upon the earth; and the young man was overwhelmed with the foliage, and instantly lost all further consciousness.

The traveller who has journeyed for many days across the fertile levels and shining flats of Holland, must often have bethought him that all this was surging ocean, but a few years ago; in like manner, by an inverse process, the voyager up the Mississippi or Missouri rivers, or the wayfarer for many days through the apparently interminable and dense forests of North America, might look forward to a period when all these masses of vegetation would become coal, if left to be dealt with by the regular process of nature.

The rapid advances of civilisation into these wooded solitudes may prevent the transmutation to which they were otherwise destined; and the same may be said of the forests even on many of the vast tracts, as yet scarcely trodden by the foot of man, in New Zealand and Australia; but many other giant forest tracts exist in unknown regions, which are destined to follow the law of transmutation, and secretly become a carbonic fuel for future ages of discovery.

But what does young Flashley now behold? He is aroused from his trance, and is again conscious of surrounding objects. He is seated, so that he cannot move, on a little wooden bench beneath a low wooden shed, such as labourers ‘knock up’ by way of temporary shelter in the vicinity of some great works. Great works are evidently in hand all around him.

Labourers with pick-axes and spades came hurrying to the spot, and began to dig a circular hole of some seven feet in diameter. Then came others with a great wooden roller on a stand, with a thick rope, like a well-rope, wound round it; and fixing this across the top of the hole, they let down a basket, ever and anon, and brought it up filled with earth and stones. It was evident that they were employed in sinking a shaft.

They worked away at a prodigious rate, the descending baskets continually taking down men with pickaxes and spades; and next with carpenter’s tools and circular pieces of wood-work, with which they made an inner frame round the sides of the shaft below. Bricklayers, with hods of bricks, were next let down in the baskets, and with the support of the circular frame beneath, they rapidly cased the inside of the shaft with brickwork up to the top. More and deeper digging out then took place—more wooden frame-work below, with more brickwork round the sides, and gradually sinking lower and lower. This was continued again and again, till suddenly loud cries from below announced some new event. The diggers had arrived at springs—water was gushing in upon them!

Up came the rope and basket with three men standing up inside and holding on the rope, and two men and a boy clinging round rope and basket, and round each other as they best could, and with no small peril to all. Leaping, scrambling, or lugged to the side, they relieved the basket, which rapidly ran down again to bring up others.

Meanwhile came labourers heavily trotting beneath the weight of pumps and pump-gear; and they rigged up the pump, and as soon as [Pg 31]all the men and boys were out of the shaft, up came the water pouring in a thick volume, now mud-coloured, now clay-coloured, and now grey and chalky. At length the volume became less and less, and soon there was no more. Down again went basket after basket, with men or boys in them. Flashley shuddered, as something within him seemed to say ‘Your turn will come!’ Up came the clay, and the sand, and the gravel, and the chalk as before; and soon a mixture of several earths and stones. Thus did they toil and toil below and above, winding up and winding down, till at last a shout of success was heard faintly echoing from the deep pit beneath, and presently up came a basket full of broken limestone, and grit, and red sandstone—and coals!

Flashley now observed a great turmoil above, but all with definite intention, and preparations for new and larger works. A steam-engine was fitted up in a small brick edifice at a hundred yards distance, from which came a strong rope that passed over a large drum or broad wheel. The rope was then extended to the shaft, over the top of which a small iron wheel was erected; and over this they carried the rope, which was to take down men and bring up coals. A larger measure than the basket, called a corve, was fastened to this rope by chains, and up and down it went bringing great heaps of coals to the surface. After a time, wood-work and iron-work of various kinds were sent down, and sledges and trucks with little wheels; and then broad belts were put round horses, by means of which they were raised, kicking and capering wildly in the air, and staring with horrified eye-balls into the black abyss, down which they were lowered, every limb trembling, and their ears sharpened up to a single hair.

At this sight Flashley’s ears began to prick and tingle in sympathy, for he felt that he should not much longer remain a mere spectator of these descents into the lower regions of the earth.

And now corve after corve full of coals rose in regular succession from the mine, and tram-roads were laid down, upon which little black waggons constantly ran to and fro, carrying away the coals from the pit’s mouth. While all this had been going on, a second shaft was sunk at no great distance; but no coals were seen to issue from it. It was for air, and ventilation of the mine.

The men sometimes went down standing up in the corve, but generally each man sat in the loop of a short chain which he hooked on to the rope; and, in this way, six or seven went swinging down together in a bunch; sometimes ten or twelve in a bunch; and now and then, by some using longer chains than the others, in a double bunch, amounting to as many as twenty, men and boys.

A voice, which seemed to come from beneath the earth, but which poor Flashley recollected too well as that of the Elfin who had carried him so recently into the antediluvian forests and swamps, now called him by his name, with a familiarity that made him shudder. Instantly he found himself borne away from the wooden shed, and placed on the brink of the first shaft. A strange apparatus, composed of a chain with a loop at bottom, and an iron umbrella over head, was now attached to the rope by three chains. It had very much the look of some novel instrument of torture. Into this loop Flashley’s legs were placed in a sitting posture.

‘Straddle your legs!’ cried an old black-visaged miner, as the young man was swung off from the brink, and suspended over the profound abyss below. Not obeying, and, indeed, not instantly understanding the uncouth injunction, Flashley had omitted the ‘straddling;’ in consequence of which the chain loop clipped him close around, and pinched his legs together with a force that would have made him utter a cry, but for the paramount terror of his position. Down he went. Round and round went the shaft-wheel above—faster and faster—and lower and lower he sank from the light of day between the dark circular walls of the shaft.

At first the motion was manifestly rapid. It took away his breath. It became more rapid. He gave himself up for lost. But presently the motion became more smooth, and more steady—then quite steady, so that he thought he was by no means descending rapidly. Presently, again, he fancied he was not descending at all—but stationary—or, rather, ascending. It was difficult to think otherwise. The current of air rising from below, meeting his swiftly descending body, gave him this impression.

He now saw a dim light moving below. It became stronger, and almost immediately after he saw three half-naked demons of the mine, as he thought, who stood ready to receive him.

For the first time he ventured to cast a forlorn look upwards. He beheld the iron umbrella with a light from beneath flashing upon it. Again, he turned his eyes below. He was close down upon the demons. One of them held a lamp up to his face as he descended among them. Whereupon these three demons all uttered a jovial laugh, and welcomed him.

‘At the first “workings” of the Billy-Pitt Mine!’ shouted a voice. ‘Steady the chains!’

The chains were steadied, and in a moment Flashley felt himself launched into a new abyss, down which he descended in utter darkness, and in utter silence, except from the rushing of the air-currents, and the occasional grating of the iron umbrella against the sides of the shaft.

‘Mother,’ then said Will, ‘why will you keep on thinking she’s alive? If she were but dead, we need never name her name again. We’ve never heard nought on her since father wrote her that letter; we never knew whether she got it or not. She’d left her place before then. Many a one dies is——’

‘Oh my lad! dunnot speak so to me, or my heart will break outright,’ said his mother, with a sort of cry. Then she calmed herself, for she yearned to persuade him to her own belief. ‘Thou never asked, and thou’rt too like thy father for me to tell without asking—but it were all to be near Lizzie’s old place that I settled down on this side o’ Manchester; and the very day after we came, I went to her old missus, and asked to speak a word wi’ her. I had a strong mind to cast it up to her, that she should ha’ sent my poor lass away without telling on it to us first; but she were in black, and looked so sad I could na’ find in my heart to threep it up. But I did ask her a bit about our Lizzie. The master would have her turned away at a day’s warning, (he’s gone to t’other place; I hope he’ll meet wi’ more mercy there than he showed our Lizzie,—I do,—) and when the missus asked her should she write to us, she says Lizzie shook her head; and when she speered at her again, the poor lass went down on her knees, and begged her not, for she said it would break my heart, (as it has done, Will—God knows it has),’ said the poor mother, choking with her struggle to keep down her hard overmastering grief, ‘and her father would curse her—Oh, God, teach me to be patient.’ She could not speak for a few minutes,—‘and the lass threatened, and said she’d go drown herself in the canal, if the missus wrote home,—and so—

‘Well! I’d got a trace of my child,—the missus thought she’d gone to th’ workhouse to be nursed; and there I went,—and there, sure enough, she had been,—and they’d turned her out as soon as she were strong, and told her she were young enough to work,—but whatten kind o’ work would be open to her, lad, and her baby to keep?’

Will listened to his mother’s tale with deep sympathy, not unmixed with the old bitter shame. But the opening of her heart had unlocked his, and after a while he spoke.

‘Mother! I think I’d e’en better go home. Tom can stay wi’ thee. I know I should stay too, but I cannot stay in peace so near—her—without craving to see her—Susan Palmer I mean.’

‘Aye, he has. And I love her above a bit. And it’s because I love her I want to leave Manchester. That’s all.’

Mrs. Leigh tried to understand this speech for some time, but found it difficult of interpretation.

‘Why should’st thou not tell her thou lov’st her? Thou ’rt a likely lad, and sure o’ work. Thou ’lt have Upclose at my death; and as for that I could let thee have it now, and keep mysel by doing a bit of charring. It seems to me a very backwards sort o’ way of winning her to think of leaving Manchester.’

‘Oh mother, she’s so gentle and so good,—she’s downright holy. She’s never known a touch of sin; and can I ask her to marry me, knowing what we do about Lizzie, and fearing worse! I doubt if one like her could ever care for me; but if she knew about my sister, it would put a gulf between us, and she’d shudder up at the thought of crossing it. You don’t know how good she is, mother!’

‘Will, Will! if she’s so good as thou say’st, she’ll have pity on such as my Lizzie. If she has no pity for such, she’s a cruel Pharisee, and thou ’rt best without her.’

But he only shook his head, and sighed; and for the time the conversation dropped.

But a new idea sprang up in Mrs. Leigh’s head. She thought that she would go and see Susan Palmer, and speak up for Will, and tell her the truth about Lizzie; and according to her pity for the poor sinner, would she be worthy or unworthy of him. She resolved to go the very next afternoon, but without telling any one of her plan. Accordingly she looked out the Sunday clothes she had never before had the heart to unpack since she came to Manchester, but which she now desired to appear in, in order to do credit to Will. She put on her old-fashioned black mode bonnet, trimmed with real lace; her scarlet cloth cloak, which she had had ever since she was married; and always spotlessly clean, she set forth on her unauthorised embassy. She knew the Palmers lived in Crown Street, though where she had heard it she could not tell; and modestly asking her way, she arrived in the street about a quarter to four o’clock. She stopped to inquire the exact number, and the woman whom she addressed told her that Susan Palmer’s school would not be loosed till four, and asked her to step in and wait until then at her house.

‘For,’ said she, smiling, ‘them that wants Susan Palmer wants a kind friend of ours; so we, in a manner, call cousins. Sit down, missus, sit down. I’ll wipe the chair, so that it shanna dirty your cloak. My mother used to wear them bright cloaks, and they’re right gradely things again a green field.’

‘Han ye known Susan Palmer long?’ asked Mrs. Leigh, pleased with the admiration of her cloak.

‘Ever since they comed to live in our street. Our Sally goes to her school.’

‘Well,—as for looks, I cannot say. It’s so long since I first knowed her, that I’ve clean forgotten what I thought of her then. My [Pg 33]master says he never saw such a smile for gladdening the heart. But may be it’s not looks you’re asking about. The best thing I can say of her looks is, that she’s just one a stranger would stop in the street to ask help from if he needed it. All the little childer creeps as close as they can to her; she’ll have as many as three or four hanging to her apron all at once.’

‘Cocket, bless you! you never saw a creature less set up in all your life. Her father’s cocket enough. No! she’s not cocket any way. You’ve not heard much of Susan Palmer, I reckon, if you think she’s cocket. She’s just one to come quietly in, and do the very thing most wanted; little things, maybe, that any one could do, but that few would think on, for another. She’ll bring her thimble wi’ her, and mend up after the childer o’ nights,—and she writes all Betty Harker’s letters to her grandchild out at service,—and she’s in nobody’s way, and that’s a great matter, I take it. Here’s the childer running past! School is loosed. You’ll find her now, missus, ready to hear and to help. But we none on us frab her by going near her in school-time.’

Poor Mrs. Leigh’s heart began to beat, and she could almost have turned round and gone home again. Her country breeding had made her shy of strangers, and this Susan Palmer appeared to her like a real born lady by all accounts. So she knocked with a timid feeling at the indicated door, and when it was opened, dropped a simple curtsey without speaking. Susan had her little niece in her arms, curled up with fond endearment against her breast, but she put her gently down to the ground, and instantly placed a chair in the best corner of the room for Mrs. Leigh, when she told her who she was. ‘It’s not Will as has asked me to come,’ said the mother, apologetically, ‘I’d a wish just to speak to you myself!’

Susan coloured up to her temples, and stooped to pick up the little toddling girl. In a minute or two Mrs. Leigh began again.

‘Will thinks you would na respect us if you knew all; but I think you could na help feeling for us in the sorrow God has put upon us; so I just put on my bonnet, and came off unknownst to the lads. Every one says you’re very good, and that the Lord has keeped you from falling from his ways; but maybe you’ve never yet been tried and tempted as some is. I’m perhaps speaking too plain, but my heart’s welly broken, and I can’t be choice in my words as them who are happy can. Well now! I’ll tell you the truth. Will dreads you to hear it, but I’ll just tell it you. You mun know,’—but here the poor woman’s words failed her, and she could do nothing but sit rocking herself backwards and forwards, with sad eyes, straight-gazing into Susan’s face, as if they tried to tell the tale of agony which the quivering lips refused to utter. Those wretched stony eyes forced the tears down Susan’s cheeks, and, as if this sympathy gave the mother strength, she went on in a low voice, ‘I had a daughter once, my heart’s darling. Her father thought I made too much on her, and that she’d grow marred staying at home; so he said she mun go among strangers, and learn to rough it. She were young, and liked the thought of seeing a bit of the world; and her father heard on a place in Manchester. Well! I’ll not weary you. That poor girl were led astray; and first thing we heard on it, was when a letter of her father’s was sent back by her missus, saying she’d left her place, or, to speak right, the master had turned her into the street soon as he had heard of her condition—and she not seventeen!’

She now cried aloud; and Susan wept too. The little child looked up into their faces, and, catching their sorrow, began to whimper and wail. Susan took it softly up, and hiding her face in its little neck, tried to restrain her tears, and think of comfort for the mother. At last she said:

‘Lass! I dunnot know,’ said Mrs. Leigh, checking her sobs to communicate this addition to her distress. ‘Mrs. Lomax telled me she went’——

‘Her as lives in Brabazon-street. She telled me my poor wench went to the workhouse fra there. I’ll not speak again the dead; but if her father would but ha’ letten me,—but he were one who had no notion—no, I’ll not say that; best say nought. He forgave her on his death-bed. I dare say I did na go th’ right way to work.’

‘Ay, if it will come to me. Childer used to be fond on me till I got the sad look on my face that scares them, I think.’

But the little girl clung to Susan; so she carried it upstairs with her. Mrs. Leigh sat by herself—how long she did not know.

‘You must listen to me a bit, and not think too much about what I’m going to tell you. Nanny is not my niece, nor any kin to me that I know of. I used to go out working by the day. One night, as I came home, I thought some woman was following me; I turned to look. The woman, before I could see her face (for she turned it to one side), offered me something. I held out my arms by instinct: she dropped a bundle into them with a bursting sob that went straight to my heart. It was a baby. I looked round again; but the woman was gone. She had run away as quick as lightning. There was a little packet of clothes—very few—and as if they were made out of its mother’s gowns, for they were large patterns to buy for a baby. I was always fond of babies; and I had not my wits about me, father says; for it [Pg 34]was very cold, and when I’d seen as well as I could (for it was past ten) that there was no one in the street, I brought it in and warmed it. Father was very angry when he came, and said he’d take it to the workhouse the next morning, and flyted me sadly about it. But when morning came I could not bear to part with it; it had slept in my arms all night; and I’ve heard what workhouse bringing up is. So I told father I’d give up going out working, and stay at home and keep school, if I might only keep the baby; and after awhile, he said if I earned enough for him to have his comforts, he’d let me; but he’s never taken to her. Now, don’t tremble so,—I’ve but a little more to tell,—and maybe I’m wrong in telling it; but I used to work next door to Mrs. Lomax’s, in Brabazon-street, and the servants were all thick together; and I heard about Bessy (they called her) being sent away. I don’t know that ever I saw her; but the time would be about fitting to this child’s age, and I’ve sometimes fancied it was her’s. And now, will you look at the little clothes that came with her—bless her!’

But Mrs. Leigh had fainted. The strange joy and shame, and gushing love for the little child had overpowered her; it was some time before Susan could bring her round. There she was all trembling, sick impatience to look at the little frocks. Among them was a slip of paper which Susan had forgotten to name, that had been pinned to the bundle. On it was scrawled in a round stiff hand,

‘Call her Anne. She does not cry much, and takes a deal of notice. God bless you and forgive me.’

The writing was no clue at all; the name ‘Anne,’ common though it was, seemed something to build upon. But Mrs. Leigh recognised one of the frocks instantly, as being made out of part of a gown that she and her daughter had bought together in Rochdale.

She stood up, and stretched out her hands in the attitude of blessing over Susan’s bent head.

‘God bless you, and show you His mercy in your need, as you have shown it to this little child.’

She took the little creature in her arms, and smoothed away her sad looks to a smile, and kissed it fondly, saying over and over again, ‘Nanny, Nanny, my little Nanny.’ At last the child was soothed, and looked in her face and smiled back again.

‘I never saw her to the best of my knowledge. I think it must be her’s by the frock. But where can she be?’

‘God knows,’ said Mrs. Leigh; ‘I dare not think she’s dead. I’m sure she isn’t.’

‘No! she’s not dead. Every now and then a little packet is thrust in under our door, with may be two half-crowns in it; once it was half-a-sovereign. Altogether I’ve got seven-and-thirty shillings wrapped up for Nanny. I never touch it, but I’ve often thought the poor mother feels near to God when she brings this money. Father wanted to set the policeman to watch, but I said No, for I was afraid if she was watched she might not come, and it seemed such a holy thing to be checking her in, I could not find in my heart to do it.’

‘Oh, if we could but find her! I’d take her in my arms, and we’d just lie down and die together.’

‘Nay, don’t speak so!’ said Susan gently, ‘for all that’s come and gone, she may turn right at last. Mary Magdalen did, you know.’

‘Eh! but I were nearer right about thee than Will. He thought you would never look on him again if you knew about Lizzie. But thou’rt not a Pharisee.’

‘I’m sorry he thought I could be so hard,’ said Susan in a low voice, and colouring up. Then Mrs. Leigh was alarmed, and in her motherly anxiety, she began to fear lest she had injured Will in Susan’s estimation.

‘You see Will thinks so much of you—gold would not be good enough for you to walk on, in his eye. He said you’d never look at him as he was, let alone his being brother to my poor wench. He loves you so, it makes him think meanly on everything belonging to himself, as not fit to come near ye,—but he’s a good lad, and a good son—thou’lt be a happy woman if thou’lt have him,—so don’t let my words go against him; don’t!’

But Susan hung her head and made no answer. She had not known until now, that Will thought so earnestly and seriously about her; and even now she felt afraid that Mrs. Leigh’s words promised her too much happiness, and that they could not be true. At any rate the instinct of modesty made her shrink from saying anything which might seem like a confession of her own feelings to a third person. Accordingly she turned the conversation on the child.

‘I’m sure he could not help loving Nanny,’ said she. ‘There never was such a good little darling; don’t you think she’d win his heart if he knew she was his niece, and perhaps bring him to think kindly on his sister?’

‘I dunnot know,’ said Mrs. Leigh, shaking her head. ‘He has a turn in his eye like his father, that makes me——. He’s right down good though. But you see I’ve never been a good one at managing folk; one severe look turns me sick, and then I say just the wrong thing, I’m so fluttered. Now I should like nothing better than to take Nancy home with me, but Tom knows nothing but that his sister is dead, and I’ve not the knack of speaking rightly to Will. I dare not do it, and that’s the truth. But you mun not think badly of Will. He’s so good hissel, that he can’t understand how any one can do wrong; and, above all, I’m sure he loves you dearly.’

‘I don’t think I could part with Nancy,’ [Pg 35]said Susan, anxious to stop this revelation of Will’s attachment to herself. ‘He’ll come round to her soon; he can’t fail; and I’ll keep a sharp look-out after the poor mother, and try and catch her the next time she comes with her little parcels of money.’

‘Aye, lass! we mun get hold of her; my Lizzie. I love thee dearly for thy kindness to her child; but, if thou can’st catch her for me, I’ll pray for thee when I’m too near my death to speak words; and while I live, I’ll serve thee next to her,—she mun come first, thou know’st. God bless thee, lass. My heart is lighter by a deal than it was when I comed in. Them lads will be looking for me home, and I mun go, and leave this little sweet one,’ kissing it. ‘If I can take courage, I’ll tell Will all that has come and gone between us two. He may come and see thee, mayn’t he?’

‘Father will be very glad to see him, I’m sure,’ replied Susan. The way in which this was spoken satisfied Mrs. Leigh’s anxious heart that she had done Will no harm by what she had said; and with many a kiss to the little one, and one more fervent tearful blessing on Susan, she went homewards.

A Cavalry Officer of large fortune, who had distinguished himself in several actions, having been quartered for a long time in a foreign city, gradually fell into a life of extreme and incessant dissipation. He soon found himself so indisposed to any active military service, that even the ordinary routine became irksome and unbearable. He accordingly solicited and obtained leave of absence from his regiment for six months. But, instead of immediately engaging in some occupation of mind and body, as a curative process for his morbid condition, he hastened to London, and gave himself up entirely to greater luxuries than ever, and plunged into every kind of sensuality. The consequence was a disgust of life and all its healthy offices. He became unable to read half a page of a book, or to write the shortest note; mounting his horse was too much trouble; to lounge down the street was a hateful effort. His appetite failed, or everything disagreed with him; and he could seldom sleep. Existence became an intolerable burthen; he therefore determined on suicide.

With this intention he loaded his pistols, and, influenced by early associations, dressed himself in his regimental frock-coat and crimson sash, and entered St. James’s Park a little before sunrise. He felt as if he was mounting guard for the last time; listened to each sound, and looked with miserable affection across the misty green towards the Horse Guards, faintly seen in the distance.

A few minutes after the officer had entered the park, there passed through the same gate a poor mechanic, who leisurely followed in the same direction. He was a gaunt, half-famished looking man, and walked with a sad air, his eyes bent thoughtfully on the ground, and his large bony hands dangling at his sides.

The officer, absorbed in the act he meditated, walked on without being aware of the presence of another person. Arriving about the middle of a wide open space, he suddenly stopped, and drawing forth both pistols, exclaimed: ‘Oh, most unfortunate and most wretched man that I am! Wealth, station, honour, prospects, are of no avail! Existence has become a heavy torment to me! I have not strength—I have not courage to endure or face it a moment longer!’

With these words he cocked the pistols, and was raising both of them to his head, when his arms were seized from behind, and the pistols twisted out of his fingers. He reeled round, and beheld the gaunt scarecrow of a man who had followed him.

‘What are you?’ stammered the officer, with a painful air; ‘How dare you to step between me and death?’

‘I am a poor hungry mechanic;’ answered the man, ‘one who works from fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and yet finds it hard to earn a living. My wife is dead—my daughter was tempted away from me—and I am a lone man. As I have nobody to live for, and have become quite tired of my life, I came out this morning, intending to drown myself. But as the fresh air of the park came over my face, the sickness of life gave way to shame at my own want of strength and courage, and I determined to walk onwards and live my allotted time. But what are you? Have you encountered cannon-balls and death in all shapes, and now want the strength and courage to meet the curse of idleness?’

The officer was moving off with some confused words, but the mechanic took him by the arm, and threatening to hand him over to the police if he resisted, led him droopingly away.

This mechanic’s work was that of a turner, and he lived in a dark cellar, where he toiled at his lathe from morning to night. Hearing that the officer had amused himself with a little turnery in his youth, the poor artisan proposed to take him down into his workshop. The officer offered him money, and was anxious to escape; but the mechanic refused it, and persisted.

He accordingly took the morbid gentleman down into his dark cellar, and set him to work at his lathe. The officer began very languidly, and soon rose to depart. Whereupon, the mechanic forced him down again on the hard bench, and swore that if he did not do an hour’s work for him, in return for saving his life, he would instantly consign him to a policeman, and denounce him for attempting to commit suicide. At this threat the officer was so confounded, that he at once consented to do the work.

When the hour was over, the mechanic insisted on a second hour, in consequence of the slowness of the work—it had not been a fair hour’s labour. In vain the officer protested, was angry, and exhausted—had the heartburn—pains in his back and limbs—and declared it would kill him. The mechanic was inexorable. ‘If it does kill you,’ said he, ‘then you will only be where you would have been if I had not stopped you.’ So the officer was compelled to continue his work with an inflamed face, and the perspiration pouring down over his cheeks and chin.

At last he could proceed no longer, come what would of it, and sank back in the arms of his persecuting preserver. The mechanic now placed before him his own breakfast, composed of a twopenny loaf of brown bread, and a pint of small beer; the whole of which the officer disposed of in no time, and then sent out for more.

Before the boy who was despatched on this errand returned, a little conversation had ensued; and as the officer rose to go, he smilingly placed his purse, with his card, in the hands of the mechanic. The poor ragged man received them with all the composure of a physician, and with a sort of dry, grim humour which appeared peculiar to him, and the only relief of his otherwise rough and rigid character, made sombre by the constant shadows and troubles of life.

But the moment he read the name on the card, all the hard lines in his deeply-marked face underwent a sudden contortion. Thrusting back the purse and card into the officer’s hand, he seized him with a fierce grip by one arm—hurried him, wondering, up the dark broken stairs, along the narrow passage—then pushed him out at the door!

‘Yes, my daughter; Ellen Brentwood!’ said the mechanic. ‘Are there so many men’s daughters in the list, that you forget her name?’

‘I implore you,’ said the officer, ‘to take this purse. Pray take this purse! If you will not accept it for yourself, I entreat you to send it to her!’

‘Go and buy a lathe with it,’ said the mechanic. ‘Work, man! and repent of your past life!’

So saying, he closed the door in the officer’s face, and descended the stairs to his daily labour.

I am the Raven in the Happy Family—and nobody knows what a life of misery I lead!

The dog informs me (he was a puppy about town before he joined us; which was lately) that there is more than one Happy Family on view in London. Mine, I beg to say, may be known by being the Family which contains a splendid Raven.

I want to know why I am to be called upon to accommodate myself to a cat, a mouse, a pigeon, a ringdove, an owl (who is the greatest ass I have ever known), a guinea-pig, a sparrow, and a variety of other creatures with whom I have no opinion in common. Is this national education? Because, if it is, I object to it. Is our cage what they call neutral ground, on which all parties may agree? If so, war to the beak I consider preferable.

What right has any man to require me to look complacently at a cat on a shelf all day? It may be all very well for the owl. My opinion of him is that he blinks and stares himself into a state of such dense stupidity that he has no idea what company he is in. I have seen him, with my own eyes, blink himself, for hours, into the conviction that he was alone in a belfry. But I am not the owl. It would have been better for me, if I had been born in that station of life.

I am a Raven. I am, by nature, a sort of collector, or antiquarian. If I contributed, in my natural state, to any Periodical, it would be The Gentleman’s Magazine. I have a passion for amassing things that are of no use to me, and burying them. Supposing such a thing—I don’t wish it to be known to our proprietor that I put this case, but I say, supposing such a thing—as that I took out one of the Guinea-Pig’s eyes; how could I bury it here? The floor of the cage is not an inch thick. To be sure, I could dig through it with my bill (if I dared), but what would be the comfort of dropping a Guinea-Pig’s eye into Regent Street?

What I want, is privacy. I want to make a collection. I desire to get a little property together. How can I do it here? Mr. Hudson couldn’t have done it, under corresponding circumstances.

I want to live by my own abilities, instead of being provided for in this way. I am stuck in a cage with these incongruous companions, and called a member of the Happy Family; but suppose you took a Queen’s Counsel out of Westminster Hall, and settled him board and lodging free, in Utopia, where there would be no excuse for ‘his quiddits, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks,’ how do you think he’d like it? Not at all. Then why do you expect me to like it, and add insult to injury by calling me a ‘Happy’ Raven!

This is what I say: I want to see men do [Pg 37]it. I should like to get up a Happy Family of men, and show ’em. I should like to put the Rajah Brooke, the Peace Society, Captain Aaron Smith, several Malay Pirates, Doctor Wiseman, the Reverend Hugh Stowell, Mr. Fox of Oldham, the Board of Health, all the London undertakers, some of the Common (very common I think) Council, and all the vested interests in the filth and misery of the poor, into a good-sized cage, and see how they’d get on. I should like to look in at ’em through the bars, after they had undergone the training I have undergone. You wouldn’t find Sir Peter Laurie ‘putting down’ Sanitary Reform then, or getting up in that vestry, and pledging his word and honour to the non-existence of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, I expect! And very happy he’d be, wouldn’t he, when he couldn’t do that sort of thing?

I have no idea of you lords of the creation coming staring at me in this false position. Why don’t you look at home? If you think I’m fond of the dove, you’re very much mistaken. If you imagine there is the least good will between me and the pigeon, you never were more deceived in your lives. If you suppose I wouldn’t demolish the whole Family (myself excepted), and the cage too, if I had my own way, you don’t know what a real Raven is. But if you do know this, why am I to be picked out as a curiosity? Why don’t you go and stare at the Bishop of Exeter? ’Ecod, he’s one of our breed, if any body is!

Do you make me lead this public life because I seem to be what I ain’t? Why, I don’t make half the pretences that are common among you men! You never heard me call the sparrow my noble friend. When did I ever tell the Guinea-Pig that he was my Christian brother? Name the occasion of my making myself a party to the ‘sham’ (my friend Mr. Carlyle will lend me his favourite word for the occasion) that the cat hadn’t really her eye upon the mouse! Can you say as much? What about the last Court Ball, the next Debate in the Lords, the last great Ecclesiastical Suit, the next long assembly in the Court Circular? I wonder you are not ashamed to look me in the eye! I am an independent Member—of the Happy Family; and I ought to be let out.

I have only one consolation in my inability to damage anything, and that is that I hope I am instrumental in propagating a delusion as to the character of Ravens. I have a strong impression that the sparrows on our beat are beginning to think they may trust a Raven. Let ’em try! There’s an uncle of mine, in a stable-yard down in Yorkshire, who will very soon undeceive any small bird that may favour him with a call.

The dogs too. Ha ha! As they go by, they look at me and this dog, in quite a friendly way. They never suspect how I should hold on to the tip of his tail, if I consulted my own feelings instead of our proprietor’s. It’s almost worth being here, to think of some confiding dog who has seen me, going too near a friend of mine who lives at a hackney-coach stand in Oxford Street. You wouldn’t stop his squeaking in a hurry, if my friend got a chance at him.

It’s the same with the children. There’s a young gentleman with a hat and feathers, resident in Portland Place, who brings a penny to our proprietor, twice a week. He wears very short white drawers, and has mottled legs above his socks. He hasn’t the least idea what I should do to his legs, if I consulted my own inclinations. He never imagines what I am thinking of, when we look at one another. May he only take those legs, in their present juicy state, close to the cage of my brother-in-law of the Zoological Gardens, Regent’s Park!

Call yourselves rational beings, and talk about our being reclaimed? Why, there isn’t one of us who wouldn’t astonish you, if we could only get out! Let me out, and see whether I should be meek or not. But this is the way you always go on in—you know you do. Up at Pentonville, the sparrow says—and he ought to know, for he was born in a stack of chimneys in that prison—you are spending I am afraid to say how much every year out of the rates, to keep men in solitude, where they CAN’T do any harm (that you know of), and then you sing all sorts of choruses about their being good. So am I what you call good—here. Why? Because I can’t help it. Try me outside!

You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, the Magpie says; and I agree with him. If you are determined to pet only those who take things and hide them, why don’t you pet the Magpie and me? We are interesting enough for you, ain’t we? The Mouse says you are not half so particular about the honest people. He is not a bad authority. He was almost starved when he lived in a workhouse, wasn’t he? He didn’t get much fatter, I suppose, when he moved to a labourer’s cottage? He was thin enough when he came from that place, here—I know that. And what does the Mouse (whose word is his bond) declare? He declares that you don’t take half the care you ought; of your own young, and don’t teach ’em half enough. Why don’t you then? You might give our proprietor something to do, I should think, in twisting miserable boys and girls into their proper nature, instead of twisting us out of ours. You are a nice set of fellows, certainly, to come and look at Happy Families, as if you had nothing else to look after!

I take the opportunity of our proprietor’s pen and ink in the evening, to write this. I shall put it away in a corner—quite sure, as it’s intended for the Post Office, of Mr. Rowland Hill’s getting hold of it somehow, and sending it to somebody. I understand he can do anything with a letter. Though the Owl says (but I don’t believe him), that the present prevalence of measles and chicken-pox among [Pg 38]infants in all parts of this country, has been caused by Mr. Rowland Hill. I hope I needn’t add that we Ravens are all good scholars, but that we keep our secret (as the Indians believe the Monkeys do, according to a Parrot of my acquaintance) lest our abilities should be imposed upon. As nothing worse than my present degradation as a member of the Happy Family can happen to me, however, I desert the General Freemasons’ Lodge of Ravens, and express my disgust in writing.

[Scene, Purgatory (1778). The Shades of an Englishman and a Frenchman are pacing by the side of a gloomy river.]

Frenchman. There are some new arrivals. One, who comes
Straight from the finest kingdom of the earth,
Has caused a vast sensation. Here he is!

Volt. Good day, Messieurs,—if we may call this day!
Faith, there’s a pleasant warmth about the place.
After our rapid journey thro’ the dark,
With cold winds driving us, and jarring atoms
Whistling about our ears, ’tis not so bad
To reach this hot and twilight land at last.
Sir, if’t be not a liberty, may I ask
For a pinch of charcoal.

Volt. France, sir, is growing young;
Thro’ me, and d’Alembert, and Diderot,
And that mad envious watchmaker, who did
Good in his own despite. Before the earth
Shall have swung a dozen times about the sun,
Our dragon’s seed will rise and show some fruit.

Volt. Without doubt, sir.
A strange place this. Our French geographers
Had doubts if such a region were. Nay, some
Proved to the satisfaction of their friends,
That ’twas impossible.

Volt. Sir, spare your arithmetic.
I am not curious. Yet, among these last,
There’s surely one who dwelt in Prussia once?
He made bad verses, which I mended. Eh?
One Frederick?

Volt. Is ’t so? N’importe.
A sedan will do for me. Now that I think of it,
Where are your ladies? Any of them from France?

Eng. Shoals, shoals, sir.
We’ve larger, lighter batches from that land,
Than all the rest o’ the globe.

Volt. I shall be glad
To renew friendship with some few of them.
Madame du Châtelet—

Volt. I had some strong delusion of that sort.
’Twas when she flattered me. But, tell me, sir,
What time do you dine in this agreeable land?
I feel no appetite.

Volt. I’ faith, this jest begins
To grow a little serious. I thought I knew
Somewhat of most things; but this puzzles me.
Lest I should err again, pray what do you here,
In this most quiet kingdom—all day long?
Nay, day and night? What pastime?—

Eng. We repose!
Sometimes we dream; of times and people gone,—
Sometimes of our own country; we retrace
Our course in earthly life; our deeds—

Volt. I have done
Some deeds myself. Perhaps, Monsieur, you have seen
A dictionary of mine, which made some noise?
A fable or two, which told some bitter truths?
A famous poem?—mark me.—

Eng. Not so:—a work less large
In bulk; yet greater. ’Twas indeed no more
Than a small memorial; touch’d wi’ the light of Truth,
The strength of Right. Fine Sense and Pity joined,
Begat it. It came forth, midst tears, and scorn,
And burning anger. These inspired your pen
To the argument, when murdered Calas died.

Volt. You bring me light, sir,—comfort,—almost faith.
The dark thoughts that at times have haunted me,—
The small ambition to be thought a wit,—
The wish to sting my many enemies,—
Seem disappearing. Sir, my thanks! I feel
A warmth about my bosom, and begin
To think that joys dwell not alone on earth,
But some survive even in Purgatory.

In red hot haste to get out of a Colonial town—where the life was too much like what I had sailed eighteen thousand miles to avoid,—I agreed to my Mr. Gumscrew’s terms without debate. Board and lodging for self and horse, undertaking to do the light work of the farm for twelve months without wages. On these conditions I took up my abode in a wooden hut thatched with bark, on which any well-bred short-horn would have looked with contempt. The sun and moon shone clearly through the chinks between the weather boards; my bedstead was a bullock’s hide stretched over four posts driven into the ground, a slip of green hide hanging from wall to wall, formed at once my clothes-horse and chest of drawers.

To the great contempt of my companion and fellow lodger, the overseer, I did put up a shelf for a few of my books, and drive in a nail for a small shaving glass, although not then able to boast a beard. The floor was of clay, variegated with large holes where the morning broom had swept too hard. The fire-place, built of unhewn stone, formed a recess half the size of our apartment. The kitchen was detached, and although small, rather better constructed than our chief hut, for the cook built it himself, and being an ‘old hand’ took pains with his special domain.

If I had been ordered into such a dog-kennel in England how I should have grumbled, and devoured my heart, in vain complainings; but now—it was my own choice, I had hope before me,—the glorious climate, the elastic atmosphere made chinks and cracks in walls of no consequence; and when inclined to grumble, I thought of the dark den-like lawyer’s office in which I had wearied away the last six months of my European life.

After a few days spent in cantering round the neighbourhood, I was ready to commence my light ‘duties.’

Returning home one evening I stopped my horse to look at our ploughman breaking up a fine piece of alluvial flat, which had recently been cleared and fenced in. He had ten pair of oxen and a heavy swing plough at work. There was a man to help him to drive, but his voice was as good as his hands, and it was a pleasure to see him, as he turned up a broad furrow of virgin soil, and halted his team, and lifted the big plough over the roots of the stumps that dotted the paddock, as if it had been a feather weight. Our ploughman, Jem Carden—Big Jem he was commonly called—was a specimen of English peasantry such as we don’t often see in Australia, tall, though a round shouldered stoop took off something from his height, large limbed but active, with a curly fair-haired bullet head, light-blue good-natured eyes, and hooked nose, large mouth full of good teeth, a solid chin, a colour which hard work and Australian sun could not extract, and an expression of respectful melancholy good nature that at once prepossessed me in his favour. He was then in the prime of life, a perfect master of every kind of rural work, ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, thatching, breaking-in, and driving bullocks and horses, and not less an adept in all Colonial pursuits, for he could do as much with a saw, an auger, an axe, and an adze as a European workman with a complete chest of tools. He was a very good fellow, too, always ready to help any one at a pinch; when the stockman broke his leg he walked twenty miles through the rain, a tropical rain in bucketfuls, although they had fought the day before about a dog of Jem’s, the stockman had been ill using; and yet Big Jem was a convict, or speaking colonially, ‘a prisoner.’

About a year after my arrival at the Station, Mr. Gumscrew having purchased a large herd of cattle a bargain from a person living some 200 miles from us, in the Mochi district, where all the grass was burned up, determined on sending me for them, as there was little doing at Springhill, and left me to choose any one I pleased to accompany me. I chose Carden.

We got our horses into the paddock close to the hut overnight; the next morning, at sunrise, buckled a blanket, a couple of shirts, a bag of tea and sugar, a quart pot, and a pair of hobbles to my saddle, and started in high spirits.

Now, living in the Bush, and especially while travelling, there is not the same distance between a master and well-behaved man, although a prisoner, as in towns. From the first I was interested in the ploughman, so I took the opportunity of this expedition to learn more about him.

We travelled all day from sunrise to sundown, seldom going off a walk, at which our horses could do nearly five miles an hour: toward evening we tried to strike some station or shepherd’s hut, the whereabouts of which Jem generally knew by the mixture of experience and instinct that constitute a perfect Bushman; if we could not light upon a hut we camped down near a waterhole, lighted a fire on some hollow fallen gum-tree, hobbled out our horses on the pasture near, put the quart pots to boil, the damper (flour cake) in the ashes to bake, and smoked our pipes until all was ready; then rolling up each in his blanket, slept soundly on the bare ground.

I think it was on the third day that we came upon a long stretch of open undulating country, where the grass scarcely gave back a sound to our horses’ feet. I dropped the reins on my little mare’s neck, and began to fill my pipe; but seeing Carden’s pipe still stuck in his straw hat, I knew he must be bankrupt in a Bushman’s greatest luxury, so handed him my pouch, and said, ‘Come, ride along side me, and tell me how you came here; for I cannot imagine how so honest a fellow ever got into trouble.’

‘Master,’ he answered, ‘I’ll tell you all the truth; but give me a little time, for my heart’s full, and it will take us a good three hours to get across these plains.’ So we paced on in silence for the space of one pipe, when he spoke again, and said, ‘Master, excuse me, but I’m not much of a scholar, and if you would read me a chapter from this book, it would do me a power o’ good. I try sometimes myself to spell it out, but somehow I can’t see the letters “plain.”’ His eyes were full of tears as he timidly handed a black clasped copy of the Bible.

There was something painful in the emotion and humbleness of a strong man before me a stripling alone with him in a desert.

I took the book from him; on the flyleaf was written, ‘Lucy Carden on her Marriage from her friend and pastor the Rev. Charles Calton,’ and turning it over it opened at the 51st Psalm: instinctively, I began to read aloud, until I came to the 17th verse, ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’ At these words my companion wept aloud, and murmured, ‘Oh, my poor wife’—and I, too, I knew not why, also wept.

Then we rode on in silence for some time; from a confused reverie I was awakened by my companion saying in a hoarse voice, ‘Master, I am ready—I can tell you my story now.

‘I was born in a village in Hampshire, the youngest of a large family—the son of labouring people. As soon as I had strength and voice enough, I was sent into the fields to scare the birds from the corn, and at eight years old, I began to drive plough for my father, so I got very little schooling but what I picked up in the winter evenings at a school kept by an old pensioned soldier. To tell the truth, I never liked my books when I was young, for which now I have often need to be sorry. But I was a strong hearty lad, and no out-door work came amiss to me. As soon as I could stand to them, I took hold of the stilts of the plough, and by the time I was sixteen, I could do a man’s day’s work.

‘When I was seventeen I won a great ploughing-match. Among the young gentlemen that came to see it was our young ’Squire, that owned nearly all the parish. He had just left College, and come into his fortune, for his father had been dead a many years. He was so much pleased with what he saw at the ploughing-match, that he determined to take the Home Farm into his own hands, and nothing would serve him but that I must be his head ploughman; indeed, I believe if I had understood writing and cyphering, he would have made me his bailiff,—for he was a young gentleman that nothing could stop when he took a fancy into his head. I mind well when he sent me off at twelve o’clock at night to London in his own carriage to buy a team of Suffolk Punches, he had heard of from a gentleman that was dining with him. Well, this made a man of me at once. I was as tall as I am now, and I’m afraid I grew spoiled with so much good. I was courting my Lucy at the time. She was the only daughter of the blacksmith in the next village, and if ever there was an angel she was one. The parson and his daughters noticed her a good deal, because she was clever at her book and sang so sweetly at church. Her father was a drunken old chap; her mother had been dead many years. I used to look out for him when he came down to our village, as he often did to drink and play at bowls, and see him safe over the stiles when he was ill able to walk straight. Many and many a day, after ploughing all day, and supping up my horses, have I walked five miles, half leading, half carrying, old Johnny Dunn, for the sake of five minutes’ talk to dear Lucy. Well, one night, in a wet autumn, I was up at the Hall to take the ’Squire’s instructions; for he loved, when he had strangers from London, to have me in after dinner, to give me a glass o’ wine and make believe of talking farming; old Dunn tried to get home after an evening’s bouse by a short cut over a ford I had often led him, missed his footing, and was found by some lads that went next morning to take up their night lines, stone dead—drowned.

‘There was poor Lucy left all alone in the world, for her father, who had been a dragoon farrier, and married one of Parson Calton’s maid-servants, had no relations in that part of the country.

‘I was getting good wages: there was a cottage and garden, belonging to the ploughman of the Home Farm, that I had never taken up, because I had lived with my father. The ’Squire made me many presents, and I had saved a little money, made by working at different things in winter evenings, being always handy with tools. Well, to make a long story short, Lucy found her father had left nothing behind him but a quarter’s pension he had not had time to drink, a few pounds due for work, and the furniture of his cottage. She had nobody to take care of her, so we moved the furniture to my cottage, and were married before I was nineteen, and on the day Parson Calton gave her that Bible, that never has left me since I left her. Many people blamed us, and wanted us to wait. I don’t think good Mr. Calton quite liked it, but his daughters were well pleased, and gave Lucy her wedding dress. Oh, God, sir, when I think upon those days, on two years that followed, and think of what I am, I wonder how I live and keep my senses. There was not a happier couple or prettier cottage in the county. My working days were not hard, for I had Lucy to welcome me home; and then on Sundays, to see her dressed in her best and walk across the fields to church, and hear her sing! Why, there was not a lady in the county could compare with her, and I have heard many great gentlemen say so.

‘I had a child, too, a darling little Lucy. * * * But this was too much happiness to last; we had been married just two years. The ’Squire stopped at our cottage, as he was riding by on his way to London, to settle about a ploughing-match that he had determined to make up for the next week, and talked over a plan for breaking up a lot of old pasture. A fortnight afterwards the bailiff came down with a letter in his hand, and said with a grave face, “Carden, I have some bad news for you; the ’Squire has determined to give up farming, and is going to foreign parts. I am to discharge all the hinds as soon as I can get a tenant for the farm. You are to be paid up to Christmas, and you may keep the cottage until the farm’s let, but I rather think Farmer Bullivant will take it.”

‘Here was a blow; we had thought ourselves provided for for life, and now we had a home and a living to seek. Farmer Bullivant would not keep me on, I knew well; he had his own ploughman, a relation. Well, we were put to sore straits; but at last I got another place, although at lower wages, some distance from my native village. Hard times came on; wages were lowered again and again; and at the same time a cry rose up round the country against the threshing-machines that were being very much used, and were throwing a good many poor people out of work. The people in England, sir, are not as we are here, sir, a very few words, and one or two desperate fellows can always lead them; they are so ignorant, they are ready for anything when they are badly off.

‘I went up one night to get my wages, and behold, when I got me to the farmer’s house, the bailiffs were in, and he going to be sold up, and the winter coming on. I walked toward home half mad; passing by a public-house, who should be at the door but the ’Squire’s gamekeeper—he kept him on—and he being sorry to see me so downcast, for he was a good kind fellow, though a gamekeeper, would make me take a glass with him; I think I had not been in a public-house since I had been married. The drink and the grief flew up into my head; before I got home, I fell in with a crowd of friends and fellow-labourers holloing and shouting. They had been breaking Farmer Bullivant’s threshing-machine, and swore they would not leave one in the county. I began to try to persuade them to go away quietly, but they ended by persuading me; we met a machine, as ill-luck would have it, on the road just turning into Farmer Grinder’s stack-yard. We smashed it to pieces; in the middle of the row the soldiers came up. I was taken in the act, with about twenty others; they lodged us in Winchester gaol the same night. The assizes were sitting; they tried us in batches, and found us guilty almost as soon as we came into court. I never saw my poor wife until the moment when the judge sentenced me to transportation for life. I hear her scream often now; I wake with it in the middle of the night. We had no time to get any one to speak to character for us; we had no lawyer or counsellor. Such poor people as we were had no friends of any use. The farmers who knew us were too angry and too frightened—although some of them were the first to speak against the threshing-machines. Good Parson Calton had been away, ill and dying, or I do not think it would have happened. For where are we poor countrymen to look for a friend wiser than ourselves if the Parson or the ’Squire does not stand by us?

‘My wife came to see me in prison, and wept so we could not talk much; for it was so quick, so sudden—it seemed like a horrid dream; for me to be a felon—for me, that could not strike a blow against any man, except in fair fight—that never wronged a living soul out of a farthing—to be the same as robbers and murderers! Well, I advised her to get quit of all bits of furniture, and try to get to service, through the Miss Caltons. I knew they were not rich, and could not help except by giving her a good name—by giving a character to the convict’s wife! We were to have met again the next day; the poor soul had walked twenty miles to Winchester, and a fruit-woman that was in court took pity on her when she fainted, and gave her half her bed. But the same night I was waked up from the first sound sleep I had had since I was taken, and put into a coach with a lot of others, with a guard of soldiers, and sent off to the hulks; and in three days we sailed for Botany Bay, as they called it in England. Oh, sir, that time was terrible. There were many on board that thought the punishment a pleasure voyage. They had no wives, no children to love. They had no good name to lose; they had not lived in one parish to know and love every stick and stone in it. They boasted of their villany, and joked at the disgraceful dress; they only found fault with the food, and the labour of helping to stow the ship; I did not care for the food or the work. They made me a constable on the voyage, and I landed with a good character from the surgeon in charge. I was assigned straight away to Major Z——. You must have heard, sir, what a terrible man he was. A rich man that had forgotten he had once been poor. He had more cattle and stock of all kinds than he could count; he starved us, he cursed us, and very few Mondays passed that he didn’t take up five or six for a flogging. But he was very glad to get me and three or four of the same lot, for it was not often such regular first-rate husbandmen came into the colony, so we were better treated than many. For in those times, if masters could be hard where they took a spite, still prisoners had a good chance of getting on. Well, my spirits rose and I began to have some hope when I found that, with good luck, I might have my “ticket,” [Pg 42]that would give liberty in the colony, in seven years, and when I saw so many who had been prisoners riding about in their carriages, or driving teams of their own, as good as the ’Squire’s. Indeed, those that had good masters got on very well, but it was commonly thought that Major Z—— never parted with a good man if he could help it. He was sure to make up some charge and get him flogged, so as to put off the time for his getting a ticket of leave.

‘I had driven oxen at home and soon got into the ways of the colony, when, one day, the master came down to see a new piece of land I had been breaking up near a house he was building, and was so pleased that he began to talk quite kindly, although every second word was an oath, and asked me all about myself. Well, I told him, and made bold to say that, as he was going to build a large dairy, if he would send for my wife and child we would serve him for any wages he choose, all the days of our lives. He turned on me like a tiger, he cursed me, he told me he wanted no women or brats on his estate, no canting saints, no parsons, all he wanted was men that could work, and work they should. “If, you fool,” he said, “you had asked for a gallon of rum among the gang you might have had it, and drowned all your troubles, but I’ll have no women here, wives or no wives.”

‘I think at that moment Satan took possession of me. I was ready to do anything for my liberty, or to be free from my tyrant, and there were tempters enough all round me. A few days afterwards one of my fellow servants, an old hand, who had heard the last part of my master’s speech, came to me in the evening, and, after telling me that he supposed I had found out that nothing was to be got by fair means, that my master was a rogue, in fact that every one was a rogue who was not a fool, he began to hint that he could tell me a way to get my wife out and my liberty too. I swallowed the bait, I listened; then he went on to show how with money anything could be done in the colony, told me instances of tickets and conditional pardons, besides escapes managed by bribing, and then, when I was thoroughly poisoned, he swore me to secrecy and explained how, out of a thousand bullocks, a few pair would never be missed; so that all I had to do when I took a bullock team to Sydney was to yoke an extra pair of young bullocks, making ten or twelve pair, instead of eight or ten—a butcher, near where the drays generally stood, was all ready prepared to take and pay for, as many pair of bullocks as I chose to drive in. They were worth from 10l. to 12l. each, and I was to have 6l. for every pair.

‘I refused point blank. “Well,” he said, “I rely on your honour not to peach.” He knew he had caught me. My master took an early opportunity of having me flogged on a charge of insolence; the magistrates were two friends who had been dining with him. My tempter came to me again, and, on the next opportunity, I drove in the bullocks and became a thief. Having begun I could not stop; my tempter became my tyrant; to drown care I began to drink and to associate with the old hands, and then the money, for which I had resigned body and soul, melted away. What I saved up I knew not what to do with, and so I went on getting worse and worse, until one day, just as I was driving a pair of young heifers into the butcher’s yard, I was arrested, tried, and convicted on the evidence of my fellow-servant, who, having been found out in another robbery, saved himself by turning on me. I was sentenced to three years hard labour in an iron gang on the Blue mountains. What I suffered in those three years no tongue can tell. I was coupled with a wretch who had been a thief from his childhood, a burglar, and a murderer, but there was one man, a political prisoner sentenced to the iron gang for striking his overseer, who saved me, and spoke words of comfort to me; my term was shortened a year for rescuing a gentleman from a bush ranger, and Major Z—— having left the colony, I was assigned to my present master. In another year I shall have my ticket, but what I shall do heaven only knows. I have had one letter from my wife; she was living as dairy-maid with one of the Miss Caltons, who had married a country gentleman; they were very good to her, and I think her letter, full of good words, helped to save me from total ruin. But you, sir, are almost the only gentleman that has spoken a kind word to me in the Colony. We live like beasts of the field, working and well-fed, but nothing more. On many stations the prisoners don’t even know when Sunday comes round, and we die like dogs.’

Here he paused: and I felt so much affected by his melancholy story, that I could not at the time answer him, or offer any words of comfort.

In my various wanderings I lost sight of Carden for two or three years; but one day as I was going down to Sydney with a mob of horses of my own for sale, at a roadside inn I met Jem Carden, at the head of a party of splitters and fencers doing some extensive work in the neighbourhood on a new station; he was looking thin, haggard, nervous, and was evidently ashamed to meet me. In fact he was only just recovering from a drunken spree; I taxed him with his folly; he owned it, and showed me the cause. He could earn with ease at piece-work, from 5l. to 8l. a week, building stations and stockyards. Twice he had saved, and paid into the hands of apparently respectable parties, 40l., to remit for the passage of his wife and daughter. The first time the dashing Mr. W—— was insolvent two days after receiving the money. In the second instance he was kept nine months in suspense, and then learned from England by letter and in the Sydney list [Pg 43]of bankrupts, that he had been again swindled. ‘And what,’ he asked, when he had concluded this tale of pitiful, contemptible robbery, ‘what can a poor fellow do but drink his cares away, when all striving to be honest and happy is in vain!’

I thought, but did not say, how uneven were the laws that sent Jem to the iron gang for stealing a bullock, and had no punishment for those who devoured his hard earnings, and laughed at him from their carriages. Thank God, a better system has been established, and government now charges itself with the passage money of poor men’s relations.

But barren sympathy was of little use, so I turned to the ploughman, and said, ‘What money have you left?’ ‘About 10l. in the landlord’s hands; he’s an honest man, although a publican.’ ‘And what are you to have from this contract?’ ‘My share will be over 40l., and I can get it done in less than six weeks, working long hours.’ ‘Then hand me over the 10l., give me your solemn promise not to touch anything stronger than Bushman’s tea for twelve months, and to let me have 30l. out of your contract when I return this way, and I will send the money for you.’

To cut this long story short, I put the business in the hands of my excellent friend B******, one of the modern race of Australians, wealthy, warm-hearted, and liberal, who was on his way to England. Within a year the ploughman embraced his wife; they returned with me to my station, they passed some years with me, and some eventful scenes, before the district round me was settled. They have now a station and farm of their own; they are growing rich, as all such industrious people do in Australia, but they have not forgotten that they once were poor. If you need a subscription for a church, a school, or a sick emigrant, you may go to Mr. Carden, safe of a generous answer. It is Mr. Carden now; and perhaps that fine little boy may sit a native Representative in an Australian Parliament. A tall youth who rides beside him, is not his son but the orphan child of a poor prisoner, whom he adopted ‘to make up in part,’ as he expressed it, ‘for what happened long ago.’

Lucy Carden, now the mother of a numerous brood of Australians, has grown happy and portly, although you may trace on her mild features the tide marks of past griefs.

The last time I saw them I was on my way to England. ‘Oh, sir,’ said the happy husband and father, ‘tell the wretched and the starving how honest, sober labour is sure of a full reward here. Tell them that here poverty may be turned to competence, crime to repentance and happiness. And pray tell the great gentlemen who rule us that we much need both preachers and teachers in this wide Bush of Australia, but that it is virtuous wives who rule us most, and in a lovely land make the difference between happiness and misery.’

If, from the heights of our boasted civilisation, we take a retrospect of past history, or a survey of other nations—savage nations included,—we shall, with humiliation, be forced to acknowledge that in no age and in no country have the dead been disposed of so prejudicially to the living as in Great Britain. Consigning mortal remains to closely-packed burial-grounds in crowded cities; covering—scarcely interring them—so superficially that exposure sometimes shocks the sentiments, while the exhalations of putrefaction always vitiate the air, is a custom which prejudice has preserved the longest to this land. A calculation made by Dr. Playfair, and quoted by the Board of Health in their admirable report on Burials, estimates the amount of noxious gases evolved annually from the metropolitan grave-yards alone at 55.261 cubic feet per acre. The average of corpses packed into each acre is 1117; therefore, as 52,000 interments take place every year, the entire amount of poison-gas emitted per annum to enter the lungs of the Londoners, and hasten their descent to the grave to contribute fresh supplies for their successors, is 2,572,580 cubic feet.

It is our present purpose to see whether such a fact can be paralleled by researches into the past or by a short survey of the manners and customs of existing savage life itself—adding such of the singular or instructive funeral ceremonies of the various people as will prove interesting.

Among the most ancient records are those of the Egyptians. The care of that extraordinary people for their dead, both as to actual preservation and that they should not become noxious to the living, has never been surpassed. This partly arose, it is true, from a superstitious reverence for the material part of man; but that superstition doubtless originated from the wise sanitary regulations of their early sages. The laws of Leviticus—many of them instituted to prevent disease and the depreciation of the species—formed, in like manner, a main part of the religion of the Jews.

The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul would return, after the lapse of ages, to inhabit, in this world, the same body from which it had been separated by death. In this belief commenced the process of embalming by which the bodies of that people have been preserved with wonderful integrity to the present day. To so extraordinary a point had the antiseptic art been brought that, as appears from Diodorus, there was a mode of preservation which ensured the retaining of the eyebrows, eyelashes, and the general external character of the person, who could be recognised by their form and features. ‘Whence,’ says Dr. Pocock, in his Travels through Egypt, ‘many of the Egyptians kept the bodies of their ancestors in houses [but [Pg 44]never near their own residences] adorned at a very great expense, and had the pleasure to see their forefathers, who had been dead many years before they were born, and to observe all their features as well as if they were living.’ The painter’s art has in modern times superseded these curious picture galleries.

Another peculiarity could not have been due to superstition, but to a more rational care of the living than we at present evince, namely, the distance of their great burial-places from their chief cities. The Nile intervened; the Necropoli, including the range of stupendous pyramids, were formed on the western, while the most considerable towns were on the eastern bank of that river. Diodorus gives an interesting account of the ceremonies arising out of this wise arrangement.

‘Those who prepare to bury a relative, give notice of the day intended for the ceremony, to the Judges and all the friends of the deceased, informing them that the body will pass over the lake of that district, or that part of the Nile, to which the dead belonged; when, on the Judges assembling to the number of more than forty, and ranging themselves in a semicircle on the further side of the lake, the vessel provided for this purpose is set afloat. It is guided by a pilot called in the Egyptian language, Charon; and hence they say that Orpheus, travelling in old times into Egypt, and seeing this ceremony, formed the fable of the infernal regions, partly from what he saw, and partly from invention. The vessel being launched on the lake, before the coffin which contains the body is put on board, the law permits all who are so inclined, to bring forward an accusation against it. If any one steps forth, and proves that the deceased had led an evil life, the Judges pronounce sentence, and the body is precluded from burial; but if the accuser is convicted of injustice in his charge, he himself incurs a considerable penalty. When no accuser appears, or when the accusation is proved to be false, the relations present change their expressions of sorrow into praises of the dead.’ The author adds, that many kings had been judicially deprived of the honours of burial by the indignation of their people; and that the dread of such a fate had the most salutary influence on the lives of the Egyptian sovereigns.

Two singular coincidences will occur to the reader on perusing this passage:—A postmortem trial, precisely similar to that described above, forms part of the Roman Catholic ritual of Canonising a Saint. Before the defunct can be inscribed in the Calendar, a person appears to set forth all the involuntary candidate’s sins and backslidings during life; and if these be of a venal character he is rejected. This officer is called ‘The Devil’s advocate.’ Secondly, the ancient Egyptian and excellent system of funereal water conveyance is, it would appear, to be revived. In the Report of the Board of Health, dated two thousand years later than that of Diodorus Siculus, the most extensive new burial-place recommended, is to be on the borders of the Thames; and one of the Board’s propositions runs thus:—

‘That, considering the river as a highway passing through the largest extent of densely-peopled districts, the facilities for establishing houses of reception on its banks, the conveniences arising from the shorter distances within the larger portion of the same area for the removal of the bodies to such houses of reception, the advantages of steam boat conveyance over that by railway in respect to tranquillity, and the avoidance of any large number of funerals at any one point, at any one time, and of any interference with common traffic and with the throng of streets; and, lastly, taking into account its great comparative cheapness, it is desirable that the chief metropolitan cemetery should be in some eligible situation accessible by water carriage.’

The case of the Jews is stronger than that of the Egyptians, as showing saner modes of burial than we have so long persisted in. They had no especial regard for the mere body, except as the temple of the soul; hence, a burial-place was, with them, the house of the living; an expression finely implying that death is the parent of immortal life. Their cemeteries were always in sequestered spots. In the 23rd chap. of Genesis we find that Abraham, when his wife Sarah died, desired a family burying-ground from the tribe among whom he lived:—

A ready consent was given, and he was offered the choice of their sepulchres. But this did not satisfy him: he wished to obtain the Cave of Machpelah, and the field in which it lay, from Ephron, the son of Zohar. The generous proprietor offered it as a gift, but the Patriarch purchased it. Thus the first transference on record of real property was the acquisition, in perpetuity, by the patriarch Abraham, of a family burying-ground especially selected for its seclusion.

Nor was the classic heathen of a more western clime less mindful of public health in his modes of disposing of the dead. The Romans, being largely indebted to the Greeks for their science, literature, arts, and habits of life, of course adopted their funeral ceremonies; and one general description may suffice for those of both. By law of the Twelve Tables, burial was prohibited within the city of Rome, and therefore cemeteries were provided without the walls.⁠[D]

Immediately after the death, the body was washed, anointed with aromatic unguents, and sometimes embalmed. It was shrouded [Pg 45]in fine linen; white with the Greeks and black with the Romans. If the departed was a person of rank, he was clothed in his garments of ceremony, kept for seven days during the preparations for the funeral, and lay in state in the vestibule of his house, at the door of which were placed branches of pine or cypress, together with the hair of the deceased, which had been consecrated to the infernal deities. In Rome, between death and burial seven days elapsed. The funeral was attended by the friends and relatives of the deceased, who were bidden by a herald, pronouncing the invitation:—‘It is time for whoever wishes, to go to the funeral of N. son of N.; who is now to be borne from home.’⁠[E]

The remains of persons who had done service to the state were honoured by the attendance of public officers, and sometimes the procession was followed by large bodies of the people. According to one of the laws of Solon, the Athenians carried out the bodies of the dead before sunrise, especially the young, in order that the orb of day might not throw his light on so sad a spectacle, or by his heat induce decomposition prematurely. The body was laid on a bier, crowned with flowers, and having the face exposed. The bier was followed by the funeral procession, among whom, at Roman funerals, there was often a mime, or buffoon, wearing the dress of the deceased, and giving satirical imitations of his bearing and manners. At the funeral of the Emperor Vespasian, the lustre of whose many virtues was tarnished by love of money, a celebrated buffoon (as Suetonius tells us) acted the part of the emperor,—mimicking, as was customary, the deportment and language of the deceased. Having asked the managers of the funeral what would be the amount of its expense, and being answered that it would cost a sum equivalent to eighty-thousand pounds, he replied, that if they would give him eight hundred, he would throw himself into the Tiber—for drowning was thought so revolting a death, that bodies rejected by the waves were denied sepulture. The bust of the deceased, his warlike trophies, or decorations of honour, were conspicuously exhibited in the procession. His family followed the bier, walking bareheaded and barefooted, with dishevelled hair, and mourning dresses of black; and after them came bands of hired mourners, male and female, who rent the air with cries and lamentations. Thus the body was conveyed to the place of sepulture.

The claims to antiquity vaunted by the Chinese next force upon attention their provisions against allowing the dead to interfere with the well-being of the living. As they believe themselves perfect, to alter any one custom is sacrilege punishable with death; hence they observe the same ceremonies now, that their ancestors did several thousand years ago. ‘Their tombs and sepulchres,’ says Mr. Sirr, ‘are always built outside the city walls, and usually upon a hill, which is planted with cypress and pine trees.’ In China nothing is so offensive to good breeding as the remotest allusion to death. A number of amusing periphrases are therefore resorted to when a hint of the subject is unavoidable; a funeral is called from the kind of mourning used: ‘A white affair.’

In Persia intramural burials are also forbidden. ‘The place of sepulture,’ says a Persian sage, ‘must be far from dwellings: near it must be no cultivation; nor the business necessarily attending the existence of dwellings; no habitation nor population must be near it.’ This is another ancient injunction in remarkable accordance with one of the recommendations of our modern sages, the Board of Health.

The Mahommedans again show much better taste than Christians in their Mausoleums and burial-places—they never bury in their temples or within the walls of a town.

Among the funeral customs of the other inhabitants of the East, that of burning the dead is of very great antiquity. The Jews adopted it only in emergencies. When Saul fell on the fatal field of Gilboa, and his body was left exposed by the enemy, it was burnt by his faithful followers (1 Samuel, chap, xxxi., v. 11–13). From a passage in the book of Amos (chap. vi., v. 10), it appears that the bodies of the dead were burnt in times of pestilence, no doubt on sanitary grounds. For the same reason, incineration has been habitually perpetuated in tropical climates, but has been accompanied unhappily with the most horrible superstitions, particularly in Hindustan, where it is associated with the self-sacrifice of the widow on the funeral pile of her dead husband. The origin of this last custom, as a religious rite, has been the subject of much investigation and discussion among learned Orientalists; but Colebrooke, in his paper on the ‘Duties of a Faithful Hindoo Widow,’ in the fourth volume of the Asiatic Researches, has shown that this, among other duties of a faithful widow, is prescribed by the ancient Sanscrit books of the Bramins. Bernier, the French traveller, who visited India at the time when this practice of self-immolation was very general, gives striking descriptions of several scenes of this kind which he witnessed. The heroine of one of them was a woman who had been engaged in some love intrigues with a young Mahommedan, her neighbour, who was a tailor, and could play finely on the tabor. This woman, in the hopes of marrying her paramour, poisoned her husband, and then told the tailor that it was time for them to elope together, as they had projected, as, otherwise, she should be obliged to burn herself. The young man, fearing lest he might be entangled in a dangerous affair, flatly refused. The woman, expressing no surprise, went to her relations and informed them of the sudden death of her husband, protesting [Pg 46]that she would not survive him, but would burn herself along with him. Her kindred, well satisfied with so generous a resolution and the great honour thereby done to the whole family, presently had a pit made and filled with wood, exposing the corpse upon it, and kindling the fire. All being prepared, the woman went to embrace and take farewell of all her kindred and friends who surrounded the pit, among whom was the tailor, who had been invited to play upon the tabor along with a number of other minstrels, as was usual on such occasions. The woman, having come to the place where the young man stood, made a sign as if she would bid him farewell with the rest; but, instead of gently embracing him, she seized him by the collar with both hands, dragged him with all her strength to the pit, into which she threw herself and him together, and both instantly perished in the flames.

It was not till a comparatively recent period that the British Government made any attempt to abolish or check this barbarous custom: being unwilling, it would seem, to interfere with the religious rites and usages of the natives. The tardy intervention of the British Government has at length effectually put an end to the practice; and the natives themselves, instead of resenting this measure as a violation of their religion, have (as might have been expected) universally hailed it as a deliverance from a horrible oppression under which they groaned, but from which they were unable to emancipate themselves.

Throughout the greatest part of the wide region comprehended under the general name of India, this practice of burning the dead prevails, except among those who profess Mahommedanism. In the kingdom of Siam, it is regarded as the most honourable funeral; the bodies of criminals, and of persons disgraced, being buried. In the Birman empire, burning is the established practice.

In colder climates where the necessity for the rapid disposal of mortality is not so great, cremation has not been prevalent. Among the Greeks and Romans, it was confined to the wealthier classes, because of its expensiveness. When the Romans burnt the bodies of the dead, the ashes were gathered and enclosed in a vase or urn, which was sometimes deposited in the burial-place of the family, and sometimes preserved by them in their house. Among the remains of antiquity which have been found in Britain, and which belong to the period when a large portion of this country was a Roman province, there are many sepulchral urns which must have been deposited in the ground, either by the Roman population of this island, or by the British who adopted the Roman usages. Some of these urns are described by Sir Thomas Browne, and later discoveries of a similar kind have been made at different times. They have been found to contain, not only ashes mixed with half-burnt human bones, but the remains of combs, beads, and other articles of dress, and coins, both Roman and British.

Burning the dead has fallen into disuse in many countries where it once prevailed, partly because of the expense—fuel diminishing as population and agriculture increased—and partly, perhaps, because the early Christians may have thought it less congruous than interment with the doctrine of the Resurrection. ‘Christians,’ says Sir Thomas Browne, in his usual quaint style, ‘abhorred this way of obsequies, and, though they sticked not to give their bodies to be burned in their lives, detested that mode after death; affecting rather a depositure than absumption, and properly submitting unto the sentence of God, to return not unto ashes but unto dust again, conformably unto the practice of the Patriarchs; the interment of our Saviour, of Peter, Paul, and the ancient Martyrs.’ In every age, and in every country where Christianity has prevailed, the burial of the dead has been the unvarying usage.

Evidence, however, of a desire for another remarkable revival of the practices of antiquity now lies before us. It is no less than the prospectus of an association—bearing the recent date of January, 1850—“for Promoting the Practice of Decomposing the Dead by Fire.” Among other advantages, cheapness is promised. We may mention as some criterion on this point, that Mr. Ward, the Indian missionary, who had many opportunities of ascertaining the fact, computed that the smallest quantity of wood necessary to consume a human body, is about three hundred weight.

However averse public feeling may be to this mode of disposing of the remains of deceased relatives; yet anything is better than crowded city churchyards and poisoned air. To these a favourable contrast is offered by even the curious expedients of savage life—of which we now proceed to take a glance.

The Parsees or Gabres—the race of fire-worshippers who still exist in India,—abhor the burning of the dead as a pollution of the Deity whom they adore. This feeling they appear to have inherited from the ancient worshippers of fire, the Chaldeans, and the Magi of Persia; from whom, also, they seem to have derived the custom of exposing the bodies of the dead to be devoured by dogs, and beasts and birds of prey. A similar usage exists at this day in the kingdom of Tibet. ‘According to the custom of Tibet,’ says Mr. Turner (Narrative of an Embassy to Tibet), ‘instead of that pious attention which is paid to the remains of the dead, in the preservation of their bodies from pollution, by depositing them in the ground, they are here exposed after their decease, like the Parsees of India, in the open air, and left to be devoured by ravens, kites, and other carnivorous birds. In the more populous parts, dogs also come in for their share of the prey, and regularly attend the consummation of the [Pg 47]last obsequies.’ The same practice anciently existed among the Colchians, and has been remarked by modern travellers among the Illinois of North America, and the savage inhabitants of the Aleutian islands. Even in this revolting custom we trace a desire—savagely indulged, it is true—to ward off the bad effects of putrefaction by a speedy disposal of the air-polluting remains of the dead.

Among the Caffres, Hottentots, and other savage tribes of Southern Africa, adjoining the European settlements, it seems to have been customary to expose aged and helpless people in desert places, and leave them to die, because of a superstition against any one expiring in a hut. Intercourse with civilisation is mitigating this and other barbarities.

Of the means used to avert the evils of decay by preservation, none are more singular than those mentioned by Captain Tuckey, as in force upon the river Congo. The people envelope their corpses in cloth; the smell of putrefaction being only kept in by the quantity of wrappers. These are successively multiplied as they can be procured, or according to the rank of the deceased. The bulk thus attained is only limited by the power of conveyance to the grave; so that the first hut in which the body is deposited becoming too small, a second, a third—even to a sixth—each larger than the former, is placed over it.

The South American savages run no risks from the putrefying remains of their dead. The Orinoco tribes fasten them by a rope to the trunk of a tree on the shore and sink the body in the river. In the course of four and twenty hours the skeleton is picked perfectly clean by the fish. Bones alone are reverenced in this part of the world. The inhabitants of the Pampas and other South American tribes bury only the bones of the dead, the flesh having been first removed from them: an operation performed by the women. While the work of dissection is going on, the men walk round the tent, covered with long mantles, singing a mournful tune, and striking the ground with their spears, to drive away the evil spirits. The bones, being prepared, are packed up in a hide, and conveyed on a favourite horse of the deceased to the family burial-place, sometimes hundreds of miles distant. Being disposed in their natural order and tied together so as to form a skeleton, they are clothed in the deceased’s best attire, and ornamented with beads and feathers. The skeleton is placed in a sitting posture, with the carcases of horses, killed—in order that their master may ride them in the next world—in a pit or grave, which is then covered over. Among all the customs of unenlightened mankind, there are few more remarkable than this provision for the material wants of the dead in another state of existence. In all ages, and in most parts of the world, the dead man has been sent to his long home, furnished with servants, horses, dogs, domestic utensils—every article of physical comfort and enjoyment he is supposed to require. Money has been supplied for his journey, and even (as among the Jukati of Siberia) food has been put into his coffin, ‘that he may not hunger on his road to the dwelling of souls.’ ‘As if,’ quaintly remarks an ancient Spanish traveller, ‘the infernal regions were a long way off.’ But in every instance the corpse has been so dealt with as to prevent injury to those who still exist.

It is now time to allude to our own burial customs, and to the great reform which happily has at length begun. It appears extraordinary, that amidst the advance which has been made in social and sanitary science, Great Britain should be the last to give up the unwholesome custom of continuing the dead as near neighbours to the quick. The long conservation of this evil has mainly arisen from a sentiment of the superior sanctity of burial-places in and near to sacred edifices. That this is, however, an unqualified superstition, it is not difficult to prove, by tracing it to its root. Joseph Bingham states in his Origines Ecclesiasticæ, that churchyards owe their origin to respect paid to the remains of saints and martyrs, which was shown first by building churches and chapels over them, and then by a general desire of people to be interred as near to their sacred dust as possible. This privilege was only for a time accorded to Emperors and Kings, but so early as the sixth century the commonalty were allowed places, not only under the church wall, but in the consecrated space of ground surrounding it. Bodies were not deposited within the church till after a long struggle on the part of the heads of the Church.⁠[F]

So far from burying in churches, corpses were not admitted into parish churches, even for the funeral service to be read over them, except under special circumstances. An interesting canon—the 15th of the Council of Tribur—runs thus, ‘The funeral service must only be performed in the church where the bishop resides: that is to say in the cathedral of the diocese. If that church be too distant, it may be celebrated in some other, where there is a community of canons, monks, or religious orders; in order that the deceased may have the benefit of their prayers. Should again that be impossible, the service may be performed where the defunct during life paid tythes: this is in his parish church.’ By a previous canon (one of the Council of Meaux) no burial fees could be exacted by the clergy, although the relations were allowed to give alms to the poor. This injunction was but little observed either at or after the time it was laid, in 845.

The unwholesome practice of intra-ecclesiastical [Pg 48]interment became general after the 10th century, when the clergy succumbed to the power of money, and the sale of the indulgence proved too profitable to be abandoned. To show by what frauds the unhealthy custom was kept up, we may cite a legend relating to St. Dunstan. An unbaptised son of Earl Harold having been deposited within the church where the deceased saint rested, St. Dunstan—so the fable runs—appeared twice to the chaplain to complain that he could not rest in his grave for the stench of the young Pagan. Other underground saints were, however, consulted on the matter, and they silenced St. Dunstan by acquiescing in the abuse. It therefore not only continued but gave rise to another evil. Tombs came to be erected, and these became convenient as lurking-places and rendezvous for various immoral and improper purposes. The Council of Winchester, in 1240, forbade the holding of markets, gaming and other iniquities performed among the tombs in churches and cemeteries. But this injunction was of little avail, as we learn from the History of St. Paul’s. Duke Humphrey’s Tomb in ‘Paul’s walk’ (the middle aisle of the Cathedral), was the occasional resort for ages of the idleness and infamy of London. It was a regular mart and meeting place for huxters, gossips, gamblers, and thieves. In 1554 the Lord Mayor prohibited the church to be used for such ‘irreverent’ purposes, under pain of fine. Still it was not till the great fire that Duke Humphrey’s tomb was utterly deserted.

Meanwhile in every part of the country, families who could afford the expense, were buried inside in preference to outside the various places of worship, and, until the present year, no effective stop has been put to the evil. Our French neighbours were before us in this respect. Inhumation inside churches was forbidden except in rare cases, by a royal ordinance dated Versailles, 10th March, 1777. We perceive by the excellent report of Dr. Sutherland to the Board of Health on the practice of interments in Germany and France, that cemeteries have been since substituted by law in almost every considerable town in those countries. It has therefore been continued, almost exclusively in this empire.

At last, however, we have good reason to hope that intramural burials, with all their attendant evils, will speedily be themselves buried with the barbarous relics of the past. The comprehensive suggestions of the Board of Health appear to meet every difficulty, and as a strong stream of common sense has, we hope and believe, set in in favour of funereal reform, we trust they will pass into the statute book without much opposition; some they will inevitably encounter, in compliance with the fixed law of English obstinacy.

It may console those in whom lingers, from old association, almost a religious prejudice in favour of churchyards, to be reminded that some of the most eminent Christians, both lay and clerical, have earnestly pleaded for extramural cemeteries. Evelyn—the model of a Christian gentleman—regretted that after the Fire of London advantage had not been taken of that calamity to rid the city of its burial-places, and establish a necropolis without the walls. ‘I yet cannot but deplore,’ says he, in his ‘Silva,’ ‘that when that spacious area was so long a rasa tabula, the churchyards had not been banished to the north walls of the city, where a grated inclosure of competent breadth for a mile in length, might have served for an universal cemetery to all the parishes, distinguished by the like separations, and with ample walks of trees, the walks adorned with monuments, inscriptions, and titles, apt for contemplation and memory of the defunct, and that wise and excellent law of the Twelve Tables renewed.’ The pious Sir Thomas Browne says quaintly in his ‘Hydriotaphia,’ ‘To live indeed is to be again ourselves; which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, ’tis all one to lie in St. Innocent’s Churchyard, as in the sands of Egypt, ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as the moles of Adrianus.’

Would it not then be well to reflect, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, whether any of the best, whether the very worst custom—considering the state of society in which it has obtained—is so extraordinary and degrading as that of burying the dead in the midst of the living, to generate an amount of human destruction, compared with which the slaughter attendant on an African funeral is as a drop of water in an ocean. It should be remembered that, in the barbarous customs we have cited there is always to be traced the perversion of an idea:—as that the dead man will want food, passage money, attendants, beasts of burden, something that benighted ignorance is unable to separate from the wants incidental to this earthly state. There is no such poor excuse for the custom into which this civilised age has insensibly lapsed, until its evils have become too great to bear. The affection which endures beyond the grave is surely more fitly associated with a tomb in a beautiful solitude than amidst the clamour and clatter of a city’s streets. If, in submission to that moral law of gravitation, which renders it difficult to separate our thoughts of those who have departed from some lingering association with this earth, we desire to find a resting-place for our dead which we can visit, and where we may hope to lie when our own time shall come, reason and imagination alike suggest its being in a spot serenely sacred to that last repose of so much of us as is mortal, where natural decay may claim kindred with nature, in her beautiful succession of decay and renovation, undisturbed by the strife of the brief scene that has closed.

Transcriber’s notes

The list of articles at the start of the book was added by the transcriber.

The original text is followed as much as possible. There are however some printing errors and inconsistencies in spelling that have been corrected. These are listed below.

Corrections

Page 26 “coal mine” in “the coal mine in which he held a share” and in “a third share he had in this coal mine” changed to “coal-mine”, as elsewhere in the text;
Page 27 “Coal-fire” in “Now, then, old Coal-fire” changed to “Coal fire”, as elsewhere;
Page 32 unmatched double quote behind “Many a one dies is——” replaced by single quote;
Page 32 “and the very day at after we came” changed to “and the very day after we came”;
Page 32 missing period added after “Thou ’rt a likely lad, and sure o’ work”;
Page 33 unmatched double quote before “Ay, if it will come to me.” replaced by single quote;
Page 35 doubling of “Park” in “and entered St. James’s Park Park” removed;
Page 37 “Guinea Pig” in “When did I ever tell the Guinea Pig” hyphenated, as elsewhere;
Page 40 “ploughing match” in “I won a great ploughing match” hyphenated, as elsewhere;
Page 40 missing opening quote added before “When I was seventeen”;
Page 41 “threshing machine” in “They had been breaking Farmer Bullivant’s threshing machine” hyphenated, as elsewhere;
Page 41 missing opening quote added before “Here was a blow;”;
Page 42 closing quote removed behind “I refused point blank.”, as the speaker continues;
Page 42 four asterisks interpreted as thought break;
Page 43 “passage-money” in “with the passage-money of poor men’s relations” separated, as usual at the time of publication;
Page 44 “burial places” in “great burial places from their chief cities” hyphenated, as elsewhere;
Page 46 single closing quote behind “for Promoting the Practice of Decomposing the Dead by Fire.” replaced by double quote, to match the opening;
Page 48 “the slaughter-attendant on an African funeral” changed to “the slaughter attendant on an African funeral”;
Page 48 “Published at...Printed by” line combined into one; originally one was placed under the left column, the other under the right one.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, No. 2, April 6, 1850

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

A CHILD’S DREAM OF A STAR.

THE TRUE STORY OF A COAL FIRE.

LIZZIE LEIGH.

WORK! An Anecdote.

GOOD VERSES OF A BAD POET.

PERFECT FELICITY.

A DIALOGUE OF SHADOWS.

AN AUSTRALIAN PLOUGHMAN’S STORY.

HEATHEN and CHRISTIAN BURIAL.

Transcriber’s notes

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