LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 191, 19 January 1875, Page 3

LITERATURE.

CIGARETTES AND COFFEE. ( Conohtded.') Lazily, dreamily paddling on the stupendous Indian Ocean, keeping as a sleepy, delicious holiday our captain’s birthday, did we, the four ‘ young gentlemen ’ of the good ship Tartarus, while away the hours in the gig appertaining to ‘ the old man,’ as we fondly termed our chieftain. With us a quarter-master —as grim an old salt as ever chewed tobacco —meant to take care of us ; two of the crew, who had begged as an immense favor to be of the party ; with a young subaltern of a detachment of troops on board us ; and two private soldiers, between whom and ourselves there had arisen a mutually advantageous alliance, defensive and—l regret to have to make the confession —offensive, as more than one person on board the ship had found out to his cost. In other words, we found tho men—Murphy and Carney by name—in such rum and tobacco as we could lay surreptitious hands on (the conscience of the midshipman is the most elastic thing in creation); while they * did’ for us as servants, and also • gave us active and most valuable help in carrying out sundry ‘ larks’ to which we were very much addicted. The subaltern in the boat with us was a decent young fellow enough, rejoicing in the romantic title of Delamere, and we had taken him with us on our holiday bo relieve the monotony of a tedious and unaccustomed long voyage, under which he seemed to suffer more intensely than ’any one else. For days and days had the Tartarus lain becalmed in that greasy waste of waters, boxing the compass as she bobbed round and round with the slow heaving swell; flapping the guineas in hundreds out of her masts and rigging and sails with the great lazy rolls ;he ever and again gave from side to side: * A painted ship upon a painted ocean,' save that her paint had long since smudged into anUndiscernibie hue, passing under the , obscure tjtla of 1 rtttujduckstty-mud colour ;’ the 11 jskifiV of ths ps&fo. wis cA#-

posed of the slimy filth from a couple of the quarters of the world. Nevertheless, we enjoyed our holiday exceedingly. A change into the captain’s gig, with a good lunch and lots of grog in the locker, was to all of us (not by any means excepting the surly old quarter-master, though be wouldn’t owu up to it) a most delightful treat; while, if anything were needed to increase the almost perfect joy we experienced when pulling away from the ship, it was to be found in the wistful faces of baffled desire leaning over the bulwarks of the Tartarus, and envying from the bottom of their hearts wc happy occupants of the gig. 4 Some of those poor fellows will go mad, I believe, if the voyage lasts much longer, ’ remarked Delamere, puffing a deliciously aromatic cheroot. 4 Mad, sir ! for why ?’ asked Murphy, in tones of great astonishment. ‘ Whist! said Carney, ‘ and don’t be axin’ the officer; sure it’d be for want of somethin’ to do, sir?’ Delamere nodded a lazy assent to the query, and we pulled away until the filthy ship lay curtseying and bobbing—like a halfdrunken old fishwife in a market—at us from a distance of some miles. We were supposed to be fishing, and had lines and hand-nets for the purpose; but it was only make-be-lieve; for, in the first place, there was no living thing, perceptible to the human eye, so far out from land but jelly-fish; and in the next, if there had been, we should have been too lazy to trouble ourselves. So we ate and drank—more than was quite good for us under the fiery beams of a blazing sun—and smoked, and spun yarns, and dozed and dreamed, and revelled in all the delights of that day of perfect rest and laziness; and we stung our arms with the long tails of the jelly-fish we hauled in; and we ate, and drank, and smoked again; and we forecast events and dates of the future, and what we would do, and say, and suffer—in fact, we visioned the time away like opium-eaters, and when the sun went down, and we had to pull back to the grimy old barque, one of our number, Murphy, lay at the bottom of the gig, apparently overcome with those drowsy occupations, but whether attributable directly to sun, or to dreams, or to ship’s rum, was more than any of us knew or very much cared to find out. But ho seemed queer, decidedly queer, when we got him on board ; and I was thankful when I was able to smuggle him off to bis bunk unnoticed by any of the officers. I speedily turned in myself for a few hours’ sleep, and was immediately unconscious. It was my watch at midnight, and as I turned up on deck a wondrous sight met my gaze. The whole ocean was a deadly, ghastly, greasy, and yet brilliant white ! It was something appallingly horrible to look upon, and it made me sick even to close my eyes for a second and only think of the hideous, hilious-like, seething mass of dead-like waters- I had never seen or heard of anything like it before, and, bold, brazen boy as I then was, it positively terrified me. 4 It’s only the Milky sea,’ said the third mate, in answer to my wondering gaze ; * common enough in these parts after a long calm.’ * But what on earth makes it— ’ I was asking, when a wild shriek burst from the fo*k’stle, and the soldier Murphy was to be seen standing, white as that horrible sea itself, gibbering and gesticulating at the greasy milky waves rising and falling all around. In another second he had placed his hand on the fo’k’stle rail, gave a wild bound ten thousand flashes of brilliant phosphoric light burst up like a bouquet of firework as the waters received him in their embrace, and then be was seen no more! In a very few seconds we lowered one of the quarter boats; four seamen and myself jumped in, and wo pulled round the stern of the vessel to find that Murphy had risen again, and was swimming away from the ship as fast as ho could. Strong man, splendid swimmer as he was, we speedily overtook him, and then ensued one of the most painful scenes I have ever experienced. Repeatedly we tried to drag him over the gunwale: but every time he managed to get his feet against the boat’s side and dash himself away farther than ever. With each effort he seemed to gain strength rather than to lose it: but yet could I readily see that the strength was the fictitious one of insanity, and I feared after each effort that he would sink to rise no more. It could not last. A second’s thought— I picked up one of the stretchers from the bottom of the boat—in another moment we were alongside him again. Before the men could grasp him I leaned over the gunwale, fetched him a crack on the head that stunned him effectually—we dragged him in, and in a few minutes had him on board, and safely bound up in a strait waistcoat. He was raving mad. I blamed myself bitterly for iry share in the result, and would not be comforted. But I might have saved myself the mental pain, for in three weeks’ time be came all right again, and the ‘ soldier, officers’—so I called them in those days—tried him by court-martial for ‘being absent without leave,’ found him guilty, and sentenced him—as a precautionary measure, I presume—to be kept in quod until we arrived home. And such was the third holiday dream misting up out of the past from Turkish cigarettes, Mooba, and Dewdrop’s fantastic jingles. ♦ * * » * A glorious old castle, lying close to, indeed almost surrounded by a glorious old forest, and in it a glorious company of holidaykeepers, assembled to celebrate a coming of age. ' Most winsome of the maidens was 4 Tittums ’ Langrishe ; and oh ! but it was sweet to hear her glory in her innocent babbling way of the devotions paid to her, the love made to her, and the butterflies who, constant and inconstant, hovered round her sweet flame. It was sweet to hear her sing in her childish fashion, yet with an evident meaning in her arch blue eye, of—- ‘ How we revelled throughout the summer night— By day they made lance-shafts flee, For Mary Beatoun and Mary Seatouu, And Mary Fleming and me !’ It described the case exactly, only instead of ‘ the Queen’s Maries’ we had Mabels, and Amys, and Maudes, and the fanciful names of the day ; and, instead of lance-shafts, the knights made jokes, and fun, and anecdotes flee, with probably quite as favorable a result on the | ladies as if the warriors had been prodding one another down in the tilt yard all day long, as they did in the days of the love-sick Marie Stuart. Foremost amongst these stalwart knights was Teddy Grey, a penman of exceeding merit, genial and jovial withal, and smitten to the heart with ‘Tittums’ Langrishe. How ■y 6 did,,chaff him, vn otters with krvs-utea-

cumbered hearts, and how we made hi™ wild when we pointed out, as we .frequently and cruelly took occasion to do, that ‘Tittums was of poverty-stricken, albeit welldescended parents; that her pretty face was her fortune: that she was not at all likely to be allowed to wreck it in favour of a destitute scribbler, doughty enough in the ranks of literature, but a sneaking craven when he had to resort to that establishment in the city which held him in terror with a perpetually overdrawn account; and finally, that Tom Dhollera, the grizzly old cotton-broker from Liverpool, had flung his pocket-handker-chief at the Dowager * Tittums, ’ and that the former worthy lady was excessively likely to pick it up in favor of her dainty daughter. But Teddy Grey would not hear anything of the sort—oh no ! ‘ Tittums ’ loved him:— ‘ Tittums’ doted on him— * Tittums ’ would be true to him—such was the constant burden of his song, though not exactly expressed in words ; and, for all our hints, he only made love all the fiercer, expending his very soul, so it seemed, on this pet of the party. In fact, as our grand holiday—sunshine, and revel, and expeditions, and balls, and wanderings in the glorious old forest, and impromptu picnics—wore on, it was evident that Teddy Grey was right and that we were wrong; for the former had, in racing parlance, evidently become first favourite, while Old Bales—so we delicately nicknamed the cotton man was absolutely nowhere. Teddy tried hard to get up such a scene as he was fond of painting in his novels. He longed for an enclosed field and a mad bull, from whose murderous horns he could rescue ‘ Tittums’ with the aid of his gingham; he thirsted with all his soul for a boat-wreck on the lake, that he might swim ashore with his lady-love on his back ; he hungered for tottering walls in crumbling old ruins we explored, in hopes that he might rush madly to the rescue of his heart’s delight; and it was even insinuated that he had been detected with a box of burglar-matches and an armful of shavings, with the dark intention of burning the hospitable castle down in the night-time, so that he might rush in triumphant and save the life of his darling from the flames! But none of these startling incidents would come in reality though they so readily sprang into existence on paper, and Teddy Grey became despondent. But at last came his winning chance. Our holiday was almost at its close, and we were out in the forest for a final alfresco banquet of the real old-fashioned happy sort. ‘ Dress how you like, do what you like, say what you like,’ was the motto of that splendid summer time at the castle, and it was fully carried out on this last occasion. We lounged, we loved, we laughed, we ate, drank, and smoked just at our own sweet wills, and we were happy as the turtle doves in spring under the magnificent old oaks forming our banqueting hall. But there came a change—a great black cloud rushing up from the southward, a few heavy drops of rain, a vivid flash or two of forked lightning, and then the appalling crash of a thunderstorm So close over our heads was it that we became almost terrified. The women shrieked, some laughed hysterically, and a few prayed. The men, for the most part, swore and quarrelled amongst themselves as to what was best to be done. Here and there the lightning struck a tree, splitting the massive timbers, wrenching mighty limbs off, and hurling the grand old trunks down to their mother earth, while the rain came down with all the force of a tornado. ‘ Tittums’ leaned shivering, trembling in every nerve, against the stalwart form of Teddy Grey. Crash! and just behind, them fell hurtling to the ground a monarch of the forest, a giant of oak giants. ‘ Tittums’ screamed out wildly. In a second Teddy Grey had torn off his best—indeed his only decent—coat, flung it round the maiden, and ran her out, in his shirt-sleeves; as ho was, to a wide open glade in the forest, where there could be no danger from falling timber. No one else of the party would dare expose themselves to the fury of that wild tempest. They—or we, perhaps, I should say—preferred to take our chances of death with dry and comfortable garments on, to standing out in a flood of water and a gale of wind. But Teddy and ‘ Tittums,’ she well wrapped up in his only really protecting garment, remained out in the open for a stricken hour, and when the tempest passed away they returned to us— Teddy soaked through and through, and shivering like one in ague, but looking very happy, for (as he told me that evening with a wink) he had ‘ made it all right with “ Tittums;” ’ while the winsome maiden was little the worse for the storm, save that her skirts were draggled and her bottiues damp. Next day our holiday party broke up, with deep regrets on all sides. ‘ Tittums* and her mamma retired to Cheltenham; Teddy Grey, none the better for his ducking, went back to his chambers in London to prepare for carrying out his engagement—one of the happiest men in the wide world; and I betook myself to study in a dull and remote German town. Eight months afterwards I paid a flying visit to London, and my first call was on Teddy Grey, whom I found scarcely alivg. He had had a terrible rheumatic fever, brought on by that holiday ducking, and ‘ Tittums’ and her parent had been most kind. Nevertheless—and he told it me with a wild cry of heart-wrung anguish —he found, soon after his recovery, that the faithless winsome maiden had just married Old Bales! Teddy put himself through a course of drink that very nearly finished him off; then he sat down to sober, plodding, scribbling; and when I dined with him, not so very dong ago, in telling me the final results of that holiday over some rare old Temple port, he wound up with the halfmuttered, half-whispered quotation from Thackeray’s ‘ The Age of Wisdom.’ ‘ The reddest lips that ever were kissed, The brightest eyes that ever have shown, May pray and whisper, and we not list, Or look away, and never be missed, Ere yet ever a month is gone!’ which I thought singularly appropriate; and that was the last holiday dream raised out of the dim mists of the past, by the aid of cigarettes, coffee, and jingles. ‘ There, I’ve ended the Roundelay,’ cried Clarence Dewdrop, ‘Now what do you really think of It ?’ 'Eh?—ah !_ yes ! think of itf I answered, shaking off the drowsiness of my day-dreams—' Oh yes !—very fine —glorious, I may say. In fact, I never tasted better cigarettes or coffee either.’ 4 Pah !’ he snorted, in tones of deep disgust ; and the humilated Minor Poet dashed furiously out of the pleasant embrace of the tented verdure of my weeping ash, by the limpid waters d the wye. Stkphsk J. MaoEifka, —Auttoir cf ‘ Off farad®.’