как I begged Mrs. Micawber to name it. 'I have parted with the plate myself,' said Mrs. Micawber. Six tea, two salt, and a pair of sugars, I 685 have at different times borrowed money on in secret, with my own hands. But the twins are a great tie; and to me, with my recollections of papa and mamma, these transthese trans690 actions are very painful. There are still a few trifles that we could part with. Mr. Micawber's feelings would never allow him to dispose of them: and Clickett' this was the girl 695 from the workhouse 'being of a vulgar mind, would take painful liberties if so much confidence was reposed in her. Master Copperfield, if I might ask you 700 I understood Mrs. Micawber now, and begged her to make use of me to any extent. I began to dispose of the more portable articles of property that very evening; and went 705 out on a similar expedition almost every morning, before I went to Murdstone and Grinby's. one Mr. Micawber had a few books on a little chiffonier, which he called 710 the library; and those went first. I carried them, one after another, to a bookstall in the City Road part of which, near our house, was almost all bookstalls and bird-shops 715 then and sold them for whatever they would bring. The keeper of this bookstall, who lived in a little house behind it, used to get tipsy every night, and to be violently scolded 720 by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up CHA bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses overnight (I am afraid 725 he was quarrelsome in his drink), and he with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, 730 while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him. Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call again; 735 but his wife had always got some had taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went down together. 740 At the pawnbroker's shop, too, I began to be very well known. The principal gentleman who officiated behind the counter, took a good deal of notice of me; and often got me, 745 I recollect, to decline a Latin noun or adjective, or to conjugate a Latin verb, in his ear, while he transacted my business. After all these occasions Mrs. Micawber made a little treat, 750 which was generally a supper; and there was a peculiar relish in these meals which I well remember. At last Mr. Micawber's difficulties came to a crisis, and he was arrested 755 early one morning, and carried over to the King's Bench Prison in the Borough. He told me, as he went out of the house, that the God of day had now gone down upon him 760 -and I really thought his heart was broken and mine too. But I heard, afterwards, that he was seen to play a lively game at skittles, before noon. CHARLES KINGSLEY. HARLES KINGSLEY (1819-1875) was born at the village of Holne, in Devonshire. Like his father, he entered the church, and he became curate and, from 1844, rector of the neglected country parish of Eversley, Hampshire, where he mainly resided till the end of his life. Besides his heavy parish duties, he took an active part in the socialistic movement then becoming conspicuous, and tried by deed and word to give it a Christian direction ('Christian Socialism'). From 1860-69 he held a professorship in Modern History at the University of Cambridge. During the latter part of his life, he was much occupied with natural history and sanitary science. His multifarious interests and his impetuous temper led him to overwork himself from the first, so that his health early declined and could not be improved by a late voyage to the West Indies (1869). Kingsley produced many volumes of novels, poetry, sermons, and miscellaneous work. Some of his minor lyrics, as The Three Fishers and The Sands of Dee, are very popular; and his poem on Andromeda (1858) is said to be the best specimen of English hexameter. But his fame rests mainly on his novels, which may be classed as either humanitarian or historical. Social questions are treated in Yeast (1848), which shows his sympathy with the agricultural labourer, in Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850), an exposition of the views and aims of the Chartist movement, and in Two Years Ago (1857), which advocates sanitary reforms in village life. Vivid scenes of the past, though always combined with a lesson for the day, were presented in Hypatia (1853), the sad story of an Alexandrian lady philosopher in conflict with early Christianity, in Westward Ho! (1855), a spirited picture of Elizabethan sea-faring life, and in Hereward the Wake (1866), a tale of the last struggles between the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors. The Water Babies (1863) is a charming fairy-tale for children. - CHARITY. [From Yeast, Chap. III (1851)] Of all the species of lovely scenery which England holds, none, perhaps, is more exquisite than the banks of the chalk-rivers - the perfect lim6 pidity of the water, the gay and luxuriant vegetation of the banks and ditches, the masses of noble wood embosoming the villages, the unique beauty of the water-meadows, 10 living sheets of emerald and silver, tinkling and sparkling, cool under the fiercest sun, brilliant under the blackest cloud. There, if anywhere, one would have expected to find 16 Arcadia among fertility, loveliness, industry, and wealth. But alas for the sad reality! the cool breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with poisonous 20 miasma. Those picturesque villages are generally the perennial hotbeds of fever and ague, of squalid penury, sottish profligacy, dull discontent too stale for words. There is luxury in 25 the park, wealth in the huge farmsteadings, knowledge in the parsonage: but the poor? those by whose dull labour all that luxury and wealth, ay, even that knowledge, is made possible what are they? ... 30 But of all this Lancelot [a young squire] as yet thought nothing. He, too, had to be emancipated from selfish dreams; to learn to work trustfully in the living Present, not 35 to gloat sentimentally over the unreturning Past. But his time was not yet come; and little he thought of all the work which lay ready for him within a mile of the Priory, as 40 he watched the ladies go out for the afternoon, and slipped down to the Nun's-pool on his crutches to smoke and fish and build castles in the air. The Priory, with its rambling courts 45 and gardens, stood on an island in the river. The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial channel through the garden, still and broad, towards the Priory mill; while just above the 50 Priory wall half the river fell over a high weir, with all its appendages of bucks and hatchways and eel- XX baskets, into the Nun's-pool, and then swept round under the ivied walls, 55 with their fantastic turrets and gables He found on the weir-bridge two of the keepers. The younger one, Tregarva, was a stately, thoughtful70 looking Cornishman, some six feet three in height, with thews and sinews in proportion. He was sitting on the bridge looking over a basket of eel-lines, and listening silently to the 75 chat of his companion. Old Harry Verney, the other keeper, was a character in his way, and a very bad character too, though he was a patriarch among all the game80 keepers of the vale. He was a short, wiry, bandy-legged, ferret-visaged old man, with grizzled hair and a wizened face tanned brown and purple by 'constant exposure. Between rheuma85 tism and constant handling the rod and gun, his fingers were crooked like a hawk's claws. He kept his left eye always shut, apparently to save trouble in shooting; and squinted 90 and sniffed and peered, with a stooping back and protruded chin, as if he were perpetually on the watch for fish, flesh, and fowl, vermin and Christian. The friendship between 95 himself and the Scotch terrier at his heels would have been easily explained by Lessing, for in the transmigration of souls the spirit of Harry Verney had evidently once animated 100 a dog of that breed. He was dressed in a huge thick fustian jacket, scratched, stained, and patched, with bulging, greasy pockets; a cast of flies round a battered hat, riddled with shot108 holes, a dog-whistle at his button hole, and an old gun cut short over his arm, bespoke his business. 'I seed that 'ere Crawy against Ashy Down Plantations last night, I'll be sworn,' said he, in a squeak- 110 ing, sneaking tone. 'Well, what harm was the man doing?' 'Oh, ay, that's the way you young 'uns talk. If he warn't doing mis- 115 chief, he'd a been glad to have been. doing it, I'll warrant. If I'd been as young as you, I'd have picked a quarrel with him soon enough, and found a cause for tackling him. 120 It's worth a brace of sovereigns with the squire to haul him up. Eh? eh? Ain't old Harry right now?' 'Humph!' growled the younger man. "There, then, you get me a snare 125 and a hare by to-morrow night," went on old Harry, 'and see if I don't nab him. I won't lay long under the plantation afore he picks it up. You mind to snare me a 130 hare to-night, now!' 'I'll do no such thing, nor help to bring false accusations against any man!' 'False accusations!' answered Harry, 135 in his cringing way. 'Look at that now, for a keeper to say! Why, if he don't happen to have a snare just there, he has somewhere else, you know. Eh? Ain't old Harry 140 right now, eh?' 'Maybe.' "There, don't say I don't know nothing, then. Eh? What matter who put the snare down, or the hare 145 in, perwided he takes it up, man? If 'twas his'n he'd be all the better pleased. The most notoriousest poacher as walks unhung!' And old Harry lifted up his crooked hands in pious 150 indignation. 'I'll have no more gamekeeping, Harry. What with hunting down Christians as if they were vermin all 155 night, and being cursed by the squire all day, I'd sooner be a sheriff's runner or a negro slave.' 'Ay, ay! that's the way the young dogs always bark afore they're broke 160 in, and gets to like it, as the eels does skinning. Haven't I bounced pretty near out of my skin many a time afore now, on this here very bridge, with "Harry, jump in, you 165 stupid hound!" and "Harry, get out, you one-eyed tailor!" And then, if one of the gentlemen lost a fish with their clumsiness Oh, Father! to hear 'em let out at me and my 170 landing-net, and curse fit to fright the devil! Dash their sarcy tongues! sarcy tongues! Eh? Don't old Harry know their ways? Don't he know 'em, now?' 'Ay,' said the young man bitterly. 175 'We break the dogs, and we load the guns, and we find the game, and mark the game, and then they call themselves sportsmen; we choose the flies, and we bait the 180 spinning-hooks, and we show them where the fish lie, and then when they've hooked them, they can't get them out without us and the spoonnet; and then they go home to the 185 ladies and boast of the lot of fish they killed and who thinks of the keeper?' 'Oh! ah! Then don't say old Harry knows nothing, then. How 190 nicely, now, you and I might get a living off this 'ere manor, if the landlords was served like the French ones was. Eh, Paul?' chuckled old Harry. 'Wouldn't we pay our taxes 196 with pheasants and grayling, that's all, eh? Ain't old Harry right now, eh?' The old fox was fishing for an assent, not for its own sake, for he 200 was a fierce Tory, and would have stood up to be shot at any day, not only for his master's sake, but for the sake of a single pheasant of his master's; but he hated Tregarva for many reasons, and was daily on the 205 watch to entrap him on some of his peculiar points, whereof he had a good many. What would have been Tregarva's answer I cannot tell; but Lancelot, 210 who had unintentionally overheard the greater part of the conversation, disliked being any longer a listener, and came close to them. 'Here's your gudgeons and minnows, 215 sir, as you bespoke,' quoth Harry; 'and here's that paternoster as you gave me to rig up. Beautiful minnows, sir, white as a silver spoon. - They're the ones now, ain't they, sir, eh ?' "They'll do!' 220 'Well, then, don't say old Harry don't know nothing, that's all, eh?' and the old fellow toddled off, peering and twisting his head about like 225 a starling. 'An odd old fellow that, Tregarva,' said Lancelot. 'Very, sir, considering who made him,' answered the Cornishman, touch- 230 ing his hat, and then thrusting his nose deeper than ever into the eelbasket. 'Beautiful stream this,' said Lancelot, who had a continual longing right or wrong to chat with his inferiors; and was proportionately sulky and reserved to his superiors. 235 Lancelot burst out laughing. The man looked up at him slowly and 255 seriously. 'You wouldn't laugh, sir, if you'd seen much of the inside of these cottages round.' 'Really,' said Lancelot, 'I was only 260 laughing at our making such very short work of such a long and serious story. Do you mean that the unhealthiness of this country is wholly caused by the river?' 265 270 276 'No, sir. The river-damps are God's sending; and so they are not too bad to bear. But there's more of man's sending, that is too bad to bear.' 'What do you mean?' 'Are men likely to be healthy when they are worse housed than a pig?' 'No.' 'And worse fed than a hound?' 'Good Heavens! No!' 'Or packed together to sleep, like pilchards in a barrel?' 'But, my good fellow, do you mean that the labourers here are in that 280 state?' 'It isn't far to walk, sir. Perhaps some day, when the May-fly has as gone off, and the fish won't rise awhile, you could walk down and 285 see. I beg your pardon, sir, though, for thinking of such a thing. They are not places fit for gentlemen, that's certain.' There was a staid irony in his tone, which Lancelot felt. 'But the clergyman goes?' 'Yes, sir.' 290 'And Miss Honoria goes?' 'Yes, God Almighty bless her!' 'And do not they see that all 295 goes right?' The giant twisted his huge limbs, as if trying to avoid an answer, and yet not daring to do so. 'Do clergymen go about among 200 the poor much, sir, at college, before they are ordained?' "The living 's worth some forty pounds a year. The great tithes, they say, are worth better than twelve hundred; but Squire Lavington has 315 them.' 'Oh, I see!' said Lancelot. 'I'm glad you do, sir, for I don't,' meekly answered Tregarva. 'But the vicar, sir, he is a kind man, and a 320 good; but the poor don't understand him, nor he them. He is too learned, sir, and, saving your presence, too fond of his prayer-book.' 'One can't be too fond of a good 325 thing.' 'Not unless you make an idol of it, sir, and fancy that men's souls were made for the prayer-book, and not the prayer-book for them.' 'But cannot he expose and redress these evils, if they exist?' 330 Tregarva twisted about again. 'I do not say that I think it, sir; but this I know, that every poor 385 man in the vale thinks it that the parsons are afraid of the landlords. They must see these things, for they are not blind; and they try to plaster them up out of their own 340 pockets.' 'But why, in God's name, don't they strike at the root of the matter, and go straight to the landlords and tell them the truth?' asked Lancelot. 345 'So people say, sir. I see no reason for it except the one which I gave you. Besides, sir, you must remember that a man can't quarrel with his own kin; and so many of them are 350 |