the other 1 to riding. No day was a day of rest; absolutely none. Days so stormy, that they "kept the raven to her nest," snow the heaviest, winds the most frantic, were never listened to as any ground of reprieve from the ordinary exaction. I once knew (that is, not personally, for I never saw her, but through the reports of her many friends) an intrepid lady,* living in the city of London (i. e., technically the city, as opposed to Westminster, &c., Mary-le-bone, &c.), who made a point of turning out her new-born infants for a pretty long airing even on the day of their birth. It made no difference to her whether the month were July or January; good undeniable air is to be had in either month. Once only she was baffled, and most indignant it made her, because the little thing chose to be born at half-past nine P.M.; so that, by the time its toilet was finished, bonnet and cloak all properly adjusted, the watchman was calling "Past eleven, and a cloudy night;" upon which most reluctantly she was obliged to countermand the orders for that day's exercise, and considered herself, like the Emperor Titus, to have lost a day. But what came of the London lady's or of Mrs Schreiber's Spartan discipline? Did the little blind kittens of Gracechurch Street, who were ordered by their Penthesiléan mamma, on the very day of their nativity, to face the most cruel winds-did they, or did Mrs Schreiber's wards, justify, in after life, this fierce discipline by commensurate results of hardiness? In words, written beyond * If I remember rightly, some account is given of this palæstric lady and her stern Pædo-gymnastics, in a clever book on household medicine and surgery under circumstances of inevitable seclusion from professional aid, written about the year 1820-22, by Mr Haden, a surgeon of London. all doubt by Shakspere, though not generally recognised as his, it might have been said to any one of this Amazonian brood: "Now mild may be thy life; For a more blust'rous birth had never babe. Quiet and gentle be thy temperature; For thou'rt the rudeliest welcomed to this world As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make, To herald thee from darkness!"—Pericles, Act III. As to the city kittens, I heard that the treatment prospered; but the man who reported this added, that by original constitution they were as strong as Meux's drayhorses; and thus, after all, they may simply illustrate the old logical dictum ascribed to some medical man—that the reason why London children of the wealthier classes are noticeable even to a proverb for their robustness and bloom, is because none but those who are already vigorous to excess, and who start with advantages of health far beyond the average scale, have much chance of surviving that most searching quarantine, which in such* an atmo * For myself, meantime, I am far from assenting to all the romantic abuse applied to the sewerage and the churchyards of London, and even more violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the "Times" starts in all its arguments, viz. this, that supposing the Thames to be even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to our mighty English capital. On the contrary, all great cities that ever were founded have sought out, as their first and elementary condition, the adjacency of some great cleansing river. In the long process of development through which cities pass, commerce and other functions of civilisation come to usurp upon the earlier functions of such rivers, and sometimes (through increasing efforts sphere they are summoned to weather at starting. Coming, however, to the special case of Mrs Schreiber's household, I am bound to report that in no instance have I known young ladies so thoroughly steeled against all the ordinary host of petty maladies which, by way of antithesis to the capital warfare of dangerous complaints, might be called the guerrilla nosology; influenza, for instance, in milder forms, catarrh, headache, toothache, dyspepsy in transitory shapes, &c. Always the spirits of the two girls were exuberant; the enjoyment of life seemed to be intense, and never did I know either of them to suffer from ennui. My conscious knowledge of them commenced when I was about two years old, they being from ten to twelve years older. Mrs Schreiber had been amongst my mother's earliest friends as Mrs Harvey, and in days when my mother had opportunities of doing her seasonable services. And as there were three special advantages which adorned my mother, and which ranked in Mrs Schreiber's estimate as the highest which earth could show, viz.-1o, that she spoke and wrote English with singular elegance; 2°, that her manners were eminently polished; and 3o, that, even in that early stage of my mother's life, a certain tone of religiosity, and even of ascetic devotion, was already diffused as a luminous mist that served to exalt the colouring of her morality. To this extent Mrs Schreiber approved of reli of luxurious refinement) may come entirely to absorb them. But, in the infancy of every great city, the chief function for which she looks to her river is that of purification. Be thou my huge cloaca, says infant Babylon to the Euphrates, says infant Nineveh to the Tigris, says infant Rome to the Tiber. So far is that reproach from having any special application to London. Smoke is not unwholesome; in many circumstances it is salubrious, as a counter-agent to worse influences. Even sewage is chiefly insalubrious from its moisture, and not, in any degree yet demonstrated, from its odour. gion: but nothing of a sectarian cast could she have tolerated; nor had she anything of that nature to apprehend from my mother. Viewing my mother, therefore, as a pure model of an English matron, and feeling for her, besides, a deeper sentiment of friendship and affection than for anybody else on her visiting list, it was natural enough that she should come with her wards on an annual visit to "The Farm" (a pretty rustic dwelling occupied by my father in the neighbourhood of Manchester), and subsequently (when that arose) to Greenhay.* As my father always retained a town-house in Manchester (somewhere in Fountain Street) and, though a plain, unpretending man, was literary to the extent of having written a book-all things were so arranged, that there was no possibility of any commercial mementoes ever penetrating to the rural retreat of his family; such mementoes, I mean, as, by reviving painful recollections of that ancient Schreiber, who was or ought to be by this time extinct, would naturally be odious and distressing. Here, therefore, liberated from all jealousy of overlooking eyes, such as haunted persons of their expectations at Brighton, Weymouth, Sidmouth, or Bath, Miss Smith and Miss Watson used to surrender themselves "Greenhay: "-As this name might, under a false interpretation, seem absurd as including incongruous elements, I ought, in justification of my mother, who devised the name, to have mentioned that hay was meant for the old English word (derived from the old French word haie) indicating a rural enclosure. Conventionally, a hay or haie was understood to mean a country-house within a verdant ring-fence, narrower than a park: which word park, in Scotch use, means any enclosure whatever, though not twelve feet square; but, in English use (witness Captain Burt's wager about Culloden parks), means an enclosure measured by square miles, and usually accounted to want its appropriate furniture, unless tenanted by deer. By the way, it is a singular illustration of a fact illustrated in one way or other every hour, viz., of the imperfect knowledge which England possesses of England Ꭰ without restraint to their glad animal impulses of girlish gaiety, like the fawns of antelopes when suddenly transferred from tiger-haunted thickets to the serene preserves of secluded rajahs. On these visits it was that I, as a young pet whom they carried about like a doll from my second to my eighth or ninth year, learned to know them, so as to take a fraternal interest in the succeeding periods of their lives. Their fathers I certainly had not seen; nor had they, consciously. These two fathers must both have died in India, before my inquiries had begun to travel in that direction. But, as old acquaintances of my mother's, both had visited The Farm before I was born; and about General Smith, in particular, there had survived amongst the servants a remembrance which seemed to us (that is to them and to myself) ludicrously awful, though at that time the practice was common throughout our Indian possessions. He had a Hindoo servant with him; and this servant every night stretched himself along the "sill," or outer threshold of the door; so that he might have been trodden on by the General when retiring to rest; and from this it was but a moderate step in advance to say that he was trodden on. Upon which basis many other wonders —that, within these last eight or nine months, I saw in the "Illus, trated London News" an article assuming that the red deer was unknown in England. Whereas, if the writer had ever been at the English lakes during the hunting season, he might have seen it actually hunted over Martindale forest and its purlieus. Or, again, in Devonshire and Cornwall, over Dartmoor, &c., and, I believe, in many other regions, though naturally narrowing as civilisation widens. The writer is equally wrong in supposing the prevailing deer of our parks to be the roe deer, which are very little known. It is the fallow deer that chiefly people our parks. Red deer were also found at Blenheim, in Oxfordshire, when it was visited by Dr Johnson, as may be seen in "Boswell." |