CHAPTER XIX. KILLODEN. SETTING himself to his match against time, Hugh had meant to do all he could to win it. Yet he knew well that too great haste might only mean the worse speed. Body and brain had been strained, but, although one and the other had stood it well, prudence whispered it was time to give them a holiday. The toughest yew will lose its spring with constant straining; the swiftest yacht may risk the race by cracking on with too much tophamper. The season was over and gone; the House had voted its latest estimates; the Ministers had eaten the last of the whitebait; the innocents had been Heroded; the Members had scattered like the fragments of a shell; the Scotch and Irish expresses were conveying their firstclass passengers six and eight in a carriage; the west was a city of the dead; the city had gone to the sea in promiscuous exodus; and Hugh had half made up his mind to follow the multitude. The craft he had launched was sailing summer seas with favouring breezes and plenty of them, and with an easy mind he could trust her for a time to other hands. Hemprigge had the requisite skill, and, for his own sake, must steer her safely, for he had freighted her with all his fortunes. Then there were one or two watchful directors seated at the Aulic Council of the Board, who, as Hugh had found, might be trusted to keep intelligent eyes on the officer of the watch. up his mind he should be asked to Killoden, as he often had been before, and had pretty nearly decided that, if asked, he would go. But, in luxurious sympathy with the general abandon of his body, his mind, and his surroundings, he coyly coquetted with the invitation. 66 Many thanks, George; as you very well know there's nothing I should like better. But, even in making holiday, business must be considered before pleasure; Killoden's a long way from town. Letters take no end of a time to reach one there. No telegraph No, thank heaven," interrupted George, impatiently cutting him short, "no telegraphs, nor metropolitan deliveries a dozen times a day, nor barrel-organs, nor beggars, nor evening parties, nor evening papers. For the post, which is all you need care about, you'll have a chance of having your digestion spoiled with bad news, only thirtysix hours stale, every morning at breakfast. Better that than leaving your correspondents to take flying shots at you, as you dodge them over the Swiss passes and down among the Italian lakes. You don't dream, I imagine, of an English wateringplace,-looking out for ships and dirty weather through a race-glass, drifting about the beach in a crowd of cockneys like a shred of old seaweed, and with about as much pleasure in life? Maclachlan writes he never saw stronger coveys, or more of them; the ground looks as if disease hadn't touched it for a century." "Sir Basil may have filled his house. I know its accommodation well, and now Miss Winter's of the family, there's a room the less." 66 He gave me special charge to persuade you, so if you're driven back on that position, you may as well surrender at discretion. Moreover, Purkiss won't be of the party. He commands in Lombard Street in the Governor's absence, - an inducement the less for you to come, by the way, but that can't be helped." "One must take the rough with the smooth in this world," remarked Hugh, gravely. "Well, George, if nothing turns up to prevent me, I'm your man the more so, that if you have to turn me out, I'm pretty safe to find quarters over with McAlpine and Rushbrook at Baragoil." 66 We shan't give them the chance, don't hope it. But what do you mean by talking of Rushbrook at Baragoil?" "You haven't heard? Why, old McAlpine was in despair because he couldn't find a tenant for his Carradale forest; and the other day, after a Board meeting, proposed, half in fun, to Rushbrook, that he should blue was as treacherous as the emerald go him halves in the whole stretch, Carra- green of the moss-pits. When it did not dale and Baragoil, grouse and deer, while subside into one of its fits of sullen steady they kept house together at the Lodge. weeping, or fly out in one of its savage The pair have become great allies. Rush- windy bursts of temper that lasted for days, brook jumped at the idea; and what began there was a charm in its very fickleness. It in joke ended in earnest. Then Barrington was the frowns that made you so keenly enyou know all about his good-luck by the joy the smiles, and in your memories you way persuaded them to take him into the carried away the sunshine and forgot the partnership, conditionally on his obtaining storm. leave of absence from his uncle." 66 The country was grandly savage. What By Jove, I'm delighted to hear we shall cultivation there was looked pitiably conhave such pleasant neighbours. It's some-scious of a false position, and its rickety exthing in the Highlands to have the materials for a rubber at your door." “Well, no; I think not," hesitated George. "The fact is, the Governor begins to fight shy of these long journeys, and I promised to do the dutiful this time, and take him and the girls in charge." 66 Quite right too. Very well, then, we meet at Killoden on the eleventh; that's arranged. Now that my mind's made up, I shall be horribly put out if anything comes to upset my plans." istence generally ended in a premature death. Here and there you saw some misguided patch of oats, where the sand or peat had been lightly stirred round a keeper's cottage, strongly fenced against the marauding deer, who regarded, as a supreme delicacy, the crop a Saxon donkey would have sneered at. Killoden, although no forest, lay surrounded by the sacred haunts of the red deer, and seduced by its rich mountain pastures, they might be seen in the grey morning, streaming homewards ghostlike, over the passes. Through the day venturesome harts were to be found lying out in the enemy's country, although sheep, or sheep-dogs, kept them ever on the alert, and the friendly grouse-cocks made the stalking them more uncertain work than was altogether pleasurable. There was luxurious shooting for elderly gentlemen in the deep heather by the lakes and streams, where the well-broke shooting pony picked his way demurely, while the setters ranged and quartered to the wave of the keeper's hand. There were the higher and Nor were these by any means mere words more distant beats, sore strains on muscles of civility. All other attractions apart that flaccid from City pavements, but where the the visit might have for Hugh, an invitation air came breathing round the sportsman in to Killoden was not a thing to be lightly de-a rush of health, and where, even wrestling clined. There were lower-lying moors, where you might have bloodier days and heavier bags, but nowhere could you enjoy in a higher perfection the poetry of sport. The place was a wild jumble of mountain and valley, hill and corrie, lying high on the water-shed of the Atlantic, a very palace of the storms where the doors stood generally ajar; a reservoir of water when the sluices were raised, with scarce a warning, on the sunniest of summer days. A dead calm, deepening, if possible, to a deader stillness, a fitful puff or two, a black cloud that glided swiftly up against the sun, a rush of wind, a thunder-shower tumbling in sheets of water, and again a flood of warm, mellow sunshine, that found everything brighter than before: that was the sort of thing you had there, weather as changeful as the scenery, skies whose sapphire up the brae in the teeth of the bitter blast, Here As you rose ridge on ridge, you opened hill on hill, buttresses of the grim old giants of geographical name, with their bare scalps, weather-driven foreheads, and the gaunt rocky shoulders that tore huge rents through their mantles of green and purple. Mountain hares, sheltered by myriads in their stony skirts, and ptarmigan flitted about in flocks among the grey wrinkles time had worn in their features. And all the picturesque "vermin" life was there. Highland foxes kenneled in the cairns, and from the rocks and the fallen boulders you heard the cry of the marten and mountain cats. The raven hovered over the gorges with sullen croak; the peregrine's breast glinted on the shivered cliffs above; a pair of ospreys had established their household gods on the truncated rocks in the lake below; while, greatest of all, soared and swooped the golden eagle, hunting to supply the larder on the ledge where the grim pledges of his flinty nuptial couch sat gaping in their rocky cradle. All this, and much more besides, came rushing vividly on Hugh's mind when he gave George his promise to go and enjoy it. As he sat dallying with his cigar after his friend had left him, he might have been in a Western opium-smoker's heaven, his mind detached itself so absolutely to go wandering among the old scenes and the familiar hunting-grounds. Again he rehearsed to their minutest incident long-forgotten stalks; again he snapped wild shots at grouse topping the hill-crest, and black-game shooting rocket-like down the wind. He breathed Highland air in his den in Harley Street, and in the thickening wreaths of his cigarsmoke saw the Atlantic mists stealing round him from the hills. In short, hugging himself in the prospect of a holiday, he felt all the premonitory symptoms of a mal d'Ecosse and a holiday longing that went on gradually growing until it threatened to be a grave disease. Possibly the prospects of the society to be enjoyed at the Lodge, with no arrière-pensée of work neglected, or dragging back from the collar, might have counted for something in his dreams of pleasure; but if there was danger impending to his peace of mind he altogether declined to look it in the face. He meant to leave his cares behind him, and began to shake himself clear of them at once. The moment he consented to slip the string the bow seemed to fly back of itself. Almost for the first time since he had taken to it, business became an effort and a drudgery; he began to count the days and then the hours; and we question whether, in his frame of mind, the prudent Mr. Childersleigh would not have found sophistry to persuade himself that a crisis in the money-market was a thing of no consequence whatever. WHAT a thing it is to be a popular lecturer! | Never mind what you say, the whole world listens. I wonder where, upon the civilized areas of the globe, that discourse of Professor Tyndall's upon haze and dust has not been, or will not be read. But, divested of its show, it was a poor affair; never, perhaps, did the Professor tell so little that was new to such an audience as that which assembled on the occasion; and never did the daily press so echo and extol him. Yet when Dr. Angus Smith, of Manchester, a week or so after, told a select gathering in that city, of his all but exhaustive labours on the organic particles of the air, the public prints, except the technical journals, echoed not a word. Dr. Smith has been, for a quarter of a century, an air and breath analyzer. He has not merely shown in gross the "atoms" which Daniel Culverwell says the sun "makes dance naked in his beams, but he has examined them in detail; studied their forms, and determined their characters. He has told us what we take into our lungs qualitatively and quantitatively how the air is charged with tiny scraps of whatever material is being knocked about in the working places of our neighbourhood - coal in the mining districts, cotton in the spinning districts, hay and straw in the agricultural districts, stone and horse refuse in the busy streets, iron in the railway carriage. In these, he says, "we breathe rolled plates of metallic iron, which are large enough to be seen by the naked eye." And mingled with all are those mysterious dormant germs of plant and animal life, which, after a few days' steeping in water, throw off their torpor and appear as living plants and animalcules! Then he has shown us what we cast out from our lungs — the sewage of the atmosphere and told of the wonderful scene of life which is developed in a drop of condensed breath from the wall of a crowded room. More than all, he has examined the very bearing-poiuts of these pervading atoms upon plagues and pestilences. Twenty-five years of research like this ought not to be put in the background, while a popular lecturer comes to the front and dazzles his listeners with the inevitable" electric lamp into the belief that it is casting light upon things unknown till it shone. Gentleman's Magazine. From The Saturday Review. THE PARSON OF THE OLD NOVELISTS. the one novel from which we do not require this sort of truth. Even the plays of the time that come down to us tell us nothing. Parson Adams resents the scraps of wit against the clergy quoted from plays of his day, and wonders Government does not interfere; but few of these survive. The real wits, little respect as they showed for morals, as a rule let religion and the parson alone, probably because the parson occupied no place in the mind of the fashionable world. The clergy, as a body, were not interesting to the readers and critics of the period. Wherever there are good livings there will be men of family and social consideration; but the wits wrote for London and of London, and knew uncommonly little about the more dignified components of country society. Their stock idea of the parson seems to have belonged to the curate order of the profession, the chaplain, and perhaps the Ordinary of Newgate. To the mass of the people, on the other hand, especially the rustic population, the clergy then represented religion and learning, at a time when learning was reverenced more than it has been since, and Latin was a mystery, an innocent. nay salutary, branch of the black art. A great deal was taken for granted and excused in a man who was an adept. Our readers will remember Addison's story to the point; but his characteristic humour expresses itself in so terse a form that we may indulge them by quoting it entire : In the modern rage for historical gossip, the passion for intruding into old-world secrets and realizing, obsolete manners, it is remarkable how little we can get to know of the social life of the clergy of but a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. The most curious and determined investigation always comes to a stop here. We hear a great deal about the politicians, the wits, the squires, the courtiers, the actors, the beaux and belles, the footmen, the waitingwomen of the last century, but the social life of the clergy is still all but a terra incognita. It has no historian, no diarist, no chronicler; and-perhaps what more than all accounts for the blank-it has no fiction devoted to its delineation; none, that is, in comparison with the enormous mass of literature dedicated to the portrayal of clerical life and character in our own time. Mr. Trollope alone, the self-constituted bard and laureate of the clergy, presents more pictures of clerical character than the whole fiction of the world up to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Accustomed as people now are to get their ideas of the class, beyond their own limited experience, from the novelist, they naturally turn to the pages of fiction for information as to a past period. There is not indeed an absolute blank. But the invariable reference, by every inquirer, to Parson Adams and Parson Trulliber shows how circumscribed is the field. Richardson, to be sure, has his parsons, but he throws none of his invention and an undue share of his prose into them. They are mere conventionalities, and tell us nothing, being simply reflections of the virtues or the villanies of their patrons and employers. Dr. Bartlett, Sir Charles Grandison's "monitor in youth," lives in his patron's house, conducts family worship, sings his praises with tears in his eyes, and provides him an amanuensis in the person of his nephew. The ruffian abductor Sir Hargrave has his snuffy priest ready to mumble the marriage service over the terrified and fainting Harriet Byron, had not the opening words of the service given her frantic strength enough to dash the book out of his hands with the well-known cry, "No dearly beloveds." Clarissa has her venerable pastor, Dr. Lewin, a worthy divine; her cruel relations have their sycophantic, pedantic, And even where there was not a pretence time-serving tool, Mr. Brand; but not one of learning, the parson who was good comof them has made himself a name. Gold-pany found tolerant judges; their reverence smith's Dr. Primrose we feel to be himself; we can scarcely accept any part of his delightful book as a picture of manners; it is I have heard of a couple of preachers in a country town who endeavoured which should largest congregation. One of them, being well outshine one another, and draw together the versed in the Fathers, used to quote every now and then a Latin sentence to his illiterate hearers, who it seems found themselves so edified by it, that they flocked in greater numbers to this learned man than to his rival. The other, finding his congregation mouldering every Sunday, and hearing at length what was the occasion of it, resolved to give his parish a little Latin in his turn, but, being unacquainted with any of the Fathers, he digested into his sermon the whole book of Que Genus, adding such explications to it as he thought might be for the benAs in præsenti, which he converted in the same efit of his people. He afterwards entered upon manner to the use of his parishioners. This in a very little time thickened his audience, filled his church, and routed his antagonist. not exacting consistency. The Connoisseur tells us of the sporting parson arriving full gallop at the church doors, where all the congregation awaited him, giving his assigns to the captain's wit over the par"brown scratch bob " a shake, clapping on son's we know— his surplice, and giving entire satisfaction Dear madam, be sure he's a fine-spoken man, to both parish and squire, both in desk and Do but hear on the clergy how glib his tongue pulpit, the squire inviting him to dinner, where jovial toasts were only interrupted by the bell for the second service. The literary interests of remote districts were mainly sustained, however, by the clergy, and we read of a little centre of intellectual activity- a club of parsons who assembled every Saturday at the nearest market town to be shaved, to exchange sermons, and to discuss the monthly reviews. ran. And this captain "all daub'd with gold lace" falls foul at once of the shabby cassock and rumpled band: Whenever you see a cassock and gown, A hundred to one that it covers a clown, Observe how a parson comes into a room, &c. No satirist of that date ever supposes that a woman can turn her thoughts on a parson till her forty-fifth year. He is the pis-aller of the old maid of genteel life. Even the devotee who disturbs good company by her scruples is not led up to them by the parson. He has had no influence over her. The gospel gossips of the Spectator are Dissenters, and the Lady Prue who goes to hear Whitfield accepts his teaching, but expects the half-hour of his sermon to condone her four hours' flirtation with the colonel. Not that this argument goes very far. Swift in his pudding-sleeves broke some female hearts. The captain's red coat only gives him five minutes' start in the favour of fair eyes, but a start which the parson of that day could not overtake. As it was, an authoress somewhat later on in the Authors of the eighteenth century wrote, however, at a time when rustics and rural pursuits were the ridicule of fine people; when Millamant nauseated walking as a country diversion; and "loathed the country and everything belonging to it," and the parson certainly not less than his surroundings. They wrote, too, in an age of fine clothes, when language separated the cleric from the laity by this one distinction. When a parson is under discussion we are never allowed to forget his clothes. Thus the history of Parson Adams's cassock accompanies his own. It had got a rent in climbing over a stile ten years before the story begins, and by the end of it scarcely a rag remains. That word cloth accounts for a great deal of oblivion in the great world. At a time when gentlemen glittered in scar-century shows an exceptional tenderness let and gold lace, the inevitable gown and for the cloth. Miss Fielding, in her Ophelia, cassock stood at a disadvantage; and when makes an interesting young parson a preswords were not only worn but drawn, the tender to the hand of her heroine - - a great compulsory submission to snub and insult promotion as times then went. which the cloth exacted was a still greater he is refused in favour of the libertine hero, disqualifier. When wit and repartee were and of course her aunt had taken his timid everything in conversation, it needed a dou- advances as intended for herself, and is fuble allowance of wit to shine in pudding-rious accordingly at the dénouement; but sleeves. That it did shine we know, but Mr. South is intended to be interesting, and the gown was an incubus to the clergyman not ridiculous, in the reader's eyes, which is in gay society, and a constant butt for the a testimony to the inherent feminine symdull joker. His cloth was a continual con-pathy with the clerical profession. sciousness to Swift; that he made capital of it-"the old wig" of clerical cut and representatives of the class, we may allow "rusty gown"-does not the less prove that the consciousness was an irksome one. Being once present at a discussion on the personal appearance of Julius Cæsar, "For my part," said Ambrose Philips, a vain man and neat dresser, "I should take him to have been of a lean make, pale complexion, extremely neat in his dress, and five feet seven inches high". an exact description of Philips himself. "And I, Mr. Philips," said Swift, "should take him to have been a plump man, just five feet five inches high, not very neatly dressed in a black gown with pudding-sleeves." The supremacy he Of course As for Fielding's (her brother's) standing the ladies some excuse for holding aloof from the curates if they in the remotest degree resembled these types. Trulliber is voted an exaggeration, yet it is impossible not to suspect much literal truth in that scene where he entertains his brother parson Adams, and snatches the cup of ale from his hands, reproving Mrs. Trulliber, who stands behind his chair (her place at meal times) for helping their guest when he had called first. No, sir, no, I should not have been so rude to have taken it from you, if you had caal'd vurst; but I'd have you krow I'm a better man than to suffer the best he in the kingdom to drink before |
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