in vessels of considerable burden. But as the proportions of naval architecture enlarged, these puny instruments were thrown aside; although the importance and necessity of some such auxiliary in the ordinary exigencies of marine life have always been felt and it has long been earnestly sought.
From the first successful application of steam to navigation–by Fulton, in 1803–it was supposed to be the simplest thing in the world to provide ships with an auxiliary motor; but the result has shown the fallacy of this conception.
For more than twenty years steam-navigation has advanced with giant strides, overstepping several times the limits which science had assigned it; but the paddle-wheel, by which the agency of steam has been applied, forms so bad an alliance with canvas, and supplies so indifferently the requirements of a man-of-war, that it has been impossible by this intermediary to render steam the efficient coadjutor of sails; and it is for this reason that steam so speedily took rank as a primary motor upon the ocean; for, in all the successful marine applications of steam by means of the paddle, steam is the dominant power, and sails the accessory, or almost superfluous auxiliary. It is the screw alone, in some of its modifications, which offers the means of a successful and economical adaptation of steam to ships of war or of commerce; for it is susceptible of a more complete protection than, the paddle, and of an easy and advantageous combination with canvas.
The screw-propeller, in fact, has assumed so important a part in all naval enterprise, that it may not be without interest to trace briefly its rise and progress to the consideration it now commands, and to review, in general terms, the various experiments by which the screw-frigate has been brought to its present high state of efficiency, excelling, for purposes of war, all other kinds of vessels.
As early as 1804, John Stevens, of Hoboken, New Jersey, engaged in experiments to devise some means of driving a vessel through the water by applying the motive power at the stern, and with a screw-propeller and a defective boiler attained for short distances a speed of seven knots; and it is surprising, that, with the genius and determination so characteristic of his race, he should have abandoned the path on which he appears to have so fairly entered.
Within the last half-century numerous attempts of a similar character have been made in Europe and America; but although many of the contrivances for this purpose were exceedingly ingenious, and the success of some of the experiments sufficient, one would suppose, to excite the interest of the public and encourage perseverance in the undertaking, yet in no instance were they followed by any practical and useful results until the year 1836, when both Captain Ericsson and Mr. F. P. Smith so fully demonstrated the speed and safety with which vessels could be moved by the screw-propeller, as to convince every intelligent and unprejudiced mind of the importance of their inventions, and immediately to attract the attention of the principal naval powers of the world.
Captain Ericsson is a native of Sweden, but for some years previous to 1836 he had resided in England, where he had become known as an engineer and mechanician of distinguished ability.
In July, 1836, he took out a patent in England for his method of propelling vessels; and during that year the results of his experiments with a small boat were so satisfactory, that in the following year he built a vessel forty-five feet long, with eight feet beam, and drawing three feet of water, called the Francis B. Ogden, in compliment to the gentleman then consul of the United States at Liverpool, who was the first person to appreciate the merits of his invention, and to encourage him in his efforts to perfect it. This vessel was tried upon the Thames in April, 1837, and succeeded admirably. She made ten knots an hour, and towed the American ship Toronto at the rate of four and a half knots an hour; and in the following summer, Sir Charles Adam, one of the Lords of the Admiralty, Sir William Symonds, the Surveyor of the Navy, and several other scientific gentlemen and officers of rank, were towed by her in the Admiralty barge at the speed of ten miles an hour.
Notwithstanding this demonstration of the powers of his vessel, Captain Ericsson did not succeed in exciting the interest of any of the persons who witnessed the performance; and it seems almost incredible that no one of them had the intelligence to perceive or the magnanimity to admit the importance of his invention. But, fortunately for Ericsson and the reputation of our country, he soon after met with Captain Stockton, of the United States navy, who at once took the deepest interest in his plans. The result of one experiment with Ericsson’s steamer was sufficient to convince a man of Stockton’s sagacity of the immense advantages which the new motor might confer upon the commerce and upon the navy of his country, and forthwith he ordered an iron steamer to be built and fitted with Ericsson’s propeller. This vessel was named the Stockton, and was launched in July, 1838, and, after being thoroughly tested and her success demonstrated, she was sent under sail to the United States in April of the next year, and was soon after followed by Captain Ericsson; when, in consequence of the representations of Captain Stockton, the government ordered the Princeton to be built under Ericsson’s superintendence, and to be fitted with his propeller.
The Princeton, of 673 tons, was launched in April, 1842, and her propeller, of six blades, of thirty-five feet pitch, and of fourteen feet diameter, was driven by a semi-cylinder engine of two hundred and fifty horse-power, and all her machinery placed _below_ the water-line. Her smoke-stack was so arranged that the upper parts could be let into the lower, so as not to be visible above the rail; and as the anthracite coal which she used evolved no smoke, she could not, at a short distance, be distinguished from a sailing-ship.
Her best speed under steam alone, _at sea_, was 8.6, and under sail alone, 10.1 knots; her mean performance under steam and sail, 8.226; and considering the imperfect form of boiler employed, and the small amount of fuel consumed, it may be doubted if this has since been much excelled. She worked and steered well under canvas or steam alone, or under both combined; was dry and weatherly, but pitched heavily, and was rather deficient in stability.
[Footnote: For a particular account of the Princeton, by B. F. Isherwood, U. S. N., see _Journal of the Franklin Institute_ for June, 1853. Taking everything into consideration, the Princeton was a most successful experiment, and, in her day, the most efficient man-of-war of her class. By her construction the government of the United States had placed itself far in advance of all the world in the path of naval improvement, and it is deeply to be regretted that it did not avail itself of the advantage thus gained; that it did not immediately order the construction of other vessels, in which successively the few defects of the Princeton might have been corrected; that it did not persist in that path of improvement into which it had fortunately been directed, instead of suffering our great naval rivals to outstrip us in the race, and compel us at last to resort to them for instruction in that science the very rudiments of which they had learned from us.]
The success of the Princeton was followed by the general adoption in America of the screw-propeller. When Ericsson left England, he confided his interests to Count Rosen, who, in 1843, placed an Ericsson propeller in the French frigate Pomone, and soon afterwards the British Admiralty determined to place it in the Amphion. Not only was the performance of these vessels highly satisfactory, but they were the first ships in the navies of Europe in which the great desideratum was secured of placing the machinery below the load-line. Ericsson’s propeller having been the first introduced into France, it was generally adopted; but afterwards, in consequence of the accounts of Smith’s screw received from England, it underwent various modifications.
Such was the result of Ericsson’s labors; it now remains to relate the success of Smith. The efforts of either had been sufficient to have secured to navigation the inestimable advantages of screw-propulsion, but their rivalry probably hastened the solution of the problem.
In May, 1836, Mr. F. P. Smith, a farmer of Hendon, in England, took out a patent for his screw-propeller, and exhibited some experiments with it attached to a model boat, and in the following autumn built a boat of six tons’ burden, of ten horse-power, and fitted with a wooden screw. This vessel was kept running upon the Thames for nearly a year, and her performance was so satisfactory, that Mr. Smith determined to try her qualities at sea; and in the course of the year 1837, he visited in her several ports on the coast of England, and proved that she worked well in strong winds and rough water.
These trials attracted much attention, and at last awakened the interest of the Admiralty, who requested Mr. Smith to try his propeller on a larger vessel, and the Archimedes, of ninety horse-power and 237 tons, built for this purpose, was launched in October, 1838, and made her experimental trip in 1839. It was thought that her performance would be satisfactory, if she could make four or five knots an hour; but she made nearly ten! In May, 1839, she went from Gravesend to Portsmouth, a distance of one hundred and ninety miles, and made the run in twenty hours.
In April, 1840, Captain Chappel, R. N., and Mr. Lloyd, Chief Engineer of Woolwich Dockyard, were appointed by the Admiralty to try a series of experiments with her at Dover. The numerous trials made under the superintendence of these officers fully proved the efficiency of the new propeller, and their report was entirely favorable.
The Archimedes next circumnavigated Great Britain under command of Captain Chappel, visiting all the principal ports: she afterwards went to Oporto, Antwerp, and other places, and everywhere excited the admiration of engineers and seamen.
Up to this period, the British engineers were nearly unanimous in the opinion that the use of the screw involved a great loss of power, and they had concluded that it could not be adopted; but it was impossible any longer to resist the impressions made on the public by the demonstration which had been given both by Smith and Ericsson; and although the engineers were still unwilling to admit the screw to a comparison with the paddle, it was evident that their first conclusions regarding it were erroneous, and thereafter it was viewed by them with less disdain and spoken of more hopefully. One of the great objections by engineers to the use of the screw was their inability, at the time of its introduction, to construct properly a screw engine,–that is to say, a direct-acting horizontal engine, working at a speed of from sixty to one hundred revolutions per minute,–all their experience having been in paddle-wheel engines, working from ten to fifteen revolutions per minute. The peculiar mechanical details required in the screw engine, the necessity for accurate counterbalancing, etc., were then unknown, and had to be learned from a long succession of expensive failures. In England, the first machines applied to the screw were paddle-wheel engines, working it by gearing; there were consequently lost all the advantages of the reduced cost, bulk, and weight of the screw engine proper, including, for war purposes, the important feature of its being placed below the water-line. At first, the screw had not only to contend with physical difficulties, but to struggle against nearly universal prejudice; many inventors had succumbed to these obstacles, and therefore too much applause cannot be bestowed upon those who, unsustained by public sympathy, and in defiance of a prevailing skepticism, maintained their faith and courage unshaken, and gallantly persisted in their efforts, until crowned with a world-wide success.
Ericsson, before interesting himself with the screw, was, as has been seen, an engineer and mechanician of distinguished ability; whereas Smith, in commencing his new vocation, had all to acquire but his first conception. Ericsson could rely upon the fertility of his own genius, was his own draughtsman, and designed his own engines, accommodating them to the new propeller by dispensing with gearing, and adapting them to a speed of from thirty to forty revolutions,–a great and bold advance for an initiative step. Smith, on the contrary, not being an engineer, had to intrust the execution of his plans to others, whose knowledge of construction was in the routine of paddle-wheel engines; and this accounts for the fact, that all the earliest British screw-steamers were driven by gearing. This want of mechanical resources on the part of Smith added to the difficulties of his career; but his resolution and perseverance rose superior to all obstacles, and carried him to the goal in triumph. Briefly, then, these were the respective merits of Smith and Ericsson, in the introduction of screw-propulsion; and it is much to their honor, that, throughout their career, no narrow-spirited jealousies dimmed the lustre of a noble rivalry.
Such was the origin of the new motor,–the mighty engine by which armadas are marshalled in battle-array, the burdens of commerce borne to distant marts, the impatient emigrant transferred to the promised land, and by which the breathings of affection, the pangs of distress, and the sighs of love are wafted to far-off continents.
In consequence of the success of the Archimedes, the Admiralty ordered the Rattler to be fitted with a screw, and it was no small satisfaction to find that her double-cylinder engines could be easily adapted to the new propeller. She is of 888 tons, and two hundred horse-power, and was launched in the spring of 1843, being the first screw-vessel in the British navy.
In the course of the two succeeding years, she was tried with a great many different screws, and numerous experiments were made to discover the length, diameter, pitch, and number of blades of the screw, most effective in all the various conditions of wind and sea. A screw of two blades, each equal to one-sixth part of a convolution, and of a uniform pitch, was, on the whole, found to be the most efficient, and this is the screw now adopted in most of the ships of all classes in the British navy.[1]
A propeller of very different construction, which had given great results in a ship of the Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company, and was afterwards exhibited in the docks at Southampton, here claims a passing notice. This propeller is so constructed as to enable the engineer to regulate the speed of the piston; for _the pitch of the screw can be increased or diminished at pleasure_. Thus, with a fair wind, by increasing the pitch, without increasing the revolutions, the full power of the engine is effectually exerted in driving the ship, instead of consuming fuel in driving the engine to no purpose; and with a headwind, by diminishing the pitch, the engines are made to do their utmost duty; and when the ship is under canvas only, the blades of the propeller may be placed in line with the stern-post, and thus offer little resistance. Another advantage claimed for this propeller (known as Griffith’s) is, that, in the event of breaking a blade, it may be readily replaced by “tipping the ship”; which method merits careful consideration by engineers, as does especially every new propeller which promises a more perfect alliance with canvas.
To resume the narrative,–the speed of the Rattler was afterwards tested by a trial with the Alecto, a paddle-wheel steamer of equal power, built from the same moulds; and the result was so favorable, that the Admiralty ordered the construction or conversion of _twenty-three_ vessels as screw-steamers, and thus was laid the foundation of the present formidable steam-navy of England.
The superiority which has been asserted for the Princeton was established during the Mexican War by her performance before Vera Cruz as a blockading ship of unprecedented efficiency, which, having been displayed under the admiring observation of a British squadron, tended more than any other single event to confirm the Admiralty in the conclusions to be drawn from the experiments just related, and to decide them in the adoption of the screw as the best auxiliary of sail, the best mechanical motor upon the ocean. Thus did England, in embracing at once the practical demonstration of the Princeton, display that forecast by which she won her ascendency at sea, and the vigilance with which she maintains it; whilst our own government awaited, in unbecoming hesitation, the results which England’s more extended trials with the screw might develop.
This cautious policy, rather than the bold and liberal course which the maritime genius of the country demands, condemned us for long years to inaction, until, at length, the absolute necessity for the renewal of a portion of our naval force produced the “Minnesota” class of frigates. Although they developed little that was absolutely new, they are very far from being imitations; but in model, capacity, equipment, and above all in their armament, they have challenged admiration throughout the world, and called from a distinguished British admiral in command the significant declaration, that, until he had seen them, he had never realized his ideal of a perfect man-of-war.
A leading idea in the conception of these ships was to reduce the number of gun-decks from two and three to a single deck, and, consequently, the space in which shells could be lodged. This is a consideration which must, it is believed, sooner or later govern in naval construction; although France and England, long accustomed to measure the power of ships by the number of gun-decks, may be more slow in following our lead in this respect than in imitating the increased calibre of our ordnance.
The new classes of steamers preparing for sea, of which the Hartford and Iroquois are types, promise to be most efficient ships, and to reflect much credit upon our naval authorities for their bold, yet judicious departure from traditions which had long hampered the administration of this important branch of the public service. Although the reflection is seldom made, it is nevertheless true, that much of the reputation enjoyed and of the influence exercised by the United States is due to the efficiency of her navy; and if these are to remain undiminished, then it is of the utmost consequence that the national ships should always represent the highest advancement of nautico-military science.
[Footnote 1: A series of experiments with the screw were made on board the Dwarf in 1845, and on board the Minx in 1847 and 1848, but the results did not materially differ from those previously obtained. In the Rattler, Dwarf, and Minx twenty-nine different propellers were tried.]
The efficiency of the screw having been demonstrated, it was seen that the next requirement for a war-steamer was to place her machinery below the waterline; and hence arose a demand for an entirely new description of engines, which it was clear would make a great change in all the labors of the engineer and machinist. Such change it was evident would greatly enhance the risk of failure, and therefore it was determined by the Admiralty to insure success in this very difficult task by enlisting all the best talent of the country. Accordingly, for the twenty-three ships an equal number of screw engines were ordered; and as with the constructors, so with the engineers, each was required to comply with certain conditions, yet each was permitted to put forth his own individuality, and each has illustrated his views of what was required by a distinct plan of engine.
The wise and liberal action of the British Admiralty, which faltered at no expense, and made trial of every improvement in machinery that gave assurance of good performance and promised in any way to increase the efficiency of the fleet, produced no less than fourteen distinct varieties of the screw engine. Among them all, Penn’s horizontal trunk-engine appears to be the favorite, and had performed so well in the Encounter of fourteen guns, the Arrogant of forty-six, the Imperieuse of fifty, and the Agamemnon of ninety, that two years ago it had been placed, in about equal proportions of two hundred, four hundred, six hundred, and eight hundred horse-power, on board of forty ships and many smaller vessels of the British navy; it had fulfilled all the promises made for it, without in any instance requiring repairs. These engines comply with all the conditions reasonably demanded in the machinery of a man-of-war; they lie very low, and the fewness and accessibility of their parts leave scarcely anything to be desired;–a lighter, more compact, or more simple combination has yet to be conceived.[1]
In all the ships above referred to the connection of the engines is direct, and many of them are driven at rates varying from fifty to seventy-five revolutions. This point is dwelt upon because it is observed that many engineers find difficulty in freeing themselves from early impressions made by long-stroke engines, express apprehensions at fifty and sixty revolutions, and stand ready to obviate the difficulty by gearing,–which it is hoped may not henceforth be adopted in our national ships. Geared engines are much heavier than those of direct connection, and occupy more space,–a great consideration in ships where room for fuel is in such demand, besides making it more difficult to place them below the waterline,–a consideration which in men-of-war should be regarded of paramount importance, as the engines of a war-steamer should be as secure from shot as her magazine. Experience has shown that the apprehensions entertained from the quick stroke of direct engines were without foundation; and that, in auxiliary ships, with a properly modelled propeller, there will be no necessity for a very high speed of piston.
The form of engine generally adopted with great success in the later screw-ships.
[Footnote 1: “Its large amount of friction” is an objection often speciously urged against the trunk-engine, although the friction diagram shows it to be actually less in this than in most other engines.] of the United States navy is the “horizontal direct action,” with the connecting-rod returning from a cross-head towards the cylinder; these engines make from sixty to eighty revolutions per minute. The steam-valve is a packed slide with but little lap, and the expansion-valve is an adjustable slide working on the back of the steam-valve. The boilers are of the vertical water-tube type, with the tubes above the furnaces, and are supplied with fresh water by tubular surface-condensers, which, together with the air-pumps, are placed opposite the cylinders.
While the vessels ordered by the Admiralty were on the stocks, it was suggested by Mr. Lloyd that the model of their after-bodies was not that most favorable to speed,–that they were too “full,” and that a “finer run” would be preferable. To settle this question, the Dwarf, a vessel of fine run, was taken into dock, and her after-body filled out by three separate layers of planking, so as to give it the form and proportions of the vessels then building. These layers of planking could be removed in succession, and the effects of a fuller or finer run upon the speed of the vessel easily ascertained. A trial was then made, and the result proved the correctness of Mr. Lloyd’s opinion; the removal of the different layers of planking increasing the speed from 3.75 to 5.75, to 9, and finally to 11 knots. A trial between the Rifleman and the Sharpshooter, vessels of four hundred and eighty tons and two hundred horse-power, and the Minx and Teaser, of three hundred tons and one hundred horse-power, gave similar results,–the speed in each trial being twenty-four per cent. in favor of the finer run.
Although great efficiency and economy had now been attained, there was still an important defect to be remedied, namely, the impediment to speed and to evolution under sail presented by the dragging propeller; which was accomplished by the invention of the “trunk” or “well,” into which the propeller can be raised at pleasure; and there is no longer anything to prevent the construction of a screw-frigate which shall be fit to accompany, under canvas only, a fleet of fast sailers, with the assurance that she may arrive at the point of destination in company with her consorts, having in reserve all her steam-power.
The mechanism by which the emersion of the screw is effected is as follows:–There are two stern-posts; between these, and connecting them with each other and with the keel, is a massive metallic frame, in which rests another frame, or _chassis_, in which the screw is suspended; near the water-line, the deck and wales are extended to the after stern-post, and through an opening or trunk in this overhanging stern the frame suspending the screw is raised by worms, working in a rack secured to the frame, and operated from the deck, as shown in the accompanying drawing,–or by a tackle, as is now most common. In the British ship Agamemnon, of ninety guns, the propeller is raised by a hydrostatic pump,–a neat arrangement, but liable to get out of order. When it is desirable to raise the propeller, the blades are first placed in a vertical position, and the operation of lifting is performed in a few minutes.
The relative advantages of the propeller fitted to lift, and that which is permanently fixed, have long been the subject of much discussion.
For merchant steamers, having an established route to perform, on which the aid of steam is in constant demand, it is generally conceded that the position of the screw should be permanent. The construction of the ship is then less costly, while greater strength is preserved; and as these vessels are out of port but for short intervals, should repairs be needed, they have access to the docks. But for men-of-war the case is widely different. Having frequently to keep the sea for long periods, much under canvas, and often far distant from a dock-yard, they should be provided with the means of lifting the screw to repair or to clear it, or to be relieved from the impediment it offers to sailing and to evolution, and also from the injurious “shake” occasioned by a dragging propeller.
[Illustration: MODE OF LIFTING SCREW.]
On the other hand, the construction of a trunk or well impairs the solidity of the stern, renders it much more vulnerable, and weakens its defences, while it opposes to speed the very considerable resistance of the after stern-post.[*] Nevertheless, no modern ship of the British navy is without the means of raising her propeller, and the best opinion of commanders and engineers of that service, of longest experience in screw-ships, goes to establish the conviction, that, for men-of-war, the advantages of being able to lift the propeller far more than outweigh the objections urged against lifting. In this connection we mention the fact, that all screw-ships “by the wind” have a strong tendency to gripe. Would not this be obviated by having a gate or slide to fill out the dead-wood when the screw is lifted?
[Footnote *: Might not a metallic stern-post, combining strength, lightness, and little resistance, be introduced?]
The best illustration of the effects of a dragging propeller was afforded on the departure of a Russian squadron from Cronstadt, bound to the Amoor, in 1857-’58, consisting of three sloops of war bark-rigged, and three three-masted schooners, under the flag of Commodore Kouznetsoff. The vessels of each class were built from the same moulds, and at the time of the experiment were of the same draft and displacement. On clearing the land, signal was made to lift screws and make sail. Soon after, all the squadron reported the execution of the order, except the Voyerada sloop, which had the misfortune to break a key in the couplings, and therefore could not lift her screw. Every effort was tried to get out the key, and meanwhile a very instructive example was presented to the squadron of the effect of a dragging propeller on the speed of the vessel. The circumstances were as follows:–The wind, a gentle breeze, right aft; the Voyerada carrying all sail but the main course; the other two sloops holding way with her with their topsails on the cap, and the schooners with their peaks dropped. Under these conditions, the Voyerada, having her screw-blades fixed horizontally, could scarcely keep her position, running two and a half and three knots. The Voyerada next succeeded in getting her screw vertical, when, without any change in the wind, the speed increased to four and a half knots. The other sloops then mastheaded their topsails, and the schooners peaked their gaffs. At length the Voyerada succeeded in lifting her screw, when immediately all the sloops under the same canvas continued their course, making six to six and a half knots. A better example of the obstruction offered by a dragging propeller could not have been afforded.[1]
The “shake,” to which reference has been made, is the tremulous or vibratory motion communicated to the after-body of the ship, and particularly to the stern, by the revolution of the propeller, often opening the seams, and in old ships sometimes starting the butts and causing dangerous leaks. This movement arises from two causes,–one inherent in the screw, the other due to its position in the deadwood. The first cause is the difference in the propelling efficiency of the upper and lower blades when in any other position than horizontal. The centre of pressure of the lower blade, being at a greater depth below the surface than the centre of pressure of the upper blade, acts upon a medium of greater resistance to displacement, and the differential of the pressures of the two blades produces inevitably a vibratory motion in the stern of the vessel. This effect is greatly increased when the clearance given to the screw in the dead-wood is too small; for the reduction of the hydrostatic pressure at the stern-post, and the increase of it at the rudder-post, on each passage of the blades, must be followed by concussion. Therefore, if the “well,” or distance between the posts, be made sufficiently long in proportion to the screw, the “shake” due to the latter cause can be almost entirely obviated.
In 1851, the British Admiralty selected three auxiliary screw-ships, of different classes and qualities, for an experimental cruise, namely:–
[Footnote 1: _Russian Nautical Magazine_, No. XLI., December, 1857.]
——————————————————————— | Guns. | Horse | Screw. | Speed. | Day’s | Sail | | Power. | | | Fuel. | Equipment ——————————————————————— The | | | 2 | 9 | 8 |
Arrogant | 46 | 360 | blades | knots | days | Ship full rig ——————————————————————— The | | | 2 | 11 | 11 |
Dauntless | 24 | 580 | blades | knots | days | Ship light rig ——————————————————————— The | | | 2 | 10-1/2 | 6 | Encounter | 14 | 360 | blades | knots | days | Barque ———————————————————————
They were ordered to pass round the Azores, each ship holding her course, and using sail or steam, or both, as was deemed most advantageous. An officer was sent on board each ship to keep a record of her performance, and to note the time when and the position where, the coal being entirely consumed, the contest ended. In this trial, the Arrogant was found superior to the Dauntless, and both of them far excelled the Encounter; indeed, no very different result was expected, the object of the trial being to ascertain their relative as well as positive value. These ships afterwards formed a part of the experimental squadron stationed at Lisbon in the same year, which was composed of the finest ships in the British navy.
It was believed by many officers, that a fast-sailing frigate, in a reefed-topsail breeze, would be able to get away from any screw-ship; but in a trial that took place between the Arethusa and the Encounter, and the Phaeton and Arrogant, under circumstances the most favorable to the sail-ships, it was found that the screw-ships, using both steam and sail, had decidedly the superiority,–and that in fresh gales, with one, two, or three reefs in the topsails, either “by the wind,” or “going free,” the Phaeton and the Arethusa, the fastest sail-frigates in the navy, were always beaten by the Arrogant. This result operated powerfully in removing the repugnance to steam existing among all classes of seamen; and the vast superiority of well-organized screw-ships for the purposes of war is now so apparent, as to render them the most important and indispensable part of every navy.
While the English were engaged in the trials here related, their rivals on the opposite coast were not indifferent spectators. The French were nearly as soon in the field of modern screw experiment as their neighbors; and did the limits of this paper permit, it would be instructive, as well as interesting, to trace the ingenious and persevering steps by which they also approached the solution of that difficult problem, the construction of a screw-man-of-war.
The first result of their efforts, La Pomone, screw-frigate, was shown to the world in 1844, and after careful inspection, (in 1853,) it is affirmed, such was the perfection of her general organization, that she has hardly been excelled by any of her younger sisters.
The most complete course of experiments ever made, perhaps, with the new motor, was that carried out by MM. Bourgois and Moll, of the French navy, in 1847 and ’48, which they verified by a second series in 1849. These experiments were instituted to ascertain the relative efficiency of all varieties of the screw-propeller, upon vessels of different models and dimensions, and under all the varying conditions of wind and sea, in order to determine the propeller best adapted to each particular description of ship.[*]
Necessarily brief as is the notice of Gallic ingenuity and skill, the acknowledgment must be made, that, for the invention of the trunk or well, with its attendant advantages, navigation is indebted to Commander Labrousse, of the French navy; and for a novel arrangement of the screw- propeller, which has not attracted all the notice it deserves, obligations are due to M. Allix, a distinguished engineer of that service; and the propeller more recently introduced by M. Mangin, of the same corps, if it performs all that is claimed for it, namely, that it does away with the “shake,” will be of great value.
[Footnote *: For a most interesting and instructive memoir upon these experiments, the reader is referred to that admirable work, by Captain E. Paris, of the French navy, _L’Helice Propulsive_.]
In concluding this recognition of the contributions by France to screw-propulsion, it is desired to submit a few general observations on the French navy; for, although upon every sea the tri-color waves over ships proudly comparing with those under any other flag, it is nevertheless too commonly believed that the docks of France are crowded and her navy-list swollen with hulks which are but the mouldering mementos of the vast armaments hastily created during the Consulate and the Empire; an illusion most hazardous to our interests abroad and our security at home.
At the period of _the coup d’etat_ of 1851, a Committee of Inquiry, composed of the most experienced and intelligent officers and distinguished legislators, had visited all departments of the navy, and made the most careful investigations into every branch of the service. Upon the evidence thus obtained, a report was submitted, providing for the improvement of the condition of the officers and seamen, and the increase, renewal, and remodelling of the _materiel_,–in fine, for the correction of every abuse, the remedy of every evil, and the development of all good existing in the navy. This report, stamped on every page with patriotism and intelligence, commanded, even in the midst of revolution, the support of all parties, the adhesion of every faction; and has since, through all changes in the Ministry of the Marine, formed the basis of the action of that department.
Under these auspices, France has in the last seven years organized the means of promptly putting to sea a numerous fleet, composed of the most modern and most powerful steamers, manned by efficient crews, commanded by skilful officers; and now worthily maintains a position as a naval power second only to that of Great Britain. At this moment, whilst the British fleet includes but thirty-six screw line-of-battle ships, mounting 3,400 guns, and propelled by 19,759 horse-power, that of France may boast of forty such ships, mounting 3,700 guns, propelled by 27,500 horse-power; and while England has but thirty-eight screw-frigates, France has forty-two.
In thus briefly summing up the forces of our ocean rivals, we cannot avoid making some reflections suggested by the unpreparedness of this country to meet any sudden burst of hostility. This not only involves the risk of national humiliation, but paralyzes our diplomacy; since it deprives us of that influence among the nations, which otherwise–from the breadth of our territory, the value of our products, the activity of our industry, the importance of our commerce, and the extent of our maritime resources–we of right should hold.
No country is more interested than the United States in the maintenance of peace; yet, even on the principle of economy, we may argue in favor of a degree of preparation for war; for that calamity may best be averted by taking from foreign powers the temptation to interfere with us: all history showing that the justice and friendship of military states are but slender guaranties for the peace of a nation unprepared for attack.
It is vain to talk of husbanding financial resources for war, without other preparation. When once embarked in hostilities, and in a position to maintain our ground, large finances, judiciously used, will ultimately command success; but no accumulation of funds can provide a timely remedy for that weakness which cannot resist the first blow.
The national safety should no longer be left to chance, but be established on a basis of certainty. A navy cannot be manufactured nor a fortress built to meet an emergency, but should be kept ready-made.
In considering the auxiliary screw-frigate under the views already offered, and in determining the canvas with which she should be supplied, it will be well to refer, as the best guide, to the fastest sail-ships,–the class which presents the greatest similarity in form to that demanded in screw-ships. In these ships the great length of deck offers every facility for the most advantageous spread of canvas; consequently the centre of effort may he kept low, and the requisite power and stability combined.
Intimately connected with her sailing-power is another branch of the equipment of a screw-ship, which requires the most earnest, patient, and intelligent consideration. Prepared to endure all the wear and tear of a sail-ship, she should at the same time be ready for transmutation into a steam-ship; namely, when, for any urgent service, her best powers of steaming are required, she should be able to divest herself speedily of yards and top-masts, and, the special service completed, resume all her perfection as a sail-ship.
It would be out of place here to enter into details of equipment. In naval affairs nothing is improvised, and a satisfactory conclusion upon these points can be arrived at only through long experiment, and perhaps frequent disappointment. Yet it is not doubted that the same ship may exhibit a handy and efficient rig, develop a high velocity canvas, and, without great power, a sufficient speed under steam.
In our navy, away from our own coast, sail must of necessity be the rule, and steam the reserve or special power; and without abandonment of our anti-colonial policy–with the depots of our rivals upon every sea, yet not a ton of coal upon which we can rely–we should not dare to send abroad a single ship which, whenever she gets up her anchor, must needs also get up her steam.
Fortunately, in the creation of a steam-fleet, the United States will not have to encounter tedious and costly experiments, nor to incur the risk of failure.[1] The best form of hull, model of propeller, and plan of engine are already so well established, that it is not easy to fall into error; that which is most to be guarded against is the popular demand, the prevailing mania for high speed,–for which single advantage there is such a proneness to sacrifice every other warlike quality. That measure of speed or power which will enable a ship to stem the currents of rivers, to enter or leave a port in the face of a moderate gale, or to meet the dangers of a lee-shore, should, it is conceived by many, be sufficient; and for these exigencies a ship, which, with four months supplies on board, can in calm weather and smooth water make nine to ten knots under steam, has ample power. This moderate rate is far below the popular mark; but, in considering this important question, it should not be forgotten, that, unlike the paddle, the screw will always cooeperate with sail,–and that, if a ship would go far under steam, she must be content to go gently. The natural law regulating the speed of a ship is, that the power requisite to propel her varies as the cube of the velocity.
[Footnote 1: The constructors and engineers of the navy are unsurpassed in professional art or science, and when conjoined with naval officers–who should always determine the war-like essentials of ships–they are capable of producing a steam-fleet that would meet the requirements of all reasonable conditions. We venture to say, that the failures with which they have been charged would be found, on investigation, to be solely attributable to undue extraneous influences.]
Let it be distinctly understood what power is here meant. As the power applied to the propulsion of a vessel is only that which acts upon her in the direction of the keel,–and as, of the gross indicated power developed by her engine, one portion is absorbed in working the organs of its mechanism, another in overcoming the friction of the load, while still other proportions are expended in the slip of the propeller and in the friction of its surfaces on the water,–only that portion of the gross power which remains is applied to propulsion; and it is this remainder which varies in the ratio of the cube of the speed.
Hence a steamer, that with five hundred horse-power can make eight knots per hour, will require rather more than one thousand horse-power to drive her at the speed of ten knots,–the law being thus modified by the increased resistance consequent upon the greater weight of the large engines; and thus a limit to speed is imposed, depending upon the weight of machinery which, relative to her dimensions, a ship can carry. A ship, that at the rate of ten knots under steam may run twelve hundred miles, can, at the speed of eight knots, and with the expenditure of rather less fuel, run the distance of eighteen hundred miles; and therefore it is, many contend, that a man-of-war for distant service should not be laden with large engines, whose full power can rarely be wanted, and which monopolize so great a space and displacement as to render it impossible to carry fuel for their proper development.
It is true, that, with large power of engine, the vessel may command, so long as her coals last, the advantage of high speed, and her large cylinders will enable her, by working the steam very expansively, to use her fuel with great economy; but there still remains the disadvantage of the increased first cost of the machinery, and its greater weight and bulk, to be permanently carried, whether used or not, and which, by increasing the displacement of the vessel, proportionally diminishes her speed.
The last great improvement in connection with the screw remains to be noticed, namely, lining the “bushings” and “bearings” with lignum-vitae,–the invention of Mr. Penn, of Greenwich, near London.
The lignum-vitae is introduced in the manner shown in the drawing. In connection therewith, it must be said, that the length and diameter of bearings has been increased far beyond the proportions of former years. The “brasses” are bored out about three-sixteenths of an inch larger than the shaft; then the recesses are slotted out for the reception of the wooden strips. If care be taken with this part of the operation, any number of strips can be supplied ready fitted, and to put in a set of spare strips becomes a short and simple operation.
[Illustration]
Strange as it appears, these wooden bearings are far more durable than those of metal, and in some ships they have endured for years without any perceptible wear in those parts which, previously to this invention, had occasioned so much trouble and expense. But for this important discovery, it is thought by some of the most competent engineers that they would have been compelled to abandon the use of the screw in heavy ships.
The Napoleon, the type of the new steam-ships of the line in the French navy, is a good illustration of a first-class, full-powered steamer.
Her dimensions are as follows:–
FT. IN.
Length extreme. 262 6.40 Length at load-line. 234 0.94 Beam. 53 8.38
Height between decks. 6 8.72 Height of lower port sill. 7 2.63 Depth of hold. 26 9.34
Deep-load draft. 25 3
Immersed cross section, sq. ft. 1063.48 Displacement. tons. 6050
Diameter of cylinders. 8 2.45 Length of stroke. 5 3.06
Diameter of propeller. (4 bladed) 19 0.70 Pitch ” ” mean) 37 11
She has eight boilers, each having five furnaces, consuming, at full speed, (12.14 knots,) 143 tons of coal per day, for which she stows five days’ supply. The boilers and engines occupy eighty-two feet in the length of the ship.
The trial of this ship has established the practicability of adapting a propeller to a ship of the largest class, so as to insure great speed, and constitute a most effective man-of-war for certain purposes and in certain situations; but when the great weight of the engines is considered, and the large space they occupy in the vessel,–thereby diminishing the stowage of supplies,–and further, that, after the coal is exhausted, the ninety-gun ship has but the sail of a sixty-gun ship to rely upon, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion, that, however useful such a vessel may be for short passages,[1] and in those seas in which her supplies of coal and provisions may be constantly replenished, her sphere of action must be very limited, and she could not be relied upon for the long cruises and various services on which an ordinary line-of-battle ship is employed.
[Footnote 1: For debarking a regiment or two of Zouaves on the shores of the Adriatic or upon the coast of Ireland.]
A ship constructed on the plan of the Napoleon, for the sake of gaining a speed of twelve knots per hour for the distance of about two thousand two hundred miles, is compelled to sacrifice a great part of her efficiency in several most important particulars.
In time of war, at short distances from port, for the defence of bays or harbors or the Florida channel, for the speedy transport of troops to an adjacent coast, or to force a blockade, such a vessel would undoubtedly be a most valuable addition to our navy: but her employment must necessarily be confined to such circumstances and such situations; for should she unluckily fall in with an enemy’s squadron, with her coal expended, or her machinery rendered useless by any of the numerous accidents to which steam-machinery is so constantly exposed, with her comparatively light rig, and want of stability in consequence of losing so great a weight of coals, she would hardly prove a very formidable opponent.
Therefore, while admitting the importance and necessity of providing for special service a small class of fast, full-power steamers, it is submitted that the auxiliary screw-steamer is the description of ship to which the largest and best consideration should be devoted; for to the nation possessing the most efficient fleet of such vessels must belong the dominion of the sea. And while their cost is counted, let it at the same time be remembered that their value can be estimated only by the character of the service they may render, and that their capacity for aggression abroad makes them the best defence at home.
Having briefly referred to the various views entertained in regard to the steam-power with which the navy should be furnished, it will be seen that a difference of opinion on this important subject may most reasonably be entertained.
None can doubt the advantages of celerity to a man-of-war, yet many believe it would be too dearly purchased by the sacrifice of space to such an extent as would require supplies to be often replenished; as this necessity would in war confine the operations of the navy to our own shores.
On the other hand, it is admitted, that, without high speed, a ship of war cannot exercise many of her most important functions,–that she can neither choose an engagement, protect a convoy, nor enforce a blockade.
The best experience affirms the policy of giving to our cruisers as large steampower as is consistent with a due development of all other warlike qualities; for what would avail the superior armament of a ship, if the option of fighting or flying remain with her adversary, which must be the case when the latter commands higher speed? The introduction of improved ordnance, throwing heavy shells with great precision at long ranges, gives increased importance to celerity; for in any future fleet-fight, victory should belong to that flag having at command a steam-squadron of superior speed, which may thereby be concentrated upon any point without having been long under fire.
May not the command of a maximum speed of thirteen knots be obtained from the machinery now employed for a maximum speed of ten knots? It evidently may, and with great economy, too, by the simple introduction of artificial draft, and the use of steam of higher pressure, when requiring the highest speed. At present, in our men-of-war, the boilers are proportioned for natural draft, burning about twelve pounds of coal per square foot of grate per hour, and for a steam-pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch. If, then, the boilers be proportioned to burn at the maximum, with blowers, say twenty-two pounds of coal to the square foot of grate, and to generate steam of forty pounds to the square inch, we shall double the power developed by the machinery, and consequently derive from it the same speed that could be attained without blowers from double the machinery; while the natural draft and the usual pressure of fifteen pounds would give sufficient speed for ordinary service. The inconvenience of the higher pressure with blowers could well be endured for the short and occasional periods during which they would be required.
To create a perfect screw-frigate, a ship with sail-power complete, and efficient for any service that may be required, the endeavor should be made–by getting rid of every dispensable article of weight or bulk, and without reducing supplies below three months’ provisions and six weeks’ water–to find space and displacement for an engine of sufficient force to drive her thirteen knots an hour, together with at least ten days’ full consumption of fuel; and this, it is believed, might be successfully accomplished in ships of the dimensions of the Wabash, beginning with a judicious reduction of spare spars, spare sails, and spare gear, and by the addition of blowers to their present machinery: a subject which should immediately receive the earnest consideration of a commission of the most intelligent officers.
Having fixed upon the proportions of hull and spars, the form of propeller, and the plan of engine, a cautious discrimination should be exercised in multiplying the types of either. Besides economy, many other advantages would flow from a judicious regard to similarity in build; as it would permit us to relieve our ships of many of the spare spars with which they are incumbered, and we should probably not again hear of suspending the operations of a frigate thousands of miles away, until a crank or rod could be sent to her; because, when ships of the same class are cruising together, by a careful distribution of spare spars and machinery among them, it is hardly probable that damage would be sustained, or loss of spars or “break down” occur, which might not be remedied by the resources of the squadron.
On the other hand, this system not be carried to a Chinese extreme, lest we follow too long a false direction,–thus losing the advantage of improvements constantly being made. For such is the change in all things pertaining to maritime war, that neither model of hull, plan of engine, nor mould of ordnance is best, unless of the latest creation. True progress will be most judiciously sought in not departing too suddenly and widely from the established order.
WHITE MICE.
A great many circumstances led me to decide on leaving the convenient boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail: a house correctly described as containing several “modern improvements”: improperly, as being “in the immediate vicinity of all the places of public amusement.” For, as the Central Park of New York is a place of public amusement, so likewise is Barnum’s Museum; and these two places being at a distance of about five miles from each other, how could any one house be in the immediate vicinity of both? But it was not upon this incompatibility that any of my objections were founded.
If I have a prejudice, it is against being talked _at_ instead of _to_. Now Mrs. Silvernail, who, like the katydid of the poplar-tree, if small, was shrill, had a way of conveying instructions to her boarders by means of parables ostensibly directed at Catharine, the tall Irish serving-maid, but in reality meant for the ear of the obnoxious boarder who had lately transgressed some important statute of the house, made and provided to meet a case or cases.
A landing-place on the stairs was usually the platform selected for the delivery of a monologue, in which Catharine was always assumed to be the person addressed; although I have known instances in which that “excellent wench” was, at the time of being so conferred with, in the grocery at the corner, about half a block distant, as I could see from the window where I sat and viewed her protracting her doorway dalliance with Jeremiah Tomaters, the grocer’s efficient young man.
“Catharine,” my landlady would say in a loudish whisper, close by a malefactor’s chamber-door, and probably when Catharine was yet far down the street,–“Catharine, who let the water in the bathroom run over just now? If the slippers he left behind him a’n’t Mr. Jennings’s, I declare! Boarders must be warned an’ watched, elseways we shall hev all in the house afloat, ‘cepting the stoves an’ flat-irons, by-‘n’-by. Somebody at Mrs. Moyler’s acted so, and the house was like a roarin’ sea, with the baby adrift in his little cradle, and the roaches a-swimmin’ round. Oh, dear!”
Now Mr. Jennings was the serious boarder, who lodged in the room just over mine: a man who, from general indications, had never had a bath in his life; certainly he had never troubled the waters in that house. I was the supposed delinquent, and at me the parable was levelled.
“Catharine, whose pass-key was that you found in the door? It’s a mussy we wasn’t all a-murdered and a-plundered in cold blood, by the light o’ the moon! Mr. Jennings’s night-key it must have been, to be sure! Boarders must be warned and watched. When Mrs. Toyler’s nephew’s night-key was found in the door of Number Forty-Seven, the boarders all went off at daylight in an omnibus, takin’ away custom and character from the house forever.”
Now Mr. Jennings, the serious boarder, was always in bed and asleep long before latch-key time came round; and even supposing he ever _had_ let himself in by means of that mischievous little convenience, he would as soon have thought of taking the door up to bed with him as of leaving the key in it. The parable was intended for the hearing of a young man who occupied the room opposite mine, and who, being connected with clubs, came home nobody ever knew when or in what condition, but had red eyes o’ mornings and a general odor of the convivial kind.
Then, again, Mrs. Silvernail had a way of being always about the doors of the rooms, and a faculty, as I thought, of hovering near several of them at one and the same moment. There are men who will turn the least promising circumstance to advantage,–even that of being listened at through a keyhole, while they discourse to themselves about affairs connected with their most cherished and secret designs. One Captain Dunnitt, who lived in the house before I came, adroitly made his account of this eavesdropping propensity of the landlady, by settling his weekly bill with a silver-mounted pistol, instead of the dollars justly due. He had been a tragedian as well as a captain, and was saturated with Shakspeare and other bards to a far greater amount than with money; and when his week came round, he used to stride up and down his room with much gnashing of teeth and other stage indications of distress, finally settling down into a chair before the table, on which he would place and replace a packet of letters and a wisp of unromantic-looking hair. Then he would take the little silver pistol from his breast, and, after the usual soliloquy of “To be or not to be,” or something equally to the purpose, would point it at his temples just as the landlady came bursting into the room, begging him for all sakes not to “ruin the character of her second-best room, and the walls newly painted at that!” Remorse would then double up the manly form of Captain Dunnitt, who would fall on his knees before the landlady,–“his benefactress! his better angel!”–and then arrangements would be entered into by which he was not to commit suicide for the present, but could avail himself of the landlady’s indulgence and wait for “that remittance,” which was always coming, but which never came.
But there were more serious objections, even than a landlady of shrill parables and an inquiring turn of mind, to my prolonging the delights of a residence at the first-class boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail. Not the least of these was the fact of its _being_ a boarding-house,–a community. In such communities, from the inevitable intercourse over the social board, your circle of acquaintance is always liable to be extended rather than improved. In them there is no escape from the disinterested offers of those who would be your perpetual friends. I am still under lasting obligations to a man who, at a boarding-house in which I sojourned for but three days, forced on me a pipeful of an extremely choice and luxurious kind of tobacco, to dilate on the properties of which he came and smoked about a quarter of a pound of it in my room that very evening, and far on into the morning light. His goodness is the more impressed upon my memory, because, on the same occasion, he drank the greater part of the contents of a large willow-bound bottle of old St. Croix rum, which I had just received from a friend who had imported it direct. Then, in boarding-house communities, one’s magnetism is as much at fault as that of a ship sailing up a river whose rock-bound shores are impregnated with iron elements. I knew a man who was over-magnetized to the extent of matrimony by the lady of the house,–a widow, and a shrew. He hated, or at least professed to hate her, and had ridiculous stories about her to no end; but she married him, and he still lives. Another, of a rather unsociable turn, rejected the proffered civilities of all his fellow-boarders who ever came to offer him rations of curious tobacco or to assist him in performing a libation of old and valuable Hollands. The only one of the party to whom he ever “cottoned” was the latest comer, a smoothed-out, blandulose kind of man, who smoked up all his cunning cigars, made sad havoc among his Hollanders of gin, departed from that house in an unexpected manner and his friend’s best trousers, in the pockets of which he had bestowed that friend’s rarest gems and gold, and is now serving out a term allotted to him in the State Prison, in recognition of the remarkable abilities displayed by him in the character of what the police call a “confidence man.”
And yet there are more objectionable boarding-house acquaintances than people who insist upon sharing with you their friendship, be they “confidence men” or not. I suppose we may allow, in these advanced times, that it is something like magnetism which decides the question of affinity and its reverse. But, in granting this, I will take the liberty of observing that external and palpable facts have a considerable effect in directing the currents of magnetism. For example, and to adopt the language of scientific men, the insignificant circumstance of a person habituating himself to the partial deglutition of his knife, while partaking of food, may produce antipathetic emotions on the part of others, whom prejudice or superstition has led to regard the knife as an article designed for cutting only. This kind of outrage I allude to merely for the purpose of illustrating a case. In first-class boarding-houses, like that of Mrs. Silvernail, such rusticities have long since become traditional, and of the things that have passed away; and, indeed, so particular was that lady with regard to her knives, that, had a boarder swallowed even a part of one, he would undoubtedly have heard the deed alluded to through the keyhole of his chamber-door on the following day, in the form of a parable having for its hero the justified Mr. Jennings, our serious young man.
If external and palpable circumstances, then, are admitted to have a decided effect upon streams of magnetism, I suppose we may assume that they have also a certain power of determining impressions by themselves, without the intervention of any of the more subtile agencies whatever. The granting of this postulate will put me on quite easy terms with regard to the very positive objection entertained by me towards a certain Mr. Desole Arcubus, who, by provision of an immutable Medo-Persic edict promulgated by Mrs. Silvernail, occupied the chair next mine at the first-rate table of that rigid expounder of boarding-house law.
Mr. Desole Arcubus, a young man of some three or four and twenty, had no special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,–this prevalent tint being infused also into the _cornea_ or “white” of his eye,–and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing him, was such as to induce a very general belief that his mind must have been affected by some terrible calamity; and his presence, indeed, was looked upon as undesirable by many of the guests, whose health had begun to suffer seriously from the manner in which Arcubus used to groan between his instalments of food. Sometimes, in the interval between the soup and the solids, he would lean his elbows upon the table, and, burying his face in his hands, so that his long, sad hair swept the board, would abandon himself for a brief space to private despondency, until the boiled leg of mutton brought with it a necessity for renewed action.
Nor was the social feeling of distrust of this unhappy young man allayed when the party learned, through a boarder of detective instincts, that Mr. Desole Arcubus was an enthusiast in scientific pursuits, and that the “romance of a poor young man,” as shadowed out by him, was no romance at all, but an unpleasant reality. Toxicology was the branch of science to which Mr. Arcubus had for some time past been devoting his mind. For fourteen hours a day he worked assiduously in the laboratory of an eminent analytical chemist, whose practice in connection with the coroner was of a flourishing and increasing kind, owing to the growing taste for suicide, and the preference given to poisons over any other means for accomplishing that irrevocable wrong. In this chamber of horrors,–a court of which the tests were the stern, incorruptible ordinances of Nature,–he had already gone steadily through a course which gave him a mastery over the secrets of the relative poisons, with which he laughed secretly now, and played as securely as a child might with a dog-rose of whose thorns he had been made aware. But of late, his haggard features, and the start with which he would wake into life when a guest haply plucked a flower from the bouquets on the table, or when the handmaiden came round to him with a dish of leguminous vegetables, could readily have been traced by a clairvoyant to associations connected with the ghastly belladonna and with the deadly bean of St. Ignatius the Martyr. For Mr. Arcubus had now arrived at the investigation of the positive poisons,–a fact which might have revealed itself to the man of science by the general narcotico-acrid expression into which he had settled down bodily; while the most casual observer might have gathered from his incoherent contributions to the table-talk that some noxious drug was envenoming the cup of his life.
He had a way of thinking aloud, and, as his thoughts always ran on the subject of his studies, the expression of them sometimes dovetailed curiously with the general conversation.
“Miss Rocket will not come down to dinner, poor thing!” said Mrs. Silvernail, in her choicest table-manner. “She has lost her beautiful Angola kitten. It slipped into the glass globe, this morning, among the gold-fishes, and was drowned.”
“Digested in water, several of its constituents are dissolved,” said Mr. Arcubus, in a husky voice, looking wildly at the picture on his plate.
“You have a _specialite_ for puddings, I perceive, Madam,” remarked a smiling old gentleman, a new-comer, addressing himself to the hostess; “may I ask now of what this very excellent one is composed?”
“Sulphate of lime, potash, oil, resin, extractive matter, gluten, _et cetera, et cetera_,” put in Mr. Arcubus, still following out his train of thought.
“During the process of evaporation, a black substance is precipitated,” continued he; and at that very moment, the small colored boy, running to pour out some water for the wild boarder, who had just arrived in an excited condition from a rowing match, caught his foot in the carpet, and came to the floor with a crash.
“Black oxide of Mercury, called _Ethiops per se_,” pursued Mr. Arcubus, grappling with his tangled hair.
“Do just try a drop or two of this Hollands of mine in that iced water; it is positively dangerous to drink it so,” said an attentive boarder to Mrs. Silvernail, who certainly _did_ look warm.
“Absorbs oxygen readily, when brought to a red heat,” said Mr. Arcubus, abstractedly, as he pulled at his long fingers and made their joints crack.
“Who is the tall lady who dined here yesterday with Miss Rocket, and talked so enthusiastically about woman’s rights?” inquired the serious boarder of Mrs. Silvernail.
“Prepared by deflagration in a crucible, one part of nitre with two of powdered tartar,” proceeded Mr. Arcubus.
“What do you think of that sample of mixed tobacco I gave you to try?” asked the wild boarder of another, whom Mrs. Silvernail used to speak of with fear and doubt. “When heated, it readily sublimes in the form of a dense white vapor,” said Mr. Arcubus, confidently, “disagreeably affecting the nose and eyes.”
“I hope you are not going to bring another dog into the house, Mr. Puglock,” remonstrated Mrs. Silvernail, addressing the wild boarder, to whose conversation she had been lending a sharp ear. “Re’lly now, I must restrict the number of dogs; we have three here already, I believe.”
“There is a strong analogy between the virus injected into wounds made by the teeth of a rabid dog and that found in the poison-apparatus of venomous snakes,” brought in Mr. Arcubus, diving his fork truculently into a ripe tomato.
This last observation of Mr. Arcubus, together with the fact that the blade of his knife had manifestly turned black, while all the other blades at table were as bright as silver, decided me. I packed up my portmanteau and writing-case that evening, and, having settled with my wondering landlady, to whom I accounted for my sudden departure by pleading expediency as to important affairs, took leave of that estimable widow, and drove away to a distant hotel, from which I sallied forth early next morning to look for lodgings,–furnished lodgings for single gentlemen, without board,–for against boarding-houses I had set my face forever.
A peculiar feature of life in lodgings in New York, as in other large cities, is the incomparable solitude attainable in that blessed state of deliverance from promiscuous “board.” One may dwell for a twelvemonth in lodgings for single gentlemen, without incurring the obligation of knowing by sight, or even by name, the lodger who occupies the very room opposite to his, on the same landing. Fifty lodgers may have successively lived in those “apartments” during the twelve months, on the same terms of perfect isolation from one who would rather mind his own business than make any inquiries regarding theirs. And so it is, that, of all the stage-pieces which have achieved popularity in our day, none is more faithful to the facts than the often-repeated one of “Box and Cox”; yet, but for the exigencies of the drama, which, of course, has for its principal object the development of a plot, there would have been no necessity whatever for bringing Box on a footing of acquaintance with Cox,–still less for attributing to either of them an idea of his landlady’s name.
For several months I lived contentedly in the house selected by me, up one pair of stairs, in a room looking out into a busy street,–a street so narrow, that the trees at one side of it, whenever a reviving breeze brought with it a subject for greeting and congratulation, shook hands in quite a friendly manner with those at the other. To illustrate the isolation of a residence in these lodgings, I may as well state, that, during all the time of my sojourn there, I never arrived at the knowledge of my landlady’s name. It was not graven upon the house-door, and, as a knowledge of it was of no immediate consequence to any of my occupations, nor likely to be, I never asked about it from the old woman who kept the rooms in order, and to whom I seldom spoke, except upon the weekly occasion of handing to her the amount due to the landlady, with whom I never had any interview after the day I agreed with her for the lodgings. I believe there was a landlord,–if that be the proper term to apply to a man who is the husband of a landlady, and nothing else. From my window I once observed a man who might have been the landlord, a man of subdued appearance, accompanying the lady of the house to church. Subsequently, as I came in one evening rather earlier than usual, the same person was leaning against the railings by the hall-door, smoking a cigar. He greeted me as I passed in, addressing me in an interrogative manner with one word, the only one I ever heard him utter,–
“Owasyerelthbin?”
To which, as I supposed him to be a foreigner, unacquainted with the English tongue, I replied at random in the only word of German of which I happen to be master,–
“Yaw!”
And this was the only communication I ever had with people of the house, excepting occasional conversations with the dust-colored old woman who cleaned the windows and swept the floors; while, with regard to a dozen or two of lodgers who succeeded each other from time to time in the other disposable rooms of the house, I never saw one of them, nor was acquainted with them otherwise than by footstep,–and that rather infelicitously at one time, in the case of something which went either upon crutches or wooden legs, and which occupied the room immediately over mine. This was in charming contrast with life at Mrs. Silvernail’s, in its freedom from parables, and from the uncared-for society of Miss Rocket’s guests; likewise from that of the serious and vicious boarders, and above all of the poisonous young man.
A day came for cleaning my windows, and, as it rained heavily, I could not give the old woman a clear stage by going out for a couple of hours, but told her to clean away and be as lively as she could, while I sat there and wrote. Lodgers, she told me, as she polished up the brightening panes, came and went week after week, so fast that she forgot one when another came, and never knew any of their names. She had an eye for character, though, and told me the peculiarities of some of them in a quaint way, nailing her sentences, now and then, with odd, hard words, put in independently of the general text.
“And who lives in the room just under mine? Somebody who raises plants, I see,–unless the green things on the balcony belong to the house.”
“A gentleman as keeps emself quite _to_ emself. Lonesome and friendless, I reckon, for he looks but poorly. Plants out queer sasses in boxes all the time, and some of ’em on the balcoany itself. Guess he makes kinder tea of ’em, or root-drink. Decoctifies.”
“And who in the room opposite, on this floor?”
“Empty now. Two dark-featured little gentlemen had it for a fortnight,– Jews, I reckon,–and as like one another as two spots of dirt on this ‘ere pane of glass. Spoke a hard-biled kind of tongue, and was furriners, I guess. Polyanders.”
The vacant room would just suit De Vonville, who had arrived a few days before from abroad. I told him of it, and he came in the next day, bag and baggage, a portion of which latter was curious and uncommon.
De Vonville, with whom I had lived in lodgings two or three years previously, was a Belgian and a _savant_, and a man of rare companionable qualities besides. Professionally, I believe, he called himself a naturalist. He had already roamed over the greater part of America, North and South, investigating the mysteries of Nature, especially of the animal kingdom, and contributing, as he went, many specimens of rare animals to the principal collections of Europe. His latest adventures took him through Africa and the East, whence he brought to New York a number of living creatures of many species, all of which, however, he had shipped for Havre before I met him, with the exception of two or three of the least disreputable kinds, which he meant to keep about him as pets. The most valued of these treasures were a small animal called a Mangouste, and a cage containing a family of white mice.
These white mice were greatly prized by De Vonville, on account of the rare manner in which they were marked, their paws and muzzles being of a perfect jet black. They were quite tame and familiar; but, on the approach of a cat, or any other cause for alarm, the whole family would concentrate their energies in a very remarkable way into one piercing squeak.
The Mangouste, an animal somewhat resembling a ferret, but more nearly allied to the Nilotic ichneumon of Egypt, was a marvellously lithe and active little creature, perfectly tame, and coming as readily as a dog to his name, “Mungo,” except when overfed, when he would sleep sometimes for hours, rolled up at the bottom of his cage, or in some dark corner of the room. There were personal reminiscences connected with Mungo which rendered him particularly valuable to De Vonville, whom he had often saved from the stings of the noxious vermin to be encountered by those who dwell in tents. His instinct was for creeping things, though he looked as if he could have dined contentedly on a brace of white mice. One piece of mischief he committed, during the few days he was allowed to run about the rooms: he gnawed holes at the bottom of all the doors, through which he could let himself in and out. He used to lie in the sun, on my table, as I sat reading; and was generally companionable and trustworthy, notwithstanding his insidious look.
Seeing the interest I took in his small menagerie, De Vonville begged me to undertake the superintendence of it, on his being called away for a brief tour to Baltimore and elsewhere, in pursuance of an engagement to deliver a course of traveller’s tales. Numerous were the directions I had from him as to the diet and general treatment most congenial to the constitutions of white mice; and there was implicit confidence expressed, that, for safety, the Mangouste should be kept strictly confined to his cage. There were parrots to be looked after, also, including an extremely vituperative old macaw, any verbal communication with whom laid the advancing party open to all manner of insult and objurgation.
The very first day of my menagerial experience, the Mangouste got out of his cage while I was feeding him, and glided away into dark nooks and garrets unknown. I failed of recovering him by a stalking process among the giddy passes of the upper stairs; nor did he return that day to my often-repeated call; for I vociferated at intervals throughout the day the word “Mungo!” in a manner that must have led the mysterious inhabitants of that silent house to the conclusion that I was a spiritual medium, inviting revelations from the shade of the mighty Park.
A hot, clammy night. No balmy essences arise from the kennels of this hollow street in which I live; whatever comes from that quarter must be malarious, if anything. The windows are thrown open as far as they were made to be thrown, and I get as far out of one of them as I safely can, by tilting my chair back, and extending my legs out into that undefined everywhere called the wide, wide world. The only newspaper within reach of my hand is one I have already looked over, but I glance at it again, reading backwards from the end an account of a terrible poisoning case lately brought to light in England, which I had already read forwards from the beginning. Throwing it away from me in disgust, I reach out my other hand for a book. The one I lay hold of is “Laurel-Water,” the melancholy drama of Sir Theodosius Boughton by insidious poisoner killed. I dashed it away, backwards, over my head, and, turning off the gas, abandoned myself to the strange influences that breathed hotly upon me from the clammy vegetation festering in the ropy night-air.
Why do civic wood-rangers choose the ailantus-tree for a bouquet-holder to the close-pent inhabitants of towns? Nothing can be more graceful, certainly, than the ellipses arched by the boughs from its taper stem. Few contrivances more umbrageous than the combination of its long, feathery foliations into its perfection of a parasol. But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers. Dead-horse chestnut it might reasonably be called, because of its heavy, carrion smell, which, under the influences of a July night, is but too perceptible to the dwellers of streets where it abides. The tree at my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom. Sleep must have overcome me, for I had a troublous dream or vision of which Poison was the predominant nightmare,–a dream and slumber broken by the convulsive sensation which roused me up as I endeavored in imagination to swallow at one draught the contents of a metal tankard of half-and-half–half laurel-water, and half decoction of henbane–handed to me on a leaden salver by a demon-waiter, with a sprig of hemlock in the third buttonhole of his coat. This Lethean influence could hardly be that of the ailantus-tree alone. What of the plants on the balcony beneath,–the strange, rooty coilers which the mysterious planter sedulously fosters at the glooming of dusk, with a weird watering-pot held forth in a fawn-colored hand?
In a particular condition of the nerves,–say, when a man feels “shaky,”–it takes but little to convince him that anything which may possibly not be all right is to a moral certainty all wrong. To sleep another night in that room, with the windows open,–and who would shut his windows in July?–directly exposed to the exhalations of a rising forest of upas-antiars of Macassar, nurtured by the unwholesome hand of a mysterious vegetarian for purposes unavowed, was no longer to be thought of. De Vonville’s room, which was at the back of the house, and had no fuming ailantus by its windows on which to browse nightmares of skunkish flavor, afforded a better climate for a night’s rest, notwithstanding the singular ideas which these travelled men, especially naturalists, have of comfort, in a civilized sense. He invariably slept on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and upas-antiar from following in my wake. The little beasts were all sleeping tranquilly in their cages, and the birds on their perches rested quietly, too,–excepting the old macaw, who cursed me in his sleep, as I lit up the gas. But the Mangouste had not returned, nor did I quite regret his absence for the present; because, although highly approving of the culture of four-footed beasts, be they large or small, I have a prejudice against having my jugular vein breathed, at midnight, by small animals of the weasel tribe,–an act of which Mungo, probably, would have been incapable. His relations _will_ do such things, however, and newspapers recording appalling instances of it may be found.
Shutting the door, I turned the gas down to a mere spark, and stretched my weary limbs on the mat which served the travelled man for a bed, drawing over me a gauze-like fabric, which, I suppose, answers in tropical countries all the purposes of the more voluminous “bed-clothes” of ours. Sleep soon came upon me,–a heavy, but unquiet sleep, in which the same influences haunted me as those I felt when slumbering at the window. The malaria from the trees was there, and the planter of the balcony watering henbane and hellebore with boiling aquafortis; likewise the demon-waiter, with his leaden salver and poisoned tankard, wearing an ophidian smile on his features and a fresh sprig of hemlock in his third buttonhole.
How long I slept thus I know not. Once I had a vague sense of the Mangouste gliding across me, but it was only part of a dream; and it was still night, black and awful, when I started up in good earnest, at a piercing shriek from the united family of white mice, whose cage stood upon a low stand, about two yards to the right of where I lay.
The sound which followed this was one which the man is not likely to forget who has once heard it,–whether beneath his foot, as he steps upon the moss-grown log in the rank cedar-swamp, or under his hand, when about to grasp with it a ledge of the rocks among which he is clambering, unknowing of the serpent’s dens. With clenched teeth, and hair that rustled like the sedge-grass, I rose and woke up the obedient gas, which flashed tremulously on the scales of an enormous rattlesnake coiled round the mice’s cage, tightening his folds as he whizzed his infernal warning, and darting out his lightning tongue with baffled fury at the trembling group in the middle of the cage. This I saw by the first flash. Grasping a sword from among the weapons with which the walls were studded, I made a pass to sever the monster; but the Mangouste was quicker than I, as he darted upon the coils of the serpent, which, in a moment, fell heavily to the floor, a writhing, headless mass.
In the heavy dreams which haunted me during the sleep from which I had just been roused, I had a vision of the planter of the balcony with a snake coiled round his naked arm. Who so dull as to require an interpreter for such plain speakings? Rushing down-stairs, I burst open the door of that person’s room with one kick, and there, in the middle of the floor, half-dressed and bending over a censer of red-hot charcoal, knelt Mr. Desole Arcubus, the poison-man of Mrs. Silvernails boarding-house. His features were collapsed and livid, and he held his left arm, which was much swollen and discolored, close over the red-hot coals, basting it wildly, the while, with ladlefuls of some hot liquid, while he crammed into his mouth, at intervals, a handful of herb-fodder of some kind from a salad-bowl on the floor beside him. He was rapidly growing faint and sinking, but indicated his wishes by signs, and one of several strangers who now entered the room continued the fomenting treatment, while another ran for medical assistance.
There was an open letter on the table, which I had no hesitation in reading, when I saw at a glance that it threw light on the matter. The following is an exact copy of it:–
“Hollow Rock—-County. N. Y. 17 Jewly. 18–
MR. HARKABUS dear Sir.
a cording to promis i send the sneak by Xpress. He is the Largest and wust Sneak we have ketched In these parts. Bit a cow wich died in 2.40 likeways her calf of fright. Hope the sneak weed growed up strong and harty. By eting and drinking of that wede the greatest sneak has no power. Smeling of it a loan will cure a small sneak ader or the like. I go in upon the dens tomorough and if we find any Pufing Aders will Xpres them to you per Xpress.
Yr. oblgd. servt. SILENUS CLUCK.”
Here was the whole story in a nutshell. For his experiments in septic poisons, Mr. Arcubus had hired this apartment, with its convenient balcony for the cultivation of his antidotes. Having prepared his decoctions, he had this night caused himself to be bitten by the snake, which, disgusted probably at its services being then rudely dispensed with, had followed its guiding instinct up to the room where the animals were, making its way through the holes nibbled by the Mangouste underneath the doors. A cold shudder seized me when I guessed the reality of the sense of something gliding over me in the night. The hunger of the reptile had steered him straight to the cage of the mice, whose cry of agony at the presence of the great enemy of mouse-kind had fortunately roused me from my lethargy,–for the rattle of the snake is but a drowsy sound, and will not awaken the sleeper. How the Mangouste came to appear on the scene at the nick of time, I know not. He might have come in at the open window, or possibly had been sleeping, since I missed him, among the trappings and traveller’s gear with which the room was lumbered.
And these were the delights of lodgings,–of lodgings without board! And who could see the end of it all?–for, if snake-poison lurked on the stairs, probably hydrophobia was tied up in the cupboard. Brief time I expended in making my arrangements to quit, having first seen Mr. Arcubus carted away to a hospital, where by skilful treatment he slowly recovered. For the Mangouste and the mice, the parrots and the blasphemous macaw, I engaged temporary board and lodging with a bird-and-rabbit man in the neighborhood, telegraphing De Vonville that I had departed from lodgings forever,–lodgings for single gentlemen, without board.
But, on leaving the house, I did not forget the dust-colored old woman, whose last words to me, as I tipped her with a gratuity, were oracular:–“Forty long years and more have I lived in lodgin’-houses and never before seen a sarpint. It behooves all on us, now, to be watchful for what may be coming next, and wakeful. Circumspectangular.”
I live in a hotel now, a very noisy life, and fearfully expensive. “But what do you wish, my friend?” as the French say, in their peculiar idiom. Believing in the ancient Egyptians, who worshipped the Nilotic ichneumon, I have privately canonized his cousin, the Mangouste, by the style and title of St. Mungo; and if ever surplus funds are discovered to my credit in any solvent bank, at present unknown to me, I will certainly devote a moiety of them to the foundation of a neat row of alms-cages, for the reception of decayed members of the family of White Mice.
FOR CHRISTIE’S SAKE.
Upon us falls the shadow of night,
And darkened is our day:
My love will greet the morning light Four hundred miles away.
God love her, torn so swift and far From hearts so like to break!
And God love all who are good to her, For Christie’s sake!
I know, whatever spot of ground
In any land we tread,
I know the Eternal Arms are round, That heaven is overhead;
And faith the mourning heart will heal, But many fears will make
Our spirits faint, our fond hearts kneel, For Christie’s sake.
Good bye, dear! be they kind to you, As though you were their ain!
My daisy opens to the dew,
But shuts against the rain.
Never will new moon glad our eyes
But offerings we shall make
To old God Wish, and prayers will rise For Christie’s sake.
Four years ago we struck our tent;
O’er homeless babes we yearned;
Our all–three darlings–with us went, But only two returned!
While life yet bleeds into her grave, Love ventures one more stake;
Hush, hush, poor hearts! if big, be brave, For Christie’s sake!
Like crown to most ambitious brows
Was Christie to us given,
To make our home a holy house
And nursery of heaven.
Oh, softer was her bed of rest
Than lily’s on the lake!
Peace filled so deep each billowy breast, For Christie’s sake!
To music played by harps and hands
Invisible were we drawn
O’er charmed seas, through faery lands, Under a clearer dawn:
We entered our new world of love
With blessings in our wake,
While prospering heavens smiled above, For Christie’s sake.
We gazed with proud eyes luminous
On such a gift of grace,–
All heaven narrowed down to us
In one dear little face!
And many a pang we felt, dear wife, With hurt of heart and ache
All shut within like clasping knife, For Christie’s sake.
I would no tears might e’er run down Her patient face, beside
Such happy pearls of heart as crown Young mother, new-made bride!
For ’tis a face that, looking up
To passing heaven, might make
An angel stop, a blessing drop,
For Christie’s sake.
If Love in that child’s heart of hers Should breathe and break its calm,
With trouble sweet as that which stirs The brooding buds of balm,–
Listening at ear of peeping pearl, Glistening in eyes that shake
Their sweet dew down,–God bless our girl, For Christie’s sake!
But, Father, if our babe must mourn, Be merciful and kind!
And if our gentle lamb be shorn,
Attemper thou the wind!
Across the Deluge guide our Dove,
And to thy bosom take
With arm of love, and shield above, For Christie’s sake!
We have had sorrows many and strange: Poor Christie I when I’m gone,
Some of my words will weirdly change, If she read sadly on!
Lightnings, from what was dark of old, With meanings strange will break
Of sorrows hid or dimly told,
For Christie’s sake.
Wife, we should still try hard to win The best for our dear child,
And keep a resting-place within,
When all without grows wild:
As on the winter graves the snow
Falls softly, flake by flake,
Our love should whitely clothe our woe, For Christie’s sake.
For one will wake at midnight drear
From out a dream of death,
And find no dear head pillowed near, No sound of peaceful breath!
May no weak wailing words arise,
No bitter thoughts awake
To see the tears in Memory’s eyes: For Christie’s sake!
And There, where many crownless kings Of earth a crown shall wear,
The martyrs who have borne the pangs Their palm at last shall bear,–
When with our lily pure of sin
Our heavenward way we take,
There may we walk with welcome in, For Christie’s sake!
THE NURSERY BLARNEY-STONE.
Where is it kept? We have often longed for a sight of that precious bit of aerolite, that talismanic moon-stone and bewildering boulder, to which the lips of all devoted to infantile education must be religiously pressed.
In vain have we searched in the closet, where the headless dolls and tailless horses, the collapsed drum and the torn primer, are put away. We have privately climbed to the summit of the clothes-press, we have surreptitiously invaded the nurse’s own private work-basket, lured by disappointing lumps of wax and fragments of rhubarb-root; but we did not find it. We believe in its existence none the less. Real as the coronation-stone of the Scottish kings now in Westminster Abbey, as the Caaba at Mecca, as the loadstone mountain against which dear old Sinbad was wrecked, as the meteor which fell into the State of Connecticut and the volcanic island which rose out of the Straits of Messina, as the rock of Plymouth, or the philosopher’s stone,–yet we have sought in vain for it, and only know of it as of the Great Carbuncle, by the light it sheds.
“Pray, my good Sir,” ask legions of fond parents, “what do you mean? Is it Dalby’s Carminative, Daffy’s Elixir, Brown’s Syrup of Squills, or White’s Magnetic Mixture? Is it of the soothing or the coercing system? a substitute for lollipops or for birch? rock candy or rock the cradle?”
“Look” not “into your heart,” responds our Muse, but into your nursery, and write!
We invite a general review of all infantry divisions. We may be, for aught you know, Mrs. Ellis _incog_., warning the mothers of America, as of yore the Cornelias of England. What is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? You have none in your own airy and southern-exposed first-pair-back, (_Nov-Anglice>_, “the keeping-room chamber,”) where you daily water and rake your young olive-sprouts? upon your word of honor, Madam, you have not? You never tell nursery-tales of ghosts or fairies; you have conscientiously stripped from the dark closet every vestige of a legend; you have permitted juvenile inspection of the chimney, to prove that Santa Claus could not descend its sooty flue without grievous nigritude of the anticipated doll’s frock, and have logically appealed to Miss Bran Beeswax’s satin silveriness in proof of the non-existence of the saint beloved of Christmas-tide. Nay, more, you tell us you have actually invited inspection of the overnight process of filling the stockings, (you brute!) and you appropriately label each gift, “From Papa,” “From Uncle Edward,” “From Sister Kate,” “From dear Mamma,” lest a figment of the supernatural untruth should linger in the infantile brain. The “Arabian Nights'” (and “Arabian Days'”) “Entertainments” are on your _Index Expurgatorius_. You have banned Bluebeard, and treated Red Ridinghood as no better than the Bonnet Rouge of domestic Jacobinism.
You are a model mother, with whom even the late Mr. Gradgrind might be satisfied. “Truth, crushed to earth” by the whole race of nurses of the good old time, rises again triumphant at your hearth-stone. Then answer us,–Why did you tell your little ones to-night, as the sparrows were making an unusually loquacious preparation for their dormitories, that the little birds were singing their evening hymns, and exhort, thereupon, your unwilling nestlings to a rival performance of the verses of Dr. Watts? You ought to be prepared to explain, also, for the benefit of any sucking Socrates, why it is that these feathered choristers have their “revival seasons,” and are terrible backsliders during the moulting period. When you looked out of the nursery-window, into the poultry-yard, and heard the noisy confabulation of the motherly hens and pert pullets, you should be prepared to state upon what theological principles it is that psalmody is not the wont of the Gallinacae. Are the Biddies given over to a reprobate mind, because you don’t happen to like their vocalization? Is it only the Piccolomini and Linds of the feathered kingdom who have a right to practise sacred music?
And how about that other stupendous fiction of the harvest-moon? Tell us, since you are voluntarily in the confessional, tell us why you kept back that explanation of its dependence on the Precession of the Equinoxes, which, at Professor Cram’s finishing examination, in your school-girl days, you so glibly recited before your admiring papa and mamma? Do you really believe that the solar and stellar system was arranged to accommodate “the reapers reaping early” of the little island of Great Britain?
We think you said angels! When little Isabel Montgomery, with her long, sunny curls, and sweet, blue eyes, was taken away, you made a very touching application of her decease, to illustrate what all good people were to become in the unknown world. How did you get out of the scrape which followed the remark of your downright eldest, remembering also the departure of a good-natured, obese, elderly neighbor,–“Then I thpothe Mithter Thimmonth ith a big angel”? So he probably is; but Simmons’s two hundred pounds of earthliness did not suit your sentimentality quite as readily as the little fairy who always wore such clean pantalets and never tore her pretty white frocks in a game of romps. Is beatification dependent upon the platform-balance? and what amount of flesh will turn the scale in favor of the _Avvocato del Diavolo?_
Once upon a time, a little boy was allowed to ramble in the woods. Being an adventurous little boy, he saw and coveted, and also conquered, (in the good old English sense of the word,) a pretty bird’s-nest and its contents, to wit, several shiny, speckled eggs. He brought them home for triumphant display. He set them out upon the drawing-room table, and called a family conclave to admire and exult. What was the surprise and grief of the infant Catiline, to find himself received, not with applause, but horror! He was accused of robbery, was threatened with Solomonic penalties, was finally condemned to penance at a side-table upon dry bread and water, while his innocent brothers and sisters were regaling upon chickens and custards. He was edified over his scanty meal by melting descriptions of the mother-bird returning to the desolated home, of her positive sorrow and her probable pining to death. And the same little boy, looking out through the prison-bars of the nursery-window, saw his mother take by the hand his weeping sister (much cast down by the fraternal wickedness) and lead her to the nest of another mother-bird, and then and there encourage her to perform the same act of spoliation. True, the eggs were not speckled and small, but of a very pretty white, and quite a handful for the juvenile fingers. But the bereaved “parient” was not slender and active,–in fact, was rather a tame, confiding, dumpy and dull, pepper-and-salt-colored dame. Her complaints were not touching, but rather ludicrous,–so much so, indeed, as to suggest to the human hen-bird that “Biddy was laughing to think what a nice breakfast little Carrie would have off her nice eggs!” The young Trenck, from aloft beholding, could not but stumble upon certain “glittering generalities,” as, that “eggs was eggs,” and that the return of them on the fowl’s part, in consideration of an advance of corn, was not altogether a voluntary barter,–quite, in short, after the pattern of Coolie apprenticeship. And thus the high moral lesson of the morning was sadly shaken. Of course this boy did not belong to any of the model mammas, for whom we are writing.
A large fragment of the Nursery Blarney-Stone has been made over, to have and to hold, to the writers of the Children’s Astor-Place Library. We yawn over poetical justice in novels, and only tolerate it as an amusing absurdity in genteel comedy, for the sake of getting the curtain rapidly down over the benedictory guardian and the virtue-rewarded fair, who are impatient themselves to be off to a very different distribution of cakes and ale. We know that the hero and the heroine walk complacently away in the company of the dejected villain to wash off their rouge and burnt cork, and experience the practical domestic felicity which is ordered for them on the same principles as for us who sit in the pit and applaud. If it were not so, and if we did not know it to be so, and if we did not know that they know that we know it, we should perhaps feel very differently.
Why must we, then, be conscientiously constrained to mark out such a very different plan for our children at home? Why is the life of little boys and girls in books always pictured on the foot-lights pattern? We remember that we were of those good little boys and girls,–quite as good as that one who saved his pennies for the missionary-box, or that other who hemmed a tiny pocket-handkerchief against the nasal needs of a forlorn infant in Burmah; but we don’t remember ever (then or since) to have encountered any of those delightful (and strong-minded) mothers or those sensible and always well-informed fathers of whom we read. Neither in our own particularly pleasant home, nor in any where we went, (at three, P.M., to take an early tea with preparatory barmecidal rehearsals on doll’s china,) did we ever meet them. Perhaps they were the progenitors of the authors of the books. Mr. Thackeray has introduced us to sundry gentlemen and ladies bearing a faint likeness to them; but he also permitted us to behold Lady Beckie Crawley _nee_ Sharpe boxing little Rawdon’s ears, and to meet Mrs. Hobson Newcome at one of her delightful “at homes,” where Runmun Loll, of East Indian origin, was the lion of the evening.
We couldn’t get through five pages of Hannah More, on a wet day, at the dreariest railway-station, when the expected train was telegraphed as “not due under two hours.” What have the innocent heirs of our name done, that Hannah should continue under numberless _noms-de-plume_ to cater for them?
We know there must have been a large lump of the Blarney-Stone, conglomerate probably, kept in the desk of our reverend instructor in the ways of syntax and the dismal paths of numbers. We have a lively recollection of the countless tables of foreign coins which we committed to memory, and of the provoking additions and subtractions we underwent to reduce to dollars and cents of the Federal denomination the fortunes of a score of Rothschilds. But when, under the shadow of the Drachenfels, we attempted to reimburse the Teutonic waiter for a cup of _cafe noir_, we were ignominiously constrained to hold forth a handful of coin and to await the white-jacketed and bearded one’s pleasure, as he helped himself.
We have a strong impression that we should never have attained to our present proud position of being allowed to write for (and be printed in) the “Atlantic Monthly,” without much previous polish, through the companionship of the fairer sex. Why was it made a crime worthy of Draconian sternness to address our she-comrades in the pleasant paths of learning? Why did we behold the severe Magister Morum himself, in utter forgetfulness of his own rule, mingle in the mazy dance on an evening occasion, at which we were allowed to sit up? Did the girls of a larger growth lose their dangerous qualities on arriving at belle-hood? Why were our primary _billets-doux_ confiscated, and our offending palms, like Cranmer’s, visited with the first penalty, though we had been obliged to walk blushingly the gauntlet of fifty pairs of maiden eyes and deliver to the “female principal” of the girls’ school across the entry notes which we have since but too much reason to conclude bore no reference to the affairs of the school-realm? There is a bit of the Blarney-Stone (always of the nursery formation) which we are sure is discoverable to the true geologic eye in the underpinning of the Fifth Congregational Society’s house of worship,–then called a meeting-house, now, we believe, styled a church. For all sermons therein delivered were supposed to be for our personal edification; albeit we were not, by reason of our tender years, specifically exposed to the heresies of Origen or Pelagius. It must have been on some afternoon when we were absent, then, that Dr. Baxter delivered the discourse of which we found a commentary written on the fly-leaf of the hymn-book in our pew,–“Terribly tedious this P.M., isn’t he?” We have always felt that a great opportunity was lost to us. We should doubtless have been permitted to indulge unchecked in the solution of that lost mystery of our boyhood, as to the exact number of little brass rods in the front of the gallery, to scratch our initials with a pin upon the pew-side, or, propped by the paternal arm, to sweetly slumber till nineteenthly’s close. No such sermon was ever pronounced in our hearing. Oh, golden time of youth! precious season thus lost! We intend yet revisiting that ancient and time-worn edifice, and, borrowing the keys of the sexton, we mean to revel in all and sundry those delights of “boyhood’s breezy hour” from which we were debarred by that untimely absence. Like the old gentleman who visited nightly Van Amburg’s exhibition of the head-in-the-lion’s-mouth feat, in the moral certainty that a single absence would fall inevitably upon the one night when Leo would vary the programme by decapitation,–so we lost the one afternoon when that dull discourse diversified the pious eloquence of Jotham Baxter, D.D., disciple of Dr. Hopkins and believer in Cotton Mather. Many a refreshing slumber has sealed our eyes under subsequent outpourings of divinity, but never with that entire sense of permissible indulgence which then would certainly have been ours. Why was it–except for the Blarney-Stone–that we were always checked in any Sabba’day notes and queries of what we had noticed in the sanctuary? Why was it wicked and deserving of a double infliction of catechism (Assembly’s) for us to have seen that Bob Jones had a new jacket, and that he took five marbles and a jack-knife (in aggravating display) out of its pockets, while our mother and sisters were enabled, without let or hindrance to the most absorbing devotion, to chronicle every bonnet and ribbon within the walls of the temple?
Certainly, the family-physician carried–as well he might–a bit of the precious rock in his waistcoat-pocket; for all our subsequent experience of _materia medica_ has never revealed to us the then patent fact, that all our bodily ailments were the consequence of those particular sports which damaged clothes and disturbed the quiet of the household. Surely, the connection between the measles and sailing on the millpond was about as obvious as that between Macedon and Monmouth; and whooping-cough must have had a very long road to travel, if it originated in our nutting frolic, when we returned home with a ghastly gash in our trousers-knee.
The Blarney-Stone got into our “Manual of History”; for either it or the “Boston Centinel” must have made some egregious mistakes as to the character of some famous men who nursed our country’s fortunes. So, too, did the author of “Familiar Letters on Public Characters”; for he was anything but an indorser of the History-Book, with its wood-cuts (after Trumbull and West) of the death of General Wolfe, exclaiming, “They run who run the French then I die happy,” and of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, with its amazing portraits of the first six Presidents, and the death of Tecumseh. Nay, we have found hard work to reconcile our faith, as per History-Book, in the loveliness of those gentlemen whom stress of weather and a treacherous pilot put ashore upon Plymouth beach, (where they luckily found a rock to step upon,) with a certain sweet pastoral called “Evangeline.” We found ourselves, just after reading the proceedings of the Plymouth Monument Association, the other day, pondering over the possible fate of the Dutch colony of the Mannahattoes, supposing that the Mayflower had made (as was purposed) the Highlands of Neversink instead of Shankpainter Hill at the end of Cape Cod. It was a perilous meditation, for we found our belief in Plutarch’s Lives, the Charter Oak, and the existence of the Maelstroem all sliding away from under us. “Think,” we said, “if New York had been Boston, how it would have fared with the good Knickerbockers!”
Who was our geographer? Why did he insist upon our believing that all French men and women passed their time in mutual bows and “curchies,” and that all Italians were on their knees to fat priests, clean and rosy-looking? Why did he palm upon us that outrageous fiction of three kings (like those of Cologne) sitting in full ermine robes, with gold crowns on their heads, all alone in a sort of summer-parlor, where the heat, must have been at 80 deg. in the shade, engaged in disparting Poland? We have seen, say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,–but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited by Pietro il Parlatore, we recall a sketch of a boy running for life down a slope of at least 45 deg., just before a snowball some five hundred times as big as the one our school-boys unitedly rolled up in the back-yard. It was a snowball, round, symmetrical, just such a magnified copy of the backyard one as might be expected to follow a boy in dreams after too much Johnny-cake for supper. And that was an avalanche. We have stood since then under the shadow of the Jungfrau, on the Wengern Alp, at the selfsame spot where Byron beheld the fall of so many. We had the noble lord’s luck, (as most people have.) and saw dozens, but not one big snowball.
We believe there has been reform since that day. Thanks to the London “Illustrated News” and the “Penny Magazine,” juster ideas visit the ingenious youth of the present age. But we solemnly declare that we grew up in the belief that the President of the United States was daily ushered to his carriage by a long array of bareheaded and bowing menials, and that his official dress was a cocked hat and knee-breeches. We furthermore make affidavit that we supposed all the nobility of Europe to be in the habit of driving four-in-hand over wooden-legged beggars. And we also depose and say, that we had no other idea of royalty than as continually clad in coronation-robes, with six peers in the same, with huge wigs, as attendants. All this upon the faith of that same Malte-Brun, _a la_ P.P. Wasn’t this a pretty dish to set before–not a king-but a young republican, who fancied himself the equal of kings? And lastly, upon the same authority, we held that “the horrible custom of eating human flesh does not belong exclusively to any nation.” We have seen, we repeat, men and cities. We have dined at the Rocher de Cancale, the Maison Doree, at Delmonico’s, at German Gasthauses, at Italian Trattorias, at “Joe’s” in London, the Trosachs Inn in the Highlands, and upon all peculiar and national dishes, from the _sardines au gratin_ of Naples to the _sauer kraut_ of Berlin, from the “one fish-ball” of Boston to the hog and hominy of Virginia,–but never yet upon any _carte_ did we encounter “Cold Missionary” or “_Enfans en potage Fijien_.”
Where, we repeat, is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? or rather, where is it not?
The gentle reader (prepared to corroborate with many a juvenile reminiscence) must by this time be prepared for our moral; and it is very briefly this:–Is it not time to consider the budding brain as entitled to fair play? We, the dear middle-aged people, must surely remember that it has taken us much toil and trouble to unlearn many things. We know, that, when we pen anything for our coevals, it is with due attention to such facts as we can command,–that we have a wholesome fear of criticism,–that, if we make blunders in our seamanship, even though professedly land-lubbers, some awful Knickerbocker stands by with the Marine Dictionary in hand to pounce upon us. But for the poor little innocents at home any cast-off rags of knowledge are good enough. We hand down to them the worn-out platitudes of history which we have carefully eschewed. We humbug their inexperience with the same nursery fables beneath whose leonine hide our matured vision detects the ass’s ears.
We have been writing lightly enough, but with a purpose. For, absurd as may seem the fictions we have sported with, are they not types of many other far more serious ones which we cram down the throats of our rising generation, long after we ourselves have begun to disbelieve them? There is a conventional teaching which we decorously administer, and leave our pupils to disavow it when they can. History is still taught in our public and private schools, seasoned with all the exploded blunders of the past. Men grow up to full manhood with ideas of foreign lands as ridiculous and unfounded as the pictures over which we have been amusing ourselves just now in our old Geography. Young America is ignorant enough, Heaven knows, of a great deal he ought to learn; but what shall we say of our persistently cramming him with what he ought not to learn? No exploding process is strong enough, it would seem, to blow away the countless pretty stories with which juvenile histories are embroidered. Niebuhr and Arnold have forever finished Romulus and Remus and the Livian legends, for maturer beliefs; but childhood goes on in the same track. Lord Macaulay’s Romance of English History has been riddled by