FLEET STREET

Little Jack Horner sat in a cornerEating a Christmas pie;He pulled out a plum with his finger and thumb,And said "What a good boy am I!"

"And is that Shakespeare's?" I exclaimed.

"And what for no'? It is a perfect specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon English, without corrupt admixture of Norman or Roman words. It is terse and dramatic.The very first line, in its revelation of the hero's remote and solitary state, presents a powerful suggestion of a contemplative character. His voracity, tempered by intense conscientiousness, is indicated in a few clear, pertinent touches that unmistakably betoken the master-hand. Yet the author's name is lost in the dust of the centuries; it has eluded the vigilance of antiquarian research. Only I am acquainted with the secret. If you doubt it, turn the poem into an anagram, and the truth shall be clear even to you."

"But," I began, "if"—

"Bah! Look at here!" cried Roderick, jumping to his feet and brandishing his sword, "I came here to improve your mind; but if you are not amenable to reason, it's no use talking. So get out of it, ye puir, daft, gawkie Southron loon!"

And so saying, he struck me so terrible a blow across the nose with his sword that I sneezed, and lo, behold! he was gone, and in the place where he had been, was nothing but a great, busy, buzzing moth, that hovered round my nose as though it had been a joy-beacon.

It was a strange experience. I don't know what to make of it. But I don't think that Shakespeare was Bacon. And, as I hadn't the slightest trace of headache when I awoke, I think that, after all, the Scottish Spirit was right. Bacon hasn't a ham to stand on. Bacon is smoked. To honest nostrils Bacon hereafter is rancid.

Be that as it may, there can be no doubt henceforth as to the authorship of "Little Jack Horner." Following Roderick'sinstructions, I have taken the letters of the lines of that poem, and have constructed with them an anagram which establishes beyond possibility of dispute that Shakespeare wrote them.

I am prepared to prove it to the British Association, and defyThe Daily Chronicle. It is true the spelling is rather bad, but Shakespeare's was notoriously beastly, so that is another proof in my favour.

It is moreover a perfect anagram, in which each letter is used, and used once only. The letters areLittle jack horner sat in a corner eating a christmas pie he pulled out a plum with his finger and thumb and said what a good boy am i.

Now, mark, hey presto! there's no deception; mix these letters and form them into new combinations, and you evolve thisremarkable, startling, conclusive, and scientifically historical revelation:—

Mistir Shakesper aloan was the Lyturery gent wich rote this Bootiful Pome in Elizabuth Raign, and Jaimce had Damn Good Lauph.

Could anything be clearer?

When I go up that quiet cloistered court, running up like a little secure haven from the stormy ocean of Fleet Street, and see the doctor's gnarled bust on the bracket above his old hat, I sometimes think the very wainscot must still be impregnated with the fumes of his seething punch-bowl.Washington Irving.

Washington Irving.

My Bosom's Lord declares that it is more of a smell than a street; but there is not a journalist of any literary pretension in Britain who does not regard Fleet Street as the Mecca of his craft, and instinctively turn his face towards it when he has occasion to say his prayers.

It is the focus, the magnetic centre, andvery heart of London's Fairyland—the Capital of the Territory of Brick and Mortar Romance.

Its enchanted courts are the inner sanctuary of Haunted London. It is the most astonishing sensation to step out of the hum and moan and fret of the rushing and turbulent City's most bustling and roaring street, into the absolute, cloistered stillness of, for instance, the Temple; where, within fifty yards of Fleet Street, you may stand by Oliver Goldsmith's grave and hear no sound save the cooing of pigeons and the splashing of a fountain.

Fleet Street's air is the quintessence of English History. From the Plague and the Fire to the Jubilee Procession, everything has passed here. All the literary eminence of the day comes to do business here.These paving-stones have felt the weight of George R. Sims, Clement Scott, Bernard Shaw, and the Poet Craig. It is the world's main artery, the centre of the Empire's nervous system, the brain and soul of England.

Be that as it may, I am conscious of an increase in my stature since I became a part of Fleet Street—a stretching of my boots since I began to walk in the footsteps of Swift, Steele, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and all the other giants whose seething punch-bowls have impregnated the wainscot of the neighbouring taverns.

barberA BARBER'S SHOP IN 1492.

A BARBER'S SHOP IN 1492.

The chief of the ghosts, of course, is the burly lexicographer—the man with the inky ruffles, the dirty large hands, the shabby brown coat, and shrivelled wig. Methinks I see him now, clinging to his door in dingy Bolt Court, and waking the midnight echoeswith his Cyclopean laughter, as he listens to a parting from fluent Burke or snuffy Gibbon.

There were no footpaths in Fleet Street in those days; spouts projected the rain-water in streams from the house-tops, and there were no umbrellas. The swinging of broad signs in high winds would sometimes bring down a wall—an accident which killed, on one occasion, in Fleet Street, "two young ladies, a cobbler, and the king's jeweller."

And yet the daintiest and prettiest of women came tripping down Fleet Street, and up the narrow court, to see the blustering, pompous Lichfield bear; unless, indeed, Miss Burney, witty Mrs. Montague, charming Miss Reynolds, and shrewd Miss Piozzi only called to caress Hodge, the doctor's cat.

(Happy thought! who knows?Mem.:Wemust get a cat.)

It was Dr. Johnson who set the excellent Fleet Street fashion of tempering the fierce delights of literary achievement with staid and lingering meditation in the pleasant taverns.

In fact, the Fleet Street taverns are visited by reverend pilgrims to this day as monuments consecrate to the great lexicographer; and at all times of the day one may find faithful congregations of Fleet Street men of letters devoutly lingering there to pour out libations to his glory.

It was at the Cheshire Cheese, whilst the chops hissed on the grid, that Dr. Johnson was wont to snub Boswell, quiz Goldsmith, and brutally beat down hisopponents with his "Why, sir," "What, sir?" and "What then, sir?"

"Here, sir," he himself admitted, "I dogmatise and am contradicted, and I love this conflict of intellect and opinion." It was in another tavern, up another narrow court, that the pompous author ofRasselassaid to his delighted biographer, "Sir, give me your hand; I have taken a liking to you." And it was under the influence of this place that Boswell wrote:—

The orthodox High Church sound of the Mitre, the figure and manner of the celebrated Dr. Johnson, the extraordinary power and precision of his conversation, and the pride arising from finding myself admitted as his companion, produced a variety of sensations and a pleasing elevation of mind beyond what I had ever before experienced.

Dear, garrulous, faithful old Bozzy! I have myself seen literary men mentallyelevated in the same hallowed atmosphere, but never have I met any who expressed his emotions with nicer precision.

But the first and foremost to me of all Fleet Street's illustrious ghosts—as actual and inevitable a feature of the famous thoroughfare as the taverns, the restaurants, the overhanging signs, the newspaper offices, the Griffin, and the Law Courts—is our old friend and colleague the Bounder.

I cannot walk from Ludgate Circus to the Griffin without meeting him. I see him stalking into Edwards', with solemn visage and weighty stride, for the momentous function of dinner. I see him with beaming countenance and abdominal "Haw, haw!" of full content, nimbly stepping out of Bower's, his "percentage restored" and his soul "satisfied in Nature." I see him striding gloomily with downcast eyes, handsin fob, and bludgeon under his arm, oblivious of the traffic and the world, wrestling in desperate conflict with the reluctant Muses, for a happy phrase or eccentric rhyme.

His Gargantuan figure is never absent frommyFleet Street. Were he to slap me on the back, I should say "Hello, Ned," as naturally as if he had never left us.

Ah me! how we get carried away from those by whose side we would have chosen to fight!

Happily, there is no settled sadness in the Bounder's ghost.

One of the earliest recollections I have of him is connected with atête-à-têtedinner (the tater-tart came many years after) in one of the Fleet Street taverns.

We had finished our ample meal, when in came my old friend Tom Sutton, oftheAthletic News, and seeing nothing but empty plates before us, cheerily invited us to dine.

I was about to explain the situation, when the Bounder, to warn me off, winking sideways, affably answered, "All right, old chap. I'll have a steak and a tankard of stout."

This he consumed, together with several accessories and supplements pressed upon his easy acquiescence by our genial host.

At last came the solemn moment

When the banquet's o'er,The dreadful reckoning, and men smile no more.

Tom Sutton looked, and looked again, pulled his moustache, and called the waiter.

"I say," he protested, "there's a mistake here. We haven't had all this."

"Mistake, sir?" said the waiter. "No, dere vas no mistake, sir; I haf charge for dat gentleman all his two dinner. Dat gentleman always have two dinner sometimes. No mistake."

"Two dinners? Why"—

But at that moment Tom looked across the table, saw the Bounder's huge frame shaking with inward chuckles, which rose to a roar as their eyes met, and then he paid and said no more.

The Bounder was of course the Mentor who introduced me to Bower's. I was "up" for a day, and of course we "signified the same in the usual manner."

"Albert," said the Bounder, "bring me a glass ofmyport—from behind the glue-pot."

I said I would take the same, and put down half a crown.

Albert brought tenpence change.

As I counted it, I began, "I say, is this change"—

The Bounder, who had been watching, at once interrupted me. "Don't expose your untutored provincial ignorance," he said; "tenpence a time. Always have it with provincials. Tenpence left? Order another."

It was soon after theClarionremoved its headquarters to London, that I paid my first visit to the Cheshire Cheese, the primitive tavern, with "nicely sanded floor," which, in a dingy Fleet Street court, still rears its antique head in proud and successful defiance of the gimcrack modern amply-mirrored restaurant.

It was a damp, cold, miserable November night, and I had been tramping with thepartner of my joys all day through slush and mire in search of houses.

Looking in for letters at theClarion'sgloomy little office in Bouverie Street, I found Fay crouching disconsolately over a handful of expiring embers in the grate.

He had been ill for many weeks, and had been reduced to a painful diet of buns and milk, but yet, if he might not feast, he could still take an interest in other people's feasting. Doctors could not rob him of that comfort.

So he inquired with touching interest where we proposed to dine.

My Bosom's Lord, with native Cornish trend, asked where was food the cheapest.

"Tut tut," said the Bounder. "Are you blessed with an appetite, yet grudge its entertainment? Is dinner-time a time to think of thrift? Go to, woman. Doyou never give thanks? It is Saturday night. The Cheshire Cheese pudding is now on. Take this poor victim of your avarice to the Cheshire Cheese, and let him for once be decently fed."

"All right," answered my frugal spouse; "if it's the Board's orders, and the Board pays, I don't object," and with a laughing "Good-night," she prepared to depart.

But as we were crossing the threshold the Bounder stopped me. "Are you going to the Cheese?" he asked.

"I expect so."

"Hum! and I'm doomed to the bun-and-milk shop." His voice quivered as he spoke. Then suddenly—"No, hang it! I'll come with you. That doctor of mine is an ass. I'll try the pudding."

And he did—several times; though I, in robust health, could stomach no more thanone helping of the rich and bilious compound.

As we came out he walked on his heels and slapped his chest. "Haw! haw!" he said, "I never felt better in my life. That doctor is an ass. Bread and milk? Bah!" And he swaggered all the way down Fleet Street.

On the next evening I found him crouching again over the little fire in Bouverie Street. I could feel his "hump" as soon as I opened the door. He was very bad.

"What's the matter, old chap? Don't you feel well?"

"No," he said, very ruefully; "I'm very bad. You know, I begin to think my doctor is a fool. I've been trying this perishing bread-and-milk diet for nearly two months, and, upon my word, I never felt worse. Really, I've given this doctor a fair trial, but,hang it all, the fellow does not understand me at all!"

Oh the gaps left by the passing years in a man's little circle of friends!

Time was when the cordial hand-grip of friends met me in Manchester at every corner, and almost every face in the streets was familiar.

I was there last Christmas, and I walked for half a day without a welcoming voice or smiling countenance to greet me. I thought of them that I had known, and walked with, and drank and eaten with there, and desolation fell upon me. To stroll through the crowded, bustling thoroughfare was like walking through a graveyard at midnight. The buildings loomed upon my gaze like monuments of the departed; and the only inhabitants I saw were spectres of the dead.

It was holiday time, and the passers-by were many. Their laughter sounded in my ears like the sobbing of wind through willows.

Then I fell into a cluster of survivors from the fray, a band of staunch and hearty friends of old, who took me by the hand and "trated me dacent."

"Well, I am glad to see you," said one; then another, then another, and all together in lusty chorus.

That was good.

Then they began to talk. "Do you remember being here with Tom Sutton on such a night? Ah, poor old Tom! His death was an awful shock!"

And, "You heard how Jones's two boys went down in the pleasure yacht? Jones has been out of his wits ever since."

And so on, and so on, till I rejoiced to hear the signal of parting.

We'll have no more of these reminiscences of graves and worms and epitaphs. "Some grief shows much of love; but much of grief shows still some want of wit."

Why, how nowe, Babell, whither wilt thou build?I see old Holbourne, Charing Cross, the Strand,Are going to St. Giles' in the Field.St. Katerne, she takes Wapping by the hand,And Hogsdon will to Hygate ere't be long.London has got a great way from the streame.I think she means to go to Islington,To eat a dish of strawberries and creame.

Thomas Freeman(1614).

"Hogsdon" has come to Hygate long since, as our friend Cartmel, wearily pedalling his bicycle through the up-piled accumulation of dingy streets that divide his slum from my elevated fastness, can sadly testify.

Where will "she" be a hundred years hence?

Where when "she" is finished?

I wonder.

James I. predicted that London would shortly be England and England would be London. Yet London in his time was literally the village that modern facetiousness calls it.

Little more than fifty years ago a magazine writer, bewailing London's vastness, declared that it must on no account be permitted to grow larger. The population was then less than a million and a half.

whitehallWHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES I.

WHITEHALL IN THE REIGN OF JAMES I.

The monstrous growth which has taken place since then and the stupendous rate of present increase fill the thoughtful observer with dread. The problems of communication and distribution grow year by year more complicated and difficult.The congestion of clever men attracted from all parts of the country by the glitter of the capital, impoverishes the provinces, and fills London with starving unemployed talent, much of which gradually degenerates into hopeless drunkenness, or still more degraded flunkeyism. The surplus artists, sculptors, writers, and actors stagnating and rotting in London would, and should, set up throughout the counties living, healthy, beneficial schools of art, culture, and general enlightenment.

The only comfort visible in the actual distortion is, that by its wholesale exaggeration of the evils afflicting the whole country, it will the more speedily bring a breakdown of the whole system, and so precipitate its own cure. Through the growth of population between 1866 and 1891 the "value" of land in London increased by £110,000,000.Ground in the City is sold at the rate of ten guineas per superficial foot. £16,000,000 a year is drawn as rent of land whose agricultural value is about £16,000 a year. That is to say, the people of London have to pay £50 every year for what would have cost, but for their own industry, only one shilling.

But these are matters for discussion in weightier works than mine. Here I merely skim the surface, and catch the superficial fact.

For instance, I observe that London's growth is steadily destroying London's picturesqueness. The embowered palaces of dukes and earls are giving place, more or less, to workmen's model dwellings; and the spots, such as Charing Cross and Tower Hill, where kings and princes were formerly decapitated in a gentlemanly way, neverrise nowadays beyond the breaking of the crowns of rude and clamorous agitators.

Nowhere, in short, is Democracy advancing so visibly as in London; nowhere is it so manifestly pushing back, and crawling over, and supplanting Aristocracy.

old houseOLD HOUSE IN SOUTHWARK.

OLD HOUSE IN SOUTHWARK.

Southwark's palaces have been famous for hundreds of years. St. Saviour's Church, where the bones of Fletcher and Massingerand Edmond Shakespeare are laid, was built on the site of a church built before the Norman Conquest, from the profits of a ferry across the Thames. Anne Boleyn had an abode here, and hither rode the enterprising Royal Henry to walk and talk with her. Elizabeth came by water with the French Ambassador to see the bull-baiting in the building near the Globe Theatre.

A famous old London tavern, the Tabard, from which Chaucer's nine-and-twenty pilgrims started on their journey, stood near London Bridge within living memory. In Southwark too, until our time, stood the galleried inn where Mr. Pickwick discovered Sam Weller. In fact, Southwark was, until our time, full of historical associations, and once ranked amongst London's most fashionable suburbs. Now it is a labyrinthof slums, and Barclay & Perkins' brewery occupies the site of the Bankside Globe Theatre.

strand oneTHE STRAND, 1660.

THE STRAND, 1660.

The narrow thoroughfares between the Strand and the river, where modern provincial visitors have their caravanserais, rustled once with fashionable satins and groaned under the weight of gilded coaches. Here dwelt dukes and earls and the pick of our nobility. Mark Twain, inThe Prince and the Pauper,has pictured for us a Royal river pageant, such as many bright and flashing eyes must have beheld from the windows and steps of the palaces that lined the Strand or Middlesex bank of the Thames between London and Westminster, for the king's town residence stood hard by in Whitehall; and thence to his country palace at Greenwich—Elizabeth's favourite "Manner of Pleasaunce"—the richly caparisoned andsilk-canopied State barges fluttered splendidly.

strand twoTHE STRAND, 1660.

THE STRAND, 1660.

Now the stateliest craft that ride the Cockney surge are the rackety penny packet and dingily plebeian coal barge.

Soho, the dingy resort of foreign refugees, was formerly a district of great mansions, glimpses of whose former grandeur can still be distinguished beneath their present grime.

James the First's unlucky son, Henry, Raleigh's friend and the people's favourite, built himself a mansion in Gerrard Street, behind the site of the present Shaftesbury Theatre. Dryden lived in the same street, and here stood Dr. Johnson's favourite club, the Turk's Head.

Charles the Second's "natural" son, the Duke of Monmouth, the ill-starred, ambitious soldier who figures as the hero of Dryden's "Absalom," and who was beheaded, at thethird stroke of the axe, on Tower Hill, had a palace in Soho Square where now stand gloomy warehouses; and in the same square, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, Gilbert Burnet, and George Colman the Elder, formerly made history and literature where Crosse & Blackwell now make pickles.

The whole district is, as Bottom might have said with more than usual accuracy, "translated." It is become the stronghold and fastness of the foreigner and of his cheap and excellent restaurants.

Nowhere in the world are cheaper or more varied dinners to be had. The odours of the fried fish of Jerusalem here mingle with the perfume of the sauerkraut of Germany, and the cheeses of France and Italy; and over all, blending them into one harmonious whole, serenely soars the powerful aroma of triumphant garlic.

This is but one of the phases of an amazing latter-day development of the Restaurant in London.

whitefieldWHITEFIELD'S TABERNACLE: TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD IN 1736.

WHITEFIELD'S TABERNACLE: TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD IN 1736.

Shall I ever forget the horror of the first dinner I ever had in England? The Gargantuan slabs of semi-raw beef, and the bitter, black, treacly "porter," seemed to my mind certain signs that I had fallen among a race of savages and cannibals.But now, instead of the mean, dingy, dirty, fly-blown chop-houses that formerly mocked and balked London's appetite, we have a collection of marble palaces, in which daintily prepared repasts are retailed at lower prices than were formerly charged for the chop-houses' superannuated chunks of brutal flesh.

The Adelaide Gallery, one of the largest of these restaurants, has taken the place of a most respectable Gallery of Practical Science, and the Oxford Street store of the most democratic of wine-importers grows its cobwebs in what, fifty years ago, was accounted one of the most fashionable resorts in Europe. "Two thousand persons of rank and fashion," as I read in an old magazine, "assembled in the splendid structure" at its opening. And itwasa splendid structure then, for the architect had introduced nichescontaining statues of "the heathen deities," with "Britannia, GeorgeIII., and Queen Charlotte" thrown in! And now, I presume, they are thrown out—or rounded off into a perfectly harmonious circle perhaps, by a supplemental and complementary statue of Ally Sloper.

These tokens of Democracy's advance are not unpleasing; the growth of the restaurant tendency affords one particular pleasure, as suggesting that the English are losing some of their dominant insular fault of sullen individualism, and are becoming more healthily disposed to the communal life.

Much less hopeful is the swelling grandeur of the London gin-palace—the modern substitute for the pleasant tavern.

In mediæval times, if the earle saw a stately edifice with stained-glass windows,statuary, and everything gorgeous, he would enter with reverence to stoop his head; now, he goes in with fourpence to soak it.

In mediæval times he would be seen crossing himself with the holy water as he emerged; now, as he comes out, he wipes it off on his coat tail.

In mediæval times, for their sins and sorrows and the glory of God, the nobles built cathedrals. In this more vulgar age, for the people's griefs and the lords' profit, England's nobility build glorified pot-houses.

In mediæval times, our chivalry won their knighthood and titles by spoiling the heathen at the sword's point; now, they secure peerages by spoiling English men and women with adulterated and brutalising liquors.

This is what we call the progress of civilisation—

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

But that is neither here nor there.

Dreaming, dozing,Fallow, fallow, and reposing.

Dr. Mackay.

There is an old Dutch pier at Gorleston separating the open sea from the mouth of the river that leads to Yarmouth. It is not ornamental; it has no pavilion, no railings, no band, but only capstans, tarry ropes, a small white-washed observatory, and—the most surprising jumble of odd, cosy, sheltered nooks overhanging the blue water, where one may sprawl all day in any garb and any posture, and, soothed by the sea's lullaby,blink at the sun, or, with the aid of our country's literature, go to sleep.

There is nothing to pay to go on, and our pier is therefore frequented by no objectionable persons. It is true there are a few mistaken damsels who sketch or paint the endless succession of spectacular marvels laid on by tide and clouds; but I think they mean no harm.

As for the apathetic individuals who come with bits of string and worms, pretending to catch fish, everybody knows that they never do; indeed, after observing them through several waking intervals, I have come to the conclusion that their only object is to politely aid our slumbers by the sight of their languidly deliberate preparations, and calm, leisurely hours of uninterrupted waiting.

As for the rest of us, we are frankly,honestly, disreputably lazy, and dowdily, drowsily sprawl and dawdle the daily clock-round.

If the wind be southerly, we take our nap on the river side of the pier, and open our eyes at intervals to scan the fishing-boats with flapping sails, as they depart to or return from their two months' strife with wind and wave to reap for us the harvest of the sea. Every vessel in Yarmouth's swarming fleet must round this pier's windy point at coming in or going out, and cross the stream that swiftly flows and whirls beneath our feet. All through the day, in and out they pass, to and from their perilous work; late at night we hail and greet them as they glide with majestic sail through the reflected moonbeams, and disappear like huge, towering phantoms into the darkness and mystery beyond.

pierGORLESTON PIER.

GORLESTON PIER.

These, with a few timber-laden steamers from Norway—their shifted cargoes, sloping decks, and fearfully-listed hulls attesting often to the fury of the Baltic gales—are the only link connecting us with the far distant world of commerce to which we once belonged. These, and—I must not forget the great morning and evening events of our drowsy days—the two big passenger steamers that set out before breakfast for Clacton and London, and the two that heavily swing into the narrow channel at dusk, with ever fresh wonder to our awakened and densely assembled holiday population.

When the wind is northerly we shift over to the south side of our pier and face the Gorleston bay and beach. Lo, what a transformation! No trace of the workaday world remains. A scene of pure enchantment, of sunny brightness and rest.

A semicircle of crumbling sandcliffs forms the background of the bay; and from the verge of a narrow streak of yellow sand, without a pebble, stretches the green, the blue, the yellow sea—nestling in its intimate nooks, splashing against the wooden promenade, or dashing with imposing affectation of fierceness over our promiscuously scattered breakwaters of granite.

We have one hotel, incongruously conspicuous on the neck of ground dividing sea from river at the pier's base; but we have no theatres, no music-halls, no punch-and-judy show, no niggers, no "amusements" (!!!) of any sort. We have a few bathing-machines upon the beach, and a vast picturesque camp of bathing-tents, but not any other sign of commercial enterprise. There is no esplanade to swagger on; no electric lights to set off our beauties bynight; no illumination over all the "promenade" and mignonette gardens and pier after sunset, except the light of the moon and stars.

Wecansee the garish lights of Yahoo Yarmouth, flaunting through the night, two miles away; but, if we can help it, we don't.

The only thing we do with assiduity is bathing, unless we belong to the army of bare-legged water-babies who unceasingly "paddle" and build castles on the beach.

Sometimes we carry our day-dreams in small boats across the glistering sea, and lazily drift or tack before the languid breeze.

It has even occurred that foolish relapses into energy have borne us upon bicycles through leafy lanes to lazier Suffolk Broads; but these excesses are rare and brief. No man could face these sleepy inland waters andpreserve an active spirit; the apathetic willows on the banks dreamily curtsey as if too tired to hold up their heads.

But let Dr. Mackay, who opened this chapter, also speak the last word—

There's a humming of bees beneath the lime,And the deep blue heaven of a southern climeIs not more beautifully brightThan this English sky with its islets white,And its Alp-like clouds, so snowy fair!—The birch leaves dangle in balmy air.

Men must work and women must weep;There's little to earn and many to keep,Though the harbour bar be moaning.

Charles Kingsley.

What is this Life at all, and what its purport? Is Good its aim or evil? If roses be fair, what need of thorns? God sends youth and health and beauty; what devil brings sickness, grief, and decay?

When I wrote the irrelevant, drowsy chapter preceding this, the sun shone so kindly, and so benignly Nature beamed, that Care was as a dream of what never could have been.

To live was to be blessed; to think was to enjoy. Nature was a doting mother that fed us with bounty and kissed us fondly to rest; the earth a sunny garden; heaven a waste of luxurious fancy.

How blind I must have been! What a glorious blindness it would be, if——

Ah! "If"!

My drop from the rosy clouds began pleasantly enough. I was nooning by the river-side, when an ancient, second-hand Danish pirate, with improbable pantomime whiskers, like tangled seaweed, fixedly looking at the lower part of my waistcoat, casually remarked, "Seems to me you're pining away down there."

"Yes," I answered briskly, "I'm not the man I was."

"No," said he meditatively, "we're noneof us as young as we was; but, come, you can't be more than forty-three."

"I am," I answered indignantly, "no more than thirty-six."

"Well," said he, with what may have been a consolatory intent, "we can't help our looks, none of us. I'm judging you'll not be for the lifeboat when you're my age."

I had decided to speak to him no more, but an undefined hope to get the better of his sauciness prompted me to ask, "What age may that be?"

"Fifty-five," he answered.

"You look," said I vindictively, "a great deal older."

Scarce had the words left my mouth than I was ashamed of them. I saw for the first time now that he was crippled, and walked with a stick. Rough weather and a hardlife had left on him a low-water mark of rust and wear and decay. But he answered, gently enough, "It's like enough I may. I've been very bad this three week. Got tangled in a rope and fell overboard, and was dragged ashore through the water from the pierhead to the harbour. My uncle and two other young fellows was in the boat, but"—

The "two other young fellows" was tempting, but I did not smile.

"They couldn't get me in," he continued unconsciously, "and I got knocked about a bit. My shoulder was main bad. I'm crawling about again, but it's hard work doing nothing."

I repeated the words to myself as I walked away, "hard work doing nothing"—especially when "doing nothing" means a bare cupboard and hungry children, eh?

Gorleston is perhaps not altogether so cheerful as I thought.

Unsneck the door to Care and you might as well take it off its hinges.

Late the same night, I was talking to the watchman at the end of the pier. A Yarmouth fishing-smack sailed out into the gloom.

"Rough night," the watchman cried to the skipper.

"Ay, ay," replied a gruff voice from below; and a moment later the smack was gone.

"Better here than on that boat to-night," I observed, as the black sail faded and merged in the black cloud.

"Ay," the watchman answered; "but they'll see worse before they see home again. There's queer weather to be found on the Dogger Bank in an eight weeks' trawling. I mind me of three hundred and sixty drownedin one March gale, and upwards of two hundred lost two or three years ago one Christmas night. Then there's always the risk of collisions in the fog, men washed overboard in a gale, or crippled in the small boat when they put out, as they must whatever the weather, when the Billingsgate steamer comes round in the night for the fish."

"H'm! And what pay sends willing men to face these risks?"

"Penny an hour, from time they start till they get back. That's fourteen shilling a week."

"And when they come home?"

"Pay stops."

"God! how can their women and children live?"

"Nay, now you're asking something. But they're better off than them as waits ashore all winter, and can't get a job."

"Fourteen shillings! Why do they stand it?"

"Because they can't help theirsels. There's too many waiting to take t' place o' them as has a job."

"Have they no trade union?"

"They've trouble enough to keep theirsels in work; who'd keep them if they went on strike?"

"Fourteen shillings a week! It's shameful."

"Happen it is, and happen the shame is not so much the men's as yours."

"Mine? How?"

"I suppose you buy and eat fish?"

"Yes, and pay the price I'm asked; if I paid twice as much, would the fishermen get the money?"

"Nay, I don't know. We look to you clever folk in London to settle these things."

They are not awe-struck by the superiority of the "clever folk from London," these outspoken men of the sea. From the taciturn solitary policeman, who looks on us with undisguised contempt, to the ancient mariners by the river-side, who gaze on us with the puzzled stare that a Viking might have cast on a French dancing-master, the natives give one the painful impression that they regard us as prodigies of ignorance and uselessness.

But—we have money. People who don't seem to know anything or to do anything always have. And they that have to wrest sustenance from the churlish sea at Gorleston, are disposed to do much for money—even to tolerate inquisitive, pompously patronising, incessantly cackling Cockneys.

I went down to the sea thinking to mend my tired body with the blow of the lustyspray, but I am judging 'twas perhaps my mind most needed change of air.

They are not so much our lungs that get stifled in the cities as our brains and hearts. We are so hemmed in with glittering shams and lies that we forget Truth's features.

What do we know of work and trade, we that scramble for gold dust in London? What do we know of Life, we that seek it in the perfumed mire and corruption of the West End? They are not the usurers and money-changers that make the wealth of nations, nor the painted splendours of Babylon that ripen our harvests, nor the swinish orgies of Sodom and Gomorrah that make the pulses beat with healthy joy of life.

One stews in London's vitiated atmosphere, and one forgets. One's perceptions grow numb, and dull and blunted; one's knowledge twisted, warped, awry. We aremade dizzy by the rush and whirl, and cheated by specious shows and make-believes. Our days and nights are passed in fever, our thoughts are as the babbling of a grim delirium, and there is no health in us.

Contango? The odds for the Leger? The new ballet?

"We went out twice that night," said the lifeboatman; "one of our men broke his arm th' first trip, and he wur main wild when he couldn't go th' second time."

"And did you save them all?"

"Ay, we got 'em all off—both lots; though they'd give up hope. They couldn't see us till we came close up to them, for it was a dirty night, and the sea was running high, but they heard the cheers we give them when we got within calling distance, poor things."

That makes a better picture than the Stock Exchange or Piccadilly Circus. The thought of the ships that sink, of the men and women and children that go down into the cold depths, "their eyes and mouths to be filled with the brown sea sand"—that is not good to think of. But the picture of the rescue, is not that glorious?

The sound of the human cheer across the roar of Nature's battle—think of it in the ears of the crew that had "given up hope"! The thrill, the gladness, the doubt, the eager lookout. The cheer again, clearer, huskier, certain now, and full of brave comfort. A chance then for life? A chance for the wailing women and the weeping bairns? Then a glimpse, deep down in the great trough of the sea, of a boat staggering and rolling amidst the waves, manfully propelled, perceptibly approaching, despite wind andsleet and drenching wave, with rough men's voices giving promise of life through the darkness of the storm!

Ah! gentlemen of the Spiers & Pond and money-making world, isn't it a brave picture to think of? The cooling dash of ocean spray is delightfully refreshing. To think that our race can still breed heroes; that even we, if we could or would but shake off the Old Man of the Earth that sits upon our shoulders, might perhaps be heroes too; that we too might risk our lives to snatch storm-tossed unfortunates from the clutch of death—is it not a blessed thought?

It is the custom of our age to boast of its civilisation. When we stand erect we fear to hurtle the stars with our foreheads as we pass under. We smile upon our accumulations of wealth and the monuments of ourcommerce, and esteem ourselves the crowning triumphs of evolution, the ultimate perfection, Nature's finished masterpieces. But how small, how mean, and how insignificant we Londoners look by the side of these stalwart and fearless fishermen of Suffolk and Norfolk.

They know nothing of Westralians, S. P. prices, futures, or the Sisters Bobalink's new dance; but what a lot they have to teach us!

The weather changes swiftly at Gorleston, and when the white foam-horses ride over the hidden sand-banks, even a Cockney-tripper may feel the sense of peril.

Ever since we came we have seen the gaunt masts of one wreck spectrally haunting our feast from behind the lightship in the east. Now there is another on a sand-bankclose to shore, a little to the north of the river's mouth.

It had been a glorious day, but towards evening the storm-clouds gathered and the wind rose in fitful gusts. A Baltic steamer, clearing out of the harbour at dusk, blocked up the mouth of the river for some hours owing to a fouled anchor, till at last, her cable being cut, she succeeded in getting to sea.

Meantime, a Yarmouth trawler, returning to port with a week's catch of fish, was misled by the lights of the disabled vessel, and, manœuvring to get clear, backed on to the dangerous North Sand, whose floor is thickly strewed with remains of former wrecks.

From the pier, through the blackening night, we watched the crew's futile efforts to get off again. It was very like a fly's efforts to escape from a spider's web, and evidentlyas profitless. The more they struggled, the deeper in the sand they sank.

Now, boom! through the night came the bang of a great gun. The Admiralty men in charge of the Board of Trade life-saving apparatus were about to begin operations. We saw lights flickering to and fro on the Denes—the low bank of land between the river and the sea. Presently, with a prodigious whiz, up to the black sky and across the ship shot the rocket, bearing the lifeline that would bring the shipwrecked mariners to land! Before this, however, one of the five lifeboats maintained on this dangerous coast had been safely launched through the surf, and reached the wreck almost as soon as the line.

But neither line nor boat would the captain of the smack accept: to leave his ship meant loss of property, and propertyin England is of all things the most sacred.

The night by this time had become wild and fearful. The wind shrieked viciously; the waves broke ashore with a hungry roar; and from the swart clouds came down squalls of rain, merging land and lights and sea and sky in one blur of desolation.

There was no more to be seen. The crew of the stranded trawler deemed it safe to remain where they were. So we curious Cockneys, perceiving no hope of further fresh sensations, hastened us home to cosy beds and warmth.

I had just gone to sleep when a boom that shook the bed roused me with a start.

I jumped up and went to the window.

A signal-rocket had been fired from the coastguard station opposite our lodging.

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