Papurau Newydd Cymru

Chwiliwch 15 miliwn o erthyglau papurau newydd Cymru

Cuddio Rhestr Erthyglau

10 erthygl ar y dudalen hon

..--LITERARY EXTRACTS.

Newyddion
Dyfynnu
Rhannu

LITERARY EXTRACTS. JsA FRANK MILDMAY STORY.—A good story of a ■Earryat novel is told by a writer in the (Jkurcl Wazettc. A philanthropic lady in a fishing village {offered to read to a class of young fellows, and hit upon ''Frank Mildmay" as a likely book. As the Btory progressed, and the captain's language grew ir intensity, she was constrained to substitute suer harmless expressions as dear me and bother it' for some of the originals. All, however, was goim well until, during the Bible reading, one lad pickec up the book and found out how the class had beer defrauded. He thereupon told his fellows and thej taxed their benefactor .with the bowdlerisation of gooc literature. She admitted it, and promised to amenc her fault, resolving, however, in her own mind tc continue to soften Marryat here and there. But hot end was defeated, for the boys bought another copy and one of them checked her off in a loud voice unti she could hold out no longer. DUMAS.—One day, December 4. 1870, he fixed his great kindly eyes on me, and, in the tone of a chilc beseeching its mother, he said to me: "I entreatyol do not force me to get up, I am so comfortable here,' I did not insist, but sat down on his bed. Suddenly a strange wistfulness took possession of him, and s solemn 0 and melancholy expression settled on his face; and in his eyes, so caressing the moment before, I saw tears gather. On my inquiring flu cause of his sadness, he took my hand, and, looking me straight in the face, he said, in a firm voice, ] will tell you, if you promise to answer my question not with the partiality of a son, or the indulgence y 11 of a friend, but with the frankness of a valiani companion in arms and the authority of a competent judge." I promise to do so,' I replied. Swear," he said. "I swear," ] again replied. Well, then "—he hesitated for ar instant, then, making up his mind-" Well! de you believe," he said, "that anything I have written will survive me ?" And his eyes watched me eagerly. If that is your only anxiety," I replied gaily, you may rest in peace; much indeed will sur- vive you." Is that true ?" he asked. Certainly,' 'I replied. On your honour ?" he said. "On my honour," I repeated. After that he spoke no more, as though nothing interested him anj longer here below. On the following day he was seized with a violent attack of fever, and in the evening at ten o'clock he gently passed away without an effort, without even being aware of his end. There is no doubt that my father is very widely read IL great surgeon said to me the other day-" All oui liOBpital patients recover or die with one of youi father's books under their pillow. When we wish to make them forget the terror of an approaching (operation, the tediousness of convalescence, or the SSreadof death, we prescribe one of your father's novels and they are able to forget."—Alexandre Du nias, younger AN U NFORTUNATE ILLUSTRATiox.- Even before a policeman gets acquainted;with the people on his beat. he should seek an introduction to the dictionary The Plain Dealer proves it by the experience of an officer who bad loved a young woman long and truly, but lacked the courage to tell her so. Finally hE mustered all his bravery-it required more nerve than to face an ugly mob-and marched to her home. "'Mary," he said, I love you." Mary started slightly. She had been expecting this remark for some time. She blushed, however, and then coyly said: Ditto, George." To her surprise and chagrin George changed the subject, and presently took hie kleparture. A few nights later he was on his way te his beat with two of his brother officers. Say, boys,' he said, I want to ask you something. You tnow I ve been keeping company with the girl on Cedar Avenue, and the other ni,ght-well, I told hei I loved her, and say, all she said was ditto.' Now. what in thunder does ditto mean ?" The brother officers laughed loud and long. Don't you know what that means ?" one of them cried. No. I don't," said George. Well, it's easy," said his friend. Look over the fence." They were just pass- ing a cabbage patch. What do you see?' Cabbages," replied George. Well, now look at that particular cabbage-head right there." Yes,' said George. "Now look at the cabbage-head next to it." Yes," said George. Well, that's it. The first-cabbage-head is a cabbage-head and the othei one is ditto." What!" roared the irate George, did that blamed girl call me a cabbage-head ?" And he turned away and refused to be comforted. A MAN'S LOVE FOR His CHILD.—There are those who smile sneeringly or contemptuously at the sight of a man's unshamed love for his child. To them it i8 an indication of something weak-almost womanish —in his nature. Is is so really? I am inclined tc suspect that the facts are the other way about, and (hat the men who have loved their children m osl passionately have been, not the feeble ones of the world, but the fighters; not the weak souls, but the strong. So, too, it is to the intellectually sturdy— to the Whitmans, Stevensons. and Henleys-not to the intellectually sickly, thatthe helplessness of child- hood most appeals. It is the strong soul, lnsting in its vigour, like a breeze from the north, that can not only croon a tender lullaby over a little child's cradle, but can chant Viking songs to brace the sinews of men. Some one will doubtless be reminding me that neither Stevenson nor Whitman had a child. What has that to do with it? It is the father-heart, the mother-heart, not the mere fact of being a father or a mother in the flesh, that constituted the true child- lover. I am not forgetting Oliver Wendell Holmes t dictum that one side of a man's nature remains un- developed until he knows what it is to have a child of his own. That, however, is true only of some men -the men of whom one might with almost equal truth say that they can never love a woman truly until they have a wife of their own. Their love is indis- Bolubly bound up with their consciousness of pro- prietary rights; for just as a spider spins from hie own body the thread upon which he advances, so certain natures can only progress along the line of eelf. But some of the most beautiful chapters in the history of the love between man and woman tell of devotion which—like that of Dante for Beatrice- went forth unasked and unasking; and the love of some childless men and childless women forchildrer lis, if less romantic than the love of a man for 6 maid. scarcely less passionate. Those who njaintair that love and life are consummated in the cominn together in marriage of man and maid, misread the imcred mysteries. Is the means to an end of more tmoment than the end itself? Is it the scattering oi the grain in spring-time or the reaping of the ripe corn at harvest that crowns the husbandman's year ? Even the pure joy of wedded love is sometimes not all unselfish but the ecstasy with which ore holds one's child hugged and gathered to one's heart is a tpassion the white flame of which casts no shadow. If is the one ecstasy of possession which is all unselfish. It asks only to give, and in giving is abundantly reo c,ompentied.- Coidso?t Kernahan in The Puritan. POLITE.-Many of us have heard of that polite Parisian cocher "—driver—who, during a long afternoon in which he drove a lady about the gay capital to see the sights, responded quite unruffled and without so much as a muscle twitching, to her con- etantly repeated orders to cochon "—pig—to drive her here or there. Indeed, foreigners receive mistakes in their language much more courteously than we receive theirs in ours. Two ladies in Italy bad this fact recently borne in upon them," as the Friends Bay, with especial distinctness. In the morning their Italian teacher made a slip in her English, and in weply to an inquiry concerning the oddly-twinkling fire embers in her little brass stove, informed them ■that the fuel she employed was small wigs." They laughed heartily at the mistake, and presently the lady herself corrected it to "twigs," and was amiable enough to laugh also. But that same day they went to see the hoiiieless rats of the city fed in the cloisters lof San Gallo, and were not sure that they had come at the right time. One of them turned to the "custode" and inquired in Italian, as she supposed, "When will the cats eat but what she really asked was When shall we eat, the cats ?" There is no systematic hour, signorina," he replied to this surprising query, liD a manner as politely matter-of-course as if it wero quite the custom there to serve kittens on toast to 'foreign ladies! Not, a flicker of expreesion showed ghat he perceived the mistake. Such a steady coun- knance under such circumstances, they agreod when they discovered it themselves, was a feat of courtesy irery rarely exhibited by an American. QUEER FACTS ABOUT SHOOTING STARS.—Sir Robert Sail told a Lonqon audience the other day sqrne in- teresting facts about, rtieteorites and shooting stars. En describing the origin of meteorites he said that millions of years ago, when the earth was an infant at play :and volcanoes were giants, the meteors were ptrown upward in infant convulsions. Some of the earth's discarded rocks returned at once but those which were flung upward at a rate greater than seven miles a second passed beyona the earth's gravitating influence and sought paths' of their own, no one could tell whither. And then, 'after millions of years, khey once more came within fee reach of the world and old Mother Earth ■esumed her sway, took back the rocks to her twom and the astronomers said a meteorite had lien. Sir Robert asked his hearers to imagine a ^rapping of some hundreds of miles of air round the earth's surface. JJow just in the same way that a, gimlet, boring its ,way into wood, becomes warm, so a let going 20 miles a minute would become extremely parm in boring its way through 20 miles cf air. And in the same way that a bullet became warm, so a Etorite travelling at this speed perhaps for.hundreds pears through realms of space, whose "paralvsing d was indeacritabie, and finding itself at last ■lunging through the warm hath of the air, became j (otter and hotter and hotter. It glowed, it became j ■phite hot, it melted, it dissolved !h a burst "ot mseou§ j Ualendour, and observers on the earth cried, Why. pore's *1 iSSt xo? J I 81R F. BlUDGE AND THE ALBERT HALL CHOIR--It is no easy matter to conduct a large choir, to obtain the best possible results and yet to remain on per- fectly friendly relations with its members. Difficult and exhausting passages have to be gone through over and over again; the conductor must know exactly the effect he wants to get and how to get it. and all the while the choir has to be kept in perfect good humour. But Sir Frederick Bridge is a past- master of the art. He is a severe critic, but all his criticisms are delivered so good-humouredly and in such a kindly way, that it is impossible for anyone, least of all any member of the Albert Hall Choir, to take offence. Sometimes a member of the choir makes a good repartee to the conductor. Such an episode occurred coon after the death of Sir J. Barnbv. Dr. Bridge (as he then was) was anxious to know what. Sir J. Barnby had done at a particular point, and calling out to the basses, said, I want some reliable man amongst you to tell me so-and-so." After a moment's pause, a voice from the clouds said solemnly: ''He's absent to-night, sir." It was im- possible to continue the rehearsal for some little time. And how skilfully Sir Frederick plays off one section of the choir against another it should be mentioned that on each side of the organ is a com- plete choir of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses now one section is praised at the expense of the other,; now both are rebuked for not keeping time: then, lest the right-hand choir should feel unduly elated, it is referred to as a pleasant echo of the choir on my left "—how particular lie is with respect to pronunciation!—and so, by cajolery, by sarcasm, by solemn conjuration, by every means, those results are attained which are familiar to every lover of music in London. It is said that, at one rehearsal, while the ladies were practising a more than usually trying passage—with results not altogether entrancing—a cat suddenly made its appearance, and stood in front of the sopranos, look- ing from them to the conductor with an expression of mild inquiry. Sir Frederick naturally made the most of the incident. Ladies," he said, this intelligent animal has come to see if, by any chance, there is a vacant place. Let us show her her mistake let us prove to her that this is not a feline choir but a highly-trained human choir." Renewed attempts— with even more disastrous results—the cat quietly lay down in front of the ladies. Sir Frederick looked at them reproachfully. "I fear, ladies," he said, "you have been too much for the cat!"—Cassell'a Magazine. How THE AMERICAN COUNTRY PARSON IS PAIn.- It is not only as a reward for performing the marriage ceremony that the country parson is paid in kind." Sometimes he receives a large part of his salary in this way. The members of his congre- gation each subscribe a certain amount of money to- wards the salary that is guaranteed the minister. Farmer Brown will, he says, contribute four dollars is his share. In the winter, when Farmer Brown should hand over his four dollars to the church treasurer, he finds himself short of ready cash, but with an abundant supply of wood on hand, having in the autumn felled many trees in his forest. Nothing can be more certain than that the minister needs fuel in the winter; therefore. Farmer Brown loads his waggon with logs of wood, drives to the parsonage, and deposits it in the minister's back yard, announc- ing to the minister that he reckons thar's nior'n foul dollars wuth of wood in that thar load The minister can, perhaps, make use of that one load of wood very conveniently but when, as is frequently the case, a dozen frugal farmers among his parishioners are struck with the same sort of notion—that of paying their subscriptions in wood instead of money-the unfortunate parson has more wood than he can burn for many winters to come, and his back yard is entirely taken up with it. He needs sugar, and paraffin, and rice, and butter, as well as a cheerful fireside. Did I say butter ? Well, sometimes he gets more butter than he wants, too. Says the farmer to his wife Jane, I promised to pay three dollars towards the parson's salary. Bein' as you're makin' fine butter this summer, you jes' take him a couple o' pounds a week till you've made three dollars worth." Two pounds of fresh yellow butter weekly from the dairy of a parishioner would be appreciated by the parson's family. They would rather have it than the stale butter from the village shop; but, since butter is made on all farms, and many farmers wives send the parson butter to pay off theii subscriptions, the parson's larder overflows with butter, while many other necessaries are scarce. It is the same with potatoes and cabbages and beetroots, with eggs, and with hay for the juinister's horse, which, by the way, is not forgotten when the time for paying subscriptions comes round. The minister loves his horse, and is glad to have plenty of hay and oats for it to eat; but to have in his barn enough of these articles to last a horse through several life- times, while the children are needing boots and coata for the present winter, is not a state of affairs that appeals to his sense of the fitness of things. Some of our country parsons, with an instinct for business, not inDorn, but thrust upon them by a stern neces- sity, have been known to become dealers in wood, potatoes, hay, and other things of which they have an over supply, selling their surplus stock off to their neighbours. In this way they are able to get a little ready cash with which to purchase such necessary commodities as do not "grow on the farm."—Tht Quiver. REBELS IN DERBYSHIRE.—The route of the Young Pretender in Derbyshire lay pretty much beside the Dove, only it was upon the high road on the Derby- shire side. An old friend of ours, recently deceased, was as a lad acquainted with an ancient goodman who had witnessed this march through Peakland. The inhabitants themselves were, as recently as the beginning of the present century, pronounced a horde of savages," but like doesn't always take tc like, and the advent of the breekless warriors of Charles Edward is said to have worried them ex- ceedingly. This did not arise so much from personal fear as for the safety of their goods and chattels. It was the confident hope of the Peaklanders that the rebels would continue their march right onward to London, and there get hanged or otherwise exter- minated, thereby saving the necessity of a return journey. Their very worst fears were justified wher the Highlanders were back upon them again in a few days Here is one story of the march which lingers locally: An old cottager espied a band of foragers in the distance. They were making toward his home- stead, and, of course, he bad a shrewd guess what their errand would be. Farm stock he had none to relieve. His wife was too hard fared to run any risk of being kissed an' carried awa' But on the wall of the houseplace there hung an obvious piece of loot, namely a flitch of bacon. The old fellow, however, determined to have a good try and keep this winter provision of his out of the wambles of the Highland gentry, so in the few minutes at his disposal he made his arrangements. When the soldiers entered the cottage they found a man lying on the settle in the last throes of dissolution, and a woman wringing her hands over him in indescribable agony. The clans- men, bare-legged though they were, yielded a certain amount of pity, and prosecuted the search after what they wanted with civility and without interfering with the dying man. After rummaging about and finding nothing of value they took their departure. Immediately they had got clear away the wild man of the Peak jumped off the settle, removed the chaff bed, and, drawing forth the baccn, proceeded to hang 51 t once more in its accustomed place Magazin*. SOME lirion BULLS.—Perhaps the greatest contempt ever expressed by one man for another was the re- jection by an old Irish gentleman of a challenge Fight with him he exclaimed. I would rather go to my grave without a fight." From an Irish news- paper-" The heavy drops of rain varied in size from a shilling to eighteenpence." The chairman of a com- pany in Cork—"Perhaps you think that in ourboard half do the work and the other half do nothing As a matter of fact, gentlemen the reverse is the case." "Is it a son or a daughter your sister has got?" asked a gentleman of one of his tenants. "The curse of the crows on me, but I don't know whether I'm an uncle or an aunt," was the immediate reply. From the witness-box A Kathleen Mavourneen loan'" questioned the judge. What in the world is that ?" That's what we calls some loans down in our parts, yer hpnner-the It may be for years, and it may be for ever' sort." Did you call your husband's uncle 4 Carey, the informer ?'" No," she replied, I didn't go so far as that. I called him Anti-Christ." Eminent London specialist to a Galway landlord—" I should like to know whether your family have been long-lived ?" Well, doctor, I'll just tell you how it is," said the patient, thoughtfully. My family is a West of Ireland family, and the age of my ancestors depended entirely on the judge and jury who tried them.' After a levee a Hussar officer in full uniform walked down Dame-street, Dublin. Two men seemed quite bewildered by the gorgeous appari- ti6n clanking towards them but when he had passed, one said to the other Oh, shouldn't I like to pawn himl" A. woman named Mrs. Flynn was brought up in Dublin for assaulting her husband. The ponce applied for a remand, as the husband, being in hos- pital, was unable to appear. The woman seemed also to be in a very battered condition. Her face was bruised, one eye was closed, and she had a bandags over her head. What an awful condition the poor wonaan is in!" said the magistrate pityingly. Och, yer worship," exclaimed the woman with a ring of CMltaficm io her voice, just wait till yez see Flynn tt Michael MacDonagh. TiIJ FRWURANCE OF ]DiclimNs.No mortal man evcf exerted so beneficial and extensive an influence over the human heart as Dickens. Very much private and still more public good will have nftf ed from his genius.—Lcmdvf* ;■ a

FUN AND FANCY.I

ULi EATER BRITAIN. I

LORD PENZANCE. = ;.',

[No title]

: THE WOMAN'S WORLD.

CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY'S…

[No title]

i READINGS FOR THE YOUNG.

GARDEXIXG GOSSIP.