ladies in London, and for soldiers in the camp. Why should we not all learn to cook! We have cookery-books for the great, and also for the million; but cookery-books are of little value till there is some aptitude at the practice. Let half a dozen popular teachers like Soyer (but who is like him!) travel through the country, each with a portable kitchen, and show all the women and girls in town and country the best way to make and cook the common preparations of food; and the benefit will be equal to a rise of wages to the labouring man at once. The mere secret of the stew—now rarely or never seen on the cottage table—would be as good as another shilling a-week in health and strength. It is difficult to stop here, on the verge of a great and enticing subject; but we can say only one thing more now—that there are literally thousands of mourning parents in England at this moment, whose manly young sons and once promising daughters are in their graves because their fathers made mistakes in providing the family food, and their mothers did not know how to set it before them. The mind recoils from such a statement, but it is true; and it ought therefore to be set down plainly. The mind also recoils from the statement that the cholera is at Dantzic and at Hamburg; and not altogether absent from England; but it is true, and ought to be told; and with it the further truth that if every family in the kingdom sat down in pure air, in a state of personal cleanliness, to three meals a day of good common food, well cooked, and earned by fair work of body and mind, the cholera would be kept out more surely than by a wall of brass, or would fly over us like the first raven we hear of, and go back to its haunts, for want of some place whereon to alight. It will be some time before that can happen. Meanwhile, what can each of us do to save some of the thousands who are for ever dropping into well-known pitfalls around the threshold of adult life? Harriet Martineau.
SULPHURWELL
Who has not heard tell of that famous Northern watering-place which I shall call Sulphurwell,—of its baths for the gouty, and its balls for the goutless,—its old-world hotels and tables d'hôte,—its bracing air and lovely environs; above all, of its celebrated marriages—the punster has no doubt already christened them sulphur-matches—with which the very name of the place has come to be identified, to the extent of making the insertion of a single gentleman’s name among the list of arrivals almost tantamount to an advertisement for a partner in life?
We have all of us, I say, heard of Sulphurwell; and yet in the eyes of us, the modern generation of Londoners, the place exists perhaps rather as a relic of the past. Cecilia and Evelina very likely spent a summer there. Gilbert Gurney, without doubt, must have paid it a visit, having run down there on the top of the Highflyer coach. Or the Pickwickians may have met there with some of their most startling, though unrecorded adventures. But modern heroes of romance no more than modern gentlemen out for a long vacation throng the Sulphurwell of the present day. The steam-engine has whistled them all off. The tourist, not content with overrunning Europe, has of late years discovered America, and at Saratoga, or Newport, or West Point, very likely, will our grandsons furnish us with granddaughters-in-law. Who goes to Sulphurwell now? Perhaps a few foreigners, a few Manchester and Leeds and Sheffield people, a few Irish—perhaps nobody at all! It may be that the mineral water is all used up in turning mill-wheels, and the vast saloons in which our ancestors strutted and minuetted are converted into ragged-school-rooms, or re-echo to the voice, addressing itself to monster meetings, of Mr. Cobden or Mr. Bright!
Such were my thoughts some two months ago, when circumstances—of which it is only necessary to say that they were not of a matrimonial character—took me to Sulphurwell for a few days. Instead of a few days, my stay protracted itself into as many weeks, and even now, the season closed and the place really deserted, I sit writing these pages in my quaint old bedroom at the George Hotel. The fact is that Sulphurwell is a rich mine for the observer, a spot the counterpart to which does not exist in Great Britain or, as far as my experience goes, in any portion of the habitable globe. And now that we are all of us so familiar with the globe aforesaid, knowing the Alps a great deal better than the Surrey Hills, and visiting Rome a good deal more often than the Tower Hamlets, perhaps a short account of the life at this out-of-the-way place, lying as it were neglected at our own doors, may come with a certain smack of novelty.
The town is divided into two parts, High and Low, situated about half a mile from each other; but it is of the former that I have principally to treat. Here we have three hotels, each with a distinctive character, or, as the French would say, a clientèle peculiar to itself. There is the Marlborough (named after that celebrated general, and built during the period of his triumphs), which goes by the name of “The House of Lords,” being the resort of such few fashionables as continue to visit the place. “The House of Commons” is represented by the George (built, and apparently furnished, in the reign of the First George), the head-quarters of fun, flirtation, and Irish aspirants. The William and Mary (whose structure and internal arrangements date from that double reign) is, again, the rendezvous of the Manchester and Leeds aristocracies,—a terribly select house, turning away lords from its doors, and shielding as much as possible its cotton-spinning heiresses from the profane southern or Milesian gaze.
One of the most curious features about Sulphurwell life is the hereditary feud which is kept up between these three chief hotels, sometimes flaming high, sometimes smouldering low, sometimes to all appearance dying out in an entente cordiale, yet always ready to spring up again, like the feuds between neighbouring peoples. How the tradition manages to keep afloat with an annually changing population, is the mysterious part of the affair. Now and then the Marlborough, it may be, offended at something done or left undone by the George, starts an opposition dance right on the evening of the George ball, and the other two
