will be served, and the yearling cock- | relationship. But, on the other hand, erel is probably in better training and he has neither the savage comfort of better fighting trim than his mature revenge like Hecuba, nor, unless inrival. But it will be a desperate battle - desperate on both sides, in the strictest sense of the term and the young victor will be punished almost more severely than the vanquished. Hope for a season bade the world farewell, And Freedom shrieked, -as Kosciusko fell. There is no patriot in the case now, only a fallen bully and tyrant. And yet, little though he has deserved it, we must extend to him some sympathy. For neither in the pages of history nor those of fiction is pictured quite so lamentable a fall as this, that must occur daily in one or other of the poultryyards of the world. For a parallel we must go to Scripture, and read the story of Satan being cast out of heaven. The Greek tragedian was perhaps beyond all other writers successful in deed some merciful biped, acting the part of the deus ex machinâ, transports him to fresh pastures, will he have, like Edipus, the chance of redeeming in old age the misfortunes of youth, life and home and all that Theban and "wholly forgetting his first sad woe." For the bowstring offered to deposed Oriental sovereigns by their supplanters, the disappearance of the dethroned sultan which we encounter in the history of Turkey, the violent murder of more than one of our own kings, the lifelong incarceration of ill-starred Robert of Normandy, are so many acts of mercy as contrasted with the fate of this autocrat, reduced to abject and hunted slavery, compelled to see his wives become the willing prey of the conqueror, condemned to wander unattended in the outskirts of the yard, and what we may be allowed to call "piling to pick up a scauty livelihood from the up the agony," and it is hard to imag refuse of his late slave's leavings, ine any reverses of fortune more awful afraid to answer the challenging crow than those depicted in the cases of of his triumphant enemy. There is no Hecuba or of Edipus. The former, in semblance of chivalry about the victor. summing up her misfortunes, tells us He will neither receive the deposed that she had been a queen, but now monarch into the circle of his intimate was a slave; that from being a happy friends like a Cyrus, nor treat him roymother she found herself in old age ally as Alexander treated Porus, nor childless, homeless, deserted, most let him retain his title and semblance wretched of mortals." But to her was of royalty in an Elba. His is rather granted the solace of a bloody if only partial revenge. Of Edipus it was the motto of the Gallic chieftain, Væ victis. Old insults will be repaid with insults, old beatings with beatings ; for every degradation that was put on himself in his youth he will heap ten-fold degradation on his former persecutor, and to compass that object he will bring into play all the resources of spite that an ill-regulated nature can invent. It only remains for us to redeem a promise made early in these pages, and to quote the only case that has come actually within our own ken where poultry have been kept at a profit. The proprietors are a limited liability company which may have escaped registration owing to the circumstance that all the shares, whether preference or ordinary, were taken up by the direc tion, may derive a vast amount of pleasure and not a little instruction from studying the manners and customs, the virtues and the vices, of his feathered friends. From The Nineteenth Century. THE OLD-AGE HOMES IN AUSTRIA. tors, and none were offered to the pub- | contra, any one who is prepared to delic. The directors are three young vote much time, much personal attenladies, and a ready market is found for tion, and a little money to a harmless the produce of the poultry-yard-at and withal a very interesting occupahome; it being an understood thing, even if there is no stamped agreement to the effect, that the housekeeper — i.e., the mother of these adventuresses - should buy eggs the whole year round at 1s. 6d. per dozen, and fowls at a trifle over the current poulterer's price, and that no extraneous purchases may be made except by special consent of the company. No rent is paid for the premises occupied by the poultry; IN the Spitalgasse in Vienna, about and as there are plenty of gardeners, a mile perhaps from the Ring, stands a etc., about the place, the employment great yellow building. There is no of outside labor would be obviously a architectural beauty about the place work of supererogation. Occasionally-artists shake their heads sorrowfully the Market has been reported to com- when its name is mentioned but it plain that there is a plethora of eggs has a solid, well-built look which prombetween February and June, and that ises much in the way of comfort for the supply is wholly inadequate to meet those who live there. It is in the very the demand at any other time of the healthiest part of the city, too, and is year; or that the chickens are ridicu- a perfect model of cleanliness and lously small, and the especially fattened are abnormally tough. But the answer to such criticisms is that the directors really cannot be held responsible for the capriciousness of laying hens; that a provident housekeeper should in the months of plenty store eggs for winter consumption; and that if the same price is quoted for a four-months as for a six-months chicken, it would be obviously false economy to feed the creature for the extra two months. Hens, it will be added, who refuse to lay must be got rid of, and it is cheaper to sell them than to give them away. "You need not eat them, mother dear, unless you like. You can bury them if you like, after you have paid for them." Hearing such words of wisdom, the Market resignedly accepts her fate. order; its windows are quite dazzling in their brightness, while as for its walls, they are painted and washed more often than those of the Burg. The house is built round a great courtyard, and abuts on the side remote from the street on one of the most beautiful gardens in all Vienna. It is a real old-fashioned garden, with sweetsmelling herbs and shrubs, and great trees that look as if they had been standing there for centuries. This house is evidently a popular resort; even in a morning many a visitor makes his way thither, and on fine afternoons the garden is often quite crowded. Young men and women stroll in when their day's work is done; and husbands and wives, with their children. Sometimes a bridal party or a christening may be seen there, in all their finery, just as they have left the church; sometimes, too, sad little groups in deep mourning. But, generally speaking, the poultry- The place is a sort of general rendezyard is by no means an El Dorado, and vous, in fact, where the old and the he who aspires to make money out of young meet together to talk things poultry-farming, either on a large or over. Not that it stands open to all the small scale, is more likely to be disap- world; it is only the friends and relapointed than the reverse. But, per tives of those who live there who are Under such circumstances as these, it is easy to imagine that there is a fair margin for profit. admitted. Stili, whether or not they | He was one of the first formally to ever cross its threshold, the poor of enunciate the doctrine that a man who Vienna all look upon this building as their own special property, and take quite a personal pride in its trim, wellkept air. The veriest Ishmael among them, even when things are at the worst with him, never thinks of grudging its inmates their comfort. For it is an Old-Age Home, one of the six great refuges which Vienna provides for her worn-out workers. These Old-Age Homes are an institution peculiar to Austria, one that dates back to very early days. The first of them, the Langhaus as it was called, was built in the thirteenth century by the citizens of Vienna. Here old men and women who had no means wherewith to support themselves were lodged and provided with lights and fuel. They were dependent for their food on chance charity; but they do not seem on that account to have fared the worse, for we are told expressly that "every day, without exception, they had wine with their dinner, and beer in an evening." The court when in residence used to send them dainties of all kinds; and the great nobles would give them a buck, or a few sheep, from time to time. It was the custom, too, on high holidays-this is very characteristic of Vienna- for the rich citizens and their wives to pay visits to the poor old folk and make them pres has worked in the days of his strength All persons who have a right of settlement in Vienna―i.e., about thirtysix per cent. of the inhabitants—may, on or after their sixtieth birthday, claim either a pension, or admission to an Old-Age Home, always providing they cannot support themselves, and have no relatives who are bound legally to support them. As, however, there is room in these institutions for only some forty-six hundred persons, and there are usually more than four times that number who wish to live there-the pensions are now miserably small- the Poor-Law authorities are vested with a certain discretionary power in deciding who shall, and who shall not, be admitted. And so far as possible the preference is given to perThe Langhaus was destroyed by the sons of good characters, to those whose Turks in 1529; but before long another destitution is the result of their misforhome was built in the St. Marx district, tune, not their heedlessness or extravand in this between five and six hun- agance. The great majority of the dred old people were not only housed, inmates of these homes, therefore, but boarded. During the seventeenth belong to the respectable poor class. century several institutions of a similar | Thus no disgrace is attached to going kind were founded. ents. As time passed, the Old-Age Homes lost, unfortunately, much of their distinctive character, and were often used as hospitals, and even as orphan asylums. The Emperor Josef the Second, however, speedily put an end to this state of things; for, if there was one work of social reform he had more at heart than another, it was that of bettering the condition of the aged poor. there; an Austrian would no more think of being ashamed that his father was in an Old-Age Home, than an Englishman would, that his had rooms in Hampton Court. One reason why old people in England dread going to the workhouse is the knowledge that, when they have once crossed its threshold, they will be regarded as pariahs even by their nearest relatives. Only two of the six Old-Age Homes thrushes, too, are in some parts of the house, though only there on sufferance. Should their singing be objected to, they must be reduced to silence or there is an inexorable law in force: no one person or his belongings shall interfere with the comfort of another. belonging to Vienna are in the city ered in the Prater. Canaries and itself; the others are at some little distance away, in the country. One is at Liesing, another at St. Andrä, another again at Ybbs, and the fourth at Mauerbach. They are all in healthy banished; for in the Old-Age Homes localities, however, and are fine large buildings with gardens. The cost of the home in the Währingerstrasse, which is reserved exclusively for freemen of the city and their wives and daughters, is defrayed out of the Bürgerfond, i.e., the income derived from money and land bequeathed by the charitable as a provision for poor citizens of Vienna. The other homes are supported out of the ordinary poor relief fund, supplemented when necessary by special grants voted by the municipality. The head of the Poor Law Department is responsible for the management of them to the burgomaster, as the representative of the city. Roughly speaking, these institutions are all organized in the same way as the one in the Spitalgasse, although in the Freemen's Home the arrangements are on a somewhat more generous scale. The corridors, which are furnished with comfortable settees, are well warmed in winter and serve as general sitting-rooms. Here, when it is too cold to be out of doors, the old men bring their pipes and the old women their knitting, and there is much talking and cackling and comparing of notes. Politics are warmly discussed sometimes, and ministers are weighed in the balance and found wanting. All the latest telegrams are read aloud, on the very day they are issued, too; for these Austrian paupers are not dependant on chance passers-by for their journals. They club together-English Guardians will be startled to hear of paupers having anything wherewith to club-and subscribe for daily papers, one for each corridor, and these they receive just as regularly and as punc|tually as if they were archdukes. "It would never do, you see," one old man informed me gravely, in his quaint Wiener dialect, "for us not to keep up with what's going on in the world. These are stirring times." -- Each wing of the Spitalgasse Home is divided into a number of large, lofty rooms, opening on to a long corridor. There are from ten to twenty beds in a room, and very comfortable beds they are, with plenty of warm coverlets. By each of them is a sort of "whatnot," with a cupboard on one side for Although the corridors throughout clothes, and shelves on the other; and the house are regarded as the common there are chairs and tables standing property of the two, all the women about. In spite of the long row of wives as well as widows and spinsters beds there is something homelike about have their rooms in a wing of the the place, owing, in some degree at building, quite separated from that least, to the fact that the old people are in which the men have theirs. In allowed to take with them there some view of certain discussions which have few of their own belongings. It may been raised in England of late, one of be only a portrait or two, a footstool, a the inmates was asked if he did not few books, or even a monstrosity in think it rather hard that he and his the form of wax flowers; but almost wife should be thus kept apart in their every inmate has some little treasure old age. or other, which it would have cost him "Kept apart?" he replied, with an a pang to part with. Then in summer odd, puzzled look on his wrinkled old the rooms are gay with flowers; there face. "We are none kept apart. are plants raised perhaps with infinite Why, I see a lot more of the old pains in some poor attic, and little woman now than I ever did in my life posies which have evidently been gath- before. She's about here from morn Blauer ment deciding what kinds of food are to be provided and at what price. The old people, however, are under no obligation to go there; they are perfectly free to have their meals elsewhere if they choose; but this they rarely do, unless it be as guests, for nowhere else can they obtain such good value for their money. The marvel is, indeed, that any caterer can be found willing to supply good food, and good it certainly is, at the price at which it is sold in the home restaurant. I subjoin the bill of fare for the able-bodied; there is another, much more elaborate and varied, for the invalids. ing till night, as often as not. And before any one of these dishes their own hours for their meals; but may be served, the director of the home and one of the doctors must certify that its ingredients are of excellent quality, and that it is well cooked. breakfasts are not served after nine o'clock; dinners, only between eleven and two; and no one is allowed to linger over his supper later than eight There is nothing in the appearance of o'clock in winter, or nine in summer. this pauper restaurant to distinguish it They make their way to their dinners from those which artisans and mem- in twos and threes as a rule. -a husbers of the lower middle class frequent. band and wife, perhaps, and a friend. It is a large, comfortable room fur- They choose their table and then settle nished with a number of chairs and themselves down to a careful considerlittle round tables; and everything ation of the menu. The relative merits about it is scrupulously clean. Within of soups and puddings are anxiously certain limits its clients may choose balanced, and much heart-searching is 1 Five kreuzers are equal to about one penny. |