Household words, No. 20, August 10, 1850
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-03-11T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English literature -- Periodicals

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Household words, No. 20, August 10, 1850

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Title: Household words, No. 20, August 10, 1850

A weekly journal

Editor: Charles Dickens

Release date: March 11, 2026 [eBook #78185]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78185

Credits: Richard Tonsing, Steven desJardins, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 20, AUGUST 10, 1850 ***

Transcriber’s Note:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

“Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS.”—Shakespeare.

HOUSEHOLD WORDS.
A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS.

No. 20.]      SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1850.      [Price 2d.

A DETECTIVE POLICE PARTY.

The fresh-complexioned, smooth-faced officer, with the strange air of simplicity, began, with a rustic smile, and in a soft, wheedling tone of voice, to relate the Butcher’s Story, thus:

“It’s just about six years ago, now, since information was given at Scotland Yard of there being extensive robberies of lawns and silks going on, at some wholesale houses in the City. Directions were given for the business being looked into; and Straw, and Fendall, and me, we were all in it.”

“When you received your instructions,” said we, “you went away, and held a sort of Cabinet Council together?”

The smooth-faced officer coaxingly replied, “Ye-es. Just so. We turned it over among ourselves a good deal. It appeared, when we went into it, that the goods were sold by the receivers extraordinarily cheap—much cheaper than they could have been if they had been honestly come by. The receivers were in the trade, and kept capital shops—establishments of the first respectability—one of ’em at the West End, one down in Westminster. After a lot of watching and inquiry, and this and that among ourselves, we found that the job was managed, and the purchases of the stolen goods made, at a little public-house near Smithfield, down by Saint Bartholomew’s; where the Warehouse Porters, who were the thieves, took ’em for that purpose, don’t you see? and made appointments to meet the people that went between themselves and the receivers. This public-house was principally used by journeymen butchers from the country, out of place, and in want of situations; so, what did we do, but—ha, ha, ha!—we agreed that I should be dressed up like a butcher myself, and go and live there!”

Never, surely, was a faculty of observation better brought to bear upon a purpose, than that which picked out this officer for the part. Nothing in all creation, could have suited him better. Even while he spoke, he became a greasy, sleepy, shy, good-natured, chuckle-headed, unsuspicious, and confiding young butcher. His very hair seemed to have suet in it, as he made it smooth upon his head, and his fresh complexion to be lubricated by large quantities of animal food.

——“So I—ha, ha, ha!” (always with the confiding snigger of the foolish young butcher) “so I dressed myself in the regular way, made up a little bundle of clothes, and went to the public-house, and asked if I could have a lodging there? They says, ‘yes, you can have a lodging here,’ and I got a bedroom, and settled myself down in the tap. There was a number of people about the place, and coming backwards and forwards to the house; and first one says, and then another says, ‘Are you from the country, young man?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I am. I’m come out of Northamptonshire, and I’m quite lonely here, for I don’t know London at all, and it’s such a mighty big town?’ ‘It is a big town,’ they says. ‘Oh, it’s a very big town!’ I says. ‘Really and truly I never was in such a town. It quite confuses of me!’—and all that, you know.

“When some of the Journeymen Butchers that used the house, found that I wanted a place, they says, ‘Oh, we’ll get you a place!’ And they actually took me to a sight of places, in Newgate Market, Newport Market, Clare, Carnaby—I don’t know where all. But the wages was—ha, ha, ha!—was not sufficient, and I never could suit myself, don’t you see? Some of the queer frequenters of the house, were a little suspicious of me at first, and I was obliged to be very cautious indeed, how I communicated with Straw or Fendall. Sometimes, when I went out, pretending to stop and look into the shop-windows, and just casting my eye round, I used to see some of ’em following me; but, being perhaps better accustomed than they thought for, to that sort of thing, I used to lead ’em on as far as I thought necessary or convenient—sometimes a long way—and then turn sharp round, and meet ’em, and say, ‘Oh, dear, how glad I am to come upon you so fortunate! This London’s such a place, I’m blowed if I an’t lost again!’ And then we’d go back all together, to the public-house, and—ha, ha, ha! and smoke our pipes, don’t you see?

“They were very attentive to me, I am sure. It was a common thing, while I was living there, for some of ’em to take me out, and show me London. They showed me the Prisons—showed me Newgate—and when they showed me Newgate, I stops at the place where the Porters pitch their loads, and says, ‘Oh dear,’ ‘is this where they hang the men! Oh Lor!’ ‘That!’ they says, ‘what a simple cove he is! That an’t it!’ And then, they pointed out which was it, and I says ‘Lor!’ and they says, ‘Now you’ll know it agen, won’t you?’ And I said I thought I should if I tried hard—and I assure you I kept a sharp look out for the City Police when we were out in this way, for if any of ’em had happened to know me, and had spoke to me, it would have been all up in a minute. However, by good luck such a thing never happened, and all went on quiet: though the difficulties I had in communicating with my brother officers were quite extraordinary.

“The stolen goods that were brought to the public-house, by the Warehouse Porters, were always disposed of in a back parlor. For a long time, I never could get into this parlor, or see what was done there. As I sat smoking my pipe, like an innocent young chap, by the tap-room fire, I’d hear some of the parties to the robbery, as they came in and out, say softly to the landlord, ‘Who’s that? What does he do here?’ ‘Bless your soul,’ says the landlord, ‘He’s only a’—ha, ha, ha!—‘he’s only a green young fellow from the country, as is looking for a butcher’s sitiwation. Don’t mind him!’ So, in course of time, they were so convinced of my being green, and got to be so accustomed to me, that I was as free of the parlor as any of ’em, and I have seen as much as Seventy Pounds worth of fine lawn sold there, in one night, that was stolen from a warehouse in Friday Street. After the sale, the buyers always stood treat—hot supper, or dinner, or what not—and they’d say on those occasions ‘Come on, Butcher! Put your best leg foremost, young ’un, and walk into it!’ Which I used to do—and hear, at table, all manner of particulars that it was very important for us Detectives to know.

“This went on for ten weeks. I lived in the public-house all the time, and never was out of the Butcher’s dress—except in bed. At last, when I had followed seven of the thieves, and set ’em to rights—that’s an expression of ours, don’t you see, by which I mean to say that I traced ’em, and found out where the robberies were done, and all about ’em—Straw, and Fendall, and I, gave one another the office, and at a time agreed upon, a descent was made upon the public-house, and the apprehensions effected. One of the first things the officers did, was to collar me—for the parties to the robbery weren’t to suppose yet, that I was anything but a Butcher—on which the landlord cries out, ‘Don’t take him,’ he says, ‘whatever you do! He’s only a poor young chap from the country, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth!’ However, they—ha, ha, ha!—they took me, and pretended to search my bedroom, where nothing was found but an old fiddle belonging to the landlord, that had got there somehow or another. But, it entirely changed the landlord’s opinion, for when it was produced, he says ‘My fiddle! The Butcher’s a pur-loiner! I give him into custody for the robbery of a musical instrument!’

“The man that had stolen the goods in Friday Street was not taken yet. He had told me, in confidence, that he had his suspicions there was something wrong (on account of the City Police having captured one of the party), and that he was going to make himself scarce. I asked him, ‘Where do you mean to go, Mr. Shepherdson?’ ‘Why, Butcher,’ says he, ‘the Setting Moon, in the Commercial Road, is a snug house, and I shall hang out there for a time. I shall call myself Simpson, which appears to me to be a modest sort of a name. Perhaps you’ll give us a look in, Butcher?’ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I think I will give you a call’—which I fully intended, don’t you see, because, of course, he was to be taken! I went over to the Setting Moon next day, with a brother officer, and asked at the bar for Simpson. They pointed out his room, upstairs. As we were going up, he looks down over the bannisters, and calls out, ‘Halloa, Butcher! is that you?’ ‘Yes, it’s me. How do you find yourself?’ ‘Bobbish,’ he says; ‘but who’s that with you?’ ‘It’s only a young man, that’s a friend of mine,’ I says. ‘Come along, then,’ says he; ‘any friend of the Butcher’s is as welcome as the Butcher!’ So, I made my friend acquainted with him, and we took him into custody.

“You have no idea, Sir, what a sight it was, in Court, when they first knew that I wasn’t a Butcher, after all! I wasn’t produced at the first examination, when there was a remand; but I was, at the second. And when I stepped into the box, in full police uniform, and the whole party saw how they had been done, actually a groan of horror and dismay proceeded from ’em in the dock!

“At the Old Bailey, when their trials came on, Mr. Clarkson was engaged for the defence, and he couldn’t make out how it was, about the Butcher. He thought, all along, it was a real Butcher. When the counsel for the prosecution said, ‘I will now call before you, gentlemen, the Police-officer,’ meaning myself, Mr. Clarkson says, ‘Why Police-officer? Why more Police-officers? I don’t want Police. We have had a great deal too much of the Police. I want the Butcher! However, Sir, he had the Butcher and the Police-officer, both in one. Out of seven prisoners committed for trial, five were found guilty, and some of ’em were transported. The respectable firm at the West End got a term of imprisonment; and that’s the Butcher’s Story!”

The story done, the chuckle-headed Butcher again resolved himself into the smooth-faced Detective. But, he was so extremely tickled by their having taken him about, when he was that Dragon in disguise, to show him London, that he could not help reverting to that point in his narrative; and gently repeating, with the Butcher snigger, “‘Oh, dear!’ I says, ‘is that where they hang the men? Oh, Lor!’ ‘That!’ says they. ‘What a simple cove he is!’”

It being now late, and the party very modest in their fear of being too diffuse, there were some tokens of separation; when Serjeant Dornton, the soldierly-looking man, said, looking round him with a smile:

“Before we break up, Sir, perhaps you might have some amusement in hearing of the Adventures of a Carpet Bag. They are very short; and, I think, curious.”

We welcomed the Carpet Bag, as cordially as Mr. Shepherdson welcomed the false Butcher at the Setting Moon. Serjeant Dornton proceeded:

“In 1847, I was dispatched to Chatham, in search of one Mesheck, a Jew. He had been carrying on, pretty heavily, in the bill-stealing way, getting acceptances from young men of good connexions (in the army chiefly), on pretence of discount, and bolting with the same.

“Mesheck was off, before I got to Chatham. All I could learn about him was, that he had gone, probably to London, and had with him—a Carpet Bag.

“I came back to town, by the last train from Blackwall, and made inquiries concerning a Jew passenger with—a Carpet Bag.

“The office was shut up, it being the last train. There were only two or three porters left. Looking after a Jew with a Carpet Bag, on the Blackwall Railway, which was then the high road to a great Military Depôt, was worse than looking after a needle in a hayrick. But it happened that one of these porters had carried, for a certain Jew, to a certain public-house, a certain—Carpet Bag.

“I went to the public-house, but the Jew had only left his luggage there for a few hours, and had called for it in a cab, and taken it away. I put such questions there, and to the porter, as I thought prudent, and got at this description of—the Carpet Bag.

“It was a bag which had, on one side of it, worked in worsted, a green parrot on a stand. A green parrot on a stand was the means by which to identify that—Carpet Bag.

“I traced Mesheck, by means of this green parrot on a stand, to Cheltenham, to Birmingham, to Liverpool, to the Atlantic Ocean. At Liverpool he was too many for me. He had gone to the United States, and I gave up all thoughts of Mesheck, and likewise of his—Carpet Bag.

“Many months afterwards—near a year afterwards—there was a Bank in Ireland robbed of seven thousand pounds, by a person of the name of Doctor Dundey, who escaped to America; from which country some of the stolen notes came home. He was supposed to have bought a farm in New Jersey. Under proper management, that estate could be seized and sold, for the benefit of the parties he had defrauded. I was sent off to America for this purpose.

“I landed at Boston. I went on to New York. I found that he had lately changed New York paper-money for New Jersey paper-money, and had banked cash in New Brunswick. To take this Doctor Dundey, it was necessary to entrap him into the State of New York, which required a deal of artifice and trouble. At one time, he couldn’t be drawn into an appointment. At another time, he appointed to come to meet me, and a New York officer, on a pretext I made; and then his children had the measles. At last, he came, per steamboat, and I took him, and lodged him in a New York Prison called the Tombs; which I dare say you know, Sir?”

Editorial acknowledgment to that effect.

“I went to the Tombs, on the morning after his capture, to attend the examination before the magistrate. I was passing through the magistrate’s private room, when, happening to look round me to take notice of the place, as we generally have a habit of doing, I clapped my eyes, in one corner, on a—Carpet Bag.

“What did I see upon that Carpet Bag, if you’ll believe me, but a green parrot on a stand, as large as life!

“‘That Carpet Bag, with the representation of a green parrot on a stand,’ said I, ‘belongs to an English Jew, named Aaron Mesheck, and to no other man, alive or dead!’

“I give you my word the New York Police-officers were doubled up with surprise.

“‘How do you ever come to know that?’ said they.

“‘I think I ought to know that green parrot by this time,’ said I; ‘for I have had as pretty a dance after that bird, at home, as ever I had, in all my life!’”

“And was it Mesheck’s?” we submissively inquired.

“Was it, Sir? Of course it was! He was in custody for another offence, in that very identical Tombs, at that very identical time. And, more than that! Some memoranda, relating to the fraud for which I had vainly endeavoured to take him, were found to be, at that moment, lying in that very same individual—Carpet Bag!”

Such are the curious coincidences and such is the peculiar ability, always sharpening and being improved by practice, and always adapting itself to every variety of circumstances, and opposing itself to every new device that perverted ingenuity can invent, for which this important social branch of the public service is remarkable! For ever on the watch, with their wits stretched to the utmost, these officers have, from day to day and year to year, to set themselves against every novelty of trickery and dexterity that the combined imaginations of all the lawless rascals in England can devise, and to keep pace with every such invention that comes out. In the Courts of Justice, the materials of thousands of such stories as we have narrated—often elevated into the marvellous and romantic, by the circumstances of the case—are dryly compressed into the set phrase, “in consequence of information I received, I did so and so.” Suspicion was to be directed, by careful inference and deduction, upon the right person; the right person was to be taken, wherever he had gone, or whatever he was doing to avoid detection: he is taken; there he is at the bar; that is enough. From information I, the officer, received, I did it; and, according to the custom in these cases, I say no more.

These games of chess, played with live pieces, are played before small audiences, and are chronicled nowhere. The interest of the game supports the player. Its results are enough for Justice. To compare great things with small, suppose Leverrier or Adams informing the public that from information he had received he had discovered a new planet; or Columbus informing the public of his day that from information he had received, he had discovered a new continent; so the Detectives inform it that they have discovered a new fraud or an old offender, and the process is unknown.

Thus, at midnight, closed the proceedings of our curious and interesting party. But one other circumstance finally wound up the evening, after our Detective guests had left us. One of the sharpest among them, and the officer best acquainted with the Swell Mob, had his pocket picked, going home!

HEALTH BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

There was a story current in the city of Mosul, about the time that the first edition of “The Hundred and One Nights” began to be popular in Oriental society, of a certain Prince who was taken ill of the plague. Though his retinue was large, he was the only person who was in imminent danger. The Court physician was also at death’s door, and a strange doctor was sent for, who pronounced the Great Man to be in a fearful state of debility, but retired without prescribing. The Prince waited long and anxiously for remedies, but in vain. He clapped his hands to summon a slave. “Where,” he exclaimed, “is the physic?”

“Sun of the Earth,” exclaimed the Nubian, “it is all taken!”

“And who has dared to swallow the medicine designed for the anointed of Allah?”

“As it is written by the Prophet,” returned Hassan, “‘when the sheik sickens, his slaves droop.’ Thy whole household was sick, and clamoured for medicine; and, lo, the man of drugs straightway drenched them therewith, ordering us all, on pain of the Prophet’s curse, not to give thee so much as a single grain of rhubarb.”

“Breath of Mahomet,” ejaculated his Mightiness; “am I then to die, and are my slaves to live?”

When a Mussulman is puzzled what to say, he invariably exclaims, “Allah is merciful;” which was Hassan’s consolation.

“Let the wretched mediciner appear!” commanded the Prince.

The doctor came. “Illustrious father of a hundred generations!” said the general practitioner, “thine own physician only could cure thee, and he lies on his pallet a helpless being. I may not so much as look at thy transcendant tongue, or feel thine omnipotent pulse.”

“Wherefore? O licenciate of the Destroyer!”

“Inasmuch as I may not infringe the vested rights of thine own special and appointed physician. The law—even that of the Medes and Persians, which never altereth—forbids me. Thy slaves I may heal, seeing that no vested rights in them exist; but——”

Here the Prince interrupted the speaker with a hollow groan, and sank on his pillow in despair.

The Arabic manuscript, from which this affecting incident was translated, ends with these words—“and the Prince died.”

This story is evidently a foreshadowing of what has recently happened in reference to the metropolis of this country and the Public Health Act. London was in extremis from the effects of density of population, filth, bad air, bad water, the window-tax, and deficient drainage. It called in certain sanitary doctors—the regular consulting body, namely, the Government, being too weak to afford the slightest assistance. The result was, that a prescription, in the form of the Public Health Act, was concocted,—but was made applicable to every other member of the great retinue of towns, except to the Imperial City; which was exempted in consequence of the existing Vested Rights in crowded houses, deadly stenches, putrid water, foggy courts, and cesspools. “Although,” in the words of a resolution, passed at the meeting which formed the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, “the strenuous efforts made in the metropolitan districts to procure a sanitary enactment mainly contributed to the passing of the Public Health Act; yet these districts were the only parts excluded from the benefits of that enactment. This exclusion has led to much misery and a great sacrifice of life.”

This exception was so monstrous, that even the Corporation of the City of London took powers under their own Sewers’ Act for the preservation of the health of the people dwelling within the City boundary,—who number no more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand out of the two millions of us who are congregated in civic and suburban London. The remaining one million eight hundred thousand are left to be stifled or diseased at the good pleasure of Vested Interests. Indeed, it is ascertained that a quarter of a million of individuals absolutely do die every year from the want of such a sanitary police as the Public Health Act, amended by some few additional powers, would establish. What number of persons are really sent out of the world from preventable causes. It is also true that those causes can be efficiently removed for about a halfpenny per head a week; or threepence per week per house; or about eight times less than those who die unnecessarily cost the public in hospitals, poor’s rates, and burial. In the “Journal of Public Health” for November, 1848, and August, 1849, it is shown by elaborate tables, that the direct cost of, and estimated money loss through, typhus fever alone in the metropolis, amounted during the four years, 1843–1847, to one million three hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds, or two hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred pounds annually. This sum is exclusive of the amounts contributed for the purchase and maintenance of fever hospitals. For 1848, when the mortality from typhus had increased to three thousand five hundred and sixty-nine, the direct cost and money loss was estimated at four hundred and forty thousand pounds.

This cold-blooded way of putting the really appalling state of the case is, alas! the only successful mode of appealing to that hard-headed, though sometimes soft-hearted, periphrasis, John Bull, when he is under no special exciting cause of dread. His heart is only reached through his pocket, except when put in a state of alarm. Cry “Cholera!” or any other frightful conjuration, and he bestirs himself. To cholera we owe the few sanitary measures now in force; but which were passed by the House—as a coward may seem courageous—in its agonies of fright. The moment, however, Cholera bulletins ceased to be issued, John buttoned up his pockets tighter than ever, and Parliament was dumb regarding public health, except to undo one or two good things it had done. The inflated promises of the legislature collapsed into thin air, on the very day the danger was withdrawn. It was the legend over again of the nameless gentleman who, when he was sick, swore he would turn a monk; but when he got well “the devil a monk was he.” Ever since, sanitary legislation has been as much a dead letter in the Metropolis, as if the deadly condition of some of its districts had never been whispered between the wind and the nobility of Westminster, in Parliament assembled.

It has no effect upon unreasoning John Bull to tell him that, on an average, cholera does not devour a tithe of the victims which fever, consumption, and other preventible diseases make away with. Cholera comes upon him like an ogre, eating its victims all at once, and he quakes with terror; the daily, deadly destruction of human beings by “every-day” diseases, he takes no heed of. Take him, however, a slate and pencil; count costs to him; show that cholera costs so much; that ordinary, contagious, but preventible diseases, cost so much more; and that prevention is so many hundred per cent. cheaper than the cheapest cures, he begins to be amenable to reason. Nothing but pocket arithmetic, terror, or melo-dramatic appeals to his soft-hearted sympathy, moves John Bull.

In order to supply the best of these exercitations by the accumulation of carefully sifted, and well authenticated facts, and sound reasonings; the results of scientific investigations, and of a large range of pathological statistics, the Metropolitan Sanitary Association has been for some months—like another “Ole Joe”—knocking at the door of Old John. Whether the heavy old gentleman will soon open it to conviction and improvement depends, we think, very much upon the energy and liberality with which that society is supported and seconded by the public; for whose sole benefit it was called into existence. To the exertions of many of its leading members, if not to the collective body itself, John Bull has responded, by admitting into his premises the Extra-Mural Interment Bill, and we think he is just now holding his door a-jar to catch the Water Supply Bill, which it is hoped he will admit, and pass through That House next session. Meantime we, in common with the association aforesaid, beg his attention to a few other points of improvement:—

The adage “as free as air,” has become obsolete by Act of Parliament. Neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the window-tax. We are obliged to pay for what nature supplies lavishly to all, at so much per window per year; and the poor who cannot afford the expense, are stinted in two of the most urgent necessities of life. The effects produced by a deprivation of them are not immediate, and are therefore unheeded. When a poor man or woman in a dark, close, smoky house is laid up with scrofula, consumption, water in the head, wasting, or a complication of epidemic diseases, nobody thinks of attributing the illness to the right cause;—which may be a want of light and air. If he or she were struck down by a flash of lightning, there would be an immediate outcry against the authorities, whoever they may be, for not providing proper lightning conductors; but because the poison—generated by the absence of light and air—is not seen at work, the victim dies unheeded, and the window-tax, which shuts out the remedies, is continued without a murmur. In illustration of these facts, we may quote a little information respecting the tadpole, an humble animal, which—if the author of “Vestiges of Creation” be any authority and the theory of development be more than a childish dream—was the progenitor of man himself. The passage is from the report of the half-fledged Health of Towns’ Commission:—

“If the young of some of the lower tribes of creatures are supplied with their proper food, and if all the other conditions necessary for their nourishment are maintained, while at the same time light is wholly excluded from them, their development is stopped; they no longer undergo the metamorphosis through which they pass from imperfect into perfect beings; the tadpole, for example, is unable to change its water-breathing apparatus, fitted for its first stage of existence, into the air-breathing apparatus, with the rudiment of which it is furnished, and which is intended to adapt it for a higher life, namely, for respiration in air. In this imperfect state it continues to live; it even attains an enormous bulk, for such a creature in its state of transition, but it is unable to pass out of its transitional state; it remains permanently an imperfect being, and is doomed to pass a perpetual life in water, instead of attaining maturity and passing its mature life in air.”

It may give some support to the theory of tadpole development above mentioned, to add, that the same cause produces the very same effects upon human beings; upon human mothers, and upon human children. Human mothers living in dark cellars produce an unusual proportion of defective children. Go into the narrow streets, and the dark lanes, courts, and alleys of our splendid cities, there you will see an unusual number of deformed people, men, women, and children, but particularly children. In some cells under the fortifications of Lisle, a number of poor people took up their abode; the proportion of defective infants produced by them became so great, that it was deemed necessary to issue an order commanding these cells to be shut up. The window duties multiply cells like those of the fortifications of Lisle, in London, in Liverpool, in Manchester, in Bristol, and in every city and town in England by hundreds and by thousands, and with the same result; but the cells here are not shut up, nor is the cause that produces them removed. Even in cases in which the absence of light is not so complete as to produce a result thus definite and striking, the effects of the privation are still abundantly manifest in the pale and sickly complexion, and the enfeebled and stunted frame; nor can it be otherwise, since, from the essential constitution of organised beings, light is as necessary to the development of the animal as it is to the growth of the plant. The diseases the want of it produces are of long continuance, and waste the means of life before death results; they may therefore be characterised as pauperising diseases. As to death itself, it has been calculated that nearly ten thousand persons perish annually in London alone from diseases solely produced by an impeded circulation of air and admission of light.

This prodigal waste of health, strength, and of life itself, falls much more heavily on the poor, than the mere fiscal burden, imposed by the tax, falls on the richer classes. Inasmuch, then, as health is the capital of the working man, whatever be the necessities of the state, nothing can justify a tax affecting the health of the people, and especially the health of the labouring community, whose bodily strength constitutes their wealth, and oftentimes their only possession. In conclusion we may say, without wishing to libel any respectable Act of Parliament, that the Window-Tax kills countless human beings in tens of thousands every year.

The next improvement which must speedily be pushed under John Bull’s very nose, is the removal of the nuisances which abound in crowded neighbourhoods from Land’s End to John o’Groats. The back-yards of houses in poor neighbourhoods are so many gardens, sown broadcast with the seeds of disease, and but too plentifully manured for abundant and continual crops. When rain falls on the surface of these parterres of poison, and is afterwards evaporated by the heat of the sun, there rises a malaria, intensified by decomposing refuse, which, inhaled into human lungs, engenders consumption, ending in the parish workhouse and death. It is a fact that the surfaces of some of the back-yards in London have been raised six feet by successive accumulations of vegetable and animal refuse. We must have no more such accumulations; offal of every kind must be removed daily by Act of Parliament.

Ill-kept stables, which cause horses to become blind, and men to die of typhus, must be reformed; cow-feeding sheds, which produce diseased milk and offensive refuse, must be abolished, and milk supplied per railway from the country; disgusting and noxious manufactures, such as are carried on a few yards west of Lambeth Palace, on the river’s bank, must be removed to consort with knackers’ yards, in places remote from human habitations.

The strong bar which John Bull opposes to such improvements is the dread of the Centralisation, which, he says, carrying them into effect would occasion. Local Government, he insists, is the great bulwark of the British Constitution. No bill is ever brought into Parliament for the good of the people,—that is well known,—but is passed for the sake of the places it creates, and the patronage it gives. Now, if we allow a practicable bill for the removal of these nuisances to pass, a swarm of commissioners, secretaries, clerks, inspectors, inquisitors, dustmen, and scavengers will be let loose upon the contented public, to supersede snug, comfortable, local boards, and to ruin innocent contractors. “Is,” John asks vehemently, “this to be borne?” and answers himself with equal emphasis, “Decidedly not. We prefer the nuisances.” But common sense steps in to reply, that as nuisances are a matter of taste, if every board could confine its own nuisances to its own parish so as not to take its neighbours by the nose, there would, perhaps, be no harm in letting it doze and wallow in its own filth as long as its taste would dictate. But as this is impossible, centralisation or no centralisation, Government, or somebody else, must interfere to protect the extra-parochial lieges from destruction, by upsetting the Board and removing the rest of the nuisances.

A practical example of the impossibility of confining noxious nuisances to the boundaries whence they originate, is afforded in the immediate neighbourhood of one of the most beautiful parts of the metropolis. In a neighbourhood studded thickly with elegant villas and mansions—namely, Bayswater and Notting Hill, in the parish of Kensington—is a plague spot scarcely equalled for its insalubrity by any other in London: it is called the Potteries. It comprises some seven or eight acres, with about two hundred and sixty houses (if the term can be applied to such hovels), and a population of nine hundred or one thousand. The occupation of the inhabitants is principally pig-fattening; many hundreds of pigs, ducks, and fowls are kept in an incredible state of filth. Dogs abound for the purpose of guarding the swine. The atmosphere is still further polluted by the process of fat-boiling. In these hovels discontent, dirt, filth, and misery, are unsurpassed by anything known even in Ireland. Water is supplied to only a small proportion of the houses. There are foul ditches, open sewers, and defective drains, smelling most offensively, and generating large quantities of poisonous gases; stagnant water is found at every turn, not a drop of clean water can be obtained,—all is charged to saturation with putrescent matter. Wells have been sunk on some of the premises, but they have become, in many instances, useless from organic matter soaking into them; in some of the wells the water is perfectly black and fetid. The paint on the window frames has become black from the action of sulphuretted hydrogen gas. Nearly all the inhabitants look unhealthy, the women especially complain of sickness, and want of appetite; their eyes are shrunken, and their skin shrivelled.

The poisonous influence of this pestilential locality extends far and wide. Some twelve or thirteen hundred feet off there is a row of clean houses, called Crafter Terrace; the situation, though rather low, is open and airy. On Saturday and Sunday, the 8th and 9th of September, 1849, the inhabitants complained of an intolerable stench, the wind then blowing directly upon the Terrace from the Potteries. Up to this time, there had been no case of cholera among the inhabitants; but the next day the disease broke out virulently, and on the following day, the 11th of September, a child died of cholera at No. 1. By the 22nd of the same month, no less than seven persons in the Terrace lost their lives by this fatal malady.

It would be thought, that such a state of things could not have been permitted to remain undisturbed, but merely required to be brought to light to be remedied. The medical officers have, time after time, reported the condition of the place to the Board of Guardians. Fifteen medical men have testified to the unhealthy state of the Potteries. The inspector of nuisances has done the same. The magistrates have repeatedly granted orders for the removal of the pigs. The General Board of Health have given directions that all the nuisances should be removed, yet nothing, or next to nothing, has been done. The inspector of nuisances has been dismissed, the guardians have signified their intention to inspect the districts themselves, yet things remain in statu quo.

Is there then no possibility of cleansing this more than Augean stable? None: the single but insurmountable difficulty being that some of the worst parts of the district are the property of one of the guardians!

Surely the force of self-government can no farther go. Another word in defence of centralisation—the great bugbear of the self-conceited parish orator—would be wasted.

In conclusion, we earnestly call on the public to second and support the efforts of the Metropolitan Sanitary Association to get the evils we have adverted to lessened or wholly removed. The rapid increase of the population demands additional exertion and additional arrangements for their well-being. At present, retrogression instead of improvement assails us. It is an appalling fact, that the number of persons dying of the class of diseases called preventible has been steadily increasing. Mr. Farr, of the Registrar-General’s office, has declared there could be no question that the health of London is becoming worse every year. In 1846, the number of persons dying of zymotic or epidemic diseases was about nineteen per cent. of the total mortality; in 1847, it was twenty-eight per cent.; in 1848, thirty-four per cent.; and last year it increased to forty-one per cent.; thus showing that nearly one-half of the mortality of London was more or less owing to preventible causes.

To reverse this state of things the people of this country must not wait for another great and fatal Fright. We know that typhus fever and consumption, like open drains and stinking water, are mean, commonplace, unexciting instruments of death, which do not get invested with dramatic interest; yet they kill as unerringly as the knife or the bullet of the assassin; only they murder great multitudes instead of single individuals. If, therefore, he will only fix his eyes on the victims of the diseases which can be easily prevented, it is well worth John Bull’s while to consider whether substantially it is not as sound a policy to save a million or two of lives per annum, as to hang the hero and heroine of a Bermondsey murder.

WHAT THERE IS IN THE ROOF OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.

Perhaps no one of the London Squares is more full of interesting associations, and certainly no one of them is more fresh and pleasant to look upon, than Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In the centre of its green Lord William Russell was beheaded; upon the old wall that used to run along its eastern side Ben Jonson, it is said, worked as a bricklayer; amongst its north range of buildings stands the thin sandwich of a house that holds the manifold artistic gems of the Soane Museum; its west side was the scene of some of Lord George Gordon’s riotings; whilst on its south side stands the noble-looking Grecian fronted building dedicated to the purposes of the English College of Surgeons.

This building has many uses, and many points challenging general admiration and approval, the chief of them being its possession of the museum made by John Hunter; afterwards purchased, and now supported, by the nation; and open freely, not only to medical men of all countries, but to the public at large. The visitor who passes under its handsome portico, up the steps and enters its heavy mahogany and plate-glass doors, finds himself in a large hall. On his right is a staid-looking, black-robed porter, who requires him to enter his name in the visitor’s book—a preliminary which members equally with strangers have to go through. On his left are the doors leading to the secretary’s office, where students may, from time to time, be seen going in to register their attendance upon the prescribed lectures, and, later in their career, passing through the same portals big with the desperate announcement that they are ready to submit to the examinations that must be passed before they can get a diploma. Facing the entrance door is a second enclosed hall, with a roof supported by fluted columns, and on the left of this a broad stately architectural stone staircase leading to the library and the council-chamber—the scene of those dreadful ordeals, the examinations, where Hospital Surgeons sit surrounded by crimson and gold, and marble busts, and noble pictures, to operate upon sweating and stuttering and hesitating students who, two by two, are seated in large chairs to be passed or plucked.

The library is a noble, large room, of excellent proportions, occupying the whole length of the building in front, having tall plate-glass embayed windows, each with its table and chair; and in each of which the passersby in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, may generally see a live surgeon framed and glazed, busily occupied with his books, or still more busily helping to keep up the tide of gossip for which the place is celebrated. For some twenty feet from the floor on all sides, the walls are lined with books, telling in various languages about all kinds of maladies and all sorts of plans for cure. Above this, and just under the handsomely panelled roof, hang portraits of old surgeons, each famous in his time, and now enjoying a sort of quiet renown amongst their successors in the art and science of chirurgery. All we have seen thus far, betokens the quiet repose of wealth, dignity, and learned leisure and ease. No bustle, no noise, no trace of urgent labour is heard or seen. Such of the officers of the place as may be encountered, have a look of somnolent if not sleek sufficiency, and seem to claim a share of the consideration which all are ready to concede, as due to the character of the spot. Returning to the hall, another door, facing that of the secretary, leads to the great attraction and pride of the place—the Hunterian Museum—a collection of skeletons and glittering rows of bottles full of evidences how “fearfully and wonderfully” all living creatures are made. On all sides we see the bony relics of defunct men and animals—giants, dwarfs, both human and quadruped, challenging attention. The huge megatherium, the bones of poor Chuny, the elephant shot in Exeter ’Change, the skeleton of O’Brien the Irish giant, who walked about the world eight feet high, and near him all that remains of the form of the Sicilian dwarf, who when alive was not taller than O’Brien’s knee. On the walls tier after tier of bottles are ranged, till the eye following them up towards the top of the building, fatigued by their innumerable abundance, and the variety of their contents, again seeks the ground and its tables, there to encounter an almost equal crowd of curious things collected from the earth, the air, and the sea, to show how infinite the varieties in which Nature indulges, and how almost more than infinite the curious ways in which life varies the tenement it inhabits. But with this multiplicity of things we see no confusion, or trace of carelessness or poverty. All is neatness, order, and repose. Not a particle of dirt offends the eye; not a film of dust dims the brilliancy of the regiments of bottles drawn up in long files upon the shelves, to salute the visitor. The place is a very drawing-room of science, all polished and set forth in trim order for the reception of the public. It is the best room in the house kept for the display of the results of the labours of the physiologist,—a spot devoted to the revelations of anatomy, without the horrifying accompaniments of the dissecting-room.

Thus far we have passed through what are in truth the public portions of the College of Surgeons, just glancing at its museum, unequalled as a physiological collection by any other in the world. In their surprise at the curious things it contains, there are many, no doubt, who wonder also where the things all came from; and what patient men have gone on since John Hunter’s time, adding to his museum where it was deficient and keeping all its parts in their present admirable state. Such a question, if put to the officials, would most likely obtain a very vague and misty reply; but a glance behind the scenes at the College will afford an ample and curious explanation, and show how one section of the Searchers for Facts, silently and unheeded, work on in their self-chosen, quiet, scientific path—undisturbed by the noises and the bustle, the excitements and the strife of the modern Babylon, that heaves and throbs around them.

Leave the handsome rooms, with their clear light, and polish, and air of neatness, and come with us up the side stair that leads to the unshown recesses, where, high up in the roof, the workers in anatomy carry on their strange duties. As we open the side door that leads towards these secret chambers, we should go from daylight to darkness, were it not for the gas that is kept burning there. Up the stairs we go, and as we ascend, the way becomes lighter and lighter as we rise, but the stone steps soon change for wooden ones, and at length bring us from the silent stairs to a silent and gloomy-looking passage, having three doors opening into it, and some contrivances overhead for letting in a little light, and letting out certain odours that here abound,—greatly to the discomfort of the novice who first inhales them. We are now in the roof of the building, and on getting a glimpse through a window, we may see the housetops are below us, the only companions of our elevation being a number of neighbouring church-spires.

The feeling of the spot is one of almost complete isolation from the world below, and a neighbourhood to something startling if not almost terrible. Like Fatima in Bluebeard’s Tower, impelled by an overbearing curiosity, we turn the lock of the centre door, and enter the chamber. A strange sight is presented. The room is large, with the sloping roof-beams above, and a stained and uncovered floor below. The walls all round are crowded with shelves, covered with bottles of various sizes full of the queerest-looking of all queer things. Many are of a bright vermilion colour; others yellow; others brown; others black; whilst others again display the opaque whiteness of bloodless death. Three tables are in the room, but these are as crowded as the walls. Cases of instruments, microscopes, tall jars, cans, a large glass globe full of water-newts, hydras, and mosses; small cases of drawers filled with microscopic objects, and a thousand other odds and ends. Here is a long coil of snake’s eggs, just brought from a country stable-yard; there some ears of diseased wheat, sent by a noble landlord who studies farming; beside them lies part of a leaf of the gigantic water-lily, the Victoria Regia, and near that a portion of a vegetable marrow is macerating in a saucer to separate some peculiar vessels for exhibition under the microscope. There are two windows to the room, besides some ventilators in the roof; and before one of these, where the light is best, are ranged microscopes complete and ready for use, and round about them all sorts of scraps of glass and glaziers’ diamonds, and watch-glasses, and forceps, and scissors, and bottles of marine-glue, and of gold-size,—these being the means and appliances of the microscopic observer. Before the second window is a sink, in which stand jars of frogs and newts, and other small creatures. A lathe, a desk, and writing utensils, the model of a whale cast ashore in the Thames, an old stiff-backed wooden chair, once the seat of the Master of the Worshipful Company of Surgeons, a few cases of stuffed birds and animals, and some tall glass-stoppered bottles that went twice round the world with Captain Cook and Dr. Solander, make up the catalogue of the chief contents of an apartment, which, at first glance, has the look of an auctioneer’s room filled with the sold-off stock of a broken down anatomical teacher. A closer inspection, however, shows that though there is so great a crowd of objects, there is little or no confusion, and the real meaning of the place, its intention, and labours, reveal themselves.

We are in a storeroom of the strange productions of all corners of the earth, from the air above and from the waters below. Every particle in every bottle that looks perhaps to the uninitiated eye only a mass of bad fish preserved in worse pickle, has its value. A thin slice of it taken out and placed under the microscope, illustrates some law of the animal economy, or displays, perhaps, some long undiscovered fact, or shows to the surprise of the gazer, a series of lines beautifully arranged, or perhaps curiously mingled, and rich in their figured combinations as the frozen moisture of a window-frame on a winter’s morning. To this room as to a general centre come contributions from all corners of the earth; the donors being chiefly medical men employed on expeditions, or in the public service, though other medicos, who go to seek fortune in strange lands, often remember their alma mater, and pack up a bottle of curious things “to send to the College.” Doctors on shipboard, doctors with armies, doctors in Arctic ships, or on Niger expeditions; in the far regions of Hindûstan, and in the fogs and storms of Labrador, think now and then of their “dissecting days,” and of the noble collection in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which every true student feels bound to honour, and to help to make complete. Many, when going forth into distant countries, are supplied from this place with bottles specially adapted to receive objects in request, and receive also a volume of instructions, how the specimens may be best preserved. “When a quadruped is too large to be secured whole, cut off the portion of the head containing the teeth,” says one direction. “If no more can be done,” says another, “preserve the heart and great blood-vessels.” “Of a full-grown whale,” says a third of these notes, “send home the eyes with the surrounding skin, their muscles and fat in an entire mass.” “When many specimens of a rare and curious bird are procured, the heads of a few should be taken off and preserved in spirit.” “When alligators and crocodiles are too large to be preserved whole, secure some part. The bones of such things are especially desirable. Secure also the eggs in different stages.” “Snakes may be preserved whole, or in part, especially the heads, for the examination of their teeth and fangs.” “Eyes of fishes are proper objects of preservation.” Such are a few of the hints sent forth to their medical disciples by the College, and the fruits of the system are a bountiful supply. Never a week passes but something rare or curious makes its appearance in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; sometimes from one quarter, sometimes from another, but there is always something coming, either by messenger or parcel-cart. Apart from these foreign sources, there are other contributaries to the general stock. Country doctors and hospital surgeons, from time to time, send in their quota; the Zoological Society likewise contribute all their dead animals. When the elephant died at the Regent’s Park Gardens, a College student and an assistant were busily occupied for days dissecting the huge animal. When the rhinoceros expired at the same place, a portion of its viscera was hailed as a prize; and when the whale was cast, not long ago, upon the shores of the Thames, the watermen who claimed it as their booty, steamed off to the College to find a customer for portions of the unwieldy monster; nor were they disappointed. Beyond all these, there still remains another searcher out of materials for the scalpel and the microscope. He is a character in his way. By trade, half cattle-slaughterer half-oysterman, he is by choice a sort of dilettante anatomist. One day he is killing oxen and sheep in Clare Market, and the next is scouring the same market for morbid specimens “for Mr. Quickett, at the College.” He knows an unhealthy sheep by its looks, and watches its post mortem with the eye of a savant. Many a choice specimen has he caught up in his time from amongst the offal and garbage of that fustiest of markets in the fustiest of neighbourhoods. Indeed, through him, all that is unusual in ox, calf, sheep, fish, or fowl, found within the confines of Clare Market, finds its way to the “work shop” of the College to be investigated by scalpel and microscope. When a butcher is known to have any diseased sheep, our collector hovers about his slaughter-house, and that which is bad food for the public, often affords him and his patron a prize. He is a sort of jackal for the anatomists—a kind of cadger in the service of science—a veritable snatcher-up of ill-conditioned trifles.

Returning to the room in the College roof, where the general cornucopia of strange things is emptied, we find its presiding genius in Mr. Quekett, a quiet enthusiast in his way, who goes on from month to month and year to year, watching, working, and chronicling such facts as can be made out. When a novelty comes in, it is examined, described, investigated by the microscope; and, if worthy, is sketched on stone for printing. It is then catalogued, and placed in spirit for preservation—minute portions, perhaps, being mounted on glass as objects for the microscope. Thus disposed of, it becomes a “store preparation.” From this store the lectures at the College are illustrated by examples; and from it also are the bright bottles in the Hunterian Museum kept complete. From time to time something very rare comes to hand, and then there is quite an excitement in the place. It is turned about, examined, and discussed, with as much zest as a lady would display when first opening a present of jewels, or first criticising a new ball-dress. If the new acquisition be an animal but recently dead, a drop of its blood is sought and placed under the microscope to see the diameter of its globules; if it has a coat of fur, perhaps one of the hairs are next submitted to the same test; and then a fine section of its bone passes a similar ordeal. Its brain is investigated, weighed, and placed in spirit for preservation. Its general characteristics are then gone over, and a description of them written down. If worthy of a place in the Museum, this description goes to make a paragraph in the catalogues of the Collection—fine quarto volumes, of which there are many now complete, containing more exact anatomical and physiological descriptions of objects, than perhaps any other work extant.

The last contribution to the series of Catalogues was made in the room we have been examining. Its production was the constant labour of two years; and the volume contains exact particulars of many facts never before noticed. Amongst other things, for instance, made out with certainty in this place by Mr. Quekett, after months of patient investigation, was the elementary differences in the character of bone. To the common eye and common idea, all bone is simply bone; and for common purposes the word indicates closely enough what the speaker would describe. Not so to the naturalist and the physiologist; and so scalpel and microscope went to work: the sea, the land, and the air, lent each their creatures peculiar to itself, and the labour of the search was at length rewarded by a discovery that each great class of living things has an elementary difference in the bones upon which its structure is built up. Hence, when a particle of bony matter is now placed under the microscope, come whence it may—from a geological strata, or from the depths of the sea, or from within the cere-cloth of a mummy—the observer, guided by Mr. Quekett’s observations, knows whether it belonged in life to bird, beast, or fish.

Glancing round this anatomical workshop, we find, amongst other things, some preparations showing the nature of pearls. Examine them, and we find that there are dark and dingy pearls, just as there are handsome and ugly men; the dark pearl being found on the dark shell of the fish, the white brilliant one upon the smooth inside shell. Going further in the search, we find that the smooth glittering lining upon which the fish moves, is known as the nacre, and that it is produced by a portion of the animal called the mantle: and for explanation sake we may add, that gourmands practically know the mantle as the beard of the oyster. When living in its glossy house, should any foreign substance find its way through the shell to disturb the smoothness so essential to its ease, the fish coats the offending substance with nacre, and a pearl is thus formed. The pearl is, in fact, a little globe of the smooth glossy substance yielded by the oyster’s beard; yielded ordinarily to smooth the narrow home to which his nature binds him, but yielded in round drops—real pearly tears—if he is hurt. When a beauty glides proudly among a throng of admirers, her hair clustering with pearls, she little thinks that her ornaments are products of pain and diseased action, endured by the most unpoetical of shell-fish.

Leaving the centre-room of the three in the College roof, let us just glance at the other two apartments. Upon entering one we see the walls lined with boxes, something like those in a milliner’s shop, but, instead of holding laces and ribands, we find them labelled “Wolf,” “Racoon,” “Penguin,” “Lion,” “Albatross,” and so on with names of birds, and beasts, and fishes. On lifting a lid, we find the boxes filled with the bones of the different creatures named; not a complete skeleton of any one, perhaps, but portions of half-a-dozen. In this room, the two students attached to the College carry on dissections, under the directions of the superior authorities. What they do is entered in a book kept posted up, and this affords another source for reference as to anatomical facts. When they have laboured here for three years, they have the option of a commission as Assistant Surgeon in the Army, Navy, or East India Company’s service, as a reward for their College work.

If the atmosphere of the two apartments we have investigated was bad, that of the third room was infinitely worse, though windows and ventilators are constantly open. In this place large preparations are kept, and all the specimens are here put into the bottles required for exhibition in the Museum. This third room, like the first, has a curiously characteristic look. It would make a fine original for a picture of an alchemist’s study. On one side is a large structure of brickwork with pipes and taps, conveying the idea of a furnace and still, or of an oven. Alongside it is a bath and a table, and the purpose of the whole is for injecting large animals. This is a very difficult operation, the object being to drive a kind of hot liquid sealing-wax into every artery of the body, even the most minute. All things brought here, and capable of it, are injected somewhat after this fashion before they pass under the scalpel. Besides this oven-looking structure there are pans, and tubs, and casks; one containing a small dromedary, another being “a cask of camel.” A painter’s easel stands there ready for use, and on the floor are some bones of a megatherium; the tables are covered with bottles and jars, and the walls are similarly decorated. Strings of bladders hang about, and under foot we see thin sheets of lead coated with tin-foil; these latter being used for tying down the preparation bottles so that they may for years remain air-tight; a tedious and somewhat difficult operation. In this place every year they use scores, sometimes hundreds of gallons of alcohol; one fact which helps to show that museums on a large scale are expensive establishments.

Here, as elsewhere, however, in our establishments, whatever may be expended on materials, the men who do the work of science are but indifferently paid. But lucre is not their sole reward. No mere money payment could compensate (for instance) a man for spending a lifetime in this College of Surgeons’ roof. Forget the object in view; ignore the charm that science has for its votaries; and this place becomes a literal inferno, filled with pestilential fumes, and surrounded by horrible sights. But they who fix the salaries know how much the pursuit of science is a labour of love; and so they pay the man of science badly, not here alone, but in all the scientific branches of the public service. But the science-worker though he may feel the injustice, yet moves on his way rejoicing, pleased with his unceasing search into the secret workings of nature, and exhilarated from time to time by some discovery, or by the confirmation of some cherished notion. And though the glittering prizes of life be bestowed on strivers in far different walks, the student of nature holds on his cheerful and philosophic way, rewarded by the glimpses he gets of the power that made and sustains all terrestrial things, and rewarded, moreover, by the holy contact with that infinite wisdom seen at work in the construction, the adaptation, and the continuance of the marvellous and illimitably varied works it is the business of his life to investigate.

CHIPS.

NICE WHITE VEAL.

We shudder at the cruelties practised upon Strasbourg geese to produce the celebrated pâtés de foie ǧras; but remorse would assuredly afflict the amateurs of veal with indigestion, if they reflected on the tortures to which calves are subjected to cause the very unnatural colour of the meat which they so much prize. The natural and wholesome tint of veal is not white, but pink. An ancient French traveller in England (1690) says that the English veal has not the “beautiful red colour of the French.” Dr. Smollett, in “Peregrine Pickle,” upbraids epicures, on the scores both of cruelty and unwholesomeness, saying that our best veal is like a “fricassee of kid gloves,” and the sauce of “melted butter” is rendered necessary only by the absence of the juices drained out of the unfortunate animal before death.

The process of killing a calf is a refinement of cruelty worthy of a Grand Inquisitor. The beast is, while alive, bled several times; in summer, during several hours of the night, and frequently till it faints; when a plug is put into the orifice till “next time.” But the lengthened punishment of the most unoffending of animals is at the actual “killing.” It is tied together, neck and heels, much as a dead animal when packed in a basket and slung up by a rope, with the head downwards. A vein is then opened, till it lingeringly bleeds to death. Two or three “knocks” are given to it with the pole-axe whilst it hangs loose in the air, and the flesh is beaten with sticks, technically termed “dressing” it, some time before feeling has ceased to exist. All this may be verified by those who insist on seeing the penetralia of the slaughter-houses; or the poor animal may be seen moaning and writhing—by a mere glance—on many days of the week, in Warwick Lane, Newgate Street.

This mode of bleaching veal is not only a crime, but a blunder. The flesh would be more palatable and nutritious killed speedily and mercifully. But were it otherwise, and had it been twenty times more a luxury, who, professing to honour the common Creator, would, for the sensual gratification of the palate, cause the calf to be thus tortured?

“ALL THINGS IN THE WORLD MUST CHANGE.”

Would’st thou have it always Spring,

Though she cometh flower-laden?

Though sweet-throated birds do sing?

Thou would’st weary of it, Maiden.

Dost thou never feel desire

That thy womanhood were nearer?

Doth thy loving heart ne’er tire,

Longing yet for something dearer?

Would’st have Summer ever stay—
Droughty Summer—bright and burning?
Dost thou not, oft in the day,
Long for still, cool, night’s returning?
Dost thou not grow weary, Youth,
Of thy pleasures, vain though pleasant—
Thinking Life has more of Truth
Than the satiating present?

Would’st have Autumn never go?
(Autumn, Winter’s wealthy neighbour),
Stacks would rise, and wine-press flow
Vainly, did’st thou always labour.
When thy child is on thy knee
And thy heart with love’s o’erflowing,
Dost thou never long to see
What is in the future’s showing?

When old Winter, cold and hoar,
Cometh, blowing his ten fingers,
Hanging ice-drops on the door
Whilst he at the threshold lingers,
Would’st thou ever vigil keep
With a mate so full of sorrow?
Better to thy bed and sleep,
Nor wake till th’ Eternal morrow!

THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER II.

In Great Stockington there lived a race of paupers. From the year of the 42nd of Elizabeth, or 1601, down to the present generation, this race maintained an uninterrupted descent. They were a steady and unbroken line of paupers, as the parish books testify. From generation to generation their demands on the parish funds stand recorded. There were no lacunæ in their career; there never failed an heir to these families; fed on the bread of idleness and legal provision, these people flourished, increased, and multiplied. Sometimes compelled to work for the weekly dole which they received, they never acquired a taste for labour, or lost the taste for the bread for which they did not labour. These paupers regarded this maintenance by no means as a disgrace. They claimed it as a right,—as their patrimony. They contended that one-third of the property of the Church had been given by benevolent individuals for the support of the poor, and that what the Reformation wrongfully deprived them of, the great enactment of Elizabeth rightfully—and only rightfully—restored.

Those who imagine that all paupers merely claimed parish relief because the law ordained it, commit a great error. There were numbers who were hereditary paupers, and that on a tradition carefully handed down, that they were only manfully claiming their own. They traced their claims from the most ancient feudal times, when the lord was as much bound to maintain his villein in gross, as the villein was to work for the lord. These paupers were, in fact, or claimed to be, the original adscripti glebæ, and to have as much a claim to parish support as the landed proprietor had to his land. For this reason, in the old Catholic times, after they had escaped from villenage by running away and remaining absent from their hundred for a year and a day, dwelling for that period in a walled town, these people were amongst the most diligent attendants at the Abbey doors, and when the Abbeys were dissolved, were, no doubt, amongst the most daring of these thieves, vagabonds, and sturdy rogues, who, after the Robin Hood fashion, beset the highways and solitary farms of England, and claimed their black mail in a very unceremonious style. It was out of this class that Henry VIII. hanged his seventy-two thousand during his reign, and, as it is said, without appearing materially to diminish their number.

That they continued to “increase, multiply, and replenish the earth,” overflowing all bounds, overpowering by mere populousness all the severe laws against them of whipping, burning in the hand, in the forehead or the breast, and hanging, and filling the whole country with alarm, is evident by the very act itself of Elizabeth.

Amongst these hereditary paupers who, as we have said, were found in Stockington, there was a family of the name of Deg. This family had never failed to demand and enjoy what it held to be its share of its ancient inheritance. It appeared from the parish records, that they had practised in different periods the crafts of shoemaking, tailoring, and chimney-sweeping; but since the invention of the stocking-frame, they had, one and all of them, followed the profession of stocking weavers, or as they were there called, stockingers. This was a trade which required no extreme exertion of the physical or intellectual powers. To sit in a frame, and throw the arms to and fro, was a thing that might either be carried to a degree of extreme diligence, or be let down into a mere apology for idleness. An “idle stockinger” was there no very uncommon phrase, and the Degs were always classed under that head. Nothing could be more admirably adapted than this trade for building a plan of parish relief upon. The Degs did not pretend to be absolutely without work, or the parish authorities would soon have set them to some real labour,—a thing that they particularly recoiled from, having a very old adage in the family, that “hard work was enough to kill a man.” The Degs were seldom, therefore, out of work, but they did not get enough to meet and tie. They had but little work if times were bad, and if they were good, they had large families, and sickly wives or children. Be times what they would, therefore, the Degs were due and successful attendants at the parish pay-table. Nay, so much was this a matter of course, that they came at length not even to trouble themselves to receive their pay, but sent their young children for it; and it was duly paid. Did any parish officer, indeed, turn restive, and decline to pay a Deg, he soon found himself summoned before a magistrate, and such pleas of sickness, want of work, and poor earnings brought up, that he most likely got a sharp rebuke from the benevolent but uninquiring magistrate, and acquired a character for hardheartedness that stuck to him.

So parish overseers learnt to let the Degs alone; and their children regularly brought up to receive the parish money for their parents, were impatient as they grew up to receive it for themselves. Marriages in the Deg family were consequently very early, and there were plenty of instances of married Degs claiming parish relief under the age of twenty, on the plea of being the parent of two children. One such precocious individual being asked by a rather verdant officer why he had married before he was able to maintain a family, replied, in much astonishment, that he had married in order to maintain himself by parish assistance. That he never had been able to maintain himself by his labour, nor ever expected to do it; his only hope, therefore, lay in marrying, and becoming the father of two children, to which patriarchal rank he had now attained, and demanded his “pay.”

Thus had lived and nourished the Degs on their ancient patrimony, the parish, for upwards of two hundred years. Nay, we have no doubt whatever that, if it could have been traced, they had enjoyed an ancestry of paupers as long as the pedigree of Sir Roger Rockville himself. In the days of the most perfect villenage, they had, doubtless, eaten the bread of idleness, and claimed it as a right. They were numerous, improvident, ragged in dress, and fond of an alehouse and of gossip. Like the blood of Sir Roger, their blood had become peculiar through a long persistence of the same circumstances. It was become pure pauper blood. The Degs married, if not entirely among Degs, yet amongst the same class. None but a pauper would dream of marrying a Deg. The Degs, therefore, were in constitution, in mind, in habit, and in inclination, paupers. But a pure and unmixed class of this kind does not die out like an aristocratic stereotype. It increases and multiplies. The lower the grade, the more prolific, as is sometimes seen on a large and even national scale. The Degs threatened, therefore, to become a most formidable clan in the lower purlieus of Stockington, but luckily there is so much virtue even in evils, that one, not rarely cures another. War, the great evil, cleared the town of Degs.

Fond of idleness, of indulgence, of money easily got, and as easily spent, the Degs were rapidly drained off by recruiting parties during the last war. The young men enlisted, and were marched away; the young women married soldiers that were quartered in the town from time to time, and marched away with them. There were, eventually, none of the once numerous Degs left except a few old people, whom death was sure to draft off at no distant period with his regiment of the line which has no end. Parish overseers, magistrates, and master manufacturers, felicitated themselves at this unhoped-for deliverance from the ancient family of the Degs.

But one cold, clear, winter evening, the east wind piping its sharp sibilant ditty in the bare shorn hedges, and poking his sharp fingers into the sides of well broad-clothed men by way of passing jest, Mr. Spires, a great manufacturer of Stockington, driving in his gig some seven miles from the town, passed a poor woman with a stout child on her back. The large ruddy-looking man in the prime of life, and in the great coat and thick worsted gloves of a wealthy traveller, cast a glance at the wretched creature trudging heavily on, expecting a pitiful appeal to his sensibilities, and thinking it a bore to have to pull off a glove and dive into his pocket for a copper; but to his surprise there was no demand, only a low curtsey, and the glimpse of a face of singular honesty of expression, and of excessive weariness.

Spires was a man of warm feelings; he looked earnestly at the woman, and thought he had never seen such a picture of fatigue in his life. He pulled up and said,

“You seem very tired, my good woman.”

“Awfully tired, Sir.”

“And are you going far to night?”

“To Great Stockington, Sir, if God give me strength.”

“To Stockington!” exclaimed Mr. Spires. “Why you seem ready to drop. You’ll never reach it. You’d better stop at the next village.”

“Ay, Sir, it’s easy stopping, for those that have money.”

“And you’ve none, eh?”

“As God lives, Sir, I’ve a sixpence, and that’s all.”

Mr. Spires put his hand in his pocket, and held out to her the next instant, half-a-crown.

“There stop, poor thing—make yourself comfortable—it’s quite out of the question to reach Stockington. But stay—are your friends living in Stockington—what are you?”

“A poor soldier’s widow, Sir. And may God Almighty bless you!” said the poor woman, taking the money, the tears standing in her large brown eyes as she curtsied very low.

“A soldier’s widow,” said Mr. Spires. She had touched the softest place in the manufacturer’s heart, for he was a very loyal man, and vehement champion of his country’s honour in the war. “So young,” said he, “how did you lose your husband?”

“He fell, Sir,” said the poor woman; but she could get no further; she suddenly caught up the corner of her grey cloak, covered her face with it, and burst into an excess of grief.

The manufacturer felt as if he had hit the woman a blow by his careless question; he sate watching her for a moment in silence, and then said, “Come, get into the gig, my poor woman; come, I must see you to Stockington.”

The poor woman dried her tears, and heavily climbed into the gig, expressing her gratitude in a very touching and modest manner. Spires buttoned the apron over her, and taking a look at the child, said in a cheerful tone to comfort her, “Bless me, but that is a fine thumping fellow, though. I don’t wonder you are tired, carrying such a load.”

The poor woman pressed the stout child, apparently two years old, to her breast, as if she felt it a great blessing and no load: the gig drove rapidly on.

Presently Mr. Spires resumed his conversation.

“So you are from Stockington?”

“No Sir, my husband was.”

“So: what was his name?”

“John Deg, Sir.”

“Deg?” said Mr. Spires. “Deg, did you say?”

“Yes, Sir.”

The manufacturer seemed to hitch himself off towards his own side of the gig, gave another look at her, and was silent. The poor woman was somewhat astonished at his look and movement, and was silent too.

After awhile Mr. Spires said again, “And do you hope to find friends in Stockington? Had you none where you came from?”

“None Sir, none in the world!” said the poor woman, and again her feelings seemed too strong for her. At length she added, “I was in service, Sir, at Poole, in Dorsetshire, when I married; my mother only was living, and while I was away with my husband, she died. When—when the news came from abroad—that—when I was a widow, Sir, I went back to my native place, and the parish officers said I must go to my husband’s parish lest I and my child should become troublesome.”

“You asked relief of them?”

“Never; Oh, God knows, no, never! My family have never asked a penny of a parish. They would die first, and so would I, Sir; but they said I might do it, and I had better go to my husband’s parish at once—and they offered me money to go.”

“And you took it, of course?”

“No, sir; I had a little money, which I had earned by washing and laundering, and I sold most of my things, as I could not carry them, and came off. I felt hurt, Sir; my heart rose against the treatment of the parish, and I thought I should be better amongst my husband’s friends—and my child would, if anything happened to me; I had no friends of my own.”

Mr. Spires looked at the woman in silence. “Did your husband tell you anything of his friends? What sort of a man was he?”

“Oh, he was a gay young fellow, rather, Sir; but not bad to me. He always said his friends were well off in Stockington.”

“He did!” said the manufacturer, with a great stare, and as if bolting the words from his heart in a large gust of wonder.

The poor woman again looked at him with a strange look. The manufacturer whistled to himself, and giving his horse a smart cut with the whip, drove on faster than ever. The night was fast settling down; it was numbing cold; a grey fog rose from the river as they thundered over the old bridge; and tall engine chimneys, and black smoky houses loomed through the dusk before them. They were at Stockington.

As they slackened their pace up a hill at the entrance of the town, Mr. Spires again opened his mouth.

“I should be sorry to hurt your feelings, Mrs. Deg,” he said, “but I have my fears that you are coming to this place with false expectations. I fear your husband did not give you the truest possible account of his family here.”

“Oh, Sir! What—what is it?” exclaimed the poor woman; “in God’s name, tell me!”

“Why, nothing more than this,” said the manufacturer, “that there are very few of the Degs left here. They are old, and on the parish, and can do nothing for you.”

The poor woman gave a deep sigh, and was silent.

“But don’t be cast down,” said Mr. Spires. He would not tell her what a pauper family it really was, for he saw that she was a very feeling woman, and he thought she would learn that soon enough. He felt that her husband had from vanity given her a false account of his connections; and he was really sorry for her.

“Don’t be cast down,” he went on, “you can wash and iron, you say; you are young and strong: those are your friends. Depend on them, and they’ll be better friends to you than any other.”

The poor woman was silent, leaning her head down on her slumbering child, and crying to herself; and thus they drove on, through many long and narrow streets, with gas flaring from the shops, but with few people in the streets, and these hurrying shivering along the pavement, so intense was the cold. Anon they stopped at a large pair of gates; the manufacturer rung a bell, which he could reach from his gig, and the gates presently were flung open, and they drove into a spacious yard, with a large handsome house, having a bright lamp burning before it, on one side of the yard, and tall warehouses on the other.

“Show this poor woman and her child to Mrs. Craddock’s, James,” said Mr. Spires, “and tell Mrs. Craddock to make them very comfortable; and if you will come to my warehouse to-morrow,” added he, addressing the poor woman, “perhaps I can be of some use to you.”

The poor woman poured out her heartfelt thanks, and, following the old man servant, soon disappeared, hobbling over the pebbly pavement with her living load, stiffened almost to stone by her fatigue and her cold ride.

We must not pursue too minutely our narrative. Mrs. Deg was engaged to do the washing and getting up of Mr. Spire’s linen, and the manner in which she executed her task insured her recommendations to all their friends. Mrs. Deg was at once in full employ. She occupied a neat house in a yard near the meadows below the town, and in those meadows she might be seen spreading out her clothes to whiten on the grass, attended by her stout little boy. In the same yard lived a shoemaker, who had two or three children of about the same age as Mrs. Deg’s child. The children, as time went on, became playfellows. Little Simon might be said to have the free run of the shoemaker’s house, and he was the more attracted thither by the shoemaker’s birds, and by his flute, on which he often played after his work was done.

Mrs. Deg took a great friendship for this shoemaker: and he and his wife, a quiet, kindhearted woman, were almost all the acquaintances that she cultivated. She had found out her husband’s parents, but they were not of a description that at all pleased her. They were old and infirm, but they were of the true pauper breed, a sort of person, whom Mrs. Deg had been taught to avoid and to despise. They looked on her as a sort of second parish, and insisted that she should come and live with them, and help to maintain them out of her earnings. But Mrs. Deg would rather her little boy had died than have been familiarised with the spirit and habits of those old people. Despise them she struggled hard not to do, and she agreed to allow them sufficient to maintain them on condition that they desisted from any further application to the parish. It would be a long and disgusting story to recount all the troubles, annoyance, and querulous complaints, and even bitter accusations that she received from these connections, whom she could never satisfy; but she considered it one of her crosses in her life, and patiently bore it, seeing that they suffered no real want, so long as they lived, which was for years; but she would never allow her little Simon to be with them alone.

The shoemaker neighbour was a stout protection to her against the greedy demands of these old people, and of others of the old Degs, and also against another class of inconvenient visitors, namely, suitors, who saw in Mrs. Deg a neat and comely young woman with a flourishing business, and a neat and soon well-furnished house, a very desirable acquisition. But Mrs. Deg had resolved never again to marry, but to live for her boy, and she kept her resolve in firmness and gentleness.

The shoemaker often took walks in the extensive town meadows to gather groundsell and plantain for his canaries and gorse-linnets, and little Simon Deg delighted to accompany him with his own children. There William Watson, the shoemaker, used to point out to the children the beauty of the flowers, the insects, and other objects of nature; and while he sate on a stile and read in a little old book of poetry, as he often used to do, the children sate on the summer grass, and enjoyed themselves in a variety of plays.

The effect of these walks, and the shoemaker’s conversation on little Simon Deg was such as never wore out of him through his whole life, and soon led him to astonish the shoemaker by his extraordinary conduct. He manifested the utmost uneasiness at their treading on the flowers in the grass; he would burst with tears if they persisted in it; and when asked why, he said they were so beautiful, and that they must enjoy the sunshine, and be very unhappy to die. The shoemaker was amazed, but indulged the lad’s fancy. One day he thought to give him a great treat, and when they were out in the meadows, he drew from under his coat a bow and arrow, and shot the arrow high up in the air. He expected to see him in an ecstacy of delight: his own children clapped their hands in transport, but Simon stood silent, and as if awestruck. “Shall I send up another?” asked the shoemaker.

“No, no,” exclaimed the child, imploringly. “You say God lives up there, and he mayn’t like it.”

The shoemaker laughed, but presently he said, as if to himself, “There is too much imagination there. There will be a poet, if we don’t take care.”

The shoemaker offered to teach Simon to read, and to solidify his mind, as he termed it, by arithmetic, and then to teach him to work at his trade. His mother was very glad; and thought shoemaking would be a good trade for the boy; and that with Mr. Watson she should have him always near her. He was growing now a great lad, and was especially strong, and of a frank and daring habit. He was especially indignant at any act of oppression of the weak by the strong, and not seldom got into trouble by his championship of the injured in such cases amongst the boys of the neighbourhood.

He was now about twelve years of age; when, going one day with a basket of clothes on his head to Mr. Spires’s for his mother, he was noticed by Mr. Spires himself from his counting-house window. The great war was raging; there was much distress amongst the manufacturers; and the people were suffering and exasperated against their masters. Mr. Spires, as a staunch tory, and supporter of the war, was particularly obnoxious to the workpeople, who uttered violent threats against him. For this reason his premises were strictly guarded, and at the entrance of his yard, just within the gates, was chained a huge and fierce mastiff, his chain allowing him to approach near enough to intimidate any stranger, though not to reach him. The dog knew the people who came regularly about, and seemed not to notice them, but on the entrance of a stranger, he rose up, barked fiercely, and came to the length of his chain. This always drew the attention of the porter, if he were away from his box, and few persons dared to pass till he came.

Simon Deg was advancing with the basket of clean linen on his head, when the dog rushed out, and barking loudly, came exactly opposite to him, within a few feet. The boy, a good deal startled at first, reared himself with his back against the wall, but at a glance perceiving that the dog was at the length of his tether, he seemed to enjoy his situation, and stood smiling at the furious animal, and lifting his basket with both hands above his head, nodded to him, as if to say, “Well, old boy, you’d like to eat me, wouldn’t you?”

Mr. Spires, who sate near his counting-house window at his books, was struck with the bold and handsome bearing of the boy, and said to a clerk, “What boy is that?”

“It is Jenny Deg’s,” was the answer.

“Ha! that boy! Zounds! how boys do grow! Why that’s the child that Jenny Deg was carrying when she came to Stockington: and what a strong, handsome, bright-looking fellow he is now!”

As the boy was returning, Mr. Spires called him to the counting-house door, and put some questions to him as to what he was doing and learning, and so on. Simon, taking off his cap with much respect, answered in such a clear and modest way, and with a voice that had so much feeling and natural music in it, that the worthy manufacturer was greatly taken with him.

“That’s no Deg,” said he, when he again entered the counting-house, “not a bit of it. He’s all Goodrick, or whatever his mother’s name was, every inch of him.”

The consequence of that interview was, that Simon Deg was very soon after perched on a stool in Mr. Spires’ counting-house, where he continued till he was twenty-two. Mr. Spires had no son, only a single daughter; and such were Simon Deg’s talents, attention to business, and genial disposition, that at that age Mr. Spires gave him a share in the concern. He was himself now getting less fond of exertion than he had been, and placed the most implicit reliance on Simon’s judgment and general management. Yet no two men could be more unlike in their opinions beyond the circle of trade. Mr. Spires was a staunch tory of the staunch old school. He was for Church and King, and for things remaining for ever as they had been. Simon, on the other hand, had liberal and reforming notions. He was for the improvement of the people, and their admission to many privileges. Mr. Spires was, therefore, liked by the leading men of the place, and disliked by the people. Simon’s estimation was precisely in the opposite direction. But this did not disturb their friendship; it required another disturbing cause—and that came.

Simon Deg and the daughter of Mr. Spires, grew attached to each other; and, as the father had thought Simon worthy of becoming a partner in the business, neither of the young people deemed that he would object to a partnership of a more domestic description. But here they made a tremendous mistake. No sooner was such a proposal hinted at, than Mr. Spires burst forth with the fury of all the winds from the bag of Ulysses.

“What! a Deg aspire to the hand of the sole heiress of the enormously opulent Spires?”

The very thought almost cut the proud manufacturer off with an apoplexy. The ghosts of a thousand paupers rose up before him, and he was black in the face. It was only by a prompt and bold application of leeches and lancet, that the life of the great man was saved. But there was an end of all further friendship between himself and the expectant Simon. He insisted that he should withdraw from the concern, and it was done. Simon, who felt his own dignity deeply wounded too, for dignity he had, though the last of a long line of paupers—his own dignity, not his ancestors’—took silently, yet not unrespectfully, his share—a good, round sum, and entered another house of business.

For several years there appeared to be a feud and a bitterness between the former friends; yet it showed itself in no other manner than by a careful avoidance of each other. The continental war came to an end; the manufacturing distress increased exceedingly. There came troublous times, and a fierce warfare of politics. Great Stockington was torn asunder by rival parties. On one side stood pre-eminent, Mr. Spires; on the other towered conspicuously, Simon Deg. Simon was grown rich, and extremely popular. He was on all occasions the advocate of the people. He said that he had sprung from, and was one of them. He had bought a large tract of land on one side of the town; and intensely fond of the country and flowers himself, he had divided this into gardens, built little summer-houses in them, and let them to the artisans. In his factory he had introduced order, cleanliness, and ventilation. He had set up a school for the children in the evenings, with a reading-room and conversation-room for the workpeople, and encouraged them to bring their families there, and enjoy music, books, and lectures. Accordingly, he was the idol of the people, and the horror of the old school of the manufacturers.

“A pretty upstart and demagogue I’ve nurtured,” said Mr. Spires often, to his wife and daughter, who only sighed, and were silent.

Then came a furious election. The town, for a fortnight, more resembled the worst corner of Tartarus than a Christian borough. Drunkenness, riot, pumping on one another, spencering one another, all sorts of violence and abuse ruled and raged till the blood of all Stockington was at boiling heat. In the midst of the tempest were everywhere seen, ranged on the opposite sides, Mr. Spires, now old and immensely corpulent, and Simon Deg, active, buoyant, zealous, and popular beyond measure. But popular though he still was, tho other and old tory side triumphed. The people were exasperated to madness; and, when the chairing of the successful candidate commenced, there was a terrific attack made on the procession by the defeated party. Down went the chair, and the new member, glad to escape into an inn, saw his friends mercilessly assailed by the populace. There was a tremendous tempest of sticks, brickbats, paving-stones, and rotten eggs. In the midst of this, Simon Deg, and a number of his friends, standing at the upper window of an hotel, saw Mr. Spires knocked down, and trampled on by the crowd. In an instant, and, before his friends had missed him from amongst them, Simon Deg was seen darting through the raging mass, cleaving his way with a surprising vigour, and gesticulating, and no doubt shouting vehemently to the rioters, though his voice was lost in the din. In the next moment, his hat was knocked off, and himself appeared in imminent danger: but, another moment, and there was a pause, and a group of people were bearing somebody from the frantic mob into a neighbouring shop. It was Simon Deg, assisting in the rescue of his old friend and benefactor, Mr. Spires.

Mr. Spires was a good deal bruised, and wonderfully confounded and bewildered by his fall. His clothes were one mass of mud, and his face was bleeding copiously; but when he had had a good draught of water, and his face washed, and had time to recover himself, it was found that he had received no serious injury.

“They had like to have done for me though,” said he.

“Yes, and who saved you?” asked a gentleman.

“Ay, who was it? who was it?” asked the really warm-hearted manufacturer; “let me know? I owe him my life.”

“There he is!” said several gentlemen, at the same instant, pushing forward Simon Deg.

“What, Simon!” said Mr. Spires, starting to his feet. “Was it thee, my boy?” He did more, he stretched out his hand: the young man clasped it eagerly, and the two stood silent, and, with a heartfelt emotion, which blended all the past into forgetfulness, and the future into a union more sacred than esteem.

A week hence, and Simon Deg was the son-in-law of Mr. Spires. Though Mr. Spires had misunderstood Simon, and Simon had borne the aspect of opposition to his old friend, in defence of conscientious principle, the wife and daughter of the manufacturer had always understood him, and secretly looked forward to some day of recognition and re-union.

Simon Deg was now the richest man in Stockington. His mother was still living to enjoy his elevation. She had been his excellent and wise housekeeper, and she continued to occupy that post still.

Twenty-five years afterwards, when the worthy old Spires was dead, and Simon Deg had himself two sons attained to manhood; when he had five times been Mayor of Stockington, and had been knighted on the presentation of a loyal address; still his mother was living to see it; and William Watson, the shoemaker, was acting as the sort of orderly at Sir Simon’s chief manufactory. He occupied the Lodge, and walked about, and saw that all was safe, and moving on as it should do.

It was amazing how the most plebeian name of Simon Deg had slid, under the hands of the Heralds, into the really aristocratical one of Sir Simon Degge. They had traced him up a collateral kinship, spite of his own consciousness, to a baronet of the same name of the county of Stafford, and had given him a coat of arms that was really astonishing.

It was some years before this, that Sir Roger Rockville had breathed his last. His title and estate had fallen into litigation. Owing to two generations having passed without any issue of the Rockville family except the one son and heir, the claims, though numerous, were so mingled with obscuring circumstances, and so equally balanced, that the lawyers raised quibbles and difficulties enough to keep the property in Chancery, till they had not only consumed all the ready money and rental, but had made frightful inroads into the estate itself. To save the remnant, the contending parties came to a compromise. A neighbouring squire, whose grandfather had married a Rockville, was allowed to secure the title, on condition that the rest carried off the residuum of the estate. The woods and lands of Rockville were announced for sale!

It was at this juncture that old William Watson reminded Sir Simon Degge of a conversation in the great grove of Rockville, which they had held at the time that Sir Roger was endeavouring to drive the people thence. “What a divine pleasure might this man enjoy,” said Simon Deg to his humble friend, “if he had a heart capable of letting others enjoy themselves.”

“But we talk without the estate,” said William Watson, “what might we do if we were tried with it?”

Sir Simon was silent for a moment; then observed that there was sound philosophy in William Watson’s remark. He said no more, but went away; and the next day announced to the astonished old man that he had purchased the groves and the whole ancient estate of Rockville!

Sir Simon Degge, the last of a long line of paupers, was become the possessor of the noble estate of Sir Roger Rockville of Rockville, the last of a long line of aristocrats!

The following summer when the hay was lying in fragrant cocks in the great meadows of Rockville, and on the little islands in the river, Sir Simon Degge, Baronet, of Rockville,—for such was now his title—through the suggestion of a great lawyer, formerly Recorder of the Borough of Stockington, to the crown—held a grand fête on the occasion of his coming to reside at Rockville Hall, henceforth the family seat of the Degges. His house and gardens had all been restored to the most consummate order. For years Sir Simon had been a great purchaser of works of art and literature, paintings, statuary, books, and articles of antiquity, including rich armour and precious works in ivory and gold.

First and foremost he gave a great banquet to his wealthy friends, and no man with a million and a half is without them—and in abundance. In the second place, he gave a substantial dinner to all his tenantry, from the wealthy farmer of five hundred acres to the tenant of a cottage. On this occasion he said, “Game is a subject of great heart-burning and of great injustice to the country. It was the bane of my predecessor: let us take care it is not ours. Let every man kill the game on the land that he rents—then he will not destroy it utterly, nor allow it to grow into a nuisance. I am fond of a gun myself, but I trust to find enough for my propensity to the chace in my own fields and woods—if I occasionally extend my pursuit across the lands of my tenants, it shall not be to carry off the first-fruits of their feeding, and I shall still hold the enjoyment as a favour.”

We need not say that this speech was applauded most vociferously. Thirdly, and lastly, he gave a grand entertainment to all his workpeople, both of the town and the country. His house and gardens were thrown open to the inspection of the whole assembled company. The delighted crowd admired immensely the pictures and the pleasant gardens. On the lawn, lying between the great grove and the hall, an enormous tent was pitched, or rather a vast canvas canopy erected, open on all sides, in which was laid a charming banquet; a military band from Stockington barracks playing during the time. Here Sir Simon made a speech as rapturously received as that to the farmers. It was to the effect, that all the old privileges of wandering in the grove, and angling, and boating on the river were restored. The inn was already rebuilt in a handsome Elizabethan style, larger than before, and to prevent it ever becoming a fane of intemperance, he had there posted as landlord, he hoped for many years to come, his old friend and benefactor, William Watson. William Watson should protect the inn from riot, and they themselves the groves and river banks from injury.

Long and loud were the applauses which this announcement occasioned. The young people turned out upon the green for a dance, and in the evening, after an excellent tea—the whole company descended the river to Stockington in boats and barges decorated with boughs and flowers, and singing a song made by William Watson for the occasion, called “The Health of Sir Simon, last and first of his Line!”

Years have rolled on. The groves and river banks and islands of Rockville are still greatly frequented, but are never known to be injured: poachers are never known there, for four reasons.—First, nobody would like to annoy the good Sir Simon; secondly, game is not very numerous there; thirdly, there is no fun in killing it, where there is no resistance; and fourthly, it is vastly more abundant in other proprietors’ demesnes, and it is fun to kill it there, where it is jealously watched, and there is a chance of a good spree with the keepers.

And with what different feelings does the good Sir Simon look down from his lofty eyrie, over the princely expanse of meadows, and over the glittering river, and over the stately woods to where Great Stockington still stretches farther and farther its red brick walls, its red-tiled roofs, and its tall smoke-vomiting chimneys. There he sees no haunts of crowded enemies to himself or any man. No upstarts, nor envious opponents, but a vast family of human beings, all toiling for the good of their families and their country. All advancing, some faster, some slower, to a better education, a better social condition, a better conception of the principles of art and commerce, and a clearer recognition of their rights and their duties, and a more cheering faith in the upward tendency of humanity.

Looking on this interesting scene from his distant and quiet home, Sir Simon sees what blessings flow—and how deeply he feels them in his own case—from a free circulation, not only of trade, but of human relations. How this corrects the mischiefs, moral and physical, of false systems and rusty prejudices;—and he ponders on schemes of no ordinary beauty and beneficence yet to reach his beloved town through them. He sees lecture halls and academies, means of sanitary purification, and delicious recreation, in which baths, wash-houses, and airy homes figure largely: while public walks extend all round the great industrial hive, including wood, hills, meadow, and river in their circuit of many miles. There he lived and laboured; there live and labour his sons: and there he trusts his family will continue to live and labour to all future generations: never retiring to the fatal indolence of wealth, but aiding onwards its active and ever-expanding beneficence.

Long may the good Sir Simon live and labour to realise these views. But already in a green corner of the pleasant churchyard of Rockville may be read this inscription on a marble headstone:—“Sacred to the Memory of Jane Deg, the mother of Sir Simon Degge, Bart., of Rockville. This stone is erected in honour of the best of Mothers by the most grateful of sons.”

TWO LETTERS FROM AUSTRALIA.

Correspondents, to whom emigration is a subject of vital importance—inasmuch as they appear to be resolved to leave kindred and home for “pastures new”—have written to us, with a hope that we will continue to give, as we have done hitherto, the dark as well as the light side of the Colonial picture. Not a few of the dangers and privations of Australian life we have already laid before them. We now are enabled to furnish some idea of how new localities are colonised, by such enterprising pioneers as the author of the letters from which we take the following extracts.

It must be remarked, that the perils he describes were self-sought, and are by no means incidental to the career of an ordinary emigrant. His adventures occurred beyond the limits of the colony as defined by the British Government which, it would appear, he was in some degree instrumental in extending.

We give the “round unvarnished tale” precisely as we received it, and as it was communicated by the author to a relative in Cheshire:—

When we separated from our partner, Mr. W., it became necessary to look for stations outside the limits of the colony, for the only station we then possessed was much too small for our stock. R. and I first took the stock up to the station on the Murray, and having heard that a fine district of country had just been discovered on the Edward, we followed it down and discovered our present runs, and, I must say, they are equal—for grazing purposes, at least—to anything I have seen in the colony. It was necessary that one of us should remain at our station on the Murray, and R. very kindly gave me the option of either remaining or going down the Edward. I preferred going and forming new stations on the Edward, while he agreed to continue where he was, which indeed he preferred. I therefore lost no time in removing the stock before the winter rains should set in, and the waters rise to an unnatural height, which the rivers down here invariably do at this period of the year, overflowing their banks, in places, for miles. It was too late,—for just as we started it commenced raining, and continued, without ceasing, for a month. It was with the greatest difficulty we got down, as, from continued exposure to wet, and what with driving the cattle by day and watching them by night, we were, as you may suppose, so completely fagged, as to be almost “hors de service.” But there is an end to everything,—in this world at least,—and so there was to our journey. It excited in me at the time, I well recollect, strange and indescribable sensations, as I rode over the runs, exploring the different nooks and crannies all so lonely and still, with not a sound to be heard, save now and then the wild shriek of the native Companion (a large bird), or the howl of the native dog, or the still more thrilling yell of the black native, announcing to others the arrival of white men.

We were now about fifty miles from any other white habitation, about six hundred from Sydney, and two hundred from Melbourne. The country down here is almost a dead level,—not a single hill to be seen, unless you choose to honour with the name a few miserable mounds of sand which rise to an elevation of some twenty or thirty feet. The plains are very extensive; there is one which extends from our door right across to the Murrum-bridge, a distance of sixty-five miles, with scarcely a tree on it.

The Murray—of which the Edward is a branch—takes its rise in the Australian Alps, and is supplied by springs and snow from these. Some of the highest mountains of this range retain perpetual snow on their summits, but on the lesser ones it melts about the beginning of spring, causing great floods in the Murray and Edward, and our runs, being particularly low, are flooded from one to three miles on either side of the river. It is necessary to state this, to enable you to understand the “secrets I am about to unfold.” We had built one hut on the south side (ycleped Barratta), but before we could get one up on the south side (Wirrai), the floods came, and I was obliged to substitute a bark one instead. I divided the cattle into two herds, and put a steady stock-keeper, along with a hutkeeper, in charge of one herd on the Wirrai station, while I, with a hutkeeper and another man (we were only five altogether) looked after the other on this side. We were badly supplied with arms and ammunition, and by no means prepared to fight a strong battle should the Blacks be inclined for mischief. The natives did not show up at the huts for two or three weeks after our arrival, but kept reconnoitring at a distance, and we could sometimes see them gliding stealthily among the trees not far off us. By degrees, two or three of them came up and made friends, and then more and more, until we had seen from forty to fifty of them, but it was remarkable that only old men, boys, and women showed themselves, and none of the warriors. Although I had heard that kindness was of no avail, I never could be brought to believe it, and determined, therefore, to do all in my power to propitiate them by trifling gifts, kind treatment, and avoiding everything that could hurt their feelings. It was of no use; no kindness—nothing, in fact—will teach them the law of meum and tuum but the white man’s gun and his superior courage. We had been down about three months, the waters were at their highest, and our huts on both sides of the river were surrounded by water, through which we had to wade every morning to look after the cattle. I was obliged to put the huts within hearing of gunshot, on account of mutual protection, for what, after all, are two or three men alone, without a chance of assistance, against a body of two or three hundred black warriors, painted and armed, as I have seen them, in all the panoply of savage warfare.

We had not seen a single Black for nearly six weeks, for, as I afterwards learned, they had all gone over to a station on the Murray, about fifty miles from us, where they succeeded in driving the whites out after killing one man, and from three to four hundred head of cattle, without the slightest check or resistance; and having brought their work to a conclusion there, and emboldened by the success of their expedition, they now turned their eyes towards us, and gathering both numbers and courage, came pouring down on our devoted station. We had heard nothing of these depredations then, and were therefore quite unprepared for them. One day about twenty Blacks come up to the huts for the purpose, I suppose, of reconnoitring the nakedness of the land, and we killed for them a bullock, thinking thereby to propitiate them. In this, however, I was most woefully mistaken, for before they had half finished it, they went among the cattle on both sides of the river, and by next morning there was not a single head left within forty miles, with the exception of a few they had killed at either station. The Wirrai stock-keeper went on the tracks of his herd, and I followed those of mine, and by a week’s time we had recovered the greatest part of both, but there were spears sticking in the sides of many of them, which wanton piece of cruelty occasioned several deaths in a short time. Not being strong enough to punish the Blacks, and unwilling to begin a quarrel which might cause loss of life perhaps on both sides, and still hoping that they would cease their depredations, I contented myself with giving them to understand that, if they attempted in future to touch either man or beast among us, they should be severely punished; they said it was not them but some Wild Blacks, an excuse they always make when they steal. In a fortnight afterwards, however, they acted the same play over again; and again we had the same trouble in recovering the cattle. They did not show after this except at a respectable distance, when it would be with a flourish of spears, or a wave of their tomahawks, accompanied with gesticulations of anything but a friendly character. Still I did not believe that they would attempt our lives, until I very nearly paid with mine the forfeit of my incredulity. I should mention that the communication with the Wirrai station was, at this time, carried on by means of bark canoes, which we paddled with long poles; the distance by water was about three miles, and by land straight across, a mile and a half.

One day I had gone over to Wirrai in a canoe, to see how the stockman was getting on, and on my return was humming a tune and thinking of you, dear William (for I was humming your old favorite “Flow on, thou shining River”), when I fancied I heard a slight noise: I stopped and listened, but could hear nothing; I went a little further and heard it again; I stopped again and peered about the bank, when suddenly about twenty Blacks sprung up from behind trees, and reeds, and long grass, only one of whom I had ever seen before; I was about fifty yards from the nearest of them, and just at the entrance of a creek about ten yards wide, lined on both sides with thick reeds. When they first appeared they did not show any weapons, and spoke in a friendly strain; “Budgery Master always gibit bullock along im Black fellow,” asked if I wanted any fish? As I had a good double-barrel gun on my knees I did not so much care about them, but not exactly liking their appearance I stopped at about thirty yards. The Blacks by this time were jabbering to more down the creek, and I could see that the one side was lined with them. Seeing that I would not come any nearer, they suddenly picked up their spears and altered their tone, and began calling all sorts of names, and threatened to break my head with their “Nella nellas” (clubs). Quick as lightning they shipped their spears, but not quicker than I levelled my gun; the instant they saw which (they have a great respect for powder,) they betook themselves behind trees, and, in truth, I thought it best to follow their example; so, keeping the gun to my shoulder the while, I began as well as I could to paddle the canoe with one hand; perceiving my object, they stood out to thwart it, and I knowing that if they sent their spears, though none of them should hit me, they must inevitably shiver the canoe to pieces, determined to get on terra firma as quickly as possible, the water being only knee deep. In stepping out I unfortunately got into a stump-hole, and the next moment was soused over head and ears in water! This was decidedly unpleasant, and for the first time a thrill of fear came over me; however, I jumped up again, and having been very particular in loading my gun, I thought it might still go off. By this time the Blacks had gathered in great numbers on the other side of the creek and were pressing on in a body; seeing this I now levelled my piece, and took as deliberate an aim as I could at the foremost of them (a huge brute, for whose capture a hundred pounds reward had been offered by Government for a murder committed by him on the Murrum-bridge), but the gun hung fire and the ball dropped into the water. Finding that there was no dependence to be placed in the gun, the only course left me was to retreat, and to attempt this I now resolved; taking courage at this, a number of them jumped into the water, again I faced them, and again they took to trees—are they not rank cowards? I was beginning to think that my only chance was to take to my legs—which indeed would have been almost certain death—when at this crisis I was, as you may imagine, agreeably surprised by the welcome “Halloo” of the stockman and hutkeeper, who, having heard the report of the gun and the yells of the savages, knew that something was up, and arrived at the nick of time to my rescue. After giving me some dry ammunition we made a rush after them, but could not overtake the black legs which were now plying at a particularly nimble rate, and which they especially do when getting out of the reach of a gun. This was the first attempt they had made on any of our lives, and their manœuvres showed that they were under the impression that, if they could “do for” the master, they might easily finish the men. But I made it a rule that never less than two were to go out on foot or in canoes, and with never less than twenty rounds of ball cartridge. We did not see anything of the Blacks for a fortnight after this, during which interval, as they afterwards told us, they were preparing for a grand attack on the Wirrai station.

About two hours before sundown the following day the stockman went out, as usual, to see that the cattle were safe. The Wirrai hut, I should mention, was at this time on a kind of island about a mile and a half in diameter, formed by the Wirrai Lagoon and a deep creek,—so that the cattle were feeding almost within sight of the hut. All was quiet; the cattle did not seem to betray any symptoms of fear, which they generally will do when the Blacks are near. He had not returned more than half an hour, when we saw the poor beasts coming rushing towards the hut—as if for protection—as hard as they could lay legs to the ground. On going among them, we found many with spears sticking in their bodies. We immediately mounted horses—(I bareback, as I had left my saddle at Barratta)—and gallopped as hard as we could in the direction the cattle had come from for about a mile, when, not seeing anything, we stopped and listened. There was a small, dense shrub before us, and, as we approached it, the awful yell that greeted our ears I shall not forget in a hurry. You can have no idea of the effect it has on one unaccustomed to the sound, for it is like nothing earthly that I can compare it to, but more like what one might imagine a lot of fiends would set up while performing their jubilee over the soul of some defunct mortal lately arrived at the “prison-house.” We gallopped through the shrub. Before us was a space bounded by two creeks, forming at their junction an angle on the plain beyond. Arranged in a semicircle in this space were some two hundred warriors, painted and armed, and drawn up in battle array. Between us and them four or five bullocks were writhing in their death agony, while the other side of the creek, beyond the warriors, was black with old men, women, and children looking on, and yelling at a most fearful rate. We gallopped within gunshot, and I then ordered the stockman to fire on them—(I had no gun myself, and had enough to do to sit the young spirited horse I was on), but he refused, saying that my horse would be sure to throw me, and that nothing then could save me from certain death. By this time the Blacks were trying to surround us, so as to hem us in between themselves and the creek, and cut off our retreat to the hut where we had left the hutkeeper in charge, and we soon found it necessary to put our horses into a gallop—they following at our heels—in order to get there in time enough to prepare for a defence. It was their intention, as they afterwards kindly informed us, to have killed every man jack of us. We had just got everything ready, when on they came yelling like so many fiends. We stood out from the hut awaiting their onset. Although the odds against us, as regarded numbers, was fearful, I was confident that if we could only make sure of three or four of the foremost of them, it would go far to intimidate the rest; so, as soon as they came within range of our guns, we gave them three rounds, which, however, only wounded one of them; still it made the others check their paces and hesitate awhile, seeing especially that we were determined to sell our lives dearly at this crisis; they betook themselves behind trees, protected by which they crept nearer and nearer to us, we taking every opportunity of firing, but with small effect. It being now nearly dark, we were obliged to take to the hut, and defend ourselves there as best we could. When inside, they threw a great many spears through the tarpaulin, very fortunately with no other effect than that of one of them just grazing my head. This kind of siege was carried on about four hours, we firing a shot now and then when we thought we could perceive the dim outline of one of them gliding through the dark, and they sending an occasional spear, and giving a yell. What we most feared was their making an attempt to set the hut on fire, for if successful in this (and the day having been very warm, our tarpaulin would have burned like so much paper) it would have been all up with us.

We had almost given up all hopes of life, and a sort of stubborn, dogged desperation seized me such as I never before felt, and such as I trust I never may again feel. We were reduced to nearly a dozen rounds of ammunition which we resolved to save for the rush. About midnight I was horribly startled by the stock-keeper announcing that on his side of the hut (we each of us guarded one side) he thought he could distinguish a fire-stick at some distance, and, on looking, we could plainly perceive it approaching nearer and nearer, until it came within what we considered safe gunshot, when I told the stockman, who was the best shot, to take good aim. He fired, and the fire-stick dropped on the ground. A good deal of yelling followed, but they did not again venture to show fire.

Everything after an hour remained quiet; the cattle had long since been rushed off the island, and the Blacks, we supposed, had gone to rest, preparatory to an attack at daybreak. Towards dawn, being faint and weak through anxiety and fasting,—for we had had nothing for twenty-four hours,—we determined on having some tea; but before it could be got ready we again heard the Blacks yelling most furiously. The stockman and hutkeeper thereupon gave it as their opinion, that our only hope of escape was in immediately quitting the hut, and attempting, if possible, to get across to Barratta; so, instantly decamping, we crossed the lagoon in a canoe, which we then dragged across a few hundred yards of land to the river. This we also quickly crossed. Just as we reached the Barratta bank, we heard a most awful hullabaloo at Wirrai, in which noises our friends the Blacks were giving vent to their feelings of disgust and disappointment at not finding us at home. Before they could overtake us, we were safe at Barratta. “To be continued in our next,” as the Editors of periodicals often say.

In a Second Letter the Narrative is resumed.

I could see plainly depicted in the faces of the two men who were in charge of the Barratta station, a considerable degree of suspicion as to the extent of our courage in the Wirrai affair. They were both plucky men, but their notions underwent a great change the next day. The day we escaped, we heard nothing more of the natives, except now and then their distant yells; so I sent up a man on horseback to the next station for assistance, to help us to find and recover the cattle. But the superintendent either would not or could not give us any, although all his servants, to a man, volunteered to go. I was obliged, therefore, to allow my four men to proceed alone. I think I mentioned that I had burned my foot very severely, and by this time, from the work I had had to undergo, I was in great agony from it. But I offered the men, if any one of them objected to it, he could remain in the hut, and I would go in his place. They all, however, readily agreed to go, for, in truth, remaining behind was by far the most dangerous post, inasmuch as the Blacks, from their numbers, could easily circumvent the men, or keep them at bay, while they attacked the hut, and I could have done little myself, in the way of defence, with only an old lockless piece, to discharge which it was necessary to use a fire-stick. Before they left, the stockman took me aside, and, with much kindness, implored me earnestly, for my own safety, to take a horse, and stop out on the plain. He told me, at the same time, that he did not expect to come back alive; “but,” said he, “it does not matter a straw what becomes of us, for not one of us would be missed.” This disinterestedness struck me not a little, as showing a high trait of fine feeling, coming as it did from an old convict who had been transported for life, and had once been condemned to be hanged. However, I resolved to take my chance in the hut, and very glad I was that I did so afterwards, as I should have looked very foolish, when my men returned, seated on a horse, and ready to make a bolt. I had waited about an hour with my old gun and fire-stick in hand, without hearing a sound to break the horrid stillness which seemed at that particular time to reign paramount around me, when a distant volley of gunshot burst upon my ear, and then a faint volley of yells. In a short time the sounds were repeated; again and again, but nearer and nearer, and more and more distinct, a shot or two at a time, with horrible yells filling up the interlude until I could distinguish my men retreating with an immense semicircle of natives trying to encompass them and cut them off from the hut. My men retreated to the water’s edge in capital order, and then faced round to the enemy, for it would have been sure death to have attempted to cross in the face of so many of the foe. After a good deal of skirmishing at this point, a very old Black took a green bough, and standing a little out from the rest, made a long harangue to the white men in his own language, which of course was just so much Hebrew to them; but being anxious for a truce they ceased firing. Another Black who could talk a little English now came forward, and after a good deal of jabber, concluded a peace, one condition of which was that they were to give up everything they had taken from the Wirrai hut. Of course we well knew, or at least fully expected, that this treaty was all hollow on their side, and like lovers’ vows, made only to be broken; but the truth was, we were glad enough to get a little respite even though for ever so short a time. After restoring most of the things they had stolen, the Blacks drew off in a body to the other side of the river.

The stockman informed me, that, when they started on their search, they first crossed the river, and then made away over to the Collegian, where they soon espied a few Blacks, apparently reconnoitring, who, when they perceived the white men, made signals to other Blacks beyond them, and who, in like manner, signalled others still further away: presently they saw slowly approaching them a dense black body which the two men who had not been at Wirrai the day before took to be the cattle they were in search of, but which the more experienced stockman at once declared to be a vast body of the Blacks. The two men at first laughed at this idea as a good joke, but were soon confirmed as to its correctness, when they changed their tone, and began to think it high time to return. On, however, they came in a dense body, and when nearly within gunshot, spread themselves out, or deployed—as our military brother would I suppose call it—and pressing on in a large semicircle, endeavoured so to manœuvre, as to cut off the escape of the retreating army in the direction of the hut as before related.

The truce, as we had anticipated, proved a very short one, as you will presently see. The day following the above incidents, I sent the stockman and another, to see after the surviving cattle which our black friends informed us had got out of the island and gone across the country to the Murray, which was true. The men had been gone about three hours, when about a hundred of the warriors came up to the hut—without their spears, but with plenty of tomahawks—pretending to be good friends. I told the two men who were working outside, to keep a sharp lookout, as I suspected their friendship was not of that description I most coveted or admired; and being myself scarcely able to move, I sat down in a corner of the hut by a table, with a gun close by me, a brace of pistols in my belt, and another on the table. I told the Blacks to keep outside the hut; but they, gradually edging their way in, soon nearly filled it: and seeing that there was no chance of keeping them out, except by proceeding to extremities, I contented myself with watching their motions with all the coolness I could command. They began talking very quietly at first, and I noticed the gentleman I mentioned who could talk a little English, edging by little and little towards me, sometimes talking to his companions and sometimes addressing me. I pretended not to notice him particularly, though at the same time—without looking directly at him—I could see his eyes rolling from the direction of mine to the fire-arms like a revolving lamp. Soon the jabbering became louder and louder (they were talking themselves into a rage), and I thought I could hear the names of some of those who had fallen, made use of. All the while the above-mentioned black fellow was shuffling closer and closer to me, until i’ faith I thought it was high time to act my part in the scene, or give up all thoughts of life. With all the calmness I was master of, I took up a pistol from the table, and taking my English friend by the arm, pointed it at his head, and told him to order all his companions to quit the hut; he shook like an aspen leaf, and turned as white as a Black well can, and ordered them to go out, which they immediately did without a word; I then led him after them, and bade them leave the place, and return to their camp, which they likewise did.

I look upon that as about the narrowest escape I ever had; for the Blacks have since told me that they were on the point of making a rush upon us, when it was providentially stopped by the timely proceeding mentioned. Had they done so, nothing of course could have saved us. Next day three or four hundred of them passed the hut in dead silence; and not one of them called. They were all fully armed and painted with red ochre (their uniform for war), and I conjectured they were up to some mischief, but what I could not tell.

In about a week we again had the pleasure of seeing them coming in great numbers, and camping in an island about a mile off. From certain signs which experience had taught us, we were well assured that they intended making a grand attack upon our hut. I had no one living at Wirrai then; and as there were only four of us at Barratta, viz., H., (who had just arrived), myself and two men, (the two who had been sent after the cattle, were still away,) and wishing to give the Blacks a severe lesson, we sent to the next station for as many men as they could spare.

The man we sent had only just reached the station, when the Commissioner of the district chanced also to arrive there. Now the Commissioner in those days was a man of great authority; in fact, altogether more like a little king, than any less lordly personage: so, instead of coming down himself with his police to our assistance, he allowed the superintendent to send six of his men, while he himself remained where he was “otium cum” for in truth the old fellow—to say nothing of his love of ease, was of old Falstaff’s opinion touching the advisable predominance of a certain quality in the exercise of valour. The men arrived in great silence at midnight, and the Blacks fortunately knew nothing of their arrival; for if they had, they would have deferred their attack until a more seasonable opportunity when we were not so well prepared for their reception.

Daylight came, and in the distance we could see their dusky figures crossing the lagoon to one side. They had only three canoes, so that it was a considerable time before all were landed. They then gathered together in a clump in dead silence, and held a council of war, thinking themselves unobserved all the time. At sunrise they slowly approached, and only those of us whom they expected to see showed out to them, and without arms; they appeared to have no other arms than their tomahawks; but every man of them was dragging a large jagged spear with their toes through the long grass. When, by the way, one of these spears enters a man’s body, it is impossible to get it out again, except by cutting the flesh all round it, or pushing it right through to the other side. As they advanced nearer, they spoke, and continued talking to us all the time in the most friendly strains, until within about twenty yards; when just as they (at a signal given by one of them) were stooping to pick up their spears to make a rush, the men in the hut let drive through loopholes right among them; and we all made a simultaneous rush, and put them to rout in a manner that would have given the Old Duke intense satisfaction had he been looking on. How many fell, I cannot say, as they always try to drag their dead from the field, and all around us, except on the water-side, was long grass and reeds; two were left dead, and these we buried.

To detail all the skirmishes and the Parthian description of fighting with the Blacks for the eighteen months which ensued, would only weary you. Where, little more than three years ago, ours was the only station in this direction, being five miles beyond any other, there are now stations formed a hundred miles below us, and even ladies grace the river forty miles down, one of them married to an old school-fellow of ours, viz., Brougham, nephew of Lord Brougham. Among other diversions, I have been employing myself in making a flower-garden, for independently of my love of flowers, I think their contemplation, and engagement in their cultivation, has a humanising, or, if you will, a civilising effect on the mind, such as I can assure you we require in the Bush.

SUPPOSING.

Supposing a Royal Duke were to die. Which is not a great stretch of supposition,

For golden lads and lasses must,

Like chimney-sweepers, come to dust:

Supposing he had been a good old Duke with a thoroughly kind heart, and a generous nature, always influenced by a sincere desire to do right, and always doing it, like a man and a gentleman, to the best of his ability:

And supposing, this Royal Duke left a son, against whom there was no imputation or reproach, but of whom all men were disposed to think well, and had no right or reason to think otherwise:

And supposing, this Royal Duke, though possessed of a very handsome income in his lifetime, had not made provision for this son; and a rather accommodating Government (in such matters) were to make provision for him, at the expense of the public, on a scale wholly unsuited to the nature of the public burdens, past, present, and prospective, and bearing no proportion to any kind of public reward, for any sort of public service:

I wonder whether the country could then, with any justice, complain, that the Royal Duke had not himself provided for his son, instead of leaving his son a charge upon the people!

I should think the question would depend upon this:—Whether the country had ever given the good Duke to understand, that it, in the least degree, expected him to provide for his son. If it never did anything of the sort, but always conveyed to him, in every possible way, the rapturous assurance that there was a certain amount of troublesome Hotel business to be done, which nobody but a Royal Duke could by any possibility do, or the business would lose its grace and flavor, then, I should say, the good Duke aforesaid might reasonably suppose that he made sufficient provision for his son, in leaving him the Hotel business; and that the country would be a very unreasonable country, if it made any complaint.

Supposing the country did complain, though, after all. I wonder what it would still say, in Committee, Sub Committee, Charitable Association, and List of Stewards, if any ungenteel person were to propose ignoble chairmen!

Because I should like the country to be consistent.

Monthly Supplement of “HOUSEHOLD WORDS,”
Conducted by Charles Dickens.
Price 2d., Stamped, 3d.,
THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF
CURRENT EVENTS.

The Number, containing a history of the past month, was issued with the Magazines.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

- Renumbered footnotes.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOUSEHOLD WORDS, NO. 20, AUGUST 10, 1850 ***

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Table of Contents

- HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL.

- A DETECTIVE POLICE PARTY.

- HEALTH BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT.

- WHAT THERE IS IN THE ROOF OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS.

- CHIPS.

- NICE WHITE VEAL.

- “ALL THINGS IN THE WORLD MUST CHANGE.”

- THE LAST OF A LONG LINE.

- IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER II.

- TWO LETTERS FROM AUSTRALIA.

- SUPPOSING.

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE