Part 4

This action for slander reminds us of another case of ruin which had some comical features, and was in fact related to us in a very humorous way by a French journalist. The gentleman in question had accepted the editorship of a small daily newspaper published in a Belgian city. His salary was to be twenty pounds a month, with free board and lodging in the house of his employer, a notary, who owned the newspaper. Our friend discharged his duties to everybody’s satisfaction for about five years, when a bustling young journalist of the locality became intimate with the notary, and pointed out to him that he—the bustling one—could edit the paper quite as well as our friend, and for half the money. Our friend had just applied for an increase of salary; so the notary, with unreflecting parsimony, resolved to dispense with his services, and installed the bustling young man in his chair. But not more than a fortnight afterwards, the Bustling One, either from negligence, or because he had some private grudge to pay off, inserted a libellous paragraph against a banker in the town. An action was instituted. The proprietor of the paper was sentenced to pay a large sum by way of damages, with all the costs of the trial, and the advertisement of the judgment—filling about two columns of small print—in twenty newspapers of France and Belgium. This heavy fine, the numberless worries attendant upon the action for libel, and the loss of professional status which accrued to the lawyer from the whole thing, proved the death of the newspaper. As our friend remarked: ‘I think the notary would have found it cheaper to raise my salary.’

It may happen, however, that to make inopportune demands for an increase of salary will ruin not him who refuses, but him who asks. A case starts to our recollection of a man who had an excellent appointment in the City. He was drawing one thousand pounds a year for work which required some talent, but was pretty easy and pleasant; moreover, he was on the fair way to better things. But he was too impatient. His employers bore with him for a while, and in fact raised his salary four times within three years, for they fully appreciated his services. A day came, however, when they had to tell him plainly that his demands were unreasonable; upon which he stood on his dignity and resigned. He quite expected that he would instantly find in the City another situation as good as that which he had left; but he was not able to get an appointment at so much as half of his former salary. Everywhere his presumption in asking for twelve hundred pounds a year was laughed at; and he soon had to acknowledge to himself that in the former situation which he had so foolishly thrown up he had been most generously overpaid. Deeply mortified, too proud to return to his old employers, who would have been willing to take him back, the misguided man became a City loafer; he tried to set up in business for himself without sufficient capital, and, after a series of luckless speculations, took to drinking, and was no more heard of. This story points a moral, which ambitious young men do not always sufficiently lay to heart—namely, that to resign a good berth before making sure of a better is to run the risk of being left out in the cold. It is by no means a recommendation to a man out of place to have formerly received a high salary and to have served under first-rate employers. All the persons to whom he applies will naturally conclude that he must have left his good appointment for unavowable reasons; and even the best certificates of character from his old masters will not serve to dispel this notion. We knew an unwise young man, who, leaving a good place out of pure caprice, was earnestly advised by his employer to think twice of what he was doing. ‘You will find it a positive disadvantage to have served in our House,’ said his employer; ‘for we are known to be just masters, and nobody will believe that you left us of your own accord.’ The young man would not heed the warning; and the upshot was that he had to emigrate, having failed in all his endeavours to get another situation.

The ruin which is produced by business competition does not come within the scope of this paper. Everybody must sympathise with the snug old-fashioned inn which is suddenly brought to nought by the big Railway Hotel, and with the petty tradesmen who are impoverished by the establishment in their midst of some colossal ‘universal provider;’ but these are unavoidable incidents in the battle of life. An interesting class of sufferers remains to be specified in persons who own house-property, and find the value of their houses suddenly depreciated by causes beyond their control. Let a sensational murder be committed in a respectable street, and the rents of the houses in that street will probably fall twenty-five per cent.; while the house in which the deed was done will in all likelihood remain untenanted for years. A murder, the perpetrator of which escaped detection, naturally marks a house with almost indelible disrepute; people do not like to inhabit such a place; and the landlord is often reduced to giving up the house at a mere nominal rent to be the abode of some charity. An epidemic, again, will play havoc with the value of houses, by getting a whole locality noted as unhealthy; and this it may be said is the fault of the landlords; but it is not always so. We were acquainted with a gentleman who became possessed by inheritance of a row of houses, as to the antecedents of which he knew nothing. Soon after he had got this property, typhoid fever broke out in one of the houses and spread down the row. The drains were examined, and found in good order; but under one of the houses was discovered a vast cesspool, caused by the drains of two large houses which had formerly stood near the site. The emptying of this pool, the building of new foundations to several of the houses, the laying down of new water-pipes, &c., proved a very costly piece of work, and brought little profit when it was finished; for the row of houses had got a bad name, and years elapsed before the landlord could find good tenants for them even at much reduced rents. This was really a hard case; and the harder because the landlord, being a high-principled man, felt bound to pay substantial indemnities to those who had suffered through the bad condition of his property.

BACK FROM ‘ELDORADO.’

It was a scorching afternoon in October, when, with much clatter and racket, cracking of long whips, and a volley of eccentric profanity from the Dutch conductor and his sable satellites, the mule-train of that eminent Cape patriot Adrian de Vos scrambled headlong, as it were, out of the market-place of Kimberley in ‘the land of diamonds,’ jolted and swung through the ‘city of iron dust-bins,’ finally disappearing in a cloud of dust adown the Dutoitspan Road.

I may state that I was awaiting the arrival of the ‘veldt express’ at the little oasis in the desert, dear to all acquainted with the ‘Eldorado’ of the Cape Colony, by the name of Alexandersfontein. Distant only a few miles from the hot fever-stricken ‘camp,’ it is blessed with a spacious hotel and—luxury of luxuries—a veritable open-air swimming-bath, together with a meandering brook, which gladdens the eye of the parched, home-sick, and, most likely, disappointed searcher after diamondiferous wealth. I had spent the most part of the day with an Irish surgeon stationed there, who had been doing his best to persuade me to travel to Cape Town in the orthodox manner, by stage-coach, and not by the ‘heavy goods,’ as it is termed; but during the last year or so I had roughed it too much to care for a little additional hardship, and I wanted to complete the tale of my experiences in South Africa by personal contact with those unfortunates who from time to time abandoning their last dream of success, cast down and forsaken, broken in health, wealth, and estate, set forth gloomily on the journey back from Eldorado.

We were not altogether without amusement at Alexandersfontein, for, in addition to the attractions of the swimming-bath, there was the mild excitement of vaccinating ‘niggers,’ brought in at intervals by an Africander scout, the smallpox scare being at the time at its height, and my friend a government officer. Nevertheless, I confess I was glad when a pillar of dust, rising up from the arid road far away to the deep-blue sky overhead, announced that the mule-train was fairly _en route_ for us. I am glad now that it was dark when they arrived, because, if I had seen the accommodation provided by that philanthropic conveyer of broken hearts and shattered fortunes to the coast, I think it very likely that I might have declined to obey the order shouted at me through the still, sub-tropical night, to ‘get aboard.’ As it was, clutching my rifle with one hand, and grasping a leathern portmanteau, destined for a pillow, in the other, I struggled upward over the disselboom, thrust my head underneath a flapping canvas covering stretched over the whole length and breadth of the wagon, and receiving a friendly but rather violent impetus from my friend the surgeon, shot forward into the midst of a conglomeration of human forms, tin cases, deal boxes, ropes, and sacking. I was welcomed with anathemas, apparently proceeding from the internal economy of a ‘mealy’ bag in the corner. I could hear my Irish friend shouting a last adieu, which mingled strangely with the vociferations of the half-caste driver to his mules; and then, as the whole machine lurched heavily but rapidly forward, I collapsed against the corner of a huge tin case, slid thence into a hollow caused by the merchandise, and thus cramped up in a hole about two feet in width, prepared to pass the night. A dismal lantern, swinging and jolting overhead, threw a sickly gleam around; the keen wind of the karroo whistled past as we pushed onward in the darkness, and forward into the wilderness, leaving behind us the land of untold riches, the wonderful camp with its mines assessed at millions, its busy streets, its citizens with but one aim, the greed of gold—and its quiet burial-place, where hundreds of brave young Englishmen lie, wrapped in that deep sleep to which no dreams of avarice may come.

Our route lay over wide-stretching plains of fine sand, studded with stunted thorn; flanked on either side by lone mountain ranges, whose lofty heads assume fantastic shape of cone, table-land, or pyramid; here and there a miserable watercourse threading its way to the babbling Modder or stately Orange River. A solitary, silent land, where the glad song of birds is unheard, but the ever-watchful vulture circles overhead; where the sweet scent of flowers is unknown, but the gaunt mimosa stretches out its bare branches, and seems to plead with the brazen skies for a cloud of moisture. Far distant from each other are the white, flat-roofed Boer farmhouses; while midway to the railway centre of Beaufort West lies the quaint Dutch village of Hopetown with its ‘nightmare’ church; and farther on, Victoria, nestling at the foot of a great brown hill.

Monotonous? Well, truly I tired of the all-pervading sand, of the glare of the fierce sun, of the jolting and bumping of the springless wagon; but there was the abiding excitement of the commissariat question, the occasional sight of a flock of wild ostriches, the rough incidents of the nightly outspan, and, as the cumbrous machine rolled onward over the starlit plain, the exchange of confidences, or the singing of songs to the accompaniment of a wheezy accordion, which one of the party—a miserable little Israelite from Houndsditch—had provided.

I think the most remarkable amongst the ‘voyagers’ was a tall gaunt man, whose snow-white beard and sunken cheeks bore evidence to the fact that time had not dealt gently with him. He reminded me irresistibly of King Lear; and when camping for the night, he crouched over his solitary pannikin with his hands stretched out, to prevent any disaster to the blazing structure of sticks and ‘peat,’ his white locks blowing in the wind, and his keen, hard, glittering eye eagerly watching for the right moment at which to insert his pinch of hoarded tea, he presented a mournful embodiment of hopeless failure. He was a lonely, morose man; defeat and disaster had occurred to him so often, that he sought for no sympathy, and expressed no hopes for the future. When the lighter spirits in this storm-beaten company were essaying to laugh at dull care, and even making jests at the bitterness of the divers fates which had overtaken them, he would sit apart with folded arms, now and again muttering to himself, and once surprising me with an apt quotation from a Latin author in the original. I am afraid we were all inclined to laugh at him for his queer ways and solitary habits; but I never did so after one night, when I found him, some distance from our camp, kneeling on the bare sands, his arms tossed aloft to the stars, that shone like lamps in the dark-blue dome of the midnight sky, and his lips babbling incoherently of the wife and children, home and kindred, he had left long, long ago, never to see again in this world, in his thirst for the gold which had lured him from continent to continent.

We had another victim of the gold-mania with us in the person of a bald-headed Irish bookbinder. Of all the gentle enthusiasts I have ever met, he was the most extraordinary. He had just returned from a particularly disastrous prospecting trip to the newly discovered gold-field euphoniously termed ‘the Demon’s Kantoor;’ and previous to that, he had made equally unsatisfactory migrations into Swazieland, the Delagoa Bay, and other regions, returning from each of them ragged, penniless, but happy, to recruit his finances with a spell of work at his trade in the towns, whilst devising some fresh scheme of martyrdom for the cause of the glittering metal that had bewitched him. He was a devout Protestant, and would gravely rebuke any who gave way to the very common colonial vice of hard swearing; and during our halts by the wayside, generally stole away to any available shade, and taking forth from the bosom of his ragged red shirt a book of devotion, would read therein, heedless of the shouts and laughter of the drivers and the screams of the mules; though, to be sure, I have reason to believe that the precious volume contained a good deal about ‘the gold of Ophir’ and ‘the land of Midian.’ He admitted, with a genial smile, that he had dug a grave for the fruits of six months’ self-denying labour amid the hillocks and boulders of the Demon’s Kantoor; but he hoped by about a year’s industry in Cape Town to realise sufficient to enable him to penetrate into the Kalahari Desert, where, if he escaped the poisoned arrow of the Bushman, or the slow death from starvation or thirst, he was perfectly certain of finding nuggets of wondrous size, and ‘rotten reef’ worth fabulous amounts. Indeed, so happy was he at the prospect of his good fortune, that in the fullness of his heart, he sought to raise the spirits of a dark, melancholy young man, by offering to share it with him. But the latter only shook his head and buried his face in his hands, being engaged just then in a retrospect of his fallen fortunes, from which nothing but an occasional fit of assumed reckless levity could rouse him. Poor fellow! He was leaving every farthing he had in the world—the remnant of a noble patrimony—in a worthless diamond mine in the vicinity of Kimberley; and he was haunted with the memory of a golden-haired wife and two blue-eyed children on whom the ‘camp-fever’ had laid its deadly hand.

As for the light-hearted actor, who, by some strange mischance, had found himself left on ‘the Fields’ with the theatre closed and the company gone, and had just raised enough by the sale of his wardrobe to ‘catch a storm,’ as he expressed it, to waft him to Cape Town—he could not understand what despair or earnestness meant. His delight was to astonish the Kaffirs and half-breeds, as they crouched around the fires at night, with extravagant selections from the transpontine drama. He would make their eyes roll and their teeth chatter by holding converse, in sepulchral tones, with the incorporeal air, and then set them all grinning with glee at some fanciful imitation of domestic animals. He was never tired of telling stories of his wanderings, and joined heartily in the laughter at some ludicrous blunder which had for the nonce involved him in ruin. I am afraid he was not very particular as to his method of getting out of scrapes, for he related with great glee how, being deserted by a manager in Japan, he and a brother _artist_ got up an acrobatic performance for the benefit of the natives. As neither of them knew anything about the business, the grumbling was excessive; and the climax was reached when, having attained to some ‘spread-eagle’ position on the framework they had erected on the stage, and being quite unable to get down gracefully, he let go, and fell with a crash. ‘We then,’ he said, ‘announced an interval of ten minutes, secured the receipts from the innocent heathen at the “Pay-here” box, and—fled the city!’ He had gone to the Diamond Fields, because he had been told he could make ‘kegs of dollars’ there; and he trusted in chance or good fortune to convey him to Australia.

Despite the coarse food and its coarser preparation, the nights spent upon the ground beneath the wagons, the awful shaking over the mountain tracks, the dust, the thirst, the intolerable heat, there are many pleasant recollections of that memorable excursion. But when I see the young, the hearty, the strong, setting off, in the pride of their manhood, in search of that prize which flattering Hope assures them waits in distant lands for enterprise and courage to secure, I wonder how many will escape the dangers of ‘flood and field,’ to undertake, broken in spirit, bankrupt in health and wealth, the journey back from Eldorado.

STEEL.

Steel, we are frequently and emphatically reminded, is the material of the future. Passing from assertions respecting the time to come, let us concern ourselves with the present and the past of the material, and inquire why and wherefore steel should be held up so prominently as destined to make its mark in the future. Every age has stamped for its own not only a certain style of architecture or a peculiar class of construction, but it has also impressed into its service different materials, by means of which it has carried out those designs to which it has given birth. As formerly wood gave place to iron, so now, slowly yet surely, is the use of iron waning before the enhanced advantages accruing from steel in large constructive works. As ductile as iron, and possessed in a superior degree of tenacity, more uniform and compact, it is not a matter of surprise that steel should have largely usurped the position formerly occupied by iron in the engineering and constructive world, or that engineers and architects should gladly avail themselves of such a material in their designs, more especially when they desire to combine the maximum of strength and security with the minimum of weight and mass. So slight is the difference in appearance between rolled iron and rolled steel, that the casual observer will be unable to distinguish between the two substances. A certain amount of experience and skill is requisite before the eye becomes sufficiently educated to appreciate the appearance presented by each material. Nor should we omit to notice a method both simple and expeditious by which all doubts may be set at rest. A drop of diluted nitric acid placed on a piece of steel will at once separate the carbon in the steel, producing a black stain on its surface. On iron, no such effect will result.

The extensive works for manufacturing steel in England, Wales, Scotland, and on the continent, amply testify to the growth and vigour of the industry; and if further proof is wanted, it is supplied by the fact of the conversion of their plant by existing ironworks, to enable them to turn out steel. Such steps—though frequently producing financial distress, happy if only temporary—show the direction in which the commerce of the present day is moving.

That steel should so speedily overcome the initial difficulties incident to the introduction of every new material, adduces important evidence in its favour. In shipbuilding, for example, the inconvenience and delay occasioned by employing steel side by side with iron presented a formidable barrier to its use, the alternate demand for iron and steel built vessels causing no small confusion in the yards. The gradual and, before long, probable abandonment of iron in this class of constructions, is rapidly enabling shipbuilders to lay themselves out for steel, and steel only. We should not omit to notice the employment of steel plates, one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness, for the ‘skin’ of torpedo launches, a use to which the lightness and tenacity of such plates eminently adapt them.

The effective and systematic manner in which it is now customary in large works to test all steel previous to its despatch, has aided in no small degree to remove the feeling of doubt and uncertainty which was attached to the material on its introduction. There hung around steel an insecurity and a novelty, which, until dissipated, caused a feeling of distrust that might have proved fatal to its extended use, had not precautions been taken by its manufacturers to demonstrate the consistency and reliability of the article they sought to bring into the market. For the purpose of making these tests, a special machine is provided, usually driven by steam. A strip from the plate to be tested is placed in ‘jaws’ at each end; the machine is then set in motion, the strain on the test-piece being gradually increased until its ultimate tensile strength is reached, and it breaks—a travelling pointer indicating the pressure exerted by the machine on the steel test-piece at the moment of fracture. Thus the ultimate tensile strength per square inch and also the elasticity of the plate under manipulation are ascertained.

In order to check these and similar tests, one or more inspectors are stationed at the manufacturers’ works by the government, the company, or the engineer in whose designs the steel is to be employed. The Admiralty employ a number of men to watch the tests of all the steel destined for the royal dockyards; a similar class of inspectors perform a like task, under Lloyd’s rules, for the private yards and the vessels of our merchant service; whilst every engineer under whose directions steel is being made places his assistants—their number varying with the importance and extent of the work—to see that these tests are faithfully carried out, that they duly fulfil the conditions he has laid down, and to report to him the quality, quantity, and progress of the material under their charge.

Accurate records are made of every test to which the steel has been subjected, and the results of the behaviour of the material are carefully noted. Hence, should any event occur to call special attention to any particular bar, its history can be traced from the very first to the moment it took up its position in the finished structure for which it was destined.

So rigid and well checked a system of testing cannot fail to command the favour of all engaged in the design of vessels, roofs, or bridges, and to inspire the general public with confidence in and reliance on this comparatively young member of the material world, daily increasingly impressed into its service, and tending to promote the general well-being and comfort of the civilised world.

THE STRAY BLOSSOM.