ALL THE YEAR ROUND.

A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

No. 251.]

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1864.

QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER I. SEULE AU MONDE.

[PRICE 2d.

a hundred and thirty thousand a year. He passes his time mostly among ostlers, enginedrivers, and firemen. He swears, smokes a cutty pipe, and of his two intimate friends, one is a rough rider and the other a rat-catcher. Mr. Benazi, the great Hebrew Financier, you must know: yonder cadaverous, dolorous-looking figure in shabby clothes, huddled up in a corner of the snuff-coloured chariot, drawn by the spare-ribbed horses that look as though they had never enough to eat. He is Baron Benazi in the Grand-Duchy of Sachs-Pfeifigen, where he lent the Grand-Duke money to get the crown jewels out of pawn. That loan was the making of Ben. There is nothing remarkable about him save his nose, which stands out, a hooked pro

among the shadows cast by the squabs of the suuff-coloured chariot. That nose is a power in the state. That nose represents millions. When Baron Benazi's nose shows signs of flexibility, monarchs may breathe again, for loans can be negotiated. But, when the Benazian proboscis looks stern and rigid, and its owner rubs it with an irritable finger, it is a sadly ominous sign of something being rotten in the state of SachsPfeifigen, and of other empires and monarchies which I will not stay to name.

THIS is Hyde Park, at the most brilliant moment in the afternoon, at the most brilliant period in the season. What a city of magnificence, of luxury, of pleasure, of pomp, and of pride, this London seems to be. Can there be any poor or miserable people--any dingy grubs among these gaudy butterflies? What are the famed Elysian fields of Paris, to Hyde Park at this high tide of splendour? What the cavalcade of the Bois de Boulogne, or the promenade of Longchamps, to the long stream of equi-montory, like the prow of a Roman galley, from pages noiselessly rolling along the bank of the Serpentine? Everybody in London (worth naming) is being carried along on wheels, or bestrides pigskin girthed o'er hundred guinea horseflesh, or struts in bright boots, or trips in soft sandalled prunella, or white satin with high heels. There is Royal Blood in a mail phaeton. Royal blood smokes a large cigar, and handles its ribbons scientifically. There is a Duke in the dumps, and behind him is the Right Reverend Father, in a silk apron and a shovelhat, who made that fierce verbal assault upon What else? Everything. Whom else? Everyhis Grace in the House of Lords last night. body. Dandies and swells, smooth-cheeked and There is the crack advocate of the day, the suc-heavy-moustached, twiddling their heavy guardcessful defender of the young lady who was chains, caressing their fawn-coloured favoris, accused of poisoning her mamma with nux clanking their spurred heels, screwing their eyevomica in her negus; and there is the young glasses into the creases of their optic muscles, lady herself, encompassed with a nimbus of petti haw-hawing vacuous common-places to one ancoat, lolling back in a miniature Brougham with other, or leaning over the rails to stare at all, to a gentleman old enough to be her grandfather, in gravely wag the head to some, to nod supera high stock, and a wig dyed deep indigo. Is that ciliously to others, to grin familiarly to a select Anonyma driving twin ponies in a low phaeton, few. Poor little snobs and government clerks a parasol attached to her whip, and a groom with aping the Grand Manner, and succeeding only folded arms behind her! Bah! there are so in looking silly. Any number of quiet senmany Anonymas now-a-days. If it isn't the sible folks surveying the humours of the scene Nameless one herself, it is Synonyma. Do you see with much amusement, and without envy. Fothat stout gentleman with the coal-black beard reigners who, after a five years' residence in and the tarnished fez cap? That is the Syrian London, may have discovered that Leicesterambassador. The liver-coloured man in the dingy square, the Haymarket, and the lower part of white turban, the draggletailed blue burnous, Regent-street, are not the only promenades in the cotton stockings, and the alpaca umbrella, is London, and so come swaggering and jabbering the Maronite envoy. The nobleman who is here, in their braid and their pomatum and driving that four-in-hand, and is got up to such their dirt, poisoning the air with the fumes a perfection of imitation of the manners and of bad tobacco. An outer fringe of nursemaids costume of a stage-coachman, has a rental of-then some soldiers listlessly sucking the knobs

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of their canes, and looking very much as if the " 'Roaring Loom of Time," the shuttle of they considered themselves as flies in amber, production is always plying, and what is Naneither rich nor rare, and wondering how the ture: a field, a flower, a shell, a seaweed, a bird's deuce they got there. As useless as chimneys feather, but the woven garment that we see in summer, seemingly, are these poor strong men GOD by? done up in scarlet blanketing, with three halfpence a day spending money, and nobody to kill, and severely punished by illogical magistrates if they take to jumping upon policemen, or breaking civilians' heads with the buckles of their belts, through their weariness. Aggravated assaults, says the magistrate, as he signs their mittimus, are not to be tolerated.

Castlemaine, but nobody dares to be rude to her. I've seen her at the Star and Garter at Richmond, at Greenwich, at Brighton, at Ventnor, in Paris, always quite alone. She's an enigma. She's a Sphinx."

"Is she demi-monde ?" Thus, one Insolent. "Nobody knows. Nobody ever presumes to speak to her, and she never was seen to speak to anybody save her groom and the waiters. She goes to the Opera; to the theatres; always quite alone. Upon my word, I think that woman would turn up at a prize fight: alone. I've seen her myself at Ascot."

As Tom Fibbs said this, a very tall angular well-dressed gentleman, with grizzled hair, and close upon fifty years of age, who had been sitting in an arm-chair close by, hastily flung down the Globe he was glancing over, darting a by no means complimentary look at Mr. Fibbs, and strode out of the room.

"I think Billy Long must know the Mysterious Stranger," languidly remarked Fainéant number one, as the door closed. "He knows all sorts of monstrous queer people, and he didn't half seem to like what Fibbs said."

"Very likely. He's a cranky fellow." "Very rich, isn't he?"

"Disgustingly so. What he wants in parliament with twenty thousand a year, I can't make out. He never speaks, and passes most of his time in the smoking-room."

"Twenty thousand. That's a tremendous screw for a Catholic baronet."

by the time he reached the Burke and Hare and hinted as mysteriously as mendaciously, that "Billy Long"-he called him Billy-had told him all about the Sphinx of Rotten Row.

"No offence," murmured the tall baronet, as puffing his cigar he strode down Pall-Mall. "I dare say you didn't mean any. Mischief-makers never do, and burn down the temple at Ephesus with the best intentions in the world. Ah, Lily!" he continued, bitterly, "how long will you give all these idle tongues some grounds to tattle? How long will you persist in being quite alone ?"

Still quite alone. Who was this female Robinson Crusoe? "Tis a question which I shall endeavour in the course of the next few | hundred pages to solve.

CHAPTER II. BETWEEN HAMMERSMITH AND

CHISWICK-LANE.

ONE bright afternoon, in the summer of 1836, the whole fashionable world of London had chosen to abandon Hyde Park, Pall-Mall, Regentstreet, and its other habitual resorts, and to betake itself to the flower-show at Chiswick.

Probably about one per cent of the ladies who thus patronised the exhibition of the Royal Horticultural Society cared one doit about the products collected in the conservatories and the tents. The Botanical Revival (which owes so much to Puseyism and the Tracts for the Times) was then but in its infancy; and, besides, a life passed in the contemplation of artificial flowers "Yes: but he was as poor as Job till his is not very favourable to the study of real flowers. father died. Painted pictures, or went on the People went to this great annual garden crush stage, or turned billiard-marker, or did something less to look at the roses in the pots than at those low for a living, I'm told; but he's all right now." on the cheeks of other people; and fuchsias on As Thomas Fibbs, Esq., member of the Com- their branches were at a discount with them, as mittee of the United Fogies Club, of the Turn-objects of attraction, compared with fuchsias pike Ticket Commutation Commission (salary that grew in white satin bonnets. Yes, ladies, 1500/. per annum, hours of business 3 to past 3 P.M., 3 times a week, 3 months in the year), was selecting his umbrella from the stand about twenty minutes subsequent to this conversation, preparatory to looking in at the Burke and Hare Club, to which he also belongs, and which is younger and more convivial than the Fogies, he found Sir William Long, Bart., M.P., in the act of lighting one of those cigars which he was almost continually smoking.

'Might I trouble Mr. Fibbs," said the baronet, in a slow and rather hesitating tone, "to refrain in promiscuous conversation from hazarding conjectures as to the identity of a lady with whom I am acquainted, and who, I can assure him, is a most respectable and exemplary person?"

"Certainly-oh, certainly, Sir William," stammered Fibbs. "I meant no offence. I'm sure I didn't." And, so saying, he buttoned up his overcoat, and trotted down the steps of the Fogies considerably flurried. Sir William Long had been a member of the club for five years, and this was the first time he had ever spoken to Fibbs. That worthy, however, recovered himself

white satin bonnets were worn in 1836; and for dresses even that sheeny material had not incurred the cruel proscription under which it seems to languish in 1863.

But if one in a hundred among the ladies were floriculturally inclined, what shall be said of the gentlemen? Did one in a thousand trouble himself concerning roses, or fuchsias, or geraniums, or pelargoniums? It did not much matter. People went to Chiswick because other people went to Chiswick. It was the thing, and a very nice, amusing, and fashionable thing, too.

So all the jobbed horses in London were spruced up, and currycombed, and polished; and all the footmen underwent dry cascades through the medium of the flour-dredger; and all the grandees in Granductoo stepped into their carriages, and were wafted rapidly to Chiswick. What pails of water had been dashed over plated axles in hay and clover-smelling mews behind the mansions of the great! What spun-glass or floss silk wigs had been smoothed over the crania of ruddy double-chinned coachmen! What fashionable milliners had sat up all night to complete the radiant flower-show

toilettes: the subordinates wearily wishing for morning to come and the dolorous task to be got through; the principals uttering devout aspirations that their bills might be paid at the end of the season. If poor Mademoiselle Ruche, of Mount-street, Grosvenor-square, did not obtain a settlement of her small account (9047. 3s. 6d.) from the Marchioness of Cœurdesart, when the season and the session were over, and did in consequence go bankrupt; if the flower-show was to unhappy Miss Pincothek, the "first hand," the seed-time for the harvest which death reaped next spring; or if the night before Chiswick was to Jane Thumb, the apprentice girl, the last straw that broke the consumptive camel's back-what were such little mischances in comparison with the immense benefit which of course accrues to the community at large from all fashionable gatherings? That the few must suffer for the benefit of the many, is an axiom admitted in the conduct of all human affairs. According to the rules of fashionable polity, the many must suffer for the benefit of the few.

There could not have been a more magnificent day for the holding of a patrician festival. It had rained the preceding year, and snowed the year before that; but the show of 1836 was favoured by the elements in an almost unprecedented degree. Although the gracious Lady who now rules over this empire was then but a pretty young princess, it was really "Queen's weather" with which the visitors to Chiswick were for a brief afternoon endowed. One cannot have everything one's own way, of course, and although the sky was very blue, the sun very warm and bright, and the summer breeze very gentle, there was rebellion underfoot; and if the worm in the dust didn't turn when trodden upon, the dust itself did, even to rising up and eddying about, and covering the garments of fashion with pulverulent particles, and half choking every man, woman, and child who happened to be in the open between Hyde Park Corner and Kew Bridge.

foliage, so delightfully as to make the speculative wayfarer ponder on the possibility of there having been child-trees among the horticultural phenomena of the garden of Eden; their silver laughter, and the ringing clack of their chubby hands as they smote them in applause, made the same wayfarers (if they happened to be philanthropists) hope that those argentine tones were never turned to wails of distress, nor that same sound of applause derived from cruel smacks administered by their pastors and masters. The domestic servants, likewise, along the line of road, if they had not had a half-holiday conceded to them voluntarily, took one without leave, and appeared at many up-stairs windows in much beribboned caps, and with lips ceaselessly mobile, now in admiration, now in disparagement of the male and female fashionables whom the carriages bore by. Nor were their mistresses, young, old, and middle-aged, employed in a very different manner at the drawing-room and parlour casements, from which points of espial they indulged in criticisms identical in spirit, if not in language, with those of the upper regions, and bearing mainly on how beautiful the gentlemen looked, and what frights the women were! Although, thus much must be stated in mitigation: That while they animadverted on the bad make of the toilettes, and the awkwardness or ugliness of the ladies, they did not withhold warm commendation from the quality of the garments themselves. Enthusiastic admiration for a moire antique is quite compatible with intense dislike of the lady inside it. It is one thing to like a dress, but another to like the wearer.

The lower orders were determined also to have their part in this great afternoon. All over the world, when sunshine is once given, the principal part of a festival is secured. This is why the Italians are so lazy. As it is almost always sunny in Italy, the sun-worshippers (and it is astonishing how many Ghebirs there are among Christians) are nearly always doing nothing, or celebrating Saint Somebody's festa, which is next door to The young ladies and gentlemen belonging to it. We see so little of the sun in England, that the various colleges, academies, seminaries, and we are bound to make the most of him whenever educational institutions in the high road from he favours us with an appearance. The trading Hammersmith Broadway to Turnham-green-for classes on the road to Chiswick enjoyed their of course there could be no such vulgar things holidays according to the promptings of their as schools in a main thoroughfare, such low several imaginations. One abandoned his shop places being only to be found in by-lanes where to the care of an apprentice, and took a stroll children are cuffed and kicked, and don't learn towards the Packhorse, where he met other calisthenics, and have fevers, and don't have tradesmen similarly minded, and was, perhaps, French lessons-the fortunate little boys and after many admiring comments on the carriages, girls attached to those gymnasia had a half- the horses, the footmen, and the fashionables, holiday on the flower-show afternoon, just as induced to stroll back again, diverge from the their tiny brethren and sisters at Clapham and main road, and take a boat at Hammersmith Mitcham are exempted from lessons and per- Suspension Bridge for a quiet row up the river. mitted to be all eyes for the passing cavalcade Another (but he would be in a small way of busion the Derby Day. Their shiny well-washed ness) gravely instructed the wife of his bosom faces were visible over the copings of many to place a row of chairs outside his domicile, brick walls; their eyes shone brighter than and there, enthroned with the partner of his many brass plates whereon the academical de-joys and his olive-branches, would smoke his grees of their preceptors were engraved; their pipe and take his placid glass, exchanging the pleasant countenances were embowered in green time of day and the news of the afternoon with

invaded the footway, screamed with delight at the processional pageantry, and endangered themselves, as usual, under the carriages without getting run over. It is certain that the offspring of Want very rarely enjoy a ride in Fortune's chariot, yet are they for ever hanging on behind, running close to the wheels, and diving beneath the horses' hoofs.

neighbours similarly employed, and otherwise came out of the by-lanes before alluded to, behaving in quite a patriarchal manner. A third, with an eye to business, wafered up sanguine placards relative to tea and coffee and hot water always ready; or displayed in front of his establishment, boards on tressels covered with fair white cloths, and creaking, if not groaning, beneath the weight of half-cut hams, fruit tarts, buns, and ginger beer. For do what Fashion will to keep itself exclusive, and have the cream Many persons of grave mien and determined of things, the common people will not be banished appearance-peripatetic, not stationary, traders from the festivals altogether. They will peep-were turning the sunshine and its consequent over the palings or through the chinks thereof; holiday to commercial account. There did not they will peep round the carriages and criticise seem any great likelihood, at the first blush, of the occupants; and what can Fashion, itself, do the Court Guide, the Blue Book, the Peerage or more? Often, the common see the best of the the Baronetage, descending from their equipages fireworks; and the music of the brass bands, to purchase lucifer-matches or knitted babies' coming from a distance, falls more sweetly caps, or to partake of jam tarts, gingerbread on their ears than of those who are privi-nuts, or apples three a penny; and the numbers leged to stand within the inner enclosure, and of speculations entered into towards that end, on to be half deafened by the blasting and the the footway, must have appeared to the superbraying. The purest pleasures in life are theficial as rash in conception and pregnant with cheapest ones. Once the writer knew a gentle- disaster. But the peripatetic merchants knew man of a lively and convivial turn, but whose circle of acquaintances was limited, and who was, besides, so chronic an invalid as to be almost permanently confined to the house. At the back there was another house, almost always full of company, and where balls, supper-parties, and other merry meetings, were continually going on. It was the valetudinarian philosopher's delight to sit sipping his sassafras tea at his open window and cry "Hear, hear," with due attention to the proprieties of time and place, to the eloquent speeches, and sometimes to join in choruses when songs were sung in the convivial chambers whose lights glimmered in the distance. No pleasure could be cheaper; yet he enjoyed it amazingly. There was no trouble about dressing, about being introduced, about meeting people he didn't care for. He went away when he liked, without having to make, perhaps, a mendacious assurance to the hostess of having spent a delightful evening; and he rose next morning without a headache, or, worse still, the loss of his heart to that pretty girl in blue.

If some of the traders just glanced at did not make holiday in honour of the sun; if one crusty-looking cheesemonger denounced the whole proceedings as rubbish, and another secreted himself in his back parlour to brood over his speech at the next vestry, or Board of Guardians meeting; or if another, the worst of all, shut himself up to grumble over his books and hard times, and scold his wife and children, and curse because the people outside were enjoying themselves-what were these but the little flaws and specks that must needs be found in the brightest social diamond! If everybody were happy, what good would there be in expatiating on the blessings of happiness? It is certain, however, that the grumblers this sunny afternoon were in a grave minority. Troops of children who did not belong to seminaries or educational institutes, and perhaps

perfectly well what they were about. There was somebody to buy everything they had to sell, and they sold accordingly. Somebody was the great wandering fluctuating stream of poor people; and poor people are always buying something, and must perforce have ready money to pay for it. More remarkable was the fact that all the taverns and beer-shops on the line of road were full of guests; the men all smoking pipes and drinking beer; the vast majority of the women holding babies in one hand and Abernethy biscuits in the other. Why was this? Why is this? Why will it be so, if augury can be hazarded, in ages to come? This flowershow was not a popular gathering. The tickets were ten shillings each. The people had nothing to do with it. They just took a good long stare-not of envy, be it understood, but of lazy and listless curiosity, at the fine folks in the carriages, and then trooped into the nearest public-house for beer, tobacco, baby-nursing and biscuit-munching. There is surely a dreary sameness about the amusements of the English people; and, for aught we know, the system adopted of rigorously excluding them from anything that is to be seen, and fencing them off by barriers and reserved seats, just as though they were unclean animals, from every trumpery section of infinite space where something humanly considered grand is going on, may have been carried a little too far. Gentility has robbed the poor play-goer of his best seats in the pit, and made them into stalls. The gallery even, once specially appropriated to the gods, has now its amphitheatre stalls. The railway formula has penetrated everywhere. All is first, second, and third class, from refreshment-rooms to funerals.

Neither pit-stalls nor railway formulæ were thought much of, however, in the year '36, and the honest folk enjoying their outing, took their pipes and malt liquor, nursed their bantlings and ate their biscuits because there was nothing else