Heads And Tales Part 5

His intellect was not for a moment clouded. His fort.i.tude was the more admirable because he was not willing to die. He had very lately said to one of those whom he most loved, 'You know that I never feared death; there have been times when I should have wished it, but, now that this great new prospect is opening before me, I do wish to stay here a little longer.' Yet no weakness, no querulousness disgraced the n.o.ble close of that n.o.ble career. To the physicians the king returned his thanks graciously and gently. 'I know that you have done all that skill and learning could do for me, but the case is beyond your art; and I submit.' From the words which escaped him he seemed to be frequently engaged in mental prayer. Burnet and Tenison remained many hours in the sick-room. He professed to them his firm belief in the truth of the Christian religion, and received the sacrament from their hands with great seriousness. The antechambers were crowded all night with lords and privy-councillors. He ordered several of them to be called in, and exerted himself to take leave of them with a few kind and cheerful words. Among the English who were admitted to his bedside were Devonshire and Ormond. But there were in the crowd those who felt as no Englishman could feel, friends of his youth, who had been true to him, and to whom he had been true, through all vicissitudes of fortune; who had served him with unalterable fidelity when his Secretaries of State, his Treasury, and his Admiralty had betrayed him; who had never on any field of battle, or in an atmosphere tainted with loathsome and deadly disease, shrunk from placing their own lives in jeopardy to save his, and whose truth he had at the cost of his own popularity rewarded with bounteous munificence. He strained his feeble voice to thank Auverquerque for the affectionate and loyal services of thirty years. To Albemarle he gave the keys of his closet and of his private drawers.

'You know,' he said, 'what to do with them.' By this time he could scarcely respire. 'Can this,' he said to the physicians, 'last long?' He was told that the end was approaching. He swallowed a cordial, and asked for Bentinck. Those were his last articulate words. Bentinck instantly came to the bedside, bent down, and placed his ear close to the king's mouth. The lips of the dying man moved, but nothing could be heard. The king took the hand of his earliest friend, and pressed it tenderly to his heart. In that moment, no doubt, all that had cast a slight pa.s.sing cloud over their long and pure friendship was forgotten. It was now between seven and eight in the morning. He closed his eyes, and gasped for breath. The bishops knelt down and read the commendatory prayer.

When it ended William was no more!"

It was a.s.suredly the stumbling of his horse against a mole-hill that led more immediately to the death of this great monarch. It is but one link in the chain of many providences affecting his life. We all remember the schoolboy ditty--

"For want of a nail the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe the rider was lost; For want of the rider the battle was lost; For want of the battle the kingdom was lost."

How much the death of King William r.e.t.a.r.ded progress in Great Britain can never be judged or determined. His appointed hour had come. It was no bullet with its billet on the banks of the Boyne that laid the Dutchman low, but the cast-up earth of a specimen of a little insectivorous quadruped called the mole, which laid him on that bed from which he never arose.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Jeremy Taylor, if I remember aright.

[29] Vol. V., pp. 305-310.

BEARS.

A most comfortably clad set of plantigrade creatures, as fond, most of them, of fruits as they are of flesh. No creatures are more amusing in zoological gardens to children, who wonder at their climbing powers. Who is so heartless as not to have pitied the roving polar bear, caged, on a sultry July day, in a small paddock with a puddle, and wandering about restlessly in his few feet of ground, as the well-dressed mob lounged to hear the military band performing in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens? Even young bears have an _adult_ kind of look about them. The writer remembers the manner of one, disappointed at its bread sap, most of the milk of which had been absorbed. A little girl standing by, not two years old, perfectly understood what the little creature was searching for, and, looking up, said "milka," or something closely resembling it. We recently saw a little brown bear, on board a Russian ship at Leith. He acted as a capital guard. The little creature had a grown-up face, more easily observed than described.

Bear hams, we speak from rare experience, are truly excellent. Bears, in our early London days, were kept by many hairdressers and perfumers. The anecdote or pa.s.sage from d.i.c.kens's "Humphrey's Clock" is very characteristic.

In one of Wilkie's pictures the brown bear is figured on its way with its owners to the parish beadle's "house of detention." We remember the very bear and its owners. A fine chapter might be written on the animals that used to be led about the country by wandering foreigners. Our first sight of guinea-pigs, our first view of the black-bellied hamster, our first sight of the camel and dromedary, with a monkey on his neck, and our first bear, were seen in this way. Boys and girls in those days seldom saw menageries. A muzzled bear on its hind legs in Nicolson Street, or at the Sciennes, was an exotic sight seldom witnessed, and not easily forgotten. The last we saw was in Bernard Street, Leith, in 1869. That very day, the police were hunting for Bruin and its leaders all over Edinburgh. Bears are now debarred from parading our streets.

AN AUSTRIAN GENERAL AND A BEAR.[30]

Mr Paget was told an excellent story of a bear hunt, which took place in the mountains of Transylvania, and in the presence of the gentleman who told him the story.

"General V----, the Austrian commander of the forces in this district, had come to Cronstadt to inspect the troops, and had been invited by our friend, in compliment to his rank, to join him in a bear hunt. Now, the general, though more accustomed to drilling than hunting, accepted the invitation, and appeared in due time in a c.o.c.ked hat and long gray greatcoat, the uniform of an Austrian general. When they had taken up their places, the general, with half a dozen rifles arrayed before him, paid such devoted attention to a bottle of spirits he had brought with him, that he quite forgot the object of his coming. At last, however, a huge bear burst suddenly from the cover of the pine forest, directly in front of him. At that moment the bottle was raised so high that it quite obscured the general's vision, and he did not perceive the intruder till he was close upon him. Down went the bottle, up jumped the astonished soldier, and, forgetful of his guns, off he started, with the bear clutching at the tails of his greatcoat as he ran away. What strange confusion of ideas was muddling the general's intellect at the moment it is difficult to say, but I suspect he had some notion that the attack was an act of insubordination on the part of Bruin, for he called out most l.u.s.tily, as he ran along, 'Back, rascal! back! I am a general!'

Luckily, a poor Wallack peasant had more respect for the epaulettes than the bear, and, throwing himself in the way, with nothing but a spear for his defence, he kept the enemy at bay till our friend and the jagers came up, and finished the contest with their rifles."

BYRON'S BEAR AT CAMBRIDGE.

When at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Byron had a strange pet. He "brought up a bear for a degree." He said to Captain Medwyn,[31] "I had a great hatred of college rules, and contempt for academical honours.

How many of their wranglers have ever distinguished themselves in the world? There was, by the by, rather a witty satire founded on my bear. A friend of Sh.e.l.ley's made an ourang-outang (Oran Hanton, Esq.) the hero of a novel ('Melincourt'), had him created a baronet, and returned for the borough of One Vote."

CHARLES d.i.c.kENS ON BEARS' GREASE AND ITS PRODUCERS.

Any one who has been long resident in London, or who has pa.s.sed through Fenchurch Street, or Everett Street, Russell Square, must have been struck with the way in which "bears' grease" is or used to be advertised in these localities. d.i.c.kens makes Mr Samuel Weller tell of an enthusiastic tradesman of this description.[32]

"His whole delight was in his trade. He spent all his money in bears, and run in debt for 'em besides, and there they wos a growling away in the front cellar all day long and ineffectually gnashing their teeth, vile the grease o' their relations and friends wos being retailed in gallipots in the shop above, and the first floor winder wos ornamented with their heads; not to speak o' the dreadful aggrawation it must have been to 'em to see a man always a walkin' up and down the pavement outside, with the portrait of a bear in his last agonies, and underneath, in large letters, 'Another fine animal was slaughtered yesterday at Jenkinson's!' Hous'ever, there they wos, and there Jenkinson wos, till he was took very ill with some inward disorder, lost the use of his legs, and wos confined to his bed, vere he laid a wery long time; but sich wos his pride in his profession even then, that wenever he wos worse than usual the doctor used to go down-stairs, and say, 'Jenkinson's wery low this mornin', we must give the bears a stir;'

and as sure as ever they stirred 'em up a bit, and made 'em roar, Jenkinson opens his eyes, if he wos ever so bad, calls out, 'There's the bears!' and rewives agin."

The author of a most amusing article in the seventy-seventh volume of the _Edinburgh Review_, on the modern system of advertising, records that, in his puff, the first vendor of bears' grease cautioned his customers to wash their hands in warm water after using it, to prevent them from a.s.suming the hairy appearance of a paw.

A BEARABLE PUN.

An illiterate vendor of beer wrote over his door at Harrowgate, "_Bear_ sold here." "He spells the word quite correctly," said Theodore Hook, "if he means to apprise us that the article is his own _Bruin_."[33]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Polar Bear. (Thala.s.sarctos maritimus.)]

SHAVED BEAR.

Robert Southey ("Common-Place Book," 4th ser., p. 359) says:--"At Bristol I saw a shaved monkey shown for a fairy; and a shaved bear, in a check waistcoat and trousers, sitting in a great chair as an Ethiopian savage. This was the most cruel fraud I ever saw. The unnatural position of the beast, and the d.a.m.nable brutality of the woman-keeper, who sat upon his knee, put her arm round his neck, called him husband and sweetheart, and kissed him, made it the most disgusting spectacle I ever witnessed. Cottle was with me."

He also tells of a fellow exhibiting a dragon-fly under a magnifier at a country fair, and calling it the great High German "Heiter-Keiter."

THE POLAR BEAR.

(_Thala.s.sarctos maritimus._[34])

Notwithstanding ice and snow, and the darkness of a nine months' winter, the Arctic regions are tenanted by several mammalia. Some of these are constant residents, the rest are migratory visitors. Of the former division, one of the most conspicuous, as it is certainly the most formidable, is the polar bear,--a creature between eight and nine feet in length, which, shuffling along the snow at a very quick pace, and being an excellent swimmer besides, cannot fail to inspire dread. The large wide head and fearfully armed jaws are united by a strong neck to powerful shoulders, from which spring the thick and muscular fore-legs.

The paws, both of the fore and of the hind feet, are broad and admirably adapted, with their long hairy covering, to keep the polar bear from sinking in the snow. Although the creature has an appearance of clumsiness, it is the reverse of inactive. Every one who knows the boundless s.p.a.ces it has to traverse, when in a state of liberty and the "monarch of all it surveys," cannot but pity it as a prisoner in the Regent's Park, where a tolerably capacious den, supplied with a bath of water of very limited dimension, affords the restless creature less liberty than a squirrel has in its round-about, or a poor lark in its cage.

Voyagers to the Arctic regions describe it as wandering over the fields of ice, mounting the hummocks,[35] and looking around for prey. With outstretched head, its little but keen eye directed to the various points of a wide horizon, the polar bear looks out for seals; or scents with its quick nostrils the luscious smell of some stinking whale-blubber or half-putrid whale-flesh. Dr Scoresby relates[36] that a piece of the _kreng_ of a whale thrown into the fire drew a bear to a ship from the distance of miles. Captain Beechey mentions, that his party in 1818, as they were off the coast of Spitzbergen, by setting on fire some fat of the walrus, soon attracted a bear to their close vicinity. This polar Bruin was evidently unaccustomed to the sight of masts, and, when approaching, occasionally hesitated, and seemed half inclined to turn round and be off. So agreeable a smell as burning walrus fat dispelled all distrust, and brought him within musket-shot.

On receiving the first ball, he sprang round, growled terrifically, and half raised himself on his hind-legs, as if expecting to seize the object which had caused so much pain; woe to any one who had at that moment been within reach of his merciless paws! Although a second and third ball laid him writhing on the ice, he was not mastered; and on the b.u.t.t end of a musket directed at his head breaking short off, the bear quickly seized the thigh of his a.s.sailant, and, but for the immediate a.s.sistance of two or three of his shipmates, the man would have been seriously injured. In these very seas--nearly fifty years before--the hero of Trafalgar encountered this Arctic tyrant, and, when missed from his ship, was discovered with a comrade attacking a large specimen, separated from them by a chasm in the ice. On being reprimanded by his captain for his foolhardiness, "Sir," said the young middy, pouting his lips, as he used to do when excited, "I wished to kill the bear that I might carry the skin to my father."[37]

Barentz, in his celebrated voyage in 1595, had two of his men killed by "a great leane white beare." In these early days, so unused were polar bears to man, that though thirty of their comrades attempted a rescue, the prey was not abandoned. The purser, "stepping somewhat farther forward, and seeing the beare to be within the length of a shot, presently levelled his peece, and discharging it at the beare, shot her into the head, betweene both the eyes, and yet shee held the man still fast by the necke, and lifted up her head with the man in her mouth, but shee beganne somewhat to stagger; wherewith the purser and a Scottishman drew out their courtlaxes (cutla.s.ses), and stroke at her so hard, that their courtlaxes burst, and yet shee would not leave the man. At last Wm. Geysen went to them, and with all his might stroke the beare upon the snowt with his peece, at which time the beare fell to the ground, making a great noyse, and Wm. Geysen leaping upon her cut her throat.

The 7th of September wee buried the dead bodies of our men in the States Island, and having fleaed the beare, carryed her skinne to Amsterdam."

This is about the earliest record of an encounter with this formidable creature; sailors now find that they can be attacked with most advantage in the water. When in this element, they try to escape by swimming to the ice, and when the ice is in the form of loose and detached small floes, Dr Sutherland has seen them dive underneath, and appear on the opposite side. Scoresby records, that when shot at a distance, and able to escape, the bear has been observed to retire to the shelter of a hummock, and, as if aware of the styptical effect of cold, apply snow to the wound.

In common with nearly every animal, this huge despot of the North is strongly attached to its young. Captain Inglefield, on his return home from Baffin's Bay in 1852, pursued three bears, as he was anxious to get a supply of fresh meat for his Esquimaux dogs. The trio were evidently a mother and twins. The captain was anxious to secure the cubs alive as trophies, and was cautious in shooting at the mother. All three fell, and were brought on board the _Isabel_. He records that it was quite heartrending to see the affection that existed between them. When the cubs saw their mother was wounded, they commenced licking her wounds, regardless of their own sufferings. At length the mother began to eat the snow, a sure sign that she was mortally wounded. "Even then her care for the cubs did not cease, as she kept continually turning her head from one to the other, and, though roaring with pain, she seemed to warn them to escape if possible. Their attachment was as great as hers, and I was thus obliged to destroy them all. It went much against my feelings, but the memory of my starving dogs reconciled me to the necessity."

The female bear when pursued carries or pushes her cubs forwards, and the little creatures are described as placing themselves across her path to be shoved forwards. Scoresby mentions an instance where, when projected some yards in advance, the cubs ran on until she overtook them, when they alternately adjusted themselves for a second throw.

It is chiefly on the seal that this bear feeds, and it displays great cunning in catching them as they sleep on the ice, or come to the holes in the ice to breathe, when it destroys them with one blow of its formidable and heavy paw. For its mode of getting the walrus we refer the reader to "Excelsior," vol. i. p. 37. Notwithstanding his strength and ferocity, the Esquimaux frequently kill the polar bear, as they esteem its flesh and fat, and highly prize its skin. The flesh is not so prized by Saxons, whether they be European or American. Dr Kane's opinion would differ but little from that of Arctic voyagers on our side of the Atlantic. The surgeon to the "Grinnell Expedition" in search of Sir John Franklin thus characterises its flesh: "Bear is strong, very strong, and withal most capricious meat; you cannot tell where to find him. One day he is quite beefy and bearable; another, hircine, hippuric, and detestable."

It is but fair to say that Captain Parry[38] regards the flesh of the polar bear to be as wholesome as any other, though not quite so palatable. His men suffered from indigestion after eating it; but this he attributes to the quant.i.ty, and not to the quality, of the meat they had eaten.

There seems to be little doubt that the liver is highly deleterious.

Some of the sailors of Barentz, who made a meal of it, were very sick, "and we verily thought we should have lost them, for all their skins came off from the foot to the head."

The skin of the bear is covered with long yellowish white hair, which, is very close, and forms a wonderful defence against the cold, and against the tusk of the animals on which it feeds. We heard of another use of this hair from an officer on one of the late Arctic searching expeditions. A bear was seen to come down a tolerably high and steep declivity by sliding down on its hinder quarters, in an att.i.tude known, in more than one part of the British Islands, by the expressive name of "katy-hunkers;" the s.h.a.ggy hair with which it was covered serving like a thick mat to protect the creature from injury. The Esquimaux prepare the skin sometimes without ripping it up, and turning the hairy side inward a warm sack-like bed is formed, into which they creep, and lie very comfortably. Otho Fabricius, in his "Fauna Graenlandica" (p. 24), informs us that the tendons are converted into sewing threads. The female bear has one or two, and sometimes three, cubs at a time. They are born in the winter, and the mother generally digs for them and for herself a snug nestling-place in the snow. The males in the winter time leave the coast, and go out on the ice-fields, to the edge of the open water after seals.--_Adam White, in "Excelsior" (with additions)._

NELSON AND THE POLAR BEAR.

In 1773, Captain Phipps, afterwards Lord Mulgrave, sailed on a voyage of discovery towards the North Pole. In this expedition sailed two Norfolk young men, one in his twenty-third year, the other a mere lad in his fifteenth year. The former sailed from a spirit of curiosity, and being sorely distressed by sea-sickness was landed in Norway. He afterwards became famous in the British Parliament, and the speeches of the Right Hon. William Windham, Secretary at War, are often referred to even now.

The younger man was Horatio Nelson, c.o.c.kswain under Captain Lutwidge, who was killed at the battle of Trafalgar, thirty-two years after his Polar expedition, and left a name which is synonymous with the glory of the British navy.