service? Here have I been scheming as to how I could manage to avail myself of this chance, and now this ungrateful girl turns round and tells me she doesn’t want the situation. Do you know what you are refusing, Eleanor Vane? Have you learnt your father’s habit of pauperism, that you prefer to be a burden upon this penniless music-teacher and her son, or nephew, or whatever he is, rather than make an honest effort to get your own living?”
Eleanor started up from the piano: she had been sitting before it until now, softly fingering the white ivory keys, and admiring the beauty of the tones. She started up, looking at her sister, and blushing indignantly to the very roots of her golden hair.
Could this be true? Could she be indeed a burden to the friends she loved so dearly?
“If you think that, Hortensia,” she said, “if you think I am any burden to the dear Signora, or Richard, I will take any situation you like, however hard. I’ll toil night and day, and work my fingers to the bone, rather than be a trouble or a burden to them any longer.”
She remembered how little she earned by her few pupils. Yes, Hortensia was no doubt right. She was a burden to those good people who had taken her to their home in her hour of desolation and misery.
“I’ll take the situation, Hortensia,” she cried. “I’ll take a false name. I’ll do anything in the world rather than impose upon the goodness of my friends.”
“Very well,” answered Mrs. Bannister, coldly. “Pray do not let us have any heroics about it. The situation is a very good one, I can assure you, and there are many girls who would be glad to snap at such a chance. I will write to my friend, Mrs. Darrell, and recommend you to her notice. I can do no more. I cannot, of course, ensure you success; but Ellen Darrell and I were great friends some years since, and I know that I have considerable influence with her. I’ll write and tell you the result of my recommendation.”
Eleanor left Hyde Park Gardens after taking two or three sips of some pale sherry which her half-sister gave her. The wine seemed of a sorry vintage, and tasted very much as if the grapes of which it was made had never seen the sun. Miss Vane was glad to set down her wine-glass and escape from the cold splendour of her half-sister’s drawing-room.
She walked slowly and sorrowfully back to Bloomsbury. She was to leave her dear friends there; leave the shabby rooms in which she had been so happy, and to go out into the bleak world a dependent upon grand people, so low and humiliated that even her own name must be abandoned by her before she could enter upon the state of dependence. The Bohemian sociality of the Pilasters was to be exchanged for the dreary splendour of a household in which she was to be something a little above the servants.
But it would be cowardly and selfish to refuse this situation, for no doubt cruel Mrs. Bannister had spoken the truth. She had been a burden upon her poor friends.
She was very gloomy and despondent, thinking of these things, but through every gloomy thought of the present a darker image loomed far away in the black future. This was the image of her vengeance, the vague and uncertain shadow that had filled her girlish dreams ever since the great sorrow of her father’s death had fallen upon her.
“If I go to Hazlewood,” she thought, “if I spend my life at Mrs. Darrell’s, how can I ever hope to find the murderer of my father?”
OUR SEA FISHERIES.
After being made the subject of several scientific essays—which may have deserved more attention than they obtained—the declining productiveness of our sea fisheries has been taken up by those to whose warnings every one will listen. The fishermen of Northumberland and Durham have recently held large meetings upon the subject, and are unanimous in condemning the practice of trawling, as the main cause of the scarcity of fish. It is well for a class when the grievance of which they complain affects, as this does, the whole community; and not as an article of food only, but also as an important item in the national trade. It has been suggested by irreverent foreigners, that the English people are nowhere more sensitive than in their stomachs and in their breeches pockets: and certainly both are concerned in the complaints of the north-country fishermen.
But we must not too hastily take their word as to the cause of the deficiency. We will admit that by far too little attention has been given to this important matter. Our fish-producing mines of wealth are out of sight, and therefore they have been too much out of mind. It has not been sufficiently considered to what a large extent fish has become the food of the people. Listening to stories of “schools” of mackerel innumerable—to accounts of the extraordinary reproductive powers of the herring, and of the marvellous fecundity of the cod and other fish—we have too readily supposed that the supply was practically inexhaustible. This happy idea must, however, be rudely dispelled. There are inexorable facts, which are proof to the contrary even more logical than the evidence of a herring’s roe.
There was indeed some ground for the delusion. When naturalists discovered, from careful calculations, that the ova of a single codfish amount to four millions, and that the roe of herrings and the spawn of flat-fish exhibit similar powers of reproduction, it would seem that we might well be careless as to the mode adopted for obtaining our supplies. But nothing is more certain than that this estimate gives a very delusive notion of the actual increase of fishes. Yet even this disappointment should not disturb our conviction that “whatever is, is right.” For, if all the fish that swim could bring to life all the eggs they deposit—and if the produce of these were to continue the work of propagation in the same manner—we should find the sea gradually rising above our shores, and the dominion of the world slowly but surely passing to the fish themselves. But their
