The other was a mechanic who had mingled in the crowd, had remained in it, but silently, during all the proceedings, and had spoken but once.
That was when Silvain, having listened to the charges which were so wildly advanced, and to the strange story of the spirit, had indignantly broken out with his declaration that he who had been slain was good and noble.
“He was both,” said the man, with a deep oath. “And he has died by the hand of one whose head is the due of the executioner. God willing, the debt shall be paid.”
The people looked at him strangely, and he went away.
DEATHS BY FIRE.
When a hermit, in our day, retires to a mountain, to spend his latter years in the repose which befits declining strength, his out-look from his retreat is very unlike that of the ancient hermit. In the dusty tombs of the Thebaid, where there were scorpions under the stones, and crocodiles in the river below, and jackals made the night dismal with their cry, and no green thing was visible for the greater part of the year but the sombre palm and the scanty foliage of the thorny acacia, the recluse did not want to know anything about the world, or his brethren living in it. He might not object to have somebody come now and then to admire him, and tell him how holy he was, and how wise he must be; but he was far too wise and holy to condescend to learn anything in return, or to suppose that a mundane visitor could have anything to tell that could be worth his listening to.
So it was with the somewhat more comfortable dwellers in the limestone caves of Syria. They must have had rather less to endure, though the heat is quite severe enough between Jerusalem and Jericho; and the winters must have been cold in the windy caverns of the honeycombed limestone; and there were storms and floods which the Egyptian hermits never knew. But the valleys of Syria are green almost all the year round, and the terraced hillsides sustained herds and flocks, and there were people within call almost everywhere. The Syrian hermit might, I suppose, abjure his kind if he pleased; but he was not so far out of the way of them as his brother on the Upper Nile. Still, it was a point of piety and pride to forget life and the world, or to strive to do so; and thus the old hermit could have no interest in the events of the day, nor anything to say on them which was worth anybody’s going far to ascertain.
The case has always been the same with monks and nuns of all denominations—well-meaning persons who consider spiritual prudence a virtue of the highest order, and who are therefore not likely to take large and genial views of human affairs. In this respect they are all pretty much alike—whether they are dressed in yellow, praying by wheel on a Thibetian mountain, or dressed in black or grey in a Spanish or South American convent; or dressed in white, grey, or black in some holy seat of sisterhood, where no pleasant feast ever greets the senses, no gay music cheers the spirits, and no news ever arrives to gratify the needs of feminine sympathy. None of these have ever used their mountain perch as a station whence to study human life. There are other classes of persons too—and not only princesses and their attendants—to whom life itself is made a sort of Happy Valley, where they are encouraged to occupy themselves with such pleasures as they are capable of, without thinking of wishing to know anything that lies outside. Of recluses like these there are multitudes in every highly civilised country. They are present wherever luxury and pride have grown up, and knowledge has not overtaken them, as we all hope it will some day. These people, however, are not conscious of their seclusion from genuine life. They take their world to be the world: and as long as they do that they will not arrive at much understanding of human affairs, or interest in them.
Very unlike all these, ancient or modern, is the old man of our time who has not strength for such strenuous life as that of our cities, and therefore retires to a lodge on the mountain, whence he may survey the past and the present at once, and, by observing and reflecting, come to know more of the world than when he lived in it. There is the press now-a-days, instead of the costly and scanty parchment literature of the early ages. There is the newspaper, which satisfies all yearnings after gossip. There is the post, which now reaches every man who can read a letter. There is the telegraph, which publishes interesting news more rapidly than the king’s riders or the fiery cross could carry it four centuries ago. Thus, when there is the inclination to look on, as human affairs are transacted, the recluse can do it in a way which was not possible of old. The hermit also has leisure, which the man of business has not, to set down his thoughts on what is interesting other men; and if what he sets down is worth other men’s reading, in odd moments of leisure, he may possibly find himself privileged to do something for somebody’s benefit, after he seemed to have gone out of the way of it. Such is the view of a hermit of 1861: and, unless his mountain air has intoxicated him, or distance has made him confound his dreams with the actual movements of mankind, he will venture to discuss, from time to time, some topic of the day in which he is in sympathy with society, or some considerable part of it.
The sympathy of society is roused, but too many times every year, by the Deaths by Fire which take place in perpetual succession. It is a question with many whether there are more or fewer deaths by fire than in an earlier stage of the world’s civilisation. Now that all England is mourning Mr. Braidwood, and that many families are privately aghast at the horrible fate which on the same occasion has overtaken some member of the household, in pursuit of duty, or of gain, or in the apparent wantonness of chance, there must be a multitude of persons thinking and talking of death by fire, and most of them, probably, regarding it as one of the chief disgraces of our civilisation. We do not now burn towns in warfare, as our forefathers did. We