IN TRUST OF RAVENS.

Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1539, 6 January 1874, Page 72

IN TRUST OF RAVENS.

(From "The Queen.") The people who believe neither in nature nor good fortune may be balanced by those who live entirely on trust. The first think they have to play providence on all occasions, as if the very fruits of the earth would not ripen in the sun without their getting up early in the morning to see to it—as if the children would not be safe for a day unless they were kept alive by intentional care. The second are of those who wait to be fed by ravens, who believe in luck before labor, and are content to place themselves under the constant overlooking of a benign Providence tolerant of sloth and unwearied by stupidity. It is not that they cast their bread on the waters and expect it to be returned to them; but they do not even plough their allotted portion of land, still less sow or reap or garner; yet they look for bread all the same, and think themselves ill-used if they do hot find it in the fallow—with cake by its side. Their welfare is everybody's business but their own; and when they fall into distress be sure they do not hold themselves to blame. Do with them what you will, you can never keep them up to the mark by their own efforts; and how often soever you aid them, you will have your work to do over again, and to give more where you have already given much. What is the use of their trusting in Providence, they think, if they are not to be rewarded ? and they translate the text which tells us it is more blessed to , give than to receive for their own benefit and your profit. When the pinch comes —and the pinch is always coming—they apply to you for assistance with the simple trustfulness of savages beseeching the Obi man for rain, or of children demanding that out of two oranges you shall make three, as you did with the sixpences on the plate the other day under the table. And how can you refuse them ? Unless you pay their rent the landlord will put in an execution; and you shrink from the pain and humiliation that will give them. By refraining from helping them you are, however, practically the cause of their sorrow; quite as much so as the hard-hearted landlord himself. What can you do then, but put your hand in your pocket for more times now than you care to count, and buy out the obtrusive broker with a douceur at the back of the bill ? That they grip your hands and thank you with effusive gratitude is all very well, and maybe creates a fine glow for the moment; but you judge a little more coolly when your wife falls ill and the doctor orders her away to Madeira—and you stand face to face with an overdrawn account, while your happy-go-lucky friend swims buoyantly on the stream of providential waters, his channel filled while yours has run dry. You would not mind so much if it was only a temporary trouble, with better times to come could it but be got over. You have known what it is to lose your own way, and be driven into a corner by a malicious fate; but then you can fend afterwards for yourself, if you are only helped ever so little now, out of your straits; and you would be ashamed to ask twice for ihe same disaster and of the same person. Not so your trustful friend. He thinks that practice makes perfect, and use hardens to suffering. Where he has struck once, and found that sweet waters flowed at his bidding, he thinks he may strike again; and he never conceives the possibility of the well failing, or of there being only enough for one in reserve, and that if his pitcher is filled yours must

go empty, me man wno lives in trust of ravens never concerns himself about the larder whence he is fed. That is their affair, not his; and if they rob themselves to feed him, well, he loves and thanks them heartily, and supposes they will have their reward. If he had it, and they needed, he says, he would share with them as they have shared with him. Only, unfortunately, he never has while others need; and the question of sharing has no value in his eyes beyond the hypothetical, which commits him to nothing. The man who lives in trust of ravens is scrupulous not to interefere with their work. If providence is minded to take care of him, he thinks it would be ungrateful and disrespectful to take the matter into his own hands, and to fly in the face of its benevolent designs. Like Micawber, he is always waiting for something to turn up ; but he does not care to spend his days in looking for this something. If it turns up at all, it will turn up of its own accord. There is no use iu fretting himself over a search which may be a simple loss Of energy and time; and, on the principle of making hay while the sun shines, of seizing the day and gathering roses while we may, he employs this interval between his present condition of ch6mage and the future moment of activity, when something has turned up, in enjoying himself after his desires. If his desires lead him to nothing more energetic than lying in the shade, reading a French novel and smoking a cigar, he is none the less sure that this is the right kind of thing pending the appearance of the trouvaille. And this, at

least, nas oniy tne negative merit or idleness. It is not like spending money on personal luxuries, he says, with an injured air if you remonstrate. Keeping out of mischief, doing no harm to any one, satisfied with a little, tranquil and simple, content and Arcadian: —can you find anything in all that to condemn 1 If he were like some fellows, now, you might growl; but, as he is, his friends may be thankful he is so inoffensive 1 All very well, you say; but those hard-worked ravens?—those luckless birds who have to provide, not only for their own nestlings, but for self-constituted cuckoos like himself? The ravens ?—ab, the ravens! well, they have opportunities, and he has none. This theory of opportunities goes a long way with those who live in trust of ravens—so far, that is, as their food- ; bringers are concerned. According to them, every one but themselves has opportunities—favours scattered out of Fortune's lucky-bag, with no more effort required by those who receive them than the trouble involved in stooping to pick them up. These opportunities which

never come to them are, however, always on the high road—always coming and on the point of arriving. But no one ever saw them fairly established and at home. Say that you present one of your own finding—say that you propose this secretaryship or that clerkship—that you dig out a hole exactly fitted to your friend’s dimensions, square if he is square, round if he is orbicular. Do you think he will will accept and be thankful ? Not a hit of it! He prefers sticking to his ravens and better chances, lying on the grass reading a French novel, and waiting till the falling skies send him roasted larks for supper. These men habitually ravenfed, know too well what is due to themselves to accept their portion of toil with the rest. There are too many workers in the world already, they say. Why, you yourself confess that every profession is over-stocked, every corner crowded. They make it, then, a matter of principle that they will not add to the multitude; and they refuse to take it on their conscience that they have stepped into the place which a better man might have occupied, and taken the bread out of the mouth of some poor wretch who wanted it more than they. So they turn over to the sun; and when they are hungry they whistle, and the ravens feed them. If this is less than worthy, some of -he raven-fed are more than pitiable. Take a tender, fragile little woman, educated to nothing, physically incapable of hard work, morally unfit to cope with the world, delicate, trustful, timid; leave her without a natural protector, and penniless, with perhaps a child or two depending on her, and what is she to do ? Nothing but her trust in ravens and their response saves her from starvation. She cannot work. Her small untaught hands hold no gift that the world wants. Her untrained empty brain has no fountain of knowledge for which others are athirst. She was fit to love her husband, and do as she was told; she could manage her house creditably enough with his strong arm to lean on if things went astray; and her children know what it is to have a loving mother, patient and fond, if neither very wise nor very profound. But when she is left to fight her own battles, then the absolute weakness of her condition is made manifest; and if the ravens do not feed her, the worms will soon know why. These women are the despair of all who know them. Short of being absolutely dowered, given a home and an income to keep it on, nothing can be done for them. Sometimes they essay a little spurious art, which they do very badly even for the miserable thing it is; sometimes they have a vague idea of making themselves hospital nurses, when they faint at the first bad wound they are called upon to see dressed. They think they would like to be housekeepers to widowed gentlemen; but then the world does not look kindly on housekeepers to widowed gentlemen with trim waists, glossy hair, dovelike eyes, and timid manners. As for governesses, they might as well attempt to be captains in her Majesty’s navy, with a hirsute crew under their orders, as to constitute themselves the teachers of things they do not know to girls they cannot govern. No; nothing remains for them but the ravens; and, if these fail them, the union. We wish there were some laws which should provide for destitute lonely women of this fragile kind on a given scale of incapacity. It fs hard to see them unresisting, helpless;' beaten down, and buffeted in the fight; to know them worthy of better things, but unable to help them thereto ; to meet them in their sorrow, and be obliged to leave them as we meet them, depending only on ravens—chance-fed ! One feels somehow that it is a disgrace to one’s manhood and a shame to one’s greater strength. Unable perhaps to he the raven on one’s own account, one casts about for those who can ; and we get infinite ill-will for the zeal with which we have pleaded a cause not our own, hut which has had the result of the transfer of coin. People do not want their compassion excited by direct appeals made in person. There is a certain stand-and-deliver kind of accent in every petition presented point blank ; and the presenter gets the brunt of the angry fear he has excited. But what are we to do, we who have on our hands one whose only hope lies in the ravens, and for whom we cannot forage for our own part ? There is nothing for it but to pass it on; in the hope that a good larder may not be far distant, and that the ravens may find it, out and distribute it.