Chapter VI: Iuri Dolgoruki, and Andrei Bogoliubski, Founders (6)

Mamillus, though but a very young child, loved his mother tenderly; and when he saw her so dishonored, and found she was taken from him to be put into a prison, he took it deeply to heart, and drooped and pined away by slow degrees, losing his appetite and his sleep, till it was thought his grief would kill him.

The king, when he had sent his queen to prison, commanded Cleomenes and Dion, two Sicilian lords, to go to Delphos, there to inquire of the oracle at the temple of Apollo if his queen still really loved him.

When Hermione had been a short time in prison, she gave birth to a daughter; and the poor lady received much comfort from the sight of her pretty baby, and she said to it, “My poor little prisoner, I am as innocent as you are.” Hermione had a kind friend in the noble-spirited Paulina, who was the wife of Antigonus, a Sicilian lord; and when the lady Paulina heard her royal mistress had got a daughter, she went to the prison where Hermione was confined, and she said to Emilia, a lady who attended upon Hermione, “I pray you, Emilia, tell the good queen, if her majesty dare trust me with her little babe, I will carry it to the king, its father; we do not know how he may soften at the sight of his innocent child.” “Most worthy madam,” replied Emilia, “I will acquaint the queen with your noble offer; she was wishing to-day that she had any friend who would venture to present the child to the king.” “And tell her,” said Paulina, “that I will speak boldly to Leontes in her defence.” “May you be forever blessed!” said Emilia, “for your kindness to our gracious queen!” Emilia then went to Hermione, who joyfully gave up her baby to the care of Paulina, for she had feared that no one would dare venture to present the child to its father.

Paulina took the new-born infant, and forcing herself into the king’s presence, notwithstanding her husband, fearing the king’s anger, endeavored to prevent her, she laid the babe at its father’s feet, and Paulina made a noble speech to the king in defence of Hermione, and she reproached him severely for his inhumanity, and implored him to have mercy on his innocent wife and child. But Paulina’s spirited remonstrances only aggravated Leontes’s displeasure, and he ordered her husband Antigonus to take her from his presence.

When Paulina went away, she left the little baby at its father’s feet, thinking, when he was alone with it, he would look upon it, and have pity on its helpless innocence.

The good Paulina was mistaken; for no sooner was she gone than the merciless father ordered Antigonus, Paulina’s husband, to take the child, and carry it out to sea, and leave it upon some desert shore to perish.

Antigonus, unlike the good Camillo, too well obeyed the orders of Leontes; for he immediately carried the child on shipboard, and put out to sea, intending to leave it on the first desert coast he could find.

So strongly was the king prejudiced against Hermione, that he would not wait for the return of Cleomenes and Dion, whom he had sent to consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphos; but before the queen was recovered, and while she still grieved for the loss of her precious baby, he had her brought to a public trial before all the lords and nobles of his court. And when all the great lords, the judges, and all the nobility of the land were assembled together to try Hermione, and that unhappy queen was standing as a prisoner before her subjects to receive their judgment, Cleomenes and Dion entered the assembly, and presented to the king the answer of the oracle sealed up; and Leontes commanded the seal to be broken, and the words of the oracle to be read aloud, and these were the words: “Hermione is innocent, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, and the king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.” The king would give no credit to the words of the oracle; he said it was a falsehood invented by the queen’s friends, and he desired the judge to proceed in the trial of the queen. But while Leontes was speaking, a man entered and told him that the prince Mamillus, hearing that his mother was to be tried for her life, struck with grief and shame, had suddenly died.

Hermione, upon hearing of the death of this dear affectionate child, who had lost his life in sorrowing for her misfortune, fainted; and Leontes, pierced to the heart by the news, began to feel pity for his unhappy queen, and he ordered Paulina, and the ladies who were her attendants, to take her away, and use means for her recovery. Paulina soon returned, and told the king that Hermione was dead.

When Leontes heard that the queen was dead, he repented of his cruelty to her; and now that he thought his ill usage had broken Hermione’s heart he believed her innocent; and he now thought the words of the oracle were true, as he knew “if that which was lost was not found” which he concluded was his young daughter, he should be without an heir, the young prince Mamillus being dead, and he would give his kingdom now to recover his lost daughter; and Leontes gave himself up to remorse, and passed many years in mournful thoughts and repentant grief.

The ship in which Antigonus carried the infant princess out to sea was driven by a storm upon the coast of Bohemia, the very kingdom of the good king Polixenes. Here Antigonus landed, and here he left the little baby.

Antigonus never returned to Sicily to tell Leontes where he had left his daughter, for, as he was going back to the ship, a bear came out of the woods and tore him to pieces; a just punishment on him for obeying the wicked order of Leontes.

The child was dressed in rich clothes and jewels; for Hermione had made it very fine when she sent it to Leontes, and Antigonus had pinned a paper to its mantle, with the name _Perdita_ written thereon, and words obscurely intimating its high birth and untoward fate.

This poor deserted baby was found by a shepherd. He was a humane man, and so he carried the little Perdita home to his wife, who nursed it tenderly; but poverty tempted the shepherd to conceal the rich prize he had found: therefore he left that part of the country, that no one might know where he got his riches, and with part of Perdita’s jewels he bought herds of sheep, and became a wealthy shepherd. He brought up Perdita as his own child, and she knew not she was any other than a shepherd’s daughter.

The little Perdita grew up a lovely maiden; and though she had no better education than that of a shepherd’s daughter, yet so did the natural graces she inherited from her royal mother shine forth in her untutored mind, that no one from her behavior would have known she had not been brought up in her father’s court.

Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, had an only son, whose name was Florizel. As this young prince was hunting near the shepherd’s dwelling, he saw the old man’s supposed daughter, and the beauty, modesty, and queen-like deportment of Perdita caused him instantly to fall in love with her. He soon, under the name of Doricles, and in the disguise of a private gentleman, become a constant visitor at the old shepherd’s house.

Florizel’s frequent absence from court alarmed Polixenes; and setting people to watch his son, he discovered his love for the shepherd’s daughter.

Polixenes then called for Camillo, the faithful Camillo, who had preserved his life from the fury of Leontes, and desired that he would accompany him to the house of the shepherd, the supposed father of Perdita.

Polixenes and Camillo, both in disguise, arrived at the old shepherd’s dwelling, while they were celebrating the feast of sheep-shearing; and though they were strangers, yet at the sheep-shearing every guest being made welcome, they were invited to walk in, and join in the general festivity.

Nothing but mirth and jollity was going forward. Tables were spread, and great preparations were making for the rustic feast. Some lads and lasses were dancing on the green before the house, while others of the young men were buying ribands, gloves, and such toys, of a peddler at the door.

While this busy scene was going forward, Florizel and Perdita sat quietly in a retired corner, seemingly more pleased with the conversation of each other, than desirous of engaging in the sports and silly amusements of those around them.

The king was so disguised that it was impossible his son could know him; he therefore advanced near enough to hear the conversation. The simple yet elegant manner in which Perdita conversed with his son did not a little surprise Polixenes. He said to Camillo, “This is the prettiest low-born lass I ever saw; nothing she does or says but looks like something greater than herself, too noble for this place.”

Camillo replied, “Indeed she is the very queen of curds and cream.”

“Pray, my good friend,” said the king to the old shepherd, “what fair swain is that talking with your daughter?” “They call him Doricles,” replied the shepherd. “He says he loves my daughter; and to speak truth there is not a kiss to choose which loves the other best. If young Doricles can get her, she will bring him that he little dreams of,” meaning the remainder of Perdita’s jewels; which, after he had bought herds of sheep with part of them, he had carefully hoarded up for her marriage portion.

Polixenes then addressed his son. “How now, young man!” said he; “your heart seems full of something that takes off your mind from feasting. When I was young, I used to load my love with presents; but you have let the peddler go, and have bought your lass no toy.”

The young prince, who little thought he was talking to the king his father, replied, “Old sir, she prizes not such trifles; the gifts which Perdita expects from me are locked up in my heart.” Then turning to Perdita, he said to her, “O hear me, Perdita, before this ancient gentleman, who it seems was once himself a lover; he shall hear what I profess.” Florizel then called upon the old stranger to be a witness to a solemn promise of marriage which he made to Perdita, saying to Polixenes, “I pray you, mark our contract.”

“Mark your divorce, young sir,” said the king, discovering himself. Polixenes then reproached his son for daring to contract himself to this low-born maiden, calling Perdita “shepherd’s-brat, sheep-hook,” and other disrespectful names; and threatening, if ever she suffered his son to see her again, he would put her, and the old shepherd her father, to a cruel death.

The king then left them in great wrath, and ordered Camillo to follow him with Prince Florizel.

When the king had departed, Perdita, whose royal nature was roused by Polixenes’s reproaches, said, “Though we are all undone, I was not much afraid; and once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly that the self-same sun that shines upon his palace, hides not his face from our cottage, but looks on both alike.” Then sorrowfully she said, “But now I am awakened from this dream. I will queen it no farther. Leave me, sir; I will go milk my ewes and weep.”

The kind-hearted Camillo was charmed with the spirit and propriety of Perdita’s behavior; and perceiving that the young prince was too deeply in love to give up his mistress at the command of his royal father, he thought of a way to befriend the lovers, and at the same time to execute a favorite scheme he had in his mind.

Camillo had long known that Leontes, the king of Sicily, was become a true penitent; and though Camillo was now the favored friend of King Polixenes, he could not help wishing once more to see his late royal master and his native home. He therefore proposed to Florizel and Perdita that they should accompany him to the Sicilian court, where he would engage Leontes should protect them, till through his mediation they could obtain pardon from Polixenes and his consent to their marriage.

To this proposal they joyfully agreed; and Camillo, who conducted everything relative to their flight, allowed the old shepherd to go along with them.

The shepherd took with him the remainder of Perdita’s jewels, her baby clothes, and the paper which he had found pinned to her mantle.

After a prosperous voyage, Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the old shepherd, arrived in safety at the court of Leontes, who still mourned his dead Hermione and his lost child, received Camillo with great kindness, and gave a cordial welcome to Prince Florizel. But Perdita, whom Florizel introduced as his princess, seemed to engross all Leontes’ attention. Perceiving a resemblance between her and his dead queen Hermione, his grief broke out afresh, and he said, such a lovely creature might his own daughter have been, if he had not so cruelly destroyed her. “And then, too,” said he to Florizel, “I lost the society and friendship of your brave father, whom I now desire more than my life once again to look upon.”

When the old shepherd heard how much notice the king had taken of Perdita, and that he had lost a daughter, who was exposed in infancy, he fell to comparing the time when he found the little Perdita with the manner of its exposure, the jewels and other high tokens of its high birth; from all which it was impossible for him not to conclude that Perdita and the king’s lost daughter were the same.

Florizel and Perdita, Camillo and the faithful Paulina, were present when the old shepherd related to the king the manner in which he had found the child, and also the circumstances of Antigonus’s death, he having seen the bear seize upon him. He showed the rich mantle in which Paulina remembered Hermione had wrapped the child; and he produced a jewel which she remembered Hermione had tied about Perdita’s neck, and he gave up the paper, which Paulina knew to be the writing of her husband; it could not be doubted that Perdita was Leontes’ own daughter. But oh! the noble struggles of Paulina, between sorrow for her husband’s death, and joy that the oracle was fulfilled, in the king’s heir, his long-lost daughter, being found. When Leontes heard that Perdita was his daughter, the great sorrow that he felt that Hermione was not living to behold her child, made him that he could say nothing for a long time, but, “O, thy mother, thy mother!”

Paulina interrupted this joyful yet distressful scene, with saying to Leontes, that she had a statue, newly finished by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, which was such a perfect resemblance of the queen, that would his majesty be pleased to go to her house and look upon it, he would almost be ready to think that it was Hermione herself. Thither then they all went; the king anxious to see the semblance of his Hermione, and Perdita longing to behold what the mother she never saw did look like.

When Paulina drew back the curtain which concealed this famous statue, so perfectly did it resemble Hermione, that all the king’s sorrow was renewed at the sight; for a long time he had no power to speak or move.

“I like your silence, my liege,” said Paulina, “it the more shows your wonder. Is not this statue very like your queen?”

At length the king said, “O, thus she stood, even with such majesty, when I first wooed her. But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so aged as this statue looks.” Paulina replied, “So much the more the carver’s excellence, who has made the statue as Hermione would have looked had she been living now. But let me draw the curtain, sire, lest, presently, you think it moves.”

The king then said, “Do not draw the curtain! Would I were dead! See, Camillo, would you not think it breathed? Her eye seems to have motion in it.” “I must draw the curtain, my liege,” said Paulina. “You are so transported, you will persuade yourself the statue lives.” “O, sweet Paulina,” said Leontes, “make me think so twenty years together! Still methinks there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I will kiss her.” “Good my lord, forbear!” said Paulina. “The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; you will stain your own with oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?” “No, not these twenty years,” said Leontes.

Perdita, who all this time had been kneeling, and beholding in silent admiration the statue of her matchless mother, said now, “And so long could I stay here, looking upon my dear mother.”

“Either forbear this transport,” said Paulina to Leontes, “and let me draw the curtain, or prepare yourself for more amazement. I can make the statue move indeed; ay, and descend from off the pedestal, and take you by the hand. But then you will think, which I protest that I am not, that I am assisted by some wicked powers.” “What you can make her do,” said the astonished king, “I am content to look upon. What you can make her speak, I am content to hear; for it is as easy to make her speak as move.”

Paulina then ordered some slow and solemn music, which she had prepared for the purpose, to strike up; and to the amazement of all the beholders, the statue came down from off the pedestal, and threw its arms around Leontes’s neck. The statue then began to speak, praying for blessings on her husband, and on her child, the newly found Perdita.

No wonder that the statue hung upon Leontes’s neck, and blessed her husband and her child. No wonder, for the statue was Hermione herself, the real, the living queen.

Paulina had falsely reported to the king the death of Hermione, thinking that the only means to preserve her royal mistress’s life; and with the good Paulina Hermione had lived ever since, never choosing Leontes should know she was living, till she heard Perdita was found; for though she had long forgiven the injuries which Leontes had done to herself, she could not pardon his cruelty to his infant daughter.

His dead queen thus restored to life, his lost daughter found, the long-sorrowing Leontes could scarcely support the excess of his own happiness. And as if nothing should be wanting to complete this strange and unlooked-for joy, king Polixenes himself now entered the palace.

When Polixenes first missed his son and Camillo, knowing that Camillo had long wished to return to Sicily, he conjectured he should find the fugitives there; and following them with all speed, he happened to arrive just at this, the happiest moment of Leontes’s life.

Polixenes took a part in the general joy; he forgave his friend Leontes the unjust jealousy he had conceived against him, and they once more loved each other with all the warmth of their first boyish friendship. There was no fear that Polixenes would now oppose his son’s marriage with Perdita. She was no _sheep-hook_ now, but the heiress of the crown of Sicily.

Thus have we seen the patient virtues of the long-suffering Hermione rewarded. That excellent lady lived many years with her Leontes and her Perdita, the happiest of mothers and queens.

A TOUR ROUND THE WORLD.

By MRS. MARY LOW DICKINSON.

[Continued.]

“If you are going to keep a journal at all, begin the minute you take off your waterproof.” This bit of wisdom descended upon the quartette from the lips of the special correspondent of the Perkinsville _Gazette_, one dripping morning when we found her taking notes in the British Museum. And surely she never said a wiser thing. First impressions may not be profound or correct, or reach in any way the heart and meaning of what passes under the eye, but they are the freshest and often the only impressions worth recording. One sees more in a first day in a new city than in many subsequent days. The eyes are open then, if ever, to all little peculiarities and characteristics; the ears catch every unfamiliar tone; the perceptions are quickened into a new and vivid interest, dissipated, alas, too soon! We Americans quickly make ourselves at home. The novelty of to-day is commonplace to-morrow, and the third day’s description of an event takes only a word, where the first day’s would have received a page. And there is no haunting demon of travel quite so fiendish as the journal that must be written, and that has “got behind.” One never can quite subdue its clamor, nor does any effort at writing up the half-forgotten record satisfy its insatiate demand. All the pith and the life are gone out of the neglected recollections, and we must accept the conclusion that it is NOT safe to wait after the “water-proof” is laid aside.

That some members of our quartette _did_ wait was, perhaps, a mercy to their friends, for it would have taken a volume to describe what they saw and did in London. That they studied their guide-books, and maps and histories, as true Chautauquans should, goes without saying. They tramped a great many miles and jostled in cabs and omnibuses a great many more, and tried the tramways and the underground road, and the penny boats upon the noiseless highway of the Thames. Somewhere they had read that the united streets of London made a stretch of over three thousand miles, and they sometimes felt as if they had traversed them all. They must visit every portion of the city, for each had its peculiar interest or charm. How could they fail, for example, to drive through the aristocratic Belgravia, the district that, within the last quarter of a century, has become a region of fine streets and spacious squares and palatial residences, transforming as well as surpassing the old West End. It seemed worth while to gaze, if only from the windows of a cab, at the residences of the real aristocracy of Britain, and better worth while to drive on, through the once beautiful and rural Chelsea, now swarming with the multitudes of London’s poor. The old city of Westminster, now swallowed up in London, whose inhabitants average a dozen inmates to every wretched home, touches Belgravia on the southeast, lying, as one writer says, “Like a filthy beggar at the rich man’s gate.” Not all the efforts of public and private philanthropy, the theories of men like Ruskin, or the practice of women like Octavia Hill, have been able to stay its ever-swelling tide of misery and sin. Strange contrast all this to the monotonous regularity of Tyburnia, whose rows on rows of handsome dwellings constitute the homes of professional men and wealthy merchants. So-called middle-class London finds its home in the Regent’s Square district. Thence, eastward still, and we find ourselves in the Bloomsbury and Bedford Square region, whose old houses, once occupied by rank and fashion, are mostly given over to lodgers like ourselves, while resident middle-class foreigners make their homes largely in the region around Leicester Square. It takes no end of wandering to familiarize the stranger with the characteristics of each district, and if one can stay in London months, it is a better way to begin than to select the special points of interest.

London is large enough for a world, and has human interests enough, if there were no other place on the planet, to occupy the time and wisdom of angels and all good men. Somebody calls it a “province covered with houses;” Carlyle spoke of it as “the tuberosity of modern civilization.” The metropolis includes more than the city of London, more than old Westminster. Its arms have stretched out until it embraces nearly forty adjacent townships and districts. Some busy-brained statistician has amused himself by treating the place as if it were a great living monster, whose gigantic throat swallows yearly over nine millions of once living creatures, either fish, flesh or fowl, washed down by fifty millions of gallons of ale and wine. No wonder that there follows close upon this statement, the grave announcement that nearly three thousand physicians are constantly hastening to and fro, and that five hundred undertakers do not suffice to meet the city’s demands. The wine and liquor merchants number nearly ten thousand, and we do not wonder, this being so, that the paupers number nearly one hundred and fifty thousand souls.

And of this great living mass of humanity, vital in every part, the “city” proper is the pulsing heart. By it we mean the space that anciently lay within the walls, keeping still with few exceptions its narrow streets and shadowy lanes; the former being the avenues of retail trade, while in the latter the wholesale trade is carried on. As space could not be commanded on the ground, the magnificent buildings required for business that manipulates the wealth of the world have had to occupy the air. Business houses stand side by side with the dark low buildings of the seventeenth century; and he who has time to penetrate some of the picturesque old mansions now used as counting-rooms, will be repaid by a sight of much that is architecturally quaint and fine. No part of London is better worth exploring than this. Our wanderers never tired of strolling from St. Paul’s, after every brief rest under the stillness of its mighty dome, into Paternoster-row, and lingering in the world of books displayed on every hand; and the weaker half of the party did not care how long they were left in the book stores, while the more active wandered off into Lombard street, among the bankers, into the exchanges, or the less imposing though no less interesting Houndsditch, the haunt of the modern Jew. All day long, from morn to night, a mighty human tide swells and surges with almost turbulent haste all through these narrow streets. One lingers and watches daily as the never-ceasing throng pours on, fascinated as by the constantly-recurring beat of the breakers upon the sea. But come down here and stand under the shadow of St. Paul’s some night, or on some calm Sunday afternoon. The very air that hangs, heavy and still with the fog-damps, above the great cross there on the old clock tower, is not stiller than the ground beneath one’s feet. The hundreds of thousands of people that composed the human throng are gone, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them. The merchants are in their homes at the West End, the clerks in their humble homes in the suburbs. Over twenty thousand buildings are left alone in the care of the police, most of them houses once occupied as dwellings, and now used for purposes of trade. There are nearly sixty churches in the district, but the Sabbath stillness of the streets is not due to the throngs gathered within the house of God. They, indeed, are almost as empty as the streets, for the residents who once rendered each parish populous are no longer here. St. Paul’s, the cathedral church of the See of London, is the present center of religious attraction, and here our travelers passed many a quiet hour, to say nothing of the more active seasons when they walked from tomb to tomb through all its length and breadth; paid their shilling and descended into the crypt and stood by the tomb of Wellington; paid another and climbed to the whispering gallery; and another and another, and went to the tower of the clock; and an extra sixpence and touched the great bell that strikes the hour. The only other service required of the bell is to toll at the deaths of members of the royal family, the bishop of London, the dean of St. Paul’s, and the mayors of London who may die in office. One and sixpence once more, and the more adventurous of the quartette climbed up and squeezed into the ball beneath the cross, while the others lingered at the golden gallery near the apex of the dome, and gazed down upon the fog, through which the roofs and towers and spires seemed like a strange shadowy spectre of a city, struggling for a tangible form. Seen from the river, or from Blackfriars Bridge, the wonderful dome stands out in all its beauty of outline; and early one morning they saw from the latter point the great cross glittering far above the city in the sunlight, which had not yet scattered the fog on which it seemed to float.

Not much time had our tourists, however, for puzzling their brains or harrowing their souls over the questions of human destiny, for their heads were filled with all sorts of associations with men and books, and they sometimes went wandering to and fro, to find the very houses where their favorite authors lived, the spots where events of interest had transpired, the places made immortal by their poets’ pens. They must have their visit to the Tower, long days in the Museum and the art galleries, for had they not, each and all, in one form or another, the genuine Kensington craze? They could not leave out any of the more common things, like a drive to Richmond Hill or an afternoon at the “Zoo.” They must go to Stoke Pogis and recite the elegy in the churchyard where Gray wrote it. They must have their day at Windsor, with its chance of seeing the queen driving in the park, and the visit to Sydenham’s Crystal Palace, and the afternoon at Hampton Court. They must stroll down by Hyde Park corner and see fashionable London dragging monotonously around the drive, or prancing on horseback through Rotten Row. They must visit the Parliament houses, and find many a still hour to linger and dream within the walls of the wonderful old Westminster Abbey, that is of itself worth crossing an ocean to see. It is not for Wesley’s _grave_ alone that we go to the City-road Chapel, or for the grave of Watts that we enter the Bunhill Fields. It is not the _tombs_ of the poets, statesmen and martyrs that hold our attention long, but we seek in the living of to-day for the spirit that animated the great, now dead; and eyes and ears alike are open to see and hear the indications of growth in the noblest things. It matters little that we see only the outside of Buckingham and St. James. There are fairer palaces in London than those of her princes, and to these, her edifices devoted to the alleviation of human suffering and the advancement of human progress, we turn with never-tiring interest and zeal. In this class stand her colleges and hospitals and asylums, her charitable organizations of every sort. London gives yearly in food and clothing, and in the relief of disease, over thirteen millions of dollars, to say nothing of a million more given privately by individuals. For educational and religious purposes she spends seven millions more, and yet the city is filled in certain localities with the most wretched of all citizens, the poor who are too far down to care to be lifted up.

We passed delightful days in visiting some of the oldest as well as some of the newest of the institutions of learning or charity. Among the former the famous old St. Peter’s College, founded as “a publique schoole for grammar, rethoricke and poetrie,” and the Charter House School, of which Wesley says, “I owed my health and long life to the faithfulness with which I obeyed my father’s injunction to run around the Charter House playing-green three times every morning,” and the blue-coat school, where the boys dressed in blue coat, yellow petticoat and stockings, and red leather girdle around the waist, seemed to have stepped down from the sixteenth century. Blue was originally a color only worn by dependents, and never by gentlemen, until after its use in the uniform of the British navy. In striking contrast to these we found Girton and the Wesleyan Normal College, for the training of teachers and the teaching of children. In another line of instruction the Government School of Design, at South Kensington, is doing a most interesting work. One feature of its service to the people is well worthy of imitation. Its library is rich in illustrated works, and these are open for the use, not only of artists, but of every poor working man or woman, at the price of one penny a volume. From this school large additions have been made to house decorators, designers and draughtsmen for the various manufactures and trades. All the collections of the wonderful museums of Kensington are intended to subserve the purpose of the school, of which branches have been formed in various manufacturing districts throughout England.

No philanthropic work in London will be more likely to attract the attention of Americans, than that done by the Peabody fund in the construction of the model lodging houses, where three rooms, comfortable and clean, can be hired for five shillings a week. The buildings in the various districts where they have already been erected are five stories in height, well lighted, well ventilated, and calculated in every way to make desirable homes for the very poor. Since the gift of Mr. Peabody, the corporation of London has given land and six hundred thousand dollars for the erection of model dwellings for the working people. Before them in this benevolent work has been the Baroness Burdett-Couts, whose heart has seemed to be as large as her purse. A morning spent in exploring the vicinity of Columbia Square Market showed us her four large blocks of neat houses surrounding a court all occupied now by a clean, orderly class of people. The adjoining market, built to accommodate the neighborhood on the site of the old “dust heap” was also her work. The place was one of the most filthy and pestilential haunts of vice and degradation in the city of London. Its refuse heaps were almost as high as its hovels, and foulness, moral and physical, made the spot a breeding place of disease to body and soul. These are only instances of what may be done, of what must be done, indeed, if cities like those of England and America are ever to be lifted from the pauperism that destroys soul and body alike. And the traveler, who makes his journey without securing a knowledge of what is stirring in other countries to solve the problem of helping people to help themselves, misses both the truth as to the realities of human conditions and the inspiration that comes from seeing what has been already done. The great consideration is time, which is always and everywhere too short. Our quartette labored faithfully and well, but, like other travelers, saw once what they wanted to see a dozen times, heard their favorite music in snatches and their favorite preachers sometimes once and sometimes not at all. They crowded ten objects of interest into the time fairly due to one, and left London with the feeling of a hungry man at a railway station whose bell rings just as he has taken the first bite of his dinner.

“Who was it, in Mother Goose, that ‘whipped his children and made them dance out of Ireland into France?’” asks the scribe of the quartette, lifting her pen with a characteristic motion that betrays an inclination to put it behind her ear. “’Twasn’t anybody,” answers the scholar, gruffly, who feels a coming talk in the air and does not like to be disturbed at his book. “Yes, it was!” persists the scribe, “and whoever he was, the chief is just like him. Here he is fairly lashing us about Londontown to drive us over to France.” Behind his newspaper the chief smiles. “You will be glad I hastened you, when once you are there out of this wretched fog.”

“But I haven’t had half enough of London.”

“True, and you never would have enough. It’s a place to _live_ in, not to visit!”

“Then I’d like to live on, straight along.”

“Very good! The rest of us must go around the world.”

“But we have made a mistake! no one could do it in the time we have set.”

“A common experience, again, sister,” said the chief, who, having the times and seasons in his hands, and having been indulgent enough to stay on from day to day, was at last in a somewhat inexorable mood.

And though there was still some coaxing to stay, one bright morning found us fairly started on our dance “out of England into France.”

The morning of our departure is fine; the air delicious, a fresh breeze blowing from the west. A good course of packing lasting well into the night added physical weariness to the rather thin layer of mental fatigue consequent on keeping a journal, and therefore London seems less attractive than it did. If it were not for a faint foreboding sense that the Channel lies just before, we could even begin to be glad that the metropolis is left behind. The chief does not say, “I told you so” as he sees our spirits rise, but then the chief is—not a woman. It is soon over,—the three hours of grace that it takes us to whirl down to Folkestone, and it’s three hours of pleasure, except the last few minutes when we catch the mocking toss of the saucy white-caps on the waves. We rejoiced this morning in the wind that scattered the London fog, but now we know how felt Lot’s wife in that dire day of Sodom. Bravely as possible we march to our fate. The wicked scribe can not forbear asking the chief whose white cheeks contradict his defiant expression, if he is glad he “made her dance.” We hear people in various stages of resistance saying “this is not bad; that the channel is often worse.” “No doubt! no doubt!” but we do not care to discuss it, and the photographs of the quartette would show them seated lugubriously, with their backs to the smoke-stack, not coldly unsocial, but each meditating profoundly on topics that are not to the others of the slightest concern. They are meditating only, and, meantime that smoke-stack rides up into the air, and they with it, and it fairly seems to be intoxicated at its upper end, yet they hold fast to it and to each other down below; and then it changes its mind and seems to go down and down, until they feel as if they were in the fast diminishing turret of a monitor, and that the bottom is dropping out of the depth of the sea.

And yet they live, and revive, and when the boat touches Boulogne-sur-Mer, are ready for the French-English table d’hôte served at the railway restaurant, and the scribe at least is ready for a walk to the heights above the town, “just to look back to old England, you know,” and see what Napoleon saw when he gathered his army of nearly two hundred thousand men along this coast, and filled the harbor with his ships, and watched and waited his chance to go over and take the British bull by the horns.

“Think, sister, how the fate of the nations might have been changed, if only Napoleon had gone”—says the chief thoughtfully.

“Now, brother, if you are going to meditate, or moralize, we shall miss the train,” answers the scribe.

He looks at her gravely. “I am afraid,” he says under his breath, “that my next duty will be to train that miss.”

(To be continued.)

THRIFT.

By CHARLES KINGSLEY.

_A Lecture for Women._

Consider that word thrift. If you will look at Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, or if you know your Shakspere, you will see that thrift signified originally profits, gain, riches gotten—in a word, the marks of a man’s thriving.

How, then, did the word thrift get to mean parsimony, frugality, the opposite of waste? Just in the same way as economy—which, first, of course, meant the management of a household—got to mean also the opposite of waste.

It was found that in commerce, in husbandry, in any process, in fact, men throve in proportion as they saved their capital, their material, their force.

Now this is a great law which runs through life; one of those laws of nature—call them, rather, laws of God—which apply not merely to political economy, to commerce, and to mechanics; but to physiology, to society; to the intellect, to the heart, of every person in this room.

The secret of thriving is thrift; saving of force; to get as much work as possible done with the least expenditure of power, the least jar and obstruction, the least wear and tear.

And the secret of thrift is knowledge. In proportion as you know the laws and nature of a subject, you will be able to work at it easily, surely, rapidly, successfully; instead of wasting your money or your energies in mistaken schemes, irregular efforts, which end in disappointment and exhaustion.

The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can do more work with less effort.

A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater. Knowledge of the electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of writing saves human speech and locomotion; knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and life; knowledge of the laws of the intellect saves wear and tear of brain; and knowledge of the laws of the spirit—what does it not save?

A well-educated moral sense, a well-regulated character, saves from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those tender emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man; and which are potent in her, for evil or for good, in proportion as they are left to run wild and undisciplined, or are trained and developed into graceful, harmonious, self-restraining strength, beautiful in themselves, and a blessing to all who come under their influence.

What, therefore, I recommend to ladies in this lecture is thrift; thrift of themselves and of their own powers: and knowledge as the parent of thrift.

“To fit women for the more enlightened performance of their special duties;” to help them towards learning how to do better what we doubt not they are already doing well; is, I honestly believe, the only object of the promoters of this scheme.

Let us see now how some of these special duties can be better performed by help of a little enlightenment as to the laws which regulate them.

Now, no man will deny—certainly no man who is past forty-five, and whose digestion is beginning to quail before the lumps of beef and mutton which are the boast of a well-regulated kitchen, and to prefer, with Justice Shallow, and, I presume, Sir John Falstaff also, “any pretty little tiny kickshaws”—no man, I say, who has reached that age, but will feel it a practical comfort to him to know that the young ladies of his family are at all events good cooks; and understand, as the French do, thrift in the matter of food.

Neither will any parent who wishes, naturally enough, that his daughters should cost him as little as possible; and wishes, naturally enough also, that they should be as well dressed as possible, deny that it would be a good thing for them to be practical milliners and mantua-makers; and, by making their own clothes gracefully and well, exercise thrift in clothing.

But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labor misapplied, you will agree, is labor wasted; and as dress, I presume, is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which only disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It would be impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walk about the streets now without passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. Instead of graceful and noble simplicity of form, instead of combinations of color at once rich and delicate, because in accordance with the chromatic laws of nature, one meets with phenomena more and more painful to the eye, and startling to common sense, till one would be hardly more astonished, and certainly hardly more shocked, if in a year or two one should pass some one going about like a Chinese lady, with pinched feet, or like a savage of the Amazons, with a wooden bung through her lower lip. It is easy to complain of these monstrosities: but impossible to cure them, it seems to me, without an education of the taste, an education in those laws of nature which produce beauty in form and beauty in color. For that cause of these failures lies in want of education is patent. They are most common in—I had almost said they are confined to—those classes of well-to-do persons who are the least educated; who have no standard of taste of their own; and who do not acquire any from cultivated friends and relations: who, in consequence, dress themselves blindly according to what they conceive to be Paris fashions, conveyed at third-hand through an equally uneducated dressmaker; in innocent ignorance of the fact—for fact I believe it to be—that Paris fashions are invented now not in the least for the sake of beauty, but for the sake of producing, through variety, increased expenditure, and thereby increased employment; according to the strange system which now prevails in France of compelling, if not prosperity, at least the signs of it; and like schoolboys before a holiday, nailing up the head of the weather glass to insure fine weather.

Let the ladies educate themselves in those laws of beauty which are as eternal as any other of nature’s laws; which may be seen fulfilled, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, so eloquently in every flower and every leaf, in sweeping down and rippling wave: and they will be able to invent graceful and economical dresses for themselves, without importing tawdry and expensive ugliness from France.

Let me now go a step further, and ask you to consider this.—There are now a vast number, and an increasing number, of young women who, from various circumstances which we all know, must in after life be either the mistresses of their own fortunes, or the earners of their own bread. And to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women of business; and to be women of business, they must know something of the meaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labor, wages, and of the relations between those two last. In a word, they must know a little political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little sound knowledge of the principles of political economy.

When we consider that every mistress of a household is continually buying, if not selling; that she is continually hiring and employing labor in the form of servants; and very often, into the bargain, keeping her husband’s accounts: I cannot but think that her hard-worked brain might be clearer, and her hard-tried desire to do her duty by every subject in her little kingdom, might be more easily satisfied, had she read something of what Mr. John Stuart Mill has written, especially on the duties of employer and employed. A capitalist, a commercialist, an employer of labor, and an accountant—every mistress of a household is all these, whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for her, in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly through their work in simpler and less civilized societies.

And here I stop to answer those who may say—as I have heard it said—that a woman’s intellect is not fit for business; that when a woman takes to business, she is apt to do it ill, and unpleasantly likewise: to be more suspicious, more irritable, more grasping, more unreasonable, than regular men of business would be: that—as I have heard it put—“a woman does not fight fair.” The answer is simple. That a woman’s intellect is eminently fitted for business is proved by the enormous amount of business she gets through without any special training for it: but those faults in a woman of which some men complain are simply the results of her not having had a special training. She does not know the laws of business. She does not know the rules of the game she is playing; and therefore she is playing it in the dark, in fear and suspicion, apt to judge of questions on personal grounds, often offending those with whom she has to do, and oftener still making herself miserable over matters of law or of business, on which a little sound knowledge would set her head and her heart at rest.

When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great household, of great estate, of a great business, struggling heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing themselves with the divine instinct of a mother for their children’s interest: I have stood by with mingled admiration and pity, and said to myself—“How nobly she is doing the work without teaching! How much more nobly would she have done it had she been taught! She is now doing the work at the most enormous waste of energy and of virtue: had she had knowledge, thrift would have followed it; she would have done more work with far less trouble. She will probably kill herself if she goes on: sound knowledge would have saved her health, saved her heart, saved her friends, and helped the very loved ones for whom she labors, not always with success.”

A little political economy, therefore, will at least do no harm to a woman; especially if she have to take care of herself in after life; neither, I think, will she be much harmed by some sound knowledge of another subject,—“Natural philosophy, in its various branches, such as the chemistry of common life, light, heat, electricity, etc., etc.”

A little knowledge of the laws of light, for instance, would teach many women that by shutting themselves up day after day, week after week, in darkened rooms, they are as certainly committing a waste of health, destroying their vital energy, and diseasing their brains, as if they were taking so much poison the whole time.