1856.]

heart.'

She drew her slight figure up, and looked as wicked as she alone can look, whilst she replied,-‘No, no; a thousand times, no. I will put my foot on his neck-I will humble him. He said Baronne Bwas handsomer and cleverer than me, did he? Baronne B-, that great foolish blonde. I will teach him to know me; and then let him break his heart, if he will be such a fool. Come to me to-morrow; I will show you how I manage him, you are all alike, you men.'

"I put Adolphe on his guard; I reasoned with him, and warned him. Sapristie, we must help each other, such women are the natural foes of our kind. But it was of no use; Adolphe would not believe a word I said to him. She had given him a rosebud and one of her gloves, and he was mad about them. Que voulez-vous? the boy loved her-as a man loves only once-with all his heart and soul; not like you and me, mon cher, who are men of the world, but like a fool. Of course, if I couldn't save him, it was no use distressing myself about the affair. These things must take their course. I went with him to her house, and I watched her as one watches a cat playing with a mouse. Poor boy! I saw in two seconds it was all over with him, and that he was that woman's slave. How cleverly she did it; first greeting him kindly, then talking about his brother-his rival, mark you, and a devilish handsome one, too-and so making him thoroughly angry and half wild; and lastly, pressing his hand at parting, and asking, with a glance at me (as if she hadn't begged me herself to come), 'why she never could see him alone? The boy's Hungarian blood couldn't stand it; if Marguerite had told him to lie down and die at her feet, he would

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have been fool enough to obey her, and she would have laughed at him afterwards. As we walked away he raved about her to me. His features writhed when he mentioned her name; it was quite a study. But, to tell the truth, I had rather it had been any one than Adolphe. So the affair went on, and she played one brother against the other till they were both mad with jealousy, and the younger was capable of any thing-anything. It was an ugly business, my friend. I was present when they quarrelled, not about her, but a foolish dispute at cards. Blows passed; they were mad; they must have been mad. A challenge was given and accepted. Will you be lieve it, they went out to fight! these two brothers that had clung to the same mother's breast. We managed the affair quietly; we drew the ball from each of their pistols. Judge of their fury, especially of that of Adolphe, when the fraud was discovered. Was I not right? I respect the laws of arms; I have been on the ground' myself more than once; but brothers, you see, mon cher, c'était un peu trop fort. More and worse would have happened, but I entreated Marguerite to interfere. Would to God I had let it alone! Forgive me-would I had brought my handsome Adolphe home shot through the heart- kismet' says our neighbour the Turk. I sometimes think there is such a thing as destiny. How she managed Fritz I know not. He was a cool, resolute fellow, and fond as he was of her, not a man that any woman on earth could make a fool of; of course she liked him the better of the two. But Adolphe-I know how she made Adolphe give his word of honour that he would never lift his hand against his brother's life,-she made it the condition of her love; she told Adolphe she would be his -and his alone. The boy was wild with happiness; he was young, as I have already told you, my friend, and a sad fool. He raved about her all the evening; I was very tired of him, I assure you, by bedtime. He walked all night under her windows

it was fortunate he could not see inside, and next day she was driving out with Fritz, and distant as ever with my very ridiculous young

friend. So she played brother against brother, and made each believe the other was the only obstacle to his own happiness; but more especially she delighted in her triumph over poor Adolphe, and, as she had Vowed that she would do, when I remonstrated with her, she did indeed put her foot on the boy's neck. This could not go on. The brothers would have fought a hundred times, but for the word of honour they had passed. The Hungarian never forfeits his word. They were of the old Hungarian noblesse; rich, handsome, gallant, and devoted. Must such men be sacrificed to a woman's momentary triumph? Must the noblest, truest heart break because a little devil in muslin chooses to play the fool? It is no business of yours and mine. Our hearts don't break quite so easily, and I, for one, never allow love-making to interfere with dinner; but Adolphe and his brother were très peu philosophes, and, would you believe it, in their madness they threw the dice to decide which of the two should commit suicide. It must have been a ghastly main, and although she does look very pretty this evening, with the light of the setting sun behind her, I think you will agree with me that the stake was hardly worth the hazard. I never knew of it till after

all was over. It appears that the loser was to have a year's grace by consent, and during that year to be unmolested in his love by his rival. I remarked that Adolphe rushed suddenly into the deepest extravagance, and appeared, what they call at Paris, to manger' his fortune very rapidly, also to have rid himself completely of his rival, but this I thought was owing to the superior good sense or greater caprice of the elder brother. I wonder whether he ever told Marguerite? I sometimes think that she knew it all the time. For the first few months I verily believe Adolphe congratulated himself on his success. For one year of her society he was content to barter life-and more than life too, perhaps but as time drew on, I remarked his cheek grow paler, and his brow more haggard day by day. Moreover, even then she could not resist the pleasure of making him unhappy. I tell you, my friend,

that woman has no more heart than a stone. One morning I knew it all. Adolphe had spent his last florin, and blown his brains out. He left a letter for me, and I learnt everything. He kept his word, you see, and behaved quite like a gentleman. They found her glove on his body. Fritz never came back. I do not think she minded that very much. It is scarcely six months ago: do you think she looks very sorrowful now? Bah! my friend; let us smoke one more cigar, and then go to the Opera.'

In any other country such a tragedy as this would have at least ereated a sensation-not so in Wallachia. The victim was a Hungarian, the heroine one of the beauties of the Principalities; it seemed to be regarded as a mere matter of course, a very natural consequence, and probably the grave Englishman and his mercurial informant, then pacing the gardens, were the only two people present who treated the subject with the slightest concern. We in England can hardly conceive how people are capable of such absurdities, but as we travel eastward, and become more familiar with the hot oriental blood-of which there is a considerable mixture in all those nations which have once been overrun by the Asiatics-we become witnesses to many a scene in real life which seems to belong only to the province of romance.

6

Alas for the soldier, here to-day, gone to-morrow, 'Cheer, boys, cheer,' and The girls we leave behind us,' are the burden of his song. Once more we must trust ourselves to the tender mercies of the poste-wagen, retrace our steps to Giurgevo, and so embark on the mighty Danube, leaving in pleasant Bucharest many an agreeable acquaintance, and one or two friends, not without regret. At Giurgevo we were more than ever impressed with the gallantry of the Turks, when they forced the passage of the river at that point, and drove the Russians pell-mell through Wallachia, in the campaign on the Danube of 1854. The question has often been asked,

How came such a general as Omer Pacha to fight a battle with such a river as the Danube in his rear?' Omer Pacha was not himself

ARE dwarfs and giants positive

6

realities, inhabiting regions lower than those airy realms of fable in which the mind loves to wander unconstrained? Are they actual flesh and blood, formed of the same solids and fluids as our Common Councilmen, gifted with the same passions and tendencies as our Statesmen, our Orators, our Duchesses, and our Milliners? Do they still exist on this earth, and where? Did they ever exist, and where ? These be questions!' Formerly, the gravest men, in common with the simplest child, believed that dwarfs and giants roamed through tracts of country specially allotted to them, and occasionally mingled-for good sometimes, but oftener for evil-in the bustle of human life. And there were many reasons for this belief, however absurd that belief may appear to us. Pliny, the most credulous of eloquent gossips, could tell where the dwarfs lived, with geographical accuracy, and tell much else concerning them. Even the astute and cautious Aristotle, the greatest naturalist the world has yet seen, when alluding to the Homeric legend of the annual fight between the pigmies and the cranes, declares that the report of trustworthy witnesses testifies to the existence of a tiny race of men with tiny horses living in the caves which are washed by the waters of the Nile.t

Nor is there anything remarkable in the belief in races of dwarfs and giants, since individual specimens, if rare, are not so rare but that every generation must have had cognizance of them; and although

one white crow is not rigorous evidence of the existence of white flocks, it is evidence enough for the imagination to work upon. The

sight of one dwarf or one giant would give the hint, and from that hint the swift generalizing tendency would soon create a race; and imagination, pleased with its new toy, would rapidly invent a mass of mythical attributes, to play their parts in a thousand legendary exploits; these legends would mingle with the common stock of traditions, deriving irresistible force from the constant reappearance of individual dwarfs and giants-not indeed so dwarfish or gigantic as those of whom the legends told, but enough so to satisfy facile credulity.

It is not with the dwarfs and giants of fable that we here propose to occupy the reader's attention, but with the curious phenomena which actual specimens present, and the light they throw on some obscure questions. The subject is one of very great interest, both to the general reader and to the speculative physiologist, for it is intimately allied to questions which continually arise, both in conversation and in scientific speculation.

We will first dispose of the question- Has there ever been, and can there be, a race of dwarfs ? Properly to define what a dwarf is, in scientific language, will be to settle the question at once in the negative. A dwarf is a being in whom arrest of growth alone, or of both growth and development, has occasioned a remarkable aberration from the normal standard of his species.' This definition

we shall substantiate in the course of the present paper, and meanwhile, begging the reader to accept it, let us remark that it points to this important fact-namely, a dwarf is an anomaly. Now, as this abnormal condition almost always brings with it variations in the vital functions, making the male dwarfs generally sterile, and the females always unfit to give birth, it is clear that no race of such anomalies can have existed.

But if we shift our language from the rigorous precision of science, and bring it on to the broad, indeterminate province of common usage, we may, without contradiction, declare a race of dwarfs possible. It is a fact that, by a graduated series of experiments, we can breed a race of animals so much smaller than the average standard that they may be called dwarfs, in popular language. Such are the dwarf terriers,' now

common. To the physiologist, however, these fulfil none of the conditions requisite in a dwarf. They are not anomalies, and they were produced in a quite normal way. The smallest dogs of a litter are bred with each other; the smallest of their progeny are likewise made to breed together; and thus, by always selecting the smallest, we descend, in the course of some generations, according to the rigorous law of hereditary transmission, to a diminutive race. But the race is a race of tiny dogs, not of dwarfs. Size alone will never constitute a dwarf species. Compared with a mastiff, a pug-dog is a dwarf in point of size; but the pugdog has the size of his species, the organization of his species, and is no more an anomaly than the mastiff is. The tiny terrier or the pug is separated from a real dwarf by three cardinal characters :

1. He has the size of his species; he is little smaller, if at all, than his father and mother, brothers, sisters, or cousins.

2. No arrest has taken place in his normal evolution.

3. He presents no anomaly of structure or function.

The dwarf is the contrary of all these he is astonishingly smaller

VOL. LIV. NO. CCCXX.

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than father, mother, brothers, sisters, and cousins; an arrest has taken place in his evolution; and he always presents one or more anomalies of structure. The reader will now perceive that, in the strict scientific sense of the term dwarf,' a race of dwarfs is a contradiction; and if he asks whether there may not have been a race of men so diminutive as to come under the popular designation, our answer would be-Certainly there may have been; no physiological evidence discountenances the possibility, but no historical evidence countenances the fact.

Although we have no evidence of a race, we have abundant evidence respecting individuals, and a sketch of the more remarkable specimens will be the most interesting introduction to the present inquiry. For obvious reasons, we pass over the dwarfs of antiquity, our object being here to set down facts for which evidence exists. Our first sketch shall be of the dwarf known to all readers of Scott-the dwarf who is made to play a part in Peveril of the Peak, and who was even more surprising in reality than he appears in the fiction. Jeffrey, or Sir Jeffrey Hudson, as he was called, after Charles I., in a frolic, had dubbed him with knighthood, was born in 1619. When eight years old, he was presented by the Duke of Buckingham to the Queen Henrietta Maria in a pasty! Absurd as this seems, it becomes less so when we learn that his height at thirty years old was only eighteen inches. The queen was so charmed with the little fellow that she appointed him one of her pages, and of course the courtiers made him their pet. One reads with regret that the wits of the day made him the butt of their cheap and cruel wit. Davenant made him the hero of a mock epic called Jeffreidos, in which the dwarf fights a single combat with a turkey-cock:

Jeffrey straight was thrown, when, faint and weak,

The cruel fowl assaults him with his beak.

A lady midwife now he there by chance Espied, that came along with him from France.

K