Never gross air poisoned in stinking streets, CHAPTER VII. P. I. RUSTIC PHILOSOPHY-AN EXPERIMENT UPON MOONSHINE. Quien comienza en juventud A bien obrar, Señal es de no errar En senetud. Proverbios del Marques de Santillana. It is not, however, for man to rest in absolute contentment. He is born to hopes and aspirations as the sparks fly upward, unless he has brutified his nature and quenched the spirit of immortality which is his portion. Having nothing to desire for himself, Daniel's ambition had taken a natural direction and fixed upon his son. He was resolved that the boy should be made a scholar; not with the prospect of advancing him in the world, but in the hope that he might become a philosopher, and take as much delight in the books which he would inherit as his father had done before him. Riches, and rank, and power appeared in his judgment to be nothing when compared to philosophy; and herein he was as true a philosopher as if he had studied in the Porch, or walked the groves of Academus. It was not, however, for this-for he was as little given to talk of his opinions as to display his reading-but for his retired habits, and general character, and some odd practices into which his books had led him, that he was commonly called Flossofer Daniel by his neighbours. The appellation was not affixed in derision, but respectfully and as his due; for he bore his faculties too meekly ever to excite an envious or an ill-natured feeling in any one. Rural flossofers were not uncommon in those days, though in the progress of society they have disappeared like crokers, bowyers, lorimers, armourers, running footmen, and other descriptions of men whose occupations are gone by. But they were of a different order from our Daniel. They were usually philomaths, students in astrology, or the celestial science, and not unfrequently empirics or downright quacks. Between twenty and thirty almanacs used to be published every year by men of this description, some of them versed enough in VOL. I.-6 mathematics to have done honour to Cambridge, had the fates allowed; and others such proficients in roguery, that they would have done equal honour to the whipping post. A man of a different stamp from either came in declining life to settle at Ingleton in the humble capacity of schoolmaster, a little before young Daniel was capable of more instruction than could be given him at home. Richard Guy was his name; he is the person to whom the lovers of old rhyme are indebted for the preservation of the old poem of Flodden Field, which he transcribed from an ancient manuscript, and which was printed from his transcript by Thomas Gent of York. In his way through the world, which had not been along the king's high Dunstable road, Guy had picked up a competent share of Latin, a little Greek, some practical knowledge of physic, and more of its theory; astrology enough to cast a nativity, and more acquaintance with alchymy than has often been possessed by one who never burnt his fingers in its processes. These acquirements were grafted on a disposition as obliging as it was easy; and he was beholden to nature for an understanding so clear and quick that it might have raised him to some distinction in the world if he had not been under the influence of an imagination at once lively and credulous. Five-and-fifty years had taught him none of the world's wisdom; they had sobered his mind without maturing it; but he had a wise heart, and the wisdom of the heart is worth all other wisdom. Daniel was too far advanced in life to fall in friendship; he felt a certain degree of attractiveness in this person's company; there was, however, so much of what may better be called reticence than reserve in his own quiet habitual manners, that it would have been long before their acquaintance ripened into anything like intimacy, if an accidental circumstance had not brought out the latent sympathy which on both sides had till then rather been apprehended than understood. They were walking together one day when young Daniel, who was then in his sixth year, looking up in his father's face, proposed this question: "Will it be any harm, father, if I steal five beans when next I go into Jonathan Dowthwaites, if I can do it without any one's seeing me?" "And what wouldst thou steal beans for," was the reply, "when anybody would give them to thee, and when thou knowest there are plenty at home?" "But it won't do to have them given, father," the boy replied. "They are to charm away my warts. Uncle William says I must steal five beans, a bean for every wart, and tie them carefully up in paper, and carry them to a place where two roads cross, and then drop them, and walk away without ever once looking behind me. And then the warts will go away from me, and come upon the hands of the person that picks up the beans." "Nay, boy," the father made answer; "that charm was never taught by a white witch! If thy warts are a trouble to thee, they would be a trouble to any one else; and to get rid of an evil from ourselves, Daniel, by bringing it upon another, is against our duty to our neighbour. Have nothing to do with a charm like that!" "May I steal a piece of raw beef then," rejoined the boy, "and rub the warts with it and bury it? For uncle says that will do, and as the beef rots, so the warts will waste away." 66 Daniel," said the father, "those can be no lawful charms that begin with stealing; I could tell thee how to cure thy warts in a better manner. There is an infallible way, which is by washing the hands in moonshine, but then the moonshine must be caught in a bright silver basin. You wash and wash in the basin, and a cold moisture will be felt upon the hands, proceeding from the cold and moist rays of the moon." "But what shall we do for a silver basin?" said little Daniel. The father answered, "A pewter dish might be tried if it were made very bright; but it is not deep enough. The brass kettle, perhaps, might do better." 66 Nay," said Guy, who had now begun to attend with some interest," the shape of a kettle is not suitable. It should be a concave vessel, so as to concentrate the rays Joshua Wilson, I dare say, would lend his brass basin which he can very well spare at the hour you want it, because nobody comes to be shaved by moonlight. The moon rises early enough to serve at this time. If you come in this evening at six o'clock, I will speak to Joshua in the mean time, and have the basin as bright and shining as a good scouring can make it. The experiment is curious, and I should like to see it tried. Where, Daniel, didst thou learn it?" "I read it," replied Daniel, "in Sir Kenelm Digby's Discourses, and he says it never fails.” Accordingly the parties met at the appointed hour. Mambrino's helmet when new from the armourers, or when furbished for a tournament, was not brighter than Guy had rendered the inside of the barber's başin. Schoolmaster, father, and son retired to a place out of observation, by the side of the river, a wild stream tumbling among the huge stones which it had brought down from the hills. On one of these stones sat Daniel the elder, holding the basin in such an inclination towards the moon that there should be no shadow in it; Guy directed the boy where to place himself so as not to intercept the light, and stood looking complacently on, while young Daniel revolved his hands one in another within the empty basin, as if washing them. "I feel them cold and clammy, father!" said the boy. (It was the beginning of November.) "Ay,” replied the father, "that's the cold moisture of the moon!" "Ay!" echoed the schoolmaster, and nodded his head in confirmation. The operation was repeated on the two following nights; and Daniel would have kept up his son two hours later than his regular time of rest to continue it on the third if the evening had not set in with clouds and rain. In spite of the patient's belief that the warts would waste away and were wasting, (for Prince Hohenlohe could not require more entire faith than was given on this occasion,) no alteration could be perceived in them at a fortnight's end. Daniel thought the experiment had failed because it had not been repeated sufficiently often, and perhaps continued long enough. But the schoolmaster was of opinion that the cause of failure was in the basin for that silver being the lunar metal would by affinity assist the influential virtues of the moonlight, which finding no such affinity in a mixed metal of baser compounds, might contrariwise have its potential qualities weakened, or even destroyed, when received in a brazen vessel, and reflected from it. Flossofer Daniel assented to this theory. Nevertheless, as the child got rid of his troublesome excrescences in the course of three or four months, all parties, disregarding the lapse of time at first, and afterward fairly forgetting it, agreed that the remedy had been effectual, and Sir Kenelm, if he had been living, might have procured the solemn attestation of men more veracious than himself that moonshine was an infallible cure for warts. CHAPTER VIII. P. I. A KIND SCHOOLMASTER AND A HAPPY SCHOOL BOY. Though happily thou wilt say that wands be to be wrought when they are green, lest they rather break than bend when they be dry, yet know also that he that bendeth a twig because he would see if it would bow by strength, may chance to have a crooked tree when he would have a straight.-EUPHUES. Daniel FROM this time the two flossofers were friends. seldom went to Ingleton without looking in upon Guy, if it were between school hours. Guy on his part would walk as far with him on the way back as the tether of his own time allowed, and frequently on Saturdays and Sundays he strolled out and took a seat by Daniel's fireside. Even the wearying occupation of hearing one generation of urchins after another repeat a-b-ab, hammering the first rules of arithmetic into leaden heads, and pacing like a horse in a mill the same dull dragging round day after day, had neither diminished Guy's good nature, nor lessened his love for children. He had from the first conceived a liking for young Daniel, both because of the right principle which was evinced by the manner in which he proposed the question concerning stealing the beans, and of the profound gravity (worthy of a flossofer's son) with which he behaved in the affair of the moonshine. All that he saw and heard of him tended to confirm this favourable prepossession; and the boy, who had been taught to read in the Bible and in Stowe's Chronicle, was committed to his tuition at seven years of age. Five days in the week (for in the North of England Saturday as well as Sunday is a sabbath to the schoolmaster) did young Daniel, after supping his porringer of oat-meal pottage, set off to school, with a little basket containing his dinner in his hand. This provision usually consisted of oatcake and cheese, the latter in goodly proportion, but of the most frugal quality, whatever cream the milk afforded having been consigned to the butter tub. Sometimes it was a piece of cold bacon or cold pork; and in winter there was the luxury of a shred pie, which is a coarse north country edition of the pie abhorred by Puritans. The distance was in those days called two miles; but miles of such long measure that they were for him a good hour's walk at a cheerful pace. He never loitered on the way, being at all times brisk in his movements, and going to school with a spirit as light as when he returned from it, like one whose blessed lot it was never to have experienced, and therefore never to stand in fear of severity or unkindness. For he was not more a favourite with Guy for his docility, and regularity, and diligence, than he was with his schoolfellows for his thorough good nature and a certain original oddity of humour. There are some boys who take as much pleasure in exercising their intellectual faculties, as others do when putting forth the power of arms and legs in boisterous exertion. Young Daniel was from his childhood fond of books. William Dove used to say he was a chip of the old block; and this hereditary disposition was regarded with much satisfaction by both parents, Dinah having no higher ambition nor better wish for her son, than that he might prove like his father in all things. This being the bent of his nature, the boy having a kind master as well as a happy home, never tasted of what old Lily calls (and well might call) the wearisome bitterness of the scholar's learning. He was never subject to the brutal discipline of the Udals, and Busbys, and Bowyers, and Parrs, and other less notorious tyrants who have trodden in their steps; nor was any of that inhuman injustice ever exercised upon him to break his spirit, for which it is to be hoped Dean Colet has paid in purgatory: to be hoped, I say, because if there be no purgatory, the dean may have gone farther and fared worse. Being the only Latiner |