“There is an unpretending plainness in some faces that has its charm—an unaffected ugliness, a thousand times more bewitching than those would-be pretty looks that neither satisfy the critical sense, nor leave the matter of beauty at once to the imagination. We like better to make a new face than to mend an old one. Sally had not one good feature, except those which John Hayloft made for her in his dreams; and to judge from one token, her partial fancy was equally answerable for his charms. One precious lock—no, not a lock, but rather a remnant of very short, very coarse, very yellow hair, the clippings of a military crop, for John was a corporal—stood the foremost item amongst her treasures. To her they were curls, golden, Hyperian, and cherished long after the parent-head was laid low, with many more, on the bloody plain of Salamanca.
“I remember vividly at this moment the ecstasy of her grief at the receipt of the fatal news. She was standing near the dresser with a dish, just cleaned, in her dexter hand. Ninety-nine women in a hundred would have dropped the dish. Many would have flung themselves after it on the floor; but Sally put it up, orderly, on the shelf. The fall of John Hayloft could not induce the fall of the crockery. She felt the blow notwithstanding; and as soon as she had emptied her hands, began to give way to her emotions in her own manner. Affliction vents itself in various modes, with different temperaments: some rage, others compose themselves like monuments. Some weep, some sleep, some prose about death, and others poetize on it. Many take to a bottle, or to a rope. Some go to Margate, or Bath.
“Sally did nothing of these kinds. She neither snivelled, travelled, sickened, maddened, nor ranted, nor canted, nor hung, nor fuddled herself—she only rocked herself upon the kitchen chair!
“The action was not adequate to her relief. She got up—took a fresh chair—then another—and another—and another,—till she had rocked on all the chairs in the kitchen.
“The thing was tickling to both sympathies. It was pathetical to behold her grief, but ludicrous that she knew no better how to grieve.
“An American might have thought that she was in the act of enjoyment, but for an intermitting O dear! O dear! Passion could not wring more from her in the way of exclamation than the tooth-ache. Her lamentations were always the same, even in tone. By and by she pulled out the hair—the cropped, yellow, stunted, scrubby hair; then she fell to rocking—then O dear! O dear!—and then Da Capo.
“It was an odd sort of elegy; and yet, simple as it was, I thought it worth a thousand of lord Littelton’s!
“‘Heyday, Sally! what is the matter?’ was a very natural inquiry from my aunt, when she came down into the kitchen; and if she did not make it with her tongue, at least it was asked very intelligibly by her eyes. Now Sally had but one way of addressing her mistress, and she used it here. It was the same with which she would have asked for a holiday, except that the waters stood in her eyes.
“‘If you please, ma’am,’ said she, rising up from her chair, and dropping her old curtsey, ‘if you please, ma’am, it’s John Hayloft is dead;’ and then she began rocking again, as if grief was a baby that wanted jogging to sleep.”——
The many “stories of storm-ships and haunted vessels, of spectre shallops, and supernatural Dutch-doggers—the adventures of Solway sailors, with Mahound in his bottomless barges, and the careerings of the phantom-ship up and down the Hudson,” suggest to Mr. Hood a story entitled “The Demon-Ship.” This he illustrates by an engraving called “The Flying-Dutchman,” representing the aerial ascent of a native of the Low Countries, by virtue of a reversal of the personal gravity, which, particularly in a Hollander, has been commonly understood to have a tendency downwards. Be this as it may, Mr. Hood’s tale is illustrated by the tail-piece referred to. The story itself commences with a highly wrought description of a sea-storm, of uncommon merit, which will be the last extract from his interesting volume that can be ventured, viz.:—