They were all attired alike, in broad felt sombreros, blue shirts, and trousers thrust into boots reaching to the knees. Each had his lasso at pummel, and between them they carried a rifle, frying-pan, coffee-pot, big loaf, and forequarter of a porker—for we were out for a long day. A more picturesque or efficient-looking group it would be hard to find. I must resist the temptation of telling all we did or saw, and come at once to our ride home shortly before sunset. The ranche-men and I were abreast, and the cowboy a few yards behind, when we came across a bunch of cattle, conspicuous amongst which strode along a stalwart yearling bull calf, whose shining brindle hide and jaunty air showed that he, at least, was not suffering from the scanty food which the drought has left for the herds on these wide plains. He was already as big as his poor raw-boned mother, who went along painfully picking at every shrub and tuft in her path, to provide his evening meal at her own expense. Now these dude calves (who insist on living on their parents, and will do nothing for their own livelihood) can only be cured by the insertion of a horse-ring in the upper lip, so that they cannot turn it up to take hold of the maternal udder, and it is often in bad times a matter of life or death to the cows to get them ringed. After a conference of a few seconds, the Marylander shifted the rifle to the saddle of the Englishman (already ornamented with the frying-pan and the coffee-pot), and calling to the cowboy, dashed off for the bunch of cattle. Next moment the cowboy shot past us at full speed, gathering up his lasso as he went; the bull-calf was “cut out” of the bunch as if by magic, and went straight away through mesquite-brush and prickly pears, at a pace which kept his pursuers at their utmost stretch not to lose ground. It was all they could do to hold it, never for a full mile getting within lasso-reach of Boliborus, the ranche-man following like fate, upright from shoulder to toe (they ride with very long stirrups), bridle hand low, and right hand swinging the lasso slowly round his head, awaiting his chance for a throw; the cowboy close on his flank; ranche-man number two clattering along, pot, kettle, and rifle “soaring and singing” round his knees, but availing himself of every turn in the chase, so as to keep within thirty or forty yards. I, a bad fourth, but near enough to see the whole and share the excitement (if, indeed, I hadn’t it all to myself, the sport being to the rest a part of the daily round). The crisis came just at the foot of a mound, up which Boliborus had gained some yards, but in the descent had slackened his pace and the pursuers were on him. The lasso flew from the raised hand, and was round his neck, a dexterous twist brought the rope across his forelegs, and next moment he was over on his side half, throttled. I was up in some five seconds, during which his lassoer had him by the horns, ranche-man number two was prone with all his weight upon his shoulders, and the cowboy on his hind quarters, catching at his tail with his left hand. That bull calf’s struggle to rise was as superb as Bertram Risingham’s in Rokeby, and as futile; for the cowboy had caught his tail and passed it between his hind legs, and by pulling hard kept one leg brandishing aimlessly in the air, while the weight of the ranche-men subdued his forequarters. The ring was passed through his upper lip, and the lasso was off his neck in a few seconds more, and the ranche-men turned to mount, saying to the cowboy, “Just hold on a minute.” The cowboy passed the tail back between the hind legs, grasped the end firmly, and stood expectant. Boliborus lay quiet for a second or two, and then bounded to his feet, glaring round in rage and pain to choose which, of his foes to go for, when he became aware of something wrong behind, and looking round, realised the state of the case. Down went his head, and round he went with a rush for his own tail end, but the tail and boy were equal to the occasion, and the latter still holding on tight by the former, sent back a defiant kick at the end of each rush, which, however, never got within two feet of the bull’s nose, and could be only looked upon as a proper defiance. Then Boliborus tried stealing round to take his tail by surprise, but all to as little purpose, when the ranche-men, who were now both mounted, to end the farce, rode round in front of the beast, caught his eye, and cried, “Let go.” Whisking his freed tail in the air he made a rush, but only a half-hearted one, at the nearest, who just wheeled his horse, and as he passed administered a contemptuous thwack over his loins with a lasso. Boliborus now stood looking down his nose at the appendant ring, revolving his next move, with so comic an expression that I burst into a roar of laughter, in which the rest joined out of courtesy. This was too much for him, as ridicule proves for so many two-legged calves, so he tossed his head in the air, gave a flirt with his heels, and trotted off after his mother, a sadder, and let us hope, wiser bull-calf; in any case, a ringed one, and bound in future to get his own living.
On my ride home my mind was much occupied by that cowboy, who rode along by me—telling how he had been reading Gulliver’s Travels again (amongst other things), found it wasn’t a mere boy’s book, and wanted to get a Life of Swift—in his battered old outfit, for which no Jew in Rag-Fair would give him five shillings. The last time I had seen him, two years ago, he had just left Hallebury, a bit of a dandy, with very tight clothes, and so stiff a white collar on, that on his arrival he had been nicknamed “the Parson.”
At home he might by this time be just through responsions by the help of cribs and manuals, having contracted in the process a rooted distaste for classical literature. Possibly he might have pulled in his college boat, and won a plated cup at lawn tennis, and all this at the cost of, say, £250 a year. As it is, besides costing nothing, he can cook a spare-rib of pork to a turn on a forked stick, hold a bull-calf by the tail, and is voluntarily wrestling (not without certain glimmerings of light) with Sartor Resartus. Which career for choice? How say you, Mr. Editor?
Crossing the Atlantic, 4th September 1885.
A mug-wump! I should like to ask you, sir—not as Editor, not even as English gentleman, but simply as vertebrate animal—what you would do if a stranger were all of a sudden to call your intimate friends “mug-wumps,” not obscurely hinting that you yourself laboured under whatever imputation that term may convey? I don’t know what the effect might have been in my own case, but that the story of O’Connell, as a boy, shutting up the voluble old Dublin applewoman by calling her a “parallelopiped,” rushed into my head, and set me off laughing. I haven’t been able to learn more of the etymology of the word than that it is said over here to have been first used in a sermon (?) by Mr. Ward Beecher, and now denotes “bolters” or “scratchers,” as they were called last autumn, or in other words, the Independents, who broke away from the party machine of Republicanism and carried Cleveland. More power to the “mug-wump’s” elbow, say I; and I only wish we may catch the “mugwumps,” “mug-wumpism,” or whatever the name for the disease may be, in England before long. One of the groups on the deck of the liner, amongst whom I first heard the phrase, was a good specimen of the machine-politician, a democrat of the Tammany Hall type. “You bet” I stuck to him till I got at his candid account of the campaign of last autumn, most interesting to me, but I fear not so to the general English reader, so I will only give you his concluding sentence:—“Well,” with a long suck at the big cigar he was half-eating, half-smoking, “I tell you it was about the thinnest ice you ever saw before we were over,—but, I got to land!” From what I heard on board and since, I believe the President is doing splendidly; witness his peremptory order for the great ranche-men to clear out of the Reserves which they had leased from the Indians, and fenced to the extent of some millions of acres; the righteousness of which presidential action is proved (were proof needed) by the threatened resistance of General B. Butler, one of the largest lessees. I can see too clearly looming up a determined opposition to the President’s Civil Service reform from politicians of both parties, mainly on the ground that he is “establishing a class” in these U.S.—a policy which “the Fathers” abhorred and guarded against, and which their only legitimate heirs, the machine politicians, will fight to the death. You may gauge the worth of this opposition by contrasting their two principal arguments—(1) Nine-tenths of the work of the Departments (Post Office, Customs, etc.) can be learnt just as well in three months as in ten years; and (2) the other tenth, requiring skilled and experienced officers, has never been interfered with by either side. But, if argument two is sound, cadit quostio, as there is ex hypothesi already a permanent class of civil servants, I conclude that were I an American I would accept “mug-wump” as a title of honour instead of resenting it, and help to get up a “Mug-wump” club in every great city.
We had a splendid crossing, deck crowded all the way, and the company gloriously cosmopolitan and communicative during the short intervals between the orthodox four full meals a day. There is surely no place in the world where that universal instinct, the desire to get behind the scenes of one’s neighbours’ lives, is so easily and abundantly gratified. Here is one of my rather odd discoveries. On reaching the deck, after my bath on the first morning, for the tramp before breakfast, I was joined by a fine specimen of an old Yorkshireman. It seems we had met years ago, at some political or social gathering, and as he looked in superb health and fit to fight for his life, I congratulated. Yes, he said, it was all owing to his having discovered how to pass his holiday. He used to go to some northern seaside place, one as bad as the other, for “whenever the wind blew on shore you might as well be living in a sewer.” So he saved enough one year to buy a return-ticket on a Cunard liner, calculating that whatever way the wind blew he must be getting sea-air all the time. He has done it every year since, having found that besides sea-air he gets better food and company than he could ever command at home. My next “find” was a pleasant soldierly-looking man who called to me from the upper deck to come up and see a sword-fish chasing a whale. Alas! I arrived too late. The uncivil brutes had both disappeared by the time I got up; but I was much consoled by the talk which ensued with my new acquaintance. He was a Lieutenant of Marines in the Admiral’s flag-ship off Palermo in King Bomba’s last days, and was sent ashore to arrest and bring on board all sailors found with the Garibaldini. He seems to have found it necessary to be present himself at the battle of Metazzo (I think that was the name) and at the storming of the town afterwards, in which the Garibaldini suffered severely. The dead were all laid out before the gate after the town was taken, and he counted no less than seventy bluejackets amongst them! They used to drop over the sides of the ships and swim ashore, or smuggle themselves into the bum-boats which came off to the fleet with provisions. No wonder that we have been popular in Italy ever since.
Then, attracted by a crowd on the fore part of the deck, roped off to divide steerage from saloon passengers, I became one of a motley group assisting at a sort of moral “free-and-easy,” got up for the 300 steerage folk by two ecclesiastics, whom I took at first for Romish priests from their costume. I found I was mistaken, and that they were the Principal and a Brother of “the Fraternity of the Iron Cross,” an order of the American Episcopal Church, which, it seems, has taken root in several of the large cities. The Brethren are vowed to “poverty, purity, and temperance” (or obedience, I am not sure which); and these two were crossing in the steerage to comfort and help the poor folk there—no pleasant task, even in so airy a ship and such fine weather. One can imagine what power this kind of fellowship must give the Iron Cross Brethren with their rather sad fellow-passengers, to whom they could say—one of them, indeed, did say it—“We are just as poor as the poorest of you, for we own no property of any kind, and never can own any till our deaths.” This Brother (a strapping young fellow of twenty-five, who I found had been an athlete at Oxford) waxed eloquent to them on his experiences in Philadelphia, especially on the working-men Brethren there. One of these, a big, rough chap, with a badly broken nose, he had rather looked askance at, first, till he found that the broken nose had been earned in a rough-and-tumble fight with a fellow who was ill-using a woman. Now they were the closest friends, and he looked on the broken nose as more honourable than the Victoria Cross, and hoped none of the men there would fail to go in for that decoration if they ever got the same chance.
In melancholy contrast to the Iron Cross Brethren were two other diligent workers in quite another kind of business. They haunted the smoking-room from breakfast till “lights out,” officious to help to arrange the daily sweepstakes on the ship’s run; gloating over, and piling caressingly as they rattled down on the table, the dollars and half-crowns; always on the watch and ready to take a hand at cards, just to accommodate gents with whom time hung heavily. Bagmen, they were said to be; but I doubt if they travel for any industry except plucking pigeons on their own account—unmistakable Jews of a low type, who never looked any man in the face:—