Ferdinand Maximilian

APRIL 23, 1864. ]

HARPER'S WEEKLY.

267

was flush of cash, and would be able even to give Joan Baptiste Constant a trifle on account of his wages. Oh, the wonderful power of paper-money, and how wide-spreading are the wings of Icarus until the wax melts off! Then he comes down plump; as Law did ; as Turgot did; as the latest edition of Chevy CHASE will do.

Frank Blunt drew his arm through that of Lord Henry, and soothed, and flattered, and told gay stories to the noble boy he meant to cheat before sunrise, and whose brains he would have been, under any circumstances, glad enough to blow out: believing, as he did, that Debonnair admired his wife too much. Poor boy! Has there not been seen, ere now, a little spaniel puppy dog frisking about in the den of a Bengal tigress? Blunt allowed no trace either of his design or of his resentment to show itself. He was a diplomatic villain, not a melodramatic one. Plunder your enemy first, and murder him afterward, if there be occasion for it : so ran the cautious current of Francis Blunt, Esquire's, reasoning.

As fate would have it, he was destined, that night or morning, neither to rob nor to kill Lord Henry Debonnair. For, just as the boy and he had quitted Gamridge's hospitable roof, and were mounting the former's cabriolet, en route for Crockey's, two men of mildewed, slightly greasy, decidedly shabby, and unmistakably Jewish, mien, made their appearance in the lamplight, one on either side of the aforesaid cabriolet. A third man, who was older, and shabbier, and greasier, and more mildewed, but not Jewish, appeared, with pantomimic suddenness, at the horse's head.

" Good Heavens, Blunt, what is the meaning of this ?" cried Lord Henry.

" It only means," replied the dandy, with well-assumed coolness, but with a very pale face, " that I am taken in execution—arrested, as it is called—for three thousand five hundred pounds, and that, instead of going in your cab to Crockford's, I must take a hackney-coach, with these respected gentlemen, to Chancery Lane."

CHAPTER XV.

GETTING UP.

THE morning broke very sadly and drearily to the little child left, quite alone, at Rhododendron House. The servant-maid, with whom she had been put to sleep, had risen at six o'clock, for her work was of the hardest, and her pabulum of rest infinitesimal. So when, about half an hour afterward, the bold sun came hammering through Lily's eyelids, preaching to old and young alike, that eternal sermon against Sloth, the girl's place beside her being yet warm, but deserted, it is not, I hope, to be taken as a very wonderful event if Lily began immediately to cry. It does not take much to bring tears from the eyes of a little child. The infant weeps instead of cogitating; and the result arrived at is about as logical in the one case as in the other. Lily's dolor was as yet of no very outrageous kind. It was less a fractious roar than a meek wail of expostulation. Her sorrows dawned with the day : the noontide of misery was to come. She had but a very faint idea of where she was, and a fainter still of how she had come there. Every thing was strange to her. Her memory was naturally short. The events of the previous day had been rapid, crowded, and unusual. The upshot was hopeless confusion. So she betook herself to tears. The sun, however, after vindicating his dignity and potency before stirring her up so rudely, seemed to relent. He condescended to console her. He was a generous giant after all, and acknowledged that so tiny a lie-a-bed might urge some plea in abatement of his wrath. There was time hard and cruel time enough for Lily to acquire habits of early rising. So murmuring (if the Sun indeed can sing) that beautiful burden to the old nurse's ballad,

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old there's quite enough for thee,

he, too, began to smile on Lily, and to show her wonderful things. He had a plenteous store, and a rich, and a brave ; and the child smiled in his company. The sun's beams dried her eyes. She looked, and saw the motes dancing in the golden rays ; the strip of drugget tesselated in a bright pattern, the knobs on the chest of drawers gleaming in the shine. Then, outside, some creeping green plants, stirred by the morning breeze, chose, with a merry furtiveness, to peep in upon her through the panes ; and the sun turned them to all kinds of colors. Her mind was yet as light as a leaf: volatile, and carried hither and thither as the wind listed. She laughed, and forgot her little woe, and found herself playing with the pillow, which, to her, speedily became animate and a thing to be fondled, dandled, chidden, and apostrophized. It is the privilege of very little girls to be able to turn any thing into a puppet ; as it is of very little boys to make any thing into soldiers. I once knew the small daughter, aged three, of a tinker, who nursed for a whole hour a dead rat for a doll.

As nobody came, however, and the painful fact of the pillow having no legs became apparent, and the sun went in (to cast up his yesterday's accounts, maybe), after showing for a moment his jolly red face at the door of his dwelling, gloom came again to overshadow Lily's soul. The petty horizon was very soon darkened, and the rain-drops began once more to patter. She felt very lonely, very friendless, very hungry; and though the sun, in his back parlor, hearing her sobbing, looked up from his ledger, and opening a casement, drove a lively beam across her bed, she was inconsolable now, and wept with unassuageable bitterness.

All at once there cam a dreadful bell. It must have been made of Chinese gongs melted down with revolutionary tocsins, fire-alarms, jarring chimes from brick chapels in grim

towns of the shoddy country, peals from jails and work-houses, bells from men-o'-war where discipline was rigid, and whose captains were Tartars: the whole hung in the Tower of Babel, furnished with a clapper forged from Xantippe's tongue, and finally cracked and flawed under the especial auspices of Mr. Denison, Q.C. It was a most appalling bell. It elected, first, to creak and groan, and then to emit a frightful rasping clangor that set your teeth on edge, and made your bosom's lord sit so uneasily on his throne as to seem in danger of tumbling off. You could hear the duller sound of the tugging at the rope, and the thud of the outer rim of the bell against the brick wall by the side of which it was hung, besides the persistent bang, bang, banging of the clapper itself. It was a campanile of evil omen, a sound of doom, a most abominable bell—the schoolbell of Rhododendron House.

The five-and-thirty boarders in Rhododendron House knew well enough, from long and sad experience, what the bell meant. It signified Get up ! Get up this minute ! Get up this instant! Get up, you lazy little minxes, under pain of ever so many bad marks, extra lessons, and diminished rations of bread-and-butter ! So, sluggishly or speedily, but still inevitably, the pupils proceeded to rise, to dress, and to lave themselves. All of these processes were ill-done; and at prayer-time few of the five-and-thirty were more than half-dressed, half-washed, or half-awake. But they were all there.

To poor little Lily the bell represented only so much deafening noise, mingled with some vague and indefinite menace of she knew not what. It made her cry more than aught else that had previously excited her emotion; and if, at the end of five minutes, or thereabouts, the horrible instrument had not surceased in its uproar, it is not at all out of the range of probability that the terrified child might have screamed herself into a fit.

" Hoity-toity!" quoth Miss Barbara Bunny-castle, entering the room at this juncture, "what's all this noise about? No crying al-lowed here, Miss Floris. You should have been up and dressed half an hour ago, little one.'

She was quite another Miss Barbara Bunny-castle to the young lady who had received Lily the night before. Her voice was sharper, her gait firmer, her manner more determined. She seemed to forget that there were any such per-sons as parents, and spoke only to pupils. Cake and wine existed no more in her allure ; she was suggestive only of bread and scrape and sky-blue. The holidays were a million miles and ten centuries away. She was not cruel, only cross; not severe, only strict. She was still the guide, philosopher, and friend of her young charges ; but she was, above all, their governess.

Miss Barbara had at first some difficulty in reconciling herself to the gross infraction of scholastic discipline committed by a young lady-boarder, who had not only neglected to leave her couch at the first sound of the "getting-up bell," and apparel herself in her everyday garments, but was also so ignorant of the arts of the toilet as to be behindhand in reaching the dingy corridor, dignified with the name of a lavatory, where the five-and-thirty matutinally fought for the possession of two jack-towels and three squares of yellow soap. Miss Floris was not even competent to hook-and-eye another young lady's frock, or entreat her, in return, to tie her pinafore. What was to be done with a pupil who could not even part her hair, and knew nothing of the proper maintenance of a comb bag? But, by degrees, it dawned on Miss Barbara that Lily Floris was a very little, little child—a mere baby, in fact—and that there was plenty of time to break her into the manage pursued at the Stockwell academy of female equitation. Even the education of Adelaide and Theodora, those paragons of judicious training, must have had a beginning. Next, it occurred to Miss Barbara that the little one represented so much good money, already paid in her behalf, and that she might be made to represent much more equally good. Accordingly, bowing to the force of circumstances, she shrugged the shoulders of her mind, and concluded that the affair, although dreadfully irregular, must be made the best of; and, in pursuance of this sage resolve, she condescended to order up Miss Floris's trunk, and to array the new inmate in the garments provided for her. Nay, she even went so far as to take soap and towel in hand and to frictionize and slouch, in alternate douches and dry rubs, the face and hands of her protegee.

Lily felt more alone than ever. She missed the warm bath, the soft sponge, the soothing words and merry tales, with which her old nurse used to make the ordeal of the tub tolerable. Now the tub was replaced by the servant-girl's wash-hand basin, a fictile bowl of many cracks, not much bigger than a pie-dish. She was dreadfully afraid—she knew not why—of her instructress; but she could not subdue a stifled sobbing. When, added to anguish of mind, you happen to have some soap in your eyes, it is hard to refrain from lamentation.

Miss Barbara observed the child's grief, and, as she washed her, chid her.

" You mustn't cry," she said, sharply. " It's wrong and foolish ; and besides it'll prevent your learning your lessons. Do you know what it is to learn lessons?"

"Ess," replied Lily, who had. once or twice essayed to put a doll through a course of elementary instruction, but, for the rest, had no more idea of lessons than of the Teeloogoo language.

"That's right," quoth Barbara. "You'll have plenty to learn while you're here, I can tell you. Idleness is the parent of vice ; and you'd better be dead than a dunce. Above all, no crying; it's wicked. Do you understand me ?"

"Ess," replied Lily again, feeling that she was called upon to say something, but understanding about as much of the drift of the query as of the primordial organization of matter.

"Then dry your eyes directly. You mustn't look as if you were unhappy. Nobody is allowed to be unhappy here. You're to be brought up under the law of kindness. I've washed and dressed you this morning, and, till you're able to do it yourself, the servant will see after you. I'm not a nursery-maid ; understand that. Now come along."

"Ess," replied Lily again, bewildered between the exposition of the law of kindness and the soap still smarting in the aqueous humors of her eyes.

"Then why don't you do as you're bidden?" pursued Miss Barbara, giving a very slight stamp with her foot.

Somehow Lily couldn't do as she was bidden. She was not naturally rebellious—only dismayed. But in her helplessness, and with this terrible personage, who spoke so sharply and scrubbed so hard, hovering over her, an indefinable feeling of insubordination took possession of her small frame. She was a very tiny leveret to stand at bay; but she clenched her fists, and crammed them into her eyes, and stammering out, "I won't," sat down in the middle of the drugget ; and the rest was inarticulate moaning.

Here was a fine piece of work! The logical Miss Barbara felt that it would be a lamentable dereliction of the law of kindness to have recourse to slapping ; on the other hand, the child only responded to commands by more passionate outcries. So Miss Barbara took a middle course, and seizing the recalcitrant by one arm, shook her.

" Will you come now, you aggravating little thing?" she exclaimed.

The shaking was slight enough, but it was quite sufficient to subdue the aggravating little thing—she who, up to that moment, had never had a finger laid upon her in anger. Miss Barbara had not clutched her with any extraordinary vigor ; but she was muscular, and her fingers had left faint red streaks on Lily's baby-flesh. The child looked at these marks, and acknowledged at once the presence of superior will, of irresistible force. An extinguisher descended quickly, and for good, on the flickering flame of revolt. She gave in—rose—suffered Miss Barbara to rearrange her rumpled frock--and very meekly followed her down stairs, clinging to the bombazine skirt of her instructress.

Miss Barbara Bunnycastle had probably never perused the famous work on Education written by Mr. John Locke, author of an Essay on the Conduct of the Human Understanding, in which that profound philosopher relates a light-hearted anecdote of a lady—a most affable maternal person, and an ornament to her sex, I am sure—who whipped her little daughter on her corning home from nurse eight times in succession, in the course of one morning, before she could sub-due her obstinacy. "And had she stopped at the seventh whipping," opines the grave Mr. Locke, "the child would have been ruined." Fortunately Lily's little outbreak had been got under by the first overt act of coercion. I am not prepared to surmise what the result might have been after eight shakings.

So down they went, passing through the lavatory before mentioned, when two or three lagging boarders, who had been late in obtaining a hold on the jack-towels and the yellow soap, or were still dallying with the comb-bag, or vainly endeavoring to find eyes for their hooks, fled, half unkempt, before Miss Bunnycastle's face, like chaff before the wind. Then they descended half a dozen break-neck stairs, and leaving a lobby, hung with bags, and cloaks, and playground hats and bonnets, behind them, entered a long, low, white-washed room, barely furnished with desks painted black, and wooden forms, and a few maps, and a closed book-case strongly resembling a meat-screen, and at the upper end of which, at a raised rostrum, sat Mrs. Bunnycastle, with a pile of open volumes before her. She was supported on either side, like her Majesty in the House of Lords, by lower chairs of estate, occupied by Miss Celia and Miss Adelaide Bunnycastle. The English and the French governesses, or "teachers," as they were less reverently called by the pupils, occupied desks at the further end of the school-room, and Miss Barbara had a kind of roving commission all over the academic premises, to inspect, to watch, to report, and to reprove. Her eye was every where, and her body was in most places.

It would seem that, on this particular morning, the whole pomp and state of the establishment of Rhododendron House had been brought out to impress the new pupil—though she was such a very little one—with a due sense of awe and reverence. It was rarely, under ordinary circumstances, that Mrs. Bunnycastle made her appearance in the school-room until after breakfast ; and as seldom did more than two of the sisters deign to attend the earliest assembly of the pupils. However, on the first appearance of Lily in the school-room, she found herself face to face with the whole dread hierarchy of her future home—to say nothing of the five-and-thirty boarders sitting at their desks, whose gaze appeared to be directed toward Miss Floris with the concentrated force of one eye.

" Don't stare about you so," whispered Miss Barbara to Lily ; she had to stoop a long way down to whisper. "Little girls shouldn't stare. It's an idle, wicked habit. Now kneel down and be very quiet."

Happily Lily needed but slender instruction in this last particular. She had been taught to pray. She plumped down on her little knees, and, folding her hands with edifying decorum, bent her fair head, and began to mumor God knows what. Emphatically HE knew what. There was a shuffling, rustling noise, as the

girls, at a signal, rose from their desks to kneel upon the forms. Then Mrs. Bunnycastle read prayers in a mild bleating voice, taking care to pronounce " knowledge" with an omega. After the orthodox orisons she read a lengthy homily from a thin dog's-eared book, which, according to a tradition among the girls, had been written by a dean, who was Mrs. Bunnycastle's grandpapa." The homily was full of very hard words, and consequently most wholesome and improving; but its arguments seemed to have a directer reference to some by-gone theological controversies than to the immediate spiritual wants of the five-and-thirty boarders. However, there was a beautiful passage about the idolatries of Rome—which Mrs. Bunnycastle, according to diaconal precedent, scrupulously pronounced Room —and the homily was accompanied by at least one gratifying circumstance, that every body seemed very glad when, it was over. The girls, who had joined in the responses to the prayers with great zeal and apparent zest, and in divers degrees of shrillness, now rustled and shuffled into their places again, and Mrs. Bunnycastle proceeded to promulgate divers bills of pains and penalties, in the shape of lessons and bad marks for offenses committed between the setting of the sun on the previous evening and the rising of the same that morning; and then, when one young lady had broken into a dismal howl at being condemned to learn by heart a whole page of Telemaque, and another had been relegated to the penal study of a cheerful genealogy in Genesis, and a third had seen the prospect of the after-dinner play-hour dashed from her lips by the stern behest to copy out thrice the verb Se Desobeir, and when all the inculpated young ladies had vehemently denied the sins of omission and commission imputed to them, and when the governesses appealed to had emitted lava floods of crimination and recrimination, and when Mrs. Bunnycastle had rapped her desk several times in a minatory manner, with the dean's volume of homilies, and somebody's ears had been boxed —for the law of kindness did not exclude some occasional commentaries and marginal references of a sterner character—the cook of Rhododendron House, who, to all appearance, had been lying in wait below till the climax of shrill outcry and uproar should be reached, suddenly burst upon the assembly, not in person, but vicariously, by ringing the bell for breakfast. A very hot person was the cook. She would bend over her sauce-pans in the kitchen till she attained, as it seemed, a red heat, and would then rash up stairs into the play-ground, and tug at the bell till she was cool: thus till triumphantly vindicating the principle of counter-irritation.

MORNING.

Far. rounded hills and dimpling vales Night's shadowy shrouds unfold, And the lonely star of morning pales, And the mists are bathed in gold.

Soft zephyrs are breathing from the west Over the rippling corn,

And the ruby kiss of the sun is prest On the white brow of the morn,

The flowers shake off their dewy sleep, And their petaled eyes unclose

With innocent looks on the calm blue deep, That curtains their repose.

From nestling homes, all leaf-embowered, The birds pour matin songs,

And fields and river banks are showered With new-horn insect throngs.

All things are glad at the wakening breath That heraldeth the day,

When sleep, so nearly akin to death, Passeth upon its way:

The sweet foreshadowing of that waking When under heavenly skies,

While the morn of another life is breaking, We shall open these darkened eyes.

THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN
AND HIS WIFE.

FERDINAND MAXIMILIAN JOSEPH, Archduke of Austria, and Emperor of Mexico by the intrigues of LOUIS NAPOLEON, whose portrait we give on page 269, is the son of Archduke FRANCIS CHARLES and of Archduchess SOPHIA, Princess of Bavaria, and is the eldest brother of the present Emperor of Austria, FRANCIS JOSEPH I. He was born July 6, 1832, and is now consequently just in the fresh summer of his years. He holds the rank of Admiral and Commander-in-chief of the Austrian Imperial Marine, having worked his way up from the lowest rank of his profession, aided very materially, of course, by the fact of his exalted birth. He is described as a remarkably plain and republican sort of personage, and has certainly enjoyed great popularity in his rule over the people of the Lombardo-Veneto and in every other position he has filled. Ambition is probably his greatest weakness.

The offer of the imperial crown of Mexico was made to the Archduke by a Mexican deputation on October 3, 1863, and was accepted by him under the condition of the election being ratified by the whole Mexican nation. The latest advices from Europe represent that the Emperor was about to sail for Mexico to take possession of his throne, in occupancy of which he is to be supported by a force drawn from two sources-1. A Foreign Legion, in the service and pay of MAXIMILIAN; 2. A body of native Mexicans, such as can be hired to uphold the usurpation. The Foreign Legion, which is to consist at first of 6000 men, is making up in part from the army of Paris, and the first installment of 500 men were embarking at Cherbourg three weeks ago.

The wife of MAXIMILIAN is Princess CHARLOTTE, daughter of King LEOPOLD I. of the Belgians, to whom he was married July 27, 1857. Princess CHARLOTTE was born June 7, 1840 and is consequently twenty-four years of age, and is said to be a woman of many charms of character.