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Rh she might try to read between my fingers, coming to herself presently, however, to say "It's a haver of a book."

"Those pirate stories are so uninteresting," I would reply without fear, for she was too engrossed to see through me. "Do you think you will finish this one?"

"I may as well go on with it since I have begun it," my mother says, so slily that my sister and I shake our heads at each other to imply, "Was there ever such a woman!"

"There are none of those one-legged scoundrels in my books," I say.

"Better without them," she replies promptly.

"I wonder, mother, what it is about the man that so infatuates the public?"

"He takes no hold of me," she insists. "I would a hantle rather read your books."

I offer obligingly to bring one of them to her, and now she looks at me suspiciously. "You surely believe I like yours best," she says with instant anxiety, and I soothe her by assurances, and retire advising her to read on, just to see if she can find out how he misleads the public. "Oh, I may take a look at it again by and by," she says indifferently, but nevertheless the probability is that as the door shuts the book opens, as if by some mechanical contrivance. I remember how she read "Treasure Island," holding it close to the ribs of Rh

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Rh the fire (because she could not spare a moment to rise and light the gas), and how, when bed-time came, and we coaxed, remonstrated, scolded, she said quite fiercely, clinging to the book, "I dinna lay my head on a pillow this night till I see how that laddie got out of the barrel."

After this, I think, he was as bewitching as the laddie in the barrel to her—Was he not always a laddie in the barrel himself, climbing in for apples while we all stood around, like gamins, waiting for a bite? He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play. And I suppose my mother felt this, as so many have felt it: like others, she was a little scared at first to find herself skipping again, with this masterful child at the rope, but soon she gave him her hand and set off with him for the meadow, not an apology between the two of them for the author left behind. But never to the end did she admit (in words) that he had a way with him which was beyond her son. "Silk and sacking, that is what we are," she was informed, to which she would reply obstinately, "Well, then, I prefer sacking."

"But if he had been your son?"

"But he is not."

"You wish he were?"

"I dinna deny but what I could have found room for him." Rh

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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Rh And still at times she would smear him with the name of black (to his delight when he learned the reason). That was when some podgy red-sealed blue-crossed letter arrived from Vailima, inviting me to journey thither. (His directions were, "You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is the second to the left.") Even London seemed to her to carry me so far away that I often took a week to the journey (the first six days in getting her used to the idea), and these letters terrified her. It was not the finger of Jim Hawkins she now saw beckoning me across the seas, it was John Silver, waving a crutch. Seldom, I believe, did I read straight through one of these Vailima letters; when in the middle I suddenly remembered who was upstairs and what she was probably doing, and I ran to her, three steps at a jump, to find her, lips pursed, hands folded, a picture of gloom.

"I have a letter from——"

"So I have heard."

"Would you like to hear it?"

"No."

"Can you not abide him?"

"I canna thole him."

"Is he a black?"

"He is all that."

Well, Vailima was the one spot on earth I had any great craving to visit, but I think she always Rh

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Rh knew I would never leave her. Sometime, she said, she should like me to go, but not until she was laid away. "And how small I have grown this last winter. Look at my wrists. It canna be long now." No, I never thought of going, was never absent for a day from her without reluctance, and never walked so quickly as when I was going back. In the meantime that happened which put an end for ever to my scheme of travel. I shall never go up the Road of Loving Hearts now, on "a wonderful clear night of stars," to meet the man coming toward me on a horse. It is still a wonderful clear night of stars, but the road is empty. So I never saw the dear king of us all. But before he had written books he was in my part of the country with a fishing wand in his hand, and I like to think that I was the boy who met him that day by Queen Margaret's burn, where the rowans are, and busked a fly for him, and stood watching, while his lithe figure rose and fell as he cast and hinted back from the crystal waters of Noran-side. Rh

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 CHAPTER VIII

A PANIC IN THE HOUSE

sitting at my desk in London when a telegram came announcing that my mother was again dangerously ill, and I seized my hat and hurried to the station. It is not a memory of one night only. A score of times, I am sure, I was called north thus suddenly, and reached our little town trembling, head out at railway-carriage window for a glance at a known face which would answer the question on mine. These illnesses came as regularly as the back-end of the year, but were less regular in going, and through them all, by night and by day, I see my sister moving so unwearyingly, so lovingly, though with failing strength, that I bow my head in reverence for her. She was wearing herself done. The doctor advised us to engage a nurse, but the mere word frightened my mother, and we got between her and the door, as if the woman was already on the stair. To have a strange woman in my mother's room—you who are used to them cannot conceive what it meant to us. Rh

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Rh Then we must have a servant. This seemed only less horrible. My father turned up his sleeves and clutched the besom. I tossed aside my papers, and was ready to run the errands. He answered the door, I kept the fires going, he gave me a lesson in cooking, I showed him how to make beds, one of us wore an apron. It was not for long. I was led to my desk, the newspaper was put into my father's hand. "But a servant!" we cried, and would have fallen to again. "No servant comes into this house," said my sister quite fiercely, and, oh, but my mother was relieved to hear her. There were many such scenes, a year of them, I daresay, before we yielded.

I cannot say which of us felt it most. In London I was used to servants, and in moments of irritation would ring for them furiously, though doubtless my manner changed as they opened the door. I have even held my own with gentlemen in plush, giving one my hat, another my stick, and a third my coat, and all done with little more trouble than I should have expended in putting the three articles on the chair myself! But this bold deed, and other big things of the kind, I did that I might tell my mother of them afterwards, while I sat on the end of her bed, and her face beamed with astonishment and mirth.

From my earliest days I had seen servants. The manse had a servant, the bank had another; Rh

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Rh one of their uses was to pounce upon, and carry away in stately manner, certain naughty boys who played with me. The banker did not seem really great to me, but his servant—oh, yes. Her boots cheeped all the way down the church aisle; it was common report that she had flesh every day for her dinner; instead of meeting her lover at the pump, she walked him into the country, and he returned with wild roses in his buttonhole, his hand up to hide them, and on his face the troubled look of those who know that if they take this lady they must give up drinking from the saucer for evermore. For the lovers were really common men until she gave them that glance over the shoulder which, I have noticed, is the fatal gift of servants.

According to legend we once had a servant—in my childhood I could show the mark of it on my forehead, and even point her out to other boys, though she was now merely a wife with a house of her own. But even while I boasted I doubted. Reduced to life-size she may have been but a woman who came in to help. I shall say no more about her lest some one comes forward to prove that she went home at night.

Never shall I forget my first servant. I was eight or nine, in velveteen, diamond socks ("Cross your legs when they look at you," my mother had said, "and put your thumb in your pocket and Rh

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Rh leave the top of your handkerchief showing"), and I had travelled by rail to visit a relative. He had a servant, and as I was to be his guest she must be my servant also for the time being—you may be sure I had got my mother to put this plainly before me ere I set off. My relative met me at the station, but I wasted no time in hoping I found him well. I did not even cross my legs for him, so eager was I to hear whether she was still there. A sister greeted me at the door, but I chafed at having to be kissed; at once I made for the kitchen, where, I knew, they reside, and there she was, and I crossed my legs and put one thumb in my pocket, and the handkerchief was showing. Afterwards I stopped strangers on the highway with an offer to show her to them through the kitchen window, and I doubt not the first letter I ever wrote told my mother what they are like when they are so near that you can put your fingers into them.

But now when we could have servants for ourselves I shrank from the thought. It would not be the same house; we should have to dissemble; I saw myself speaking English the long day through. You only know the shell of a Scot until you have entered his home circle; in his office, in clubs, at social gatherings where you and he seem to be getting on so well he is really a house with all the shutters closed and the door locked. Rh

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Rh He is not opaque of set purpose, often it is against his will—it is certainly against mine, I try to keep my shutters open and my foot in the door, but they will bang to. In many ways my mother was as reticent as myself, though her manners were as gracious as mine were rough (in vain, alas, all the honest oiling of them), and my sister was the most reserved of us all; you might at times see a light through one of my chinks: she was double-shuttered. Now, it seems to be a law of nature that we must show our true selves at some time, and as the Scot must do it at home, and squeeze a day into an hour, what follows is that there he is self-revealing in the superlative degree, the feelings so long dammed up overflow, and thus a Scotch family are probably better acquainted with each other, and more ignorant of the life outside their circle, than any other family in the world. And as knowledge is sympathy, the affection existing between them is almost painful in its intensity; they have not more to give than their neighbours, but it is bestowed upon a few instead of being distributed among many; they are reputed niggardly, but for family affection at least they pay in gold. In this, I believe, we shall find the true explanation why Scotch literature, since long before the days of Burns, has been so often inspired by the domestic hearth and has treated it with a passionate understanding. Rh

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Rh Must a woman come into our house and discover that I was not such a dreary dog as I had the reputation of being? Was I to be seen at last with the veil of dourness lifted? My company voice is so low and unimpressive that my first remark is merely an intimation that I am about to speak (like the whirr of the clock before it strikes): must it be revealed that I had another voice, that there was one door I never opened without leaving my reserve on the mat? Ah, that room, must its secrets be disclosed? So joyous they were when my mother was well, no wonder we were merry. Again and again she had been given back to us; it was for the glorious to-day we thanked God; in our hearts we knew and in our prayers confessed that the fill of delight had been given us, whatever might befall. We had not to wait till all was over to know its value; my mother used to say, "We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it," and there can be few truer sayings, but during her last years we exulted daily in the possession of her as much as we can exult in her memory. No wonder, I say, that we were merry but we liked to show it to God alone, and to Him only our agony during those many night-alarms, when lights flickered in the house and white faces were round my mother's bedside. Not for other eyes those long vigils when, night about, we sat Rh

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Rh watching, nor the awful nights when we stood together, teeth clenched—waiting—it must be now. And it was not then; her hand became cooler, her breathing more easy; she smiled to us. Once more I could work by snatches, and was glad, but what was the result to me compared to the joy of hearing that voice from the other room? There lay all the work I was ever proud of, the rest is but honest craftsmanship done to give her coal and food and softer pillows. My thousand letters that she so carefully preserved, always sleeping with the last beneath the sheet, where one was found when she died—they are the only writing of mine of which I shall ever boast. I would not there had been one less though I could have written an immortal book for it.

How my sister toiled—to prevent a stranger's getting any footing in the house! And how, with the same object, my mother strove to "do for herself" once more. She pretended that she was always well now, and concealed her ailments so craftily that we had to probe for them:

"I think you are not feeling well to-day?"

"I am perfectly well."

"Where is the pain?"

"I have no pain to speak of."

"Is it at your heart?"

"No."

"Is your breathing hurting you?" Rh

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Rh "Not it."

"Do you feel those stounds in your head again?"

"No, no, I tell you there is nothing the matter with me."

"Have you a pain in your side?"

"Really, it's most provoking I canna put my hand to my side without your thinking I have a pain there."

"You have a pain in your side!"

"I might have a pain in my side."

"And you are trying to hide it! Is it very painful?"

"It's—it's no so bad but what I can bear it."

Which of these two gave in first I cannot tell, though to me fell the duty of persuading them, for whichever she was she rebelled as soon as the other showed signs of yielding, so that sometimes I had two converts in the week, but never both on the same day. I would take them separately, and press the one to yield for the sake of the other, but they saw so easily through my artifice. My mother might go bravely to my sister and say, "I have been thinking it over, and I believe I would like a servant fine—once we got used to her."

"Did he tell you to say that?" asks my sister sharply.

"I say it of my own free will."

"He put you up to it, I am sure, and he told Rh

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Rh you not to let on that you did it to lighten my work."

"Maybe he did, but I think we should get one."

"Not for my sake," says my sister obstinately, and then my mother comes ben to me to say delightedly, "She winna listen to reason!"

But at last a servant was engaged; we might be said to be at the window, gloomily waiting for her now, and it was with such words as these that we sought to comfort each other and ourselves:

"She will go early to her bed."

"She needna often be seen upstairs."

"We'll set her to the walking every day."

"There will be a many errands for her to run. We'll tell her to take her time over them."

"Three times she shall go to the kirk every Sabbath, and we'll egg her on to attending the lectures in the hall."

"She is sure to have friends in the town. We'll let her visit them often."

"If she dares to come into your room, mother!"

"Mind this, every one of you, servant or no servant, I fold all the linen mysel."

"She shall not get cleaning out the east room."

"Nor putting my chest of drawers in order."

"Nor tidying up my manuscripts."

"I hope she's a reader, though. You could set her down with a book, and then close the door canny on her." Rh

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Rh And so on. Was ever servant awaited so apprehensively? And then she came,—at an anxious time, too, when her worth could be put to the proof at once,—and from first to last she was a treasure. I know not what we should have done without her.

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 CHAPTER IX

MY HEROINE

it was known that I had begun another story my mother might ask what it was to be about this time.

"Fine we can guess who it is about," my sister would say pointedly.

"Maybe you can guess, but it is beyond me," says my mother, with the meekness of one who knows that she is a dull person.

My sister scorned her at such times. "What woman is in all his books?" she would demand.

"I'm sure I canna say," replies my mother determinedly. "I thought the women were different every time."

"Mother, I wonder you can be so audacious! Fine you know what woman I mean."

"How can I know? What woman is it? You should bear in mind that I hinna your cleverness" (they were constantly giving each other little knocks).

"I won't give you the satisfaction of saying her name. But this I will say, it is high time he was keeping her out of his books." Rh

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Rh And then as usual my mother would give herself away unconsciously. "That is what I tell him," she says, chuckling, "and he tries to keep me out, but he canna; it's more than he can do!"

On an evening after my mother had gone to bed, the first chapter would be brought upstairs, and I read, sitting at the foot of the bed, while my sister watched to make my mother behave herself, and my father cried H'sh ! when there were interruptions. All would go well at the start, the reflections were accepted with a little nod of the head, the descriptions of scenery as ruts on the road that must be got over at a walking pace (my mother did not care for scenery, and that is why there is so little of it in my books). But now I am reading too quickly, a little apprehensively, because I know that the next paragraph begins with—let us say with, "Along this path came a woman": I had intended to rush on here in a loud bullying voice, but "Along this path came a woman" I read, and stop. Did I hear a faint sound from the other end of the bed? Perhaps I did not; I may only have been listening for it, but I falter and look up. My sister and I look sternly at my mother. She bites her underlip and clutches the bed with both hands, really she is doing her best for me, but first comes a smothered gurgling sound, then her hold on herself relaxes and she shakes with mirth. Rh

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Rh "That's a way to behave!" cries my sister.

"I cannot help it," my mother gasps.

"And there's nothing to laugh at."

"It's that woman," my mother explains unnecessarily.

"Maybe she's not the woman you think her," I say, crushed.

"Maybe not," says my mother doubtfully. "What was her name?"

"Her name," I answer with triumph, "was not Margaret;" but this makes her ripple again. "I have so many names nowadays," she mutters.

"H'sh!" says my father, and the reading is resumed.

Perhaps the woman who came along the path was of tall and majestic figure, which should have shown my mother that I had contrived to start my train without her this time. But it did not.

"What are you laughing at now?" says my sister severely. "Do you not hear that she was a tall, majestic woman?"

"It's the first time I ever heard it said of her," replies my mother.

"But she is."

"Ke fy, havers!"

"The book says it."

"There will be a many queer things in the book. What was she wearing?"

I have not described her clothes. "That's a Rh

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Rh mistake," says my mother. "When I come upon a woman in a book, the first thing I want to know about her is whether she was good-looking, and the second, how she was put on."

The woman on the path was eighteen years of age, and of remarkable beauty.

"That settles you," says my sister.

"I was no beauty at eighteen," my mother admits, but here my father interferes unexpectedly. "There wasna your like in this countryside at eighteen," says he stoutly.

"Pooh!" says she, well pleased.

"Were you plain, then?" we ask.

"Sal," she replies briskly, "I was far from plain."

"H'sh!"

Perhaps in the next chapter this lady (or another) appears in a carriage.

"I assure you we're mounting in the world," I hear my mother murmur, but I hurry on without looking up. The lady lives in a house where there are footmen—but the footmen have come on the scene too hurriedly. "This is more than I can stand," gasps my mother, and just as she is getting the better of a fit of laughter, "Footman, give me a drink of water," she cries, and this sets her off again. Often the readings had to end abruptly because her mirth brought on violent fits of coughing.

Sometimes I read to my sister alone, and she Rh

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Rh assured me that she could not see my mother among the women this time. This she said to humour me. Presently she would slip upstairs to announce triumphantly, "You are in again!"

Or in the small hours I might make a confidant of my father, and when I had finished reading he would say thoughtfully, "That lassie is very natural. Some of the ways you say she had—your mother had them just the same. Did you ever notice what an extraordinary woman your mother is?"

Then would I seek my mother for comfort. She was the more ready to give it because of her profound conviction that if I was found out—that is, if readers discovered how frequently and in how many guises she appeared in my books—the affair would become a public scandal.

"You see Jess is not really you," I begin inquiringly.

"Oh, no, she is another kind of woman altogether," my mother says, and then spoils the compliment by adding naively, "She had but two rooms and I have six."

I sigh. "Without counting the pantry, and it's a great big pantry," she mutters.

This was not the sort of difference I could greatly plume myself upon, and honesty would force me to say, "As far as that goes, there was a time when you had but two rooms yourself——" Rh

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Rh "That's long since," she breaks in. "I began with an up-the-stair, but I always had it in my mind—I never mentioned it, but there it was—to have the down-the-stair as well. Ay, and I've had it this many a year."

"Still, there is no denying that Jess had the same ambition."

"She had, but to her. two-roomed house she had to stick all her born days. Was that like me?"

"No, but she wanted——"

"She wanted, and I wanted, but I got and she didna. That's the difference betwixt her and me."

"If that is all the difference, it is little credit I can claim for having created her."

My mother sees that I need soothing. "That is far from being all the difference," she would say eagerly. "There's my silk, for instance. Though I say it mysel, there's not a better silk in the valley of Strathmore. Had Jess a silk of any kind—not to speak of a silk like that?"

"Well, she had no silk, but you remember how she got that cloak with beads."

"An eleven and a bit! Hoots, what was that to boast of! I tell you, every single yard of my silk cost——"

"Mother, that is the very way Jess spoke about her cloak!"

She lets this pass, perhaps without hearing it, for solicitude about her silk has hurried her to the wardrobe where it hangs. Rh

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text:
Author:Alexander of Hales

Works

 * Summa fratris Alexandri

title: Author:Alexander of Hales


text:
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Rh "Ah, mother, I am afraid that was very like Jess!"

"How could it be like her when she didna even have a wardrobe? I tell you what, if there had been a real Jess and she had boasted to me about her cloak with beads, I would have said to her in a careless sort of voice, 'Step across with me, Jess, and I'll let you see something that is hanging in my wardrobe.' That would have lowered her pride!"

"I don't believe that is what you would have done, mother."

Then a sweeter expression would come into her face. "No," she would say reflectively, "it's not."

"What would you have done? I think I know."

"You canna know. But I'm thinking I would have called to mind that she was a poor woman, and ailing, and terrible windy about her cloak, and I would just have said it was a beauty and that I wished I had one like it."

"Yes, I am certain that is what you would have done. But oh, mother, that is just how Jess would have acted if some poorer woman than she had shown her a new shawl."

"Maybe, but though I hadna boasted about my silk I would have wanted to do it."

"Just as Jess would have been fidgeting to show off her eleven and a bit!"

It seems advisable to jump to another book: Rh

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text:
Author:John Duns Scotus

Works

 * Lectura (early Oxford Lectures)
 * Opus Parisiense or Reportata parisiensia (Paris lectures)
 * Ordinatio or Opus Oxoniense (Oxford lectures)
 * Tractatus de Primo Principio (Treatise on the First Principle)
 * Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle Latin text
 * Quaestiones Quodlibetales
 * De Rerum Principio (Of the Beginning of Things)
 * Cuestiones Cuodlibetales
 * Opera Omnia
 * Opera Philosophica

Works about Scotus

 * Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception by Berard Vogt
 * Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception by Berard Vogt
 * Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception by Berard Vogt
 * Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception by Berard Vogt
 * Duns Scotus, Defender of the Immaculate Conception by Berard Vogt

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Rh not to my first, because—well, as it was my first, there would naturally be something of my mother in it, and not to the second, as it was my first novel and not much esteemed even in our family. (But the little touches of my mother in it are not so bad.) Let us try the story about the minister.

My mother's first remark is decidedly damping. "Many a time in my young days," she says, "I played about the Auld Licht manse, but I little thought I should live to be the mistress of it!"

"But Margaret is not you."

"N—no, oh no. She had a very different life from mine. I never let on to a soul that she is me!"

"She was not meant to be you when I began. Mother, what a way you have of coming creeping in!"

"You should keep better watch on yourself."

"Perhaps if I had called Margaret by some other name——"

"I should have seen through her just the same. As soon as I heard she was the mother I began to laugh. In some ways, though, she's no so very like me. She was long in finding out about Babbie. I'se uphaud I should have been quicker."

"Babbie, you see, kept close to the garden wall."

"It's not the wall up at the manse that would have hidden her from me."

"She came out in the dark." Rh

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text:
Author:Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann

Works

 * Manual of the History of Philosophy

title: Author:Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann


text:
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Rh "I'm thinking she would have found me looking for her with a candle."

"And Gavin was secretive."

"That would have put me on my mettle."

"She never suspected anything."

"I wonder at her."

But my new heroine is to be a child. What has madam to say to that?

A child! Yes, she has something to say even to that. "This beats all!" are the words.

"Come, come, mother, I see what you are thinking, but I assure you that this time——"

"Of course not," she said soothingly, "oh, no, she canna be me;" but anon her real thoughts are revealed by the artless remark, "I doubt, though, this is a tough job you have on hand—it is so long since I was a bairn."

We came very close to each other in those talks. "It is a queer thing," she would say softly, "that near everything you write is about this bit place. You little expected that when you began. I mind well the time when it never entered your head, any more than mine, that you could write a page about our squares and wynds. I wonder how it has come about?"

There was a time when I could not have answered that question, but that time had long passed. "I suppose, mother, it was because you were most at home in your own town, and there Rh

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Rh was never much pleasure to me in writing of people who could not have known you, nor of squares and wynds you never passed through, nor of a countryside where you never carried your father's dinner in a flaggon. There is scarce a house in all my books where I have not seemed to see you a thousand times, bending over the fireplace or winding up the clock."

"And yet you used to be in such a quandary because you knew nobody you could make your women-folk out of! Do you mind that, and how we both laughed at the notion of your having to make them out of me?"

"I remember."

"And now you've gone back to my father's time. It's more than sixty years since I carried his dinner in a flaggon through the long parks of Kinnordy."

"I often go into the long parks, mother, and sit on the stile at the edge of the wood till I fancy I see a little girl coming toward me with a flaggon in her hand."

"Jumping the burn (I was once so proud of my jumps!) and swinging the flaggon round so quick that what was inside hadna time to fall out. I used to wear a magenta frock and a white pinafore. Did I ever tell you that?"

"Mother, the little girl in my story wears a magenta frock and a white pinafore." Rh

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Rh "You minded that! But I'm thinking it wasna a lassie in a pinafore you saw in the long parks of Kinnordy, it was just a gey done auld woman."

"It was a lassie in a pinafore, mother, when she was far away, but when she came near it was a gey done auld woman."

"And a fell ugly one!"

"The most beautiful one I shall ever see."

"I wonder to hear you say it. Look at my wrinkled auld face."

"It is the sweetest face in all the world."

"See how the rings drop off my poor wasted finger."

"There will always be some one nigh, mother, to put them on again."

"Ay, will there! Well I know it. Do you mind how when you were but a bairn you used to say, "Wait till I'm a man, and you'll never have a reason for greeting again?"

I remembered.

"You used to come running into the house to say, 'There's a proud dame going down the Mary-wellbrae in a cloak that is black on one side and white on the other; wait till I'm a man, and you'll have one the very same.' And when I lay on gey hard beds you said, 'When I'm a man you'll lie on feathers.' You saw nothing bonny, you never heard of my setting my heart on anything, but what you flung up your head and cried, Rh

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Rh 'Wait till I'm a man.' You fair shamed me before the neighbours, and yet I was windy, too. And now it has all come true like a dream. I can call to mind not one little thing I ettled for in my lusty days that hasna been put into my hands in my auld age; I sit here useless, surrounded by the gratification of all my wishes and all my ambitions, and at times I'm near terrified, for it's as if God had mista'en me for some other woman."

"Your hopes and ambitions were so simple," I would say, but she did not like that. "They werena that simple," she would answer, flushing.

I am reluctant to leave those happy days, but the end must be faced, and as I write I seem to see my mother growing smaller and her face more wistful, and still she lingers with us, as if God had said, "Child of mine, your time has come, be not afraid," and she was not afraid, but still she lingered, and He waited, smiling. I never read any of that last book to her; when it was finished she was too heavy with years to follow a story. To me this was as if my book must go out cold into the world (like all that may come after it from me), and my sister, who took more thought for others and less for herself than any other human being I have known, saw this, and by some means unfathomable to a man coaxed my mother into being once again the woman she had been. On a day but three weeks before she died my father Rh

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Rh and I were called softly upstairs. My mother was sitting bolt upright, as she loved to sit, in her old chair by the window, with a manuscript in her hands. But she was looking about her without much understanding. "Just to please him," my sister whispered, and then in a low, trembling voice my mother began to read. I looked at my sister. Tears of woe were stealing down her face. Soon the reading became very slow and stopped. After a pause, "There was something you were to say to him," my sister reminded her. "Luck," muttered a voice as from the dead, "luck." And then the old smile came running to her face like a lamp-lighter, and she said to me, "I am ower far gone to read, but I'm thinking I am in it again!" My father put her Testament in her hands, and it fell open—as it always does—at the Fourteenth of John. She made an effort to read, but could not. Suddenly she stooped and kissed the broad page. "Will that do instead?" she asked. Rh

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 CHAPTER X

ART THOU AFRAID HIS POWER SHALL FAIL?

years I had been trying to prepare myself for my mother's death, trying to foresee how she would die, seeing myself when she was dead. Even then I knew it was a vain thing I did, but I am sure there was no morbidness in it. I hoped I should be with her at the end, not as the one she looked at last, but as him from whom she would turn only to look upon her best-beloved, not my arm but my sister's should be round her when she died, not my hand but my sister's should close her eyes. I knew that I might reach her too late; I saw myself open a door where there was none to greet me, and go up the old stair into the old room. But what I did not foresee was that which happened. I little thought it could come about that I should climb the old stair, and pass the door beyond which my mother lay dead, and enter another room first, and go on my knees there.

My mother's favourite paraphrase is one known in our house as David's because it was the last he Rh

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Rh learned to repeat. It was also the last thing she read—

I heard her voice gain strength as she read it, I saw her timid face take courage, but when came my evil day, then at the dawning, alas for me, I was afraid.

In those last weeks, though we did not know it, my sister was dying on her feet. For many years she had been giving her life, a little bit at a time, for another year, another month, latterly for another day, of her mother, and now she was worn out. "I'll never leave you, mother."—"Fine I know you'll never leave me." I thought that cry so pathetic at the time, but I was not to know its full significance until it was only the echo of a cry. Looking at these two, then, it was to me as if my mother had set out for the new country, and my sister held her back. But I see with a clearer vision now. It is no longer the mother but the daughter who is in front, and she cries, "Mother, you are lingering so long at the end, I have ill waiting for you."

But she knew no more than we how it was to be; if she seemed weary when we met her on the stair, she was still the brightest, the most active Rh

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Rh figure in my mother's room; she never complained, save when she had to depart on that walk which separated them for half an hour. How reluctantly she put on her bonnet, how we had to press her to it, and how often, having gone as far as the door, she came back to stand by my mother's side. Sometimes, as we watched from the window, I could not but laugh, and yet with a pain at my heart, to see her hasting doggedly onward, not an eye for right or left, nothing in her head but the return. There was always my father in the house, than whom never was a more devoted husband, and often there were others, one daughter in particular, but they scarce dared tend my mother—this one snatched the cup jealously from their hands. My mother liked it best from her. We all knew this. "I like them fine, but I canna do without you." My sister, so unselfish in all other things, had an unwearying passion for parading it before us. It was the rich reward of her life.

The others spoke among themselves of what must come soon, and they had tears to help them, but this daughter would not speak of it, and her tears were ever slow to come. I knew that night and day she was trying to get ready for a world without her mother in it, but she must remain dumb, none of us was so Scotch as she, she must bear her agony alone—a tragic, solitary Scotch-woman. Even my mother, who spoke so calmly to Rh

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Rh us of the coming time, could not mention it to her. These two, the one in bed, and the other bending over her, could only look long at each other, until slowly the tears came to my sister's eyes, and then my mother would turn away her wet face. And still neither said a word, each knew so well what was in the other's thoughts, so eloquently they spoke in silence, "Mother, I am loath to let you go, and "Oh, my daughter, now that my time is near, I wish you werena quite so fond of me." But when the daughter had slipped away my mother would grip my hand and cry, "I leave her to you; you see how she has sown, it will depend on you how she is to reap." And I made promises, but I suppose neither of us saw that she had already reaped.

In the night my mother might waken and sit up in bed, confused by what she saw. While she slept, six decades or more had rolled back and she was again in her girlhood; suddenly recalled from it she was dizzy, as with the rush of the years. How had she come into this room? When she went to bed last night, after preparing her father's supper, there had been a dresser at the window: what had become of the salt-bucket, the meal-tub, the hams that should be hanging from the rafters? There were no rafters; it was a papered ceiling. She had often heard of open beds, but how came she to be lying in one? To fathom these things she Rh

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Rh would try to spring out of bed, and be startled to find it a labour, as if she had been taken ill in the night. Hearing her move I might knock on the wall that separated us, this being a sign, prearranged between us, that I was near by, and so all was well, but sometimes the knocking seemed to belong to the past, and she would cry, "That is my father chapping at the door, I maun rise and let him in." She seemed to see him—and it was one much younger than herself that she saw—covered with snow, kicking clods of it from his boots, his hands swollen and chapped with sand and wet. Then I would hear—it was a common experience of the night—my sister soothing her lovingly, and turning up the light to show her where she was, helping her to the window to let her see that it was no night of snow, even humouring her by going downstairs, and opening the outer door, and calling into the darkness, "Is anybody there?" and if that was not sufficient, she would swaddle my mother in wraps and take her through the rooms of the house, lighting them one by one, pointing out familiar objects, and so guiding her slowly through the sixty odd years she had jumped too quickly. And perhaps the end of it was that my mother came to my bedside and said wistfully, "Am I an auld woman?"

But with daylight, even during the last week in which I saw her, she would be up and doing, for Rh

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Rh though pitifully frail she no longer suffered from any ailment. She seemed so well comparatively that I, having still the remnants of an illness to shake off, was to take a holiday in Switzerland, and then return for her, when we were all to go to the much-loved manse of her much-loved brother in the west country. So she had many preparations on her mind, and the morning was the time when she had any strength to carry them out. To leave her house had always been a month's work for her, it must be left in such perfect order, every corner visited and cleaned out, every chest probed to the bottom, the linen lifted out, examined and put back lovingly as if to make it lie more easily in her absence, shelves had to be repapered, a strenuous week devoted to the garret. Less exhaustively, but with much of the old exultation in her house, this was done for the last time, and then there was the bringing out of her own clothes, and the spreading of them upon the bed and the pleased fingering of them, and the consultations about which should be left behind. Ah, beautiful dream! I clung to it every morning; I would not look when my sister shook her head at it, but long before each day was done, I too knew that it could never be. It had come true many times, but never again. We two knew it, but when my mother, who must always be prepared so long beforehand, called for her trunk and band-boxes we brought Rh

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Rh them to her, and we stood silent, watching, while she packed.

The morning came when I was to go away. It had come a hundred times, when I was a boy, when I was an undergraduate, when I was a man, when she had seemed big and strong to me, when she was grown so little and it was I who put my arms round her. But always it was the same scene. I am not to write about it, of the parting and the turning back on the stair, and two people trying to smile, and the setting off again, and the cry that brought me back. Nor shall I say more of the silent figure in the background, always in the background, always near my mother. The last I saw of these two was from the gate. They were at the window which never passes from my eyes. I could not see my dear sister's face, for she was bending over my mother, pointing me out to her, and telling her to wave her hand and smile, because I liked it so. That action was an epitome of my sister's life.

I had been gone a fortnight when the telegram was put into my hands. I had got a letter from my sister, a few hours before, saying that all was well at home. The telegram said in five words that she had died suddenly the previous night. There was no mention of my mother, and I was three days' journey from home.

The news I got on reaching London was this: Rh

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Rh my mother did not understand that her daughter was dead, and they were waiting for me to tell her.

I need not have been such a coward. This is how these two died—for, after all, I was too late by twelve hours to see my mother alive.

Their last night was almost gleeful. In the old days that hour before my mother's gas was lowered had so often been the happiest that my pen steals back to it again and again as I write: it was the time when my mother lay smiling in bed and we were gathered round her like children at play, our reticence scattered on the floor or tossed in sport from hand to hand, the author become so boisterous that in the pauses they were holding him in check by force. Rather woful had been some attempts latterly to renew those evenings, when my mother might be brought to the verge of them, as if some familiar echo called her, but where she was she did not clearly know, because the past was roaring in her ears like a great sea. But this night was the last gift to my sister. The joyousness of their voices drew the others in the house upstairs, where for more than an hour my mother was the center of a merry party and so clear of mental eye that they, who were at first cautious, abandoned themselves to the sport, and whatever they said, by way of humourous rally, she instantly Rh

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Rh capped as of old, turning their darts against themselves until in self-defence they were three to one, and the three hard pressed. How my sister must have been rejoicing! Once again she could cry, "Was there ever such a woman!" They tell me that such a happiness was on the daughter's face that my mother commented on it, that having risen to go they sat down again, fascinated by the radiance of these two. And when eventually they went, the last words they heard were, "They are gone, you see, mother, but I am here, I will never leave you," and "Na, you winna leave me; fine I know that." For some time afterwards their voices could be heard from downstairs, but what they talked of is not known. And then came silence. Had I been at home I should have been in the room again several times, turning the handle of the door softly, releasing it so that it did not creak, and standing looking at them. It had been so a thousand times. But that night, would I have slipped out again, mind at rest, or should I have seen the change coming while they slept?

Let it be told in the fewest words. My sister awoke next morning with a headache. She had always been a martyr to headaches, but this one, like many another, seemed to be unusually severe. Nevertheless she rose and lit my mother's fire and brought up her breakfast, and then had to return to bed. She was not able to write her daily letter Rh

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Rh to me, saying how my mother was, and almost the last thing she did was to ask my father to write it, and not to let on that she was ill, as it would distress me. The doctor was called, but she rapidly became unconscious. In this state she was removed from my mother's bed to another. It was discovered that she was suffering from an internal disease. No one had guessed it. She herself never knew. Nothing could be done. In this unconsciousness she passed away, without knowing that she was leaving her mother. Had I known, when I heard of her death, that she had been saved that pain, surely I could have gone home more bravely with the words,

Ah, you would think so, I should have thought so, but I know myself now. When I reached London I did hear how my sister died, but still I was afraid. I saw myself in my mother's room telling her why the door of the next room was locked, and I was afraid. God had done so much, and yet I could not look confidently to Him for the little that was left to do. "O ye of little faith!" These are the words I seem to hear my mother saying to me now, and she looks at me so sorrowfully.

He did it very easily, and it has ceased to seem Rh

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Rh marvellous to me because it was so plainly His doing. My timid mother saw the one who was never to leave her carried unconscious from the room, and she did not break down. She who used to wring her hands if her daughter was gone for a moment never asked for her again, they were afraid to mention her name; an awe fell upon them. But I am sure they need not have been so anxious. There are mysteries in life and death, but this was not one of them. A child can understand what happened. God said that my sister must come first, but He put His hand on my mother's eyes at that moment and she was altered.

They told her that I was on my way home, and she said with a confident smile, "He will come as quick as trains can bring him." That is my reward, that is what I have got for my books. Everything I could do for her in this life I have done since I was a boy; I look back through the years and I cannot see the smallest thing left undone.

They were buried together on my mother's seventy-sixth birthday, though there had been three days between their deaths. On the last day, my mother insisted on rising from bed and going through the house. The arms that had so often helped her on that journey were now cold in death, but there were others only less loving, and she went slowly from room to room like one bidding good-bye, and in mine she said, "The beautiful Rh

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Rh rows upon rows of books, and he said every one of them was mine, all mine!" and in the east room, which was her greatest triumph, she said caressingly, "My nain bonny room!" All this time there seemed to be something that she wanted, but the one was dead who always knew what she wanted, and they produced many things at which she shook her head. They did not know then that she was dying, but they followed her through the house in some apprehension, and after she returned to bed they saw that she was becoming very weak. Once she said eagerly, "Is that you, David?" and again she thought she heard her father knocking the snow off his boots. Her desire for that which she could not name came back to her, and at last they saw that what she wanted was the old christening robe. It was brought to her, and she unfolded it with trembling, exultant hands, and when she had made sure that it was still of virgin fairness her old arms went round it adoringly, and upon her face there was the ineffable mysterious glow of motherhood. Suddenly she said, "Wha's bairn's dead? is a bairn of mine dead?" but those watching dared not speak, and then slowly as if with an effort of memory she repeated our names aloud in the order in which we were born. Only one, who should have come third among the ten, did she omit, the one in the next room, but at the end, after a pause, she said Rh

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Rh her name and repeated it again and again and again, lingering over it as if it were the most exquisite music and this her dying song. And yet it was a very commonplace name.

They knew now that she was dying. She told them to fold up the christening robe and almost sharply she watched them put it away, and then for some time she talked of the long lovely life that had been hers, and of Him to whom she owed it. She said good-bye to them all, and at last turned her face to the side where her best-beloved had lain, and for over an hour she prayed. They only caught the words now and again, and the last they heard were "God" and "love." I think God was smiling when He took her to Him, as He had so often smiled at her during those seventy-six years.

I saw her lying dead, and her face was beautiful and serene. But it was the other room I entered first, and it was by my sister's side that I fell upon my knees. The rounded completeness of a woman's life that was my mother's had not been for her. She would not have it at the price. "I'll never leave you, mother."—"Fine I know you'll never leave me." The fierce joy of loving too much, it is a terrible thing. My sister's mouth was firmly closed, as if she had got her way.

And now I am left without them, but I trust my memory will ever go back to those happy days, not to rush through them, but dallying here and Rh

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Rh there, even as my mother wanders through books. And if I also live to a time when age must dim my mind and the past comes sweeping back like the shades of night over the bare road of the present, it will not, I believe, be my youth I shall see but hers, not a boy clinging to his mother's skirt and crying, "Wait till I'm a man, and you'll lie on feathers," but a little girl in a magenta frock and a white pinafore, who comes toward me through the long parks, singing to herself, and carrying her father's dinner in a flaggon. Rh

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275 INDEX II.

[This Index comprises the whole of the work with exception of the Summaries, for which see Index I. The references are to the pages. The entries apply solely to the page number or page group-number which they immediately precede, and not to all the pages between themselves and the next entry. In the majority of cases a simple number reference is given, and the fuller entries are to those points which the author wishes specially to emphasise.]


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276


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Rh


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 obviously a means of achieving the quest, has, in the later one, become the end of that quest.

It seems impossible to resist the following conclusions:—The many forms of the incident found in the Grail romances are not variants of one, and that an orderly and logical original; they testify to the fact that in the body of popular tradition which forms the basis of these romances the incident of the visit to a magic castle was a common one, that it entered into the thread of stories, somewhat similar in outline and frequently centered in the same hero, but differing essentially in conception, and that the forms in the romances which are most likely to keep close to the traditional model are those secondary ones with which the innovating spirit, whether due to the genius of the individual artist, or to intruding Christian symbolism, has least concerned itself. There is apparently but one case in the Conte du Graal, that of Perceval's visit to the Castle of Maidens, which has been modified by neither of these influences.

To accept these conclusions is to clear the ground. If we rid our minds of the idea that there is a Grail legend, a definite fixed sequence of incidents, we need not be discouraged if we fail to find a prototype for it in Celtic tradition or elsewhere. We shall be prepared to examine every incident of which the Grail is a feature upon its own merits, and satisfied if we can find analogies to this or that one. And by so doing we are more likely to discover the how and why of the development of the legends as we find them in the romances.

Leaving subsidiary details out of account, we may bring all the instances in which the Grail appears under two formulas: that of the kinsman avenging a blood feud by the means of the three magic talismans, sword and lance and vessel; and that of the visit to the Bespelled Castle, the inmates of which enjoy, thanks to the magic vessel, a supernaturally prolonged life, from which they are released by the hero's question concerning that vessel. The one we may call the feud quest, the other the unspelling quest. The Proto-Mabinogi belonged, as we have already seen (supra, p. 139), to the first class, and accordingly we find that all relating to the question is obviously interpolated from Chrestien. Chrestien's model


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 and there is a maiden therein, and she is detained a prisoner there, and whoever shall set her free will attain the summit of the fame of the world."

In this last case certainly, in the other cases probably, a direct influence, to the extent at least of the passages quoted, must be admitted. But before concluding hastily that the Welsh story-teller is the copyist, some facts must be mentioned on the other side. Thus the incident of the blood drops in the snow, which Birch-Hirschfeld sets down as one of those taken over by the Mabinogi, with the remark that the Welsh story contains no trace of a passion as strong as Perceval's for Blanchefleur, has been dealt with by Professor H. Zimmer in his "Keltische Studien," vol. ii, pp. 200. He refers to the awakening of Deirdre's love to Noisi by similar means, as found in the Irish saga of the Sons of Usnech (oldest MS. authority, Book of Leinster, copied before 1164 from older MSS.) as evidence of the early importance of this motif in Celtic tradition. The passage runs thus in English: "As her foster-father was busy in winter time skinning a calf out in the snow, she beheld a raven which drank up the blood in the snow; and she exclaimed, 'Such a man could I love, and him only, having the three colours, his hair like the raven, his cheeks like the blood, his body like the snow.'"

Now the Mabinogi says, almost in the same words—the blackness of the raven and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood he compared to the hair and the skin and the two red spots upon the cheek of the lady that best he loved. In Chrestien there is no raven, and the whole stress is laid upon the three drops of blood on the snow, which put the hero in mind of the red and white of his lady's face. As Zimmer justly points out, the version


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 Calumny [cf. T. 395] ]

Candle-lighting election, Km. 386

Cannibalism ordered, Kj. vii, 153

Cannibal princess, R. 175; Lg. Ixxiv [cf. T. 395]

Carried home by enemy in sack, Kj. vii, 152

Carrier carried, Cln. 68

Carry water in sieve task, C. ii, 245 [see Sieve-pail]

Casting sheep's eyes, Ko. 684; Kj. v, 19; C. ii, 178; Cln. 126-8

Cat and Co. frighten robbers, G. i, 351, 375, 390; Ko. 125-6; Kg. 245; C. ii, 103

Cat legacy, Km. 158

Cat nature, Cr. 38125

Changed bride. Kg. 225; Cr. 338; J. K. 386 [cf. T. 398]

Changeling discovered, Ko. 321

Chastity test, Ch. i, 266-71; ii,

Cheese squeezing, Kj. vii, 252

Child from devil, Kj. vii, 263

Childless queen. Kg. 211

Child-murder calumny, Kg. 22 1

Church walls moved, Kj. vii, 286; Cln. 55

Clever lass, Cr. 383

Clever lass, Ch. i, 485

Clothes invited, Cr. 38017

Coal and straw travel, G. i, 358

Coals on ashes, Cr. 308

Cock resuscitated, Ch. i, 239, 505

Collecting commission, Cr. 3789

Concealed food, Ko. 505-6

Concealment of heroine from hero, C. i, 256

Concealment in golden bull, C. i, 275-6

Conditional permission to revisit parents, Kj. vii, 146; Kg. 209; C. ii, 130, 220; Ch. i, 488; Km. Ixxxiv; J. K. 370-1

Confused identity, G. i, 383, 385

Contented wife, C. i, 156-7

Cowards, G. ii, 418; Cln. 55

Cow for pig, pig for goose, etc., G. 1,452; C. i, 156-7

Cowhide sell, Ko. 489-505; C. i, 156-7

Creaking door cured. Kg. 21 1-2,

Cuckoo ends engagement. Km. 470; Cr. 380

Cure by animal language, A.R. 'i, 86

Cure by laughing, G. i, 429; Kj. v, 15; Kg. 210, 224; Cr. 347; J.K. 312

Cutting golden hair, C. i, 196, n.

Dancing fleas, Kj. v, 15 (Benf i, 518)

Dancing flute, G. ii, 411, 523; Kj. v, 10

Dancing water, singing tree, and bird of truth, Kg. 209; Km. 213; C. i, 192-3

Dark tower. Kg. 222

Dead mother aid. Kg. 219

Dead mother sell, C. i, 226-7

Deaf v. Deaf Cr. 378?

Death index, G. i, 422, 453; ii, 400; Ko. 119-20; Kg. 230; Kb. 248; C. i, 70-2, 193; Cr. 326; J. K. 339 [cf. T.'s "Life Index"]

Deforming fruit and antidote, Kk. 365; Kg. 223; C. i, 127

Deliverance kiss, Kk. 365; Ch. i, 307

Demon's mother baked, Ka. 283

Descent into pit, Ko. 299-300; R. 80; C. ii, 6

Devil decides. Kg. vii, 6-7

Dipping into water transforms, Ch. 1,338; ii, 505; iii, 505


text:
User talk:99.184.10.18

Welcome

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text:
Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/128

 90 Disguised as servant, Kj. viii, 256; J.K. 319 [cf.T.412]

Disguised hero conquers thrice, Kj. viii, 256; Kg. 246; C. i, 142-5; ii, 93

Disguised hero tells story, C. ii,

Divining cross, G. i, 425; C. i, 227 Door thrown down, G. i, 418; Kj. v, 20; Kj. viii, 267

Doves aid, Ko. 109

Dragon killed by dogs, Kj. iii, 133; viii, 246; C. ii, 58; J. K. 325

Dragon-stealing, Kj. vii, 138

Dream foretells luck, J. K. 376 [cf. T. 403-4]

Dress seized (of nymph), C. ii, -23 [cf T. 406]

Dress demanded for recognition, Kj. vii, 27

Drinking the moon, Kj. v, 11

Drinking river, Ko. 301

Drowning eels, Cln. 34

Eagle carries off hero, Kj. vii, 24; Kg. 239; Ko. 299; C. ii, 141, n.; Cr. 33614

Eating bet, Kj. v, 7; C. ii, 110

Eating with fairies tabu, Ch. i,

Echo answers, Cln. 69

Ejaculation guess, G. ii, 45 1; C. ii, 118; Cr. 383

Enemy's children imitated, Ko. 301; Ka. 278

Enforced marriage postponed [cf. T. 429]

Eternal ferryman, C. i, 215

Evading demons, C. ii, 232

Evading marriage by demanding wonders, C. i, 275

Evasion by transformation, J. K.

Exchanged ornaments disguise, Ko. 301

Exposed hero, G. i, 421; C. i, 192; A. R. i,85; J. K. 374

Exposed princess, C. i, 77-8; ii, 58, 260 [cf T. 396]

Extraordinary comrades, G. i, 435;Benf. AusV 58, No. 41 seq.; Ko. 298; Kj. V, 14; vii, 33; Kk. 357; Kg. 248-9; C.i,9, 123-5;", 145; J. K. 407 [cf. Nutt in MacInnes]

Eye bet, Kj. vii, 9

Eye for food, G. ii, 569

Eye restored, C. ii, 44; Kj. vii, 6; Kg. 252

Eyes exchanged, G. ii, 416

Face mirrored in pool, Ko. 109

Fairy salve, Ch. i, 339; iii, 505

Falling on robbers, C. i, 241-2

False champion, Kj. vii, 133. See Impostor

False bride pickled. Kg. 227

False sister of dragon slayer, Kj. vii, 133

Fatal bride task, K. Germ, iii, 203

Fate personified. Kg. 218; R. 196-8 [cf T. 400]

Father, unnatural, G. i, 430; Ko. 294-6; Kg. 220-1, 229; R. 159, n.; C. i, 275; J. K. 401

Fat wolf prisoner, G. i, 436; C. ii,

Fay spouse summoned, Kj. vii, 146-7

Fear unknown, G. i, 342-7; ii, 419; Ko. 680; Kg. 237; C. ii, 259; J. K. 405; R- C. 3

Feather guides, G. i, 428

Feeding animals rewarded, C. i, 139, n.

Feefifofum, Lp. Ixiii; J. K. 340-1

Feigned illness, J. K. 386 [cf. T. 409]


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 92 Hand cut off, G. i, 379; Kg. 220; C. ii, 325; J. K. 338; Ch. iii,

Hand of glory, C. i, 184

Hard delivery, Kj. vii, 255; Kg. 210-1

Hare and hedgehog, G. ii, 463

Hare postman, Kj. vii, 280; Cr.

Haunted castle, R. 282; C. ii, 262,

Hen divided. Kg. 205; Cr. 382

Henny-penny, Cr. 377

Herd stealing, C. ii, 276

Hero recovered from deep, C. i,

Hermit and angel, Km. 386

Hold on till cockcrow, Ch. i, 336

Horse's ear purse, Ko. 107, 112

Horse shaving task, Kk. 359

Horse stealing, C. ii, 277

House without windows, Cln. 58-65

How far to heaven, Cr. 276

How many stars, Cr. 272

Huff and puff, C. ii, 320; Cr. 377

Human midwife, Ch. i, 359; ii, 505 [cf Hartland, Science]

Husband in basket, G. ii, 395

Husk burnt, Kj. vii, 254-6; Kg. 231; Kk. 363 (Benf. i, 254); Km. lxxxi

Husks, Lcp. Ivii-lxii; J. K. 386 [cf.T. 421,423]

Iced wolf's tail, G. i, 436; C. ii, 160 "If I married King", C. i, 190-1; J- K. 337

"If so and so were to happen", G. i, 418; Ko. 319; Cr. 280; Cln. 198

Imaginary pursuit, C. ii, 349; Cln.

Impoliteness punished, Kj. vii, 25; C. i, 214

Impostor, K. Germ, xi, 398; C. i, 44-6; ii, 294 (m); ii, 44, 199(f)

Impostor discovered, Ko. 112-3

Inanimates bespelled, Lg. Ixxii

Indelible blood, Kj. vii, 172

Inquiries after unknown land, Kj. vii, 255

Inside again, G. ii, 401

Instrument resuscitating, Kg. 232; C. ii, 7, 185

Invisible cap, Kj. vii, 146; Kk. 359 [cf. T. 423]

Iron shoes, Kj. vii, 254; Kg. 224; K. Awar. xxvi; Kb. 159; Cr. 324

"I see you", Kj. vii, 152-3

Jachimo, Ko. 315; Kg. 209

Jealous brothers, Kg. 238; J. K.

Jealous mother-in-law, G. i, 409; C. ii, 244

Jealous stepmother, Kg. 206; Cr. [cf T. 394]

Jealous stepsister, C. i, 250, 256

Jonah on board, Ch. ii, 15, 510

Jonah's whale, Lp. Ivii; R. C. 6 [cf. T.411]

Jumping into shirt, Cln. 209

Jumping over table, Ch. ii, 127,

Killing reward, G. i, 415, 421; it, 433; Kg. 245; R. 134

Killing riddle, Kj. vii, 272

King abducts heroine, J. K. 314-6

Kingship test, A. R. i, 98

King Sole, G. ii, 455

King Wren, G. ii, 455

Knife trick, Kj. v, 12


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Rh friends of my youth, the scenes of my boyhood, and early manhood, of the slavery of my punishment, of the liberty I had panted for, and which, although now, realized, after a fashion, made the heart sick, even at its enjoyment. I remember, I was here subjected to the most severe mental sufferings for several hours, and then pursued my solitary journey.

How I could have deceived myself into a belief of ever reaching Sydney, and particularly by travelling in that direction, is to me astonishing; and even if I had found it possible to do so, of course I should, on my arrival there, have been confined as a runaway, and punished accordingly. The whole affair, was, in fact, a species of madness.

During my first day's lonely march, I saw, at a distance, about a hundred natives, in and about some huts built of bark, and boughs of trees, and others of the Tribe making toward me. Being greatly, alarmed, I took to the river, and swam across it with my clothes on, and in so doing extinguished my fire-stick, so that I was deprived of the means to cook my food. This was a sad loss, not only as respected the way of making what I could obtain to eat, palatable, but of preserving my health, under the great privations to which I was subjected. I was glad however to observe the natives retiring from the bank of the river to their huts, instead of following me as I expected, and, with this consolation, when I had made my way to the, beach, I laid myself down to sleep in the thick scrub, covering myself over with leaves, rushes, and broken boughs. It was a


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12 miserable night, my clothes being wet, and the weather cold, it being the early part of the spring of the year. At daylight, I endeavoured to ascertain if the natives were moving, as their huts and fires were within sight, and finding them not astir, I left my uncomfortable lodging, and took again to the beach.

As it was low tide, I found a considerable supply of the shell fish before mentioned, which the natives call Kooderoo; it is the same as the English describe as mutton fish. Its shape is something like that of the oyster, but it is tougher, and larger, and consequently not so digestable. The shell is inlaid with what appears to be mother of pearl. These fish I was now obliged to eat raw, and having no fresh water I suffered exceedingly from thirst until the evening, when I reached the river Kaaraf, a stream of considerable width and depth, I there laid myself down for the night. It was one, far worse than the last, for I had taken off my clothes and hung them up in the trees to dry, covering myself with the long grass as my only shelter from the weather. The next day, I forded the Kaaraf, and having left it and taken to the bush, I suffered dreadfully during the day from thirst, having nothing to allay it but the dew from the boughs which I collected with my hands in passing. Even this supply was very uncertain, on account of the strong breezes which prevailed during the nights.

Continuing my course along the beach, I reached the Doorangwar River, where I took up my quarters in my usual manner, having the sky for my canopy, and the


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Rh earthy scrub for my resting-place. I did so this night with increased anxiety, having seen several deserted native huts in my day's march, by which I concluded they were somewhere in the neighbourhood; on this account I had avoided going into the bush as much as possible, although compelled occasionally to leave the beach, in order to ford the rivers I had met with on my journey.

The following day I came to a stream the natives call Kuarka Dorla, without having seen any living creature excepting birds, and a few wild dogs; the latter fled at my approach, but their dismal howlings, and especially during the night, added to the solitary wretchedness of my situation. Although so very short a time had elapsed since I commenced my gloomy pilgrimage, I began to find, the weather, as I thought, warmer—as if I had travelled into another climate. This increased my thirst, and the consequent distress, which I could in no way alleviate, the streams I crossed being, even at low water, all brackish from the flow of the tide water. Added to this, my only food being shell fish, I suffered much, so exceedingly indeed, that almost regardless of life, I lay myself down for the night in a state of total exhaustion. With the morning's light, however, I pursued my journey, but this day I was more unfortunate than the one preceding, for I could not find a single fish, or particle of any other kind of food or water, and in great pain and misery that day ended. The following was one which I anticipated would be my last, for I could scarcely move my limbs along, and the stages I made, were in consequence,


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Rh CHAPTER XI.

THE BURNING OF OUR QUARTERS.—CARRYING THE MAIL. had hardly finished arranging our quarters when, one freezing night, I was awakened by a roaring sound in a chimney that had been defective from the first. Women have such a rooted habit of smelling smoke and sending men on needless investigating trips in the dead of night, that I tried to keep still for a few moments. The sound grew too loud to be mistaken, and I awakened my husband. He ran up-stairs and found the room above us on fire. He called to me to bring him some water, believing he could extinguish it himself. While I hurried after the water, there came such a crash and explosion that my brain seemed to reel from fright. I had no thought but that my husband was killed. Nothing can describe the relief with which I heard his voice calling back to my agonized question as to his safety. His escape was very narrow; the chimney had burst, the whole side of the room was blown out, and he was covered with plaster and surrounded with fallen bricks. The gas from the petroleum paper put on between the plastering and the outer walls to keep out the cold had exploded. The roof had ignited at once, and was blown off with a noise like the report of artillery. The sentinel at the guard-house fired his carbine as an alarm. The general ran to one of the lower windows, and with

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Page:Life and Adventures of William Buckley.djvu/37

14 very short. At length I came to two rocks nearly close to each other on the beach; weary and tired, foot sore and nearly heart broken, I laid myself down between them. I had not been there long, when the tide came in so rapidly, that I found it necessary to climb some way up one of them, and remain there until it had receded. The descent was a work of difficulty, having now been three days without a particle of food or drop of fresh water: however, I resolved on making another effort to hobble along the beach, and at length came to the Mangowak, another salt water stream which I forded. I found the natives had been burning the bush about this place, so I carefully examined it hoping to find some remains of fire; and, at length to my great joy, discovered a tree still smoking, and by this means again provided myself with a fire-stick. For a time, however, this was useless, as I had no kind of eatables to cook, and was still without fresh water. At length I discovered a high shrub bearing a kind of berry, many of which I knocked down; but not knowing what effect they might have upon me, I ate of them very sparingly. These berries I found very refreshing, and soon after I was so fortunate as to discover a native well near the bank of the stream, and close to the beach, in which there was excellent water—of which I drank abundantly. The Almighty indeed, appeared that day to favour me—especially, as I thought, in pity to my sufferings, for I found also a great supply of shell fish: so that I had now food, and fire, and water.

I should have mentioned, that when I parted


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Rh with my companions, one of them took with him the gun I spoke of, as having been brought with us from the encampment; indeed, I must here state, that if I omit to place any very precise details, in their particular order, I hope to be excused; because, so many years' wanderings must have impaired my recollection—except as to the more prominent and material incidents of my life.

At this spot I remained more than a week, perhaps it may have been two or three, for I seem henceforward to have lost all record of time, except by the return of the seasons, and the rising and setting sun. With such luxurious living, for one in my situation, I soon recovered my strength, and be assured, I did not fail to offer up fervent prayers of thankfulness to the God who had hitherto sustained me, and for his support under the other trials and sufferings, to which I might be subjected. At this place it rained very heavily during a whole day and night; being the first that had fallen since my wanderings commenced, but I found a cavern near the beach, and in it I sheltered myself very comfortably. At length, being sufficiently recovered, I resolved on resuming my journey, and by keeping along the beach, found abundance of fish, but very little fresh water—the streams being all salt, or brackish.

In two days I came to a large rock, about a mile long, which the natives call Nooraki. It is sheltered by very high overhanging land, so that the sun seldom shines upon it, the tide apparently never receding from it, as the depth of water seemed to be always the same.


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116 his powerful voice that he could throw so far called for the guard. Then we hurried to the room occupied by our girl-friend. The plastering falling on her bed from the burning roof was the first hint she had of the danger. It was unsafe for her to stop to gather her clothes, and wrapping a blanket about her we sent her to our sister next door.

In an incredibly short time the men were swarming about the house. The general had buttoned his vest, containing his watch and purse, over his long night-dress, and unconscious of his appearance, gave just as cool orders to the soldiers as if it were at drill. They, also, were perfectly cool, and worked like beavers to remove our things; for with no engine and without water it was useless to try to save the house. The general stood upon the upper landing and forbade them to join him, as it was perilous, the floors being then on fire. He had insisted upon my going out of the house, but I was determined not to do so until he was safe. When I did leave I ran in my night-dress over the snow to our sister's. The house burned very quickly. Fortunately it was a still, cold night, and there was no wind to spread the flames. Except for this the whole garrison must have been burned.

When the morning came we went to inspect the heap of household belongings that had been carried out on the parade-ground. It was a sorry collection of torn, broken, and marred effects! Most of my clothes were gone. Our poor girl-friend looked down into her trunk, empty except for one tarlatan party gown. I had lost silver and linen, and what laces and finery I had. The

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User talk:EWVGN3T0

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to Wikisource! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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Page:Boots and Saddles.djvu/130

Rh only loss I mourned, as it was really irreparable, was a collection of newspaper clippings regarding my husband that I had saved during and since the war. Besides these I lost a little wig that I had worn at a fancy-dress ball, made from the golden rings of curly hair cut from my husband's head after the war, when he had given up wearing long locks.

The fire served one purpose after all. Before it occurred I had always been a trial to Mary because I cared so little for dress and really owned so few ornaments. When the servants gathered together after that to boast of the possessions of their several mistresses, as is customary with the colored people, who so love display, Mary was armed with an excuse for me. I used to hear of her saying, "You jist orter seed what Miss Libbie had afo' the fire;" and then she would describe in detail elegant apparel that I had never even thought of having. Long afterwards I heard of the comments of one of our number, who loved the loaves and fishes of this life beyond everything. In vain she accumulated and had the proud satisfaction of out-doing every one in the number of her dresses. Mary managed to slip into her kitchen on some feigned errand, and drawing upon her imagination related how much richer Miss Libbie's possessions were before the fire. I had a hearty laugh by myself when I heard that the Miss Flora McFlimsey of our circle, worn out with the boasting of the cook, was heard to exclaim, "I wish I might have seen for myself all the gorgeousness described. I am tired to death of hearing about 'befo' the fire.

The general selected another set of quarters next to

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 Ladder of hair, G. i, 353; Kg. 236; Cr. 335; Ch. i, 486

Landship, Ko. 298-9; Kg. 249

La Perette, G. ii, 453 [cf. M. Müller, ''Sel. Essays'', i, 417-500]

Language of animals, G. i, 357; Ko. 686; Km. 384-6; A.R.'i [cf T. 413]

Laziness bet, G. ii, 445-7

Leaves into ships, Kk. 359

Letter substituted, Ko. 289

Letter to kill bearer, Kg. 220 [cf T. 410]

Lieland, G. ii, 450, 452

Lies, G. ii, 424, 435, 442, 450, 452

Life index, Ko. 101-3, 117; Kg. 215-6; Cr. 335; C. i, 173-7; ii, 131; J. K. 339-40,371,378,400 [cf T.] Frazer, Golden Bough

Life restoring herb, G. i, 356; R. 236; C.,80, n.; Cr.326; J. K. 341; Km. cv-vii [cf T. 404-5]

Light tabu, G. ii, 433; Kg. 225-6

Limbs restored, G. i, 379

Looking back tabu, G. ii, 400; S. 282-3; J- K. 362 [cf T. 415]

Loss of temper bet, Ko. 683-4; Kj. viii, 250; C. ii, 50

Love by portrait, Cr. 33812

Love in dream, Ko. 302

Love under husk. Kg. 246

Lovers deluded. Kg. 237

Loving like salt, Ko. 152; C. i,

Lucky now or later? Kg. 218

Lying watch, G. ii, 413; Kj. vii, 277; J- K. 350

Magic beanstalk, Kj. v, 23; vii, 278; R. 293-8; J. K. 188; C. ii,

Magic horse, mule, etc., G. i, 412, S. 278-9; C. i, 216 and n.; J. K. 245-9

Magic plants, A. R. i, 164

Magic purse, hat, etc., G. ii, 422; Ko. 124-5; Kj. vii, 246; C. i, 125-6; ii, 84, 285

Magic ring. Km. Ixxxiv; A.R. i, 163; Kj. vii, 146

Magic ring answers, Ko. 121, 123

Magic sword, C. ii, 185; J. K. 350-2

Magical ascent, C. i, 14

Magical fruit disappears, C. i,

Maiden transformed to flower, G. i, 437; R. 17, n.

Man stealing, C. ii, 277

Marking house with chalk, C. ii, 7

Marriage with animals, G. 1,427-9; ii, 379; Lg. lxxi; Lcp. liv-vii; J. K. 400

Married to first comer, C. ii, 100

Marvellous breath, G. i, 453

Master thief, G. i, 431, 464

Master thief, Ko. 305-13, 678; Kj. V, 4-8; vii, 138

Matricide by overfeeding, Cr. 380

Measuring gold by bushel, C. i, 225-6, 229

Meeting at church, Ko. 682

Message after a week, Cr. 378 (290)

Message unsupported. Kg. 226

Metamorphosis, Lg. lxxii

Miraculous nourishment, C. i, 1512 and n.

Mistaken fratricide, Kg. 230

Money recovered, C. ii, 339

Monster hero, C. ii, 224

Moonrakers, Cln. 44

Mother transformed, Kg. 224

Mountains of jewels, C. ii, 20, n.; J. K. 350

Mrs. Fox mourns, G. i, 387; Cr. 357


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118 his brother's, and thither removed the remnants of our household goods. He begged me not to go near the house, or attempt to settle, until I had recovered from the fright of the fire and of his imperilled life the night before. We were all busy enough trying to fit our things upon our little friend. Her purse, with abundance to buy a new outfit, was burned, and it would be weeks before she could receive a remittance from home by our slow mails. Next day, as she sat among us in borrowed apparel, several sizes too large, she had a surprise. A huge clothes-basket was handed in at the door, with a note addressed to her, begging her to consider herself, what the garrison had long felt that she was, "the daughter of the regiment." The basket contained everything that the generous hearts of friends could suggest. Not content with this, another was sent on the next day, with a further supply of things bought in the store at Bismarck. She objected to the acceptance, and tears rose in her eyes at the thoughtfulness; but there were no names signed to the note, so we would not heed remonstrances. Every one came with needles and thimbles, and the scissors flew.

I was too much absorbed in this scheme to ask many questions about the new quarters. When I did inquire, the general put me off by saying that in a few days I should begin to settle. The second evening after the fire he sent for me, and asked if I would come and consult with him about some arrangement of the furniture, as he was too busy to come after me. I started at once, but Mary, ever thoughtful of my appearance, and deep in the mystery that followed, urged me to put on my

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Rh other gown. I was unwillingly put into it, and went to the new house to find both sets of quarters lighted throughout, and the band playing "Home, Sweet Home." My husband, meeting me, led me in, and to my utter surprise I found the whole place completely settled, a door cut through into Colonel Tom's quarters, and the garrison assembled at the general's invitation for the house-warming. The pantry was full of good things to eat that Mary had prepared for the supper. Every one tried, by merry frolic and dancing, to make me forget the catastrophe, and the general, bubbling over with fun, inspired me to join. Then he told me to what subterfuges he had resorted to get the house ready, and repeated to me again that it was never worth while to "cry over spilled milk."

The life of the enlisted men was very dull during the cold weather. In the summer they had mounted drill and parades, and an occasional scout, to vary the life. They got very little good out of their horses in the winter. An hour in the morning and another in the afternoon were spent every day in grooming them. The general took me down to the stables sometimes to watch the work. Each horse had the name given to him by his rider printed in home-made letters over his stall. Some of the men were so careful of their horses that they were able to keep them for service during the five years of their enlistment. The daily intercourse of horse and rider quickened the instinct of the brute, so that he seemed half human. Indeed, I have seen an old troop-horse, from whose back a raw recruit had tumbled, go through the rest of the drill as correctly as if

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 94 Murdered mother returns thrice, G. i, 352; C. i, 235; R. 20; J. K. 403

"Myself", Cln. 194-5

"Myself", Ko. 331

Name knowing tabu, A. R., 118

Name on hoof, G. ii, 430

Needle in hay, Kj. v, 19

Nine, Kk. 356-7

Nonsense story, Cr. 263

Noodle, Kg. 228; R. 54, n.; C. ii, 330, 349; J. K. 355-8

Nostrums for getting children [cf. T. 429]

Not counting self, Cln. 28-33

Nuts containing wonders, Kj. vii, 255; Kg. 240; C. ii, 145

Oblivion curse. Kg. 237

Oblivion drink, Ch. i, 363

Oblivion embrace, G. i, 430-1; ii, 414; Ko. 105, 107, 110; Kk. 362; Kg. 212, 213-4; Cr. 343-4; C. ii, 17; J. K. 321

Oblivion food, Ko. 108

Oblivion removed by story telling. Kg. 237

Obstacles to pursuit, Ko. in; Kk. 362; R. 132, 142-3; Cr. 335; C. i, 139, 141; J. K. 393-4; Lc.92-3

One answer for all, G. i, 383, 385; Kj. v, 9

One cheese after another, Cln. 34-5

"One of them", G. ii, 401; Cr. 383; C.ii, 186

Oracle solving reward. Kg. 233

Outcast child, Ka. 288

Out of sack, G. i, 423, Ko.489-506; Kj. vii, 128; Cr. 293, 307; C. i, 113; ii, 209

Overheard council of witches, Kj. vii, 6; Cr. 3257

Parents' obeisance, A. R., 86; Km. 385

Partition of pay among beasts. Kg. 212; C. i, 170-2; ii, 130

Passers-by judges, G. ii, 391, 575; Kj. V, 6-7, 146; Kk. 359; C. i, 93, n., 170-1

Patches, G. i, 453

Paunch cut, Kj. vii, 16; Kg. 231; C.ii, 51

Paws in vice, G. i, 402; C. i, 30-1

Pea for hen, hen for pig, etc., Cr. 373; C.ii, 205

Pearls from mouth, C. ii, 119; Lg. 225 [cf. T. 426]

Peepo! bride wager, Ka. 272

Pet animal denies it has eaten, C. ii, 116

Pilgrim from Paradise, C. i, 239; Cln. 205, 214-8

Pixy cobblers, G. i, 389; C. i, 84-5

Pledge left, G. ii, 405

Polyphemus, Ko. 122; Cr. 34531

Pot without fire sell, Cr. 305; C. i, III; ii, 136

Pound of flesh, Ko. 315-6

Prickly barrel punishment, G. i,

Princess brought through air, C. ii, 6, 84

Princess cured, Kj. vii, 6, 11

Princess guarded by dragon, C. i, 13, n.

Princess with golden hair, C. ii,

Prisoner of giant, C. ii, 13; R.

Promised before birth to demon, G. i, 413; ii, 392; Ko. 115; Kj. vii, 145, 262; vii, 256; Kk. 362; Kg. 236; R. 132; C. i, 139-41, 164, 171-2, 269; ii, 13, 16, 232, 316; J. K. 384

Prophetic child. Kg. 222


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120 by a well-trained soldier. Many of the soldiers love and pet their dumb beasts, and if the supply of grain gives out on a campaign they unhesitatingly steal for them, as a mother would for a starving child.

Beside every stall hung the saddle and equipments of the trooper, and the companies vied with one another in keeping them in perfect condition. Some of the horses' coats shone like satin under the busy currycomb of an attached master. The captain of a company and his first-sergeant soon discovered the faults of a horse. When the preparations for a campaign began, it was really laughable to hear the ingenious excuses why an apparently sound horse should be exchanged for another from the fresh supply.

In the same way a soldier who was hopelessly worthless was often transferred to another company. The officers who had been the recipient of the undesirable soldier would come to the general to complain. I could not always keep a straight countenance when the injured captain narrated his wrongs. One told of what desperate need he had been in for a tailor. He had been proffered this man with many eulogies by a brother officer, and the final recommendation given which insured the acceptance of this seemingly generous offer was, "He has made clothes for me." Not until the transfer was effected, and a suit of clothes ruined for the captain, was he told by his would-be liberal friend the whole story, which was, "Oh yes! he made clothes for me, but, I forgot to add, I couldn't wear them."

The general sympathized with the impatience of the enlisted men in their dull life, which drove the

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Rh to solicit as a privilege the transportation of the mail. For a man of my husband's temperament it was easy to understand that danger was more endurable than the dead calm of barrack life. The telegraph lines were frequently down, and except for the courage of the sergeants we should have been completely isolated from the outside world. With four mules and the covered body of a government wagon on bobs, they went over a trackless waste of snow for two hundred and fifty miles. Occasionally there were huts that had once been stage stations, where they could stop, but it was deadly perilous for them to leave the telegraph line, no matter through what drifts they were compelled to plunge.

The bewilderment of a snow-storm comes very soon. An officer lying in the hospital, quite crazed from having been lost in attempting to cross a parade-ground only large enough for the regiment in line, was a fearful warning to these venturesome men. If the mail sergeant did not appear when he was due—at the end of two weeks—the general could scarcely restrain his anxiety. He was so concerned for the man's safety that he kept going to the window and door incessantly. He spoke to me so often of his fears for him that I used to imagine he would, for once, express some of his anxiety when the sergeant finally appeared to report; but military usage was too deeply bred in the bone of both, and the report was made and received with the customary repressed dignity of manner. However, I have seen my husband follow the man to the door, and tell him that he had felt great concern about him, and renew his directions to take every precaution for his safety. How Rh

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122 thankful I used to be that I was not hedged in with a soldier's discipline, but that I could follow the faithful old trooper and tell him how the general had worried about him, and how thankful we all were for his safe return.

It did not take long for the garrison to discover the poor mules, with their tired, drooping heads and wilted ears, dragging the mail-sleigh into the post. Every officer rushed to the adjutant's office for his mail. It was a great event and the letters were hailed with joy. An orphan, and having no brothers and sisters, I must have been the only one who was contented not to get any. For my world was there. An officer's wife who could hardly wait for news from her lonely, delicate mother in the East used to say pathetically, realizing the distance that intervened, that no one knew what it was to be married to a husband and a mother at the same time.

As soon as the mail was distributed, the general buried himself with the newspapers. For several days after he agreed with me that an old engraving, called "My Husband," was a faithful likeness of him at such a time (the picture represented a man sitting in a chair, completely hidden, except his crossed legs and his hands, and clasping an outspread paper). As soon as the contents were devoured, he cut from the illustrated papers comic pictures, and adding to them some doggerel, sent them in to our witty neighbor as illustrating some joke that had transpired against her. With other papers, by a little drawing he transposed the figures and likenesses of some of the officers who

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Rh had been placed previously in some ludicrous position. Adding marginal comments, he left the pictures uppermost where they were sure to be seen by the persons for whom they were intended, when they came in as usual to look over the papers and magazines in his room. A clever lady in a neighboring garrison, speaking of the arrival of the mail, described how voraciously she seized the new reading matter and closeted herself for hours to read up in advance of the others. She felt that "having exhausted every other topic she must coach up on something new."

In spite of the great risks and dangers of the mail-carriers, their journeys were accomplished without serious accident. I used to hear occasionally that the sergeant had levied such a heavy tax upon the citizens of Bismarck, when he brought small parcels through for them, that he had quite a little sum of money for himself by spring.

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26 ANCIENT CELTIC GODDESSES

Professor

extant remains of the Celtic forms of religion afford abundant testimony to the great variety of divine names which were associated therewith. No student of Celtic religion can fail to be impressed with the number of Celtic deities, who appear to have been local or tribal in character. Even where a certain deity appears to have become non-local, it will generally be found on investigation that the sphere of the extended worship has fairly well-defined areas and centres. We cannot take as our first guide for the classification and grouping of Celtic gods a Pantheon like that of Homer, behind which there is a long history of religious development, and upon which there is the impress of a literary tradition. Patient archæological investigation has thrown light on the local character and history of many of the deities of the Hellenic world, and in the Celtic world likewise we find the more rudimentary local divinities, which, had the fates so willed, might, under a civilisation like that of Greece and in the hands of Homer and his forerunners, have developed into as elaborate a Pantheon as that of Greece. As it is, however, we can only observe the scattered elements out of which, under other circumstances, a Pantheon might have been constructed. This is not altogether a misfortune, since it enables us to see in Celtic lands actual parallels to the hypothetical stages of development, which lie behind the more advanced religious systems of more highly civilised and literary countries, such as Greece and Rome. Religious development always stands in some correlation with the social development generally, and the civilisation of the Celtic world, in its various forms and in its several localities—a civilisation that at best was but rudimentary compared with that of the Græco-Roman world—had as the religious concomitants of its culture, conceptions and divinities of a corresponding character. Some of the

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