CHAPTER XLIII. A LOW LOT. WHEN the morning broke, Richard Cable did not dare to kiss the white brows or the rosy cheeks of his sleeping children; but he took little locks of their shining hair between his fingers and put his lips to them, and dropped over each alike a clear teardrop, and then went away before the seven pairs of bright eyes opened, and the little voices began to chirp and laugh and chatter. Richard Cable drove his herd of young cattle all the way from St. Kerian to Exeter, some fifty miles. There he trucked them on the Bristol and Exeter line, and travelled with them into Somersetshire, where he disposed of them to such advantage that he was well content. But he would not return with only money in his pocket. He had a van constructed, very light, on four wheels, for his cob, and he bought as many calves, a week or ten days old, as he could convey in this van. Bessie fall. He never got that experience "Have you any relatives this way?" asked Mrs. Stokes one Saturday evening. "There's a young woman of your name at the Hall, a lady's maid to Miss Otterbourne." "I have no relatives," answered Richard, "but the seven and my mother who are under my roof at St. Kerian, in Cornwall." "'Tis a curious and outlandish sort of a name too," said Mrs. Stokes. "I mean, it ain't a name one expects to come across twice in a lifetime."" Richard shrugged his shoulders. "Here comes Mr. Polkinghorn, the footman," said the landlady. "He does come here at times to see if there be any one to have a talk with. He can tell you all about your namesake." "I am not interested about her," answered Richard. "I have none that belong to me save the seven and my mother, and they — I know where they are, under my own roof." He made Bewdley his headquarters, and stayed at the Otterbourne Arms, where was the landlady, Mrs. Stokes, the sister of the coastguardman at Pentargon. To her he remitted the spar, and the mundic, and the brooch of bog-oak with Cornish crystals in it. She was a tidy, red-cheeked woman, with many children. Among these was a Mary, the eldest, as Cable had been told there would be. He took great delight in talking to and playing with this "Good-evening, Mr. Polkinghorn; how little girl, and also in listening to the crow-do you find yourself? And how is Miss ing and laughing, and occasional crying, Otterbourne?" of the rest of the family. They recalled to him sounds very familiar and very dear. He looked long and curiously at the little Stokes children, and thought how vastly inferior to his own they were in every particular, in manners and in appearance. He did not allow the landlady to see that he drew comparisons between her children and his own - that he considered the blue of his Mary's eyes purer and deeper and truer in color than that of the irises of her Mary that there was richer gold and gold more abundant in the hair of his eldest daughter than crowned her first daughter. He had not the coarse pride which would suffer him to do this, and wound the good woman's vanity; but he thought it, nay, he knew it; he was as positive that all superiority in every way lay with his children and his Mary, as that an English soldier could thrash a dozen Frenchmen. Cable was a temperate man. He remembered that terrible night when he let little "We are both of us pretty well. She's been suffering a little from nettle rash, that has made her fractious, and she has rung the bell outrageous; but she's better now, and I'm middling, thank you. Worrited with her nettle rash and the constant ringing of the bell caused by the irritation. First, it was the blinds were not drawn to her fancy; then it was she wanted a lump of coal with the wood in the grate; and then the Venetian blinds must come down, or be turned, or pulled up; and then the geranium or pelargonium on the table I'm blessed, Mrs. Stokes, if I know what is the difference between a geranium and a pelargonium-wanted water; or she desired another book from the library. It really is wonderful, Mrs. Stokes I'll have a glass of beer, thank you-how a little matter upsets a whole household. It comes of lobster mayonaise or cucumber, one or t'other, which don't agree with the old woman. If she takes either of them, and she's roaring fond of them, face; he thought the man might be a lunatic; therefore, with great presence of mind, he drew the cheese-knife from his plate and secreted it in the pocket of his short coat. she gets eruptions, generally nettle rash; | backed his chair from the table. He did and when she's got eruptions, it disturbs not like the expression on the stranger's us all, keeps the whole household capering; one has to go for the doctor, another has to get cooling fomentations, and her temper is that awful, it is a wonder we stand it. But we know her, and put it down to disorder of the system. We must bear and forbear; must we not, Mrs. | ard. Stokes? so we pass over all the aggravations, as good Christians and philanthropists." "You've not been introduced," said the hostess. "You don't know this gentleman, Mr. Cable of Cornwall.' "Cornwall!" exclaimed the footman. "You don't happen to have come across the manor and mansion of Polkinghorn anywhere thereabouts, do you? Our family come from the west of England, and have a lordship called after us; but I don't exactly know where it is. Still, it's traditional in the family that there is one. We've come down in life; but so have many great folks; and, sir, what are our British aristocracy now?-mushrooms, sir, creatures of to-day. Bankers and brewers and civil engineers, who were not even known, who had not lifted their heads out of the dust, when the Polkinghorns were lords of manors and drove their coach-and-four." Mrs. Stokes produced the ale. "I'll take a mouthful of bread and cheese with it," said the footman, who was not now in livery. "So you, sir, are called Cable. We've a Cable among us." "Do you mean among the Polking horns?" Polkinghorns, sir!" said the footman, bridling up. "I do not, sir, think such a name as Cable has found its way among us, into our tree, sir. I alluded to an inmate of the Hall, sir, a lady's maid there, who is a Rope or a Cable, or something of that sort-possibly, as she is not stout, merely a Twine." Then, as he finished his glass of ale: "Excuse my freedom, sir; I am generally_accounted a wit. I once sent a trifle to Punch." "I asked you a question," cried Rich"What did you say? 66 Merely, sir, merely that that we have a lady's maid attending on our old woman who is good-looking, but wanting in what I should consider - breeding. If she be a relative, I am sorry"What is her name?" Josephine Cable." "How long has she been with you? "Since last September. She was well recommended; she brought excellent testimonials. Her character quite irreproachable-from some good friends of ours, the Sellwoods of Essex, a respectable family, unfortunate in having gone into the Church. I should have preferred the army for them." "Why is she " Cable stopped; he was trembling. He put his hand to the table to steady himself. "I mean - who is she? "I do not know," answered Mr. Polkinghorn. "She is uncommunicative; that is what I mean when I say she has not the breed of a lady. She ain't at her ease and familiar with us. She is reserved, as she might call it; awkward, as I should say. If we ask her questions, she don't answer. She's maybe frightened at finding herself in such high society; and I'm not surprised. I don't fancy she was in other than a third-class situation before — with some people in business or profession-not real aristocrats. That does make a person feel out of her element when she rises to our walk of life. It is just the same as if you were to invite a common sailor to a dinner-party among millionaires and aristocrats - how would he feel? He'd look this way and that and be without power of speech. He wouldn't know where to put his feet and how to behave himself. It is much the same with Miss Cable. She's not been brought up to our line of life, and don't understand it, and is as miserable among us as a common sailor would be among gentleman and "Did you say Miss Cable?" you understand me, which pro-ladies." claims inferiority. Not bad-looking, either, is Miss Josephine." "What! shouted Cable, springing to his feet and striking the table. "What did you say?" Mr. Polkinghorn stared at him and "To be sure I did. I don't suppose she's a married woman. She wears no gold wedding ring." "And her Christian name is 'Josephine. But then we always call 66 Necessity of course. No lady would so demean herself unless forced. Will you take a glass of ale with me?" "With pleasure," answered Cable; "and I'll ask you not to mention my name at your place not to the young lady you speak of." "I understand," said Mr. Polkinghorn with a wink, and a tap of his nose with his finger. "Poor relations are nuisances; they come a-sucking and a-sponging, and are a drag on a man who is making his way. No, sir, I'll not say a word. May I ask if she is a relative ?" "I have not seen her. I cannot say." "Does the name Josephine run in the family, as John Thomas does in that of Polkinghorn?" "We never had one baptized by that name.' "I myself," said the footman, "intend to marry some day, so as to perpetuate John Thomas. I'm not sure that I may not take Miss Raffles. I won't deny that I had a tenderness towards the Cable at first; she is good-looking, has fine eyes, splendid hair; a brunette, you understand, with olive skin, and such a figure! But I could not stand the want of polish and ease which go with the true lady, and that she will never get among us. Richard left the room abruptly. He was greatly moved, partly with surprise at finding Josephine in such a position, partly with anger at the insolence of the footman. This latter looked after him contemptu ously. "Well, Mrs. Stokes," he said, "I've only come on two Cables in the course of my experience, and, dash me, if there be not a twist in them both." Richard went forth, and did not return to the inn till late. He walked by the river. He was disturbed in mind. Mr. Sellwood had told him nothing of Josephine's plan of going into service; he had not felt himself authorized to do this; and at the time he saw Cable, he doubted whether Josephine's resolution might not be overcome. All that Cable knew was that she had surrendered the estate and left the Hall. She was proud, and would have nothing to do with a property that came to her, as she concluded, unjustly; and he was proud, he would accept no property that was offered to him by her. But that she had been so reduced in circumstances by this voluntary surrender as to oblige her to earn her bread by menial work, seemed to him imposssible. Her father was a man of some fortune. It was not possible that he would consent to her leaving him for such a purpose. Yet, how else could he account for Josephine's being at Bewdley Manor in the capacity represented? There was a mistake. This could not be Josephine. Some one else was in the house who had assumed her name. He could not be satisfied till he had seen her. But he would not allow himself to be seen by her. He hobbled along the river path, leaning on his stick, racking his brain over the questions that arose, seeking solutions which always escaped him. To whom at Hanford could he apply for information concerning the affairs and movements of his wife? There was no one but Mr. Sellwood, and to him he would not write. His brother-in-law Jonas Flinders was dead, and he shrank from corresponding on the subject with any of his old mates. a Then he suddenly burst into a bitter laugh. Was this his Josephine, this servant girl, whom the vulgar flunky, and with him her fellow-servants, despised as not up to their level, wanting in style low lot? Josephine, who had scorned his lack of breeding, was herself looked down on by the ignoble tribe of pariahs on civ. ilization! It was a just judgment on her. How she must toss and writhe, what agonies of rage and humiliation she must endure in such association! "A low lot!" shouted Cable, slashing at the bulrush heads on the bank, and laughing savagely a low lot!" But then a gentler feeling came over him, a wave of his old kindliness and pity, so long suppressed or beaten back. He saw his haughty, splen did, wilful Josephine surrounded by these common-minded, swaggering, vain, unintelligent, and debased creatures - alone, cold, stern, eating out her heart rather than show her disgust and shame. If it had been misery to him to be transferred to a condition of life above him to which he was unfitted, it must be misery to her to be flung down into a sphere to her infi and ran as hard as he could run with his faulty thigh along the road, and the dog heard his retreating steps and barked furiously. Cable heeded nothing, but ran on with the sweat breaking out on his brow and dripping from his face, as it had dripped on that night when he ran to Brentwood Hall, and as now the dew was dripping from the leaves of the trees in the park. Only when he reached the river bank outside the park gate, away from the sight of the house and the sound of the song, did he halt and strike his stick angrily, passionately, into the oozy soil, and cry out, half sobbingly, half savagely: "A low lot! A low lot!" From Macmillan's Magazine. HOMER THE BOTANIST. nitely distasteful and repellent. He was a man who could hold his own, or retire with dignity. She was a girl, helpless. His heart began to flutter, and he turned his steps into the path by a wicket gate. The evening was still, the sky clear. The great trees stood against the silver-gray sky as blots. The dew was falling heavily; the grass was charged with water. He might as well have been wading in a stream as walking through it. So heavily was the dew falling, that the leaves of the trees were laden with the moisture, and bowed under the weight, and dripped as with rain. The glow-worms shone in the damp banks and among the grass under the tree-trunks. The stars were twinkling in the sky, looking golden in contrast with the bluish light of the glow-worms; an auroral haze hung over the set sun, fringed with a faint tinge of ruddy brown before it died into the deep gray blue of the night sky. THERE are certain low-lying districts in He drew near to the house, and a watch-southern Spain where the branched lily, dog in the back court began to bark. It or king's spear, blooms in such profusion had heard his steps on the gravel of the that whole acres, seen from a distance drive. Richard stepped off the carriage- towards the end of March, show as if way upon the turf and remained still. The densely strewn with new-fallen snow. Just dog, hearing no further noise, presently such in aspect must have been the abode of desisted from barking. Then Richard the Odyssean dead. There, along boundmoved on through the grass till he came less asphodel plains, Ulysses watched where he could see the front of Bewdley Orion, a spectral huntsman pursuing specManor-house. Three tall windows were tral game; there Agamemnon denounced lighted, one somewhat brilliantly, the next the treachery of Clytemnestra; there Ajax less so, the third least of all. It was clear still nursed his wrath at the award of the that all three belonged to one room, per- Argive kings; there Achilles gnawed a haps a drawing-room, and that the lamp shadowy heart in longing, on any terms, that. illumined it was at one end. The for action and the upper air; thither Her window which was at the further end was mes conducted the delinquent souls of the half open, the blind was drawn up, and suitors of Penelope. A tranquil dwellingRichard could make out gilt frames to place; where the stagnant air of apathy large pictures on a dark wall. He stood, was stirred only by sighs of inane regret. looking at the three windows, wondering whether a shadow would pass, and by the shadow he could tell who it was that passed. Did he desire to see Josephine again? He shrank from so doing; but he was uneasy at the thought that she was in this great house, a servant, with fellows like Polkinghorn about her. As he stood thus, looking up, he heard the notes of a piano issue from the open window. The first chords that were struck made him start and a shiver pass through his limbs. Then he heard a clear voice, rich and sweet, sing: O wie wogt es sich schön auf der Fluth, Homer's asphodel grows only in the under world, yet it is no mythical plant. It can be quite clearly identified with the Asphodelus ramosus, now extensively used in Algeria for the manufacture of alcohol, and cultivated in our gardens for the sake of its tall spikes of beautiful flowers, pure white within and purplestreaked without along each of the six petals uniting at the base to form a deeply indented starry corolla. The continual visits of pilfering bees attest a goodly store of honey; while the perfume spread over the northern shores of the Gulf of Corinth by the abundant growth of aspho The daffodil has no other connection with the asphodel than having unaccountably appropriated its of narcissus, while the asphodel belongs to the lily name, through the old French affodille. It is a kind tribe. del was said to have given their name, in some far-off century, to the Ozolians of Locris. Introduced into England about 1551, it was succeeded, after forty-five years, by the yellow asphodel (Asphodelus luteus), of which already in 1633 Gerard in his "Herbal" reports "great plenty in our London gardens." Hence Pope's familiarity with this kind and his consequent matter-of-course identification of it with the classical flower in the lines, the potato of antiquity. It indeed surpassed the potato in fecundity, though falling far below it in nutritive qualities. Pliny, in his natural history, states that about eighty tubers, each the size of an average turnip, were often the produce of a single plant; and the French botanist, Charles de l'Ecluse, travelling across Portugal in 1564-5, saw the plough disclose fully two hundred attached to the same stalk, and together weighing, he estimated, some fifty pounds. Moreover, the tubers so plentifully developed are extremely rich in starch and sugar, so that the poorer sort, who possessed no flocks or herds to supply their table with fat pork, loins of By those happy souls who dwell On yellow meads of asphodel: wherein he has entirely missed what may with some reason be called the local color-young oxen, roasted goats' tripe, or similar ing of Hades. carnal delicacies, were glad to fall back upon the frugal fare of mallow and asphodel lauded by Hesiod. Theophrastus tells us that the roasted stalk, as well as the seed, of the asphodel served for food; but chiefly its roots, which, bruised up with figs, were in extensive use. Pliny seems to prefer them cooked in hot ashes, and eaten with salt and oil; but it may be doubted whether he spoke from personal experience. In order to explain the lugubrious associations of the branched asphodel, we must go back to an early stage of thought regarding the condition of the dead. Instinctively man assumes that his existence will, in some form, be continued beyond the grave. Only a few of the most degraded savages, or a handful of the most enlightened sceptics, accept death with stolid indifference as an absolute end. The almost universally prevalent belief is Their consumption, however, was recthat it is a change, not a close. Humanity, ommended by the example of Pythagoras, as a whole, never has admitted and never and was said to have helped to lengthen can apostatize from its innate convictions out the fabulous years of Epimenides. by admitting that its destiny is mere blank Yet, such illustrious examples notwithcorruption. Apart from the body, how-standing, the degenerate stomachs of more ever, life can indeed be conceived, but recent times have succeeded ill in accomcannot be imagined; since imagination modating themselves to such spare susteworks only with familiar materials. Re-nance. course was then inevitably had to the expedient of representing the under world as a shadowy reflection of the upper. Disembodied spirits were supposed to feel the same needs, to cherish the same desires, as when clothed in the flesh; but they were helpless to supply the first or to gratify the second. Their opulence or misery in their new abode depended solely upon the pitying care of those who survived them. This mode of thinking explains the savage rites of sacrifice attendant upon primitive funeral ceremonies; it converted the tombs of ancient kings into the treasure houses of modern archæologists; and it suggested a system of commissariat for the dead, traces of which still linger in many parts of the world. Here we find the clue we are in search of. It is afforded by the simple precautions adopted by unsophisticated people against famine in the realm of death. Amongst the early Greeks, the roots of the branched lily were a familiar article of diet. The asphodel has even been called When about the middle of last century the Abate Alberto Fortis was travelling in Dalmatia, he found inhabitants of the village of Bossiglina, near Traù, so poor as to be reduced to make their bread of bruised asphodel roots, which proving but an indifferent staff of life, digestive troubles and general debility ensued. This is the last recorded experiment of the kind. The needs of the human economy are far better, more widely, and almost as cheaply subserved by the tuber brought by Raleigh from Virginia. The plant of Proserpine is left for Apulian sheep to graze upon. Asphodel roots, accordingly, rank with acorns as a prehistoric, but now discarded article of human food. They were, it is likely, freely consumed by the earliest inhabitants of Greece, before the cultivation of cereals had been introduced from the East. There is little fear of error in assuming that the later Achaian immigrants found them already consecrated by traditional usage to the sustenance of the dead. Perhaps because the immemorial antiquity |