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CHAPTER VI.

KINGSTON. - INSTRUCTIVE REMARKS ON EARLY ENGLISH HISTORY. - INSTRUCTIVE

OBSERVATIONS ON CARVED OAK AND LIFE IN GENERAL. - SAD CASE OF STIVVINGS,

JUNIOR. - MUSINGS ON ANTIQUITY. - I FORGET THAT I AM STEERING. -

INTERESTING RESULT. - HAMPTON COURT MAZE. - HARRIS AS A GUIDE.

IT was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to

take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper

green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange,

wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood.

The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water's

edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sunlight, the glinting

river with its drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas

on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at

the sculls, the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors,

all made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and yet so

peaceful, that, early in the day though it was, I felt myself being

dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.

I mused on Kingston, or "Kyningestun," as it was once called in the days

when Saxon "kinges" were crowned there. Great Caesar crossed the river

there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands. Caesar,

like, in later years, Elizabeth, seems to have stopped everywhere: only

he was more respectable than good Queen Bess; he didn't put up at the

public-houses.

She was nuts on public-houses, was England's Virgin Queen. There's

scarcely a pub. of any attractions within ten miles of London that she

does not seem to have looked in at, or stopped at, or slept at, some time

or other. I wonder now, supposing Harris, say, turned over a new leaf,

and became a great and good man, and got to be Prime Minister, and died,

if they would put up signs over the public-houses that he had patronised:

"Harris had a glass of bitter in this house;" "Harris had two of Scotch

cold here in the summer of `88;" "Harris was chucked from here in

December, 1886."

No, there would be too many of them! It would be the houses that he had

never entered that would become famous. "Only house in South London that

Harris never had a drink in!" The people would flock to it to see what

could have been the matter with it.

How poor weak-minded King Edwy must have hated Kyningestun! The

coronation feast had been too much for him. Maybe boar's head stuffed

with sugar-plums did not agree with him (it wouldn't with me, I know),

and he had had enough of sack and mead; so he slipped from the noisy

revel to steal a quiet moonlight hour with his beloved Elgiva.

Perhaps, from the casement, standing hand-in-hand, they were watching the

calm moonlight on the river, while from the distant halls the boisterous

revelry floated in broken bursts of faint-heard din and tumult.

Then brutal Odo and St. Dunstan force their rude way into the quiet room,

and hurl coarse insults at the sweet-faced Queen, and drag poor Edwy back

to the loud clamour of the drunken brawl.

Years later, to the crash of battle-music, Saxon kings and Saxon revelry

were buried side by side, and Kingston's greatness passed away for a

time, to rise once more when Hampton Court became the palace of the

Tudors and the Stuarts, and the royal barges strained at their moorings

on the river's bank, and bright-cloaked gallants swaggered down the

water-steps to cry: "What Ferry, ho! Gadzooks, gramercy."

Many of the old houses, round about, speak very plainly of those days

when Kingston was a royal borough, and nobles and courtiers lived there,

near their King, and the long road to the palace gates was gay all day

with clanking steel and prancing palfreys, and rustling silks and

velvets, and fair faces. The large and spacious houses, with their

oriel, latticed windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs,

breathe of the days of hose and doublet, of pearl-embroidered stomachers,

and complicated oaths. They were upraised in the days "when men knew how

to build." The hard red bricks have only grown more firmly set with

time, and their oak stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down

them quietly.

Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved

oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston. It is a shop now, in the

market-place, but it was evidently once the mansion of some great

personage. A friend of mine, who lives at Kingston, went in there to buy

a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in his pocket

and paid for it then and there.

The shopman (he knows my friend) was naturally a little staggered at

first; but, quickly recovering himself, and feeling that something ought

to be done to encourage this sort of thing, asked our hero if he would

like to see some fine old carved oak. My friend said he would, and the

shopman, thereupon, took him through the shop, and up the staircase of

the house. The balusters were a superb piece of workmanship, and the

wall all the way up was oak-panelled, with carving that would have done

credit to a palace.

From the stairs, they went into the drawing-room, which was a large,

bright room, decorated with a somewhat startling though cheerful paper of

a blue ground. There was nothing, however, remarkable about the

apartment, and my friend wondered why he had been brought there. The

proprietor went up to the paper, and tapped it. It gave forth a wooden

sound.

"Oak," he explained. "All carved oak, right up to the ceiling, just the

same as you saw on the staircase."

"But, great Caesar! man," expostulated my friend; "you don't mean to say

you have covered over carved oak with blue wall-paper?"

"Yes," was the reply: "it was expensive work. Had to match-board it all

over first, of course. But the room looks cheerful now. It was awful

gloomy before."

I can't say I altogether blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief

to his mind). From his point of view, which would be that of the average

householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, and not that

of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved

oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no

doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does not lie

that way. It would be like living in a church.

No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't care for carved oak,

should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care

for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of

this world. Each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have

what he does want.

Married men have wives, and don't seem to want them; and young single

fellows cry out that they can't get them. Poor people who can hardly

keep themselves have eight hearty children. Rich old couples, with no

one to leave their money to, die childless.

Then there are girls with lovers. The girls that have lovers never want

them. They say they would rather be without them, that they bother them,

and why don't they go and make love to Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are

plain and elderly, and haven't got any lovers? They themselves don't

want lovers. They never mean to marry.

It does not do to dwell on these things; it makes one so sad.

There was a boy at our school, we used to call him Sandford and Merton.

His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever

came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful

rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular

verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of

weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an

honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a

clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew

such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.

Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn't go

to school. There never was such a boy to get ill as that Sandford and

Merton. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he

had it, and had it badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and

have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six weeks' period of drought, he

would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a

November fog and come home with a sunstroke.

They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his

teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with

toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never

without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever;

and he always had chilblains. During the great cholera scare of 1871,

our neighbourhood was singularly free from it. There was only one

reputed case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings.

He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and

hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn't

let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.

And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school-life

for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give

our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn't catch so

much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good,

and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us

fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make

us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught

colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till

the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to

the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the

oven and baked.

To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair

notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of

three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic

beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we

prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that

gives them their charms in our eyes. The "old blue" that we hang about

our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a

few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses

that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they

understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the

eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.

Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day

always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-

pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in

the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the

beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now

break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and

stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It

is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots.

Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to

verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of

art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even

my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by

the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.

But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug

up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and

will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will

pass i