‘Perhaps,’ said Walburg, ‘a little piece of vanille would improve the taste.’
‘On no account,’ said Hamilton.
‘The best thing to give it a flavour is rum,’ observed Madame Berger.
‘I forbid the rum, though I must say the idea is not bad,’ said Hamilton, laughing.
Hildegarde put the tea-pot on a little tray, and left the kitchen just as her stepmother entered it.
His tea was unanimously praised, but Madame Rosenberg exhibited some natural consternation on hearing that the whole contents of her paper cornet, with which she had expected to regale her friends at least half-a-dozen times, had been inconsiderately emptied at once into the tea-pot!
‘It was no wonder the tea was good! English tea, indeed! Any one could make tea after that fashion! But then, to be sure, English people never thought about what anything cost. For her part, she found the tea bitter, and recommended a spoonful or two of rum.’ On her producing a little green bottle, the company assembled around her with their tea-cups, and she administered to each one two or three spoonfuls as they desired.”[[34]]
Here our limits compel us to stop. After staying a few days at Tütz we returned upon our steps, again saw our friends at Berlin, thence came to Cologne in one day, to Ghent the second, and to London the third. We fell in with the Peace deputies on their way from St Petersburg, and divers other accidents happened to us which our most patient readers will thank us for passing by.
THE NATIONAL LIFE OF CHINA.
If it becomes one to know something of those with whom he is about to be brought into contact, it is high time the rest of the world were acquainting itself with that portion of the vast human family that has so long segregated itself upon the plains of China. The world seems to have entered again upon a migratory era of mankind, in which no longer solitary individuals are seen groping their way over land or over sea, in search of the excitement of adventure or the pleasure of acquiring strange knowledge; but whole nations are seen feverous with the passion for emigration, and throwing off their surplus swarms to settle in the more favoured places of the earth. Ireland is emptying itself upon America,—England and Scotland are peopling Australia; a restless host, 150,000 strong, yearly takes its march from the Continent, mostly for the New World;—while in America itself a similar movement is ever afoot, pressing peacefully from east to west, but not seldom dashing covetously against the crumbling States that line the coveted shores of the Mexican sea. We do not know if the Old World likewise, within its own bosom, is not on the eve of exhibiting a similar movement of nations—a heave and roll of people upon people, of north upon south—an overflowing of the long-pent-up barbaric energies of Muscovy over the crumbling States which fringe alike its European and Asiatic borders. But how different the impelling motive here, and how significant of the undeveloped state of the Russian compared with the Western world! It is the barbaric lust of territorial extension, the rude fervour of fanaticism, the sensual dream of luxury to be captured in the South;—in one word, it is the same spirit that animated the hordes of an Attila or Gengis Khan that now spreads its contagion among the Russians. They move, too, like an inert mass. There is no individual life in them, that culminating phase of civilisation,—no spontaneous and self-reliant action in the units of the mass. They move, not by virtue of an innate and self-directing force, but are swayed to and fro by the will of their Czar, as vastly and unresistingly as the slumbrous mass of ocean beneath the influence of the moon. They press southwards from their northern homes as the vast torpid mass of the glacier gravitates from its cradle in the snows, crushing its slow way down to the plain, and spreading a cold blight around in valleys that once bore the vine. The glacier soon melts when it overpasses the zone of cultivation; so, we trust, will the power of Russia when it strives to take hold of the seats of civilisation.