LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 852, 17 March 1877, Page 3

LITERATURE.

ELLEN CAVANAGH. A Tale of Three Stories, CHATTER I. —MY STORY. My uncle was eccentric, but not mad. The lawyers had tried to prove him so, and his relations had done their best to blacken his name. He was too good a man for the mass of those with whom he came in contact, and so he suffered. Even when he was dead, and those who had expected to be his heii-s, found that his money was left to Ellen Cavanagh, whom nobody had ever heard of, they fought over him, and tried to make him suffer in the spirit, as they had made him suffer in the flesh. They went to law about his estate, and tried to prove him mad. But they didn’t succeed ; and 1, fighting for his good name,, never felt happier than when I won the cause for the dead. I had loved him lik© my own father, and ho had been as dear to me. Indeed, of the two, my own father is less in my memory, for he died when I was young ; whereas my uncle I can picture now, with his silver-gray hair, tall upright form, and gentle kindly smile, the squire of that happy Suffolk village, where all who knew him loved him. Ha was my favorite uncle, and I was his favorite nephew. At all events, I oan remember that my school vacations were always spent at my uncle’s house ( ‘ Hall ’ it was called in the village), and that winter or summer, Christmas or June, ‘ home for the holidays ’ meant * homo to my uncle’s. As a rule, my relations did not like me. 1 was voted a rude and uncultivated boy by them. As a rule, 1 did not like my relations, and 1 voted them a lot of preachy, ill-natured, mean (when they forgot to give me a halfcrown as I went back to school), and contemptible bores. My uncle was the excep tion. He would say to my dear mother, as she sat in a low easy chair in a shady corner of the room, doing some mysterious work with two long needles and a ball of wool, while I played 4 touch’ with my uncle round the tables, ‘ Boys will be boys ; and it does me good to see him.’ Then my mother, who had occasioned this remark by a protest against what she called ‘plaguing my uncle,’ but which I always understood to mean 4 not so much noise, I can’t bear it,’ desisted fiom her objections, and once more the boy and the man romped as boys together. Years afterwards, when the hair of the man had thinned on his head, and the down of the boy had thickened into hdr on his upper lip, we were companions just the same. Indeed, I had no other, and I wanted none. My relations were just the same 4 bores ’ to me as formerly. I did not want their halfcrowns then, still less did I want their preachings. They went their ways, and I went my uncle’s ; they went to church three times every Sunday in their carriages, and my uncle went once ; they walked abroad in their ‘ purple and fine linen,’ to see and to be seen ; my uncle walked, but studied less the people he met than God’s works, and night or day, God’s ocean, the trees, flowers, and fields were prayer and hymn of praise to him. My maiden aunts, who gave me as a boy tracts on humility, and preached at me when I went to sec them, saw Jim the crossing-sweeper, and though they knew he swept the crossing in hopes to win a copper for his sick sister lying faint with hunger and burning with fever in a miserable garret, or in hopes to win a copper t» satisfy his mother and her craving fur the, drink which curses the life-stream of our civilisation—they, I say, like many others, passed him by, and drew their ‘purple and fine linen’ closer round them, so that a touch i should not contaminate thorn. They would have given him a tract, though (they are cheap charity), but they knew the boy could not read, and thought the tract would be wasted. My uncle would have taken the boy by tho hand and questioned him, until ho had drawn from him the story of Iris misery, and. thou, church or no church, would have gone to i.he home ia the garret, and, as he would himself have said, ‘have seen it through.’ That meant with him doctoring the girl until she was well, and setting tho boy Jim into work of some honest kind.

Who did not love my ujclc? I doubt if the parson of the parish was as much looked

ip to or called to as a friend as was my uncle, and every one loved him for his own -•lake.

the boy who had romped with the man >f tbirty-fivo was at twenty-seven an ad'iiitred solicitor, a ‘gentleman by Act of Parliament,’ and ‘ licensed,’ aa my uncle *aid, ‘to perform a solemn conjuring trick by proving black was white, and to live on the rascality of others.’

Of course, when launched in my own business, I did not see so much of my uncle as formerly, but at fifty he was, I remember a strong hearty man, with an iron frame unimpaired with the storms of life. Regularly at Christmas I spent some days with him, and endured an immense amount of chaff on professional blood sucking,’ as he termed ray vocation. But regularly at Christmas I left him with orders to execute some new commission, the conveyance of some property or other upon trust—only excuses, I know, on his part for putting money into my pocket under the disguise of business, but with strict injunctions from him to be careful of my charges, for he knew, he said, every item I could legally claim. Dear old man, he knew nothing about it ; and his cheques for a hundred pounds at a time would have covered, though sent ‘ merely on account,’ twenty times over any expenses I had incurred, but refused to charge to him. It was some two or three years after I had been practising that my uncle to ole to making journeys to London, and at such dines was usually my companion in my business. He had frequently accompanied me to the Old Bailey, and on such occasions always displayed much interest in the criminal trials. He used to say that that place and the police courts of the metropolis were starting points for philanthropy, and where philanthropists might find wide fields to explore. Beyond doubt such places are the keys to districts where are to be found every kind <>f criminal ready, for gold, to execute the most fearful of crimes, and to carry them out with the most dogged pluck and perseverance. There is, in the mass at times brought before the courts, a phase of life so varied, so new, so irreconcilable with notions of humanity, as to strike the uninitiated with wonder.

It was to the Old Bailey one morning that my uncle accompanied me ; lon business—ho to study, as he said, the many-sided pic tare of human nature presented then, Whilst waiting for the sitting of the court a little ‘ wiry man accosted me, and said, ‘ Good morning, sir.’ He was a most odd-looking man, witb close-cropped iron-gray hair, small shifting eyes which he repeatedly rubbed with a coloured silk handkerchief, and a stiff cravat. With his black frock-coat buttoned tight up to the chin, he looked something like a military man ; but he was an inspector of police, the sharpest, most astute, and quickest of men in a certain class of cases (offences against the coin-laws) that the service possessed.

(To hr. continued .)