: The Life and Times of John Wilkins Warden of Wadham College Oxford; Master of Trinity College Cambridge; and Bishop of Chester by Wright Henderson P A Patrick Arkley - Wilkins John 1614-1672; Wadham College; Bishops England Chester Biography

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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1897. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

A WILD DAY IN '48.

BY WILLIAM BLACK.

There was a vague apprehension in the air; every one appeared conscious that something was about to happen, though no one seemed to know precisely what; and so, as childhood is naturally curious, the writer of these lines, being then of the age of seven, managed to escape from the house unobserved, out into the great murmuring town. Half-frightened glances turned towards the east were a kind of guidance; and in that direction he accordingly wandered, until he came in sight of a crowd--not a beautiful, richly colored, processional crowd such as might have gone through the streets of Florence in mediaeval times, with boy choristers chanting, and maidens carrying palms, but a black and grimy and amorphous assemblage of men, silent, in deadly earnest, who at the moment were engaged in tearing down the tall iron railing surrounding Glasgow Green, in order to secure weapons for themselves. And this small person of seven thought that he too must be up and doing. The others were wresting these enormous bars from their soldered sockets; why should not he also be furnished with an implement of destruction? And so he tugged and pulled and struggled; and yet the iron bar, about thrice as high as himself, remained obdurate; and again and again he pulled, and dragged, and vainly shook; in the midst of which determined endeavors a hand was swiftly laid on his arm, and a young Highland lass , who had been wildly running and searching all over the neighborhood, dragged away the young rebel from the now marshalling crowd. Perhaps the alarm in her face impressed him; at all events he meekly yielded. That was not the usual expression of her face--when she was telling marvellous tales of children being carried away by eagles and brought up in a nest on a crag; the heroine of these various adventures, I remember, was called Angel; and whatever else happened to her, in the end her constancy, and virtue, and beauty were invariably rewarded by a happy marriage.

But now the surging mass of rioters came along, each man of them with one of those long spikes over his shoulder; and the trembling Highland lass, still clinging tightly to her charge, shrank hiding into an archway, and tried to conceal the child with her substantial skirts, till the man-eating ogres should go by. "Willst du nicht aufstehn, Wilhelm, zu schauen die Prozession?" some one might have asked--but not this Highland girl, who was doubtless thinking that the people who dwelt in cities were capable of dreadful things. Well, when one did peep out, there was not much to see--at least, nothing picturesque to attract the wondering eyes of childhood: there were no flags, no Maenads with flowing hair; nor was there any gesticulation, nor any attempt at oratory; only this great dark multitude moving on into the city, with two or three leaders marching in front, these ominously glancing from right to left, as if to judge where the sacking should begin. For they had come to sack a city, had these men. There was a talk at the time of bread riots; and no doubt there was a great deal of distress prevailing, as there generally is; and presumably there was a considerable proportion of these demonstrators honestly protesting against a social system that did not provide them with work. But it was not loaves the instigators of this movement were after, as events showed; rather it was silver teapots, and diamond brooches, and silk umbrellas--in short, a general partitioning of property; and of course there were plenty of vagabonds and ne'er-do-weels only too ready to fall in with that entrancing idea.

What now followed was one of the most singular scenes that any small boy of seven ever set eyes upon. From the wide-opened door flashing white things came flying out; high above the heads of the crowd they came; but as they descended a forest of straining arms and hands received them; and there was cheer after cheer as the plunder went on. It did not matter what it was: silver fish-knives, coffee-pots, biscuit-boxes, cruet-stands, opera-glasses--out they came flying to fall into this or that one's clutch; and again and again the hoarse roar of exultation went up, even from those who could not get near enough to share. These people with the upstretched arms appeared to have no fear whatever of getting their heads cut open by an electro-plated salver, a drawing-room lamp, or a brass candlestick. Out the missiles came; and the covetous fingers grabbed here and there; and the fierce tumult of applause ebbed and flowed. Where were the police? Well, there did not seem to be any police. It is true, a number of special constables had been hastily sworn in ; but they could not be everywhere; and meanwhile the poor silversmith's goods were being catapulted out to those clamorous upstretched hands.

Of a sudden a new feature appeared in this changing panorama. Ten or a dozen men who seemed to have dropped from the clouds were jamming their way through the dense multitude; and when at length they had reached the pavement in front of the silversmith's shop, they began to lay about them lustily with their staves, each blow falling vertically on several heads at once. In Egypt I have seen an old Arab sheik do precisely the same thing, when his young men had become unruly. And in neither case was there the slightest resistance to constituted authority. This great mass of people could have turned upon the handful of special constables and rent them in pieces; but they did not; they tried in a kind of way to move on, though by this time all the central thoroughfares of the city were blocked, and a man who has a cruet-stand or a silver dish-cover concealed under his coat cannot glide easily between his neighbors. Whether the constables succeeded in arresting any of the ringleaders at this particular spot, I cannot recollect; but all the afternoon came wilder and wilder stories of chases, and captures, and seizures of booty. My brother was personally conducting a party of five of the rioters to the police-station, through a very bad neighborhood, when they turned on him, tripped him, and threw him down. But he was up again in a moment, with the cursory declaration that if any one of them advanced a step towards him, or attempted to escape either, he would forthwith split his, the thief's, skull in two. And what is more, he would have done it; for he was a powerful man; and he had a drawn truncheon; and he was never at any time a slave to punctilio. I forget the number of gold and silver watches found in the possession of these rascals.

What happened next was remarkable enough. The fact is, you cannot at a moment's notice drive a welded crowd out of a long and narrow thoroughfare. It is not to be done; and in this case it was not done; for the people, seeing their neighbors here and there knocked over by the horses or slapped on the shoulder by those gleaming blades, forthwith fled pell-mell into the adjacent "closes," lanes, archways, and common stair-cases, which were very speedily choked up. To all outward seeming, the pavements and the causeway, now dimly visible under the yellow light of the street lamps, had been swept clear; but none the less the Trongate held all these innumerable huddled and hiding groups of frightened folk, as we were soon to know. For, through some accident or another, the outer door of our house chanced to be opened for a second, and instantly there burst into the lobby and into the rooms a whole number of women, panting, shaking, haggard-eyed, and speechless.

They made no apology for taking possession of a stranger's dwelling, the simple reason being that in their agony of alarm they were incapable of uttering a word; they did not know what they were doing or where they were; they were entirely bereft of their senses. A friend of mine who was through a long war told me that on one occasion, after an unexpected reverse, the regiment in which he served was seized by a perfectly ungovernable panic; there was no withstanding the infection of this madness; the whole lot of them, himself included, took to their heels, and ran, and ran, and ran, hour after hour, until they flung themselves exhausted on the floor of any barn or shanty that chanced to be on their way; and then there was never more than ten minutes' sleep to be snatched, for one or other of them was sure to spring up with the cry, "They're coming!" and off they would set again, in hysterical and insensate flight. It would seem as if a regiment had a nervous system just as a human being has, and that either may find it fail at a critical moment, until reason reasserts itself. I remember regarding with the greatest curiosity these unaccountable visitors who had invaded our home. Decent-looking, respectably-dressed women they were, who obviously had had no more to do with the riot than the man in the moon; most likely they had never heard of such a thing as a Riot Act; but here they were imprisoned, their voice and wits alike gone from them, and no means possible to them of communicating with their friends. Not any one of them appeared to know any other of them. Some stood in the middle of the dining-room, seemingly unable to move another step, pale, trembling, distraught; one or two had sunk helplessly into chairs; one or two were looking out from the windows at the terrors from which they had just escaped, their scared eyes following the clanking up and down of the dragoons, the charging of the horses, the escape of this or that guilty-conscienced runaway along the dark and gas-lit street. And what was to be done with these paralyzed and speechless guests, when once they had partially come to themselves? Among the elder members of the family I gathered there was some talk of our being able to pass them through the lines of the soldiery when our special constable should return; but no one knew at what hour his multifarious duties might be over. Well, that is all I can relate of this peculiar situation of affairs, for now I was taken off to bed; and at what hour, and under what escort these tremulous fugitives were conveyed past the lines of military occupancy I cannot determine. Altogether it was a wild and memorable day, and many and wild and wonderful were the tales thereafter told of it; so that, for the time being, in the case of one small listener, his old friends the Giants Pope and Pagan, Robinson Crusoe and Friday, and even the eagle-captured children of the far West Highlands were quite put into the shade.

MILADY'S CAST-OFFS.

I found a garment yesterday A-lying on the hills; 'Twas rare with radiant coloring And rich with gleaming frills: A skirt of crinkled golden-rod And purple-aster sleeves, A belt of burning cardinals, A mantle of brown leaves, And a bodice of the laces That the dandelion weaves.

A bonnet trimmed with thistle-blooms Was lying not far off, And sandals made of birchen bark Were satin--brown and buff; And dainty, dainty mittens Were lying here and there, Grown by the loving sumach-tree For hands both small and fair, With other witching trinkets that A woodsy nymph might wear.

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