REMOVALS.
“Three removes are as bad as a fire.”“A rolling stone gathers no fog.”Poor Richard.
“Three removes are as bad as a fire.”“A rolling stone gathers no fog.”Poor Richard.
“Three removes are as bad as a fire.”“A rolling stone gathers no fog.”Poor Richard.
“Three removes are as bad as a fire.”
“A rolling stone gathers no fog.”
Poor Richard.
There is an allegory in the Spectator, called, if I recollect rightly, “The Mountain of Miseries.” It narrates how the human race were once summoned by a good Genius to a particular spot, and each permitted to cast down the misery which most afflicted him, taking up some one which had belonged to a fellow-creature, and which he thought he should be more able to endure. Some cast down diseased limbs, some bad wives, and so forth; but the end of the story is, that after the exchange had been made, all felt themselves a great deal more uneasy under their adopted evils than they had ever felt under their natural ones, and, accordingly, had to petition the Genius for permission to take back each his own proper original misery. I have often thought that the practice of removing from one house to another, in the hope of finding better ease and accommodation, was not much unlike this grand general interchange of personal distresses; and often on a Whitsundayin Scotland, when I have seen people flying in all directions with old tables and beds, that would have looked a great deal better in their native homes than on the street, I have mentally compared the scene to that which is so graphically described by Addison.
The English, it seems, are not much of a removing people. When a Southron once settles himself down in a house, he only quits it with the greatest reluctance. No matter for an increasing family—no matter for bettered circumstances—no matter for the ambition of wife or daughters to get into a genteeler neighbourhood. An Englishman has naturally a strong feeling about his house: it is his castle, and he never will abandon the fort so long as he can possibly retain it. Give him but a few years’ associations to hallow the dwelling—let him have been married in it, and there spent the years of the youth of his children; and sooner than part from the dear little parlour where he has enjoyed so many delightful evening scenes, with his young spouse and his happy infants around him, he would almost part with life itself. An Englishman gets accommodated to all the inconveniences of his house, however great, as naturally as the fish with its shell, however tortuous. Some strange angularity in his vestibule, which nearly throws you down every time you visit him, may appear to you a most disagreeable crook in his lot, and one that ought to make the house intolerable to him; but, ten to one, he looks upon it as only an amiable eccentricity in the plan of the mansion, and, so far from taking ill with it, would feel like a fish out of water if it were otherwise.
The Scotch, on the contrary, are an eminently migratory people. They never are three months in any house till they wish that the annual term were once more at hand, when they might remove to another. There is no day in the year so important in their eyes as Whitsunday, when almost the whole population of every considerable town is found to be on the move, exchanging houses with each other. This is a curious feature in the people, andseems as if it only could be accounted for by supposing that the nation is totally deficient in the phrenological organ calledinhabitiveness. It is all to no use that experience is constantly showing how vain are their expectations of better lodging. Every disappointment seems to give them but a keener relish for a new attempt.
The fact is this: A family always enters upon a new house in a state of high hope as to its accommodations. So long as the recollection of their deserted abode is still fresh, the new house appears a paradise; for, mark, it has been selected on the express account of its not being characterised by any one of the inconveniences alleged against the old. By and bye, however, its own peculiar evils are felt; and, long before Candlemas day, it has been found as disagreeable as the other. Then a new one is selected, which, in its turn, is declared as bad as any. So far as my observation has extended, the itch for removing more generally prevails among the female than the male department of the population. Husbands in general are too little in the house ever to fall out of conceit with it; but the wife, as the more domestic creature, has full opportunity to observe and feel its defects; and she it is who most frequently urges and achieves the removal. There are various things about a house in which the husband can never see any importance, or feel any interest, but which appear to the wife as each the most cardinal of all cardinal points. One of these, for instance, is a back-green. “A back-green!” let the words be pronounced with a solemnity befitting their awful import. Often, when a house has seemed to the husband all that could be desired, he has been thrust out of it, whether he would or not, all on account of a thing which was as inexplicable to him as the mysteries of the Chinese faith—a back-green. Perhaps you hear some day that your back-green lies totally out of the sun, or that the right use to it is shared by some disagreeable neighbours, or is naught for some other equally intelligible reason. But you learn no more, and next Whitsunday you find yourselfin the horrors and agonies of a removal to some distant part of the town, all on account of a little space of ground, of which you never yet could guess the use or purpose. Very often you are removed from a comfortable and every way excellent house, because it wants a back-green, and taken to one every way inferior, and, indeed, utterly wretched, but which, in the eyes of your sweet spouse, is rendered equal to a palace—because it has a back-green. I would advise all husbands to keep a sharp look-out after the back-greens, as well as several other things, which I shall point out to them.
Let us suppose a case of proposed removal in the middle walks of life. You are, say, the father of a rather numerous family, living very contentedly in aflatin not the least dense part of the town. For a long time there have been grumblings, like distant thunder among the mountains; but you have never yet heard any very strong reason urged why you should remove. At length, about the New Year, these mutterings begin to get voice; and your wife, some quiet evening, after all the young people are gone to bed, opens a sudden and most tremendous attack upon you, respecting the necessity of no longer keeping the children pent up in this small dwelling, so far from any play-ground or fresh air. And, really, she does not think it is good for her own health that you should live any longer here. She has plenty of exercise, she acknowledges, but no air. It is so far from public walks, that it makes a toil of a pleasure before they can be reached. And then, no place whatsoever to dry the clothes. Your own shirts are never properly seen to, being only hung in an open garret, where they are exposed to all the smoke of the town; at least, all that chooses to come in at the skylights. And there is no such thing as a servant’s bed-room in this house. The girl, I assure you, has her own complaints as to the hardship of being obliged to sleep in that den above the kitchen door. And as for the stair, is it not a thoroughfare to all the scum of the town? Some of the neighbours, I assureyou, are no better than they should be, if all tales be true. There is even an old man in the garret who is supposed to live byBurking. The fact is, we would now require an additional bed-room for the boys—&c. &c.
Lectured up to removing point, you consent, unhappy man! to leave your shop some forenoon, in order to take a walk with your wife about the outskirts of the town, in search of a more airy, more spacious, and more genteel abode. You are dragged “by the lug and the horn,” as shepherds say, through multitudes of those “delightful smallself-containedhouses,” which offer, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the college,” all the elegancies of Heriot Row and Great King Street, at a tithe of the rent. You find them all as like each other in the interior as if they had been made on the principle of chip-boxes; but yet, to your wife, each seems to have its own peculiar merits. One excels in the matter of a lobby; another has an extra closet; a third affords a superior view from the drawing-room windows; and a fourth—O merit above all merits!—transcends its fellows in the article of a back-green. Every thing, however, is inspected—every thing is taken into the general account; and the result of the whole is, that though the rent is ten pounds higher, and the dining-room a thought less than in your present abode, youmustremove. The carpets, with a very little eeking and clipping, will all suit. Your sideboard, of which your spouse has a measure in her reticule, will exactly answer the recess devoted to it. The jack in the kitchen answers to a tee; and even the scraper at the door has something about it that is singularly appropriate, as if the builder at the very first had designed to take the measure of your foot. All things appear, in the showing of your good dame, to be so remarkably answerable and proper, that you half believe it to be a matter of destiny, and, in completing your arrangements, hardly bargain so much with the landlord as with Fate.
During the spring months which elapse before the dayof removal, you live in a state of dreamy bliss respecting your new house. Almost every fine morning you rise about seven for a walk, and, by a strange chance, you invariably take the house of promise in your way, and enjoy a survey of its external excellencies. When you observe, from the closed shutters, that its present occupants, so far from being agog about it like yourself, are snugly snoozing in their beds, you wonder at their indifference. If you were they, you would have been up hours ago, enjoying the air in the back-green, or playing the king of the Vandals in the front-plot. What a pity to see that splendid ruin of a rhododendron drooping in that fashion! What a shame to pay so little attention to the boxwood! At length, the 25th of May arrives. You transfer yourself to the now vacated tenement, pitying with all your heart the stupid people who have left it. For a time, a kind of honeymoon delirium pervades the household. You certainly do find some pleasure in contemplating from your drawing-room windows the cattle in the neighbouring grass-park, even though sensible all the time that they are only kept therein pettoby the exterminating butcher at the end of “the Row.” Your wife, too, reposes upon the joys of her back-green with a gratulation of spirit that seems as if it could never know an end. And while the servant girl rejoices in a chamber to herself, your boys have sport unceasing in pasting over the kitchen door with pictures and excellent new songs. But all this only holds good while summer lasts—summer, during which no house ever appears inconvenient or disadvantageous. By and bye comes the winter of your discontent. The views from the window are no longer fair; the back-green, which already in autumn had begun to lose its character as a play-ground, in consequence of the swarms of creeping things, which covered the walls in such a way as if they had a design to form a living entomological museum, and so fairly frightened the children into the house, is now a sink of mud and melting snow; the serving-wench finds that it was better to sleepin “that den above the kitchen door”—in so far as the said den was very “cosey”—than to lie in a chamber under the slates, exposed to the malevolence of the elements in all its shapes. You find, too, that in the short days it is not very agreeable to walk several times to and from town in the dark, through a district which, in the language of house-proprietors, “has the advantage of being out of the bounds of police.” The phrase, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the College,” appears to you as only calculated for the faculties of some itinerating prodigy, in as much as it never takes you less than twice the time. The worthy housewife herself, after long suffering in secret, and great reluctance to confess her counsel wrong, has to complain at last of “the distance from the market,” which obliges her to buy every thing from small dealers in the neighbourhood, who necessarily must make up for uncertain custom by “two prices.” No getting so much as a pennyworth of vegetables without sending for it nearly a mile; and then “that creature Jenny,” there is no sending her out, you know, even upon the shortest errand, but she stays an hour. When we want even so much as change for a shilling, there is no getting it nearer than Port Hopetoun, which is half a mile away. Then we are such a distance from the kirk. It is only in fine weather we are able to get that length, and at most only once in the day. I declare, if we stay here much longer, we shall become absolute heathens. Although, to be sure, we pay less taxes in this out-of-the-way place than we did before, have we not lost a washing-tub, from there being no police? And then, is there not a toll-bar betwixt us and the town, at which we must pay one shilling every time we have to go out or come home in a coach? And, above all things, we are cut off here from all our friends and acquaintances. We do not know a soul nearer hand than the Duncans, who live at the back of the Meadows. And there is no dropping in here, in an easy way, upon a forenoon call, but the people, when they reach us, are so much fatiguedwith the distance, that they must be asked to stay to dinner: and the case ends, perhaps, with the good man being obliged to walk three miles home with a young lady at twelve o’clock at night! Only think of that! No, no, this cold, outlandish, genteel place, will never do. Give me a good front door in the New Town, “with all the conveniences,” and I’ll leave such places as this to them that like them better.
When once a resolution is formed to leave a house, it is amazing how many holes are picked in its character, many of them literal. The wind gets in at a hundred places; we can see daylight through stone walls and double-deafened ceilings. Then, there is such a draught up the staircase, and into the best bed-room, that positively there is no enduring it. I think another six months of this house would fairly make an end ofme. It’s not a house for tender folk. You might sometimes as well sit in the open street, as by the fireside. You burn your shins, and all the time your back is freezing. Upon my word, I think we should save all the difference between this and a front door in doctors’ bills!
A front door is then determined upon; and you think you have at length, by a little stretch of your purse, reached the very perfection of comfort. But alas! “fronti nulla fides,” which is as much as to say, there is no reliance to be placed on a front door. It is true, you escape all the evils of your former habitation, and that nothing can match your back kitchen as a convenience to the servants. But then the family living above you has twice your number of children; and these imps seem to do nothing whatever the whole day long, from six in the morning till seven at night, but run pat, pat, pat, along the floors overhead, till they almost drive you mad,non vi sed sæpe cadendo. Even the charms of a back-green, or a superior scullery, will not stand against this; and so you determine at last to go to an upper flat in the same neighbourhood, where you may have the pleasure of tormenting some person below withyourchildren, without the risk of being at the same time tormented yourself. The last selection is made upon moderate and prudent principles; but yet hope is also even here upon the wing. The house has no pretensions to style or external gentility, but yet “Edwin was no vulgar boy.” The stair is remarkably spacious and well lighted, and has, further, the advantage of a door at the bottom, which can be opened by any inhabitant, by means of a pulley, without the necessity of descending to the bottom. In fact, it is what I would call a genteel stair. “The Stevensons” live in the firstflat. The kitchen door has a nice hole at the lower corner for the cat; and what a delightful place there is by the side of the fire for the lamp, or where we could keep our salt dry in apig! The request of the Regent Earl of Mar, as inscribed on the front of his house at Stirling,
“I pray all lukaris on this ludgingWith gentil ee to gif their judging,”
“I pray all lukaris on this ludgingWith gentil ee to gif their judging,”
“I pray all lukaris on this ludgingWith gentil ee to gif their judging,”
“I pray all lukaris on this ludging
With gentil ee to gif their judging,”
comes powerfully into force in all cases where the tenant is just entering upon his house. As in the other case every fault is exaggerated, and made the subject of congratulatory disgust, so in this, every fault is extenuated. “The ceilings are a little contracted, I see, by the roof.” “Oh! a wee thought coomceyled—a very small matter; these rooms are only intended for the children. We have some capitalpublicrooms at the back, looking into the Queen Street gardens, and have a little peep of the sea in the distance.” “Upper flats,” observes your Malagrowther friend, “are very apt to smoke.” “Oh! not at all, I assure you. But I have been assured that Dr Bonnyman cured this house entirely some years ago, and since then there has never been a single puff of smoke.” “Your nursery is in the garret; don’t you think the children will feel it rather cold?” “Oh, the most comfortable nursery in the world; and see,only see, what a nice door there is at the top of the garret stair to prevent the bairns from tumbling down!” “I am sorry, however, to see a green-wife established so close beneaththe door, at the bottom of yourcommonstair.” “Oh, Sir, but consider the convenience of the greens.” In fact, there is no peculiarity about the house, however trifling, but, in the eyes of a new tenant, it will seem a beauty, as in those of a departing one it will constitute a disgrace. And this is just the philosophy of the question, and the real cause why there is so much useless tossing and tumbling of old furniture on each 25th of May.