asked where Sir Francis meant to take her; and when he said that she was not to return to Buxton, but to go to a country house for the present, and then to Tutbury, she wept aloud, and appealed to the people within hearing for aid. Felton’s anguish was in vain: the countryfolk crowded together, and seemed mortally afraid of the well-armed gentlemen, who announced to them that there was treason afoot against Queen Elizabeth. There was nothing to be done for Mary. At the next turn, the Buxton road was quitted,—even by Bess of Hardwick herself. She would not lose sight of her charge. The Earl must recover as well as he could without her. She must learn what all this meant, and be ready to answer to the Queen—
“Yes, indeed!” one of Sir F. Knollys’ gentlemen observed in her ear. “It was quite time to do so when, but for an accident, the Queen of Scots would have escaped in the course of a week, and the English crown would have been again in danger. A conspiracy was suspected: her Grace of Scotland’s secretaries were doubted, and it was necessary to separate her Grace from them till her papers had been examined. It was a sudden thought,—this start this afternoon; and it was not settled, he believed, where the night should be passed; but it would certainly not be at Buxton.”
Felton prevailed to have the poor queen conveyed once more to his house, near Chesterfield. She was dissolved in tears as she dismounted at his door; and in the hall she flung herself into a chair sobbing out:
“Here again! Disappointed again! Going again to Tutbury! O! anywhere but Tutbury! If you knew,”—and she turned to Knollys, “what I have endured of indignity and misery of every kind at Tutbury, you would spare me from going there.”
Sir F. Knollys was concerned that her Grace had so strong a dislike to Tutbury, as it was his charge to convey her there.
She sprang from her seat, dashed away her tears, and demanded to be conducted to her chamber. For three days and nights, her host watched for a moment’s sight of her; but in vain. A sentinel was placed at her door; and no one but her ladies saw her till a messenger brought the news that the coast was now clear at Tutbury.
SEA-SIDE LIFE.
There is, or used to be, among some theologians, a test of doctrinal accuracy so very complete and exacting that few opinions had any chance of satisfying it. The requirement was that the statement, dogma, or fact, should be held “always, everywhere, and by all.” Some time ago I walked, with occasional lifts, along the western coast of England, from Weymouth to Bristol, looking in, as I went, upon the watering-places which fringe the land. It was August when I made my tour, and every place I visited was filled with summer residents.
Surely, thought I to myself, as I reposed at home after my round, I have discovered the uniform invariable state, if not sentiment, which the old formula would fit. Sea-side life is led in the same way—“always, everywhere, and by all.” Whereever I went, there were the same people and the same pursuits. The scenery varied from the chalk upland to the rose-tinted rock, from the sandy beach and treeless downs of Dorset, to the wooded coombes of South Devon, and the Cornish black slate cliff, up which the long Atlantic wave crept like a tide. I saw the sea under a hundred forms, racing round the promontory—asleep in the land-locked bay—flashing with painful brightness, as if the sun had burst and been half spilt on the water. I saw it leaden-coloured—green—flat, like a soft field when it has been rolled—clear, showing the trembling pebbles and wavy weeds which floated from the rock, or rolling folds of mud from the river’s mouth. I saw it streaked with flecks of white—I saw it misty and boundless, the great waves looking unnaturally large as they bowled in out of the fog. I saw it hard-edged, metallic, with stiff little tinkling waves, like a copper-plate engraving. I saw it fight and I saw it play. Everywhere it met me with old welcome buoyant power, and a fresher grace, filling me with deeper reverence and love. But the human shrimps which capered at its brink presented everywhere the same appearance. They were all doing the same things. Of course you can’t sit on rocks where there are none, nor dig with wooden spades on granite; but there were some features peculiar to sea-side life which connected every watering-place, such as donkeys, white bathing machines, telescopes, mimic nautical phraseology, thumbed novels, and aimless interest in the reflexion of the moon on the water.
“I fear the visitors here lead a very idle life,” said a worthy man to me one day, as we had a stray chat on a bench. Being an energetic resident, he did not see that that was the very life they came there to lead. Don’t judge a man by his phase of relaxation. There is a fire-engine station at the bottom of my street, close to one of the great thoroughfares of London. When I leave my house, and put out into the great human stream, I always see one man at rest there. He wears a cleaned-up, official sort of undress, and sits on a low stool outside the engine-house door, generally smoking a long new clay pipe. There is nothing more calm than the repose of a fireman. But a breathless householder, with a mob of little boys at his heels, comes round the corner. In two minutes our friend is driving fourteen miles an hour against the stream of Regent Street, like a flash of brass and red paint.
Therefore, do not hastily judge the idler by the sea-side; he is reposing. But he can work, at the right time. Last week he fought the fiercest counsel on circuit. Last week he hushed a mob. The day before yesterday he sent in tenders for the construction of a steam-engine seven hundred thousand horse power, and will have it all hammered and rivetted within sound of his office. Yesterday he extracted the diaphragm of a bricklayer’s labourer before the College of Surgeons, in one minute and twenty-three seconds. The newspaper that gentleman offered him he saw printed this very morning (he came by a mid-day train) amid a crowd of machines and dexterous compositors. With sweat
