the world, very well know one appreciable advantage to be gained from getting caught out in the rain; namely, the excuse that is furnished for taking refuge in cottage kitchens, and making the acquaintance of the country folk at their own firesides. It is on this ground, also, that a good, brisk downpour is to be regarded in the light of an opportunity, during an expedition to Runswick, another village that hangs like a gull's-nest to the cliffs. How the large-framed Runswick fishermen manage to accommodate themselves to the minute dimensions of their cottages is a problem of measurement that never becomes clear to the mind. The amount of comfort that may be extracted from one of their small open fires is, on the contrary, a quantity capable of practical demonstration. The grate is not large enough to contain more than a handful or two of coals, but over it always hangs a kettle ready for brewing at a moment's notice, while a miniature bake-oven flanks it on one side, and a small tank filled with hot water on the other. The warmth and brightness that issue from the open bars are enough in themselves to give cheer to a dull day; but what with the flower-pots on the broad sill of the window, the china cupboard in the corner, and the soft voice of the fisherman's wife who does the honors of the room, it will be strange if one does not envy the environment of the lodgers who have installed themselves in her best room across the scrap of a hallway. Besides Runswick, one must, to make the cycle of Whitby excursions in any wise complete, also see "Falling Foss," which is reached only by one of what Mr. Lowell has called the "shy footpaths." His own longer expedition to Rievaulx Abbey has been described by his companion, Mr. Henry James, as charmingly as befits the theme. It may safely be said, however, that, no matter how charming the excursion, when he comes back from it the tourist will always feel fresh pleasure at the sight of Whitby. Not only has her bold situation a perennial attraction, but her va riety of interests is inexhaustible. Her leading photographer, Sutcliffe, is an artist in his profession; the purveyor of cakes and confections across the road is another in hers; the man who sells mushrooms and gooseberries and damsons from a handcart beside the pavement is just the sort of person whose further acquaintance one will wish for before dealings with him have come to an end; while a veritable rara avis of antiquity dealers is to be met with in a spot withdrawn from the bustle of summer shoppers. This queen of her class lives on the hill that overhangs the harbor, and sets out her wares in a handsome lower window which gives only a hint of the wealth in the rooms above. A tour of inspection involves no necessary financial difficulties; for the mistress of the place loves her Delft and Wedgwood, her Spode and old Nankeen, for their intrinsic interest, and will accept admiration of them in lieu of pounds, shillings, and pence. She keeps a keen eye on the treasures of the potter's art stowed away in dressers and cupboards of farmhouses and sailors' cottages, and knows just when to descend on their owners, silver in hand. She has an eye to London auctions as well, and probably can estimate with the best what an object will fetch in Wardour Street. There is, of course, the famous jet to be seen everywhere, in all stages of its transformation, from the uncouth lump to the carved and polished ornament. And there is the human interest of the quays, where the fishing-people unload and repack their draughts. But above all, there are always the cliff-tops, grassy and spacious and breezy. Any one who watches from them the panorama of sky and sea will have the key to Mr. Lowell's saying, "There is not a corner of England that has not its special charm, and the freaks of the atmosphere interest me more than any novel I ever read." Eugenia Skelding. THE POLITICAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIFE OF A FRENCH "MAÇON." IN a former paper I have related the rough up-bringing of a French building operative, who yet was heir to an ancestral property of which the acquisition dated back for centuries. Nothing, I think, came out more vividly in the picture than the strength of the family feeling. At seventeen the lad takes upon himself part of the burden of the family debt, and his main concern in after-life is to pay it off. We left that debt reduced in 1842 to one thousand francs. He tells us it was not entirely paid off till 1848. Other sides of the writer's career have now to be shown. It will be remembered that his father was a strong Bonapartist. It was the Emperor's son whom he would have wished to see proclaimed in 1830. By 1834 the younger Nadaud was already a republican, and, being a better scholar than his fellow-workmen, used every morning to be asked to read aloud in the wineshop the Populaire, a communistic paper edited by Cabet. A young medical student noticed one morning that he read with energy, and complimented him. "It was the first time that a bourgeois shook me by the hand, and I own that I felt much flattered." The student asked him if he would join the then wellknown Société des Droits de l'Homme, a secret political society, and he was enthusiastically admitted a member in one of its sections, together with two workingmen friends. He found himself here in company with educated and well-mannered men, and this stimulated his desire to learn. When he opened his classes, as described in the previous paper, the book which he first selected for classreading was Lamennais's Paroles d'un Croyant, a work nearly forgotten now, upon but which exercised an immense influence at the time. From 1838 to 1848 he bought "the most revolutionary" papers and pamphlets to read to his pupils. "I taught them to love the republic, and to look that form of government as being alone capable of gradually lifting the people to the level of the other classes of society, from the moral point of view and from that of political and social rights." He made parade of his republicanism, wearing the obnoxious Phrygian cap, proclaiming his views at the wineshop where he took his meals. Already in 1842, as he discovered more than thirty years later, his movements were reported to the police as those of a "dangerous man," and the record was consigned to a dossier (register of documents relating to a suspicious person), which was from thenceforth regularly continued. He had the honor, as he also discovered on another occasion, of a similar dossier in his department. Still, he was getting on, earning one hundred and fifty francs a month for an eighteen months' engagement, which was almost the maximum pay of a maître compagnon, and he was able eventually to send for his wife. Meanwhile he was becoming acquainted with the leading Socialists and Communists of the day, Cabet in particular, on whose behalf he, with some other workmen, went on deputation to Louis Blanc, Proudhon, Pierre Leroux, to obtain support for the Populaire.1 All this time Louis Philippe's government was carrying on its insane policy of repression, gagging the press, suppressing public meetings, at last forbidding political dinners. One day when Nadaud was working on the mairie of the Pantheon, he saw the troops of the line occupy the place on one side, the national guard on the other. Some political move 1 Cabet, a man of very ordinary capacity, was nevertheless one of sterling character and great kindliness. Nadaud has told me that he took great pains to correct not only faults of speech, but faults of manner, in the workingmen whom he befriended, and, for instance, would teach ment was evidently going on, and work was at once suspended. At two P. M. the colonel of the national guard received tidings of the king's abdication. The revolution of 1848 had taken place. After the republic had been proclaimed, Nadaud was surprised to find that those workmen who had till then been most indifferent to their rights and liberties had become suddenly so exacting that no measure taken by the provisional government could satisfy them. Instead of spending their evenings in the clubs, many took to meeting in the open air, and there, before long, the malcontents began to put forward Louis Napoleon as their chief. Nadaud now began to feel himself at issue with the mere revolutionists by whom he was surrounded. They had the republic, they had universal suffrage; he would have been satisfied with consolidating these two great conquests, and would fain have concentrated his whole energies on questions of association. Meanwhile a national assembly had to be elected, and a meeting of Creusois was to be held at the Sorbonne for the choice of departmental candidates to the "Constituent Assembly." He went straight from work, in his working dress. A crowd of young men, "skipping about like grasshoppers," had come up from the Creuse to offer themselves as candidates. He listened to them, and they seemed to him "as parrots trying to amuse the gallery." By a sudden impulse-never having spoken in public before he rose from one of the back benches of the amphitheatre and asked to speak. His voice was strong, and when he had to repeat the request it was in a louder tone yet. "Turn him out!" cried some. "To the tribune!" called others; and the tribune he reached at them how to take off their hats, how to come into a room, would send them out to wipe their boots on the mat if they had not done so, etc.; and all this was done in such a kindly, fatherly way as never to give offense. last. He spoke at once against the last representative (Émile de Girardin), and against all the young candidates, so prodigal of promises, who had just been heard. At the conclusion of his speech, which was frequently applauded, a welldressed young man, whom he had never seen (a working tailor), proposed him for a candidate, and he was accepted. He failed, however, at the election, and, after speaking at two meetings, returned to Paris, where he found his place taken, but had it restored to him a month later. complimented by men like Jules Favre and Michel de Bourges. He took part in an abortive protest (meant to be something more) against French intervention in Italy. At the prorogation of 1851, the air being full already of rumors as to an impending coup d'état, he went to his department, and, in spite of the enmity of the prefect, was received everywhere with cries of "Vive Nadaud, notre maçon!" More than this, Émile de Girardin, the most influential of French journalists, had put forward the idea of a workingman as President of the republic for the elections of 1852, and Nadaud's name was foremost among those of the workingmen representatives; so that as early as September, 1850, a squib was published on the subject in a reactionary journal. On the other hand, the President, in his struggle against the Assembly, had struck a shrewd blow in his own favor through the reëstablishment of universal suffrage. From this time forth many workingmen among Nadaud's friends began to say that the President was better than the Assembly, and many who had been in the habit of coming to him kept away. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of the 2d of December, when he had scarcely dropped asleep, his concierge woke him up, and he found in his room a commissaire de police and four strapping sergents de ville. He was told at first that he was only to be taken to the house of the police officer; but this was a trick. As soon as he had stepped into the cab that stood in waiting, he found that he was being taken to the prison of Mazas. The yard of the prison was already filled with hackney coaches which had brought other prisoners. Thiers and the ultra-republican Greppo were brought in while Nadaud was waiting in the office. For nineteen days he remained at Mazas in solitary confinement, but after three days obtained books, and made He sat in the Assembly from 1849 to acquaintance with Guizot's two works on the coup d'état, spoke frequently, some- the History of Civilization in Europe and times for hours at a time, and was in France, the perusal of which was of A terrible commercial stagnation had soon followed on the revolution, and Bonapartists found easy recruits amongst famished men; nay, the crowds of miscellaneous workers or idlers which poured forth daily from the national workshops, Nadaud declares, would have torn in pieces any one who should have uttered any other cry than that of "Vive Napoléon!" He was himself named a delegate to the Labor Commission for the study of industrial questions, presided over by Louis Blanc, but, owing to his occupations, does not appear to have attended as delegate any meeting after the first. He took part in the founding of a cooperative association in his own trade, which for years stood at the head of the French productive associations. But the year had been an expensive one. His wife had had a severe illness which was to cost her her life. He had intended to start for America, to join Cabet's colony, with the second band of Icarians. On the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, however, he was pressed by his workingmen friends to stand for its successor, the Legislative Assembly, and, notwithstanding a trick sought to be played off upon him by the reactionists, of setting up as a dummy candidate another Nadaud (not Martin), he received, one morning, while at work, a letter directed "Citoyen Nadaud, Représentant du Peuple." advantage to him years after, during his career as a teacher. Better days came when he was transferred to Sainte-Pélagie. All the representatives who had been arrested were placed in the left wing of the prison, groups of several in a large room. The room he occupied contained, besides friends of his own, political opponents, such as Duvergier de Hauranne and General Leydet. Their days were quiet, and "as agreeable as possible." Friends were allowed to come to see them, and supply them with provisions, even beyond their wants. Relations of brotherly esteem grew up between monarchists and republicans. Nadaud was even offered by General Leydet a sum of one thousand francs, subscribed for him by the latter's friends, which he refused, saying that he could always earn his living by his trade. One morning the prisoners received a copy of the official paper, which informed Nadaud that he and sixty-five other republican representatives were exiles for life. Nadaud took a passport for Belgium, and the clerk who handed it over to him offered him a letter to a Brussels architect. At Brussels he seemed to himself to be in the corridors of the Palais Bourbon, where the Assembly had sat, so many former colleagues and friends did he find there. He went into lodgings with one who was both a colleague and a friend, Agricol Perdiguier, nicknamed "Avignonnais-la-Vertu," a joiner, and one of the chief writers in the workingman's paper, L'Atelier, whose Livre du Compagnonnage is often spoken of by George Sand, and had more effect, according to Nadaud, in moralizing French workmen than all the laws and penalties of the Louis Philippe régime. Perdiguier was the cook, and so economical was he that their expenses rarely exceeded a frane a day each. On the other hand, Nadaud found that wages in his trade were very low in Brussels, not exceeding two and a quarter or two and a half francs a day, and a great public meeting, organ ized by the Brussels workmen in honor of the exiles, at which he was chosen to return thanks in their names, soon led to his being driven away. On the morrow of the meeting he was ordered to present himself to the burgomaster, who made him understand that he must leave Brussels. Victor Schoelcher and another received the same notice, and all three were sent to Antwerp, where for the first time Nadaud saw the sea. But here also, on inquiry, he found wages in the building trade very low, though somewhat higher than at Brussels, three francs a day. On learning (January, 1852) from Louis Blanc, then in England, and to whom he had written, that he could earn more than double this amount (five shillings) in London, and that Louis Blanc had already spoken about him to Mr. Pickard,1 manager of a then existing North London Working Builders' Association (founded in connection with the Christian Socialist movement of the time), he crossed the Channel (at the cost of dreadful seasickness) to the country which was to be his home for eighteen years. The day after his arrival his future employer (who, alas, went to the bad eventually, both morally and pecuniarily) called upon him, and it was settled that he should begin work three days later. He did not yet speak a word of English, and Louis Blanc not only got him an interpreter, in the person of a boy of thirteen or fourteen, but himself took him, the first day, to the building yard at Islington where he was to work. The rain was pouring down in torrents; the roads in the neighborhood of the yard were almost impracticable for foot-pasand little Louis Blanc sank poor so deep in the mud, tearing himself out of one rut only to tumble into another, that his sturdy companion hardly knew whether to laugh or to urge him to go no farther. Nadaud soon made friends, particularly with two worthy Irishmen, who sengers, 1 Louis Blanc had been put in relation with Mr. Pickard by the late Mr. Vansittart Neale. |