A HIGH RANGER.

BY IAN MACLAREN.

CHAPTER I.

JASMINE COURT.

IT were profane to criticise the ways of a city council, for they are high and cannot be understood by people of low estate, but it may be allowed to express amazement at the majestic detachment from circumstances with which the streets of certain quarters are named. There is a pleasant story that the Governor of a Western State, being embarrassed by the number of new towns which were rising and the poverty of his geographical imagination, laid hold of an ancient history and reproduced the Roman Empire in his sphere of influence to the lasting satisfaction of the people and his own immense pride. It was upon this large and classical scale that the modern streets of Westport were named, and the contrast between the title and the fact lent a certain piquancy to the sombre streets, as when a solid matron pranks herself out with a gay-coloured ribbon like some young girl. When he came across a district of monotonous respectability inhabited by tradesmen, and head clerks, and widows of professional men, who took one high-class lodger, then the alderman-for less than that he could not have been-into whose hands this duty was committed divided it up among the heathen divinities, with whose lives it is only fair to suppose he was imperfectly acquainted. And when one passed from Jupiter to Leda Street, or turned the corner almost too indiscreetly from Venus to Vulcan Street, and was met everywhere with persons of almost obtrusive morality, then one began to think of the alderman as a greater Savonarola who had changed the gay society of Olympus into a company of English Puritans.....

Sometimes the alderman in the greatness of his going would drop with a certain air of good-natured toleration into modern literature, and then rows of podgy villas, of maddening uniformity, would be named after the romances of Scott or the idylls of Tennyson, and prosperous people who were on terms of jocularity with 'Mr. Alderman,' and who had copies of Tupper (in gilt) on their drawing-room tables, and preferred a good going murder story to Copyright, 1901, by the Rev. John Watson, in the United States of America.

'Vanity Fair,' would be obliged to give Guinevere Road as their private address.

The only time one was inclined to quarrel with this overlord -and this only through the pity of it-was when he relaxed from the severity of his higher studies and allowed himself, so to say, to rusticate. It was all very well that he should leave his library and lay aside his robes (purple, I imagine, trimmed with fur), and wander in easy undress through the woods and among the flowers, and a pleasure to know that he had enriched his vocabulary, but one wished he had used it more mercifully. It was a stroke of masterly irony, caught, no doubt, from over-much reading of Swift, to re-name for some municipal purpose the most miserable quarter of the city with words which carried the unfortunate inhabitants, whom drink and poverty had not made quite callous, back to the scenes of their happier childhood. Oak and beech. ash and willow, rose and primrose, snowdrop and daffodil—this remorseless satirist had spared them nothing, but was determined to press the paradox of life to its utmost. It was his masterstroke to call the street which ran from Lancaster Road through the most miserable section of a most miserable quarter by the name of Chestnut. One thought at the sound thereof of a vista of stately trees, whose branches met one another along some boulevard, and whose greenery filled the vision from the windows. beneath whose shade age sat and children played, whose breaking forth was a glory in the spring-time. What one saw was a street where two dust-carts, if they had met-which they never did-would have passed with difficulty; where the only greenery was refuse from the baskets of street hawkers, and the flowers were heaps of unsavoury rubbish. There were seats all along the streetthe doorsteps of the houses-on which women were sitting, idle. dishevelled, dirty--and the whole street was a playground where neglected children made such sport as they could, floating sticks in the gutter or dragging empty biscuit-boxes as make-believe carriages.

The greater glory of the street was two gorgeous publichouses, one at either end, with plate-glass windows and mahogany fittings, and various coloured bottles, which stood like fortresses to defy any attack of religion, or even respectability, upon Chestnut Street; and, in case they should be captured, there were two other saloons, half-way along the street, to form a last reserve of resistance to cleanliness and godliness. It could not

be said that the people had much to spare from necessary food and clothing—and, indeed, it might be very well urged that they had not enough to secure even such necessaries for themselves and their children. And yet the men found money somehow to drink themselves into a state of sodden stupidity every Saturday night, and occasionally, if work were rife, on other nights too; and the women, although kept on short allowance, no doubt for moral reasons, by their lords and masters, also dropped in during the daytime to refresh themselves under the burden of life, and also-but that was an accident with which they had nothing to do- to swell the profits of a brewer who owned some hundreds of those outposts of civilisation and gave munificently to the decoration of the cityas if, indeed, he had not spent enough upon the decoration of its poorer quarters already. There was a lesser glory in Chestnut Street, and that was a couple of exceedingly modest shops, which certainly could not boast of any ornament, and which had a very small take' indeed, compared with the Chestnut Tree' and the 'Old House at Home,' as the brewer with pleasant humour called his establishments. Those shops depended on the sale of the 'Police News' and other highly-illustrated, but not immoral, literature, on herb beer (a decoction which almost excused a man going into the public-house), and small articles of food; but they chiefly maintained their existence, and afforded a scanty living to the women who kept them, by the sale, at an enormous profit, of the humblest form of sweets.

Although the young Chestnuts had not, as a rule, been afflicted with soap for the last month, and their clothes were sanitary to the highest degree in the matter of ventilation, they seemed to be able to purchase sweets almost daily, which showed either that there was more affluence in Chestnut Street than one would have expected, or that their improvident and often intoxicated parents were at least good-natured to their children. When a young Chestnut had a huge brown sugar ball in his mouth which he shared in turn with two or three friends-keeping a watchful eye upon the length of time each friend had it in his mouth-and was able to build a fortress out of a mass of garbage where he could reproduce the South African War, he was fairly happy; and as he seemed indifferent to cold and wet, perhaps he was not so badly off, after all, and having all the joys of a savage state of existence, did not deserve so much pity as philanthropic ladies wasted fruitlessly upon him when they took their turn of slumming in Chestnut Street.

Chestnut Street could not be called a pleasant spectacle for-the eyes, and it was particularly unpleasant-material for the nose any day; while on Saturday night it was beyond description, and was not, happily, then seen by ladies, philanthropic or otherwise.

There is always a lower deep, and whatever may have been the sanitary and social defects of Chestnut Street, its inhabitants regarded the courts behind with pity and contempt, and in this aristocratic attitude the Chestnuts had reason on their side. Their street, at least, was open from end to end, and when the wind was in the right quarter the thickness of its atmosphere was stirred, and some slight breath of freshness came to their doors: they had, for the most part, water somewhere in each house, and sanitary accommodation, although thirty people might share it; they had a view of a kind across the street, and a more limited one-very limited indeed-upon a back yard behind; their houses also had a back as well as a front, so that if the family in the upper back room opened their window, which possibly had openings which were automatic, and also opened their door, which possibly had nothing to keep it shut, and the family in the upper front room did likewise, they might by good luck and hearty cooperation get up a draught, and on a favourable day, by the greatest of good fortune, have a suggestion of fresh air in both rooms. West-end people, with their big houses and gardens. might commiserate the Chestnuts, but they had reason to thank God-although they did not do so, being beneath all forms of religion that they were not as the miserables of the court, and especially those whose lot was cast in Jasmine.

Jasmine Court, Chestnut Street. belonged to an excellent maiden lady, who supported mission work among the women of India with all her spare means, and did not know whence her income was gathered, and would have been very much horrified if anyone had told her that her own tenants needed her help very much more than the women in the zenanas. Her estate, with others of the same kind, was managed by an agent, who was not any worse by nature than other men, but who considered it to be his duty to spend as little upon the property, and to get as much out of the property, as he was able by unrelenting energy in securing the rent and imperturbable callousness to the misery of the tenants. Very likely he was a deacon in a chapel somewhere, and not only paid his own bills with regularity, but also gave liberally to the hospital collection, and was very much beloved in

his own family.

For half our sins are done vicariously or ignorantly, and we may be as cruel as Herod the Great, and all the time consider ourselves to be kind-hearted, open-handed, Christian people. The agent would have been very much ashamed if anyone had accused him of sentiment, and his policy might well justify him from such a charge; but even this austere man had his lapses into poetry, although he endeavoured to make the Muses serve the purposes of business. So long as the street to which his property clung, like a child to the skirts of a very unsympathetic mother, was called Back Hooley Lane, he was quite content that his court should be known as No. 11; and, indeed, except for police sheets and coroners' inquests, it did not really require any name. Chestnut Street quickened the imagination of the agent, and as occasionally he had been told that his property was a moral disgrace to the city--this by the philanthropic visitors-and also that it was a sanguinary pigstye-this, slightly translated, by the inhabitants-he felt that something must be done; but instead of cleaning and repairing it, he covered all its faults as with a garment by painting up in black letters on a white ground-the only whiteness in the place-Jasmine Court. This achievement no doubt gratified the agent's artistic sense, and showed the good effect of the alderman's example, but I regret to say that it did not lay to rest the grumbling of the tenants or make the court more popular. They were not intimately acquainted with the names of flowers, and took it into their heads that Jasmine was the designation of some blooming toff' whom they henceforward regarded with undying hatred.

'Oo's 'e?' inquired Mrs. Hopkins-a lady of commanding temper and less than bigoted abstinence, who had sauntered to the mouth of the passage to get a breath of air and see what the painter was doing. Oo's this 'ere Jasmine, wot's stickin' 'is blooming name on the wall and sp'ilin' a respectable court? If 'e'd jist come down we'd Jasmine 'im-I'd wipe up the court with 'im.'

And there was a general idea in old No. 11 that a liberty had been taken.

It was encouraging to know that any sense of pride survived in Jasmine Court, for one would have said that the last liberty had been taken with that unfortunate locality, and that it would not have been possible to invent a new insult. You entered it by a long, narrow, covered passage, which was the only ventilating shaft which Jasmine enjoyed. As the shaft was