RECOLLECTIONS OF AN OLD NURSE.

FAMOUS people often write their reminiscences, but as it is a task rarely undertaken by those whose lives have been bumble and olicure, the dim world in which, to our eyes, they seem to exist, is therefore seldom lit by any torch of autobiography. If it is difficult to share in their joys and sorrows when they are of our own generation, how much harder is it to do so when the lapse of many years separates us from them. Bat sometimes the darkness is partly Mu- .minated, and we may look for a moment into another room of life than our own.

The present writer has two small manuscript books, the contents of which throw a ray of light into "a poor man's house" of the early nineteenth century. They are the recol- lections of the childhood and youth of his old nurse, whose father was a sailor in the Navy at the time of the Mutiny of the Nore. They were written towards the end of a long and hard-working life, which she sums up in these words: "I have not had an unpleasant life, although I was an old maid, and was a servant for fifty years. I was a nurse, and no mother could have loved her children more than I loved those I nursed. I had three dear, good mistresses, two of whom I left against their will." The third, and last, was the present writer's mother, whom the old nurse outlived for many years.

Looking back on her sailor father's life, she asks : " What did he get for all his bard work and risk, for all his exposure to cold and heat and the dangers of the sea? ' Bad food and never more than £2 a month. He need to say that seafaring life was a martyrdom. Dr. Johnson called it the worst kind of prison, but my father thought it worse than that."

In these recollections of the daughter of a man who helped to fight our battles we hear nothing of the "glory of war," but much of the misery inseparable from it. If those who think lightly of the problem of national defence could realize, if but vaguely, the effect of war, they might be more ready to take precautions against it :—

" I am writing of the time a little after Waterloo," we are again quoting from the manuscript. "We were living at Dartmouth. Everything was very dear. We lived mostly on barley bread. We children were so used to it that we did not mind it, but my poor mother could never eat it without repug- nance, and we always tried to make her get white bread, not knowing that she could not properly afford it. Many a time (so she told me in after years) she made her supper off a turnip rather than let her children go hungry to bed. The cheapest sugar was then tenpence a pound, and the very cheapest tea quite as much as fivo shillings, but what I had to get for my mother was in very small quantities. We children never had it, nor, as far as I remember, cared for it. It was a treat when we could get milk to dip our bread in."

The ravages of the press gang were a constant terror in those days. The old nurse did not herself remember .heing "awakened in the night by people crying out that they had been taken," for she was not born until 1810, but

f` my mother used to tell me heartrending stories about these times. I can hardly even now," she writes in her old age, "bear to think of the dreadful things done by the press gang in the name of the law. I never hated the French as I hated them. Thinking of these days, this story has come into my mind. A great friend of my mother's, a pork butcher, had been boatswain on board a man-of-war. He was a tall, powerful man, and had been at sea for many years. However, at last he ran away. The punishment for this was to be flogged through the fleet, and of course that meant certain death. But he would have escaped this, as the authorities were anxious to get him back, for he was a man who knew his work. He was living in a seaport town, and to save himself from being pressed, he was looking out for a small vessel, for being master of ever so small a one would prevent his being taken. He had nearly concluded a bargain, when ono day an old Admiral who lived in the town sent to ask him if he would please to call, as be bad something very particular to say to him. The sailor know that this Admiral was very old, and hardly able to move about, so he thought it would do no harm to go. When he got to the house he took off his shoes and left them on a mat in the hall, and then went upstairs to the drawing-room, where the old man was sitting. He talked kindly and seemed to take a great interest in him, our friend used to say, but instead of telling him anything important, the Admiral asked him all sorts of questions about different things. All at once it flashed into the man's mind that the press gang was coming, and at that moment he heard a loud knock at the front door. Here's the Lieutenant,' he said to him- self, and rushed downstairs as fast as he could. Sure enough the servant was opening the door to a young officer. They looked. hard at each other, but our friend rushed past without waiting to put on his shoes, and went as fast as he could to-the owner of the little craft he was trying to buy. He bought her on the man's terms, and was glad to do so. ' That was a near shave,' he would say. I can see his jolly face and hear his laughter now."

The English press gang* seems from this story to have acknowledged some laws, and though no doubt it was quite bad enough, it cannot have been no intolerable as was that of Frederick the Great, which George Sand denounces with fiery energy in Consuelo. "Partout la violence, is inert et l'epouvante."

But in the companionship of her mother the little Salome (so the old nurse was called) found a refuge from the stern realities of life. For besides being a woman of strong and upright character and a devout Methodist, the mother had a passionate love for literature, which was inherited by her daughter, whose own appreciation of literary style was not the least remarkable of her characteristics. " One day," she says, " when I was a housemaid, I was dusting the books, and according to my usual habit, I opened one and read a few pages, duster in hand. It happened that I took down a volume of Junius, and I began to read. I knew nothing about the Duke of Grafton, or any of the people I read about, and yet I had not read two pages before I felt as if I was drunk "—eo tremendous was the effect of the heady invective on her mind and emotions. Of Swinburne she says "His poetry is like the smell of a too hot conservatory." She does not say much of her love for Milton and Shakespeare, but it was a "ruling passion" with her, to borrow one of her favourite expressions, for she was an appreciative reader of Pope. She looked on the characters in the plays as personal friends. "There," she would say, tapping the book, " there they all are—I don't want anybody else."

Writing of her young days, the old nurse says :—

" Though we were very poor, my childhood seems pleasant to me as I look back, for my mother did all she could to make us happy. She went out sewing very often, and we were glad she should go, for she got better food than she could get at home, and what was, I believe, as much good to her, she sometimes got food for her mind. But, poor dear, she was always having a struggle with her conscience, and her love of what is called light reading, es being a Methodist she thought it wrong to read such books. She told me that when she was married she was given a new edition of all the Elizabethan plays, twenty-five volumes, beauti- fully bound. (I heard. afterwards that a new edition was published at that time.) However, about the year 1818 she thought it right to burn them, although she was so fond of them. Yet when I was sitting at work with her she would tell me tales out of the plays. How vexed I used to be with her for burning them, poor dear loving soother 1 She taught me to read out of my father's large old Bible, and the Apocrypha was a book of wonder to me. She was fond. of Young's Night Thoughts, and I would read it • Its Sir Cyprian Bridge has shown, the press can, though partial and Violent, du( not play anything like as great or as cruel a part as one would imagine from fiction or from traditions and old memories sock as those of the old nurse. Only a very small proportion of our Sailors were pressed 11.1011—pro- bcdAy not tee per cent. The other ninety per cent. were band-fide volunteers who joined for the fighting and the price-money. The pay and food In the Navy were also good coosidering the standard of the age. Still, though not many, there wore some very cases, and these deeply affected, and most siltis.11Y, the attitude of the nation towards the press gang and made it lata- fut beyond endumoco.—En. Spectator.

when I could get nothing more to my fancy. Milton she read often; my father gave it to her ; poor man, he thought it would please her. He was a sweet-tempered man, easy and kind-hearted, but not clever like my mother. He once said to her when she laughed at him for some blunders, Well, my dear, what can the woman with five talents expect from the man with one P'"

She was indeed a woman of parts, and in her old age she could. repeat whole books of Paradise Lost, and in spite of her religions scruples as to stage plays, she knew Hamlet by heart

"Poor mother," the old nurse goes on, "though her life was uncongenial, and the only treat she gave herself was a little reading, she did not often seem depressed. She believed with all her heart in her religion. My father, too, was a good man, but his religion was only a reflection of hers. Oh, I did love her ! Shall I meet her in the world to which I am so near P How we shall talk over all that has passed since we parted. Now I have got so old I often feel sorry that I was not kinder to her in little things. I miss these little things so myself, but we cannot recall the day that is past."

We have not apace for much more quotation from these old recollection; but here is an instance of the practical sincerity of the mother's religion:—

" There was a good deal of smuggling going on in the town when I was a girl, and one day a member of my mother's chapel brought some gay things for her to buy. Oh, how I did long for her to get me a pretty neckerchief, but she said, 'No, my dear, I cannot buy it for you, as I do not see any difference in cheating a single man or a government of men. I believe that in the sight of God both are equally sinful.'" Here, too, is one more episode from her Biographic, Literaria. She told the present writer that when she came up from Dartmouth to Bristol at the end of the "twenties" or beginning of the "thirties " she lay in the straw at the bottom of " the waggon "—the poor man's stage-coach—and read, as if in an enchantment, Wordsworth's Muth. A lady had in this case given her the book, but you could no more keep her from good literature than you could keep an opium-eater from laudanum. She always got "the first read" of any poetry that came into the house. She " bagged " the book, even if it belonged to the master, while the family were at lunch or dinner, and it remained "lust" till she had rushed through it with blazing eyes and flying finger.

Though we have given but a few of the old nurse's tales and recollections, they are perhaps enough to show us some- thing of an epoch when men's vitality was so great that even want and hunger could not deaden the activity of their minds, nor take from them the life of the spirit or the pleasures of the imagination.