HAROUN THE CARPENTER

HAROUN THE CARPENTER

Haroun, bien entendu, was not his name, but it was that by which some called him among themselves. The reason will appear in the sequel. He lived in a low house of one storey, with a door in the middle, and a window on each side, a typical Welsh cottage, with a thatched roof, and the roof drawn down over the gables, also in a peculiarly Welsh style.

He had his yard and workshop behind the house. In front was a bit of garden, of which he took great care, and which was bright with flowers from earliest spring to latest fall.

“Aaron,” the squire’s wife would say, “how do you manage to get your bulbs to bloom before mine?”

“My lady,” he would reply, “I hold they like the smell of the wood.”

Aaron was, in fact, his Christian name. The reason why, in the rectory and in the Hall, he was called Haroun was this:—

Aaron was a man of one book, and that book was the “Arabian Nights.”

Many years ago a copy was given to the lending library of the village, and was taken out by Aaron Price, the carpenter. He had not read three pages before his mind was in the grip of the narrator. He read, he did not sleep, he did not work, or worked badly, he went to church, but did not pray—his mind had been carried up and away from the present, away from the green Welsh valley in which he lived, away, over the russet mountains to the gorgeous East, and to the times when Jinns were all-powerful unless controlled by Solomon’s seal, and magicians were as common as blackberries and as mischievous as kittens.

Aaron very nearly fell into disrepute as a carpenter on account of that book, so badly was his work done when under the spell. But he rallied. He became active, industrious, skilful once more, yet never, thenceforth, was the witchery of the “Arabian Nights” off his mind. He had no rest to his soul till he had purchased a copy for himself, and from that precious volume he read daily. He never wearied of it; he never wanted another book.

“Lord, sir, it is meat and drink to me!” he said once when questioned about it. He was advised to give it up. “I couldn’t do it,” was his reply. “Beside—what would be the good? It’s in me, all over me, in every fibre. I know it from one cover to the other.”

“Then why not part with it—if so familiar?”

“Why don’t you part with your wife because you know her face and voice and thoughts? I couldn’t do it. I love the book because so familiar to me—every tale, every word.”

One day a note from the Hall told the rector that the squiress had got a real treat for Haroun. She was going to give him as a Christmas present “Tales of the Genii.”

The rector laid down his daily paper, took his hat and stick, and pushed down to the Hall at once.

“My dear lady! I implore you, do nothing of the kind. Give him a book on practical carpentering or a dictionary of gardening. But another book of Jinns and necromancers will turn poor Haroun mad altogether.”

Now and then, on a Sunday evening, the rector would say to his wife, “Look here, Rosie, I could read Haroun’s mind to-day as he sat under the pulpit, as though it were a book in large primer type, open before me. He was very attentive when I began my sermon, and he followed me some way, but by degrees his eye became vacant, abstracted, his expression of face altered, and I knew that he was away with the Three Calenders, hearing why Zobeide whipped the hounds.”

“Harry,” responded the rectoress, “you have only yourself to blame. Try to be more interesting when you preach.”

“My dear Rosie,” exclaimed the parson, “I do my level best, but what pulpit discourse could ever compete with ‘Sindbad’s Voyages’ or ‘The Hunchback’?”

The good lady sighed and said, “Whatever will Haroun do for a wife? We have no Fatimas and Zobeides in this village.”

“I wish with all my heart that Haroun would weave his own web of romance, fall in love, and—then he’d forget the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“In time this infatuation will wear off.”

“I doubt it. This has now been going on for years, and that book only works its way deeper into his soul. Upon my word, Rosie, I believe the Bible interests him only because of the wonders that are in it.”

“Then, my dear, I am sure you judge him wrong. He is a good man, and God-fearing.”

“Yes—but oh! so fantastical.”

Aaron Price did not keep his treasury of stories bottled up in his own breast. He was great at retailing them, but he transferred the scenery to Wales, translated Camaralzaman and Badoura into David Jones and Sheena Williams, located every incident in some well-known spot, and thoroughly bewildered his hearers, who could not make out whether he were poking fun at them or narrating facts.

Perhaps the climax was reached when he converted Ganem the slave of Love, into the amiable, somewhat corpulent, and eminently respectable squire, Sir John Vaughan, at Llanselyf. The whole tale was told with so much circumstance and such actuality, that next Sunday, when the squire came to church, he found himself the object of intense interest, observation, and private whispered comment.

It may be remembered that in the original tale Ganem was up a tree overhanging a cemetery when he saw some slaves bury a chest, at the dead of night, in the earth. When they were gone he descended from the tree, dug down to and opened the chest, when he found it contained a lady of incomparable beauty who “as soon as she was released from her confined situation, and exposed to the open air began to sneeze, and half-opening her eyes and rubbing them exclaimed, ‘Zohorob Bostan (Flower of the Garden), Schagrom Marglan (Branch of Coral), Cassabos Souccar (Sugar-cane), Nouronnihar (Light of Day), Nagmatos Sohi (Star of the Morning), Nouzhetos Zaman (Delight of the Season), speak, where are you?’”

This, as related by the carpenter, took a very local and personal complexion. The incident was transferred to the churchyard of his own parish, and to a certain elm tree that grew there; it was Sir John Vaughan who climbed the tree, and the lady when released from the box exclaimed, “Mary Jones, my housemaid, Flower of the Garden, and you, Susanna Rees, scullery-maid, Branch of Coral; and you also, Elizabeth Thomas, tweenie maid and Sugar-cane; and you, Margaret Cole, the lady’s-maid, Light of Day, and under housemaid Joan, Star of the Morning, and third housemaid Wilmot, Delight of the Season, speak, my dear tried servants, where are you?”

Now, on this particular Sunday morning, not only was Sir John an object of great interest, but so was Lady Vaughan, and when, during the service, she sneezed, it produced a general agitation; so also were the maid-servants of the family. On their arrival there were nudgings, “Here comes Branch of Coral, and there is Light of the Day. But where is Flower of the Garden?” To which an answer came in a whisper, “Got a bad cold in her head, and can’t come to church.”

Now, a remarkable occurrence in the parish took place. Aaron, alias Haroun, fell in love, and took to courting Elizabeth Thomas, alias Sugar-cane, alias Cassabos Souccar, the tweenie maid. It took the whole parish by surprise, for Elizabeth was not beautiful; she had not the eyes or the frame, or the svelte movements or the elastic tread of the light gazelle. She was a somewhat heavily formed, broad-shouldered, pudding-faced damsel, who could not cross a room without rattling all the chimney ornaments, and who had no more imagination and genius than has a duck. And in what did the attraction consist? Why had Aaron not become enamoured of the lady’s-maid, a most willowy person with a very sweet and refined face? Why not with the kitchen-maid, the Sprig of Coral, who had indeed coralline lips, and who in time would know how to boil a potato and do a chop so as not to be done to leather. But a tweenie! and such a tweenie! The whole parish discussed it for a month. It was most astounding that the man who romanced about every one and everything and every place, should make such dead prose of his own love affair. However, after this had been debated in the servants’ hall, at the forge, in the stable, at the tavern, each such debate ended with some one remarking sententiously, “After all, it is his affair and not mine.”

It is, however, a mistake to say that Aaron’s courtship was prosaic. That it was not so was proved by one of his letters to Elizabeth Thomas, which the girl carelessly left about; and it got read, copied, and distributed through the village, and excited much admiration at the splendour of the style, till some one detected the original, of which it was but a copy, in the story of Abdul Hassan and Schemselnihar. Here is the epistle—

Not to make too long a story of this. The course of true love ran smoothly enough. The adored tweenie took it all very calmly, very much as a matter of course, and in due time they were married.

No one supposed that they could be happy together, so opposite were they to each other. Yet never did the parish see a more affectionate and devoted couple. Aaron “yarned” to his Bessie, telling her his marvellous tales. She knitted or darned listening with a stolid face, and when he had done said, “Aaron, get along with your nonsense, I don’t believe in any of your marvels.”

He took her unbelief in good part. If she did not relish his tales, it was her misfortune and not her fault. He was soul, she was body, and each has its proper place in the economy of nature. He was everything that was imaginative, she was wholly commonplace, and the mixture in one household produced not ferment, but peace.

“I wish,” said Aaron, “I wish, Lizzie, I could see wonders. I read of them, I think of them, I tell of them, and yet I have never seen one.”

Suddenly, to the amazement of every one, Aaron died. He caught a chill that settled on his lungs, and he was dead in three days. His wife attended to him with devotion and unflagging solicitude. One night he turned his bright feverish eyes on her and said—

“Liz! kiss me. I’m going at last to see wonders, and you won’t say to me there, where I am going: ‘Get along with your nonsense.’”

He did not say another word, but passed in this eager, expectant attitude of soul into the World of Wonders.

Every one respected Haroun, though he had perplexed all, and all had laughed at him. His death was felt by all, and the entire parish attended his funeral. Sir John Vaughan forgave having been converted into Ganem, the slave of Love, and he was there.

And when Aaron was gone, all said—

“We can’t, for certain, have a more pleasant and romancing carpenter in his place, even if we get—which is doubtful—a better workman.”

And now I come to another singular fact, and fact it is. The widow, Bessie Price, that dull, inanimate, prosaic body—soul none thought to call her—moped and drooped after his death. Nothing roused her, nothing interested her, she seemed to have lost everything when the earth closed over the dear, rodomontading carpenter. Folk said at first, “Bless you, she’s not one to feel her loss. She has not the depth in her.”

But they were mistaken. She felt her loss so deeply, so intensely, that without any apparent malady, she drooped, faded, and from no perceptible physical cause sank, and within twelve months, this bit of putty or dough was laid by the quicksilver of her husband.

And so, even in this dull, heavy creature there was the poetry of love, the romance of a life devoted to one man. Where Love is—there is the Spirit of Poesy.

SHONE EVANS

SHONE EVANS

Shone, that is to say John, Evans was a miner in the Dulais Valley, in South Wales, and a man nearer forty than thirty.

The Dulais Valley had been solitary, with a brawling mountain stream flowing between great ridges of brown heathery moss-land, on which the sheep had browsed and shone white in the sun. But of late years there had come a transformation of the scene. Coalpits had been opened. Plain, ugly rows of houses had been run up. Tall chimneys had been erected, chapels and churches, public-houses, factories as well. What sheep still fed on the hilltops were grey, if not black, for the air was heavy with smoke, and the soot settled everywhere, and not the sweetest herb could avoid a flavour of soot, nor the fairest flower escape a film of “smuts.”

As for the sparkling, laughing Dulais, it had turned to a sullen, dirty stream, of which nothing was required but that it should carry off the scum and sewage of the dense population that clogged the valley and dug into the hills. In long-gone-by days the stream had acquired its name of Blackwater, for so Dulais may be interpreted, from the lyns and pools of bottle-green deeps, formed after its leaps over the barriers of rocks. Now it merited its name more truly, so sombre was it, in the midst of heaps of coal refuse, and so soiled were its waters with every sort of defilement.

“Man makes the town, God made the country,” is a saying; but it is only half true. God makes the town, for He it is who has laid the beds of coal, and run into the rock the veins of ore that draw men to excavate them, and without which men would hunger, and civilisation could not progress.

Beautiful on the hills of old were the harebells, beautiful in the evening the glory of light that lit up the russet hills—ugly, maybe, is now the mining settlement; and yet there is a loveliness above that of harebell and bracken and heather and foaming mountain rill in the lives of the men and women who have invaded and displaced the rude natural charms of the Dulais Valley. And I am going to tell you of one of these beauties, and thus I introduce you to Shone Evans.

The man himself was not comely. A broad-shouldered, plain man, with a stoop such as is often seen in colliers—a reserved, a serious man, and somewhat shy. Perhaps in this he was a typical Welshman—that he was full of tenderness of heart and deep feeling, but at the least token of ridicule or superciliousness, he closed like a flower against rain, brooded over any injury his feelings may have received, but he said nothing.

Centuries of isolation and of wrong done to the Welsh race have had this effect on them. They have been sneered at, swaggered over by domineering Saxons or tyrannical Normans, then exploited by speculative North-countrymen; they have been treated as men to be employed for the advantage of others, and when useless, to be cast aside as broken tools. Their idiosyncrasies have been the subject of joke and scoff; their language has been derided; their aspirations, national and individual, disregarded. This has bred in them a sensitiveness that is foreign to the coarser Saxon—a reserve that forms a crust about the manner that is repellent to the stranger, if in that stranger there be the smallest assumption of superiority. Yet underneath lies the richest, deepest, purest vein of golden love and goodwill that God, who formed the mountains and made man, ever buried in the human heart.

Shone had not married till he was some way past thirty, and then, perhaps, more for convenience than that passion which whirls most men into matrimony; and about a year after his marriage his wife gave him a little son, but did not recover the confinement, and died.

Shone was left alone in the cottage with a baby, and he had his daily work to accomplish in order that he and his baby might live. He could not neglect his work, and he would not neglect his baby. Some neighbours offered to relieve him of the child, but to this Shone was averse. The baby was his; it was almost the only living being that was absolutely, indisputably his own. And now it was that the fountains of love in that closed and sealed heart opened and gushed forth. He loved that child with a love such as only a mother, one might have supposed, could entertain for a poor little, feeble, wailing lump of flesh.

Shone considered what he should do. He would not commit the child to Martha Rees, who had volunteered to take it, for she was a slovenly person, and he could not be sure that she would keep the little creature clean. Nor to Rachel Price, for she was violent tempered when put out: she might lose patience if the child cried, and maltreat it, though usually she was a most good-natured woman. Nor to Alice Tooker, for she was an Englishwoman, and he would not have his child reared save to the sound of the Welsh tongue, and sung to sleep with Welsh lullabies.

Then Shone formed his resolve—and to this he adhered for many, many months.

One morning Shone appeared among the men of his shift, presenting an aspect so surprising, that at first his mates were silent with astonishment, and then broke into laughter.

Shone had taken a sheet, and had cast it over his left shoulder, then wound it round him, thrown it over the right shoulder, and bound it about his waist like a plaid, and between his shoulders, safely bedded in the wraps, was his babe.

“Why, Shone, what have you brought the little kid here for?” was the general exclamation.

“To make a collier of him,” answered Evans good-humouredly. He expected some chaff, and did not take it amiss—from his mates. But chaff would not deter him from carrying out his purpose.

And here it must be observed that throughout this story the conversation must be understood to be translated from the Welsh, and will be, accordingly, free from those colloquialisms or dialectic terms that would be natural had it been carried on by English speakers.

“Shone, you are not going to take the child down the pit, surely?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then he must pay his footing!”

“You must give him something, mates, first with which to pay,” said Evans. “Or, hold! he will give you all round a swig at his bottle.”

“His bottle! You have brought that with you?”

“Certainly,” said Evans, and produced a feeder. “Who will have a smack? Drink to the health of the new hand!”

“Not I,” said one, “in milk and water!”

“We would not deprive him of the least taste!” said another.

Instinctively, and at once, these rough men understood and appreciated Shone’s conduct; he might have to, and he did, encounter good-natured jokes—he was called “Mammy Shone,” but nothing was said in ridicule that could wound. In every heart there sprang up great respect for Shone; and as to the babe, he became the pet of the coalpit.

Thenceforth, whether Evans were on day or night shift, when he went down to his work the child went with him, lodged between his shoulder-blades. When he reached his place where he had to work, he unfolded the sheet—often grimy, it could not be other—made up a nest of it among lumps of coal, and placed the little creature in the folds, with its feeding-bottle accessible. And as he toiled he turned his head over his shoulder every now and then to say an endearing word, and to soothe the child should it begin to cry.

When the men assembled for a meal, there were consultations held as to what was suitable for the stomach if griped, or the gums, should there appear a rash about the chin and lips; also as to whether the proportions of milk and sugar and water were correct; and a lively and heated discussion broke out relative to a suggestion made by one collier that he had known a drop of gin added with the best possible effects—not, of course, regularly, but when there was stomach-ache. Moreover, in the relaxation from work, the babe was passed round and dandled and fondled, admired and remarked upon by the colliers, and fulsome expressions of admiration were lavished upon it, which may or may not have been appropriate; but seeing that the infant succeeded in begriming its face and entire body with coal-dust after the first few minutes that it had been below, it was not possible for any one to pronounce a well-balanced and justified opinion on its personal appearance.

However, affection sees not with ordinary eyes, and as the child was loved by every man and boy in the pit, its beauties were accepted as absolutely beyond dispute.

Now although every collier set himself up to be an authority on baby-culture, and pumped his wife for information which he might retail as his own, acquired experimentally, when next he was below, yet there was an elderly man named Ebenezer Llewellyn who had been the father of fourteen children, ten of which were living, and who was, therefore, by common consent, regarded as a principal authority on the management of babies; and when Ebenezer pronounced an opinion, all bowed to it, whether on the constitution of milk or the adoption of fuller’s earth. Llewellyn did not hold by violet powder; he said coal-dust was better, if sufficiently fine.

On one occasion, in a panic, Shone rushed after Ebenezer to another portion of the pit to bid him come to his assistance—the child was strangling. According to his account it had got a lump of coal into its mouth twice as big as its head, and Shone could not get it out.

“There is no room in the mouth for my finger to be inserted so as to whisk it out. Come quick, Llewellyn, or the child will be dead—it is black in the face.”

“But it always is,” said Ebenezer.

“I mean turning black between the coal grains and where its tears have washed the face. Come at once.”

The father of fourteen, that man of wide experience, obeyed. He sat down, took the infant on his lap, and dexterously with his little finger worked the piece of coal out of the mouth; whereupon the babe set up a howl that rang down the passages of the mine.

“I will tell you what is in prospect,” said Llewellyn sententiously. “This kid is getting to use his hands. He will lay hold of everything he can touch, and he will put whatever he grips into his mouth. They all do it. I have had fourteen and have raised ten, so I ought to know. This is the most critical period in the lives of little ones, and if you don’t mind, he’ll eat up all your output every day—truckloads of coals he’ll put away, if you let him.”

“But I will not allow him.”

“Then you must sit over him and watch his every movement.”

“I cannot do that.”

“There it is that women come in to be of some use in the world. They can look after male babies when they are in the grabbing and devouring age—that’s about teething time. You see how he dribbles. That,” pursued Ebenezer gravely—“that comes of the gums being strained and painful. Babes, at this period, must bite—it’s a necessity. They will bite anything. I’ve had fourteen, so I ought to know. This is a terribly critical time.”

Shone left the pit that day depressed and meditative. As it happened, he encountered the doctor, who hailed him—

“What, Evans! still nursing your baby?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the collier gravely. “I had a bit of difficulty with him to-day; he shovelled about half a ton of coals into his mouth, and Ebenezer Llewellyn and I had a sight of trouble in getting him to disgorge.”

“You take my advice as a sensible man,” said the surgeon. “It is, first, if you value the child, to give it more sun and air; it wants it. Sun and air are more than beef and bread. If the little chap were not as black as a hedgehog, curled up there at your back, I should say it was bleached like sea-kale. It won’t do, Shone. The child now must be brought up upon another system; that is, if you desire it to live and be healthy and happy—unless you have insured its life, and want to get it under ground altogether, so as to pocket the insurance money.”

Evans turned as blank as he could, considering the grime on his face. His jaw dropped.

“But wherever am I to put him?” he asked.

“Now, I have been wanting to see you about this for some while,” said the surgeon, who was a thoroughly good-hearted man, and who valued and admired Shone. “There is Shian Thomas, the dressmaker, as good and steady a wench as I know. She is very badly off. She has been caring for her poor little crippled sister for several years. Now the child is dead, and she has had heavy expenses, what with doctor’s bill—mine, you know——”

“Ah!” said Evans, “I know better than that. You were never hard on the widow or the orphan. What is hard, is to get you to take anything for your trouble when folks are in need themselves.”

“Well, well! there was the funeral and the mourning,” said the doctor, laughing and colouring at the same time. “Now Shian [Jane] mopes for the loss of her sister, and I am sure—I am as sure of this as of anything—that if you confided the young shaver to her, it would be good for her, good for the child, and”—he said the last words as he turned away—“in the end might be good for you.”

Evans walked on his way meditatively. He did not act at once. He waited a day or two. But as the acquisitiveness of the babe became more pronounced, he resolved to put it beyond temptation, where it could not devour coals; and so he arranged with Shian Thomas that she should look after his child at such time, day and night, as he was at work. But as soon as ever he returned from the pit, whether in the very early morning before dawn, or whether in the afternoon, he was to reclaim the child and carry it home with him. He would not be in the house without it; but he brought himself to admit that now it was advisable, if not necessary, that it should no longer go down the pit with him till, as he said, “he comes of age and takes it upon himself.”

He undertook to make a small payment to Shian for her trouble, which was of assistance to her in her then straitened circumstances.

“And you may reckon on this, Shone,” said she, “I’ll take every bit as much care of him as if he were my own. There is an empty place in my house, and in my heart, since I have lost Bessie, and I will put the little man there.”

A couple of weeks under the care of Shian told on the child. He put on fat, became more merry, crowed, chirped, and waxed rosy.

It was a delight to his father to see him, and he did not always return from the pit alone. One day he brought with him Ebenezer Llewellyn to criticise the babe and judge whether the improvement was real or fictitious. He, a father of fourteen children, ten of whom he had reared, after weighing the little one and turning down his lips to see if the colour were red, gave verdict that was favourable. Then came what Shian called “the committee,” a body of workmen on the shift with Shone, to see with their own eyes that all was going on well with the “shaver.” He belonged to the pit, and all the men felt an interest in him, and all wanted to be satisfied that the child was flourishing. All wished to have their say about him, and to give Shian advice as to how he was to be dieted and clothed.

More critical than the rest was Shone, and the dressmaker was obliged to be forbearing with him, for his criticism became at times captious. As, for instance, on one occasion when he came to resume the child and found she had cut out for its amusement a score of dancing men and women, the latter with tall Welsh hats, holding hands, capering vigorously—she had cut them with her scissors out of a sheet of folded paper—Shone put on a grave face.

“I think you should not have encouraged levity in the boy,” said he. “I wouldn’t have the idea put into his head that men and women are created to dance.”

“But, Shone, they are only paper.”

“Paper or flesh and blood is all the same. They are dancing. I don’t like it. You can’t be too careful with a child. It’s just when they’re young that they take in ideas, as they do nourishment—they suck it in in buckets.”

“How would you have me cut them out?—walking to chapel?”

“That would be better.”

“Shone, if I do that, I must make them prance. One cannot cut out these paper men and women without giving them high action. You would not have a whole train of them prancing to church like war-horses!”

The fact of the case was that Shone was slightly jealous. His child had taken to Shian, he clung to her, dabbed his little mouth over her cheek—in kisses, and was distinctly more happy with her than with his father.

Shone was conscious of it, and fought against it. He reasoned with himself; but could not reason himself out of his jealousy.

Had his child not put on fat, not gained in colour—had it become peevish, he would have blamed the young woman, and taken it away. But when not only Ebenezer, but also the “committee,” and his own consciousness assured him that all was well with the infant—better than it had been when it lived half its time underground—then he could not withdraw it from Shian, save for those hours when he was free from work.

So matters went on for a while, and then the situation became aggravated, for the child began to cry when he took it in his arms to remove it, and stretched forth its little hands to Shian, and sobbed, and would not be comforted by the father. It fretted when at home, it screamed, moaned, was restless. Shone thought it must be ill, and consulted a doctor; he battled against the assurance that nothing ailed the child, save its temporary separation from the woman who was as a mother to it.

He worked himself into excitement against Shian; she was stealing his child’s heart from him. But his good sense returned. She was not willingly doing this. It was due to the irresistible. The natural nurse of a babe is a woman, and not a man, and the child instinctively clings to the nurse.

“I pay her six shillings for it,” grumbled Shone. “He ought to understand that she is a hireling and not his mother.”

This he said to the doctor, to whom, perhaps unguardedly, he had let out what embittered his heart.

“Quite so, Evans,” answered the surgeon. “But as the child has not as yet reached the age of reason in which it can draw such distinctions, why do you not make Shian its mother?”

Shone opened his eyes, stared at his adviser, turned his back, and walked away.

But the advice stuck.

Here was a solution to the difficulty, yet not one very pleasing to the collier. He brooded over his wrong, and also over the redress that lay open to him. Not a word could be said against Shian. She was a quiet, hard-working, steady girl.

Shone had taken to her stockings to be darned, garments to be mended, and had paid her for her work. He was obliged occasionally to call in the aid of a charwoman to do his washing, and also to clean up his house. As to his bit of cooking, he did that himself, but was not skilful at the fire and oven. He fared poorly, and was not infrequently out of sorts—the cause, his own bad cooking. Now all these inconveniences would be rectified had he a wife—and yet—and yet——Shone shook his head.

Then an epidemic of scarlet fever broke out in the Dulais Valley. Shone was frightened. For the sake of his child he considered what was to be done. Some provision must be made. If the little one sickened, who was to attend to it?—and attention it would need day and night. The proper person would be Shian—a stranger would never do. But Shian—he could not bid her nurse the child in his house, and to have it throughout the long sickness in hers, and he not with it—that would never do. Besides, she was a dressmaker. She could not take in needlework when there was risk of infection in her house. Shone stamped. What was to be done?

“How is it?” he asked, as he came back from the pit.

“Very well, Shone. As usual, very cheerful.”

“No signs of a sore throat? Have you looked?”

“None at all.”

“But suppose he were to get it?”

“Get what?”

“The scarlatina.”

“You need not suppose it. He is quite well.”

“We must provide against the worst.”

“The worst, Shone!”

“Oh!” with a shiver, “I do not mean the worst at all—God forbid; but against his catching the fever.”

“Well, what will you do?”

“Do, Shian? There is nothing else to be done but for you to marry me. You see—I do it for the babe’s sake, and because of the infection.”

She was surprised—a little amused.

“And,” put in Shone, a little apologetically, “there are my stockings want mending. But, really, for the child’s sake, I wish it.”

“I suppose, Shone, if the poor little chap were to be taken ill, he’d be removed from here?”

“No doubt of it. The sanitary officer wouldn’t allow it here.”

“Nor could I nurse it?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, then, Shone, for the scarlatina’s sake I don’t mind if I do take you.”

“Then,” said Shone, “we must look sharp. Let me see his throat. He might have it come on sudden. I’ll get a license.”

It was certainly an odd proposal and a queer acceptance, and no expense was spared.

“Bless me,” said Shone, “for the child’s sake, and because of the scarlet fever, I will stump up a guinea for the license.”

So Shone and Shian were married; and the child did not get scarlatina—so that all this trouble and expense were, in Shone’s eyes, thrown away.

“Might just as well have chucked it all down a disused coalpit!” said he.

Positively he became grumpy and querulous because his child showed no signs of drowsiness, sore throat, and eruption. Not that he wished it to be ill, but he wanted a justification of his marriage.

Shian did her utmost to make him comfortable. She brought the cottage to a condition of scrupulous cleanliness; she took in hand all his clothes, she mended them, and made some that he had discarded as neat as new. She did the washing in a manner very different from that of the charwoman. Above all, she cooked really-appetising meals that made Shone’s face relax.

No sooner did he return from the pit than at once she put the child in his arms. She made no attempt to stand between it and the father. On the contrary, she talked to the little creature of its daddy when he was away, and encouraged it to look out for his return. Indeed, as he came up the street every day, he could see Shian at the door holding up the child; he could see its arms extended, and the hands clapping with pleasure at his appearance.

Shian felt that she was an accessory, not a prime factor in the house and in the well-being of Shone—the baby was the monarch, engrossing all his affection, occupying all his thoughts. She was accepted as a necessity, as conducing to the health and happiness of the child—one who could be and would be dispensed with unless needed for the child’s sake. But she was a patient, sweet, and uncomplaining woman. She was not a little sad at heart, and the tears often filled her eyes. She coveted some of the kisses, some of the endearing terms lavished on the child—some, also, of the glow of love that lit up the father’s eyes as he watched his babe. Oh, if only, as he returned from the pit, he had looked at her a little—just a little—instead of fixing his eyes, from the first moment he saw it till he had it in his arms, on the child. But she had been taken into the house, had become Shone’s wife, for the sake of the child; and she submitted to be regarded with just so much consideration as behoved a dutiful servant to the little one.

Time went on. Shone began to mend in spirits. He looked more respectable on Sundays; his digestion was better; he had no more unpleasant attacks after a meal of what might have been beef, but was leather, which had troubled him at one time. He had now Yorkshire pudding dipped in gravy; he had not that in the days of his widowership.

He began to have words for Shian relative to other topics than the baby. She caught him, by the firelight—as he smoked in the evening and she knitted—observing her attentively.

Then came Christmas Day.

Now there were sprigs of holly stuck in the windows and about the mantelpiece. The fire blazed, and was reflected in the burnished Bristol ware that shone on the dresser as though real copper. And there was a savoury smell in the house.

“Goose!” exclaimed Shone. “By the powers—goose! And sage and onions,” said he, after a pause—“I smell them. Goodness me, I wish the boy were old enough to enjoy it all.”

“Here, father,” said Shian, as she laid the dinner—“here you are—goose, yes; onion and sage—yes. You would not have goose alone, surely?”

“Well,” said Shone, and his face beamed with peace and goodwill, “well—to—be—sure.”

“And”—when the first course was over—“I have another pleasure in store for you.”

“That is——”

“See!” Shian introduced a little Christmas tree, manufactured out of a branch of fir, and to it were hung two—just two—articles: a cap lined with swansdown, and trimmed with cherry ribbons, and a long pair of newly-knitted stockings. “There,” said Shian, “for baby and you—your Christmas presents. I bring it now, whilst he is awake, that he may enjoy it with us.”

“Well,” gasped Shone, “this is delightful! How lovely the child will look in such a glorious bonnet. And how warm my legs will be in these beautiful stockings.”

“That is not all,” said Shian.

“What more can there be?”

“This!” And she dished up a real Christmas plum-pudding.

When Shone saw this the tears came into his eyes.

“Why, Shian!” he said, and felt a pinch of the heart, “you have thought for every one but yourself!”

“No, no, father,” said she. “I have had some of the goose, and shall of the plum-pudding.”

“Some—some!” said he impatiently. “But there is nothing for yourself particularly.”

Then he jumped up, ran behind her at table, caught her head in his arms, pressed her face to his heart, and covered brow and lips with kisses.

“O Shian! You have my love—my very heart!”

“Because of—baby?”

“No, not only; because——”

“Of the goose?”

“No—no, not only; because——”

“Of the plum-pudding?”

“No—no; I mean——”

“Because of the long stockings?”

“No, Shian; because of yourself, your own dear, sweet self—the best in the world!”

“That is my Christmas box, Shone! You could not have given me a better.”

HENRY FROST

HENRY FROST

There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman, than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.

It is—so far as my experience goes—quite useless to assure a Frenchman that such transfer of wives is not a matter of every-day occurrence and is not legal; he replies, with an expression of incredulity, that of course English people endeavour to make light of, or deny a fact that is “notorious.”

In a book by the antiquary Colin de Plancy, on Legends and Superstitions connected with the Sacraments, he gives up some pages to an account of the prevalent English custom.

When I was in France a few years ago, in a town church in the south, I heard an abbé once preach on marriage, and contrast its indissolubility in Catholic France with the laxity in Protestant England, where “any one, when tired of his wife, puts a halter round her neck, takes her to the next market town and sells her for what she will fetch.” I ventured to call on this abbé and remonstrate, but he answered me he had seen the fact stated in books of the highest authority, and that my disputing the statement did not prove that his authorities were wrong, but that my experience was limited, and he asked me point-blank whether I had never known such cases. There, unhappily, he had me on the hip. And when I was obliged to confess that I did know of one such case, “Mais, voilà, mon Dieu,” said he, and shrugged his shoulders with a triumphant smile.

Now it must be allowed that such sales have taken place, and that this is so is due to rooted conviction in the rustic mind that such a transaction is legal and morally permissible.

The case I knew was this.

There lived a tall, thin man in the parish when I was a boy, who was the village poet. Whenever an event of any consequence took place within the confines of the parish, such as the marriage of the squire’s daughter, he came down to the manor-house with a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion, and was then given his dinner and a crown. Now this man had actually bought his wife for half-a-crown. Her husband had led her into Okehampton and had sold her there in the market. The poet purchased her for half the sum he had received for one of his poems, and led her home with him, a distance of twelve miles, by the halter, he holding it in his hand, she placidly, contentedly, wearing the loop about her neck.

The report that Henry Frost was leading home his half-crown wife preceded the arrival of the couple, and when they entered the village all the inhabitants turned out to see the spectacle.

Now this arrangement was not very satisfactory to either squire or rector, and both intervened. Henry Frost maintained that Anne was his legitimate wife, for “he had not only bought her in the market, but had led her home, with the halter in his hand, and he’d take his Bible oath that he never took the halter off her till she had crossed his doorstep and he had shut the door.”

The parson took down the Bible, the squire “Burn’s Justice of Peace,” and strove to convince Harry that his conduct was warranted by neither Scripture nor the law of the land. “I don’t care,” he said, “her’s my wife, as sure as if we was spliced at the altar, for and because I paid half-a-crown, and I never took off the halter till her was in my house; lor’ bless yer honours, you may ask any one if that ain’t marriage, good, sound, and Christian, and every one will tell you it is.”

Mr. Henry Frost lived in a cottage that was on lives, so the squire was unable to bring compulsion to bear on him.

When I call the man Frost, I am not employing his real name, because his relatives are alive, and I know them very well.

Frost, as already intimated, was village bard or poet. I remember well his coming down to the house with a poem on a transaction of my father’s, the advisability of which I now greatly doubt.

In our village, the “revel” was kept up every year on the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday, and the week following. A revel in Devonshire is the equivalent of the wake in other parts of England, and of the feast in Cornwall. It used to be celebrated on the day of the saint to whom the parish church is dedicated. But when the new style came into use, the conservative rustic mind resisted the change and adhered to the computation according to the unrevised calendar. Accordingly, in most places the feast or revel is eleven days after the day of the patron saint. In some places, however, it is movable. Now our church is dedicated to St. Peter, accordingly our revel ought to be on the nearest Sunday after June 29. It is rare indeed that the first Sunday after Trinity should fall so late, and impossible, I believe, that it could synchronise with old-style St. Peter’s Day. In 1899 the first Sunday after Trinity was on June 4—twenty-five days before new-style St. Peter’s Day, and thirty-six before the feast reckoned by the old style.

There is, however, some reason to believe that the earlier dedication was to St. Petrock, whose day is June 4, and that the title of the church was altered in 1261, when reconsecrated. The bishops of Exeter always endeavoured to get rid of the patron saints when belonging to the Celtic Church, and substitute for them some who were in the Roman calendar.

The revel at Lew Trenchard agreed much more closely with St. Petrock’s Day than with that of St. Peter the Apostle.

However, this is neither here nor there. The revel was kept up with shows, a fair, and horse-races, and it must be allowed there was some drunkenness.

My father, as squire, and in those days an autocrat, disapproved of the revel and abolished it, and substituted for it a cottage garden show, on no very determined date. The revel has never recovered, and the flower show, after living for two years, died a natural death.

I do not myself believe in the destruction of any ancient institution. Let it be reformed, but never abolished.

Well, now to the point.

Henry Frost appeared on the occasion of the first flower show with a poem composed to celebrate the birth of the cottage garden exhibition and the burial of the revel. It was very laudatory of my father, and every verse concluded with the refrain—