I can’t imagine anything that would “up-trup” an English woman. But as small feet and hands are not essential to salvation I forgive them this. They can’t help it. I presume they would if they could, but they are so kindly, so hospitable, so bright and pleasing generally, that I shut my eyes gladly to their feet, and their bad taste in dress, and accept it all without a word.
Still I wish they could pare down their feet. Then an English woman would be the simple perfection of nature’s most perfect work. I can’t help thinking, however, that when your hostess’s shoe is—but never mind. Their kindliness and their cheery laughs and their never failing good humor are admirable substitutes for small feet. Feet are not the whole of life.
You see soldiers about London. They are as common as mosquitos in New Jersey, and to me just about as offensive. They are everywhere. Go where you will, you see a tall fellow in a blue or scarlet, or some other colored uniform, with an absurd little cap on his head, to which is attached a leather strap which comes down to his lower lip, to keep the absurd little cap in place. He has sometimes a sword hanging to him, and sometimes not, but he is a soldier all the same. England has need of a great many soldiers. In London they are used as a sort of show, as walking advertisements of the power and strength of the Government, and to make the picture of royalty complete.
As soldiers don’t cost much here, it is a luxury royalty can afford a great deal of. The ordinary soldier gets twenty-five cents a day, and his rations, and after twenty-one years service, if rum and beer and bullets—the two first are the most dangerous—have not finished him, he becomes a pensioner, which means he puts on a red coat and eats three times a day in a sort of hospital, all the rest of his life.
A RED-COATED ROMANCE.
The army is recruited largely from Ireland and the poorer districts of England and Scotland. It is about the last thing an Englishman or Irishman does, but various causes keep the ranks full without conscription. Women are the best recruiting officers the Queen has. It is the regular thing for a young fellow who has been jilted to go and enlist. He thinks he will make the girl feel badly. But it doesn’t. She rather prides herself upon the number of young fellows she has given the army, and when the time comes to marry and settle down, she goes and marries, and laughs at them all.
Poverty is another very active and efficient recruiting sergeant. A young fellow comes down to “Lunnon” to seek his fortune, equipped with a few pounds and his mother’s blessing. He finds London quite different from what he expected. He discovers it to be a very hard and cruel place, with more mouths than bread, and more hands than work. He lives as closely as he can, but, as meagerly as he lives, his pounds melt into shillings and his shillings into pence. And finally, when his last penny is gone, and hunger is upon him, he takes the Queen’s shilling, and the next thing his mother hears of him, he is fighting the Boers in South Africa. And once a soldier, always a soldier. The life unfits a man for any other, and when he has once worn a uniform, he never wears anything else.
As I said, women are the best recruiting sergeants. I got into a conversation with one very handsome young fellow who had been in the service only a year, who told me his little story. He is the son of a small farmer in Scotland somewhere, with an unpronounceable name, where it doesn’t matter. He had been in love with a pretty daughter of a widow near by from the time he was a boy, and the girl professed to be, and doubtless was, in love with him, but as she grew up she made the discovery that she was very handsome (what woman does not?), and she found that that beauty attracted others beside poor Jamie. Other swains in the neighborhood laid siege to her, and she, exulting in her power over the young fellows, and being unquestionably the belle of the neighborhood, made it very uncomfortable for her real lover, to whom she was betrothed.
Sore were the conflicts between them. The girl delighted in annoying him, for she was as wilful and cruel as she was beautiful. She would dance with the others, and she would flirt with them to the point of driving the poor man mad, and then, just at the nick of time, she had a trick of coming back to him, and for a time being as sweet as possible, and so for several years she kept him alternating between the seventh heaven of happiness, and the lowest depths of a hell upon earth.
There was one fellow in the neighborhood as much smitten with her as Jamie, who was determined to marry her, whether or no. He was a well-to-do young man, who had a farm of his own, and being quite as good-looking and more enterprising than Jamie, was a most dangerous rival to the hapless youth. Jennie had dismissed all the others, but with the perversity that seems to be an infallible accompaniment to beauty, she persisted in receiving the attention of this man.