Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850

Having made this revelation, the farmer and his wife again implored their guest to preserve their secret.

He hesitated.

“Nay,” said he, “I think it would not be right to do that. That would be to make myself a party to a public deception. It would be a kind of fraud on the world and the landlord. It would serve to keep up those superstitious terrors which should be as speedily as possible dissipated.”

The farmer was in agony. He rose and strode to and fro in the room. His countenance grew red and wrathful. He cast dark glances at his guest, whom his wife continued to implore, and who sate silent, and, as it were, lost in reflection.

“And do you think it a right thing, sir,” said the farmer, “thus to force yourself into a stranger’s house and family, and, in spite of the strongest wishes expressed to the contrary, into his very chambers, and that only to do him a mischief? Is that your religion, sir? I thought you had something better in you than that. Am I now to think your mildness and piety were only so much hypocrisy put on to ruin me?”

“Nay, friend, I don’t want to ruin thee,” said the Quaker.

“But ruin me you will, though, if you publish this discovery. Out I must turn, and be the laughing-stock of the whole country to boot. Now, if that is what you mean, say so, and I shall know what sort of a man you are. Let me know at once whether you are an honest man or a cockatrice?”

“My friend,” said the Quaker, “canst thou call thyself an honest man, in practicing this deception for all these years, and depriving thy landlord of the rent he would otherwise have got from another? And dost thou think it would be honest in me to assist in the continuance of this fraud?”

“I rob the landlord of nothing,” replied the farmer. “I pay a good, fair rent; but I don’t want to quit the old spot. And if you had not thrust yourself into this affair, you would have had nothing to lay on your conscience concerning it. I must, let me tell you, look on it as a piece of unwarrantable impertinence to come thus to my house and be kindly treated only to turn Judas against me.”

The word Judas seemed to hit the Friend a great blow.

“A Judas!”

“Yes – a Judas! a real Judas!” exclaimed the wife. “Who could have thought it!”

“Nay, nay,” said the old man. “I am no Judas. It is true, I forced myself into it; and if you pay the landlord an honest rent, why, I don’t know that it is any business of mine – at least while you live.”

“That is all we want,” replied the farmer, his countenance changing, and again flinging himself by his wife on his knees by the bed. “Promise us never to reveal it while we live, and we shall be quite satisfied. We have no children, and when we go, those may come to th’ old spot who will.”

“Promise me never to practice this trick again,” said John Basford.

“We promise faithfully,” rejoined both farmer and wife.

“Then I promise too,” said the Friend, “that not a whisper of what has passed here shall pass my lips during your lifetime.”

With warmest expressions of thanks, the farmer and his wife withdrew; and John Basford, having cleared the chamber of its mystery, lay down and passed one of the sweetest nights he ever enjoyed.

The farmer and his wife lived a good many years after this, but they both died before Mr. Basford; and after their death, he related to his friends the facts which are here detailed. He, too, has passed, years ago, to his longer night in the grave, and to the clearing up of greater mysteries than that of – the Haunted House of Charnwood Forest.

[From Fraser’s Magazine.]

LEDRU ROLLIN – BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Ledru rollin is now in his forty-fourth or forty-fifth year, having been born in 1806 or 1807. He is the grandson of the famous Prestidigateur, or Conjurer Comus, who, about four or five-and-forty years ago, was in the acme of his fame. During the Consulate, and a considerable portion of the Empire, Comus traveled from one department of France to the other, and is even known to have extended his journeys beyond the Rhine and the Moselle on one side, and beyond the Rhône and Garonne on the other. Of all the conjurors of his day he was the most famous and the most successful, always, of course, excepting that Corsican conjuror who ruled for so many years the destinies of France. From those who have seen that famous trickster, we have learned that the Charleses, the Alexandres, even the Robert-Houdins, were children compared with the magical wonder-worker of the past generation. The fame of Comus was enormous, and his gains proportionate; and when he had shuffled off this mortal coil it was found he had left to his descendants a very ample – indeed, for France a very large fortune. Of the descendants in a right line, his grandson, Ledru Rollin, was his favorite, and to him the old man left the bulk of his fortune, which, during the minority of Ledru Rollin, grew to a sum amounting to nearly, if not fully, £4000 per annum of our money.

The scholastic education of the young man who was to inherit this considerable fortune, was nearly completed during the reign of Louis XVIII., and shortly after Charles X. ascended the throne il commençait à faire sur droit, as they phrase it in the pays Latin. Neither during the reign of Louis XVIII., nor indeed now, unless in the exact and physical sciences, does Paris afford a very solid and substantial education. Though the Roman poets and historians are tolerably well studied and taught, yet little attention is paid to Greek literature. The physical and exact sciences are unquestionably admirably taught at the Polytechnique and other schools; but neither at the College of St. Barbe, nor of Henry IV., can a pupil be so well grounded in the rudiments and humanities as in our grammar and public schools. A studious, painstaking, and docile youth, will, no doubt, learn a great deal, no matter where he has been placed in pupilage; but we have heard from a contemporary of M. Rollin, that he was not particularly distinguished either for his industry or his docility in early life. The earliest days of the reign of Charles X. saw M. Ledru Rollin an étudiant en droit in Paris. Though the schools of law had been re-established during the Consulate pretty much after the fashion in which they existed in the time of Louis XIV., yet the application of the alumni was fitful and desultory, and perhaps there were no two classes in France, at the commencement of 1825, who were more imbued with the Voltarian philosophy, and the doctrines and principles of Rosseau, than the élèves of the schools of law and medicine.

Under a king so skeptical and voluptuous, so much of a philosophe and pyrrhonéste, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society – to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes; and not all the lately acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the efforts of the Jesuits, could restrain or control the tendencies of the étudiants en droit. What the law students were antecedently and subsequent to 1825, we know from the Physiologic de l’Homme de Loi; and it is not to be supposed that M. Ledru Rollin, with more ample pecuniary means at command, very much differed from his fellows. After undergoing a three years’ course of study, M. Rollin obtained a diploma as a licencié en droit, and commenced his career as stagiare somewhere about the end of 1826, or the beginning of 1827. Toward the close of 1829, or in the first months of 1830, he was, we believe, placed on the roll of advocates: so that he was called to the bar, or, as they say in France, received an advocate, in his twenty-second or twenty-third year.

The first years of an advocate, even in France, are generally passed in as enforced an idleness as in England. Clients come not to consult the greenhorn of the last term; nor does any avoué among our neighbors, any more than any attorney among ourselves, fancy that an old head is to be found on young shoulders. The years 1830 and 1831 were not marked by any oratorical effort of the author of the Decline of England; nor was it till 1832 that, being then one of the youngest of the bar of Paris, he prepared and signed an opinion against the placing of Paris in a state of siege consequent on the insurrections of June. Two years after he prepared a memoir, or factum, on the affair of the Rue Transonian, and defended Dupoty, accused of complicité morale, a monstrous doctrine, invented by the Attorney-general Hebert. From 1834 to 1841 he appeared as counsel in nearly all the cases of émeute or conspiracy where the individuals prosecuted were Republicans or quasi-Republicans. Meanwhile, he had become the proprietor and rédacteur en chief of the Réforme newspaper, a political journal of an ultra-liberal – indeed, of a republican-complexion, which was then called of extreme opinions, as he had previously been editor of a legal newspaper called Journal du Palais. La Réforme had been originally conducted by Godefroy Cavaignac, the brother of the general, who continued editor till the period of the fatal illness which preceded his death. The defense of Dupoty, tried and sentenced under the ministry of Thiers to five years’ imprisonment, as a regicide, because a letter was found open in the letter-box of the paper of which he was editor, addressed to him by a man said to be implicated in the conspiracy of Quenisset, naturally brought M. Rollin into contact with many of the writers in La Réforme; and these persons, among others Guinard Arago, Etienne Arago, and Flocon, induced him to embark some portion of his fortune in the paper. From one step he was led on to another, and ultimately became one of the chief, indeed, is not the chief proprietor. The speculation was far from successful in a pecuniary sense; but M. Rollin, in furtherance of his opinions, continued for some years to disburse considerable sums in the support of the journal. By this he no doubt increased his popularity and his credit with the republican party, but it can not be denied that he very materially injured his private fortune. In the earlier portion of his career M. Rollin was, it is known, not indisposed to seek a seat in the chamber under the auspicies of M. Barrot, but subsequently to his connection with the Réforme, he had himself become thoroughly known to the extreme party in the departments, and on the death of Garnier Pagès the elder, was elected in 1841 for Le Mans, in the department of La Sarthe.

In addressing the electors after his return, M. Rollin delivered a speech much more republican than monarchical. For this he was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment, but the sentence was appealed against and annulled on a technical ground, and the honorable member was ultimately acquitted by the Cour d’Assizes of Angers.

The parliamentary début of M. Rollin took place in 1842. His first speech was delivered on the subject of the secret-service money. The elocution was easy and flowing, the manner oratorical, the style somewhat turgid and bombastic. But in the course of the session M. Rollin improved, and his discourse on the modification of the criminal law, on other legal subjects, and on railways, were more sober specimens of style. In 1843 and 1844 M. Rollin frequently spoke; but though his speeches were a good deal talked of outside the walls of the chamber, they produced little effect within it. Nevertheless, it was plain to every candid observer that he possessed many of the requisites of the orator – a good voice, a copious flow of words, considerable energy and enthusiasm, a sanguine temperament and jovial and generous disposition. In the sessions of 1845-46, M. Rollin took a still more prominent part. His purse, his house in the Rue Tournon, his counsels and advice, were all placed at the service of the men of the movement, and by the beginning of 1847 he seemed to be acknowledged by the extreme party as its most conspicuous and popular member. Such, indeed, was his position when the electoral reform banquets, on a large scale, began to take place in the autumn of 1847. These banquets, promoted and forwarded by the principal members of the opposition to serve the cause of electoral reform, were looked on by M. Rollin and his friends in another light. While Odillon Barrot, Duvergier d’Hauranne, and others, sought by means of them to produce an enlarged constituency, the member for Sarthe looked not merely to functional, but to organic reform – not merely to an enlargement of the constituency, but to a change in the form of the government. The desire of Barrot was à la vérité, à la sincerité des institutions conquises en Julliet 1830; whereas the desire of Rollin was, à l’amélioration des classes laborieuses: the one was willing to go on with the dynasty of Louis Philippe and the Constitution of July improved by diffusion and extension of the franchise, the other looked to a democratic and social republic. The result is now known. It is not here our purpose to go over the events of the Revolution of February, 1848, but we may be permitted to observe, that the combinations by which that event was effected were ramified and extensive, and were long silently and secretly in motion.

The personal history of Ledru Rollin, since February, 1848, is well known and patent to all the world. He was the ame damnée of the Provisional Government – the man whose extreme opinions, intemperate circulars, and vehement patronage of persons professing the political creed of Robespierre – indisposed all moderate men to rally around the new system. It was in covering Ledru Rollin with the shield of his popularity that Lamartine lost his own, and that he ceased to be the political idol of a people of whom he must ever be regarded as one of the literary glories and illustrations. On the dissolution of the Provisional Government, Ledru Rollin constituted himself one of the leaders of the movement party. In ready powers of speech and in popularity no man stood higher; but he did not possess the power of restraining his followers or of holding them in hand, and the result was, that instead of being their leader he became their instrument. Fond of applause, ambitious of distinction, timid by nature, destitute of pluck, and of that rarer virtue moral courage, Ledru Rollin, to avoid the imputation of faint-heartedness, put himself in the foreground, but the measures of his followers being ill-taken, the plot in which he was mixed up egregiously failed, and he is now in consequence an exile in England.

[From Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal.]

A CHIP FROM A SAILOR’S LOG

It was a dead calm – not a breath of air – the sails flapped idly against the masts; the helm had lost its power, and the ship turned her head how and where she liked. The heat was intense, so much so, that the chief mate had told the boatswain to keep the watch out of the sun; but the watch below found it too warm to sleep, and were tormented with thirst, which they could not gratify till the water was served out. They had drunk all the previous day’s allowance; and now that their scuttle but was dry, there was nothing left for them but endurance. Some of the seamen had congregated on the top-gallant forecastle, where they gazed on the clear blue water with longing eyes.

“How cool and clear it looks,” said a tall, powerful young seaman; “I don’t think there are many sharks about: what do you say for a bath, lads?”

“That for the sharks!” burst almost simultaneously from the parched lips of the group: “we’ll have a jolly good bath when the second mate goes in to dinner.” In about half an hour the dinner-bell rang. The boatswain took charge of the deck; some twenty sailors were now stripped, except a pair of light duck trowsers; among the rest was a tall, powerful, coast-of-Africa nigger of the name of Leigh: they used to joke him, and call him Sambo.

“You no swim to-day, Ned?” said he, addressing me. “Feared of shark, heh? Shark nebber bite me. Suppose I meet shark in water, I swim after him – him run like debbel.” I was tempted, and, like the rest, was soon ready. In quick succession we jumped off the spritsail yard, the black leading. We had scarcely been in the water five minutes, when some voice in-board cried out, “A shark! a shark!” In an instant every one of the swimmers came tumbling up the ship’s sides, half mad with fright, the gallant black among the rest. It was a false alarm. We felt angry with ourselves for being frightened, angry with those who had frightened us, and furious with those who had laughed at us. In another moment we were all again in the water, the black and myself swimming some distance from the ship. For two successive voyages there had been a sort of rivalry between us: each fancied that he was the best swimmer, and we were now testing our speed.

“Well done, Ned!” cried some of the sailors from the forecastle. “Go it, Sambo!” cried some others. We were both straining our utmost, excited by the cheers of our respective partisans. Suddenly the voice of the boatswain was heard shouting, “A shark! a shark! Come back for God’s sake!”

“Lay aft, and lower the cutter down,” then came faintly on our ear. The race instantly ceased. As yet, we only half believed what we heard, our recent fright being still fresh in our memories.

“Swim, for God’s sake!” cried the captain, who was now on deck; “he has not yet seen you. The boat, if possible, will get between you and him. Strike out, lads, for God’s sake!” My heart stood still: I felt weaker than a child as I gazed with horror at the dorsal fin of a large shark on the starboard quarter. Though in the water, the perspiration dropped from me like rain: the black was striking out like mad for the ship.

“Swim, Ned – swim!” cried several voices; “they never take black when they can get white.”

I did swim, and that desperately: the water foamed past me. I soon breasted the black, but could not head him. We both strained every nerve to be first, for we each fancied the last man would be taken. Yet we scarcely seemed to move: the ship appeared as far as ever from us. We were both powerful swimmers, and both of us swam in the French way called la brasse, or hand over hand, in English. There was something the matter with the boat’s falls, and they could not lower her.

“He sees you now!” was shouted; “he is after you!” Oh the agony of that moment! I thought of every thing at the same instant, at least so it seemed to me then. Scenes long forgotten rushed through my brain with the rapidity of lightning, yet in the midst of this I was striking out madly for the ship. Each moment I fancied I could feel the pilot-fish touching me, and I almost screamed with agony. We were now not ten yards from the ship: fifty ropes were thrown to us; but, as if by mutual instinct, we swam for the same.

“Hurra! they are saved! – they are alongside!” was shouted by the eager crew. We both grasped the rope at the same time: a slight struggle ensued: I had the highest hold. Regardless of every thing but my own safety, I placed my feet on the black’s shoulders, scrambled up the side, and fell exhausted on the deck. The negro followed roaring with pain, for the shark had taken away part of his heel. Since then, I have never bathed at sea; nor, I believe, has Sambo been ever heard again to assert that he would swim after a shark if he met one in the water.

[From Howitt’s Country Year-Book.]

THE TWO THOMPSONS

By the wayside, not far from the town of Mansfield – on a high and heathy ground, which gives a far-off view of the minster of Lincoln – you may behold a little clump of trees, encircled by a wall. That is called Thompson’s Grave. But who is this Thompson; and why lies he so far from his fellows? In ground unconsecrated; in the desert, or on the verge of it – for cultivation now approaches it? The poor man and his wants spread themselves, and corn and potatoes crowd upon Thompson’s grave. But who is this Thompson; and why lies he here?

In the town of Mansfield there was a poor boy, and this poor boy became employed in a hosier’s warehouse. From the warehouse his assiduity and probity sent him to the counting-house; from the counting-house, abroad. He traveled to carry stockings to the Asiatic and the people of the south. He sailed up the rivers of Persia, and saw the tulips growing wild on their banks, with many a lily and flower of our proudest gardens. He traveled in Spain and Portugal, and was in Lisbon when the great earthquake shook his house over his head. He fled. The streets reeled; the houses fell; church towers dashed down in thunder across his path. There were flying crowds, shrieks, and dust, and darkness. But he fled on. The farther, the more misery. Crowds filled the fields when he reached them – naked, half-naked, terrified, starving, and looking in vain for a refuge. He fled across the hills, and gazed. The whole huge city rocked and staggered below. There were clouds of dust, columns of flame, the thunder of down-crashing buildings, the wild cries of men. He suffered amid ten thousand suffering outcasts.

At length, the tumult ceased; the earth became stable. With other ruined and curious men he climbed over the heaps of desolation in quest of what once was his home, and the depository of his property. His servant was nowhere to be seen: Thompson felt that he must certainly have been killed. After many days’ quest, and many uncertainties, he found the spot where his house had stood; it was a heap of rubbish. His servant and merchandise lay beneath it. He had money enough, or credit enough, to set to work men to clear away some of the fallen materials, and to explore whether any amount of property were recoverable. What’s that sound? A subterranean, or subruinan, voice? The workmen stop, and are ready to fly with fear. Thompson exhorts them, and they work on. But again that voice! No human creature can be living there. The laborers again turn to fly. They are a poor, ignorant, and superstitious crew; but Thompson’s commands, and Thompson’s gold, arrest them. They work on, and out walks Thompson’s living servant, still in the body, though a body not much more substantial than a ghost All cry, “How have you managed to live?”

“I fled to the cellar. I have sipped the wine; but now I want bread, meat, every thing!” and the living skeleton walked staggeringly on, and looked voraciously for shops and loaves, and saw only brickbats and ruins.

Thompson recovered his goods, and retreated as soon as possible to his native land. Here, in his native town, the memory of the earthquake still haunted him. He used almost daily to hasten out of the place, and up the forest hill, where he imagined that he saw Lisbon reeling, tottering, churches falling, and men flying. But he saw only the red tiles of some thousand peaceful houses, and the twirling of a dozen windmill sails. Here he chose his burial-ground; walled it, and planted it, and left special directions for his burial. The grave should be deep, and the spades of resurrection-men disappointed by repeated layers of straw, not easy to dig through. In the church-yard of Mansfield, meantime, he found the grave of his parents, and honored it with an inclosure of iron palisades.

He died. How? Not in travel; not in sailing over the ocean, nor up tulip-margined rivers of Persia or Arabia Felix; nor yet in an earthquake – but in the dream of one. One night he was heard crying in a voice of horror, “There! there! – fly! fly! – the town shakes! the house falls! Ha! the earth opens! – away!” Then the voice ceased; but in the morning it was found that he had rolled out of bed, lodged between the bedstead and the wall, and there, like a sandbag wedged in a windy crevice, he was – dead!

There is, therefore, a dead Thompson in Sherwood Forest, where no clergyman laid him, and yet he sleeps; and there is also a living Thompson.

In the village of Edwinstowe, on the very verge of the beautiful old Birkland, there stands a painter’s house. In his little parlor you find books, and water-color-paintings on the walls, which show that the painter has read and looked about him in the world. And yet he is but a house-painter, who owes his establishment here to his love of nature rather than to his love of art. In the neighboring Dukery, some one of the wealthy wanted a piece of oak-painting done; but he was dissatisfied with the style in which painters now paint oak; a style very splendid, but as much resembling genuine oak as a frying-pan resembles the moon. Christopher Thompson determined to try his hand; and for this purpose he did not put himself to school to some great master of the art, who had copied the copy of a hundred consecutive copies of a piece of oak, till the thing produced was very fine, but like no wood that ever grew or ever will grow. Christopher Thompson went to nature. He got a piece of well-figured, real oak, well planed and polished, and copied it precisely. When the different specimens of the different painters were presented to the aforesaid party, he found only one specimen at all like oak, and that was Thompson’s. The whole crowd of master house-painters were exasperated and amazed. Such a fellow preferred to them! No; they were wrong; it was nature that was preferred.