without suspicion, until whole regiments arose and killed their officers ? A week ago, red tape, half bouncing and half poohpoohing what it bounced at, would have scouted the idea of a Dublin jail not being able to hold a political prisoner. But for the blacks in Jamaica being over-impatient and before their time, the whites might have been exterminated, without a previous hint or suspicion that there was anything amiss. Laissez aller, and Britons never, never, never! Meantime, if your honour were in London, you would see a great embankment rising high and dry out of the Thames on the Middlesex shore, from Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars. A really fine work and really getting on. Moreover, a great system of drainage. Another really fine work, and likewise really getting on. Lastly, a muddle of railways in all directions possible and impossible, with no general public scheme, no general public supervision, enormous waste of money, no fixable responsibility, no accountability but under Lord Campbell's Act. I think of that accident in which I was preserved. Before the most furious and notable train in the four-and-twenty hours, the head of a gang of workmen takes up the rails. That train changes its time every day as the tide changes, and that head workman is not provided by the railway company with any clock or watch! Lord Shaftesbury wrote to me to ask me what I thought of an obligation on railway companies to put strong walls to all bridges and viaducts. I told him, of course, that the force of such a shock would carry away anything that any company could set up, and I added: "Ask the minister what he thinks about the votes of the railway interest in the House of Commons, and about his being afraid to lay a finger on it with an eye to his majority." I seem to be grumbling, but I am in the best of humours. All goes well with me and mine, thank God! Last night my gardener came upon a man in the garden and fired. The man returned the compliment by kicking him in the groin and causing him great pain. I set off, with a great mastiff-bloodhound I have, in pursuit. Could n't find the evildoer, but had the greatest difficulty in preventing the dog from tearing two policemen down. They were coming towards us with professional mystery, and he was in the air on his way to the throat of an eminently respectable constable when I caught him. My daughter Mary and her aunt Georgina send kindest regard and remembrance. Katey and her husband are going to try London this winter, but I rather doubt (for they are both delicate) their being able to weather it out. It has been blowing here tremendously for a fortnight, but to-day is like a spring day, and plenty of roses are growing over the labourers' cottages. The Great Eastern lies at her moorings beyond the window where write these words; looks very dull and unpromising. A dark column of smoke from Chatham Dockyard, where the iron shipbuilding is in progress, has a greater significance in it, I fancy. DXIII. MISS DICKENS GAD'S HILL PLACE, HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, Kent, MY DEAREST MAMIE, the Sphinx, here they are. As you want to know my views of But I have only seen it once; and it is so extraordinarily well done, that it ought to be observed closely several times. Any one who attentively notices the flower trick will see that the two little high tables hung with drapery cover each a trap. Each of those tables, during that trick, hides a confederate, who changes the paper cone twice. When the cone has been changed as often as is required, the trap is closed and the table can be moved. When the curtain is removed for the performance of the Sphinx trick, there is a covered, that is, draped table on the stage, which is never seen before or afterwards. In front of the middle of it, and between it and the audience, stands one of those little draped tables covering a trap; this is a third trap in the centre of the stage. The box for the head is then upon IT, and the conjurer takes it off and shows it. The man whose head is afterwards shown in that box is, I conceive, in the table; that is to say, is lying on his chest in the thickness of the table, in an extremely constrained attitude. To get him into the table, and to enable him to use the trap in the table through which his head comes into the box, the two hands of a confederate are necessary. That confederate comes up a trap, and stands in the space afforded by the interval below the stage and the height of the little draped table! his back is towards the audience. The moment he has assisted the hidden man sufficiently, he closes the trap, and the conjurer then immediately removes the little draped table, and also the drapery of the larger table; when he places the box on the last-named table with the slide on for the head to come into it, he stands with his back to the audience and his face to the box, and masks the box considerably to facilitate the insertion of the head. As soon as he knows the head to be in its place, he undraws the slide. When the verses have been spoken and the trick is done, he loses no time in replacing the slide. The curtain is then immediately dropped, because the man cannot otherwise be got out of the table, and has no doubt had quite enough of it. With kindest regards to all at Penton, Ever your most affectionate. DXIV. MISS MARY BOYLE OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," MY DEAR MARY, - Feeling pretty certain that I shall never answer your letter unless I answer it at once (I got it this morning), here goes! I did not dramatise "The Master of Ravenswood," though I did a good deal towards and about the piece, having an earnest desire to put Scott, for once, upon the stage in his own gallant manner. It is an enormous success, and increases in attraction nightly. I have never seen the people in all parts of the house so leaning forward, in lines sloping towards the stage, earnestly and intently attractive, as while the story gradually unfolds itself. But the astonishing circumstance of all is, that Miss Leclercq (never thought of for Lucy till all other Lucies had failed) is marvellously good, highly pathetic, and almost unrecognisable in person! What note it touches in her, always dumb until now, I do not pretend to say, but there is no one on the stage who can play the contract scene better, or more simply and naturally, and I find it impossible to see it without crying! Almost every one plays well, the whole is exceedingly picturesque, and there is scarcely a movement throughout, or a look, that is not indicated by Scott. So you get a life romance with beautiful illustrations, and I do not expect ever again to see a book take up its bed and walk in like manner. I am charmed to learn that you have had a freeze out of my ghost story. It rather did give me a shiver up the back in the writing. "Dr. Marigold" has just now accomplished his two hundred thousand. My only other news about myself is that I am doubtful whether to read or not in London this season. If I decide to do it at all, I shall probably do it on a large scale. Many happy years to you, my dear Mary. So prays Jo. DXV. WILLIAM CHARLES KENT MY DEAR KEnt, GAD'S HILL, Thursday, January 18, 1866. I cannot tell you how grieved we all are here to know that you are suffering again. Your patient tone, however, and the hopefulness and forbearance of Ferguson's course, gives us some reassurance. Apropos of which latter reference I dined with Ferguson at the Lord Mayor's last Tuesday, and had a grimly distracted impulse upon me to defy the toast-master and rush into a speech about him and his noble art, when I sat pining under the imbecility of constitutional and corporational idiots. I did seize him for a moment by the hair of his head (in proposing the Lady Mayoress), and derived some faint consolation from the company's response to the reference. O! no man will ever know under what provocation to contradiction and a savage yell of repudiation I suffered at the hands of, feebly complacent in the uniform of Madame Tussaud's own military waxers, and almost the worst speaker I ever heard in my life! Mary and Georgina, sitting on either side of me, urged me to "look pleasant." I replied in expressions not to be repeated. Shee (the judge) was just as good and graceful as he (the member) was bad and gawky. Bulwer's "Lost Tales of Miletus" is a most noble book! He is an extraordinary fellow, and fills me with admiration and wonder. It is of no use writing to you about yourself, my dear Kent, because you are likely to be tired of that constant companion, and so I have gone scratching (with an exceedingly bad pen) about and about you. But I come back to you to let you know that the reputation of this house as a convalescent hospital stands (like the house itself) very high, and that testimonials can be produced from credible persons who have recovered health and spirits here swiftly. Try us, only try us, and we are content to stake the reputation of the establishment on the result. Ever affectionately yours. DXVI. JOHN FORSTER OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND," MY DEAR FORSTER, -I most heartily hope that your doleful apprehensions will prove unfounded. These changes from muggy weather to slight sharp frost, and back again, touch weak places, as I find by my own foot; but the touch goes by. May it prove so with you! -, Captain, and Captain Yesterday Captain dined at Gad's. They are, all three, naval officers of the highest reputation. is supposed to be the best sailor in our service. I said I had been remarking at home, apropos of the London, that I knew of no shipwreck of a large strong ship (not carrying weight of guns) in the open sea, and that I could find none such in the shipwreck books. They all agreed that the unfortunate Captain Martin must have been unacquainted with the truth as to what can and what cannot be done with a steamship having rigging and canvas; and that no sailor would dream of turning a ship's stern to such a gale said unless his vessel could run faster than the sea. (and the other two confirmed) that the London was the better for everything that she lost aloft in such a gale, and that with her head kept to the wind by means of a storm topsail which is hoisted from the deck and requires no man to be sent aloft, and can be set under the worst circumstances the disaster could not have occurred. If he had no such sail, he could have improvised it, even of hammocks and the like. They said that under a Board of Inquiry into the wreck, any efficient witness must of necessity state this as the fact, and could not possibly avoid the conclusion that the seamanship was utterly bad; and as to the force of the wind, for which I suggested allowance, they all had been in West Indian hurricanes and in typhoons, and had put the heads of their ships to the wind under the most adverse circumstances. VOL. II. |