Chapter I: Part 1

“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”--SHAKESPEARE.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 304.] SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1856. {PRICE 2_d._
{STAMPED 3_d._

INSULARITIES.

It is more or less the habit of every country--more or less commendable in every case--to exalt itself and its institutions above every other country, and be vain-glorious. Out of the partialities thus engendered and maintained, there has arisen a great deal of patriotism, and a great deal of public spirit. On the other hand, it is of paramount importance to every nation that its boastfulness should not generate prejudice, conventionality, and a cherishing of unreasonable ways of acting and thinking, which have nothing in them deserving of respect, but are ridiculous or wrong.

We English people, owing in a great degree to our insular position, and in a small degree to the facility with which we have permitted electioneering lords and gentlemen to pretend to think for us, and to represent our weaknesses to us as our strength, have been in particular danger of contracting habits which we will call for our present purpose, Insularities. Our object in this paper, is to string together a few examples.

On the continent of Europe, generally, people dress according to their personal convenience and inclinations. In that capital which is supposed to set the fashion in affairs of dress, there is an especial independence in this regard. If a man in Paris has an idiosyncracy on the subject of any article of attire between his hat and his boots, he gratifies it without the least idea that it can be anybody’s affair but his; nor does anybody else make it his affair. If, indeed, there be anything obviously convenient or tasteful in the peculiarity, then it soon ceases to be a peculiarity, and is adopted by others. If not, it is let alone. In the meantime, the commonest man in the streets does not consider it at all essential to his character as a true Frenchman, that he should howl, stare, jeer, or otherwise make himself offensive to the author of the innovation. That word has ceased to be Old Boguey to him since he ceased to be a serf, and he leaves the particular sample of innovation to come in or go out upon its merits.

Our strong English prejudice against anything of this kind that is new to the eye, forms one of our decided insularities. It is disappearing before the extended knowledge of other countries consequent upon steam and electricity, but it is not gone yet. The hermetically-sealed, black, stiff, chimney-pot, a foot and a half high, which we call a hat, is generally admitted to be neither convenient nor graceful; but, there are very few middle-aged gentlemen within two hours’ reach of the Royal Exchange, who would bestow their daughters on wide-awakes, however estimable the wearers. Smith Payne and Smith, or Ransom and Co., would probably consider a run upon the house not at all unlikely, in the event of their clerks coming to business in caps, or with such felt-fashions on their heads as didn’t give them the head-ache, and as they could wear comfortably and cheaply. During the dirt and wet of at least half the year in London, it would be a great comfort and a great saving of expense to a large class of persons, to wear the trousers gathered up about the leg, as a Zouave does, with a long gaiter below--to shift which, is to shift the whole mud-incumbered part of the dress, and to be dry, and clean directly. To such clerks, and others with much outdoor work to do, as could afford it, Jack-boots, a much more costly article, would, for similar reasons, be excellent wear. But what would Griggs and Bodger say to Jack-boots? They would say, “This sort of thing, sir, is not the sort of thing the house has been accustomed to, you will bring the house into the Gazette, you must ravel out four inches of trousers daily, sir, or you must go.”

Some years ago, we, the writer, not being in Griggs and Bodger’s, took the liberty of buying a great-coat which we saw exposed for sale in the Burlington Arcade, London, and which appeared to be in our eyes the most sensible great-coat we had ever seen. Taking the further liberty to wear this great-coat after we had bought it, we became a sort of Spectre, eliciting the wonder and terror of our fellow creatures as we flitted along the streets. We accompanied the coat to Switzerland for six months; and, although it was perfectly new there, we found it was not regarded as a portent of the least importance. We accompanied it to Paris for another six months; and, although it was perfectly new there too, nobody minded it. This coat so intolerable to Britain, was nothing more nor less than the loose wide-sleeved mantle, easy to put on, easy to put off, and crushing nothing beneath it, which everybody now wears.

During hundreds of years, it was the custom in England to wear beards. It became, in course of time, one of our Insularities to shave close. Whereas, in almost all the other countries of Europe, more or less of moustache and beard was habitually worn, it came to be established in this speck of an island, as an Insularity from which there was no appeal, that an Englishman, whether he liked it or not, must hew, hack, and rasp his chin and upper lip daily. The inconvenience of this infallible test of British respectability was so widely felt, that fortunes were made by razors, razor-strops, hones, pastes, shaving-soaps, emollients for the soothing of the tortured skin, all sorts of contrivances to lessen the misery of the shaving process and diminish the amount of time it occupied. This particular Insularity even went some miles further on the broad highway of Nonsense than other Insularities; for it not only tabooed unshorn civilians, but claimed for one particular and very limited military class the sole right to dispense with razors as to their upper lips. We ventured to suggest in this journal that the prohibition was ridiculous, and to show some reasons why it was ridiculous. The Insularity having no sense in it, has since been losing ground every day.

One of our most remarkable Insularities is a tendency to be firmly persuaded that what is not English is not natural. In the Fine Arts department of the French Exhibition, recently closed, we repeatedly heard, even from the more educated and reflective of our countrymen, that certain pictures which appeared to possess great merit--of which not the lowest item was, that they possessed the merit of a vigorous and bold Idea--were all very well, but were “theatrical.” Conceiving the difference between a dramatic picture and a theatrical picture, to be, that in the former case a story is strikingly told, without apparent consciousness of a spectator, and that in the latter case the groups are obtrusively conscious of a spectator, and are obviously dressed up, and doing (or not doing) certain things with an eye to the spectator, and not for the sake of the story; we sought in vain for this defect. Taking further pains then, to find out what was meant by the term theatrical, we found that the actions and gestures of the figures were not English. That is to say,--the figures expressing themselves in the vivacious manner natural in a greater or less degree to the whole great continent of Europe, were overcharged and out of the truth, because they did not express themselves in the manner of our little Island--which is so very exceptional, that it always places an Englishman at a disadvantage, out of his own country, until his fine sterling qualities shine through his external formality and constraint. Surely nothing can be more unreasonable, say, than that we should require a Frenchman of the days of Robespierre, to be taken out of his jail to the guillotine with the calmness of Clapham or the respectability of Richmond Hill, after a trial at the Central Criminal Court in eighteen hundred and fifty-six. And yet this exactly illustrates the requirement of the particular Insularity under consideration.

When shall we get rid of the Insularity of being afraid to make the most of small resources, and the best of scanty means of enjoyment? In Paris (as in innumerable other places and countries) a man who has six square feet of yard, or six square feet of housetop, adorns it in his own poor way, and sits there in the fine weather because he likes to do it, because he chooses to do it, because he has got nothing better of his own, and has never been laughed out of the enjoyment of what he has got. Equally, he will sit at his door, or in his balcony, or out on the pavement, because it is cheerful and pleasant and he likes to see the life of the city. For the last seventy years his family have not been tormenting their lives with continual enquiries and speculations whether other families, above and below, to the right and to the left, over the way and round the corner, would consider these recreations genteel, or would do the like, or would not do the like. That abominable old Tyrant, Madame Grundy, has never been of his acquaintance. The result is, that, with a very small income and in a very dear city, he has more innocent pleasure than fifty Englishmen of the same condition; and is distinctly, in spite of our persuasion to the contrary (another Insularity!) a more domestic man than the Englishman, in regard of his simple pleasures being, to a much greater extent, divided with his wife and children. It is a natural consequence of their being easy and cheap, and profoundly independent of Madame Grundy.

But, this Insularity rests, not to the credit of England, on a more palpable foundation than perhaps any other. The old school of Tory writers did so pertinaciously labor to cover all easily available recreations and cheap reliefs from the monotony of common life, with ridicule and contempt, that great numbers of the English people got scared into being dull, and are only now beginning to recover their courage. The object of these writers, when they had any object beyond an insolent disparagement of the life-blood of the nation, was to jeer the weaker members of the middle class into making themselves a poor fringe on the skirts of the class above them, instead of occupying their own honest, honorable, independent place. Unfortunately they succeeded only too well, and to this grievous source may be traced many of our present political ills. In no country but England have the only means and scenes of relaxation within the reach of some million or two of people been systematically lampooned and derided. This disgraceful Insularity exists no longer. Still, some weak traces of its contemptuous spirit may occasionally be found, even in very unlikely places. The accomplished Mr. Macaulay, in the third volume of his brilliant History, writes loftily about “the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond.” No such responsible gentleman, in France or Germany, writing history--writing anything--would think it fine to sneer at any inoffensive and useful class of his fellow subjects. If the clerks and milliners--who pair off arm in arm, by thousands, for Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond, to celebrate the Early Closing Movement, we presume--will only imagine their presence poisoning those waters to the majestic historian as he roves along the banks, looking for Whig Members of Parliament to sympathise with him in admiration of the beauties of Nature, we think they will be amply avenged in the absurdity of the picture.

Not one of our Insularities is so astonishing in the eyes of an intelligent foreigner, as the Court Newsman. He is one of the absurd little obstructions perpetually in the way of our being understood abroad. The quiet greatness and independence of the national character seems so irreconcileable with its having any satisfaction in the dull slipslop about the slopes and the gardens, and about the Prince Consort’s going a-hunting and coming back to lunch, and about Mr. Gibbs and the ponies, and about the Royal Highnesses on horseback and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise, and about the slopes and the gardens again, and the Prince Consort again, and Mr. Gibbs and the ponies again, and the Royal Highnesses on horseback again, and the Royal infants taking carriage exercise again, and so on for every day in the week and every week in the year, that in questions of importance the English as a people, really miss their just recognition. Similar small beer is chronicled with the greatest care about the nobility in their country-houses. It is in vain to represent that the English people don’t care about these insignificant details, and don’t want them; that aggravates the misunderstanding. If they don’t want them, why do they have them? If they feel the effect of them to be ridiculous, why do they consent to be made ridiculous? If they can’t help it, why, then the bewildered foreigner submits that he was right at first, and that it is not the English people that is the power, but Lord Aberdeen, or Lord Palmerston, or Lord Aldborough, or Lord Knowswhom.

It is an Insularity well worth general consideration and correction, that the English people are wanting in self-respect. It would be difficult to bear higher testimony to the merits of the English aristocracy than they themselves afford in not being very arrogant or intolerant, with so large a public always ready to abase themselves before titles. On all occasions, public and private, where the opportunity is afforded, this readiness is to be observed. So long as it obtains so widely, it is impossible that we should be justly appreciated and comprehended, by those who have the greatest part in ruling us. And thus it happens that now we are facetiously pooh-poohed by our Premier in the English capital, and now the accredited representatives of our arts and sciences are disdainfully slighted by our Ambassador in the French capital, and we wonder to find ourselves in such curious and disadvantageous comparison with the people of other countries. Those people may, through many causes, be less fortunate and less free; but, they have more social self-respect: and that self-respect must, through all their changes, be deferred to, and will assert itself. We apprehend that few persons are disposed to contend that Rank does not receive its due share of homage on the continent of Europe; but, between the homage it receives there, and the homage it receives in our island, there is an immense difference. Half-a-dozen dukes and lords, at an English county ball, or public dinner, or any tolerably miscellaneous gathering, are painful and disagreeable company; not because they have any disposition unduly to exalt themselves, or are generally otherwise than cultivated and polite gentlemen, but, because too many of us are prone to twist ourselves out of shape before them, into contortions of servility and adulation. Elsewhere, Self-respect usually steps in to prevent this; there is much less toadying and tuft-hunting; and the intercourse between the two orders is infinitely more agreeable to both, and far more edifying to both.

It is one of our Insularities, if we have a royal or titled visitor among us, to use expressions of slavish adulation in our public addresses that have no response in the heart of any breathing creature, and to encourage the diffusion of details respecting such visitor’s devout behaviour at church, courtly behaviour in reception-rooms, decent behaviour at dinner-tables, implying previous acquaintance with the uses of knife, fork, spoon, and wine-glass,--which would really seem to denote that we had expected Orson. These doubtful compliments are paid nowhere else, and would not be paid by us if we had a little more self-respect. Through our intercourse with other nations, we cannot too soon import some. And when we have left off representing, fifty times a day, to the King of Brentford and the Chief Tailor of Tooley Street, that their smiles are necessary to our existence, those two magnificent persons will begin to doubt whether they really are so, and we shall have begun to get rid of another Insularity.

BEN SERRAQ.

The French-Algerian magistrate’s chaouch or sheriff’s-officer, Djilali by name, was recovering a little from the out-of-countenance condition into which he had been thrown by his failure in giving a miraculous turn to the embezzlement of a couple of sacks of wheat from the backs of a pair of donkeys: he straightened his back, stood stiff on his legs, and abruptly entered with ineffable zeal on the discharge of his functions as chief-constable and crier-of-the-court. He felt himself in one of those happy moments when, after having well deserved a good beating, he was ready to transfer the favour to the first person he met. He was an eight-day clock wound up again, when just at the point of running down and coming to a stop. As he opened and shut the police-room doors with the loudest bangings and clappings--shouting for the plaintiffs to appear, and hustling everybody who stood in his way as he swaggered about the antechamber--the assembly present, still impressed with the sack-and-donkey scene they had witnessed, whispered from mouth to mouth and from ear to ear that, in the memory of mekrazeni, so accomplished a chaouch had never been seen.

Suddenly, a confused noise was heard out of doors. As it approached, the sounds grew louder; and at last the ear could distinguish the most energetic oaths in the Arab language, and the music which proceeds from fisticuffs and kicks when applied to divers parts of the human body. Djilali’s voice rose above the tumult, and his stick accompanied the melody of his voice. Finally, the door opened, and a group of men, singularly interlaced together, rolled into, rather than entered the room. When Djilali, by a succession of the most skilful movements, had succeeded in putting a little restraint and order into this tempestuous storm of arms and legs, the eye could manage to distinguish a group of five men, four of whom had quite enough to do to enforce on the fifth a little respect. The last-named worthy was of lofty stature and vigorously limbed. His garments torn to shreds, and his sorry face, attested participation in a recent struggle; but his hands, tied behind his back and fastened by a rope to his neck, were evidence that he had not been victorious. His companions held him fast with a degree of caution which showed that even in the state to which he was reduced, they were not quite sure he would not make his escape. Four ropes’-ends, which dangled from his wrists and his neck, were tightly grasped with exaggerated uneasiness and tenacity. Scarcely had the five new comers subsided into calmness, when an unanimous exclamation arose from the midst of the audience, “’Tis Ben Serraq! What has he been doing now?”

M. Richard, the presiding magistrate, inquired somewhat severely:

“What has the man done, that you should bring him bound in that cruel way?”

“’Tis Ben Serraq!” was the answer he received from the quartette of voices.

“Ah, Ben Serraq! A professional robber belonging to the Sefhha, is he not?”

“The very same!” said the Coryphæus of the associated plaintiffs.

“Yes, sure enough; ’tis I, Ben Serraq,” growled the prisoner, in a voice which reminded you of a wild beast roaring at night.

“But I was informed that he had amended his mode of life, and that lately he has been living at peace with his neighbours?”

“I have always lived at peace with my neighbours. I am a good Mussulman, fearing Allah and the law. I am calumniated.”

“Hold your tongue,” said the court, “and do not speak till you are spoken to.”

“It is true,” explained plaintiff number one, “that, for some time past, he has let us be quiet, and only committed distant robberies; but a few days since, he stole one of our bullocks.”

“Sidi Bou Krari!” roared the savage. “How dare they slander a poor innocent creature like me in that way?”

“But is the fact clearly proved?” the president inquired. “How did it occur?”

“It is as plain as can be,” stated plaintiff number two. “There is not the least doubt about the matter.”

“That’s what you get by serving the French!” muttered Ben Serraq, with the air of a Cato. “What ingratitude, gracious Allah, Lord of the universe!”

At this juncture, Djilali received orders to prevent the accused, by any means whatever, from making lengthy interruptions to the recital of the plaintiffs’ wrongs. As to short exclamations that will break forth, the chaouch might allow them to burst from their safety-valve, seeing the material impossibility of confining them within the lips of a subject like the present defendant.

“Come, then,” said the court, decidedly, “one of you explain the business.”

“Don’t mind what they say,” Ben Serraq roared out. “They are liars. Besides, they have a spite against me.”

“As I said just now,” the complainant stated, “the case is plain. Our herds were grazing in the neighbourhood of Ben Serraq’s tent. On driving them home in the evening we discovered that a bullock was missing. My brethren and myself immediately took the field, to discover some trace of the robbery, but we could discover nothing. At last, after several days of fruitless search, it entered into our heads to have a look at Ben Serraq’s tent. We had suspected him, in consequence of what had happened some months previously.”

“Barbarians!” yelled the untamed innocent; “to violate the tent of an honest Mussulman!”

“But we had no need to enter it; which, moreover, we should not have done without the kaïd’s authorisation.”

“Quite right,” said the magistrate, approvingly.

“We met his wife, as she was coming from the water.”

“What an abomination!” howled the biped brute; “to stop a woman on the road!”

“And who, for the promise of a trifling reward, told us the whole affair.”

“A capital witness!--a she-beggar, who betrays me!”

“She explained that it was her husband who stole our bullock, in order to provide himself with a store of salt meat.”

“Sidi Bou Krari! That a woman should lie like that!”

“She then showed us several goat-skins filled with the meat.”

“As if a Mussulman were not allowed to keep salted meat in his tent!”

“And, to remove all doubt as to where the meat came from, she showed us the bullock’s head lying in one corner of the tent, still in a state sufficiently preserved to enable us to recognise the animal.”

“What a horrible she-vagabond! But her evidence is good for nothing; I had given her a beating not two days before.”

“Our only thought then was to seize the wild-boar who is now before you. There was the difficulty; for this son of Satan is as strong as no one else, and can knock down a camel with a blow of his fist.”

“What a joke! I am as mild as a sheep.”

“Twenty of us met in company, and at dawn of day, informed by his wife--”

“What a pity I did not strangle her, as I meant to!”

“Informed by his wife that he was still asleep, we rushed down upon him; and, after a hard struggle, contrived to bind him in the way you see, as he lay on his mat.”

“Sidi Abd-Allah! What treachery! To attack a good Mussulman as he lay asleep!”

“And a good thing it was that we did attack him in that way; for, although he was hardly awake, he managed, while he was wrestling with us, to break one of Oulid Sekrad’s legs, and to put out one of Ali Oud Ama’s eyes. He smashed in five or six of poor Bou Senan’s teeth, and bit Otsman Oud Messassit’s back savagely.”

“Justice of the Master of the World! is it possible to lie in this way? On the contrary, I have been half killed by you. Don’t you see my face is covered with blood?”

“Son of a dog! you well know the blood is from poor Oud Messassit’s body.”

“Sidi Abd-Allah!” exclaimed Ben Serraq. But it was of no use invoking the saints. Djilali called for a towel and a basin of water, and with them washed Ben Serraq’s face. The experiment established the fact that that interesting individual had not received the slightest scratch, and that the bite on the unfortunate Oud Messassit’s back must have been the only source of the stains.

“Well, Ben Serraq,” said the president; “although I cannot entertain any reasonable doubt of your guilt, you are, nevertheless, at liberty to speak--let us hear what you have to say in justification.”

“Ah! I am allowed to explain! Well; you will soon see! In the first place, my wife is a she-vagabond--everybody knows it--don’t they, Djilali?”

But Djilali, who was particularly anxious to conceal all cognisance of the defendant’s affairs, only replied,--“May your tent catch fire! Pray, what connection have I ever had with you, that I should know how your wife employs herself?”

“Very well; ’tis of no consequence. But the fact is notorious and incontestable--the she-dog betrays my honour.”

“I will take your word for it,” said the court; “and then?--”

“She has taken a fancy to Oud Raï, whose people’s shepherds have treated me so shamefully. I have often said to her, ‘Fatma, my darling, things cannot go on in this manner; your improper conduct sets everybody talking, and a modest and virtuous man, like myself, will soon be the laughing-stock of the whole country, and that on your account. Mind what you are about, else I shall be obliged to beat you; and you are aware, my beloved, that, when I do hit, I hit rather hard.’”

“But I do not see what reference your matrimonial tribulations can have to the business now before us.”

“I beg your pardon--you will see directly. I admonished her, therefore, with the utmost gentleness, in accordance with my natural disposition. But it was a waste of time and breath. She persevered in her infamous conduct till I was obliged, as a gentleman, to administer to her and to Oud Raï one day, a considerable number of kicks and thumps.”

“But, again I ask, what have these details to do with the theft of which you stand accused? Explain yourself, more clearly.”

“What! cannot a man of your great genius see, now, how things have been managed?”

“I have an idea I can; but probably not in the same light as you do.”

“What! don’t you see that Oud Raï and my wretch of a wife, to be avenged of the beating I gave them, have subtracted the bullock in question without my knowledge, and have cut it up in my tent, in order to compromise me with the authorities? Sidi Bou Krari! it is as clear as the sun, that. Don’t you see that I am a virtuous husband calumniated by a criminal wife?”

A subdued murmur, mingled with stifled laughter arose in the assembly at the victim air which Ben Serraq tried hard to assume, and also at listening to the singular pleading which he had improvised.

“Ben Serraq,” said the magistrate, in a sceptical tone, “your case must be a very bad one, to compel you to employ such poor arguments for its defence. How could your wife play you such a trick as you describe without your knowledge, since your accusers found your tent filled with the animal’s remains, the head particularly being so conspicuous and recognisable an object?”

“What is there extraordinary in that?” asked Ben Serraq, not in the slightest degree disconcerted. “My wife is so artful, and I am so simple and innocent, that she could easily contrive to conceal the matter.”

“Come; these are wretched arguments. For a man like you, who has had so many transactions with the authorities, it is not a clever way of getting out of the scrape.”

“I invoke Allah and his justice!” screamed Ben Serraq with the throat of a wild boar. “I am a poor persecuted innocent; there is nothing proved against me, absolutely nothing. The case at least is doubtful,--that is incontestable,--and in cases of doubt the law requires me to take an oath. Put me on my oath; I will swear on the Koran, on Sidi Bou Krari, on whatever book you please, I am as innocent as a suckling.”

“No doubt. You will take a hundred oaths as readily as one. But, unfortunately for you, I have not forgotten your previous character, and must consider the charge as completely established.”

“Allah! Lord of the Universe! Justice is not to be had in this country.”

“Honest men will say the contrary, when they hear you are caught, and especially when they see you transported to France: whither I intend requesting you to be sent.”

“That’s the reward people get for serving the French!” swaggered Ben Serraq, as Coriolanus might have done when banished by ungrateful Rome.

“Not bad, by my faith! You doubtless consider you are rendering people a service by easing them of their purses.”

“I have been of service to you in time of warfare, by marching constantly at the head of your columns.”

“True; you have sometimes marched at the head of our columns as a guide; but most assuredly you insisted upon heavy wages, as far as I can recollect. Besides, that is no reason why you should be allowed, in recompense, to plunder the whole human race. You ought to have reformed, as you promised you would, and then we should have forgotten the past.”

“I am slandered! I am a victim!”

“Retain that idea for your consolation, and hold your tongue. Djilali, take some of the men on guard and lead this fellow to prison.”

“Sidi, Sidi!” pleaded Ben Serraq, “can you not deliver me from these bonds, which give me horrible pain?”

“Very well; I will. Djilali, unfasten the ropes, which, in fact, are a little too tight. It is impossible for him to make his escape now; only, take some of the cavalry with you, and keep a sharp eye on him on the way to prison.”

“O, Sidi! such precautions are unnecessary. I am as gentle as a lamb.” And Ben Serraq made his exit escorted by a numerous suite of mekrazenis, at the head of whom was Djilali, and who, feeling the greatness of his responsibility, marched as if he were carrying the world. But an Arab chief in alliance with the French, named Ben Safi, whispered to the president as soon as the prisoner had disappeared,

“Perhaps you were wrong to let his arms be untied.”

“That is rather too good,” the magistrate replied. “How, do you suppose, can he contrive to escape from the custody of ten soldiers, and in the midst of the town?”

“I have seen him escape,” Ben Safi explained, “under circumstances that would make one believe there was something diabolical in his composition. One night, when he had the impudence to come and rob in my own smala, we contrived to seize him by killing the horse he had stolen from us, and under which it chanced that he was caught as it fell. I had his hands tied behind his back, and I ordered one of my men to kill him like a dog, from behind, with a pistol-shot. The shot was fired; but my gentleman, instead of dropping down dead, as he ought to have done, jumped up as lively as a grasshopper, and disappeared as if a flash of lightning had carried him off. The bullet had only cut the cords which bound him, and had been flattened on the palm of his hand. We were stupefied with astonishment.”

“And well you might be!” said the official head of the Arab bureau, beginning to feel a little fidgety. “I now believe I should have acted more prudently if I had forbidden his being unpinioned till he was safely lodged in prison.”

“I am sure you would;” interposed Ben Tekrouide, a second friendly chief. “I have always been told that this fellow is a perfect demon, in human shape. At the market of Kremis, he once robbed a man of his ass, without his being aware of the theft, although he was sitting on its back at the time.”

“Indeed!” said the magistrate, in a fidget. “I should be very glad to know that he was definitely in custody under lock and key.”

“He has the strength of twenty men,” observed Ben Maoudj, a third philo-Gallic chieftain. “He once stole a camel laden with wheat from a caravan proceeding to the south; and, as the animal was unable to travel over the rocky road by which he wanted to pass, he took it on his back, wheat and all, and carried it in that way for half-a-night’s march.”

“That must be a slight exaggeration,” remarked the president, now feeling horribly uncomfortable. “Nevertheless, I should like to be quite sure that he had reached the inside of the prison walls. They are very long about it; they ought to be back by this time.”

“Do you wish that I should go and see?” asked Ben Safi, pitying his friend’s uneasiness.

“I shall be much obliged to you.”

At the moment when Ben Safi was leaving the court, a distant clamour was heard from without, followed by several successive gunshots. A sound of many footsteps was audible, as if a crowd of men were approaching. The doors were thrown open violently, and Djilali made his appearance. His clothes were torn and soiled with dirt, and his right eye seemed to have suffered severely.

“Ouf!” he puffed out, “my back is broken! May Sidi Abd-Allah burn me, if he is a man.”

“Explain yourself. Tell me!” said the court, on thorns. “Ben Serraq?--”

“Ben Serraq, indeed? If ever you contrive to get him into prison, I will consent to be roasted alive.”

“He has escaped, then?”

“How should it be otherwise: he is the devil in person?”

“Have the goodness to tell me how you could have been so stupid as to let a single man break away from ten of you.”

“The thing was very simple, and he was not long about it. When we got to the prison, at the instant when they opened the door, he unceremoniously seized the sentinel’s gun; he twisted it round like the sails of a windmill, and threw down three-fourths of our number flat on our backs. I immediately rushed upon him; together with the rest who were still on their legs, and you see”--here he exhibited his exterior, including his black and swollen eye--“what I got by it. After having nearly felled me by putting his doubled fist into my eye, he seized me by the skin, and threw me, like a bundle of old clothes, on the top of my comrades. We were all left rolling pell-mell together; and, when I got up, I saw that demon already landed on the other side of the river. The guard came out and fired more than thirty musket-shots at him while he was climbing up the bank; but, bless me! they might just as well have dusted his back with pepper and salt. The bullets were flattened without hurting him.”

“The thing is prodigious!”

“After he got to the other side of the river, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he burrowed into the ground, whilst others declare that he took flight with a couple of great black wings that suddenly grew out of his sides and unfolded wide. The soldiers belonging to the guard will have it that he laid hold of a horse that was grazing there, that he jumped on its back, and set off at full gallop.”

LANGTHWAITE.

Langthwaite was in a state of excitement; its morals were perturbed, and its ideas confused; its old landmarks were being swept away, and it did not approve of its new landmarks. Langthwaite notions were being assaulted, and Langthwaite’s morality was put to shame. Madame Floriani, the Italian widow, had dared to defy the authority and disturb the influence of Mr. Bentley, the young incumbent. Was Langthwaite to be ruled over by a strange woman who introduced foreign customs, and upset the existing institutions, or was its government to be a virtuous hierarchy as before? Was the cousin of a dean, or the widow of an Italian count, to be considered the first personage of the vale? This grave question was what Langthwaite was called on to decide; and the quiet valley in the heart of the mountains lashed itself into a state of perturbation, strongly suggestive of the famous tempest that was brewed in a teapot.

The origin of the evil was this:--

When old Jacob White the miser, who built Whitefield House of stone and marble, and furnished it with painted deal and calico--died, he left all his wealth to a certain niece of his, his sister’s child, who had been born and bred and married in Rome, and who was now Count Floriani’s widow. She was his only relative; and, although it went sorely against him to leave his wealth to one who was more than half a foreigner, yet family pride at last conquered national prejudice, and Madame la Comtessa Floriani was made the heiress of Whitefield House and the lands circumjacent. This good fortune brought that Romanised young Englishwoman from the blue skies and rich light of Italy, to a remote village in the heart of the Cumberland mountains.

The society of Langthwaite was peculiar, and beyond measure dull. Dull, because bigoted. The ideas of the denizens ran in the narrowest of all narrow gauges, out of which not a mind dared to move. The peculiarity of Langthwaite was its power of condemnation. Everything was wicked in its more than puritanic eyes. Life was a huge snare; the affections were temptations; amusements were sins; pleasure was a crime; novel-writers “had much to answer for,” and novel-readers were next door to iniquity; an actor was a being scarcely less reprehensible than a murderer; and an artist was lost to all moral sense--if, indeed, it ever chanced that artists were spoken of at all, for the Langthwaite intellect did not penetrate far into the regions of art. No one “living in the world” had a conscience, and no foreigners had the faintest notion of virtue. Langthwaite was the centre of salvation, and outside its sphere revolved desolation and ruin.

There was a national school at Langthwaite, where all the ladies went on different days and at different hours, to superintend, some the work, and some the spelling; and there was a Sunday school where everyone fought for a class. It was the cordon bleu of Langthwaite to have a class in the Sunday school. There were a great many dissenting chapels, and a great many missionary meetings. Religious excitement being the principal dissipation at Langthwaite, school feasts, Dorcas meetings, district visitings, missionary sermons, awakening preachings, and prayer meetings, were infinite. The parish clergyman, Mr. Bentley, said that the parish was well-worked; and so it was. It was worked until its mental condition was in such a state of turmoil and unrest that no one knew exactly what to believe.

To this society came Rosa Floriani, the widow of an Italian artist-count, certainly, and the semi-papistical latitudinarian, perhaps. Why she came to Langthwaite seemed a mystery to many. But it was in truth no mystery:--she thought it was only right to live among her tenants, and to do her best to the society which gave her her fortune.

She was a beautiful woman, about twenty-eight or thirty years of age, with fine blue eyes, and light auburn hair, as soft and shining as silk, braided in two thick wavy masses of imprisoned curls. She was very pale, as if she had lived much in darkened rooms; but her lips were red, and so were her nostrils. She was about the middle size; one of those women with small bones and soft outlines who keep young and supple to the last. She was negligent but coquettish in her dress; with such taste in all her arrangements, that, when she received her visitors in a white muslin dressing-gown and small morning-cap, clinging, like trellis-work against flowers, to the curling hair, she seemed to be far better dressed than the Miss Grandvilles in their silks and satins, and jewellery and lace, and grander than their grand carriage with a footman six feet high. She was excessively indolent in her habits; at least the Langthwaite world said so; never, by any chance, “dressed” at eleven or twelve o’clock, which was the general time for paying morning visits in that part of the world; and always receiving her _monde_, as she called them, upstairs in her dressing-room, in this kind of pretty negligence--very often wearing slippers, not shoes; little slippers of blue, or rose, or brown satin, trimmed round with lace and ribbon, clacking on the ground as she walked, for they had no heels. And indeed it was said that Madame Floriani had been seen in the middle of the day, and even in the evening, in the same undress, which was very near to a crime in Langthwaite. But her abode was worse than her attire. She had fitted up Whitefield House with all her Roman treasures, and they scandalised Langthwaite. The Miss Grandvilles said they were quite shocked, and Mr. Bentley spoke through his nose, and sighed as he called the pretty woman “heathenish.” She had casts of many of the best statuary set about her apartments--Saint Catherine’s Marriage, the Madonna, Saint Sebastian, the Judgment of Paris, a Venus or two, and a few martyrdoms. All this was like fire to stubble among the people of Langthwaite. But Madame Floriani, totally unconscious of the effect she was producing, only thought the Langthwaitians very cold in matters of art, and strangely ignorant of real merit.

She was an artist herself; and sometimes when they came in their grand, stiff, expensive, and ungraceful toilettes, they found her dressed in a man’s brown holland blouse, girded with a broad leathern band: while a little blue velvet cap, with a long tassel, was stuck jauntily on the top of her graceful head, just above those curly handfuls of bright auburn hair. Whereat they were doubly shocked; and the Miss Grandvilles, very tall, bony and desiccated gladiators, said she was really very unfeminine, and that it positively was not proper.

Madame Floriani’s worst enemy was Mr. Bentley. Mr. Bentley was the young incumbent of Langthwaite. He was not more than thirty as it was, and he looked like twenty. He was a tall, round, boyish person, with a round face, and round cheeks highly coloured, an innocent little snub nose, with those wide flat nostrils that make a greybeard look a youth, light-grey eyes, narrow shoulders, red hands--very red--with the fingers always swollen, as if from chronic chilblains, and a full, unformed mouth, swollen, too, like a boy’s. But in spite of this round face, with its ludicrous boyishness, Mr. Bentley had taken up the condemnatory and ascetic side. His sermons breathed more than Judaic severity; hatred of pleasure, hatred of art, hatred of liberation, hatred of everything but extreme Calvinistic tenets, church-going, and missionary meetings. This was Mr. Bentley’s profession of faith as far as he dare utter it even in Langthwaite. Yet his solemn looks and severe words were in such ludicrous contrast to that round, red, apple-face of his, which nature intended to express jollity, that more than once Madame Floriani looked up and laughed, saying, with her sweet voice and foreign accent, “But, Monsieur l’Abbé, assuredly you do not believe in yourself when you speak so!”

Which words used to make Mr. Bentley furious. As he said to the Miss Grandvilles, his fast allies, it was very painful to see Madame Floriani’s unconverted state of mind. Thus the war between the pretty foreign woman and the grave young clergyman went on, and Langthwaite stood aghast.

Madame Floriani thought she must do something for the place; so, after every one had called, she began to give parties. Everyone went to the first out of curiosity. Even Mr. Bentley who disapproved of her so much that he called nearly every day at Whitefield--to try and convert her--even he went. Though in general he was never seen at any evening party, where the object was not to sing hymns and hear a chapter expounded. But he made an exception. Madame Floriani had arranged her rooms very prettily. She had brought in all the flowers from the greenhouse, and placed them about the hall and drawing-room. She had wreathed the chandeliers with evergreens mixed in with flowers; while large baskets of flowers, evergreens, and moss, were placed on pedestals all about, and brilliantly lighted. The rooms were a flood of light, all excepting the little room off the drawing-room, which old Jacob White had called the study, and which Madame Rosa said was her boudoir; and this was dark. One candelabrum of two wax-lights only, placed on a beautiful little buhl table, reflected by two large mirrors set in deep gold frames of grapes and vine leaves, and falling on a marble statue of Ariadne, set within a draperied recess--this was all the light which Madame Floriani allowed in her boudoir. Many objects of art were about; there were models of the Coliseum and the Tower of Pisa, of the Lion in the Rock of Lucerne, of the Parthenon at Athens, and there were busts of famous men--Dante, and Petrarch, and Tasso--and pictures; a Magdalen by Giorgione, a Venus by Correggio, and views of Italy and Greece; and there was a carved book-case full of splendidly bound books, one was clasped with ivory and one had precious stones upon the cover; these, with curtains and draperies of rich rose-coloured silk, made up the furniture of Madame Rosa’s boudoir. A new style of room in Langthwaite. They could not understand it. The soft dim light, the living beauty on the walls, the wealth, the art, the management of effect, all perplexed the worthy mountaineers, and went far to convict Madame Floriani of some undesirable characteristics. The Miss Grandvilles, who led public opinion on matters of taste and propriety, peered into it curiously, but stepped back again immediately, as if it had been a sorcerer’s cave; and by way of being facetiously condemnatory, spoke to Madame Floriani of the “great white woman in the corner” as something they did not understand, nor quite approve of.

The widow looked at them with the surprised open-eyed look that had become familiar to her since she came to Langthwaite, and then with her silvery good-humoured laugh cried out, “Why, my dear mademoiselle, that is Ariadne!”

“I wonder how you can like those horrible Greek stories!” said the eldest Miss Grandville severely. “We who know so much better things, to encourage those dreadful superstitions and idolatries in any way--it is shocking!”

“But, my dear demoiselle, you don’t think that I believe in Ariadne as the Greeks did!” said Madame Rosa. “It’s the art, not the goddess one loves!”

“Art!” cried Miss Grandville, disdainfully, “art! What is art, I should like to know, but the worship of the creature. Art is more nearly successful, Madame Floriani, than I am afraid you think it is?”

“Ah, mademoiselle! pity me, spare me! I have been brought up among the great things of art, and opened my eyes on the Coliseum--I have lived where Michelangelo worked--I have drank in love of art with my first breath. I cannot forget its rich lessons in this ascetic doctrine of yours. On the contrary, I find in your beautiful country so much to love and admire, that I wonder you are so little gifted with the power of appreciating and reproducing the beauty He has created.”

This was a long speech for Madame Rosa, and strangely free from foreign idioms. For she was excited, and forgot to be careful.

“My dear Madame,” said Mrs. Bentley, solemnly; “you speak of natural religion only.”

“Come! come! we must not discuss theology at a soirée,” she exclaimed, “that would be a misuse of time indeed. Will you waltz, Miss Grandville!” And before that horrified lady could return an answer, the pretty widow had glided across the room in her peculiar manner of grace and lightness; and, going to the piano, dashed into a maddening waltz. Now, to begin with, only two young ladies of the Langthwaite’s society could waltz, and these were the daughters of a retired Captain, who had the good luck to own relatives in London. But they were thought bold and light in Langthwaite (although as good girls as ever breathed), because they went to the opera and the theatres when they were in town, and confessed to the polka, and waltzing. They were very pretty, lively, and good-natured; and when Madame Rosa played her waltz, they both stood up and said, that if others would dance they would. There was no response. Some said, “What bold girls those Miss Winters are!” and others, “Oh! Laura and Helen Winter will go the whole way with any woman of the world! We can’t expect anything from them.” And one old maid, who had never had an offer, nor heard a word of love in her life, bit the end off the adjective “disgusting,” and flounced her shawl--Shetland--tightly round her, as she thanked Heaven, that she had never done such a thing when she was young! And then when Rosa turned round on her music-stool, with her hands in her lap, and said, “Eh bien! who will dance?” Mr. Bentley came up, “Excuse me, Madame Floriani,” he said rather nervously, for the widow looked so arch and lovely, that it required all Langthwaite severity to resist her. “You are a stranger to our customs, and you do not understand us yet. I hope that after you have been among us for a little time we shall be good friends and be able to work together. But we have banished all these frivolities from Langthwaite. My flock, I am happy to say, does not dance.”

“Not dance, Monsieur! and why?” cried Rosa, with a burst of laughter, real southern laughter, such as you never hear in polite society in England now.

“I look on dancing, Madame Floriani, as an invention of the enemy.”

“What enemy?--the Russians? Oh no, I assure you, les Russes did not introduce the dance. That is drôle; I did not know you were such good patriots down here!” And she laughed again.

“But Madame Floriani,” said Miss Grandville, coming to the rescue; “we don’t ourselves think dancing proper.”

“Not proper!” said Rosa, flushing to her temples, “what monstrous ideas! What impropriety can there be in a party of young people amusing themselves with dancing or anything else convenable?”

“It is a worldly amusement,” said Miss Grandville stiffly.

“And a degradation of the immortal nature,” said Mr. Bentley.

Madame Rosa looked from one to the other as if they had been Aztecs or Red Indians, or any other unusual specimens of humanity; then, utterly unable to find any sort of answer to such sentiments, turned back to the piano and rattled off a brilliant fantasia, which no one understood and every one thought noisy.

It was the same with the games that Madame Rosa proposed. For, when dancing was forbidden, she thought she would enliven her society by games. At first every one refused to take part in them. They were dull, childish, uninteresting, a waste of time; but at last she gained over some of the younger girls to a stray Cantab or two, whom she had managed to get hold of somehow, no one knew how. “She must have fished them out of the lake,” said Miss Grandville; for, indeed, Cantabs were rare animals in Langthwaite, owing to the character for dullness and cant which that beautiful vale had gained in the university. A few used to come, certainly: generally pale young men wearing spectacles and afflicted with colds; but Madame Floriani soon learnt to distinguish the various types, and to fly this type as she would poison. Yet even when she had gone so far as to positively establish games at her soirées, the Miss Grandvilles and the Bentleyites used to sit by grimly, and protest in loud whispers against the downward course of things in Langthwaite.