Part 5

The admirable arrangement displayed in America, as well as in Germany, for receiving tickets without that delay which has been so much complained of in England, cannot be sufficiently applauded. When however delay is unavoidable, to receive the mails, or from some other cause, no sooner does the train stop, than a waiter, or sometimes a pretty waitress—who is more likely to find customers—trips up the steps with a tray laden with iced water and lemonade, glasses of light wine or _maitrank_,(a kind of Burridge-cup,) biscuits, cakes, and other edible nick-nacks, so that the passenger may take some slight refection without getting down.

In the railway from Bonn to Cologne, on the Rhine, they have pushed convenience yet farther, having provided the first-class carriages with tables, so that during the journey, one pressed for time may write letters with the greatest ease; pens and a portable inkstand being all that is necessary for that purpose. Paper may be had at the station.

It has been also suggested on several of the continental railways, that such travellers as chose to pay for the space, might have a regular bed; a great convenience for ladies or invalids, unable to bear the fatigue of a journey of many hours by night.

These hints might be followed with very great advantage to the shareholders in particular and to the public in general, by the directors of British lines.

IMPROVING A BULL.

The highly respectable old lady who addressed us on a former occasion, has obliged us with another communication, on a most important subject:—

“Sir,—You would have heard before, but the cause was a mad bull, which being tossed might at my age be very ill-convenient. But that’s nothing to what I’m going to tell you. Only to think of the power of horns! Bulls tosses very high, I’ve heard, but did you ever hear, Mr. Conductor, of a mad bull tossing a widow and six children across the sea, half over the side of the round world, from our Borough to Australia? Well you may stare, but it’s a fact!

“The bull run right at me, full butt, and so I grasped my umbrella with both hands and ran to where the shops was—drat the boys, how they did screech about one!—and it was cold water, which I doesn’t often drink, by which means I came to in a pastry-cook’s. The name was Bezzle, I see it on a bag while she was putting in gingerbread nuts for Mrs. Jenks’s baby, which I bought not to be under obligation for stepping in.

“‘Gracious mussy, Mrs. Bezzle,’ says I, ‘why wasn’t I killed? What ever is the reason of them bulls?’

“Says she, ‘It’s market day.’

“‘Smithfield!’ says I.

“Says Mrs. Bezzle, ‘Mum, all the abuse and outcry against Smithfield is very narrow-minded.’

“Says I, ‘How so?’

“Says she, ‘It don’t consider shop-keepers. When a bull takes a line of street, it drives the people into the shops on either side, and they make purchases for fear of being gored.’

“‘Heighty teighty, mum,’ I says, ‘you are alluding to my gingerbread.’

“Says she, ‘I scorn allusions. It’s a rule. Whether it’s bulls or thunderstorms, or what it is we look to, we respects whatever sends us customers.’

“Says I, ‘Mrs. Bezzle, you astonish me. Where’s your family trade?’

“Says she, ‘There are too many traders. Where one of us earns meat, three of us only earn potatoes.’

“‘Emigrate,’ says I.

“Says she, ‘That’s very well, but then,’ says she, ‘in such a move it’s hard to know which way to put one’s foot, and when a step’s made, if it’s a wrong one, it’s not easy to retrace it.’

“‘Spirited trading—’ says I.

“‘Ah!’ says she, cutting me short rudely; but I forgive her, owing to her feelings. ‘Take Chandlery, within seven minutes of this door, mum. One man sells soap under cost price, and other things at profit, hoping to bring people to his shop for soap, and then get them to buy other articles. But his neighbour sells cheap herrings in the same way; another sacrifices pickles, and another makes light of the candle business. What’s the result? Folks buy in the cheapest market; go for soap to the man who sells that at the ruin prices, go for herrings to his neighbour, go down the other street for pickles, and get candles over the way.’

“‘Well,’ says I, ‘that’s an Illustration of Cheapness, but,’ says I, ‘it’s dishonest. A fair trader has no right to sell an article at less than its first cost.’

“‘No right!’ says she. ‘And I dessay he thinks he has no right to starve. It’s very hard to judge. The young tradesman, with his little capital and knowledge of a trade, has got his sweetheart and his ambition. He must wedge into society somehow, and he begins with the sharp end.’

“‘But,’ says I, ‘it isn’t sharp, Mrs. Bezzle.’

“So she shakes her head; says she, ‘I’ll give you an example which is true, and one out of a many.’

“‘I once knew an excellent young man who died of cholera. He left a widow and three little children. After deducting all expenses for her husband’s burial, the widow found that she possessed a hundred pounds. With fear and trembling, she embarked this money, in an effort to support herself. With it she fitted up a little shop, and had begun to earn a livelihood, when——’

“‘Well, Mrs. Bezzle, what prevented her?’

——“‘An empty house close by was taken by another person following her trade. Immediately her receipts diminished. One cannot live except by bread that can be got out of a neighbour’s cupboard. The widow and the children have already lost eighty pounds, have only twenty left; their house is taken by the year, and so they still are in it; and the poor lost woman cannot be comforted. Her hope is gone.’

“‘Heigh, dear,’ says I, ‘it wasn’t so in my young days. I believe this is owing to overpopulation,’ says I.

“‘Well,’ says Mrs. Bezzle, perking up. ‘It’s cruel to blame us for our struggles. What if I _have_ got nine, and six on ’em dependant on penny tarts and gingerbread for meat, drink, washing, and lodging, are they to be thrown in my teeth?’

“‘Emigrate,’ says I, six times more pointedly than before.

“‘Where to?’ says she, ‘and how? Who can tell me that?’

“‘Go and lay your case before Parson Pullaway; he knows our M.P., and _he_ knows all about colonial places. Hasn’t his brother’s wife’s first cousin got one of them? He is Sub-under-Secretary to Lord Oxfordmixture, who has all the emigration settlements under his thumb.’

“‘I’ll think about it,’ says Mrs. Bezzle, quite struck-like,—for down came the scales on the counter like a shot, and the whole ounce of sugar-candy jumped into the little boy’s apron of its own accord. He had come for two penn’orth on pretence of a cough. ‘Besides, didn’t Mr. Pullaway christen seven out of my nine children, and not a penny of the fees owing for?’

“The last word as ever I spoke to Mrs. Bezzle was, ‘Emigrate!’

“Well, who would have thought it? Next week Mrs. Bezzle’s business was to sell. The week after, it was sold. The week after that, Mrs. Bezzle and her son Tom, and Tom’s wife, and Tom’s brother Sam, and Mrs. Bezzle’s eldest daughter, and little James, and Sarah, and Mary Ann, and the two little urchins, were on board a ship, at Liverpool, bound for Port Philip. That’s a year, come Michaelmas, ago.

“But, drat ’em, why didn’t they pay the postage? Two-and-two is a consideration when butter (best fresh) is a rising a penny a pound every week. Not but what I was glad to hear from Mrs. Bezzle. Tom and his wife, and his brother Sam, are settled in a ‘run;’ and though there was some words I couldn’t make out, I dare say they didn’t explain how a ‘run’ could be a settlement. ‘Quite the reverse!’ as Mrs. Jenks said—(I have made it up with her, though she did insinuate the gingerbread nuts the mad bull made me buy gave her babby the cholera; and, bless it! it was only the teeth after all). Mrs. Bezzle has settled herself in the mutton-pie and cheesecake line, and has no fear of opposition; and as in Port Philip there is good digestions and plenty of ’em, pies is popular. Prices, too, is better,—penny pies being tuppence. James is on the ‘run,’ along with his eldest brother. Sarah an’t married yet,—for out of six offers, a young gal of seventeen has a right to be puzzled for six months or so, and more dropping in every week. Mary Anne is family governess to a rich copper-man, with plenty of stock—I suppose by that he is in the soup line. However, all is doing well.

“Well, Mr. Conductor, it was all owing to that bull, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t improved that solemn occasion, where would Mrs. Bezzle, and four out of six of her helpless offspring have been by this time?—why, in the workhus.”

LUNGS FOR LONDON.

Travellers describe nothing to be so much dreaded by the people of the East as a flight of locusts, except indeed a settlement of locusts. When those devouring insects alight on the fields and pastures, they begin from a centre composed of myriads, and eat up everything green within radii extending over not acres, but miles. They fall upon gardens and leave them deserts; and upon a field they do not permit so much as a blade of grass to indicate where grass was.

Although, in fact, these little devastators do not trouble us; in effect, Londoners are the victims of equally efficient destroyers of their green places.

Bricklayers are spreading the webs and meshes of houses with such fearful rapidity in every direction, that the people are being gradually confined within narrow prisons, only open at the top for the admission of what would be air if it were not smoke. Suburban open spaces are being entombed in brick-and-mortar mausoleums for the suffocation as well as for the accommodation of an increasing populace; who, if they wish to get breath, can find nowhere to draw it from, short of a long journey. The Lungs of London have undergone congestion, and even their cells are underground.

Of all the neighbourhoods of which London is a collection, Finsbury and Islington have suffered most. Within the recollection of middle-aged memories, Clerkenwell Green was of the right colour; Moorfields, Spafields, and the East India Company’s Fields, were adorned with grass; and he must be young indeed who cannot remember cricket-playing in White Conduit, Canonbury, Shepherd and Shepherdess, Rhodes, and Laycock’s, besides countless acres of other “Fields,” which are now blotted out from the face of the Country to become Town, in the densest sense of the word. Thanks to the window tax and the bricklayer, fresh air will be thoroughly bricked out, unless a vigorous effort be made to stop the invasion of burnt clay and water.

Mr. Lloyd, a gentleman of Islington who dreamt a few years since that he lived in the country, but has recently awoke to the conviction that his once suburban residence has been completely incorporated with the town, determined, if possible, to arrest the invasion of habitations. His plan is to dam out the flood of encroachment by emparking a large space at Islington for the behoof of the Borough of Finsbury, which contains a population of three hundred thousand panting souls. This space is, according to his plan, that which surrounds the village of Highbury, one of the highest and airiest suburbs of London. It is within two miles of the City, and might be rendered accessible to Victoria Park in the east, and to Regent’s Park in the west. The proposed enclosure will take in a good portion of the course of the New River, and a large quantity of ground so well and picturesquely wooded, that a paling and a name are only requisite to convert it at once into a park. In shape the enclosure would be a triangle, the base of which is the Holloway Road and Hopping Lane, and the apex, a point at which the Seven Sisters’ Road joins the Green Lanes. The extent of these grounds is about three hundred acres, and the total cost of securing them to the public is not more than one hundred and fifty thousand pounds.

Mr. Lloyd has been vigorously agitating this matter for more than nine years, and yet—such is the pace at which the public are apt to move in affairs in which the public alone is itself concerned—it is only lately that he has obtained an attentive hearing for his plan.

A prospect of success appears now, however, to dawn. Public meetings have been lately held in every district concerned, in which every sort of co-operation has been promised. A single difficulty seems to stand in the way; one little thing needful is only required to turn the project into an accomplished fact, and that is, the money,—one hundred and fifty thousand pounds merely. Mr. Lloyd and his coadjutors have, we believe, mentioned their little difficulty at the Treasury, and are awaiting an answer. This state of things would form a curious problem for De Morgan, Quetelet, or others learned in the doctrine of probabilities: given, official routine multiplied by systematic delay, what are the chances of the cash required within the present generation?

A park for Finsbury is too urgent a demand for a dense population to allow of much time being wasted in knocking at the door of the Treasury. The public must bestir _themselves_ in the scheme, and it will soon be accomplished and carried out.

THE LOVE OF NATURE.

Where the green banners of the forest float, Where, from the Sun’s imperial domain, Armour’d in gold, attentive to the note Of piping birds, the sturdy trees remain, Those never-angered armies; where the plain Boasts to the day its bosom ornaments Of corn and fruitage; where the low refrain Of seaside music song on song invents, Laden with placid thought, whereto the heart assents, Often I wander. Nor does the light Noon, Garrulous to man’s eye, declaring all That Morning pale (watched by her spectre moon, Or solemn Vesper, seated near the pall Of Day) holds unrevealed; nor does the fall Of curtain on our human pantomime, The sweeping by of Day’s black funeral Through Night’s awe-stricken realms, with tread sublime, Chiefly delight my heart; beauty pervades all time. Morning: the Day is innocent, and weeps; Noon: she is wedded and enjoys the Earth; Evening: wearied of the world she sleeps. Night watches till another Day has birth. The innocence of Morning, and the mirth Of Noon, the holy calm of Eventide, The watching while Day is not, there is dearth Of joy within his soul who hath not cried: “I welcome all, O God,—share all Thou wilt provide!”

THE PRESERVATION OF LIFE FROM SHIPWRECK.

It is a difficult matter to reconcile with the sympathy, which it is well-known the sufferings of the unfortunate always receive in England, the apparent apathy which exists among the public, on a subject so important as the preservation of Life from Shipwreck. Several pleas in extenuation have been urged by those most interested. In the first place, there is that natural hardihood and contempt of danger in the English sailor, which it is, occasionally, impossible to tame down to anything like prudence and forethought. This indomitable spirit of emulation and daring, is found to be the greatest enemy to the adoption of any of those appliances which science has rendered available. The Deal boatman trusts his life in precisely the same sort of craft that his father, and his father’s father, did before him. Confident in, and proud of, the skill which he has inherited from them, he scorns to tarnish, as he falsely reasons, his name by the habitual use of buoy or belt, lest those of his comrades who are firmly entrenched behind their ancient prejudices, should set him down as faint-hearted, and unworthy the honourable name of a “Deal boatman.”

The still more inaccessible Scotch fisherman, with his four thousand piscatory brethren, “shoots his nets” on the exposed coast of Caithness, in the open boat used by his ancestors, notwithstanding the evil consequences which have often ensued. The latest example of the ill effects of this tenacity of opinion occurred two years since, when a fearful gale, which did more or less damage along the whole eastern face of England and Scotland, wrecked and damaged a hundred and twenty-four of their boats, drowned a hundred men, and occasioned a loss to the fishing community of above seven thousand pounds, which, although a large sum, will not bear any comparison with the misery and destitution thus entailed upon the widows and orphans of the lost.

It is impossible to say how many of these unfortunate men might have been saved, had they had proper harbours to run for, with lights and beacons to warn, and life-boats to afford assistance; proper boats to keep the sea, and buoys and belts, as a last resource; but surely we are warranted in thinking that fully one half would have been left among us.

In both these examples, it must be acknowledged that it would be a useless effort to attempt any sudden innovations on these deeply-seated prejudices; the only thing that can be done, in either case, is to let the new principle quietly work of itself. Let us find a life-belt for the Deal boatman, which he can wear and work in, until in it he recognises his best friend; let the Scotch fisherman have ocular demonstration that the “model” boat prosecutes the fishery with equal success, and far greater safety and comfort in bad weather, and we shall soon have a different system of things.

In the course of each year an average of something like six hundred ship disasters occur on the shores of this kingdom alone,—some wrecked through stress of weather; some by carelessness, and other disgraceful causes; some through mistaking lights, or having been lured to destruction by useless ones; some through actual rottenness of timber; some dashed to pieces on the very rock for which they were anxiously looking half a mile further a-head, where it _ought_ to have been, according to the chart; and some from other causes, more or less easily averted. These losses are attended by the almost incredible destruction of a thousand lives, and the value of tens of thousands of pounds sterling.

The shocking wreck of the Orion—not, we say with sorrow, the last occurrence of the kind—startled, for a moment, the public from their culpable apathy. But the shock passed away; and attention to this subject is gradually subsiding into the usual indifference. The details of this catastrophe ought to have had a more permanent effect on the public mind. In the moment of danger, the gear of the boats was so imperfect, that these could only be released from their davits by capsizing their human cargoes into the deep. Even when they righted, they immediately filled, for the plug-holes were actually unstopped. The most ordinary precautions for saving life were not at hand, as precautions. The hen-coops, barrels, seats, combings, and other means of escape, by which many were saved, were purely accidental life-preservers.

Every English ship, before leaving port, should be submitted to a supervising power similar to the inspection that emigrant ships undergo, in order that it should be certified that means, both simple and efficacious, for the safety of the passengers and crew, exist on board—boats, belts, mattresses, rafts; everything, in short, that can add to the security of those about to “go down to the sea in ships.”

That this sort of supervision is effectual, is proved by the few disasters which happen to the vessels of the Royal Navy. In these ships, everything is not only kept in its proper place, to be ready when wanted, but each man is constantly exercised in what he is to do with it when no danger is apprehended, that he may be in a state of prompt efficiency when it is. The Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean squadron can step on board any one of his ships in the middle of the night; and although three-fourths of its crew are asleep in their hammocks, he can, by ordering the “beat to quarters,” make sure of every man being at his post in seven minutes, ready for action or for any sudden disaster. This sort of discipline it is which is so much required in the merchant navy. In case of a ship striking, a dozen men rush to do one thing,—perhaps to release a boat from one of her davits,—and, consequently, swamp the boat, by leaving the stern rope untouched. Captain Basil Hall, in his “Fragments of Voyages and Travels,” describes the vigilant precaution daily made even against the loss of one life. To each life-buoy there is as regular a “service” as to any other part or apparatus of the ship. He says:—

“On the top of the mast is fixed a port-fire, calculated to burn, I think, twenty minutes or half-an-hour; this is ignited most ingeniously by the same process which lets the buoy down into the water. So that a man falling overboard at night, is directed to the buoy by the blaze on the top of its pole or mast, and the boat sent to rescue him also knows in what direction to pull. Even supposing, however, the man not to have gained the life-buoy, it is clear that, if above the surface at all, he must be somewhere in that neighbourhood; and if he shall have gone down, it is still some satisfaction, by recovering the buoy, to ascertain that the poor wretch is not left to perish by inches. The method by which this excellent invention is attached to the ship, and dropped into the water in a single instant, is perhaps not the least ingenious part of the contrivance. The buoy is generally fixed amidships over the stern, where it is held securely in its place by being strung, or threaded, as it were, on two strong perpendicular iron rods fixed to the taffrail, and inserted in holes piercing the framework of the buoy. The apparatus is kept in its place by what is called a slip-stopper, a sort of catch-bolt or detent, which can be unlocked at pleasure, by merely pulling a trigger. Upon withdrawing the stopper, the whole machine slips along the rods, and falls at once into the ship’s wake. The trigger which unlocks the slip-stopper is furnished with a lanyard, passing through a hole in the stern, and having at its inner end a large knob, marked ‘Life-Buoy;’ this alone is used in the day-time. Close at hand is another wooden knob, marked ‘Lock,’ fastened to the end of a line fixed to the trigger of a gun-lock primed with powder: and so arranged, that when the line is pulled, the port-fire is instantly ignited, while, at the same moment, the life-buoy descends, and floats merrily away, blazing like a lighthouse. It would surely be an improvement to have both these operations always performed simultaneously, that is, by one pull of the string. The port-fire would thus be lighted in every case of letting go the buoy; and I suspect the smoke in the day-time would often be as useful in guiding the boat, as the blaze always is at night. The gunner who has charge of the life-buoy lock sees it freshly and carefully primed every evening at quarters, of which he makes a report to the captain. In the morning the priming is taken out, and the lock uncocked. During the night a man is always stationed at this part of the ship, and every half-hour, when the bell strikes, he calls out ‘Life-buoy!’ to show that he is awake and at his post, exactly in the same manner as the lookout-men abaft, on the beam, and forward, call out ‘Starboard quarter!’ ‘Starboard gangway!’ ‘Starboard bow!’ and so on, completely round the ship, to prove that they are not napping.”