Cowes

“ If we sail to the eastward on leaving Cowes Harbour, the first objects demanding our attention are Norris Castle and the royal Palace of Osborne, with their extensive lawns sweeping to the shore, shaded by numerous groups of noble trees. After passing the Creeks of King's Quay and Wootton, we have a partial sight of Binstead: and a most comprehensive view of the fashionable town of Ryde, just as we leave the Pier. Hence to St. Helen's the coast forms several beautiful bays, lined with gentlemen's seats and villas, hamlets, and luxuriant woods. ”

“ I think it would have been wiser not to subject an Italian to such an ordeal as a wet English June in an utterly lonely country house. You know, even Englishmen, who can always find such refuge and comfort in prize pigs and straw-yards and unusually big mangolds, get bored if they are in the country when there is nothing to shoot; and Englishmen are used to being drenched to the skin every time they move out. He is not. Lord Cowes says love is like a cotton frock,—very pretty as long as the sun shines, but it won't stand a wetting. I wish you had been here: Gladys looked quite lovely. ”

“ On the eastern slope of the hill, where the high-road turns off for Newport, stands Westhill, a charming cottage-ornee in the centre of a smooth sloping lawn interspersed with magnificent elms and close shrubberies.—In the environs of Cowes are several other genteel residences: Moor-House is distinguished by its Gothic pinnacles and commanding station: and near Gurnard Bay is a pretty retired seat, appropriately called Wood-vale. ”

“ One is out of the way of harm (and there is plenty of that going round in the river when the tide makes out like a mill race) and one is yet not too far out of the way. Roche’s Mills have not always been as peaceful as to-day. Here, as at Porchester and elsewhere, were confined numerous French prisoners of war, though how the buildings were adapted for the purpose of a gaol it is a puzzle to imagine.
Cowes, notwithstanding its appearance of, shall we say, possible antiquity, is not an “old, ancient place,” such as many of the more western and more eastern seaports along the coast. ”

“ In front sparkled the waters of the Solent, the Bond Street of ocean highways. A breath of air from the west rippled over a strong current sweeping eastward. It merely kissed the emerald plain into tiny facets. It was so light a breeze that any ordinary sailing craft would have failed to make headway against the tide, and the gay flags and bunting of an innumerable pleasure fleet hung sleepily from their staffs and halyards. Yet it sufficed to bring a covey of white–winged yachts flying back to Cowes after rounding the East Lepe buoy. ”

“ From the Lady Mary Bruton, Belgrave Square, London, to Mrs d'Arcy, British Embassy, Berlin.
'The season has been horribly dull; quantities of marriages—people always will marry, however dull it is. The one most talked about is that of the Cowes' second daughter, Lady Gladys, with the Prince of San Zenone. She is one of the beauties, but a very simple girl, quite old-fashioned, indeed. She has refused Lord Hampshire, and a good many other people, and then fallen in love in a week with this Roman, who is certainly as handsome as a picture. But Cowes didn't like it at all ”

“ They cut a branch of a bowe and binde it hard, and hange an earthen pot vpon it, which they emptie euery morning and euery euening, and still it and put in certaine dried raysins, and it becommeth very strong wine in short time. Hither many shippes come from all partes of India, Ormus, and many from Mecca: heere be manie Moores and Gentiles. They haue a very strange order among them, they worshippe a cowe, and esteeme much of the cowes doung to paint the walles of their houses. They will kill nothing not so much as a louse; for they holde it a sinne to kill any thing. ”

“ My resolution was so mastered with feare, that at every stroake of the oares of these inhumans I thought it to be my end.
By sunsett we arrived att the Isles of Richelieu, a place rather for victors then for captives most pleasant. There is to be seen 300 wild Cowes together, a number of Elks and Beavers, an infinit of fowls. There we must make cottages, and for this purpose they imploy all together their wits and art, ffor 15 of these Islands are drowned in Spring, when the floods begin to rise from the melting of the snow, and that by reason of the lowness of the land. ”

“ From the dawn of day in the morning, till the darkness was complete in the evening, I was kept at hard work, in the field or the woods. At certain seasons of the year, we were all kept in the field till eleven and twelve o'clock at night. At these times, Covey would attend us in the field, and urge us on with words or blows, as it seemed best to him. He had, in his life, been an overseer, and he well understood the business of slave driving. There was no deceiving him. He knew just what a man or boy could do, and he held both to strict account. ”

“ I had never driven oxen before, and I was as awkward, as a driver, as it is possible to conceive. It did not answer for me to plead ignorance, to Mr. Covey; there was something in his manner that quite forbade that. He was a man to whom a slave seldom felt any disposition to speak. Cold, distant, morose, with a face wearing all the marks of captious pride and malicious sternness, he repelled all advances. Covey was not a large man ”

“ THE PURPLE PILEUS
Mr. coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and, sick not only of his own existence, but of everybody else's, turned aside down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge that goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in the damp pinewoods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to him that he would stand it no longer.
He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black moustache. ”

“ Covey have the government of their slaves a year or two, almost free of charge, for the sake of the excellent training they had under his management. Like some horse-breakers noted for their skill, who ride the best horses in the country without expense, Mr. Covey could have under him the most fiery bloods of the neighborhood, for the simple reward of returning them to their owners well broken. Added to the natural fitness of Mr. Covey for the duties of his profession, he was said "to enjoy religion," and he was as strict in the cultivation of piety as he was in the cultivation of his farm. ”

“ Businesses that fatten on misfortune--the saloon, pawn, old clothes and cheap food shops-lined the squalid Cowgate. Palaces were cut up into honeycombs of tall tenements. Every stair was a crowded highway; every passage a place of deposit for filth; almost every room sheltered a half famished family, in darkness and ancient dirt. Grand and great, pious and wise, decent, wretched and terrible folk, of every sort, had preceded Auld Jock to his lodging in a steep and narrow wynd, and nine gusty flights up under a beautiful, old Gothic gable. ”

“ Muir today for the first time for several years,” he said after a silence. “She is in London with the boy.”
“Is she as handsome as ever?”
“Quite. Hers is not the beauty that disappears. It is line and bearing and a sort of splendid grace and harmony.”
“What is the boy like?”
Coombe reflected again before he answered.
“He is—amazing. One so seldom sees anything approaching physical perfection that it strikes one a sort of blow when one comes upon it suddenly face to face.” ”

“ Kathleen asked brightly.
His lordship was like a bear with a very sore head, the Stanwys manner was not in evidence. He growled and cursed under his breath. He flung poisoned darts of wit, sneers and jibes at Coombe and they glanced harmless enough from that gentleman's toughened hide, but they went home when he turned his battery on Sir Josiah.
"Poisonous old devil he is," Coombe muttered to himself as he put away a huge breakfast. ”

“ Doubtless it will amaze you to be told that his paragraph on the death of Moses Page, the Byrds' old negro butler, was a far more useful article in every way than your long critique on the currency system of Germany which appeared in the same issue. Colonel Cowles is a big-hearted human being. You—you are a scientific formula. And the worst of it is that you're proud of it! The hopeless part of it is that you actually consider a few old fossils as bigger than the live people all around you! How can I show you your terrible mistake?... Why, Mr. Queed, the life and example of a little girl ... ”

“ This extraordinary conduct of Covey, really made me begin to think that Sandy's herb had more virtue in it than I, in my pride, had been willing to allow; and, had the day been other than Sunday, I should have attributed Covey's altered manner solely to the magic power of the root. I suspected, however, that the Sabbath, and not the root, was the real explanation of Covey's manner. His religion hindered him from breaking the Sabbath, but not from breaking my skin. He had more respect for the day than for the man, for whom the day was mercifully given ”

“ The stout-hearted and wicked Covey, having lost all the impressions of his former reflections, heaped, in rapid succession, the most dreadful imprecations on the eyes, and limbs, and souls of what he called his cowardly shipmates, for lying down to avoid the balls of the Dutch. He refused to obey the order, till, fearing the authority of an officer not far from him, he in part complied, by leaning over a cask which stood near, till the word of command was given to fire. At the moment of rising, a bar-shot carried away one of his legs and the greater part of the other ”

“ A woman, divining the priest, would, involuntarily, despise.
Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port, and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil, and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only—sometimes it will come over one—what if the poet strode in? ”

“ I was now, for the first time in my life, a field hand. In my new employment, I found myself even more awkward than a country boy appeared to be in a large city. I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the blood to run, and raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger. The details of this affair are as follows: Mr. Covey sent me, very early in the morning of one of our coldest days in the month of January, to the woods, to get a load of wood. He gave me a team of unbroken oxen. ”

“ The road towards the coast dipped—too steeply for tight boots—down a wooded coombe, and he followed it, treading delicately. The hollow of the V ahead, where the hills overlapped against the pale blue, was powdered with a faint brown bloom, soon to be green—an infinity of bursting buds. The larches stretched their arms upwards, as men waking. ”

“ Cowles, one daughter, and two sons. They were members of the same church as Mrs. Danforth, and their children, though brought up in the city and surrounded by all the temptations to vice which proved so fatal to many of their companions, still retained the purity and freshness commonly considered the characteristics of rural life. It had been the great desire of Mr. and Mrs. Cowles to render their home so attractive that their children would prefer it, after the labors of the day had ended, to a stroll through the brilliantly-lighted streets, or a lounge in some popular saloon. ”

“ My stormy life at Covey's had been of service to me. The things that would have seemed very hard had I gone directly to Mr. Freeland's from the home of Master Thomas, were now "trifles light as air." I was still a field-hand, and had come to prefer the severe labor of the field to the enervating duties of a house-servant. I had become large and strong, and had begun to take pride in the fact that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men. There was much rivalry among slaves at times as to which could do the most work, and masters generally sought to promote such rivalry. ”

“ Edward Covey. Eight or ten years had now passed since I had been taken from my grandmother's cabin, in Tuckahoe; and these years, for the most part, I had spent in Baltimore, where—as the reader has already seen—I was treated with comparative tenderness. I was now about to sound profounder depths in slave life. The rigors of a field, less tolerable than the field of battle, awaited me. My new master was notorious for his fierce and savage disposition, and my only consolation in going to live with him was, the certainty of finding him precisely as represented by common fame. ”

“ Sitting by the magistrate's side, after he had given his evidence, he happened to look all round the Court, and in a distant corner he saw the enormous mottled nose and sinister eyes of Daniel Cox glaring at him with a strange but puzzled expression.
Cowen had learned to read faces, and he said to himself: "What is there in that ruffian's mind about me? Did he know me years ago? I cannot remember him. Curse the beast—one would almost—think—he is cudgelling his drunken memory. I'll keep an eye on you." ”

“ The practice is a very common one.
On the first of January, 1834, I left Mr. Covey, and went to live with Mr. William Freeland, who lived about three miles from St. Michael's. I soon found Mr. Freeland a very different man from Mr. Covey. Though not rich, he was what would be called an educated southern gentleman. Mr. Covey, as I have shown, was a well-trained negro-breaker and slave-driver. ”