of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci’s _Last Supper_, together with an appropriate view of York Minster.
III
I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing _’Way down upon the Suwanee River_, while the light played in “ditties no-tone” over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night’s sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop’s palace, or villa, the right way.
[Illustration: YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER]
So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars, and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive, two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my meals.
IV
We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat- woman’s cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and asked if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if we preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam sandwiches, there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat down in that pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake came out of the oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to a flow of delightful and instructive talk. For our refection we paid sixpence each, but for our edification we are still, and hope ever to be, in debt. Our hostess was of a most cheerful philosophy, such as could not be bought of most modern philosophers for money. The flour for our tea-cakes, she said, was a shilling fivepence a stone, “And not too much for growing and grinding it, and all.” Every week-day morning she rose at half-past four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode their bicycles, or, in the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage into York, where they worked in the railway shops. No, they did not belong to any union; the railway men did not seem to care for it; only a “benefit union.”
She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every hail from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not stupid or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one of the palace walls, “Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings every day.”
When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she presently followed when the steamer’s whistle sounded, and held her boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered the reflection, as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry business very shattering to the nerves, and she said,
“Yes, but it’s nothing to a murder case I was on, once.”
“Oh, what murder, what murder?” we palpitated back; and both of us forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman began again:
“A man shot a nurse–There! Throw that line, will you?”
But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled aboard without hearing any more of the murder.
This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one; as good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
* * * * *
A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day, as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure, I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit of knowledge–I said to myself, “Not mere amusement”–and set out for Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
I
I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway routes.
Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere. It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years earlier.
Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station, he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the station.
II
The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute’s glimpse of them. But how different was the behavior of that easy- going Majesty of England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious I had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it. All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at their face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without exception, his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think well of a king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think ill of him if you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly republican when there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all hands to be a man of great good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by himself, but by the system which he is no more a part of than the least of his subjects. If he will let a weary old man or a delicate woman stand indefinitely before him, he is no more to blame for that than for speaking English with a trace of German in his _th_ sounds; he did not invent his origins or his traditions. Personally, having had it out with life, he is as amiable and as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares, as far as he can, the great and little interests of his people. He has not, so far as noted, the gifts of some of his sisters, but he has much of his mother’s steadfast wisdom, and his father’s instinct for the right side in considerable questions; and he has his father’s prescience of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man’s divinity. The system which provides him for the people provides them the best administration in the world, always naturally in the hands of their superiors, social and political; but we could be several times rottener than we administratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as republicans, than those well-governed monarchists.
[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL–NORTHWEST VIEW]
Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it. But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit of ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in which thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar of Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans; now it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his own people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling which a little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which would be out of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of sense, and not of sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could have no affection for a nation whose existence denies him. He is very civil to Americans; it is part of a constitutional king’s business to be civil to every one; but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we need not be sentimental about him.
He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that day as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he loves beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the sidewise seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the simple turnout of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on the right, and he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he wore, while he lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually, almost absently, to the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the sidewalks. He was very, very stout, even after many seasons of Marienbad, and after the sufferings he had lately undergone, and he was quite like the pictures and effigies of him, down to those on the postage- stamps. He has a handsome face, still bearded in the midst of a mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white hairs prevalent on the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though hardly from the uneasiness of wearing a crown.
It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence that those German majesties were. The good- natured crowd did not strain itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did not stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed myself to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect in England, “Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr. I-don’t- know-what’s-his-name.” The others laughed at this ribald satire of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the races lest I should hear worse things of them.
III
The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did not find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks, although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters and peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as a solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in the familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to show us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand, and mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here. With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here. With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the end of the third race he had softened into something like confidence toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect of my being a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the trustfulness of the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch outside her dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy in a certain supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled suddenly together like the crushing of paper and the sense of something tragically mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of one of the horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if shot, and presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some _spoliarium_ the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf which its hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl, with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, “Isn’t it sad?”
[Illustration: FINCHALE PRIORY]
IV
She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must have been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed themselves from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space from our Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical name, which I would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be irreverent; but paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion. The King never showed himself there at all, though much craned round for and eagerly expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close, and stood and talked together; very tall people, very easily straight and well set up, very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have been really kind and good, or they may have looked so to please the King and keep his spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that these were courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very historical quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will not take from the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the courtiers wore derby hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I am not sure what the fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the ladies had on a dress with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves, and a vast black picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of authority.
The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it was raining or not, but we feared its absent- mindedness, and at the end of the third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day too far; this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it wore on, and we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise of a very refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had got out to the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very gate, that it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to walk back to town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the way by tram; but we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because we presently found ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was an alluring sight and smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of the refection, you could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a very little money. All up and down this happy avenue there went girls of several dozen sizes and ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper to the day and place, and never to be had on any other day in any other place.
We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see the Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing. Our belief was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller’s, where we stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, “Perhaps it was closed for the races.” So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on reflection it did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities where people and prince are of one texture in their pleasures and devotions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf.
V
At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim, therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where it almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist that turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color, which a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing, but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English society was complete, and that I might go home and write novels of English high life, and do something to redeem myself a little from the disgrace I had fallen into with my fellow-plebeians by always writing of common Americans, like themselves, and never _grandes dames_ or ideal persons, or people in the best society.
But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
VI
It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I did not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham is, or what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with depths of woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the September wind. As it takes flight for the heavens, to which its business is to invite the thought, it seems to carry the earth with it, for if you climb those noble heights, you find your feet still on the ground, in a most stately space of open level between the cathedral and its neighbor castle, which alone could be worthy of its high company.
The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so Gothic, and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures or memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it a sin to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What chiefly remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is, strangely enough, an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars, alternating with the clustered columns of the interior, and I do not suppose I ever shall: the spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures chiselled in their surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to trifle with their proud bulk.
But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like to live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small, that I saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort is realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is approached by a very stately court- yard, of like spacious effect with the cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century, with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be, perhaps, of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the luxury in which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments, dim and rich, and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they sleep and where they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness for the moment to be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit setting. There is also a fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black staircase of ancient oak, and a gallery with classic busts, and other pictures worthy of wonder, let alone a history from the time of William the Conqueror, who first fancied a castle where it stands, down to the present day. The memory of such successive guests as the Empress Matilda and Henry II. her son, King John, Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III., Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and James I., and Charles I., and Edward VII., abides in the guidebook, and may be summoned from its page to the chambers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intending impressions for literary use from a medieval environment in perfect repair.
VII
One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle, and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral. I went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful Weare. There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who I am sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and I asked him, with due entreaty for pardon, “What river was that.” He quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered gently, “The Weare.” “Ah, to be sure! The Weare,” I said, and thanked him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt myself so unworthy that I had not the face to prompt him further. He passed, and then I met a man much more of my own kind, if not probably so little informed. That rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he made occasion of this to say, “This is a cold wynd a-blowin’, Mister.” “It is, rather,” I assented. “I was think-in’,” he observed from an apparent generalization, “that I wished I was at home.” Then he suddenly added, “Help a poor man!” I was not wholly surprised at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. “Will that do?” He hesitated perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, “Yes, that’ll do,” and so passed on to satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL–ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER]
I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near a most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly- looking workman and asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near that would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently with his looks, “Ah doot,” and as he owned that it was a long way to town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen it, and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my third class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still on my hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, and will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for whoever will visit it. Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in my ample hour. It was as charming to weave my conjectures, about the two gentlemen with whom I had so barely spoken, as to have carried my acquaintance with them further, and I cannot see how it would have profited me to know more even of that fellow-man who, in the cold wynd a- blowing, had just been thinking he wished he was at home.
* * * * *
THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us from Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a loss. There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th that we went this divine journey. My companion was that companionable archaeologist who had guided my steps in search of the American origins in London, and who was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over the ground where they sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons. At divers places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the region that George William Curtis’ people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and Eliot’s, the Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo Emerson country, with its big market town of Bishop’s Stortford; and beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not unworthy of it, at the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I had fallen into in our railway carriage, with the cry: “There! That is where Captain John Smith was born.” “Where? Where?” I implored too late, looking round the compartment everywhere. “Back where those chickens were.”
I
That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was flat, and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that dun sky, with sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the imbrowning oaks and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the full, still streams scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
We did not reach Boston until six o’clock, when the day was already waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph’s Church stood dim against the sky. It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to the hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched the fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so, because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square of Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had dinner, specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from Bath, and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he developed a large valise, which I now think held samples. If he was a Dutch Jew, he was probably a Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the difficult reader have more, in the materials for his romance? Did we gather about the grate after we had done dinner, and each tell the story of his life, or at least the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to him?
[Illustration: THE “STUMP” OF ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY]
I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach it we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one of the most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of Faneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in America. At one side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling of Jean Ingelow, and at the point nearest the church is the statue of Herbert Ingram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bostonian, who founded the _Illustrated London News_ with the money he made by the invention and sale of Old Parr’s Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament from his native town, and he related it to America, after two centuries, by drowning in Lake Michigan. “R. N.,” the otherwise anonymous author of a very intelligent and agreeable _Handbook of Boston_, relates that in his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who, when he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion, was told by four of them in succession that they were promised “to their cousin Ingram,” and who thereupon declared that if he had known Ingram “was cousin to the whole town” he would, never have stood against him. Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of Lincolnshire were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, “R. N.” believes, to the isolation of Boston before the draining of its fens, and not to their conviction that there were no outsiders worthy to mate with them.
II
The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. “R. N.” will say nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
[Illustration: THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES]
The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a conjecture of the church’s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered, but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach, and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric softening some hard doctrine.
Apparently, however, Cotton’s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or even hard enough, for such “a factious people, who were imbued with the Puritan spirit,” as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar of St. Botolph’s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud’s ecclesiastical tyrannies began that he came to see “the Sin of Conformity” and to preach resistance. His conflict with the authorities went so far that exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope. Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, “if he had been guilty of drunkenness, uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon, but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety.”
The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received from Cotton’s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge overseas, and “the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.” Edward Everett, one of Cotton’s descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription in Latin, which “R. N.” has Englished in verse, and I am the more scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
That here John Cotton’s memory may survive Where for so long he labored when alive, In James’ reign and Charles’, ere it ceased– A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest; Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God He in a new world sought a new abode, To a new England, a new Boston came,
(That took, to honor him, that reverend name) Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there– Till death deprived it of its shepherd’s care– There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext, Whether with cares of this world or the next; Two centuries five lustra from the year That saw the exile leave his labors here, His family, his townsmen, with delight– (Whom to the task their English kin invite)– To the fair fane he served so well of yore, His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore, This chapel renovate, this tablet place, In this, the year of man’s recovered Grace, 1855.
III
I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night, but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous; the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even women to be pretty.
[Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING]
We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church, under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there seemed shipyards along the river’s course, but at one place there was a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life.
What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember. The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten o’clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.
The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o’clock I found the fruiterer’s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers, but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.
The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to, is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging bare- armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty, and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.
IV
From other interests in St. Botolph’s you somehow keep always, or finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the humor of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could not be in the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a claim upon the spectator’s wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far as I know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a loftier room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet from the ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was done when the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and has not the claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure as he might wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a crick in the neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a way, it is worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment of the tower is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston, Massachusetts, and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is groined.
When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself as usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the town, which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking them about in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller piece over a gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
[Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM]
There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it, but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops, but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which could not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people. Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one of those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes. Being out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found a contractor there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold of the Boston winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out of.
V
There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us to Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their “dread lord,” James the First, and were arrested for this crime, and brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town. Their dread lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at Hampton Court, and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the Pilgrim Fathers, get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at least none of King James’ thinking.
But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor Bradford in his _Historie of Plymouth Plantation_, where he says that “ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston in Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves, & made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and take them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they accordingly would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, & large expences, though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length & tooke them in, in the night. But when he had them & their goods abord, he betrayed them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers & other officers so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open boats, & ther rifled and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even the women furder then became modestie; and then caried them back into the towne, & made them a spectakle & wonder to the multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus first, by the catchpoule officer, rifled, & stripte of their money, books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they were comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and shewed them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, & sent to the places from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in prison, and bound over to the Assises.”
My excellent “R. N.” of the _Handbook of Boston_ is anxious to have his reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine, distinguish between these future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and scholars who later founded Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its name after that of the town they had dwelt in or often visited before they left the handsome keeping of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Richard Bellingham, Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even Bradford or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were of the humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston took from their vessel. “Pathetic but splendid figures,” my brave “R. N.” calls them, and he tells how, after a month’s jail, they were “sent home broken men, to endure the scoffs of their neighbors and the rigors of ecclesiastical discipline.”
VI
The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread and water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall kitchens immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with “R. N.” that they were put there “by a refinement of cruelty,” so that they might suffer the more in that vicinage. “The magistrates” who had “used them courteously and shewed them what favour they could,” would not have willed that; but perhaps “the Counsell-table” did; and it was certainly a hardship that the dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as any man may see at this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are any longer used; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed, and the cells where the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen jars. For no other or better reason, the large open spaces of the basement outside of them were scattered about with agricultural implements, ploughs, harrows, and the like. It was the belief of my companion, founded on I know not what fact, that the hall in which the Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber which we found occupied by a boys’ school. The door stood partly ajar, and we could see the master within walking up and down before some twenty boys, as if waiting for one of them to answer some question he had put them. Perhaps it was a question of local history, for none of them seemed able to answer it; presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know, and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place like Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and asking so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same or worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England, under the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same hardship did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of Boston, which we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
“The nexte spring after,” as Bradford continues the narrative of their sorrows, “ther was another attempte made by some of these & others, to get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they light of a Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their condition, hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of their owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe & Hull, where was a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the prefixed time, the women & children, with the goods, were sent to the place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a day before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very sicke, prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they lay on ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they were fast, & could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the shipe maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be getting the men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But after the first boat full was gott abord, & she was ready to goe for more, the Mr. espied a greate company, both horse & foote, with bills, & gunes, & other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’ and having the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, & away. But the poore men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their wives and children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to shifte them with, more then they had on their baks, & some scarce a peney aboute them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from their eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly part. The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to escape away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that best might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping & crying on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of them, & their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking with could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to another, and from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not what to doe with them; for to imprison so many women & innocent children for no other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them; and to send them home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the trueth was, they had no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or otherwise disposed of their houses & livings. To be shorte, after they had been thus turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to another, they were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes: for all were wearied & tired with them. Though in the mean time they (poore soules) indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie forste a way for them.”
VII
If there is any more touching incident in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was to visit the scene of it near “Grimsbe,” or Great Grimsby, as it is now called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such “poore people” as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders, and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional kind of cab,–looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable to orient itself aright,–available for the long drive to that “large comone a good way distante from any towne,” which we were to make, if we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims’ sufferings in their second attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage, therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west, and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel, but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van, lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.
The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant’s cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter’s coal, and he and his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two, I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us, they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over “the large comone,” and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly have been much wilder, and there was the “creeke hardby wher they lay,” the hapless women and children, in their boat “at lowwater,” while the evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail of a steamer’s smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that “great company, both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons,” coming to harry those poor people, “swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’ and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,” leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.
VIII
On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She had such a very charming hat on.
The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one’s pride, if one has believed that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only “_one_ of the principal fishing ports” of the United Kingdom. What can one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a single night.
[Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY]
After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines, in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard, if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said, but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions. However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for brothers, and let them in, probably.
* * * * *
ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth, but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways, when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro, Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render, are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men, defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.
I
Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their h’s when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines. They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the grandsire of “the great Elizabeth,” not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the English cabinet.
The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly refutive of that Englishman’s position. I can only urge further the noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which rather weary one in England. They said “Yes,” and “No,” but as gently as if they had always added “Sir.” If I have it on my conscience to except from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
II
In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the good looks of either the men or women was of the American average. I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably; and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings, but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season, they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene, compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to make our stay difficult, and our going easy.
[Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH]
Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other end was the Amusement Pier, with the co- educational college, which is part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh, often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice. In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined having the English King’s son born in one of them did they bring the Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among them did.
III
All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately band of tall men in evening dress and top- hats, with musical instruments in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she gave a glad cry: “Oh, they’re the Neegurs! They’re the white Neegurs!” and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American Sufferance.
But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his writings in the _Welsh Gazette_, treating our proposed triumph in his distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing; but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and finally took leave of us without rancor.
The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer’s boy to whom our friend presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me understand what an _englyn_ was. I am able now to explain that it is a polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers, or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he said at last, “Let us go into this grocery. There’s a boy here who will _show_ you what an englyn is,” and after I was introduced the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston grocer’s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten, about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are honored according to their poetic worth.
IV
After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came, one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman’s place not far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western Welsh coast than on other shores of the “rainy isles,” but not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as those did.
I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
V
There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn, backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began. Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King Arthur’s knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.
[Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS]
After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans’ hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to all sufferers ever since it came into her family’s keeping. That they might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.
I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming seventeenth- century house, which would be old for this country, but which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do, in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. “A home of ancient peace,” it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through which the Chautauquans followed from it.
VI
At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was the difference of the people from the people over the English border in their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful, they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.
The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King’s Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too literally.
Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture- postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats like the men’s. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.
VII
All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the payment of such part of the Dissenters’ taxes as would go to the support of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came of it I do not know.
Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach. Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.
The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
VIII
I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle, and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell’s lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to Llandudno.
* * * * *
LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
Froissart’s saying, if it was Froissart’s, that the English amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English call watering- places. Of these I should like to take as a type the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
I
The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their double _l_ and their French _u_, Thlandidno. According to another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George Borrow’s, who says that the Welsh _ll_ is the same as the Spanish _ll_, but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it _lhl_ you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix _Llan_ speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint’s sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally with all his brothers.
But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the sight of his country’s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which they have religiously adhered.
[Illustration: LLANDUDNO–THE CITY AND HARBOR]
Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second- best we decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly Church-of- England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.
II
Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing- room floor was frankly set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was about.
Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: “At least _we_ think so,” but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before, my actual Cymric youth said, “Then he asked you too little,” which seemed a _non sequitur_ but was really an unexpected stroke of logic.
It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno. They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so that his _Wild Wales_ is a desert of blighted literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the composer.
III
One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go to hear it, not being good for a week’s music without intermission. At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers, which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots _are_ amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen’s apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators’ chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
[Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME’S NECK]
On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband’s. It was indeed a time and place that invited to