Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/455

Rh post-office, and if we were Mr. Donald Cameron, member for Inverness-shire, including St. Kilda, Lord John Manners should have an uncomfortable life of it until their claim was recognized. Perhaps it may be some claim on the postmaster-general's sympathies that the St. Kildans are all exceedingly polite, so polite that they will on the slightest hint even leave off the luxury of boring. They think it polite to visit a stranger and talk to him: —


 * In the evening, about twenty women in a body paid me a visit, each bringing a burden of turf in her plaid, which they piled up in a corner of the room as a gift. After standing for a few minutes with pleasant smiles on their good-natured faces, they departed, with a kindly "Feasgar math libh!" I was subsequently honoured with frequent calls from the fair sex, and like misfortunes, they never came singly, but in crowds. I had still more frequent visits from the men, who also came all together if they came at all. Their visits were no doubt kindly meant; but as they all talked, or rather bawled, at one time, and with powerful lungs, I was almost driven distracted, and at length, to drown the din, seized the pipes (the largest size) and played a piobrachd with all the variations. But their good-nature rendered this strategy of no avail, as they listened with the utmost decorum until the performance was finished, and after thanking me politely, resumed their conversation as if it had never been interrupted. But after a time their visits suddenly ceased, from which I inferred that my half-jocular grumblings had been communicated to them by the minister. They, however, remained as friendly as ever.

People who are capable of taking a hint like that deserve a mail-boat.

 

 From The Queen.

" will get over it." Of all the styptics applied to a bleeding heart, a wounded soul, this sounds the most cruel, but is, in fact, the most wholesome. The reparative power of nature — that vis medicatrix of which schoolmen talked such marvellous nonsense in the days when ideas stood where facts stand now — is as true of the human mind as it is of the body; and shattered joy repairs itself, happiness is restored after mutilation, wounded affection is healed, and scars take the place of sores, all the same in the life of man as in the life of the world — in souls as in plants. It is wonderful, when we think of it, what we do get over; some of us, certainly, with more trouble, and taking a longer time about it than others; but we all, with few exceptions, get over everything in time, and after the due amount of despair has been undergone, the due number of tears have been shed. ...

It is easy to understand the passionate desperation of inexperienced youth when things go wrong, and disappointment comes to shatter the fairy shrine that hope and fancy had busied themselves in building up out of mist-wreaths and rainbows. The boy's fever-fit of despair when cruel parents interpose with their vile prosaic calculations of how much for house-rent, and how much for the butcher and baker, with the maddening deficit against the artist's income that is to provide food and a home for the beloved, and consequent denial of the daughter's hand, and interruption of all intercourse for the good of both — well, he thinks that he shall never get over it! It has broken his heart, destroyed his life, ruined his happiness forever, and there is nothing worth living for now, since Araminta is impossible. On her side, Araminta holds that it would be very nice to die and have done with the trouble of dressing for balls when Bertie is not there to see her — where, if he is there, he is not to dance with her, make sweet love in the conservatory, on the stairs, over the ices, the champagne. She thinks that, Bertie denied, her womanhood will have no more sweetness, bring her no more hope; she will never get over it — never, she says weeping to her confidante; but next year she is the radiant wife of a well-to-do stockbroker, and Bertie's artistry and love-making are no more substantial than her childish dreams of dolls and dolls's houses. Bertie too laughs at his former self, when he is a prosperous R. A., painting for guineas where formerly he was not paid in pence, and meets with Araminta at the private view — she a British matron with her quiver full and her brown hair grey; he also the father of a family, who has done with dreams even in his art, and who paints what will sell rather than what he thinks to be the best. Ah! the Berties and Aramintas of life get over their romances with humiliating celerity; and that vis medicatrix is sometimes quicker and more thorough in its operation than is quite satisfactory to the self-love of either. Submission to the inevitable is all very well in its way; but nobody likes that submission to be too entire when it involves the loss of himself.

The man's deeper disappointment — the woman's lifelong sorrow — even these are got over in a way, if the scars never heal 