23

SIXTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS.

SOME PASSAGES BY THE WAY.

BY HENRY W. LUCY.

I.

MY START IN LIFE.

In the course of a lecturing tour which befel eight years ago, announcement in the local papers that I was to visit Gloucester brought me a letter from an unknown correspondent urgently asking for an interview. Having half an hour to spare, I called and heard the interesting disclosure that I, as head of the Hereford branch of the Lucy family, am the rightful owner of Charlecote.

I bore the news with philosophical calmness, but was interested in the voluminous notes of pedigree my friend in his zeal had acquired. They showed, what is an uncontested fact, that in the year 1786 George Lucy of Charlecote died childless. There was much hunting for the heir, resulting in the claim of a Mr. Hammond, a second cousin of the late lord of Charlecote, being conceded. Whereupon he, by sign manual, took the name of Lucy. According to my informant, my forbears, then living in Ledbury, whose church still shelters monuments to dead-and-gone Lucys, should have fought for their own. Probably in those days of slack intercommunication they never heard of the sudden death of the intestate owner of Charlecote. However it be, I must leave the responsibility with them.

I was born at Crosby, near Liverpool, on December 5. It is characteristic of the haphazard ways of the household to which I was introduced that it is at this time uncertain whether the year was 1844 or 1845. With old-age pensions in view, I begin to think it must have been 1844. Crosby at that time was a rural village. Certainly there was a garden attached to our house, as I remember my mother telling me how my father used to carry me round it, picking for me the largest strawberries.

Even at the time this was told me I thought it notable, since it was about all he ever did for me. An engraver in the watch

trade, admittedly of great taste and skill, he never within my knowledge was capable of making both ends meet. His father was a well-to-do old gentleman with a large family, amongst whom on his death he equally divided his fortune. I do not remember the legacy making any appreciable difference in our household. Probably it was mortgaged in advance. My grandfather lived in a terrace of white houses at Seacombe, facing the river and Liverpool. I recollect only once finding myself in his august presence. He was sitting at one side of the fireplace (left-hand side going in), a prim gentleman dressed in black, with a white neckcloth and a chilling aspect. On the other side of the fireplace sat an old lady, also bolt upright, in a black gown, with a colossal white cap on her head, on the whole of a kindlier aspect.

There came to me in due order of bequeathal their portraits, painted more than a hundred years ago by a master-hand. They hang in our dining-room in London, and follow the comings and goings of their grandson with wondering eyes. My grandfather put me through a tremendous examination, chiefly in arithmetic, and when it was over gave me fourpence. From the length of the examination I expected at least half a crown. As it turned out, fourpence was the kinder gift. At that time there was stationed at the approach to St. George's Landing Stage at Liverpool a man with a truck on which was displayed a tempting array of a compound resembling very stiff batter pudding. Greyishwhite in hue, here and there a raisin was ostentatiously stuck on the surface. It was sold in slabs, a penny each. Passing homeward, I invested half my capital in this nameless substance. I was dreadfully ill after eating it, and see now the finger of Providence in my grandfather's restraint from opulent generosity. If he had given me the half-crown and I had bought fifteen pennyworth of this stuff, my career, not yet started, would never have been run. 'Called hence by early doom,' I should have 'lived but to show how sweet a flower in Paradise might bloom.'

II.

IN THE HIDE AND VALONIA BUSINESS.

That at the age of twelve I should have won the head prize in a school of five hundred boys demonstrated that there was nothing further for me to learn. Accordingly, thus mature in

years, I entered the office of Messrs. King & Son, stock and share brokers, Liverpool, at a weekly wage of 3s. 6d.

I have often wished I had stayed longer in this office. Acquaintance with stockbroking and the ways of the Stock Exchange forms a useful addition to general knowledge. It certainly would have been much more valuable than the insight into the hide and valonia business I next had an opportunity of acquiring. My Stock Exchange connexion was prematurely cut short by a failing never eradicated. I had to be at the office by nine o'clock, and I rarely was. After one or two remonstrances, Mr. King gave me a week's notice. Thus was I shipwrecked on the very threshold of life. I remember, walking home on the last night of my engagement, coming up with another little office-boy also homeward bound. We did not know each other, had never been introduced, but, after the manner of boys, fell into conversation and exchanged confidences. I was sad at heart, comparing my lot with his he a trusted, probably a treasured, assistant in a commercial house; I disgraced, dismissed with 3s. 6d. in my pocket, and no prospect of any in the following week or in those that would immediately succeed it.

My mother went to my old schoolmaster, who speedily put me on the track of another engagement. This was with Mr. Robert Smith, hide merchant. Mr. Smith was a deacon at the Crescent Chapel and a member of the school committee, a noteworthy man who, directly and indirectly, had considerable influence on my life. His office was in Redcross Street, a worm-eaten, rat-haunted place in a courtyard near the docks. On one side stood the warehouse, an old building which dated back almost to the founding of Liverpool's fortunes. It has disappeared long ago; probably fell down, as the workmen used to tell me it certainly would.

Mr. Smith was not in a large way of business, and the clerical staff was limited. There was an old gentleman, formerly a prosperous hide merchant, who had come down in the world, and was glad to take the 30s. or 40s. a week offered him by the frugal Smith. I always had a notion, of course purely imaginative, that poor old Tunstall when he took service had promised to bring over some of the customers who had contributed to the fortunes of his own house when he was a merchant prince. They never came, and that was a circumstance that did not assist Mr. Smith in overlooking the broken-down

old man's habit of midday tippling. He and I shared a desk. Across the waste of years I smell the caraway-seed he assiduously chewed on returning from one of his excursions to report on some cargo of hides he had been examining or valonia he had been sampling.

Between these two men there was a universe of difference. Old Tunstall, with his red nose growing too weak to carry the glasses he wore on its very tip, shambling about the office in his shabby black clothes, pen in hand, crunching his carawayseed and affecting to be stupendously busy: prim Robert Smith, tall, erect, spotless in his attire-a blue frock-coat, buff waistcoat, grey trousers with riding-straps tightly holding them over his square-toed shoes. He was, I think, a kind-hearted man, but he was not genial. When the odour of caraway-seed was exceptionally pungent it was painful to see him cast upon old Tunstall a look of withering indignation, anger, and scorn that made me tremble in my boots. That I wore boots is a fact that proves Mr. Smith was not so tyrannical as memory recalls him. For himself he had worn shoes all his life, and he had no patience with people who preferred boots. One recommendation about his shoes he, really anxious for my welfare, pointed out was that, having them made exactly the same shape, he could change them about every morning, and so wear them evenly on sole and heel.

'What do you want with lefts and rights?' he used to ask me, as if I were responsible for the introduction and prevalence of the national custom.

He cherished a deeply rooted objection to the use of envelopes. All the correspondence of the office was carried on upon smooth blue paper of letter size, a make extinct now, I fancy. It was folded over and fastened with a wafer, and woe to me if the corners were not true and square.

Mr. Smith lived in a house facing a pleasant walled garden in Breck Road, now a nest of jerry-built cottages. Office work began at nine in the morning and finished at any time in the evening between six and eight. On Saturday afternoons we were supposed to make holiday. When I first went to Redcross Street it was one of my multifarious duties to walk up to Breck Lodge every Saturday afternoon for clean towels. As it was three miles from the office this pretty well disposed of my half-holiday. Two small towels were doled out to us every week, Mr. Smith,

though scrupulously clean himself, not thinking it necessary we should waste his time at the office with undue ablutions. It occurred to me that if I brought down four or six towels at a time I might sometimes have a Saturday afternoon for other purposes. It was long before I carried the point. For years 'the boy' had gone on Saturday afternoon to Breck Lodge with two soiled towels, bringing down two clean ones on Monday mornings, and if the rule were broken no one could say what would happen.

Everything in Mr. Smith's house and office went by rule. So abject was the terror in which everyone near him lived that the housekeeper had quite a turn when I broached the subject. A dear old thing was Anne, one of my earliest friends. With a maid-ofall-work and occasional assistance from Joseph, who doubled the functions of gardener and coachman, she managed the household. Her kitchen was a paradise of cleanness and neatness, with bright brass pans flashing on the walls, and a steel fender, the like of which was never seen on sea or land, gleaming in the firelight. Very early in our acquaintance Anne took to asking me to tea, when I, towel-laden, made my weekly visit: tea with real cream in it, cakes of her own making, bread-and-butter, jam galore, now and then, when fortune favoured the hens, an egg.

Joseph was a big, heavy-limbed, red-and-white-faced man, brought from Bolton cheap. He had an ineradicable objection to brushing his boots, whether as to soles or uppers, and as a consequence was never permitted to enter Anne's kitchen. If he had anything to say, he stood at the open door and bawled it out, or made uncouth signs at the window.

It shocked my sense of propriety even in those childhood days to see Joseph sitting behind his master on the dogcart driving down to the office, the one looking as if he had stepped out of an old picture-frame, the other frowsy, unwashed, with garden soil clinging to his boots, and hairs from the horse's coat speckling his garments. Thought and speech came slowly to Joseph, the mechanism being curiously assisted by a habit of unfastening the last two buttons of his waistcoat. As daily life presented many problems, Joseph's waistcoat was rarely fully buttoned, a peculiarity that did not add a touch of smartness. He was, however, a capital gardener, growing whole beds of sweetsmelling flowers, stocks, sweet Williams, verbenas, wallflowers, with here and there the glory of a rose-bush. Sometimes when I