Chapter I: Part 1

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL

OF

POPULAR

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART

Fifth Series

ESTABLISHED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, 1832

CONDUCTED BY R. CHAMBERS (SECUNDUS)

NO. 124.—VOL. III. SATURDAY, MAY 15, 1886. PRICE 1½_d._]

THE HERRING-FISHERY AND FISHERMEN.

IN TWO PARTS.—PART I.

The herring-fishery has been prosecuted more or less by the inhabitants of this country for several hundred years, and the industry has been long recognised not only as an important factor in the food-supply of the country, but as one of the most valuable export trades in Scotland. The catching of herrings received a good deal of attention from the fishing population last century; but as the prosecution of the fishing was marked by great irregularities, the fishermen became disheartened at the repeated failures in the catch, and being unacquainted with any proper mode of curing and salting herrings that would have enabled them to take advantage of prolific seasons, the industry began to languish and decay. The government, however, incited by the success of enterprising Dutchmen engaged in the fishery, saw the prospects of developing, under enlightened auspices and unmeasured energy, a vast sphere of operations; and with the view of encouraging both fishermen and fishcurers to engage in the industry, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1750, and another in 1753, offering substantial bounties to all boats employed in the herring-fishery; which was followed up in 1809 by payment of a bounty of two shillings for every barrel of herrings cured, accompanied by an allowance of two and eightpence per barrel exported. From 1815 to 1826 the export rate was deleted; but the bounty per barrel cured was in the last-mentioned year raised to four shillings; while in the four succeeding years, a yearly reduction of one shilling took place; and in 1830, when the trade was fairly established, the government bounties were abolished.

The fostering care bestowed upon the herring-trade was fruitful of great results; and our countrymen, who had looked upon the Dutch fishery, with all its technicalities, as quite unapproachable, were gratified to find that the Scotch herring-industry was destined to take first rank both in extent and excellence of cure. What was still more satisfactory to those who had seen it in its struggling days, instead of requiring a continuance of state aid, it was soon able to repay all advances made from the revenue arising from fees paid by fishcurers for receiving the government brand certifying the contents and quality of the barrels, the annual income of which now averages nearly eight thousand pounds.

The regular prosecution of the fishing on the north and north-east coasts may be said not to have commenced till 1815; but from that date, it has been looked upon as a staple industry; and its success or failure has influenced to an enormous extent the comfort or poverty of the communities inhabiting the smaller towns scattered along the eastern shores of Scotland. In the early part of this century, the quantity of fish salted presented a very sober account; and in 1810, the grand total cured in Scotland, England, and the Isle of Man was only 90,185 barrels; while in 1851, the total for Scotland and the Isle of Man was 594,031 barrels. From 1851 till 1870, a period of inactivity prevailed, and the official statistics year after year were abundant proof that the spirit of enterprise was sadly deficient, or that the notoriously capricious herrings had betaken themselves to other waters. Whether the deficiency in the catch was attributable to lack of energy on the part of curers and fishermen, or a long-continued scarcity of fish, is a problem yet unsolved; but it remains on record that the total quantity cured in 1851 was 594,031 barrels; while in 1869 it had only increased to 675,143 barrels. In 1870, Scotland alone produced 833,160 barrels; while in the season of 1884, the total quantity cured reached the enormous figures of 1,697,000 barrels!

It will thus be seen that this great fishing, which is now the mainstay of a vast population extending round the shores of Scotland, has gone on progressing till it has reached a position entitling it to rank among the greatest industries of the country. The money value of the fishing presents a fairly intelligent view of the progress made during the last fifty years in its prosecution; and the figures given confirm the inexhaustible riches of the sea, and prove the boundless deep to be a mine of wealth, only now beginning to receive the attention which it deserves. The value of the fishing in 1810 was about seventy thousand pounds; and though it was subject to reverses now and again, it gradually gained in dimensions until 1851, when its value was half a million sterling! In 1870, the catch yielded about nine hundred and sixteen thousand five hundred pounds; whereas in 1884 the total quantity cured represented a sum of two million one hundred and twenty-one thousand three hundred and forty-six pounds; which is equal to the rentals of the counties of Aberdeen, Banff, Elgin, Nairn, Inverness, Cromarty, Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness—or the annual value of nearly a half of that of the total area of Scotland.

Along with other improvements, the increase in the number and size of the herring-boats forms an interesting feature in the trade, and is a striking proof of the immense resources at the command of the fishermen. Not only has the numerical strength of the fleet increased greatly, but the size and style of the boats have also changed immensely; and the craft measuring thirty-five feet of keel and fourteen feet of beam, used in 1830-50, have given place to handsome and substantially built vessels, averaging fifty-six feet from stem to stern, and not under eighteen and a half feet of beam, whose burden runs from twenty-five to forty registered tons. Although the demand for herrings has gone on increasing steadily, the tastes of former large consumers have shown remarkable changes, and those—especially the inhabitants of Ireland—who in the early days of the fishing were the best customers of the Scotch curers, now but very moderately recognise salt herrings as an article of food. In 1821, the exportation of salted herrings to Ireland was 125,445 barrels; to the continent, 89,524; and to places out of Europe, 79,836: whereas in 1851 the figures were, Ireland, 66,138; continent, 198,403; places out of Europe, 2367: and in 1884, Ireland, 34,000; continent, 1,149,000; places out of Europe, 960 barrels. The radical changes in the quantities of fish consumed at the different markets in the course of half a century are rather striking; but Ireland has, it is said, largely substituted bacon and other cheap food for the once much-prized fish; while the almost complete collapse of the colonial trade is directly caused by the emancipation of the West Indian slaves, who were provided by their masters with salted herrings as the leading article of fare, and who, in order to efface all recollections of their former degradation, studiously avoided touching the herring after their liberty was secured!

Although not the rule, a number of fishermen often commence fishing for herrings at various ports on the east coast early in July; but it is generally not until about the 20th of the month that the fishermen’s regular engagements commence and operations are begun in earnest. At that date the fishcurers are bound to receive the fish at twenty shillings per cran—one cran being equal to a capacity of thirty-seven gallons, and reckoned to contain about eight hundred herrings—from early morning till twelve o’clock midnight; and should the weather prove favourable and the shoals abundant, a single crew of energetic men have often earned no less than one hundred pounds in the first week of the fishing, and continued the work with such success, that at the end of the season of eight weeks, a sum of five hundred pounds stood at their credit in the fishcurer’s books. In recent years, the boats have largely increased at the leading ports of Fraserburgh, Peterhead, Aberdeen, and Wick, where the numbers employed during the season vary from seven or eight hundred at Fraserburgh, down to four hundred at Aberdeen—not to mention the enormous recent increase at Shetland—each boat being manned by six men and one boy. The extent of netting in use has also largely increased.

For a considerable period of the season the boats prosecute the fishing on the banks from forty to sixty miles away, gradually nearing the shore as the season advances; but in no season imitating the modest efforts of the fishermen of forty or fifty years ago, who never ventured more than ten or fifteen miles off, with the result that the fish, undisturbed in their inward course, were caught in large quantities quite close to the shore. With regard to those days, many of the old people now living on the Aberdeenshire coast have a vivid recollection of the extraordinary excitement that existed in the fishing-towns one or two generations ago when the word passed round that ‘a body’ of herrings had at length appeared in the bay, the indications of which were a dense flock of seagulls to be seen preying upon the finny tribe, or a large shoal of whales pursuing the fish—the manœuvres of the former attracting the fishermen to their mark, and afforded an interesting sight to those on the shore.

At this stage of its history, one of the most serious drawbacks to the prosperity of the herring-fishery was the immense shoals of dogfish which regularly visited the north-east coast during the months of July and August, to the almost complete prostration of the fishermen’s efforts; for not only did those rapacious fishes greatly destroy the nets in their pursuit of food, but the herrings, which seemed to have a wholesome dread of this enemy, immediately disappeared from their usual haunts whenever the dogfish arrived upon the ground. It was no uncommon thing to see boat-loadfuls of dogfish brought in daily by the fishermen, from whom they were purchased by farmers and crofters for manuring the land, and also for the purpose of providing oil for domestic uses; as, before paraffine or candles had come within the reach of all, a great portion of the lamp-oil used by the poorer classes, on the Aberdeenshire coast at least, was extracted from dogfish. After having visited the coast bound by the German Ocean more or less regularly for sixty or seventy years, the dogfish mysteriously disappeared in 1866; and though they are still met with at intervals by fishermen at the west coast herring-fishing (Lewis and Barra) and at Shetland, they have never again returned to the east coast; a freak of nature which has puzzled the most intelligent fishcurer or fisherman to explain, but which has wielded an influence for good scarcely conceivable, since the disappearance of these pests from the adjacent seas marked the setting in of a tide of prosperity in the trade which has never again receded. The greatly increased size and number of boats, and the competition for herrings existing in the trade, have rendered inshore fishing next to impossible; and as it is generally the case that herrings are now more abundant at sea than near the land, the anxiety to secure good takes is year by year drawing the fishermen to more distant grounds; hence, there are reasonable prospects that ere many years have elapsed, the prosecution of the fishing will have developed into the regular employment of large smacks and steam-craft able to venture great distances to sea, and, if need be, remain there till a sufficient catch has been obtained.

* * * * *

Having given a short sketch of the rise and progress of the Scotch herring business, some notes on the social aspect of the industry, and a general description of the present mode of catching and curing the fish, will probably prove interesting to those who have not been privileged to visit any of the great fishing-towns during the months of July and August, a time of each year when the mighty herring constitutes the sole topic of conversation.

At the harbours of the herring-towns in the end of June and beginning of July, boats are arriving from north, south, and west laden with all kinds of household goods; and uppermost are the fisher-folk’s beds and blankets, upon which are lying the wives and children, who have been taken by this route to save the expense of a trip by rail, but whose condition, from the effects of stormy seas, often demonstrates the folly of the fishermen’s financial policy. In addition to the fishermen and their belongings, every train brings hundreds of Highlanders from Inverness, Sutherland, Ross, and the Isles in search of employment on board the boats; and they, in conjunction with the influx of crofters (to be engaged for carting purposes), tramps, itinerant dealers, preaching representatives of various denominations, &c., soon swell the normal population by many thousands, and form as motley a crowd as can be well imagined. The fishing-towns of Aberdeenshire and more northern ports awaken, after a protracted period of somnolence, to the fact that the season of activity has arrived; and the streets which formerly looked bare and deserted, now teem with men, women, and children, all drawn together to share in the spoils of the deep. Order in such a miscellaneous population is sometimes not easily maintained, and the surging and unruly masses which on a Saturday night congregate about the leading thoroughfares tax the energies of the police to the uttermost; and if the Highlanders be on the ‘warpath’ from the effects of too liberal potations of their own ‘mountain dew,’ the question of local government has to be settled by military force—an instance of which took place at Fraserburgh in 1874, when fully a thousand Highlanders in an infuriated condition wrecked the police station, bombarded the town-house, and threatened to burn the town, and were only brought to their senses by the arrival of a detachment of soldiers from Aberdeen.

The evening of the seventh day of the week is invariably one of confusion, noise, and fight in every large fishing-town; but throughout the other nights, all frivolities are cast aside, and the single aim of the whole community is to secure as rich a harvest of herrings as possible. Under ordinary circumstances, the sight afforded by the departure from the harbour of so many craft crawling lazily along in twos, threes, and half-dozens, is very pretty; but when the prospects of a good fishing are exercising the fishermen’s minds, and every one is anxious to reach the fishing-ground early, the excitement and competition among the fishermen to secure a good start, transforms the harbour channel into a scene of the wildest confusion, where the fishermen shout, threaten, and at times deal blows at each other, playing tragedy and comedy in turns, to the intense delight of those watching their movements from the piers. Should the weather be favourable, the boats keep constantly streaming from the harbour-mouth; and if a fresh breeze prevails, a very short time will suffice to fill the bay with hundreds of the handy little craft, gaily ploughing their eastward course to the fishing-ground. By-and-by the horizon for a considerable stretch will be dotted with their brown sails, still holding onwards; and only when the sea and clouds join hands, do they finally disappear in the wide waste of waters.

On leaving the harbour and getting the sails set and trimmed, the crew of the craft betake themselves to comfortable quarters among the nets and spare sails lying about the deck, where local yarns are told, and the Highlanders sing Gaelic songs, or rehearse the leading incidents of their life in the Western Isles since last ‘she’ was in the east coast; but as the fishing-ground is neared, the stories cease, and every one, from the skipper down to the ‘scummer’ boy—the lad who is employed with a small hand-net to pick any herrings out of the water that happen to fall from the nets—eagerly scans the water in hopes of descrying indications of fish. Should the wished-for appearances be discovered, so much the better; but it often happens that no certain proofs of the existence of fish are obtained, and after reaching a distance where fish are supposed to abound, the sails are lowered, and the men commence to cast the nets into the sea in the dusk of the evening. In doing this, a small portion of the sail is hoisted, and while the craft moves slowly through the water, the fishermen continue casting their nets overboard, until their fleet of say, fifty, nets, attached to one another, and extending in a direct line for a length of two thousand yards, are shot, the whole hanging perpendicularly in the water, and suspended from a rope, to which is fastened skin or metallic buoys floating on the surface of the water. When the whole of the nets belonging to the boats engaged at a large station are set, the sea for a stretch of many miles is one complete network, from which the herrings can scarcely escape; and the work falling upon the fishermen nightly in shooting and hauling their nets may be guessed from the fact that the netting used by the Scotch fishermen, if stretched in a direct line, would extend ten thousand miles, or something like three times across the Atlantic.

Having got the nets safely into the deep, the mast is lowered, the light hoisted, and everything put into its proper place for the night; and as the craft drifts slowly along with the wind or tide, surrounded by hundreds of other fishing-boats, not a sound is heard save the occasional whistle of a steamer slowly threading its way through the floating hamlet, or the shrill cry of the expectant seabirds. On board the boats, the crews have retired to rest, with the exception of one or two left to act as the watch, but who, when their conversation runs dry, invariably seek change in the arms of Morpheus, and trust to providence to fulfil the duties which they had undertaken. Once or twice during the night the skipper causes a net or two to be pulled up; and if the prospects of a successful fishing are good, the position occupied is retained; but if no herrings are in the nets, it is not uncommon for the crew to remove to another spot, in hopes of meeting in with better luck, where the labour of shooting the nets has again to be undergone.

As the morning breaks, the crews bestir themselves, and at an early hour the work of hauling commences, which being accomplished sooner or later, according to the weight of fish secured, all canvas is set upon the craft; and as she speeds steadily through the sea, causing the wavelets rippling at the bow to sparkle brilliantly in the morning sun, the crew, all unconscious of the glorious panorama spread before them, actively engage in shaking the herrings out of the nets and otherwise preparing for discharging their catch on reaching the harbour. As the net hangs like a curtain in the water, herring in their progress get their heads into the meshes, whence they cannot retreat, and are thus held captive till the nets are hauled on board and the fish shaken into the hold. On many occasions the herrings strike so densely that almost a whole complement of nets sink to the bottom, which often entails a loss upon a single crew of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty pounds; while at other times the craft are so deeply laden with the precious freight, that they run the harbour for a distance of perhaps forty miles, with the water occasionally playing upon their decks, and only saved from foundering by the extreme calmness of the weather. In many seasons, the fishing proves a complete blank for a protracted period; and as the whole community in the fishing-towns is entirely dependent upon the success of the industry, such occasions throw the spirits of everybody below zero, and the usual bustle and smiling faces give place to solemn countenances; and curers, coopers, and others stand in groups on the piers and at the street corners discussing the fishermen’s chances and prophesying the result of next week’s fishing.

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XXVI.

No human eye ever again beheld Wilberforce Whitaker, alive or dead. The torrent that had washed down the gap in the narrow horsepath tore away with it in the course of that evening’s rain a great mass of tottering earth that had long trembled on the edge of the precipice; and when next day the governor’s servants went down in awed silence to hunt among the débris for the mangled body, they found nothing but a soaked hat on the road behind, and a broken riding-whip close to the huge rent that yawned across the path by the crumbling ledge of newly fallen clay. Louis Delgado alone could tell of what had happened; and in Louis Delgado’s opinion, Dr Whitaker’s crushed and shapeless body must be lying below under ten thousand tons of landslip rubbish. ‘I see de gentleman haltin’ on de brink ob de hole,’ he said a hundred times over to his gossips next day, ‘and I tink I hear him call aloud someting as him go ober de tip ob de big precipice. But it doan’t sound to me ezackly as if him scared and shoutin’; ’pears more as if him singing to hisself a kind ob mounful miserable psalm-tune.’

In tropical countries, people are accustomed to hurricanes and thunderstorms and landslips and sudden death in every form—does not the Church service even contain that weirdly suggestive additional clause among the petitions of the litany, ‘From earthquake, tempest, and violent commotion, good Lord, deliver us?’—and so nobody ever tried to dig up Wilberforce Whitaker’s buried body; and if they had tried, they would never have succeeded in the attempt, for a thousand tons of broken fragments lay on top of it, and crushed it to atoms beneath them. Poor old Bobby felt the loss acutely, after his childish fashion, for nearly a fortnight, and then straightway proceeded to make love as usual to Miss Seraphina and the other ladies, and soon forgot his whole trouble in that one congenial lifelong occupation.

Nora Dupuy did not so quickly recover the shock that the mulatto’s sudden and almost supernatural death had given her system. It was many weeks before she began to feel like herself again, or to trust herself in a room alone for more than a very few minutes together. Born West Indian as she was, and therefore superstitious, she almost feared that Dr Whitaker’s ghost would come to plead his cause with her once more, as he himself had pleaded with her that last unhappy evening on the Italian terrace. It wasn’t her fault, to be sure, that she had been the unwitting cause of his death; and yet in her own heart she felt to herself almost as if she had deliberately and intentionally killed him. That insuperable barrier of race that had stood so effectually in his way while he was still alive was partly removed now that she could no longer see him in person; and more than once, Nora found herself in her own room with tears standing in both her eyes for the poor mulatto she could never possibly or conceivably have married.

As for Tom Dupuy, he couldn’t understand such delicate shades and undertones of feeling as those which came so naturally to Nora; and he had therefore a short and easy explanation of his own for his lively little cousin’s altered demeanour. ‘Nora was in love with that infernal nigger fellow,’ he said confidently over and over again to his uncle Theodore. ‘You take my word for it, she was head over ears in love with him; that’s about the size of it. And that evening when she behaved so disgracefully with him on the terrace at the governor’s, he proposed to her, and she accepted him, as sure as gospel. If I hadn’t threatened him with a good sound horsewhipping, and driven him away from the house in a deuce of a funk, so that he went off with his tail between his legs, and broke his neck over a precipice in that terrible thunderstorm—you mark my words, Uncle Theodore—she’d have gone off, as I always said she would, and she’d have ended by marrying a woolly-headed brown man.’

Mr Theodore Dupuy, for his part, considered that even to mention the bare possibility of such a disgrace within the bosom of the family was an insult to the pure blood of the Dupuys that his nephew Tom ought to have been the last man on earth to dream of perpetrating.

Time rolled on, however, month after month, and gradually Nora began to recover something of her natural gaiety. Even deep impressions last a comparatively short time with bright young girls; and before six months more had fairly rolled by, Nora was again the same gay, light, merry, dancing little thing that she had always been, in England or in Trinidad.

One morning, about twelve months after Nora’s first arrival in the island, the English mail brought a letter for her father, which he read with evident satisfaction, and then handed it contentedly to Nora across the breakfast-table. Nora recognised the crest and monogram in a moment with a faint flutter: she had seen them once before, a year ago, in England. They were Harry Noel’s. But the postmark was Barbadoes. She read the letter eagerly and hastily.

‘DEAR SIR’—it ran—‘I have had the pleasure already of meeting some
members of your family on the other side of the Atlantic’—that was
an overstatement, Nora thought to herself quietly; the plural for
the singular—‘and as I have come out to look after some property of
my father’s here in Barbadoes, I propose to run across to Trinidad
also, by the next steamer, and gain a little further insight
into the habits and manners of the West Indies. My intention is
to stop during my stay with my friend Mr Hawthorn, who—as you
doubtless know—holds a district judgeship or something of the sort
somewhere in Trinidad. But I think it best at the same time to
inclose a letter of introduction to yourself from General Sir Henry
Laboutillière, whom I daresay you remember as formerly commandant
of Port-of-Spain when the Hundred and Fiftieth were in your island.
I shall do myself the honour of calling upon you very shortly after
my arrival, and am meanwhile, very faithfully yours,

HARRY NOEL.’

The letter of introduction which accompanied this very formal note briefly set forth that Sir Walter Noel, Mr Noel’s father, was an exceedingly old and intimate friend of the writer’s, and that he would feel much obliged if Mr Dupuy would pay young Mr Noel any attentions in his power during his short stay in the island of Trinidad.

It would be absurd to deny that Nora felt flattered. She blushed, and blushed, and blushed again, with unmistakable pleasure. To be sure, she had refused Harry Noel; and if he were to ask her again, even now, she would refuse him a second time. But no girl on earth is wholly proof in her own heart against resolute persistence. Even if she doesn’t care a pin for a man from the matrimonial point of view, yet provided only he is ‘nice’ and ‘eligible,’ she feels naturally flattered by the mere fact that he pays her attention. If the attention is marked and often renewed, the flattery is all the deeper, subtler, and more effective. But here was Harry Noel, pursuant of his threat (or should we rather say his promise?), following her up right across the Atlantic, and coming to lay siege to her heart with due formalities once more, in the very centre of her own stronghold! Yes, Nora was undeniably pleased. Of course, she didn’t care for him; oh, dear, no, not the least little bit in the world, really; but still, even if you don’t want to accept a lover, you know, it is at anyrate pleasant to have the opportunity of a second time cruelly rejecting him. So Nora blushed, and smiled to herself, and blushed over again, and felt by no means out of humour at Harry Noel’s evident persistence.

‘Well, Nora?’ her father said to her, eyeing her interrogatively. ‘What do you think of it?’

‘I think, papa, Mr Noel’s a very gentlemanly, nice young man, of a very good old English family.’

‘Yes, yes, Nora: I know that, of course. I see as much from Sir Henry Laboutillière’s letter of introduction. But what I mean is, we must have him here, at Orange Grove, naturally, mustn’t we? It would never do, you see, to let a member of the English aristocracy’—Mr Dupuy dwelt lovingly upon these latter words with some unction, as preachers dwell with lingering cadence upon the special shibboleths of their own particular sect or persuasion—‘go to stop with such people as your coloured friends over yonder at Mulberry, the Hawthorns.’

Nora was silent.

‘Why don’t you answer me, miss?’ Mr Dupuy asked testily, after waiting for a moment in silent expectation.

‘Because I will never speak to you about my own friends, papa, when you choose to talk of them in such untrue and undeserved language.’

Mr Dupuy smiled urbanely. He was in a good humour. It flattered him, too, to think that when members of the English aristocracy came out to Trinidad they should naturally select him, Theodore Dupuy, Esquire, of Orange Grove, as the proper person towards whom to look for hospitality. The fame of the fighting Dupuys was probably not unknown to the fashionable world even in London. They were recognised and talked about. So Mr Dupuy merely smiled a bland smile of utter obliviousness, and observed in the air (as men do when they are addressing nobody in particular): ‘Coloured people are always coloured people, I suppose, whether they’re much or little coloured; just as a dog’s always a dog whether he’s a great big heavy St Bernard or a little snarling snapper of a Skye terrier. But anyhow, it’s quite clear to me individually that we can’t let this young Mr Noel—a person of distinction, Nora, a person of distinction—go and stop at any other house in this island except here at Orange Grove, I assure you, my dear. Tom or I must certainly go down to meet the steamer, and bring him up here bodily in the buggy, before your friend Mr Hawthorn—about whose personal complexion I prefer to say absolutely nothing, for good or for evil—has time to fasten on him and drag him away by main force to his own dwelling-place.’ (Mr Dupuy avoided calling Mulberry Lodge a house on principle; for in the West Indies, it is an understood fact that only white people live in houses.)

‘But, papa,’ Nora cried, ‘you really mustn’t. I don’t think you ought to bring him up here. Wouldn’t it—well, you know, wouldn’t it look just a little pointed, considering there’s nobody else at all living in the house except you and me, you know, papa?’

‘My dear,’ Mr Dupuy said, not unkindly, ‘a member of the English aristocracy, when he comes to Trinidad, ought to be received in the house of one of the recognised gentry of the island, and not in that—well, not in the dwelling-place of any person not belonging to the aristocracy of Trinidad. _Noblesse oblige_, Nora; _noblesse oblige_, remember. Besides, when you consider the relation in which you already stand to your cousin Tom, my dear—why, an engaged young lady, of course, an engaged young lady occupies nearly the same position in that respect as if she were already actually married.’

‘But I’m not engaged, papa,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And I never will be to Tom Dupuy, if I die unmarried, either.’

‘That, my dear,’ Mr Dupuy responded blandly, looking at her with parental fondness, ‘is a question on which I venture to think myself far better qualified to form an opinion than a mere girl of barely twenty. Tom and I have arranged between us, as I have often already pointed out to you, that the family estates ought on all accounts to be reunited in your persons. As soon as you are twenty-two, my dear, we propose that you should marry. Meanwhile, it can only arouse unseemly differences within the family to discuss the details of the question prematurely. I have made up my mind, and will not go back upon it. A Dupuy never does. As to this young Mr Noel who’s coming from Barbadoes, I shall go down myself to the next steamer, and look out to offer him our hospitality immediately on his arrival, before any coloured people—I mention no names—can seize upon the opportunity of intercepting him, and carrying him off forcibly against his will, bag and baggage, to their own dwelling-places.’

SOME RUSTIC NAMES OF FLOWERS.

Who does not love the country names of old-fashioned flowers better than those by which botanists and florists call them? By old-fashioned flowers—if forms perennially renewed can ever be called old-fashioned—are meant the flowers our oldest poets praise, and whose simple charms find a place in the songs of modern ones—flowers, the roots of which the old Flemings and the proscribed of Nantes brought with them in their enforced migration to this country, and which, like the industries they introduced, flourished into brighter bloom and strength than in the Fatherland. Some of the rustic names of these old flowers have a quaint prettiness and meaning in them, like the pet names of little children, which are at once piquant and endearing; and as some are local, others little known, and others, again, nearly obsolete, and likely to be wholly so in another generation or two, one is interested in endeavouring to preserve them.

The ‘Falfalaries’ (checkered snake’s head) of old Shropshire people are properly spoken of by their children’s children as ‘Fritillaries;’[1] and bright-looking blushful ‘Pretty Betty,’ indigenous to the Kentish chalk, and familiar to many persons by this name, is now, thanks to botany and Board Schools, correctly known as ‘Red Valerian.’ We, however, who have known it from childhood by its homelier name, will know it by no other; for us, it will always be ‘Pretty Betty,’ and suggestive of the high bloom on the hypothetical maiden’s cheek in honour of whom it was so named. In Chaucer’s time, it was crudely called ‘Setwale,’ or ‘Set-a-wall,’ from its well-known habit of cresting old castles and other crumbling walls, and of growing above gray posterns and old garden-gates, whence, from the tender ‘Good-nights’ not unusual at such places, it probably got its Shropshire name of ‘Kiss-at-the-wicket,’ and its Surrey synonym, ‘Kiss-behind-the-garden-gate.’ The variegated ‘Ribbon-grass’ of our gardens, anciently called—but that was when the rood of Boxley flourished, and village maidens, knowing no other literature, read their saints’ calendar in flowers—‘Our Lady’s Laces,’ had become, when Parkinson wrote, ‘Painted’ or ‘Ladies’ Laces,’ which makes all the difference. In many places it has the common name of ‘Gardener’s Garters;’ but in a corner of Kent not far from the Weald, where many old-world ways and words are cherished, it has the pretty, pert, but apposite one of ‘Match-me-if-you-can’—a name that prompted the examination of a dozen blades of it, only to discover that, by some exquisite diversity of arrangement of the creamy white and pale-green stripes, not one of the delicately striated leaves exactly resembled another.

‘I won’t have it called “London-pride,”’ said the eighty-year-old proprietress of a garden, once fuller of bloom and colour and sweetness than any other we have known; but that was before sight failed its owner. ‘What have we country-folk and simple flowers to do with “London-pride?” For my part, I like it best by its old Kentish name of “None-so-pretty.”’ If any doubt the fitness of the sobriquet, let them take the trouble to microscopically examine the minute painted and jewelled corolla of this flower, and assure themselves how truly it deserves the appellation.

No country garden is without ‘Honesty,’ or ‘White Satin-flower’ as it is sometimes called, from the silvery lustre of its large circularly shaped _saliques_, which, when dried, were used to dress up fireplaces in summer, and decorate the chimney-mantels of cottages and village inns. Our aged friend had another name for this plant also, and called it ‘Money-in-both-pockets.’ The curious seed-vessels, which grow in pairs, and are semi-transparent, show the flat disc-shaped seeds like little coins within them, an appearance which no doubt originated the name.

Reminiscent of the times to which we just now alluded, when holy names hung about the hedgerows, and the blossoming of plants recalled sacred seasons and events, the lilac in Devonshire bears the name of ‘Whitsuntide Flower;’ the country-people know it by no other. There _Cardamine pratensis_, Shakspeare’s ‘Lady-smocks,’ the ‘Cuckoo-flower’ of old Gerarde, whose blossoms border the streams and rivulets in spring ‘all silver-white,’ like lengths of bleaching linen, is known as ‘Milkmaids;’ and in the same county the ‘Foxglove’ becomes ‘Folk’s-glove’ or ‘Fairy-glove;’ while in Ireland, children call the drooping tubular freckled bells ‘Fairy thimbles,’ and are careful not to meddle with them after sunset, on pain of being pinched by the ‘good-people.’

The milk-white ‘Candytuft’ (_Iberis amara_) grows plentifully on stony upland fields in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Once, in the latter county, when we were gathering some of it from a field in which some women were weeding, one of them remarked to another that she should not have liked to have done so when she was a young woman; upon which we inquired its name, and was told, almost reluctantly, ‘Poverty’—a most expressive name; for it loves best a poor and arid soil, and has its botanical name from its intense bitterness. Evidently, village lads and lasses had from early times an unwritten language of flowers, and this was one of its phrases.

As our readers know, ‘Pansy’ is a very old name for the ‘Heart’s-ease,’ as old at least as Queen Elizabeth’s time, and probably older. Spenser writes of the ‘pretty pauncy;’ and Ophelia gives it ‘for thought.’ It is a plant of many names. Shakspeare twice calls it ‘Love-in-idleness.’ Poor, simple, pious folk, seeing its three lower petals rayed like a ‘glory,’ called it ‘Herb of the Trinity.’ The vagrant habit of the plant procured it the name of ‘Kit-run-the-streets,’ which appellation it has not wholly lost in country-places. Rustics also call it ‘Two-faces-under-a-hood.’ But it was as ‘Heart’s-ease’ we first knew it, a name that gives sweet force to that other old-world one, ‘Call-me-to-you,’ which without it had been meaningless.

Of local names for flowers, one of the prettiest we know is that by which a Dorsetshire girl designated the ‘Michaelmas Daisy’—a name full of unconscious poetry; she called it ‘Summer’s Farewell.’ ‘We shall not have many more nosegays this year, ma’am; I see “Summer’s Farewell” is blowing;’ and upon desiring to see the unknown flower, she pointed out the familiar ‘Michaelmas Daisy.’

In Wiltshire, the children give the names of ‘Rushlights’ and ‘Fairy-candles’ to the ‘Trip-madam’ of our ancestors, the small fleshy-leaved erect stems and terminal flowers with spreading anthers of the yellow sedum (or stonecrop), frequent on old walls and housetops; and to the subtle child-fancy, we have no doubt the resemblance is sufficiently strong to set them all alight on summer nights.

The ‘Danewort’ or Dwarf-elder is in some districts said to be so called because the people fancy it sprung from the blood of the Danes slain in battle; and that if, upon a certain day of the year, you cut it, it bleeds. It is noteworthy that the large terminal cymes of this plant, which loves waste places, are of a purplish colour, the berries black, and that the juice of the flowering stems, like the fruit, produces a blood-like stain.

The curious corruption of ‘Fritillary’ to ‘Falfalarie,’ with which we started, is easily understood; but who would recognise the poetically named ‘Narcissus’ under the homely guise of ‘White Nancies,’ the common name for it in Shropshire gardens? We had rather it kept its pretty rustic name of ‘daffodil,’ a name inwoven in many a garland of old English verse, and sweetly suggestive of woods, and nut-boughs sparkling with buds, and village children, and the fresh young joy of spring. The name daffodil is now generally applied to the species with bright yellow flowers.

Another old-world plant included in these days under the generic name of _Campanula_, and which in many parts was known as ‘Country-bells,’ keeps in its Kentish name of ‘Canterbury-bells’ a local legend; and is so called not only from the prevalence of the plant in the neighbourhood of the old sainted city, but because it was the type of ‘Becket’s bells,’ which pilgrims to his shrine carried away with them, in token of their having been there. Another of its tribe, better known than liked, has the quaint name of ‘Little-steeple-bell-flower,’ a picturesque name one would not willingly blot out from floral nomenclature; though its common one of ‘Rampions’ is quite good enough for it, and highly characteristic of the exuberant mode in which its fleshy and at the same time fibrous roots take possession of the soil and overrun it. It is a dangerous plant to admit into gardens, where its tall tapering stem, beset with little watchet blue-bells, is occasionally seen.

In the north of England, the wild hyacinth of the south—sometimes erroneously called ‘Harebell’—with its pendulous flowers underhanging each other on one side only of its drooping stem, has the curious name of ‘Ring-of-bells’ from a fancied resemblance (a writer in _Notes and Queries_ tells us) to the bells on which King David is sometimes represented playing in old wood-engravings. In Shropshire, the fertile stems of the Horsetail (_Equisetum arvenses_), which shoot up like brown pencils out of the soil before the sterile ones appear, are called ‘Toadpipes’ by the children; and a similar name is applied to them in many parts of Scotland. In Shropshire, also, the chalk-white flowers of the rock alyssum have the pretty trivial name of ‘Summer Snow;’ and the scarlet pimpernel, that trusted hydroscope of hind and shepherd—of which Lord Bacon wrote: ‘There is a small flower in the stubble-fields which country-people call “Wincopipe,” which if it openeth in the morning, you may be sure of a fine day’—is ‘Wincopeep;’ which, methinks, to use his lordship’s idiom, is the more correct of the two, seeing the habit of the plant is to close its petals when a rain-cloud dulls the sky, and to open them wide in sunshine—alternations suggestive of the name ‘Wink-and-peep,’ which time has probably contracted. In some places it is known as ‘the poor man’s weather-glass.’

In the same district, that fine sour relish of our childhood, ‘Sorrel,’ is simply ‘Sour-dock;’ and the early Purple Orchis (_O. mascula_), with its dark-green leaves plashed with brown, and spikes of richly coloured flowers springing up in cowslip-covered meadows, is hailed as ‘King’s Fingers.’

The cowslip has in Shropshire the common name of ‘Paigle,’ a name the derivation of which no one appears to understand; but its old Kentish name of ‘Culver-keys’ is unknown. We have lately seen the meaning of this also queried. It had its origin most probably in the common country fashion of christening flowers, in Gerarde’s time, from some fancied resemblance in its drooping umbel of unopened flowers to a ‘bunch of keys’ hanging from a ring or girdle; just as the pendent clusters of ash-seeds are called—we presume from the same idea—‘Ashen-keys;’ and as a bunch of keys must belong to some one or some thing, why not to the ‘culver,’ or wood-pigeon? In this fanciful way we can imagine the pretty rustic name of ‘Culver-key’ coming about; an hypothesis wholly our own, and therefore open to correction.

It was after this fashion, Parkinson tells us, he named the ‘Wild Clematis’ (_C. vitalba_), ‘Traveller’s Joy,’ because it loves to spread green bowers in hedgerows near villages and the habitations of men. But whence came the name of ‘Roving Sailor?’—one of the trivial ones for the ivy-leaved Toad-flax (_Linaria cymbalaria_), the fine thread-like runners of which hang from old garden-walls—those of Hampton Court, for instance—bearing in their season little solitary blue or purple petaled flowers. No rustic would have so named it; to him, its other appellations of ‘Hen-and-chickens,’ or ‘Mother-of-thousands,’ would have been more natural. But ‘Roving Sailor’ savours of that other element with which the husbandman meddles not, and may have been bestowed by some maritime superannuant, whose imagination transformed the long streaming roots into cordage, and the tiny blue-jacketed flowers into sailors climbing it, while the straggling habit of the plant completed the similitude.

Traditions die hard in country villages, and faith in the specially remedial properties of plants once dedicated to holy names and anniversaries is by no means extinct amongst peasant-folk. Thus, we were gravely informed last summer by a cottager of our acquaintance, in the sweet hamlet of Harbledown, in Kent, that there was nothing for a green wound better than the leaves of our ‘Saviour’s Flannel’ (or ‘Blanket’), a startling name for the exquisitely soft, glaucous, green leaves of what some persons secularly call ‘Mouse-ear,’ and which—to liken nature to art—resemble in texture the finest silken plush, and retain their softness and pliability for months after they are gathered. It is often seen in borders, where its silvery leaves and pale mauve-coloured flowers render it effective.

Again, the great ‘White Lily’ (_Lilium candidum_), the ‘Sceptre Lily’ of our time, ‘Our Lady’s Lily’ in the past, of which the old masters made such effective use in their pictures of the Virgin, is in Shropshire still known as ‘Ascension Lily,’ an evident misnomer. It should be, remembering the time of its blooming, the ‘Lily of the Annunciation.’ In the neighbourhood of the Wrekin it has another name—it is the ‘Healing Lily;’ and the curative virtue of the whole plant is firmly believed in.

It was a pretty custom to name the plants after the saints and holy seasons about whose anniversaries they fell a-flowering. It saved some absurdities and vulgarities in christening them, and left us names so sweet and appropriate, that, like the gillyflowers and sops-in-wine, sweetbrier, &c., of the old poets, they will never become old or inapt. Who would exchange ‘Christmas Rose’ for ‘Black Hellebore,’ or ‘Lent Lily’ for ‘Pseudo Narcissus,’ or prefer ‘Anemone’ to ‘Easter-flower,’ or ‘Polygally’ to ‘Crosswort?’ (carried on wands in the ancient perambulations of Rogation-week). ‘Whitsuntide Flower’ is a prettier name than ‘Lilac,’ and ‘Michaelmas Daisy’ than ‘Aster Tradescanti,’ the one by which it was known when Charles I. was king.

But these are not the purely rustic names of plants with which we started. One more example—a local one—and our personally formed catalogue of them is ended. Any one who has observed the regular height to which the garden fumitory grows when planted against a wall, forming a background of its soft, finely cut, bright-green leaves, which overhang each other, and the seemingly equal distances at which its clusters of yellow or rose coloured flowers depend, will at once perceive the fitness of its quaint Shropshire name of ‘Ladies’ Needlework Flower.’ It has the richness, with some of the formality, of a flounce of old chenille embroidery, such as in other years exercised the industry and ingenuity of English ladies. This plant is said to be called fumitory (earth-smoke, _fume terre_) from the belief that it was produced without seed from vapours arising from the earth. This was an ancient and well-rooted belief as far back as 1485. In Kent it is called ‘waxdolls,’ from the doll-like appearance of its little flowers.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Near Weston, one of the seats of the Earl of Bradford, in Shropshire, there is a field locally called the ‘Falfalarie Field,’ which people annually visit for the sake of the fritillary, which abounds there, as it does in Christ Church Meadows, Oxford.

SPIRITED AWAY.

IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAP. III.

Five minutes later, when my eyes were unbandaged, I found myself being driven along a road which was apparently in the extreme suburbs of London, the houses that we passed were so scattered and far apart. Legros was by my side, and two other men were sitting opposite us; but the windows of the conveyance were drawn up, and although the night was now perfectly clear, only the vaguest outlines were discernible of anything outside, except for a moment now and again when we came within the faint circle of light radiated from an occasional street-lamp. Suddenly my heart gave a great throb, for by the momentary gleam of a lamp I saw that the conveyance in which I was travelling was a mourning-coach—a coach draped in black, and such as is never made use of except for following the dead. Could it be possible that the hearse with its dread burden was in front of us, and that we were following it to some bourn to me unknown? I sank back into my corner, and asked myself whether it was really true that I, who had left my far-off country home scarcely twenty-four hours ago, could thus suddenly, and without any action of my own, have become a participant in some dire tragedy, of which as yet I knew neither the beginning nor the end. I was but a boy, just recovering from a long illness, and if a few tears welled from my eyes in the darkness, it is perhaps hardly to be wondered at.

But it was of Karavich I was thinking more than of myself. There was little doubt left in my mind that the poor _cafetier_ had come to some foul and sudden end. But who and what was he, and what was the nature of his crime? Who were these men, who had constituted themselves at once his judges and his executioners, and to what place was the body of the murdered man being conveyed so mysteriously in the dead of night? Vain questions one and all. A sense sat heavily upon me of being in the power of an inexorable Destiny, who was leading me onward whether I willed it or no, by paths to me unknown, towards a goal I was unable to foresee.

Soon the last lamp was left behind, and we plunged forward into the blacker darkness of the country; and now our pace was increased, the horses breaking into a long swinging trot, which gradually became wearisome from its absolute monotony. As on our first journey, not a word was spoken by any one. By-and-by, from sheer fatigue I suppose, perhaps aided in part by the liqueur given me by Legros, I fell into a sort of troubled sleep, in which the real and the imaginary were strangely blended. How long this state of semi-consciousness lasted, and how many miles we travelled during the time, I had no means of judging. The abrupt stoppage of the coach, and the cessation of the monotonous grinding of the wheels, brought me back with a start to the realities of my position. Legros let down one of the windows. Day was just breaking. A dim misty light pervaded the atmosphere, through which as yet nothing was clearly visible. M. Legros and one of the others alighted and went forward, leaving me and the other man inside.

‘Are we near the end of our journey?’ I said to the silent figure sitting opposite me.

He started, stared at me for a moment, and then made some unintelligible reply. Presently the coach moved forward a little way, and then halted again. Then M. Legros came up, and standing on the carriage step, spoke to me through the window.

‘Another stage of our journey is at an end,’ he said. ‘We have one more stage to travel together before we separate. You will now please to alight; but before doing this, I must ask you to give me your promise that neither by word nor gesture will you endeavour to attract the attention or rouse the suspicions of any strangers, not of our party, whom you may presently see. As I have already told you, you have only to obey my instructions implicitly, and no harm shall befall you.—Have I your word, monsieur?’ There was a stern questioning look in his eyes as he finished speaking.

‘I am helpless, and in your power; I can only do as you wish.’

‘It is well,’ he said as he stepped down and opened the carriage door.

I was glad enough to get out and be able to stretch my cramped limbs. The other man followed, and during the next few minutes he and M. Legros kept close to me, one walking on either side of me.