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A Fortnight in Faroe.

287

ART. II. 1. A Fortnight in Faroe, from Unpublished Journals, V.Y.

2. Faroernes Fuglefauna med Bemærkninger om Fuglefangsten af Sysselmand H C. MÜLLER. Kjobenhavn, 1863.

THE time will soon come when we shall all be flitting. When the London season will begin to flag, and its joys to pall on our jaded taste. In May it is a beautiful girl, in June a full-grown man, in July a palsied gray-beard, scarce able to make a valid disposition of its goods and land, in August it will be dead and buried. We who have laughed at its many quips and cranks a month back will have wept and even cursed over its bier, and then that great greed for travel and wandering will come over us, and even the best of us will loathe the town and long for the country. Well, whither shall we go!" Of course abroad," say our wives and daughters, who think that " Paterfamilias" has the purse of Fortunatus safely lodged at his banker's. Abroad of course; but let him propose Boulogne or Dieppe. We would not be in the bed of that father of a family, no! not for a single night. There is, however, much to be said for Dieppe, it being always understood that you do not reach it via Brighton. The horrors of that "middle passage" no tongue can tell, no pen write, no pencil portray. Let it be enough to say that there the voyage is always long, the sea short and chopping, the boat slow but lively, the steward nowhere, and sea-sickness rampant except when it leans over the side. When you get to Dieppe it is pleasant enough and dear enough out of all conscience. You Paterfamilias, being a man of pure and cleanly life, will bathe, but you will bathe under the eye of the police, bathe with your netherman hidden from the vulgar gaze by what the French call caleçons, bathe in batches, the men in one batch and the women in the other. Above all things beware of following the example of an Englishman who rashly went into his box to bathe, attended by his faithful Newfoundland dog. Neptune, the dog and not the sea, we grieve to write it, was unmuzzled, in itself a crime of the deepest dye in France. The master having divested himself of all his garments, till he stood shivering like Adam before the Fall, rashly opened the door and peeped out; in an instant Neptune rushed in, caught the fatal caleçons in his mouth and tore away along the sands. His master still more rashly rushed after him to save the garment. Groans and execrations rose all along the beach, the police came up, and Neptune and his master were taken to the guardhouse, the master for being in state closely resembling that of

the ancient Picts without their woad, and the dog for being without a muzzle. Need we say that both were heavily fined, and that both left Dieppe by the next steamer? But barring such accidents Dieppe is not a bad place. True, it is rather dearer than Paris, and perhaps the ladies who flock thither dress rather better and more often in the twenty-four hours than they do in the French capital. No! we should not say it would cost more to take your wife and daughters to Dieppe in August and September, than it would to live in Belgravia during May and June; but then you have Fortunatus' purse at your banker's, so pay the bill like a husband and a father and let us have no meanness. Besides, is there not the boat from Dieppe to Brighton, and can you not run backwards and forwards to the city and make money there, while your wives and daughters bathe under the eye of the whole society y comprise la police on the sands at the mouth of the Somme ?

And here a serious question arises, as it has often arisen to many a father of a family-

"Medio de fonte leporum

Surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat.'

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Is it needful to take your wife and daughters abroad with you? We are bold even to ask such a question; and on the whole, unless we wrote under this sweet anonymous mask, we should not dare to do so. The fate of Acteon, of Orpheus, and all those unhappy wights who have fared so ill at women's hands, would be light matched against ours. In a meeting of wives and daughters there would not be a morsel of us left in five minutes, and yet we dare to ask, Is it needful to take your wives and daughters abroad at all? Are they fit for it? does it do them any good? are you or they the better for it? do they learn anything? "Wretch!" shrieks the indignant wife and mother. "Can we not speak French; that is to say, not I but the girls, at least they have been taught, and though they have never tried no doubt they can; and if they can't what does it matter? So that is settled." Settled indeed in woman's wise, but in sorrow we utter it, the British woman of all classes, except the very highest, and with many exceptions even there, is not voluble or even audible in any tongue but her own. The difference between the mothers and their daughters is about this the mothers never open their mouths, except to say "wee" or "yah," and do not pretend to speak; but the daughters do open their mouths, and yet no one understands them. Whether their French be of Stratteford at-the-Bow, or their German the choicest Kauderwelsch we dare not say, but the effect on the natives is that of great amazement. They are

Why Wives and Daughters should stay at Home. 289

"astonied" like Daniel, though if they are garçons or kellner, not "for the space of one hour," no foreign waiter could afford to lose so much time. After staring a minute or so the said garçons and kellner answer in very fair English. The same farce is repeated by the daughters at every stage of the journey with the same. results; and so their French and German turns out to be like that of the Irishman who thought he was master of French, because he could utter "parlez vous Français;" and when the answer was "Oui, Monsieur," he went on, "Then will yer lind me the loan of a gridiron." As for the unhappy father of a family himself, who three or four times a day assists at the burial of the French of the household,-lucky man if when his boys come home from Eton, he does not find them as ignorant of Horace and Xenophon, as for this woful man, we are bound to say that he often cuts a better figure abroad than the rest of his following. He sometimes knows a little French. He can wade through a few plain phrases in that tongue, though he cannot swim. Sometimes too he is not quite at sea in German; and though he makes sad blunders, still with all his floundering, putting his foot in it, as the saying is, at every step he makes abroad, though he orders "jambes de mouton" for his dinner, utterly ignoring "gigots,"-still we say he is often a good fellow and good company; and so it is that we mean to take him with us on his foreign travels, and are ungallant enough to leave his wife and daughters at home. They will we know be ready to scratch out our eyes; but our comfort is that they do not know us, that they will be much happier down in Devonshire at pleasant Ilfracombe, or at Weymouth with its many bills besides that enormous Bill of Portland, or Eastbourne which is so healthy that none of the residents ever die either of marsh fever or scarlatina, though such accidents sometimes happen to "visitors," or Scarborough where like Dieppe you bathe before all the world, but unlike Dieppe you must do so in the condition of Adam and Eve in Paradise, Scarborough where a man must bathe nude, and yet dare not swim out lest he should be carried out by the tide; Scarborough, ever haunted by excursionists who often sleep in bathing-machines, and where if you are going to have an early dip on Monday morning, you will probably find an excursionist man and his wife, or perhaps two wandering bachelors, sound asleep in your machine. To each and all of these charming places our friend's family are heartily welcome, but as for him we mean to take him with us and show him foreign parts.

To do him justice he is at first rather unwilling to trust himself with us. How can he a man of middle age leave wife and children at the dull sea-side? What will the Smiths say who

live over the way? Smith never leaves his wife; why should he? Then who will look after the children, take care that they do not get into scrapes, see that the boys bathe before breakfast, and do not eat more than forty unripe pears every day, who will save them if they fall overboard out fishing? Our answer is, Let Smith be good enough to mind his own business. No doubt he has good reasons for never leaving his wife, as good perhaps as you have for leaving yours just this once. We have heard that Smith when younger was a sad dog, kept late hours, was always at his club, had two latch-keys for he was always telling Mrs. Smith that he kept the spare one to lend it to a friend in case he lost his own; often stayed at the Great Saurian Society till three o'clock in the morning; was an original member of "The Anthropomorphic," which only opens at one o'clock in the morning, one of their great days being one A.M. on Monday morning. All which fables the unhappy Mrs. Smith believed till her eyes were opened. Now Smith never leaves her. So much for Smith. As for the children, it is no insult to you to say that your wife can look after them much better than you can. Did you ever see a cock looking after his wife's chickens? No, nor ever will. Small care takes a tom-cat for his offspring, and yet the world rolls on from day to day, and children, chickens, and kittens, all grow up together under their mother's eye. As for saving them when they fall overboard, we do not believe you can swim, and as for jumping overboard we know good swimmers who would think twice before doing such a rash, cold-blooded thing. Certain it is, we would rather trust a mother who could not swim to jump overboard after her children, than a father who could. So let us have no nonsense; you will be better for leaving them, and they will do very well without you; come along, præbe te hominem, don't be ever dangling at your wife's apron-string. And so our friend is parted from house and home, and stands ready to go with us whithersoever we please.

We said we would give him a complete change, and so we will. We don't know whether he is a good sailor. He says he is, but seeing is believing, and there are many good sailors on the sunny side of Pall-Mall, or in bonnie Princes' Street, whose heart and head fail them ere they reach the Nore, or are well past the Bass. He can ride-in Rotten-Row; he can swim-at Brill's bath at Brighton, or Portobello. So we will take him, as the summer is hot, and he wants cooling after a town-life, to the North. We would take him to Denmark, and so on to Norway, show him Hamburg, that most dissolute of cities, where Smith once was; Kiel that key of the Baltic for which Prussia is making a lock, or a deadlock in Sleswig; Copenhagen that

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