The Days Before Yesterday | Page 8

laughing as they tumbled in miniature cascades over rocky ledges into
swirling pools, in their mad haste to reach the placid waters below.
Here were purple heather-clad hills, with their bigger brethren rising
mistily blue in the distance, and great wine-coloured tracts of bog (we
called them "flows") interspersed with glistening bands of water, where
the turf had been cut which hung over the village in a thin haze of
fragrant blue smoke.
The woods in the English place were beautifully kept, but they were
uninteresting, for there were no rocks or great stones in them. An
English brook was a dull, prosaic, lifeless stream, rolling its
clay-stained waters stolidly along, with never a dimple of laughter on
its surface, or a joyous little gurgle of surprise at finding that it was
suddenly called upon to take a headlong leap of ten feet. The English
brooks were so silent, too, compared to our noisy Ulster burns, whose
short lives were one clamorous turmoil of protest against the many
obstacles with which nature had barred their progress to the sea; here
swirling over a miniature crag, there babbling noisily among a
labyrinth of stones. They ultimately became merged in a foaming,
roaring salmon river, expanding into amber-coloured pools, or breaking
into white rapids; a river which retained to the last its lordly
independence and reached the sea still free, refusing to be harnessed or
confined by man. Our English brook, after its uneventful childhood,
made its stolid matter-of-fact way into an equally dull little river which
crawled inertly along to its destiny somewhere down by the docks. I
know so many people whose whole lives are like that of that particular
English brook.

We lived then in London at Chesterfield House, South Audley Street,
which covered three times the amount of ground it does at present, for
at the back it had a very large garden, on which Chesterfield Gardens
are now built. In addition to this it had two wings at right angles to it,
one now occupied by Lord Leconfield's house, the other by Nos. 1 and
2, South Audley Street. The left- hand wing was used as our stables and
contained a well which enjoyed an immense local reputation in Mayfair.
Never was such drinking-water! My father allowed any one in the
neighbourhood to fetch their drinking-water from our well, and one of
my earliest recollections is watching the long daily procession of men-
servants in the curious yellow-jean jackets of the "sixties," each with
two large cans in his hands, fetching the day's supply of our matchless
water. No inhabitants of Curzon Street, Great Stanhope Street, or South
Audley Street would dream of touching any water but that from the
famous Chesterfield House spring. In 1867 there was a serious outbreak
of Asiatic cholera in London, and my father determined to have the
water of the celebrated spring analysed. There were loud protests at
this:--what, analyse the finest drinking-water in England! My father,
however, persisted, and the result of the analysis was that our
incomparable drinking-water was found to contain thirty per cent. of
organic matter. The analyst reported that fifteen per cent. of the water
must be pure sewage. My father had the spring sealed and bricked up at
once, but it is a marvel that we had not poisoned every single inhabitant
of the Mayfair district years before.
In the early "sixties" the barbarous practice of sending wretched little
"climbing boys" up chimneys to sweep them still prevailed. In common
with most other children of that day, I was perfectly terrified when the
chimney-sweep arrived with his attendant coal- black imps, for the
usual threat of foolish nurses to their charges when they proved
refractory was, "If you are not good I shall give you to the sweep, and
then you will have to climb up the chimney." When the dust-sheets laid
on the floors announced the advent of the sweeps, I used, if possible, to
hide until they had left the house. I cannot understand how public
opinion tolerated for so long the abominable cruelty of forcing little
boys to clamber up flues. These unhappy brats were made to creep into
the chimneys from the grates, and then to wriggle their way up by

digging their toes into the interstices of the bricks, and by working their
elbows and knees alternately; stifled in the pitch-darkness of the narrow
flue by foul air, suffocated by the showers of soot that fell on them,
perhaps losing their way in the black maze of chimneys, and liable at
any moment, should they lose their footing, to come crashing down
twenty feet, either to be killed outright in the dark or to lie with a
broken limb until they were extricated--should, indeed, it be possible to
rescue them at all.