OUR SOCIAL BEES. / OUR SOCIAL BEES 7 ; OB, PICTURES OF TOWN & COUNTRY LIFE, AND OTHER PAPERS. ANDREW WYNTER, M. D. AUTHOB OP " CUEIOSITIES OP CIVILIZATION," ETC. "Not in vain the distance beckons. Forward, forward let us range; Let the great world spin for ever Down the ringing groove of change." TENNYSON. LONDOK: EGBERT HARDWICKE, 192, PICCADILLY. 1861. TO THE EEADEE. THE public favour which attended the issue of "Curiosities of Civilization" has induced me to collect another series of my papers, and to publish them in an uniform volume. Some of the articles have already appeared in two little volumes long since out of print. The major portion, however, have been published from time to time in the pages of Once a Week, and others in Frasers Magazine, the London Review, the Times, and other channels. The article on " Human Hair " originally appeared in the Quarterly, and the one on " Brain Difficulties/' in the Edinburgh Review. COLEHERNE COURT, OLD BROMPTON. June \st, 1861. M362725 CONTENTS. Page. THE POST-OFFICE 1 LONDON SMOKE 24 MOCK AUCTIONS ... ... ... ... ... 35 HYDE PARK 43 THE SUCTION-POST ... ... ... ... ... 52 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON ... ... ... 59 THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST ... ... 71 OUR PECK OF DIRT ... ... ... 76 THE ARTIFICIAL MAN 88 BRITANNIA'S SMELLING-BOTTLE ... ... ... 96 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM AT THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS 106 A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS ... ... ... 123 COMMERCIAL GRIEF 134 ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE ... ... ... ... 143 THE WEDDING BONNET 152 AERATED BREAD ... ... 159 THE GERMAN FAIR ... ... ... ... ... 165 CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED ... ... 175 NEEDLE-MAKING ... ... ... ... ... 184 PRESERVED MEATS ... ... 191 Viii CONTENTS. Page. LONDON STOUT ... 208 PALACE LIGHTS, CLUB CARDS, AND BANK PENS ... 226 THE GREAT MILITARY-CLOTHING ESTABLISHMENT AT PIMLICO... ... ... ... ... ... 222 THOUGHTS ABOUT LONDON BEGGARS 237 WENHAM LAKE ICE ... ... ... ... ... 243 CANDLE MAKING ... ... 254 WOMAN'S WORK ... ... ... ... ... 264 THE TURKISH BATH... ... ... 273 THE NERVOUS SYSTEM OF THE METROPOLIS ... 284 WHO IS MR. REUTER? ... ... 297 OUR MODERN MERCURY 304 THE SEWING MACHINE ... ... ... ... 314 THE "TIMES" ADVERTISING SHEET 323 OLD THINGS BY NEW NAMES ... ... ... 333 A SUBURBAN FAIR ... ... ... 339 A FORTNIGHT IN NORTH WALES ... ... ... 346 THE ARISTOCRATIC ROOKS ... ... ... ... 377 THE ENGLISHMAN ABROAD 387 A GOSSIP ABOUT THE LAKES... ... 418 SENSATIONS OF A SUMMER NIGHT AND MORNING ... 438 PHYSICAL ANTIPATHIES ... ... 453 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BABYDOM ... ... ... 461 BRAIN DIFFICULTIES 466 HUMAN HAIR THE POST-OFFICE. READER, if you be not entirely " used up/' and can still relish a minor excitement, take a stroll through the General Post-office some Saturday evening, just as the clock is upon the strike of six. The scene is much more exciting than half the ententes which take place on the continent ; considerably cheaper, and much more safe. Stand aside amid the treble bank of spectators on the right hand, and watch the general attack upon the letter-takers. A stream of four or five hundred people, who run as Doyle's pencil only can make them run, dash desperately towards the open windows of the receivers. Against this torrent a couple of hundred who have posted, dodge and finally disappear. Wave after wave of people advances and retreats, gorging with billets the capacious swallow of the post. Meanwhile, a still more active and vigorous attack is going on in the direction where newspapers are received. A sashless window-frame, with tremendous gape, is assaulted with showers of papers, which fly faster and thicker than the driven snow. Now and then large sackfuls, direct from the different newsvenders and publishing offices, are bundled in and bolted whole. As the moments pass, the flight of papers 2 THE POST-OFFICE. grows thicker ; 'jhose who cannot struggle " to the fore" whiz their missiles of intelligence over the heads of the others, now and then sweeping hats with the force of round shot. Letters struggle with more desperate energy, which is increased to frantic desperation as the clock slowly strikes, one two three four five six ; when, with a nigh miss of guillotining a score of hands, with one loud snap all the windows simultaneously descend. The post, like a huge monster, has received its full supply for the night, and, gorged, begins, imperceptibly to the spectators, in quiet to digest. If we enter behind the scenes, and traverse what might be considered the vast stomach of the office, we shall perceive an organization almost as perfect as that which exists in the animal economy, and not very dissimilar to it. The huge piles of letters, and the huger mountains of newspapers, lie in heaps the newly-swallowed food. To separate their different atoms, arrange and circulate them, requires a multiplicity of organs, and a variety of agents, almost as numerous as those engaged in the animal economy no one interfering with the others, no one but is absolutely necessary to the well-being of the whole. So perfect is the drill, so clearly defined the duty of each member of the army of seven or eight hundred men the stranger looks down upon from one of the galleries, that he can only compare its noiseless and unerring move- ments to the action of some chemical agency. Towards the vast table upon which the correspondence of two millions of people for two days is heaped and tossed, a certain number, performing the functions of the gastric juices, proceed to arrange, eliminate, and prepare it THE POST-OFFICE. ^ for future and more elaborate operations ; certain others take away these eliminated atoms, and, by means of a sub- terranean railway, transport them to their proper office on the opposite side of the building ; others, again, like busy ants, carry the letters for the general delivery to the tables of the sorters, when in a moment the important operation of classing into roads and towns, sets all hands to work as busily, as silently, and as purposefully as the restless things we peep at through the hive-glass, building up their winter sweets. In an hour the process is complete ; and the thoughts of lawyers, lovers, merchants, bankers, swindlers, masters, and servants, the private wishes of the whole town, lie side by side, enjoying inviolable secrecy ; and, bagged, stringed, and sealed, are ready, after their brief meeting, for their final dispersion over the length and breadth of the land. All the broad features of this well-contrived organization, its economy and power, the spectator sees before him ; but much as he is struck thereby, it is only when he begins to examine details, and to study the statistics of the Post- office, that he sees the true vastness of its operations, and estimates properly the magnitude and variety of its func- tions, as the great metropolitan heart of communication with the whole world. As we pass the noble Post-office at St. MartinVle- Grand, with its ranges of Ionic columns, its triple porticos, and its spacious and elegant quadrangle a worthy outward manifestation of the order, ingenuity, and intelligence that reign within we cannot help contrasting its present con- dition with the postal operations of two or three centuries B 2 4 THE POST-OFFICE. ago, the noble oak of the present, with the little acorn of the past. No truer estimate of the national advance can be obtained than by running down the stream of history in relation to any of our great institutions which deal with the needs and wishes of the masses of the people ; and in no one of them is our advance more clearly and correctly shown than in the annals of the Post-office. They form, in fact, a most delicate thermometer, marking the gradual increase of our national vitality, and indicating, with microscopic minuteness, the progress of our civilization. In early times, the post was a pure convenience of the king, instituted for the purpose of forwarding his des- patches, and having no dealings with the public whatsoever. Instead of St. Martin's-le-Grand being the point of depar- ture, "the court," wherever it might happen to be, " made up the mails." How these mails were forwarded may be imagined from the following exculpatory letter written by one Brian Tuke, " Master of the Postes," in Henry the Eighth's time. It would appear that Cromwell had been pulling him up rather sharply for remissness in the for- warding of despatches. The worthy functionary states that : " The Kinges Grace hath no moo ordinary postes, ne of many days bathe had, but betwene London and Calais. . . For, sir, ye knowe well, that, except the hackney horses betwene Gravesende and Devour, there is no suche usual conveyance in post for men in this realine as in the accustomed places of France and other parties ; ne men can keepe horses in redynes withoute som way to here the charges ; but when placardes be sent for suche cause (to THE POST-OFFICE. 5 order the immediate forwarding of some State packet,) the constables many tymes be fayne to take horses oute of plaices and cartes, wherein can be no extreme diligence." We should think not, Master Tuke. The worthy post- master further shows how simple and rude were the arrangements of that day, by detailing the manner in which the royal letters were conveyed in what we should have considered to be one of their most important stages: " As to postes betwene London and the courte, there be nowe but 2 ; wherof the on is a good robust felowe, and was wont to be diligent, evil intreated many tymes, he and other postes, by the herbigeours, for lack of horse rome or horsemete, withoute which diligence cannot be. The other hath been the most payneful felowe, in nyght and daye, that I have knowen amongst the messengers. If he nowe slak he shalbe changed, as reason is." This was in the year 1533. In the time of Elizabeth and James I., horse-posts were established on all the great routes for the conveying of the king's letters. This postal system was, of course, a source of expense to the Govern- ment in the latter reign of about 3,400 annually. All this time subjects' letters were conveyed by foot-posts, and carriers, whose expedition may be judged of by the following extracts from a project for "accelerating" letters by means of a public post first started in 1635 : " If (say the projectors) anie of his Ma ts subjects shall write to Madrill in Spain, hee shall receive answer sooner and surer than hee shall out of Scotland or Ireland. The letters being now carried by carriers or footposts 16 or 18 miles a-day, it is full two monthes before any answer from Scotland or Ireland to London." 6 THE POST-OFFICE. This project seems to have been acted upon, for three years later we find a vast reform effected in the post. In fact, it was put upon a foundation which lasted up to the introduction of mail-coaches ; as it was settled to have a '* running post or two to run night and day between Edin- burgh in Scotland, and the city of London, to go thither and come back again in six days ;" carrying, of course, all the letters of the intermediate towns : the like posts were established in the following year on all the great routes. The principle of posts for the people once established, the deficit was soon changed to a revenue. Cromwell farmed the Post-office for j10,000 a year, he being the first to establish the general office in London. It might not be out of place to give an insight as to the scale of charges for letters, then settled. A single letter could be posted within eighty miles of London for 2d. ; above that distance for 3d. ; to Scotland for 4d. ; and to Ireland for 6d. ; double letters being charged double price : not such high charges these, considering the expenditure of horse- flesh and post-boys' breath ; for every rider was obliged to ride " seven miles an hour in summer and five in winter, according as the ways might be/' and to blow his horn whenever he met a company, and four times besides in every hour. Charles II. leased the profits of the Post- office for 21,500 a year. The country, it was evident, was rapidly advancing in commercial greatness and activity, for in 1694 the profits of the Post-office were 59,972. 145. 9d. In the next century the introduction of mail-coaches gave an immense impulse to the transac- tions of the Post-office, which augmented gradually until the end of the year 1839, when the number of letters THE POST-OFFICE. 7 passing through all the offices in the kingdom amounted to 75,907,572, and the net profit upon their carriage was 1,659,509. 17s. 2|dL With the beginning of the year 1840 commenced that vast revolution in the system so long projected by Sir Rowland Hill the Penny Postage. The effect of that system upon the number of letters passing through the post, and upon the manner of payment, was almost instantaneous. During the last month of the old high rates of postage, the total number of letters passing through the general office was a little more than two millions and a half; of these 1,159,224 were unpaid, and only 484,309 paid. In the same time a short twelvemonth after the introduction of the cheap postage the proportion of paid to unpaid letters was entirely changed ; the latter had shrunk to the number of 473,821, whilst the former had run up to the enormous number of 5,451,022. Since 1841 the flow of letters has been con- tinually on the increase. The return made to Parliament in 1847 gave the following results : Unpaid, 644,642 ; paid, 10,957,033: the term "paid" includes, of course, all those letters on which the penny was prepaid, and those impressed with her Majesty's gracious countenance. The prepayment of the penny was a vast benefit to the post, and, together with the general introduction of letter-boxes in private houses, saved the whole time lost to the letter- carriers whilst old ladies were fumbling for the postage ; but the introduction of the stamp was of still greater importance, as on its ultimate exclusive adoption a vast saving was effected in the labour of receiving letters. When stamps were first introduced by Sir Rowland Hill, 8 THE POST-OFFICE. he did not appear to anticipate the use that would be made of them as a medium of exchange ; but every one is aware how extensively they are used in the smaller monetary transactions of the country. Bankers, dealing in magnifi- cent sums, do not deign to take notice of vulgar pence : the Government has, however, taken up the neglected coin, and represented its value by a paper currency, which, if not legally negotiable, yet passes from hand to hand un- questioned. The Post-office now allows, and even recom- mends, the use of postage-stamps as a medium of currency, in order to discourage the sending of coins by post. With this view, provision has been made in the London office for exchanging postage-stamps for money, a small deduc- tion being made as commission on the transaction. It would be impossible, of course, to ascertain the amount of penny stamps that pass from town to town, and from man to man, in payment of small debts ; but without doubt it must be very considerable very much beyond the demand for letters : as long, therefore, as this sum is floating, until it comes to the post (its bank) for payment in shape of letter- carriage, it is a clear public advance to the Exchequer. The only good reason yet assigned against introducing these penny stamps, and those representing a higher value, such as the colonial shilling stamp, as a regular currency, is the fear of forgery. At the present time great precau- tions are used to prevent such an evil ; the die itself, hideous and contemptible as it undoubtedly is as a work of art, in intricacy of execution is considered a master- piece at the Stamp-office. If you take one from your pocket-book, good reader, and inspect it, you will doubt- less pronounce it to be a gross libel upon her Majesty's THE POST-OFFICE. U countenance, muddled in line, and dirty in printing ; but those who know the trick, see in that confusion and jum- ble certain significant lines, certain combinations of letters in the corners, which render forgery no such easy matter. The great security against fraud, however, is that letter- stamps are placed upon the same footing as receipt or bill stamps. Venders can buy them at first hand only of the Government ; and the consequent difficulty forgers would have in putting sufficient spurious stamps in circulation to pay them for their risk and trouble, seems to obviate all risk of their being turned to improper account. It is our intention to confine ourselves mainly, in this article, to the operations of the General Post-office ; but in order to give our readers an idea of the vast amount of correspondence which annually takes place in the United Kingdom, it may be as well, perhaps, to take a glance at the general postal transactions of the country. Make a round guess at the number of letters which traverse the broad lands of Britain, which circulate in the streets and alleys of our great towns, and which fly on the wings of steam, and under bellying sail, to the uttermost parts of the earth. You cannot ? Well, then, what say you to 544,000,000 ? To that enormous amount had they ar- rived in the year ending 31st December, 1859. The number of letters posted in the metropolis and in the country is subject at stated times to a very great augmentation. In London, for instance, on Saturday night and Monday morning, an increase in letters of from thirty to forty per cent, takes place, owing to the Sunday closing of the Post-office. Valentine's Day, again, has an immense effect in gorging the general as well as local posts 10 THE POST-OFFICE. with love epistles. Those who move in the higher circles might imagine the valentine to be " a dead letter ; " but the experience of the Post-office shows that the warm old saint still keeps up an active agitation among tender hearts. According to the evidence given by Sir Rowland Hill, the increase of letters on the 14th of February is not less than half a million throughout the United Kingdom. We have spoken hitherto only of the conveyance of letters, but they form an inferior portion of the weight carried by the Post-office. The number of newspapers and book packets posted in London throughout the week is something enormous. Several vanfuls of the Times, for instance, are despatched by every morning and evening mail ; other morning papers contribute their sackfuls of broad-sheets ; and on Saturday evening not a paper of any circulation in the metropolis, but contributes more or less largely to swell that enormous avalanche of packets which descend upon the Post-office. In the long room lately added to the establishment of St. MartinVle-Grand, which swings so ingeniously from its suspending rods, a vast platform attracts the eye of the visitor ; he sees upon it half a dozen men struggling amid a chaos of newspapers, which seem countless as the heaped-up bricks of ruined Babylon. As they are carried to the different tables to be sorted, great baskets with fresh supplies are wound up by the endless chain which passes from top to bottom of the building. The number of books and papers passing through all the post-offices in the kingdom is not less than 81,000,000 per annum. Of late years the broad- sheet has materially increased in size and weight, each paper now averaging five ounces ; so that tens of thousands THE POST-OFFICE. 11 of tons weight of papers annually are posted, full half of which pass through St. MartinVle-Grand, and thence to the uttermost ends of the earth to India, China, or Aus- tralia for one penny ; whilst if they were charged by the letter scale, tenpence would be the postage ; so that, if weight were considered in the accounts of the Post-office, there would be a loss in their carriage of ninepence on every newspaper. Of course this loss is mostly nominal, as the railways take the mails without calculating their weight ; and to the packets, tons or hundredweights make no earthly difference. Even if this cost were real, the speedy transmission of news to all parts of the kingdom and its colonies is a matter of so much importance, that it would not by any means be purchased dearly. We are continually seeing letters from subscribers in the Times, complaining that their papers do not reach them, and hinting that the clerks must keep them back pur- posely to read them. If one of these writers were to catch a glance of the bustle of the office at the time of making up of the mails, he would smile indeed at his own absurdity. We should like to see one of the sorting clerks quietly reading in the midst of the general despatch ; the sight would be refreshing. The real cause of delays and errors of all kinds in the transmission of newspapers, is the flimsy manner in which their envelopes and addresses are frequently placed upon them. Two or three clerks are employed exclusively in endeavouring to restore wrappers that have been broken off. We asked one of these officials once what he did with those papers that had entirely escaped from their addresses ? " We do, sir/' said he, very significantly, " the best that we can," at the same time packing up the 12 THE POST-OFFICE. loose papers with great speed in the first broken wrappers that came to hand. The result of this chance medley upon the readers must be funny enough ; a rabid Tory sometimes getting a copy perhaps of the Daily News, a Manchester Had a Morning Post, or an old dowager down at Bath, a copy of the Mark Lane Express. The carriage of magazines and other books is an entirely new feature in post-office transactions, introduced by Sir Rowland Hill. At the end of every month the sorting tables at the Post-office are like publishers' counters, from the number of quarterlies, monthlies, magazines, and serials, posted for transmission to country subscribers. The lighter ones must all be stamped at the Stamp-office, like newspapers ; and any magazine under two ounces with this talisman pressed upon it, passes without further ques- tion to any part of the United Kingdom free, whilst books under sixteen ounces can be forwarded for fourpence. This arrangement is a wise and liberal one, recognizing as it- does the advantage of circulating as widely as possible the current literature of the country. Many a dull village, where the current literature of the day penetrated not a few years ago, by this means is now kept up level in its reading with the metropolis. The miscellaneous articles that pass through the post under the new regulations are sometimes of the most ex- traordinary nature. Among the live stock, canary birds, lizards, and dormice, passed not long ago, and sometimes travelled hundreds of miles under the tender protection of rough mail-guards. Leeches are also very commonly sent, sometimes to the very serious inconvenience of the post- men. Ladies' shoes go through the general office into the THE POST-OFFICE. 13 country by dozens every week ; shawls, gloves, wigs, and all imaginable articles of a light weight, crowd the Post- office ; limbs for dissection have even been discovered (by the smell), and detained. In short, the public have so little conscience with respect to what is proper to be for- warded, that they would move a house through the post if they could do it at any reasonable charge. Considerable restrictions have, however, lately been placed on this pro- miscuous use of the post. The manner in which a letter will sometimes track a person, like a bloodhound, appears marvellous enough, and is calculated to impress the public with a deep sense of the patience and sagacity of the Post-office officials. An im- mense number of letters reach the post in the course of the week, with directions perfectly unreadable to ordinary persons ; others sometimes circulars by the thousand with only the name of some out-of-the-way villages upon them ; others, again, without a single word of direction. Of these latter, about eight a day are received on an average, affording a singular example of the regularity with which irregularities and oversights are committed by the public. All these letters, with the exception of the latter, which might be called stone blind, and are immedi- ately opened by the secretary, are taken to the Blind Letter- office, where a set of clerks decipher hieroglyphics without any other assistance than the Rosetta stone of experience, and make shrewd guesses at enigmas which would have puzzled even the Sphinx. How often in directing a letter we throw aside an envelope because the direction does not seem distinct useless precaution ! the difficulty seems to be to write so that these cunning folks cannot understand. 14 THE POST-OFFICE. Who would imagine the destination of such a letter as this, for instance ( . fffi n -/-/in h 1 11 n i . Some Russian or Polish town immediately occurs to one from the look of the word, and from its sound ; but a blind-letter clerk at once clears up the difficulty, by passing his pen through it and substituting Ratcliffe Highway. Letters of this class, in which two or three directions run all into one, and garnished with ludicrous spelling, are of constant occurrence, but they invariably find out their owners. Cases sometimes happen, however, in which even the sharp wits of the Blind Letter-office are non- plussed. The following, for instance, is a veritable ad- dress : df tk Much was this letter paused over before it was given up. " It would have been such a triumph of our skill," said one of the clerks to us, " to have delivered it safely ; but we THE POST-OFFICE. could not do it. Consider, sir/' said he, deprecatingly, " how many Smiths there are in England, and what a number of churches ! " In all cases like this, in which it is found impossible to forward them, they are passed to what is called the Dead Letter-office, there opened and sent to their writers if possible. So that out of the many millions of letters passing through the Post-office in the course of the year, a very few only form a residuum, and are ultimately destroyed. The workings of the Dead Letter-office form not the least interesting feature of this gigantic establishment. According to a return moved for by Mr. T. Duncombe in 1847, there were in the July of that year 4,658 letters containing property consigned to this department, repre- senting perhaps a two months' accumulation. In these were found coin, principally in small sums, of the value of 310. 9s. 7d. ; money-orders for 407. 12s. ; and bank- notes representing 1,010. We might then estimate the whole amount of money which rests for any time without owners in the Dead Letter-office, to be 11,000 in the year. Of this sum the greater portion is ultimately re- stored to the owners only a very small amount, say one- and-an-eighth per cent., finding its way into the public ex- chequer. A vast number of bank post-bills and bills of exchange are found in these dead letters, amounting in the whole to between two or three millions a year ; as in nearly all cases, however, they are duplicates, and of only nominal value, they are destroyed with the permission of the owners. According to Mr. Greer's return of 1858, 30,000 letters containing property reached the Dead Letter-office. Of the miscellaneous articles found in these letters, there 16 THE POST-OFFICE. is a very curious assortment. The ladies appear to find the Post-office a vast convenience, by the number of fancy articles of female gear found in them. Lace, ribands, hand- kerchiefs, cuffs, muffettees, gloves, fringe a range of articles, in short, is discovered in them sufficient to set up a dozen pedlars' boxes for Autolycus. Little presents of jewellery are also very commonly to be found ; rings, brooches, gold pins, and the like. These articles are sold to some jeweller, whilst the gloves and handkerchiefs, and other articles fitted for the young bucks of the office, are put up to auction and bought among themselves. These dead letters are the residuum, if we may so term it, of all the offices in England, as, after remaining in the local posts for a given time, they are transferred to the central office. The establishments of Dublin and Edinburgh, in like manner, collect all the same class of letters in Ireland and Scotland. In looking over the list of articles remaining in these two letter-offices, one cannot help being struck with the manner in which they illustrate the feelings and habits of the two peoples. The Scotch dead letters rarely contain coin ; and of articles of jewellery, such as form presents sent as tokens of affection, there is a lamentable deficiency ; whilst the Irish ones are full of little cadeaux and small sums of money, illustrating at once the careless yet affec- tionate nature of the people. One item constantly meets the eye in Irish dead letters "A free passage to New York/' Relations, who have gone to America and done well, purchase an emigration ticket, and forward it to some relative in the " ould country " whom they wish to come over to join them in their prosperity. Badly written and THE POST-OFFICE. 17 worse spelled, many of them have little chance of ever reaching their destination, and as little of being returned to those who sent them : they lie silent in the office for a time, and are then destroyed, whilst hearts, endeared to each other by absence enforced by the sundering ocean, mourn in sorrow an imaginary neglect. When one considers it, the duties of the Post-office are multifarious indeed. Independently of its original function as an establishment for the conveyance of letters, of late it has become a parcel-delivery company and banking-house. In the sale of postage-stamps it makes itself clearly a bank of issue, and in the circulation of money-orders it still more seriously invades the avocations of the Lombard- street fraternity. The money-order system has sprung up almost with the rapidity of Jack the Giant-killer's bean-stalk. In the year ending April, 1839, there were only 28,838 orders issued, representing 49,496. 5s. 8d. ; whilst in the year ending December, 1859, there were sold 6,969,108, value 13,250,930, or nearly one order to every four persons of the entire population of the kingdom. The next ten years will in all probability greatly enhance this amount, as the increase up to the present time has been quite gradual. It cannot be doubted that the issuing of money-orders must have seriously infringed upon the bank-draft system, and every day it will do so more, as persons no longer confine themselves to transmitting small amounts, it being fre- quently the case that sums of 50 and upwards are forwarded in this manner by means of a multiplication of orders. The rationale of money-orders is so simple, and so easily understood by all persons, that they must rapidly 18 THE POST-OFFICE. increase, and we do not doubt that Sir Rowland Hill's suggestion of making them for larger amounts will before long be carried into execution, as it is found that the public cannot be deterred, by limiting the amount of the order, from sending what sums they like, and the making one order supply the place of two or three would naturally diminish the very expensive labour of this department. The thirteen millions of money in round numbers repre- sented by these orders, of course includes the transactions of the whole country, but they are properly considered under the head of the General Office, as all the accounts are kept there, and there every money-order is ultimately checked. About 18,000 money-orders are issued daily in England and Wales, and a duplicate advice of every order is sent to the Chief Office in London for the purpose of recording the transaction and checking the Postmaster's accounts. These advices are examined and entered by upwards of 100 clerks. Formerly 200 were employed. Thus, while the work has increased, the establishment of clerks has been considerably reduced, a most commendable fact in a Government office. On the sale of money-orders the Government gains 4. 10s. per thousand (in num- ber) issued, and this more than covers the whole expense of the greatest monetary convenience for the body of the people ever established. There is one room in the Post-office which visitors should not fail to inquire for the late Secret Office. When Smirke designed the building he must have known the particular use to which this room would be put ; a more low-browed, villanous-looking apartment could not well be conceived. It looks the room of a sneak, and it THE POST-OFFICE. 19 was one an official sneak, it is true, but none the less a sneak. As we progress in civilization, force gives place to ingenious fraud. When Wolsey wished to gain possession of the letters of the ambassador to Charles V. he did so openly and dauntlessly, having ordered, as he says, " A privye watche shoulde be made in London, and by a certain circute and space aboutes it ; in the whiche watche, after mydnyght, was taken passing between London and Brayneford, be certain of the watche appointed to that quarter, one riding towards the said Brayneford ; who, examyned by the watche, answered so closely, that upon suspicion thereof, they searched hym, and founde secretly hyd aboutes hym a little pacquet of letters superscribed in Frenche." More modern ministers of state liked not this rough manner, but turning up their cuffs, and by the aid of a light finger, obtained what they wanted, without the suf- ferer being in the least aware of the activity of their digits. In this room the official letter-picker was appropriately housed. Unchallenged, and in fact unknown to any of the army of a thousand persons that garrisoned the Post- office, he passed by a secret staircase every morning to his odious duties ; every night he went out again unseen. He was, in short, the man in the iron mask of the Post- office. Behold him, in the latter day of his pride, in 1842, when the Chartists kept the north in commotion, and Sir James Graham issued more warrants authorizing the breaking open letters than any previous Secretary of State on record, behold him in the full exercise of his stealthy art ! c 2 20 THE posT-orncE. Some poor physical-force wretch at Manchester or Bir- mingham has been writing some trashy letters about pikes and fire-balls to his London confederates. See the springes a powerful government set to catch such miserable game ! Immediately upon the arrival of the mails from the north the bags from the above-mentioned places, together with one or two others to serve as a blind to the Post-office people, are immediately taken, sealed as they are, to the den of this secret inquisitor. He selects from them the letters he intends to operate upon. Before him lie the imple- ments of his craft a range of seals bearing upon them the ordinary mottoes, and a piece of tobacco-pipe. If none of the seals will fit the impressions upon the letters, he care- fully takes copies in bread ; and now the more serious operation commences. The tobacco-pipe red-hot pours a burning blast upon the yielding wax ; the letter is opened, copied, resealed, and returned to the bag, and reaches the person to whom it is directed, apparently unviolated. In the case of Mazzini's letters, however (the opening of which blew up the whole system), the dirty work was not even done by deputy ; his letters were forwarded unopened to the Foreign -office, and there read by the minister himself. The abuses to which the practice was carried during the last century were of the most flagrant kind. Walpole used to issue warrants for the purpose of opening letters in almost unlimited numbers, and the use to which they were sometimes put might be judged by the following : "In 1741, at the request of A., a warrant issued to permit A/s eldest son to open and inspect any letters which A/s youngest son might write to two females, THE POST-OFFICE. 21 one of whom that youngest son had imprudently mar- ried." The foregoing is from the Report of the Secret Com- mittee appointed to investigate the practice in 1844, and which contains some very curious matter. Whole mails, it appears, were sometimes detained for several days during the late war, and all the letters individually examined. French, Dutch, and Flemish enclosures were rudely rifled, and kept or sent forward at pleasure. There can be no doubt that in some cases, such as frauds upon banks or the revenue, forgeries, or murder, the power of opening letters was used, impartially to individuals and beneficially to the State ; but the discoveries made thereby were so few that it did not in any way counterbalance the great public crime of violating public confidence and perpetuating an official immorality. Thus far we have walked with our reader, and explained to him the curious machinery which acts upon the vast correspondence of the metropolis with the country, and of the country generally with foreign parts, within the establishment at St. Martin's-le-Grand. The machinery for its conveyance is still more vast, if not so intricate. The foreign mails have at their command a fleet of steamers such as the united navies of the world can scarcely match, threading the coral reefs of the " lone Antilles/' skirting the western coast of South America, touching weekly at the ports of the United States, and bi-monthly traversing the Indian Ocean tracking, in fact, the face of the deep wherever England has great interests or her sons have many friends. Even the vast Pacific, which a hundred years ago was rarely penetrated even by the adventurous 22 THE POST-OFFICE. circumnavigator, has become a highway for the passage of her Majesty's mails ; and letters pass to Australia and New Zealand, our very antipodes, as soon as the epistles of old reached the Highlands of Scotland or the western counties of Ireland. This vast system of water-posts, if so they might be called, is kept up at an annual expense of over 1,000,000 sterling. The conveyance of inland letters by means of the rail- ways is comparatively inexpensive, as many of the com- panies are liberal enough to take the bags at rates usually charged to the public for parcels ; the total cost for their carriage in 1854 being only ^446, 000. Every night and morning, like so much life-blood issuing from a great heart, the mails leave the metropolis, radiating on their fire-chariots to the extremities of the land. As they rush along, the work of digestion goes on as in the flying bird. The travelling post-office is not the least of those curious contrivances for saving time consequent upon the introduc- tion of railroads. At the metropolitan stations from which they issue, a letter-box is open until the last mo- ment of their departure. The last letters into it are, of course, unsorted, and have to go through that process as the train proceeds. Whilst the clerks are busy in their itinerant office, by an ingenious, self-acting process, a de- livery and reception of mail-bags is going on over their heads. At the smaller stations, where the trains do not stop, the letter-bags are lightly hung upon rods, which are swept by the passing mail-carriage, and the letters drop into a net suspended on one side of it to receive them. The bags for delivery are, at the same moment, transferred from the other side to the platform. The sorting of the THE POST-OFFICE. 23 newly-received bags immediately commences, and by this arrangement letters are caught in transitu, sorted, ar- ranged 'in districts, ready to be transferred to the district offices in the metropolis, without the trouble and loss of time attendant upon the old mail-coach system, which necessitated the carriage of the major part of such letters to St. Martin's-le- Grand previous to their final despatch. There have been a great number of pillar and wall letter- boxes erected since they were first introduced about four years ago, and the plan is found to be so convenient and economical that their erection continues at the rate of about 500 a year. In most cases, the public prefer these pillar- boxes to receiving houses, as their letters are safe from the scrutiny of curious post-mistresses and their gossips. The success of Sir Rowland Hill's system, with its double delivery, its rapid transmissions, and its great cheapness, which brings it within the range of the very poorest, is fast becoming apparent. Year by year it is increasing the amount of revenue it returns to the State, its profits for 1859 being 1,135,960, a falling off, it is true, of some 500,000 a year from the revenue derived under the old rates, but every day it is catching up this income, and another ten years of but average prosperity will, in all probability, place it far beyond its old receipts, with a tenfold amount of accommodation and cheapness to the public. As it is, the gross earnings have already done so by nearly ,^250,000 a year ; but the cost of distribution has, of course, vastly augmented with the great increase of letters which pass through the post under the penny rate. LONDON SMOKE. ALL those who have experienced the depressing effects of a November day, and have seen the atmosphere without a moment's warning put on the changeable complexion of a very bad bruise, and then resolve itself into a dull, leaden, hopeless hue, for the rest of the day, can readily under- stand the fixed belief of the Parisian that in that month Cockneys give themselves up to suicide, and leap in a constant stream from London-bridge. Indeed, a country- man from the breezy South Downs, or from any country village where the air "recommends itself nimbly to the senses/' may well feel his heart sink within him as he looks up in vain for the blue sky, and sees nothing but that solemn gray canopy of vapour which sits like an incubus on the whole town. It may be said that it is unfair to take a November fog as offering any specimen of the atmospheric impurities in the midst of which we live. It may be so, but we look upon fogs as providential inflictions, which at certain times in the year seize for our special edification, as it were, the offending elements, and exhibit them under our eyes and noses, in order to show us what filth we are con- LONDON SMOKED 25 tinually throwing into the air, and which as continually returns, although in not quite so demonstrative a manner. Smoke we have always with us. If we look out on a fine summer's day from the top of the Crystal Palace for a view of the great metropolis, we naturally exclaim, " I see it ; there is the smoke ;" indeed, any picture of London without its dim canopy of soot would be as unre- cognizable as would a portrait of Pope, Hogarth, or Cowper, without their well-known headgear. This black and heavy cloud is supported by the 500,000 or 600,000 columns of smoke that arise from the 400,000 houses of London. In it we behold the great aerial coal- field, which contains annually no less than 200,000 tons of fuel that escapes from us up our chimneys. Escapes, did we say ? Oh that it did, and that we never heard or saw more of it ; but smoke, like a chicken, still returns to roost. We do not allude to " those horrid blacks " that dance and waltz before our very eyes, and then maliciously plump down upon the ample page of some fine edition, or "squat" deliberately upon the most delicate distance of a sketch by Copley Fielding or Cox, but to those finer blacklets that invisibly permeate the air. If we look at any fracture through which a draught penetrates, a cracked window or a shrunken skirtingboard, we shall find that the edges are ragged, with a fine fringe of soot pointing towards the fireplace ; this fact alone is enough to demonstrate that the air is charged both inside and outside our houses with a vast amount of infinitely divided carbon. If it is depo- sited in this manner by the mere friction of passing any object, we may imagine what irritation it must occasion to 26 LONDON SMOKE. the human lungs, into which it is sucked 30 times in the minute, converting them, as it were, into a temporary coalscuttle, out of which we are perpetually compelled to shovel the obnoxious intruder with a cough. The effect upon vegetable life is still more striking ; the plane, which annually throws off its greatcoat of soot, is the only tree which will flourish in London. Young wives fresh from the country in the summertime beguile them- selves with the idea that they will snatch a recollection of home every morning by a view of the blooming geraniums and rosetrees in the balcony. Alas ! in a month's time you shall see the debris of smutty stalks and melancholy flowerpots in the back court, and she never tries the ex- periment again. If vegetation grows black, our children grow white, and perish in far greater numbers than they would do in purer air. Life suffering thus, under the dominion of smoke, what shall we say of fabrics of all kinds, furniture, &c., which have not the capacity to throw it off? Families who have a town and country experience have only to compare their washing bills to perceive how enormously a residence in the former aug- ments them. The loss to Londoners from this source alone must amount to millions sterling in the course of the year. But every article that is capable of being spoilt by the most tenacious of all floating pigments suffers alike, and in an incredibly short time tones down to the pre- vailing leaden hue. Five centuries ago the very condition to which the smoke nuisance has brought us was foretold, and attempts were made to avert it. Until the time of Edward II. London used only wood for fuel, drawn from the neighbour- LONDON SMOKE.' 27 ing forests. In this reign, however, coal began to be imported from Newcastle, and, the effects of the smoke speedily showing themselves, Parliament in 1316 peti- tioned the King to prohibit its use in London, on the ground of its being a public nuisance ; whereupon he ordered all who burnt seaborne coal to be mulcted, and on a second offence, to have their furnaces demolished. Like most unnecessarily severe orders, however, it speedily fell into abeyance, and the evil from that time has been going on apace. At the Restoration, there were only 200,000 chaldrons imported ; in 1775, 500,000 arrived ; a quan- tity which had increased to 900,000 at the beginning of the present century, and now upwards of 6,000,000 tons are received in the metropolis by land and sea. " Things when they are at their worst generally mend," says the old proverb. It required, however, a great deal of apparently hopeless agitation of the smoke question in Parliament to make that slowly-moved body entertain the idea of removing the nuisance by a public act, and it was not until 1854 that the measure now under review came into operation. According to this act, no furnaces em- ployed in the metropolis, with certain exceptions to be mentioned presently, are to be used without being so con- structed as to burn their own smoke, under a penalty of not less than 40s., and not more than 5., while for a second offence King Edward's punishment of "demolition" is almost equalled by the fine of ^10, " and for each succeeding conviction a sum double the amount of the penalty imposed for the last succeeding conviction." As a considerable portion of the penalty inflicted goes to the informer, it may be readily imagined how narrowly the 28 LONDON SMOKE. 6,500 furnace chimneys which come under the act are watched. The smoke-producing districts lie almost entirely over the water, in the parishes of Lambeth, Bermondsey, Kotherhithe, and the Borough of Southwark. Here lie the greater portion of the factories such as those of tanners, bone-boilers, brewers, saw-mills, flour-mills, dis- tillers, and engineers, whose wealthy proprietors, before the passing of this act, were in the habit of deluging the town with the densest smoke, while they retired themselves every evening, with the most philosophic indifference, to their country villas, far away from its baleful influence. Nothing can be more satisfactory than the working of the act to abate the smoke nuisance. You may steam it many times up and down between Westminster and London-bridge and see the tall chimneys on the South- wark bank standing idle in the air. Upon its first passing, its utter and early failure was predicted ; but the Home Secretary is not the man to let a measure fail in his hands ; and, people having found this out, are gradually complying with its provisions. One would have imagined that the proved gain to the manufacturer of 12 per cent, on the amount of coals con- sumed by either Jukes's, Hazeldine's, or Hall's smoke- consuming furnace would have been sufficient to induce their adoption without the interference and coercion of the law ; but such has not yet proved to be the case in any considerable degree. The advanced and more enlightened manufacturers such as Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, & Co., the great brewers, and Price & Co., the patent candle- makers, indeed, adopted smoke-consuming furnaces long LONDON SMOKE. 29 before the passing of the act, and the latter company have introduced them into their great factory on the banks of the Mersey, near Liverpool. It is not our purpose here to enter into any account of the different smoke-consuming furnaces which have lately beeen patented, and it will be sufficient to state that the principle of all those in general use is the same. By the action of movable furnace-bars a thin stratum of coal is continually pushed under the fire, and, of course, all the smoke has to ascend through the incandescent mass, and is consumed in its passage. Al- though this plan entirely meets the requirements of the act, yet it cannot be concealed that it does not consume the carburetted hydrogen, the carbonic oxide, and the various hydro-carbons all of which escape in the form of thin unindictable vapour, of a highly obnoxious character. "We ought to be able to adjust the quantity of oxygen to the quantity of disengaged gases requiring its presence to produce combustion in the furnace as easily as we do in a moderator lamp, where the slightest motion of a screw converts the angry and lampblack-giving flame into a pure white light. Attempts have been made, we believe, to produce such furnaces, but we know not with what success. The second clause of the act provides that all steam- boats plying above London-bridge shall have their furnaces so constructed as to consume their own smoke. At first sight one certainly cannot see why the unfortunate people on the banks of the river below bridge should be con- demned to wear out a sooty existence by reason of this arbitrary demarcation of the stream ; indeed we feel strongly inclined to think that the framers of the act 30 LONDON SMOKE. must have plagiarized this idea from the announcement generally posted upon the paddlebox, of " No smoking allowed abaft the funnel/' west-enders, like cabin passen- gers, being supposed to demand an exemption which is not accorded to less fastidious people. The reason urged for this distincton is that ocean-going steamers never pass London-bridge ; but why these leviathans of passage, which unfurl such long pennants of smoke, should be allowed to escape free, while the penny boats are pounced upon, we are at a loss to know. The Bridegroom and the Bride are forced to burn anthracite coal or to alter their furnaces, but the magnificent Dundee or Ostend steamers may do as they like ; and, still more absurdly, Waterman No. 3, that plies between Hungerford and Woolwich, may fume away as merrily as it pleases until it passes under London-bridge, but then it must cease to smoke as sud- denly as any young gentleman in a train, when the suspecting guard pops his inquiring nose in at the window. Perhaps Lord Palmerston has given the west-enders the best of it by water, as a compensation for their sufferings by land, for the pedestrian passing by the Penitentiary is surprised to see the chimneys on the Lambeth side, between Westminster and Vauxhall bridges, staining the air with smoke as they did of old. These belong to glassworks and potteries, which are especially exempted from the opera- tions of this act ! How long such obnoxious exceptions are to remain and abuse the patience of the public is a question which, perhaps, the Home Secretary can best answer. Since the six thousand and odd chimney shafts of the metropolis have been put under the surveillance of in- LONDON SMOKE. 31 formers and policemen, who watch their tops as a terrier would a rathole, the air has become sensibly purer on the south side of the river. It cannot be supposed, however, that the total suppression of smoke in all manufacturers' chimneys will have more than a partial effect in freeing the town from floating carbon. We have still left the reeking chimneys of the 390,000 and odd houses of the metropolis to keep up the dismal cloud for ever hanging over us. The question naturally arises, Can we put out the smoke of the domestic hearth ? Dr. Arnott has attempted to solve this question by the introduction of his improvement upon Cutler's smoke-consuming fire- grate. We have seen this burning on the premises of Mr. Edwards, the manufacturer, in Poland-street, and we can safely say that if it will work as well under domestic supervision as it does there, nothing more is required. The grate is the ordinary fireplace, having underneath it, in lieu of the under bars, a square iron coal-box, which has a movable bottom. In the morning this box is filled with coal, and the fire is then built and lit in the ordinary manner. As it consumes, instead of replenishing it with coals placed upon the top, by means of a bent poker, which acts as a levtfer, you press up the bottom of the coal-box, and thus supply as much fuel as you require below the fire ; of course, there is no smoke, and it is warranted to burn for fourteen hours with 20 Ib. of coal. An ordinary fire is generally allowed a medium-sized scuttle a-day, which must weigh from 28 Ib. to 30 Ib. The saving of fuel, according to this calculation, is very great. Cf course, if there is no smoke, there is no soot produced, and therefore no fear of chimneys catching 32 LONDON SMOKE. fire, with their inevitable results horrid fire-engines and officious policemen, who mulct you at the rate of about 5s. per spark. We do not see why in the course of time the smoke nuisance in London should not be entirely abated ; and, when that period shall come, what shall we have gained ? The crisp, bright atmosphere of Paris, for the suicidal peasoup air of London, during a portion of the year, at least. Does our reader doubt it ? Has he never expe- rienced $ perfect sensation, strolling home in the small hours some spring morning, at being able to see from the top to the bottom of Bond-street, and to distinguish the slightest detail of architecture at a hundred yards' distance ? Every fine summer morning of our existence this smoky, dirty town is born afresh, bright and clear, like Venus rising from the sea, only to descend upon the wheel of night black and grim as Pluto himself. Let us conquer this smoke nuisance, scare away this nightmare of our own producing, and who shall say that the richest capital in the world shall continue one of the ugliest ? It lies within our power to perpetuate throughout the day to a certain extent the morning's pellucid atmo- sphere by act of Parliament, and by private economy as effectually as we are now purifying our water. When we shall have done this, Decimus Burton will no longer labour in vain, and we shall cease to be guilty of the folly of introducing Greek or Italian architecture, with a certainty of seeing all details incrusted and lost in a few years beneath a covering of soot. Passing on the north side of St. Mary-le- Strand Church the other day we perceived with astonishment some exquisite carvings of cherubim, LONDON SMOKE. 33 flowers, and fruit over the heads of the windows, which had just been disinterred by workmen from their grave of soot, where for years they had been as completely hidden from human view as the Nineveh marbles were by the sandheaps of Mossul. If a still more glaring example were wanting of injury done to our architecture by the fugitive fuel of our fires, there stands St. Paul's. For generations the full tide of London life has passed around it, without learning the lesson it teaches. The picture-cleaner places a p&trait in his window, one half restored to its original freshness, the other clogged with dirt. Wind and rain, the cleaners of nature, have swept the south side of the metropolitan cathedral in its upper half, and kept the Portland stone as bright as it came from the quarry, while the lower half, which is protected by the surrounding houses, is coated with dismal carbon. Nay, as if to teach the passer-by more distinctly the evil smoke is doing it, we have one side of a pillar white and the other black ; and St. Paul himself, crowning the southern pediment, smiles benignly with a pure and spotless right cheek and side, while the drapery hanging over his left arm is thickly lined with soot ! Never did any building cry out in a more dramatic manner to be purified and protected from pollution. While the smoke nuisance continues, of course decora- tions in colour of any semi-exposed building are absurd. Mr. Sang's polychromic embellishments of the arcade of the Royal Exchange have to be repainted every ten years ; the cobalt tympanum of the British Museum is becoming a good fog colour ; the pictures in the National GaDery D o* LONDON SMOKE. are deteriorating ; Owen Jones is in despair ; and all because we will send our coal up the chimneys at an average cost of 26s. a-ton, in order that it may distribute itself broadcast upon ourselves, our goods, and our public works of art ! MOCK AUCTIONS. PASSING along one of the most crowded thoroughfares of the city the other day, I was attracted by the arrange- ments made for the sale of a " respectable tradesman's stock." Large placards pasted on the shop-windows an- nounced that Mr. Ichabod had the honour to announce to the nobility and public in general, that he was about to dispose of a valuable stock by order of the proprietors ; and long slips of paper shooting diagonally across the whole shop-front, like a flight of rockets, inscribed with " This Day/' in large letters, testified to the vehement desire of the proprietor to realise without more delay. The dishevelled state of the goods in the window well seconded these outward appearances. A plated coffee-pot, of rather florid design, with a deep smear of tarnish across its bulging sides ; a candlestick, with resplendent glass pendules, ornamented with doubtful ormolu work ; and a lady's work-table of papier mache, varnished to within an inch of its life, and so deposited as to show the full glare of the flagrant rose wreath that ornamented its top ; spoke of the rather mixed nature of the stock now in the agonies of dissolution within. As I entered the shop the bidding was not very active, D 2 36 MOCK AUCTIONS. nor the compary large. Indeed, the group of bidders looked almost as Hfeless as the figures in a stereoscope, and the lots passed with pantomimic silence. No one looked round, but it was evident my footstep over the threshold gave a gentle electric shock of pleasure to the assembled company. The auctioneer seemed suddenly to find his voice, the bidding grew brisker, and the splendid china tea-service, as if by magic, seemed to become the object of keen contention ; the whole company leapt at once into life, as though I were the fairy prince who had suddenly broken into the enchanted palace. I ventured to ask a tall gentleman, who volunteered to assist me in my biddings, for a catalogue. They were not selling by catalogue that day, he said, as the trade were not there ; and I should therefore embrace the opportunity to get bargains. Taking a quiet but comprehensive glance around me, I certainly could neither see any signs, nor smell the proximity, of that lively race which is indigenous to ordinary sale-rooms. There was a tall man, dressed in a brown coat, that hung down to his feet, with a face long and lean, and of a most simple expression. His modest white neckcloth, neatly folded beneath his old-fashioned waistcoat, and his rather large hands encased in black woollen gloves, gave me the idea that he was the respected deacon of some provincial Zion. As a contrast to this unsophisticated individual, there was a rough man in top boots and corduroys, with a huge comforter tied in a great bunch under his chin ; whilst in his hand he held a cud- gel, greatly exaggerated about the knots. He might have been a drover. The rest of the company were remarkably nosey and breast-pinny. MOCK AUCTIONS. 37 " Come, show the gentleman the matchless Dresden service/' said the auctioneer. Whereat the company instantly seemed to part down the middle, and I found myself raked by the piercing eye of the presiding functionary. My friend the deacon appeared all of a sudden to take an amazing fancy to that splendid service, for he stretched out a nervous hand to examine a cup, when it slipped through his fingers, and broke upon the floor. My friend apologized for his awkwardness, and begged to be allowed to pay for his mishap ; but the auctioneer would not hear of it it was quite an accident he was among gentlemen, who would treat him as such. My heart began to soften ; possibly it was a genuine concern, after all : I actually made a bid. It had been a bad day, I suppose, in consequence of the " absence of the trade/' Be that as it may, the sight of a naked foot-mark did not more astonish Crusoe than did apparently the sound of my voice the assembled company. "One pound ten/' I cried. " Why, you're a making game/' said my tall friend. " Why, it's a hundred-guinea set. Two pounds ten." " It's only Stafford ware/' I retorted. " Only Stafford, is it ? " he remarked, with a faint laugh : "I should say they was Sayvres." But the auctioneer held me with his " glittering eye." " Let the gentleman come forward," he said : " they was made for the Grand Dock of Saxe Coburg, only they wasn't finished in time." " Indeed/' said I : " that was a pity." I suppose there must have been some peculiarity in the 38 MOCK AUCTIONS. tone of my voice, for I instantly perceived that I had in- curred the displeasure of the gentlemen around me, and my position was beginning to grow rather unpleasant, as all the noses and breast-pins converged upon me in rather a threatening attitude. The deacon alone looked mildly on. At that moment I was aware of a fresh footstep on the floor, the same gentle electric shock as before seemed to pervade the bidders, and the rather bloated gentleman in the rostrum gave a slightly perceptible start, just as a spider does when a bluebottle blunders into his web. And now I discovered how it was that the company could see so well what was going on behind them ; for on the oppo- site wall hung a looking-glass, and in it I could see an unmistakable country clergyman timidly looking at a "genuine Raphael." " Jim/' said the auctioneer, sotto xoce, " tip us the old master/' In a moment the " Grand Dook " tea-service was knocked down to a sulky-looking bidder in a blue bird's- eye cravat, and Jim staggered beneath the weight of a remarkably brown Virgin, encased in a resplendent frame. " The pictures I have the honour to submit to your bidding this morning, gentlemen," commenced the auc- tioneer, in the most impressive voice, " have been brought to the hammer under the most peculiar I may say unpre- cedented circumstances. The late proprietor a noble- man ransacked the stores of foreign collectors, and pur- chased, regardless of cost, the few, but priceless gems I now have the honour of submitting to your notice. Un- fortunately, circumstances have compelled his representa- MOCK AUCTIONS. 39 tives to realise, without a moment's delay, in short, they must be sold for what they will fetch. The first lot, gentlemen, is a genuine Raphael, originally in the collec- tion of Cardinal Ritz. It is a genuine engraved picture," remarked the official, examining some apocryphal memo- randum through his gold eye-glass, " termed the Virgin and Twilight, which accounts for the dark and solemn nature of the subject/' The noses and the pins now became violently agitated. " Ah ! that ain't for such as we," said one. "No," said another ; "it's a pity it should be put up when the trade ain't here." " Come, gentlemen, make your bidding," said the voice from the rostrum, " you must have it at your own price." " Well, then, just to give it a start," said the gentleman in the blue bird's eye neckerchief, " I'll say 5." " "What ! for this untouched picture," almost shrieked the horror-stricken auctioneer. " More likely 500." The noses began to grow excited. They actually seemed bidding "five pun ten," "six pun," "seven pun ; " but the clergyman made no sign. " Gentlemen," said the auctioneer, wiping the sweat of agony from his brow, " I cannot rob my employers in this way. What ! only seven pounds for this untouched gem of Italian art ! Jim, run round to the executor's, in Doctors' Commons, and ask him if I must throw the pictures away into the dirt in this manner." Jim obeyed the order ; and, calculating the time it would take to go and return, in pipes and goes, quietly stepped into an adjoining tap. In about five minutes he rushed back. " Mr. 40 MOCK AUCTIONS. says they must go at any price they must be closed at once/ 7 " Very well You hear what he says, gentlemen ; it's not my fault go it shall ; " and with a look of horror he held the hammer aloft, " Going at seven pounds." " Let me look/' gently interposed the clergyman. He looked, wiped the Virgin's face with a wetted handker- chief, and scrutinised the worm-eaten panel, enriched with the seal of the art-loving cardinal. " Here's the buyer for the National Gallery coming/' remarked the tall man by his side. " Ah ! I thought he wouldn't be far off to-day," said the auctioneer, exultingly, " Eight pounds ! " cried the clergyman. " Wait a minute," said the auctioneer ; " here's a gen- tleman coming that knows what a good picture is. " Nine pounds ! " shouted the deacon. " Fifteen pounds ! " cried the new comer, scarcely deigning to look at the gem. " Twenty pounds ! " faintly but hastily rejoined the clergyman. The purchaser for the National Gallery, for some unaccountable reason which Mr. Conyngham should in- quire into, would not go further, and the clergyman gained what the nation should have possessed so said the auctioneer. "You've been and made your fortune, sir/' said the deacon ; and so the worthy purchaser seemed to think. I fancy I can see that dear old black-gaitered pastor, in his snug vicarage, standing, some fine morning, before his priceless gem, his finger and thumb between the fresh-cut MOCK AUCTIONS. 41 leaves of this week's Guardian, pointing out its beauties to a brother of the cloth. " Snapped it up, sir, for a bagatelle, under the nose of the National Gallery purchaser a gem from the Petti Palace sold under a distress for rent/' What other ancient masters were given away on that day I know not ; for, happening to hazard some mild doubt as to the genuineness of the Raphael, the deacon, to my amazement and horror, addressed a few words to my private ear that I never dreamed could have fallen from his simple evangelical lips. I shall not repeat them, but merely content myself by saying, that with Doric strength he intimated that I had better depart, or it would be the worse for me ; and, taking the hint, I retired. Since that occasion, I have passed the establishment several times, and, I regret to say, Mr. Ichabod has not yet accomplished the sale of the whole of the stock, nor has the deacon yet returned to the duties of his local Zion. He still bids with charming simplicity for the china tea-service ; nay, it would appear that he is not yet cured of that nervous bashfulness which led him to break the tea-cup, for I saw him repeat his misfortune, with many apologies, only yesterday ; and, if I am not greatly mistaken, I also perceived a pile of tea-cups behind the rostrum, which the benevolent proprietor, to all appear- ances, has provided against his unfortunate casualties. Strange to say, the cattle-dealer has not yet been able to tear himself away from the excitement of the bidding. At the same time that we must admire the skill with which some figures in these little dramas play their parts, I cannot help thinking that, on one or two points, there 42 MOCK AUCTIONS. is room for improvement, and if Mr. Ichabod is not proud, I will venture to make a suggestion or two. In the first place, why does he not introduce one or two lady bidders representatives of those stout females, all false- front and catalogues, who cheapen pots and pans at genuine sales ? Then, to make it look more like the real thins:, there should be a little more chaffing groino- O' O O O on quarrelling with the auctioneer anything to break up the ghost-like silence of the bidders. I miss, too, our old friend the porter one of those grimy individuals into whose soul dirty carpet has entered. Surely the genius that dressed the deacon and manages his deport- ment is equal to improvising so necessary a functionary. There is another point which strikes me as entirely neglected. There should be more bustle among the company, more in-coming, and out-going. Why could they not pass out by a back-door and in again at the mart-entrance, thus economising their numbers as they do in grand processions at the theatres ? Some arrange- ment of this sort would give to the scene an out-of- door life which at present is altogether wanting, and the absence of which tends to excite the public suspicion, which might, with great advantage (to the proprietors), be avoided by a little ingenuity. The next time I pass Mr. Ichabold's establishment, I shall see if he is above taking the hints I thus freely throw out. HYDE PARK I REMEMBER often in my student days to have watched with eager eyes the breathing lung of a frog to have seen, focussed in the microscope, the apparatus at work which supports the ever -burning lamp of life. Distinctly within the narrow field of vision I could see the dark red blood globules, rushing in a tumultuous tide along the transparent veins, then pacing slowly as the veins broke up into a delicate net-work of little vessels, so narrow that they could only pass in Indian file ; then again I beheld them debouching into the widening arteries, where they commenced once more their mad race, one over the other : no longer purple, but under the influence of the air, which in their slow progress had permeated them a brilliant scarlet. With that curious spectacle fresh in my recollection, I will, in imagination at least, change " the field " of the microscope for that of air, and suspend myself in a balloon over this mighty city of millions. Slowly, as I rise, casting out sand in the ascent, the earth seems to recede from me, and at last all is gray mist, and a few fleecy clouds. A little adjustment of the sand-bags and the escape-valve, and I can focus London as the physiologist does the frog's lung in the microscope. Directly under- 44 HYDE PARK, neath me, hemmed in by a huddled mass of brick and stone, lies a large open space, traversed by wide white lines, along which crowd and jostle a flood of small dark spots, no bigger than the heads of pins out of these wide lines branch an infinite net-work of small lines across the open space, sprinkled with many dots, which fall in crowds once more into the wide white lines. The small dots which enter the open space look pale and worn ; as they circulate about, their colour changes ; they move quicker and lighter ; and at last roll out of the great space, florid and bright. Surely, I have only been looking at the frog's lung again, magnified a little more ! No, I have been peering at Hyde Park, watching Rotten Row, and the drive, and the different pathways crowded with holiday people. I have been looking at a lung, too ; for what are all these dark points, but people repre- senting blood globules, which, in the aggregate compose the great tide of life ? And what is this park but an aerator to the race, as the one I before looked at was to the individual ! Let me descend to a more minute anatomy of this great pulmonic space : dropping myself just inside the beautiful screen of Hyde Park-corner. Five o'clock, and Rotten Row alive with equestrians ! Far away between majestic elms, now gently dipping into the hollow, now slightly ascending the uneven ground, made as soft and as full as tan can make it, runs, in the very eye of the setting sun, this superb horse promenade. And here comes a goodly company, seven abreast, sweeping along with slackened rein ; the young athletes on the Elgin marbles yonder upon the frieze of the screen do not seem more a portion of their horses than those gay young fellows, whispering cour- HYDE PARK. 45 tesies to the ladies so bright-eyed and supple of waist, who gently govern with delicate small hands their fiery-eyed steeds. Single riders trot steadily past, as though they were doing it for a wager. Dandies drawl along, superbly indifferent to everything about them, with riding-sticks " based on hip/' And when I reach the Albert Gate, all Belgravia seems pouring out through the narrow streets on prancing, dancing, arch-necked steeds. Where all the horses come from is the wonder to me. As far as the eye can see, out far into Kensington, where the perspective of the road is lost in feathery birch trees, I see nothing but prancing, dancing horses, tossing their heads, caracolling, humbly obeying the directions of delicate wrists, or chafing at the curb of powerful bridle-hands. Nor do they end here ; over the bridge and round the drive, the contingents from Tyburnia pour along in troops ; and now, as I come to the corner of Kensington Gardens, there is a perfect congestion of equestrians, listening to the band of the Life Guards playing a waltz. There they are, ranged round the great trees, English men and maidens, and English horses, all thorough-bred as noble a group as the wide world can show, whilst over head, the thick fan-like green leaves of the chesnut- trees cast a pleasant shade. Meanwhile, the drive is gorged with carriages moving along at a foot-pace. Let me constitute myself (for the nonce) a young man about town, and comfortably resting my arms over the railings, take a good stare at the passing beauty. I need not feel bashful. As far as I can see, for hundreds of feet on each side of me, there is nothing but young men leaning over the railing, tapping their teeth with their dandy little sticks, and making the most 46 HYDE PARK. powerful use of cheir eyes. Here I watch moving before me the great portrait gallery of living British beauties. Every instant a fresh profile passes in review, framed and glazed by the carriage window. Onward rolls the tide of vehicles of dashing cabs with pendant tigers of chariots with highly-groomed horses of open phaetons, the reins of faultless white, guided by lady whips of family coaches, ancient and respectable. Now and then some countryman and his " missus," in a home-made chaise- cart, seem to have got accidentally entangled among the gay throng, and move along sheepishly enough. On they go all to where Kensington Gardens leans, like a sister, beside her bolder brother, Hyde Park ; and here all alight and pour in a bright flood of moving colour upon the emerald turf. Country people pity us poor town people, and wonder how we can exist ! Did anybody ever see such a public park as this in the country? / never did. Indeed, I question if there be a prettier promenade in Europe than the north bank of the Serpentine, with its mimic beach of broken shells, washed by its fresh- water lake. Here, where I stand, might be called the port ; underneath tall syca- more trees, which cast a pleasant shade on the edge of the water, are grouped the various boats which hail from this place. There is a cutter, with flapping sails, just come off a cruise ; another is beating up in the wind's eye a quarter of a mile off ; a third comes sweeping in with her gunwale under water. There is some respectable sailing to be picked up on the Serpentine, I suppose. Near the pic- turesque little boat-house, which, with its weather-beaten carved gables and moss-grown roof, looks as though it had HYDE PARK. 47 been an old inhabitant of some Swiss valley, lie grouped a dozen light skiffs, dancing on the water, and reflecting on their sides the twisting snakes of gold cast from the sun-lit little waves. But what are all those mimic skiffs I see, coasting from shore to shore cutters, sloops, and schooners, now on their beam-ends, now sliding in between the swans, which scarcely deign to turn aside their feathery breasts ? These, at least, are playthings. Not at all. One of the boatmen, with a straw in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets, informs me that they form the squadron of the London Model Yacht Club, and that they are testing their powers for the next sailing match. I am not quite sure that those grave-looking men with long poles, watching the per- formances of the different craft, are not the members of the Club. That big man there may be, for anything I know, the commodore for they have a commodore, and rules, and a clubroom, and they sail matches for silver cups ! Look into Bell's Life in London, a week or two since, and there you will find full particulars of the next match of the Yacht Club, " established in 1845," which is to come off in next June, for a handsome twelve-guinea cup, and which informs us that the measurements must be as follows : " The length, multiplied by the beam, not to exceed five hundred inches over all ; the keel, for cutters, or yawls, not more than two feet six inches ; and for two-masted vessels, two feet ten inches, on the level of the rabbet, with not less than four inches counter/' It is a very serious sporting matter. The vice-commodore of the sister Club at Birkenhead having proposed, by advertisement, to change the flags of the Club, " the white ensign to be 48 HYDE PARK. without the cross," &c., the editor of our sporting contem- porary gravely oujects, " that the alteration of our national ensign cannot be legally made without the written sanction of the Admiralty/' Fast young boats these ! For the cup, some years ago, fifteen yachts started, and the different heats lasted the whole day ; the A merica, modelled on the lines of the famous Yankee boat, coming off victorious. It is a pretty sight to see these little cutters driving along under full sail ; and many an old gentleman, standing amid his boys, I have noticed enjoying it to his heart's content. After watching them for some little time, one's ideas of proportion get confused ; they look veritable ships sailing upon a veritable great lake ; the trees, the men, the sheep on the shore, swell into immense propor- tions, and it seems as if one were contemplating the fleet of Lilliput from the shores of Brobdignag. A little farther on stands the boat-house belonging to the Royal Humane Society ; and in it are seen the awful- looking " drags" with which the drowning are snatched from Death's black fingers. Across the road is the esta- blishment for recovering those who have been rescued from the water. Over the door is the bas-relief of a child attempting to kindle with his breath an apparently extin- guished torch, and around it is the motto : " Lateat forsan scintilla," Perhaps a spark still lingers. Baths, hot-water beds, electrifying machines, and mechanism by which artificial breathing can be maintained, are ranged around the rooms. The majority of poor creatures carried beneath these portals are persons who have sought their own destruction. The bridge across the Serpentine is the Westminster HYDE PARK. 49 " Bridge of Sighs/' Who would think this bright and sunny spot could be the haunt of suicides ? They are mostly women of the better order, who have been brought to shame and abandoned at least five women to one man being the proportion. The servants of the Society, who form a kind of detective water-police, and are always on the look-out, scarcely ever fail to mark and to watch the women who contemplate self-destruction. They know them by their usually sitting all day long without food, griev- ing ; towards evening they move. When they find they are watched, they sometimes contrive by hiding behind the trees to elude observation, and to find the solitude they desire. The men, less demonstrative and more deter- mined, escape detection, and but too often succeed in ac- complishing their purpose. Those who have been restored to life, after hours of attention in the receiving-house, fre- quently repay the attendants with, " Why should I live against my will?" Nevertheless, it very rarely happens, here, at least, that a second attempt at suicide is made. While I have been dwelling upon this melancholy sub- ject, the shades of evening have been coming on. The last carriage has driven off, and the last young man about town has tapped his teeth with his cane for the last time, and departed to his club. The water's edge is only thinly dotted with people, and the old gentlemen who have been sitting reading on the seats have gone in to escape the night-air. Gradually, however, I perceive a gathering of boys upon the opposite shore ; they thicken apace, and soon the hum of hundreds of small voices is wafted over towards me ; they line the whole shore for a mile, like little black E 50 HYDE PARK. dots. As I look, the black dots gradually become party- coloured. What are they doing here in the boat-house ? Getting ready a flag to hoist on the pole ; three boats are also putting off. What is it that excites and moves to and fro the living multitude on the other side ? The whole mass is turning white with frantic rapidity ; up runs the red bunting, and five thousand youngsters dash simultaneously into the water, driving it in a huge wave before them. As far as can be seen along the bank, the water is studded with heads, like pins in a pincushion ; some of the heads move out into the middle ; the great majority remain timidly near the shore, splashing and dashing with hands and feet. The boats have taken up their different sta- tions, and here they will remain, ready to go to the rescue so long as the bathing continues. At nine o'clock the flag drops, and " All out \" roared from stentorian lungs, booms over the water : " All out ! " is echoed by many silvery young voices. The opposite bank is again a moving mass of white specks : these deepen to gray, soon become black, and then move off across the green, and all is quiet. Morning and evening, during the summer months, the Serpentine is thus made a huge bath for the children of the labouring classes. The better classes also make use of it early in the morning. One party of gentlemen, who have formed themselves into a club, bathe here all the year round; and when the frost is very hard and the ice is very thick, a space is cut for them with hatchets, to enable them to take their diurnal dip. The twilight deepens. A few children, feeding the swans upon the margin of the water, is all the human life HYDE PARK. 51 to be seen of the vast tide rolling along so incessantly a short time ago. Across the glass-like lake the waterfowl, here and there, are gently sailing, leaving long trails of silver as they go. Over the bridge the foliage seems to float in a bath of purple haze, and across the deep amber of the sky a flight of wildfowl go, in swiftly moving line. Danby should be here to paint from it one of his delicious pictures of evening. E 2 THE SUCTION POST. ONE great invention draws others in its train. The locomotive necessitated the telegraph, and with the tele- graph we have grown dissatisfied with our whole postal system. We can converse with each other at opposite ends of the kingdom, yet a letter will sometimes take half a day journeying from one extremity of the metropolis to the other. Our great nerves and arteries (the telegraphic and railway systems) put the four corners of the earth in speedy communication with each other, considering the hundreds of millions of square miles they serve ; but the central heart, London, is a blank in the general system, and the utmost speed with which its distances can be travelled is measured by the pace of a Hansom cab. Three millions of people are naturally dissatisfied with this state of things, and busy brains are hard at work attempting to remedy it. At the present moment, in fact, there is a race to lay down a metropolitan nervous system. If the reader happens to go into the City, he sees above the house-tops and across the river science weaving a vast spider's web from point to point. The sky is gradually becoming laced with telegraph wires, along which messages THE SUCTION POST. 53 of love, of greed, of commerce, speed unseen. These wires belong to the District Telegraphic Company, and perform the office of putting public offices in communica- tion with each other, of supplying the nervous system between the Docks and the Exchange, carrying the news of the moment and the price of stocks from the counting- house of the merchant to his snuggery far down in the country, hard beside some railway. But the spider's web is also extending beneath our feet ; if we take up the flags, there too we find the fine filaments traversing in their iron sheaths, linking railway station to railway station, and speeding the message under the feet of millions from one telegraphic line to another. With all these facilities for forwarding urgent messages between given points, however, the town still wants some rapid augmentation of its ordinary carrying system. We are going to shoot passengers from point to point by means of a subterraneous railway. Shall letters and parcels still toilfully pursue their way, urged by sorry screws and weary postmen ? Or shall we not harness another power of Nature to relieve our toil ? When a lounger on a very hot day sits down under an awning, and goes to work upon his sherry-cobbler, he notes with satisfaction how immediately and how smoothly the liquor glides up the straw upon the application of his lips to it. But the odds are that he never associated with this movement the Post Office or the London Parcels Delivery Company in any manner whatever. Yet, if we are not greatly mistaken, the power at work in that straw is destined to revolutionize the machinery of those very important metropolitan associa- 54 THE SUCTION POST. tions. There are some people perverse enough to turn the dislikes of others to their own special profit. Now a company has heen formed, and is in actual working, to take advantage of a special dislike of Nature. We all know that our great mother abhors a vacuum ; but the Pneumatic Despatch Company, on the contrary, very much admires it, inasmuch as they see in it their way to a vast public benefit and profit to themselves. For some years the International Telegraph Company have employed this new power to expedite their own business. Thus their chief office at Lothbury has been for some time put in communication with the Stock Exchange and their stations at Cornhill and Mincing Lane, and written messages are sucked through tubes, thus avoiding the necessity of repeating each message. We witnessed the apparatus doing its ordinary work only the other day in the large telegraphic apartment of the com- pany in Telegraph Street, Moorgate Street. Five metal tubes, of from two to three inches in diameter, are seen trained against the wall, and coming to an abrupt termina- tion opposite the seat of the attendant who ministers to them. In connection with their butt-ends other smaller pipes are soldered on at right angles ; these lead down to an air-pump below, worked by a small steam-engine. There is another air-pump and engine, of course, at the other end of the pipe, and thus suction is established to and fro through its whole length. Whilst we are looking at the largest pipe we hear a whistle ; this is to give notice that a despatch is about to be put into the tube at Mincing Lane, two-thirds of a mile distant. It will be necessary therefore to exhaust the air between the end we THE SUCTION POST. 55 are watching and that point. A little trap-door the mouth of the apparatus is instantly shut, a cock is turned, the air-pump below begins to suck, and in a few seconds you hear a soft thud against the end of the tube the little door is opened, and a cylinder of gutta-percha encased in flannel, about four inches long, which fits the tube, but loosely, is immediately ejected upon the counter ; the cylinder is opened at one end, and there we find the despatch. Now it is quite clear that it is only necessary to enlarge the tubes and to employ more powerful engines and air- pumps in order to convey a thousand letters and despatches, book parcels, &c., in the same manner. And this the company are forthwith about to do. They propose in their prospectus to unite all the district post-offices in the metropolis with the central office in St. Martin Vle-Grand. We particularly beg the attention of the indignant suburban gentleman who is always writing to the Times respecting the delays which take place in the delivery of district letters, to this scheme. At present a letter is longer going from one of the outer circles of the post-office delivery to one of the inner ones than from London to Brighton ; but with the working of the Pneumatic Despatch Company a totally different state of things will obtain. An obvious reason of the present delay is the crowded state of the London thoroughfares, which obstructs the mail-carts in their passage to the central office, or from district to district ; another reason is that, from the very nature of things, letters are by the present system only despatched at intervals of two or three hours. But when we have JEolus to do our work the letters will flow towards head- quarters for sorting and further distribution incessantly. 56 THE SUCTION POST. Indeed, the different tubes will practically bring the ten district post-offices of London under one roof. At the present moment the contract rate at which the mail-carts go is eight miles per hour. The Pneumatic Company can convey messages at the rate of thirty miles an hour, and this speed can be doubled if necessary. The same system will be ultimately adopted for bringing the mail-bags to and from the railway-stations, and instead of seeing the red mail-carts careering through the streets, we shall know that all our love-letters, lawyers' letters, and despatches of importance, are flying beneath our feet as smoothly and imperceptibly as the fluid flows outwards and inwards from that great pumping machine the human heart. The spider's web that is being hung over our head has indeed a formidable rival in this web of air-tubes under ground, inasmuch as by the latter we can send our thoughts at length, and with perfect secrecy, and quite as quickly for all practicable purposes, as by the telegraph. The post-office authorities, if they adopt the scheme, of which we have no doubt, will be able to forward letters with a very great increase of despatch at a much smaller cost to itself than even at present. A pipe between the Charing Cross post-office and Saint Martin Vie- Grand is about to be laid, so that the public service will very speedily test its capabilities, if further testing indeed be needed. If we can suck letters in this manner, between point and point of the City, it will naturally be asked, why not lay down pipes along the railroads, and convey your mails by pneumatic power ? But it must be remembered that the exhaustive process cannot be put in operation for any long THE SrCTION POST. 57 distance without great loss of power, and that it would be difficult to send letters great distances, even with relays of air pumps, much faster than by ordinary mail trains. However, it is impossible to say what may not be eventually done in this direction, but we are certain, from actual ex- periment carried on for years, that the system is perfectly adapted for this vast metropolis, as regards the postal ser- vice, and there is as little doubt that it is quite capable of taking upon itself a parcel-delivery service, indeed, the size of the articles to be conveyed is only limited by the power of the pumping-engine, and the size of the con- ducting tube. The company are now about to lay down a pipe between the Docks and the Exchange, for the conveyance of samples of merchandise, thus practically bringing the Isle of Dogs into Cornhill ; and for all we know, this invention may hereafter be destined to relieve the gorged streets of the metropolis of some of its heavy traffic. The projector of the railway system could scarcely have foreseen the extent to which the locomotive would super- sede other means of progression, and the principle of suction certainly starts on its career with as much certainty of succeeding as did that scheme. Some time towards the end of the century, we may perchance hear the householder giving directions to have his furniture sucked up to High- gate for hills form but little impediment to the new system of traction, or the coal merchant ordering a waggon load of coals to be shot into the pipe for delivery a dozen miles distant. And this new power, like the trunk of the elephant, is capable of being employed on the most trivial as well as upon the weightiest matters. 58 THE SUCTION POST. At the station of the International Telegraph Company, in Telegraph Street, it acts the part of messenger between the different parts of the establishment. The pipes wind about from room to room, sufficient curve being maintained in them for the passage of the little travelling cylinder which contains the message, and small packages, and written communications traverse almost as quickly in all directions as does the human voice in the guttapercha tubing, to which, in fact, it is the appropriate addendum. In all large establishments, such as hotels and public offices, the application of the invention will be invaluable ; and from its fetching and carrying capabilities, it may well be nick-named the tubular " Page." That we have been recording the birth of an invention destined to play a great part in the world, we have, as guarantees, the names of the well-known engineers, Messrs. Rammell and Latimer Clarke, and among the directors that of Mr. W. H. Smith, whose establishment in the Strand supplements the Post-office in the distribu- tion of newspapers throughout the country. In making our lowest bow to this new slave of the lamp that has been enlisted in our service, we may observe that, unlike steam, it cannot at any time become our master, or bring disaster where it was only intended to serve. SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. AT the most active corner of the most active lung of the great metropolis stands a large building, more remarkable for its size than its classic beauty. Its vast monotonous white flank, exposed to the full roar of Picadilly, gives no sion of life or animation ; and if it were not for the in- O ' scription on its frieze, " Supported by Voluntary Con- tributions/' it might be taken for a workhouse, or for one of Nash's palaces. Will the reader be conducted through the labyrinths of Saint George's Hospital, and see some- thing of the eternal fight that every day beholds be- tween the good Saint George and the undying Dragon of Disease? But let him not enter with the idea that there is any- thing repulsive in the contemplation of this congregation of human sufferers ; but rather with a sense of the bene- ficence of an institution which snatches poor helpless crea- tures from the depressing influences of noisome alleys, or the fever-jungles of pestilential courts, and opens to them here in the free air, where a palace might be proud to plant itself a home, with Benevolence and Charity as their friends and servitors. Neither must he look with a half-averted glance upon the scenes we have to show him ; 60 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. for their aim is to render the anguish of one sufferer sub- servient to the future ease of some succeeding sufferer ; to make great Death himself pay tribute to the living. As we enter and proceed into the fine vestibule, a crowd of students are seen hanging about the board-room door. It is one o'clock, and "High Change" at the hospital. Dotted about, among the living mass, are some who carry little wooden trays filled with lint and surgical instruments. These are " dressers/' waiting for the surgeons to make their daily round -of the wards. Others have long green books tucked under their arms : these are the clerks of the physicians, whose duty it is to post up, day by day, the progress of the patients, until " dead " or " recovered " closes the account. They are all looking into the board- room, and expecting the advent of the big medicine-men. The younger men regard this room with awe ; for to them it is a sealed book ; and they wonder if the time will ever come when they will lounge carelessly in and out of it, or have their portraits hung upon the walls, or their busts placed upon brackets. Now, the board-room door opens : a surgeon comes out, wheels to the right, strides down the passage, and off goes one of the trays and a broil of students. A physician follows, and turns to the left : with him flies a green book and another ring of satellites. Surgeons and physicians follow, one after another, each taking up his little crowd of followers, green books, and trays ; and the noisy vesti- bule is at once deserted. Let us follow the last batch up the stairs. This is a physician's ward. At this hour all the patients are in bed to await their doctor's visit. The cluster of SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. 61 students follow the physician, and settle for a few minutes here and there upon particular beds, as they proceed down the long vista of sufferers. The patients are quiet enough whilst the physicians are present ; but we will just look in half-an-hour hence, and see what a change there will be. At the end of each ward is a room for the nurse. See how she has contrived to make it look like home ; the bit of carpet, the canary, the pictures round the walls, all express an individuality strongly in contrast with the bare monotonous aspect of the open ward. Meanwhile the swarm of black bees is pitching upon a distant bed. Before we can reach it, however, a little bell rings, and all the patients' eyes turn towards a particular part of the wall. There we see a large dial, like that of a barometer, with a hand in the centre. Round it are the names of the medical -officers, nurses, and the words accident, opera- tion, chapel, &c. There is one of these dials in every ward, and all are worked by a series of iron rods which communicate with each other, the impulse being given by the porter below in the hall. By this means, anything that is going on in the hospital is known simultaneously at every part of it. The bell that has just rung is part of the apparatus, and draws attention to the movements of the hand. It stops at " operation ; " and in a minute afterwards a long line of students are seen winding up the stairs, the surgeon at their head. He looks calm ; but, depend upon it, he bears an anxious mind ; for life and reputation wait upon his skill. Let us follow the crowd : a new spirit has come over the students ; the j oiliest and most careless walk up steadily and silently. It is to be a tremendous operation, one of the great arteries, deep 62 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. down in the peHs, has to be tied, and no one knows how it may terminate. Steadily and quietly the Operating Theatre is overflowed from the top benches, and the spectator looks down upon a hollow cone of human heads. The focus of this living mass is the operating table, on which, covered with a sheet, lies the anxious patient ; and every now and then he sweeps with an anxious glance the sea of heads which surrounds him. Close to him is the surgeon, his white cuffs lightly turned up, examining carelessly a gleaming knife, and talking in whispers to his colleagues and his assistants. Slowly the bewildered countenance of the patient relaxes ; his eyes close ; he breathes peacefully ; he sleeps under the beneficent influence of chloroform like a two years' old child. The sheet is removed ; and there lies a motionless, helpless, nerve-numbed life : an assistant pushes back the eyelid, and the fixed eye stares vacantly at the roof. The student below us clutches the bars in front of him. It is his first operation ; and he wishes he were far away, and wonders how the porters can stand so calmly by, waiting with the sponges. There is a sudden movement forward of every head, and then a dead silence. The surgeon has broken into the bloody house of life, and every eye converges towards his hands; those hands that manipulate so calmly; those fingers that see, as it were, where vision cannot penetrate, and which single out unerringly, amid the tangled net- work of the frame, the life-duct that they want. Fcr a moment there is a painful pause ; an instrument has to be changed, and the operator whispers to his assistant. SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. 63 " Something is going wrong/' flashes in a moment through every mind. No ! the fingers proceed with a precision that reassures ; the artery is tied ; and the life that trem- bled upon the verge of eternity is called back, and secured by a loop of whipcord ! There is a buzz, and a general movement in the theatre ; the huge hollow cone of heads turns round, and becomes a cloud of white faces, no longer anxious. Some students vault over the backs of the seats ; others swing up by the force of their arms : the whole human cone boils over the top benches, and pours out at the doors. Brown pulls Jones's hair playfully ; whereupon Jones " bonnets } ' Robinson; and there is a universal " scrimmage" on the stairs. Can these be the same silent, grave-looking students we saw half-an-hour since ? Certainly ! Who expects medical students to keep grave more than half-an- hour ? As we pass down-stairs towards the basement, we see the wards opening out on either hand. These are the surgeons' wards ; and you look upon long vistas of "fractures/'' and of convalescent operation cases. The " dressers " are at work, and trays now come into full play. A stranger's preconceived ideas of the suffering in an hospital are not at all borne out by the appearance of the patients generally. Many of them are quietly reading the better-class cheap literature of the day ; others are con- versing round the ample fire. The little child, with its leg in a splint, is as merry as possible, with its bed covered with playthings. Everything that humanity can dictate, or to which art can minister, is supplied. The most eminent medical men whose attendance sometimes the rich cannot 64 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. purchase watch the patient with all due art and skill ; whilst carefully-trained nurses are at hand, day and night, to ease the tired limb, or to soothe his racking pain. Below again is the floor devoted to medical cases ; which we have already passed through : but it does not look like the same ward. See how that Rheumatism case has struck up an acquaintance with the Chronic Bronchitis ; and how confidentially the Dropsy is whispering to the St. Vitus's Dance. The fair-haired girl, with the large lustrous eyes, is making up a bonnet for the coming spring poor girl ! before that time comes, the dark screen will, in all proba- bility, be drawn round her bed, and then all the ward will know what has happened. Anything to get rid of ennui in the hospital. As we pass the men's ward, that rough navigator washes up his own tea-things ; that convalescent cabman smooths the little child's pillow ; and farther on the poor shattered tailor helps his fellow in misfortune to walk with the inverted sweeping-brush as a crutch ! The tenderness and sympathy you see rough fellows show in hospitals is very touching. The basement floor is mostly given up to the purposes of the medical school and the students. The library is there ; its windows look out upon a sickly garden (why should hospitals have sickly gardens, when covered glass conser- vatories, affording an equable temperature, might be so easily and cheaply constructed ?). Where books do not prevail, the walls are covered with full-length plates of the human form, dressed in light suits of blue and red piping. In the corner sits a young anchorite mournfully contem- plating a skull ; he is only a first-year's man having a SAINT GEOEGE AND THE DRAGON. 65 " grind at the bones." Two or three more are in close consultation with that "rough sketch of man/' suspended by a cord from the ceiling ; they are articulating his joints, and rubbing up their own brains for an examination. Another group by the fire-place is holding a black inquest upon some proceeding of the big medicine-men up-stairs : young students are so very critical. In a few years these seemingly thoughtless young fellows will be spread the wide world over ; some, in the golden East ; some, skirt- ing the pestilential shores of Africa ; some, in the new Australian world ; some, in remote hamlets ; some, in the fever-stricken depth of cities all bent upon the mission of warring with the grim Dragon disease. But we must pass on, as we have yet much to see. This is the lecture-room. How well the students know that hideous cast over the glass-case, with the notch and swell- ing in its neck ; their chief point of view in many a long lecture. Through the lecture-room is the Pathological Museum, surrounded by armies of cold shiny bottles. These contain contributions from the dead to the living of disease to health. It seems wonderful how the poor human frame manages to rub on at all; subject, as we here see it is, to such innumerable maladies. But it does contrive; and many of these " specimens" are the tri- umphs of the surgeon's skill over the destroyer. Scores of men walk about well and hearty who could recognize their own peculiar property among these bottles, and who remember with gratitude the successful burglary com- mitted upon their own bodies, when mortal pain was stolen from them as they sweetly slept. There is the representation of a woman who seems to F 66 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. Lave been devotod from her youth up to the nourishment of that huge, pale pumpkin growing from her neck ; there are casts of hands sprouting with supernumerary fingers. Here are models of fearful faces in wax, which call to mind Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. Next comes a skeleton almost tied up into a knot by disease ; above our head is^a shelf devoted to a whole infant popu- lation, not constituted exactly according to pattern. "But what is all this boiled tripe for ? " says the visitor. Boiled tripe, my visitor ! These are the real valuables of the Museum, and each bottle has its separate and absorbing history posted on that great blood-red ledger. Tbe mere curiosities of the place are to be found in this glass-case. There you see the half-sovereign that stuck in Mr. Brunei's windpipe : a present from its late proprietor, who was doubtless as glad to get rid of it as we, the public, were to learn that he had done so. There is a long tube filled with the very best Japan ink (for so it seems), taken out of a tumour. Pence that have lain perdu for months in the stomach, and knives that have made the grand tour without inconvenience, lie side by side ; and here is a packet of needles that came out simultaneously all over a young lady's body. Do you see that hide ? Take off your hat, for you owe it some reverence ; the pretty girl you love, but for the late occu- pant of that skin, might have been a loathsome fright. That is the hide of the sacred cow from which Jenner took the first vaccine matter. But what are they doing in that little room beyond ? opening Goldcer's canisters ? No, no ; there sit the cu- rator and his assistant putting up " preparations/' Why SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. 67 is he interested so much about that bit of cartilage ? Why does he so carefully put away that piece of fractured bone? What mystery lies in that little soft gray mass, that he should scrutinize it so narrowly with the microscope, adjusting and re-adjusting the screws with such nervous eagerness ? These are the hieroglyphics which must be deciphered ere the great hidden lan- guage of disease can be discovered ; these are the pains- taking labours by which science creeps on from point to point. The next door leads to the Bluebeard's chamber of the establishment, which we will not explore. Another step takes us into the Post Mortem Theatre. There, upon that cold slab underneath the sheet, you trace that dread mysterious outline, which appals more than the uncovered truth. It has been brought from the ward above to answer some enigma, which has baffled the questioning of the physician for months ; and here, in the face of his class, his judgment and skill will speedily be tested, and the knife will show us what has brought to a stand -still the curious and delicate machinery of life. Think not, however, that nature yields up her secrets without, sometimes, exacting a terrible retribution upon those who would pry into them. The faintest puncture upon the surgeon's hand, the least abrasion of the cuticle with the knife that has drank the venom of the body, has been known to kill as surely as the most subtly-concocted poison ever administered by Italian revenge. But let us return to the ground-floor wards. These wards, right and left, are consigned to the surgeons : you F 2 68 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. see, as you pass, the long perspective of " accidents/' to which the ground-floor is mainly devoted, on account of its proximity to the street. But that room filled with such decent-looking persons what are they doing there, ranged round the wall ? These are the out-patients ; the sickly troop that flocks day by day for relief. Do you wish to know how terrible the sufferings, how fearful the struggles, of " respectable po- verty ?" Go, then, and listen to the questions the phy- sician puts to them one by one, and you will come out saddened and astonished. There is one disease which haunts that room to which he cannot minister, one quiver from which issue unseen the arrows of death, which he cannot avert. Listen whilst he questions that neatly- dressed young woman : " How have you been living ?" She hangs her head, fences with the query, and is silent ; pressed kindly, she confesses, a little tea and bread have been her only nourishment for months. Wait a few mi- nutes until the men are called in, and you shall hear that wasted giant, in the adjoining room, make still the same reply ; " tea and bread for months " have dragged his herculean frame to the ground. They do not complain : they take it as a matter of course. As we leave the hospital the clock strikes three, the " seeing hour " of the poor patients in the wards ; the crowd of visitors who have been waiting outside the doors press in, and throng up the vestibule. The burly porter, however, posts himself in front, and dodges about like a boy who heads a flock of bolting sheep. Now he pounces upon an old fishwoman who tries to rush past him. What SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. 69 is he about ? Flat pick-pocketing, by all that is sacred ! Is he going to rob the woman of her seed-cake ? Scarcely is she past, than he dives into the capacious pocket of the second, and comes up with half-a-dozen oranges ; a third is eased of an eight-ounce bottle of gin ; a -fourth, in evident trepidation, gives up a pound of sugar ; a fifth to her he gives a low bow, and she passes on in " maiden meditation, fancy free." She, be sure, is one of the " Governors/' This momentary suspension of his power, makes him a very tiger after " trash and messes ; " a fresh onslaught is commenced, scarce a person but is mulcted of some article, and his eye rests upon the table covered with the spoils with the complacency of a man who has done his duty. This stern janitor is the percolator of the esta- blishment, through whom the visitors are strained of the deleterious ingredients they would smuggle to their friends. Let us take one more peep into the wards before we go. Who would think he was in an hospital, and that he was surrounded by disease ? Each bed is a divan, and each patient gives audience to a host of friends. A thousand kind greetings are heard on every hand, and the lines that pain has long been graving in the countenance, joy and affection for a moment efface. Did we say each bed was thronged with friends ? Ah, no ! not at all ! Here and there we see a gap in the chain of human sympathy a poor sufferer, by whose lonely bed no friend waits. Let us come forth once more into the air. The fresh breeze of the park seems sweet after the close atmosphere of St. George's ; yet sweeter seem the actions of the merciful. As we pass the corner of the hospital, 70 SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. the eye catches an inscription upon a porcelain slab let into the wall. The words are simple : " In aid of those patients who leave this Hospital homeless and iii need/' Below, is an opening for the reception of gifts, so that the poorest and most friendless go not uncared for. This little arrangement is " the corner-stone of faith" of one of the benevolent physicians. He imagined that a constantly open hand for the wounded held out at this thronged corner, might not be without its effect, and his confidence in the good side of human nature was not ill-placed. As much as twelve pounds have been taken from the box in one week glittering gold and silver mixed with pence and farthings, attesting that human sympathy is not of class or degree. In the full light of day, whilst the tide of life has been swiftly flowing past, many a rough hand has dropped its contribution ; and in the silent night, when the bright stars above have been the only witnesses, many a rich gift has been deposited, together with the good wishes of com- passionate and sympathizing human hearts. THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST. WE have all of us laughed at the grotesque appearance made by toy heads of vulcanized india-rubber. A little lateral pressure converts its physiognomy into a broad grin, whilst a perpendicular pull gives the countenance all the appearance that presents itself when we look into the bowl of a spoon held longways. The pressure re- moved, the face returns to its normal condition. Of the thousands of persons who have thus manipulated this plaything, it perhaps never struck one of them that in this perfect mobility lay the germ of a very useful inven- tion, destined to be, we believe, of great practical value in the arts. If we take a piece of sheet vulcanised india- rubber and draw a face upon it, exactly the same result is obtained. This fact, it appears, struck an observant per- son, and out of his observation has sprung a patented process, worked by a company under the name of the " Electro- Printing Block Company/' for enlarging and diminishing at pleasure, to any extent, all kinds of draw- ings and engravings. It must be evident that if a piece of this material can be enlarged equally in all directions, the different lines of the drawing that is made upon it in a quiescent condition must maintain the same relative 72 THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST. distance between each other in its extended state, and be a mathematically correct amplification of the original draft. The material used is a sheet of vulcanised india-rubber, prepared with a surface to take lithographic ink ; this is attached to a moveable framework of steel, which expands by means of very fine screws. On this prepared surface, lines are drawn at right angles ; these are for the purpose of measurement only. The picture to be enlarged is now printed upon its face in the usual way, and supposing it is to be amplified four-fold, the screw frame-work is stretched until one of the squares formed by the intersec- tion of the lines, measures exactly four times the size it did whilst in a state of rest. It is now lifted on to a lithographic stone and printed, and from this impression copies are worked off in the usual manner. If the picture has to be worked with type, the large impression has, of course, to be made from block plates, the printing lines of which stand up like those of a woodcut. This is accom- plished by printing the picture with prepared ink, upon a metal plate : the plate is then subjected to voltaic action, which eats away the metal excepting those parts pro- tected by the ink. In examples of the amplification and reduction of a woodcut by this process, they are exact transcripts of the original, even to little defects. The human hand, with unlimited time, could never reproduce such a fac-simile as we have here performed in a few minutes, at a very trifling expense. Where it is required to make a reduced copy of a drawing, the process is in- verted ; that is, the vulcanised india-rubber sheet is stretched in the frame before the impression is made upon it. It must be evident, that on its being allowed to THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST. 73 contract to its original size, it will bear a reduced pic- ture upon its surface from which the copies are printed. The application of this art to map-work is very ap- parent. Let us instance the ordnance maps. Both enlargements and reductions of the original scale on which they were drawn have been made in the ordinary way at an enormous expense, the greater part of which might have been avoided had this process been known. As it is, we have gone to work in a most expensive manner. The survey for the whole of England was made on the very small scale of one inch to a mile for the country, and of six inches to the mile for towns, and now there is a cry for an enlarged scale of twenty -five inches to the mile. In other countries, comparatively speaking poor to England, this scale has been far exceeded. For instance, even poverty-stricken Spain is mapped, on the enormous scale of as many as sixty-three inches to the mile. The Government maps^of France and of Sweden are equally large ; it does, therefore, seem strange that, when we are making a second edition of our Doomsday books, with the pencil rather than with the pen, our Legis- lature should shrink from undertaking a scale of only twenty-five inches to the mile for so rich a country as our own. But with this question we have nothing to do ; our purpose is only to show that it would be a great saving if the twenty-five-inch scale had been originally carried out, as with this new process all the smaller scales could have been produced with perfect accuracy from this one at a very small cost. Indeed, the public could, if they wish, have pocket facsimile copies of that gigantic map of England and Scotland on the twenty-five-inch scale, which, jl THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST. according to Sir M. Peto, would be larger than the London Docks, and would require the use of a ladder to examine even a county. The new art is applicable to engraving of every kind ; and, moreover, it can very profitably repro- duce types itself in an enlarged or reduced form. This is a fact of great importance to all Bible Societies, for enormous sums are spent in producing this work in all imaginable sizes. The clearness and beauty with which a page of type can be reduced is such as will surprise Mr. Bagster or Lord Shaftesbury. But, it will be asked, what advantage does this method present over a resetting of the page in the usual manner ! Two very important ones speed and price. Let us sup- pose, for instance, that we wish to make a reduction of a royal octavo University Bible to a demy octavo. The price of resetting the type alone would be 800, and the " read- ing for corrections" another 300 at the least. Now, an identical copy could be produced by the process employed by the Company for 120; there would be no charge for "reading," as the copy is a facsimile. Where there are many rules, marginal notes, and different kinds of types, as in Polyglot Bibles, the advantage of reproducing by the india-rubber process would be of course proportionately greater. Any society possessing one standard Bible have thus within their reach the means of bringing out as many different-sized editions as they like, from the large type fitted for the eyes of very old men, to the diamond editions that require a microscope to read them. We may mention another power possessed by the new method, which will prove very valuable to publishers. It THE INDIA-RUBBER ARTIST. 75 sometimes happens that when a new edition of a work is called for, some of the original blocks, or stereotyped impressions, are found to be wanting. Heretofore new drawings and engravings would have to be made ; but now all this difficulty is obviated, by simply taking the engraved page out of the old book, and reproducing the block required from it. This actually occurred with respect to the well-known work " Bell on the Hand/' the missing blocks of which have been reproduced from some old printed pages. It is scarcely known yet how many centuries may elapse ere the ink of old books becomes so dry that it cannot be transferred by the new process ; but it is quite certain that a couple of hundred years does not so far dry it as to render it incapable of giving an impression, so that we may have the earliest folio copies of Shakspeare's Plays reproduced with exactness, in more available sizes, through the medium of a few sheets of India-rubber. It seems only the other day since this extraordinary substance performed the solitary duty of rubbing out pencil-marks : now there is scarcely a manu- facture in which its agencies are not employed, and it bids fair, as we have shown, to revolutionize one branch of the fine arts, and to add very largely to the sum of enjoyment among the refined and educated classes of society. When the first savage tapped the india-rubber tree, how little did he dream that the turgid stream that flowed from the bark was destined to work such changes in certain branches of trade, and to add a new and most important civilizing agent to the pale-faced nations ! OUR PECK OF DIRT. " WHAT a fellow you are, Routitout ; can't you let us enjoy our breakfast in peace?" good humouredly remarked handsome Fred, as he balanced on his fork the bright purple end of a polony, at a bachelor's breakfast-party. Now old Routitout wasn't a bit of a curmudgeon, but when he took up any subject, nothing could induce him to let it go until, like a puppy with a new rug, he had tugged it to pieces. The report of the debate in the House of Commons on the adulteration of food had, unluckily, just caught his eye, and accordingly he went into the subject, with which he was really well acquainted, with as much gusto as Tom Sayers went in at the Benicia Boy. " It's all very well to say, I don't care for adultera- tion/ " he authoritatively exclaimed, " but you must : this breakfast-table is built up of adulterations ; take that polony you think so spicy, what will you say to finding your toes rotting off in a month or two, like an old post in damp ground ? " " Come, that won't do, old fellow ; why should we take in the dry rot with German sausages ?" "My dear boy, that is precisely what you must take OUR PECK OF DIRT. your chance of, if you will eat these poison-bags without inquiring ; why, in all probability, that sausage is made from putrid meat you may always suspect bad meat, where there is high seasoning, and there are hundreds of instances on record, of people rotting away at their extremities, from eating these putrid German sausages." We all looked up ; Bob Saunders in his amazement spilt a spoonful of yoke down his handsome whiskers, and there was a general pause. There is nothing like opening a conversation with a startling fact, and this old Routitout knew full well, and proceeded to take instant advantage of the sensation he had created. " Fact !" said he; "here is an account" (pulling an old German newspaper out of his pocket) " of three German students, who gradually rotted away, from eating putrid sausages at Heidelberg." " Well, they may keep their polonies for me," said Bob, " I stick to eggs ; what can you make of them, old fellow?" " Why, in all probability, the one you are eating ought to have been by this time a grandfather. Laid in some remote village of France this time last year, it has lain ever since pickled in lime water. The antiquity of your London eggs is marvellous. They come over here by the million at a time, and you don't suppose the Continental hens hold monster meetings to suit the time of the exporter ?" " I wish you would turn the conversation," Bob replied. " I taste the lime quite strong, and must wash it down with a cup of coffee." " Bean flour, you mean," replied his tormentor, " and F8 OUR PECK OF DIRT. possibly something worse. Just turn it over in your mouth again, and see if there is a saw-dust smack in it. The fine dark Mocha you get in the New Cut, for instance, is adulterated with mahogany sawdust/' My friend, Ned Allen, a bit of a heavy swell, who affected to admire, now and then, a plebeian thing, struck in here in his lisping way : " Well, I musth declare the fines th cup of coffee I ever tasthed, was at four o'clock in the morning, at an itinerant coffee-stand after Lady Charlotte's ball 'twas really delicious ! " I saw old Routitout's eye twinkle, as much as to say, " now thou art delivered into my hands." " Fine body in it, eh ! Such a ' horsey-doggy ' man as you should have recognised the flavour of, &c., &c/' " Good God ! what can you mean ?" exclaimed Ned. " Oh ! nothing, nothing ; no doubt you felt a sinking after that old skinflint's supper, and wanted some animal food." " Animal food in coffee, prepostwous !" " Ah ! my dear friend, I don't like to disturb your equanimity, but it is a noted fact that the strong coffees used by the itinerant coffee standkeepers get their flavour from the knackers' yards. There are manufactories over in the Borough, where they dry and pulverize horses' blood for the sake of adulterating cheap coffees ; and then the cream, how do you think they could give you such luscious cream in your coffee at a penny a cup? why, simply enough, they thicken it with calves' brains. If you don't believe me, read ' Rugg on London milk,' and see what he found in it with his microscope." OUR PECK OP DIET. 79 " Well, I'm safe, then," I interposed, " as I never touch anything but the best green." " That's just the mistake you reading men always make," he replied. " I dare say you innocently believe that green tea is made of the young tender leaves of the plant ; but the real truth is, it is black tea painted painted and bloomed like a worn-out old hag." Old Routitout dipped his huge fist into the caddy, and took out a handful of young Hyson, and held it side-ways to the light on his open hand : " Do you see that beautiful pearly green colour, that's called the glaze a mixture of turmeric and Prussian blue. Think, my dear fellow, of the dose of poison you have been regularly taking every night and morning ; perhaps you can now account for that dreadful nightmare you had last night. Old Sarah, the first and great Duchess of Marlboro ugh, used to say that she was bom before nerves came into fashion ; and she never said a truer thing, for green tea came in about her time, and ' the cup that cheers, but not inebriates ' began to do its deadly work upon us Britons." " Do the Chinese drink green tea ?" I inquired. " Yes," he replied, " the real young sprouts of the shrub, but not the glazed abomination sent over here ; that is manufactured by them expressly to suit the bar- barian." " But is there no tea wholesome?" we all cried, in astonishment. "Yes," retorted old Eoutitout, tartly, "your good strong Congou at 3s. 4<7. is generally pure ; black tea is mostly pure unless you happen to get some old tea-leaves re-dried. There are people who go about to club-houses 80 OUR PECK OF DIRT. to collect old tea-leaves, not to brush carpets with, but to re-curl and dye, and sell again. If you happen to take a cup that tastes like hay, be sure that there has been a resurrection from the tea-pot. Hundreds of tons of it are made in London yearly/' " Have an anchovy, Bob ?" "They ain't anchovies/' interposed our old friend. " Do you think they can afford to give you real anchovies at a shilling a bottle ? I tell you what they are, though, Dutch fish coloured and flavoured to suit the market ; that strong red paste in which they swim is bole armenian, a feruginous earth. You must eat your peck of dirt before you die, you know." " My dear Mr. Routitout," interposed a quiet gentle- manly man of our party, " take a pinch of snuff to restore your equanimity." Our quiet friend might just as well have trodden at that moment on the tail of a puff adder. Old Routitout took a pinch with a mock serenity, and said, " Yes, if I wished to be poisoned. Do you ever feel a weakness in your wrists, my dear friend, eh ?" " Good gracious me ! no, sir !" " "Well, then, if you will only persist long enough in taking this kind of snuff, you will gradually find your hands fall powerless at the wrist, like the fore-paws of a kangaroo." Here was another sensation, and we all looked for some explanation. "You think you are taking nothing but powdered tobacco," said our old friend, glaring at the snuffer, " but I tell you there is either chromate of potash, chromate of OUR PECK OF DIRT. 81 lead, or red lead in it to give it a colour, and you get saturnine poisoning as a consequence." " Come, take a pickle ?" archly interposed that incorri- gible Bob, determined to rile our tormentor, " the vinegar won't disagree with you." " You are verdant enough to suppose that is the natural colour of the vegetable, I suppose ? " retorted old Routitout, harpooning a gherkin with his fork. "To be sure I am, my Diogenes/' that youth replied ; u come, get out of your tub and descant." " Then give Diogenes a steel fork, a knitting-needle anything of bright steel will do, to touch this verdant lie, and show you the ugly venomous thing it contains. Now, let that knife remain in the jar for an hour, and perhaps we shall learn the secret of these verdant pickles. The very vinegar is falsified." " While you are about it, you may as well attack the whole cruet-stand ! " "Nothing easier in the world. That prime * Durham Mustard/ for instance, is a delusion and a snare. There's scarcely a bit of mustard that you can get pure at any price. This stuff is nothing more than 95 per cent, of wheaten flour, just a dash of pure mustard, turmeric to paint it up to concert pitch, and black pepper to make it sting ; and you have been labouring under the delusion all the while that you have been eating mustard, sir." " Ton my honour, I have," replied Bob ; " but what about the vinegar?" " When do you particularly like vinegar ?" " Well, to tell you the truth, I like a dash on a native, G 82 OUR PECK OF DIRT. taken standing at an oyster-stall, just to cool one's coppers after the opera." " Just so/' said Mr. Routitout, gravely drawing from his pocket a notebook. "Til let Dr. Hassall have a word with you this is what he says for your especial comfort : ' We have found some samples of vinegar to consist of little else but sulphuric acid coloured with sugar : it is in low coffee-houses and oyster-stalls that such vinegar is not uncommonly met with/ So you see, my friend, you are in the habit of ' cooling your coppers' with vitriol, sir, vitriol ! " " Now, then/' said Bob, not half liking it, " serve out the pepper, my boy." " Well, pepper what you call pepper is mainly flour and linseed-meal, flavoured with D. P. D." " What in the name of all that is sacred is D. P. D. ?" " Oh, D. P. D. is short for dust of pepper dust the sweepings of the mills. The manufacturers supply it to the grocers in barrels, so that they can falsify at pleasure." " Don't forget the soy while you are about it." " Well, that's nothing more than treacle and salt, so says Hassall, and the fish-sauce nothing but vinegar, and catsup coloured with what do you think ? " . " Can't tell." " Minute chips of charred deal !" ." Come," I interposed, " after all these disagreeables, allow me to recommend you one of these sweetmeats. What will you have ? a mutton chop, a rasher of bacon, or an oyster all done in sugar or here's a cock coloured to the life." " Charming bird, certainly ; and so you recommend this cock for a delicate stomach ? " OUR PECK OF DIET. 83 " Well, drop it in your pocket, and I dare say one of the little Routitouts will not make wry faces about it." " Won't they ! I think I know something about this amiable bird. Look at his bright yellow beak well, that's only chromate of lead, and those blood-red wattles there is nothing more injurious in their colour than vermilion. Those beautiful stripes of yellow on the wings are gamboge, and the verdant stand on which he is strutting is arseniate of copper, or Scheele's green three deadly poisons and a drastic purge ! Perhaps now you would like one of your younkers to have a suck at this game pullet ? " " Not so bad as that, old fellow ! " I replied, furtively dropping out of my pocket a coloured bonbon, intended for the little one at home. "A slight indigestion, perhaps, that a dose of grey- powder would put to rights in a day ?" " I am very glad you mentioned grey -powder mercury and chalk that should be ; for let me tell you, you may find the remedy worse than the disease/'' " Why, do you know, sir," he said, raising his voice, " that they sometimes make this infantile remedy out of the scrapings of looking-glasses ? " 11 And what are the scrapings of looking-glasses com- posed of?" " Why, an amalgam of tin, antimony, and arsenic, as a foil for the mercury. They sell this abominable stuff at Sd. a-pound, and if you happen to buy grey powder in a low neighbourhood, you stand a very good chance of getting some of it. ' Not content with poisoning and loading our food with all sorts of indigestible rubbish, they next pro- ceed to adulterate the drugs we depend upon to cure us/' " Well, upon my word/' said Bob, " here we've been G 2 8-i OUR PECK OF DIRT. jollifying at this elegant dejeuner a la fourchette, and eating all the delicacies of the season, when in comes this learned wretch and turns it all into gall and wormwood. Let us see what we've really taken. Why, there's a whole paint-box of paints to begin with Prussian blue, turmeric, bole armenian " " Stop a bit/' cried old Routitout, " those preserves look very red there's cochineal in them ; put down cochineal/' " Very well, cochineal, blue, yellow, red and scarlet, four coats of paint for delicate stomachs." tc Now, then, for the minerals ; sulphur in the sulphuric acid, lead in my friend's rappee." " Stop a minute," eagerly interposed Routitout again, "let me examine the knife/' and rushing to the pickle-jar, he triumphantly returned, " Copper ! " I told you so look at the coating on the knife. Copper, by jingo ! " " Very well, lead, copper." " And if any of you had happened to have sweetened your tooth with that cock of magnificent plumage, there would have been an addition of mercury and arseniate of copper, a pretty metallic currency to put into your blood's circulation with your breakfast, and then for a gentle alterative to-morrow morning antimony, mercury, and arsenic, alias grey powder, would be likely to set matters right with a vengeance," and old Routitout laughed a de- moniac laugh ; " and, stop a bit, you have not done yet there's lime in the eggs, sand in the sugar, horse-blood in the coffee, and, perhaps, mahogany saw-dust ; just throw these little items in to make it ' thick and slab.'" " Bob," said I, turning very briskly upon our tormentor, "let's wash our mouths out with a glass of beer." OUR PECK OF DIRT. 85 " Here's to you/' he said, watching with his clear blue eye the c beaded bubbles winking at the brim/ " I dare say now, you think that fine head is a recom- mendation to your tipple. The author of a practical treatise on brewing, however, lets us into a secret ; the heading, he tells us, is a mixture of half alum and half copperas, ground to a fine powder, and is so-called for giving to porter and ales the beautiful head of froth which constitutes one of its peculiar properties, and which land- lords are so anxious to raise to gratify their customers. That fine flavour of malt is produced by mixing salts of steel with cocculus indicus, Spanish liquorice, treacle, tobacco, and salt." " But there's nothing of the kind in pale ale," I replied. " Well/' said he in a half-disappointed tone, "they used to talk about strychnine, though I believe that's all bosh, but you can't deny the camomiles." " But what's the use of disenchanting us in this way, if tradesmen are all robbers together ?" I inquired. " What remedy have we ? " " That's just the thing the House of Commons have been trying to give you. Mr. Scholefield's bill on the adulteration of food, which was originally intended to hit the adulterator very hard, is emasculated enough, though, for fear of interfering with trade ; but there will be some protection for the intelligent classes, it is true. Any article suspected of being adulterated, may be pub- licly analysed, and if found to be sophisticated, the guilty party will be liable to a fine : this will lead to the better class of tradesmen warranting their goods as pure, and the middle and upper classes will, in the end^ reap the benefit 86 OUR PECK OF DIRT. of Dr. HassaH's investigations, and Mr. ScholefielcTs bill but as for the poor, God help them ! They pay dear for what they have, and never, by any chance, have it pure ; and as they can't afford to have suspected articles analysed, they must go to the wall as of old. We want a little touch of French despotism in these matters. Every drop of milk brought into Paris is tested at the barriers by the lacto- meter, to see if the ' Iron- tailed cow' has been guilty of diluting it if so, the whole of it is remorselessly thrown into the gutter the Paris milk is very pure in consequence. If a tradesman adulterates any article of food offered for sale, he is first fined, and then made publicly to confess his fault, by means of a large placard in his window, setting forth the exact nature of the trick he has played upon his customers. Imagine some of our leading trades- men obliged to sit in sackcloth and ashes, and suffer this moral pillory ! One or two rogues thus exposed would have a marvellous effect, in keeping the sand out of the sugar, and the burnt beans out of the coffee, &c., &c." " Now then, old fellow, as you have worked yourself round into a good humour again, take a weed ?" " Not the slightest objection in life, for it's the only thing to be got unsophisticated there is plenty of bad tobacco, it is true but we know it is tobacco. There are many tales going, about the fine qualities of British tobacco grown in the Camberwell cabbage beds but it's all fudge." " Come," said I, "let 'stake a constitutional in the fresh air after this lecture ?" " Fresh air, indeed," all our friend's savageness was evi- dently reviving. "Fresh air with every gully hole sending OUR PECK OF DIRT. 87 forth streams of sulphuretted hydrogen, and sulphuric acid, impregnating all the water where on earth do you find your fresh air ? " Where he would have ended there is no telling, had not Bob slily tempted him with a thumping principe, on which his mouth closed with immense satisfaction to all parties concerned. THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. WHILE lounging, the other day, in a medical library, I chanced to take up a little volume, the odd title of which led me to dip into it " Bigg on Artificial Limbs/' I had heard of the skilful, anatomical mechanician of Lei- cester Square, whom the Queen delighted to honour with commissions for cunningly devised limbs for wounded soldiers during the Crimean war, but never realised to myself the art with which man can eke out the defects of nature until I glanced over this little volume ! the con- tents of which so struck me, that I was determined to see for myself how far that cunning biped man can simulate the handiwork of our great mother. I was received courteously, and on explaining the nature of my errand, an assistant was sent through the different workshops to satisfy my curiosity. A very few minutes' conversation with my conductor left the impression upon my mind that, instead of having any profound respect for Nature, he looked upon her as sometimes rather in the way than otherwise ; for, happen- ing to ask him playfully, as a kind of starting question, with how small a modicum of humanity he could manage to work, " Sir," said he, very seriously, " we only want THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. 89 the vital principle ; give us nervous centres and sound viscera, and we find all the rest/' " But/' said I, not prepared for this liberal ofler, " suppose a man had only three inches of stump ! " " Three inches of stump ! " he replied, contemptuously, " with that allowance we could do anything. There is," said he, " somewhere in Ireland, a gentleman bora with- out limbs, who goes out hunting in a clothes-basket strapped on his horse's back. If we could only get hold of him, his friends, in six weeks, would not know him." An inspection of my friend's ateliers, certainly, went far to justify the confident spirit in which his assistant spoke. I soon found out that there are first, second, and third-class limbs, however, as of everything else. " What ! " said I, " do you make banisters as well as legs," pointing to a shelf-full neatly turned and painted. " Banisters ! mjr dear sir," he replied, a little hurt, " these are our Chelsea pensioners ! " And on a closer examination such they proved to be. Here was the hard third-class fact simple and unadorned. " And these buckets?" I rejoined, pointing to some scores of hollow wooden cones placed one within the other. " Bucket's the word ! " said he, reaching one down, and screwing a banister into its lower end. " These are our Chelsea pensioners complete. But this is nothing to what they have in store at Chelsea Hospital. During the war we could not make them fast enough, and they were obliged to apply to the mop-makers. Fact," said he, seeing the surprise in our eyes " and arms, too ! You should see the rows and rows stored on the shelves : 90 THE ARTIFICIAL MAX. their hooks hanging out like so many hundred dozen of umbrellas. Government can only afford hooks for soldiers and sailors ; but officers who are not able to pay can get new legs and arms of the very best construction at the expense of a grateful nation, by simply applying at the Horse Guards/' All the while this serio-comic conversation was going on, a workman in the coolest possible manner was working away at a most delicate little leg that would not have come off second best in the Judgment of Paris a faultless Balmoral boot, and the daintiest silk stocking covered pro- portions that Madame Vestris might have envied. " These/' said my companion, " are some of our first- class goods. Would you like to see the mechanism ? Goodge, pull down the stocking." "With that the work- man bared the limb, whilst my companion put it through its paces. " This, you see, is our patent knee-cap and patella, and this the new vulcanised india-rubber tendon- Achilles ; here, in the instep, you will observe a spiral spring elevating the toes, and if you will just observe (opening a little trap-door in the back of the calf), here is an ingenious contrivance by which the bending of the knee elevates the front part of the foot, thus allowing it full play to swing forward clear of the ground/' Certainly it was an admirable contrivance. " And can a man or woman progress easily with that arrangement ? " I said. " Do you know Lady ? " said he, " Yes/' " Nothing the matter there ? " he rejoined, interroga- tively. THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. 91 I was obliged to confess, not to my knowledge. " That's her spare leg, nevertheless/' he replied triumphantly. " Spare leg ! What do you mean ? " II Lord bless you ! look into that cupboard. I have the spare members of half the town there duly labelled. Things will go wrong with the best conducted limbs ; and to save difficulties we keep duplicates here which can be applied at the shortest notice. A gentleman, whom we will call Mr. Smith, once lost the pin out of his knee-joint, and sent here for his off-leg. A young lad up from the country sent him another Mr. Smith's box containing an arm very awkward/' " Will you allow me ? " said I, trying to read the names on the boxes. 11 Certainly not/' said he, shutting the door and turning the key : " this is our Blue Beard's cupboard, and I wouldn't allow even my wife to peep. But come and look at our hands." There they were some clenched, some spread out, some in the act of holding, some gloved, and displayed like Vandykes, as if to challenge attention. " Now, what will they do ? " said I, almost doubtful whether the clenched fist wouldn't strike. " Do anything," said he : "by means of the hook in- serted in the palm, it can lift, or hold the reins, almost as well as the natural member. Observe the beautiful opera- tion of the spring thumb imitating the grand privilege of man and monkey, by means of which it can grasp a fork, or lightly finger a toothpick." u Do you supply fingers and such small deer?" I inquired. 92 THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. " Fingers, toes, noses, lips we take them as they come. A gentleman with but one finger on his left-hand came to us the other day, and asked to have the complement made up. We fitted on the rest, and attached them by means of a signet ring to the remaining finger movement per- fect ; you should see him pass his fingers through his hair natural as life. The hand is a wonderful thing that beats me legs are mere ABC, but the hand ! Here/' said he, recovering from his momentary admiration of nature, here is a drawing of a pretty thing. A Hudson's Bay trapper had his hand bitten off by a bear, and came to us to replace it." " Do you want something really useful ? " said I. " ' Yes/' said he. " So I made him this dagger, fitting into his arm-stump socket. He sleeps in his dagger, and finds it particularly handy when there are bears about. Look at the action of this spring and rachet-elbow : you have only to touch the little button in the elbow, and the fore-arm closes as natural as life. Who would wear an empty sleeve when a member like this can be obtained ? We always recommend our arm and hand patients to wear a cloak neatly folded over it, as it prevents any attempt at hand-shaking. We don't warrant the shake the touch isn't quite natural." "But how about the more delicate operations eyes and noses ? " I inquired. " Oh, we do any feature at a moment's notice. A nose, for instance : the best way is to bring a patient to the modeller, who first designs the missing member in clay after a portrait or instructions ; from this an india-rubber cast is taken, to which we fit on a pair of spectacles, to THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. 93 break the flesh line ; and when the superstructure is com- plete, an artist puts in the complexion/' " And eyes ? " I added, deeply interested. " Eyes we do not do so much in," he added apologe- tically. " There is M. Boisenou, from Paris, who travels with all the eyes of Europe from the black of Andalusia to the blues of Scandinavia/' " But how are they applied ? " " Easily as possible/' he added, pulling out a drawer and displaying the upturned gaze of winkless scores. " Let me see/' said he, rapidly taking up eye after eye, and com- paring them with my own. " Light grey that's a good match. Now, with this little ivory jemmy we prize the eye into its socket; the muscle being left, we get good motion, and the deception is perfect. A lady once closed her good eye, and went up to the glass to see her false one. There is one little drawback, however : you can wipe away a cold tear perfectly, but as the eyeball itself is not sen- sitive, the flies sometimes walk about upon it, which looks odd." " You must see a vast deal of maimed humanity ?" said I. " And vanity, too," he replied. " But I am afraid I must leave you, as I see there is a leg-below-knee, two toes, and an arm wanting to see me in the waiting-room, and there in the cab we are near levee-day, I suppose is the Honourable Augustus Witherdman calling for his calves." As I walked homeward, my head full of the subject I had been dwelling upon, it seemed to me that the artificial man met me in detail everywhere. There were his teeth grinning at me in glass cases outside the dentists' shops 94 THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. teeth in sets, with the new patent elastic india rubber gums, warranted equal to the living tissue, without the disadvantage of growing gum-boils. How many fair dames smile at us whose flashing ivories have lain for years on con- tinental battle-grounds, or may be under the verdant church- yard sod at home ! The hairdressers' windows, again, bloomed with deception. Here, indeed, art has made a stride. The old stereotyped form of wig, with its sprawl- ing wavy curl of glossy black across the forehead, flanked with the frothy bosses of curls on either side, leaving the hard skin line to disclose the bungling hand of man this is gradually giving place to higher efforts. Mark, for instance, that wig, so puritanical in its plainness, with a few gray hairs artfully cast in ; see, again, what efforts have been made with the net parting, to simulate the thin rooting of the hair : and, again, how its setting- on gradually fines off towards the forehead. And what shall we say to those long coils of gold which hang in such pendulous richness: these are the contributions of the poor German peasant girls to London fashionable life. Does my Amelia eke out her natural tresses with these shining snakes of glossy hair ? Does my maiden aunt Bridget hide the gradually widening parting of her once raven locks with that platted coronet ? What mem- ber is there in this artful age that we can depend upon as genuine? what secret bodily defect that we particu- larly desire to keep to ourselves that wicked " Times' 7 does not show up in its advertising sheet, and tell us how to tinker ? And if the individual can thus craftily be built up, imagine, good reader, the nightly dissolution. Picture THE ARTIFICIAL MAN. 95 your valet taking off both your legs (such things are often done), carefully placing away your arm, disengaging your wig, easing you of your glass eye, washing and put- ting by your masticators, and, finally, helping the bare vital principle into bed, there to lie up in ordinary, like a dismantled hulk, for the rest of the night ! In these latter days we are, indeed, sometimes, as the Psalmist said, fearfully and wonderfully made ; and, like the author of Frankenstein, we may tremble at our creations. BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. DID the reader ever ask himself, as he passed a per- fumer's shop, How are these delicate odours that strike so sweetly upon the sense taken prisoners ! What chains can we forge fine enough to enslave the delicious breath of the rose ? what trap can we set sufficiently subtile to seize the odour of the violet ? By what process do we manage to " bottle " the hawthorn-scented gale ? If the perfumer (guessing his thoughts) were to say " The most successful trap we set is a lump of fat," pos- sibly our reader would open his eyes very wide, and ex- claim incredulously, What possible affinity can there be between so gross an animal product, and so volatile an essence? Verily, good reader, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy ; and this is one of them. Possibly, if we were to tell you that the perfumer salts down his rose-leaves in order to preserve their odour, just as the meat-curer salts down his pork, you would be still incredulous ; yet, verily, we speak the words of truth and soberness, as we shall presently show you. The cultivation of flowers for the manufacture of per- fumes is chiefly carried on in the south of France, in the BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. 97 plains watered by the river Var ; and now that Louis Napoleon has acquired both banks of that river, he may be said to have taken possession of the scent-bottle of Europe. Those who have visited Cannes and its neigh- bourhood must have seen the flower-farms bright with a thousand brilliant dyes ; and at Grasse, again, the planta- tions of orange-trees which perfume the air. To secure the odours of those flowers is the care of the proprietors, so that thousands in far-off capitals shall be able to enjoy the perfume that otherwise would waste its sweetness upon the desert air. There are various modes of accomplishing this ; but the principal one, for the more delicate flowers, such as the jasmine, the violet, tube rose, and orange, is by what we will call the fat-trap. Those who know anything of chemistry are well aware that carbon, in the shape of charcoal, possesses an asto- nishing affinity for all kinds of odours a property which the physician avails himself of to absorb the foul smells of the hospital. The hydrocarbons, such as beef and mutton fat, highly purified, possess a similar absorptive power, which is taken advantage of by the flower farmer, to take and secure the fleeting breath of his flowers. Let us sup- pose, for instance, that it is the season for violets. The proprietor has already prepared thousands of square wooden frames, the rims of which are, say, three inches in depth ; in the middle of this frame is inserted a sheet of glass, and the whole series of frames are constructed so as to fit one upon the other. Upon both sides of the glass a film of finely purified fat is spread, to the depth of a quarter of an inch, and upon this fat the violet flowers just picked are lightly spread. Thus it will be seen the flowers are H 98 BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. sandwiched between layers of fat, resting upon the lower layer, but not touching the upper layer. In a short period the fat will have absorbed the whole perfume of the flower, when a fresh supply is added, and this process of feeding with flowers is often repeated thirty times, until the fat is thoroughly saturated with its perfume. Thus imprisoned, the odour is safely transferred from one part of the globe to another. The extent to which this process is carried in the south of France may be imagined when we say that 1,600,000 Ibs. of orange flowers, 500,000 Ibs. of rose blooms, 100,000 Ibs. of jasmine blooms, 60,000 Ibs. of violets, 65,000 Ibs. of acacia buds, 30,000 Ibs. of tube rose flowers, and 5,000 Ibs. of jonquil flowers are consumed annually, the value of which cannot be less than 240,000. But, says the reader, what can all this scented fat be used for ? The fat, good reader, is only the vehicle in which these odours travel. The next process, when it reaches the manufac- turing perfumer, is to liberate the delicate Ariel from its bondage. In order to accomplish this, the fat is cut into small cubes and macerated in pure spirits of wine. The scent, like an inconstant mate, immediately deserts its more material partner, and combines with the spirit, just as wives now and then will desert their solid city husbands for some mercurial singing-master. The scent is now in the form of an extract, but is by no means fitted for the pocket-handkerchief. Here the artist steps in and com- bines in definite proportions different colours so as to pro- duce bouquets, or he manufactures primary odours ; for your fashionable perfumer will no more allow the public to enjoy the pure perfume of the flower than a chef ' de cuisine BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. 99 will permit you to taste the natural quality of the meat. And, first, with respect to primary odours, it is astonish- ing how few art has yet managed to extract direct from the flower. Violets, geraniums, orange blossoms, and roses, are translated, it is true, by the absorptive process immediately into the perfumer's stores. But of the scores of scents which the European nose smells at, full two- thirds are but a delusion and a snare. Mr. Septimus Piesse, of the firm of Piesse & Lubin, has written a very interesting book on the art of perfumery, in which this secret is most frankly confessed. We must admit, however, that the manufacturing perfumer is in no wise to blame in this matter. It is not his business to provide the primary odours ; his department is the higher duty of combining them : give him a fuller scale of notes, and he will afford the public more varied airs. Mr. Piesse indeed laments, that whilst cultivators of gardens spend thousands for the gratification of the eye, they altogether neglect the nose. Why should we not grow flowers for their odours as well as for their colours ? There are scores of flowers in our gardens that would yield admirable extracts with a little pains. For instance, there is heliotrope, the lily of the valley, honeysuckle, myrtle, clove pink, and wall- flower. We have extracts of all these flowers in the per- fumers' shops, but they are nothing but skilful combina- tions of other scents. They play tricks with our noses as they do with our palates. We know full well that certain flavourings, such as pine-apple drops, jargonelle pears, See., are manufactured out of the refuse of gas tar and from rotten cheese. In the same way some of our sweetest, and, as we believe, natural flower-scents, have their base u 2 100 BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. in foetid animal secretions, such as musk, civet, &c. Who will come to the rescue ? There is a great cry for woman's work here it is. Many a lady would willingly employ her time, which hangs heavy in country-houses, if she only knew how. We will tell her. " I want heliotrope pomade/' says Mr. Piesse. " I would huy any amount that I could get ; " and this is the way to get it. If there is such a thing as a glue-pot in the house, you have the only piece of machinery needed it is, in fact, a water- bath. As the details of the process are all-important, we will proceed in Mr. Piesse's own words : " At the season when the flowers are in bloom, obtain a pound of fine lard, melt the lard, and strain it through a close hair sieve, allow the liquid fat as it falls from the sieve to drop into the cold spring water ; this operation granulates and washes the blood and membrane from it. In order to start with a perfectly inodorous grease, the melting and granulation process may be repeated three or four times, using a pinch of salt and a pinch of alum in each water ; it is then to be washed five or six times in plain water ; finally, re-melt the fat, and cast it into a pan, to free it from adhering water. Now put the clarified fat into the glue-pot, and place it in such a position near the fire of the greenhouse, or elsewhere, that will keep it warm enough to be liquid ; into the fat throw as many flowers as you can, and there let them remain for twenty- four hours. At this time strain the fat from the spent flowers, and add fresh ones ; repeat this operation for a week : we expect, at the last straining, the fat will have become very highly perfumed, and when cold, may be BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. 101 justly termed pommade a la heliotrope." To turn this pomade into an extract fit for the handkerchief, all that has to be done is to cut the perfumed fat into small pieces, drop it into a wide-mouthed bottle, and cover it with highly rectified spirit, in which it must remain for a week. When strained off the process will be completed. In this manner every flower of the garden may be turned into a genuine extract, and the lady who takes .the trouble to perform the operation may be sure that she possesses a perfume which money cannot buy from the best perfumer's in the metropolis. Moreover, she would then possess some individuality in her perfume. Why should we not know our fair friends by the delicate odours with which they are surrounded, as we know them afar off by the charm of voice ? There is an appropriate odour, to our minds, to each particular character. The spirituelle should affect jasmine ; the brilliant and witty, heliotrope ; the robust, the more musky odours ; and young girls just blooming into womanhood, the rose. The citron-like per- fumes are more fitted for the melancholy temperament, and there is a sad minor note in vanille that the young widow should affect. When we study the aesthetics of odours, we shall match nice shades of character with deli- cate shades of odour. Why should human feeling be expressed better by colours than by perfumes ? Meanwhile we must trust to the perfumer to set the fashion, and to impose upon us his bouquets at his own good will. We are, in fact, the slaves of his nose. All the fashionable world, like the Three Kings of Brentford, but a little while ago were smelling at one nosegay in the celebrated " Ess Perfume ;" later still, we have had imposed upon us 102 BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. " Kiss-me- Quick ;" and now the latest novelty of the season is " Stolen Kisses/' with its sequel, " Box his Ears/' Why are the Messrs. Piesse & Lubin so ama- tory in their nomenclature ? Besides the processes of maceration and absorption, or enjleurage as the French term it, there are several other methods of obtaining the odours of flowers, the principal of which is distillation ; by this means the essential prin- ciple, or the otto of the flower only, is extracted. It is an old saying that we can have too much of a good thing, and it will be verified by an inspection of a perfumer's laboratory. One is apt to think that a connoisseur's wine- bins contain the dearest liquids in the world old port at two guineas a bottle looks extravagant enough ; but let us enter the dark little room where the perfumer keeps his ottos and extracts. He draws you a drop of oil of jas- mine, holds it to your nose, and tells you, with a com- placent smile, that it is only worth nine guineas a wine- glass full he shows you a little bottle of otto of roses from the far East. The principal rose farms of Europe are situated in the Balkan in Bulgaria, and the expense of the perfume may be estimated, when we state that it requires at least 2,000 blooms to yield a single drachm of the otto. Different districts have their own peculiar shades of difference, just as different vineyards produce different qualities of wine. The Provence roses of the south of France have a fragrance peculiarly their own, which is attributed to the fact that the bees carry the pollen of the orange blossoms into the rose buds, and it is to the deli- cate flavouring of the orange that this otto owes its value. The suggestion of the bridal flower is indeed very slight, BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. 103 but herein the charm is constituted, as the eating-house connoisseur well knew when he ordered a slice of beef cut with a hammy knife. Some of these precious ottos and extracts, smelt at in the bulk, are positively disgusting ; take civet, for instance a pot suddenly opened is enough to knock you down. It is the infinite subdivision of the scent which gives it its true value as a perfume. Some astounding tales have been told of the persistence of scents, but we know that some of them have outlived the memory of great empires, and probably will yet exist when the New Zealander takes his seat on the broken arch of London Bridge : there is to be seen at Alnwick Castle a jar of perfume, at least three thousand years old, which still gives out a perfume. We know no better illustration of the infinite divisibility of matter than is afforded by the history of some of the more persistent perfumes. But it is not the animal perfumes alone that are disagreeable in a concentrated form all flower odours are more or less changed ; otto of roses is anything but nice, and otto of violets is for all the world like prussic acid. When they are diluted with an appropriate quantity of spirit, they regain all their delicacy, just as they do when subjected to the diluting influence of the gentle breeze in the summer evening. The concoction of bouquets is the triumph of the per- fumer's art. His nose must have the most delicate appre- ciation of the harmonies, so that no one odour shall out- rage another. A writer in " Chambers 's Journal" has very subtly remarked that scents, like sounds, affect the olfactory nerve in certain definite proportions. Thus there are octaves of odours, the different notes of which agree 104 BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. with each other. Let us take heliotrope, vanille, almond and orange blossoms, for instance, and we find that they possess a cognate smell. There is another series of per- fumes which constitute a higher octave, such as citron, lemon, orange-peel, and verbena. Again, we have half- notes, such as rose, and rose-geranium ; and minor keys, such as patchouly, vilivart ; and, lowest in the scale, musk and other animal odours strike a deep bass note. The skilful perfumer with this full gamut before him can make a thousand different harmonies ; indeed, the combinations are endless, but they must be made with a full knowledge of the art. He can no more jumble half-a- dozen perfumes together, and expect to be able to please the nos,e, than he could strike half-a-dozen notes at ran- dom, and expect to charm the ear with the harmonious effects of a chord. But an harmonious perfume is not all that is required ; the British public are very exigent, they want a delicate yet strongly-marked odour, and a persistent one at the same time, two totally incompatible qualities, for an odour that strikes powerfully upon the nose must be a very volatile^ one ; and, if it is volatile, how can it be expected to remain in the handkerchief for any length of time ? it is like eating a cake and expecting to have it afterwards. The perfumer gets over the difficulty by making some persistent odour, such as musk or vanille, the base of his perfume. The effect of this, however, is to give the scent two different odours, the volatile perfume on its departure leaving behind it the base, which is often objected to as smelling " sickly." The moral of our story is, that we should not expect a delicate perfume to be two things at the same time volatile and lasting. BRITANNIA'S SMELLING BOTTLE. 105 England is famous for only two products used in per- fumery lavender and peppermint. We grow roses also in large quantities, but only for the purpose of making rose- water. Our flower-farms are situated at Mitcham and Hitchin. English lavender is worth four times as much in the market as any other, and it is a scent which par- takes somewhat of the national character ; it has, indeed, a sad and grave smell, and possesses a certain poetic grace, but is withal healthy and invigorating. We are informed that this and peppermint form the base of many kinds of cheap perfumery ; but musk is the ptice de re- sistance of the manufacturers. People very commonly say, " I detest musk I never have a perfume containing musk/' The perfumer smiles, and gravely assures them the articles he sells do not contain it. All the while he is well aware that it forms a very essential part of all favourite perfumes : it is a principal ingredient in the renowned old Windsor soap ; all sachets, or dry perfumery- bags, contain it ; few essences or bouquets are without it ; and yet this is a perfume that no one likes ! The scents of the ancients were, as far as we know, entirely dry perfumes, such as myrrh, spikenard, frankin- cense, all gum resins which are still in use by perfumers, and they were used rather to perfume the air than the person, although it was a very old custom to scent the beard. It is a question purely of taste as to whether scent is allowable to the male sex, but among Englishmen, at least, the feeling is against it ; the fashion is certainly feminine, and long may it be confined to the ladies, for although it would be a superfluity to paint the lily, we may yet be permitted to perfume the living violet. THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM AT THE COLLEGE OE SURGEONS. How many among the thousands who have viewed with artistic delight Sharp's engraving of Sir Joshua's picture of John Hunter have ever taken the trouble to inquire further respecting the glories of the great original ? Yet Hunter was, without the slightest doubt, one of the most prominent representative men of the last century a man whose advent the great Bacon must have foreseen, and whose traces will be discernible to physiologists of the latest posterity. A poor lad, without friends for those valuable ones he had, he unhappily became estranged from wends his way from an obscure town in the north, sets resolutely to work, and bone by bone, tissue by tissue, specimen by specimen, builds up a history of animated creation from the shapeless zoophite to imperial man him- self. Before the time of Hunter a few detached groups of facts were all that we possessed of the great chain of ter- restrial life. By painful every-day toil, by incessant thought, link by link, he connected these groups together, supplied entire lengths that were deficient, and made manifest the spirit of unity that pervaded the whole. He touched the full diapason of organised life, and left to posterity in his great museum the harmonious song he had elicited from the most hidden recesses of nature. He did all this, and THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 107 like many others in the ranks of pure philosophy, he died rich only in the gifts he had conferred upon mankind. When the exigencies of his widow demanded that his museum should be offered to the Government which at that time meant William Pitt the reply of the Minister was, characteristic of the warlike atmosphere in which he lived, " What, give .20,000 for bottles ? We want the money to buy gunpowder ! " The value of the truths enshrined in those bottles, however, would prevail, and after seven years' clamouring at the doors of Ministers, Science at length got a hearing in the House of Commons, and Parliament agreed to purchase the Hunterian Collec- tion for the sum of J15,000, and it was then transferred to the custody of the Corporation of Surgeons, which became incorporated in the year 1800 as the Royal College of Surgeons. Other grants of money were afterwards made towards the collection by Government, and the college itself has since built the magnificent museum in which is enshrined what may truly be considered the apothesis of Hunter. Year by year this magnificent collection has been added to by purchase, and the additions made by the curator of the college have gone on to such an extent, that the preparations, physiological and pathological, the exclu- sive work of Hunter, which only numbered at his death 10,536, now reach to upwards of 30,000. If the visitor happens to know an M.R.C.S., he readily obtains a passport to its lofty apartments, and as readily falls into a certain attitude of wonder at beholding such an infinity of natural objects in, to him, an unnatural dress. The floors groaning with the weight of gigantic skeletons of extinct animals ; the side cases filled with the 108 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. grand procession of organised life, from the vegetable to the highest order of animal life ; the upper galleries shining with a vast army of bottles, the depositories of Nature's more subtile secrets ; the shelves full of mon- strosities and malformations, and the glass cases rich in physical curiosities illustrative of the accidents to which life is subjected. Here a series of tadpoles, from the time the creature leaves the ovum to that period of adolescence when, contrary to the human example, it casts its tail ; there a couple of gigantic American elk horns, fast locked in conflict, the doe for which the animals had been fighting was found dead beside the entangled belligerents ; a little further on the skeleton of poor Chunee the hap- less elephant who suffered death at Exeter Change for the crime of having the toothache his skull riddled with balls, showing that the file of soldiers who did the murder were not possessed of the skill of the great hunter, Gordon Gumming, who dropped his elephant of a hundred summers with one ball judiciously planted. Turn which way he will, where in fact all is order, he sees nothing but confu- sion. Under these circumstances we cannot do better than take the visitor by the hand, and let his attention fall naturally upon the most prominent objects. There is evidently a natural determination of giants towards the museum. The most striking object the eye meets on entering the first large room is the skeleton of the Irish giant, 'Bryan. His fate was a memorable example of how vain is the struggle men of such extrava- gant development wage against the anatomist. Poor 'Bryan, who drank himself to death, evidently had a presentiment of the manner in which his body would be THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 109 disposed of; and he tried to avert it by directing that his body should be sunk in the deep, and in order to provide for this disposition of it, two men were provided to watch it until the time for the burial came. But Hunter could not bring himself to let slip such an opportunity to acquire such a " specimen/' and he attempted to bribe the wretches by offering them a hundred pounds for it. His eagerness was too apparent, however, and these trustworthy individuals managed to raise the price to 800 ! The prize obtained, Hunter sent it home in his own carriage, and fearing lest it should be claimed, immediately dismembered, and boiled it. The writer of the description in the catalogue apolo- getically refers to the consequent brown appearance of the skeleton, in the same spirit as a clear-starcher would of the unsatisfactory "get up" of a piece of fine linen. It does not appear to make much difference to 'Bryan, however, who is posed in an easy attitude, with one arm hanging carelessly by his side, and the other held elegantly aloft, towering by the head and shoulders over another " rough sketch of man," which stands upon an opposite pedestal. In the glass cases which fill the left-hand corner of the upper end of the room, other giants with a com- mendable modesty keep in the back ground. Freeman, the American pugilist, as far as the whiteness of his bones is concerned, cannot complain of his "getting up;" and in the other corner a gigantic tinker forms a becoming pendant. This man when in the flesh used to pass by the college, and do odd jobs, and in return he is conveniently housed in this comfortable glass case. At the bottom of the glass case we see the outstretched hands of other giants marked the English giant, Bradley ; the French giant, 110 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. Mons. Lewis, seven feet four inches ; the Irish giant, Patrick Cotter, eight feet seven inches. They seem to hold up their hands in testimony of their stature ere they finally subside to the level of mother earth. But what is there particular about that rather short and powerful skeleton between the two larger ones ? The attendant takes out his card, which lies against the wall in the shape of a coffin-plate thus inscribed : \M3o na tff, an y ' i/ear aae The card forgets to give his last address, doubtless from motives of delicacy. Tyburn was not such a fashionable neighbourhood then as it has since become. There is nothing about the present appearance of the great thief- catcher which at all reminds one of his bad pre-eminence in life. In all probability, many of the skeletons about him were those of thieves and murderers ; for of old the THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. Ill conservator of the museum was dissecter in ordinary to all malefactors executed in London. Nevertheless, Wilde seems no longer to scent his prey, and the hunter and hunted are at last at peace, at least when they are not being dusted, which I am assured is done by one of the porters three times a year with the utmost impartiality. In an adjoining glass case there are specimens of Australian and African skeletons, which present certain differences from the European type which are highly interesting to the comparative anatomist. How clearly we see the countenance of the Bosjesman in the facial bones of the skull, and how feeble is the framework of the Australian savage when compared with that of the European, ener- vated, as some people choose to say, with an ultra civilisation. At the opposite end of this room there are some human mummies, which we must not omit to notice. For instance, there stands Mrs. Van Butchell, who has most certainly not been preserved for her beauty. We are apt to think that in this age we have arrived at the very perfection of advertising, direct and indirect ; yet here is a specimen of the ability of the last century, which will bear comparison with our best efforts. Think of a charlatan utilising his defunct partner in this direction ! Van Butchell, who would seem to have been a kind of St. John Long of his day, appears to have had his wife embalmed on the same principle that Barnum stuffed his mermaid to draw the public purse ; and like that worthy he advertised his wares judiciously in the public press. On the breast of the lady, for instance, we find a card inscribed with the following notice from the St. James's Chronicle of October 21st ; 1773: 112 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. " Van Butclieli (not wishing to be unfortunately circum- stanced, and wishing to convince some good minds they have been misinformed) acquaints the curious no stranger can see his embalmed wife unless (by a friend personally) introduced to himself any day between nine and one, Sundays excepted." What could induce persons to pay a visit to Mr. Van Butchell in order to see such a shocking spectacle we cannot conceive. In this collection the body is by no means out of place, flanked on either hand by an Egyptian mummy, and by the preserved remains of a woman who died in the Lock Hospital, whilst a dried specimen of the genus homo, sitting crouched up on his haunches, looks on apparently amazed at the change of scene he experiences from Guaco at Caxamana, in Peru. There is food for conjecture in another skeleton of a young lad close at hand. All his history is comprised in the fact that he was found erect in a vault, with the remnants of his clothes on, under St. Botolph's, Aldgate, old church, in the year 1742. The last time the vault had been opened was during the Great Plague in 1665, so that in all probability the poor little fellow was employed in some way in the interment, and must have been forgotten by the workmen when the vault was finally closed. Next to the cases containing the human skeletons is a golgotha, or place of skulls. These domes of bone tell of the wide diversity of power that ranges through the human race. Here we have the full scale, from the head of the Caucasian type (a line from the forehead of which to the lower jaw is almost perpendicular) to that of the Carib (in which the line slants outwards towards the jaw with a most THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 113 animal-like slant) . If the visitor will take the trouble to examine the skull of the gorilla, a gigantic chimpanzee, in the adjoining room, he will see that between the skull of the most debased tribe of mankind and that of the highest ape, the difference is immense. The gorilla's skull seems all taken up with the facial bones, the powerful lower jaw occupying the most prominent part ; indeed, in this respect it contrasts ill with the skulls of several of the lower monkeys, which in general form seem to parody but too closely that of man. We may see at a glance in these skulls the prominent races of mankind. The small Tartar physiognomy is traced in those prominent high cheek bones, the delicate Hindoo in that small fine skull of most fragile construction. Again, we see the race of narrow foreheads in the Australian and New Guinea skulls. Here and there we find that the skull has been utilised as a water-vessel, a piece of twisted native grass passing through the orbits and the great foramen by way of handle. The Scandinavians used, it is said, to drink mead out of the skulls of their ancestors ; the natives of Western Australia use " the dome of thought " as a calabash in which to carry water. Here is a specimen in which the water has clearly been poured from the eye-holes, as the edges of the bones have been quite polished by the friction of the fluid. The Polynesians have a custom of ornament- ing their skulls. Among the collection before us there is one with eyes of wood hideously projecting from the sockets, and with a kind of comical bowsprit running out from the nose. But how comes this high-browed Caucasian skull among those of the lowest type of savages ? All the catalogue tells us is that it came from South Australia, the i THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. natives of whicli were known at one time to have been cannibals. There are traces of fire still to be seen upon the temporal bones, and we may draw the dark inference that its owner must have been some European dispatched and eaten ages ago. Strange that, through the agencies of science, this grim relic should have made the circuit of the globe to testify to the fact ! The osteological collection, mainly the work of Hunter, from the human skeletons we have been looking at, descends in an unbroken chain down to the lowest insect life. It is curious to contrast the beautifully-dissected framework of the minute humming-bird with that of the gigantic dinornis of New Zealand, the imperfect skeleton of which towers above us from its appropriate pedestal. The history of these bones affords a proof of the marvel- lously prophetical powers of science. Some years ago a few very large bones, found in a New Zealand watercourse, were brought to this country and submitted to the inspec- tion of Professor Owen, then the curator of the museum. After a careful study of their peculiarities, he pronounced them to belong to an extinct wingless bird of gigantic proportions. At the time his scientific friends merely smiled at the poetical flight of the Professor, and attempted to discourage what they considered to be his rashness in building such a superstructure upon a few disjointed bits of bone : he persisted, however, in his opinions, and has lived to find them verified, as whole skeletons of these extraordinary birds have since been found, proving that they belong to that class of which the apteryx in the Zoological Gardens is now the diminutive and sole living representative. There are in the museum some eggs of the THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 115 dinornis, and casts of those of a still larger species once living in the Island of Madagascar, a section of which would be big enough for a foot-bath. The curiosities of the museum are the points which princi- pally attract the non-professional visitors, and among these are some singular examples of the desperate injuries the human frame can sustain with comparative impunity. For instance, here is the shaft of a chaise ; some fine day in the year 1812, we are informed, it transfixed the chest of a certain Mr. Tipple, entering under the left arm and coming out under the right arm ; and, in confirmation of the story, we find in a large bottle close at hand a prepara- tion of the chest bones, integument, and lungs, showing the cicatrices of the old wound and the manner in which the lungs had been injured. Nevertheless, the object of this unpleasant operation lived eleven years afterwards, and drove, for all we know, his tax-cart as jollily as before. In a recess close at hand is a drawing of another accident of a similar nature, in which, however, the chest was sub- jected to a still more severe trial in a contrary direction. John Toylor, a Prussian, " whilst guiding the pivot of the trysail mast into the main boom, the tackle gave way ; the pivot passed obliquely through his body, apparently between the heart and the left lung/' Notwithstanding this spitting process, the man got quite well, and has been several times to the museum with his shipmates to view the drawing, quite proud of his achievement ; and, in order to further illustrate the case, he promises to dedicate his chest to the museum after his death ! If we traverse the pathological gallery we shall find i 2 116 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. some astounding examples of the tolerance with which the stomach will bear the presence of very awkward foreign bodies. This one, for example, is full of pins, bent double in the form of fish-hooks. When we see a poor dyspeptic patient attribute his misery to " that bit of plum cake he took over night/' we cannot help thinking of the secret this woman must have possessed to deliberately swallow crooked pins until she had accumulated a couple of Ibs. in her stomach without any seeming inconvenience. Close at hand, in a bottle, we see a juggler's " failure/' in the shape of a dagger swallowed not wisely " but too well." It was fast disappearing under the effects of the gastric juice, but, unfortunately, the patient could not wait for the completion of the digestive process. Very near there is another bottle full of the remains of clasp knives. The patient's stomach in this case had managed to dissolve all the handles, and nothing was left but the bare frameworks of iron and the blades. What would half the over-fed, under-worked class of valetudinarians give for such a splendid organ ! If we descend to the floor of the museum once more, we shall find a few odd things to show the visitor. In this glass case, devoted to skin curiosities, we come suddenly upon a little bit of historical illustration. These little dry remnants of brown-looking leather take us back to the times of the Anglo-Saxons, and tell a tale of those lawless times. We read in romance of the darino- o sea-kings, but here is a plain and a very ugly bit of prose, in the shape of specimens of skins from flayed Northmen, caught plundering our churches. Our ancestors had a trick of nailing the hides of those they caught thus amusing themselves, upon the church doors "pour d'en- THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 117 courager les autres," and the specimens we see have been taken from the church-doors of Hedstock and Copford in Essex, and from the north door of Worcester. Seeing that these remnants of frail humanity must have heen thus ex- posed for upwards of a thousand years, there seems to be some truth in the boast that there is "nothing like leather/' There is a very stout piece of dermis near those Danish fragments, which looks remarkably like a piece of india-rubber, but the catalogue informs us that it is " from the shoulder of a remarkably stout man, and was tanning from April to September ; " a very obdurate piece of skin, doubtless, but we do not see the scientific importance of the explanation. In the frame devoted to the concretions found in the human organs are some remarkable examples of human hair, matted and felted together so as to form a solid mass in one instance pretty nearly the shape and size of that organ itself. Some girls have an inveterate habit of swallowing hairs, and in this instance the patient must have almost denuded her head. Cows are liable to these concretions, and there are some remarkable instances of them here, but they are collected .accidentally in the act of licking. We particularly desire to draw the attention of Scotchmen to an ugly lump, which the label informs us is composed of oat-hairs and husks, found in the stomach of a man in the habit of taking oatmeal porridge ! Of surgical injuries these glass cases contain many ex- traordinary examples : there are some skulls penetrated at Inkermann with Minie balls, showing the terrible nature of the wounds inflicted by modern projectiles ; and skulls, again, which prove what gashes may be made in solid 118 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. bone by sabre cuts, without doing any injury to the brain ; possibly, as these skulls are Chinese, their extra thickness may have been a protection. Glancing through the glass-cases devoted to the teeth of the various animals, we notice what appear to be some singular rings of bone. On referring to the catalogue we find they are the incisor teeth of rodents, or gnawing animals. We are apt to think that the rat and the beaver gnaw for mere mischiefs sake, or, at least, to work their way through obstacles ; but these specimens prove that the process is a necessity to keep their teeth down. The curved incisors are always growing, and unless they are worn away proportionably, they at last curve round so as to prevent the animal eating. We must not omit to draw attention to some remarkable examples of diseased skulls, some of them, at least, an inch thick, others presenting extraordinary osseous growth from the facial bones. We beg to draw Tom Sayers' at- tention to one particular specimen, in which masses of diseased bone have grown from the orbits, forming pro- jections of at least three inches; its late owner was a prize-fighter, and those frightful growths are attributed to the injuries he had received in pugilistic encounters. One more curiosity and we have done with the show speci- mens of the museum. Here is the lower jaw of an ancient Roman, with the stains on one of the molar teeth of the obolus, or small copper coin, placed in his mouth, as Charon's fare to carry him over the Styx : as the coin evidently remained in between his teeth, we must conclude he was too late for the ferry. We have been trifling, however, with the mere toys of THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 119 this magnificent collection ; the real scientific gold of the museum is to be found in the little army of uninviting- looking bottles which line the walls from the ground-floor upwards. The Pathological museum, the first room we enter, contains a history of disease written upon the dif- ferent organs and tissues of the human body itself. We do not stop to dwell upon mere curiosities here, but mark the methods by which this mortal frame is gradually sapped and destroyed ; or how nature wrestles with the destroyer, and sometimes repairs the ravages he has committed. Amid the immense mass of preparations, it is rather diffi- cult to single out examples of the vis medicatrix natures ; but as we pass, we may notice the contrivances by which our great mother sets about her work. Here, for in- stance, is a preparation of a mortified foot. See how nature has set to work, and entrenched herself against the further spread of death. The living and the black- ened portions of flesh seemed divided as if by a sharp knife, and across this gap death cannot leap. Or note again this diseased bone, and the delicate %ay in which the reparative process is to be seen building up a new framework of osseous matter within it. Again, be a wit- ness of the manner in which it gets over the difficulty of a stoppage in a blood-vessel. Here is the example of the femoral artery, the great highway of blood in the thigh, having been tied by the surgeon. If, by this means, an impediment to the circulation in the lower limb had oc- curred, the limb would have died. But nature makes provisions for such accidents, and carries the blood, as we see in this specimen, through some small collateral channel, which gradually accommodates itself to the in- 120 THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. creased work put upon it, and becomes a large vessel. When Fleet Street is stopped up by gas or water com- panies, tbe tide of human life is turned along some back street, until it finds the great thoroughfare clear again ; so it is with the main conduits which convey the sanguineous tide in the human body. Unhappily, however, nature is not always successful in this fight with disease ; nay, in the majority of cases, her exertions are painfully feeble, and but too often the de- stroyer has proceeded from the first with unconquerable steps, and human life has appeared to form a passive framework on which it builds its monstrosities. Look, for instance, at that example of elephantiasis, or the leg and thigh of a woman, pretty nearly as large as the shaft of a Doric column ; or inspect that cabinet of wen-like tumours in which the whole nutritive process seems to have gone through life to support and inflate enormous growths, until at last the human fabric appears only to be a dwindled and accidental appendage to the dominant bal- loon-like tumour. If we would still continue our survey of the sad mischances to which poor humanity is subject, let us glance at the curious skeleton in which all the bones are anchylosed, or knotted together by osseous growth, so as to be tied into a perfectly immobile knot. Again, we may see bones so brittle that they fly to pieces on the least strain, like the glass toy known as a Prince Rupert's drop, or arteries so solidified that in life they must have clasped and stifled in their solid grip the labouring and heaving human heart. We might fill pages with details of morbid specimens of unutterable value to the scientific man, but which we fear would only impel the more THE HUNTERIAN MUSEUM. 121 curious visitor to turn aside from these articles to more congenial topics. Now and then Hunter amused himself with trying gro- tesque experiments upon life. In this Museum are examples of animal graftings a human tooth growing from a cock's comb, and a spur from the animal growing in the same way. The physiological portion of the museum, which pos- sesses by far the most interest to the general visitor, was the portion to which Hunter gave the main strength of his remarkable genius. Comparative anatomy was the delight of his life, and the practice of it seemed to have formed his relaxation from other studies. Let us take the first glass case and inspect the leaf dissected by the winter weather, and trace up the series to that of the highest mammal, man, whose exquisite nervous system is dissected into filaments, even finer than those of the leaf, and we shall be able to estimate the enormous amount of labour presented by this portion of the collection. Here, if we may so speak, nature seems to sit in undress : first we see a perfect Noah's ark of skeletons, or bony frameworks on which the softer parts are modelled and upheld. Then follow groups of dissections, preserved in spirit, by which the machinery of the different organs of animals are made patent to us. Every portion of the animal economy which is subservient to the preservation of the individual, or to the preservation of the race, lies here exposed to the view of the philosophical student. Motor organs, digestive organs, the absorbent, circulating, respiratory, nervous, and eliminative systems of the different orders of animal life, by the careful aid of the dissector's scalpel, give up the history of their 122 THE HUXTERIAX MUSEUM. hidden functions to any one who enters this temple of science with a willing and inquiring mind. When we reflect upon the enormous experience of the man who thus unveiled so large a portion of animal life to our scrutiny, we are tempted to ask, what literary records has he left of his life-long labours, the material evidence of which lies hefore us ? It cannot be imagined that the ob- servant mind of Hunter, after having laid bare, as it were, the constructive subtleties of Nature, had not obtained the key to many an enigma which still remains to puzzle natural philosophers : indeed, we know that he made care- ful notes of his observations in comparative anatomy, which extended to ten folio volumes of MS., besides many others on physiology and pathology. That Hunter placed great value on these volumes may be gathered from the fact that he introduced them himself into the grouping of his portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Of these manu- scripts, more valuable perhaps than the museum itself, that picture contains the only visible representative ; the originals having been committed to the flames by his brother-in-law, Sir Everard Home, in order to conceal the theft he had made from them in his own numerous papers read to the Royal Society. A more astounding instance of literary incendiarism is not perhaps on record, and it affords us some clue to the degraded social character of the Georgian era in which the perpetrator of such an act lived, that it did not in any way appear to influence his position, much less to exclude him, as it should have done, from the society of all honest men. A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. GOOD reader, I am one of those poor unfortunate people you sometimes meet with in the streets a perambulating board-man. I have dined at good men's tables, and seen better days ; but. what matter, I am now reduced to carry a board, and wander the streets from morning till night. Being always of an observing turn of mind, notwith- standing the sleepy, half vegetable kind of life I lead, I amuse myself with studying the physiognomies of shop- fronts, and much there is to be learned from them of human nature, without doubt. Of all shop-windows, tailors' afford me the most matter for speculation ; they are such a fine, demonstrative race these tailors so artful, get on so by slipping to the blind side of poor human nature. What can be more enchanting than an East-end " empo- rium of fashion ? " the smaller the shop the bigger name they give it no angler knows better the right kind of bait to suit the water. I hate " splendacious" pantaloons, with checks big enough for the wearer to play draughts upon his knees ; and that " superior vest/' with a pattern that would require a Daniel Lambert to display it. What a thorough aggravator it is ! Sometimes, as I rest my board 124 A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. for a minute and look about me, I see the "gents" flock round such windows, and then pass on as though they had got some new idea, some vision of a future killing cut, such as a Cremorne or Vauxhall would "Startle, waylay, and betray." And then these city tailors, how artfully they play upon the feelings of affectionate mothers what genteel-looking little boys with the bluest eyes that stare so long, one feels annoyed that they do not wink and the most golden- coloured hair and the most genteel features, all done in the best wax-work, are fixed to the side of the doorways, and show oft 7 their tight-fitting tunics. Pretty darlings, guilt- less of tops and of soap-alleys, how many Billies and Bobbies, revelling in all the glorious ease of frockhood, have you not reduced to the cruel purgatory of breeches and button-dom ; but, as I have said before, these tailors play upon the feelings of the human race with such remorseless vivacity. There is one feature, however, in the tailor's shop worthy of observation, and that is the facility with which it can throw off its character of a philanthropist anxious to clothe the whole brotherhood of mankind at the lowest possible figure, and assume an aristocratic reserve quite chilling to a common spirit. Sackville-street, for instance, is the head quarters of the West-end tailors, and yet not a vestige of shop-front is to be seen. A well built pair of trousers might sometimes be observed thrown carelessly over some window-blind, of course, with no idea of show and this is all the trace to be seen of the refined Schneider within. In the tailoring A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. 125 trade, as in electricity, there are, as regards public favour, poles of attraction and repulsion. At the one end Moses, Doudney, &c., with their bands of poets, hold the sway ; at the other, Buckmaster, and other West-enders of the craft, preside with a self-sustained dignity and a chilling hauteur. What tailors' shops are to men, linendrapers' are to women. In all my experience and I have trudged up and down the world a good bit I never saw a woman pass a mercer's without taking a good long draught with her eyes at the silks, satins, and muslins within. They may be going for their half-ounce of tea, their pat of butter, or the tops-and-bottoms for the " babies/' or for anything else farthest in the world from a " warranted fast colour/" but just peep in they must, and in my belief 'tis the happiest five minutes in a woman's life ; and for an idle half hour, what a mine of wealth is the mercer's window. How many ideal dresses do they not possess in the course of an afternoon's walk ! How many shabby Leghorns revive with illusory ribbons ! As the sculptor sees the statue in the block of marble, a woman perceives a full-trimmed body in the simple goods piece, and as she goes from window to window, a whole wardrobe passes through her mind like so many dissolving views, as she glances from the flaunting and profligate satins to the staid and sober- minded stuffs. But it is to " bankrupts' stocks " that women " most do congregate." The taste ladies have for " fifty per cent, under prime cost" is extraordinary. There is one shop in St. Paul's Churchyard that, with laudable gallantry, makes a " frightful sacrifice" of itself every autumn for their especial pleasure. For a few days pre- 126 A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. viously it puts its shutters up, and retires into itself to contemplate the great act of devotion it is about to perform. Then, at an appointed time, the shutters are withdrawn, and the mental agony the stock has endured, at the thought of its approaching dissolution, is observable. The ribbons lie dishevelled in every corner ; the " 5,000 dozen of muslins" precipitately pitch themselves into the window, as though in despair at not being able to get rid of themselves before the wet weather sets in ; lace visites implore you by their emphatic tickets to save them from the wreck ; and glossy satins coax to be removed from the vulgar neighbourhood of "warranted washing colours/' There should be a bill brought by Lord Shaftesbury to put down the infamous manner in which mercers thus agitate the feelings of the softer sex. And now for a word or two upon the chemist and drug- gist's shop, and I hope it is not offended at being, however inadvertently, placed after the linendraper's. The chemist establishment is such a rare dandy, that one scarcely likes to talk of it as a shop, and one feels quite ashamed to step in among so much looking-glass, polished mahogany, and gilding, for a pen'orth of salts ; and then the gentlemen behind the counter, they don't seem quite to have made up their minds whether they are professionals, or only trades- men. What have they got those queer conjuror's letters on the big bottles for? 'Tis only to "impose" upon poor ignorant people ; and what's the meaning of the big bottles ? Many times Fve asked that question, as I have gone by and seen myself coolly walking upon my head round the great globes of blue how disgusting 'tis at A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. 127 night to see them, glare out upon you like great goblin's eyes glaring right out into the dark night, across the road, along the pavement, and up the wall, giving every passer-by, alternately, the scarlet-fever, or the last stage of cholera. One feels the chemist's shop is a great sham, the real stock in trade is the French polish, and the gilt, and the bottles, and the "bounce" of the proprietors all the rest is "leather and prunella." Contrasted with the affected gentility of the druggist is the harness maker's, a good honest shop, where the master is a real working tradesman, who stitches away in his shirt-sleeves among his apprentices, without an atom of pride ; look in when you will at the harness maker's, there is the master and his men cutting and sewing away, in that slow methodical manner so fitted to one of our great Saxon staples, as yet guiltless of any of the improvements of the " go-a-head" world. A saddler's shop appears chiefly furnished with the honest-looking craftsmen you see pursuing their labours through the loops of pendant bridles, the glistening steel bits, and the ranks of whips. I scarcely like to begin about pawnbrokers, over the threshold of whose doors the footsteps of misfortune so furtively glide. What an odd museum the window of mine "uncle" presents! From the flat-iron of the drunken laundress to the wedding-ring of the starving widow, everything is ticketed and has its price. If each article could give its story, what despair, what misery, would be laid bare to the world ! A little tray in the window is filled with articles of jewellery : there lies a locket containing hair the hair of some dead lover and many a summer evening has its owner sat in the twilight 128 A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. kissing it with unavailing tears ; she would not have parted with it for her life's blood, but the pinched face of that poor little sister, through which starvation gauntly glares, how can she resist its mute appeal ? Can you not fancy the shame, the revolting pride of the poor creature, as she nears the dreaded door ? Now she passes, as though she did not intend to enter, now she returns and looks about her, as though she were about to commit a dreadful crime, and now, at last, she plunges in, and gives up for ever a portion of her heart for a sister's meal. The next article in the tray is a gold pin, plucked by a street- walker from the breast of a drunken man. Then again we see a silver pencil-case it bought the last meal for a ruined merchant, ere the fatal leap was taken from the bridge. A desperate history stares you in the face in each trinket of the group. The prison, the deep water, the mad house, and the midnight grave, hold possession of their late owners, and here they all lie huddled together, marked " Anything in this tray for 4s. 6d." The pawnbroker's shop puts on a different complexion, according to the neighbourhood in which it is situated. At the West-end, the old battered plate, the choice cabinet picture, the signet ring of value, show the necessities that exist in the upper as well as the lower circles. In the meaner neigh- bourhoods, old clothes, counterpanes, sheets hung up at full length by the dozens, flat-irons, and workmen's tools, tell the straits to which the poor are driven sometimes for a meal. There is, at all times, a dignity in misfortune and suffering which we cannnot but respect ; let us pass on then, from the pawnbroker's window without any ill-timed jest. A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. 129 The book stalls are, perhaps, the only really picturesque shops, reminding one of the olden time, extant. Theru is a keeping about these stalls which is quite delightful ; all the books seem to have acquired by companionship such a family likeness ; such a dingy old-world appearance. It would be too great a stretch for the brain to imagine the time when they were wet from the press, and guiltless of those old mouldy stains, like maps of out-of-the-way countries, scattered over their pages. And then the stall- keepers they say that foxes and other wild animals of the desert grow to the colour of the sand ; so it is with the old stall-keeper, there he stands, his face the colour of a vellum MS., and his body bound in cloth the hue of that musty volume of " Hervey's Meditations among the Tombs." The only thing out of keeping with the book-stalls is that sharp little face peering out of a peep-hole between the books, like a spider watching for a heedless fly. There is a cunningness about the book-stall boy unworthy of the old-fashioned, trustful, respectable dulness of the presiding spirit in ancient spectacles. And then the old pinched-up faces that daily poke over the books, withered men, in camlet cloaks up to their knees, with great bunching umbrellas under their arms, poking out to the infinite danger of .passers-by. How they moon over the ragged, dirty surface of the book-range, " Anything new to-day, Mr. Maggot ? " " Nothing particular, Mr. Wormy/' The same question and the same answer have been exchanged every day these last twenty years. " Anything new to-day?" Lord love you; none of those camlet gentry would look at anything that was not drilled ISO A CHAPTER ON SHOP- WINDOWS. through like a honeycomb, and as old as the parish steeple. But, alas ! the genuine old book-stall is getting rarer and rarer ; the gloomy hollow space, in the dim distance of which the old tomes were faintly discovered, have been parted off from us by glaring plate glass. The very books in some of the new shops seem to have suffered a resurrection : old editions, published " at ye Sunne, over against ye Conduit, in Fleete Street/' issue afresh from the press ; the genuine originals, that have lain on dusty shelves for a couple of centuries, are aghast at seeing the very counterparts of themselves arise, in all the pristine beauty of youth, and push them from their stools. It is a wonder to me that Tonson and other ancient publishers don't bustle out of their graves at the sight of their old copyrights revived again, and kicking, in this low, degenerate age, when cabmen and others of the vulgar can command the books that, in their time, were soiled by no thumbs meaner than those of dukes and duchesses. I have well nigh gone through my beat for the day, but I have a word or two to say about butchers, and an odd change that comes over them towards night-time on Satur- days. We all know what a jolly good-natured race they seem, as they smile at their well-to-do customers through the ranks of legs of mutton and the carcases of sheep. Good reader, you would never think that that bland breadth of beef-like cheek could do anything but laugh ; if you think so, come along with me one Saturday night, and I will show you what a changed man he can make of himself. There he sits in his empty shop ; the hooks all guiltless of sweltering legs and ruddy surloins ; the great block A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. 131 scraped up clean for the week ; the gas flaring out in a stream from the open neck of the pipe, now only in a blue stream of light, now in a flaming sword of fire, as the wind plays with it, and alternately plunges the shop into intense light and deep shadow ; the board before the window is spread about with a hundred miserable scraps of meat it is the feast of the poor. A dozen wretched women, with their little baskets, hang about the board, and turn the scraps over, one by one, whilst the butcher sullenly looks on. "What's the price of this, mister?" one of them demands. "Sixpence," is the reply, without the moving of a muscle. "What, for that bit?" " There, if you don't like it, missis, you can move on ;" and here the attempted barter ends. Another and another eager pair of eyes scrutinize the miserable flaps of meat, but they never seem to buy, but pass on, whilst the butcher steadily keeps his seat. And in the next and next street, the gas flares, and a butcher sits in plethoric insensibility, keeping guard over his scanty scraps, and the pale crowd of women wander from shop to shop, and covet the offal their means cannot obtain. Reader, if you wish to believe in the jollity of the butcher, don't go out on a Saturday night and watch his dealing with the poor. And now I will conclude with a word or two upon doomed shops. The doomed shop is originally some respectable old concern that has outlived its neighbourhood. How often K 2 132 A CHAPTER ON SHOP- WINDOWS. in some bygone street do we see some such gloomy establishment, wearing the same aspect it did fifty years ago, when it was first opened by the firm. Fashion and the town have moved on long ago, but no change is to be seen in its dismal windows, filled with articles of a quality and nature which have reference to out-of-date times. It is looked up to with deep respect by the meaner class of shops, which have sprung up around it, to suit the fallen fortunes of the locality. The very stillness and absence of vulgar bustle which distinguishes it gives a certain dignity, and implies a certain wealth in the proprietors. At last the concern, which everybody looks upon as a fixture, as much as the parish church, becomes bankrupt, or the partners die, and it is closed. Shortly afterwards it re- opens with a dash, as a cheap tea mart, the whole place is transformed, and becomes the talk of all the old women of the courts round, who make a trial of its " good strong Congou, at 2s. 9d." Its dazzle is of short continuance, however ; the bailiff some fine morning walks in and makes a clear sweep of the whole stock for rent, and so it is closed again. The next time the shutters are taken down 'tis by some meek-minded individual from the country, who sets up a cigar-shop, and calls it a divan, upon the strength of a few bundles of home-made Havan- nahs, a dozen Dutch pipes, and two jars of "rag," the whole stock being kept guard over by a painted plaster-of- Paris brigand, with a cigar in his mouth, half as big as himself. One can always foretell what such concerns will come to ; the proprietor some night putting the key under the door and decamping. At this stage of the doomed shop's disease its symptoms of change are very rapid, a A CHAPTER ON SHOP-WINDOWS. 133 milliner is succeeded by a slang printseller ; then comes a sweetmeat shop ; the shifting of tenants taking place almost as quickly as in a pantomime. At last the place is closed for a long, long time ; but, for dear existence, it makes one more struggle, divides itself up the middle, and opens as two different establishments, the original door serving for both concerns. A boot and shoe maker takes possession of one window, and a fancy baker and confectioner the other ; the most opposite trades always thus falling cheek by jowl. One wonders how they manage to live, nobody ever goes in to buy anything, and what becomes of the stale pastry is a puzzle ; the boots 'tis true, will keep themselves, but not their proprietor. The children of the respective establish- ments dirty and squalid fraternize upon the door-step. At last the two firms are reduced to a system of barter, a pair of children's shoes being considered an equivalent for a baked meat pie, but alas ! two people can't go on living upon each other in this way, and the place is finally closed, the shutters, after a vain struggle, give themselves up to the bill-sticker, and an old apple woman, with her stall, takes possession of the doorway. It might open years hence, perhaps as a miserable broker's, when an old meat screen, two or three Windsor chairs, a few saucepans, some odd pieces of crockery, and a buggy-looking bedstead swathed like a mummy in its own sacking, will form the whole stock in trade, and to serve which, a woman in a dirty cap, and a gown freely opening, will rush out from some back slum at the sight of a customer. But this picture I must leave for another time to bring to perfection. COMMERCIAL GRIEF. " WHEN business orders are received From parties painfully bereaved, Five minutes' time is all we ask, To execute the mournful task." MOSES & SON. WHEN a man has more than his usual number of letters of a morning, and leisure to play with them, it is ob- servable what flirtations he indulges himself in, ere he finally makes them unbosom themselves. Now he toys with them, scrutinizes one after another, and guesses whom they can be from. Sometimes a handwriting that he dreamily remembers calls to him, as it were, from the envelope. Such a letter, deeply bordered with black, at once attracted my attention among the heap that lay upon my table. Whom could it be from ? It was evidently a messenger of affliction ; but how could that affect an old bachelor, with neither chick nor child ? I tore the white weeping willow upon a black background, that formed the device upon the seal, and read the contents. Nothing more than an intimation from a relative (perhaps once more intimate than now), of the sudden death of her brother-in-law, and a request that, under the circum- stances of the sudden bereavement of the widow, I would COMMERCIAL GRIEF. 135 undertake certain sad commissions relative to the mourning and monument which she entrusted to my care. It is noteworthy that, even in the deepest affliction, especially among women, in the matter of dress, how the very abandonment of grief is shot, as it were, with the more cheerful love of the becoming ; and in this instance I found, no departure from the general rule, as I was particularly enjoined, in the most decent terms that the writer could command under the circumstances, to do my sad spiriting at a certain maison de deuil mentioned. Of course, the term was not absolutely new to me ; but I had never realized its exact meaning, or imagined with what exquisite delicacy and refinement those establishments had gone in partnership, as it were, with the emotions, and with what sympathy, beautifully adjusted to the occasion, trade had met the afflictions of humanity. After breakfast, I set out upon my sad errand, and had no difficulty in finding the maison de deuil in question. It met me in the sad habiliments of mourning. No vulgar colours glared from the shop-windows, no gilt annoyed with its festive glare. The name of the firm scarcely pre- sumed to make itself seen in letters of the saddest grey, on a black ground. Here and there beads of white set off the general gloom of the house-front, like the crape pipings of a widow's cap. The very metal window-frames and plates had gone into a decorous mourning, zinc taking the place of what we feel, under the circumstances, would be quite indecent brass. Our neighbours across the Channel, who know how to dress up affliction as appropriately as their bonbonnittre, have long since seen the necessity of classifying the trappings of grief, and of withdrawing 136 COMMERCIAL GRIEF. them from the vulgar atmosphere of gayer costumes. In any of our smaller country towns, the ordinary mercer who has just been handling a flaunting silk thinks it no shame to measure off, with his last smirk still upon his features, a dress of paramatta. The rude Anglo-Saxon provincial element feels no shock at the incongruity. They manage these things better in France, and we are following their example in the great metropolis. On my pushing the plate-glass door, it gave way with a hushed and muffled sound, and I was met by a gentleman of sad expression, who, in the most sympathetic voice, in- quired the nature of my want : and, on my reply, directed me to the INCONSOLABLE GRIEF DEPARTMENT. The inside of the establishment I found to answer exactly to the ap- pearance without. The long passage I traversed was panelled in white with black borderings, like so many mourning cards placed on end ; and I was becoming im- pressed with the deep solemnity of the place, when I caught sight of a neat little figure rolling up some ribbon, and on inquiring if I had arrived at the Inconsolable Grief De- partment, she replied in a gentle voice, slightly shaded with gaiety, that that was the half-mourning counter, and that I must proceed until I had passed the repository for widows' silk. Following her directions, I at last reached my destination, a large room draped with black, with a hushed atmosphere about it, as though a body was invisibly lying there in state. An attendant in sable habiliments picked out with the inevitable white tie, and with an undertakerish. eye and manner, awaited my commands. I according produced my list. Scanning it critically, he said : COMMERCIAL GRIEF. 137 " Permit me to inquire, sir, if it is a deceased partner ?" I nodded assent. " We take the liberty of asking this distressing ques- tion/' he replied, " as we are extremely anxious to keep up the character of this establishment by matching at once the exact shade of affliction. Our paramattas and crapes in this department give satisfaction to the deepest woe. Permit me to show you a new texture, which we term the Inconsolable." With that he placed a pasteboard box before me, full of mourning fabrics. " Is this it ?" I inquired, lifting a lugubrious piece of drapery. "Oh no ! " he replied : " the one you have in your hand was manufactured for last year's afflictions, and was termed 'the stunning blow shade;' it makes up well, however, with our sudden bereavement silk a leading article and our distraction trimmings." " I am afraid," said I, "my commission says nothing about these novelties." " Ladies in the country," he blandly replied, " are pos- sibly not aware of the perfection to which the art of mourning genteelly is now brought. But I will see that your commission is attended to to the letter." Giving another glance over my list : " Oh ! a widow's cap is mentioned, I see. I must trouble you, sir, to proceed to the Weeds Department for that article the first turning to the left." Proceeding as I was directed, I came to a recess fitted up with a solid phalanx of widows' caps. I perceived, at a glance, that they exhausted the whole gamut of grief, 138 COMMERCIAL GRIEF. from its deepest shade to that tone which is expressive of a pleasing melancholy. The foremost row confronted me with all the severity of crap en folds, in the midst of which my mind's eye could see the set features of many a Mrs. Clennain, whilst those behind gradually faded off into the most jaunty tarlatan ; and one or two of the outsiders even breaking out into worldly feathers, and the most flaunty weepers. Forgetting the proprieties for the moment, I inquired of the grave attendant, if one of the latter would be suitable ? "Oh no, sir/' she replied, with a slight shade of se- verity in her voice ; " you may gradually work up to it in a year or two ; but any of these/' pointing to the front row of weeds, "are indispensable for the first burst of grief." Acquiescing in the propriety of this sliding-scale of sorrow, I selected some weeds expressive of the deepest dejection I could find ; and having completed my commis- sion, I inquired whether I could procure for myself some lavender gloves ? " Oh, sir, for those things/' she said, in the voice of Tragedy speaking to Comedy, "you must turn to your right, and you will come to the Complimentary Mourning counter." Turning to the right, accordingly, I was surprised and a little shocked to find myself once more among worldly colours ; tender lavender I had expected, but violet, mauve, and even absolute red, stared me in the face. I was about retiring, thinking I had made a mistake, when a young lady, with a charming tinge of cheerfulness in COMMERCIAL GRIEF. 139 her voice, inquired if I wanted anything in her depart- ment ? " I was looking for the Complimentary Mourning counter/' I replied, "for some gloves, but I fear I am wrong/' " You are quite right, sir/' she said ; " this is it." She saw my eye glance at the cheerful silks, and, with the instinctive tact of woman, guessed my thoughts in a moment. " Mauve, sir, is very appropriate for the lighter sor- rows." " But absolute red/' I retorted, pointing to some velvet of that colour, " Is quite admissible when you mourn the departure of a distant relative; but may I show you some gloves?" and suiting the action to the word, she lifted the cover from the glove-box, and displayed a perfect picture of deli- cate half-tones, indicative of a struggle between the cheer- ful and the sad. " There is a pleasing melancholy in the shade of grey," she said, indenting slightly each outer knuckle with the elastic kid, as she measured my hand. " Can you find a lavender ? " " Oh yes ; the sorrow-tint is very slight in that, and it wears admirably." Thus, by degrees, growing beautifully less, the grief of the establishment died out in the tenderest lavender, and I left, profoundly impressed with the charming improve- ments which Parisian taste has made on the old aboriginal style of mourning. But my task was not yet accomplished. A part of my 140 COMMERCIAL GRIEF. commission was to select a neat and appropriate monu- ment, the selection of which was left entirely to my own discretion. Accordingly I wended my way towards the New Road, the emporium of " monumental marble/' Here every house has its marketable cemetery, and you see grief in the rough, and ascending to the most delicately chiselled smoothness. Your marble mason is a very different stamp of man from the maison de deuil assistant, and my en- trance into the establishment I sought, was greeted with a certain rough respect by the man in attendance, who was chiselling an angel's classic nose. " Will you kindly allow me to see some designs for a monument ? " I inquired. " Certainly, sir. Is it for a brother or sister, father or mother, sir?" " A gentleman/' I replied, rather shortly. " I hope no offence, sir but the father of a family ? " I nodded assent. "Then will you please to step this way/' he replied ; and leading the way through the house, he opened a door, and we entered a back yard filled with broken, but erect, marble columns, that would not have disgraced Palmyra. " That/' said he, "will be a very suitable article." " But," said I, " do you really break these pillars pur- posely ?" " Why, that all depends, you see, sir. When the father of a family is called away on a sudden, we break the column off short with a rough fracture : if it has been a lingering case, we chisel it down a little dumpy. That, for instance/' said he, pointing to a very thick pillar, fractured as sharp and ragged as a piece of granite, "is for COMMERCIAL GRIEF. 141 an awful and sudden affliction a case of apoplexy a wife and seven small children/' " But," I observed, " there are some tall and some short columns." " Well, you see," said he, " that's all according to age. We break 'em off short for old 'uns, and it stands to reason, when it's a youngish one, we give him more shaft." " The candle of life is blown out early in some cases ; in others, it is burnt to the socket," I suggested. " Exactly, sir," he said, "now you have hit it." " Nevertheless," I replied, " I have not exactly made up my mind about the column. Can you show me any other designs ?" " Yes, certainly, sir." With that he led the way again to the office, and placed before me a large book of " pat- terns." "We do a great deal in that way," he said, displaying a design with which my reader is probably familiar. It was an urn, after the old tea-urn pattern, half enveloped in a tablecloth overshadowed by a weeping- willow and an exceedingly limp-looking lady, who leaned her forehead against the urn, evidently suffering from a sick-headache. " No," I said, " I think I have seen that design before." "Perhaps so," he replied; "but really there are so many persons die that we can't have something new every time." " What is this ?" I inquired. It was an hour-glass and a skull overgrown by a bramble. "Oh, that is for the country trade," he said, hastily 142 COMMERCIAL GEIEF. turning over the leaf ; "we don't do anything in that way among genteel people. This is the snapped lily-pattern, but that won't do for the father of a family ; and here is the dove-design, a pretty thing enough. We do a good many of them among the Evangelicals of Clapham." A rather plump-looking bird, making a book-marker of his beak, was directing attention to a passage in an open volume. " But," said I, " have you no ornamental crosses ?" " No/' said he ; " you must go to Paddington for them sort of things. Lord bless your soul, we should ruin our trade if we was to deal with such Puseyite things." " I never knew before/' said I, " that sectarianism thus pursued us even to our tombstones. '' The art of design, it is quite clear, had not yet pene- trated to the workshop of the marble-mason, so I was con- tent to select some simple little design, and leave my friend to a resumption of the elaboration of the angel's nose, in which occupation I had disturbed him. ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. AND why not? We stall-feed milcli cows in upper stories of London houses, bring deep-sea fishes and zoo- phytes under inspection in our drawing-rooms, and grow choice ferns in domestic glass-cases, and we contend it is quite as easy to pick our own fruit from our own trees in the centre of the city as from the south-peach wall of some snug country house. Our reader, of course, is incre- dulous, but we mean what we say, and hope, before we have done, to convince him that we speak the words of truth and soberness. The cultivation of fruit-trees in pots in hot-houses has long been practised by nurserymen in this country, in the same manner as grapes are culti- vated; this process is necessarily expensive, and entails the necessity of employing highly-skilled gardeners. Mr. Rivers, of Sawbridgeworth, in Hertfordshire, was the first, however, we believe, who proposed to simplify the growing of rare fruits such as the peach, nectarine, and apricot so as to render their culture within the means and knowledge of persons of very moderate incomes. To grow peaches at the cost of two shillings a-piece has never been a difficulty ; to grow them at one penny a-piece is a triumph, and that he has taught us all to do. In this 144 ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. country the production of the rare stone-fruits out of doors has always been a lottery. We rejoice greatly at seeing our walls one sheet of blossom in early spring ; and then comes a day of wet and a nipping frost, as in this very year, and all our hopes are blighted. To afford protection during the few trying weeks of March and April, and to produce a temperature like the dry yet vary- ing atmosphere of the East, the natural home of our finest wall-fruit, without delivering us into the hands of the pro- fessed gardener with his stoves, hot pits, boilers, and other horticultural luxuries, which the rich only can afford was the desideratum, and that Mr. Rivers has accomplished with what he terms, his " orchard-houses." These are not the elaborate pieces of carpentery work we meet with in great gardens, but glass-houses, con- structed so simply that any person of an ingenious turn may construct them for himself ; they are nothing more, in fact, than low wooden-sided houses, with a glass-roof. As there is no window-framing, planing, mortising, or rebating required, the cost is very inconsiderable. A span-roofed orchard-house, thirty feet long by fourteen feet wide, with a height to the ridge in the middle of eight feet, sloping down to four feet on either side, can be constructed by any carpenter for 27. 10s. ; smaller lean- to houses for very considerably less : estimates for which our more curious reader, who may feel inclined to make an experiment in home fruit-growing, will find carefully set forth in Mr. Rivers's original little work, " The Or- chard-House/' published by Longman. One of these houses gives the fruit-grower an atmosphere as nearly as possible resembling the native one of the peach, nectarine, ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. 145 and apricot. The glass affords abundance of light through its ample panes, and its protection gives a dry atmosphere, in which the fruit is sure to set and come to maturity ; whilst the vigour of the tree is insured by the wide openings or shutters in the opposite side walls, which admit a constant and abundant current of air through the house when it is thought desirable to do so. The atmo- sphere produced, beds are made, composed of loam and manure, on either side of the sunken central pathway, not for our orchard to grow in but upon. And here begins the singularity of this new method of culture. Any one who has grown fruit-trees must be aware that their roots are great travellers : they penetrate under the garden-wall, crop up in the gravel path, and penetrate into the old drains ; they seek their food, in fact, as the cow does in the meadow, moving from place to place, and, like the cow, they, to a certain extent, exhaust themselves in so doing. Under such circumstances, artificial aid is of little avail, you cannot give nourishment to roots that have run you don't know where ; but you can confine the roots and stall-feed them, as we do animals, with a certainty of pro- ducing the effect we desire, and this we accomplish by put- ting our orchards into pots. But Pomona has still an infinity to learn. It clearly will not do to allow our fruit-trees to fling about their arms as they do in a wild state ; in the orchard-house we have to economize room ; there must not be an inch of useless wood. A little time since, small standard trees, about four feet high, were thought to be the best form for the orchard-house, but Mr. Rivers has come to the conclu- sion that most light and heat is gained by training his 146 ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. trees perpendicularly in the form of a small cypress thus a stem, four feet high, supports a large num- ber of short lateral branches, pinched back to five or six fruit-buds. This somewhat formal shape has the great advantage of allowing a large number to be congregated together, and of ripening their fruit better, inasmuch as they are not so much shaded with leaves, as those having straggling branches. And now for the manner of feeding them. The pots in which the roots are encased may be considered the mangers of the tree ; to these nutriment is given in the autumn of every year, in the shape of a top- dressing of manure, in addition to which, instead of one hole, three or four are made in the bottom of the pot, to allow the roots to emerge into the rich compost of two- thirds loam and one of manure, forming the border. " But," says our reader, " this, after all, is but a round- about way of making the roots seek mother earth." It may appear so, but in reality it is a very different thing. In the first place, the zone of baked clay placed round about the roots, in the shape of the pot, is a good conductor of heat, which highly stimulates the tree. In the second place, the roots, although allowed to strike into the border, are within call ; when the branches are pinched back in the spring, these roots also are pruned ; thus the vegetation, which otherwise would be apt to run riot and fill the house with useless leaves and wood, is checked at will. To provide still further nourishment to our nurslings, every two years the earth is picked out of each pot, two inches all round, and six inches deep, and fresh compost is rammed into its place. Our reader will perhaps smile when he thinks of the ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. 147 old grey and mossy orchards of the country, with their tumble-down trees leaning in every direction, and spread- ing over acres of ground, and hundreds of yards of wall trees being compressed into a little glass-house, and thus made so shockingly tame by the hand of man, that they are forced to depend upon him, like barn-door fowl, for their daily nourishment ; but he would smile, and that with delight, to see the town of orchard-houses in Mr. Bivers's nursery, thus filled with obedient trees, and bear- ing educated crops, such as no open orchard or garden ever dreamed of doing. Trees, once potted and placed in the orchard-house, the trouble attendant upon them is not very much, and does not require any special gardening qualifications. A lady might, with advantage, relieve the monotony of making holes upon cambric and sewing them up again, by this delightful occupation. In the winter and spring months protection should be given against frosts by closing the shutters ; very little water should be allowed in winter, as the trees require to hibernate, and water acts as a stimu- lant. About March, pruning should commence, and should continue through the season until the final autumn pruning, when the orchard is once more put to sleep. All these are matters which afford infinite pleasure to all persons of healthy tastes. The trees are all brought microscopically, as it were, before us ; we watch the buds perfected into the blossom, and an orchard-house of peaches in full bloom is one of the most beautiful sights in horti- culture. We watch with still greater interest the gradually- ripening fruit. Some one has wittily said, " that the orchard-house is the ladies' billiard table/' and certainly L 2 148 ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. a more pleasurable occupation for them, could not well be devised. Peaches, nectarines, or apricots, grown on these pyramidal trees, as they are somewhat incorrectly called, are charmingly ornamental, especially the apricot, the golden fruit of which contrasts beautifully with the green leaves, and what can be more quaint or delicious than to pluck your own fruit from the living tree orna- menting the dessert table ? It will be impossible within the limits of this article to attempt any directions with regard to the management of the different fruit that may be grown in these domestic orchards, we would rather refer the reader to Mr. Bivers's little volume for these particulars. It is essential to inform our reader, however, that failure, with even the most moderate care, is the exception rather than the rule. We all know how difficult it is to keep the peach and nectarine trees clear of the brown aphis blight which infests them. These and all other kinds of blight, including the red spider, the pest of hot- houses, can now be most readily destroyed by the applica- tion of the new patent composition, termed Gishurst, a kind of sulphur soap, which readily dissolves in water. One or two applications of this compound clears the most shrivelled leaves of these parasites at once without injuring the points of the tender growing shoots, as the fumes of sulphur or the decoction of tobacco-water are sometimes apt to do. But it may be asked, what is the actual gain resulting from this domestic method of treatment ? We reply, in point, size, quantity and quality, the fruit is greatly superior to that given by the old method of wall- training. ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. 149 An orchard-house thirty feet long and fourteen feet wide will hold, say forty perpendicularly-trained peach-trees, or two rows on either side the centre pathway. These trees in the third year, and henceforth for many years (Mr. Rivers has them still luxuriantly bearing in the twelfth year), will produce two dozen fruit each, or eighty dozen altogether, and by the selection of various sorts and the retardation of the ripening, by the simple expedient of removing some of the trees to an out-of-door north aspect, a constant succession of this fine fruit may be maintained from August to November. The trees should be placed alternately, thus . .'... in the double row, so as to give them the utmost amount of light and air. By this arrangement the fruit is ripened all round, instead of simply on its outer surface, as it often happens with wall-fruit. Another important matter is to shift the trees now and then let the pot in the north- east end of the house be taken to the south-west ; a little visiting in fresh air is quite as beneficial to trees as to humans ; and this locomotive quality is another advantage that orchard-house trees have over those planted against walls. Apples, pears, grapes, figs, and oranges, are grown in this manner with the same facility, certainty, and cheap- ness, as the choicer stone-fruit ; and, be it remembered, these orchard-houses are designed for small gardens and for small gardeners. All that is required is a slip of ground open to the sun, just large enough to find room for the orchard-house, which should, if possible, lie south- east by north-west, in order that the full summer sun may, in the course of the day, fall upon all sides of the trees. : 150 ORCHARDS IN CHEAPSIDE. There is scarcely a suburban road- side slip of garden which may not find room for its peach-orchard, and where room and expense is an object, a small lean-to house may be erected for a very few pounds, which will ripen its fruit as well as the larger ones. And where there are no gardens, we may make them on the roofs of our houses, as they do in the East. Where there are flat-leads the erection of glass orchard-houses is a simple matter enough. "But what about the blacks ? " interposes my reader. Simply this : we must treat the orchard-houses in such situations as we do persons with delicate lungs ; we must provide them with respirators ; over all the openings left in the sides for the free cir- culation of air, woollen netting with three-quarter inch meshes must be stretched. The small fibres projecting from these meshes filter the air in the most surprising manner, as will be evidenced by the soot entangled within them by the time they have done their work for the season. Moderate frosts are intercepted in the same matter. A gentleman living at Bow, in the midst of the smokiest suburb of London, has in this way pro- duced abundant crops of the rarest fruit for many years ; and Mr. Rivers informs us, that he would engage to produce excellent fruit in City orchard-houses, if required to do so. Glass is now so cheap, that we see no reason why the roofs of the houses should not be glazed instead of tiled. By an arrangement of this kind, every citizen may, if he likes, possess his attic garden blooming with fruit, and after it is gathered, with autumn flowers, such as chrysanthemums. Such glass-roofed attics (only far more lofty and expensive ones) already meet the eye in OECHAKDS IN CHEAPSIDE. 151 all directions, built for the use of photographers. We see no manner of reason why peaches, as well as pic- tures, may not be produced in such situations ; and indeed there is nothing to prevent the construction of very fruit- ful " Orchards in Cheapside." THE WEDDING BONNET. I WAS the other day in the company of half-a-dozen young ladies gentle cousins all of them as merry as little larks, as busy as lamplighters, and as important as the prepara- tion for the great event in female life a wedding could make them. The bride's bonnet had just come home, and I had the satisfaction of seeing a dozen lily-white hands all in one tumultuous group, arranging and shaping it to the face of the fair maid herself. It was pronounced on all hands quite the thing a love of a bonnet, in fact ; and after having deposited it in the centre of the table, and hunted under the sofa and in all quarters of the room to make sure that the cat was not there, they left me with an especial charge not to touch it for the world. I promised accordingly, as I sat dozing before the fiie, and they left me alone to pursue their welcome task. Presently, a knock, knock, came to the door ; it speedily opened, and a strange gentleman in respectable black entered with a magic- lantern under his arm. Somehow or other I was not a bit astonished at his entrance, but took it quite as a matter of course. " So you have a bride's bonnet there/' said he, looking at me with his keen gray eyes ; "all smiles and happiness, I suppose ? " THE WEDDING BONNET. 153 " Yes/' said I, as though he had been the oldest friend in the world, " little Anne " " Ah ! " said he, interposing, " people must marry, I suppose ; but I have a word or two to say to you about this gimcrack." And stepping up to the bonnet, he turned up his cuffs like an expert chemical lecturer, took it in his hands, blew upon it, and as quickly as a child's card-house rattles to the ground, the bonnet lay in pieces before him. Satin, blush-rose, feather, frame-work, and the very cotton with which it was sown, lay grouped under his hands. He then deliberately wiped the illuminated lens of his magic- lantern. " Let us begin/' said he, " from the beginning/' taking in his grizzly fingers the blush-rose, and stripping its stem until the iron wire of which it was composed was laid bare. Before even this thread of metal can be produced, men must dive into the bowels of the earth to procure the ore and the fuel with which to smelt it. " I will show you the true history of the making of this bonnet." With that he turned the focus of the lantern upon the wall, and I saw a picture of a deep pit into which men continually kept entering, and as continually emerging from, like so many emmets, black and filthy to the last degree ; and further in the mine, toiling up steep ascents, women on their hands and knees, with chains round their bodies, dragged up the heavy corves of coal.* " But this," said I, " surely is not fit employment for women ? " "Well," said he with a shrug, as if mimicing a * Since this paper was written, this degrading kind of labour has been prohibited by the Legislature. 154 THE WEDDING BOKNET. general expression, " what's to be done ? Somebody must do it." With that he changed the slides, and I saw a child, not more than five years old, sitting in a narrow low passage in the remotest darkness of the mine. I saw him pull something he held in his hand, a little door opened, and the woman harnessed to the corve passed onwards ; the door shut to, and the child was again in the darkness, huddled up in the corner to protect himself from the cold and damp. Noticing my surprise, my strange visitor remarked, " This sort of thing soon uses them up, but there are plenty more in the ' labour market/ What so cheap as flesh and blood ? But we have forged the tough iron and spun the fine wire. Now for the artist's touch/' As he spoke, a fresh slide rattled through the lantern ; and in a mean room I saw a poor girl, winding delicate gauze round the iron wire, and with wan fingers, mocking nature in one of her most beautiful moods. As she added petal after petal of the rose she was making, she stole hour ,after hour from the night. " You see/' said he, " she tints the flower from the colour of her own poor cheek. Alas ! that the human rose should decay that this artificial thing might flourish ! " He said this sadly, but imme- ately added, in his usual tone, "but there what's to be done ? _The pay is slow starvation, I admit ; but these women crowd the labour-market so, that they are glad enough to slave even at this work if not, a worse fate awaits them. "But we have only got as far as the flower in our lecture/' he said, and held out the blush-rose he had taken THE WEDDING BONNET. 155 from the bonnet ; he then put it aside with the triumphant air of one who has just made a successful demonstration. " Here/' said he, holding up a piece of the glazed calico lining, " I will show you something interesting about this," and immediately threw out upon the wall a picture which differed from all that had gone before it. Tall palms, and all the luxuriant vegetation of the East, shot up. Then a village was seen upon the banks of the Ganges. In the open air workmen sat at their looms weaving cloth, and singing as they wove. "Have you noticed the scene enough?" said he. I nodded, the picture dissolved, and instead of the former scene of beauty and industry, I saw a village in ruins, through which the wild dog alone roamed, and the jungle grew up to its very foot. " You see," said he, anticipating my eager query as to the cause of this change, " when the power- loom first began to revolve, and the tall chimneys of Manchester to rise, the poor rude looms on the banks of the Ganges, and their frugal, industrious workers perished at a blow. But you know competition is the order of the day the weak in these times must go to the wall/' Perceiving that I did not exactly understand the Christian spirit of this doctrine, he added, with a more earnest tone, " Perhaps the time will come, when the transition from a slow to a more speedy method of produc- tion, through the agency of machinery, will be made with some mitigation of all this sudden and unlooked-for misery but while I am moralizing my lamp is burning, and I have a score of slides yet to show you." 156 THE WEDDING BONNET. With that the lantern threw upon the wall another picture. It was an African desert, and an Arab on horse- back was hunting down the swift ostrich, which with outspread wings sailed along the burning sand. At length, worn out by the greater power of endurance of his pursuer, he was taken and slain, and his captor rewarded himself for his trouble by plucking from the yet bleeding bird his waving plumage. In the distance, a caravan comes winding along towards some distant mart, to which the Arab attaches himself the wells fail the moving multitude, and one by one, man and beast, fall and leave their whitened bones as a track-mark for future travellers across the wastes ; but the merchandise is borne home, though human life is lost. " You would not think, to see with what negligent elegance this feather falls/' said the stranger, holding up its white sweep, " that man had given even life in the struggle to bring it to this perfection. But there, what's to be done ? we always thought more of matter than of man. We have not quite finished yet," said he, taking up the cane framework of the bonnet ; "we must go to the New World for our next picture/' As he spoke, he adjusted a new slide, and showed a Brazilian plantation, in which the slaves laboured under fear of the cow-hide of the overseer. " The bees who make the honey," said he, with his cold sneer, " how grateful man is to them ! I suppose you think we have no such slaves. I have two or three choice slides here/' said he, holding up the transparent glasses " a figure or so of an exhausted milliner, and a Spitalfields weaver in his little garret, weaving inch by inch glossy satin, whilst his own THE WEDDING BONNET. 157 poor family have only rags to cover them ; but I have shown you enough of the misery that has gone towards making this little trifle. The pretty little miss, when she puts it on, and carries it so lightly on her head, will little think how it has been delved, and forged, and weaved, and built up into such a becoming fashion but it is worth a thought about/' With that he blew lightly on the scat- tered materials, and they rushed together again as speedily as they had before fallen to pieces. " And now/' said he, in the rising tone of one coming to his peroration, " I am not altogether such a bad sort of a spirit as you might have taken me to be. So I will give you a sentiment of much importance to the working bees in the busy human hive, and that is A HAPPIER PRODUCTION AND A BETTER DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH/' And clapping his magic lantern under his arm, he wished me a good evening and disappeared. " Why, Tom/' said a sweet voice close to my ear, at the same time a soft little fist thumped me on the back " why, Tom/' said Anne, " you have been talking such strange things in your sleep this last half-hour. I told you how 'twould be, eating so many nuts/' And truly I had gone fast asleep with my feet on the fender, and saw this vision. And now, gentle reader, do not be angry with me if, imitating the tactics of the newspaper puffs, which begin with some alluring title and gradually lead on to the " Mart of Moses," or the as inevitable " Macassar/' I have struck in your heart upon an universal sympathy, 158 THE WEDDING BONNET. and thus beguiled you into the less interesting channels of social economy. But for once the puff, like the foam of the tankard, is all on the top, and it will be seen, perhaps, that there is more substance in the matter below than the title warrants. Considering how important a portion of the community are the productive classes, it is no slight matter that we endeavour to rid their daily occupation as much as possible of the needless repulsiveness and danger that in too many cases at present attaches to them. As for the proposition of " A better distribution of wealth," it has occupied the attention of all the most enlightened econo- mists, but they have looked upon it as a thing rather to be desired than capable of accomplishment. In the various joint-stock associations, however, and mutual benefit societies which have spread lately so widely among the middle and working classes, by which profits are diffused through the masses instead of centring in large capitalists, one of the methods by which the problem is to be worked is perhaps hit upon. AEEATED BREAD. IT certainly is not pleasant, in biting a thick hunch of bread, to find that you have made a section of a cock- roach ; nevertheless, however unpleasant, the discovery is instructive. The geologist, from a much meaner fragment of pre-Adamite life, bisected in a railway cutting, will tell you the exact condition under which the globe existed in some very early stage of its formation, and that much- abused cockroach is equally capable of telling a tale respecting one condition under which the bread which formed its matrix was produced. Everybody knows, or should know, at least, in these days of physical science, what the globe is like at that particular slice which is filled with saurian s like the plums in a cake. But how few know anything of that substratum of urban life, the whereabouts of which is discovered to us in frosty weather only by a patch of thaw upon the pavement. That the staff of life somehow or other emerges from these under- ground caverns we may possibly be cognisant of, but how many of us have ever troubled ourselves to have ocular demonstration of what daily and nightly goes on in these sunless dungeons ? The evidence of the cockroach in the bread, like the presence of the saurians in the blue lias, 160 AERATED BREAD. indicates, it is true, the presence of a very high tempera- ture in those regions, but we feel satisfied that there is a charming ignorance abroad respecting a manufacture which comes home directly to our breakfast-tables. The arrangement of a metropolitan bakehouse, then, literally described, is pretty much as follows. The oven is in the cellar, under the roadway, the mixing- troughs and knead- ing boards are in the basement. The heat ranges from 80 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. There is generally a privy under the stairs in some corner of the den, all the impure gases from which are sucked, as a matter of course, towards the furnace-mouth, ventilating the dough in the course of its progress over it. It is scarcely necessary to remark, that a temperature of the nature we have indi- cated cannot be without effect upon the skin of the work- man ; nevertheless, the machinery of these establishments consists simply of the baker's hands and arms, and, in some cases, of their feet ! With these they knead the dough much as they did at the earliest times of which we have any knowledge. The result, with respect to the bread, we leave to our reader's imagination, but we wish particularly to draw attention to the condition of the workers. According to the report of Dr. Guy, the jour- neyman baker habitually works in the polluted atmosphere we have described from eighteen to twenty hours a day, and, towards the end of the week, nearly two entire days in succession ! Is it to be wondered at that, under these circumstances, the trade of the baker is one of the most unhealthy in the metropolis ? Compositors who work in a heated atmosphere, we are told by Dr. Guy, are peculiarly subject to chest diseases of a severe character ; they spit AERATED BREAD. 161 blood (a very grave symptom) in the proportion of twelve and a half in a hundred ; but journeymen bakers, we are informed by the same authority, spit blood in the propor- tion of thirty-one in the hundred. Amongst the journey- men of the under-priced bakers, we are further told, that no less than every other man spits blood ! We do not wish to pursue this unpleasant subject further than is necessary to insure public attention to the sufferings of a class of workers who have hitherto borne their cross with almost culpable patience. We have said enough, however, to show that society is the ogre we read of in the nursery- tale, and like him may cry, " We grind their bones to make our bread ! " The Operative Bakers' Society endeavoured, some time since, to obtain a Committee of the House of Commons to inquire into their grievances, but they failed, and nothing seemed left to them but to interest public opinion in their favour. It is probable, however, that their grievances will gradually be redressed in a manner quite unexpected. The iron limbs of machinery are coming to the rescue of the over- tasked human muscle ; another powerful drudge once tho- roughly engaged in our service, not only will the evils complained of by the operative bakers disappear, but other advantages will flow to the public we have yet to mention. Some little time since we witnessed the working of bread-making by machinery, at the steam bakery of Messrs. Peek, Frean, and Co., of Dockhead. It has long been well known in the medical profession, that the ordi- nary fermented bread is very apt to disagree with dyspeptic persons a fermentation still going on in the stomach after M 162 AERATED BREAD. it is eaten. Impressed with this difficulty as regards or- dinary bread, Dr. Dauglish has succeeded in making by machinery a very pure unfermented bread, the constituents of which are simply flour and salt, with the addition of what we shall term soda-water. In the production of this article, which is perhaps familiar to the reader under the term of aerated bread, the hand of the workman never touches the material during the whole process of manu- facture. The mixing is performed in a hollow air-tight iron receptacle, by the rapid revolution of iron arms fixed upon a central spindle, very much in the same manner in which mortar is mixed in a pugmill. In ordinary bread, the vesicular texture is given by the addition of yeast, which causes a fermentation in the dough mass, resulting in the production of carbonic acid gas, which fills the tenacious substance with air-bubbles, and thus lightens it. In the new process, however, the carbonic acid gas is supplied direct to the flour in conjunc- tion with the water, and the lightening process is thus performed without any decomposition whatever. The aerated water is pumped into the mixing receptacle at a very high pressure, and when the kneading is finished a process which is completed in as many minutes as it for- merly took hours a valve is opened in the bottom of the mixer, and the dough is forced out by the elasticity of its contained carbonic acid gas. A boy in attendance receives it as it flows, and cuts off, with marvellous exactness, just enough to fill a small 2 Ib. 4 oz. tin. It is as much as he can do to keep time with the stream of dough as it issues from the machine, and cut off sufficient portions to fill up the little army of tins that are supplied to his hand. The loaves, AERATED BREAD. 163 now ready for baking, are placed upon what is termed a traversing oven, the platform of which is composed of an endless chain working upon two rollers. By this con- trivance the dough is taken in at one end, and after tra- velling, and baking meanwhile, for the space of one hour, is ejected at the other extremity as bread. The lightness and purity of the aerated bread will, without doubt, command for it, ere long, universal demand. The rejection of the process of fermentation, whilst it does away with a certain cause of indigestion, is also valuable, inasmuch as it renders a certain kind of adulteration, to which all town-made bread is obnoxious, unnecessary. Londoners are particularly partial to very white bread. Now this quality can only be obtained by the admixture of alum with the flour, in order to overcome the partial discoloration which takes place during the fermenting pro- cess even in pure flour ; damaged flour, which bakers use in the poorer districts, in consequence of its dark appear- ance even before fermentation, requires a much more liberal allowance of the bleaching alum. Dr. Hassall, in his work on the Adulteration of Food, devotes a special chapter to the falsification of bread in the metropolis. Out of twenty- four loaves, purchased indiscriminately from bakers residing in different parts of London, he found every one adulterated with alum, the degree of adultera- tion corresponding with the poverty of the neighbourhood in which it had been bought. Thus it is clear that the ordinary bread is contaminated with a pernicious drug. The quantity thus taken at one time is small, it is true, but its repetition from day to day cannot fail to exercise a considerable influence upon the digestive organs, espe- M 2 164; AERATED BREAD. cially in young children. The aerated machine-made bread does not require the addition of alum to whiten it, the energy of the kneading apparatus transferring even the darkest spurred flour into perfectly white loaves. The poor journeyman baker, no less than the public, will be the gainer by the application of machinery to the opera- tion of mixing, inasmuch as it will at once lift a very clumsy handicraft, carried on by small masters, with in- sufiicient means, into a manufacture of the first class, necessitating the employment of large capital. The steam- bakery of Messrs. Peek, Frean, & Co., for instance, where we saw Dr. Dauglish's bread machinery at work, contained workshops as spacious as those of a cotton-mill, contrast- ing most favourably with the miserable, fetid dens in which our metropolitan bread is at present made. The air is pure, the temperature moderate, and the time occupied in the manufacture of the loaf so short (an hour and a half), that the operatives are entirely exempt from the fearful amount of illness and mortality which exists among those employed by low-priced bakers. The introduction of steam machinery into the trade is, in fact, as great a boon to the poor mechanic, as the invention of the sewing machine is to the tailor and sempstress. Iron limbs worked by steam muscles, it is clear, will ere long lift the working man above the mere drudgery of his task in most handicrafts, and prepare the way, more than any other circumstance, for their ultimate elevation in our social system. THE GERMAN FAIR. IF Paterfamilias wishes for a new sensation, let him pro- vide himself with a big basket and follow me. It will try his dignity, perhaps, to be seen struggling amid a mob of children ; but, after all, he will not get half as much put out as in the crush-room of the Opera, and I promise him more thorough delight, far brighter eyes, and more genuine laughter than he will meet with there. Say it is three o'clock in the afternoon and on a seasonable Decem- ber day when our cab drives up to the German Fair in Regent Street. Was there ever such a crowd before of merry little feet all pattering and pushing along the entrance hall lined with Christmas-trees ? Paterfamilias perhaps has not forgotten that cry of " Eureka ! " the ten thousand gave when they first caught sight of the sea ; but we question if it was half as hearty as the joyous " Oh ! " that burst from the mouths of a hundred "terrible Turks," as they swarm into the glittering hall of the German Fair. Twice in our lives toys make themselves known to us as great facts. In youth, when we play with them and smash them ourselves, and in middle age, when we do it by 166 THE GERMAN FAIR. deputy in the persons of our own children ; and, possibly, if you ask Paterfamilias, he will tell you that he enjoys them the second time more than the first for then there are more to smash, and more to laugh and enjoy. But, if a man has any heart in him, how must he delight to see five hundred urchins all boiling over with pleasure, whilst five hundred mammas and papas are enjoying their happiness. In my young days, when George IV. was king, toys were toys, and youngsters were obliged to use them economically ; but now there is no such necessity, for here we are in a room where it is impossible to spend more than a penny at a time. I can get anything for a penny from a capital yard measure to a soup tureen and as I am alive ! there is Paterfamilias with his basket half-full already. He has a railroad that moves, a duck that swims, a trumpet that blows, a doll that cries, a perambulator that runs, and a monkey that jumps over a pole, and he has only got rid of sixpence ! It becomes absolutely absurd to have so much for your money, and how he will manage to spend the sovereign he designs is to me a mystery. All around him urchins are busy. " I've had one of those, and two of those, and three of these, and four of those/' "Why, it reminds us of Punch's satiated schoolboy settling his reckoning in the cake-shop, only here the boy has his cakes and toys still to enjoy. But there is a sixpenny and a shilling counter not far off, and interspersed amid the meaner gew-gaws, toys that rise to the rank of real works of art. Whilst Paterfamilias is picking out his two hundred and forty separate and distinct toys, let us pause for a moment, THE GERMAN FAIR. 167 and ask where they all come from. Reader, have you ever travelled for a livelong day through the dark and melan- choly pine or fir forests of Germany ? Ever listened to the soughing of the wind through the branches, or walked on the dumb carpet of pine tassels ? If so, what has been the complexion of your thoughts ? Possibly like mine, gloomy as the Halls of Dis. Yet, from these old inky forests, from the green valleys up which the pine-trees climb like black priests to the mountain summit, rush the torrents of toys which push on from year to year and pene- trate into every nursery in Europe. In the recesses of the old Thuringian and other forests are glued, and turned, and painted, the legions of soldiers, the fleets of NoahV arLs, and the countless whips, rattles, and squeaking dolls, that go to their last account in the snug nurseries of Europe. Strange fact, that in these grim forests half the laughter and joy of childhood should find their birth ! The same principle that plants cotton-factories in Lansashire determines the production of toys the presence of the raw material. If the pine logs from which they are manufactured were not immediately at hand, there would be no penny toys and, possibly, no German Fair. Let -is examine one of these penny articles. Here is a man wheeling a barrow of fruit. The prime cost of this article in the forest where it was made is only a kreuzer, or one-tldrd of a penny ! The rest represents its package and carriage to these shores, the duty, and profit of the propristor. It seems inconceivable that for so small a sum such a result can be obtained, for the man is well enough proportioned, his barrow really will run, and the fruit is coloured after nature. A little inquiry, however, at the 168 THE GERMAN FAIR. same time that it clears up the mystery only increases our astonishment. In the first place, the wood is obtained for a mere nothing. For instance, the Grand Duke of Saxe Meinin- , gen, on whose estates the flourishing toy colony of Sonneberg is situated, allows his people to select any tree from his forest close at hand for 2|d. Thus the raw material may be said to be given to them. Again, the organisation and division of labour is carried on to an extent in the production of these trifles which we can only liken to that exhibited in this country by watchmakers or pin fabricators. Let us revert to the man with the barrow of fruit, for instance. Possibly a dozen hands have been employed in its production. The man who turned the body of the figure, had nothing to do with his arms. A tliird person was employed to put together the barrow ; a fourth to turn the wheel ; a fifth to put the spokes in ; a sixth to put the linch-pin in ; a seventh to turn the fruit ; an eighth to turn the basket on which they are placed ; a ninth to colour the fruit ; a tenth to colour the barrow : an eleventh to glue the whole together ; and a twelfth to supply the final varnish. The incredible rapidity with vhich this minute division of labour enables the men, women, and children to accomplish each detail, is the secret of the whole matter. Not only do the dozen individuals manage to make a living out of the third of a penny, or rather less, which is to be divided amongst them, but they contrive to live comfortably and respectably into the bargain. The toy, thus completed, has to be packed and conveyed hun- dreds of miles along Alpine roads and down rapid rivers, until it is finally transported by the Rotterdam steam-boat THE GERMAN FAIR. 169 to our shores, to be again unpacked and displayed by Mr. Cremer in the German Fair. The history of the fruit- barrow is the history of almost every wooden article on the penny counters of this extraordinary place. The process of manufacture is the same throughout Germany, but the localities from which the different toys come are widely different. The vast majority are made at Griinhainscher, in Saxony. The glass comes from Bohemia. The bottles and cups are so fragile, that the poor workman has to labour in a confined and vitiated atmosphere, which cuts him off at thirty-five years of age. All articles that contain any metal are the produce of Nuremberg and the surrounding district. This old city has always been one of the chief centres of German metal work. The workers in gold and silver of the place have long been famous, and their iron-work is unique. This speciality has now descended to toys. Here all toy printing-presses, with their types, are manufactured ; magic-lanterns ; magnetic toys, such as ducks and fish, that are attracted by the magnet ; mechanical toys, such as running mice and con- juring tricks, also come from Nuremberg. The old city is pre-eminent in all kinds of toy diablerie. Here science puts on the conjuror's jacket, and we have a manifestation of the Germanesque spirit of which their Albert Durer was the embodiment. The more solid articles which attract boyhood, such as boxes of bricks, buildings, &c., of plain wood, come from Griinhainscher, in Saxony. Very latterly a rapidly-increasing town named Furth has sprung up, six miles from Nuremberg, entirely devoted to the manufacture of Noah's arks, dissected puzzles, &c. The toys with motion, such as railroads, steam-vessels, 170 THE GERMAN FAIR. and moving cabs, are the speciality of the people of Biberach, in Wiirtemberg. And where should those splen- did cuirasses, helmets, guns, and swords come from but Hesse Cassel, the centre of soldiering Germany ? But the workmen of the principality are not entirely devoted to arms. The charming little shops, and parlours, and the dolls-houses without which no nursery is complete are made here. Neither must we forget the theatres, beloved of boys. Here and there some exquisite little interior of a cafe, with its fittings of marble tables, bottles, mirrors, and plate, attract the attention, and the inquirer learns with astonishment that they are made by felons in Prus- sian prisons. The taste and dexterity of hand displayed is amazing, and the result far preferable to the miserable hemp-beating or " grindings at nothing" at which some of our own prisoners are so fruitlessly employed. But this counter is fitted up as a refreshment stall. Here we have rolls and sausages and ducks and bottles of champagne and a hundred other dainties ; but the children are too cunning ; they are only shams paper. The Ber- liners who make them call them " surprises/' for it is rather a surprise to find bonbons for the stuffing of fowls, and sugar-plums tumbling out of simulated pieces of em- broidery. Now and then we find a greater surprise still, for there goes a rich plum- pudding floating up to the ceiling an edible balloon. But where do all the dolls come from ? I hear my little flaxen ringlets say. Dolls are an universal vanity almost as universal as vanity itself. They seem to be made everywhere, excepting the one country that has a repute for making them. The wooden-jointed specimens THE GERMAN FAIR. 171 known as Dutch dolls all over the world, really come from the Tyrol, where wood-carving is a very ancient art. The Dutch have the credit of their production simply from the fact, that they are generally shipped from Rotter- dam, which is found to be the most convenient port for German goods coming from the interior. To the Dutch, however, we are indebted for the introduction of the crying doll, which, I am happy to inform my young friends, cries for a penny almost as natural as life. The pattern origi- nally came from Japan (a nation very ingenious in toys), and has long been lying in the Museum at the Hague. The German toy-makers, however, are now constructing them upon the same model. Fine wax dolls, with natural hair, are made, we are informed, at Petersdorff, in Silesia. It will be flattering, however, to the national vanity to be informed, that the Londoners alone are capable of making the finest and most expressive dolls. The French, clever as they are, cannot touch us here. Some of the higher class English dolls are perfect models the eyes are full of expression, and the hair is set on like nature itself. The faces are originally modelled in clay, and the wax is put on in successive layers. The highest class of workmen alone are capable of this kind of work. The beauty of Grecian sculpture is ascribed to the fine natural forms which their artists had to copy. Possibly we owe to the beauty of our women, in a like manner, our superiority in dolls, which now rank almost as works of art. It must be evident that where wood is employed as the material for toy-making, it is impossible to hope for any- thing very artistic at a rate that can be paid by the great middle class. This fact has led to the employment of a 172 THE GERMAN FAIR. substance that can be cast in a mould, and yet be suffi- ciently tough to bear knocking about. Those who examined the Zollverein department in the Exhibition of 1851 will remember the beautiful toys exhibited by Adolphe Fleisch- mann.* These were composed of papier-mache, mixed with a peculiar kind of earth. Since that time the art of toy-making in this new material has undergone a very great development all over Germany ; but at Sonneberg, in Saxe Meiningen, a school of art has been established by the duke, for the cultivation of the workmen in the arts of design. In this school, models of all the best antique and modern sculpture are to be found, and collections of good prints. To this school all the young children are sent to model, under pain of a fine ; and an art education is the result, which shows itself in the exquisite little models which come from the ateliers of Adolphe Fleischmann. There are now in the German Fair models of animals that a sculptor may copy. Bulls, lions, asses, &c., delineated with an anatomical nicety which is really wonderful. Many of the works of art produced by him are copied from well-known engravings, and are entitled solid pic- tures. There is one in the Fair now, representing Luther and his family around a Christmas tree in the room he once occupied. The modelling of this group originally cost nine guineas, but the moulds once produced, the subse- quent copies are procurable at a very cheap rate. There * The toys exhibited at the Great Exhibition were purchased by Mr. Cremer, of Bond Street, and formed the foundation of the present German Fair. The Great Exhibition has certainly borne no more welcome fruit to children than the establishment of this fountain of pleasure. THE GERMAN FAIR. 173 can be no doubt that to familiarize children with well- designed toys is a very important step towards educating the race in the love of art. We cannot help thinking, however, that what the future man will gain, the child will lose. If we make our toys too good, they will either be used as ornaments, or children will be stinted of their full enjoyment of them, for fear they may be injured which God forbid. It may be very wrong, and possibly I am inculcating very destructive principles, but I cannot help thinking that a judicious smashing of toys now and then is a very healthy j uvenile occupation. There are some little monsters we know, that will keep their toys without speck or spot for years, but they are doomed to die old maids or bachelors. Besides, how could we better or earlier satisfy the analytic spirit that is within us, than by breaking open the drummer-boy to see what makes him drum ? With this destructive view of the subject, we think Mr. Cremer, the proprietor of the Fair, is entitled to the thanks of every paterfamilias in the kingdom, for at a penny a-piece our children may break their toys to their heart's content. How many of these penny toys does my reader imagine are here sold day by day ? Fifty pounds' worth ! A little calculation shows that this sum represents 12,000 toys. Now, calculating each toy to produce only ten occasions of enjoyment, we have 120,000 bursts of merriment dispersed every day about Christmas time to the rising generation of London alone, to say nothing of the enjoyment produced by the higher-priced toys. How that joy is reflected by the fond mothers' eyes a hundredfold, I need not say ; and as to going on with the calculation, that is quite out of the question. 174 THE GERMAN FAIR. The Saxon is the great consumer of the toys produced by the Saxon. England and America take more toys than any other nation. The value of the toys imported to England alone in the year 1846 was 1,500,000 florins ; and the paper and packthread with which they were packed cost 25,000 florins, or 2,100 ! Whilst Paterfamilias toils after me with his hand- basket, let me draw the attention of my young friends to the old monk near the doorway, who carries in one hand a Christmas tree, whilst he holds in the other a birch for naughty boys, but over his shoulder we see a bag of toys for the good ones. This is St. Nicholas, the patron of children. On Christmas Eve it is the fashion throughout France and Germany, to prepare the children of the house- hold for his nocturnal visit. Refreshment is laid for him- self, and hay and other provender for his ass. In the morning the eager children find the food and provender gone, but in their place all kinds of beautiful toys. Mr. Cremer is our St. Nicholas, and does the business of the old monk without any mystery, but in an equally satisfac- tory manner. CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. SOME remarks beneath this head have of late been going the round of the newspapers, circulating from eye to eye not unlike some bright piece of money of a new coinage, the exact value of which none of us have yet ascertained. The paragraph sets forth the advisability of building under one roof a series of chambers for married people. The bachelor part of the community has long had its wants supplied in the Inns of Court, the Albany, the Adelphi, Sec. ; and it is now sought to render the asso- ciative principle applicable to the desires of families. In London, it is well known that the chief expense of a family is the high price of rent. To young house- keepers, of moderate means (say about 200 per annum ; and how vast is the number of respectable couples in the metropolis whose incomes do not exceed this), a good house in any decent neighbourhood in town is quite without their means, and they are driven either to let some of their apartments, by way of assisting them with their rent, or they are obliged to retire to some of those dismal rows of mean little stuccoed houses that we pass sometimes on the tops of omnibuses, and wonder what kind of people 'tis that live in them. Bitter alternative 176 CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. either to suffer the mortification of being considered lodging-house keepers, or to be driven, like outward barbarians, into those unknown wilds where friends venture not. This unpleasant feature in metropolitan life has so long existed, that we wonder some remedy has not been applied to it. We have only to cross the water to France, and we find how much better they manage things there. Even Auld Reekie can give us a valuable lesson. In their system of " flats/' we see the germ of that new social arrangement which, for a certain class in society, is so much required. Let us imagine, then, a handsome building, somewhat similar to our West-end club-houses, only larger in extent ; the interior so arranged as to contain on each floor a certain number of suites of apartments fitted up for the accommodation of families. These suites, of course, might be of different sizes and rents, according to the eligibility of the floor on which they are situated. For '30 a year, well-ventilated apartments, of elegant proportions, per- fectly suitable to small families, might be obtained, which would be as much insulated from each other as separate houses the staircase only being common to the whole. In addition to these private apartments, a building of this kind would admit of a library, baths, and, above all, of some central assembly-room, in which those who like society might meet together for the purpose of conversa- tion, or to make up little concerts among themselves. And this is a want which is so much felt, that we take the liberty of enlarging upon it. In English society, every- body feels that some such a neutral ground is required to bring young people more together. Under the present CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. 177 system of perfectly distinct establishments, everybody is boxed off from everybody as effectually as if a vast sea ran between them. Or if they meet, it is at public or private balls, where young ladies are all smiles and affec- tation, and the gentlemen all blandness and deceit ; they meet each other as completely masked, as far as their real dispositions go, as Fat Jack's tormentors about Herne's oak. Like the pretended fairies, they think they know each other, because the one has wit enough to cry "Budget" to the other's "Mum" conventionalisms of sentiment being their present passwords ; and the con- sequence is, that she in green is mistaken for she in white, and the Master Slenders of society, when it is too late, find that instead of securing some " sweet Ann Page," that they are locked for life, if not to a "lubberly boy," as in the play, to some temper whose incompatibility with their own is a constant source of unhappiness and regret. And those who have the wisdom not to set their happi- ness upon these hasty unions, or who perhaps want the opportunity to form them, even under present artificial cir- cumstances, what do they too often come to ? We will paint a picture one in which the lights and shadows appear strong, perhaps, but which every one will recognize as not outraging the truth of Nature. There are two houses built side by side. In the one dwells a widow and her daughter, fair, light-hearted, the sunshine of her mother's declining years, but, alas ! not rich. With all the affectionate instincts of a woman's heart, with all the capabilities to create happiness in a man's house, she remains unseen and unchosen. As time passes on, N 178 CLUB CHAMBERS FOB THE MARRIED. she gradually deepens into old maidism. Where once she was heard singing about the home, like Una making a sunshine in the shady place, her voice is now heard shrill in complaint ; parrots and cats accumulate, taking the place of a more human love, and her words are those of sharp reproof and spite against those very instincts of maternity which have been so long the master-spirit of her thoughts. Her affections, after in vain throwing themselves out to seek some sympathetic answer, turn in with bitterness upon her own heart, and she remains that most melancholy of all spectacles a nature with aspira- tions unfulfilled. In the next house lives a bachelor young, open-hearted, and generous. Busied in the struggle of life, he has perhaps no time for parties, he sees little of society, the female portion of it especially ; a knowledge of his own brusqueness of manners at first prevents him from coming in contact with womankind, and this shy- ness in time becomes so strong as not to be overcome. It might seem strange, but we are convinced it is the fact, that some men are much more afraid of women than women are of men, and fearing " to break the ice " is a fruitful cause of old-bachelorism. Gradually age grows upon him, chalk stones gather in his knuckles, gout seizes hold of his toes ; served by menials, he is a stranger to the soft and careful hand of affection ; and he goes to the grave, his death not only unlamented, but absolutely re- joiced over by his heir-at-law. A wall of but six inches thick has all this time divided these two people : English society does not allow them even a chink through which, like Pyramus and Thisbe, they may whisper, although by CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. 179 nature they might have been formed to make a happy couple, instead of two miserable units. Eugene Sue, in his " Wandering Jew," describes two people as approaching each other from the different conti- nents of the Old and the New World. The woman wanders to the shores of north-western America, the man approaches from the north-easternmost part of Asia. Behrens' Straits alone seem to divide their destiny. Let us ask how many Behrens' Straits do we not interpose in our social relations between heart and heart ? We are by far too exclusive and reserved in our habits. Not to speak of France, even stolid and primitive Germany looks with astonishment at the care with which Englishmen seem to hedge themselves in from intrusion, and to avoid that interchange of ideas which society alone can admit of. For the reasons we have given at such length, then, we wish to see the estab- lishment of assembly-rooms in club chambers. They would admit of a society partaking of the change and fresh- ness of the public soiree and the more open friendliness of the family circle. Let us not for a moment, however, be supposed to wish to supersede that privacy and retire- ment which many people, and those of the purest natures, can only enjoy in the retirement of their own families. In club chambers of the kind we are advocating, each indivi- dual would act according to the bent of his inclination. Those who like society will avail themselves of the place of general meeting ; for those, on the contrary, who wish seclusion, their own chambers would be as private as so many distinct houses. It is by such a system as this we are convinced that the selfishness of the present club H 2 180 CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. life, from which females are excluded, can alone be corrected. And now let us come to one other want, which by our plan would be supplied with great advantage. We admit that what we are about to propose is revolutionary in the highest degree of the existing order of things, but we must out with it a good general kitchen. We are aware a proposition of this kind will rouse up a whole host of gentle enemies. We can see the dear young wife rebellious at the idea of being defrauded of the pleasure of preparing with her own hand "something nice " for her husband at having a little world of household joys anni- hilated at a blow by our new-fangled system. Heaven forbid that we should do so at least to a greater extent than she herself willingly submits to. Let us ask her, does she not entrust the getting up of her ball-suppers to the pastrycook round the corner ? Is it not both better and cheaper to do so ? We show her by her own acts that she admits the insidious advances of the very monster she would so loudly oppose. The respected matron, armed with her shining bunch of keys, and backed up with the whole army of pickles and preserves, will do ns battle to the death. But let us ask her calmly, did a suspicion never cross her mind that in her own particular department there might not be a saving by buying of the Italian ware- houses ? Domestic duties are blessed things, but are they not dearly bought by the perpetually bad dinner ? awful shade of scrag of mutton, dread spectre of domestic life ! bolder leg, with thy natural descent of cold, and hashed, and stewed ! come to our aid, and by the horrors your memories conjure up, strengthen us to bear the CLUB CHAMBERS FOR THE MARRIED. 181 assaults of the tyranny of domestic cookery, and save our fair wives from faces flushed from the basting ! Who that has enjoyed the classic lamb-chop and mint-sauce which the genius of a Soyer provides him with at the Reform Club, would willingly return to the home manufacture ? Yet even at the former magnificent establishment they can afford to serve you up this dainty, worthy of the gods, at quite as moderate a price as your own domestic, little, wretched smoked flap of meat costs you. And how is this done ? let us ask. By association : by making two or three fires do the duty of fifty, and by making the culinary art an exact science, instead of a continual and often - failing experiment. A public kitchen, then, with a first-rate cook at its head, should form the material genius of these club cham- bers, and each inmate should be able to order for his dinner just what he pleased, and when he pleased, as he now does at Verey's, or any other of the great restaurants, the prices being at a minimum instead of a maximum rate, which should be printed in a bill of fare. These club-houses might be built a little way out of town. Indeed, we do not see any reason why they should not be erected along the lines of railway, if companies would provide return tickets at a moderate rate. It might be even worth the while of companies themselves to build clubs of this kind. They erect hotels, and foster places of amusement along their lines, merely for the sake of the casual traffic they bring. The steady traffic to and fro, caused by a few such communities as this, would be no small item in their receipts. They should be built in good air, and in open ground, so that a public garden might be attached. What 182 CLUB CHAMBERS FOE THE MARRIED. a blessing ! Good light and air ! Think of this, ye people who from want of a proper combination of your means are forced to put up with confined apartments, whose utmost view is bounded by the chimney-pots of the next row of houses. And let it not be supposed that in pro- posing these club chambers, we have been consulting the " comfortable classes " only. To the poor they would be even more applicable. The necessities of the wretched, in- deed, have forced them to adopt a system of this kind, but of a most vicious character. Every house in the poorer neighbourhoods of the metropolis is let off, floor by floor, to the families of the working classes ; but three or four families, in most instances, can only afford the room and privacy which decency demands for each. To correct the evils attendant upon the crowding of the poor together, " The Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Labouring Classes" have erected what might be consi- dered as a series of model club chambers for poor fami- lies, between the Lower-road, Pentonville, and Gray's inn-road. These chambers contain the rude and half- developed germs of those we have been proposing for the middle classes. Buildings of this kind we should like to see erected in our manufacturing districts and to these how peculiarly applicable would be a public kitchen, if it could be arranged. In the cotton-spinning districts alas, that it should be so ! the women labour in the fac- tory as well as the men, and the household duties are necessarily neglected. Dr. Cooke Taylor, in his tour in the manufacturing districts, has testified to the waste and want of knowledge of even the most simple rules of the culinary art, resultant upon this misapplication of female CLUB CHAMBERS TOR THE MARRIED. 183 labour. As long, then, as this labour is so perverted, what a blessing it would be to all parties to the husband, to the children, to the poor women themselves if the office of preparing the meals was to be performed in one general kitchen, attached to workmen's club chambers. NEEDLE-MAKING. IT is often asked, Where do all the pins go ? and it may be as pertinently inquired, Where do all the needles come from ? The little machine that is put in action to make the greater part of the clothes of the world,* and to minister to the vanity of womenfolk, surely must have some birth- place worth noting, and a pilgrimage into Worcestershire the other day led us to its discovery. We are but too apt to associate with iron and steel workers, grimy and soot- clogged towns, blasted neighbouring country, and pale and stunted artisans. The manufacture of needles, however, entails no such disagreeables. Redditch, the grand ar- moury of the female weapon, is as pretty a little village as need be met with, and were it not for the presence of a tall red chimney, and the hiss of a grind-stone as you pass a water wheel, now and then, you may well imagine yourself in a Kentish village. Incited by curiosity, we asked per- mission to see the workshops of one of the largest manu- facturers, which was most courteously granted, and an attendant ushered us into a little door, where a stalwart Vulcan presided over a fierce furnace, the walls of his apartment being hung round with coils of wire of all weights and sizes. * The sewing-machine, since this paper was written, has rapidly encroached upon the province of the common sewing-machine. KEEDLE-MAKING. 185 " Here," said our cicerone, " the needle makes its first start into existence/' and as he spoke, the workman reached down a huge coil of wire, measured about three inches, and snapped off with a pair of shears, at one jerk, sixty small wires, each one forming, of course, the segment of a large circle or coil. To straighten this raw material of the future needles is his next care, and this he does in a very ingenious manner. The bundles of wire as they are cut off, are put within two iron rings of about four inches diameter, and placed sufficiently apart to allow the whole length of the wires to rest between them ; when the two rings are nearly full, the whole is placed in the furnace and heated to a dull red heat. And now the future needle receives its first instruction. The workman with an iron rod rapidly works the wires within the two rings, one upon another, and this process of mutual attrition rapidly straightens them out, just as little boys warped and bent from the mother's knee, get set up true again, by the bullying and hard knocks of a public school. The straightened wires are now handed over to the grinder to give them their points. We must take a little excursion out of the town to witness this process, inasmuch as it is performed by water-power. As we walked across the meadows, knee-deep in grass, and listened to the drip, drip, of the merry mill-wheel, and saw the stream meandering in silver at our feet, it was difficult to believe that we were seeking a factory, rather than the haunts of speckled trout. Still more difficult was it to believe that the little cottage, whose tallest rose peeped in the casement, was nothing more than a workshop, full of busy artisans ; and more difficult than all to persuade ourselves that in this ap- 186 NEEDLE-MAKING. parent dwelling-place of health, a manufacture was being carried on which not loDg since was the most deadly in existence. We have all heard of the fork-grinders of Sheffield, whose average term of life is twenty-nine years. Well, the occupation of a needle-grinder, a few years since, was no less deadly. The grinding process is carried on with a dry stone, and of old, the artisan, as he leaned over his work, received into his lungs the jagged particles of steel, and the stone dust given off in the process, and as a con- sequence, they speedily became disorganised, and his early death ensued. The expedient of covering over their grind-stones and driving out the dust by means of a revolving fan, was adopted only a few years ago ; so little are men inclined to move out of the old accustomed ways, even to save their lives ; nay, their lives have to be saved even against their will ; as, even now, if not closely watched, they would disconnect the fans, and thus delibe- rately renew the old danger : indeed some of them look upon the danger as so much capital with which they think that the masters have no right to interfere, exclaiming with the Sheffield fork grinders, that the trade is " so overfull already," that these fans will " prevent them getting a living" However, the higher intelligence of the masters, we trust, will prevent any relapse into former ways ; and the deadly nature of needle-grinding is now only a thing of the past. The workmen we saw were certainly rosy, robust-looking men. To return to our needle wires, however ; it will be ob- served, that the workman grinds both ends to a sharp point, for a reason which the next process makes evident. They are now taken back to the factory, and enter the NEEDLE-MAKING. 187 stamping shop, where girls, with inconceivable rapidity, place each wire beneath a die, and stamp exactly in the middle thereof two eyes and two channels or gutters, as they are termed. It is clear that the wire is to produce Siamese-twin needles, for another batch of little girls are now seen actively punching out the eyes that were before only indicated by the stamping process. The eyes stamped, another batch of urchins catch them up and spit them, in other words, pass fine wires between the two rows of eyes, a manoeuvre preparatory to separating the Siamese into separate needles ; the bur is now filed off, and the rough form of the needle is complete. Having been licked into form, its temper has next to be hardened. Fire again is called on to do its part, and the needles, in traysful, are once more heated to a dull red, and then suddenly quenched in oil. This process makes them so brittle, that they fly at the slightest attempt to bend them. Like fiery little boys, they want taking down a little, which is done by placing them on a hot plate, and turning them about with two little tools, shaped like small hatchets. This is very nice work, indeed, and the change that is going on in the needle mass is marked by the change of colour, the deep blue gradually growing pale, and a straw colour, by faint shades, taking its place ; at a particular moment the true temper is established, and then the heat is withdrawn. Having been thus tried by fire, earth (or stone), and water, some of the needles have per- haps got a little out of the straight line, and this is rectified by women, who take them up, one by one, and with wonderful delicacy of finger discover its faulty parts, and with one tap of a hammer on a small anvil, restore it 188 NEEDLE- MAKING. to its right shape. The education of the needle in all its essentials may now be said to be complete. It is fully formed, tempered, and trained, and is about to leave school to receive that further polish which is to make it serviceable in the world. And just as in the world the awkward youth is subjected to severe antagonistic influences, which together mould him into the smooth and pleasant man, so the needle, in like manner, suffers a wholesome trituration. The process is droll enough. Fourteen pounds' weight of needles, amounting to many thousands, are placed side by side in a hempen cloth, to which are added a certain modicum of soft soap and sweet oil. So far this promises to be an "oily gammon" sort of process ; but the addition of a due amount of emery powder soon dissipates any such antici- pation. The mass is then wrapped up into a kind of roly-poly pudding ; and when several puddings have been prepared, they are all slipped into a machine exactly like a mangle, the roly polies serving as the rollers thereof ; and now the whole machine is set in motion by the water- wheel. Backwards and forwards, to and fro, grind and sweat the roly-polies with their layers of needle jam, for eight hours of eight mortal days, at the end of which time they are released from their terrible mauling, evidently all the brighter, smoother, and pleasanter for the infliction. The oil of battle still clings to them however ; and in order to get rid of it, the needles are thoroughly washed in soap- suds in a copper pan, swinging upon a pivot, and then dried in sawdust. They are now all at sixes and sevens, and have to be " evened," or placed in a parallel direction. NEEDLE- MAKING. 189 This is accomplished by shaking them in little trays. Heads and points still lie together, and in order to put them all in the same direction, the "ragger" is employed. The little girl who performs this office places a rag or dolly upon the forefinger of her right hand, and with the left presses the needles against it ; the points stick into the soft cotton, and are thus easily withdrawn and laid in the contrary direction. Little children " rag" with incon- ceivable rapidity, and with equal speed the process of sorting, according to lengths, is performed, the human hand appreciating even the sixteenth of an inch in length, and separating the different sizes with a kind of instinct with which the reasoning power seems to have nothing to do. The needles are now separated into parcels, and such is their uniformity, that, like sovereigns, weighing takes the place of counting one thousand needles in one scale exactly balancing one thousand in another. The needles being now placed in companies, are in future mano3uvred together. That is, the heads of each company are simulta- neously subjected to heat, in order to soften them, for the double purpose of giving a blue to the gutters, which is considered an ornament, and of counter-sinking the eyes in order that they may not cut the cotton. The final pro- cesses of grinding the heads and points, and polishing, is now performed by skilled workmen. The needles, in com- panies of seventy each, are subjected to a small grindstone, the workmen slowly revolving the whole number, so that they are ground in a mass, as it were, and the polishing being accomplished in a like manner, on a similar wheel smeared with crocus. The original batch of wire, of four- teen pounds weight, gives material for 48,100 needles ; ]90 NEEDLE-MAKING. and after having undergone every process, it is found that they number, on the average, 46,700 so that the loss by breakage has only been 1,400; even with this compara- tively small waste, however, the accumulation of imperfect needles in course of time is immense. We saw heaps of many tons weight in the premises of one of the large manufacturers. It is roughly calculated that upwards of ten tons of wire are weekly employed in the manufacture of needles in Redditch and the adjoining villages. If we multiply this by 52 we get the enormous weight of 520 tons of needles turned out annually from this neighbour- hood alone. This mass representing a number of needles which we feel unequal to calculate, goes to keep company, we suppose, with the pins, the mysterious manner of whose final disappearance has never yet been properly accounted for. PRESERVED MEATS. IN the year 1799, at a place called Jacutsh, in Siberia, an enormous elephant was discovered embedded in a trans- lucent block of ice, upwards of two hundred feet thick. The animal was as perfect in its entire fabric as on the day when it was submerged, and the wolves and foxes preyed upon its flesh for weeks. Upon an examination of its bones, the great Cuvier pronounced it to have belonged to an animal of the antediluvian world. We might fairly presume this to be the oldest specimen of preserved meat upon record, and Nature was therefore clearly the first discoverer of the process, although she took out no patent, nor made any secret of her method. The exclusion of the external air in this natural process, combined with the effect of a low degree of temperature which prevented fermentation taking place in the tissues themselves, man has long imitated. In the markets of St. Petersburg vast quantities of frozen provisions are to be found the greater part of the year, and our own coun- trymen have taken advantage of the method to preserve Scotch and Irish salmon for the London market. Our own illustrious Bacon was one of the first to recog- nize the vast importance of preserving animal food ; and 192 PRESERVED MEATS. the last experiment the great author of Experimental Philosophy performed, was that of " stuffing a fowl with snow to preserve it, which answered remarkably well/' in the conduct of which he caught a cold, and presently died. Indeed, modern luxury has brought this process, in a modified form, into our own homes, and every man who possesses a refrigerator has the power of arresting for a time the natural decay of animal and vegetable substances. This mode of preservation is too evanescent, and at the same time too expensive and cumbersome, especially where transit is concerned, ever to prove of any great importance in temperate or warm latitudes. The more scientific and enduring method of excluding the air from the article to be preserved, has also long been practically known and roughly carried out. Good house- wives of the old school would have stared, perhaps, if they could have been told, whilst boiling and corking down, hot and hot, their bottled gooseberries, that they were practising an art which, when performed a little more effectually, would prove one of the most valuable discoveries of modern times. But we do not exaggerate. The difference between the bottled gooseberries and the meats preserved in vacua is only a question of degree, and the art of preserving a few vegetables from year to year, and of storing up whole herds of oxen and keeping them, if needs be, till doomsday, depends entirely upon the power of pumping out more or less atmospheric air from the vessels containing them. The first successful attempt at preserving meat by this latter process was made by M. Appart, in France, in the year 1811 ; and for his discovery the emperor rewarded him with a gift of 12,000 francs. His process was essen- PRESERVED MEATS. 193 tially the same as that of the old housewife he boiled his provisions, thereby getting rid of the greater portion of the air entangled in their substance, but instead of the clumsy method of corking, he hermetically sealed his cases at the proper moment with a plug of solder. This method was brought soon after to England, and remained the only one in use until the year 1839, when M. Pastier sold to Mr. Goldner an improved process, by which a complete vacuum is formed in the canisters, thereby ensuring the preservation of their contents as long as the vacuum is maintained. This process, which is patented, is carried on by the firm of Messrs. Ritchie and M'Call, in Houndsditch. There is so much that is curious in their Establishment, that if our reader will walk with us, we will take a rapid survey of the actual manufacture, instead of entering into dry details. The room which we first enter is the larder the people's larder. A lord mayor would faint at the bare contempla- tion of such an embarrass des richesses. What juicy rounds what plump turkeys what lively turtle what delicious sweetbreads what pendants of rare game what tempting sucking pigs and succulent tomatas ! Come next week and the whole carte will be changed ; the week after, and you shall find a fresh remove. A plethora in the market of any article is sure to attract the attention of the manufacturer. His duty is to buy of superfluity and sell to scarcity ; and by this judicious management he can afford to sell the preserved cooked meats cheaper than they can be procured in the raw state in open market. We shall see presently how infinitely this principle of buying o 194 PEESERVED MEATS. in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, and of storing for the future, can be extended, and what a vastly important principle it is. As we pass through the main court to the kitchen, we see a dozen fellows opening oysters, destined to be eaten perhaps by the next generation of opera-goers. Here is the room where the canisters are made the armour of mail in which the provisions are dressed, to enable them to withstand the assaults of the enemy. The kitchen itself is a spacious room, in which stand a series of vats. There is no fire visible, but look how simply those half-a-hundred canisters of green peas are being dressed. There they stand, up to their necks in a brown-looking mixture, very like chocolate ; this is a solution of chloride of calcium, which does not boil under a temperature of 320 degrees. Steam-pipes ramify through this mixture, and warm it up to any degree that is required within its boiling-point. By this arrangement a great heat is obtained, without steam. The canisters containing the provisions were, previously to being placed in this bath, closed permanently down, with the exception of a small hole through the cover, not much bigger than the prick of a cobbler's awl. And now observe, the cook stands watching, not with a basting spoon, but with a soldering tool and a sponge. Steam issues in a small white jet from one of the covers ; this drives all the enclosed air before it ; and at the moment when experience tells him that the viands are done to a turn, he squeezes from the sponge a drop of water in the hole ; the steam is instantly condensed, and as instantly he drops, with the other hand, a plug of molten solder, which hermetically seals it. Canister after PRESERVED MEATS. 195 canister at the proper moment is closed in the same man- ner, until the whole are finished. Hounds of beef, of 50 Ibs. weight, can be preserved by this method, which the old process did not allow of. Poultry and game, which also require large canisters, have to be watched with minute attention ; and here the skill of the French cook is brought into play ; the process being, however, in all precisely the same. The canisters we have just seen closed down, for anything the manufac- turer yet knows to the contrary, may be entire failures. All the air may not have been extracted, or it may have crept in after the sealing process. In either case the meat is spoiled, and it is as well that this fact be ascertained ere it be discovered to the dismay of the arctic explorer, or of the ship's crew straitened for provisions. The testing-room gives the "warrant" to the provisions. Here all the canisters are brought, after they have been sealed, and submitted for several days, and sometimes for weeks, to a great heat. We see them piled in pyramids, the covers all facing us like a wall. As the light of the fire falls sideways upon the glittering metal, it discloses in an instant an unsound canister, as each cover is a perfect anaeroid barometer, marking with the greatest nicety the pressure upon it of the external air. They are all, we see, concave, and therefore good. In the next heap, however, there is a canister bulged, or convex ; this is undoubtedly bad, and the attendant takes it out, and turns its contents into the manure heap. And here let us say a few words upon the great scandal of the Goldner canisters. All the world has been shocked at the alleged fraudulent victualling of the Hungarian Jew ; o 2 196 PRESERVED MEATS. and in the universal and hasty condemnation passed upon the man, his process has well nigh been overwhelmed with him. A more absurd or unfortunate judgment could not have been come to, and we heartily join the lament of Dr. Lindley, in his lecture at the Society of Arts, " That a highly ingenious chemical principle one that was unimpeachable, and capable, when properly ap- plied, of yielding the most satisfactory results should stand a chance of being impugned, owing to its careless employment." In every word of this we fully agree, and it does seem suicidal folly on the part of the public to con- ceive a prejudice against a discovery which is of great public importance in a hygienic point of view, and which has been attested and proved by such scientific men as Daniell, Brande, and Graham. But, says our reader, how can you get over the disgust- ing disclosures in our dockyards ? How explain away the affecting picture of hardened commissioners fainting from the awful smell given forth by the putrid contents of the inspected canisters, and only kept up to their work by smelling at that benificent nosegay, Burnett's disinfecting fluid ? How excuse or explain away the offal found in the canisters ? We can only answer these questions by begging our reader to examine with us the true particulars of the case, unbiassed by mere penny-a-line statements, seasoned high with horror to astonish the public. The best refutation of the charge of failure brought against the preserved meats issued to the navy, and of the charge of fraud brought against the contractor, is to be found in the report called for by Mr. Miles, and which has been some time issued. By this document it appears that out of PRESERVED MEATS. 197 2,741,988 Ibs. issued since the first introduction of these meats, 2,613,069 Ibs., or 95 per cent., proved good and very palatable to the sailors, their only complaint being that they had not any potatoes. Of the quantity con- demned, only eighteen canisters were found to contain so-called offal, the vast majority being rejected on account of the putridity of their contents. Now, the question which immediately suggests itself is, How did tins putrescence arise ? We answer, from the carelessness, or, to say the least of it, from the want of knowledge, on the part of the Navy Board, of the delicate nature of the packages which they submitted to so much rough usage. If the canisters were received into store by the Victualling Office in an unsound condition, the blame rests with that department ; for we have shown that unsound canisters declare themselves instantly by their convex appearance. Granted then, that the meat when delivered was sweet, what caused its subsequent putrescence ? We will place one of these contract canisters on the table, and let it answer the question itself. We have before us, as we write, one of the same lot as those forming the contract of 1846. It has been kept in a dry place, and has not been handled since it was first received in this country from Moldavia. Yet it looks as though it had been in the wars : its sides are indented, we might say battered ; its top and bottom plates are sunken in ; and it looks as though it had been besieged on all sides. And so it has. An enemy, omnipresent, sleepless, subtle, and de- termined, has never ceased to assault it since the first moment of its manufacture. Its battered armour shows the force that has been levelled at it, and the gallant man- 198 PRESERVED MEATS. ner in which it has resisted. This enemy is the universal air. If this canister has had so hard a fight to maintain itself, kept close in the even atmosphere of the storehouse, what must have befallen those wilfully exposed to damp, knocked about from depot to depot now in the arctic circle, now in the tropics now bundled together in the holds of ships, now landed with as much care as pig-iron what but that they must in the long-run have succumbed to the ever- vigilant enemy ? An inspection of one of the putrid canisters shows us the exact manner in which the enemy obtained entrance. At one portion of the case where the tin has been cut, in fitting in the top, the iron is exposed ; on this unguarded point, moisture, acting as a nimble ally of the air, has seized, and, singularly enough, has spread like an erysipe- latous disease under the tin, until it has eaten its way through at some weak point. The admission of the air of course immediately caused the putrefaction of its con- tents. Here clearly moisture was the cause of all the mischief the saline moisture of the sea to which it had been carelessly exposed. The proof of this was seen in the return of the condition of the meats issued to Capt. Austin's expedition in search of Sir John Franklin. To his ships, the Assistance and Resolute, 86,614 Ibs. of a superior quality of corned beef, manufactured by Messrs. Gamble, of London, were issued. Of this quantity, 35,1 50 Ibs. were consumed on the voyage, and only 18 Ibs. were discovered to be bad. On the return of the ships, however, a further quantity of 726 Ibs. was found to be putrid, and since the remainder has been returned into the store, 1,226 Ibs. have been condemned, PRESERVED MEATS. 199 and the rest is understood to be in a very unsatisfactory condition. Now, from this it is clear that the meat was perfectly sound when shipped, and that it was not until the full effect of the sea air was felt by the canisters, that the meats began to perish. The weak point of the metal envelope having been dis- covered, a great many remedies suggest themselves, the best of which will be adopted by the manufacturer ; and there is reason to believe that even the most wilful negligence will not in future render these canisters liable to corrosion ; of course, we speak within certain limits, as we could no more expect meat to keep that it was de- termined to spoil, than we could steel goods to retain their polish after having been dipped in the sea. The ordinary carelessness of sailors, however, must be provided against. The importance of accomplishing this, to a nation of islanders, must be evident. England, with regard to her dependencies and foreign countries, is like a city situated in the midst of a desert ; vast foodless tracts have to be traversed by her ships, the camels of the ocean ; and if these provisions are not entirely to be depended on, the position of the mariners might be likened to the people of a caravan whose water-bags are liable at any moment, without previous warning, to burst, and to discharge the means of preserving life into the thirsting sands. Properly secured, however, this method of preserving food must prove of infinite advantage in annihilating the last vestige of that terrible disease, the sea scurvy. The discovery of the anti-scorbutic effects of lime-juice has in a great measure banished this disease from our 200 PRESERVED MEATS. navy, and the terrible ravages it once committed are now almost matters of history. It is worth while to recall a few instances, however, to show its effects upon large bodies of men, because it still lingers in a subdued form in the merchant service. The expedition of Admiral Anson, undertaken in the middle of the last century, in order to intercept the trea- sure galleons of the Spaniards, consisted of three ships, the Gloucester, the Centurion, and the Tryal (a provision ship). The number of men on board when he left Eng- land was 961, and out of these he had lost, by the time he reached the island of Juan Fernandez, 626, all of scurvy. At this island, where fresh provisions were procurable, the malady stopped, as if by magic, and for the reason which we shall set forth by-and-by. Again, the Channel fleet, in 1799, under Sir C. Hardy, had 3,500 sick of this fatal disease, and within four months of a subsequent year, 6,064 were sent to Haslar similarly afflicted. All this suffering, all this death, was entirely owing to the improper nature of the food eaten by the sailors ; salt junk, and an absence of fresh vegetables, starved the blood of its most valuable constituents ; a general degradation of the tissues ensued, and the very life-blood oozed out in consequence at every pore. Salt junk is still for six days a week the main food of the navy on the seventh the preserved provisions are served out. It seems difficult to conceive why the Admiralty should persist in supplying this unwholesome food whilst the preserved meats are much less expensive. The last contract for salt junk was made at 21. 9s. 6d. per barrel of 208 Ibs., or at about 6f d. PKESERVED MEATS. 201 per Ib. This stuff, all chemical analysis has proved to be utterly unable to maintain the muscular power of man. The method in which it is prepared takes from it all its valuable qualities. Liebig, in his " Researches on Che- mistry/' says, " It is obvious that if flesh employed as food is again to become flesh in the body, if it is to retain the power of reproducing itself in its original condition, none of the constituents of raw flesh ought to be withdrawn from it during its preparation for food. If its composition be altered in any way ; if one of its constituents which belong essentially to its constitution be removed, a cor- responding variation must take place in the power of that piece of flesh to reassume in the living body the original form and quality on which its properties in the living or- ganization depend. It follows from this that boiled flesh, when eaten without the soup formed in boiling it, is so much the less adapted for nutrition the greater the quan- tity of the water in which it has been boiled and the longer the duration of the boiling/' Can anything be more clear than that the navy is mainly victualled with a food which has the tendency of lowering the blood-making powers of the body, and consequently of laying the constitution open to the attacks of disease, as well as of keeping the mus- cular force below its natural standard ? The persistence in this kind of food is the more extraordinary when we find that the yearly saving to the Admiralty by the adoption of the preserved meats, for only one day in the week, has been 10,0(W. ; or the difference between junk at 6f