Various

“ In hours of doubt and danger, the Arachnite despairs; but the Melissite buckles to for the work of decision and deliverances, hoping while a ray of light remains, or a plank whole out of the wreck. The one cannot spell success; the other will not learn to say defeat; the one does not hold on, the other cannot be beaten off. Hence we seldom find the working Arachnides successful in life; and the bread which they have to bake for themselves is apt to be both scant in quantity and sour in quality. The others, on the contrary, for the most part succeed. ”

“ Their presence in society reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breath was a chain which without a sound, The earth and the air and the water bound.’ Where they are, freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only the most robust of those moral pachyderms who oppose their thick insensitiveness to all outside influences whatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect of the Arachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; their pinched lips paralyse; their very smiles are the fracture of a crystal more than the visible sign of a living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable ‘freezing mixtures’ of life. ”

“ If we do not nowadays use the memory as the only registry of facts within our reach, we do use the memory even more than the ancients, for the simple reason that our knowledge travels over an immeasurably wider area, we have more to remember, and, as civilisation and culture advance, a good memory becomes more and more needful for the work of life; the general level of intelligence is being raised, and mental power is developed from age to age. ”

“ This was more surprising than ever, for Hetherington, he knew, had no crew on board. An enthusiastic yachtsman, he, in true Corinthian spirit, worked his little craft himself, with the assistance of one or two good friends and fellow-spirits like Phipps—no paid hands being permitted on board during a Corinthian race—and even when cruising, scrubbed decks and polished brasswork with his own hands, sleeping also on board in harbour, unlike men of more luxurious habits, who generally preferred the comforts of a hotel to the straitened accommodation of a five-tonner, even when it was their own. ”

“ Brief as all this is to tell, Bertha found that she had spent nearly two hours since her arrival in the town in finding out about Harry, so that, when she turned again into the market-place to begin her purchases, it was the usual hour when she was due at home; and by the time she had finished, the church bells were chiming three o’clock. As she turned out of the arch on to the homeward road, she felt bewildered and upset by the events of the past few hours as she had never felt before, and the central figure in the midst of her mental confusion was that of Jasper Rodley. ”

“ How different it is with those others—those Melissides who drink their wine of life in deep draughts from golden cups; those singers of glad melodies; those lovers of their kind and rejoicers in the sunshine; those whose own jocund nature tints the whole outlook with roseate hues, eloquent of the fresh morning and the young day’s hope! Wherever they are, things go more easily. ”

“ In most instances, the prize-money is paid in cash to the successful candidate. The age in which we live is eminently competitive, a fact early recognised by children at school, and still better understood in after-life. In comparing ourselves with our neighbours, may it not be a fact that we are an over-examined people? We may further ask, are examinations always fair tests of ability? Is the reward system, as we have it, the best means of promoting a higher culture? ”

“ Should the State provide and maintain schools for the people, or should these be largely left to individual enterprise, as at present?—Should State interference take the form it has done in recent educational experiments, wherein two universities and one gigantic scheme of intermediate education have been framed on the lines of mere examining boards, disbursing public prize-money?—What is the relative value of the kinds of instruction ordinarily given in schools?—How may the desire for information be aroused among the masses, and in what way may the stimulus be best applied? ”

“ Mervyne would have liked to get her topsail up, but this he could not well attempt alone, and he feared to wake Hetherington, for, having got out of the harbour, he was now possessed with a boyish desire to see how far on his course he could reach before his chum awoke: however, the tide was in his favour, and he was making splendid way as it was, so, lighting his pipe, he gave himself up to all the exquisite enjoyment of the situation. ”

“ He’s the very same man I told you of the other evening, that wouldn’t pick my whip up for me the first day I came to Trinidad. I’m glad he’s had a taste of it to-day for his continual impudence.’
‘He’ll have you up for assault, you may be sure, Mr Noel,’ Nora answered earnestly. ‘And if Mr Hawthorn tries the case, he’ll give it against you, for he’ll never allow any white man to strike a negro. That man’s name is Delgado; he’s an African, you know—an imported African—and a regular savage; and he had a fearful quarrel once with papa and Tom Dupuy about the wages, which papa has never forgiven. ”

“ Delgado stood in the middle of the lane and watched them retreating at an easy canter; then he solemnly replaced the bundle of sticks on the top of his head, spread out his hands and fingers in the most expressively derisive African attitudes, and began to dance with wild glee a sort of imaginary triumphal war-dance over his intended slaughter. ”

“ They say severely that no one knows what they suffer, save those who are in like manner afflicted, and that they alone can measure the pain they endure. Perhaps the good-tempered interlocutor thinks to himself: ‘A little honey mixed in with all thy vinegar, O Arachnite, would soften much of thy misery and reduce thy misfortunes to zero; and the milk of human kindness set to make cream is a better spiritual drink than the poison thou distillest and the vinegar which makes thee thin ”

“ In all troublous times, the Melissite—he who looks at a man’s circumstances from that man’s own{387} standpoint, and not from one external, unintelligent and unsympathetic—escapes the doom accorded to the Arachnides, and lives in peaceful security where these others are not safe, however well protected. If such as he did not form what Matthew Arnold calls the remnant, society would stand still like the clogged wheels of a watch, and men would perish in the moral desert as they perish in the material. ”

“ The well-known and popular China, or Chinese, grass-cloth, specimens of which, generally in the shape of handkerchiefs, are brought home by most travellers in the East, is now likely to become yet more popular and have a far more extensive market in Europe than was formerly the case. This China grass—soie végétal, the French call it—is the fibre, not of a grass, but of a species of nettle, the Bœhmeria nivea and other specimens of the urtica. These nettles are carefully cultivated in China, where they grow in great quantities, as they do in India and Ceylon. ”

“ The loss of a hundred men in a battle does not touch them so much as the loss of a row of cabbages in their garden; and a burnt duster out of a set is a more serious affair in their eyes than a passenger-ship wrecked on the Cornish coast or a merchant-steamer burnt to the water’s edge. On one thing only can they be made loquacious—on their own small sufferings. On these they will descant an hour by the clock, and more to come after. But speak to them of the heart-anguish of others, and they are unsympathetic, dumb, indifferent. Their fire burns for themselves alone ”

“ Now, each of these ladies has left behind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreading gens, as the old Romans would have said—in the people who prefer to drink vinegar out of a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who are to their surroundings as frost or as dew; who see the trodden backward path and the unsurmounted hills in front through spectacles tinted in black or in rose-colour ”

“ If ‘all great people have great memories,’ as Sir Arthur Helps declares in his delightful book entitled Social Pressure, it by no means follows that all those who are possessed of great memories are ‘great people.’ Many an instance might be cited to show that men of very moderate intellectual capacity may be endowed with a power of memory which is truly prodigious. In addition to this, there are plenty of well-authenticated examples of the extraordinary power of memory displayed even by idiots. ”

“ You can’t race—of course, I see that, and I’m sorry for it; but I should like a bit of a sail, after coming all this way, and I want to see how the little craft behaves.’
‘Oh, by all means,’ replied Hetherington eagerly. ‘I had thought of that. I can’t lie in harbour and see all the craft going out to race; and I don’t think I could bear to see the racing going on without being able to join in it. I vote for getting under way early in the morning, and making tracks to the eastwards. ”

“ A common practice nowadays with many who enter for prize{391} examinations is to hurriedly prepare a large number of subjects, selected more with reference to their maximum of marks than to the tastes of the pupil, then to obtain the coveted prize, and subsequently to forget the mass of undigested information with which their memories have been surfeited, possibly never to return without disgust to the consideration of them. ”

“ Have you a false tooth?—a well-concealed twist of the poor weak spine?—a tress of hair that never grew on your own head?—a blemish on your shoulder beyond the line of the most décolleté dress, and to the world therefore as though it were not?—and has Arachne found out, or been told in an impulse of misdirected confidence, one or all these things? It is only a question of time. In time the whole of society will know the fact ”

“ No one will suggest that the method of reward as applied to donkey-races would meet the case. With our present light, we are not prepared to recommend a thorough-going remedy. Much may, however, be done for the cause of true culture by modifying the distribution of prizes. The current notion of a prize is, that it is a reward for something well done, due as soon as the meritorious act is accomplished. ”

“ Probably the Arachnite pinches his lips and says ‘Nothing;’ but ‘nothing’ does not answer the purpose, and an explanation is forced—if indeed that poor chilled soul can be forced into anything frank and human. If he cannot, then the other does his best to laugh away the cloud and to go on as before ”

“ No one knows what has offended them, but all at once they become like anthropomorphous polar bears to those to whom they had been moderately human a little while before; and more intolerable than ever to those to whom they had been intolerable enough when things were at their best. Then they retreat into their own spiritual den to hammer away at that leaden cup from which they drink the deadly acid that vitiates all their life and destroys all their happiness. ”

“ Should these inventions, when put to the test and tried on a large scale, be found to answer as well as the trial experiments, a little time is only wanted, when a most important and valuable industry will arise in India, and, more than probably, give work to many thousands of hands at home. At all events, if all goes right, India will be the richer in the near future by many millions of pounds sterling. And it is even likely that serious attempts at acclimatisation and careful cultivation of these useful nettles will be made in other of our semi-tropical colonies and possessions. ”

“ The government of India, seeing what a great benefit might be expected to arise could a practical and inexpensive method of gathering the ‘vegetable silk’ be found, offered some time back a reward to stimulate inventors in discovering an economical method for preparing the fibre of the China grass. Such discovery has at last been made; three French gentlemen have been successful in perfecting two different inventions which would seem to completely meet the existing difficulty. ”

“ If we inquire what inducements are offered to pupils to excel in special subjects or to proceed to higher branches of them, we find that the same general plan is followed in all our institutions, from the most elementary to the highest—namely, money prizes or their equivalent in books or medals, the obtaining of which presupposes a competitive examination. ”

“ The little beauty sped along on her course, making no fuss whatever, peeling the bright water evenly away from the polished surface of her sharp bow, and running it aft with a gentle little hiss, and only the faintest, dimmest suggestion of a shadowy wake astern. ”

“ If it were regarded as not merely a reward for something past and done, but also as a stimulus to further effort in the same direction, more lasting good might be effected, and a modification of the present system of distribution would become a necessity. For example: a large money prize obtained in a junior school, instead of being paid directly to the successful candidate, might be divided into two unequal sums, the smaller to provide a medal or book, &c., as a tangible evidence of distinction ”

“ They do not suffer troubles to arise, but put their broad backs to the work when strength is required—handle the difficulty with their delicate fingers where tact is needed—and by the marvellous power of their genial tempers, smooth all ruffled feathers and still all angry seas. ”

“ When these workers in gold are, what common parlance calls friends, with the workers in lead, the former have a hard time of it. They are always at the point where the Arachnides are backing and the Melissides are pulling—where the one are trying to break and the other doing their best to hold. The Arachnite takes offence at a word, a look, a gesture, a thing done or not done ”

“ When they do speak, their words fall like vocal icicles which freeze and cut at the same time; and they contrive to make their good advice more painful than other people’s rebukes, and to give their information the form of a sarcastic reproach in that you did not know it all before. ”

“ Generous as a master and genial as an administrator, he puts up with the worries and disappointments inevitable to his business, whatever it may be; not troubling the gods with his complaints because men are made of clay, and every now and then break in the handling and fly in the firing. On the contrary, he makes the best of things even when they are bad ”