No truer saying was ever uttered than that “one half the world does not know how the other half lives.” And yet I am continually contradicted by wiseacres of the streets and squares when I meekly but firmly maintain that it is actually possible to live a happy, intelligent, useful, and progressive life in an out-of-the-way country parish—“far from the madding crowd”—and literally (as I happen to know at this moment) three miles from a lemon. “Don’t tell me!” says one of my agnostic friends who knows everything, as agnostics always do, and who is absolutely certain, as agnostics always are, that they know all about you—“don’t tell me! You may make the best of it as you do, and you put a good face upon it, which I dare say is all right; but to try and make me believe you like being buried alive is more than you can do. Stuff, man! You might as well try and persuade me you like being snowed up!” Now it so happened that, a few days after my bouncing and aggressive friend had delivered himself of this delicate little protest against any and every assertion I might venture to make in the conversation which had arisen between us, I was awaked at the usual hour of 7 a.m. by Jemima knocking at the door; and when Mr. Bob had growled his usual growl, and I had declared myself to be awake in a surly monosyllable, Jemima cried aloud, saying, “It’s awful snow, sir—drifts emendjous!” I drew the curtains open, pulled up the blinds, and lo! there was snow indeed. Not on the trees—that was well, at any rate—but all the air was full of snow. Not coming down from the clouds, but driving across the fields in billows of white dust—piling itself up against every obstacle—pollard, stump or gatepost, hedgerow, or wall, or farmstead—rolling, eddying, scudding along before the cruel north-easter, that was lashing the earth with his freezing scourge of bitterness. At about the distance of a pistol-shot from my window the high road runs straight as a ruler between low banks and thin hedges, and we can see it for half a mile or so till some rising ground blocks the view. This morning there was no road!—only a long broad stripe of snow that seemed a trifle higher than the ploughed lands that lay to the northward, and which were almost swept bare by the gale. To the southward there were huge drifts packed up against every little copse or plantation, and far as the eye could see not a human creature or sheep or head of cattle to lessen the impression of utter desolation.

By the time we got down to breakfast the wind had lulled, and fresh snow was falling. That was, at any rate, an improvement upon the accursed north-easter. But it was plain that there were to be no ante-jentacular or post-prandial peregrinations, as Jeremy Bentham used to phrase it, for us this day. “My dear,” I said, “I’m afraid we are really snowed up!” Now, what do you suppose was the reply I received from her Royal Highness the Lady Shepherd? Neither more nor less than this—“What a jolly day we will have! We needn’t go out, need we?”

Nathan, the wise youth—agnostic, as he calls himself, which is only Greek for ignoramus—would have sneered at the Lady Shepherd’s chuckle, and she—she would have chuckled at his sneer. But as he was not there we only laughed, and somewhat gleefully set ourselves to map out the next fifteen hours with plans of operation that would have required at least fifty hours to execute.

“The only thing that can be said for your pitiful life,” said Nathan to us once, “is that you have no interruptions. But there is not much in that, where there’s nothing to interrupt.” Nathan, the wise youth, is a type of his class. He’s so delicate in his little innuendos, so sympathetically candid, so tender to “the things you call your feelings, you know.” Do these people always wear hob-nailed boots, prepared at any moment for a wrestling match, where kicking is part of the game? “No interruptions!” Oh, Lady Shepherd, think of that! “No interruptions!”

You observe that our day begins at eight. When we came first to Arcady we said we would breakfast at half-past eight. We tried the plan for a month. It was a dead failure. Jemima never kept true to the minutes. We found ourselves slipping into nine o’clock; that meant ruin. It must either be eight o’clock, or the financial bottom of the establishment would inevitably drop out. So eight o’clock it is and shall be.

At eight o’clock, accordingly, on this particular morning we went down as usual to the library—and, I am bound to say, we were just a little depressed, because we had made up our minds that no postman in England could bring us our bag this morning. To our immense surprise and joy, there were the letters and papers lying on the table as if it were Midsummer Day. The man had left the road, tramped along the fields which the howling wind had made passable. There were nine letters. When I see what these country postmen go through, the pluck and endurance they exhibit, the downright suffering (i.e., it would be to you and me) which they take all as a part of the day’s work, and how they go on at it, and retire at last, after years of stubborn jog-trotting, to enjoy a pension of ten shillings a week and the repose of acute rheumatism consequent upon sudden cessation from physical exertion, I find myself frequently exclaiming with the poet,—

p???? t? de??? ?’ ??d?? ?????p?? de???te??? p??e?.

Many the wonderful things that be, but the wonder of wonders is—Man!

Now it will be a surprise, perhaps a very great surprise, to some of my genuine town friends, to learn that even a country parson—who after all is a man and a brother—gets pretty much the same sort of letters that other people do. He gets offers to assign to him shares in gold mines; offers of three dozen and four, positively all that is left, of that transcendental sherry; offers to make him a life governor of the new college for criminals; invitations to be a steward at a public dinner of the Society for Diminishing Felony; above all, he gets some very elegant letters from gentlemen in very high positions in society offering to lend him money. I do verily believe these scoundrels, who invariably write a good hand on crested paper and express themselves in a style which is above all praise, are in league with one of my banker’s clerks. How else does it happen that, as sure as ever my account is very low and that I am in mortal terror lest my last cheque should be returned dishonoured, so sure am I to hear from one of these diabolical tempters? There’s one scarlet Mephistopheles who must know all about my financial position. How else could he have thought of sending me two of his gilt-edged seductions in a single week just when my banking account was overdrawn? It is absurd to pretend that he keeps a medium.

Moreover, proof sheets come by post even in this wilderness, and they have to be corrected, too; and real letters that are not begging letters come, some kind and comforting, some stern and uncompromising, some with the oddest inquiries and criticisms. Sometimes, too, anonymous letters come. What a queer state of mind a man must have got himself into before he can sit down to write an anonymous letter! Does any man in his senses ever read an anonymous letter of four pages? If he does, the writer gets no fun out of it. I am inclined to think that the practice of writing anonymous letters is dying out now that the schoolmaster is abroad; and yet, they tell me, insanity is not decreasing. Then, too, there are the newspapers. I could live without butter—I shouldn’t like it, but I could submit to it; or without eggs, though I dislike snow pancakes; or without sugar—and there are some solids and some liquids that are insipid without that; but there is one thing I could not do without—I could not do without the Times. We have tried again and again to economize by having a penny paper, but it has always ended in the same way. As entremets they are all delightful, but for a square meal give me the Times. Without it “the appetite is distracted by the variety of objects, and tantalized by the restlessness of perpetual solicitation,” till, when the day is done, the mind wearies under “a feeling of satiety without satisfaction, and of repletion without sustenance.”

On this particular morning we had adjourned from the library to the breakfast-room, and were opening our letters in high spirits, spite6 of Nathan the wise, and notwithstanding the bitter wind and the snow, when a hideous sound startled us. There, under the window, the snow steadily falling, drawn up in single file, were four human creatures, two males and two females, arrayed in outlandish attire, and every one of them playing hideously out of tune. It was a German band!

A more lugubrious spectacle than is presented by a German band, droning forth “Herz, mein Herz” in front of your window in a snowstorm it would be difficult to imagine. We suffer much from German bands, but we have only ourselves to thank. I love music, and I am possessed by the delusion that it is my duty to encourage the practice of instrumental execution. Five or six years ago there was a band of eight or nine performers who perambulated Norfolk, and they came to me at least once a month. Whenever they appeared I went out to them and gave them a shilling, airing my small modicum of German periodically, and receiving flattering compliments upon my pronunciation, which gratified me exceedingly. These people disappeared at last, but they were succeeded by another band, and a very inferior one, and I took but little notice of them. There were seven of these performers, a cornet and two clarionets being prominent—very. However, they got their shilling, and vanished. Three days after their departure came another band: this time there were only four. I thought that rather shabby, but I was busy, did not take much notice of them, and again gave them a shilling. The cornet player was really quite respectable. Next day came four more, and there was no cornet, only the abominable clarionet. It was insufferable. I said I really must restrict myself to sixpence, and that was fourpence more than they were worth. Two days after their departure came a single solitary performer; he had a pan-pipe fastened under his chin, a peal of bells on his head, which he caused to tinkle by his nods, a pair of cymbals attached to his elbows, a big drum which he beat by the help of a crank that he worked with one of his feet, and a powerful concertina which he played with his hands. He led off with a dolorous chorale in a minor key. It was really more than flesh and blood could bear. “Send him away, Jemima. Send him away!—instantly! Tell him I am sehr krank. Send him away!” The fellow smiled with unctuous complacency. But when he got only twopence, his face fell. “Ach, nein! You plaize, ze professor, he geeve one sheeling to ze band—I am ze band. He geeve ze band only twopence. He do not understand I am ze band! You plaise tell him I am ze band!” “No! You’re to go away. Master’s sore and kranky!” Ze band loitered for half a minute; then it took itself to pieces and went its way. But the fellow’s hint about the shilling was significant, and led to an investigation. Then it turned out that the band of seven or eight which was going its rounds that year, split itself up when it came into my neighbourhood, and, in view of my shilling, presented itself in two detachments, each of which reckoned on my shilling, and several times carried it off. Now I give one penny for each performer, and only when there is a cornet do I send out coffee to the instrumentalists.

It was, however, not in flesh and blood to withhold the shilling from the players of that quartette on that bitter morning. It was heart-rending to think of their having at the peril of their lives staggered through three miles of snowdrifts. It was inhuman to send them away without coffee. And they had it accordingly. Poor things! poor things! Where were they going? They were going back to the “Red Lion,” a stone’s throw off, where they had slept the night before, and where they meant to spend this night in delighting the hearts of the rustics by waltzes and polkas, and gathering not such a bad harvest for the nonce. “Lor, sir!” said Mr. Style, “to hear that there trombone a soleing ‘Rule Britannia’! That made you feel he was a real musician—that it did!”

So you see we began the day with a band of music. That does not sound so bad. But the band being dismissed, we finish our breakfast and retire to the library.

We do not go empty-handed. Each of us carries a plate piled up high with bread cut up for the birds that are waiting to be fed. A space under the window is swept clear from snow, and there the birds are, ready for their breakfast. Sparrows by the score, robins that will hardly wait till the window is opened, chaffinches and tomtits, dunnocks, blackbirds and thrushes, linnets and—jackdaws, yes! and, watching very warily for a chance, a dozen or so of rooks in the trees in yonder plantation, very much excited, very restless, very shy, but ready to come down and gobble up the morsels if we keep ourselves out of sight. As to the robins, there is no mauvaise honte about them; they will almost fly on to the plate. Sometimes I send a shower of morsels quite over the robins, and they greatly enjoy the fun. One saucy little fellow last week laughed out loud at me. “Laughed?” Yes, laughed! I’ve known a robin laugh convulsively. But then it was not under a street lamp.

It is one of the laws of this palace that we do not begin real work before half-past nine. And before that time arrives there is usually a good half-hour for reading aloud by the Lady Shepherd. What is the Shepherd doing meanwhile? He is not going to tell you anything more than this, that he is devoting himself during that half-hour to preventing the ravages of moths and bookworms. You people who suppose we poor country folk must be horribly dull and depressed may as well understand that this library in which I am sitting is an apartment that for a country parsonage may be regarded as palatial. Pray haven’t I a right to have one good room in my house? One thing I know, and that is that I am rated as if I lived in a house of £430 a year, and if I must pay rates on that amount I may as well have something to show for it. Also I would have you to know that the walls of this library are lined with books from floor to ceiling. Then there are flowers all about—grown on the premises, mind you—none of your bought blossoms stuck on to a bit of stick with a bit of wire, but live flowers that turn and look at you—at any rate, they certainly do turn and look out at the window if you give them a chance. Moreover, they are not under the dominion of a morose stipendiary, for the sufficient reason that the head gardener is the Lady Shepherd, and the under gardener only comes three times a week, and Jabez has his hands full, and Ishmael is no servant of ours, but the servant of the maids in the kitchen; and when you’re snowed up Ishmael must give his life to the solemn duties of a stoker and filler of coal-scuttles, and to shovelling away the snow, and to running errands. There is no doubt about the seriousness of that boy. He is oppressed by the sense of his responsibility, and convinced that he occupies the position of the divine being in Plato’s Theoetetus. As long as t? ?? kept his hand upon the world it went round all right; when he took it off, the world straightway spun round the wrong way. That being Ishmael’s view, he is naturally grave. When the maids shriek at him he exhibits a terror-stricken alacrity, but when I tell him to do this or that, he looks at me with a cunning expression as if he would say, “Do you really mean that? Well, you must take the consequences.” Then he glides off. From Ishmael not much is to be expected in the greenhouse. But when half-past nine strikes I roll my table into position and set to work, my head gardener puts on her apron and gathers up her skirts, and starts forth with her basket on her arm, equipped for her day’s work.

Now, if a man has four good hours in the morning which he may call his own, it’s a great deal more than most men have, and there’s no saying what may be done in such hours as these. But if you allow morning callers to disturb you, then it’s—I was going to say a bad word!

I had just settled myself to work in earnest when Jemima’s head appeared. “Please, sir, Tinker George wants to see you.” “Tell your mistress.” And I thought no more about it, but went on with what I was doing. If Tinker George had been one of my parishioners I should have jumped up and heard him patiently, but Tinker George does not belong to me, but to the next parish, and as his usual object in coming to see me is to show me his poetry, I passed him on this time, knowing very certainly that he would not be the worse for my not seeing him. An hour later I got up to warm myself. “May I speak?” said the Lady Shepherd. “I let Tinker George go away, but I’m afraid you’ll be sorry I did. I think you would have liked to see him.” “What’s the matter?” “He’s been writing to the dear Queen” (the Lady Shepherd always speaks of “the dear Queen”) “and he came to show you the letter, and to ask what address he should put on it.”

Tinker—George—writing to—the—Queen! What did the man want? He wanted to be allowed to keep a dog without paying tax for it. George goes about with a wheel, and he calls for broken pots and pans. Sometimes he finds the boys extremely annoying, they will persist in turning his wheel when his back is turned and he has gone into a house for orders. Now, you see, if he had a dog of spirit and ferocity chained to his wheel, George might leave that wheel in charge of that dog; but then a dog is an expensive luxury when there is the initial outlay of seven shillings and sixpence for the tax. So he wrote to the Queen, and he put it into the post, and I never saw it. This was just one of those things which cause a man lifelong regret, all the more poignant because so vain. The Lady Shepherd is the most passionately loyal person in England, and she firmly believes that there will come a holograph reply from her Majesty in the course of a few days addressed to Tinker George, promptly and graciously granting him his very reasonable request. “I’ve promised Tinker George,” she added, “to give him a sovereign for the letter when it comes, and it shall have a box all to itself among my autographs.”

Be pleased to observe that it was only just noon, and two events of some interest had happened already, though we were snowed up. But at this point I must needs inform you who we are. In the first place there are the Shepherd and the Lady Shepherd; in the second place there are the Shepherd’s dogs. No shepherd can live without dogs—it would not be safe. No man ever pulled another man out of the snow: it is perfectly well known that men don’t know how to do it. Till lately we had three of these protectors. But—eheu fugaces!—we have only two now; one a blue Skye, silky, surly, and exceptionally stubborn; and a big colley, to whom his master is the Almighty and the All-wise. I do not wish to claim more for my friends than is due to them. Ours are only average dogs; but they are average dogs. And if any one will have the hardihood to assert that he holds the average man to be equal to the average dog in morals, manners, and intelligence, I will not condescend to argue with that purblind personage. I will only say that he knows no more about dogs than I do about moles, and I never kept a tame mole.

Nothing perplexes some of my friends more than to hear that I do not belong to a single London club. Not belong to a club? One man was struck dumb at the intelligence; he looked at me gravely—suspicion in every wrinkle of his face, perplexity in the very buttons of his waistcoat. He was working out the problem mentally. I saw into his brain. I almost heard him say to himself, “Not belong to a club? Holloa! Ever been had up for larceny? Been a bankrupt? Wonder why they all blackballed him?—give it up!” He evidently wanted to ask what it meant—there must be something wrong which he did not like to pry into: a skeleton in the cupboard, in fact.

“I said a London club!” I added, to relieve his embarrassment. “Of course I do belong to a club here—the Arcadian Club. It’s a very select club, too, and we can introduce strangers, which is an advantage, as you may perhaps yourself have felt if you have ever been kept for ten minutes stamping on the door-mat of the AthenÆum with the porter watching you while that arch boy was sauntering about, pretending to carry your card to your friend upstairs. We are rational beings in our club, and I’ll introduce you at once—Colonel Culpepper, Toby! Colonel Culpepper, Mr. Bob.” Neither Toby nor Mr. Bob took the least notice of the gallant colonel, who seemed rather shy himself. “They’re dangerous dogs are colleys, so I’m told. In London it does not so much matter, because, you see, they must go about with a muzzle. And this is really all the club you belong to?”

Yes. This and no other; the peculiarities of our club being that false witness, lying, and slandering were never so much as known among the members. There is a house dinner every day, music every evening, no sneering, no spite, no gossip, no entrance fee, no annual subscription, no blackballing, no gambling, no betting, and no dry champagne or dry anything. Show me a club like that, my dear colonel, and I’ll join it to-morrow, whether in Pall Mall or in the planet Jupiter. At the present moment I know of only one such club, and it is here—the Arcadian Club! Enjoy its privileges while you may, and be grateful.

Seriously, I defy any club in England or anywhere else to produce me fifty per cent. of its members so entirely courteous, cordial, and clubbable—so graceful, intelligent, and generous—such thorough gentlemen, and so entirely guiltless of talking nonsense, as our friends Toby and Mr. Bob. Of course there are the infirmities which all flesh is heir to, and jealousy is one of these. But put the case that you should say to a little man, “You may sleep inside that door on a cushion by the fire,” and say to a big man, “You’re to sleep outside that same door on the mat!” and put the case that each of those men knew he was a member of the same club to which the fire, the cushion, and the mat belonged:—and pray what modus vivendi could be found between the big man and the little man on this side the grave?

But to return. The snow had ceased falling, but in the bleak distance as far as the eye could see, the road was blocked by ugly-looking drifts, in which a man on horseback might very easily be buried and flounder hopelessly till he sank exhausted never to rise again. There was nothing stirring except the birds, looking fluffy, cold, and starving. So I turned my chair to my table again and resumed my task.

Hark! Actually a ring at the front-door bell. The dogs growled and sniffed, but there was no fierce barking. Confound these tramps! That trombone has gone back to the “Red Lion,” and the rogues are oozing out to practise upon our weakness. “That’s not a tramp,” said the Lady Shepherd. “Toby didn’t bark.” She was right, as she always is. For Toby has quite an unerring discernment of the proximity of a tramp. His gift in this line is inexplicable. How the great Darwin would have delighted to observe that dog! If it was not a tramp, who could it be? “I believe it’s Polus!” said the Lady Shepherd. “Only Polus could have the ferocity to come here in defiance of the snowdrifts.” Right again. It was Polus. She had given him the name because he was eager to get into the County Council.—Poor man! He only got three votes.—There was no reference to the young gentleman in the Gorgias who bore that name—only a desire to indicate that he was the man who went to the Poll.

It was hardly more than noon; we were snowed up, and yet already we had had music; poetry as represented by Tinker George; a flood of literature; and now there was discussion imminent on the profoundest questions of politics, philosophy, and law.

Enter Polus! What in the world had brought him hither this dreadful day? What had he been doing? whither was he going? Should we put him to bed? To send for a doctor was out of the question. But we could soon get him a mustard poultice and a hot bath. Polus laughed the hearty laugh of rude health and youth. “You, dear old people, you forget I’m only thirty-five. I’ve had a pleasant walk from Tegea—greased my boots well—only rolled over twice. I’ve come for a talk. Dear me! dear me! Didn’t I see a moth there on the curtains? Curious that they should come out in such numbers when you’re snowed up! May I help you to get rid of the pests?” The man had come to show his defiance of the laws of nature and ordinary prudence. In fact, he had come for mere cussedness! Also he had come for a conference. What was the subject to be this time? “Anything but the education question,” said I; “we must draw the line somewhere. Woman’s rights, Man’s wrongs. Agricultural depression. The People’s Palace. The Feudal System. The Bacon-Shakespeare—anything you please in reason—but Education! No! Not for worlds.” It was not long before the cat jumped out of the bag. Polus was bent on floating a most magnificent new International League. His ideas were a trifle mixed, but so are those of many men in our times. Polus makes the mistake of bottling his grand schemes and laying them down, as it were, when they ought to be kept on draught. The result is that there’s always a superabundance of froth—or shall we call it foam?—that we have to plunge into before we can taste of that pleasant draught; and when you have drunk about half your fill, there’s a wholly unnecessary and somewhat disagreeable sediment at the bottom, which interferes with your enjoyment. Thus the new League was to be so comprehensive a League, for effecting so many desirable objects, that it was difficult to discover what the main object was—or, in fact, if the main object did not resolve itself into an assemblage of objects, each of which was struggling with the rest for prominence and supremacy.

On this occasion Polus had the effrontery to begin by assuring me that I was in honour and conscience bound to join the League, for the idea of it had been first suggested to him by a pregnant and suggestive saying of mine some months before. “What! when you were so hot for the abolition of the punishment by death?” Oh dear no. He’d changed his mind about that long ago. “Was it when you were advocating the desirability of the labourers having the cows and the landlords keeping the land?” “No, no! I’ve improved greatly upon that. Haven’t you heard? I’m for letting the landlord keep the cows, but giving the labourers the calves only; that appears to me the equitable adjustment of a complex question.” I thought a little, and Polus gave me time. What was it? What could it have been that we had been talking about? Enfantin’s hullucinations and the dual priesthood (couple-prÊtre)? Fourrier’s Phalanstery? It must have been an obiter dictum which dropped from me as he laid down the law about Proudhon. I shook my head. “Don’t you remember? Entails!”

Then it appeared that the great League was to be started for the abolition of everything in the shape of entails. In our last conference I had let fall the remark that for every acre of land tied up in strict entail there was a thousand pounds sterling tied up in much stricter entail. If you are going to deal with the one, why not with the other? Polus was putting on his hat when I gave him that parting dig, and I thought I had silenced him for ever. So far from it, I had but sown a new seed in his soul, and now he came to show me the baby.

Polus meanwhile had plunged into the heaving billows of statistics. He had discovered, to his own satisfaction, that 500 millions of the National Debt was strictly entailed; that 217 millions belonged prospectively to babes unborn; that the British people were paying “enormous taxes, sir!” not only for the sins and extravagances of their forefathers, but for enriching of their hypothetical progeny. That it was a state of things altogether outrageous, irrational, monstrous, and a great many other epithets. Would I join the League? Of course I’d join a league for the extinction of nasal catarrh or the annihilation of stupidity—gladly, but upon conditions. I must first know how the thing is to be effected. Your object may be heroic, but the means for carrying out this glorious reform? the machinery, my dear Polus? Let me hear more about that. A new voyage en Icarie implies that you are going to embark upon some safe vessel. By the way, how did Cabet get to his enchanting island?

Hereupon ensued an elaborate monologue, admirably expressed, closely reasoned, carrying not so much conviction as demonstration along with it. Granting the premises, the conclusion was inevitable. It was as good as Bishop Blougram. The scheme was this: Property—even in the funds—is a fact. There is no denying that. Therefore face the facts first, and deal with them as such. Timid reformers go only halfway towards building up the ideal social fabric. They say meekly, nationalize the land. The true reformer says, abolish all permanent financial obligations. But hardships would ensue upon any sudden and violent extinction of private debts. Prudence suggests that you should begin by a gradual extinction of public debts—in other words, the National Debt. The living holders of stock shall be fairly dealt with, and during their lifetime they shall enjoy their abominable dividends wrenched from the pockets of the people. As they drop off—and the sooner they go the better—their several claims upon the tax-payer shall perish with them. None shall succeed to their privileges of robbing the teeming millions. All stock standing in the name of trustees shall be transferred to the names of the present beneficiaries, and shall be extinguished by the death of the several holders. All powers of bequest in regard of such stock shall be taken away. In the case of infants—and there are 147,623 of such cases—who are only prospective owners of stock—being only prospective owners, and therefore having never actually tasted the joys of unrighteous possession—they shall continue to be prospective owners, and never be allowed to become anything else. They will have nothing to complain of; you take from them nothing that they ever had. All that will happen to them will be that they will be saved from cherishing delusive hopes, such as should never have been aroused in them. The scales will drop from their eyes; they will no longer be the victims of treacherous phantasms. The sooner they learn their glorious lesson the better. They will speedily rise to a true conception of the dignity of citizenship, and grow to the stature of a loftier humanity, whose destiny who shall foreshadow? “Now, my dear Doctor,” said Polus, pausing for a moment in his harangue, “I ask you as a Christian and a philosopher, is not ours a magnificent League, and is not the vision that opens before us sublime?”

“Place aux dames! Place aux dames!” I answered. “Ask the Lady Shepherd. Let her speak.”

It is a curious physiological fact that I have been puzzled by for several years past, and which I am only half able to explain or account for, that flashing eyes have almost disappeared from off the face of the earth. You may see many sorts of eyes—eyes of various shades of colour and various shapes—eyes that glitter, that gleam, that sparkle, that shine, that stare, that blink; even eyes that are guilty of the vulgarity of winking; but eyes that flash with the fire and flame of wrath, and scorn, and scorching indignation—such as once or twice I have cowered and trembled under when I was young—such eyes have passed away; the passion in them has been absorbed in something, it may be better or it may be worse—absorbed in utter tenderness. The last time I saw eyes flash was when a certain college don came to pay his respects to a certain little lady—she was a little lady then—a week after she was married. The old blunderer boasted that he had been on Lord Powis’s committee on a certain memorable occasion. “Ah, my dear madam, you are too young to know anything about that, and your husband of course was an undergraduate. But——” The man almost jumped from his chair; he turned pale as an oyster. The little lady sprang up a pillar of flame. “Do you mean, sir, that you voted against the Prince Consort? You will oblige me by not referring to the subject.” I rang the bell again and again; I called for buckets of water—the whole room seemed to be, the whole house seemed likely to be on fire.

Ah! there were real live Tories (spelt with a capital T) then. We were blue or yellow, not a pale green made up by smudging the two together. We didn’t stand upon legs that were not a pair. None of your Conservative Liberals or Liberal Conservatives going about hat in hand and timidly asking, “What will you be good enough to wish to have conserved?” It was “Church and Queen, sir, or salt and water. No shilly-shallying.” Hesitate, and nothing remained for you but pistols for two in the back yard. Argument? Nay! We dealt with that as Uncle Sammy’s second wife did, and everyone knows that

If I could have looked forward in those days, what a monster would my future self have appeared!

Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

Something in the look of the Lady Shepherd’s, eyes this snowy morning reminded me of the old terrible flash; but it all passed, and only merriment shone out. “Sublime, my good Polus? How can a vision be sublime? A visionary is at best a dreamer, and a vision is a sham. A sublime sham is a contradiction in terms. Why don’t you try and talk sense sometimes?” “You’re not a bit better than that chit of a girl with a mop on her head that came gabbling here last week. But it’s like you men—you’ve no more common sense than this trowel! Visions indeed!

Ah! you may laugh. But it’s all on my side.”

Away she swept, basket and trowel and all. Stop to listen to that gibberish—not she!

When her Royal Highness came back to us [in these moods she is the Princess, in her gentler and more pastoral moods she is the Lady Shepherd] she found us deep in another part of the discussion. The business of the Great International League having extinguished the National Debt by a very simple process, the next stall in the Augean stable of existing abomination, as he expressed it, must be dealt with. “Suppose we change the metaphor, my dear Polus, and say the next plank in your platform must be pulled up.” “Pulled up? Quite the contrary. Fixed, firmly fixed, nailed down!” “Be it so! Let us look at the plank. A stall in the stable of abominations suggests dirty work, you know!”

The next great problem which the Great International League sets before itself to solve is this: the National Debt being annihilated, how is the accumulation of property to be prevented in the future? I observed that at this point Polus was not so inclined for the monologue form of discussion as before. It was not the Socratic speaking ex cathedrÂ, as in the Laws; there was a quite unusual glad-of-a-hint attitude, as in the Lysis or the Meno.

“Come,” I said, “I see through you; you haven’t thought it out, and you want me to give you a hint. Which is it to be? Am I to serve as whetstone, or do you come in trouble and pain crying out for t?? a?e?a??” He threw up his hands: “Speak, and I will listen.” Then said I, “O Polus, you’re just the man I want. Everybody knows I am a dull old dog, slow of thought and slow of speech as a country bumpkin must be; feeling after my words, and as often as not choosing the wrong ones. But I have been excogitating of late a theory which will supply your next plank to perfection, and in fact would make your fortune as a politician, if indeed the Great League will allow you to have any property, even in your brains. Forty years ago—for there were thinkers, my dear Polus, in the waste places of the earth even before you were born—I came across quite a “sublime” scheme of some French financier, propounded, I think, during the Great Revolution, for which the world was not yet ready. The man was before his age, and his own generation pooh-poohed him. I quite forget his name. I quite forget the title of his book if he ever wrote one; and I shall be very much obliged to you if you can find out something about the great man, for a great man he was. When I heard of this scheme I was little more than a lad, and now, after much cogitation, I cannot honestly tell you how much of the plan is his and how much my own. But I’ll give him all the credit for it.”

The scheme was a scheme for automatically adjusting all incomes and reducing them to something like equilibrium—that is, the operation of the process set in motion would tend in that direction. All incomes, no matter from what sources derived, were to be fixed according to an algebraic formula, and the formula was this:

·0001 (x-m)² = The income tax levied upon each citizen. Here x=the actual income earned by the citizen;

m=1,000 pounds sterling, or an equivalent in francs or dollars, if you prefer it.

When x=m, then of course there could be nothing to pay; which is only another way of saying that a man with £1,000 a year was free from all taxation.

When x was greater than m, then taxation upon the income in excess of £1,000 came into operation with rather alarming rapidity: until when a man was convicted of having in any single year made £10,000 his taxation amounted to £8,100 for that year, and if he were ever found guilty of having made an income of £12,000 the State claimed the whole in obedience to this great and beneficent law.

But what happens in the case of those who have an income below the £1,000 a year—that is, when x is less than m?

In this case the grandeur and sagacity, not to speak of the paternal character of the scheme, become apparent. The moment a man begins to earn more than the normal £1,000 a year, that moment he begins to pay his beautifully adjusted quota of taxation to the State; but the moment that his income falls below the £1,000, that moment the State begins to pay him. Of course you will not forget that minus into minus gives plus, therefore the square of the minus quantity represented by x-m, where m is greater than x, offers no difficulty. The two poles of this perfect sphere, if I may so speak, this financial orb—teres atque rotundus—are reached, first when x=0, last when x = £11,000. In the first case the State comes to the help of the pauper who has earned or can earn nothing, and gives him a ten-thousandth part of a hypothetical million, which amounts to exactly £100 a year; in the other case the State deprives the bloated plutocrat of a ten-thousandth part of the same million, and relieves the dangerous citizen of ten thousand out of the eleven, saying to him, “Citizen, be grateful that you still have your thousand, and beware how you persist in piling up riches, for the State knows how to gather them.”

“Now, my dear Polus, next time you come, do bring me tidings of my Frenchman, and do work the thing out on paper, for I never was much of a mathematician, and now my decimals are scandalously vague!” So Polus went his way with a dainty rosebud in a dainty paper box for Mrs. Polus, and a saucy message from the Lady Shepherd. “Tell her, with my love, I’m very sorry her husband’s such a goose!” We watched him floundering through the snowdrifts; and I verily believe he was working out my problem with his stick, ·0001 (x-m)².

I don’t think that man went away much impressed with the darkness and desolation of our Arcadian life. Nay, I’m inclined to think the other side had something to say, and I’m afraid this is what it said: “Oh yes, it’s all very fine—intellectual intercourse, and so on. Freshens you up? Glad to see people? Of course I am. But I did hope we were going to have a long day together, and there! it’s all broken into. It’s always the way. How was I to do my autographs with him extinguishing my £1,000 in the funds all the while?”

Here I may as well explain that the Shepherd and his lady are the objects of some wonder and perplexity to their great friends on the one hand and their little friends on the other. The first pronounce them to be poor as rats; the second declare that they are rolling in riches. This conflict of opinion is easily accounted for. When the great and noble Asnapper comes to smile at us he has to take pot-luck. Come when he may, there is all due provision—

But the forks are all electro-plate, and the dishes are all of the willow pattern. When meek little Mr. Crumb brings Mrs. Crumb and two of the eight daughters to enjoy one hearty meal at afternoon tea, he is awe-struck by the sight of the books and the splendour of half a dozen good engravings hanging upon the walls. As the old grey pony trots home in high spirits—for Jabez has a standing order always to give that poor little beast a double feed of corn—Mr. Crumb remarks to Mrs. Crumb, “Those people must be extremely affluent. I wonder he does not restore his church!”

The great and noble Asnapper, on the contrary, observes, “All the signs of deep poverty, my dear. Keeps his pluck up, though. Quite out of character with the general appearance of the establishment to have those books and collections and what not. I suppose some uncle left him the things. Cooking? I forgot to notice that; but the point of one’s knife went all sorts of ways, and the earthenware was most irritating. Eccentric people. The Lady Shepherd, as they call her, has actually got near a thousand autographs. Why in the world doesn’t she send them up to Sotheby’s and buy some new stair carpets?” Ah! why indeed? Because such as she and the Shepherd have a way of their own which is not exactly your way, my noble Asnapper; because they have made their choice, and they do not repent it. Some things they have, and take delight in them; some things they have not, and they do without them.

But not even in Arcady is it all cakes and ale. Thank God we have our duties as well as our enjoyments; pursuits and tastes we have, and the serious blessed duties which call us from excess in self-indulgence. When the roads are blocked for man and beast we chuckle because there can be no obligation to trudge down to the school a mile and a half off, or to go and pay that wedding call upon the little bride who was married last week, or to inquire about the health of Mrs. Thingoe on the common, whose twins are ten days old.

But snow or no snow, as long as old Biddy lives, one of us positively must go and look after “the old lady.” Every man, woman, and child in the parish calls her “the old lady,” and a real old lady she is. Biddy was ninety-three last November. She persists she’s ninety-four—“leastways in my ninety-four. That Register only said when I was christened, you know, and who’s a-going to say how long I was born before I was christened?”

Biddy has been married three times, and she avers that she wouldn’t mind marrying again if she could get another partner equal to her second. Every one of her husbands had had one or more wives before he wedded Biddy. We make out that Biddy and her three spouses committed an aggregate of twelve acts of matrimony. If you think that old Biddy is a feeble old dotard, drivelling and maundering, you never made a greater mistake in your life. She is as bright as a star of the first magnitude, and as shrewd as the canniest Scotchman that ever carried a pack. She is almost the only genuine child of Arcady I ever knew who has a keen sense of humour, and is always on the look-out for a joke. She is quite the only one in whom I have noticed any tender pity for the fallen, not because of the consequences that followed the lapse, but simply and only because it was a fall. Biddy lives by herself in a house very little bigger than an enlarged dog-kennel, and much smaller than an average cow-house. Till she was eighty-three she went about the country with a donkey and cart, hawking; since then she has managed to exist, and pay her rent too, on eighteen pence a week and a stone of flour. She is always neat and clean, and more than cheerful. She has been knitting socks for me for eight years past, and I am provided with sufficient hosiery now to last me even to the age of the patriarchs. Of course we demoralise old Biddy; her little home is hardly 100 yards off the parsonage, and every now and then the old lady comes to tea in the kitchen. One of the servants goes to fetch her, and another takes her home; and, as I have said, most days one of us goes to sit with her, and I make it a rule never to leave her without making her laugh. You may think what you like, but I hold that innocent merriment keeps people healthy in mind and body, improves the digestion, clears the intellect, brightens the conscience, prepares the soul for adoration—for is not gaiety the anticipation of that which in the spiritual world will be known as fulness of joy?

On this day of snow I found Biddy sitting before the fire, half expecting me and half doubting whether I could get there. “‘Cause, you know, you ain’t as young as you was when you came here first.” “Is any one, Biddy?” She looked up in her sly way. “Dash it, I ain’t!” By her side on the little table was a Book of Common Prayer in very large print, and her spectacles on it. “I’ve begun to read that book through,” she said, “and I’ve got as far as where it’s turned down, but there’s some on it as I’ve got to be very particular with. That there slanting print, that’s hard, that is; that ain’t so easy as the rest on it. But I’m going to read it all through for all that. You see I’ve done it all before, and some of it comes easy.” “Well, Biddy, you ought to know the marriage service by this time.” “And so I do,” said Biddy, grinning. “But I never had no churchings, and I don’t hold wi’ that there Combination. Dash it! I never did like cussing and swearing!”7 It turned out that Biddy had set herself the task of reading the Prayer Book through, rubrics and all. Very funny, wasn’t it? Pray, my reverend brethren of the clergy, have you all of you set yourselves the same task and carried it out?

A little later the Lady Shepherd dropped in to look at Biddy. She found the old woman chuckling over some very mild pleasantry of mine, which she repeated in her own odd way. Suddenly she stopped. “Our doctor won’t live to ninety-four!” “Oh, Biddy, that’s more than you can tell. One thing is quite certain; if he does, you won’t be here to see him.” “Why sha’n’t I?” answers Biddy. “He’s nigh upon threescore, ain’t he? and I’m in my ninety-four. You can’t tell, neither, as I shan’t be here. The Lord knows.”

Dear old Biddy! Who does know anything? It seems to me that we can none of us know anything about anything but the past. I hardly know whether we are most ignorant of the things that shall be or the things that are. Old Biddy is the last of the old-world folk that fascinated me so much with their legends and traditions and reminiscences when first I settled among them—it seems but yesterday. Old Biddy has told me all she has to tell, the gossip and the experiences of days that were not as our days. With her will pass away all that is left of a generation that was the generation of our fathers. If I leave her with a smile upon the wrinkled old face there is more often a shade of sadness that passes over my own. Other faces rise up before me; other voices seem to sound; the touch of the vanished hand—gone—gone! As I turn homeward with bowed head in the grey twilight, and muse upon those ten years that have rushed by so peacefully, and yet which have remorselessly levied their tribute and left me beggared of some who were dearer than all the jewels of the mine—

That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is life.

Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here it is, then, wrapped up in a very short and pithy aphorism—“The man who does not like the place he has to live in is a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how dazed and forlorn you’d be! We could accommodate ourselves to your life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes. You could never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your only solace would be in droning forth a new version of the Tristia, which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s.

This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps again—never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna, hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you assume that two old fogies like us must be longing for a change, fidgeting and hankering after it, and that we must be getting rusty, dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with a querulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all day and every day—then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our home must be, there are our hearts.