Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 23, February, 1873

To get into "county" society is by no means easy to persons without advantages of position or connection, even with ample means, and to the wealthy manufacturer or merchant is often a business of years. The upper class of Englishmen, and more especially women, are accustomed to find throughout their acquaintance an almost identical style and set of manners. Anything which differs from this they are apt to regard as "ungentlemanlike or unladylike," and shun accordingly. The dislike to traders and manufacturers, which is very strong in those counties, such as Cheshire and Warwickshire, which environ great commercial centres, arises not from the folly of thinking commerce a low occupation, but because the county gentry have different tastes, habits and modes of thought from men who have worked their way up from the counting-room, and do not, as the phrase goes, "get on" with them, any more than a Wall street broker ordinarily gets on with a well-read, accomplished member of the Bar.

A result of this is that a large number of wealthy commercial men, in despair of ever entering the charmed circle of county society, take up their abode in or near the fashionable watering-places, where, after the manner of those at our own Newport, they build palaces in paddocks, have acres of glass, rear the most marvelous of pines and peaches, and have model farms which cost them thousands of pounds a year. To this class is owing in a great degree the extraordinary increase of Leamington, Torquay, Tonbridge Wells, etc.—places which have made the fortunes of the lucky people who chanced to own them.

English ladies, as a rule, take a great deal of interest in the poor around them, and really know a great deal of them. The village near the hall is almost always well attended to, but it unfortunately happens that outlying properties sometimes come off far less well. The classes which see nothing of each other in English rural life are the wives and daughters of the gentry and those of the wealthier farmers and tradesmen: between these sections a huge gulf intervenes, which has not as yet been in the least degree bridged over. In former days very great people used to have once or twice in the year what were called "public days," when it was open house for all who chose to come, with a sort of tacit understanding that none below the class of substantial yeomen or tradesmen would make their appearance. This custom has now fallen into disuse, but was maintained to the last by the Hon. Doctor Vernon-Harcourt, who was for more than half a century archbishop of York, and is yet retained by Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth House, his princely seat in Yorkshire. There, once or twice a year, a great gathering takes place. Dinner is provided for hundreds of guests, and care is taken to place a member of the family at every table to do his or her part toward dispensing hospitality to high and low.

During the summer and early autumn croquet and archery offer good excuses for bringing young people together, and reunions of this kind palliate the miseries of those who cannot afford to partake of the expensive gayeties of the London season. The archery meetings are often exceedingly pretty fêtes. Somtimes they are held in grounds specially devoted to the purpose, as is the case at St. Leonard's, near Hastings, where the archery-ground will well repay a visit. The shooting takes place in a deep and vast excavation covered with the smoothest turf, and from the high ground above is a glorious view of the old castle of Hastings and the ocean. In Devonshire these meetings have an exceptional interest from the fact that they are held in the park of Powderham Castle, the ancestral seat of the celebrated family of Courtenay. All the county flocks to them, some persons coming fifty miles for this purpose. Apropos of one of these meetings, we shall venture to interpolate an anecdote which deserves to be recorded for the sublimity of impudence which it displays. The railway from London to Plymouth skirts the park of Powderham, running so close beside it that each train sends a herd of deer scampering down the velvety glades. One afternoon a bouncing young lady, who belonged to a family which had lately emerged from the class of yeoman into that of gentry, and whose "manners had not the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere," found herself in a carriage with two fashionably-attired persons of her own sex. As the train ran by the park, one of these latter exclaimed to her companion, "Oh look, there's Powderham! Don't you remember that archery-party we went to there two years ago?" "To be sure," was the rejoinder. "I'm not likely to forget it, there were some such queer people. Who were those vulgarians whom we thought so particularly objectionable? I can't remember." "Oh, H–: H– of P–! That was the name." Upon this the other young lady in the carriage bounced to her feet with the words, "Allow me to tell you, madam, that I am Miss H– of P–!" Neither of those she addressed deigned to utter a word in reply to this announcement, nor did it appear in the least to disconcert them. One slowly drew out a gold double eye-glass, leisurely surveyed Miss H– of P– from head to foot, and then proceeded to talk to her companion in French. Perhaps the best part of the joke was that Miss H– made a round of visits in the course of the week, and detailed the disgusting treatment to which she had been subjected to a numerous acquaintance, who, it is needless to say, appeared during the narration as indignant and sympathetic as she could have wished, but who are declared by some ill-natured persons to have been precisely those who in secret chuckled over the insult with the greatest glee.

English gentlemen experience an almost painful sensation as they journey through our land and observe the utter indifference of its wealthier classes to the charms of such a magnificent country. "Pearls before swine," they say in their hearts. "God made the country and man made the town." "Yes, and how obviously the American prefers the work of man to the work of the Almighty!" These and similar reflections no doubt fill the minds of many a thoughtful English traveler as the train speeds over hill and dale, field and forest. What sites are here! he thinks. What a perfect park might be made out of that wild ground! what cover-shooting there ought to be in that woodland! what fishing and boating on that lake! And then he groans in spirit as the cars enter a forest where tree leans against tree, and neglect reigns on all sides, and he thinks of the glorious oaks and beeches so carefully cared for in his own country, where trees and flowery are loved and petted as much as dogs and horses. And if anything can increase the contempt he feels for those who "don't care a rap" for country and country life, it is a visit to such resorts as Newport and Saratoga. There he finds men whose only notion of country life is what he would hold to be utterly destitute of all its ingredients. They build palaces in paddocks, take actually no exercise, play at cards for three hours in the forenoon, dine, and then drive out "just like ladies," we heard a young Oxonian exclaim—"got up" in the style that an Englishman adopts only in Hyde Park or Piccadilly.

When an American went to stay with Lord Palmerston at Broadlands, the great minister ordered horses for a ride in the delicious glades of the New Forest. When they came to the door his guest was obliged to confess himself no horseman. The premier, with ready courtesy, said, "Oh, then, we'll walk: it's all the same to me;" but it wasn't quite the same. The incident was just one of those which separate the Englishman of a certain rank from the American.

There is of course a certain class of Americans, more especially among the jeunesse dorée of New York, who greatly affect sport: they "run" horses and shoot pigeons, but these are not persons who commend themselves to real gentlemen, English or American. They belong to the bad style of "fast men," and are as thoroughly distasteful to a Devonshire or Cheshire squire as to one who merits "the grand old name"—which they conspicuously defame—in their own country.

The English country-loving gentleman to whom we have been referring is, for the most part, of a widely different mould—a man of first-rate education, frequently of high attainments, and often one whose ends and aims in life are for far higher things than pleasure, even of the most innocent kind, but who, when he takes it, derives it chiefly from the country. Many of this kind will instantly occur to those acquainted with English worthies: to mention two—John Evelyn and Sir Fowell Buxton.

REGINALD WYNFORD.

THE FOREST OF ARDEN

A girl of seventeen—a girl with a "missish" name, with a "missish" face as well, soft skin, bright eyes, dark hair, medium height and a certain amount of coquetry in her attire. This completes the "visible" of Nellie Archer. And the invisible? With an exterior such as this, what thoughts or ideas are possible within? Surely none worth the trouble of searching after. It is a case of the rind being the better part of the fruit, the shell excelling the kernel; and with a slight effort we can imagine her acquirements. Some scraps of geography, mixed up with the topography of an embroidery pattern; some grammar, of much use in parsing the imperfect phrases of celebrated authors, to the neglect of her own; some romanticism, finding expression in the arrangement of a spray of artificial flowers on a spring bonnet; some idea of duty, resulting in the manufacture of sweet cake or "seeing after" the dessert for dinner; and a conception of "woman's mission" gained from Tennyson—

Oh teach the orphan-boy to read,Or teach the orphan-girl to sew.

No! no! no! not so fast, please. In spite of Nellie's name, of her face, of her attire, that little head is filled quite otherwise. It is not her fault that this is so: is it her misfortune? But to give the history of this being entire, it is necessary to begin seventeen years back, at the very beginning of her life, for in our human nature, as in the inanimate world, a phenomenon is better understood when we know its producing causes.

Nellie's father was a business-man of a type common in America—one whose affairs led him here, there and everywhere. Never quiet while awake, and scarcely at rest during slumber, he resembled Bedreddin Hassan in frequently going to sleep in one town, to awake in another far distant, but without the benighted Oriental's surprise at the transfer, the afrit who performed this prodigy being a steam-engine, and the magician it obeyed the human mind.

In these rapid peregrinations it would not have been easy for Mr. Archer to carry an infant with him; so, when his wife died and left Nellie to his sole care at six months old, he speedily cast about in his mind to rid himself of the encumbrance.

Having heard that country air is good for children, he sent the little one to the interior, and quite admired himself for giving her such an advantage: then, too, the house in the city could be sold.

But to whom did he entrust his child? For a while this had been the great difficulty. In vain he thought over the years he had lived, to find a friend: he had been too busy to make friends. For an honest person he had traversed the world too hurriedly to perceive the deeper, better part of mankind; he had floated on the surface with the scum and froth, and could recall no one whom he could trust. At last, away back in the years of his childhood, he saw a face—that of a young but motherly Irishwoman, who had lived in his father's family as a faithful servant, and had been a fond partisan of his in his fickle troubles when a boy.

He sought and found her in his need. She had married, borne children and grown old: her offspring, after much struggling and little help from the parent birds, had learned to fly alone, and had left the home-nest to try their own fortunes. It was not hard for Mr. Archer to persuade Nurse Bridget and her husband to inhabit his house in the country and take charge of the baby. In a short time the arrangements were complete, and the three were installed in comfort, for the busy man did not grudge money.

If in the long years that followed a thought of the neglected little one did at times reproach him, he dismissed it with the resolution of doing something for her when she should be grown up; but at what date this event was to take place, or what it was that he intended to do, he did not definitely settle.

The mansion in the country was an old rambling house, in which there were enough deserted rooms to furnish half a dozen ghosts with desirable lodgings, without inconvenience to the living dwellers. The front approach was through an avenue of hemlocks, dark and untrimmed. Under the closed windows lay a tangled garden, where flowers grew rank, shadowed by high ash and leafy oak, outposts of the forest behind—a forest jealous of cultivation, stealthily drawing nearer each year, and threatening to reconquer its own.

There was an unused well in a corner that looked like the habitation of a fairy—of a good fairy, I am sure, because the grass grew greenest and best about the worn curb, and the tender mosses and little plants that could not support the heat in summer found a refuge within its cool circle and flourished there.

On the other side of the house, and dividing it from level fields, were the kitchen-garden and orchard. In springtime you might have imagined the latter to be a grove of singing trees, bearing song for fruit: in autumn, had you seen it when the sun was low, glinting through leaves and gilding apples and stem, you would have been reminded of the garden of the Hesperides.

Below the fields lay a broad river—in summer, languid and clear; in winter, turbid and full. The child often wondered (as soon as she could wonder) if, when it was lying so tranquil under the summer clouds, it was thinking of the frolic it would have with the great blocks of ice in the winter; whether it loved best the rush and struggle of the floods or the quiet of low water; and, above all, whither it was going.

The homely faces and bent, ungainly forms of the old nurse and her husband harmonized well with the mellow gloom about them; and the infant Nellie completed the scene, like the spot of sunlight in the foreground of a picture by Rembrandt.

Now, Nellie inherited her father's active disposition, and, left to her own amusement, her occupations were many and various. At three years of age she was turned loose in the orchard, with three blind puppies in lieu of toys. Day by day she augmented her store, until she had two kittens, one little white pig with a curly tail, half a dozen soft piepies, one kid, and many inanimate articles, such as broken bottles, dishes, looking-glass and gay bits of calico. When the little thing became sleepy she would toddle through the long grass to a corner, whence the river could be heard fretting against its banks, and lie there: she said the water sang to her. Finding that this was her favorite spot, the old nurse placed there a bright quilt for her to rest on, and in case she should awake hungry there stood a tin of milk hard by. This was all the attention she received, unless the fairy of the well took her under her protection, but for that I cannot vouch. Sometimes the puppies drank her milk before she awoke; then she went contentedly and ate green apples or ripe cherries. Thus she lived and grew.

By the time Nellie was seven she had seen whole generations of pets pass away. It was wonderful what knowledge she gained in this golden orchard. She knew that piepies became chickens—that they were killed and eaten; so death came into her world. She knew that the kid grew into a big goat, and became very wicked, for he ran at her one day, throwing her to the ground and hurting her severely; so sin came into her world. She saw innate depravity exemplified in the conduct of her innocent white pig, that would take to puddles and filth in spite of her gentle endeavors to restrain its wayward impulses. Her puppies too bit each other, would quarrel over a bone, growl and get generally unmanageable. None of her animals fulfilled the promise of their youth, and her care was returned with base ingratitude. Even the little wrens bickered with the blue-birds, and showed their selfishness and jealousy in chasing them from the crumbs she impartially spread for all in common.

So at seven she was a wise little woman, and said to her nurse one day, "I do not care for pets any more: they all grow up nasty."

Was Solomon's "All is vanity" truer?

With so much experience Nellie felt old, for life is not counted by years alone: it is the loss of hope, the mistrust of appearance, the vanishing of illusion, that brings age. A hopeful heart is young at seventy, and youth is past when hope is dead. But, in spite of all, hope was not dead in the heart of the little maid, and though deceived she was quite ready to be deceived a second time, as was Solomon, and as we are all.

It was now that the girl began to be fond of flowers. She made herself a bed for them in a sunny corner of the kitchen-garden, and transplanted daisy roots and spring-beauties, with other wood- and field-plants as they blossomed. She watched the ferns unroll their worm-like fronds, made plays with the nodding violets, and ornamented her head with dandelion curls. This was indeed a happy summer. Her rambles were unlimited, and each day she was rewarded by new discoveries and delightful secrets—how the May-apple is good to eat, that sassafras root makes tea, that birch bark is very like candy, though not so sweet, and slippery elm a feast.

Her new playmates were as lovely and perfect as she could desire. They did not "grow up nasty," but in the autumn, alas! they died.

One day at the end of the Indian summer, after having wandered for hours searching for her favorites, she found them all withered. The trees also looked forlorn, shivering in the chill air, with scarce a leaf to cover them: the wind moaned, and the sky was gray instead of the bright summer blue. The little one, tired and disappointed, touched by this mighty lesson of decay, threw herself on a friendly bank and wept.

It is true the beautiful face of Nature had grown sad each winter, and her flowers and lovely things had yearly passed away, but Nellie had not then loved them.

Here she was found by a boy rosy-cheeked and bright, who all his life had been loved and caressed to the same extent that Nellie had been neglected. He lived beyond the forest, and had come this afternoon to look for walnuts. Seeing the girl unhappy, he essayed some of the blandishing arts his mother had often lavished on him, speaking to her in a kindly tone and asking her why she cried.

The child looked up at the sound of this new voice, and her astonishment stopped her tears. After gazing at him for some time with her eyes wide open, she remarked, wonderingly, "You are little, like me."

"I am not very small," replied the boy, straightening himself.

"Oh, but you are young and little," she insisted.

"I am young, but not little. Come stand up beside me. See! you don't more than reach my shoulder."

"Shall you ever get bigger?"

"Of course I shall."

"Shall you grow up nasty?" she continued, trying to bring her stock of experience to bear on this new phenomenon.

"No, I sha'n't!" he answered very decidedly.

"Shall you die?"

"No, not until I am old, old, old."

"I am very glad: I will take you for a pet, All my little animals get nasty, and my flowers have died, but I don't care, now that you have come: I think I shall like you best."

"But I won't be your pet," said the boy, offended.

"Why not?" she asked, looking at him beseechingly. "I should be very good to you;" and she smoothed his sleeve with her brown hand as if it were the fur of one of her late darlings.

"Who are you?" he demanded inquisitively.

"I am myself," she innocently replied.

"What is your name?"

"I am Nellie. Have you a name?" she eagerly went on. "If you haven't, I'll give you a pretty one. Let me see: I will call you—"

"You need not trouble yourself, thank you: I have a name of my own, Miss Nellie. I am Danby Overbeck."

"Dan—by—o—ver—beck!" she repeated slowly. "Why, you have an awful long name, Beck, for such a little fellow."

"I am not little, and I will not have you call me Beck: that is no name."

"I forgot all but the last. Don't get nasty, please;" and she patted his arm soothingly. "What does your nurse call you?"

"I am no baby to have a nurse," he said disdainfully.

"You have no nurse? Poor thing! What do you do? who feeds you?"

"I feed myself."

"Where do you live," she asked, looking about curiously, as if she thought he had some kind of a nest near at hand.

"Oh, far away—at the other side of the woods."

"Won't you come and live with me? Do!"

"No indeed, gypsy: I must go home. See, the sun is almost down. You had better go too: your mother will be anxious."

"I have no mother, and my flowers are all dead. I wish you would be my pet—I wish you would come with me;" and her lip trembled.

"My gracious, child! what would the old lady at home say? Why, there would be an awful row."

"Never mind, come," she answered coaxingly, rubbing her head against his sleeve like a kitten. "Come, I will love you so much."

"You go home," he said, patting her head, "and I will come again some day, and will bring you flowers."

"The flowers are all dead," she replied, shaking her head.

"I can make some grow. Go now, run away: let me see you off."

She looked for a moment at this superior being, who could make flowers grow and could live without the care of a nurse, and then, obeying the stronger intelligence, she trotted off toward home.

And now life contained new pleasure for Nellie, for the boy was large-hearted and kind, coming almost daily to take her with him on his excursions. Indeed, he was as lonely as the child, companions being difficult to find in that out-of-the-way neighborhood, and the odd little thing amused him. She would trudge bravely by his side when he went to fish, or carry his bag when he went gunning; and his promise of flowers was redeemed with gifts from the conservatory, which enhanced her opinion of this divinity, seeing that they were even more beautiful than those of her own fields. Often, when tired of sport, Danby would read to her, sitting in the shade of forest trees, stories of pirates and robbers or of wonderful adventures: these were the afternoons she enjoyed the most.

One day, seeing her lips grow bright and her eyes dark from her intense interest in the story, he offered her the book as he was preparing to go, saying, "Take it home, Nellie, and read it."

She took the volume in her hand eagerly, looked at the page a little while, a puzzled expression gradually passing over her face, until finally she turned to him open-eyed and disappointed, saying simply, "I can't."

"Oh try!"

"How shall I try?"

"It begins there: now go on, it is easy. There" he repeated, pointing to the word, "go on," he added impatiently.

"Where shall I go?"

"Why read, Stupid! Look at it."

She bent over and gazed earnestly where the end of his finger touched the book. "I look and look," she said, shaking her head, "but I do not see the pretty stories that you do. They seem quite gone away, and nothing is left but little crooked marks."

"I do believe you can't read."

"I do believe it too," said Nellie.

"But you must try; such a big girl as you are getting to be!"

"I try and I look, but it don't come to me."

"You must learn."

"Yes."

"Do you intend to do it?"

"Why should I? You can read to me."

"You will never know anything," exclaimed the boy severely. "How do you spend your time in the morning, when I am not here?"

"I do nothing."

"Nothing?"

"That is, I wait until you come," in an explanatory tone.

"What do you do while you are waiting?"

"I think about you, and wonder how soon you will be here; and I walk about, or lie on the grass and look at the clouds."

"Well, did I ever hear of such an idle girl? I shall not come again if you don't learn to read." Nellie was not much given to laughter or tears. She had lived too much alone for such outward appeals for sympathy. Why laugh when there is no one near to smile in return? Why weep when there is no one to give comfort? She only regarded him with a world of reproach in her large eyes.