Raise the song of harvest home.
As he listened to the voices, rising and falling in grateful cadence, old times, old faces, old scenes, rose out of the midst of the past, and the stranger dreamed. Was there any significance to him in what he saw and heard? Was it not a generous welcome to the wanderer home? Home! His thoughts shaped themselves into words, and they were sung in his brain all the time he sat there dreamily wondering at their meaning:
‘Home again, in the twilight of the year and of my life.’
He could see the Willowmere pew, and his eyes rested long on Dame Crawshay’s placid face; still longer on that of Madge. On the other side he could see the Manor pew, which was occupied by the three ladies, Alfred Crowell and Philip. Mr Hadleigh and Coutts were not there. Coutts considered it hard enough to be expected to go to church on Sunday (he did not often go); but only imbeciles, he thought, and their kin—women—went on a week-day, except on the occasion of a marriage or a funeral.
Mr Beecham’s gaze rested alternately on Philip and Madge. They occupied him throughout the service. He retained his seat whilst the people were passing out, his eyes shaded by his hand, but his fingers parted, so that he could observe the lovers as they walked by him. He rose and followed slowly, watching them with dreamy eyes; and still that phrase was singing in his brain:
‘Home again, in the twilight of the year and of my life.’ But he added something now: ‘It is still morning with them.’
INDIAN SNAKES.
A REMINISCENCE.
We have it on good authority, apropos of the climate of India and the chances of life there, that the British soldier who now serves one year in Bengal encounters as much risk in the mere fact of dwelling there, as in fighting three battles such as Waterloo (see Dr Moore’s Health in the Tropics); and that the mortality amongst children up to fifteen years of age is eighty-four per thousand, as against twenty-two per thousand in twenty-four large towns of England. Statistics such as these tell their own tale. A soldier’s life, as compared with a civilian’s, whether official or unofficial, is by no means an unhealthy one, regulated as it is by all that experience and scientific sanitation can suggest. But what, after all, are the risks to life in a battle such as Waterloo? We can form some notion of this by a sort of analogy, if we are content to accept the statement of Marshal Saxe, said to be a high authority on such matters, who lays it down as a truth, that for each man killed in battle the weight of an average-sized man is expended in lead. This is said to have been verified at Solferino, where the Austrians fired eight million four hundred thousand rounds, and killed two thousand of the enemy, which gives four thousand two hundred rounds per man killed. Taking a bullet at one ounce weight, we have four thousand two hundred ounces, or over eighteen stone—about equal to one average man and a half; so the Marshal was under the mark. If these figures are reliable, it would seem that in battles, as with pugnacious dogs, there is noise out of all proportion to the amount of damage done; and the risks to life in war, as compared with those incidental to ordinary life in Bengal, need not seriously alarm us. The weapons of precision now in use have wrought a change, perhaps, to the great saving of lead. Still, these are stubborn figures to deal with; and a mortality of eighty-four per thousand children, and a proportionately high rate for adults, in the Indian plains, shows that, all precautions notwithstanding, the white man in the tropics or under an Eastern sun is in the wrong place.
It is estimated that nine to ten thousand natives are killed annually in Bengal alone by snakes; and throughout India, at a rough calculation—probably very much under the mark—twenty thousand persons lose their lives from this cause every year. There is no perceptible diminution in the number of these deadly reptiles; on the contrary, they are seemingly increasing, notwithstanding that government puts a price on the head of every snake destroyed; and small though the reward may be, indigent peasants are not slow to avail themselves of it, and a snake that ventures to show itself rarely survives the discovery. The cry of Sámp! (snake) has a magical effect on the most apathetic and inert of natives.