Stories of Childhood Part 10

"It isn't time to stop sewing, is it?" asked the Lady of Shalott, in faint surprise. Sary Jane only gave her sharp looks, and said,--

"Nonsense! That man will be back again yet. He'll look after ye, maybe.

Nonsense!"

"Yes," said the Lady of Shalott, "he will come back again. But my gla.s.s is broken."

"Nonsense!" said Sary Jane. But she did not go back to her sewing. She sat down on the edge of the bed, by the Lady of Shalott; and it grew dark.

"Perhaps they'll do something about the yards; who knows?" said Sary Jane through the growing dark.

"But my gla.s.s is broken," said the Lady of Shalott.

"Sary Jane, dear!" said the Lady of Shalott, when it had grown quite, quite dark. "He is walking on the waves."

"Nonsense!" said Sary Jane. For it was quite, quite dark.

"Sary Jane, dear!" said the Lady of Shalott. "Not that man. But there _is_ a man, and he is walking on the waves."

The Lady of Shalott raised herself upon her little calico night-dress sleeve. She looked at the wall where the 10 X 6 inch looking-gla.s.s had hung.

"Sary Jane, dear!" said the Lady of Shalott. "I am glad that girl is down by the waves. I am very glad. But the gla.s.s is broken."

Two days after, the Board of Health at the foot of the precipice, which the lessor called a flight of stairs, which led into the Lady of Shalott's palace, were met and stopped by another board.

"_This_ one's got the right of way, gentlemen!" said something at the brink of the precipice, which sounded so much like a rat-trap that the Board of Health looked down by instinct at its individual and collective feet to see if they were in danger, and dared not by instinct stir a step.

The board which had the right of way was a pine board, and the Lady of Shalott lay on it, in her little brown calico night-dress, with Sary Jane's old shawl across her feet. The Flower Charity (Heaven bless it!) had half covered the old shawl with silver bells, and solemn green shadows, like the shadows of church towers. And it was a comfort to know that these were the only bells which tolled for the Lady of Shalott, and that no other church shadow fell upon her burial.

"Gentlemen," said the Hospital doctor, "we're too late, I see. But you'd better go on."

The gentlemen of the Board of Health went on; and the Lady of Shalott went on.

The Lady of Shalott went out into the cart that had carried away the monkeys from the spring-box, and the purple wing lifted to let her pa.s.s; and fell again, as if it had brushed her away.

The Board of Health went up the precipice, and stood by the window out of which the Lady of Shalott had never looked.

They sent orders to the scavenger, and orders to the Water Board, and how many other orders n.o.body knows; and they sprinkled themselves with camphor, and they went their ways.

And the board that had the right of way went its way, too. And Sary Jane folded up the shawl, which she could not afford to lose, and came home, and made nankeen vests at sixteen and three quarters cents a dozen in the window out of which the Lady of Shalott had never looked.

MARJORIE FLEMING.

BY JOHN BROWN, M.D.

One November afternoon in 1810,--the year in which "Waverley" was resumed and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three weeks, and made immortal in 1814, and when its author, by the death of Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in India,--three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school-boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet.

The three friends sought the _bield_ of the low wall old Edinburgh boys remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout west-wind.

The three were curiously unlike each other. One, "a little man of feeble make, who would be unhappy if his pony got beyond a foot pace," slight, with "small, elegant features, hectic cheek, and soft hazel eyes, the index of the quick, sensitive spirit within, as if he had the warm heart of a woman, her genuine enthusiasm, and some of her weaknesses." Another, as unlike a woman as a man can be; homely, almost common, in look and figure; his hat and his coat, and indeed his entire covering, worn to the quick, but all of the best material; what redeemed him from vulgarity and meanness were his eyes, deep set, heavily thatched, keen, hungry, shrewd, with a slumbering glow far in, as if they could be dangerous; a man to care nothing for at first glance, but, somehow, to give a second and not-forgetting look at. The third was the biggest of the three, and though lame, nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store-farmer, come of gentle blood; "a stout, blunt carle," as he says of himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills,--a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and somewhat stooping shoulders was set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world.

He was in high spirits, keeping his companions and himself in roars of laughter, and every now and then seizing them, and stopping, that they might take their fill of the fun; there they stood shaking with laughter, "not an inch of their body free" from its grip. At George Street they parted, one to Rose Court, behind St. Andrew's Church, one to Albany Street, the other, our big and limping friend, to Castle Street.

We need hardly give their names. The first was William Erskine, afterwards Lord Kinnedder, chased out of the world by a calumny, killed by its foul breath,--

"And at the touch of wrong, without a strife, Slipped in a moment out of life."

There is nothing in literature more beautiful or more pathetic than Scott's love and sorrow for this friend of his youth.

The second was William Clerk,--the _Darsie Latimer_ of "Redgauntlet"; "a man," as Scott says, "of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension," but of more powerful indolence, so as to leave the world with little more than the report of what he might have been,--a humorist as genuine, though not quite so savagely Swiftian as his brother Lord Eldon, neither of whom had much of that commonest and best of all the humors, called good.

The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say, not even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something higher than pleasure, and yet who would care to split this hair?

Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word, the man of the Parliament House and of the world, and, next step, moody, the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible; his shut mouth, like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad: he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and drifts! On-ding o' snaw,--ay, that's the word,--on-ding--" He was now at his own door, "Castle Street, No.39." He opened the door, and went straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where, in one year, 1823, when he was fifty-two, he wrote "Peveril of the Peak," "Quentin Durward," and "St. Ronan's Well," besides much else. We once took the foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we would say, since Scott, into this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green where faithful Camp lies.[1]

[Footnote 1: This favorite dog "died about January, 1809, and was buried, in a fine moonlight night, in the little garden behind the house in Castle Street. My wife tells me she remembers the whole family in tears about the grave, as her father himself smoothed the turf above Camp with the saddest face she had ever seen. He had been engaged to dine abroad that day, but apologized on account of the death of 'a dear old friend.'"--_Lockhart's Life of Scott._]

He sat down in his large, green morocco elbow-chair, drew himself close to his table, and glowered and gloomed at his writing apparatus, "a very handsome old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such order that it might have come from the silversmith's window half an hour before." He took out his paper, then, starting up angrily, said, "'Go spin, you jade, go spin.' No, d--- it, it won't do:--

'My spinnin'-wheel is auld and stiff; The rock o't wunna stand, sir; To keep the temper-pin in tiff Employs ower aft my hand, sir.'

I am off the fang.[2] I can make nothing of 'Waverley' to-day; I'll awa'

to Marjorie. Come wi' me, Maida, you thief." The great creature rose slowly, and the pair were off, Scott taking a _maud_ (a plaid) with him.

"White as a frosted plum-cake, by jingo!" said he, when he got to the street. Maida gambolled and whisked among the snow; and her master strode across to Young Street, and through it to 1 North Charlotte Street, to the house of his dear friend, Mrs. William Keith of Corstorphine Hill, niece of Mrs. Keith of Ravelston, of whom he said at her death, eight years after, "Much tradition, and that of the best, has died with this excellent old lady, one of the few persons whose spirits and _cleanliness_ and freshness of mind and body made old age lovely and desirable."

[Footnote 2: Applied to a pump when it is dry and its valve has lost its "fang."]

Sir Walter was in that house almost every day, and had a key, so in he and the hound went, shaking themselves in the lobby. "Marjorie!

Marjorie!" shouted her friend, "where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo?" In a moment a bright, eager child of seven was in his arms, and he was kissing her all over. Out came Mrs. Keith. "Come yer ways in, Wattie." "No, not now. I am going to take Marjorie wi' me, and you may come to your tea in Duncan Roy's sedan, and bring the bairn home in your lap." "Tak' Marjorie, and it _on-ding o' snaw!_" said Mrs. Keith. He said to himself, "On-ding--that's odd--that is the very word." "Hoot, awa! look here," and he displayed the corner of his plaid, made to hold lambs,--the true shepherd's plaid, consisting of two breadths sewed together, and uncut at one end, making a poke or _cul de sac_. "Tak' yer lamb," said she, laughing at the contrivance; and so the Pet was first well happit up, and then put, laughing silently, into the plaid neuk, and the shepherd strode off with his lamb,--Maida gambolling through the snow, and running races in her mirth.

Didn't he face "the angry airt," and make her bield his bosom, and into his own room with her, and lock the door, and out with the warm, rosy little wifie, who took it all with great composure! There the two remained for three or more hours, making the house ring with their laughter; you can fancy the big man's and Maidie's laugh. Having made the fire cheery, he set her down in his ample chair, and, standing sheepishly before her, began to say his lesson, which happened to be, "Ziccotty, diccotty, dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck wan, down the mouse ran, ziccotty, diccotty, dock." This done repeatedly till she was pleased, she gave him his new lesson, gravely and slowly, timing it upon her small fingers,--he saying it after her,--

"Wonery, twoery, tickery, seven; Alibi, crackaby, ten, and eleven; Pin, pan, musky, dan; Tweedle-um, twoddle-um, Twenty-wan; eerie, orie, ourie, You, are, out."

He pretended to great difficulty, and she rebuked him with most comical gravity, treating him as a child. He used to say that when he came to Alibi Crackaby he broke down, and pin-Pan, Musky-dan, Tweedle-um, Twoddle-um made him roar with laughter. He said _Musky-Dan_ especially was beyond endurance, bringing up an Irishman and his hat fresh from the Spice Islands and odoriferous Ind; she getting quite bitter in her displeasure at his ill behavior and stupidness.

Then he would read ballads to her in his own glorious way, the two getting wild with excitement over "Gil Morrice" or the "Baron of Smailholm"; and he would take her on his knee, and make her repeat Constance's speeches in "King John," till he swayed to and fro, sobbing his fill. Fancy the gifted little creature, like one possessed, repeating,--

"For I am sick, and capable of fears,-- Oppressed with wrong, and, therefore, full of fears; A widow, husbandless, subject to fears; A woman, naturally born to fears."

"If thou, that bidst me be content, wert grim, Ugly, and slanderous to thy mother's womb,-- Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious--"

Or, drawing herself up "to the height of her great argument,"--