SUMMER—A WINTER ECLOGUE.
A Back Parlour at Camberwell. Sylvanus is seated at the breakfast-table, and greeteth his friend Civis.
SYL.—A good morrow to you, friend Civis, and a hearty welcome!—How hath sleep dealt with you through the night?
CIV.—Purely indeed, and with rare pastoral dreams. I have done nothing but walk through pleasant groves, or sit me down under shady boughs, the whole livelong night. A foretaste, my friend, of the rural delights yet to come, in strolling with you amongst the dainty shades of this your verdant retreat. How have I yearned all through the month of June, to be a Jack-i’-the-Green again amidst your leaves here! You know my prospect in town.
SYL.—Aye, truly; I did once spend, or rather misspend a whole week there in the dog-days. You looked out opposite on a scorching brick front of six stories, with a south aspect—studded with I know not how many badges of Assurance from fire, and not without need—for the shop windows below seemed all a-blaze with geranium-coloured silks, at that time the mode, and flamme d’enfer. The left-hand shop, next door, was all red, likewise, with regiments of lobsters, in their new uniforms; beyond that, a terrible flaring Red Lion, newly done up with paint. At the next door, a vender of red morocco pocket-books—my eyes were in a scarlet fever, the whole time of my sojourning.
CIV.—A true picture, I confess. We are, indeed, a little strong in the warm tints; but they give the more zest to your suburban verdure. All the way down overnight, I thought only of the two tall elm trees beside your gate, and which have always been to my city optics as refreshing as a pair of green spectacles. Surely of all spots I have seen, Camberwell is the greenest, as the poet says, that ever laid hold of Memory’s waist.
SYL.—It hath been greener aforetime. But I pray you sit down and fall to.—Shall I help you to some of this relishing salted fish?
CIV.—By your good leave, Sylvanus, I will first draw up these blinds. My bed-room, you know, looks out only to the road, and I am longing to help my eyes, to a little of what, as a citizen, I may truly call the green fat of nature.
SYL.—Nay, Civis—I pray you let the blinds alone. The rolls are getting cold. This ham is excellently well cured, and the eggs are new-laid. Come, take a seat.
CIV.—I beseech your patience for one moment. There the blind is up. What a brave flood of sunshine—and what a glorious blue sky!—What a rare dainty day to roam abroad in, dallying with the Dryads!—But what do I behold! Oh, my Sylvanus, the Dryads are stripped of their green kirtles—stark naked! The trees are all bare, God help me! as bare as the “otamies in Surgeons’ Hall!”
SYL.—You would take no forewarning—I bade you not pull up the blind. It was my intent to have broken the truth to you, after you had made a full meal; but now you must to breakfast with what appetite you may!
CIV.—As I hope to see Paradise—there is not a green bough between this and Peckham!
SYL.—No, truly, not a twig! I would not advise any forlorn Babes to die in our woods, for Cock Robin would be painfully perplext to provide them with a pall. Alas! were a Butterfly to be born in our bowers, there is not a leaf to swaddle it in.
CIV.—Miserable man that I am, to have come down so late, or rather that winter should have arrived thus early! Ungenial climate! untimely Boreas!
SYL.—Blame not Boreas, nor winter neither. Boiling heat had more part than freezing point in this havoc. To think that even summer nowadays should go by steam!
CIV.—You speak in Sphynxian riddles! Oh, my Sylvanus, tell me in plain English prose what has become of the green emeralds of the forest?
SYL.—Destroyed in one day by a swarm of locusts. Not the locusts of Scripture, such as were eaten by St. John in the wilderness, but a new species. I caught one in the fact, on the very elm tree you wot of, and which it had stripped to the bone, saving one bough.
CIV.—I am glad, with all my heart, that you have him secure, for I delight to gaze on the wonders of nature, even of the destructive kinds. You shall show me your new locust. Of course you thrusted a pin through the body, and fixed it down to a cork after the manner of the entomologists.
SYL.—No, truly; for it knocked me down after the manner of the pugilists, and so made its escape.
CIV.—How! be they so huge, then? To my fancy, they seem more like flying dragons than locusts.
SYL.—It is true, notwithstanding. Some of them which I have seen, measured nearly six feet in length; others, that were younger, from three to five. One of these last, the Minimi, or small fry, I likewise took captive, though not without some shrewd kicking and biting, and striking with its fore-paws.
CIV.—The smallest of animals will do so to escape from bondage. I take for granted you knocked him on the head, for the sake of peace.
SYL.—No, indeed. I had not the heart; the visage was so strangely human, ape or monkey could not look more like a man in the face; and then it cried and whined for all the world like a mere boy.
CIV.—It would have been a kind of petty murder to slay him. I do not think I could commit Monkeycide myself. They look, as Lady Macbeth says, so like our Fathers. To kill an ape would plant the whole stings of an apiary in my conscience. I pray you go on with the description.
SYL.—Willingly, and according to the system of the great Linnæus. Antennæ or horns he had none, thus differing from the common locust, but in lieu thereof, sundry bunches and tufts of coarse red hair; eyes brown, and tending inwards towards the proboscis or snout. Two fore-legs or arms terminating in ten palpi or feelers, and the same number of toes or claws on the hinder feet. On grasping truncus, or the trunk, it was cased in a loose skin resembling corduroy, the same being most curiously furnished with sundry bags or pouches, into which, like the provident pelican, it stuffed the forage it had collected from the trees.
CIV.—With submission, Sylvanus, to your better judgment, I should have taken this same Locust, from your description, to have been actually a mere human boy.
SYL.—Between ourselves, he was—though of what nation or parentage I know not. To use his own heathenish jargon, he was doing “a morning fake on the picking lay for a cove wot add a tea-crib in the monkery.”
CIV.—A strange gibberish, but I do remember that Peter the Wild Boy was wont to discourse in the same uncouth fashion. Poor savage of the woods! I do feel for his pitiful estate; but what could move him to pluck off all-the green emeralds of the Forest?
SYL.—To make sham Hyson and mock Souchong. Even in June you would have deemed it was November, there were so many ragged Guys collecting gunpowder. Oh, Civis, thou hast no notion of the tea-trade that hath been carried on in these parts. Many times I have believed myself to be dwelling in Canton, and that my name was Hum. Thrice I have caught myself marvelling at the huge feet of Mrs. S., and have groped behind my nape for the national pigtail.
CIV.—Sylvanus, spare me. I have but one green week in the year, and here it is all blotted out of the calendar. I pray you do not jest with me. What hath become of the leaves of yon sycamore?
SYL.—Plucked by a Blackamoor, who preferred it to the climbing of chimneys.
CIV.—And yonder Ashes, which I could mourn for in appropriate sackcloth?
SYL.—Stripped by the select young gentleman of Seneca-house, who left the politer branches of education for the purpose. Scholars, you know, will play truant gratis, and these had the opportunity of performing it at twopence the hour. One Saturday they did turn their half-holiday into a whole one, and were found by the geographical master picking Chinese Pekoe and Padre on the sloe bushes and willows of Peckham Rye.
CIV.—Oh, my Sylvanus, such then is the cause of the desolation I survey. To think that I may have myself helped to swallow the verdure that I should now be sitting under. That the green Druidical leaves, instead of clothing the Dryads, should be assisting in the sweeping of my own Kidderminster carpets!
SYL.—Verily so it is. The great god Pan is dead, and Pot will reign in his stead.
CIV.—Such a misfortune was never before read in a tea-cup! Oh, my Sylvanus, what is to become of patriotism or love of the country, when the best part of the country is turned to grouts?
SYL.—I have heard by way of rumour, that Mistress Shakerly of our village, attributes her palsy to a dash of aspen in her British Congo; indeed there be shrewd doubts abroad whether the great Projector hath been at all reforming by turning over a new leaf. Mr. Fairday, the notable chemist, hath sworn solemnly on his affidavit, that the tea is strongly emetical, having always acted upon his stomach as tea and turn out.
CIV.—Of a verity it ought to be tested by the doctors.
SYL.—They have tested it, and tasted it to boot. Dr. Budd, the Pennyroyal Professor of Botany, hath ranked it with the rankest of poisons, after experimenting its destructive virtues on select tea parties of his relations and friends.
CIV.—And I doubt not Dr. Rudd, of the same Royal College, hath added a confirmation to this christening.
SYL.—You know the proverb. Doctors’ opinions do not keep step, or match together, better than their horses. Dr. Rudd hath given this beverage with cream of tartar and sugar of lead to consumptives, and hath satisfied himself morally and physically that phthisic does not begin with tea.
CIV.—Dr. Rudd is an ass! Oh, my Sylvanus, I am sick at heart! Only two days since I did purchase a delectable book of poems, called “Foliage,” purposely to read under your trees, but how can I enjoy it, when the very foliage of nature is, as the booksellers say, out of print! “Bare ruined quires where late the sweet birds sung.”
SYL.—My friend, take comfort. This tea-tray will not be brought up another year, for the counterfeit herb hath all been seized, and condemned to be burnt in the yard of the Excise.
CIV.—I am glad on’t, for it will be, as the French say, “a feu-de-joie;” and verily all the little singing birds ought to collect on the chimney-pots to chaunt a Tea Deum. In the mean time I must borrow Job’s patience under my boils, though they be of the size of kettles, and have boiled away my summer at a gallop. Possibly you may have fewer locusts another season; but by way of precaution, the next time I come down by the stage I shall attend to an old stage direction in Macbeth, namely, “Enter the army with their green boughs in their hands.”