If you want to bark a stick, steep it in hot water, and rub off the coat with a piece of sacking. If you want to bend or straighten a stick, cover it with hot wet sand, and get it into shape while it is hot.
Of canes we need make no mention, nor need we deal with the birch. They are but luxuries, frequently doomed to be misunderstood. Their days are over. Alas, poor cane! Alas, poor birch!
Nothing has been said so far about carving its handle, and as a stick of our own cutting and carving has a certain charm about it, and in its making affords an agreeable exercise for a wet day, we [herewith] give a couple of designs which can easily be improved upon, and which are grotesque enough to look well even as failures; and this to a beginner is a quality not to be despised. We may as well, however, adopt the usual plan of descending from generals to particulars, and find space for a few notes on stick history.
When Œdipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, he thought of a walking-stick—as many others of the puzzled have done. ‘There’s a being,’ said the riddler, ‘which has four feet, and three feet, with only one voice; but its feet vary, and when it has the most it is the weakest.’ ‘That,’ said Œdipus, ‘must be man, who, when he is a child, crawls on his hands and knees; when he is a man walks uprightly; and when he is old totters with a walking-stick!’
On the origin and development of the walking-stick a goodly volume might be written. Perhaps the most interesting form the stick took was that of the pilgrim’s staff. This staff was about four feet long, armed at the lower end with a spike, and fitted about a foot from its top with a knob for the hand to rest upon. The lower part was solid, the upper part was hollow, and was used for relics of saints, or a musical instrument, or something to eat, according to the taste of the owner. It was in a pilgrim’s staff that saffron was secretly brought from Greece to Saffron Walden, and it was in a similar way that silkworms found their way to Europe. This idea of using a stick as a carrier has been utilised in our own days, not only for telescopes, match-boxes, swords, and guns, but also for surgeons’ instruments.
Another striking form was that of the ferula, which derives its name from the giant fennel, of whose stalk it generally consisted. The tough lightness of the fennel wood rendered it particularly suited for the support of the aged, and hence it gradually became the prototype of those lighter wands which have continued amongst us as a sign of office or seniority; and at the same time it retained its popularity with the chastisers of erratic youth. In the East the ferula was replaced by the reed; but in Egypt the reed gave place to slender sticks of cherry wood, some of which had a carved handle. This carving of the head is, however, peculiar to no country and no age. It is a practice indulged in by all men, savage and civilised.
In our own Tudor period the walking-stick began to flourish much. Then for the first time do we get it elaborately carved and adorned with precious metals. In the inventory of the old palace at Greenwich, there is entered, “A cane garnished with sylver and gilte, with astronomie upon it. A cane garnished with golde, having a perfume on the toppe; under that a diall with a pair of twitchers and a pair of compasses of golde; and a foot rule of golde, a knife and a file of golde, with a whetstone tipped with golde.” A somewhat elaborate battery to carry in a walking stick! In the seventeenth century sticks became even more ornamental, and in the eighteenth they began to be made entirely of agate, or clouded marble, or ivory. How these were used and abused can be learnt from No. 103 of the Tattler, where Isaac Bickerstaffe issues licences regarding them, and is appealed to by petitioners, one of whom asks for permission to retain his cane on account of its having become as indispensable to him as any of his other limbs. “The knocking of it upon his shoe, leaning one leg upon it, or whistling upon it with his mouth, are such great reliefs to him in conversation, that he does not know how he should be good company without it.” Later on this fashion of elaborate walking sticks was adopted by the old ladies, and it was quite common to see the dames out walking with wood, ivory, whalebone, or green glass sticks, five or six feet in length, having the ends bent over like a shepherd’s crook, and twisted back again towards the ground.
In these days, now that the means of communication have been so much improved and the world become one huge country, foreign sticks have lost much of their rarity. They come to us in tons, and a stick importer’s warehouse is a sight to see. The goods in the rough do not look inviting; in fact, anything more resembling a lot of firewood it would be difficult to imagine. Those who have not the chance of seeing the interior of one of these stores, can obtain a very good notion of what they are like by inspecting a shop window next door to the Autotype Gallery in what used to be New Oxford Street. There can be seen canes of all sorts, rough and rooty, from the eastern and western tropics—rajahs from Borneo; malaccas from Sumatra (nearly all the malaccas come from Siak, they are the stems of Calamus scipionum); whanghees (the stems of Phyllostachis) from Hongkong; lawyers (a species of Calamus) from Penang; ratans and dragons from Calcutta; white bamboos, black bamboos, fluted bamboos from other seaports in the great Bay of Bengal; partridge canes, jambees, and dog’s-head canes; Spanish reeds (Arundo donax); jacks (vine stems), cinnamons, pimentos (the stem of the allspice), cabbage-stalks, and coffee-branches from the West Indies, with the green-backed orange and knobby lemon sticks from the same colonies; triangular leaf stalks of the date palm from Tunis; myrtle, pomegranate, and olive sticks from Algeria and Italy; blue gums from Australia; mahoganies from Cuba; ebonies, tulips, and crocodiles; cabbage-stalks from Guernsey; and, perhaps, tooroos from Guiana.
But English sticks, and the foreign importations supposed to be such, are the favourites after all, and it is them that we would ask our readers to choose for their experiments. The chief, as already explained, are oak, ash, beech, blackthorn, cherry, maple, crab, and hazel, all of them within reach of those that walk or dwell in country places, and all easily dressed and made presentable.