Lippincotts Magazine, July 1885 | Page 8

any such existed,
where the young Indian women could learn to boil a potato properly,
and the use of brooms and pails and scrubbing-brushes. "You must first
clean them and then convert them: get them into the bath-tub, and you
can take them anywhere," said Sir Robert, with great truth and
perspicacity.

"One doesn't get such a dinner, except at a few great houses, outside of
London or Paris," Mrs. Sykes was pleased to say when it was over. "I
have found out that almost everything was ordered from New York;
and a pretty penny it must have cost. Not that this man cares. I dare say
he is only too glad to have the chance of entertaining me,--that is, us. I
was sent in with a waspish little man that turned suddenly crusty on my
hands and was an owl for the rest of the time; but I was rather glad to
be able to devote myself to my dinner for once."
Mrs. Sykes's escort had "turned crusty" because that lady, following her
instinct of ingratiation, had said to him, "All the gentry of this country
are in the South, aren't they? They don't live about here, do they?"--not
from a prejudice in favor of Southerners at all, as was proved when she
went to New Orleans later and promptly asked the first acquaintance
she made whether all the education was not at the North.
The week that followed was a very gay one, the Ketchums' friends in
the neighborhood and in Kalsing being most intent on hospitable
thoughts and providing something agreeable in the shape of an
entertainment for every night. Every moment of the day, too, of every
day was filled up. It seemed to Mrs. Ketchum that "those English
people," as she called them, were never idle, and had discovered the
secret of perpetual motion.
Sir Robert had the boudoir, to which he devoted exactly two hours after
breakfast. He had a geological chart of America, with what he felt to be
melancholy blanks for the chalk and oolite beds of his own country,
and appropriate fossils indicated by an index-finger in red ink. He had
the Poor-Law and electoral systems to master, as well as the prison
systems of the different States. He had to prove that the
Mound-Builders and the race that built the buried cities of Central
America were one and the same. He had innumerable questions,
political, social, agricultural, pressing upon him, from the history of
spiritualism, the purity of the ballot, and the McCormack reaper, down
to certain expressions that immensely struck and pleased him, which
had to be entered in the diary as "unconscious poetry of the
Westerners,"--such phrases as "the fall" (of the leaf),
"morning-glories," "dancing like a breeze," "Daphnes" (instead of
laurels), and many more, which he hoped would be "permanently
engrafted on the mother-tongue." There were other entries to be

made,--"customs of the Westerners," their "descent," "taxation,"
"climate" (as affected by the Great Lakes), "population in 1900," and so
on. There were books, books, books, to be read, referred to, ordered.
There was even a little taxidermy to be done, and the "native birds" to
be first sought, then bought, then prepared, and packed to be sent back
to England. The others, if not quite so busy, were anything but idle.
Miss Noel walked her five miles a day. She was out sketching for hours
under her umbrella, no matter what the weather was, and only said,
"Thank you for your kind concern, but I am quite equal to it," when
Mrs. Ketchum, astonished to see a woman of her own age enduring
such fatigue and running such risks, undertook to remonstrate with her.
"One must get one's constitutional, you know, and one must not mind a
drop or two. There has been no really bad weather yet, --nothing to
keep one in-doors, at least." If she stayed in-doors, she and Mrs. Sykes
(when the latter was not scouring the country on foot or horse-back)
interested themselves in their plants, minerals, seeds, drawings, the
herbarium, the Wardian case, the diaries and letters and fancy-work, the
beautiful collection of sea-weed sent by Miss Marlow from New
England, and a dozen things besides. Mr. Heathcote, meanwhile, was
walking, and riding, and visiting, and, above all, photographing. He got
a small covered cart, into which he would put his photographic
apparatus and go the rounds of the country-side alone, getting his
luncheon as he could, and coming back late in the evening, flushed
with heat and victory, bringing amusing accounts of his experiences, a
bouquet as of an apothecary-shop, and "proofs" of "a lane,--quite an
English-looking lane," "a dog on the chain," "rear view of an American
public" (house), "Saint Lieuk's Church" (five different aspects), "what
the natives call an 'ash-hopper,'--came out