Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 2.pdf/15

 "Do you know what a poor member of parliament is, 'hanging on' at every one's beck and call, hunted by all, respected by none, not knowing which to serve most as most likely to be able to serve him—would you like to be that, would your pride suffer that? That's all these people want of you—to make you their tool, their party's tool; for you yourself they have not the remotest care. Do you hear?"

"I do. But you have not told me, Mrs. Creswell, what I should get for retiring?"

"Your own terms, Walter Joyce, whatever they were. A competence for life—enough to give you leisure to follow the life in which, as I understand, you have engaged, in ease, when and where you liked. No drudgery, no anxiety, all your own settled on yourself!"

"You are strangely anxious about the and result of this election, Mrs. Creswell."

"I am—and I am willing to pay for it!"

Joyce laughed again—a very unpleasant laugh. "My dear Mrs. Creswell," said he, "if government could promise me ten times your husband's fortune to withdraw from this contest, I would refuse! If I had your husband's fortune, I would gladly forfeit it for the chance of winning this election, and defeating you. You will excuse my naming a money value for such pleasure; but I know that hitherto it has been the only one you could understand or appreciate! Good morning!" And he took off his hat, and left her standing in the road.

is impossible for our voyaging bird in black to pass over the chalk hills and seven streets of Saffron Walden, which is built on a tongue of land twenty-four miles north-west of Chelmsford, because there exists so curious and interesting a legend about the origin of the singular name of that town. The story is this. Great quantities of saffron for dyers used to be grown in this part of Essex. The first seed or root of this valuable plant was brought from the East by a shrewd pilgrim, concealed, tradition says, in the hollow top of the staff which supported his weary feet, and on which he hung his calabash of water. Lord Braybrook's umbrageous park, with a pleasant wilderness of shade, shadows the approach to Saffron Walden, and girds that stately palace of a house, Audley End, which occupies the site of a Benedictine monastery founded by Mandeville, the first Earl of Essex, "to the honour of St Mary and St. James," in the year of Grace 1136. At the suppression it was granted to Sir Thomas Audley, who took it as the title of his barony, and in the time of James the First the Earl of Suffolk erected a many-windowed mansion here which took an army of men thirteen years to put together, and was regarded as the largest residence in the kingdom next to Windsor Castle. A small portion now only remains, and is a mere hut in comparison with the old greatness. The castle at Saffron Walden was built by the same proud Mandeville who built Pleshy.

Not far from Saffron Walden is Thaxsted, a small village, once a borough, rotten even in James the Second's time, and then disfranchised. Here in 1577 was born that laborious and delightful old compiler of voyages, Samuel Purchas. Purchas took his B.D. at Cambridge, where, at St. John's College, he was educated. In 1604 he became vicar of Eastwood, but resided chiefly in London, being also rector of St. Martin's, Ludgate, that vexatious church that keeps getting in a rude and envious way before St. Paul's when one is walking up Ludgate-hill, and longing to get a clear view of the old black giant. The great work of the old London rector was his well-known and valued Pilgrimages, or Relations of the World, a collection of voyages, in five volumes folio, a stupendous labour, worthy of a nation of travellers like ourselves. How solemnly and yet humbly he begins his work!

"First, therefore, I beseech Him, that is the First and Last, the Eternal Father, in the name of His beloved and only Sonne, by the light of His holy and all-seeing Spirit, to guide me in this perambulation of the world, and so to take view of the time, places, and customs, therein, as may testify my religious bond to Him, whose I am, and whom I serve, and the service I owe unto His church, of at least this my mite [five vols, folio!] may be serviceable to the least of the least therein."

After this fine and religious preamble the old worthy goes steadily on through every country and region of the world—resolute as Drake and as furious a hater of the Spaniards as Raleigh. His chapters on America breathe the old Elizabethan spirit against the Spaniards, and he seems never tired of railing at the enormous cruelties of the conquerors of the New World. In his ninth book on America (chapter fifteen) he says, in a whirlwind of quaint invective:

"I was once present, says Casas, when the inhabitants of the town brought us forth victuals and met us with great kindness, and the Spaniards, without any cause, slew three thousand of them, and twenty-two caciques met us, whom the captain, against all faith, caused to be burned. This made the desperate Indians hang themselves (which two hundred did), and a Spaniard, seeing them take this course, made as though he would hang himself, too, and persecute them even in the region of death, which fear detained some from that self-execution. Six thousand children died in three or four months' space, while I was there, for the want of their parents, who were sent to the mines. From Darien to Nicaragua they slew four hundred thousand people with dogs, swords, fear,