text: Talk:The Lustful Turk

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title: Talk:The Lustful Turk


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The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Abnormal

EDUCATION, Abnormal. See .


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The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Indian

EDUCATION, Indian. See .


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The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Industrial

EDUCATION, Industrial. Industrial education aims directly at training men and women, both youths above 14 years of age and adults, for progressively intelligent, skilful and economic production of food, clothing luxuries, machinery, structures and all the conveniences of life. It is distinguished from ordinary elementary or secondary education and from technical education by the fact that its purposes and methods are primarily dictated by the need for increased production through developed skill and experience, rather than by a desire to add breadth or culture to the future citizen and producer. Its organization in the United States is very recent and still incomplete and unsystematized.

In a century the United States has changed from a country of less than 10,000,000 people, essentially agricultural, in 1820, to a complex industrial and agricultural nation of 110,000,000, with unmeasured resources. With the development of a complicated factory system of production, machines took the place of much skilled hand labor, and the old apprentice system for training workers broke down. The substitution of school instruction for the former shop methods of training young workers in this country grew up slowly and uncertainly, lagging far behind European provisions for industrial training. The demand for some form of industrial education was expressed very early in the period of the “industrial revolution” in the United States, in fact before the end of the first quarter of the 19th century. But up to 1860 not more than four schools were giving instruction in applied science and two in agriculture. (See ). The movement which led to the founding of ../Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/ (q.v.) in 1824 was later supplemented by the beginnings of agricultural education in the foundation of institutions like the Michigan Agricultural College (1857) and the “Illinois Industrial University” (now the University of Illinois). The latter was the result of agitations of the Illinois Industrial League between 1850 and 1860 for the purpose of “bringing education home to the people of the State — the great industrial classes” or, in more concise terms, to produce “thinking laborers” rather than “laborious thinkers.” The passage of the great Morrill act in 1862, which stands to-day as the most important Federal legislation affecting education, provided Federal aid to the States “for the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college whose leading object shall be. . . to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts. . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life,” and gave the movement for industrial and technical education its greatest impetus.

While nearly all of the 51 institutions, not exclusively for colored students, which receive aid as land grant colleges, started with the idea of preparing young men and women for agricultural and mechanical industries, they developed, during the 30 years between 1870 and 1900, into technical, rather than industrial, institutions training men for engineering or technological professions. On the other hand the 16 institutions exclusively for colored

students still devote their energies mainly to literary instruction and to training in both agriculture and the mechanic arts and not at all to technical education.

Along with this evolution of the aim and organization of the land grant institutions, many experiments in industrial education for both men and women were tried in a great variety of schools and courses which were designed to fit students for immediate betterment of their condition as wage earners and independent producers. Both technical and industrial types of education were at first considered as competitors with the general or liberalizing education of the elementary or secondary schools; both suffered from the lack of specially trained teachers and of a body of organized and tested materials for instruction. The necessity for using teachers trained in the old order caused many a failure but ultimately both types have been recognized as auxiliaries or supplements, not rivals, to the older types of schools and both now receive liberal support on the same basis, namely, the common differentiated service of the whole community in the promotion of an industrial efficiency in America equal to the best in Europe without class distinction and without closing the door of opportunity to any student.

The centennial exhibition of 1876, especially the Russian exhibit, stimulated the introduction of manual training or manual arts into the elementary and secondary public schools of the United States. (See ). The object of this form of education, however, was not the production of marketable material, but the training of the pupil's hand and eye, as well as his brain, as vitally related to his full personal development. But the demands of the industries in a rapidly expanding, competitive order, which was no longer provided with an apprenticeship system, could not be met by this form of training, and institutions sprang up to provide various forms of special training for vocations like agriculture, carpentry, cooking, iron-working, machine work, painting, plumbing and stenography. By 1900, 144 manual and industrial training schools reported to the United States Bureau of Education from 38 States and Territories showing 41,736 pupils under instruction. From 1900 to 1917 the number of schools devoted primarily to industrial and trade education greatly increased, both through tax-support and through private foundation on a generous scale, for example, the Dunwoody bequest of approximately $3,000,000 for the Dunwoody Institute for free instruction in industrial and mechanic arts for the youth of Minneapolis and Minnesota, a worthy successor in the long line in which ../Girard College/ (q.v.) was a pioneer. In 1917 public and private high schools to the number of 2,610 reported 130,734 students in technical and manual training courses. Three thousand five hundred and ninety schools reported 260,413 students in commercial courses and 145,727 students in courses in domestic economy. In the same year, 912 private commercial schools or business colleges enrolled 192,388 students.

The following courses of instruction in Wentworth Institute, opened in Boston in 1911 as a purely industrial, endowed school “for the purpose of furnishing education in the

arts,” will illustrate the scope and method of an extremely and immediately practical type of industrial education confined to building and manufacturing and to printing and graphic arts. Admission to the one-year day course is open to students “at least 16 years of age. . . thoroughly in earnest”; to the two-year day courses, to those who pass examinations in arithmetic and English. One-year day courses are offered in carpentry and building, electric-wiring, plumbing, machine-work, pattern-making, foundry practice, forging, hardening and tempering. The weekly schedules for three terms in the course in machine-work calls for 20 hours of shop practice in machine-tool work, machine construction, bench-work and tool-making; 6 hours of mechanical drafting and blue-print reading; 9 hours of practical mechanics, materials of construction, power transmission, etc.; 5 hours of practical mathematics, machine shop computations. The two-year day courses are for persons who wish to become master mechanics, foremen, etc., and provide instruction in machine construction and tool design, electrical construction, steam and electrical power plant practice, foundry management and operation, and architectural construction. Evening shop courses are provided for persons employed during the day, and are selected from the list just given, together with tool-making, foundry chemistry and advanced plumbing; evening technical courses are for persons employed in building and manufacturing industries and give instruction in practical mathematics, mechanical drawing, machine design, architectural drawing, architectural design, practical mechanics, reinforced concrete and modern fireproof building, applied electricity, care and operation of steam boilers and engineering. There are also day and evening courses in printing and graphic arts, including typographic printing and composition, block printing and etching. Similarly detailed curricula would be found in specialized schools in cities like Lowell, Mass., where textile industries predominate, and Scranton, Pa., in the mining region.

Another form of industrial education is found in the 101 State industrial schools, which reported in 1916 36,976 males and 9,567 female students learning some trade or occupation. Of the type wholly supported by the State are the Iowa Industrial School for Boys and the New Jersey State Home for Boys; of the co-operative type, privately managed but subsidized by the State, for the care and instruction of orphans and delinquents, is the Roman Catholic Home of the Good Shepherd in New York, in which girls are prepared for various occupations.

Still another important group of schools for industrial education is that tor special groups or races, as schools for negroes and Indians. The increase of industrial facilities in colored schools, however, has not been equal to that in white institutions. Among the most notable of these industrial schools is the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute of Virginia, opened in 1868 under the great leadership of Gen. S. C. Armstrong for training of negroes in academic, industrial and agricultural subjects. The institution has national recognition “as a pioneer in

the development of the educational value of manual labor and in the correlation of academic subjects with industrial training.” An offshoot or imitator is the ../Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute of Alabama/ (q.v.), built up, under the leadership of Booker T. Washington, from nothing to a plant and endowment worth $4,000,000, an attendance of nearly 1,400, and a teaching staff, all colored, of 184. These two have been followed in some degree by the 16 land grant schools for negroes and by more than 200 smaller institutions scattered all over the South. One hundred and sixty-three counties in Southern States provide county industrial teachers. Washington, D. C., Charleston, S. C. and Columbus, Ga., are the only cities which maintain industrial schools for negroes. Important among the 109 boarding schools under Federal management, for the general and industrial education of Indians, are the Indian Industrial School of Carlisle, Pa., The Haskell Institute of Lawrence, Kan., and Sherman Institute, Riverside, Cal., in all of which the industrial element is kept strongly predominant.

Other forms of industrial education in process of organization and standardization are the special schools, continuation schools and corporation schools for workers in service. The motto of these schools is “Learn while earning, and earn while learning.” They are conducted as day schools, evening schools or correspondence schools, frequently as parts of the public school system of cities, and have for their four objects (1) the advancement of the individual by special training for more technical work, (2) the prolongation of the period of education for those who would otherwise not go to school at all, (3) the increased efficiency of the student in his present position, (4), the discovery for each student of the kind of work for which he is best fitted. The lower age limit for all of these schools is 14 years. The co-operation between school and employer takes varying forms. In some instances the student is detailed from his regular task to the school for certain hours on his employer's time; in other cases instruction is in the shop with the aid of a paid instructor in addition to the shop superintendent. In still others like the recent “vestibule schools” the employee is intensively trained for a brief period before admission to the regular service of the employer. Twenty-four big corporations in 1917 had special training schools for men in preparation for service of the corporation, the largest of these schools being that of the General Electric Company, which admits 250 to 300 college men per year for a training period of 12 to 15 months. In a similar manner the American Bridge Company receives about 60 college men per year for a course in bridge engineering from one to two years in length. The Boardman Apprentice Shops, part of the public school system of New Haven, Conn., provides industrial education in co-operation with corporations in that city on a plan providing for eight hours of instruction per day, 5½ days per week, and 50 weeks of the year for a two-year period, approximately one-quarter time being devoted to academic subjects and three-quarters to actual trade practice under the instruction of skilled mechanics for the production of salable articles. In some cases in this school, as in others, the boys in pairs alternate between school and the factory in

which they are employed, one working in the factory while the other is in school. The significance of this form of industrial education is attested by the formation of the National Association of Corporation Schools in 1913, which had in 1917 104 company members, including such corporations as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which reported 37 railway shop schools for apprentices; the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the International Harvester Company.

The incorporation of industrial or vocational education into the State systems, with provision for State subsidies to vocational or industrial schools, had been provided for in 10 States in 1916: Massachusetts (Department of Vocational Education), New York (Division of Agricultural and Industrial Education), Connecticut (State Superintendent of Trade Education), Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Indiana, California, New Mexico and Maine.

The movement for industrial education received its greatest recent reinforcement in the passage of the so-called Smith-Hughes Act of Congress, 23 Feb. 1917 “to provide for the promotion of vocational education; to provide for co-operation with the States in promotion of such education in agriculture and the trades and industries; to provide for co-operation with the States in the preparation of teachers of vocational subjects,” which made an initial appropriation in 1917 of $1,860,000 to be gradually increased to an annual grant of $7,367,000 after 1926. The allotments to the States for the various purposes of the act are made in the proportion which the rural, urban and total population of each State bears to the corresponding totals for the United States, the allotments to be administered through State boards in accordance with plans approved by the Federal Board for Vocational Education,

Bibliography. — Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Education (especially chapters on “Vocational Education”); Bulletins of Bureau of Education (especially 1916, No. 39, “Negro Education,” 2 vols.); Bulletins of the Federal Board for Vocational Education (especially No. 1, “Statement of Policies”); Annual Reports of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education; The Report of the Committee on Industrial Education, American Federation of Labor (Sen. Doc. No. 36, 2d sess., 62d Congress, 1912); Reports of the meetings of the National Association of Corporation Schools.


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62  Without any violation of the principles of the constitution, the general of the Roman armies might receive and exercise an authority almost despotic over the soldiers, the enemies, and the subjects of the republic. With regard to the soldiers, the jealousy of freedom had, even from the earliest ages of Rome, given way to the hopes of conquest, and a just sense of military discipline. The dictator, or consul, had a right to command the service of the Roman youth, and to punish an obstinate or cowardly disobedience by the most severe and ignominious penalties, by striking the offender out of the list of citizens, by confiscating his property, and by selling his person into slavery. The most sacred rights of freedom, confirmed by the Porcian and Sempronian laws, were suspended by the military engagement. In his camp the general exercised an absolute power of life and death; his jurisdiction was not confined by any forms of trial or rules of proceeding, and the execution of the sentence was immediate and without appeal. The choice of the enemies of Rome was regularly decided by the legislative authority. The most important resolutions of peace and war were seriously debated in the senate, and solemnly ratified by the people. But when the arms of the legions were carried to a great distance from Italy, the generals assumed the liberty of directing them against whatever people, and in whatever manner, they judged most advantageous for the public service. It was from the success, not from the justice, of their enterprises, that they expected the honours of a triumph. In the use of victory, especially after they were no longer controlled by the commissioners of the senate, they exercised the most unbounded despotism. When Pompey commanded in the East, he rewarded his soldiers and allies, dethroned princes, divided kingdoms, founded colonies, and distributed the treasures of Mithridates. On his return to Rome he obtained, by a single act of the senate and people, the universal ratification of all his proceedings.


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Rh Such was the power over the soldiers, and over the enemies of Rome, which was either granted to, or assumed by, the generals of the republic. They were, at the same time, the governors, or rather monarchs, of the conquered provinces, united the civil with the military character, administered justice as well as the finances, and exercised both the executive and legislative power of the state.

From what has been already observed in the first chapter of this work, some notion may be formed of the armies and provinces thus intrusted to the ruling hand of Augustus. But, as it was impossible that he could personally command the legions of so many distant frontiers, he was indulged by the senate, as Pompey had already been, in the permission of devolving the execution of his great office on a sufficient number of lieutenants. In rank and authority these officers seemed not inferior to the ancient proconsuls; but their station was dependent and precarious. They received and held their commissions at the will of a superior, to whose auspicious influence the merit of their action was legally attributed. They were the representatives of the emperor. The emperor alone was the general of the republic, and his jurisdiction, civil as well as military, extended over all the conquests of Rome. It was some satisfaction, however, to the senate that he always delegated his power to the members of their body. The imperial lieutenants were of consular or prætorian dignity; the legions were commanded by senators, and the prefecture of Egypt was the only important trust committed to a Roman knight.

Within six days after Augustus had been compelled to accept so very liberal a grant, he resolved to gratify the pride of the senate by an easy sacrifice. He represented to them that they had enlarged his powers, even beyond that degree which might be required by the melancholy condition of the times. They had not permitted him to refuse the laborious command of the armies and the frontiers; but he must insist on being allowed to restore the more peaceful and secure provinces to the mild administration of the civil magistrate. In the division of the provinces Augustus provided for his own power and for the dignity of the republic. The proconsuls of the senate, particularly those


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steadily declined from this time. I went to see him two years later. He was not at home. Meg wept to me as she told me of him, how he let the business slip, how he drank, what a brute he was in drink, and how unbearable afterwards. He was ruining his constitution, he was ruining her life and the children’s. I felt very sorry for her as she sat, large and ruddy, brimming over with bitter tears. She asked me if I did not think I might influence him. He was, she said, at the “Ram.” When he had an extra bad bout on he went up there, and stayed sometimes for a week at a time, with Oswald, coming back to the “Hollies” when he had recovered—“though,” said Meg, “he’s sick every morning and almost after every meal.”

All the time Meg was telling me this, sat curled up in a large chair their youngest boy, a pale, sensitive, rather spoiled lad of seven or eight years, with a petulant mouth, and nervous dark eyes. He sat watching his mother as she told her tale, heaving his shoulders and settling himself in a new position when his feelings were nearly too much for him. He was full of wild, childish pity for his mother, and furious, childish hate of his father, the author of all their trouble. I called at the “Ram” and saw George. He was half drunk.


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480 I went up to Highclose with a heavy heart. Lettie’s last child had been born, much to the surprise of everybody, some few months before I came down. There was a space of seven years between her youngest girl and this baby. Lettie was much absorbed in motherhood.

When I went up to talk to her about George I found her in the bedroom nursing the baby, who was very good and quiet on her knee. She listened to me sadly, but her attention was caught away by each movement made by the child. As I was telling her of the attitude of George’s children towards their father and mother, she glanced from the baby to me, and exclaimed:

“See how he watches the light flash across your spectacles when you turn suddenly—Look!”

But I was weary of babies. My friends had all grown up and married and inflicted them on me. There were storms of babies. I longed for a place where they would be obsolete, and young, arrogant, impervious mothers might be a forgotten tradition. Lettie’s heart would quicken in answer to only one pulse, the easy, light ticking of the baby’s blood.

I remembered, one day as I sat in the train hastening to Charing Cross on my way from France, that that was George’s birthday. I had the feeling of him upon me, heavily, and I could not rid myself of the depression. I put it down to travel fatigue, and tried to dismiss it. As I watched the evening sun glitter along the new corn-stubble in the fields we passed, trying to describe the effect to myself, I found myself asking: “But—what’s the matter? I’ve not had bad news, have I, to make my chest feel so weighted?”


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Rh control of the finances was intrusted to their care and, though they seldom had leisure to administer justice in person, they were considered as the supreme guardians of law, equity, and the public peace. Such was their ordinary jurisdiction; but whenever the senate empowered the first magistrate to consult the safety of the commonwealth, he was raised by that degree above the laws, and exercised, in the defence of liberty, a temporary despotism. The character of the tribunes was, in every respect, different from that of the consuls. The appearance of the former was modest and humble; but their persons were sacred and inviolable. Their force was suited rather for opposition than for action. They were instituted to defend the oppressed, to pardon offences, to arraign the enemies of the people, and, when they judged it necessary, to stop, by a single word, the whole machine of government. As long as the republic subsisted, the dangerous influence which either the consul or the tribune might derive from their respective jurisdiction was diminished by several important restrictions. Their authority expired with the year in which they were elected; the former office was divided between two, the latter among ten persons; and, as both in their private and public interest they were adverse to each other, their mutual conflicts contributed, for the most part, to strengthen rather than to destroy the balance of the constitution. But when the consular and tribunitian powers were united, when they were vested for life in a single person, when the general of the army was, at the same time, the minister of the senate and the representative of the Roman people, it was impossible to resist the exercise, nor was it easy to define the limits, of his imperial prerogative.

To these accumulated honours the policy of Augustus soon added the splendid as well as important dignities of supreme pontiff, and of censor. By the former he acquired the management of the religion, and by the latter a legal inspection over the manners and fortunes, of the Roman people. If so many distinct and independent powers did not exactly unite with each other, the complaisance of the senate was prepared to


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Rh I was surprised when I reached my lodging in New Maiden to find no letters for me, save one fat budget from Alice. I knew her squat, saturnine handwriting on the envelope, and I thought I knew what contents to expect from the letter.

She had married an old acquaintance who had been her particular aversion. This young man had got himself into trouble, so that the condemnations of the righteous pursued him like clouds of gnats on a summer evening. Alice immediately rose to sting back his vulgar enemies, and having rendered him a service, felt she could only wipe out the score by marrying him. They were fairly comfortable. Occasionally, as she said, there were displays of small fireworks in the back yard. He worked in the offices of some iron foundries just over the Erewash in Derbyshire. Alice lived in a dirty little place in the valley a mile and a half from Eberwich, not far from his work. She had no children, and practically no friends; a few young matrons for acquaintances. As wife of a superior clerk, she had to preserve her dignity among the work-people. So all her little crackling fires were sodded down with the sods of British respectability. Occasionally she smouldered a fierce smoke that made one’s eyes water. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, she wrote me a whole venomous budget, much to my amusement.

I was not in any haste to open this fat letter, until, after supper, I turned to it as a resource from my depression.

“Oh dear Cyril, I’m in a bubbling state, I want to yell, not write. Oh, Cyril, why didn’t you marry me, or why didn’t our Georgie Saxton, or somebody. I’m 31


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482 deadly sick. Percival Charles is enough to stop a clock. Oh, Cyril, he lives in an eternal Sunday suit, holy broad-cloth and righteous three inches of cuffs! He goes to bed in it. Nay, he wallows in bibles when he goes to bed. I can feel the brass covers of all his family bibles sticking in my ribs as I lie by his side. I could weep with wrath, yet I put on my black hat and trot to chapel with him like a lamb.

“Oh, Cyril, nothing’s happened. Nothing has happened to me all these years. I shall die of it. When I see Percival Charles at dinner, after having asked a blessing, I feel as if I should never touch a bit at his table again. In about an hour I shall hear him hurrying up the entry—prayers always make him hungry—and his first look will be on the table. But I’m not fair to him—he’s really a good fellow—I only wish he wasn’t.

“It’s George Saxton who’s put this in my marital cup of cocoa. Cyril, I must a tale unfold. It is fifteen years since our George married Meg. When I count up, and think of the future, it nearly makes me scream. But my tale, my tale!

“Can you remember his faithful-dog, wounded-stag, gentle-gazelle eyes? Cyril, you can see the whisky, or the brandy combusting in them. He’s got d—t’s, blue-devils—and I’ve seen him, and I’m swarming myself with little red devils after it. I went up to Eberwich on Wednesday afternoon for a pound of fry for Percival Charles’ Thursday dinner. I walked by that little path which you know goes round the back of the ‘Hollies’—it’s as near as any way for me. I thought I heard a row in the paddock at the back of the stables, so I said I might as well see


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Rh the fun. I went to the gate, basket in one hand, nine-pence in coppers in the other, a demure deacon’s wife. I didn’t take in the scene at first.

“There was our Georgie, in leggings and breeches as of yore, and a whip. He was flourishing, and striding, and yelling. ‘Go it old boy,’ I said, ‘you’ll want your stocking round your throat to-night.’ But Cyril, I had spoken too soon. Oh, lum ! There came raking up the croft that long, wire-springy race-horse of his, ears flat, and, clinging to its neck, the pale-faced lad, Wilfred. The kid was white as death, and squealing ‘Mam! mam!’ I thought it was a bit rotten of Georgie trying to teach the kid to jockey. The race-horse, Bonny-Boy—Boney Boy I call him—came bouncing round like a spiral egg-whish. Then I saw our Georgie rush up screaming, nearly spitting the moustache off his face, and fetch the horse a cut with the whip. It went off like a flame along hot paraffin. The kid shrieked and clung. Georgie went rushing after him, running staggery, and swearing, fairly screaming,—awful—‘a lily-livered little swine!’ The high lanky race-horse went larroping round as if it was going mad. I was dazed. Then Meg came rushing, and the other two lads, all screaming. She went for George, but he lifted his whip like the devil. She daren’t go near him—she rushed at him, and stopped, rushed at him, and stopped, striking at him with her two fists. He waved his whip and kept her off, and the race-horse kept tearing along. Meg flew to stop it, he ran with his drunken totter-step, brandishing his whip. I flew as well. I hit him with my basket. The kid fell off, and Meg rushed to him. Some men came running. George


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66 supply every deficiency by the most ample and extraordinary concessions. The emperors, as the first ministers of the republic, were exempted from the obligation and penalty of many inconvenient laws: they were authorized to convoke the senate, to make several motions in the same day, to recommend candidates for the honours of the state, to enlarge the bounds of the city, to employ the revenue at their discretion, to declare peace and war, to ratify treaties; and by a most comprehensive clause, they were empowered to execute whatsoever they should judge advantageous to the empire, and agreeable to the majesty of things private or public, human or divine.

When all the various powers of executive government were committed to the Imperial magistrate, the ordinary magistrates of the commonwealth languished in obscurity, without vigour, and almost without business. The names and forms of the ancient administration were preserved by Augustus with the most anxious care. The usual number of consuls, prætors, and tribunes were annually invested with their respective ensigns of office, and continued to discharge some of their least important functions. Those honours still attracted the vain ambition of the Romans; and the emperors themselves, though invested for life with the powers of the consulship, frequently aspired to the title of that annual dignity, which they condescended to share with the most illustrious of their fellow-citizens. In the election of these magistrates, the people, during the reign of Augustus, were permitted to expose all the inconveniences of a wild democracy. That artful prince, instead of discovering the


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484 stood fairly shuddering. You would never have known his face, Cyril. He was mad, demoniacal. I feel sometimes as if I should burst and shatter to bits like a sky-rocket when I think of it, I’ve got such a weal on my arm.

“I lost Percival Charles’ ninepence, and my nice white cloth out of the basket, and everything, besides having black looks on Thursday because it was mutton chops, which he hates. Oh, Cyril, ‘I wish I was a cassowary, on the banks of the Timbuctoo.’ When I saw Meg sobbing over that lad—thank goodness he wasn’t hurt—! I wished our Georgie was dead; I do now, also; I wish we only had to remember him. I haven’t been to see them lately—can’t stand Meg’s ikeyness. I wonder how it all will end.

“There’s P. C. bidding ‘Good-night and God Bless You’ to Brother Jakes, and no supper ready——”

As soon as I could, after reading Alice’s letter, I went down to Eberwich to see how things were, Memories of the old days came over me again till my heart hungered for its old people.

They told me at the “Hollies” that, after a bad attack of delirium tremens, George had been sent to Papplewick in the lonely country to stay with Emily, I borrowed a bicycle to ride the nine miles. The summer had been wet, and everything was late. At the end of September the foliage was heavy green, and the wheat stood dejectedly in stook. I rode through the still sweetness of an autumn morning. The mist was folded blue along the hedges; the elm trees loomed up along the dim walls of the morning, the horsechestnut trees at hand flickered with a few yellow leaves like bright blossoms. As I rode through


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Rh the tree tunnel by the church where, on his last night, the keeper had told me his story, I smelled the cold rotting of the leaves of the cloudy summer.

I passed silently through the lanes, where the chill grass was weighed down with grey-blue seed-pearls of dew in the shadow, where the wet woollen spider-cloths of autumn were spread as on a loom. Brown birds rustled in flocks like driven leaves before me. I heard the far-off hooting of the “loose-all” at the pits, telling me it was half-past eleven, that the men and boys would be sitting in the narrow darkness of the mines eating their “snap,” while shadowy mice darted for the crumbs, and the boys laughed with red mouths rimmed with grime, as the bold little creatures peeped at them in the dim light of the lamps. The dog-wood berries stood jauntily scarlet on the hedge-tops, the bunched scarlet and green berries of the convolvulus and bryony hung amid golden trails, the blackberries dropped ungathered. I rode slowly on, the plants dying around me, the berries leaning their heavy ruddy mouths, and languishing for the birds, the men imprisoned underground below me, the brown birds dashing in haste along the hedges.

Swineshed Farm, where the Renshaws lived, stood quite alone among its fields, hidden from the highway and from everything. The lane leading up to it was deep and unsunned. On my right, I caught glimpses through the hedge of the corn-fields, where the shocks of wheat stood like small yellow-sailed ships in a wide-spread flotilla. The upper part of the field was cleared. I heard the clank of a wagon and the voices of men, and I saw the high load of sheaves go lurching, rocking up the incline to the stackyard.


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Fishhead

IT GOES past the powers of my pen to try to describe Reelfoot Lake for you so that you, reading this, will get the picture of it in your mind as I have it in mine.

For Reelfoot Lake is like no other lake that I know anything about. It is an after-thought of Creation.

The rest of this continent was made and had dried in the sun for thousands of years-millions of years, for all I know-before Reelfoot came to be. It's the newest big thing in nature on this hemisphere, probably, for it was formed by the great earthquake of 1811.

That earthquake of 1811 surely altered the face of the earth on the then far frontier of this country.

It changed the course of rivers, it converted hills into what are now the sunk lands of three states, and it turned the solid ground to jelly and made it roll in waves like the sea.

And in the midst of the retching of the land and the vomiting of the waters it depressed to varying depths a section of the earth crust sixty miles long, taking it down -- trees, hills, hollows, and all, and a crack broke through to the Mississippi River so that for three days the river ran up stream, filling the hole.

The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly in Tennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, and taking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay, reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, may have got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot: at least so it sounds.

Reelfoot is, and has always been, a lake of mystery.

In places it is bottomless. Other places the skeletons of the cypress-trees that went down when the earth sank, still stand upright so that if the sun shines from the right quarter, and the water is less muddy than common, a man, peering face downward into its depths, sees, or thinks he sees, down below him the bare top-limbs upstretching like drowned men's fingers, all coated with the mud of years and bandaged with pennons of the green lake slime.

In still other places the lake is shallow for long stretches, no deeper than breast high to a man, but dangerous because of the weed growths and the sunken drifts which entangle a swimmer's limbs. Its banks are mainly mud, its waters are *muddled, too, being a rich coffee color in the spring and a copperish yellow in the summer, and the trees along its shore are mud colored clear up their lower limbs after the spring floods, when the dried sediment covers their trunks with a thick, scrofulous-looking coat.

There are stretches of unbroken woodland around it, and slashes where the cypress knees rise countlessly like headstones and footstones for the dead snags that rot in the soft ooze.

There are deadenings with the lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached, fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb.

There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog- spawn cling like patches of white mucus among the weed-stalks, and at night the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly, round, white eggs with tough, rubbery shells in the sand.

There are bayous leading off to nowhere, and sloughs that wind aimlessly, like great, blind worms, to finally join the big river that rolls its semi-liquid torrents a few miles to the westward.

So Reelfoot lies there, flat in the bottoms, freezing lightly in the winter, steaming torridly in the summer, swollen in the spring when the woods have turned a vivid green and the buffalo-gnats by the million and the billion fill the flooded hollows with their pestilential buzzing, and in the fall, ringed about gloriously with all the colors which the first frost brings-gold of hickory, yellow-russet of sycamore, red of dogwood and ash, and purple-black of sweet-gum.

But the Reelfoot country has its uses. It is the best game and fish country, natural or artificial, that is left in the South today.

In their appointed seasons the duck and the geese flock in, and even semi-tropical birds, like the brown pelican and the Florida snake-bird, have been known to come there to nest.

Pigs, gone back to wildness, range the ridges, each razor-backed drove captained by a gaunt, savage, slab-sided old boar. By night the bullfrogs, inconceivably big and tremendously vocal, bellow under the banks.

It is a wonderful place for fish -- bass and crappie, and perch, and the snouted buffalo fish.

How these edible sorts live to spawn, and how their spawn in turn live to spawn again is a marvel, seeing how many of the big fish-eating cannibal-fish there are in Reelfoot.

Here, bigger than anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the Reptilian Period.

The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of fresh-water sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the water.

On every stranded log the huge snapping turtles lie on sunny days in groups of four and six, baking their shells black in the sun, with their little snaky heads raised watchfully, ready to slip noiselessly off at the first sound of oars grating in the row-locks. But the biggest of them all are the catfish!

These are monstrous creatures, these catfish of Reelfoot -- scaleless,slick things, with corpsy, dead eyes and poisonous fins, like javelins, and huge whiskers dangling from the sides of their cavernous heads.

Six and seven feet long they grow to be, and weigh 200 pounds or more, and they have mouths wide enough to take in a man's foot or a man's fist, and strong enough to break any hook save the strongest, and greedy enough to eat anything, living or dead or putrid, that the horny jaws can master.

Oh, but they are wicked things, and they tell wicked tales of them down there. They call them man-eaters, and compare them, in certain of their habits, to sharks.

Fishhead was of a piece with this setting.

He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one place, at the mouth of a certain slough.

He had been born there, of a negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked.

Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare!

He had the body of a man -- a short, stocky sinewy body -- but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect.

His skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly be said to have a have a forehead at all; his chin slanted off right into nothing. His eyes were small and round with shallow, glazed, pale-yellow pupils, and they were set wide apart in his head, and they were unwinking and staring, like a fish's eyes.

His nose was no more than a pair of tiny slits in the middle of the yellow mask. His mouth was the worst of all. It was the awful mouth of a catfish, lipless and almost inconceivably wide, stretching from side to side.

Also when Fishhead became a man grown his likeness to a fish increased, for the hair upon his face grew out into two tightly kinked slender pendants that drooped down either side of the mouth like the beards of a fish!

If he had another name than Fishhead, none excepting he knew it. As Fishhead he was known, and as Fishhead he answered. Because he knew the waters and the woods of Reelfoot better than any other man there, he was valued as a guide by the city men who came every year to hunt or fish; but there were few such jobs that Fishhead would take.

Mainly he kept to himself, tending his corn patch, netting the lake, trapping a little, and in season pot hunting for the city markets. His neighbors, ague-bitten whites and malaria-proof negroes alike, left him to himself

Indeed, for the most part they had a superstitious fear of him. So he lived alone, with no kith nor kin, nor even a friend, shunning his kind and shunned by them.

His cabin stood just below the State line, where Mud Slough runs into the lake. It was a shack of logs, the only human habitation for four miles up or down.

Behind it the thick timber came shouldering right up to the edge of Fishhead's small truck patch, enclosing it in thick shade except when the sun stood just overhead.

He cooked his food in a primitive fashion, outdoors, over a hole in the soggy earth or upon the rusted red ruin of an old cookstove, and he drank the saffron water of the lake out of a dipper made of a gourd, faring and fending for himself, a master hand at skiff and net, competent with duck gun and fishspear, yet a creature of affliction and loneliness, part savage, almost amphibious, set apart from his fellows, silent and suspicious.

In front of his cabin jutted out a long fallen cottonwood trunk, lying half in and half out of the water, its top side burnt by the sun and worn by the friction of Fishhead's bare feet until it showed countless patterns of tiny scrolled lines, its underside black and rotted, and lapped at unceasingly by little waves like tiny licking tongues.

Its farther end reached deep water. And it was a part of Fishhead, for no matter how far his fishing and trapping might take him in the daytime, sunset would find him back there, his boat drawn up on the bank, and he on the other end of this log.

From a distance men had seen him there many times, sometimes squatted motionless as the big turtles that would crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and motionless like a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against the yellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks -- all of them yellow together.

If the Reelfooters shunned Fishhead by day they feared him by night and avoided him as a plague, dreading even the chance of a casual meeting. For there were ugly stories about Fishhead -- stories which all the negroes and some of the whites believed.

They said that a cry which had been heard just before dusk and just after, skittering across the darkened waters, was his calling cry to the big cats, and at his bidding they came trooping in, and that in their company he swam in the lake on moonlight nights, sporting with them, diving with them, even feeding with them on what manner of unclean things they fed.

The cry had been heard many times, that much was certain, and it was certain also that the big fish were noticeably thick at the mouth of Fishhead's slough. No native Reelfooter, white or black, would willingly wet a leg or an arm there.

Here Fishhead had lived, and here he was going to die. The Baxters were going to kill him, and this day in late summer was to be the time of the killing.

The two Baxters -- Jake and Joel -- were coming in their dugout to do it!

This murder had been a long time in the making. The Baxters had to brew their hate over a slow fire for months before it reached the pitch of action.

They were poor whites, poor in everything, repute, and worldly goods, and standing -- a pair of fever-ridden squatters who lived on whiskey and tobacco when they could get it, and on fish and cornbread when they couldn't.

The feud itself was of months' standing. Meeting Fishhead one day, in the spring on the spindly scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log, and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him, wantonly and without proof, of running their trout-line and stripping it of the hooked catch -- an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and the shanty boaters of the South.

Seeing that he bore this accusation in silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of their lives -- bloodying their noses and bruising their lips with hard blows against their front teeth, and finally leaving them, mauled and prone, in the dirt.

Moreover, in the onlookers a sense of the everlasting fitness of things had triumphed over race prejudice and allowed them -- two freeborn, sovereign whites -- to be licked *by, a nigger! Therefore they were going to get the nigger!

The whole thing had been planned out amply. They were going to kill him on his log at sundown. There would be no witnesses to see it, no retribution to follow after it. The very ease of the undertaking made them forget even their inborn fear of the place of Fishhead's habitation.

For more than an hour they had been coming from their shack across a deeply indented arm of the lake.

Their dugout, fashioned by fire and adz and draw-knife from the bole of a gum-tree, moved through the water as noiselessly as a swimming mallard, leaving behind it a long, wavy trail on the stilled waters.

Jake, the better oarsman, sat flat in the stern of the round-bottomed craft, paddling with quick, splashless strokes, Joel, the better shot, was squatted forward. There was a heavy, rusted duck gun between his knees.

Though their spying upon the victim had made them certain sure he would not be about the shore for hours, a doubled sense of caution led them to hug closely the weedy banks. They slid along the shore like shadows, moving so swiftly and in such silence that the watchful mudturtles barely turned their snaky heads as they passed.

So, a full hour before the time, they came slipping around the mouth of the slough and made for a natural ambuscade which the mixed-breed had left within a stone's jerk of his cabin to his own undoing.

Where the slough's flow joined deeper water a partly uprooted tree was stretched, prone from shore, at the top still thick and green with leaves that drew nourishment from the earth in which the half uncovered roots yet held, and twined about with an exuberance of trumpet vines and wild fox-grapes. All about was a huddle of drift -- last year's cornstalks, shreddy strips of bark, chunks of rotted weed, all the riffle and dunnage of a quiet eddy.

Straight into this green clump glided the dugout and swung, broadside on, against the protecting trunk of the tree, hidden from the inner side by the intervening curtains of rank growth, just as the Baxters had intended it should be hidden when days before in their scouting they marked this masked place of waiting and included it, then and there, in the scope of their plans.

There had been no hitch or mishap. No one had been abroad in the late afternoon to mark their movements -- and in a little while Fishhead ought to be due. Jake's woodman's eye followed the downward swing of the sun speculatively.

The shadows, thrown shoreward, lengthened and slithered on the small ripples. The small noises of the day died out; the small noises of the coming night began to multiply.

The green-bodied flies went away and big mosquitoes with speckled gray legs, came to take the places of the flies.

The sleepy lake sucked at the mud banks with small mouthing sounds, as though it found the taste of the raw mud agreeable. A monster crawfish, big as a chicken lobster, crawled out of the top of his dried mud chimney and perched himself there, an armored sentinel on the watchtower.

Bull bats began to flitter back and forth, above the tops of the trees. A pudgy muskrat, swimming with head up, was moved to sidle off briskly as he met a cotton-mouth moccasin snake, so fat and swollen with summer poison that it looked almost like a legless lizard as it moved along the surface of the water in a series of slow torpid S's. Directly above the head of either of the waiting assassins a compact little swarm of midges hung, holding to a sort of kite-shaped formation.

A little more time passed and Fishhead came out of the woods at the back, walking swiftly, with a sack over his shoulder.

For a few seconds his deformities showed in the clearing, then the black inside of the cabin swallowed him up.

By now the sun was almost down. Only the red nub of it showed above the timber line across the lake, and the shadows lay inland a long way. Out beyond, the big cats were stirring, and the great smacking sounds as their twisting bodies leaped clear and fell back in the water, came shoreward in a chorus.

But the two brothers, in their green covert, gave heed to nothing except the one thing upon which their hearts were set and their nerves tensed. Joel gently shoved his gun barrels across the log, cuddling the stock to his shoulder and slipping two fingers caressingly back and forth upon the triggers. Jake held the narrow dugout steady by a grip upon a fox-grape tendril.

A little wait and then the finish came!

Fishhead emerged from the cabin door and came down the narrow footpath to the water and out upon the water on his log.

He was barefooted and bareheaded, his cotton shirt open down the front to show his yellow neck and breast, his dungaree trousers held about his waist by a twisted tow string.

His broad splay feet, with the prehensile toes outspread, gripped the polished curve of the log as he moved along its swaying, dipping surface until he came to its outer end, and stood there erect, his chest filling, his chinless face lifted up, and something of mastership and dominion in his poise.

And then -- his eye caught what another's eyes might have missed -- the round, twin ends of the gun barrels, the fixed gleam of Joel's eyes, aimed at him through the green tracery! In that swift passage of time, too swift almost to be measured by seconds, realization flashed all through him, and he threw his head still higher and opened wide his shapeless trap of a mouth, and out across the lake he sent skittering and rolling his cry.

And in his cry was the laugh of a loon, and the croaking bellow of a frog, and the bay of a hound, all the compounded night noises of the lake. And in it, too, was a farewell, and a defiance, and an appeal!

The heavy roar of the duck gun came!

At twenty yards the double charge tore the throat out of him. He came down, face forward, upon the log and clung there, his trunk twisting distortedly, his legs twitching and kicking like the legs of a speared frog; his shoulders hunching and lifting spasmodically as the life ran out of him all in one swift coursing flow.

His head canted up between the heaving shoulders, his eyes looked full on the staring face of his murderer, and then the blood came out of his mouth, and Fishhead, in death still as much fish as man, slid, flopping, head first, off the end of the log, and sank, face downward slowly, his limbs all extended out.

One after another a string of big bubbles came up to burst in the middle of a widening reddish stain on the coffee-colored water.

The brothers watched this, held by the horror of the thing they had done, and the cranky dugout, having been tipped far over by the recoil of the gun, took water steadily across its gunwale; and now there was a sudden stroke from below upon its careening bottom and it went over and they were in the lake.

But shore was only twenty feet away, the trunk of the uprooted tree only five. Joel, still holding fast to his shot gun, made for the log, gaining it with one stroke. He threw his free arm over it and clung there, treading water, as he shook his eyes free.

Something gripped him -- some great, sinewy, unseen thing gripped him fast by the thigh, crushing down on his flesh!

He uttered no cry, but his eyes popped out, and his mouth set in a square shape of agony, and his fingers gripped into the bark of the tree like grapples. He was pulled down and down, by steady jerks, not rapidly but steadily, so steadily, and as he went his fingernails tore four little white strips in the tree-bark. His mouth went under, next his popping eyes, then his erect hair, and finally his clawing, clutching hand, and that was the end of him.

Jake's fate was harder still, for he lived longer -- long enough to see Joel's finish. He saw it through the water that ran down his face, and with a great surge of his whole body, he literally flung himself across the log and jerked his legs up high into the air to save them. He flung himself too far, though, for his face and chest hit the water on the far side.

And out of this water rose the head of a great fish, with the lake slime of years on its flat, black head, its whiskers bristling, its corpsy eyes alight. Its horny jaws closed and clamped in the front of Jake's flannel shirt. His hand struck out wildly and was speared on a poisoned fin, and, unlike Joel, he went from sight with a great yell, and a whirling and churning of the water that made the cornstalks circle on the edges of a small whirlpool.

But the whirlpool soon thinned away, into widening rings of ripples, and the corn stalks quit circling and became still again, and only the multiplying night noises sounded about the mouth of the slough.

The bodies of all three came ashore on the same day near the same place. Except for the gaping gunshot wound where the neck met the chest, Fishhead's body was unmarked.

But the bodies of the two Baxters were so marred and mauled that the Reelfooters buried them together on the bank without ever knowing which might be Jake's and which might be Joel's.

title: Fishhead


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Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/494

486 The lane debouched into a close-bitten field, and out of this empty land the farm rose up with its buildings like a huddle of old, painted vessels floating in still water. White fowls went stepping discreetly through the mild sunshine and the shadow, I leaned my bicycle against the grey, silken doors of the old coach-house. The place was breathing with silence. I hesitated to knock at the open door. Emily came. She was rich as always with her large beauty, and stately now with the stateliness of a strong woman six months gone with child.

She exclaimed with surprise, and I followed her into the kitchen, catching a glimpse of the glistening pans and the white wood baths as I passed through the scullery. The kitchen was a good-sized, low room that through long course of years had become absolutely a home. The great beams of the ceiling bowed easily, the chimney-seat had a bit of dark-green curtain, and under the high mantel-piece was another low shelf that the men could reach with their hands as they sat in the ingle-nook. There the pipes lay. Many generations of peaceful men and fruitful women had passed through the room, and not one but had added a new small comfort; a chair in the right place, a hook, a stool, a cushion, a certain pleasing cloth for the sofa covers, a shelf of books. The room, that looked so quiet and crude, was a home evolved through generations to fit the large bodies of the men who dwelled in it, and the placid fancy of the women. At last, it had an individuality. It was the home of the Renshaws, warm, lovable, serene. Emily was in perfect accord with its brownness, its shadows, its case. I, as I sat on the sofa under the window, felt


text: Author:Kendric Charles Babcock

title: Author:Kendric Charles Babcock


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Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/495

Rh rejected by the kind room. I was distressed with a sense of ephemerality, of pale, erratic fragility.

Emily, in her full-blooded beauty, was at home. It is rare now to feel a kinship between a room and the one who inhabits it, a close bond of blood relation. Emily had at last found her place, and had escaped from the torture of strange, complex modern life. She was making a pie, and the flour was white on her brown arms. She pushed the tickling hair from her face with her arm, and looked at me with tranquil pleasure, as she worked the paste in the yellow bowl. I was quiet, subdued before her.

“You are very happy?” I said.

“Ah very!” she replied. “And you?—you are not, you look worn.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I am happy enough. I am living my life.”

“Don’t you find it wearisome?” she asked pityingly.

She made me tell her all my doings, and she marvelled, but all the time her eyes were dubious and pitiful.

“You have George here,” I said.

“Yes. He’s in a poor state, but he’s not as sick as he was.”

“What about the delirium tremens?”

“Oh, he was better of that—very nearly—before he came here. He sometimes fancies they’re coming on again, and he’s terrified. Isn’t it awful! And he’s brought it all on himself. Tom’s very good to him.”

“There’s nothing the matter with him—physically, is there?” I asked.


text:
The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Junior High School

EDUCATION, Junior High School. See .


text:
The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Kindergarten

EDUCATION, Kindergarten. See .


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Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/496

488 “I don’t know,” she replied, as she went to the oven to turn a pie that was baking. She put her arm to her forehead and brushed aside her hair, leaving a mark of flour on her nose. For a moment or two she remained kneeling on the fender, looking into the fire and thinking. “He was in a poor way when he came here, could eat nothing, sick every morning. I suppose it’s his liver. They all end like that.” She continued to wipe the large black plums and put them in the dish.

“Hardening of the liver?” I asked. She nodded.

“And is he in bed?” I asked again.

“Yes,” she replied. “It’s as I say, if he’d get up and potter about a bit, he’d get over it. But he lies there skulking.”

“And what time will he get up?” I insisted.

“I don’t know. He may crawl down somewhere towards tea-time. Do you want to see him? That’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

She smiled at me with a little sarcasm, and added: “You always thought more of him than anybody, didn’t you? Ah, well, come up and see him.”

I followed her up the back stairs, which led out of the kitchen, and which emerged straight in a bedroom. We crossed the hollow-sounding plaster-floor of this naked room and opened a door at the opposite side. George lay in bed watching us with apprehensive eyes.

“Here is Cyril come to see you,” said Emily, “so I’ve brought him up, for I didn’t know when you’d be downstairs.”

A small smile of relief came on his face, and he put out his hand from the bed. He lay with the


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Rh disorderly clothes pulled up to his chin. His face was discoloured, and rather bloated, his nose swollen.

“Don’t you feel so well this morning?” asked Emily, softening with pity when she came into contact with his sickness.

“Oh, all right,” he replied, wishing only to get rid of us.

“You should try to get up a bit, it’s a beautiful morning, warm and soft—” she said gently. He did not reply, and she went downstairs.

I looked round to the cold, whitewashed room, with its ceiling curving and sloping down the walls. It was sparsely furnished, and bare of even the slightest ornament. The only things of warm colour were the cow and horse skins on the floor. All the rest was white or grey or drab. On one side, the roof sloped down so that the window was below my knees, and nearly touching the floor, on the other side was a larger window, breast high. Through it one could see the jumbled, ruddy roofs of the sheds and the skies. The tiles were shining with patches of vivid orange lichen. Beyond was the corn-field, and the men, small in the distance, lifting the sheaves on the cart.

“You will come back to farming again, won’t you?” I asked him, turning to the bed. He smiled.

“I don’t know,” he answered dully.

“Would you rather I went downstairs?” I asked.

“No, I’m glad to see you,” he replied, in the same uneasy fashion.

“I’ve only just come back from France,” I said.

“Ah!” he replied, indifferent.

“I am sorry you’re ill,” I said.


text: Author:Patty Smith Hill

title: Author:Patty Smith Hill


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Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/498

490 He stared unmovedly at the opposite wall. I went to the window, and looked out. After some time, I compelled myself to say, in a casual manner:

“Won’t you get up and come out a bit?”

“I suppose Is’ll have to,” he said, gathering himself slowly together for the effort. He pushed himself up in bed.

When he took off the jacket of his pajamas to wash himself I turned away. His arms seemed thin, and he had bellied, and was bowed and unsightly. I remembered the morning we swam in the mill-pond. I remembered that he was now in the prime of his life. I looked at his bluish feeble hands as he laboriously washed himself. The soap once slipped from his fingers as he was picking it up, and fell, rattling the pot loudly. It startled us, and he seemed to grip the sides of the washstand to steady himself. Then he went on with his slow, painful toilet. As he combed his hair he looked at himself with dull eyes of shame.

The men were coming in from the scullery when we got downstairs. Dinner was smoking on the table. I shook hands with Tom Renshaw, and with the old man’s hard, fierce left hand. Then I was introduced to Arthur Renshaw, a clean-faced, large, bashful lad of twenty. I nodded to the man, Jim, and to Jim’s wife, Annie. We all sat down to table.

“Well, an’ ’ow are ter feelin’ by now, like?” asked the old man heartily of George. Receiving no answer, he continued, “Tha should ’a gor up an’ com’ an’ gen us a ’and wi’ th’ wheat, it ’ud ’a done thee good.”

“You will have a bit of this mutton, won’t you?”


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Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 1 (1897).djvu/141

Rh least symptom of impatience, humbly solicited their suffrages for himself or his friends, and scrupulously practised all the duties of an ordinary candidate. But we may venture to ascribe to his councils the first measure of the succeeding reign, by which the elections were transferred to the senate. The assemblies of the people were for ever abolished, and the emperors were delivered from a dangerous multitude, who, without restoring liberty, might have disturbed, and perhaps endangered, the established government.

By declaring themselves the protectors of the people, Marius and Cæsar had subverted the constitution of their country. But as soon as the senate had been humbled and disarmed, such an assembly, consisting of five or six hundred persons, was found a much more tractable and useful instrument of dominion. It was on the dignity of the senate that Augustus and his successors founded their new empire; and they affected, on every occasion, to adopt the language and principles of Patricians. In the administration of their own powers, they frequently consulted the great national council, and seemed to refer to its decision the most important concerns of peace and war. Rome, Italy, and the internal provinces were subject to the immediate jurisdiction of the senate. With regard to civil objects, it was the supreme court of appeal; with regard to criminal matters, a tribunal, constituted for the trial of all offences that were committed by men in any public station, or that affected the peace and majesty of the Roman people. The exercise of the judicial power became the most frequent and serious occupation of the senate; and the important causes that were pleaded before them afforded a last refuge to the spirit of ancient eloquence. As a council of state, and as a court of justice, the senate possessed very considerable prerogatives; but in its legislative capacity, in which it was supposed virtually to represent the people, the rights of sovereignty were acknowledged to reside in that assembly. Every power was derived from their authority, every law was ratified by their sanction. Their regular meetings were held on three stated days in every month, the Calends, the


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Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/461

291 in c, niṣ kṛdhi for nāçaya. The comm. takes the two words in a as names of disorders, which is perhaps preferable, and regards them as occasioned by phlegm (çleṣman); balāsa he defines as kāsaçvāsātmaka çleṣmaroga. ⌊For ā́sthita, see note to iv. 17. 8.⌋ ⌊Delete the accent-sign over -saṁ in c.⌋

2. The balā́sa of him that has balā́sa I destroy like a muṣkará; I cut its bond like the root of a gourd.

3. Fly out forth from here, O balā́sa, like a young āçuṁgá; then, like the [last] year's bulrush, scud away, innocuous to heroes.

1. Thou art the highest of herbs; of thee the trees are subjects (upastí); let him be our subject who assails us.

2. Whoever, both kindred and not of kin, assails us, of them may I be highest, as this one of trees.

3. As of herbs soma is made highest of oblations, as the talā́çā of trees, [so] may I be highest.

title: Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/461


text:
The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Education, Medical

EDUCATION, Medical. See .


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Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/499

Rh Tom asked him, tapping the joint with the carving knife. George shook his head.

“It’s quite lean, and tender,” he said gently.

“No, thanks,” said George.

“Gi’e ’im a bit, gi’e ’im a bit!” cried the old man. “It’ll do ’im good—it’s what ’e wants, a bit o’ strengthenin’ nourishment.”

“It’s no good if his stomach won’t have it,” said Tom, in mild reproof, as if he were speaking of a child. Arthur filled George’s glass with beer without speaking. The two young men were full of kind, gentle attention.

“Let ’im ’a’e a spoonful o’ tonnup then,” persisted the old man. “I canna eat while ’is plate stands there emp’y.”

So they put turnip and onion sauce on George’s plate, and he took up his fork and tasted a few mouthfuls. The men ate largely, and with zest. The sight of their grand satisfaction, amounting almost to gusto, sickened him.

When at last the old man laid down the dessert spoon which he used in place of a knife and fork, he looked again at George’s plate, and said:

“Why tha ’asna aten a smite, not a smite! Tha non goos th’ raight road to he better.”

George maintained a stupid silence.

“Don’t bother him, father,” said Emily.

“Tha art an öwd whittle, feyther,” added Tom, smiling good-naturedly. He spoke to his father in dialect, but to Emily in good English. Whatever she said had Tom’s immediate support. Before serving us with pie, Emily gave her brother junket and damsons, setting the plate and the spoon before him as if


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492 he were a child. For this act of grace Tom looked at her lovingly, and stroked her hand as she passed.

After dinner, George said, with a miserable struggle for an indifferent tone:

“Aren’t you going to give Cyril a glass of whisky?”

He looked up furtively, in a conflict of shame and hope. A silence fell on the room.

“Ay!” said the old man softly. “Let ’im ’ave a drop.”

“Yes!” added Tom, in submissive pleading.

All the men in the room shrank a little, awaiting the verdict of the woman.

“I don’t know,” she said clearly, “that Cyril wants a glass.”

“I don’t mind.” I answered, feeling myself blush. I had not the courage to counteract her will directly. Not even the old man had that courage. We waited in suspense. After keeping us so for a few minutes, while we smouldered with mortification, she went into another room, and we heard her unlocking a door. She returned with a decanter containing rather less than half a pint of liquor. She put out five tumblers.

“Tha nedna gi’e me none,” said the old man. “Ah’m non a proud chap. Ah’m not.”

“Nor me neither,” said Arthur.

“You will Tom?” she asked.

“Do you want me to?” he replied, smiling.

“I don’t,” she answered sharply. “I want nobody to have it, when you look at the results of it. But if Cyril is having a glass, you may as well have one with him.”


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68 Nones, and the Ides. The debates were conducted with decent freedom; and the emperors themselves, who gloried in the name of senators, sat, voted, and divided with their equals.

To resume, in a few words, the system of the Imperial government, as it was instituted by Augustus, and maintained by those princes who understood their own interest and that of the people, it may be defined an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed.

The face of the court corresponded with the forms of the administration. The emperors, if we except those tyrants whose capricious folly violated every law of nature and decency, disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen, but could add nothing to their real power. In all the offices of life, they affected to confound themselves with their subjects, and maintained with them an equal intercourse of visits and entertainments. Their habit, their palace, their table, were suited only to the rank of an opulent senator. Their family, however numerous or splendid, was composed entirely of their domestic slaves and freedmen. Augustus or Trajan would have blushed at employing the meanest of the Romans in those menial offices which, in the household and bedchamber of a limited monarch, are so eagerly solicited by the proudest nobles of Britain.

The deification of the emperors is the only instance in which they departed from their accustomed prudence and modesty. The Asiatic Greeks were the first inventors, the successors of Alexander the first objects, of this servile and


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Rh Tom was pleased with her. She gave her husband and me fairly stiff glasses.

“Steady, steady!” he said. “Give that George, and give me not so much. Two fingers, two of your fingers, you know.”

But she passed him the glass. When George had had his share, there remained but a drop in the decanter.

Emily watched the drunkard coldly as he took this remainder.

George and I talked for a time while the men smoked. He, from his glum stupidity, broke into a harsh, almost imbecile loquacity.

“Have you seen my family lately?” he asked, continuing. “Yes! Not badly set up, are they, the children? But the little devils are soft, mard-soft, every one of ’em. It’s their mother’s bringin’ up—she marded ’em till they were soft, an’ would never let me have a say in it. I should ’a brought ’em up different, you know I should.”

Tom looked at Emily, and, remarking her angry contempt, suggested that she should go out with him to look at the stacks. I watched the tall, square-shouldered man leaning with deference and tenderness towards his wife as she walked calmly at his side. She was the mistress, quiet and self-assured, he her rejoiced husband and servant.

George was talking about himself. If I had not seen him, I should hardly have recognised the words as his. He was lamentably decayed. He talked stupidly, with vulgar contumely of others, and in weak praise of himself.

The old man rose, with a:


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494 “Well, I suppose we mun ma’e another dag at it,” and the men left the house.

George continued his foolish, harsh monologue, making gestures of emphasis with his head and his hands. He continued when we were walking round the buildings into the fields, the same babble of bragging and abuse. I was wearied and disgusted. He looked, and he sounded, so worthless.

Across the empty cornfield the partridges were running. We walked through the September haze slowly, because he was feeble on his legs. As he became tired he ceased to talk. We leaned for some time on a gate, in the brief glow of the transient afternoon, and he was stupid again. He did not notice the brown haste of the partridges, he did not care to share with me the handful of ripe blackberries, and when I pulled the bryony ropes off the hedges, and held the great knots of red and green berries in my hand, he glanced at them without interest or appreciation.

“Poison-berries, aren’t they?” he said dully.

Like a tree that is falling, going soft and pale and rotten, clammy with small fungi, he stood leaning against the gate, while the dim afternoon drifted with a flow of thick sweet sunshine past him, not touching him.

In the stackyard, the summer’s splendid monuments of wheat and grass were reared in gold and grey. The wheat was littered brightly round the rising stack. The loaded wagon clanked slowly up the incline, drew near, and rode like a ship at anchor against the scotches, brushing the stack with a crisp, sharp sound. Tom climbed the ladder and stood a


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Rh moment there against the sky, amid the brightness and fragrance of the gold corn, and waved his arm to his wife who was passing in the shadow of the building. Then Arthur began to lift the sheaves to the stack, and the two men worked in an exquisite, subtle rhythm, their white sleeves and their dark heads gleaming, moving against the mild sky and the corn. The silence was broken only by the occasional lurch of the body of the wagon, as the teamer stepped to the front, or again to the rear of the load. Occasionally I could catch the blue glitter of the prongs of the forks. Tom, now lifted high above the small wagon load, called to his brother some question about the stack. The sound of his voice was strong and mellow.

I turned to George, who also was watching, and said:

“You ought to be like that.”

We heard Tom calling, “All right!” and saw him standing high up on the tallest corner of the stack, as on the prow of a ship.

George watched, and his face slowly gathered expression. He turned to me, his dark eyes alive with horror and despair.

“I shall soon—be out of everybody’s way!” he said. His moment of fear and despair was cruel. I cursed myself for having roused him from his stupor.

“You will be better,” I said.

He watched again the handsome movement of the men at the stack.

“I couldn’t team ten sheaves,” he said.

“You will in a month or two,” I urged.


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vi. 16-

1. O ābayu, non-ābayu! thy juice is sharp (ugrá), O ābayu! unto thy broth do we eat.

2. Vihálha by name is thy father, madávatī ('intoxicated') by name is thy mother; for thou art he, not thyself, thou that didst consume thyself.

3. O tāuvilikā, quiet down; this racket hath quieted down; both the brown and the brown-eared one: go away, O nirāla!

4. Alasálā art thou first; silā́njālā art thou after; nīlāgalasálā.

This verse is wanting in Pāipp. (save so far as its last word is found in that version of vs. 2). The comm. understands the three obscure words it contains to be names of

title: Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/462


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496 He continued to watch, while Tom got on the ladder and came down the front of the stack.

“Nay, the sooner I clear out, the better,” he repeated to himself.

When we went in to tea, he was, as Tom said, “downcast.” The men talked uneasily with abated voices. Emily attended to him with a little, palpitating solicitude. We were all uncomfortably impressed with the sense of our alienation from him. He sat apart and obscure among us, like a condemned man.


text: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book VI/Hymn 14

title: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book VI/Hymn 14


text: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book VI/Hymn 15

title: Atharva-Veda Samhita/Book VI/Hymn 15


text: The White Peacock

title: The White Peacock


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 1

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 1


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 2

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 2


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 3

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 3


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 4

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 4


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 hold bright and sociable for all the children ; and I feel more every day that every right healthy joy is a little bit of true riches the end for which really all work is done. . . . Tell dear Flo. I will write next time, and assure her I remember all her directions about half hours after dinner very seriously and very tenderly, because they remind me of her. I hope she'll find my education improved on her return. Give her a kiss for me. January 18th, 1863. .

We are all reassembled for work after Xmas dispersion ; and my little troop occupy much of my time. We are all well, and busy. I am succeeding capitally. Ruskin, you know, perhaps, has gone, giving me the grandest drawing lesson, an hour and a half quite alone, thorough teaching ; and then it is so nice ; I do feel we are such thorough friends. He talks so quietly, so trustfully, so (I had almost written) reverently ; and then the thought made me laugh. But I think you'll know what I mean. He saw me again the next day at Burne-Jones's, introducing me to him and his wife ; and after a little time, asking to speak with me on business. We went into a quiet little room ; and, after business was over, had the most delicious talk. He asked me to write to him in Switzerland, saying that I was "the one" (and then with his accustomed accuracy correcting the statement to), "one of the few" people from whom he wished to hear ; and then once more he qualified it by saying, "You tell me just the things I wish to hear." All this, however, this quiet acknowledged friendship can hardly be described even in words, to me so precious, which expressed it, because it


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 5

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 5


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 6

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 6


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 7

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 7


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 8

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 8


text: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 9

title: The White Peacock/Part 1, Chapter 9


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 1

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 1


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 depended on the way, and slight accents and actions impossible to describe. So to come to more important things ; Ruskin was so delighted with the trumpet Fra Angelico, that I am to leave Turners and all else and devote myself to Fra Angelico and Orcagna, wherever I can find them ; also a little water-colour drawing won the remark that now I had "delicacy" of touch for anything. Nevertheless Ruskin's heart is with social things ; and I was earnestly charged to leave any drawing, if I saw what of help I could give anywhere, believing (which is not difficult) that in doing any good, I was fulfilling Ruskin's wish and will as much as in drawing. "Never argue that it is not my work," he said ; "I believe you have power among people, which I ought not to monopolise. I'm going away myself too ; so just look upon it that I leave you charged to do anything you may see good to be done ; only mind, Octavia ! one way there is in which you may both grieve and vex me, namely by hurting yourself. Don't be proud and foolish ; remember your strength is worth keeping. Rest for months or years, if you ought, but don't lose it." Rather a strange, rather a proud, a very thankful and glorious position,—isn't it, Emma ? It doesn't make much practical change. The social work is best done by the way. He didn't mean "help people with money," for he didn't leave me any. I meant to rest a good deal ; but the confidence and the freedom, if it is wanted,—these make a difference. 14, Nottingham Place, W., February 4th, 1863. .

.... I only began my physiology yesterday, but have done a great deal since, and if Mrs. M. has the


text:
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue

MASARYK, THOMAS GARRIGUE, first President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic, and chief of the nationalist movement which led to the establishment of the Republic. He was born in Gǒding, Moravia, 1850, received only an elementary education, and was then apprenticed to a blacksmith. Through individual

he gained further education and finally entered the University of Leipsic, where he subsequently taught. In 1882 he became professor of philosophy at the new Czech University at Prague. In 1891 he was elected to the Austrian Parliament, where he gained prominence by his criticism of the Austrian policy in Herzegovina. In 1893 he resigned, in protest against the inactivity of the Czech nationalist movement. He then came to the United States and lectured for a time at the University of Chicago. In 1907 he returned to Prague, where he remained until December, 1914, when he was compelled to flee to Italy, on account of his activities in favor of a nationalist movement, for which reason he was sentenced to death by the Austrian Government. During the war he represented the Czecho-Slovak nationalist organization in Paris, London, and Washington, D. C., and gradually gained the recognition of the Czecho-Slovak nation from the Allied countries. In 1917 he went to Russia, at the urgent call of Paul Milyukoff, whence he proceeded to Tokio, Japan, and back to Washington, D. C. In October, 1918, he was formally proclaimed President of the Czecho-Slovak Republic. He immediately proceeded to Prague, where he took his oath of office on December 21, 1918. In politics he was liberal in his tendencies, but strongly nationalistic.


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 sense not to object to the children's learning it, I shall go on with it steadily, preparing a lesson for them each week, and so shall learn much myself. I think you would think all our little flock very much improved, if you could see them. . ..

.... You will have heard, I suppose, of our magnificent concert for the blind. It was one of the most splendid evenings of my life. . . . M.E. is so delightful a child to me. I can't tell you how I enjoy her. I often long for you, dear, with all your sympathy with people in general, and power of making children happy. You know I've a damping cool sort of way that just stabs all their enjoyment. I don't think I've any child nature left in me. However, it will injure them less, that what they all want is to grow up. I mean S. and I. and M.E. want qualities, that will fit them for early usefulness, developed. July 25th, 1863. . .... I think neither M. nor O. can have found time to tell you about their visit to Ruskin. He entertained them grandly at luncheon. They stayed two hours talking on all kinds of high subjects. It seems M. said some very pithy things, which delighted him extremely, and which he afterwards quoted. He spoke of O.'s painting powers very highly—he was all kindness. M. says he seems so impressed with O.'s greatness, and he told someone she was the best person he knew. .... He said to O., "I don't like to blame people for what they do, when they are mad with grief or terror ; but I must say it was cruel of you to tell me about A.'s illness ; I was very ill at the time ; and it threw me back." She answered, "I didn't think——" "You


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 didn't think I should care. I care very much for her sake, and very much for yours." He asked a great deal about it, and when they spoke of how we nursed you, the tears came into his eyes. July, 1863..

Miranda's life has been in imminent danger ; in fact, for some days the doctors gave us no hope. . . . You may imagine what the watching and nursing were. I can never tell ; so awfully is every incident of those long days and nights burnt into my memory. But there is one thing you can't know. The infinite, the wonderful, the universal sympathy and desire to help ; it was something triumphantly beautiful ; one felt it even at the worst, only it felt so very far away, so helpless. Mr. Maurice was here daily, often twice or thrice. He used to come, like a great tender angel of strength, so infinitely pitiful, saying and reading to us things never to be forgotten, answering Miranda's questions unconsciously asked, so that they answered those deep down in us, thinking no service too small for him to render, none too arduous, startling me to a sense of my own existence by some tender bit of thought for me. And Miss Sterling, I don't know what we should have done without her. When danger was gone but anxiety remained, I sank down to a state of miserable weakness and low spirits ; and she would come and take me out for drives. I couldn't stand or walk, so terribly fatiguing had the nursing been ; why, the simple feeding was enough. Miranda was fed every half hour, and Mama and I did very nearly everything. Ruskin sent most kindly. And then the little children, who stole about the house and spoke in


text:
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Sun, Eclipses of the

SUN, ECLIPSES OF THE, caused by the moon coming between the earth and the sun, may be either partial, total, or annular. In a partial eclipse the observer is situated in the penumbra of the moon's shadow, and only a part of the sun's light is cut off on one side. In a total eclipse the observer is in the umbra of the moon's shadow, and all the light of the sun is cut off except that from the prominences and corona surrounding the sun. In an annular eclipse the disk of the moon is wholly projected on that of the sun, but is not large enough to cover it completely, so that a ring of sunlight is left all round the moon. The apparent diameters of the sun and moon are so nearly equal that their variations with their varying distances make a central eclipse sometimes total and sometimes annular. In fact, the same eclipse may be total for some parts of the earth where the sun and moon are near the meridian at the time, and annular for other parts where they are low down in the E. or the W. at the time of central phase. In the annular eclipse the observer, instead of being in the cone of the moon's shadow, is in the prolongation of that cone, beyond its apex, in the other nap of the cone. At present the only scientific importance of partial and annular eclipses is the use that may be made of them for determining the relative positions of the sun and moon, and thus correcting the elements of the terrestrial and lunar orbits. But the fleeting minutes of every total eclipse are now utilized so far as possible to study the sun's surroundings, especially the mysterious corona, which is so faint that it is only visible when the bright light of the photosphere is cut off (see ). Geometrically considered, a solar eclipse is only an occultation of the sun by the moon, like that of any other heavenly body by the moon in its motion across the heavens.


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 January 10th, 1878. . As to Octavia's work, she means to get Gertrude to be the centre, as far as she can, but each of the volunteers to be put in direct communication with the owners, and to be answerable immediately to them ; and she will ask the owners to understand that she expects them to look into the balance sheets, each quarter, and to see how things are going for themselves ; not to hold her responsible any more just now. Meanwhile she leaves all the work in train ; and Gertrude will advise and help the volunteers, and direct the assistants as far as she can, but will not take Octavia's responsibility to the owners. Of course she could not, as the work cannot be her first duty ; and she might have to break off any time. 0. thinks the plan will make the volunteers splendidly independent, and will answer very well wherever there is a good worker ; also that the worst can do little else than not make any great improvements in their properties. The management of the Donation Fund she leaves with Minnie, whose judgment she trusts very much. Hotel D'Holland, Cannes, January 24th, 1878. . We reached here last night. Miss Yorke is kinder, brighter, and with subtler sympathy than I had imagined. She is an excellent manager, and prevents one's feeling forlorn in travelling. It is an immense comfort that all my work is so well started, and that I am anxious about nothing. ... I hope dear Gertrude found all as easy as could be ; but one feels how


text:
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Sun, Parallax of the

SUN, PARALLAX OF THE, or SOLAR PARALLAX, the angle subtended by the radius of the earth at a distance equal to that of the earth from the sun. More exactly, it is the angle subtended by the equatorial radius of the earth at the mean distance of the sun, though this would be called, when speaking exactly, the mean equatorial horizontal parallax of the sun. It is, as nearly as we know it today, almost 8.8", with an uncertainty of probably not more than 0.01" or 0.02" different from this in either direction. This corresponds to a distance of the sun a little less than

93,000,000 miles. More time, labor, and money have been expended in the determination of the polar parallax than of any other astronomical constant, on account of its importance in giving us an accurate base line with which to gauge the solar system and then strike out into the depths of stellar space. Before the last transit of Venus it was thought that careful observation would give an exceedingly accurate value of this constant; but these hopes were disappointed, and it is known that we have at hand at any time more accurate methods of determining the distance of the sun than from any possible observation of a transit of Venus. The most accurate direct method is likely to be the direct measurement of the parallax of the nearer and brighter asteroids by the heliometer.


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 whispers ; and my children, who did their work quite self-reliantly, and waited with gentlest service on us ; and poor old women who sent daily to ask, and teachers who offered all service to set us free, and friends who drove in to bring flowers and grapes, and servants who were like rocks of strength : there wasn't one person, who didn't show love and helpfulness far above what one could have dreamed or hoped. July 25th, 1863. .

Minnie and I had been at Ruskin's, talking for two hours about faith. It has left upon us both an impression of the deepest solemnity. Minnie says joy. Well yes, I say joy too. . . . I am sitting in the hush of an examination ; the children each at a separate table are deep in sums ; so strangely do the little things of this world blend themselves with the great, all these strange duties leading one on to the great thoughts and facts that lie below. 14, Nottingham Place, September 1st, 1863. .

Dear Octa has just arrived. She has been so happy at Leicester. She says she never had such a fight to get away from any place. They were so happy together, those girls. Octa spirited them up to all kinds of things, made designs for L.'s carvings, inspired one of them to come up to town and go in for a Latin certificate at Queen's ; gave A. hints about village schools, etc.


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 2

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 2


text:
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Sun Yat-sen

SUN YAT-SEN, a Chinese revolutionary leader, born in 1866, near Canton. When still young, he was taken by his parents to Hawaii, where he attended Iolani College. He later graduated from the Hongkong School of Medicine, and for a year practiced at Macao. Soon, however, he gave himself up to the project of driving the Manchu dynasty from China. He attempted a revolt in 1895, which failed, and he fled to Japan and later to Honolulu and San Francisco. He organized the Chinese living abroad in all countries into a reform association to aid the coming revolution. Although large rewards were offered by the government for his death, he escaped without harm. The revolution of 1911 was chiefly successful through the preparations made by him, and he was elected provisional president of the Chinese Republic. He resigned in 1912 in favor of Yuan Shih-kai, in order to induce the latter to join the Republican cause. He later incurred the hostility of Yuan and was obliged to retire to Japan, He continued to agitate for reforms in China and was largely responsible for the rebellions of 1913, 1915, and 1916.


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 November 29th, 1863. .

We have all felt some time or other how much we owe to those who have consented to be served by us ; and I sometimes dream about the time that shall come when we shall try "to keep up the spirit of our poor," not by shutting up their hearts in cold dignified independence, but by giving them others to help, and thus rousing the deepest of all motives for self help, that which is the only foundation on which to build our services to others. How strangely then, when all confess mutual dependence, and glory in mutual service, will all our strange words sound about admiration for those who starve in silence ; as if that silent starvation were not the most awful protest against all who might have been near friends, who might have been noble Christian ministers. ... I have been thinking very much of the past, because of the sad news from Australia of my dear old playfellow Charlton Howitt. They sent me a copy of the ''Govt. Provincial Engineer'', saying it should be sent to me as "one of dear Charlton's old old friends" ; and they all seem to bear it as calmly and faithfully as they were sure to do. Offley Cottage, Luton, Beds., December 22nd, 1863. .

It happens that Andy's school has moved to the very room which, in the first old days of London work, Mama took as a workroom, now twelve years ago,

I had not been to the room till the day of this party, and Andy had not remembered it. And there I stood again after twelve years, with a


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 3

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 3


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 4

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 4


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 5

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 5


text: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 6

title: The White Peacock/Part 2, Chapter 6


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 deep sense of mighty love on all sides, to help me to do whatever I willed ; friends and sisters, pupils and servants watched and waited for sign and look that they might know what I wanted done ; and there was not one among the little pale faces lit up with unwonted joy, that I might not have committed to some strong friend to be cherished, if my own strength failed.

On the Sunday following I had eight young servants from different places, whom I have long known and watched, to go with me to receive the Communion, as we hope to do together each year.

As I came out, Mr. Hughes was waiting for me, asking, almost entreating, that one of us would teach his children. Finding that we really couldn't, he asked me to come to breakfast next day, and see Mrs. Hughes, to advise her about a governess.

They were extremely cordial and earnest, said that for years they had been longing to get us, but that Miss Sterling had always told them that we were too busy, which indeed is true. I was much touched by Mr. Hughes' grief about the children's hatred of lessons ; and finding that they wanted someone to take the children into the country for a month, till they could find a governess, I thought that I might take the work, and perhaps might get the little things through some difficulties, and so might make lessons pleasanter hereafter.

I gave my own pupils three days' lessons. Minnie took the last three, after which they went in to the Cambridge Local Examinations. I came down here at three days' notice, and have succeeded beyond my brightest hopes.