and Colonel Mackeson, I have never met his equal in field or council; he was preeminently our best and bravest, and his loss is not to be atoned for in these days.' The troops have behaved with singular moderation towards women and children, considering their provocation. I do not believe, and I have some means of knowing, that a single woman or child has been purposely injured by our troops, and the story on which your righteous indignation is grounded is quite false; the troops have been demoralized by drink, but nothing more. In November he gets a few weeks' leave, and is off to Umbala to meet his wife for the last time, safe after all, and no longer a lieutenant under a cloud. What a meeting must that have been. With the taking of Delhi our narrative, already too long, must close, though a grand five months of heroic action still remained. Nothing in the book exceeds in interest the ride of ninety-four miles from Seaton's column, with young Macdowell, to carry a despatch to Sir Colin, on Dec. 30th. The tale of the early morning summons, the rumours of enemies on the road, the suspense as to the Chief's whereabouts, the leaving all escort behind, their flattering and cordial reception by Sir Colin (who gets them chops and ale in a quiet friendly way'), the fifty-four miles ride home, the midnight alarm and escape, and the safe run in, take away our breath. And the finish is inimitable. All Hodson said (writes Macdowell) when we were at Bewar, and safe, was By George! Mac, I'd give a good deal for a cup of tea,' and immediately went to sleep. He is the coolest hand I have ever yet met. We rode ninety-four miles. Hodson rode seventy-two on one horse, the little dun, and I rode Alma seventy-two miles also. One more anecdote, however, we cannot resist. On the 6th of January, 1858, Seaton's column joins the Commander-in-chief; on the 27th, at Shumshabad, poor young Macdowell (whose letters make one love him) is killed, and Hodson badly wounded. They were in advance, as usual, with guns, and had to charge a superior body of cavalry : But there was nothing for it but fight ing, as, had we not attacked them, they would have got in amongst our guns. We were only three officers, and about 18c horsemen-my poor friend and second in command, Macdowell, having received a mortal wound a few minutes before we charged. It was a terrible mêlée for some time, and we were most wonderfully preserved. However, we gave them a very proper thrashing, and killed their leaders. Two out of the three of us were wounded, and five of my men killed and eleven wounded, besides eleven horses. My horse had three sabre-cuts, and I got two, which I consider a rather unfair share. The Commander-in-Chief is very well satisfied, I hear, with the day's work, and is profusely civil and kind to me. In another letter he writes : They were very superior in number, and individually so as horsemen and swordsmen, but we managed to 'whop' them all the same, and drive them clean off the field; not, however, until they had made two very pretty dashes at us, which cost us some trouble and very hard fighting. It was the hardest thing of the kind in which I ever was engaged in point of regular in fighting,' as they say in the P.R.: only Bell's Life could describe it properly. I got a cut, which laid my thumb open, from a fellow after my sword was through him, and about half an hour later this caused me to get a second severe cut, which divided the muscles of the right arm and put me hors de combat; for my grip on the sword-handle was weakened and a demon on foot succeeded in striking down my guard, or rather his tulwar glanced off my guard on to my arm. My horse also got three cuts. I have got well most rapidly, despite an attack of erysipelas, which looked very nasty for three days, and some slight fever; and I have every reason to be thankful. He is able, notwithstanding wounds, to accompany the forces, Colonel Burn kindly driving him in his dog-cart. Nothing could exceed Sir Colin's kind attentions. Here is a chief at last who can appreciate a certain captain, late lieutenant under a cloud. The old chief drinks his health as colonel, and on Hodson's doubting, says: I will see that it is all arranged; just make a memorandum of your services during the Punjab war, and I venture to prophesy that it will not be long before I shake hands with you as Lieutenant-Colonel Hodson, C.B., with a Victoria Cross to boot. By the end of February he is well, and in command of his regiment again, and in his last_fight saves the life of his adjutant, Lieut. Gough, by cutting down a rebel trooper in the very act of spearing him. And now comes the end. For a week the siege had gone on, and work after work of the enemy had fallen. On the 11th of March the Begum's Palace was to be assaulted. Hodson had orders to move his regiment nearer to the walls, and while choosing a spot for his camp heard firing, rode on, and found his friend Brigadier Napier directing the assault. He joined him, saying, ‘I am come to take care of you; you have no business to go to work without me to look after you.' They entered the breach together, were separated in the mêlée, and in a few minutes Hodson was shot through the chest. The next morning the wound was declared to be mortal, and he sent for Napier to give his last instructions. He lay on his bed of mortal agony (says this friend), and met death with the same calm composure which so much distinguished him on the field of battle. He was quite conscious and peaceful, Occasionally uttering a sentence, My poor wife, My poor sisters.' "I should have liked to have seen the end of the campaign and gone home to the dear ones once more, but it was so ordered.' It is hard to leave the world just now, when success is so near, but God's will be done.' 'Bear witness for me that I have tried to do my duty to man. May God forgive my sins, for Christ's sake.' 'I go to my Father.' 'My love to my wife-tell her my last thoughts were of her.' 'Lord, receive my soul.' These were his last words, and without a sigh or struggle his pure and noble spirit took its flight. 'It was so ordered.' They were his own words; and now that the first anguish of his loss is over, will not even those nearest and dearest to him acknowledge 'it was ordered for the best ?' For is there not something painful to us in calculating the petty rewards which we can bestow upon a man who has done any work of deliverance for his country? Do we not almost dread eagerly as we may desire his return to hear the vulgar, formal phrases which are all we can 145 devise to commemorate the toils and sufferings that we think of with most gratitude and affection? There is somewhat calming and soothing in the sadness which follows a brave man to his grave in the very place where his work was done, just when it was done. Alas, but it is a bitter lesson to learn, even to us his old schoolfellows, who have never seen him since we parted at his leaving breakfast.' May God make us all braver and truer workers at our own small tasks, and worthy to join him, the hard fighter, the glorious Christian soldier and Englishman, when our time shall come. On the next day, March 13th, he was carried to a soldier's grave, in the presence of the head-quarters, staff, and of Sir Colin, his last chief, who writes thus to his widow : I followed your noble husband to the grave myself, in order to mark, in the most public manner, my regret and esteem for the most brilliant soldier under my command, and one whom I was proud to call my friend. What living Englishman can add one iota to such praise from such lips? The man of whom the greatest of English soldiers could thus speak, needs no mark of official approbation, though it is a burning disgrace to the authorities that none such has been given. But the family which mourns its noblest son may be content with the rewards which his gallant life and glorious death have won for him and them-we believe that he himself would desire no others. For his brothers-inarms are erecting a monument to him in Lichfield Cathedral; his schoolfellows are putting up a window to him, and the other Rugbæans who have fallen with him, in Rugby Chapel; and the three regi ments of Hodson's Horse will hand down his name on the scene of his work and of his death as long as Englishmen bear rule in India. And long after that rule has ceased, while England can honour brave deeds and be grateful to brave men, the heroes of the Indian mutiny will never be forgotten, and the hearts of our children's children will leap up at the names of Lawrence, Havelock, and Hodson. THOMAS HUGHES. HOW I MUSED IN THE RAILWAY TRAIN; BEING THOUGHTS ON RISING BY CANDLELIGHT; ON NERVOUS FEARS; AND ON VAPouring. NOT entirely awake, I am stand ing on the platform of a large railway terminus in a certain great city, at 7.20 a.m., on a foggy morning early in January. I am about to set out on a journey of a hundred miles by the 7.30 train, which is a slow one, stopping at all the stations. I am alone; for more than human would that friendship be which would bring out mortal man to see one off at such an hour in winter. It is a dreamy sort of scene; I can hardly feel that it substantially exists. Who has not sometimes, on a still autumn afternoon, suddenly stopped on a path winding through sere, motionless woods, and felt within himself, Now, I can hardly believe in all this? You talk of the difficulty of realizing the unseen and spiritual is it not sometimes, in certain mental moods, and in certain aspects of external nature, quite as difficult to feel the substantial existence of things which we can see and touch? Extreme stillness and loneliness, perhaps, are the usual conditions of this peculiar feeling. Sometimes most men have thought to themselves that it would be well for them if they could but have the evidence of sense to assure them of certain great realities which while we live in this world we never can touch or see; but I think that many readers will agree with me when I say, that very often the evidence of sense comes no nearer to producing the solid conviction of reality than does that widely different evidence on which we believe the existence of all that is not material. You have climbed, alone, on an autumn day, to the top of a great hill; a river runs at its base unheard; a champaign country spreads beyond the river; cornfields swept and bare; hedgerows dusky green against the yellow ground; a little farmhouse here and there, over which the smoke stagnates in the breezeless air. It is heather that you are standing on. And as you stand there alone, and look away over that scene, you have felt as though sense, and the convictions of sense, were partially paralysed: you have been aware that you could not feel that the landscape before you was solid reality. I am not talking to blockheads, who never thought or felt anything particularly; of course they could not understand my meaning. But as for you, thoughtful reader, have you not sometimes, in such a scene, thought to yourself, not without a certain startled pleasure,-Now, I realize it no more substantially that there spreads a landscape beyond that river, than that there spreads a country beyond the grave? There are many curious moods of mind, of which you will find no mention in books of metaphysics. The writers of works of mental philosophy keep by the bread and butter of the world of mind. And every one who knows by personal experience how great a part of the actual phases of thought and feeling lies beyond the reach of logical explanation, and can hardly be fixed and represented by any words, will rejoice when he meets with any account of intellectual moods which he himself has often known, but which are not to be classified or explained. And people are shy about talking of such things. I felt indebted to a friend, a man of high talent and cultivation, whom I met on the street of a large city on a snowy winter day. The streets were covered with unmelted snow; so were the housetops; how black and dirty the walls looked, contrasting with the snow. Great flakes were falling thickly, and making a curtain which at a few yards' distance shut out all objects more effectually than the thickest fog. It is a day,' said my friend, I don't believe in;' and then he went away. And I know he would not believe in the day, and he would not feel that he was in a world of reality, till he had escaped from the eerie scene out of doors, and sat down by his library fire. But has not the mood found a more beautiful description in Coleridge's tragedy of Remorse? Opium, no 1859.] Rising by Candlelight. 147 doubt, may have increased such they are well known by numbers On a rude rock, A rock, methought, fast by a grove of firs, And there can be no doubt that the long vaulted vistas through a pine wood, the motionless trunks, dark and ghostly, and the surgy swell of the wind through the spines, are conditions very likely to bring on, if you are alone, this particular mental state. But to return to the railway station which suggested all this; it is a dreamy scene, and I look at it with sleepy eyes. There are not many people going by the train, though it is a long one. Daylight is an hour or more distant yet; and the directors, either with the design of producing picturesque lights and shadows in their shed, or with the design of economizing gas, have resorted to the expedient of lighting only every second lamp. There are no lamps, too, in the carriages; and the blank abysses seen through the open doors remind one of the cells in some feudal dungeon. A little child would assuredly howl if it were brought to this place this morning. Away in the gloom, at the end of the train, the sombre engine that is to take us is hissing furiously, and throwing a lurid glare upon the ground underneath it. Nobody's wits have fully arrived. The clerk who gave me my ticket was yawning tremendously; the porters on the platform are yawning; the guard, who is standing two yards off, looking very neat and trimly dressed through the gloom, is yawning; the stoker who was shovelling coke into the engine fire was yawning awfully as he did so. We are away through the fog, through the mist, over the black country which is slowly turning gray in the morning twilight. I have with me various newspapers; but for an hour and more it will be impossible to see to read them. Two fellow-travellers, whose forms I dimly trace, I hear expressing indignation that the railway company give no lamps in the car riages. I lean back and try to It It is most depressing and miserable work, getting up by candlelight. It is impossible to shave comfortably; it is impossible to have a satisfactory bath; it is impossible to find anything you want. Sleep, says Sancho Panza, covers a man all over like a mantle of comfort; but rising before daylight envelops the entire being in petty misery. An indescribable vacuity makes itself felt in the epigastric regions, and a leaden heaviness weighs upon heart and spirits. must be a considerable item in the hard lot of domestic servants, to have to get up through all the winter months in the cold dark house let us be thankful to them through whose humble labours and self-denial we find the cheerful fire blazing in the tidy breakfast parlour when we find our way downstairs. That same apartment looked cheerless enough when the housemaid entered it two hours ago. It is sad when you are lying in bed of a morning, lazily conscious of that circling amplitude of comfort, to hear the chilly cry of the poor sweep outside; or the tread of the factory hands shivering by in their thin garments towards the great cottonmill, glaring spectral out of its many windows, but at least with a cosy suggestion of warmth and light. Think of the baker, too, who rose in the dark of midnight that those hot rolls might appear on your breakfast table; and of the printer, intelligent, active, accurate to a degree that you careless folk who put no points in your letters have little idea of, whose labours have given you that damp sheet which in a little will feel so crisp and firm after it has been duly dried, and which will tell you all that is going on over all the world, down to the opera which closed at twelve, and the Parliamentary debate which was not over till half-past four. It is good occasionally to rise at five on a December morning, that you may feel how much you are indebted to some who do so for your sake all the winter through. No doubt they get accustomed to it: but so may you by doing it always. A great many people, living easy lives, have no idea of the discomfort of rising by candlelight. Probably they hardly ever did it: when they did it, they had a blazing fire and abundant light to dress by; and even with these advantages, which essentially change the nature of the enterprise, they have not done it for very long. What an aggregate of misery is the result of that inveterate usage in the University of Glasgow, that the early lectures begin at 7.30 a.m. from November till May! How utterly miserable the dark, dirty streets look, as the unhappy student splashes through mud and smoke to the black archway that admits to those groves of Academe! And what a blear-eyed, unwashed, unshaven, blinking, illnatured, wretched set it is that fills the benches of the lecture-room! The design of the authorities in maintaining that early hour has been much misunderstood. Philosophers have taught that the professors, in bringing out their unhappy students at that period, had it in view to turn to use an hour of the day which otherwise would have been wasted in bed, and thus set free an hour at a better season of the day. Another school of metaphysicians, among whom may be reckoned the eminent authors, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, have maintained with considerable force of argument that the authorities of the University, eager to advance those under their charge in health, wealth, and wisdom, have resorted to an observance which has for many ages been regarded as conducive to that end. Others, again, the most eminent among whom is Smith, have taken up the ground that the professors have fixed on the early hour for no reason in particular; but that, as the classes must meet at some hour of each day, they might just as well meet at that hour as at any other. All these theories are erroneous. There is more in the system than meets the eye. It originated in Roman Catholic days; and something of the philosophy of the stoic and of the faith of the anchorite is involved in it. Grim lessons of endurance; dark hints of penance; extensive disgust at matters in general, and a disposition to punch the head of humanity; are mystically connected with the lectures at 7.30 a.m. in winter. It is quite different in summer, when everything is bright and inviting; if you are up and forth by five or six o'clock any morning then, you feel ashamed as you look at the drawn blinds and the closed shutters of the house in the broad daylight. There is something curious in the contrast between the stillness and shut-up look of a country-house in the early summer morning, and the blaze of light, the dew sparkling life-like on the grass, the birds singing, and all nature plainly awake though man is asleep. You feel that at 7.30 in June, Nature intends you to be astir; but believe it, ye learned doctors of Glasgow College, at 7.30 in December, her intention is quite the reverse. And if you fly in Nature's face, and persist in getting up at unseasonable hours, she will take it out of you by making you horribly uncomfortable. There is, indeed, one fashion in which rising by candlelight, under the most uncomfortable circumstances, may turn to a source of positive enjoyment. And the more dreary and wretched you feel, as you wearily drag yourself out of bed into the searching cold, the greater will that peculiar enjoyment be. Have you not, my reader, learned by your own experience that the machinery of the human mind and heart may be worked backwards, just as a steam-engine is reversed, so that a result may be produced which is exactly the opposite of the normal one? The fundamental principle on which the working of the human constitution, as regards pleasure and pain, goes, may be stated in the following formula, which will not appear a truism except to those who have not brains to understand it THE MORE JOLLY YOU ARE, THE JOLLIER YOU ARE. |