not? You are still in the possession of a reasoning faculty, yet you deliberately assent to such a proposition as this." Geoff again held down his head without a word. Durham, in despair, took quite a different tone. "My dear lad," he said entreatingly, even coaxingly, "do make an end of this sorry farce. Be your old honest, cheerful self. Give me your hand. Go to your mother with the word that shall set all right." But Geoff was neither to be castigated nor persuaded into a right frame of mind. Turning away his face, appearing not to see his tutor's proffered hand, he said in a low dogged tone: "Only my mother can say that now." He looked as if he wanted to go, and Durham, feeling that he had exhausted every effort, let him have his way. This interview had been brief, but no confabulations, however long, could have brought out more clearly the true state of Geoff's mind. He was determined not to be conciliated, still less to conciliate. That hitherto easily moved, and as some had opined, even shallow nature, was manifesting a strength of will and concentration of purpose little looked for from those who should be its best judges. Whither such obstinacy would lead him, upwards or downwards, who could determine? One thing seemed inevitable, Geoff must be left to himself for the present. Durham had no need to explain this to Pearla when he rejoined her at the tea-table; a blank look, a disconcerted smile sufficed. CHAPTER XXVIII.-"LORD OF HIMSELF.” So Geoff was now left to himself. Every one of his kind physicians having lost heart by turns, they finally handed him over to the all-potent healer, Nature. The youth for the first time in his life now enjoyed absolute freedom. No one vouchsafed a yea or nay. He was made to feel that, as he had set himself against his natural advisers, he must take the direction of affairs into his own hands. By placing himself in direct antagonism to his mother and guardian, he had tacitly shaken off all authority. For better, for worse, he was now his own master. Durham and Pearla were compelled to let him go his own way, with some show, not of hardness, but of indifference. Such it seemed at least to the unhappy lad, as he brooded over his fancied wrongs. The liberty now accorded could but mean want of affection. The silence regarding his plans arose from want of interest in them. XXIV-37 Poor Geoff! poor Pearla! Poor Pearla and poor Durham ! Little did these two, fondest mother and faithfullest friend, imagine what was passing in the boy's mind. They saw the outward discontent, the unconcealed moroseness, but they could not unravel the workings of the heart or decipher the signs of that clouded brow. They could only sorrow for what was on the surface. Geoff, in reality, suffered no less than themselves. If his silence wrung Pearla's heart, and injustice wounded Durham's sensitiveness; their enforced coldness, interpreted by him as indifference, sent him to his closet with bitter tears, and made his waking up a thing of unspeakable forlornness. His new studies could not be begun till October, and meantime how spend the intervening months so pleasantly and profitably as in seeing the world? Seeing the world is a phrase susceptible of many meanings, and the object of Geoff's desire was one that naturally occurs to us at eighteen and a half. Two days before, a collier from Newcastle had steamed into the little harbour, and as it came at full speed, all sails set, imagination could hardly frame a more captivating sight. Is not a ship indeed one of the loveliest, most fairylike things of human invention? Those tawny sails on a bright sea, that flashing sheer, took hold of Geoff's imagination. The ship was come, it waited, it invited. He would go. So without saying a word to any one, and circumstances favouring, he quietly went down to the beach an hour or two before the vessel was to start for the north, and asked the skipper if he might return with him. The thing had never been done before, but as Geoffrey Auriol was a favourite among the fishing population, and as he had a well-filled purse, the desired permission was readily accorded. Pearla, quite unsuspicious of evil, awaited him that evening as usual. It was one of those seasons, traditional we may almost now begin to regard them, when the last meal of the day might be taken out of doors, and delicious indeed was Pearla's garden this balmy July night. Strangely enough, as she stood on the upper ground of her little domain, she was now watching the very ship whither Geoff had fled as a refuge-and from what? the tenderest mother in the world. As she watched the beautiful fairylike thing gaily steering eastward between glowing heavens and sea, she thought of just such a summer evening three years ago. Yes, just three years ago she had come to this sweet place, borne by sails as swift and on seas as calm, with airiest hopes stirring her bosom. And now, although one deep, unlooked-for joy had come, where were the rest of those airy hopes? Yonder ship hastening on its way was not farther from her than her boy's heart. She sighed as she gazed, and was about to re-enter the house when she met the old man-servant Fairfax with a dismayed countenance. He carried a cloak on his arm, for the faithful old fellow had ever a chivalrous care of his sweet mistress when the master, as he now called Durham, was away. Before opening his lips, he bestowed it carefully about her shoulders; then, motioning her back to the spot she had just quitted, he lifted a finger in the direction of the vessel. "Master Geoffrey is gone away in yonder coal-brig, my lady," he said. 'Oh! Fairfax, conceal nothing from me," Pearla asked anxiously. "What ship is that?" "Tis a collier bound to Newcastle, and | Master Geoffrey is bound to Newcastle too. The wind is fair, he'll take no harm, 'tis but a freak," said the old man. "No," Pearla answered; "this is more than a freak." Then with almost desperation written in her sweet face she added" I have lost my son." "Let me send for Mr. Durham," suggested the old man, taken aback by his mistress's distress. He had looked for a fainting fit, or burst of sobs at least, and regarded such ebullitions of feeling as safety valves invented by nature to let off feminine emotion. "Mr. Durham can do nothing," Pearla said with a deep sigh. "Better for me to hear that than the master, madam," Fairfax ventured to say. Τ She seemed only half to take in the sense of the implied reproach. 'But, Fairfax," she added after a moment's thought, "Mr. Durham should know this at once. Will you go to him without delay? He ought to be consulted in what is best to do. Pray start and try to reach Stoneham to-night. "There is just time enough," Fairfax replied as he looked at his watch. "Has my lady any other message to Mr. Durham?" "None," Pearla replied, with just a touch of imperiousness, for she knew well enough what the old servant wanted her to say. Then wrapping her shawl about her still closer, for she was shivering, though with sorrow and not with cold, she left the untouched teatray and entered the house. Crestfallen and making sundry signs of discomfiture to himself, Fairfax followed his mistress into the house. Would it come to this? he pondered; would that young scapegrace, Master Geoffrey, be the means of estranging as sweet a lady and as proper a gentleman as Heaven ever designed for each other? Not for worlds, however, would he have unclosed his lips on such a topic in the servants' hall; and without a hint as to his errand he quickly gave his orders and set forth. Pearla went to her room, now flooded with the mellow light of a July moon, to spend perhaps the forlornest night of her existence. The disillusion of her early married life had not touched her so nearly, because the perceptions are so much more acute at thirty-eight than at eighteen. And she could not resist a certain feeling of self-reproach. She had accepted love, but at what a cost? If Geoff went wrong, she felt now that the sin would be her own. LONDON HAUNTS. A ROOKERY DISTRICT. IT falls to the lot of the present writer to have charge of what is popularly known as a "rookery" district in the great metropolis. Than a human rookery there can, to a thoughtful mind, be no more sorrowful spectacle. As an institution-and even in these days of supposed "sweetness and light" it is an institution-it is the great blot on "the resources of civilisation "the veritable earthly inferno. This being a general feeling upon the subject, my district naturally, and I may add deservedly, bears the reputation of being, socially speaking, a "hot 'un." In what special capacity I am in charge of it is of no particular importance in the present connection. Sufficeth it to say here that it is a secular and official capacity, and one in which I have acted for a number of years. The discharge of the duties of my office brings me daily into contact with the inhabitants of the district, and gives me perforce an intimate knowledge of their ways of life. I see them in their habits as they live; see them as they are seen among themselves, it lines; if instead of saying to "The Local Authority" "You may," it had said, "You must demolish dwellings which, though used as, are unfit for, human habitations "if this had been the case my district, as it at present exists, would long ere this have been swept away. Fit for human habitation its dwellings certainly are not, though they are very much inhabited, overcrowding being the rule in them. The houses are small, and in outward appearance dirty and dilapidated. Within they are gloomy as well as dirty. There is, generally speaking, quite as much rag and paper as glass in the windows, and in more than one instance "The hole that serves for a casement Is glazed with an ancient hat." and as others do not see them, especially such others as are occasionally brought sightseeing under police guidance and protection. Taken generally, the locality affords a practical illustration of the saying that one half of the world does not know how the other half lives. It lies well inland in that half world situated on Poverty's side of the social gulf, and the supposed warmth of its social atmosphere causing it to be avoided by strangers, but little is known of the modes of existence prevailing in it, even by the dwellers on the threshold of "Society's" side of the gulf. Though the life of the quarter, as a whole, is by no means so strange, or savage, or sensational as many good people to whom it is a terra incognita imagine, it is yet sufficiently distinctive and curious to form an Many of the doors show odd or broken panels, interesting, and even a graphic study in soci- and the original paint alike of doors and ology. It is a fairly representative district of window-frames has been altogether overlaid its kind. It is not large, but it is compact by a dispiriting arrangement in various and densely populated, its inhabitants num- shades of weather-stain and worn-in dirt, bering twenty thousand all told. Roughly Roughly" picked out" by irregular touches of sunspeaking, it forms an oblong with a series of blister. Such metal "fixings as scrapers narrow streets running across its length, these and door-handles, knockers, or numbers, have streets being in their turn intersected by a in the majority of instances long gone the network of still narrower slums and alleys. way of the marine stores. The furnishing Longitudinally it is bounded on the one edge of the homes is always upon the scantiest by the fore-shore of the river, and on the possible scale, and in the roughest and most other by the general high-street of the larger rickety style. The walls and timbers of the neighbourhood, of which my ground forms apartments are permeated with a malodorous the "low" quarter. Running parallel with "reek of humanity," not to speak of their these boundaries, and about midway between being permanently colonised by those dothem, is a long and comparatively wide street, mesticated insect tribes that are not usually which, cutting right through the cross streets, named to ears polite. Save in a few rare has the effect of partitioning off the rookeries cases, even the smallest houses are occupied into two distinct sets, to both of which it by two or more families, and numbers of the serves as a special high-street, its shops and larger-the six-roomed-houses have their methods of trading being adapted to the family per room. This leads to the windows means and tastes of a London slum's popula- of upper stories being a good deal used by tion. The lower rookeries, those bordering way of doors. Even in the winter, opposite on the river, are occupied by irregularly neighbours gossip across the street from them, employed dock-labourers, deal-porters, and and exchange "catches" with loaves, shoes, coalheavers, the unskilled hands (of both bundles of firewood, and other the like sexes) employed in chemical works, white- borrowings and lendings. All manner of lead factories, and other such unhealthy or things are "heaved" or hoisted up to them unpleasant trades established on the river from the pavement, and pails of dirty water, banks, watermen fallen upon evil days, and or baskets of ashes, or other household refuse "waterside characters." The inhabitants of are freely flung down. This latter practice is the upper rookeries constitute a still more mis- not here the danger that it would be in a cellaneous gathering, made up chiefly of odd- different locality. It is known to be "a cusjob men, costers, hawkers-licensed and unli- tom of the country" by the natives and such censed-tinkers, sandwich men, shoe-blacks, official foreigners as have recognised business crossing-sweepers, and all other manner there, and it is very rarely indeed that any of street people, a small colony of what others penetrate into the district. Passers-by their neighbours call "the wild Irish," and a are therefore taken to be generally forewarned, liberal sprinkling of the no-visible-means-of- and are supposed to keep a bright look-out on support class. If the Dwellings Improvement open windows, and to have their ears open Act had not been framed on the how-not-to-do- for the warning cry of " Below there!" which it is due to the lady denizens of the upper floors to say they are careful to whoop out before letting go" with their slop-pails or dust-baskets. As passengers, from mere force of habit, do keep on the alert it is very seldom that any accident occurs. Occasionally a woman may get a bucket of water over her from a second-floor window, but in most such cases this is the result, not of accident, but of a "plant," the "doused" and the "douser" being at enmity, and "bucketing" being a favourite method of attack in the feminine warfare of the district. The streets, as I have said, are narrow, and they are also ill-paved, badly drained, and over-guttered, for practically the entire roadways are turned into gutters. And in these gutters the children of the rookeries may be seen disporting them selves at all hours of the day-the School Board notwithstanding-comparatively happy in their dirt and freedom. The adult inhabitants, also, show out of doors a good deal; not, of course, tumbling about the gutters, but sitting on the door-steps or window-sills, or lounging or reclining upon the pavement. This is most markedly the case in the summer months, when the multitudinous insect colonists of the dwellings are given to show themselves tormentingly active in the struggle for existence. Donkeys and goats are quartered pretty much as members of the families to which they belong, and the fowls, which are numerous though not choice, have about as free a run of the houses by night as they have of the streets by day. All sorts of odd and obscure industries are also carried on indoors, so that upon the whole these ramshackle dwellings are very fully and variedly utilised. The parish dust-cart is rarely seen in the district, but the parish fever and smallpox cabs find a good deal of their work there; so likewise do the parish doctor and the relieving officer; while the wife-beatings, violent assaults, street rows, and public-house scrimmages, for which the quarter is notorious, furnish neighbouring hospitals and police courts with some of their most interesting cases. Like other and better people, the inhabitants of a rookery district must have their amusements. Chief among these-especially with the younger men and women-are the public-house "Harmonic Meetings." Admission to these entertainments is free, the publicans looking for their gain to the extra drinking "for the good of the house," which in these cases it is found in practice music (?) has charms to promote. Mine host supplies the instrumental music, generally a much worn piano "jangled out of tune," while the audience furnish the vocal "talent." Ladies and gentlemen who fancy they can sing-and to judge from their efforts, such a fancy upon their parts must in most instances involve great powers of imagination-" oblige the company." The company in return drink the "health and song" of each performer, and all goes pleasantly, that is to say, profitably for the landlord, however it may be with his customers. The organ-grinder and the street ballad-singers are welcome visi tants in a rookery district. Curiously enough, however, the members of the street-singing fraternity who are resident in a district, or habitual frequenters of its common lodginghouses, find themselves, like prophets, with out honour in their own country. The fact is, the modern wandering minstrel is, as a rule, likely to fare better the farther he wanders from where he is best known. The language current in a rookery is full of strange oaths, and so slangy as at times to be understood but of few not native and to the manner born. The manners prevailing are a good deal mixed, ranging from the abjectly "umble" to the brutally ferocious. The customs are undesirable but curious. That as a body the inhabitants of such a locality as we have been describing are a rough, and in some respects a "fearsome" set is but over true; but any aversion that may be felt towards them should in justice be tempered with pity. That they are as they are is at least as much their misfortune as their fault. Their obnoxious characteristics are in a great measure an inevitable result of, to use the phrase of the day, the law of environment. Their surroundings, material, moral, and social, preclude development in the graces of life. More literally than most others, they are born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Many of them inherit physical defects, or sickly constitutions, and there can be little doubt that a considerable proportion of them are born with the drink craving, which to them is the root of all evil. They are uneducated, have been "dragged up," or have had to "tumble up," without even the help of parental dragging, and they are steeped to the lips in poverty with all its attendant ills and coarsening effects upon the human character. Whether or not there is any far-off touch of truth in their own theory, vaguely and variously expressed, that they are Society's martyrs, certain it is that their actual lot in life is a hard one, and on the whole they bear it bravely. They are for the most part unconscious philosophers, making the most of any passing good that may befall them, and as for the rest, going upon the principle that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Generally speaking, they do not look forward to any improvement in the condition of their class. It has always been thus with the poor, they argue, and "ever will be till the world shall end." But there are those among them who are not without hope that there is a good time coming, and we can but trust that this more cheerful view may prove prophetic. THE RIVERSIDE VISITOR. IT FRAGMENTS OF TEACHING IN EVERSLEY CHURCH. BY THE LATE CHARLES KINGSLEY. IV.-DIVES AND LAZARUS. T has been an open question with some whether the parable of Dives and Lazarus, which we find in the sixteenth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, must not be interpreted figuratively throughout; whether, like many of our Lord's sayings which are popularly supposed to refer to the next life, it does not speak of the fate of the Jewish nation; whether the Scribes and Pharisees (the only men whom our Lord ever denounced) are not meant by the rich man helped with God's special favour, clothed in purple and fine linen, and faring sumptuously every day; and whether the poor man be not the heathen diseased with sin, fallen to the likeness of brutes, who lay at their doors, longing in vain for teaching. But there are objections to this interpretation, the most serious of which is, that it would not have been so understood by those who heard it; that they would have naturally supposed our Lord to speak of an actual rich man, an actual poor one, and their actual death and fate. Considering this, it is safer to interpret the parable, as the first hearers would have done, to be of two actual men, and look reverently and cautiously while our Lord deigns to lift the veil off one nook, at least, of the world beyond the grave, and learn what we can from this parable, as He Himself has spoken it, without inserting any doctrines or fancies derived from elsewhere. And let no one suppose from my interpretation of this parable that I do not believe that sin is punished, and punished terribly-that we must give an account of the deeds done in the body, whether good or evil-that as a cup of cold water given in Christ's name will in no wise lose its reward, so we shall answer in the day of judgment for every idle word spoken on earth, and that it is better to cut off our right hand or pluck out our right eye than let them lead us into sin. The subject is especially important just now, when the minds of civilised men are more exercised about the next life and endless punishment therein than they have been for several centuries. Vast numbers, not merely of the most thoughtful and learned, but of the most pious and virtuous, are troubled with honest doubts on the matter. Their numbers are increasing, and it is not too much to say that the fate of the Church of England, and of Christianity itself, in these islands may depend mainly on what decision is arrived at during the next generation or two upon the awful subject of punishment after death. Christianity, I repeat, may stand or fall therewith and thereby. How important, therefore, should this parable be to us, for it is almost the only instance in Scripture in which the life after death is certainly described. Many other well-known texts may not apply to the next life at all: but, I think, this parable must. It is an open question, for instance, whether the "outer darkness" spoken of does not mean that outer darkness of barbarism and degradation into which too many nations have sunk back since our Lord's time. It is an open question whether "the worm that dieth not, and the fire which is not quenched" does not refer, like the similar passage in Isaiah, to Gehenna, the Vale of Hinnom, beneath the walls of Jerusalem, where everlasting fires were kept up to burn the offal of the city, and where the unburied bodies of great criminals were cast out. 66 But is the subject of this parable an open question? It surely speaks of the next life. The poor man died, we read, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom ; and the rich man died likewise, and in hell he lift up his eyes in torment." If then our Lord condescends for once to lift off the veil, in part at least, of the unseen world, how reverently and how cautiously should we look at what He deigns to show us. Reverently and cautiously. And we shall |