“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jan,” she said. "Sometimes I feel as if there was no longer any place in the world for me and Amilly. You may be sure I would not mention it, but that you know it as well as I do—that there is, I fear, no dependence to be placed on this promise of papa’s, to allow us an income. I have been thinking—”
“Don’t let that trouble you, Miss Deb,” interrupted Jan, tilting himself backwards over the arm of the chair in a very ungraceful fashion, and leaving his legs dangling. “Others will, if he wo—if he can’t. Lionel has just been saying that as Sibylla’s sisters, he shall see that you don’t want.”
“You and he are very kind,” she answered, the tears dropping faster than she could wipe them away. “But it seems to me the time is come when we ought to try and do something for ourselves. I have been thinking, Mr. Jan, that we might get a few pupils, I and Amilly. There’s not a single good school in Deerham, as you know; I think we might establish one.”
“So you might,” said Jan, “if you’d like it.”
“We should both like it. And perhaps you’d not mind our staying on in this house while we were getting a few together; establishing it, as it were. They would not put you out, I hope, Mr. Jan.”
“Not they,” answered Jan. “I shouldn’t eat them. Look here, Miss Deb, I’d doctor them for nothing. Couldn’t you put that in the prospectus. It might prove an attraction.”
It was a novel feature in a school prospectus, and Miss Deb had to take some minutes to consider it. She came to the conclusion that it would look remarkably well in print. “Medical attendance gratis.”
“Including physic,” put in Jan.
“Medical attendance gratis, including physic,” repeated Miss Deb. “Mr. Jan, it would be sure to take with the parents. I am so much obliged to you. But I hope,” she added, moderating her tone of satisfaction, “that they’d not think it meant Master Cheese. People would not have much faith in him, I fear.”
“Tell them to the contrary,” answered Jan. “And Cheese will be leaving shortly, you know.”
“True,” said Miss Deb. “Mr. Jan,” she added, a strange eagerness in her tone, in her meek blue eyes, “if we, I and Amilly, can only get into the way of doing something for ourselves, by which we may be a little independent, and look forward to be kept out of the workhouse in our old age, we shall feel as if removed from a dreadful nightmare. Circumstances have been preying upon us, Mr. Jan: care is making us begin to look old before we might have looked it.”
Jan answered with a laugh. That notion of the workhouse was so good, he said. As well set on and think that he should come to the penitentiary! It had been no laughing matter, though, to the hearts of the two sisters, and Miss Deb sat on, crying silent tears.
How many of these silent tears must be shed in the path through life! It appears that the lot of some is only made to shed them, and to bear.
BUDE HAVEN, AND THE WRECK OF THE BENCOOLEN.
The thundering shore of Bude.
Tennyson, “Idylls of the King.”
There is a wonderful sameness in the “Watering-places” of the south of England. Except in size, and in the necessary differences of one hill, it may be, higher than another, or a little more or less of wood, or a steeper cliff, or a shallower beach, they are evidently members of one family, and have the monotonous family likeness. Go from Margate to Plymouth,—the Alpha and Omega of the class,—you will find this to be true. The same kind of lodging-houses, and the same tariff of prices; the same Lord Nelson Inns and Royal Hotels; the same dingy circulating libraries and dreary reading-rooms, with one “Times” and four penny local papers; the same sort of shore, half shingle, half sand, with its tiresome little waves all alike from year’s end to year’s end; the same young ladies with their pork-pie hats and wet hair down their backs coming out of the bathing machines, identical with one another from the Nore to the Start; the same young gentlemen lounging all day long with the same penny cigars in and out of the same kind of billiard-rooms, with the same kind of chipped balls and greasy cloth:—but let one word suffice; Margate, Ramsgate, Worthing, Hastings, Brighton, Bournemouth, Weymouth, Teignmouth, Ilfracombe, and a dozen others, may, one and all, be equally described under the head “Watering-place.” Let us, however, go round the Lizard and the Land’s End; or, if our sea-going qualities are but second rate, let us not conclude that Devonshire is the last county in England which can be reached by land; and we shall find two small villages upon the west coast of Cornwall, which cannot (anyhow at the present time) be put upon the same bad eminence as those which we have named. One of these is Newquay, the other, Bude Haven.
It is of the last of these places that we propose to give our readers a short account: Newquay is perhaps equally primitive, but it is less accessible; of less importance; and without the variety of scenery which surrounds Bude.
Queen Elizabeth, of pious and chaste memory, was good enough to say that the further she went west in her dominions, the more convinced she was that the wise men came from the east. However this may be, it is quite certain that the men of the east, who desire “to suffer a sea change,” have not yet shown their wisdom by going westward: visitors to Cornwall are still not numerous. The “season,” such as it is, at Bude, mainly depends upon the annual coming of almost neighbours from the county towns; of people whose faces are well known, and whose absence would be missed and to be accounted for. And the writer of this paper sincerely trusts that it will be very long before such a state of things is altered; he does not want a railroad within a mile, and “facilities of communication:” he hopes excursionists will never hear of Bude, or ever be able to get at it and home again within the day: he is intensely selfish, and desires to keep Bude