iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges

iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor from Araunah the Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things did Araunah, as a King, give unto the King—and Araunah said unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” Not our God, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.

‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’

No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.

Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.

Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.

Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’

I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.

“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”

What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive friends. That was precisely what the vision did foretell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm, [39] saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?

Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’

For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.

Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger the promised land was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.

And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever asking what mountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren, Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.

I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.

But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona. [40] Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’ [41] but had even a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.

My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.

But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity upon her, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.

I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.

The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines.

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.

I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.

I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.

Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:—

£ s. d. March. F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning) 1 4 1 Miss M. Guest 2 2 0 April. James Burdon (tithe of wages) 2 10 0 Wm. B. Graham (gift) 1 0 0 Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead) 1 10 0 -------- £8 6 1

II. Affairs of the Master.

£ s. d. March 16. Balance 1471 8 11 21. Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold 90 5 0 28. R. Forsyth (tea-shop) 54 0 0 April 7. Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock 315 0 0 8. Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like) 25 3 3 ---------- 1956 6 4

March 21. Jackson £50 0 0 22. Self [42] 100 0 0 23. Warren and Jones 56 16 3 25, and April 7. Crawley 40 0 0 April 1. Secretary 25 0 0 1. Downs 25 0 0 2. Kate, (and 11th April) 45 0 0 6. Burgess 50 0 0 6. David 53 0 0 --------- 444 16 3 ----------- Balance, April 16. £1511 10 1

III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:—

“16th March, 1876.

“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.

We remain, yours truly.”

My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.

Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (and He is quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.

Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—

1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. The one thing needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.

2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.

3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.

4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.

5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.

6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.

7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.

I can’t tell you more till next letter.

IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils and charges:—

“What is to be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then, asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.

“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?

“Much love, dear Godfather, “Ever your loving Godchild.”

V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.

“Laxey, April 14, 1876.

“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s. 5d., should be £107 16s. 5d.

“Yours, ever truly, “Egbert Rydings.

“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”

May the Almighty give us success over these fellows and enable us to get a Peace

FORS CLAVIGERA.

[All Signed Petitions against Rydal Railway to be sent immediately to me at Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.]