Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, September, 1880

Perhaps it would be interesting to the participants of the gay Newport cotillons of to-day to know the names of the dances with which the company regaled themselves a hundred years ago. They were "The Stony Point" (so named in honor of General Wayne), "Miss McDonald's Reel," "A Trip to Carlisle," "Freemason's Jig" and "The Faithful Shepherd." As Benoni Peckham, the fashionable hair-dresser of the day, advertises in the Newport Mercury a "large assortment of braids, commodes, cushions and curls for the occasion," we may guess that the belles of Newport made elaborate toilettes. One of them, writing to a friend in New York, speaks of a dress she had worn at some festivity which probably was not unlike many at Washington's ball. "I had," she says, "a most stiff and lustrous petticoat of daffodil-colored lutestring, with flowered gown and sleeves lined with crimson. My cap was of gauze raised high in front, with doublings of red and bows of the same, and was sent me direct by the bark Fortune from England." So it seems the Newport beauties did not disdain the exports of the mother-country they were at war with. A few nights later the citizens gave a ball in honor of the two heroes.

The visit of the French to Newport terminated soon after this fête. Washington and Rochambeau, it is said, planned in the Vernon house an attack on New York, and in May the vicomte de Rochambeau brought to his father from France the news of the sailing from Brest, under Admiral de Grasse, of a large squadron laden with supplies and reinforcements. The restrictions imposed on him by De Sartines were removed, and the new ministry sent him full powers to act. He therefore determined upon an immediate move, for his troops were becoming demoralized through long inactivity. After a conference with Washington at Weathersfield a summer campaign was resolved upon, and, returning to Newport, Rochambeau proceeded to make arrangements for it. The troops began to move on the 10th of June, almost a year from the date of their arrival. A farewell dinner was given on the Due de Bourgogne to which about sixty Newport people were asked. The next day the whole army left camp and marched to Providence, so ending a sojourn which, although not productive of positive advantage, will long remain a brilliant page in the history of Newport.

A few words on the after fate of these gay Frenchmen. The story is not a bright one. The times that tried men's souls were at hand, and many of them fell victims. The comte de Rochambeau, made a marshal by Louis XVI., narrowly escaped death under Robespierre. In 1803 Napoleon gave him a pension and the grand cross of the Legion of Honor: he died in 1807. Lauzun perished on the scaffold, sentenced by the Tribunal in January, 1794. The night before his death he was calm, slept and ate well. When the jailer came for him he was eating his breakfast. He said, "Citizen, permit me to finish." Then, offering him a glass, he said, "Take this wine: you need strength for such a trade as you ply." D'Estaing, on his return from America, was commander at Grenada. He became a member of the Assembly of Notables, but being suspected by the Terrorists was guillotined on the 29th of April, 1793. The vicomte de Rochambeau was killed at the battle of Leipsic; Berthier became military confidant to Napoleon, was made marshal of France and murdered at Bamberg; the comte de Viosmenil was made marshal at the Restoration; his brother the marquis was wounded and died, defending the royal family; the comte de Darnas, who helped their flight, barely escaped with his life; Fersen was killed in a riot at Stockholm; the comte Christian de Deux-Ponts was captured by Nelson while on a boat-excursion at Porto Cavallo: Nelson generously released him on learning who he was; Desoteux, the master of ceremonies of the Newport assembly, became the celebrated Chouan chief in Vendée; Dumas was president of the Assembly, general of division, fought at Waterloo and took a high rank in the constitutional monarchy of 1830. With what interest and sympathy must the Newport belles have watched the career of their quondam admirers! How must the tragic fate of some of them have saddened friendly hearts beyond the ocean they had once traversed as deliverers! The lot of the fair danseuses of the French balls at Newport was in most cases the ordinary one, and yet the record of their loves and their graces leaves a gracious fragrance amid their former haunts in the city by the sea. In the old streets and peeping from the quaint latticed windows we can with a little imagination see their graceful figures and fair faces, or find in the Newport drawing-rooms their pictured likenesses on the wall or in the persons of their descendants, often no less piquante and attractive than the dames of 1780. Miss Champlin married, and until lately her grandson was living in the old house, the home of five successive generations; her brother, Christopher Champlin, married the beautiful Miss Redwood; one of the Miss Ellerys took for a husband William Channing and became the mother of a famous son; her granddaughter was the wife of Washington Allston; the Miss Hunters married abroad—one the comte de Cardignan, the other Mr. Falconet, a Naples banker.

We pass over the sad fate of Newport for years following the Revolution—the misery and dilapidation that succeeded its former prosperity. We turn from the picture which a later French traveller, Brissot de Warville, draws of its poverty and desolation in 1788 to look at the renaissance, the rejuvenation that rescued this historic spot from oblivion. To-day lines of villas and stately mansions have uplifted themselves on the avenues, and gay crowds throng the streets. The shadowy forms of a past generation may still haunt the scenes of their former triumphs, but must rejoice over the life and light that nineteenth-century revels have dowered them with. The world rolls on, and brings in its course new actors, new scenes, a new drop-curtain, but men and women are always men and women. The loves, hopes, fears, disappointments or triumphs of to-day,—these, if nothing else, link us to a past generation. The idler on the club piazza, if not a Lauzun or Fersen, may no doubt arouse himself as nobly in a grand question of right or wrong (have we not seen it in our own generation?), unsheathe his sword and become, like Lytton's hero, "now heard of, the first on the wall:" the pretty belle of the afternoon fête, may she not have the same heart of steel and a spirit as true as that of some eighteenth-century ancestress? There is room, then, even in this historic spot, for the gay modern cortêge, for the life, the light, the prosperity and pleasure which embalm old memories and keep a centennial on the shrines where the youth and chivalry of a century ago lived, loved and have left the subtle odor of past adventure to add a mysterious but not unlovely fragrance to present experience.—FRANCES PIERREPONT NORTH.

STUDIES IN THE SLUMS

V.—DIET AND ITS DOINGS

Later and more scientific investigations have tended to confirm the truth of the rather broad statement made by Buckle in his History of Civilization, that rice and potatoes have done more to establish pauperism than any and all causes besides. A food easily procured, sufficiently palatable to ensure no dissatisfaction, and demanding no ingenuity of preparation, would seem the ideal diet, the promised rest for weary housekeepers and anxious political economists; but the latter class at least have found their work made double and treble by the results of such diet, while social reformers—above all, the advocates of total abstinence—are discovering that till varied and savory food and drink are provided the mass of the people will and must crave the stimulant given by alcoholic drinks.

National dietaries and their results on character and life, fascinating as the investigation is, have no place in the present paper, the design of which is simply to show the existing state of the food-question among the poor. Of these, poor Irish form far the larger proportion, a German or French pauper being almost an anomaly. Thrift seems the birthright of both the French and German peasant, as well as of the middle class, and their careful habits, joined to the better rate of wages in America, soon make them prosperous and well-to-do citizens. It is in the tenement-houses that we must seek for the mass of the poor, and it is in the tenement-houses that we find the causes which, combined, are making of the generation now coming up a terror in the present and a promise of future evil beyond man's power to reckon. They are a class apart, retaining all the most brutal characteristics of the Irish peasant at home, but without the redeeming light-heartedness, the tender impulses and strong affections of that most perplexing people. Sullen, malicious, conscienceless, with no capacity for enjoyment save in drink and the lowest forms of debauchery, they are filling our prisons and reformatories, marching in an ever-increasing army through the quiet country, and making a reign of terror wherever their footsteps are heard. With a little added intelligence they become Socialists, doing their heartiest to ruin the institutions by which they live. The Socialistic leader knows well with what he deals, and can sound every chord of jealousy and suspicion and revenge lying open to his touch. On the rich lies the whole responsibility of want and disease and crime. Equalize property, and these three dark shadows flee fast before the sunshine of prosperity. Character, intelligence, common decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less pestilent homes.

Yet foul air and overcrowding would be less fatal in their results were food understood. The well-filled stomach gives strange powers of resistance to the body, and nothing shows this more strongly than the myriad cases of children and infants who are taken from the tenement-houses to the sanitariums at Bath or Rockaway. A week or two of pure air and plenty of milk gives a look almost of health to children who have been brought there often with glazed eyes and pinched, ghastly little faces. Air has meant half, but many mothers have been persuaded to give milk or oatmeal porridge instead of weak tea and bread poisoned with alum, and have found the child's strength become a permanent and not temporary fact.

That these children are alive at all, that fatherhood and motherhood are allowed to be the right of drunkards and criminals of every grade, is a problem whose present solution passes any human power, but which all lovers of their kind must sooner or later face. In the mean time the children are with us, born to inheritances that tax every power good men and women can bring to bear. Hopeless as the outlook often seems, salvation for the future of the masses lies in these children. Not in a teaching which gives them merely the power to grasp at the mass of sensational reading, which fixes every wretched tendency and blights every seed of good, but in a practical training which shall give the boys trades and force their restless hands and mischievous minds to occupations that may ensure an honest living, while the girls find work from which, with few fortunate exceptions, they are still debarred.

The American distaste for domestic service seems to be shared in even greater degree by the children of foreigners born in this country and to a certain extent Americanized. The mothers have usually been servants, and still "go out to days' work," but, no matter how numerous the family, such life for any daughter is despised and discouraged from the beginning. Work in a bag-factory or any one of the thousand, but to the employés profitless, industries of a great city is eagerly sought, and hardships cheerfully endured which if enforced by a mistress would lead to a riot. To be a shop-girl seems the highest ambition. To have dress and hair and expression a frowsy and pitiful copy of the latest Fifth Avenue ridiculousness, to flirt with shop-boys as feeble-minded and brainless as themselves, and to marry as quickly as possible, are the aims of all. Then come more wretched, thriftless, ill-managed homes, and their natural results in drunken husbands and vicious children; and so the round goes on, the circle widening year by year till its circumference touches every class in society, and would make our great cities almost what sober country-folk believe them—"seas of iniquity."

Happily, to know an evil is to have taken the first step in its eradication. The work only recently begun—the past five years having seen its growth from a very humble and insignificant beginning to its present promising proportions—holds the solution of at least one equation of the problem. To have made cooking and industrial training the fashion is to have cleared away at a leap the thorny underbrush and tangled growth on that Debatable Ground, the best education for the poor, and to find one's feet firmly set in a way leading to a Promised Land to which every believer in the new system is an accredited guide. That cooking-schools and the knowledge of cheap and savory preparation of food must soon have their effect on the percentage of drunkards no one can question; but with them, save indirectly, this present paper does not deal, its object being rather to show what "daily bread" means to the lower classes of New York, the same showing applying with almost equal force to the working poor of any large town throughout the country. Knowledge of this sort must come from patient waiting and watching as one can, rather than from any systematized observation. The poor resent bitterly, and with justice, any apparent interference or spying, and only as one comes to know them well can anything but the most outside details of life be obtained. In the matter of food there is an especial touchiness and testiness, every woman being convinced that to cook well is the birthright of all women. I have found the same conviction as solidly implanted in far higher grades of society, and it may be classed as one of the most firmly-seated of popular delusions that every woman keeps house as instinctively and surely when her time comes as a duck takes to water.

Such was the faith of Norah Boylan, tenant of half the third floor in a tenement-house whose location need not be given a "model tenement-house," six stories high and swarming from basement to attic, forty children making it hideous with the screaming and wrangling of incessant fights, while in and over all rested the penetrating, sickening "tenement-house smell," not to be drowned by steam of washing or scent of food. Norah's tongue was ready with the complaint all tongues made in 1878—hard times; and she faced me now with hands on her hips and a generally belligerent expression: "An' shure, ma'am, you know yourself it's only a dollar a day he's been earnin' this many a day, an' thankful enough to get that, wid Mike overhead wearin' his tongue out wid askin' for work here an' there an' everywhere. An' how'll we live on that, an' the rint due reg'lar, an' the agent poppin' in his ugly face an' off wid the bit o' money, no matter how bare the dish is? Bad cess to him! but I'd like to have him hungered once an' know how it feels. If I hadn't the washin' we'd be on the street this day."

"What do you live on, Norah?"

"Is it 'live'? Thin I could hardly say. It's mate an' petatys an' tea, an' Pat will have his glass. He's sober enough—not like Mike, that's off on his sprees every month; but now we don't be gettin' the same as we used. Pat says there's that cravin' in him that only the whiskey 'll stop. It's tin dollars a month for the rooms, an' that's two an' a half a week steady; an' there's only seven an' a half left for the five mouths that must be fed, an' the fire an' all, for I can't get more'n the four dollars for me washin'. It's the mate you must have to put strength in ye, an' Pat would be havin' it three times a day, an' now it's but once he can; an' that's why he's after the whiskey. The children an' meself has tay, an' it's all that keeps us up."

"How do you cook your meat, Norah?"

Norah looked at me suspiciously: "Shure, the bit we get don't take long. I puts it in the pan an' lets it fry till we're ready. Poor folks can't have much roastin' nor fine doin's. An' by that token it's time it was on now, if you won't mind, ma'am. The children 'll be in from school, an' they must eat an' get back."

"I am going in a few moments, Norah. Go right on."

Norah moved aside her boiler, drew a frying-pan from her closet, put in a lump of fat and laid in a piece of coarse beef some two pounds in weight. A loaf of bread came next, and was cut up, the peculiar white indicating plainly what share alum had had in making the lightness to which she called my attention. A handful of tea went into the tall tin teapot, which was filled from the kettle at the back of the stove.

"That isn't boiling water, is it?" I ventured.

"It'll boil fast enough," Norah answered indifferently as she pulled open the draughts, and soon had the top of the stove red hot. The steak lay in its bed of fat, scorching peacefully, while the tea boiled, giving off a rank and herby smell.

"Pat doesn't get home to dinner, then, Norah?"

"There's times he does, but mostly not. They'd like a hot bite an' sup, but it's too far off. There's five goes from here together, an' a pailful for each—bread an' coffee mostly, an' a bit o' bacon for some. It's a hot supper I used to be gettin' him, but the times is too hard, an' we're lucky if we can have our tea an' bread, an' molasses maybe for the children. Many's the day I wish myself back in old Ireland."

As she talked the children came rushing up the stairs, Norah the second, pale-faced and slender, leading the way; and I took my leave, burning to speak, yet knowing it useless. Fried boot-heel would have been as nourishing and as tooth-some as that steak, and boiled boot-heel as desirable and far less harmful a drink, yet any word of suggestion would have roused the quick Irish temper to fever-heat.

"It's Norah can cook equal to myself," Norah had said with pride as she emptied the black and smoking mass into a dish; and these methods certainly cannot be said to be difficult to follow.

There is no conservatism like the conservatism of ignorance, yet in this case want of knowledge there certainly was not. Norah had lived for two years before her marriage with a family the mistress of which had taught her patiently and indefatigably till she became able to set a fairly-cooked meal upon the table, but the knowledge acquired then seemed to have been laid aside as having no connection with her own life. I have seen the same thing—though, happily, only in exceptional cases—among educated Indians, girls who had spent years in the schools at Faribault or under the direct training of missionaries reverting on marriage to old wigwam habits, and content to eat the parched corn and boiled dog of their early experience. The same law holds in full force among many of the Irish, who, no matter how well trained or how exacting in their demand for varied food while servants, quickly lose the desire, and allow only a certain fixed order from which it is wellnigh impossible to move them.

In this case, tolerably well-to-do at first, hard times had brought them to this swarming tenement-house, from the various rooms of which, as I passed down the stairs, came the same odor of burning fat and the rank steam of long-boiled coffee or tea. My errand had been to find the address of a little shop-girl, a niece of Norah's, a child who had been educated at one of the ward schools, and whom no power could induce to take a place as waitress or chambermaid. To stand twelve or fourteen hours behind the counter of a Grand street store met her ideas of gentility and of personal freedom far better than yielding to the requirements of a mistress; and the six dollars a week went in cheap finery till the hard times forced her to make it part of the family fund. Then sore trouble came. The father had died, the mother was in hospital, from which she was never likely to come out, and Katy, thrown utterly on her own resources, had found her six dollars all inadequate to the demands her habits made, and, frightened and perplexed, went from one cheap boarding-house to another, four or five girls clubbing together to pay for the wretched room they called home, and still striving to keep up the appearance necessary for their position. Cheap jewelry, banged hair and a dress modelled after the latest extremity of fashion were the ambition of each and all, but neither jewelry nor puffs and ruffles had been sufficient to keep off the attack of pneumonia through which these same girls had nursed her, sitting up turn by turn at night, and taking her duty by day that the place might still be kept open for her.

Katy's cheeks were flushed and an ominous cough still lingered, but she spoke cheerfully: "It's my last day in: I can go to-morrow. It's the beef-tea has done it, I do believe. Did you know Maria brought it to me every day? I don't know what I'll do without it."

"Learn to make it yourself, Katy."

"Me?" and Katy laughed incredulously. "When would I get time? and what would I make it on? We don't have a fire but Sundays, and only a show of one then. And I don't want it, either: I ain't used to it."

"What do you live on, Katy?"

"Why, we did have breakfast and tea here—coffee and meat for breakfast, and bread and butter and tea for supper. I get a cream-cake or some drop-cakes for dinner, but for a good while I've just paid a dollar a week for my share of the room, and bought something for breakfast—'most always a pie. You can get a splendid pie for five cents, and a pretty good one for three; and it's plenty too. That's the way the girls in the bag-factory do. They don't get but three dollars a week, and it takes seventy-five cents for their room, so they haven't got anything for board. Mary Jones says she's settled on pie, because it stays by better'n anything, and once in a while she goes down to Fulton Market and has some coffee. I do too, but it spoils you for next day. You keep thinking how'd you'd like a cup when the chills go crawling all over you, but it's no use."

"Couldn't it be made in the store? The girls could club together, and it would cost much less than your pies and candy. The gas is always burning, and you could have a little water-boiler."

"You don't know much about stores to think that. Why, Mr. Levy watches like a cat to see we don't eat peanuts or candy: we're fined if he catches us. I've a good mind to take board at the 'Home,' only I should hate to be bossed 'round, and you can't get in very often, either, it's so crowded. But I don't mind so much now, for you see"—Katy's pale cheeks grew pink—"Jim and I don't mean to wait long. He has ten dollars a week, and we can manage on that. He says he's 'most poisoned with the stuff his boarding-house keeper gives him, and he wants me to keep house. I just laugh. That's a servant-girl's work: 'tain't mine."

The old story. I had seen "Jim," and knew him as rather a sensible-looking young fellow for an East Side clerk in a cheap store. What sort of future could lie before them? What help could come from this untrained child, herself helpless and with too limited intelligence to understand what demand the new life made upon her? and could any way be found to open her eyes and make her desire better knowledge?

Busy with this always fresh problem, I had come to a side street leading to the market from which two or three small groceries draw their supplies, and stopped for a moment to look at the flabby, half-decayed vegetables, the coarse beef and measly-looking pork from which comes the sickly, heavy smell preceding positive putrefaction.

"Look away! Get the sense of it all," said a brisk voice behind me—a voice I knew well as that of one who gave days, and often nights, to work in these very streets. "Did you see that tall woman with the big basket and a face like a chimney-swallow? She runs a boarding-house 'round on Madison street, and this is the stuff she feeds them on. Poor wretch! She has a drunken husband and three drinking sons. She means well, would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends meet. I've been there and tasted the messes that come to her table, and I would drink too if forced to live on them. She's got sense, a little—enough not to fly in a rage when I told her the food was enough to make a drunkard of every man in the house. 'I can't help it,' she said, crying. 'I've only just so much money, and the girl spoils most of what I do get.'—'Cook yourself,' I said.—'I can't,' she answered: 'I don't know any better than the girl. I'll do anything you say.' I am not a cook: I could not tell her anything. 'Go to cooking-school,' I said: 'it'll pay you.'—'I've neither time nor money,' she said; and there it ended. What's to be done? I've just come round the market. It is dinner-time, and I think every other man was eating pie. The same money might have bought him a bowl of strong soup or a plate of savory and nourishing stew, if there had been anybody with sense enough to provide it. Up and down, in and out, wherever I go, I see that cooks are the missionaries needed. Come in here a moment."

I followed up the steps of a "Home" for sailors, planned to give them a refuge from the traps known as "sailors' boarding-houses." The long dining-room we entered was spotlessly clean, and some thirty men were dining. I looked for a moment as my friend spoke with some one sitting at the head of the table, then passed out.

"You saw," he said, "plenty of food, and all clean as a whistle, but what sort? Steak fried to a crisp, soggy potatoes, underdone cabbage and pork, bread rank with alum, and coffee whose only merit is warmth. Those men are filled, but not fed. The bread alone is condensed dyspepsia. In an hour the weaker stomachs will have what they call 'a goneness.' They will crave something, and poor R– will have half a dozen of them half drunk or wholly so on his hands by night. He will pray and exhort, and bundle them up to the Mission if he can, and cry as he tells me how they will give way and yield to the devil whether or no. And so it goes. Women must get hold of this thing. It's the first item in your temperance crusade, and till the people have better food there is no law or influence that can make them give up drinking. I wouldn't if I were they."

Here the talk ended. My impetuous friend disappeared around a corner, and I went my way, a little surer than before of the fact which was already so distinct a belief it needed no new foundations, that better food will and must mean better living. Hard times are passing, but none the less is there still the imperative demand for wider knowledge of what food those hard-earned dollars shall buy. Philanthropists may urge what reforms they will—less crowding, purer air, better sanitary regulations—but this question of food underlies all. The knowledge that is broad enough to ensure good food is broad enough to mean better living in all ways; and not till such knowledge is the property of all women can we look for the "emancipation" from some of the deepest evils that curse the life of woman in the slums and out. Toward that end all women who long to help, yet see no outlook, may work, and with its full recognition will come the day for which we wait—a day whose faint dawn even now flushes the east and gives promise, dim yet sure, of the slowly-nearing light, holding even when most clouded the certainty of

Purer manners, nobler laws.

                                    —HELEN CAMPBELL.

DELECTATIO PISCATORIA

THE UPPER KENNEBEC

From the great mere set round with sunbright mountains
Full born the river leaps,
Dashing the crystal of a thousand fountains
Down its romantic steeps.

'Tis now a torrent whose untamed endeavor
Is eager for the sea,
Angry that rock or reef should hinder ever
Its frantic liberty.

Then, for a space, a lake and river blended,