"THE ROSE."
Theft is practically unknown, and the few cases with which the magistrate is troubled arise from the street brawls which now and then take place. The men are usually serious, and rarely joke among themselves or with strangers, and, oddly enough, all the young men are particularly reserved.
Of course the women are not nearly so grave. They are all more lively as well as talkative. Though they are rather good-looking, they get aged and weatherbeaten early, owing to the anxiety of household affairs and other causes. For the men are addicted to the vile habit—common among all uncivilized and too many civilized races—of allowing the women to do very nearly the whole of the manual labor of the house, field and garden. Accordingly we find that the females have to pay in premature age the penalty of their lords' laziness.
The climate is very bracing, but the winters are wet and stormy. The air is so saturated with saline spray that the rain will leave a slight deposit of salt after it has evaporated. During the winter, communication with the mainland is maintained by boat once a week, though the island is often completely isolated for a considerable period by rough weather, drift ice, and various other causes.
Rats and mice are found in Heligoland in plenty, but the oft-quoted story about the rabbits, and the ruin which their burrowing was fast bringing upon the doomed isle is declared by a competent authority to be pure romance. The sea is making rapid inroads upon parts of the Holy Isle, and it is not unlikely that at some far-distant period all that will remain of this out-of-the-world spot will be a wave-lashed rock, the haunt of the gull and the cormorant.
