"Well," said my father, when he had read this twice; "I call that something like a Government. If we only get a few more contracts, Sophy, we'll send Tommy into the House to see about them. There might be a stranger thing, my dear, than a long blue paper for ten thousand pounds, with "Thomas Upmore" signed for Her Majesty above, and "Bucephalus Upmore," for himself below. What a rage John Windsor will be in, when he reads about those six samples, and not one of them gone out of his gate! I had sense enough to keep the whole of that inside my own waistcoat."
Now, it would have been good, and even pleasant for the public—lustily though they condemned us, at the time—if the only increase of activity shown in those parts had come out of our chimneys. But there always is a mob of people, who never will leave well alone; and these had got up deputations, petitions, memorials, circulars, indignation meetings, committees, commissions, and worst of all missiles, concerning the wholesome smell we made, and had made before some of their fathers were born. When the unenlightened mass of minds falls into this bubonic fever of excitement, the right thing to administer is gruel, in the form of general promises, a desire to hear all that can be said, and a thoroughly unselfish gratitude towards those, who have made the worst of you. But my father had never possessed this wisdom, which belongs of sweet right to the Liberals; and whether on the ground of true British principle, or the Royal Arms, or the money coming in, he took a firm stand, with his hands in his pockets, and his legs well apart, and defied the public.
"Every blessed flue of mine," he said, "have gone ten feet higher, since I were a boy; and with present foundations, can't go no higher. Before folk grumble, their place is to stump up. If every cantankerous fellow, who don't know a wholesome smell by the touch of it, would put down a half-crown, if he has got one, instead of signing lies against me, I don't know but what I might lay foundations, and change my insurance, and go twenty foot higher. Though a heap of disease would break out, I expect. Look at the plants in my bed-room window, scarlets, and blue things, and lilies of the Nile! Is there any man, or woman, round these parts, half so good-looking, or so sweet to come by? They like it rarely, and so would you, if you understood what is good for you. And who was here first, you, or I, and my fathers, for three generations of boilers? We didn't want the houses; they came round us; every brick of them was laid, with my smoke to set it. And very good neighbours they have always been, till this scientific stuff came up, about cur-bones, and oxen, and the Lord knows what! I tell you what—if you don't like it, budge yourself, but you won't budge me."
Such speeches only made the fuss grow louder; until the authorities felt themselves compelled to do something sanatory. There was no "Metropolitan Board of Works," as yet, I believe; or if there was, it never came up our way. But the Vestry of St. Pancras had many stormy meetings, which my father deigned not to attend; but his workmen were there in great force, and made more noise than our new steam-engine. In short, the matter came (as every matter does now, and the practice already was beginning) to what is called "a reasonable and satisfactory compromise, conciliating all interests." The complaint of the public had been about the air, and the noxious exhalations, and vile odours, as they chose to call them. But who can see the air? Who can tell what is in it? It varies with every puff of wind. Let us turn to something tangible. The earth is a thing that can be dealt with, and the earth is at the bottom of every mischief on the face of it. So, to cure the smell of our chimneys, they ordered a four-foot culvert down our valley, where the course of the old Fleet-stream had been; and the voice of the public went off to it.
This being settled, my father was enabled to make tenfold the smells he had ever made before, without any one hoisting a handkerchief. An inquisitive stranger would sometimes ask, whether this neighbourhood was always choked with vapours, which he coarsely stigmatized. A piece of valuable advice, common (yet neglected universally) about the prior claims of his own affairs, was the only reward for his sympathies. What right had a fellow, with a walking-stick, to come grumbling against our rate-payers, and their engineers, and contractors? Measures were being taken, or at any rate were in contemplation; and every man with a horse and cart would get fifteen shillings a day for them.
But alas, how little do we forecast, while we vindicate, our own welfare! It would have been better for my dear father—as upright and downright a man as ever lived—to have gone to the expense of a new chimney-stack one hundred feet high, or even to have put out all his fires, than to have helped to bring that drain, down our hitherto Maiden valley. The soil in the bottom was of concentrated essence, combining all the density of bygone generations with the volatile relics of their labours. It would grow almost anything, if only scratched, and no healthier place for a walk could be found; but wisdom is not justified of her fathers, when she goes to turn them up.
In happy ignorance of woes impending, I went back to the Partheneion, and found the whole establishment turned upside down. Grip came with me, as a thing of course, and found his old barrel standing on its head, and a notice upon it in large letters—"No dogs allowed." If anything rouses the juvenile spirit, such rude breach of prescription does it. With the help of Jack Windsor, who was quite of my mind, I replaced the barrel in its old position, which was snug in a corner impregnable to guns, and I fastened him there with his own long chain, and said, "Now defend yourself, old boy. I have got lots of money, and you shall not starve." He fully understood the situation; and if any demand for sympathy arose, it would be on behalf of the individual attempting to dislodge him.
Then all of us were summoned to the hall, to hear an oration from the "Principal"—as he styled himself, to start with—our new schoolmaster, Ernest Mauleverum Crankhead, a short brisk gentleman, quite young, with a pale square face, a yellow moustache, and very quick bronzy eyes, which never took two seconds' rest upon anything. Accustomed as we were to the long grave countenance, waving white locks, and calm abstracted gaze of our simple old Dr. Rumbelow, we could not believe that we saw the new man; until he stood up at what he called the rostrum, and hit it three times, with an ivory hammer.
"Going, going, gone!" Jack Windsor whispered; and gone was the glory of the Partheneion. We knew it, we felt it, without a word uttered, our hearts fell into the heels of our socks; and no boy thought twice of the things in his pocket. Our account would be with a sharp hand now, a resolute, and a malignant one; and what was worst of all, and which a boy descries at the very first glance,—we should not have to deal with a gentleman. "I shall never go up any more," thought I.
I remember very little of what Crankhead said; and none of it is worth repeating. But he gave us to understand, that the sooner we forgot everything we had learned hitherto, and began on lines entirely new, the better it would be for our own minds, and what mattered far more, our success in life. For the few, whose parents might still be benighted enough to insist upon Greek and Latin, a Classical Master would be kept, but the College—for such he had the cheek to call it—would henceforth aim at a loftier mark. Science was the noble, and simple distinction, the all-absorbing element of this age. Mankind had been lying on their backs till now, looking up at the stars, and at imaginary Powers; now they arose, and asserted their rights, and their kinship to every organic being, and the interchangeability of everything. Classes for science would be formed to-morrow, under the charge of the four most eminent Professors of the period, Professors Brachipod, and Jargoon, Chocolous, and Mullicles!