07 it was evident that he was guided more by scent only in the simplest manner, with single thread; than sight. He worked the floor as a pointer but in the continuation of the work it is not deg works his field; and when he crossed the simply plain, but fanciful. The usual border of trail of a beetle, even a few inches from him, the stocking which prevents the rolling up of Venta/th he became excited, and putting his nose to the the work is narrow, consisting of a row of turned fresh scent, followed up his prey. Further evi-loops; and the circle, the nicely shaped heel, which dence of this feature was observed by his discovery is a little different from our method, show a very of a crevice in the floor, where he exhibited a singular mode of proceeding. Discovering by smell that his game was there, he inserted his hind-leg-the front one probably being too short and grasping with his clawby being too short dragged black beetles one by one and gave them quick despatch. ings run loft rounded point, the Egyptian stock But in the the there is a characteristic difference between the Egyptian stockings and our modern socks. While ours end in a rounded point, the Egyptian stock width, like the fingers of a glove. This strange shape, made to suit the sandals, which are furnished is But the tameness and apparent intelligence ofw strap, about the middle of the sandal; and as the strap has to be laid over the stocking, the division is needed,' 鲨 the animal are his most interesting characteristics. The winter sleep is almost abandoned now, or is very short at the most, and in lieu thereof he comes into the kitchen at all hours, getting inside the fender, and stretching himself out before the fire for a snooze. He eats any pickings he can get, sharing the bones with the dog, lapping from his dish of water or milk, not sucking it up as a pig does. tit do 1 of and go to ffroy But it is very remarkable to find him tapping at the door. If, after taking a stroll in the back-yard, he finds the door of the house is shut, you hear a gentle tap, tap, tap, often repeated if don't answer. You go and gently open you the door; and the little animal actually tries to look you' in the face, by turning up its nose ind small pig-like eyes; which you at once interpret Oh, thank you I have been waiting here -for some time,' as he mounts the step and walks in. + HTTIP IS WEL L67 — [00:07 Is it well with thee, and with thy husband, and with the child? And she iv. TITVTIHAK PI 7 ravished gates shine on our face lengthens And though the tender ties we strove to strengthen "Break one by one at evening time is light... buh 9f 19 if we trat boden VW YES; it is well! S 1 wit 2 dub viiburi ai troi Tis well! The way was often dull and weary; The spirit fainted oft beneath its load; And yet our feet were bound to tread that road! No sunshine came from skies all gray and dreary, best orti Dowella pnl 0 Is br no fubfc fr Lure a odt omni 7619Å AT Tis well that not again our hearts shall shiver Beneath old sorrows, once so hard to bear ... <! That not again beside Death's darksome Shall we deplore the good, the loved, the fair. 20 MA bot youll chon mit Tour in 2004 teranof suq usti dns179 9ft of voters p No more with tears, wrought from deep, inner anguish, Shall we bewail the dear Hopes crushed and gone; No more need we in or fear to languish; red glas vask So far the Day is past, the journey done! So cla-Isrib yo to NOT J It may be thought such an animal in the house would be dirty. Not so. When you discover -I J any smell, the odour approaches that of musk OP moreover, the children are quite familiar with it, and take it up and let it eat from their hand. tq qo 9 gi Hadded € 39 rialt-1 ot Country boys, on nieeting with a hedgehog, think it a duty at once to kill the poor creature, utterly ignorant, like many bigger boys and older men, of the services such animals perform in the economy of creation. C 1 T "1 " Supri ( T 61 unsilage eji je 0 As voyagers, by fierce winds beat and broken dat 90* 76 - KNITTING › OF STOCKINGS BY THE ANCIENTÍ volt fi uew EGYPTIANS impoH - don f ( } Our contemporary, the Textile Manufacturer, płyta bio prodomo skirt-romnih glt doode ger says The Egyptians of the present, Kopts (as -well as Arabs run about with bare feet. The ancient Egyptians, on the contrary, who are now only to be seen in a dried condition in museums, possessed a a good method of knitting stock-Fair ings, as is shown in the collection at the Louvre fo in Paris. In the grave of a mummy there were found a pair of knitted stockings, which gave the surprising evidence, firstly that short stockings, resembling socks were worn by the ancient Egyptians; and secondly, that the art of knitting stockings had already attained great perfection in ancient Egypt. These curious, stockings are knitted in a very clever manner Inviting Homeward at the day's decline konsforl A sweet air cometh from the Shore immortal,judj ro Almost we see where from the open portalit geva forms stand beckoning with their smiles divine. -ch dziruzelq mom T gaiładza d The Earth with all her myriad voices h Tas lost the power our senses to enthiral'; fond sad we hear above the tumult and the moises ytildo Soft bonds of music, like an angel's call. A elbour sitt ni sami notlo „borroqqu en toute gib VIC If n I our Tis well, 9 friends! We would not turn retracing Race. fine wool of sheep, that might once have been white, is now Brown with The needles with which the work was done must have been alittle thicker than we should choose for their gift bus noodhound wit to gentili same purposey and the knitting is loose and elastic. Printed and Published by W. & Pu CHAMBERS, 47 LPICThe stocking is begun just as we make the design, noster Row, LONDON, and 339 High Street ou ou EDINBURGH All Rights Reserved. CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART. CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS. No. 991.-VOL. XIX. OF POPULAR SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1882. PRICE 1d days. And the moving melodrama of Punch, which for a couple of centuries interested the youth of Europe, has lost much of its glamour for our urchins. The thin and incredulous crowd that condenses round the perambulating abode of the cynical hunchback, grows continually less; and the income of the showman dwindles portentously. For the twentieth century, it is to be feared Punch will be an archæological reminiscence, which will furnish a theme for the learned. In our ears resound the last bursts of laughter excited by his marital unkindness and the indignation of his dog Toby. IS MERRIMENT DECLINING? THERE is an impression prevailing that the present is a somewhat mournful period; and that as man grows wiser his capacity for mirth grows less. It is remarked that our lighter literature has lost in jocundity during the past twenty years. No one has succeeded Dickens in broad hearty humour. We have no audacious versifier like 'Ingoldsby.' No half-smiling, halfcynical humorist has followed the lead of Thackeray into the follies and vices of higher society. Eccentricity is disappearing among the less polished of the people. Cabmen, clodpoles, and costermongers neither use the quaint locutions of former times, nor do they indulge in buffooneries to the extent of their predecessors. 'Chaff' is not so pertinent as it was; badinage is less relished in the clubs; tomfooleries have become intolerable. Many social gatherings are bankrupt of joy. The class of merry diners-out, who once set the table in a roar with their madcap sayings, funny stories, and nimble repartees, those jolly fellows are becoming historic. The survivors do not evoke the tempests of cachinnation that once shook the dinner-table. Somehow, old-style jocularity has lost its savour. With moribund Punch are dying those antique festivals of which he was an important, nay indispensable feature. The puppet-show goes far away into time. Railways have killed the great fairs that used to be held in every part of Europe, and which gave the international multitudes opportunities for pleasure in the intervals of business. Village 'wakes,' formerly universal in England, have fallen into desuetude. May-day brings no rejoicings as of yore. The Maypole has lost its significance, and a group of morrisdancers would astonish our present rustics as much as Harlequin and Columbine would if they performed a lilt upon the Thames Embankment. Only draymen and carters pay homage now to Bacchanalian songs have quite disappeared, the genius of Spring. They adorn their steeds even from the symposia of students and tavern with gay ribbons and furbished harness, when roysterers. From negro minstrelsy, too, the fun the merry month opens. But there is something is exhaling. The modern playwright does not fictitious in the observance, and it will fade add much to the gaiety of life. Typical characters as the homage of the sweeps has done. The have been used up' long ago; and the decay of sooty pantomimists who used to dance round Jackoddity and eccentricity robs the dramatist of new in-the-Green, no longer impede the traffic of models. A few years back, a new style of comic London thoroughfares. An unsympathetic police songs appeared, often inane in the text, but bade them, with other anachronisms, 'move on' blithesome in tune. Certain sections of society long ago. The fiery carnival of Guy Fawkes were greatly entertained by them. Yet these are has been extinguished by the same authorities. waning. Christmas pantomimes have delighted Only here and there is the of 'Guy' to be several generations. But at length, the 'Clown' seen on the fifth of November dodging the fails to rejoice the youngsters by his grotesque guardian of order in the streets. Bonfires, squibs, ill-treatment of the Pantaloon and the police. the salvos of Lilliputian cannon, are forbidden; His knavish escapades and burlesque benevolences ay more, are voted unmeaning nuisances by the do not evoke the delirious approbation of former adult public. " ** Christmas, too, grows yearly more grave. Even the strait-laced, the dyspeptic, and the saturnine formerly agreed to be jolly and sans souci at that gracious season. To be hospitable and to lavish hospitalities then, was deemed an imperative duty. Kill-joys might snarl and scoff at every other festivity, but to abstain from the wassail of Yuletide was equivalent to lèse-majesté. Immoderate indulgence in eating, drinking, and dancing was not only allowed, but encouraged by moral custodians. For a time the machinery of society was allowed to run out of gear-misrule reigned in place of law. If we have not changed all that, we have vastly modified the licensed dissipation of Father Christmas. Enjoyments are less gross, less prolonged, more intellectual, less sensual than they were 'forty years ago.' In the United States, where business is more developed than in England, where it is the occupation of a whole people, holidays of a formal kind are fewer than elsewhere. On the fourth of July the nation rejoices universally in the anniversary of its independence; on the first of June it commemorates its fallen heroes, who gave their lives to maintain the Union. Whatever further relaxations are indulged in are according to the taste and financial capabilities of individuals. This, indeed, is the distinction between modern and ancient times. Formerly, the people amused themselves en masse, and at stated periods. Nowadays, individuals take their pleasures when and where and how they please. Superficially, the inhabitants of the United States seem to be immersed in almost incessant toil. Fundamen tally regarded, they are the greatest holidaymakers of the age. Rich and poor alike, when opportunity serves them, seek large and varied repose-not by hallooing in the streets, not by crowding into murderous congestions in some particular spot, but by dispersing over the whole planet. ( The same may be said of the festivals of Easter and Whitsuntide. They are no longer marked by drunken orgies, by ribald pleasantries, by street jokes, as of old. Not that these have quite disappeared. Roughs, blackguards, and inebriated buffoons still accentuate our holidays with the marks of coarser times. But the public is against them, and their ideas of merriment are an offence to all of higher taste. Nor is the sombre shadow falling upon British mirthfulness absent from other European countries. Modern Frenchmen are not so gay as their fathers were. They are losing that boyish insouciance which made them seize pleasure without effort. Cafés are more frequented than ever; theatres are densely crowded; racegrounds are black with excited spectators; and summer holidays áre more enjoyed than before the era of railways; still, the face of Jacques Bonhomme has lost much of its old vivacity, and is sicklied o'er with nineteenth-century pensiveness. The old Gallic abandon has gone from rural and civic hearts, and an indefinable inquietude has taken its place. This brings us to answer the question we started with: Is merriment declining Fully and frankly, we say No. The quality of merriment has changed, but the quantity of it now diffused through the Caucasian family of man is greater than at any previous time. Gregarious merriment has given place to personal merriment. We do not laugh en bloc, as the Athenians did at the comedies of Aristophanes; but the audiences of a hundred theatres delight in the doings on board H.M.S. Pinafore. The merry tales which amused the idlers of the Forum and market-place are now read by millions in every place. Verbal drolleries emitted from London, New York, Melbourne, or Calcutta, are despatched in printed form to every part of the earth, and tickle the fancy of innumerable readers. Could Italians have not been noted for joviality at the hurricane of laughter they provoke be conany period. Serene lassitude, puerile trivialities, centrated, it would stun the ears of humanity varied with frenzied lottery-gambling, have more than the most stupendous clamours of the marked the intervals of serious business. But elements. Weak as the comic journals of Britain, the Carnival provoked such merriment as the America, and France may be at times, the quantity nation was capable of, and foreign onlookers often of real humour they create in a year is extra wondered how men and women could find plea-ordinary. If we compare any good collection of sure in the childish nonsense indulged in. Now, bons-mots of the previous half-century with those the Italians themselves wonder where the fun appearing now, there is no disparagement of lies in silly practical jokes; and they also ask contemporary wit possible. Nor does the cariis it necessary to spend eleven days in a satur- caturist's pencil lose its point. It is not so coarse nalia which has quite lost its significance. Were as it was; but its tracings are quite as poignant to it not for municipal subventions and the astute-folly, sham, and pretence. The improved manners ness of interested shopkeepers and hotel pro- of the time are as marked in humorous literature prietors, the Roman Carnival would soon cease. and illustration as they are in other things; Even in the Eternal City, the spirit of commercial and this greater geniality is positive evidence utilitarianism has penetrated, and will end by that mankind is more wisely happy than it was abolishing a festival which it has already con- The greatest proof, that amusement is desired, demned as ridiculous. And not only in Rome lies in the immense success that many of the is the Carnival decaying; it is moribund in comic periodicals have attained. every part of the Peninsula, and indeed of the Humour partakes of the idiosyncrasy of the Catholic world. The number of religious holi-period, like other matters. We cannot find the days grows less, too. Business cannot be inter- fun which lay under the noses of our fathers. rupted nowadays, when it has passed from the It has gone with the objects that produced it. locality to the whole world. France, Italy, Spain, The rollicking scenes of Tom Jones and Roderick Austria, and other Catholic countries are bound Random have gone with the turbulent, sensual, by the telegraph, the Stock Exchange, and the and ignorant people who lived amid them. ten thousand strands of trade, to do as Britain Squire Western has not a representative in the Fand America do, or taken the disastrous con-most stationary of the shires. Our fox-hunters ! "p Th ocean in which we swirl, we may well take courage, and believe that amusement is as much the appanage of man as labour. mate could possibly meet with the adventures of Roderick, in our ironclads; nor is there probability of the existence of another Midshipman Easy, on board any ship in the fleet. Those who But we also are legatees of the toils and tribulacomplain that Dickens has no successors, must tions of those who did in their day what we are address their grievance to history, which refuses doing now. The peace and security in which to allow two epochs to be alike. Pickwick, the we live had to be fought for; the thousand Wellers, and other worthies, belong to the age instruments for winning food which cost us no when steam was not. The amazing outbursts invention, had to be pondered out by our fathers. of enterprise which followed the invention of We possess all the gains of the infinite labourers railways, flooded 'society' with a host of humbly- of the past, and among them the treasures of born plutocrats, whose financial dominion excited humour contained in the literatures of all peoples. the wrath and the cynical jocularities of the Our sources of amusement are indeed inexhaustprivileged. But the nouveaux riches have multi-ible, and our leisure abundant compared with that plied to such a marvellous extent that to ridicule of former times. It is admitted that human them would be absurd. The 'caste' spirit has nature is capable of indefinite improvement, and evaporated to an immense extent; so that a that our faculties expand with their exercise. speculative Jeames,' instead of being despised for Hence it follows that the joyous susceptibilities seeking to rise out of a menial to a higher position, of our species may be expected to develop with is applauded. First Lords have abolished the the rest. And such we find to be the case. The ruffians and tyrants who caused the woes, comic higher races have the sense of humour much and tragic, of Marryat's heroes; and commisera- more acute than the lower. Savages rarely laugh. tion has done much to annihilate the picturesque The incidents of their lives have little in them squalor in which Lever's grotesque peasants that is comical. Semi-civilised Mongolians cannot fooled and fretted away their lives. Our recent comprehend the frolicsome gaiety of the Western humorists have been social reformers, the most world. The Japanese are truly a merry race, but searching and effective of all that extraordinary resemble our children rather than our youths legion of humanitarians which have made the in their amusements. Among ourselves, too, the nineteenth century so different from its pre- modes and sources of humour are higher than decessors. they were. Obscenity and profanity do not evoke the laughter of our rustics, as they did even a few years ago. Idiots and mental weaklings do not furnish butts for rude jokers now. The base and the malignant may still find a ferocious pleasure in scoffing at the deformed and the oddtempered; but the sympathies of the people are with the sufferers. Ill-natured wit is less relished than at any previous time; cruel amusements are ever growing wider asunder. Dec. 23, 1882.] 1 I Education and the interfusion of town and country folks are fast erasing the quaint rurals whose psychological peculiarities were so wonderfully reproduced by George Eliot. Uncouth speech and archaic phraseology will erewhile be as rare in the village as in the city. Science is gradually destroying the superstitions which maintained romance in the country long after it had perished in the town. As civilisation goes on reducing all classes to intellectual uniformity, amusements will necessarily change. But they will not fail The appearance of a new school of humorists in America is evidence that laughter and smiles are not becoming obsolete. Preoccupied by the cyclopean labours of converting the wilderness into infinite cities, and eager for wealth beyond all other people, the Americans find time to enjoy the drolleries arising from the very gravity of their pursuits, and from the odd incidents arising out of the blending of many races into one people. German ponderosity and Hibernian flightiness are producing a novel sort of literature, as the two races mingle, and promise mankind incalculable entertainment when the American genus homo becomes more distinctive. 1 Amusements, like other things, are less violent than they were; people can enjoy fun without the strident roars of noisier times. is not Laughter holding both his sides that relishes a good thing' most. We can digest a joke without any more symptoms of the process than a smile; and yet the assimilation of it into our mental being will be more complete than if we had gone through muscular paroxysms in 'getting it in. No people enjoy the absurd more than the Americans; still they laugh less than the English. It is indeed possible to be merry in a quiet way, and that we are becoming. Our merriment is of a temperate kind, and therefore will last longer than the furious pleasures of earlier times. A TRUE STORY OF THE OLD I 1 Considering the incessant activity of the time, the large demands made by science upon the attention of all but the lowest classes, and the serious problems arising from the profoundly modified condition of society, it would not be wonderful if fun and frolic were wholly eclipsed. We cannot be in two places at the same time; nor can we be under the influence of two moods. Joyousness depends upon favourable conditions, upon good health and kindly relations with men and things. When we find, therefore, that in spite of the rush and roar prevailing everywhere, in spite of remorseless egotisms, and of the left school for good' some months before. The endemic malady of thought, that laughter prospect of the journey had been scarcely less innocent and hearty still ripples over the grim | delightful than that of London itself, and tedious MANY years ago, when a journey from Edinburgh to London was a matter of days instead of hours, I started to make it, for the first time in my life, in the stagecoach which I shall call the Royal William. I was travelling alone, inasmuch as I knew none of the other passengers; but the guard had been tipped' to look after me, and he did that as well and for as long as he could. It was about ten days before Christmas. I was going to pay my first visit to London, having |
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