“I’ll tell both of you something that will astonish you. I’ve made a calculation, and I find that if everybody in England would give up their Christmas dinner—that is, in Scotland, and Ireland too—”
“They never have any in Ireland, Bob.”
“Hold your tongue till I’ve done, Charley. They do have Christmas dinners in Ireland. It’s pretty nearly the only day that they do, and I don’t count much upon them either. But if everybody gave up his special Christmas dinner, and dined as he does on other days the saving would amount to two millions and a half.”
Charley whistled.
“Two millions and a half is a large sum of money,” said Mrs. Granger, the elder lady of the party.
“Those calculations never do any good,” said the younger lady, who had declared herself not to be a widow.
“Those calculations do a great deal of good,” continued Bob, carrying on his argument with continued warmth. “They show us what a great national effort would do.”
“A little national effort, I should call that,” said Mrs. Granger, “but I should doubt the two millions and a half.”
“Half-a-crown a head on thirty million people would do it. You are to include all the beer, wine, and whisky. But suppose you take off one-fifth for the babies and young girls, who don’t drink.”
“Thank you, Bob,” said the younger lady—Nora Field by name.
“And two more fifths for the poor, who haven’t got the half-crown a head,” said the elder lady.
“And you’d ruin the grocer and butcher,” said Charley.
“And never get your half-crown, after all,” said Nora.
It need hardly be said that the subject under discussion was the best mode of abstracting from the pockets of the non-suffering British public a sufficiency of money to sustain the suffering portion during the period of the cotton famine.
Mr. Granger was the rector of Plumstock, a parish in Cheshire, sufficiently near to the manufacturing districts to give to every incident of life at that time a colouring taken from the distress of the neighbourhood; which had not, however, itself ever depended on cotton—for Plumstock boasted that it was purely agricultural. Mr. Granger was the chairman of a branch relief committee, which had its centre in Liverpool; and the subject of the destitution, with the different modes by which it might be, should be, or should not be relieved, were constantly under discussion in the rectory. Mr. Granger himself was a practical man, somewhat hard in his manners, but by no means hard in his heart, who had in these times taken upon himself the business of alms-begging on a large scale. He declined to look at the matter in a political, statistical, or economical point of view, and answered all questions as to rates, rates in aid, loans, and the Consolidated Fund, with a touch of sarcasm, which showed the bent of his own mind.
“I’ve no doubt you’ll have settled all that in the wisest possible way by the time that the war is over, and the river full of cotton again.”
“Father,” Bob replied, pointing across the Cheshire flats to the Mersey, “that river will never again be full of American cotton.”
“It will be all the same for the present purpose, if it comes from India,” said the rector, declining all present argument on the great American question.
To collect alms was his immediate work, and he would do nothing else. Five-pound notes, sovereigns, half-crowns, shillings, and pence! In search of these he was urgent, we may almost say day and night, begging with a pertinacity which was disagreeable, but irresistible. The man who gave him five sovereigns instantly became the mark for another petition.
“When you have got your dinner, you have not done with the butcher forever,” he would say in answer to reproaches. “Of course, we must go on as long as this thing lasts.”
Then his friends and neighbours buttoned up their pockets; but Mr. Granger would extract coin from them even when buttoned.
The two young men who had taken part in the above argument were his sons. The elder, Charles, was at Oxford, but now in these Christmas days—for Christmas was close at hand—had come home. Bob, the second son, was in a merchant’s house in Liverpool, intending to become, in the fullness of time, a British merchant prince. It had been hinted to him, however, more than once, that if he would talk a little less and work a little harder, the path to his princedom would be quicker found than if his present habits were maintained. Nora Field was Mrs. Granger’s niece. She was Miss Field, and certainly not a widow in the literal sense of the word; but she was about to become a bride a few weeks after Christmas.
“It is spoil from the Amalekites,” Mr. Granger had said, when she had paid in some contribution from her slender private stores to his treasury:—“spoil from the Amalekites, and therefore the more precious.” He had called Nora Field’s two sovereigns spoil from the Amalekites, because she was about to marry an American.
Frederic Frew, or Frederic F. Frew, as he delighted to hear himself called, for he had been christened Franklin as well as Frederic—and to an American it is always a point of honour that, at any rate, the initial of his second Christian name should be remembered by all men—was a Pennsylvanian from Philadelphia; a strong Democrat, according to the politics of his own country, hating the Republicans, as the Tories used to hate the Whigs among us before political feeling had become extinct; speaking against Lincoln the president, and Seward his minister, and the Fremonts, and Sumners, and Philipses, and Beechers of the Republican party, fine hard racy words of powerful condemnation, such as used to be spoken against Earl Grey and his followers, but nevertheless as steady for the war as Lincoln, or Seward, or any Republican of them all;—as steady for the war, and as keen in his bitterness against England.
His father had been a partner
