Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/142

 and then I became conscious of nothing but the strange veil-like misty rain, and, looking through this veil where it drew away thin and transparent, I saw my own body asleep on a couch in Mr. Volt's laboratory, with Mark Stedburn beside it, loosening my necktie and shirt collar and sprinkling water on my face. Then the veil shrivelled up and was gone, and I was sitting on the sofa with Mark's hand on my pulse.

"You're all right now, old fellow, eh?" he said, kindly.

"Let me go back to London, Mark. I have had such queer ideas since Mr. Volt's funeral, that I don't feel myself."

"Funeral! Why, here is Mr. Volt. Do you know how long you slept under the 'hatchis'?"

"I woke once, I know, two months ago, and went to London. You haven't given me that stuff again since I came back, have you?" I stammered in doubt.

"You had one dose precisely ten minutes ago, and it is now nine o'clock to the minute," said Mark, holding up his watch in confirmation. "—Singular preparation, is it not?"

"I hope," said Mr. Volt, "you are now thoroughly convinced of the reality of the impressions produced by 'hatchis.' They were sequent and recurrent, I believe, as those to which you restrict the term reality; were they not? And they took place independently of your will, I think?"

"Quite so," I rejoined, "but still they differed from reality in this important particular, that whereas phantasy told me you had committed suicide, I wake up to find you resolutely and persistently alive."

Mr. Volt much wished to argue this point, but Mark insisted that our time was out, and dragged me away from the tower to his house to supper.

"He is one of the cleverest chemists we have in the country," Mark explained, as we walked home.

"But he surely is not sane?"

"He is only mad on one point," returned Mark, "and I humour him in that for the sake of his intelligence in other respects; but rest assured that, although we frequently exchange ideas, in the common acceptation of the phrase, I have no earthly intention of exchanging outward ideas with Mr. Volt, in his sense of the term."

THE WITCH.

AN ENGLISH PEASANT.

there be any class of the English people that is pre-eminently unknown to itself and to all other classes, it is that of the farm, labourer. The squire or other great landed proprietor of the neighbourhood knows them after a certain fashion, as he knows his cattle; but of the labourer's mind he has as little idea as he has of that of the animal which he bestrides in the hunting-field. He knows the peasant to be a useful drudge, like the horse that draws the plough, but unlike the horse, to be a burden upon the poor-rates, either present or prospective. Furthermore, he suspects him to be a poacher; and in his capacity of magistrate deals out the harshest justice (or injustice) towards him, if the suspicion ever comes to be verified. The squire's lady, and the clergyman's lady, and the fair matrons and spinsters of the Dorcas Society, or managers of the Penny Clothes Club, know the labourer's wife as the grateful and very humble recipient of eleemosynary soup, coals, flannels, medicines, and other small mercies that are great in their season. The parson knows the labourer and his family better perhaps than anybody, if he be a true parson, and does his duty by his flock; but it is doubtful whether even he, however zealous and truly christian-like he may be, penetrates into the arcana of the labourer's mind, or understands what the poor man really thinks of his condition in this world, or his prospects in the next. The farmer who employs him ought to know him better, but he does not. The farmer's only concern with him is on a par with the concern he has for his inanimate tools—for his plough, his spade, or his harrow, which he buys as cheaply as he can, uses as long as possible, and throws away when they are worn out. He employs the labourer when he is young and strong, and gets as much work out of him as he can, for