Part 3
Silas Monk was taken back to his tumble-down dwelling in the dismal row, and was tended with all possible care by his devoted grand-daughter. His recovery to a certain point was rapid. But the mental condition was curiously impaired. His brain had lost its force; no recollection of the past survived. His memory seemed to have fled into darkness, and to be resting there and sleeping—a darkness into which it was safer not to admit a single ray of light. This was the bitter irony displayed by nature when granting to this old miser a further extension to his lease of life. For time out of mind, Silas Monk had been governed by a master-passion—his only thought that of hoarding gold. The glitter, like sunlight, had pierced his cold heart, and had helped to keep it beating; and it would almost seem as though the warmth which this gold had driven into his veins still lingered there, and helped to sustain vitality, even when the memory which had given birth to all this agitation was dead.
It had been thought advisable by those who study the mysterious workings of the mind, that gold should be concealed from the sight of Silas Monk, and, if possible, even the sound of it, in order that his memory might rest dormant and his life be prolonged.
One evening the old man was seated in his armchair before the fire, with closed eyes. Rachel sat on a low stool at his feet, holding his hand. On the other side of the hearth was Walter Tiltcroft.
‘Walter,’ said the girl in a low voice, ‘you hardly know how happy I am, now that grandfather can give me all his love. He thinks no more about his’——She stopped, and looked up at her grandfather’s face, frightened that even the mention of gold should reach his ears.
‘Ah!’ cried Walter with a sigh, ‘how many are there, I wonder, in this old city whose minds would be less disturbed if that precious word was forbidden to be uttered in their presence? Does not your grandfather already look less pale and haggard than he did a few weeks ago?’
‘Indeed, he does,’ replied Rachel. ‘He remembers both of us when we are near him. He seems to need nothing now except our affection.’
Walter took the girl’s disengaged hand and said: ‘Rachel! Let me be near you and him. Why should we not be one, and watch over grandfather together?’
At the young man’s words, a look of rapture crossed the girl’s face. ‘Dear Walter,’ cried she, ‘that is all I wish for in this world!’ She spoke like a true and tender woman—from her heart. Seated there by that homely fireside, with the only two beings who were dear to her, she never thought, or cared to think, that all the gold which Walter Tiltcroft and the detective had found in the vault below the strong-room in Crutched Friars would one day belong to her—that, when her grandfather died, she would be a great heiress—worth, indeed, some thousands of pounds. All she thought of, with that look of rapture in her face, was that she had gained Walter Tiltcroft’s love.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, Joe Grimrood having been accused of the robbery in Crutched Friars, was tried, and convicted. Thereupon, he made a full confession. For some days before committing the theft, he had watched Silas Monk from the scaffolding, after the rest of the workmen had gone. Through a chink in the old shutter he had observed every movement of the old miser. He had seen Silas Monk raise the trap-door which led into the vault; he had seen him descend with his lantern, and bring up bag after bag of gold, and pour it out on the desk before him. Watching in Crutched Friars, after having been shown to the door by Walter Tiltcroft, he had seen the young clerk leave the premises. Re-entering the house by means of a key which he had taken the precaution to forge, he had gone straight to the strong-room, where he had met with unexpected resistance. Silas Monk had displayed, according to Grimrood’s statement, almost supernatural strength; defending his gold as a tigress defends her young ones, with a savage leap at the workman’s throat. When utterly exhausted, Grimrood had carried Silas down into the vault and had closed the trap-door upon him. Then, having placed all the gold with which the desk was covered, into the bags, the burglar had decamped, making his way to the docks, and securing a berth on board an emigrant ship which was on the point of departure for the high seas.
Thus it happened that, but for the shrewdness and energy of the detective, Joe Grimrood would have started on a voyage to Australia with, as it appeared, nearly a thousand pounds in hard cash belonging to Silas; and the old miser himself would in all probability have been left to die in the vault under the strong-room in Crutched Friars, and ‘the mystery of Silas Monk’ would have remained a mystery to the present day.
All this occurred some years ago. Silas Monk is long dead; and Walter Tiltcroft, who married the old miser’s grand-daughter, is now a merchant-prince. He purchased, soon after the death of Mr Armytage, a partnership in the great firm; and thus the gold which old Silas had hoarded up in Crutched Friars proved the means, to a great extent, of making Walter Tiltcroft’s fortune.
SOMETHING ABOUT THE HONEY-BEE.
BY A BEEKEEPER.
To ascertain the kind of flower, plant, or shrub which the honey-bee mostly prefers, is worth care and consideration. Having been a keeper of bees for some years, I think it may be useful to make known the results of my experience and observations in Somersetshire, Hertfordshire, and Middlesex.
I will suppose that I have purchased a new stock and hive, bar-frame for preference, and caused it to be removed from the market-gardens around Middlesex to a country town in Hertfordshire. My bees on arrival examine their prospect, and what an estate-agent may call their ‘outlook,’ very minutely, going even over the walls and trees adjacent to their own hive, and taking trial-trips of flight into the air, straight up—very like the rising of a skylark from a field—and dropping again almost as suddenly. Having to some extent, after a day or two, mastered the topography of the district, they will, if on a warm day in February, commence upon the crocuses, and work only upon them—not, as some may suppose, dodge about irrespective of the kind of flower. Although the casual spectator may see bees upon every description of open flower upon one and the same day, yet they are winging their way from different hives. Our bees have commenced on the crocus. The day following this, they will try the common field dandelion; and the next, the white arabis of the garden culture. Then the black-thorn; later on, the currant and gooseberry blossoms, and the sweet ‘may’ of our hedgerows; and of trees—lime, palm, chestnut come next.
The hive should face the south, and the alighting-board occupy as free a space as possible. Water should be given, even during winter—inside, if frost is severe.
Some beekeepers suppose that colour attracts the bee; others, that they possess acutely the sense of smell; and much has been written on the subject. But our readers are to suppose that we are keeping bees between us, and that I am relating my own experiences, which point to this—the preference of these intelligent insects for some plants over others. I have tried to educate my bees, by inducing them on certain days to gather from flowers presented to them in small bunches upon the alighting-board of their hive. In two instances I succeeded. One was with white clover, which I picked in a field a mile distant. This appeared to cheer the bees greatly, and drove away their listlessness and inactivity. After making an examination of my offering, they began work in earnest; and this stimulant had the desired effect of inducing an idle community to work well. The second experiment was much more demonstrative. Early in the morning, before the workers came forth, I placed by the alighting-board some bunches of alder-flower. I had shortly the satisfaction of seeing the outgoing bees return with little white trousers of pollen, and I watched their flight to an alder tree at a corner of the garden, not far from their hive. This was conclusive.
Now for some descriptions of preference shown by bees. I have grown garden-peas of various descriptions near my hives without inducing the bees to notice them. Yet they will greedily gather from French beans or scarlet runners the whole day, till long after sunset. In spring-time, the yellow gorse on uncultivated spots forms a very strong attraction for the honey-bees; yet they never touch the blossom of the laburnum, which to ordinary mortals smells much the same. The cultivated hyacinth they do not care about, although they gather from the wild sort in the woods and shady groves. Bees show great preference for the pollen of some sorts of lilies, yet are wholly indifferent to the lily of the valley. They gather from the field-daisy, yet are careless of the cultivated sort.
Stocks they prefer to pinks, and lavender to either; also the small flower of the borage delights them; yet wild foxglove possesses little charm. I have heard that bees like monkshood, and will gather from it, but I have never seen them do so. If they did, their honey would be poisonous. Bees are passionately fond of clover and certain vetches, and they will desert any garden flowers for such natural feeding. Wild thyme and heather, which improve the flavour of the honey, bees perfectly revel in. Garden primroses, they do not care much for; and auriculas, however gaudy in colour, form no kind of attraction. The polyanthus they have a languid liking for. I have seen the wild-bees attack the cowslip; but not the honey-bee of our hives. I saw a bee once upon a cultivated rose; it was only resting. I have likewise a distinct remembrance of seeing many upon the wild-rose and dog-rose, wild clematis, honeysuckle, and blackberry blossom.
The situation of our hive cannot always be in such a flowery land; and the beekeeper will do well to study the different flora and trees in the immediate neighbourhood of his hive, and endeavour to supply any deficiencies of pollen-bearing plants, as well as to give a gentle hint to the inhabitants of his hives of any honey-bearing plant from which he especially wants them to gather. Of course, in wild heather districts, there is no need to resort to planting or sowing for the bees; they will in such places always take care of themselves. In Somersetshire, bees find honey from the many miles of apple-orchard stretching away to the mild county of Devon; and farmers well know that a good bee season, with a warm and early spring, means a plentiful show of fruit in the autumn for cider. In and around Middlesex, there are market and fruit gardens; and in Hertfordshire, grazing and clover lands, besides hedges lined with limes and hawthorn, and later on, honeysuckle.
It is always a good plan to send late swarms of the hive into heather-bearing counties; for the bees being young, and having every inducement to work for the approaching winter, will store better than hives which have been ‘swarmed’ and deprived of honey, the colonies of which are worn or fatigued with the long-continued gathering of a summer in more southern counties. It must likewise be remembered that bees cannot gather, or rather will not do so, late in the autumn, when the cold prevents them sealing over with wax the top of the cell.
And now, a last word as to the preference of our bees for certain flowers over others, which we would imagine, with our limited powers of the sense of smell and taste, would be preferred by these insects, and for which we have the greater amount of regard. I have seen, upon the approach of a bee to any flower, that it flies around the calyx almost always before alighting upon the flower itself. This is a cursory examination; and with its antennæ outstretched and quivering, it is evidently scenting the honey contained within. Should this prove a fruitful flower and of the flavour required, the bee settles on the centre of the stamen, and clutching it with its four front-legs, steadies itself with its longer outstretched two hindermost ones, and withdraws the nectar by its proboscis, the rings of the body assuming a vibratory motion the while. The bee’s proboscis is a most important instrument. It is composed of forty cartilaginous rings, each of which is fringed with minute hairs, having also a small tuft of hair at its extremity, where it is somewhat serrated. Its movement is like the trunk of an elephant, and is susceptible of extension and contraction, bending and twisting in all directions. Thus, by rolling it about, it searches out the calyx, pistil, and stamen of every flower, and deposits its nectar upon the tongue, whence it passes into the gullet at the base. The gullet or first stomach is the honey-bag. No digestion takes place here. In shape, it is like an oil-flask, and when full, contains about one grain. It is susceptible of contraction, and is so arranged as to enable the insect to disgorge its contents into the cells of the hive. A short passage leads to the ventricle or true stomach, which is somewhat larger. This receives the food from the honey-bag, for the nourishment of the bee and the secretion of wax. Dzierzon says that the honey which a bee can take into her stomach will enable her to subsist for a week under some circumstances, while under others she will die of hunger within twenty-four hours. This opinion of Dzierzon settles my conviction, that in the selection of the kind of food which will enable the bee to live longest, the true guide is to be found in the flowers for which it has the strongest preference.
BOOK GOSSIP.
The Norman Conquest is one of the great outstanding and predominating facts in English history. It occasioned a sudden break in the life of the English people, and its influence is felt in their character and institutions even to the present day. A hundred and fifty years before that event, the long black ships of the Norse pirates entered the wide mouths of the Seine and the Loire, and their crews, the rudest of the rough barbarians of Denmark and Norway, sacked the towns and pillaged the churches of the country which was afterwards to be called by their name. They had no science, no arts, no culture. Their physical strength was their glory; and their weapons of war, their defence at home, served also as their passport into the lands of the stranger whom they plundered and slew. But they had a remarkable power of adaptation. However foreign to them the environment into which their hardy courage had brought them, they did not long remain untouched by it. Without losing their own native hardihood and fearlessness, they quickly absorbed into them the spirit of the peoples and institutions among which they had taken root; and before a century had passed over their heads in France, they had already become one of the great political forces of Europe. It was this people, brave, warlike, and with strong practical sagacity, who landed on the English shores in 1066, and shattered the Saxon arms on the slopes of Senlac. The battle at ‘the hoar apple tree,’ where Harold lay dead with the Norman arrow deep in his brain, marks the beginning of a new epoch in England.
The history of that great event, with its antecedents and consequents, has rarely been better told than it is by Mr Wm. Hunt, in the new volume of the ‘Early Britain Series,’ entitled _The Norman Conquest_ (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). As compared with the work of Freeman, this is in bulk but a small book; yet it contains within it all that thousands of readers would desire to know of the history of the Conquest. The author is extremely well-informed on his subject, and his scholarly little book gives evidence not only of original research but of much original thought. The pictures he draws for us of the England that preceded the Conquest, and of the England that followed it, are sketched with a fullness and beauty of detail which amply exhibit the capacity and preparedness of the author for the task which he undertook, and which he has executed so well. His extensive reading has enabled him to take advantage of the results obtained by all the best and more recent investigators in this section of European history; and the Northmen both before and after their descent on France, as well as the Saxon tribes and Danish hordes that scoured our coasts centuries before, are portrayed with a quick and living touch. Still more interesting is the story of the Normans after their taking possession of England; and the strange manner in which the Saxon head eventually conquered the Norman hand—the Saxon language and institutions arising in more than their original vitality and force out of the ashes, as it were, of a temporary death—is here narrated with admirable clearness and coherency. The book is one of the best of the very valuable series to which it belongs.
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The same publishing house issues another learned little volume on _Anglo-Saxon Literature_, by Mr John Earle, Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. It belongs to the series bearing upon ‘The Dawn of European Literature,’ and is rich with the results of the best modern scholarship on the early history and growth of our language. The time when Latin and Greek formed the chief essentials of learning is fast receding into the past, and these languages are having a place assigned them more consistent with the necessities of the modern world, which is not tolerant of the acquisition of a kind of knowledge that in great part is archaic and useless. Under the influence of this change, our own language is rising into an importance which it could never attain so long as it was regarded simply as a vulgar tongue, and the historical study of English is becoming one of the most popular as well as one of the most useful pursuits of our philologists. The great English Dictionary of the Philological Society is only one evidence of this; for individual scholars, during the last twenty years, have done not a little to lay bare to us the inner structure of our language, and the changes and modifications to which it has been subjected in the course of its long descent.
In the little work under review, Mr Earle states that Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe. The materials of this early literature are found chiefly in written books and documents; but they are found also in such subsidiary sources as inscriptions on churches and church towers, sun-dials, crosses, and even on jewellery. One of the most remarkable in this last category is what is known as the Alfred Jewel. It was discovered in Newton Park, near Athelney, in 1693, and in 1718 had found its way to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where it still is. It consists of an enamelled figure enshrined in a golden frame, with a golden back to it, and with a thick piece of rock-crystal in front, to serve as a glass to the picture. Around the sloping rim the following legend is wrought in the fabric: ÆLFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCEAN (‘Alfred me commanded to make’). ‘The language of the legend,’ says the author, ‘agrees perfectly with the age of King Alfred, and it seems to be the unhesitating opinion of all those who have investigated the subject that it was a personal ornament of the great West-Saxon king.’ Mr Earle traces the language from the Heathen Period—that is, from the time previous to the English conversion to Christianity, about 597 A.D.—down to the times that immediately succeeded upon the Norman Conquest, and gives examples of the language during these six centuries, with translations of the various passages adduced. All who have an interest in the study of the English tongue, and of the changes superinduced upon it by contact with other European vernaculars, will find Mr Earle’s volume a ready and efficient guide.
THE MONTH:
SCIENCE AND ARTS.
Projects for cutting waterways across isthmuses follow one another with such amazing swiftness, and the project is in most cases so quickly followed by realisation, that it would appear that before many years have passed, all the available peninsulas of the world will have been operated upon and transformed into islands. Our French neighbours are at present discussing the feasibility of a gigantic undertaking of this nature, which, if carried out, will unite the Bay of Biscay with the Mediterranean. This projected canal, which is to be of such dimensions that the largest ships afloat can make use of it, is to have one entrance near Bordeaux, and the other at Narbonne. This short-cut across France will obviate the necessity of the tedious voyage round Spain and through the Straits of Gibraltar, and will undoubtedly be a boon to shipping, and especially to British vessels; but the scheme is at present only on paper. It remains to be seen whether the undertaking is possible; by which is meant, in these days of engineering marvels, whether it will pay.
Like most other canal projects, this one is by no means new; indeed, a canal already exists almost along the same line of route—namely, the Canal du Midi, which finds an outlet at Cette in the Gulf of Lions, and joins the river Garonne at its other extremity at Toulouse; the entire navigable distance from Bordeaux to Cette being three hundred and thirty-two miles. The existing canal only accommodates small vessels, and the entire journey is by no means a rapid one, for there are more than a hundred locks to be encountered, which gradually raise the boats to a level of nearly eight hundred feet above the sea. Whether the engineers of the new undertaking propose any novel means of battling with this difficulty of level, we do not know; but it will be readily seen that the undertaking has not the simplicity of a simple cutting, such as the Suez Canal presents. Another formidable obstacle to the work is the presence of certain rivers which flow right across the track. In the present case, these are crossed by aqueducts. But what would be the size and cost of aqueducts which would give passage to the floating palaces which have taken the place of the small vessels of days gone by?
Coming nearer home, a project has been mooted for cutting a channel from the river Tyne to the Solway; and another across the low land which separates the Forth from the Clyde. It is true that in the latter case a narrow passage already exists; but what is required is—according to the opinion of a former President of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, who writes to the _Times_ upon the subject—a channel which will allow the passage of our largest merchantmen and ships of war, so that in case of need the efficiency of our naval defences may be practically doubled. In case of war, the advantages of quick transport of our ships from one coast to the other is obvious, and may in a manner be compared to the undoubted advantages which we reap from being able to convey information quickly from place to place by telegraphic agency.