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has again affixed her tears to the account of Princess Charlotte running away late at night to her injured and deserted mother in 'only a little pelisse and an Oldenburg bonnet':

Her Royal Highness actually ran until she reached a hackney-coach on the stand in Cockspur Street. She did not wait for assistance, but with her own hand opened the door and got in and instantly after the coach drove off. She was fetched back at three in the morning by the Duke of York, Mr. Brougham having hastened to inform Her Royal Highness that the laws of the land compelled her to obey her father's commands.

Of the later nuptials of the Princess to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey has surely gathered into her scrapbook every detail. · The marriage was solemnized at nine o'clock in the evening in the Great Crimson Room of Carlton House, and after it the Royal pair drove to the Duke of York's seat at Oatlands, which they did not reach till after midnight. Some one told Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey that the next morning the Prince came down to breakfast in a blue coat, buff waistcoat, and black pantaloons.

'A bridegroom in black pantaloons! The death of one of the bridal pair within the year was thus made

inevitable.'

Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey has also affixed her own comment to the lengthy account of the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the Thames Tunnel. 'Precisely at twenty-five minutes before four o'clock, Her Majesty, Prince Albert and their suite landed on the Tunnel pier where the company was more numerous than select. Her Majesty and the Prince, however, continued to look remarkably well.' Against this Mrs. Humphrey has written: "There is no doubt that in such cases special grace is vouchsafed.'

She likes pathos and sensibility. She has selected a series of verses which have as a truly melancholy but crisp

refrain, 'Her heart had burst - had burst,' and they are followed by an 'Ode to a young lady who expired suddenly during the Marriage Service,' and a warm commendation of another young lady who, thinking that it was a younger son who was going to offer himself, fainted when she discovered that her attraction had really been felt by the Earl. But Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey is most captivated by the cheerful and humorous:

The most extraordinary instance of corpulency known in later times is that of Mr. Bright, a tallow chandler of Maldon, Essex, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine. Seven persons of the common size were with ease enclosed in his waistcoat, and a stocking which, when sent home to him, was found too little, was large enough to hold a child four years old. Mr. Bright was comely in his person, affable in his temper, honest in his trade. He was a kind husband, a tender father, a good dancer, and a valuable friend.

'I should like to have seen the creature,' is Mrs. Humphrey's comment.

From the series of exclamations, she also likes the story for which Baron Sternhold vouches in John Bull, recalled by the proceedings taken in 1820 before the Consistory Court, imputing to the Rev. James Cotteril, of St. Paul's, Sheffield, irregularity in causing to be sung in his church certain hymns and versions of psalms not permitted by any lawful authority:

I enclose you a copy of a Psalm sung at a church in Yorkshire composed by the parish clerk on occasion of the distemper among the horned cattle in the summer of 1784. It was sung and chorussed by the whole congregation in the church. The four first stanzas contained an account of the cattle that died, and the names of the farmers to whom they all belonged; the remaining verses were as follows:

'No Christian bull, nor cow, they say,
But takes it out of hand;
And we shall have no cows at all,
I doubt, within this land.

The doctors, though they all have spoke
Like learned gentlemen,
And told us how the entrails look,
Of cattle, dead and green.

Yet they do nothing do at all,

With all their learning store;

So heaven drive out this plague away,

And vex us not, no more."

This piece was so well received that after the service it was desired again by all the congregation, except five farmers, who wept, and declared that 'the lines were too moving.' The clergyman, in going out, said to the clerk, 'Why, John, what psalm was that we had to-day - it was not one of David's?' 'No, no, Sir,' quoth John, big with the honor he had acquired, 'David never made such a psalm since he was born - this is one of my own.'

Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey has property, and is resolved to earn laurels by it as easily as this Berkshire landlord:

Formerly the cottages were in bad order, the pavements and windows broken. I engaged, after the cottages were thoroughly repaired, to pay £1 a year for repairing them. I undertook to make the repairs myself, and deduct the expenses from this £1, but if they wanted no repairs they were to have the whole £1 for themselves. This course has, I find, formed habits of care, and no deduction is ever made. In the winter I give them two-score of faggots toward their fuel, and by this means save my hedges and fences. I have set out four acres as a play-ground, on which my sheep and cows feed, keeping the grass under so that balls can run, and I also let it for £4 a year to a man on condition that he cuts the hedges and keeps it clean. Many persons accuse the poor of ingratitude, but I find them the most grateful people alive for these little attentions. And what do they all cost me? Why, not more altogether than the keep of one fat coach horse!

Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey warmly commends to all bachelors the example of Mr. William Akers, a fan-maker of Fetter Lane, who, by denying himself every luxury except a little gin and water, accumulated six thousand pounds, which he left to 'Her Majesty, my Queen,' to be applied by her toward the liquidation of the National Debt; but underneath the story she has written: 'It is to be hoped that married gentlemen will not thus put patriotism before the comfort of their ladies!'

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An amusing little story, to which, as usual, a footnote is added, is told under the heading 'A Curious Stratagem':

On Thursday morning last the village of Walton upon Thames was thrown into a considerable state of alarm in consequence of the appearance of a man, dressed in a smock frock, his face and hands blackened, with a tremendous cudgel in his hand, which he brandished in a menacing manner, going from house to house. Everyone ran to their doors to look at him, and on a particular house being opened the supposed maniac entered and the mystery was explained. It proved that he was a constable, who had disguised himself in the frightful manner above described for the purpose of drawing the people who resided in that house to the door, in order to execute a distress warrant, issued against them by the magistrates at Kingston. They, being on their guard, kept their door locked, but by this dark stratagem were induced to open it.

'May heaven,' hopes Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey, 'always inspire with such inventiveness the constables who are often set by the Almighty to be the only protection of lonely, imposedupon females.'

As she is one of the large class of people who prefer conversation to concerts, she is strongly in sympathy with 'Monochord,' who, driven crazy by the Waterloo Waltz and the Coburg Cotillion, writes to the Morning Chronicle to suggest that no gentleman or lady shall be permitted to perform in private without a licence to be taken out annually in the same manner as that for wearing hair powder:

Those unfortunate gentlemen who have more than one musical wife [sic] and three unmarried musical daughters shall be subject to a modification of the duty, and though the tax may not knock pianos on the head so much as it has knocked hair powder out of it, it may prevent cabinet makers from sticking piano-fortes instead of cellarets into their side-boards which, alas! has now become the fashion. Instead of being ordered to 'bring the other bottle' John is commanded to 'arrange the side-board for Miss Phoebe,' when, by touching a spring, down drops the front of the side-board, which instantly becomes a piano-forte, and furnishes the entertainment of the long evening,

Perhaps that is enough of Mrs. Elizabeth Humphrey's footnotes to history as it appealed to her in her hour. We leave her not without a lively feeling of gratitude to the order of mind which enables us to affix some of the fringes and flounces to life as it was lived nearly a century ago.

[The Bookman] PATRICK MACGILL, THE NAVVY POET'

BY DAVID HODGE

IN a sense it is unfortunate that Patrick MacGill should still have attached to him the label 'the navvy poet,' for he has progressed far on the literary highway since the days when his writings were regarded as remarkable in themselves but more so on account of the fact that they were the work of a self-taught Irish stripling who had left his native Donegal to work as a navvy in Scotland. In another sense the retention of the label is fitting, because he was among the first to make vocal that little understood class the Irish navvies who toil unregarded at our railways, docks, and roads, and at the beginning of his writing career it was in verse that he did this service to his colleagues of the pick and shovel. That was only ten or twelve years ago, when MacGill was working as a member of a repair gang on the Caledonian Railway between Greenock and Wemyss Bay. At that time with characteristic enterprise

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he resorted to the methods of the early poets and did his own distribution, leaving his little Gleanings from a Navvy's Scrapbook at back doors one evening and calling back later in the week for sixpence if the book had happened to meet some one who wished to buy it. A bright-eyed lad with black curly hair and a melodious and sym

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pathetic voice, his personality excited almost as much interest as his writings, and to this day- when he approaches his thirtieth year and has to his credit a long list of books in prose and verse and an established reputation among contemporary poets and novelistspublic curiosity remains keen as to how a youth with little or no educational advantages, and with all the disadvantages that a navvy's life may be expected to place in the way of literary development, succeeded in achieving his present eminence. It may be said that greater writers were more severely handicapped by their early environment and early life, and the cases of Dickens and Burns may be cited. The boy Dickens had disabilities almost as. serious as those of MacGill, but Burns had not, thanks to his father, from whom he received a sound education and every encouragement to study.

Naturally, many myths surround MacGill's beginnings. It is told, for instance, without truth, that he first took to writing verse through having picked from the permanent way on which he was at work in the Glasgow neighborhood, Barrack-Room Ballads, dropped from a passing train. More accurate is the tale that MacGill was interested in a poem on a margarine wrapper at Kinlochleven, and that, moved to emulation by what he had read, he wrote some lines which he sent to a Glasgow evening newspaper, which not only printed them but paid for them. Facts are that he was born at Glenties, County Donegal, of poor peasant parents, attended the national school of his village, but left at the age of ten and went, when twelve, to work as a laborer in the Irish Midlands. Later he worked in Scotland as a railway platelayer and as navvy at the great. waterworks at Kinlochleven, from which he returned to the railway. All the time he had been endeavoring to

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educate himself. He joined circulating libraries, and studied in particular Montaigne, Carlyle, Victor Hugo, Bret Harte and Rudyard Kipling. The secondhand bookshops of the cities knew him well, but at these establishments he had to go cautiously, the booksellers often insisting that he must purchase books he had fingered, so grimy were his navvy hands. To a London newspaper he sent an article on navvy life. 'Post that man his railway fare, and bring him south,' said the editor, much impressed by the contribution. MacGill duly presented himself in Fleet Street, where the corduroys of the raw-green navvy were at once superseded by less unconventional Fleet Street attire, and he was instructed to write half a column on the latest fashions in men's neckties and socks. He tried to do so, but failed. which is not surprising, the task to which he was put being just as easy for him as the writing of an essay on bimetallism or George Meredith would be to a Sandwich Islander. MacGill was not a Fleet Street success: not even an Irish Barrie can picture him as a disciple of Rob Angus and Noble Simms. Later, he was taken in hand by Canon Dalton, through whose influence the young Irishman got congenial work among the manuscripts at Windsor Castle, where he might have been to this day if his novels had not encouraged him to devote himself exclusively to letters. In August, 1914, he joined the army, and as a private in the London Irish he fought till wounded at Loos and invalided out. He had many offers of a commission, but he preferred to remain in the ranks, where he felt that he could best study the fighting man. Returning to England he was employed in the War Office Propaganda Department, where written work had to be turned out whether the spirit moved him or not. The effect

was not wholly beneficial; but he has now completely returned to himself, as witness his new novel, Maureen.

MacGill has written many noteworthy works - all highly charged with the influence of a masterful personality-but his most important books remain Children of the Dead End and The Rat Pit. Each is autobiographical to a large extent, and it is in describing what he has actually seen and felt that MacGill- like the majority of authors — is at his best. With imagination he is not always — even in his verse- completely successful, and it is the easiest thing in the world to determine which parts of his books are based on actual experience and which on hearsay or invention. Realism is the key-note of Children of the Dead End and The Rat Pit- which are indeed one book, both telling the story of Dermod Flynn and Norah Ryan, who come from Ireland as mere children to take part in the arduous and miserably-paid work of potatodigging in Scotland. MacGill writes with first-hand knowledge of this work, but the appalling particulars he gives as to how the workers live and are housed have been challenged.

He describes the sleeping quarters of the decent Irish folk as 'an evil-smelling byre, the roof of which was covered with cobwebs, the floor with dung. On both sides of the sink, which ran up the middle, was a row of stalls, each stall containing two iron stanchions to which chains for tying cattle were fixed.' A government report gives even a more fœtid description of such accommodation as was provided for these Irish toilers within recent years. But still more amazing to the uninformed must appear MacGill's accounts of Glasgow's underworld. It is an underworld of which even an overwhelming majority of the citizens of that city had no knowledge; but it existed, and there

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is no reason to believe that it does not exist to-day. The back 'lands' are still there, the barefooted harlots, the squalid public houses, the dust-heap pickers, the doss-houses, the sweating, and the churches that have as neighbors dens of iniquity and vice. Regarding all these we are not spared in the pages of MacGill. It is with Zolaesque vigor and relentlessness that he tells of these and of the making of the great aluminium works at Kinlochleven, an undertaking that drew navvies from all parts of Britain and Ireland to form a community that would not have seemed incongruous at Ballarat or the Klondyke in their early days.

At Kinlochleven, MacGill worked,
and wrote, and fought. His descrip-
tions of fights are lyrics of the ring
not the ring as we have it in London to-
day, but the ring of the olden times
when men fought with bare fists for the
sport of the thing and not for pots of
gold. While Kinlochleven was in the
making, the outside public had no
knowledge of the mighty work in prog-
ress, and they would have remained
ignorant as to what the making of it
meant had not the rough, fighting,
card-playing, blaspheming navvies had
among them the author of Children of

the Dead End. There were no women at
Kinlochleven. The author writes:
'Since I came to Kinlochleven I had
not looked on a woman, and the
thoughts of womankind had almost
gone from my mind. With the rest of
the men it was the same. The sexual
instinct was almost dead within them.
Women were merely dreams of long
ago.' At another point he describes
navvies as a class of men who are re-
markably pure. No women hang about
their lodging houses, and they do not
go in quest of women. Children of
the Dead End and The Rat Pit are etched
with a very sure hand, and superfluous

...

lines are rare. Pictures abound. This for instance, of Kinlochleven:

The winter was at hand. When the night drew near a great weariness came over the face of the sun as it sank down behind the hills which had seen a million sunsets. A strange silence settled on the lonely places. Nature waited breathless on the threshold of some great event, holding her hundred winds suspended in a fragile leash. The heather-bells hung motionless on their stems, the torrents dropped silently as smoke from the scarred edges of the desolate ravines, but in this silence there lay a menace; in its supreme poise was its threat of coming danger. The crash of our hammers was an outrage, and the exploding dynamite a sacrilege against tired nature.

As a poet MacGill has an easy command of rhythm as well as a true poetic sense, and it is as a poet that some of his admirers and ablest critics consider that he will leave his most enduring mark. Ten years ago he suffered from his label: in their surprise that a navvy could write verse, the critics were apt to omit to apply their customary standards. Still, nascent genius was detected; and as time went on MacGill produced verse that, the critics saw, was good, even when judged by standards that were high. It is said that he copied Kipling. Of course he did who among our youthful poets of twelve years ago did not? He copied Kipling, but the MacGill element in the copies was the stronger and the more intimate, as in 'Padding It To Ballachulish':

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