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 Hunter. Yet I will observe in conclusion, that had his career been cut short at an earlier period, he would not have laboured in vain, far less would he have lived unhappy. Unlike him who toils for gain alone, and whose praise is measured by the wretched gold which he has accumulated—unlike the warrior or the statesman, who must appeal to success for justification, and whose failures are reckoned as crimes by exasperated nations—the man of science labours in a genial field, where exertion is its own reward ; for while the worshippers of power and wealth are sickened by each trifling dis- appointment, the humblest acolyte in the temple of knowledge feels that it is good to be there, and that even failures are but lessons. The pursuits of the scientific inquirer, when carried on ina right spirit, stand second among all the subjects which can occupy the human mind. ‘Though faction and avarice unceasingly murmur in the vicinity, his mind remains unruffled by their clamour. Like the fleece of the Hebrew leader, while all around is parched, he alone is fostered by the gentle dews of heaven.

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title: The Hunterian Oration 1843


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 After these trifling remarks, Pons inquired after his friends. I told him that they were quite well; but thus not having seen him since the affair of Avesnes, I had left them very uneasy as to what had become of him. (The affair of Avesnes was a murder. When I alluded to it, his countenance exhibited not the slightest emotion.)

"Well, and what brings you to this part of the country?" asked he; "are you after a bit of moonshine, eh?"

"You have just hit it, my friend," said I. "My business here is to endeavour to dispose of a string of broken-down horses, which are famously doctored up for taking-in the knowing ones. Our friends told me that you could lend me a helping hand."

"Ah, to be sure, you may depend on me," protested Pons.

With this sort of conversation we reached Hirson, where we halted at the house of a clock-maker who sold wine. We were soon placed round a table; our wine was brought, and, whilst we were drinking it, I led the conversation back to Court and Raoul. "Poor fellows," said I, "I fear that at this present moment they are very queerly situated."

"How so?" asked he.

"Why I did not wish to tell you all at once; but the fact is, they are in considerable trouble; they have been arrested, and I greatly fear that they are now in prison."

"On what account?"

"Of that I am ignorant; all I know is, that I was breakfasting with Court and Raoul, when the police broke in upon us, and, after closely interrogating us all three, they allowed me to go about my business. As for our two poor friends, they were detained in solitary confinement; nor would you have learned their misfortune, had not Raoul, in returning from his examination, managed to whisper a few words to me unobserved, begging of me to warn you to be on your guard, for


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 that they had been closely questioned as to their acquaintance with you. I cannot give you any further particulars."

"And who arrested you?" inquired Pons, who seemed thunderstruck at the intelligence.

"Vidocq."

"Oh! the scoundrel, the scamp! But who is this Vidocq, of whom we hear so much: I have never been able to meet him face to face; once only I perceived him following an individual into the house of Causette. I was told it was him, but I forget all about him; and I would cheerfully give half-a-dozen bottles of wine to any one who would procure me a good stare at him."

"Bless you, it is easy enough to meet with him," replied I; "he is always about in one place or another."

"Well, I would advise him to keep out of my reach," exclaimed Pons. "If he were here, I'll engage he would pass the worst quarter of an hour he ever experienced in his life."

"Oh! you are like all the rest of them, talking of what you would do; and yet if he were before you at this moment, you would sit perfectly still, and be the first to offer him a glass of wine." (At the time I was saying this I held out my glass, which he filled.)

"I'll offer him wine! May a thousand devils seize me first!"

"Yes, you, I say, would invite him to drink with you."

"I tell you I would die sooner."

"Then you may die as soon as you please, for I am Vidocq, and I arrest you!"

"How, how; what is this?" [sic]

"Yes, I arrest you!" and approaching my face to his, "I tell you, villain, I arrest you, you are done; and if you dare to stir one step, I will tweak off your rascally nose. ClementClément [sic], handcuff this worthy gentleman."

The astonishment of Pons defies description. Every feature appeared distorted, his eyes starting from their


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Rh presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.”

It was not until after an interval of years from the period of Hunter’s death, nor without much solicitation, that the Government became masters of the sacred treasure which was committed in trust to the guardianship of this College. And to what protection, let me ask, could it so properly have been consigned, or with such reciprocity of benefit? Enormous sums have been cheerfully expended upon its conservation, and strenuous efforts have been made, and of late years redoubled, to convey to the scientific world a just appreciation of its value. On the other hand, this splendid Collection exhibits copious and conclusive evidence of the truth of those principles and doctrines, which have mainly contributed to raise the character of British Surgery to the exalted position which it holds among the nations of Europe.

To elucidate this statement it may be useful to take a short retrospect of the rise and progress of the art.

The history of surgery demonstrates, as might a priori be expected, that its improvement has been progressive in a ratio corresponding to the knowledge of the structure and uses of the parts of which the human frame is composed. In the time of Hippocrates it was a profanation to touch the dead body, except in the funereal ceremonies ; and when, centuries afterwards, Galen arrived at Alexandria for the purpose

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4 of prosecuting anatomy, human dissection was forbidden. In the interval, under the enlightened sway of the Ptolemies, the first rude dissections of the human subject had been made by and, the founders of the once celebrated school of Alexandria. But the feeble and delusive light which dawned upon anatomy in the Greek and Roman era was chiefly obtained from dissection of the bodies of animals, living and dead, and of such occasional exhibitions of the human organization as war, famine, and casualty contributed to present.

Yet it is not to these circumstances only, unfavourable as they appear to the progress of anatomical knowledge, that the long prevailing darkness is justly to be ascribed; for it may be remarked, although the anatomy of animals furnishes a very various and imperfect type of the human structure, that the most important physiological facts which later and happier times have established have been derived from this source. It is rather attributable to the rare appearance, in the course of ages, of men instinctively impelled by the ardent desire of investigating nature in this interesting department of her works, and at the same time capable of conceiving and exemplifying the power which knowledge and a right use of the reasoning faculties confer; unenlightened as was their epoch by an insight into the method, the uses, and the motive of a sound philosophy. But had the consum-

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Rh mate genius of Aristotle been free to explore the penetralia of the human structure, and directed to the ceconomy of man’s organization in comparison with that of animals, it is scarcely probable that he would have anticipated Harvey or Asellius; since, (so gradual is the march of truth,) the principal facts which form the bases of their grand discoveries lay sterile in the hands of the original observers.

The surgery of the ancients was purely mechanical, suggested by such crude observations of the phaenomena of local injuries and diseases as persons ignorant of anatomy might find opportunity for making. This polar star, by which alone their course could be directed, was to them "dark and silent.” But there were doubtless then, as now, minds of various orders employed in penetrating the mists by which they were enveloped. Some ardent and adventurous spirits, by whatever impulses directed, assuming the hazardous office of pioneers in the field of discovery, would either win the confidence or impose upon the credulity of their companions; or, by a glaring exposure of their errors, open a way for the advancement of more cautious and contemplative observers. And so true a picture is this of the progress of knowledge, even in our days of maturer science, that it would ill become us to weigh with a scrupulous rigour the contributions, or to judge harshly of the fallacies, of those who in

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6 its infancy were condemned, in the beautiful language of Lucretius,

 * “Errare, atque viam palantes querere vite.”

It is, in truth, with a feeling of surprise, that, upon many important subjects, a candid inquirer discovers such various and accurate knowledge to have been attained as may be gleaned from a reference to the surgical writings of, , and.

Haller expresses his admiration at the fulness and accuracy of Hippocrates in his description and arrangement of the different species of dislocation. And although in his treatise on injuries of the head he denudes the bone, on suspicion of its being damaged, and directs the fissure of the skull to be eraded to obliteration, he is careful to lay down and warn us of the course of the sutures, ingenuously confessing that he had mistaken a fissure for a suture. It is to him we owe the original observation, that an injury of the brain paralyses the opposite side of the body. Celsus first describes the breaking up or dispersion, as well as the depression, of the cataract with the needle; and his account of the operation for lithotomy is the germ of the present most approved section, although he excludes all patients under nine and above fourteen years of age from the benefit of the operation. Galen’s proudest contribution to surgery was the discovery of the true contents of the arteries. "‘‘Primus, puto, coe-

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Rh vorum arterias incidit,” says Haller. But Celsus and Galen, it must be admitted, are in relation to surgery little better than epitomists of Hippocrates, the father as well of surgery as of medicine.

The style of Celsus is yet a model of perspicuity and elegance; and Galen was not only the best physician and critic of his time, but the only distinguished physiologist of the Roman era. The originality and graphic power of his description of the special anatomy and physiology of the human hand are without a parallel.

Celsus, there is every reason to believe, never practised surgery, and Galen’s surgical practice was limited to an attendance on the gladiators wounded in the games of his native city of Pergamus, before he quitted it for Rome in his twenty-eighth year. Their stores were drawn from the Greeks,—that noble nation, to whose congenial soil science, arts, and literature were alike indigenous. Nor was imperial Rome, so long the mistress of the world, distinguished throughout all her splendid history by the possession of a single surgeon whose name is worthy of record. The profession of medicine indeed was in no esteem, and its cultivation was discouraged among the Romans. Cato the Censor held it in such contempt as to in-

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8 terdict its study to his son, who died prematurely ; probably entertaining opinions similar to those which are expressed with such irreverent vigour by our Drydent :

 * “Better to hunt in fields for health unbought,
 * Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught;
 * The wise for cure on exercise depend;
 * God never made his work for man to mend.”

The treatise of, a native of Egina, who was a practitioner of surgery, and a travelled observer of its state and condition in the seventh century, contains the most complete body of the art on record previous to the revival of learning.

Paulus professes himself a compiler. He divides the tunica vaginalis in hydrocele, burns the fistula lacrymalis to exfoliation, distinguishes the hernia from rupture and from dilatation of the peritoneal sac, and operates only in the latter case, when he also extirpates the testis. After Hippocrates and Galen, he pronounces the sudden evacuation of the fluid in ascites fatal. He distinguishes the true and spurious aneurism, does not interfere with the larger arteries, but ties the superficial branches of the head and extremities above and below the wound or aneurism. He also describes, after Antyllus, the operation of bronchotomy.

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THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 9 In no department of knowledge was the long and dreary period of what are emphatically called the “dark ages” more blank and desolate; and for a period of eight centuries surgery shared the common fate of science. From the overthrow of the Roman empire, until the revival of literature and the arts in Europe, it was exclusively in the preservation of the Arabians, who practised physic and surgery in common, although prohibited by their religion from dissecting dead bodies. Their medical knowledge was essentially derived from the old Greek writers, many of whose MSS., preserved from destruction at the burning of the famous Alexandrian Library A.D. 640, they garbled and put forth as original productions. Throughout Europe the practice of medicine was chiefly in the hands of the clergy; and that of surgery, from which the priests were restrained on pain of excommunication by repeated Papal edicts, was consigned to Jews, women, and illiterate pretenders. To the Italian College of Salernum near Naples, erected into an university by the Emperor Frederic II. early in the thirteenth century—the first Christian university in Europe—is due the honour of the revival of medical learning, by its translation of the Arabian MSS., as well as the Arabian copies of the Greek authors, into the Latin tongue. A constant communication between these countries had been kept up by the education of the Salernian professors in the

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 sockets, his cheeks quivering, his teeth chattered, and his hair stood on end; by degrees these symptoms of a general convulsion, which had affected only the upper part of his frame, gave way to a fresh revulsion of nature. After his arms were fastened, he remained for nearly half an hour motionless, and as though petrified. His lips were apart, and his tongue glued to the palate of his mouth; and it was only after repeated efforts that he succeeded in detaching it; in vain his parched and swollen tongue sought a moisture, which the dried up lips were unable to afford, and the countenance of the ruffian exhibited alternately the pale, livid, cadaverous hues of a corpse; at last, recovering from his lethargy. Pons articulated these words:—

"What, are you Vidocq? ah, had I but known it when you first spoke to me, I would have rid the earth of such a sneaking beggar."

"Well," said I, "I thank you all the same for your kind intentions; meanwhile, as you have fallen into the trap, you owe me the six bottles of wine you promised to whoever would show you Vidocq, and you cannot deny my having done so. Another time I advise you not to tempt the devil."

The gendarmes who were called in after the arrest of Pons, could scarcely credit their eyes; during the search we had been directed to make throughout his house, the mayor of the place begged to see us, that he might express his grateful sense of the service we had rendered to the whole province.

"You have," said he, "delivered us from a frightful scourge, from a wretch who was our torment and dread."

All the inhabitants joined in expressing their joy at the capture of their late foe, as well as their astonishment at the ease with which it had been effected.

The search over, we removed to sleep at La Capelle. Pons was closely handcuffed to one of my agents, who had orders not to quit him night or day; at our first halt, I caused him to be undressed, in order to ascertain whether or not he had any concealed arms about him.


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 When he was stripped I really doubted his belonging to the human race; the whole of his body was covered with a thick bushy glossy hair; he might, indeed, have been mistaken for the Hercules Farnèse, enveloped in the skin of a bear.

Pons appeared perfectly tranquil, nor did anything more than common arise till the following day, when I ascertained that, during the night, he had eaten more than a quarter of a pound of tobacco. I had, from previous observation, noticed, that men who are greatly accustomed to the use of either tobacco or snuff, make an immoderate use of it in times of great peril or emergency. I knew well that a pipe is never more quickly consumed than when in the hands of a condemned criminal, whether it be immediately after receiving his sentence, or on the eve of its being put into execution; but I had never yet seen a prisoner, situated as Pons was, introduce into his stomach a substance, which, taken in so large a quantity, might produce the most fatal effects. I very much feared that he would suffer from his excess, and even suspected he had committed it in the hope of its acting as poison. I, therefore, took from him what tobacco he had remaining, and gave orders that it should only be dealt out to him in small doses, and this on condition that he would engage only to chew it. Pons yielded with a tolerably good grace to this regulation; he ceased to devour his tobacco, although I never had any reason to suppose he had experienced the slightest inconvenience from what he had previously taken.


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XXXVII.]

“I know not what doth cheer you,” the minstrel answer made:

“When saw you e’er for friendship so many knights array’d,

With fasten’d helmets marching, and bearing sword in hand?

By us will Rüdeger pay for his castles and his land.”

E’en as the fiddle-player of speaking made an end,

One saw the noble Rüdeger before the palace wend.

His goodly shield he lower’d and set before his feet:

He could not offer service, his friends he might not greet.

Then cried the noble margrave to those within the hall;

“Be on your guard, I warn you, ye valiant Niblungs all!

Ye should have had my succour, now must ye ransom me;

Once were we friends; now will I be from the troth-pledge free.”

They shudder’d at these tidings, those sorely troubled men;

or them but little comfort there was therefrom to gain,

Since he would fight against them whom they had held so dear!

From foes they had already had mickle ills to bear.

“Now grant it, God in Heaven,” the warrior Gunther said;

“That you will let your pity be movéd to our aid,

And that abounding honour which hope unto us gave;

Much liefer would I trust you thus never to behave.”

“I can in nowise help it,” the brave man said thereto;

“In battle I must meet you, since so I swore to do.

Now guard yourselves, bold heroes, as ye your lives hold dear:

From me the wife of Etzel would no refusal hear.”


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Broken Necks/The Man with One Wife

I

Moments come into every man’s life when the consciousness of sin penetrates his sophistication and causes him to suffer. Hardened though he be, cynical of the moral standards of his fellow-men, into the innermost solitude of his being the nausea of guilt still manages to creep. And then, for the moment, he stands face to face with himself and knows himself as the gods he has denied and foresworn know him.

Thus Ezra Gimmil sat in the thirty-seventh year of his life staring out of the window of his home at the mountain which, like an eternal guardian, shut out the world from Provo, the city of his birth. He was a tall, gaunt man; a headstrong, cynically abandoned man. Yet, as he sat before the window gazing out upon the serene mountain, upon the lazy streets that stretched themselves under the afternoon sun, upon the low roofs and the quiet order of Provo, the torment which seeks men out, who crudely fancy they have hidden themselves from God, came into his heart.

He thought, while he sat as motionless as some awkwardly carven image, of his father and his father’s father, and of his mothers, plump and gentle women. All had been pious, law-abiding. The name Gimmil had been one of the prides of Provo. And now, here he was, Ezra Gimmil, a pariah among the righteous, an affliction in the thought of the godly.

In the midst of his thinking the door opened and a woman of twenty-five entered. Her hair was black and her face full. Her figure was strong and undulant. She stood regarding him for a space and, with a deep, curious laugh, moved toward him.

"Why so sad, Ezra?" she asked.

The sound of her voice fell across his emotion like a whip. He brought himself slowly to his feet. Here was the cause of his disgrace, here the reason for the disfavor that had overtaken the name of Gimmil. She it was who had caused him to deny the teachings of God, to fly in the face of his townspeople. Were it not for her and the insidious spell she exercised over him, he would have married Martha Dale and Eva Dale. Yes, he could have taken to himself Martha and Eva and Ruth and Mary, all of them beautiful and pious women who would have helped him to live properly in the eyes of God and of his fellow men, who would have reflected righteousness and glory upon his name, and by whom he would have had children, twenty-thirty children, as the Prophet of the Mormons had ordained.

She it was, standing now before him, who had placed her plump arms about his neck and in exchange for a sterile kiss caused him to sell his soul to the Devil. A hardened, malignant, headstrong sinner, Ezra Gimmil, yet as he stared at her he hated her and hated himself. He saw himself as the contemptible renegade whose name was fast becoming a byword in Utah.

"Get away!" he cried out to her. "Get away and leave me be!"

The woman who was his wife only smiled at him. She knew these periodic tempers of his. Slowly she continued to approach him. How much longer she would be able to hold him in the coils of her passion she could not tell. But, womanlike, she managed to smile most when thinking most bitterly. With tender, cautious strength she pulled him back into the chair.

"What is it, husband?" she asked softly. "Do you no longer love me? Do I no longer make recompense for the frowns of your neighbors?"

Her arms once more encircled him and upon his lips she fastened hers. Closing his eyes and his senses to the power of the woman, Ezra murmured, as in desperation:

"My father was a good man in the eyes of his God and his people. He had twelve wives. His father, who was among the first to come to Provo, had fourteen wives. And I, who bear their name, live in sin with one wife, live in defiance of all that is holy and pure."

Slowly, with eyes flashing, Ezra’s wife removed her lips from his. She, too, was a Mormon and, like her husband, given to sudden outbreaks of conscience. Well she knew the emotions which the Elders of the Church entertained toward her husband, the manner  in which the Apostles raised their eyes in scorn and  prayer when he passed. Was it worth while, after all, this life of defiance? Would not, as the Elders preached, retribution, terrible and complete, overtake both of them?

Miami Gimmil sighed and straightened her body. As long as her husband spoke not of this thing, no thought of it came to disturb her. But seeing him lost in the torments which God sends to sinners, Miami, too, felt the still, small voice of conscience speaking faintly and divinely in her soul of souls. Silently she fell to her knees before her husband.

"Go," she whispered brokenly. "It is your...your duty."

Her head fell into the lap of Ezra Gimmil and she wept.

Here, in order to understand and appreciate the sinister convolutions of Ezra Gimmil’s thought, one  must understand and appreciate the first great principle of all great egoists and sinners—no man to himself can long remain vile. Thus, although he had opened his heart for the moment to the consciousness  of sin, Ezra Gimmil was not stirred out of the ways  of evil by the shock. He had, during this moment of spiritual illumination, seen to the bottom of his being. With tortured senses he had observed his transgressions as if with the eyes of God Himself. But of so coarse a fiber is the soul of man, of so virile a substance the natural evil, once it comes uppermost, that  it can, with the agility of a duck’s back, shed the  holiest of waters and the purest of thoughts.

Conscious of his returning weakness, aware of his renunciation of God and purity, Ezra Gimmil slowly  gave himself over to the unhallowed tumult beginning to stir in his bosom. He felt, as he had on the day of his wedding in the Temple of Provo, the insidious lure of Miami. For a moment there circled in the back of his thought the vision of Elder Dale and his thirty-seven daughters. But he put this last effort of his fading virtue from him. An expression of unholy rapture lighted his narrow, evil eyes. His lips parted in a wild laugh. Truly, as he stood inanimate for an instant, facing his one wife, he was Ezra Gimmil as the elect of Provo deemed him, a  man possessed by the Evil One, immune to the Gospels, oblivious to the laws of decency and righteousness.

"Miami," he cried aloud, "come, I have love for you. And only you. What does it matter, the obloquy of the world? I shall brook no other’s trespassing upon our home. Let them cast me out. We shall go forth together, sinners in truth, but with the light of freedom in our hearts. What are the laws of God and of man compared to the laws of the heart? Miami, my own, tell me you do not wish for any wifely companions?"

A curious, abandoned note came into his voice, a wilder gleam into his eye. He raised his gaunt arm and shook it at the mountain that guarded the city of his birth, at the Temple wherein his fathers had worshipped.

"Miami," he cried, "we will live as one, you and I. And there shall be no other."

For a space Miami Gimmil shuddered before the violent sacrilege of her husband. Into her heart crept a dread. What manner of demon was this, her Ezra, to defy God and his people? What ominous retribution would overtake him? And her? Dared she continue?

Suddenly all that was female in her made answer. With a joyous cry she threw herself into her husband’s arms.

It was at this significant instant that Elder Brigham Dale passed the front windows of the home of Ezra Gimmil. Elder Dale was a man advanced in years, white-bearded and with the stateliness which long virtue and long worship of the true God alone can give a man. He was short and heavy through the chest and stomach. But his legs were still firm and his eyes clear and vigorous.

Thus, passing the windows of Ezra Gimmil’s home at this particular instant, he was able to see that which sent a shock into the depths of his being. There before him, shamelessly embraced in each other’s arms, standing in the same light which shone upon the Temple, were the wanton Miami and the apostate Ezra.

Thirty-seven daughters had Elder Dale, each of them a plump and gentle maiden. And nine wives had Elder Dale, each of them a pious and wondrous helpmate. The youngest of his daughters was six, the eldest of them thirty ; two of them were betrothed and two of them were married and thirty-three of them waited to be taken by good Mormons.

Raising his eyes the Elder murmured a prayer, which in his anger and horror he was unable to complete. He had known the father of Ezra Gimmil. He had known the wives of his father. All of them pious, scrupulous Mormons. And he, himself, had reared thirty-seven daughters. Ingrate, renegade, servant of Satan! Elder Dale shook his fist at the two embraced figures. Overpowered by his emotions, he dashed up the steps of Ezra Gimmil’s home and burst into the room wherein the couple still stood. His first words separated the twain like some blow delivered from on high.

"Monogamist!" he shouted in his deep voice. "For this have we and our fathers led you into the true ways of God! For this! To be betrayed by you! To watch you flaunt your evil in our faces! To abide with you whilst you disown the fruits of our work! Where are your wives? Where are your pledges to the Apostles? Answer me, monogamist!"

Miami, at the sound of the booming voice of the Elder, slipped coweringly toward the opposite wall. In her face shame burned and her eyes were filled with terror. In this moment the teachings of her childhood, the holy things learned at her mother’s knee, rushed to the surface, and raising her eyes she waited for God to strike.

As the Elder continued to speak, she stole a glance at her husband. Ezra was standing with his head thrown back, his lips drawn back in a snarl. She watched the Elder approach him slowly. She heard the Elder talking now in a calmer voice, an appealing voice.

"Ezra Gimmil, the Apostles of the Temple have appointed me to speak with you. Are you of a mood to listen?"

Indeed, for one so outraged and violent but a moment before, a curious change had come over the Elder. It had, moreover, its affect upon the apostate.

Shaking his head slowly, Ezra Gimmil answered,

"What speech can there be between us, Elder? You see me as I am, as I wish to be. What more can I say?"

There was a note of sorrow in the voice of Ezra Gimmil, which the Elder was quick to hear.

"Come with me to the Temple," the Elder went on more calmly than before; "and we shall see what is to be seen. Better than that, come with me to my home. Provo has not abandoned you, my son, though you have abandoned it in your soul. Provo still remembers your father and his father. None fought so valiantly for the Saints, none worked so faithfully as they. Your sisters themselves will speak for that. Come with me to my home, Ezra, my son, and I will show you to my daughters. I am not one to condemn in sudden anger the waywardness of youth."

A cloud came upon Ezra Gimmil’s features. He continued to shake his head.

"No," he answered, "it cannot be. It will not avail for me to look upon your daughters."

II

The home of Elder Brigham Dale was divided into nine houses. Therein, in peace and humanly orchestrated harmony, lived his extensive issue. In the heart of the town of Provo were two stores which the Elder owned. He was, because of his good works and his reputed wealth, a man of power in the place, and for six years he had held a council seat. His thirty-seven daughters were indeed as so many fair monuments to his piety.

But together with the blessings which had been given him had been meted out his proper allotment of hardships. As may be easily inferred, the problems of thirty-seven daughters, with thirty-three of them yet to be given in wedlock, were not among the least of his declining years. Thus it was that his thoughts had of late centered about Ezra Gimmil. Could this strange renegade be won back into the faith of his fathers, a faith which he had not publicly renounced, he could be induced to take from the Dale home at least ten daughters.

Elder Gimmil had surrounded himself with twelve wives. That his son should find content with one in the face of the revelation of God and the laws of Holy Church was something which Elder Dale, with all his deep learning, could not understand. Rightfully he laid it to the ramified evil which had taken root in the soul and body of Ezra Gimmil.

After his futile visit in the Gimmil home the Elder, inspired by a lifelong virtue as well as an economic necessity—for his wealth under the strain of thirty-seven daughters was not now what it had once been—called a meeting of the Apostles in the Temple. Before the men who assembled, all venerable, all wise, and all virtuous Mormons, Elder Dale set forth the dangers which such a man as Ezra Gimmil introduced into the life of Provo. This was before the days when the tentes of faith began to weaken, when the youths of Provo, thirsting for adventure, began to slip quietly from the town, when the satraps of the government at Washington began to pry into the divinities of the great Creed.

But in laying before the assemblage in the Temple the facts and inferences and dangers, Elder Dale urged above all things caution. He had carefully meditated upon the matter. To drive Ezra Gimmil from his home and from the soil which his fathers had tilled and built upon would be a simple business. But in driving him forth would he not drive forth also the potential husband of his ten daughters? Few young men there were in Provo as wealthy at their age as Ezra Gimmil. His inheritance had been large. He had no brothers. Therefore, caution, urged Elder Dale. Prayers and meditation, faith and cajolery. Let them summon before them the woman Miami first and talk with her. Let them do all that could be done before taking violent measures to rid the town of its Devil’s adherent.

Thus it came about that during the month which followed this assemblage the name of Ezra Gimmil was to be heard continually in the prayer of the righteous of Provo. Courtesy and kindness were shown to him everywhere. The Elders themselves bought heavily of his grain, which filled to bursting the three great barns behind his home. Yet these maneuvers fell insensibly upon the apostate. Since the day he had opened his heart to the torments of a consciousness of sin Ezra Gimmil had closely watched himself. There was in him the stubbornness which is to be noted in the characters of great sinners as well as in those of great saints, both of whom are identically of the stuff of martyrdom.

At night he often lay awake, scowling into the darkness. He had no precepts of God or man to excuse his weakness. Yet there was something within him greater than all the human and divine dictates he had been taught by his fathers to reverence. It was the voice of his flesh crying out against the voices of godliness and virtue. And this voice alone he would follow, let it lead him into the seventh perdition. He was a man and able to march upon Hell like a man—if only Miami would remain at his side. Let the Devil claim them both...

It was after the services in the Temple one March evening that Elder Dale finally spoke the word of doom. He had waited long. He had done all that could be done. He had fought to the last moment. He leaped now into the pulpit and raising his arm above the heads of the congregation, burst forth in a booming voice:

"Brethren of God, children of the Latter Day Saints, hearken! I am to speak to you of that which all of you know. There is in our midst one who has foresworn the God of his fathers, one who has turned upon the laws of the land into which he was born. His name is Ezra Gimmil, son of Rufus Gimmil. We of the Temple have spoken with him and prayed for him. But the light of God will not enter a soul overshadowed by the breath of evil. For five years has Ezra Gimmil continued to live in flagrant monogamy with a wanton named Miami. For five years has this woman, with her eyes and her kisses, her words and her body, lured this man to continue to live in sin with her alone, to deny to the sisters of his Church the sanctity of his home. Inhospitable and abandoned, I denounce him as a menace to the morals of our Provo and a danger to the youth of our Church. Such an example of depravity is bound, if countenanced, to have an effect upon the immature among us. All kindness has failed. There remains but one thing, brethren ..."

Through the gloomy streets of Provo, overshadowed by the guardian mountain which shut it off from the world, moved a silent procession. Fifty men there were in the procession, recruited from the most respectable and pious of the Temple’s congregation. They moved through the dark streets without a murmur. In their midst five of them carried a long rough timber.

Ezra Gimmil, raising his eyes from a book he was reading, stared out of the window into the darkness. He had caught the sound of the tread of many feet. Instinct, which is the companion of evil no less than of virtue, had shot a message into his brain.

He darted to the window and peered out.

Silence and the night—but beyond, the slowly moving shadows of many figures.

They were coming after him.

Without a murmur Ezra Gimmil sped swiftly to the second floor of his home. In her bed, weary with the duties of her home, lay his wife Miami. He shook her and awakened her.

"Our time is come," he whispered fiercely. "For our sins we are to be ridden out of Provo upon a rail at the hands of the Elders. Do you come with me?"

A terrified light shone from Miami’s eyes. She rose and dressed. Noiselessly the two rushed down the stairs, slipped out of the back door, and scurried in the darkness toward the mountain. Beyond the mountain ran the stage coach. Ezra Gimmil had filled his pockets with coin. All else, his home, his animals and his lands, he had left behind.

The fifty Elders of the Temple, bearing the long, rough timber found the home empty and cried out in wrath, sending their curses after the sinners who had fled.

III

In the city of Chicago, whither Ezra Gimmil and his wife Miami finally made their way, there was little to recall to their thought the harrowing experiences of their life in Provo. Here, Ezra Gimmil, with the same grimness which had characterized his defiance of his people, plunged himself into the activity about him. Within two months he had obtained a foremanship in a grain elevator on the river. He worked from 7 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, and each day he returned to the home his wife Miami kept for him, five little rooms in a huge building full of strange and heathen people.

But contentment did not come to him. Even as he had sat tormented one afternoon in the home of his fathers in Provo, did he sit now night after night, nursing the true torments of one who has been separated from land and people and God.

Each night Miami, too, sensing more and more the griefs which were consuming their happiness and parting them, spoke hopefully to her husband:

"It is not too late, Ezra. Here, even in the land of the heathen, we may retrieve the favor of God. You can repent. See, I wish it, my husband. Come, let us look about us and find for our home at least two other wives. And I will write to the elders of Provo what you have done and they will forgive."

But Ezra Gimmil, looking into the eyes of the woman for whom he had lost his earthly wealth and his divine soul, only shook his head.

"I cannot," he said. "There is something within me that forbids. I was born dedicated to the Devil. I cannot fly against my destiny. In sin we have lived. In sin we must die. There is no retracing our ways."

And because he was at heart a pious and reverent man, there was for Ezra Gimmil no consolation in the fact that the heathen among whom he worked and lived deemed him a worthy and righteous man. Nay, there was sin in his soul and he knew it. And so he lived and died—and went to Hell.

title: Broken Necks/The Man with One Wife


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372

“Too late dost thou forswear us,” the great king answer made;

“Thou, Rüdeger most noble, by God shalt be repaid

For all the love and fealty that thou to us hast shown,—

If thou wilt in thy kindness still to the end go on.

“And we’ll be aye beholden, for all that thou didst give,

Myself and eke my kinsfolk, if thou’lt but let us live;

Those precious gifts thou gavest, what time, in good faith, here

To Etzel’s land thou ledst us: think of it, Rüdeger!”

“How gladly would I do it,” said Rüdeger the thane;

“As willingly at this time as ever I was fain

My gifts in full abundance upon you to bestow;

No blame should I thereover e’er need to undergo.”

“Then have thy way,” said Gernot, “O noble Rüdeger!

For never yet to strangers a welcome kindlier

By any host was bidden than thou to us didst give:

Of that thou hast the profit if we should longer live.”

“Would God, most noble Gernot,” said Rüdeger again,

“That ye were back in Rhineland, and I myself were slain

With some degree of honour,— since I with you must fight!

From friends have heroes never suffer’d such foul despite.”

“Now God reward thee, Rüdeger,” spake Gernot in reply,

“For those rich gifts thou gavest: I grieve that thou shouldst die

If with thee there must perish a mind so virtuous too;—

Here carry I the weapon thou gavest me, hero true!


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Rh IV

" Theign's not yet here!" Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. "But he told me I should find you."

"He has kept me waiting," that gentleman returned—"but what's the matter with him anyway?"

"The matter with him"—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—"must of course be this beastly thing in the 'Journal.'"

Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. "What's the matter with the beastly thing?"

"Why, aren't you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?"

"If you call that a regular dig you can't have had much experience of the Papers. I've known them to dig much deeper."

"I've had no experience of such horrid attacks, thank goodness; but do you mean to say," asked Lord John with the surprise of his own delicacy, "that you don't unpleasantly feel it?"

"Feel it where, my dear sir?"


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174 "Why, God bless me, such impertinence, everywhere!"

"All over me at once?"—Mr. Bender took refuge in easy humour. "Well, I'm a large man—so when I want to feel so much I look out for something good. But what, if he suffers from the blot on his ermine—ain't that what you wear?—does our friend propose to do about it?"

Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty. Lady Sandgate was before them, having reached them through the other room, and to her he at once referred the question. "What will Theign propose, do you think, Lady Sandgate, to do about it?"

She breathed both her hospitality and her vagueness. "To 'do'?"

"Don't you know about the thing in the 'Journal'—awfully offensive all round?"

"There'd be even a little pinch for you in it," Mr. Bender said to her—"if you were bent on fitting the shoe!"

Well, she met it all as gaily as was compatible with a firm look at her elder guest while she took her place with them. "Oh, the shoes


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Rh of such monsters as that are much too big for poor me!" But she was more specific for Lord John. "I know only what Grace has just told me; but since it's a question of footgear dear Theign will certainly—what you may call—take his stand!"

Lord John welcomed this assurance. "If I know him he'll take it splendidly!"

Mr. Bender's attention was genial, though rather more detached. "And what—while he's about it—will he take it particularly on?"

"Oh, we've plenty of things, thank heaven," said Lady Sandgate, "for a man in Theign's position to hold fast by!"

Lord John freely confirmed it. "Scores and scores—rather! And I will say for us that, with the rotten way things seem going, the fact may soon become a real convenience."

Mr. Bender seemed struck—and not unsympathetic. "I see that your system would be rather a fraud if you hadn't pretty well fixed that!"

Lady Sandgate spoke as one at present none the less substantially warned and convinced. "It doesn't, however, alter the fact that we've thus in our ears the first growl of an outcry."


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 owes something a parting scene, if nothing else Well, something  to a man one's been in bed with I didn't give you a parting scene at  ah, Yssingueux-les-Pervenches  so I give you this tip instead

He said:

"Will you leave your bedroom door unlocked, or won't you?"

She said:

"If that man would throw his handkerchief to me, I would follow him round the world in my shift Look here see me shake when I think of it She held out her hand at the end of her long arm: hand and arm trembled together, minutely, then very much "Well," she finished, "if you see that and still want to come to my room  your blood be on your own head She paused for a breath or two and then said:

"You can come I won't lock my door But I don't say that you'll get anything or that you'll like what you get That's a fair tip She added suddenly: "You sale fat  take what you get and be damned to you!

Major Perowne had suddenly taken to twirling his moustaches; he said:

"Oh, I'll chance the A.P.M.'s

She suddenly coiled her legs into her chair.

"I know now what I came here for," she said.

Major Wilfrid Fosbrooke Eddicker Perowne of Perowne, the son of his mother, was one of those individuals who have no history, no strong proclivities, nothing, his knowledge seemed to be bounded by the contents of his newspaper for the immediate day; at


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XXXVII.]

“And never hath it fail’d me in all this struggle dread,

And many a knight hath fallen, beneath its edges, dead.

Strong is it and well-temper’d, a good and handsome blade;

I ween a gift so worthy by knight will ne’er be made.

“And should we not persuade thee to come unto our side,

If friends of mine thou slayest who still within abide,

With thine own sword I’ll smite thee and take away thy life:

Thee, Rüdeger, I pity, and eke thy noble wife.”

“Now would to God, Sir Gernot, that thus it e’en might be,

That all your will and purpose might be fulfill’d on me,

Whereby your kinsmen longer might yet enjoy their life!

Ay! gladly would I trust you with daughter and with wife.”

Then spake the young Burgundian, the child of Uté fair:

“Why do you thus, Sir Rüdeger? All these who with me are

To you are well-disposéd; an evil course you take;

Your daughter fair too early a widow you will make.

“If you and your retainers in strife contend with me,

How grievously unfriendly will that appear to be!

In that beyond all others my faith in you I laid,—

In such wise that your daughter my wife I would have made.”

“Unto your pledge be faithful, O prince of noble race,”

Said Rüdeger, “if haply God send you from this place;

Suffer not that the maiden for me atonement make;

Be pitiful towards her, for your own virtue’s sake.”


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176 "Ah," Lord John concurred, "we've unmistakably the first growl of an outcry!"

Mr. Bender's judgment on the matter paused at sight of Lord Theign, introduced and announced, as Lord John spoke, by Gotch; but with the result of his addressing directly the person so presenting himself. "Why, they tell me that what this means, Lord Theign, is the first growl of an outcry!"

The appearance of the most eminent figure in the group might have been held in itself to testify to some such truth; in the sense at least that a certain conscious radiance, a gathered light of battle in his lordship's aspect would have been explained by his having taken the full measure—an inner success with which he glowed—of some high provocation. He was flushed, but he bore it as the ensign of his house; he was so admirably, vividly dressed, for the morning hour and for his journey, that he shone as with the armour of a knight; and the whole effect of him, from head to foot, with every jerk of his unconcern and every flash of his ease, was to call attention to his being utterly unshaken and knowing perfectly what he was about. It was at this happy pitch


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 any rate, his conversation never went any farther. He was not bold, he was not shy: he was neither markedly courageous nor markedly cowardly. His mother was immoderately wealthy, owned an immense castle that hung over crags, above a western sea, much as a birdcage hangs from a window of a high tenement building, but she received few or no visitors, her cuisine being indifferent and her wine atrocious. She had strong temperance opinions and, immediately after the death of her husband, she had emptied the contents of his cellar, which were almost as historic as his castle, into the sea, a shudder going through county-family and no, or almost no, characteristics. He had done England. But even this was not enough to make Perowne himself notorious.

His mother allowed him—after an eyeopener in early youth—the income of a junior royalty, but he did nothing with it. He lived in a great house in Palace Gardens, Kensington, and he lived all alone with rather a large staff of servants who had been selected by his mother, but they did nothing at all, for he ate all his meals, and even took his bath and dressed for dinner at the Bath Club. He was otherwise parsimonious.

He had, after the fashion of his day, passed a year or two in the army when young. He had been first gazetted to His Majesty's Forty-second Regiment, but on the Black Watch proceeding to India he had exchanged into the Glamorganshires, at that time commanded by General Campion and recruiting in and around Lincolnshire. The general had been an old friend of Perowne's mother, and, on being promoted to brigadier, had taken Perowne on to his staff as his galloper, for, although Perowne rode rather indiffer-


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Rh that he replied to the prime upsetter of his peace.

"I'm afraid I don't know what anything means to you, Mr. Bender—but it's exactly to find out that I've asked you, with our friend John, kindly to meet me here. For a very brief conference, dear lady, by your good leave," he went on to Lady Sandgate; "at which I'm only too pleased that you yourself should assist. The 'first growl' of any outcry, I may mention to you all, affects me no more than the last will!"

"So I'm delighted to gather"—Lady Sandgate took him straight up—"that you don't let go your inestimable Cure."

He at first quite stared superior—"'Let go'?"—but then treated it with a lighter touch. "Upon my honour I might, you know—that dose of the daily press has made me feel so fit! I arrive at any rate," he pursued to the others and in particular to Mr. Bender, "I arrive with my decision taken—which I've thought may perhaps interest you. If that tuppeny rot is an attempt at an outcry I simply nip it in the bud."

Lord John rejoicingly approved. "


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 ently, he had a certain social knowledge and could be counted on to know how correctly to address a regimental invitation to a dowager countess who had married a viscount's third son As a military figure otherwise he had a very indifferent word of command, a very poor drill and next to no control of his men, but he was popular with his batmen, and in a rather stiff way was presentable in the old scarlet uniform or the blue mess jacket. He was exactly six foot, to a hairbreadth, in his stockings, had very dark eyes, and a rather grating voice; the fact that his limbs were a shade too bulky for his trunk, which was not at all corpulent, made him appear a little clumsy. If in a club you asked what sort of a fellow he was your interlocutor would tell you, most probably, that he had or was supposed to have warts on his head, this to account for his hair which all his life he had combed back, unparted from his forehead. But as a matter of fact he had no warts on his head.

He had once started out on an expedition to shoot big game in Portuguese East Africa. But on its arrival his expedition was met with the news that the natives of the interior were in revolt, so Perowne had returned to Kensington Palace Gardens. He had had several mild successes with women, but, owing to his habits of economy and fear of imbroglios, until the age of thirty-four, he had limited the field of his amours to young women of the lower social orders

His affair with Sylvia Tietjens might have been something to boast about, but he was not boastful, and indeed he had been too hard hit when she had left him even to bear to account lyingly for the employment of the time he had spent with her in Brittany. Fortunately no one took sufficient interest


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178 the only way—with the least self-respect—to treat it!"

Lady Sandgate, on the other hand, sounded a sceptical note. "But are you sure it's so easy, Theign, to hush up a real noise?"

"It ain't what I'd call a real one, Lady Sandgate," Mr. Bender said; "you can generally distinguish a real one from the squeak of two or three mice! But granted mice do affect you, Lord Theign, it will interest me to hear what sort of a trap—by what you say—you propose to set for them."

"You must allow me to measure, myself, Mr. Bender," his lordship replied, "the importance of a gross freedom publicly used with my absolutely personal proceedings and affairs; to the cause and origin of any definite report of which—in such circles!—I'm afraid I rather wonder if you yourself can't give me a clue."

It took Mr. Bender a minute to do justice to these stately remarks. "You rather wonder if I've talked of how I feel about your detaining in your hands my Beautiful Duchess?"

"Oh, if you've already published her as 'yours'—with your power of publication!"


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 in his movements to wait for his answer to their indifferent questions as to where he had spent the summer. When his mind reverted to her desertion of him moisture would come out of his eyes, undemonstratively, as water leaves the surface of a sponge

Sylvia had left him by the simple expedient of stepping without so much as a reticule on to the little French tramway that took you to the main railway line. From there she had written to him in pencil on a closed correspondence card that she had left him because she simply could not bear either his dullness or his craking voice. She said they would probably run up against each other in the course of the autumn season in town and, after purchase of some night things, had made straight for the German spa to which her mother had retreated.

At the later date Sylvia had no difficulty in accounting to herself for her having gone off with such an oaf: she had simply reacted in a violent fit of sexual hatred, from her husband's mind. And she could not have found a mind more utterly dissimilar than Perowne's in any decently groomed man to be found. in London. She could recall, even in the French hotel lounge, years after, the almost painful emotion of joyful hatred that had visited her when she had first thought of going off with him. It was the self-applause of one who has just hit upon an excruciatingly inspiring intellectual discovery. In her previous transitory infidelities to Christopher she had discovered that, however presentable the man with whom she might have been having an affair, and however short the affair, even if it were only a matter of a week-end Christopher had spoilt her for the other man. It was the most damnable of his qualities that to hear any


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Rh Lord Theign coldly laughed,—"of course I trace the connection!"

Mr. Bender's acceptance of responsibility clearly cost him no shade of a pang. "Why, I haven't for quite a while talked of a blessed other thing—and I'm capable of growing more profane over my not getting her than I guess any one would dare to be if I did."

"Well, you'll certainly not 'get' her, Mr. Bender," Lady Sandgate, as for reasons of her own, bravely trumpeted; "and even if there were a chance of it don't you see that your way wouldn't be publicly to abuse our noble friend?"

Mr. Bender but beamed, in reply, upon that personage. "Oh, I guess our noble friend knows I have to talk big about big things. You understand, sir, the scream of the eagle!

"I'll forgive you," Lord Theign civilly returned, "all the big talk you like if you'll now understand me. My retort to that hireling pack shall be at once to dispose of a picture."

Mr. Bender rather failed to follow. "But that's what you wanted to do before."

"Pardon me," said his lordship—"I make a difference. It's what you wanted me to do."


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180 The mystification, however, continued. "And you were not—as you seemed then—willing?"

Lord Theign waived cross-questions. "Well, I'm willing now—that's all that need concern us. Only, once more and for the last time," he added with all authority, "you can't have our Duchess!"

"You can't have our Duchess!"—and Lord John, as before the altar of patriotism, wrapped it in sacrificial sighs.

"You can't have our Duchess!" Lady Sandgate repeated, but with a grace that took the sting from her triumph. And she seemed still all sweet sociability as she added: "I wish he'd tell you too, you dreadful rich thing, that you can't have anything at all!"

Lord Theign, however, in the interest of harmony, deprecated that rigour. "Ah, what then would become of my happy retort?"

"And what—as it is," Mr. Bender asked—"becomes of my unhappy grievance?"

"Wouldn't a really great capture make up to you for that?"

"Well, I take more interest in what I want than in what I have—and it depends, don't you see, on how you measure the size."

Lord John had at once in this connection a


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 other man talk of any subject—any, any subject—from stable form to the balance of power, or from the voice of a given opera singer to the recurrence of a comet—to have to pass a week-end with any other man and hear his talk after having spent the inside of the week with Christopher, hate his ideas how you might, was the difference between listening to a grown man and, with an intense boredom, trying to entertain an inarticulate schoolboy. As beside him, other men simply did not seem ever to have grown up

Just before, with an extreme suddenness, consenting to go away with Perowne, the illuminating idea had struck her: If I did go away with him it would be the most humiliating thing I could do to Christopher And just when the idea had struck her, beside her chair in the conservatory at a dance given by the general's sister, Lady Claudine Sandbach, Perowne, his voice rendered more throaty and less disagreeable than usual by emotion, had been going on and on begging her to elope with him She had suddenly said:

"Very well let's

His emotion had been so unbridled in its astonishment that she had, even at that, almost been inclined to treat her own speech as a joke and to give up the revenge But the idea of the humiliation that Christopher must feel proved too much for her. For, for your wife to throw you over for an attractive man is naturally humiliating, but that she should leave you publicly for a man of hardly any intelligence at all, you priding yourself on your brains, must be nearly as mortifying a thing as can happen to you.

But she had hardly set out upon her escapade before two very serious defects in her plan occurred to her with extreme force: the one that, however humili-


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Rh bright idea. "Shouldn't you like to go back there and take the measure yourself?"

Mr. Bender considered him as through narrowed eyelids. "Look again at that tottering Moretto?"

"Well, its size—as you say—isn't in any light a negligible quantity."

"You mean that—big as it is—it hasn't yet stopped growing?"

The question, however, as he immediately showed, resided in what Lord Theign himself meant. "It's more to the purpose," he said to Mr. Bender, "that I should mention to you the leading feature, or in other words the very essence, of my plan of campaign—which is to put the picture at once on view." He marked his idea with a broad but elegant gesture. "On view as a thing definitely disposed of."

"I say, I say, I say!" cried Lord John, moved by this bold stroke to high admiration.

Lady Sandgate's approval was more qualified. "But on view, dear Theign, how?"

"With one of those pushing people in Bond Street." And then as for the crushing climax of his policy: "As a Mantovano pure and simple."


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Excursion

 * The Excursion (1814), an epic poem by William Wordsworth
 * Excursions (1863), an essay collection by Henry David Thoreau

title: Excursion


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182 "But my dear man," she quavered, "if it isn't one?"

Mr. Bender at once anticipated; the wind had suddenly risen for him and he let out sail. "Lady Sandgate, it's going, by all that's—well, interesting, to be one!"

Lord Theign took him up with pleasure. "You seize me? We treat it as one!"

Lord John eagerly borrowed the emphasis. "We treat it as one!"

Mr. Bender meanwhile fed with an opened appetite on the thought—he even gave it back larger. "As the long-lost Number Eight!"

Lord Theign happily seized him. "That will be it—to a charm!"

"It will make them," Mr. Bender asked, "madder than anything?"

His patron—if not his client—put it more nobly. "It will markedly affirm my attitude."

"Which will in turn the more markedly create discussion."

"It may create all it will!"

"Well, if you don't mind it, I don't!" Mr. Bender concluded. But though bathed in this high serenity he was all for the rapid


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Rh of it elsewhere. "You'll put the thing on view right off?"

"As soon as the proper arrangement"

"You put off your journey to make it?" Lady Sandgate at once broke in.

Lord Theign bethought himself—with the effect of a gracious confidence in the others. "Not if these friends will act."

"Oh, I guess we'll act!" Mr. Bender declared.

"Ah, won't we though!" Lord John reechoed.

"You understand then I have an interest?" Mr. Bender went on to Lord Theign.

His lordship's irony met it. "I accept that complication—which so much simplifies!"

"And yet also have a liberty?"

"Where else would be those you've taken? The point is," said Lord Theign, "that I have a show."

It settled Mr. Bender. "Then I'll fix your show." He snatched up his hat. "Lord John, come right round!"

Lord John had of himself reached the door, which he opened to let the whirlwind tremendously figured by his friend pass out


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184 first. Taking leave of the others he gave it even his applause. "The fellow can do anything anywhere!" And he hastily followed.

 V

, left alone with Lord Theign, drew the line at their companion's enthusiasm. "That may be true of Mr. Bender—for it's dreadful how he bears one down. But I simply find him a terror."

"Well," said her friend, who seemed disposed not to fatigue the question, "I dare say a terror will help me." He had other business to which he at once gave himself. "And now, if you please, for that girl."

"I'll send her to you," she replied, "if you can't stay to luncheon."

"I've three or four things to do," he pleaded, "and I lunch with Kitty at one."

She submitted in that case—but disappointedly. "With Berkeley Square then you've time. But I confess I don't quite grasp the so odd inspiration that you've set those men to carry out."


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Rh He showed surprise and regret, but even greater decision. "Then it needn't trouble you, dear—it's enough that I myself go straight."

"Are you so very convinced it's straight?"—she wouldn't be a bore to him, but she couldn't not be a blessing.

"What in the world else is it," he asked, "when, having good reasons, one acts on 'em?"

"You must have an immense array," she sighed, "to fly so in the face of Opinion!"

"'Opinion'?" he commented—"I fly in its face? Why, the vulgar thing, as I'm taking my quiet walk, flies in mine! I give it a whack with my umbrella and send it about its business." To which he added with more reproach: "It's enough to have been dished by Grace—without your falling away!"

Sadly and sweetly she defended herself. "It's only my great affection—and all that these years have been for us: they it is that make me wish you weren't so proud."

"I've a perfect sense, my dear, of what these years have been for us—a very charming matter. But 'proud' is it you find me of the


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Broken Necks/Infatuation

I

The dolorous night peered Madonna-like into the open windows of the café. At the little round tables, their arms resting on the black lacquered tops, their fingers clinging forgetfully to the stems of glasses, sat groups of idle celebrants. The wail of the café orchestra lost itself in the night noises that drifted through the windows—the noises from the little summer lake below, the heavy patches of wood beyond, and the amorous laughter of young men and young women walking across the darkened hotel lawns or congregated in the pavilion above the boat-house.

Lucian Walters stared about him for a moment in the café, removing his eyes with difficulty from the curious creature who sat opposite him at one of the little black lacquered tables. The heavy brooding eyes of middle-aged women sitting stiff and immobile in all the pompous finery of their summer wardrobe, encountered his. The lachrymose gaze of middle-aged men drifted by him to the opened windows and the alluring night. A sad lot, laughing now and then, talking aloud, humming the simple melodies of the orchestra, sipping at their glasses. A miserable company, vaguely frightened by the stiff little dreams that scratched timidly at their souls. Here and there a youthful couple, confronting each other with wine-glasses in their fingers and sinning ruthlessly with their frantic eyes. The little artificial scene, so piquantly located in the midst of the solemn wilderness about them, faded again from Walter’s thought. His eyes with a start focused back upon the curious creature opposite him at the little table.

She looked like a cross between a macaw and a marionette. Luxurious, perverse, artificial, she sat facing him and the night about her, a sort of savagery in caricature. Her face was like a sentence full of unexpected adjectives—startling and meaningless. The bodice of her dress—curiously folded purples, golds and lavenders—was reminiscent of the Salome which Van Gogh never painted. Her skirt revealed no human lines, but spread about her in a flare of blue greens, ruffled and looped into the semblance of clumsy and exotic plumage. Her legs beneath its high hem stretched to the ground, straight and birdlike. They were encased in yellow silk embroidered with yellow rosettes above the ankles.

They seemed the finely chiseled effort of some amorous goldsmith’s art. The elaborated feet were stifly corseted in little lyre-like amber-colored shoes.

Walters contemplated her darkly. In his contemplation was contained the doubt and self-disgust of a man who at the age of thirty-four discovers himself unreasonably, irrationally, unintelligently, and hopelessly in love. Until five days ago he had regarded himself in the flattering light of a man of precocious sanity and unassailable humour. His sophistication in the matter of women had been one of his most cherished prides. He had, during the course of numerous and intricate amours, proved to his satisfaction certain axioms and paradoxes concerning the sex. And for a matter of eight years he had devoted himself to the writing of novels in which he had left no convention unturned and no illusion intact. To find himself thus, at the zenith of his prowess and the apex of his career, bewilderingly absorbed in the contemplation of a seventeen-year-old imbecile, a creature devoid of any known glimmering of intellect, charm, or cunning, was, accordingly, a matter which darkened his eye and filled him with deprecating oaths.

He contemplated now her hat. It was a challenge, a green and silver gesture flung across her copper-tinted hair. It rose obliquely from her left ear, to which was attached a large coral earring, and concluded with a piratical slant high over and beyond her opposite shoulder. It was incredible that the wearer of such a hat could be an imbecile—a persistent and indubitable imbecile. Strange and sinister thoughts were to be expected from such a hat as this—Borgian convulsions, Saturnalian philosophies. And yet he had determined since his arrival at The Dells five days ago that in all his life he had never encountered man or woman of such unwearying and spontaneous ignorance.

Lured to her by an inexplicable attraction, he had concentrated upon the creature, plumbed the shallows of her soul, vivisected her whims, turned her few pathetic mental processes inside out, and submitted them to the microscopic eye of his widely renowned masterly mind. He was, within two days of such activities, prepared to pronounce her coldly and conservatively an imbecile, a vain, empty-headed, vacant-souled little flapper of the most unengaging type. And having determined this to the entire satisfaction of his critical mind, he had forthwith and insanely discovered her more alluring, more irresistible than any woman he had known during an intelligently sybaritic life.

The whine of the café orchestra dissipated his painful meditations in a curious mist. For moments he sat staring at the girl opposite him, repeating in his mind her name, "Myra Lanier." The silent syllables affected him magically. He abandoned himself with the intensity of an amateur drunkard to the business in hand and poured forth a stream of lovesick inanities, amorous piffle. He was not more than half conscious of his words. He recovered as the last violin note quavered into silence and the cold laugh of a breathless youth dashing about somewhere in the night rocketed into the café. A wave of self-disgust overcame him. He turned miserably toward the open window, cursing to himself the orchestra, the wine he had consumed, the indescribable night, and the creature who was fast making as fatuous and whole-hearted an ass out of him as he had ever described in his own writings.

II

In the name of the thousand and one gods of sanity and upright living, how had he come by this thing, and why? What latent streak of idiocy or hereditary taint of imbecility had brought him, open- mouthed, shining-eyed, and giddy-headed, to the feet of a vapid little peacock; and he thirty-four, the author of three discriminating volumes and a man of aloof and sensitive poise! He turned his embittered smile upon her face, one side of which was concealed as by a carefully painted shadow. It was an arresting, impressionistic face of stenciled features, poster tints—provokingly immobile. There were visible only one of her eyes, one of her ears, one of her cheeks, an enigmatic section of her lips, and the whitened tip of her nose. It was not the face of an imbecile. Cleopatra would not have despised so mocking and esoteric a surface. Walters’ long fingers caressed nervously the stem of the tall conical glass before him. The memories of the past five days overwhelmed him with a loathing. The manner in which he had danced kittenish attendance upon her disgusting coquetries! The manner in which he had. . .Face or no face, the creature was an infant and a fool!

She sat with her elbows planted on the black lacquered top of the café table, her forearms in their tight lavender and gold sleeves tilted forward like embracing and exotic serpents. Her palms were pressed together, the pink and waxen fingers interlaced. Her nails glistened like rubies on the backs of her hands. Her chin was lifted, her whitened throat presented a line of moonlight. Her bosom made two little ivory buckles above the purples, golds and lavenders of her bodice.

Walters observed these things cautiously, holding his emotions well in check. He wondered dimly just what he had said a moment ago that had so animated her usually expressionless face. The revulsion he was experiencing had become familiar to him during the five days of his infatuation. Hard upon moments of groundless intoxication similar revulsions had overtaken him. He seized upon them with a low sort of joy. They were respites, lucid, wonderful intervals during which he could most satisfactorily curse and belabor himself.

He sat now elate. What sort of a callow, poppy-cocking idiot was he becoming! Spending five days of his precious holiday bouncing along in the wake of this half-witted, giggle-cursed, inanely stupid, and insanely clothed infant! Submitting himself to the insufferable horseplay and companionship of a pack of barely-weaned bull calves who were his rivals for the maiden’s accursed favor! Five days of mental and spiritual suicide! What, in the name of all the gods of fact and legend, had come over him? Arguing hotly with a mess of sleek-haired, grinning-faced undergraduates! Circumventing them by imbecile ruses! Sinking to the loathsome level of impassioned baby-talk! He, Lucien Walters! My God, the unmentionable idiocies, the horrifying banalities!

III

Myra’s familiar high-pitched girl’s voice came to him suddenly from across the table.

"I'm sorry," she was saying, "but I can't marry you. I'm only seventeen, y'know, and I don't want to marry yet."

She giggled. Walters waited stupidly for her to resume, moistening his lips and experiencing cold, blighting sensations in his stomach.

The giggle finished. Myra went on, suppressing with difficulty further and lustier giggles.

"You're really my first 'catch.' Nobody ever actually honest-Injun proposed to me before and asked my hand in marriage."

The giggles had their delighted way for the moment.

"Won't mama be proud. She's always telling me that no serious man would ever ask me to be his wife. Just wait till I tell her that that..."

Walters nodded his head solemnly as the object of his mad passion, overcome for the nonce by a strange and delicious mirth, choked, coughed, and gurgled an interruption.

"...that you did," she went on. "And nobody can say you ain't a serious man—even mama, who is so particular about such things. Because you are serious, aren't you, Lucian?"

"Yes," said Walters.

"I knew it," cried the creature with an air of triumph, "I could tell."

Again Walters nodded his head solemnly. It was just as well that she shouldn't marry him. He would undoubtedly end by murdering her within a week if she did. And he had actually proposed! Well, perhaps this final evidence of his utter depravity would serve to shock him back into reason. My God, what an abominable voice! Would she never reach an end to this morbid chatter of hers? He stared at her desperately, half hearing her further remarks.

When she had finally ended a peculiar depression seized upon his spirit. The irrational impulses he had learned to dread, as a victim of mania dreads the first approaches of his hallucination, were struggling back to life in his thought. Baffling, mysterious, luring, a creature of insidious and overpowering fascination—she sat confronting him.

He gazed at her miserably. His rapid thoughts beat passionately about her, like drunken moths hurling themselves into flame. She was as mysterious and provoking as a colored hieroglyph staring from a Pheenician ruin. She became, as he gazed, something daintily barbaric, something not quite a woman but a compound of exotic mysteries. He waited an instant after she had finished.

"But you must marry me," he answered slowly. "I can't live without you. Don't you see?"

Thank God it was a safe topic! And it was the one topic on which she showed the remotest vestiges  of intelligence. Hadn’t she refused him! He stared about him at the stiff blurred figures lingering in the  café, middle-aged women with heavy, brooding eyes,  men with sad little secrets upon their faces. He would tear himself away. He had unquestionably stepped into some hideously enchanted atmosphere. He would pack his trunk and leave in the morning as early as possible. He was interrupted in his re- solves by a series of explosive giggles.

"I'm so sorry. Really so sorry. If there's anything I can do..."

One of the hands that stared like a vacant little white head above the gold and lavender arm reached across the black table top and touched his wrist. He felt a chaotic elation. Even the falsetto of the unceasing giggle which accompanied the gesture of the hand upon his wrist was powerless to affect him. He surged and soared, freed at last from the cruelties of his self-disgust, his revulsion, his critical anguish.

"Myra," he murmured, his voice become hoarse and choked. A heavy hand thumped him between his shoulder blades. The space about him became suddenly filled with violent howls. He perceived as in a mist the sprawling figures of four youths—the Bull Calves, the sleek-haired and grinning-faced creatures of the Dance Pavilion—his rivals! They were jumping around the table, hurling insults, convulsed in abominable laughters. One of them started singing the Wedding March from "Lohengrin." Another struck the attitude of an outraged parent and launched into a mock tirade against his "darter’s elopement."

Walters became conscious of the faces of his neighbors at the little tables. They were turned toward him, scowling, smiling appreciatively, laughing coarsely.

He staggered to his feet, extricated himself from the violent and horrible group that clustered about him and dashed headlong from the café. In his ears trailed the words, "We seen yuh—gosh ding it! We caught yuh!" And the joyous, hysterical laugh of a woman—Myra.

He reached the hotel after colliding fiercely with a forest of trees and barking his shins on a maze of croquet arches. Fronting the wide steps he ceased his plunging and pulled himself together. He mounted the steps with dignity. It was barely possible that his shame had not preceded him, and that the horrible scene in the café—why it was horrible he was unable to explain—was still unknown to the rocking-chair brigade on the dark veranda. He passed into the lobby without creating any further disturbance. A few minutes later he sat in his room overlooking the tops of vague and innumerable trees and the glint of the little lake below. He would pack at once and be off as early as possible.

And for the hundredth time in five days Lucian Walters contemplated himself and marveled. He wasn't in love. He had contracted a disease—a furious malady which had already unseated his reason and changed him from a shrewd, discriminating gentleman into an infatuated and imbecile schoolboy.

He undressed and lay in his bed, helplessly bewildered. Images of Myra floated before his weary eyes, Myra astride gorgeous-hued peacocks, Myra dancing before ivory idols, Myra riding in state upon elephants attended by himself in the guise of a bejeweled and wonderfully tunicated rajah. Her face, exaggerated in his fancies, became the mask of a priestess before the altars of Astarte.

He abandoned the notion of packing. He was in love. He had never been in love before. It was the fatuous whim of the gods who preside over such things to see that he should fall in love with a chattering, giggle-cursed, empty-headed imbecile seventeen years old. It was perhaps a divine punishment for his pride and prejudice in such matters.

He cursed, he tossed. And finally, as a silence settled upon the hotel and the wood noises racketed mysteriously outside, he fell asleep.

IV

It was early morning when Walters opened his eyes. He felt he had been violently drunk the night before. He remembered that he had asked Myra to marry him while sitting in the café. He sat up and experienced a sensation of emptiness in his heart. He remembered then that she had refused.

An hour later he had finished his breakfast and was walking mournfully about the gossip-echoing veranda. Men and women nodded with mysterious geniality at him.

"All the world loves a lover," he murmured grimly to himself.

He passed on to the lawn. He was, although not yet admitting it, heading for the boathouse and the bathing pier. He had, during the five previous days, painfully absented himself from this spot. Here the Bull Calves and Myra were wont to disport themselves during the forenoon, to splash water upon each other and leap and dive about. Being unable to swim and a man of peculiar sensitiveness in such matters, Walters had remained away.

He walked now with measured steps toward the flight of stairs that led to the foot of the hotel hill down to the bathing pier. Two or three figures were already on the scene. Myra and her companions had not yet arrived, however. He sauntered down the stairs in the grip of ungovernable impulses. To himself he repeated with the resignation of a suttee martyr, "What's the use? I'm in love. Why not own up? I can't escape it."

He arrived on the pier and sat down on a stone bench against the railing. Two feminine figures clothed in long capes appeared. His heart leaped toward them, and then leaped back again. Neither was Myra. They removed their long capes and stood, two shapely figures in their tight-fitting bathing suits.

Walters turned wearily away. His career was ruined. He would let this ungovernable infatuation run its course. He would overcome the creature and marry her. A damned fool and venomous destiny had ordained it. There was no escaping the inexplicable lure, the morbid fascination the imbecile exercised over him. Even now, as he sat and waited, his heart drummed in his ears and his head whirled.

Another figure was descending the flight of steps down the hill. It was Myra, her copper-tinted hair concealed beneath a violently green rubber cap, her figure hidden under a long voluminous cape. She approached down the pier and, spying him, came running to his side with the affected daintiness of a creature unaccustomed to bare feet.

"Going in? Oh, go get your things off. Come on. All the boys'll be here in a minute."

Walters cleared his throat twice and endeavored a remark. It failed. She was about to remove the voluminous cape. He stared brazenly, powerless to think or to conceal his emotion. With a mincing little step the creature separated herself from her single garment and stood before him, a slim, white-skinned girl, lithe-legged, lean-bodied, reed-throated. Under his gaze a blush crept into her cheeks.

Suddenly, as if awakened from a dream, Walters sprang to his feet, laughing. He walked without comment up the pier, turning once or twice to stare at the bewildered, shining figure of the nude girl. He mounted the stairs, chuckling and shaking his head. His brain seemed cleared of some horrible fume. He murmured to himself:

"What a funny kid! What a funny kid! Good Lord, I've been insane. I've been madly, horribly in love with a purple and gold dress and a green hat. Yes, sir. God, what a plot! What a plot!"

The brain of Lucien Walters exercised itself nimbly. Coldly and without a tremor it recalled the image of Myra in her ruteliant fabrics, garlanded and festooned in amazing colors—the dress with its unhuman lines, the curiously folded bodice of purples, golds, and lavenders, the green and silver hat, the yellow stockings, the amber-colored shoes.

"A sort of savagery in caricature," he muttered carefully—for "the sorrows of life must ever be the joys of art." A beauty that didn't reach to the skin. Mystery exotics, enigmas—born in a dressmaker's shop."

He turned on top of the hill and gazed toward the pier. There, dipping her toes coquettishly into the placid water of the lake, stood slightly inclined the naked figure of Myra Lanier. Walters smiled and nodded his head with vigor.

"What did I expect to see?" he abruptly questioned himself. "Something, something unimaginable? Not a bad-looking kid at that. A little too scrawny..."

He moved on, placing a cigarette between his lips.

"I'll call the story simply, 'Infatuation'," he announced abruptly to the trees, "and let them draw their inferences."

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186 daughter who does her best to ruin me, or of the one who does her best to humiliate?"

Lady Sandgate, not undiscernibly, took her choice of ignoring the point of this. "Your surrenders to Kitty are your own affair—but are you sure you can really bear to see Grace?"

"I seem expected indeed to bear much," he said with more and more of his parental bitterness, "but I don't know that I'm yet in a funk before my child. Doesn't she want to see me, with any contrition, after the trick she has played me?" And then as his companion's answer failed: "In spite of which trick you suggest that I should leave the country with no sign of her explaining?"

His hostess raised her head. "She does want to see you, I know; but you must recall the sequel to that bad hour at Dedborough—when it was you who declined to see her."

"Before she left the house with you, the next day, for this?"—he was entirely reminiscent. "What I recall is that even if I had condoned—that evening—her deception of me, in my folly, I still loathed, for my friend's sake, her practical joke on poor John."


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366 the models furnished by their Mahommedan conquerors.

We are now engaged, as you are aware, in a very expensive and tedious war, in countries whither the Mahommedans were never able to penetrate. This tediousness, together with the partial reverses which the armies have sustained, has given rise to all manner of evil reports among the people of Hindostan, and to a great deal of grumbling and discontent among the English. After all, I cannot myself perceive that there is any body to blame. Every body cried out for war in the first instance, as necessary to the honour of the Government, and murmured greatly against Lord Amherst, for not being more ready than he was to commence it. Of the country which we were to invade no intelligence could be obtained; and in fact our armies have had little to contend with, except a most impracticable and unknown country. It is unfortunate, however, that after a year and a half of war we should, except in point of dear-bought experience, be no further advanced than at the beginning, and there are very serious grounds for apprehending, that if any great calamity occurred in the East, a storm would follow on our north-western and western frontier, which, with our present means, it would be by no means easy to allay. Something, however, has been gained; if we can do little harm to the Birmans, it is evident, from their conduct in the field, that, beyond their own jungles, they can do still less harm to us. And the inhabitants of Calcutta, who, about this time last


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Rh Lady Sandgate indulged in the shrug conciliatory. "It was your very complaint that your own appeal to her became an appeal from herself."

"Yes," he returned, so well he remembered, "she was about as civil to me then—picking a quarrel with me on such a trumped-up ground!—as that devil of a fellow in the newspapers; the taste of whose elegant remarks, for that matter, she must now altogether enjoy!"

His good friend showily balanced and might have been about to reply with weight; but what she in fact brought out was only: "I see you're right about it: I must let her speak for herself."

"That I shall greatly prefer to her speaking—as she did so extraordinarily, out of the blue, at Dedborough, upon my honour—for the wonderful friends she picks up: the picture-man introduced by her (what was his name?) who regularly 'cheeked' me, as I suppose he'd call it, in my own house, and whom I hope, by the way, that under this roof she's not able to be quite so thick with!"

If Lady Sandgate winced at that vain dream


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Rh year, were asking leave to send their property into the citadel, and packing off their wives and children across the river, will hardly again look forward to seeing their war-boats on the salt-water lake, or the golden umbrellas of their chiefs erected on the top of St. John’s Cathedral. I was then thought little better than a madman for venturing to Dacca. Now the members of government are called all manner of names, because their troops have found unexpected difficulty in marching to Ummerapoora.

For me there are very many ingredients of happiness; much to be seen, much to be learned, and much, I almost fear too much, to be done or attempted. I have been hitherto so fortunate as to be on the best possible terms with the Government, and on very friendly terms with nine out of ten of my few clergy; and in my present journey I have, I hope, been the means of doing some good, both to them and their congregations. Indeed my journey has been perfectly professional; and, though I certainly did not shut my eyes or ears by the way, I have been at no place which was not either a scene of duty, or in the direct and natural way to one. And every where I am bound to say I have met with great kindness and attention from the local magistrates, down to the European soldiers, and from the Rajas and Kings down to the poor native Christians.

.


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188 she managed not to betray it, and she had, in any embarrassment on this matter, the support, as we know, of her own tried policy. "She leads her life under this roof very much as under yours; and she's not of an age, remember, for me to pretend either to watch her movements or to control her contacts." Leaving him however thus to perform his pleasure the charming woman had before she went an abrupt change of tone. "Whatever your relations with others, dear friend, don't forget that I'm still here."

Lord Theign accepted the reminder, though, the circumstances being such, it scarce moved him to ecstasy. "That you're here, thank heaven, is of course a comfort—or would be if you understood."

"Ah," she submissively sighed, "if I don't always 'understand' a spirit so much higher than mine and a situation so much more complicated certainly, I at least always defer, I at least always—well, what can I say but worship?" And then as he remained not other than finely passive, "The old altar, Theign," she went on—"and a spark of the old fire!"

He had not looked at her on this—it was as


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Rh if he shrank, with his preoccupations, from a tender passage; but he let her take his left hand. "So I feel!" he was, however, kind enough to answer.

"Do feel!" she returned with much concentration. She raised the hand to her pressed lips, dropped it and with a rich "Good-bye!" reached the threshold of the other room.

"May I smoke?" he asked before she had disappeared.

"Dear, yes!"

He had meanwhile taken out his cigarette case and was looking about for a match. But something else occurred to him. "You must come to Victoria."

"Rather!" she said with intensity; and with that she passed away.

 VI

alone he had a moment's meditation where he stood; it found issue in an articulate "Poor dear thing!"—an exclamation marked


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374

“That would I do right gladly,” young Giselher replied:

“But these my high-born kinsmen who still are here inside,

If they at your hands perish, the friendship firmly knit

With you and eke your daughter by me must be acquit.”

“Then God have mercy on us!” the gallant warrior spake.

Thereon they raised their bucklers, as though a way to make,

By force, unto the strangers within Kriemhilda’s hall.

Then loudly from the stairway was Hagen heard to call:

“Now for a while yet tarry, most noble Rüdeger;”

Such were the words of Hagen: “we would again confer,—

Myself and eke my masters,— forced by necessity:

How will it profit Etzel if we poor exiles die?

“I am in grievous trouble,” yet Hagen said, “the shield

That Lady Gotelinda gave me as mine to wield,

The Huns for me have batter’d and hack’d it out of hand:

In friendliness I brought it unto King Etzel’s land.

“If so be God in heaven would grant me of His grace

To hold as good a buckler once more before my face,

As that which thou dost handle, right noble Rüdeger,

No longer in the combat need I a hauberk wear.”

“Right gladly would I serve thee as touching this my shield,

Durst I make thee the offer in spite of Dame Kriemhild.

But do thou take it, Hagen, and bear it on thine hand;

Ay! what if thou shouldst bring it to thy Burgundian land!”


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Rh to remove, which makes a parent regard it as unpropitious to allow his son to remain unmarried, and which couples together children of twelve or fourteen years of age. The second has its origin in the long-continued misfortunes and intestine wars of India, which are as yet too recent (even when their causes have ceased to exist) for the agitation which they occasioned to have entirely sunk into a calm. But to say that the Hindoos or Mussulmans are deficient in any essential feature of a civilised people, is an assertion which I can scarcely suppose to be made by any who have lived with them. Their manners are, at least, as pleasing and courteous as those in the corresponding stations of life among ourselves; their houses are larger, and, according to their wants and climate, to the full as convenient as ours; their architecture is at least as elegant, and though the worthy Scotch divines may doubtless wish their labourers to be clad in “hodden grey” and their gentry and merchants to wear powder and mottled stockings, like worthy Mr. ——————— and the other elders of his kirk-session, I really do not think that they would gain either in cleanliness, elegance, or comfort, by exchanging a white cotton robe for the completest suits of dittos. Nor is it true that in the mechanic arts they are inferior to the general run of European nations. Where they fall short of us (which is chiefly in agricultural implements and the mechanics of common life,) they are not, so far as I have understood of Italy and the south of France, surpassed in any great degree by the people of those countries.


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352 Their goldsmiths and weavers produce as beautiful fabrics as our own, and it is so far from true that they are obstinately wedded to their old patterns, that they shew an anxiety to imitate our models, and do imitate them very successfully. The ships built by native artists at Bombay are notoriously as good as any which sail from London or Liverpool. The carriages and gigs which they supply at Calcutta are as handsome, though not as durable, as those of Long Acre. In the little town of Monghyr, 300 miles from Calcutta, I had pistols, double-barrelled guns, and different pieces of cabinet-work brought down to my boat for sale, which in outward form (for I know no further) nobody but perhaps Mr. ——————— could detect to be of Hindoo origin; and at Delhi, in the shop of a wealthy native jeweller, I found broaches, ear-rings, snuff-boxes, &c. of the latest models (so far as I am a judge), and ornamented with French devices and mottos.

The fact is, that there is a degree of intercourse maintained between this country and Europe, and a degree of information existing among the people as to what passes there, which, considering how many of them neither speak nor read English, implies other channels of communication besides those which we supply, and respecting which I have been able as yet to obtain very little information. Among the presents sent last year to the Supreme Government by the little state of Ladak in Chinese Tartary, some large sheets of gilt leather, stamped with the Russian eagle, were the most conspicuous. A traveller, who calls himself


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Rh a Transylvanian, but who is shrewdly suspected of being a Russian spy, was, when I was in Kemaoon, arrested by the commandant of our fortresses among the Himalaya mountains, and after all our pains to exclude foreigners from the service of the native princes, two chevaliers of the legion of honour were found, about twelve months ago, and are still employed in casting cannon and drilling soldiers for the Seik Raja, Runjeet Singh. This you will say is no more than we should be prepared to expect, but you probably would not suppose (what I believe is little, if at all, known in Russia itself,) that there is an ancient and still frequented place of Hindoo pilgrimage not many miles from Moscow, or that the secretary of the Calcutta Bible Society received, ten months ago, an application (by whom translated I do not know, but in very tolerable English,) from some priests on the shore of the Caspian sea, requesting a grant of Armenian Bibles. After this you will be the less surprised to learn that the leading events of the late wars in Europe (particularly victories) were often known, or at least rumoured, among the native merchants in Calcutta before Government received any accounts from England, or that the suicide of an English minister (with the mistake, indeed, of its being Lord  instead of the ,) had become a topic of conversation in the “burrah bazar,” (the native exchange) for a fortnight before the arrival of any intelligence by the usual channels. "With subjects thus inquisitive, and with oppor- a