As I drove along, I chanced on an umbrella-maker, trudging through the snow, head down, with a bundle of his manufacture under his arm. He neither saw nor heard the dogcart till it was close on him, when the driver shouted to him to stand aside. Then he started back, looked up, and I saw the change of expression in the man’s face, as his eyes took in the apparition above him of the expanded red umbrella, flower-wreathed and brass-mounted. The face had been inanimate; then, a wild enthusiasm or astonishment kindled it, and down into the snow at his feet fell the umbrellas he was carrying. I drove on, but looked back at intervals, and as long as he was in sight, I saw him standing in the road, with eyes and mouth open, hands expanded and every finger distended, and his umbrellas, uncollected, scattered about him in the snow.
These reminiscences of my remarkable umbrella lead me to say something of umbrellas in general.
I hardly think that the true origin, development, and, shall I say, degradation of the umbrella, is generally known. Yet it deserves to be known, for it supplies a graphic and striking condensation of vast social changes.
The umbrella comes to us from the East, from nations living under a burning sun, to whom shade is therefore agreeable. We can understand how the giving of shade came easily to be regarded as a symbol of majesty. In the apocryphal book of Baruch occurs the passage, “We shall live under the shadow of Nebucodonosor, king of Babylon, and under the shadow of Balthasar, his son.” Primitively, kings gave audience and delivered judgment seated under trees, not only because of the comfort of the shade, but also because of the symbolism. So, when Ethelbert, King of Kent, received St. Augustine, he was seated under an oak; and Wagner is quite right when, in the opening scene in Lohengrin, he makes King Pepin hold his court enthroned under a tree.
But when sovereigns took to receiving suitors and dispensing justice indoors, they transferred with them to within the symbol of the tree. Phylarchus, in describing the luxury of Alexander, says that the Persian kings gave audience under plane trees or vines made of gold and hung with emeralds, but that the magnificence of the throne of Alexander surpassed theirs. Curtius relates how the kings of India had golden vines erected in their judgment halls so as to overspread their thrones. The throne of Cyrus was over-canopied by a golden vine of seven branches. Firdusi describes a similar throne-tree at the festival given by Kai Khosru:
“A tree was erected, many-branched,
Bending over the throne with its head:
Of silver the trunk, but the branches of gold;
The buds and the blossoms were rubies;
The fruit was of sapphire and cornelian stone;