MALUNT QUAM ALTERI.

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on deck as quietly as he could. A fruit ship from the Mediterranean had arrived the day before, and, for a temporary mooring, had passed a hawser to my uncle's ship. Look at that hawser,' the mate whispered. It seemed to move. After a while my uncle made out, through the darkness, a continuous line of rats passing from his own ship to his neighbour. He and the mate watched till the long procession came to an end. They had been much troubled with rats on the voyage home, but had none going out. It has occurred to me to ask how the rules of Christian charity apply to the case. But I suppose it comes under the head of 'ruling ideas.'

My father had prepared us for the house at Derby being dull. Nothing could be more lively and cheerful than our house in Gainsborough Market Place; but we were now to be rather gloomy and grand. I suppose Miss Holt felt herself rising in the world, for she at once took my second sister by the hand and danced her round the dining-room. My sister would probably be too tired to share her elation, but a minute after she found her level. A window was open, and she looked out, as was natural to a child not yet six. 'Look at that wench!' she heard a boy calling out to another. She had never heard the word before. A Lincolnshire lass is a maid in

Devonshire, and is, or at least then was, a wench in Derbyshire.

The house was on the direct highway from London to Manchester and Liverpool; but as all the coaches had to go into the town the street had long been comparatively deserted by traffic. On that account it had become genteel. On the other side of that narrow street, just vis-à-vis, was a large roomy mansion, convertible into offices. This has saved it, for it still survives better and more modern houses in its immediate neighbourhood. Our house was capacious; it had an architectural front, a spacious entrance hall, a very handsome staircase, and a room fitted up with Tudor wainscoting from an older house on the site.

The kitchen of the old house had been retained, with an immense open chimney, up which one could see the sky. The fire never went out. Coals were cheap. When the servants went to bed they brought in a big coal, three or four feet long, and set it on end against the fire back. The first who came down in the morning took an enormous poker, and with one well-directed blow broke the lump to pieces, when there was at once a blazing fire.

There was a good garden, large stables, a roomy hayloft, and a straw chamber. Upon the whole our own little world was satisfactory. We gardened, and had our pet flowers, still brighter in my memory than any flowers I have seen since. My own special hobby was building houses, or simply ornamental edifices, with such bits of stone, marble, or alabaster as came into my hands. Once or twice my vanity

was a little touched when I found these structures regarded as eyesores, and indicative of a certain. feebleness of character and conception.

Something put silkworms into our heads. In 1817 our kind uncle brought from the West Indies as many as a score large sheets of paper encrusted with the eggs. He told us how to manage them. A spacious greenhouse, with a broad marble shelf all round, seemed the very place for them. We spread out these sheets, and were delighted to see the little bits of life showing themselves. But in the first place we had no mulberry leaves. Endive we were told would do, but we had to eke that out with lettuce. The worms grew, certainly. But the difficulty was to change the leaves. We had not the apparatus, which is simply a framed net, upon which the new leaves should be daily laid over the old, when the worms at their leisure leave the old for the new.

Soon we had to leave them in the hands of servants, for the whole family went on a villeggiatura to Quarndon. We had been told the silkworms required close watching. In the factories are suspended coloured figures of the normal condition of a silkworm for the forty stages of its forty days' life, to show what the creature ought to be; and the slightest change of temperature, or of humidity, is sure to tell upon it.

I walked into Derby several times to see how things were going on, and it was an awful sight. All sorts of creatures were waging war against the poor helpless strangers. There appeared an army of ants. First stinging a worm till it was yellow and dead, or

nearly so, one ant would go to the head and another to the tail, and so they would carry it off to their hidingplace. Beetles and huge centipedes came. I think it sickened me of pets I could not quite manage.

The elders also had their mitigation of a town. life. They tried a dairy, pigs, and poultry. For the first they rented a large field, which it would now be hard to trace in any map of Derby, so cut up by roads and so buried under houses. They came in for a taste of agricultural distress. A cow produced two calves, which were kept for some weeks in hopes of a better market, but had at last to be sold without reserve. The servant took them to a periodical cattle fair, and stood with them a whole day in what proved a falling market, finally disposing of the pair for three shillings. We had no run for the poultry, and they must have had a dull time of it.

Pigs are such a risk that I rather wonder at the famous dictum that they pay better than pupils. We had two serious losses. While a couple of huge flitches were soaking in brine, the filthy brook behind overflowed into our back offices, and the bacon was drowned in dirt, I think in the night, before it could be rescued. Two other flitches remained for months on a rack suspended from the kitchen ceiling. When they were taken down they were found saturated with gas, then a new invention, and not so well understood

as now.

What to do with kitchen refuse is one of the most difficult problems of town life. In no matter does Providence show more of what we may venture to call its generosity and its ingenuity, than in the supply

of inferior creatures, in infinite succession, to consume the remains of better tables, at last the banquet and the banqueters both alike. An opposite neighbour in the Wardwick had one advantage over us, for he had a country-house. In the Wardwick he occupied one of the most ancient mansions in the town, and exercised the trade of money-lending, in which he accumulated more than half a million. 'Munjey' he was always called, but whether that be a usual corruption or familiar form of Edmund is more than I can say.

I suppose it must have been in the interval between the Ides and the Calends that he regularly paid a visit to his rural home. He drove down in a well

appointed close carriage and pair. But it was a varnished sepulchre. The money-lender's usual companion on these journeys was a cask of swill from his kitchen to his expectant family of pigs in the country. One hot day the cask exploded violently, saturating his clothes and the carriage linings with its contents in high fermentation.

I ascertained by measurement how many times round the garden would make a mile, and one afternoon ran three miles without stopping. As I was once chasing my brother James, he retreated behind some lilacs. I threw a stone amongst them, and heard a scream. The stone had cut one of my brother's eyebrows right in two. An inch lower and it must have destroyed the eye, and possibly deprived the world of many volumes the interest of which grows by time. I was met by a family friend running through the town, pale as death, for the doctor.