—but still fruit whereby a household could
live, if with only Duke Humphrey as the daily
guest. But cut and carved into the likeness of an
artist—winged and bidden to soar to the empyrean
forthwith—he was a failure—a mere lay
figure, draped according to rules and devoid of
locomotive power. Artist! he had no more
artistry in him than he had military genius! A
mere dull copyist, what was there in him of
the fire that lived in Raffaele and glowed
through the soul of Rubens! A formal transcript
there, with the tracing-paper held very
tight, and a dry detail here—yes, he could do
these sure enough! But formal transcripts and
dry details could not bring grist to the family
mill; and by the time that Maulstick looked
down from heaven to earth—from the ideal to
the real—and beheld his mistake, the mischief
was done, and a tolerable clerk had been
spoilt in the vain endeavour to make an
impossible artist.

Clericus committed the same mistake when
he insisted on his son's taking to square-cut
vests and dearly beloved brethren, in continuation
of his own special manner of rooting. The
lad remonstrated, but in vain; he hated square-
cut vests, and wanted nothing with his dearly
beloved brethren, save to order them up to the
cannon's mouth. Clericus held the purse-strings
and rode his son's destiny with that strongest
of all martingales. It mattered nothing to him
that the boy was born to be a cavalry officer—
that his whole soul lay in the pomp and
circumstances of the parade-ground—and that the
glorious creatures standing in their loose boxes at
the Horse Guards were to him like beatified
visions, worth all the saints ever canonised.
Clericus, guiding destiny with those purse-strings
of his, drove past the Horse Guards to the
Abbey, and planted there a stick in the shape
of a drinking, roystering, fox-hunting parson,
who kept his gown on his back simply because
no one took the trouble of stripping it off.
These were two instances of watering dry sticks
and misplanting growths with a vengeance!
Ploughing sea-sand in Maulstick's case, without
reaping even a mouthful of thistles good for
donkeys, if not for daintier feeders; in the
other, budding with night-shade what was
meant to bear pomegranates. But theirs are
by no means exceptional instances; for they
both have brothers—many brothers—at this
moment employed in the same unprofitable
methods of horticulture.

Another manner of watering dry sticks, half-
painful and half-pathetic, is, when the strength
of a family goes to the maintenance of its
weakest members, while the robust, with a useful
future if well cared for, are clipt of their
power that the sickly, of no future whatever,
may be shored up for a few more years of suffering
than nature, unassisted, would give them.
This is seen much among the poor, and the
class immediately above the poor—that class
which is fashioned out of the tattered fringe of
poor gentility—with appearances to keep up,
and inadequate means on which to keep them
up. An unremunerative member to them is
almost as heavy a dead weight as with the
very poor, to whom it means simply food and
clothing out of the common fund, and nothing
put into it. And yet it must be done! That
sickly girl, that feckless boy must be supported
in sufficiency, though the younger ones are
pinched for their share: that poor diseased
creature must be tended night and day, no
matter what the work lying to be done, and the
value of the time taken to water the dry stick
of a hopeless malady! The butcher's bill must
be cut low while the doctor's is running high;
the schooling of those who else would have
been learning the accidence of their own future
profitable gardening must be stopped, while the
nurse's fees have to be paid, preparatory to
those of the sexton and undertaker. It must
be so. Our sick and diseased must not perish
for want of extremest care, even though the
healthy give of their health and the strong of
their power. And in taking the living beams to
shore up the dry sticks of the community, the
good done to general morality, by the tenderness
and self-sacrifice called forth, more than
compensates for the individual loss incurred. It is
a problem why it should be, but a truth all the
same, that so much of public good springs from
private damage. The storm which clears the
atmosphere for miles round, letting the checked
crops grow while it sweeps away the fever that
has been brooding in the stifled air, ruins the
farmers close at hand; the persecution which
established a creed good for all time by the
blood of its first professors, brought sorrow
and wailing to hundreds of hearths, though it
brought light and freedom to millions after; the
monstrous wrong which redeemed a race from
abject barbarism through the partial suffering of
a few—these, and many more examples, if we
cared to tabulate them, evidence the truth of
public gain coming by private loss—evidence,
but do not explain. And on this plea we must
accept as necessary, that painful and pathetic
watering of dry sticks which one sees in families,
when the unremunerative members are kept
alive at the expense of the workers, and the
spiritual gain of sacrifice is bought by the
material loss of strength. Unless, indeed, we go
through and beyond all this, and uphold the
physical well-doing of the public as superior to its
moral elevation. In which case we must knock
on the head all the old women, and half the old
men, all the feckless, the sickly, the paupers,
the criminals, and the imbecile; and so reduce
society to a residuum of practical efficiency which
shall mean simply the dominion of selfishness
and the tyranny of force.

There is a good deal of dry stick watering
done, almost literally, in the bleaker parts
of the country, where husbandry is ten failures
for one success. Down in the North are farms
lying on the edge of barrenness, where a man's
whole lifetime of labour can scarcely dig out a
miserable subsistence. Unlike the advancing
outposts of the Far West, where toil is
rewarded by abundance—where "the earth