Chambers’s Journal, by Various—A Project Gutenberg eBook

To the majority of people, the surroundings of the legal profession, to say nothing of the law itself, are subjects fraught with no inconsiderable amount of the mysterious. For instance, what a variety of conceptions have been formed by the uninitiated with respect to one ceremony alone connected with the ‘upper branch’ of the legal profession; we mean that known as ‘Call to the Bar.’ The very expression itself has often proved a puzzle to the lay outsider, and perhaps not unnaturally, because there can be no doubt that it is one of those out-of-the-way phrases the signification of which sets anything like mere conjecture on that point at defiance. There is a hazy notion abroad that ‘Call to the Bar’ involves proceedings of a somewhat imposing character, especially as there is just a smack of the grandiloquent about the term. Accordingly, it may be disappointing to many persons to learn that, in the first place, there is no ‘calling’ at all connected with the ceremony, except the calling over the names of the gentlemen who present themselves for admission to the profession known as the Bar. And in the next place, it may be a little surprising to learn that there is no semblance even of a ‘bar’ of any description employed in the performance of the ceremony alluded to.

Again, people appear to have a somewhat indistinct notion about legal festivities, the traditional fun of a circuit mess, the precise share which ‘eating dinners’ has in qualifying a student for the Bar, and so forth. Often, too, they wonder how it is that men addicted to such grave pursuits as those followed by the working members of the Bar, are so much given to mirth and jollity and costly festivity. The answer to this is that, just in proportion to the mental tension superinduced by the demands of their calling, is the recoil of their minds in an exactly opposite direction after that tension.

Well, then, assuming that barristers are not only a learned and laborious but also at suitable times a convivial body of men, we will endeavour to describe the proceedings in the Hall of an Inn of Court on the evening of a day when barristerial conviviality is supposed to reach its culminating point—namely, on what is termed ‘Grand Day.’

We may observe that during each of the four legal terms or sittings there is one Grand Day, but the Grand Day of Trinity Term is the grandest of them all, and is accordingly styled ‘Great Grand Day.’ Also, that these days are observed in each of the four Inns of Court—namely, the Inner and Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, and Gray’s Inn. For present purposes, however, we shall suppose our Grand Day to be in Trinity Term, and at an Inn which we shall for certain proper reasons call Mansfield’s Inn.

It is a glorious summer evening, and as we approach our noble old Hall, we soon perceive that something ‘out of the common’ is going on. There is the crimson cloth laid down for the noble and distinguished guests who are always invited on these occasions; and near the entrance there is a little knot of spectators of all kinds, from the elderly respectable gentleman down to the shoeless ‘arab’ from the streets. The carriages are beginning to arrive; and the sooner we are inside the Hall the better. But there is something to be done before we get thither. We must first enter one of the anterooms. Here there is a great crush owing to the invariable preliminary to every dinner in Hall—the ‘robing,’ as it is called; for benchers, barristers, and students all dine in gowns. There are two men now busily engaged at this work of robing, selecting from a great black mountain of gown-stuff the attire suited to each member. On they go, asking all the time the question, ‘Barrister or student, sir?’ of those with whom they are unacquainted, until the last man is served. But who is that portly looking personage, wearing a gorgeous scarlet gown, who ever and anon appears on the scene and gives directions? Nonsense! Did you say the head-porter? Certainly; and{562} he is so called, after the lucus a non lucendo fashion, because he is never employed to carry anything except perhaps letters and messages. In like manner the women called ‘laundresses’ who attend to the chambers in the Inns of Court, are so termed because they never wash anything at all, which in some instances is but too painfully true. But the ‘head-porter’ is carrying something this evening, in the shape of an enormous baton with a silver knob big enough to produce five pounds-worth of shillings. Then there is another important-looking gentleman, of graver and more anxious demeanour, wearing a black gown, who seems to be the life and soul of the preparations generally, and who moves about with such alacrity as to suggest an approach to the ubiquitous. This individual is the head-butler, and of course his position is one of serious responsibility, especially on the present occasion.

Being now robed, we enter the Hall. What a babel of tongues is here also! ‘Have you got a mess?’ is the question asked by friend of friend. (An Inn of Court mess consists of four persons, the first of whom is called the ‘Captain.’) ‘Come and join our mess,’ says another. ‘I have a capital place up here,’ shouts a joyous young student. ‘Oh, but you’ll be turned down,’ replies his friend, with a slightly consequential air; and we see that the latter, by his sleeved and otherwise more flowing robe, is a barrister, although as juvenile as his hopeful friend; hence the tone of importance.

‘We sit by seniority on Grand Day,’ our learned young friend goes on to state, and languidly falls into a seat.

‘When were you called, sir?’ says a voice to the languid but consequential one. The voice proceeds from a form which might easily be that of the other’s father, if not grandfather; but the question is put pro formâ.

‘Then I fear I must trouble you to move, for I was called in Hilary ’58, ha, ha, ha!’ in which the students previously corrected heartily join.

‘Oh, all right,’ with a slight soupçon of deference; and away go the youngsters; while the man called to the Bar in 1858 will very likely have to make way for another called in ’48, and so on, until the whole are duly and severally located.

There is an unquestionable aspect of distinction about the place this evening. The old Hall itself, in the centre of which is displayed the costly plate of Mansfield’s Inn, seems to smile in the sunshine of the summer evening. Yet, as the light softly steals in through the stained glass forming the armorial bearings of distinguished members of the Inn long since passed away, we seem to feel a sort of melancholy, in spite of all the gaiety around, from the consideration—which will force itself upon the mind—that the paths of law, like glory, ‘lead but to the grave.’

Then, again, the timeworn and grim-looking escutcheons of the old ‘readers,’ which crowd the wainscoted walls, seem to be less grim than usual. At the same time, it is impossible not to heave one little sigh, as we look up and see in front of us the name and arms, say, of Gulielmus Jones, Armiger, Cons. Domi. Regis, Lector Auct. 1745 (William Jones, Esquire, Counsel of our Lord the King, Autumn Reader, &c.), and wonder how much that learned gentleman enjoyed his Grand Days in the period of comparative antiquity mentioned on his escutcheon.

Our business, however, is strictly with the present; and as one of the features of Grand Day dinner is that the mauvais quart d’heure is a very long quart indeed, we shall be able to look round before dinner and see what is going on.

It requires no very great expenditure of speculative power to comprehend the nature of the present assembly, numerous though it is. Each member of it will readily and with tolerable accuracy tell us who and what he is, as mathematicians say, by mere inspection on our part. The fact is, we are really face to face with a world as veritable and as varied as that outside, only compressed into a smaller compass.

Here are to be seen old, worn, sombre-looking men, some of them bending under the weight of years, and actually wearing the identical gowns—now musty and faded, like themselves—which had adorned their persons when first assumed in the heyday of early manhood, health, high spirits, and bright hopes. Among these old faces there are some that are genial and easy-looking; yet, beyond a doubt, we are in close proximity to many of those individuals who help to constitute that numerous and inevitable host with which society abounds—the disappointed in life. We see clearly that upon many of these patriarchal personages, the fickle goddess has persistently frowned from their youth up, and that they have borne those frowns with a bad grace and a rebellious spirit.

Hither, also, have come those who began their career under the benign and auspicious influences of wealth and powerful friends; yet many of these are now a long way behind in the race—have, in fact, been outrun by those who never possessed a tithe of their advantages. Such men form a very melancholy group; and we gladly pass from them to another class of visitors. These are they whose lives have been a steady, manful conflict with hard times and hard lines, but who, uninspired by that devouring ambition already alluded to, have not experienced the disheartening and chilling disappointment which has preyed upon some of the others. These men, however, have seen many of their early hopes and aspirations crushed; but they have borne the grievance with patience and cheerfulness. They may have had a better right to expect success than some of those who had been more sanguine; but they have not sneered at{563} small successes because they could not achieve grander ones, and have not been ashamed to settle down as plodders. They are most of them gentlemen in all senses of the word; men of whom universities had once been proud, and who had also honoured universities; men who, if unknown to the world at large, have yet enlightened it; men whose bright intellects have perhaps elucidated for the benefit of the world the mysteries of science, thrown light upon its art, literature, and laws; and who, without having headed subscription lists or contributed to so-called charities, have yet been genuine benefactors to their species. But with all this, they are nevertheless men who, destitute of the practical art of ‘getting on in the world,’ have not made money. They have never condescended to ‘boo’ or toady, in order to do so, and thus they must be content to shuffle along the byroads of life as best they can, after their own fashion.

Intermingled with such members of the Inn as we have just mentioned are their opposites—those who are regarded as having been successful in the race of life. How portly and well got-up they are; how bland are the smiles which light up their jolly, comfortable-looking countenances, whereon exist none of those lines so painfully conspicuous elsewhere. There is no lack of geniality here; and you are certain that these gentlemen possess happy, if not indeed hilarious temperaments, the buoyancy of which is never endangered by the intrusion of any such ‘pale cast of thought’ as wears away the existence of those others whom we have referred to.

This species of ‘successful’ barristers, fortunate though they may be, and risen men, too, in one sense, must yet not be confounded with that other set of men who make up the real bonâ fide rising and risen ones. These latter are grand fellows, and constitute the most interesting group of the evening. In some respects they are like those others we have spoken of, who have had to fight; but unlike them, they have possessed and exercised the gifts of energy, tact, perseverance, a wider acquaintance with human nature; and they have also possessed the inestimable gifts of good physique and the capacity for unmitigated labour. Like the other successful ones, they have risen; but unlike them, they have achieved honours which appertain more closely to their profession. They are the men from whose ranks our judicial strength is recruited; men who in time may become statesmen too, and leave distinguished names behind them. They are, in short, gifted honourable men, whose promotion is a delight to their friends and a benefit to the community, because the promotion of such is always well deserved.

Observable also in the present assembly are several of what may be termed the purely ornamental limbs of the law, who are to be found in the Inns of Court, and elsewhere. This class comprises country squires, gentlemen at large generally, and so forth, who, although entitled to the designation of ‘barrister-at-law,’ make no pretensions—at anyrate, here—to any depth of legal learning. Yet, likely enough, many of them are administrators of the law as county magistrates. However, great lawyers are not always the best hands at discharging the often rough-and-ready duties of ‘justices out of sessions;’ and whatever may be the ability of our friends now in Hall, one thing concerning them is clear, that they are to-night amongst the jolliest of the jolly. Look at them greeting old friends, dodging about the Hall, replenishing here and there their stock of legal on dits and anecdotes for retailing to admiring audiences elsewhere, discussing the affairs of the Inn and of the nation generally!

Lastly, there are the youngsters, ranging from the shy students only recently ‘of’ the Inn, to the youthful barristers who have just assumed the wig and gown. Some of the latter are engaged in detailing to eager and ambitious listeners the glories surrounding the first brief, while all are brimful of mirth and hopefulness. To such, the business of Grand Day appears tame in comparison with the high and substantial honours which they all firmly believe to be in store for them in the future. Ah! the future; that alluring period, so surpassingly enchanting to us all in the days of youth!

Such is the assembly before us at Mansfield’s Inn on Grand Day of this Trinity Term.

‘Dinner!’ shouts the head-porter, who stands at the door with his great silver-headed baton in hand. We now see the use of this badge of office; for immediately after enunciating the above welcome word, he brings his baton heavily on to the floor three times. Then slowly advancing up the Hall, we see that he is a sort of vanguard, or rather avant-courier, of a host which is gradually following him, gentlemen who walk two and two in procession, almost with funereal precision and solemnity. As they proceed, the previous loud hum of conversation is considerably lulled, and everybody is standing at his place. These are the Benchers of the Inn and their guests. The proper designation of the former is ‘Masters of the Bench’ of the Inn to which they belong. Each is called ‘Master’ So-and-so; and the chief of their body is the Treasurer of the Inn, who holds office for one year. The guests are invariably persons of well-known position in the Army and Navy, the Church, Politics, Law, Science, Literature, and Art. Sometimes royal personages honour the Inns with their company on Grand Day; and it is well known that several members of the royal family are members of certain Inns. The Prince of Wales is a Bencher of the Middle Temple, and dined there on Grand Day of Trinity Term 1874, when an unusually brilliant gathering appeared. The Prince on that occasion delivered a humorous and genial speech, in which he reminded his learned friends of the circumstance of Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton opening a ball in that very place with Queen Elizabeth. On the recent occasion of the Prince again dining there, no speeches were delivered in Hall.

The procession moves on; and as many of the various guests are recognised, the hum of conversation recommences. The Benchers wear silk gowns; and now we are actually brushed by a K.G., whose blue ribbon is unquestionably a distingué addition to evening dress; or by a G.C.B., whose red ribbon is so extremely{564} becoming as to set some of the youngsters speculating which they would rather be, a Knight of the Garter or a Grand Cross of the Bath. Here we are, then, with peers, right honourables, generals, judges, orators, poets, painters, humorists, and so forth, around us; but, alas, in the midst of so much grandeur, we are troubled by a prosaic monitor whose demands are becoming imperative. In other words, we are getting hungry. Well, we have not much longer to wait. ‘Rap, rap, rap!’ goes the head-porter—this time with an auctioneer’s hammer on one of the tables. Immediately dead silence ensues, and then ‘grace’ is read by the Preacher of the Inn.

Now we fall to. There is soup, fish, joint, poultry, pastry, beer, champagne, and one bottle of any other wine for each mess; and all for half-a-crown! However, we know the Inn is rolling in wealth, and we feel no compunction as to assisting in the heartiest way to carry on the work of consumption going on in all directions.

Presently comes the rapping of Mr Head-porter again, who now proclaims ‘Silence!’ and having secured this, there comes another request to the assembly: ‘Gentlemen, charge your glasses, and drink to the health of Her Majesty the Queen.’ The Treasurer then rises and says: ‘Gentlemen, “The Queen;”’ whereupon a great and enthusiastic shout of ‘The Queen!’ bursts forth. There is no more conservative body of men than the Bar of England, nor has the Crown more staunch or more devoted supporters than the gentlemen of the Long Robe. At the same time, no body of men in this country has ever more firmly withstood any attempt to extend the royal prerogative to the injury of the subject. The toast, ‘The health of the Queen,’ is always drunk at these Bar gatherings with an amount of fervour which betokens strong attachment to the constitution; and on this particular occasion, the intensity and unanimity of the response forcibly reminds one of the discharge of a sixty-eight-pounder!

As a rule, there is no speechifying in Hall, and there is none this evening. The practice is for the Benchers to take dessert in one of their reception-rooms, called ‘The Parliament Chamber.’ There, all the speeches are made, and the speakers are refreshed by the choicest products of the vineyard which money and good judgment can procure. Who would not be a Bencher?

And now, so far as the ordinary portion of the assembly is concerned, dinner is over. Grace again is said; and the Benchers, with their guests, retire in the order in which they entered. But now there is not altogether that grave air of solemnity about the procession which distinguished it at its entrance; indeed, everybody looks and feels all the better for the good things which have been partaken of. Neither the distinguished guests nor those of the Benchers who are popular with the Inn are allowed to depart without a friendly cheer; and if some personage happens to be very popular indeed, his name is shouted out in a fashion often bordering on the obstreperous.

The last two members of the retiring procession have now passed through the door of the Hall, and away go also the majority of those who have been dining. A few of the ‘Ancients’ or senior barristers are left behind, to finish their wine and their chat; but by twelve o’clock the Hall itself and its purlieus are once more deserted and silent.

CHAPTER XLV.—HIGH PRESSURE.

Madge reached home in the darkness, and opened the outer door so quietly that she got up to her own room without being observed by any of the inmates. Hat and cloak were off in a minute, and flung carelessly anywhere—thus marking how completely her mind was distracted from ordinary affairs; for, as a rule, she was careful in putting things away.

Then!—she did not fling herself on the bed, and give way to an overwhelming sense of despair, in the manner of heroines of romance. She sat down; clasped hands lying on her lap, and stared into the darkness of the room, which was luminous to her hot, dry eyes, and wondered what it was all about.

Her engagement with Philip was broken off, and he wished it to be so! Now, how could that be? Was it not all some disagreeable fantastic dream, from which she would presently awaken, and find him by her side? They would laugh at the folly of it all, and be sorry that such ideas could occur to them even in dreams. And that horrible, silent drive to the station; the silent clasp of hands as the train started; no word spoken by either since, in her pain and confusion, she had said ‘Good-bye,’ and he had echoed it—all that was a nightmare. She would shake it off, rouse up, and see the bright day dawning.

But she could not shake it off so easily. He had said that she was to consider herself free from all bond to him. He wished it—there was the sting—and they had parted. It was a different kind of parting from the one she had prepared herself to pass through with composure. Was it a distorted shadow of her mother’s fate that had fallen upon her?

At this she started, and bravely struggled with the nightmare which had weighed upon her from the moment the fatal word ‘Good-bye’ had escaped her lips. They were not parted—absurd to think that possible. She took blame to herself; she had been hasty, and had not made sufficient allowance for his worried state. Perhaps she had been quickened to anger by his apparent want of faith because she would not reveal what she had promised to be silent about for his sake. She, too, felt distracted at the moment; and want of faith in those we love is the cruelest blow to the distracted mind.

Ay, she should have been more forbearing—much more forbearing, considering how worried he was. And she could see that haggard face now with the great dazed eyes of a man who is looking straight at Ruin, feeling its fingers round his throat choking him.... Poor Philip. She had been unkind to him; but it should be all put right in the morning. She would tell Aunt Hessy and Uncle Dick, and they would force him away from that dreadful work which was killing him, and——

And here what threatened to be a violent fit of hysteria ended in a brief interval of unconsciousness.

The door opened, light streamed into the room, and Aunt Hessy, lamp in hand, entered. Madge had slipped down to the floor, and long, sobbing sighs were relieving the overpent emotions of her heart.

The good dame did not waste more words in useless exclamations of amazement and sorrow, but raised her niece to the chair and, without calling for any assistance, applied those simple restoratives which a careful country housewife has always at command for emergencies. The effect of these was greatly aided by the sturdy efforts made by the patient herself to control the weakness to which she had for a space succumbed.

‘I’ll be better in a minute or two, aunt,’ were the first words she managed to say; ‘don’t fret about me.’

‘I’ll try.... But there is such sore news. Philip says he is ruined, and that he must—he must ... because it is Uncle Dick’s wish ... he must’——

‘Say nothing more until I give thee leave to speak,’ said Aunt Hessy with gentle firmness; but the tone was one which Madge knew was never heard save when the dame was most determined to be obeyed. ‘We have heard much since thou hast been away; and we have been in fright about thee, as it grew late. But though thou wert with friends, I knew that home was dear to thee, whether thou wast glad or sad. So I came up here, and found thee.’

To her surprise, Aunt Hessy did not immediately lift her voice in comforting assurance of the impossibility of such a calamity. She only raised her hand, as if to remind her that silence had been enjoined. Seeing that this was not enough, or moved by compassion for the distress which shone through Madge’s amazement, she said:

But Madge could not be so easily satisfied; for something in her aunt’s manner suggested that there might be truth in Philip’s assertion of the view her guardians would take of the position. He had said they would hold it as contrary to common-sense that a man who had been disinherited by his father and ruined by speculation should keep a girl bound to wait for him till he had retrieved his fortune, or to marry him and share—or rather increase his poverty. That was a cruel kind of practical reason which she could neither understand nor appreciate. If they really intended to insist upon such a monstrous interpretation of the engagement she had entered into with Philip, then she must try to explain how differently she regarded it. The moment of misfortune was the moment in which she ought to step forward and say: ‘Philip, I am ready to help you with all my strength—with all my love.’

And there the poor heart sank again, for he had in effect said this: he had told her that he wished the bond to be cancelled. That was a very bitter memory, even when she made allowance for his conviction that her guardians expected him in honour bound to make such a declaration. Now, however, she recognised self-sacrifice in his act; and feeling sure that it was love for her which prompted it, took comfort.

Her first idea, then, was to find out what her guardians were to do, and she was about to rise, with the intention of asking her aunt to go with her to the oak parlour, when she was interrupted.

There was first a banging of doors below; next there was a deep voice from the middle of the staircase:

Before any answer could be given, Uncle Dick presented himself with as near an approach to a frown as his broad honest face was capable of forming.

‘So you are here, Madge. Thought as much. I told the missus you could take care of yourself; but a rare fuss you have been making among us, running about here, there, and anyhow, when you know the day for Smithfield is nigh, and ever so many things to do that you ought to do for me. I say that ain’t like you, and I’m not pleased.’

While Crawshay was venting this bit of ill-humour, he stood in the doorway, and as Madge had risen, the lamp was below the level of her face, so that he could not see how ill she looked.

‘I hope I have not forgotten anything,’ she said hastily; ‘you remember the first papers were filled up by—by Philip.’

‘They’re right enough; but here’s a letter from the secretary you didn’t even open.’

‘Like enough, like enough,’ he went on irritably, although the dame had now grasped his arm, and was endeavouring to stop him. ‘Away early and back late—that’s the shortest cut into a mess I know of.—Where have you been?’

It was evident that the unopened letter of the Smithfield secretary had less to do with his ill-humour than he was trying to make believe. The question with which he closed his grumble suggested the real cause of vexation.

‘Quiet thyself, Dick,’ his wife interposed. ‘Madge is not well to-night, and it makes her worse to find thee angry.’

‘Could a man help being angry?’ he said, becoming more angry because of his attention being called to the fact that he was so, as is the wont of quick tempers. ‘Have you told her about them blessed letters?’

‘I have told her that we received them: to-morrow, we can tell her what they are about.’

‘I would rather know at once, aunt,’ said Madge calmly, as she advanced to Crawshay, and only a slight tremor of the voice betrayed her agitation. ‘They concern Philip; and I should not be able to sleep if anything was kept back from me. He is in cruel trouble, Uncle Dick, and he says you want me to break{566} off from him, and that has upset me a little, although I know that you would not ask me to do such a thing, when he is in misfortune.’

‘Dick Crawshay never left a friend in a ditch yet, and he had no business to say that of me,’ blurted out the yeoman indignantly. Then, checking himself, he added: ‘But there’s sense in it too. Maybe he wants to break off himself; and I shouldn’t wonder, either, if he has heard what that fellow Wrentham says about your goings-on with Beecham.’

‘Ay, that’s it.... Come now, lass, tell truth and shame the devil—was it Beecham you went off in such haste to see to-day?’

‘Then it is true, mother—you see she owns to it,’ said Uncle Dick, his passion again rising. ‘And you’ve been writing to Beecham and meeting him underhand.’

‘Not underhand, uncle,’ she exclaimed, drawing back in surprise and pain. The word ‘underhand’ assumed the significance of a revelation to her; but even now she did not see clearly the extent of the misconceptions to which her conduct was liable, if criticised by unfriendly eyes.

‘You say it ain’t underhand! I say it’s mortal like it. You never said a word about Beecham this morning, though you must have known that you were going to see him.... Come now, did you not?’

He added the question in a softer tone, as if hoping for a negative answer. But Madge evaded a direct reply.

‘What’s in them?—Why, Shield says that Philip has been a fool, allowing himself to be cheated on all sides, and that there’s nothing for him but the Bankrupt Court. That’s a fine thing for a man to come to with such a fortune in such a short time. But I might have known it would end in this way—it’s the same thing always with them that set up for improving on the ways of Providence.’

Uncle Dick was in his excitement oblivious of the fact, that whilst he had cast some doubt on the success of Philip’s project, he had approved the spirit of it. Madge did not observe the inconsistency; she was so much astonished by what appeared to be the harsh language of Mr Shield, notwithstanding the assurances he had given to her. But she was presently set at rest on this point by Aunt Hessy.

‘Thou art forgetting, Dick, that Shield says he’ll see what can be done to put Philip right again.’

Madge was relieved; for in spite of its improbability, the thought had flashed upon her, that Austin Shield might have been deceiving her as to his ultimate purpose regarding Philip.

‘That may be,’ continued Uncle Dick in a tone of general discontent; ‘like enough, he’ll spend more money on the lad, if so be as that Beecham hasn’t got something against it; and blame me if ever I trust a man more, if Beecham be a knave.—Now you can settle all that, Madge. Seems you know more about him than any of us. Tell us what you know.’

There was no way of evading this request, or rather command; and yet she could not comply with it immediately. She had been told that Philip would be safe if she kept her promise.

‘What, will you not speak?’ thundered Uncle Dick, after he had waited a few seconds. ‘You know that Beecham has to do with Shield, and will say nought!’

‘Does Philip know you are in league with this stranger, and maybe helping to ruin him?’

‘I don’t want your buts—honest folk don’t need them. That scamp Wrentham is right; and it’s a bad business for Philip, and for you, and for all of us. Think on it, and when you do, you’ll be sorry for yourself.’

There was a long silence in the room; and then Madge turned with pleading eyes to the dame.

‘I am sorry that I cannot say he is wrong, child,’ was the gentle, but reproachful answer.

Whales are more numerous than is usually supposed—that is to say, there is a greater variety of these giants of the deep than the two or three which are known to commerce; such animals being abundant in all seas, so far as they have been explored. It is not, however, our intention to enter into the natural history of these cetaceans farther than may be necessary to understand their commercial value. Nor do we intend to dwell on the dangers which are incidental to the pursuit of the whale, of which it would not be difficult to compile a melancholy catalogue. Terrible shipwrecks, vessels ‘crunched’ by the power of the ice without a moment’s warning, others run into and destroyed by the animal itself; pitiful boat-voyages, so prolonged as to cause deaths from hunger and thirst; ships ingulfed amid the roar of the tempest, and crews never heard of since the day they sailed—these are among the incidents which have from its beginning marked the progress of the whale-fishery; the mortality connected with which has often attracted attention, not only in the icy regions of the arctic seas, but also in those of the Pacific Ocean, in which, all the year round, men pursue the sperm-whale with unceasing activity, at a risk to life and limb only faintly realised by landsmen.

It is ‘for gold the merchant ploughs the main;’ and there are persons who say that the risks encountered by whale-ships are not greater than those common to most branches of the mercantile marine. ‘And if it pays,’ say the advocates of whaling, ‘why not carry on the enterprise?’ But no matter what defence may be offered,{567} whale-fishing has always been much of a lottery, in which the few have drawn prizes, whilst the many have had to be content with the blanks.

The fortunes of ‘whaling’ are exceedingly varied: one ship may capture ten or twelve fish;[1] some vessels occasionally come home ‘clean;’ while others may each secure from two to half a dozen. We have before us several records of the financial results of whale-fishing, in which the profits and losses among Pacific whalers exhibit some striking differences. One ship, for instance, places at her credit during her voyage one hundred and thirty-two thousand dollars; but to the owners of the fleet of whalers fishing from New Bedford, United States, in 1858, there accrued a loss of more than a million dollars. Again, a Scottish whale-ship from Peterhead, in Aberdeenshire, was one season fortunate enough to capture forty-four whales, the largest number ever ‘fished’ by one vessel. The value of the cargo in oil and bone considerably exceeded ten thousand pounds sterling. One of the largest cargoes ever landed was brought home by the steamer Arctic of Dundee, commanded by Captain Adams, one of the ablest arctic navigators. It consisted of the produce of thirty-seven whales, which, besides oil, included almost eighteen tons of whalebone.

The only whales of commerce were at one time the great sperm-whale of southern latitudes, and ‘the right’ or Greenland whale, both of which are animals of gigantic size and great power, the latter being undoubtedly the larger. No British vessels take part in the sperm-fishery, their operations being confined to the arctic regions. Dundee is now the chief whaling port, sending out annually sixteen ships to Greenland. The Greenland whale, which our British whalemen endure such dangers to procure, seldom exceeds sixty feet in length, and is about half that number in circumference. An average-sized specimen will weigh some seventy tons or more, and forms a mass of matter equal to about two hundred fat oxen. One individual caught by a Scotch whaler was seventy-two feet in length, with a girth of forty-five feet, the total weight being reckoned at upwards of one hundred tons. The chief product of the sperm and ‘the right’ whale—their oil—is of course common to both animals, and is obtained by boiling their fat, or ‘blubber’ as the substance is technically called.

It is somewhat curious that in both of these whales the head is the portion, size being considered, which is the most valuable. In the sperm-whale, ‘the case,’ situated in the head, is filled with a substance which is known as spermaceti, and brings a high price. One of these giants of the deep will sometimes yield a ton of this valuable substance, which is found, when the whale is killed, as an oily fluid, that when prepared, gradually concretes into a granulated mass. In the Greenland whale the great prize is ‘the bone’ with which its head is furnished, and which at the present time is quoted as being of the enormous value of two thousand two hundred and fifty pounds per ton! The price in America is even higher, the last sales in that country bringing two thousand five hundred pounds. It is only the Greenland fish which yield this valuable commodity. The whale of the Pacific is furnished with teeth; but ‘the right’ whale has in lieu thereof a series of plates, or laminæ, on the upper jaw, which are in reality the whalebone of commerce. The uses to which ‘bone’ is applied vary according to the demands of fashion, so that within the last hundred years the price has fluctuated exceedingly, and has been quoted from almost a nominal price per ton up to the sum mentioned. At one period, we are told in an American account of the fishery, the rates for whalebone were so low that few whalemen would bring any of it home, their space being of much greater value when packed with oil. Threepence a pound-weight was at one time all that could be obtained for it; now the price of bone is twenty shillings per pound-weight. It may be explained that the yield of bone is as eight or ten pounds to each barrel of oil. A vessel which brings home one hundred tuns of oil will, in all probability, have on board six tons of whalebone.

There is a special product of the sperm-whale which is of greater value than either spermaceti or whalebone; it is known as ambergris. For a series of years there raged a hot controversy as to what this valuable substance really was, the most extraordinary opinions being offered regarding its origin, composition, and uses. One statement, dated so far back as 1762, says that ambergris issues from a tree, which manages to shoot its roots into the water, seeking the warmth therefrom in order to deposit therein the fat gum of which it is the source. ‘When that fat gum is shot into the sea, it is so tough that it is not easily broken from the root unless by the strength of its own weight. If you plant such trees where the stream sets to the shore, then the stream will cast it up to great advantage.’ Another authority, Dr Thomas Brown, in a work published in 1686, shows that an idea then entertained was, that ambergris was only found in such whales as had come upon the substance floating in the sea and swallowed it. In course of time it was found that this precious commodity was generated in the whale itself. An American doctor residing in Boston made it public in 1724, that some Nantucket whalemen, in cutting up a spermaceti whale, had found about twenty pounds of the valuable substance, which, they said, was contained in a cyst or bag without either outlet or inlet. As a matter of fact, ambergris, which is an important drug, is a morbid secretion in the intestines of the sperm-whale. Captain Coffin, in a statement he made at the bar of the House of Commons, said that he had lately brought home three hundred and sixty-two ounces of that costly substance, which he had found in a sperm-whale captured off the coast of New Guinea. At the time of Coffin’s examination, ambergris was of the value of twenty-five shillings an ounce. The Pacific whalers search keenly for this commodity, and large finds of it sometimes bring them a rich reward.

Formerly, it was the oil which rendered the whaling voyages remunerative, and made or marred the fortune of the venture, but the case is now altered, owing to the enormous prices realised for bone. The head of the sperm-whale is equal to about a third of its whole size, and ‘the case’ yields spermaceti, which commands a high price; but in the case of the Greenland whale, as we have shown, only a comparatively small weight of whalebone is contained in the mouths of each of them; but small as it is, the quantity tends to swell the account and increase the dividends. Whaling ventures are usually made by Companies, and nearly everybody engaged in the hazardous work has a share in the venture—the men being partially paid by a share of the oil-money. Whalers earn their wages hardly. The work—not to speak of the dangers incurred—is always carried on at a high-pressure rate, and is anything but agreeable. The pursuit and capture of a whale are usually very exciting, some of these animals being difficult to kill, even when the boats, after a long chase, come within such a distance of them as admits of striking with the harpoon. Many are the adventures which take place on the occasions of whale-killing; though most of the animals attacked finally succumb. Then begins the labour of securing the prize, and converting the products which it yields into matter bearing a commercial value. The dead whale must be brought either close to the ship, or the ship must be brought close to the whale, which, in the icy waters of the high arctic latitudes, involves a great deal of fatigue, the animal being sometimes killed at a considerable distance from the ship. On some occasions a day will elapse before it can be known that the whale will without doubt become the prey of those who have found it, and several boats may require to take part in the process of killing. As many as four boats may at one time be ‘fast,’ as it is called, to the same animal—in other words, they have all succeeded in planting their harpoons in the whale. But the harpoon, even when shot from a gun into the fish, does not kill it; the putting of the animal to death is accomplished by means of what are called ‘lances,’ instruments which are used after the animal has been harpooned. After that process has been successfully achieved, the labour of capture, which may have taken from two to ten hours to accomplish, is over. Instances are known where boats have been ‘fast’ for upwards of fifty hours before the whale was finally despatched.

The whale is usually dragged to the ship by the boats engaged in its capture. Holes are cut in its tail, and ropes being then attached, the laborious process of towing the gigantic carcass commences. Once alongside of the ship, the work of flensing, or cutting-up of the whale, is speedily in operation, all engaged being in a state of ferment, and eager for further work of the same sort. The crew may be likened to those animals which, having tasted blood, long for more. The operation of removing the bone from the head of the whale is first entered upon; this is superintended by an officer known as the ‘spectioneer,’ and who is responsible for this part of the process. After the bone has been carefully dealt with, the blubber is cut off the body in long strips, which are hauled on board by means of a block-and-tackle. It is first cut into large squares, in which condition it is allowed to remain till the salt water drains out of it, a few hours, or even a day or two, being allowed, according to the work on hand. The skin is then peeled off, and the mass of fatty matter is further dealt with by being chopped into little pieces, which are stowed away in barrels or tanks, to be brought home to the boileries, in order to be, as we may say, distilled into a commercial product. When the fish has yielded up its valuable products, the flensed carcass is cut adrift. Sometimes the ponderous jawbones are preserved; when that is the case, they are cut out of the head and lifted on board. The strips of blubber vary in thickness from ten to sixteen inches, or even more, according to the size and fatness of the fish. In general, it averages twelve inches all over the body, the thickest portion being at the neck, where twenty-two inches of blubber are sometimes found. The yield of oil is of course in proportion to the size and condition of the animal, and will run from five to twenty tuns. A whale caught many years ago by the crew of the Princess Charlotte of Dundee yielded thirty-two tuns of oil. An examination of some old records of the fishery shows fifteen hundred tuns of oil to the one hundred and thirty-five fish of the Aberdeen fleet of eleven vessels; twelve hundred and forty-three tuns to the Peterhead fleet of eleven ships (three vessels had been lost), which captured eighty-eight whales and three thousand seals.

In sperm-whale fishing, the process of flensing and disposing of the carcass is much the same as in the Davis Straits’ fishery. When the body has been stripped of the blubber, it is thrown loose, and is permitted to float away, to become the prey of sharks and sea-birds which are usually in attendance. In the process of dissecting the great whale of the southern seas, the head is usually the last portion dealt with. It is cut off and kept afloat till required, being carefully secured to the vessel. The valuable contents of ‘the case’ are brought on board by means of buckets, and are very carefully preserved, being known as ‘head-matter.’ A large whale of the Pacific seas will yield from seventy to ninety, or even on occasion a hundred barrels of oil. Sperm oil is more valuable than train oil, the produce of the Greenland fish. In a trade circular, we find as we write, ‘crude sperm’ quoted at sixty-four pounds ten shillings per tun, the other sort being set down as ranging from twenty-seven to thirty-two pounds. But the prices are ever varying according to supply and demand. Spermaceti is offered at about a shilling per pound-weight.

The ships which go whale-fishing from Scotland to the arctic regions make an annual voyage, which lasts from five to nine months; but sperm-whalers often remain at sea for a period of three years. They boil out their oil as they cruise about in search of their prey; or when blubber has so accumulated as to warrant the action, the ship will put in at some convenient island, where the process of melting the fat can be conveniently carried on.

We have no statistics of the number of vessels or men at present engaged in the southern fishery; but the exciting nature of the work being attractive to many persons, crews are never wanting when ships are being fitted out to hunt the sperm-whale. At one period in Great Britain, ‘whaling’ was an enterprise of great moment, and was encouraged by government, which awarded bounty-money to ships engaged in that particular enterprise. In the earlier years of the present century over one hundred and fifty British ships were engaged in the industry of whale-fishing; by 1828, the number had, however, fallen to eighty-nine vessels, forty-nine of these being fitted out at Scottish ports. In that season, eleven hundred and ninety-seven fish were killed, the produce being thirteen thousand nine hundred and sixty-six tuns of oil, and eight hundred and two tons of whalebone. Dundee, as already mentioned, and Peterhead are the principal centres of the British whaling industry, the number of vessels employed by the two ports being between twenty and thirty; but for many years past, some of these ships also make a voyage in the way of seal-fishing, which sometimes proves a profitable venture. The total value of the seal and whale fisheries so far as the Dundee fleet was concerned amounted last year to £108,563; in 1882 it was £110,200; while in 1881 it reached £130,900.

No recent statistics of an authentic kind of the seal-fishery have been issued other than those contained in the newspapers; but from figures before us relating to a period from 1849 to 1859, we find that over one million seals were killed within that time by Scottish sealers alone; and the success of individual crews in the killing of these animals, it may be said, comes occasionally within the realms of the marvellous. The oil obtained from the seals is as valuable as that got from the arctic whales, whilst their skins are also of some commercial importance. It was a happy circumstance that just as whale-fishing began to fall off, gas as an illuminant became common; and although train and sperm oils are still used in various manufactories, and especially in jute-mills, the mineral oils which have been found in such quantity have doubtless served many of the purposes for which whale-oil was at one time in constant demand.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.

Mr Solomon Pudster and Mr Gideon Maggleby were bosom friends; nor could they well be otherwise. They were both born on the 29th of May 1815, in Gower Street, Bloomsbury; Solomon entering upon the world’s stage at an early hour in the morning at No. 69, and Gideon first seeing the light about mid-day at No. 96. At the age of ten, the boys were sent to Westminster School; at the age of seventeen, they became fellow-clerks in the great West India warehouse of Ruggleton, Matta, & Co.; and at the age of four-and-twenty they went into partnership as sugar-merchants in Mincing Lane. At that period they were bachelors; and being already sincerely attached one to the other, they decided to live together in a pleasant little house in the then fashionable neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square. For years they were almost inseparable. Day after day they breakfasted and dined together at home, and worked and lunched together in the City; and but for the fact that the firm purchased a large sugar estate in Demerara, Solomon Pudster and Gideon Maggleby would probably have never been parted for more than a few hours at a time until death decreed a dissolution of their partnership. The sugar estate, unfortunately, required a great deal of looking after; and at regular intervals of two years, one of the partners was obliged to cross the Atlantic and to remain absent from his friend for five or six months. Solomon and Gideon alternately undertook these troublesome expeditions, and braved the heat and mosquitoes of the tropics; and meantime the firm of Pudster and Maggleby prospered exceedingly; and no shadow of a cloud came between the devoted friends—the former of whom, on account of his being a few hours the older, was declared senior partner in the firm.

But in the year 1865 an important event happened. Mr Pudster and Mr Maggleby ran down by train one evening to see the fireworks at the Crystal Palace; and on their return journey they found themselves in a compartment the only other occupant of which was a remarkably buxom and cheery-looking widow of about forty years of age. The two gentlemen, with their accustomed gallantry, entered into conversation with her. They discovered that she and they had several friends in common, and that she was, in fact, a certain Mrs Bunter, whose many domestic virtues and abounding good-nature had often been spoken of in their hearing. They were charmed with her; they begged, as if with one accord, to be permitted to call upon her at her house in Chelsea; and when, after putting her into a cab at Victoria Station, they started off to walk home, they simultaneously exclaimed with enthusiasm: ‘What a splendid woman!’

‘If only we had such an angel at home to welcome us!’ continued the senior partner.

‘Just what I was thinking,’ assented Mr Maggleby, who thereupon looked up at the moon and sighed profoundly.

‘No other woman ever affected us in this way, Gideon,’ said Mr Pudster; ‘and here we are at fifty’——

‘But upon my word and honour, Gideon, Mrs Bunter’s a magnificent specimen of her sex.’

‘She is, Solomon; and I don’t think we{570} can conscientiously deny that we are in love with her.’

Having thus ingenuously confessed their passion, the two gentlemen walked on in silence; and it was not until they were near home that they again spoke.

‘I suppose that it will be necessary as a matter of formal business,’ suggested Mr Pudster diffidently, ‘for us to call upon Mrs Bunter and apprise her of the state of our feelings. We mean, of course, to follow the matter up?’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ agreed Mr Maggleby; ‘we mean to follow the matter up.’

‘Perhaps the firm had better write to her and prepare her mind,’ proposed the senior partner, with kindly forethought.

‘The firm had better write to-morrow, Solomon; but, Solomon, it occurs to me that the firm cannot marry Mrs Bunter. You or I must be the happy man; and then, Solomon, we shall have to separate.’

‘Never!’ ejaculated Mr Pudster, who stopped and seized his friend by the hand—‘never! You shall marry Mrs Bunter, and we will all live together.’

‘Solomon, this magnanimity!’ murmured Mr Maggleby, who had tears in his eyes. ‘No; I will not accept such a sacrifice. You, as the senior partner, shall marry Mrs Bunter; and, with her permission, I will stay with you. The firm shall write to prepare her mind. Business is business. The firm shall write to-night; and I myself will take the letter to the post.’

Half an hour later, Mr Maggleby handed to Mr Pudster a letter, of which the following is a copy:

14 Mincing Lane, City,
August 4, 1865.

To Mrs Ferdinand Bunter,
Matador Villa, Chelsea.

Madam—Our Mr Pudster will do himself the honour of calling upon you to-morrow between twelve and one, in order to lay before you a project which is very intimately connected with the comfort and well-being of the undersigned. We beg you, therefore, to regard any proposition that may be made to you by our Mr P., as made to you on behalf of the firm and with its full authority.—We remain, madam, most devotedly yours,

Pudster and Maggleby.

‘Excellently well, Gideon,’ said Mr Pudster. ‘But don’t you think that “most devotedly yours” sounds rather too distant? What do you say to “yours admiringly,” or “yours to distraction?”’

‘“Yours to distraction” sounds best, I think,’ replied Mr Maggleby after considerable reflection. ‘I will put that in, and re-copy the letter, Solomon.’

‘We are about to take an important step in life,’ said Mr Pudster seriously. ‘Are you sure, Gideon, that we are not acting too hastily?’

‘Mr Pudster!’ exclaimed Mr Maggleby warmly, ‘we may trust these sacred promptings of our finer feelings. We have lived too long alone. The firm needs the chaste and softening influence of woman. And who in this wide world is more fitted to grace our board than Mrs Bunter?’

Mr Maggleby re-copied the letter, signed it with the firm’s usual signature, and carried it to the nearest letter-box. When he returned, he found his friend waiting to go to bed, and trying to keep himself awake by studying the marriage service.

On the following forenoon, Mr Pudster, with the scrupulous punctuality that is characteristic of City men, called at Matador Villa, Chelsea, and was at once shown into the presence of Mrs Bunter, who was waiting to receive him. ‘I am quite at a loss to understand why you have done me the honour of coming to see me to-day,’ said the widow. ‘From your letter, I judge that you have some business proposal to make to me. Unfortunately, Mr Pudster, I am not prepared to speculate in sugar. I am not well off. But, perhaps, I am under a misapprehension. The letter contains an expression which I do not understand.’

‘It is true,’ replied the senior partner, ‘that we have some hope of persuading you to speculate a little in sugar; and there is no reason why your want of capital should prevent your joining us.’

‘Well, I am not very good at explanations,’ said Mr Pudster; ‘but I will explain the situation as well as I can. You see, Mrs Bunter, Mr Maggleby my partner, and myself, are bachelors and live together. We find it dull. We long for the civilising influences of woman’s society. We are, in fact, tired of single-blessedness. The firm is at present worth a clear five thousand a year. It will support a third partner, we think; and so we propose, Mrs Bunter, that you should join it, and come and take care of us in a friendly way.’

Mrs Bunter looked rather uncomfortable, and was silent for a few moments. ‘You are very good,’ she said at last; ‘but although I am not well off, I had not thought of going out as a housekeeper. The late Mr Bunter left me enough for my little needs.’

‘I hope so indeed, madam. But we don’t ask you to come to us as a housekeeper simply. Marriage is what we offer you, Mrs Bunter. In the name of Pudster and Maggleby, I have the honour of proposing for your hand.’

‘Mercy!’ exclaimed Mrs Bunter in some agitation. ‘Surely you would not have me marry the firm?’

‘I put it in that way,’ said Mr Pudster, ‘because Maggleby and I are practically one and the same. But I will be accurate. The proposition is, Mrs Bunter, that you should become the wife of—ahem!—the senior partner; and that Gideon Maggleby should live with us in his old sociable way. Excuse my blunt way of expressing myself, Mrs Bunter.’

‘Then you, Mr Pudster, are the senior partner!’ said Mrs Bunter, with a very agreeable smile. ‘I am very much flattered, I assure you; but your proposal requires consideration.’

‘No doubt,’ assented Mr Pudster. ‘The firm is willing to wait for your reply. In matters of business we are never in a hurry.—When may we look for your answer?’

‘Well, you shall have a note by to-morrow morning’s post,’ replied Mrs Bunter. ‘I may say,’ she added, ‘that I have heard a great deal of your firm, Mr Pudster; and that I am conscious that it does me great honour by thus offering me a partnership in it.’

No sooner had he departed than the widow burst into a long and merry fit of laughter. Her first impulse was to write and refuse the ridiculous offer; but as the day wore on, she thought better of the affair; and in the evening, after dinner, she sat down quite seriously, and wrote a letter as follows:

‘I must fall in with their humour, I suppose,’ she reflected. ‘And really, Mr Pudster is a very nice man, and almost handsome; and I’m sure that I shall do no harm by marrying him. Besides, it is quite true that they must want some one to look after them. If they go on living by themselves, they will grow crusty and bearish.’ And Mrs Bunter sent her maid out to post the letter.

Three weeks later, the widow became Mrs Pudster; Mr Maggleby, of course, officiating as best-man at the wedding, and being the first to salute the bride in the vestry after the ceremony. Thenceforward, for a whole year, the three members of the firm lived together in complete harmony; and the pleasant history of their existence was only interrupted by Mr Pudster’s enforced departure for Demerara in September 1866. Mr Maggleby, it is true, offered to go instead of him; but Mr Pudster would not hear of it; and Mr Maggleby was obliged to confess that business was business, and that it was certainly Mr Pudster’s turn to brave the mosquitoes. And so, after confiding his wife to the care of his friend, Mr Pudster departed. During his absence, all went well; and in March 1867 he returned to England. But this time the heat had been too much for poor Mr Pudster. His wife noticed that he was looking unwell. Maggleby, with sorrow, perceived the same. Pudster laughed. Nevertheless, he soon took to his bed; and after a long and painful illness, died.

The grief of Mrs Pudster and Mr Maggleby was terrible to witness. Mrs Pudster talked of retiring from the world; and Gideon Maggleby disconsolately declared that he had no longer anything left to live for. No one, therefore, will be much surprised to hear that towards the end of March 1868, Mr Gideon Maggleby led Mrs Solomon Pudster to the altar.

‘Ah, dear sainted Solomon!’ Mrs Pudster had exclaimed as she fell weeping upon Mr Maggleby’s breast.

In a former paper (April 19, 1884), instances were cited of fortunes suddenly made, not by inheritance or industry, but by what people are pleased to call luck. Cases of sudden ruin are less frequent, for, generally speaking, the wreck of a man’s fortune is like that of a ship: some rock is touched; water flows in; frantic attempts are made to lighten the vessel or to steer it into port; and finally, the foundering is slow. The striking upon a rock, however, is commonly with fortunes, as with ships, a sudden accident. It may be the result of careless or incapable steering; or it may be caused by a combination of adverse tides and winds, which no human skill can stem, and which hurry on the ship helplessly to destruction, inevitable, though it is not always foreseen. The rock, in whatever way it may be reached, is the determining cause of ruin; and when we speak of a man having been suddenly ruined, we mean that the calamity which brought him to poverty by degrees more or less rapid, occurred at a time and in a manner which took himself and his friends by surprise.

We are happily exempt in this country from those overwhelming disasters occasioned by political convulsions. Those who witnessed the flight of French ladies and gentlemen from their country upon the downfall of the Second Empire heard tales of misfortune not easily to be forgotten. Senators and prefects who, in July 1870, were living in luxury and power, drawing large salaries, and secure of the future, were towards the middle of September huddling in lodging-houses of towns on the English south coast; and along with them were bankers who had been obliged to suspend payment, and manufacturers and landowners of the eastern provinces who had fled from the tide of invasion, after seeing their factories or fields burnt, ravaged, and overrun by the enemy.

In most of these cases, ruin had been sudden and irremediable, so much so, as to appal sympathising British minds. And yet vicissitudes quite as pitiable had been witnessed in London a few years before—that is, on the Black Friday of May 1866, when, within a single day, hundreds of fortunes were wrecked in the City. For the most part, the people who were ruined on this awful Friday had had no warning of the fate impending over them; and this must needs be so whenever banks or financial companies fail. The credit of these establishments is like a piece of glass, which must remain undamaged, or there is an end to its value. For self-preservation, banks and companies feel bound to conceal their difficulties till these are past mending; and thus it generally happens that whenever a House suspends payment, almost all its customers are utterly unprepared. What this means, we all know, if not from personal experience, at least from misfortunes which have fallen upon persons of our acquaintance. Our country neighbour who lived in such grand style, returns from{572} town one evening with a haggard face. A few days later it is announced that his house is to let; there is a sale; a notice among the bankruptcies in the Gazette; the family quietly leave their home; and from that time, only intimate friends know for certain what has become of them. Perhaps, years afterwards, somebody who knew the neighbour in great wealth, finds him eking out a penurious existence in the suburbs of some large city. Among the hundreds of acres of cheap houses which form the outskirts of London, the people ‘who have seen better days’ are an unnumbered multitude. Every suburban clergyman and doctor knows some, and generally too many of them; every bachelor in quest of furnished lodgings is pretty sure to stumble upon several people in this plight. Auctioneers and brokers, however, know them best of all, for it is they who play the chief part in the closing act of the drama of Ruin, when the last waifs of former wealth—the pieces of good old furniture, the pictures, china, books, and other such long-treasured valuables, have to be sold off to buy necessaries.

One of the most frequent and deplorable agents of sudden ruin is the dishonest partner. No business can be managed without mutual confidence between those who conduct it; and though, when we hear that a commercial man has brought himself within reach of the law, we are inclined to doubt if his partner can have been unaware of his malpractices, yet it must be obvious that the dishonesty of one partner too often arises from the unsuspicious simplicity of the other. There are even instances in which no amount of sagacity will save a man from the enterprises of a roguish partner. The following is a very common case: A and B being partners, A dies, and his son succeeds to his share of the business. So long as A was alive, the speculative tendencies of B were kept in check; but young A has not the same experience as his father; he has learned to respect B; he looks to him for guidance; and if B has made up his mind to extend the business of the firm by new methods, now that he is head-partner, the junior partner will generally be a mere tool in his hands. If young A be more fond of pleasure than business, he will of course be even less than a tool—a mere cipher; and B will be left to manage matters as he pleases, until he succeeds in his schemes, and proposes to buy A out of the business; or fails, and brings A to poverty and disgrace. It is a cruel thing that if B has absconded, A will have to bear the entire brunt of creditors’ wrath, and perhaps be criminally punished for his innocence. But partners have learned this lesson so often, that it is almost a wonder how any sane man can assume responsibilities without ascertaining the nature and extent of them. It is certainly not for the public interest that the sudden ruin of an honest partner should be pleaded in extenuation for his ignorance or carelessness.

Let us take some other causes of sudden ruin. We may set aside the destruction of property by fire or flood, as offering examples too many and obvious; nor does the sudden ruin of spendthrifts by cards or betting call for notice. But the ruin which comes to a man through sudden loss of character in his trade or profession is always most lamentable, especially when the offence perpetrated was unintentional, and did not appear to call for so heavy a punishment. The chemist who asked to be discharged from serving on the jury in ‘Bardell v. Pickwick’ on the ground that his assistant would be selling arsenic to the customers, expressed an alarm in which there was nothing jocular at all. We know of a chemist whose assistant committed this very mistake of supplying arsenic for some other drug, and three children were poisoned in consequence. The chemist was totally ruined. A coroner’s jury having brought in a verdict of manslaughter against him, he took his trial at the assizes, and was acquitted. But doctors ceased to recommend him; the public avoided his shop; his appointment as local postmaster was taken from him, and in a short time he became bankrupt. Poisoning by inadvertence has been the ruin of many a chemist, and of not a few country doctors who supply their own medicines.

But we remember an instance of a young doctor destroying his career by means just the contrary of this—that is, by suspecting that poison had been administered, when such was not the case. One of his patients, a lady, who seemed to have nothing worse than a cold, died very suddenly. The doctor had reason to believe that this lady and her husband had been living on bad terms, so he not only refused to certify as to the causes of death, but openly hinted his suspicions that there had been foul-play. At the inquest, however, it was proved that the lady had died from heart-disease; and the reports about her having been on bad terms with her husband were shown to have proceeded from the malicious tattle of a busybody. As a result of this affair, the doctor lost almost all his patients. It was thought that he had not behaved with discretion; and his ruin was consummated by an action for slander brought against him by the widower, whom he had too hastily accused of poisoning.

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{573} 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.

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{574} 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{575} 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, 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{576} 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.

Printed and Published by W. & R. Chambers, 47 Paternoster Row, London, and 339 High Street, Edinburgh.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The whale suckles her young, and is therefore a mammal, and not, strictly speaking, a fish. It is, however, so called by all sailors.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART, FIFTH SERIES, NO. 36, VOL. I, SEPTEMBER 6, 1884 ***

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 36, Vol. I, September 6, 1884

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

CONTENTS

‘GRAND DAY.’

BY MEAD AND STREAM.

CHAPTER XLV.—HIGH PRESSURE.

THE COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS OF THE WHALE.

MR PUDSTER’S RETURN.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.

SUDDEN RUIN.

BACK FROM ‘ELDORADO.’

STEEL.

THE STRAY BLOSSOM.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 36, Vol. I, September 6, 1884

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL OF POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

CONTENTS

‘GRAND DAY.’

BY MEAD AND STREAM.

CHAPTER XLV.—HIGH PRESSURE.

THE COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS OF THE WHALE.

MR PUDSTER’S RETURN.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.—CHAPTER I.

SUDDEN RUIN.

BACK FROM ‘ELDORADO.’

STEEL.

THE STRAY BLOSSOM.

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.