M^^^^^z^^MlMiL s. ^^' .' ^•^ "''^ .5 f^ %,^' '%%">■ \^,f ^ ■iS" ^^. <• .O' -^^ V^'' ^0 &, P-. .-^ %4 ,0 ok BY-WAYS NATURE AND LIFE BY CLARENCE DEMING G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK : 27 * 29 WEST 23D STREET LONDON: 25 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN 1884 Press of G. P. Putnam's Sons New York 5\J^ % w^^ The chapters of this volume, having already appeared over the initials of the author in the columns of the New York Evening Post, need no formal introduction to the readers of that journal. To other readers, who see these sketches now for the first time, it may be explained briefly that they have been penned in out-of-the-way places of nature and life, during trips on two continents, extending over three years of time and some eighty thousand miles of distance. Often composed during the hurry of travel or of transitory sojourn, they must crave the reader's kindest indulgence for not a few errors of form and, it may be, some errors of fact. If, for the faults of the volume, any variety or freshness of its themes shall compensate, the writer's largest hopes will be abundantly fulfilled. CONTENTS rAGE The Bowery of London i Curiosities of ZoOlogy n A British Election-day 24 England's Gun Foundry 34 London in a Fog 43 Waterloo To-day 52 The Giant Tides of Fundy 61 Newfoundland and the Cod-fishers 75 Seal-hunting on the Ice-fields 93 Heart's Content and the! Ocean Cables 102 Deep Fishing IN Tropic Seas 114 Shadows in Cuba 124 The Bahama Sponge-fishers 143 Down in a Coal-mine 152 The Buried Forests of New Jersey 162 Petrolia and its Marvels 172 A Yankee Town-meeting 182 On Black Ice 193 The Old College Ball-ground 203 An Historic Meeting-house 212 Oddities of Fishcraft 227 Among the Maniacs 237 Silver Spring 249 Catching the Grayling 258 A Yankee Coon-hunt 276 Logging in Michigan Wilds 285 IV CONTENTS. The Father of Waters 303 The Shoestring District ; A Political Retrospect . . .321 The Southern Planter 332 The Negro of the Mississippi Bends 343 Negro Rites and Worship 355 Negro Songs and Hymns 37° By-ways of Nature and Life. THE BOWERY OF LONDON. A WIDE street, like an artery of the human body, cuts the map of London in that part which rep- resents the northeastern region of the great city. Like so many of the London thoroughfares, it changes its name several times without shifting its general direction, becoming in succession Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road, and The Bow. In times long gone by it was the old Essex Turnpike, and at its suburban extremity pleasant dwellings and neat door-yards still resist the crush of city growth and the ambition of trade. But at the White- chapel end the street may almost be called the aorta of London. Through it by day the city life pulsates and reflows. By night the human tide is drawn from the slums of East London into the great street as naturally as the low life of the east side of New York drains into the Bowery. Whitechapel Road is reached from Regent Street or the Strand by a number of omnibus lines which pass the Bank of England, go by the great financial houses of Cornhill and Lcadenhall Street, and pass also Hounds- 2 BY-WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. ditch, where the Jews' Old Clothes Exchange, with its admission fee of a penny, well repays a visit. The stretch from the high life of the West End to the low life of White- chapel is not more than three miles ; yet the American tourist rarely makes the trip, and to most of our London visitors the very name of the curious street will be un- familiar. I doubt whether a single London guide-book ever mentions the huge thoroughfare as one of the city sights. For all that it is not less a curiosity, a spectacle, and a wonder never forgotten when once seen, and never studied without expanding into fresh realms of lowly human life, teeming with things curious, strange, and sad. For visiting Whitechapel Road one can choose any pleasant evening, but Saturday night is best, when the humble denizen of London not only exults in the impend- ing hoUday, but must hie him out-of-doors to get provision for Sunday, when the shops will be closed. Take an omnibus, mount to one of its twin top seats far above the madding crowd of the Strand or Oxford Street, and let it bear you through the whirl, and rush, and gleaming lights of West London to your destination. In twenty minutes one reaches the Bank and the financial centre of England, by daylight congested with business, but now at night dull as a village green. A little way beyond the crowds begin to increase. It is an altered crowd too in dress and bearing from that left behind in the west city. Shops begin to appear anew and low drinking-places to multiply. These latter bear a different set of titles from the liquor THE BOWERY OF LONDON. 3 shops of fashionable London. "The Mitre," "The Crown," " The Swan and Eagle " of the West End are succeeded by " The Blind Beggar," " The Jug and De- canter," "The Plug," and " Eel Pie House," of the humbler Whitechapel region. Then we enter the great street itself, at first narrow, but in a few blocks widening to its full proportions. And what a street ! It is two hundred and fifty or three hundred feet wide, say three or four times the width of the Bowery of New York. On each side are foot-pavements which dwarf those of the Paris Boulevards, twenty-five to sixty feet wide, each of them broader than most of the London thoroughfares. The sidewalk on the right going out Whitechapel is compara- tively deserted, and most of its crowd is turned toward the broader pavement on the left. Along the exterior side of this foot-pavement, which is more like a street than a sidewalk, hucksters are allowed space without paying license. The effect is to convert one side of the broad Whitechapel Road into a new street or market-place three quarters of a mile long, with the solid structures on one side, the hucksters' booths on the other. Between flows a vast current of human beings, nine tenths from the baser classes, and so big and incongruous that it seems as though low London had but one outlet, and that White- chapel. To see this crowd alone is worth the trip to Whitechapel and back. The very size and the resistless sweep of the torrent of humanity give an impression of power and dignity which is only lost when one mixes with the mass and sees its vile elements. 4 BY-WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. Words are tame to describe the fantastic brilliancy of the scene. It is Vanity Fair by gas-light, only a Vanity Fair far more varied, grotesque, and big than that in Bunyan's allegory. On the one side are the shops, using the name to designate the places where every thing, includ- ing character, is sold. Bakeries, stores, markets, mix side by side with low concert-rooms, billiard-halls, and grog- shops. At intervals dark alleys lead behind to deeper haunts of vice or misery. Here and there is a small chapel or a little hall opened for nightly prayer-meetings by some of the Christian associations of London ; for the city missions justly recognize that in the Whitechapel quarter is at once the fairest and foulest field for Chris- tian endeavor. In front of one of the humble places of worship often stands a street preacher addressing a group of hearers who are more curious than reverent. Sometimes he is a man singularly gifted with rude elo- quence and the power of whose rough phrase and crude pathos puts to shame the rhetoric of more finished orators. Over all this medley of trade, vice, and religion shine the brilliant gas-jets from the shops, meeting half-way the lurid glare from the petroleum torches of the hucksters across the walk, and through the gauntlet of light pours the endless crowd. The booths of the hucksters and cheap Jacks reach along the outer edge of the sidewalk for a distance of half or three quarters of a mile. A few shillings will set any one up for business in this Acheron of trade. THE BOWERY OF LONDON. 5 It is hard to say whether wonder or pity predominates at sight of the infinite forms of catching a penny by trafific or trickery. Every thing sold is of tenth-rate quality, and it goes without saying that every thing imaginable is sold. The old junk booths seem to represent the prevailing type of traffic. One can buy in them every conceivable article of small hardware, from a shingle-nail up to a coffee-mill, but every thing is rusty, weather-beaten, or broken. Next to the junk shop, it may be, comes a vendor of cast-off tooth-brushes, " One for a penny, three for tuppence." A roaring quack is next in line, crying up his panacea for tapeworms and exhibiting a ghastly bottled array of the creatures. His companion sells old pieces of sole leather or boots and shoes which look as if their own weight would break them down. Move on a few feet. Here is a shooting gallery on an original plan. There is space only for a range about five feet long, so that every thing except the gun, is reduced to correspond. You hold the muzzle of the firearm within a foot of the target, but you are expected to hit a bull's-eye of the size of a pea with a ball like a small bird shot. A little farther on comes the "cocoa-nut game" in full blast. The pro- prietor has put up a wire alley twenty feet long and ten feet wide. At one end are equi-distant and upright rows of cocoa-nuts, say two feet apart, made by mount- ing the nuts on sticks of different heights. You pay a penny apiece for wooden balls and get two pennies for 6 BV-fVA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. each cocoa-nut knocked down. To the eye it seems as though the veriest tyro could hit a nut at every shot. Try it ! You will find that throwing with horizontal arm the three nuts in each upright row are almost as hard to hit as though the three nuts were one, and that the shrewd proprietor has not arranged them thus to lose money. Your pennies melt away like copper in a crucible, and you leave with more experience and less small change. Here, too, are the electric batteries, the tests of hitting, smiting, throwing, and other devices familiar to summer visitors on Coney Island. There are for sale old clothes, torn umbrellas, rotten dry-goods, decayed fruit, books, as immoral within as they are dirty without, archaic fish and oysters, to whose lasting quality in a sense the writer can testify from actual experience. You eat one at night and you taste it until next morn- ing. But why proceed ? As well try to list the articles in the Chatham Street shops or catalogue the truck thrown annually into the East River. And then the theatres of this lowly region ! They are many in number, but of one invariable kind — the variety show ; and they give variety with a vengeance. By the side of them the extinct Old Bowery ranked as a temple of High Art, and its vilest tragedies were fairly Shakes- pearian. I recall a visit to one of these playhouses of the Whitechapel precinct. By a long and devious passage, and borne in by a surging throng of street Arabs, we reached the interior of the theatre, behind the row of THE BOWERY OF LONDON. J houses facing the street. For one and sixpence (thirty- six cents American money) we secured the chief box, giving a proscenic view of the stage, and a still better point whence to observe the unique show in front. A curious scene it was. The begrimed theatre was filled with about two thousand people. The single gallery slanted from the shadowy rafters down almost to the stage, looking like a quarter-section of a big Roman amphitheatre. An actor at the footlights could almost have shaken hands with the small boys in the front gallery row. Below the gallery the seats reached back from the dingy orchestra until lost in the fog of all-pervading tobacco smoke. The audience — one part female, two parts, men, and ninety-seven parts street- boys — was kept in quasi order by a cohort of censors in faded uniforms, called " chuckerouts " by the young- sters, from their proclivity for " chucking out " too unruly lads. Indeed, one of our prime diversions at the show was the " Look sharp ! The chuckerout 's got his eye on ye ! " piped every now and then from the mist that clouded the rear of the auditorium. It cost a penny to be a gallery god, and twopence to get into the alleged " choice " seats of the orchestra circle in this Temple of Thespis. The youngsters got their money's worth. The programme advertised some forty events, and the per- formance lasted from seven o'clock till early morning — making one think of the Chinese play which Artemus Ward describes as beginning with the birth of the hero 8 BY-WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. and continuing several months until he is killed or married. The writer remembers vividly a characteristic and funny episode at this theatre some years ago. The long play of the evening was a sanguinary version of the " Old Curiosity shop " of Dickens, and by a common stage paradox the part of the villain Quilp had been given to the only really good actor in the cast. How in the world this man, whose acting would have done credit to a lead- ing part at Wallack's, ever got among that crowd of fifth- rate actors is hard to imagine. Perhaps he was a new theatrical luminary first rising on the Whitechapel horizon, or more likely a good actor whose bad habits had driven him from the West End stage. However, there he was, acting a realistic villain among stage blockheads, a veri- table martyr surrounded by sticks. But his intense realism was unpopular with the boys, and as the play went on he became the bugbear of the piece. He played too well for the youngsters, who were so carried away by his vivid portrayal that they began to think he was a villain in dead earnest. Every time he appeared a torrent of hisses, cat-calls, and hoots met him, and when at last, with his meshes all drawn around his victims, he exulted in his triumph, the howls rose to such a pitch that it looked as though Quilp would be a crushed tragedian. The " chuckerouts " had a lively time of it for a while, but at last restored order by decimating the audience. The play proceeded, and Quilp went to the final destiny of all stage villains amid shrieks of approving delight. THE BOWERY OF LONDON. 9 Another of the Whitechapel theatres is as large as the foregoing playhouse, but higher priced and better toned. Here the " chuckerout " is superseded by a beefy presiding officer at a table in front of the orchestra. He bellows out the entries on the programme, and in the intervals divides his time between big mugs of ale and lusty thumps with a gavel. Barring his dress coat, he looks for all the world like the chairman of a Tammany primary ; and as a presiding officer, so far as keeping order is concerned, is quite as signal a failure. But there are rifts even in the gloomy shadows of life along Whitechapel. One night there was advertised in large print a stereopticon lecture on " America." A penny gave us admission to a rough building with rougher seats, where a thousand or more from the humble classes had gathered. The lecturer in the darkened room took his audience with him on a trip from New York up the Hudson, thence across to Niagara Falls, and then to Washington, illustrating each point of interest with views on the canvas. Suddenly, while describing the Capitol at Washington, he flashed upon the screen a picture of the statue of Abraham Lincoln. There was a momentary hush, then the first applause of the evening came forth like a burst of thunder. A more impressive scene followed when, without a word of announcement, the face of Gar- field appeared on the screen. The crowd knew it instantly. They rose to their feet and gave it roar after roar of welcome, outburst succeeding outburst, so that lo jBY-h^ays of nature and life. after several minutes the lecturer could scarcely proceed. The scene was one to be recalled for a lifetime — the dusky- room, the swaying audience, the swelling plaudits, and this gathering from the very sink of London paying its tribute to our two martyrs. How sharply it carried memory back to the dark days of civil strife, when these humble men were with us and England's proudest against us ! How it emphasized that more recent sympathy which went out to us from both England's highest and lowest when our second presidential martyr fell, suffered so long, and died ! This was no formal demonstration, but a sincere and spontaneous burst of feeling from men who had no motive save to speak their hearts. Let us record it as something even more signifi- cant, and as a sign of that common sympathy which glows beneath the surface of two nations which are one in kinship, one in their civic liberty, and one in their aspiration toward the ideals of human progress. CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. IF the American visitor to the London Zoological Gar- dens can make the rounds under the guidance of Mr. A. D. Bartlett, the old superintendent, he will find far more to instruct and amuse than the mere spectacle of the best collection of birds, beasts, and reptiles in the world. For fifty years Mr. Bartlett has been connected with the gardens, and for twenty years he has been the active superintendent. In the Hne of his duties he has been forced to make a special study of the habits of each creature, and his theoretical knowledge of natural history has been supplemented by a vast array of practical facts that have come directly under his eye. If his reminiscen- ces of all the curious things which he has seen in the garden could be printed, they would fill a volume which would be no small addition to what we know already about animal life. Outside of its spectacular quality the world-famous " Zoo " has been of great scientific value in two ways. Not only has it disclosed natural traits of the animals in their wild state, which had been unobserved and never would have been known unless the creatures had been kept in long captivity, but it has also shown animal traits peculiar to the captive condition. I can illustrate this by 12 BV.fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. a single example, itself one of the most curious facts brought out during the history of the garden. It has been found, as is commonly known, that the carnivorous animals, like the lions, tigers, bears, and even hyenas, can be readily tamed when brought to the gardens young, while the adult animals remain often fierce and untamable to the last. But the effect with certain of the vegetable- eating creatures — deer, goats, and wild sheep — has been precisely the reverse. If taken as adults they are shy and ready to fly at the least alarm ; but when captured as fawns and reared they become savage and dangerous, a constant source of peril and fear to their keepers. Mr. Bartlett explains this by the following line of reasoning : The deer, for instance, in their wild condition, are naturally even more fierce than the carnivora, but have the trait of timidity when brought face to face with unfamiliar ob- jects. Thus the bucks, though they shun man, will fight to the death with each other, and will stand at bay or attack instantly the smaller wild animals of prey. In the same way, when familiarized with man, their native fierce- ness asserts itself. They attack him fearlessly, and in- stead of being tamed by confinement, the restraint only serves to make them ferocious. A similarly curious paradox has been observed at the gardens in the case of certain birds. The dove is the prescriptive bird of Eros and the poets. The budding Tennysons and Longfellows, however, who want to utilize the wealth of metaphor drawn from the soft cooings and CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. 13 gentle dalliance of the birds of Venus, must keep away from the Zoological Gardens. It seems hard and harsh to upset at once the legends of mythology and the imagery of the verse-makers, but the rude fact must be asserted, that the dove, as shown by experience with many speci- mens of his tribe at the " Zoo," is any thing but a well- behaved bird. Besides other bad habits, he is a vindictive and relentless brawler, and during the love season is in constant warfare. Nature fortunately has not given him sharp and fatal weapons, but with the joint of his wing he can strike a blow of amazing force and precision. The mellow cooing which the poets ascribe to affection is, far more likely, a challenge to combat than a gentle note of love. But, on the other hand, certain birds of prey— the eagle, the vulture, and the buzzard— to which we attribute all the vices, become in captivity at the gardens most staid and reputable birds, dwelling together in harmony and giving no trouble to their keepers. They cannot change their diet, but they succeed in establishing a character for domesticity and good behavior that some of their more reputable companions would do well to emulate. Out of a dozen curious stories that could be told about the nimble denizens of the monkey-house, let me select two, both connected with apes that have now gone to the happy peanut-ground of monkeys. A chimpanzee named " Joe," who came to the gardens some years ago, used to be kept in a separate compartment of the big cage. Every 14 BV-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. morning his keeper used to let Joe out for an airing, and the little fellow was the terror of his mates, leaping like a flash around the outside of the cage, pulling their tails, and abusing his liberty in the most shameful fashion. By and by came the hour when the visitors began to arrive and when Joe had to be shut up again in his cage. Then Joe would rebel. He refused to come to his keeper, Mr. Sutton, who might as well have tried to cage the light- ning as catch by ordinary means the nimble rascal leaping over the outside of the big monkey-cage. No blandish- ments or dainties would allure crafty Joe, who, sitting high on the upper bars, would make the most horrible grimaces at his pursuer. But Joe, though of male gender, had two feminine failings — curiosity and fear ; and these were used to foil his cunning. Near one end of the monkey-house was a large dark hole out of which came a gas-pipe. Having first set open the door of Joe's com- partment, Mr. Sutton would approach the dark hole, peering in as if he saw a ghost. Joe would instantly stop his contortions, descend from the cage, follow behind Mr. Sutton, and, like him, look earnestly into the hole. Then, with a sudden movement, as though the apparition were emerging, Mr. Sutton would retreat, making every gesture of fear. Instantly Joe's courage and wits would forsake him. Chattering with fright he would fly to his cage for refuge. The door was shut and he was a captive anew. The most singular feature of it all was that Joe never seemed to learn the trick. It was repeated day after day for many months and with unvarying success. CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. 1$ One of the by-gone heroines of the monkey-house, " Miss Jenny," also died some years ago. She came from India, and had a peculiar parting of the hair upon the head, marking her as of a new species, which gave the men of science a good deal of trouble to classify and name. Among Jenny's dissipations was one which Mr. Darwin never ought to have overlooked as a simian prototype of a later human vice. Other monkeys at the garden have gone through the motions of smoking, but Miss Jenny was the first that ever smoked a pipe full of real tobacco. She did it too with unction and enjoyment, and once she snatched a half-smoked cigar from the mouth of a visitor and coolly finished it. Sometimes she would take a bottle of ale, and, holding it with her hind foot in a position infi- nitely comic, drink down long draughts in the intervals between her puffs. The chief of the singular birds at the " Zoo " is kept in a secluded cage, and can be seen only through the good offices of his keeper and a fee. His Latin name, particu- larly if it described half his accomplishments, would be so long that we pass it by and choose the more prosaic title of hornbill. It is a bird with a body much like that of the eagle, black and white in color. Its head is fitted with an enormous bill as large as the human hand, sharp-pointed and crowned with a horny plate as large as a butter dish. Mr. Hornbill's keeper takes his stand ten feet away and tosses grapes at the bird so rapidly that the human eye can hardly follow them through the air. But the eye of l6 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. the hornbill is quicker, and he catches them every one in his bill, now depressing it, now raising it in air, and again turning it sideways according to the angle at which the grape is delivered to him ; and when half a dozen grapes are shot at him in succession as rapidly as the keeper can do it, the bird usually misses but one. If a grape were only a base-ball, the hornbill could give points to the best of our professional first basemen. The hornbill and toucan (which also has a huge bill, sometimes ten inches long) have a funny way of feeding from the ground. They pick up the food in the extremities of their bills ; then, with a toss of the head, open the mouth, and the food describes the arc of a circle, falling into the gullet with absolute cer- tainty. Some years ago under the hornbill's perch was found what looked like a fig enclosing a mass of slightly digested grapes and other food. It was supposed for a time that the bird had disgorged his own stomach. The fig-like mass was passed over to the dissector of the Zoological Society, and Mr. Hornbill was watched care- fully for any ill effects. Presently the bird, which mean- time had kept as well as usual, threw up its " stomach " again, and ere long the dissector reported that what seemed a stomach was only an inner lining formed by a thick secretion, the disgorging of which was a natural function of the bird. Soon after it was found that other birds in the " Zoo" had the same curious habit. It seems that the hornbill, of which there are altogether some six species living in Africa, Hindostan, and Burmah, have a CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. 1/ singular way of nesting, of which the habit above described is an incident. The male takes the female to a hollow tree. There the mother-bird builds a nest of her own feathers and lays her eggs. Then the male builds up the hole with clay, and keeps his mate a close prisoner until the eggs are hatched. In the clay is left a small hole, through which the female protrudes her bill, and the male bird keeps her well provided with dainties, gathering them in his stomach and then disgorging them in the pouch mentioned above. If the female breaks down the clayey barrier the male instantly kills her. During the period of incubation the labors of the male make him so weak and sickly that he often yields to any sudden change of weather, and dies. But the female waxes fat as a Thanks- giving turkey on her lord's devotion, and the natives often seek her out when on her nest and kill her as a great delicacy. Other rare birds have shown their strange habits in the captivity of the " Zoo." A bird called the " greater vasa parrakeet " entered the gardens as an adult bird on the 30th of June, 1830, and has never touched water since. It is still in the best of health, and its case, and that of other birds at the gardens, prove conclusively that certain kinds of feathered creatures never need water to sustain life. A strange biped from Australia, the satin-bower bird, builds in the love-making season a platform and long gallery of twigs, adorned with shells, feathers, and brilliant strings. On their balcony the pair go through all kinds of queer 1 8 BV-IVAVS OF NATURE AND LIFE. posturings and enact a kind of a bird love-scene of the Romeo and Juliet type. The darter, a bird from Florida, shaped like a heron, with a bill sharp as a needle, goes fishing in unique fashion. Let a small living fish be tossed in the tank, and the darter dives and swims for it under -water. The fish goes like an arrow, but the darter like an electric spark. The bird overtakes the fish, stabs it with his sharp bill, slightly opened so as to hold the prey by a series of saw-like projections on the inner edges. Then the bird comes to the surface, tosses its prey into the air, catches it descending, and swallows it in a trice. The next-door neighbor of the darter is a penguin that rivals the Florida bird in the speed with which it swims under water, never using its webbed feet, but, instead, propelling itself with the paddles placed where the wings belong on an ordinary bird. All these are but a small fraction of the singular facts, many of them of scientific interest, disclosed by the bird life of the " Zoo." The reptile-house, with its magnificent collection of snakes, one a python twenty-three feet long, has also its fund of incident shadowed by a single tragedy. Some years ago the keeper, when in liquor, took the cobra from its cage. The reptile bit him, and, spite of quick anti- dotes, he died in twenty minutes. In 1850 a boa-con- strictor swallowed his blanket, and after holding it thirty- three days disgorged it. The careful scrutiny of the ways of the python and other snakes of the constrictor species sheds important scientific light on their habits of CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. I9 preying. They invariably throw themselves from the tail, grasping with it a tree or rock. Having once seized the prey with their jaws, and thus secured what we may call a new fulcrum from the other end of the body, they proceed to constrict and kill. The alleged habit of saliva- ting their prey is all moonshine. The story doubtless arose from the habit which the constrictors have of feel- ing the dead prey carefully with the nose so as to find the head and begin swallowing. In the paroxysms of hunger the constrictors are fierce and aggressive. If two of them at such a period happen to grasp the same rabbit or duck with which they are fed, the larger and stronger snake not only swallows the prey but also the smaller serpent, which is either unwilling or unable to let go its hold. This has the savor of fiction, but I am satisfied that the keeper who told it was not drawing the long bow. In fact, the Zoological Society has lost one or two valuable serpents in this way, and the keepers have to be careful in feeding the con- strictors to avoid accidents of the sort. If both creatures seize the prey at once, the keeper instantly takes it away. The jaws of the constrictors are curiously formed, and ap- parently fall apart at the lower extremities when the rep- tile is gorging, a muscular contraction bringing the ex- tremities back to place when the prey is swallowed. Among the more striking curiosities of the reptile-house, is a snake-eating serpent from India, for which the keeper has on hand a constant supply of young snakes caught in England. 20 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. The experience of the keepers at the " Zoo " has shown that there is a good deal of fallacy in the common belief that the good-will of animals is won by feeding them. Some years ago a new keeper was put in charge of one of the buildings containing large animals. The man was a sober and steady fellow, watchful of his duties, and giving careful attention to the feed and cleanliness of the brutes. But he utterly failed to conciliate them, and their aver- sion and anger when he entered their cages became the talk and wonder of the other keepers. Mr. Bartlett looked into the matter, as it is a cardinal point in the treatment of the brutes that they should be kept good- tempered and contented. The superintendent at last found out the secret. The keeper never talked to the animals, and as he could not learn to utter the expressive and kindly sounds which the animals love to hear, even though they do not understand the words, the man had at last to be dismissed. Mr. Bartlett never feeds the creatures, except now and then with a bit of biscuit or some other trifle. But he has the gift of kindly talk, and in consequence they many of them know him and come to his call as quickly as to the voice of their keepers. But no care or training prevents the animals from getting now and then into wicked moods. A female hippopota- mus, a few years ago, after bringing forth three young, became so savage that it was feared she would tear her building into splinters. No keeper dared to enter her house, and the food and water supplied her through a CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. 21 hole broken in the roof she refused to touch for days. The great African elephant " Jumbo," now of inter- national fame, eleven feet high, weighing some ten thousand pounds, and probably the largest beast in the world, used to be tractable and pleasant when out- side his house and carrying his load of children along the broad walk of the gardens; but in his enclosure he was often wicked and dangerous. The frequent repeti- tion of these angry moods was the secret reason that induced the sale of the huge beast to Mr. Barnum. During a part of the year Jumbo had already shown signs of the approach of the period of elephant puberty, which is revealed by the secretion of a viscous fluid on a gland of the. neck. This is a peculiarly dan- gerous crisis in the life of the elephant species. The ani- mal for several months in the year becomes often almost mad. In India, at such a juncture, the keepers beat the poor brute pitilessly, or, confining him in large holes, starve him until the passion is subdued. Now and then one of these mad leviathans escapes and for weeks runs a deadly muck against man and beast. They tell at the " Zoo " a story of one of these " rogue " elephants — as they are locally dubbed in India — which in that country, some years ago, escaped from its herd. For weeks it kept a region as large as a British county in terror. Lurking at the edge of a jungle during the day it would rush out in the dusk upon some adjacent village, wrecking the flimsy habitations of the natives, slaughtering ruth- 22 BV-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. lessly men, women, and children, and driving the fugitives in panic to the bush. Many and inventive were the snares contrived for the outlawed beast, but it showed the cun- ning which sometimes marks human insanity in eluding them all. After it had slain scores of people, this wild fellow one day, his period of madness having expired, re- turned quietly and took his old place in a tame herd. The marks of some two hundred bullet-wounds, none of which had been serious, were counted on his body. In selling Jumbo to Mr. Barnum, the theory of the directors of the " Zoo " was that fellowship with a large herd of elephants, together with the active travel of a circus, would avert the threatened humor ; an hypothesis which the sequel has shown to be well founded. The cost of the creatures in the " Zoo " varies in each species almost as much as the prices of horses, being fixed by the size, health, and perfection of each specimen. The hippopotamus heads the list, a good specimen well grown being worth from $8,000 to $10,000; a well-shaped ele- phant, full grown, can be bought for $2,000; a rhinoceros for about $3,000; a large python for $1,000; a tiger or lion for about $400 or $500 ; a bear from $250 to $500 ; a zebra for $1,500, and a good specimen of a giraffe for about the same sum. The chimpanzee leads the monkey tribe in value, costing about $250 — the orang-outang and gorilla by their scarcity being ruled out of the list. On their triangular ground of seventeen acres the Zoological Society have now about four thousand specimens of the CURIOSITIES OF ZOOLOGY. 23 various creatures, whose tastes are carefully catered to in the spacious enclosures, the neat and clean houses, and the weedy pools where their captivity is passed. Each year there are about 6cx),ooo visitors to the gardens, or almost exactly the number that visit the British Miuseum, al- though admission to the latter is free, while the " Zoo " charges a shilling on all days but Mondays, when the price is sixpence. The best collection of living animals in the world can be seen at the "Zoo," therefore, for twelve cents. The yearly receipts of the Zoological Society from all sources are about $125,000,. and the expenses about the same, but the accumulated value of its property during its fifty-seven years of existence is incalculable. It has gath- ered, along with its living curiosities, a select and costly zoological library. With no design of money-making, never declaring dividends, and finding its richest reward in the delight and instruction of the public, the society has reached a basis of prosperity as enduring as it is well deserved. A BRITISH ELECTION-DAY. ON the night of the third of March, eighteen hun- dred and eighty-two, there closed in the English city of Northampton an era of public ferment and uproar more violent than the oldest resident of the borough could recall in all its political annals. A week before, the gov- ernment had issued its writ, calling for the election of a " fit and proper person " to represent the city in place of the famous radical, Bradlaugh, expelled from Parliament. That persistent agitator, who had already been " shuttle- cocked," as the phrase went, between Northampton and the British Commons several times, presented himself once more as a candidate. After hanging long on the skirts of the Commons, refusing to take the oath recog- nizing a God, he had brought the controversy to a focus by boldly advancing to the bar of the House, and, Bible in hand, administering the oath to himself. This fright- ful breach of venerable tradition, and the consequent ex- pulsion from the Commons, sent him back once more for vindication to his Northampton electors, and Edward Corbett, a local land-owner, had come forward to contest the seat in the anti-Bradlaugh interest. Words are faint and feeble to portray the asperity of that conflict. Ram- pant Conservatism on the one side was pitted against A BRITISH ELECTION.DA Y. 2$ furious Radicalism on the other. Personal hatreds, re- ligious enthusiasm, the fury of sects, the jealousy of class, —every passion, good or bad, that excites the voter, was appealed to, and gave sting to a canvass which ended decisively in sending Bradlaugh back panoplied for a fresh bout with the Commons. Northampton, the chosen battle-ground of Bradlaugh — who, however, does not live in the borough, — is a hot-bed of British Radicalism. It is a city of about fifty-three thousand inhabitants spread over a large area of rising ground sixty-seven miles northwest of London. It may be described more figuratively as the Lynn of England. Saint Crispin is its tutelary genius. It bristles with the smoking chimneys of shoe factories, and I have heard it estimated that at least half its population is engaged in leather industries alone. A large proportion of its area is covered with the lowly dwellings of factory-men. Women loaded down with shoes which they are taking home to finish by hand are met along every block, and a single factory gives work to more than a thousand hands. Of course, this city of shoemakers has been fertile ground for trades-unions, leagues, and all sorts of labor combina- tions ; and a plentiful crop of " isms " has sprung«up with them. The Bible brushes in constant warfare with social- ism or Tom Paine, and the faithful and faithless of North- ampton meet in perpetual encounter. The registered voters of the borough number 8,321, of whom all but a few hundred cast their ballots on that election-day. 26 B Y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. These figures give a significant hint as to the inclusive character of the British qualification for the suffrage. In an English borough election every voter of legal age must have been a resident for at least a year, must have paid his taxes, and must either be owner or tenant of a sepa- rate dwelling, or the occupier of lodgings worth ten pounds sterling a year unfurnished. It will be seen that Northampton, though it is under these restrictions, turns out almost as many voters as an American city of the same size. Entering the borough on the eve of the appeal to the polls it was easy to see that some momentous event was impending. Crowds lined the streets, and the open spaces of the city were filled with men earnest in gesture and prompt to back opinions by that supreme argument of Englishmen, a bet. Gangs of boys made the air reso- nant with yells, and frowzy women circulated among the crowd talking politics in a key as high as their own morals were low. The gin-shops were all doing a royal trade, and, in truth, the amount of drunkenness eclipsed any thing to be seen at an American election. The out- put of literature in the week's canvass was prodigious. Walls, sign-posts, and fences fairly bulged with calls to patriots of every stripe. Irishmen, Dissenters, Working- men, " Christians of every denomination," and especially that focal object of the hand-bill, the " moderate man," — who in that particular juncture figured as prominently as a chairman during a tie vote, — were all appealed to lustily A BRITISH ELECTION-DA Y. V by placard. The bills were graduated from a simple '* Bradlaugh" in letters five feet long down to a scrap of paper giving selections from those really outrageous utter- ances against religion and morals which have made of him a fair target. It was evident that the great majority of the literary effusions emanated from the anti-Bradlaugh camp. This, however, was to be attributed to the weak points in the record of the man, rather than to the sug- gestion made by a Conservative, that Bradlaugh's ad- herents could neither read nor write. The merit and temper of the poetry of that local crisis may be judged by the annexed extracts from two separate outbursts of the Northampton muses : " Stand firm ! my lads, against our common foe, We '11 let them know, we '11 let them know ! Their great Iconoclast we '11 soon lay low : From such we will be free. Our virtuous wives and daughters he '11 insult no more. Against our Church and Bible all in vain he '11 roar ; With Corbett at our head we '11 drive him from our door — From such we will be free. " Chorus— 'T is Edward Corbett shall our member be. We '11 show the Rads we can be free ; And down with all their hateful company — For Corbett shall our member be. O may the year that 's dawned on us with bright and sunny skies See England from her ashes once more like a Phoenix rise ! At home be peace, and o'er the sea her prestige gained again, And Gladstone and his Cabinet replaced by better men. 28 BY- WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. "Chorus — Then wake, ye sons of Albion, from apathy awake ! No longer let such councils guide — such policy forsake ; Assert once more your ancient might, rout dastards from their den. Throw off their trammels, show the world again you *re English- Whatever may be thought of the Northampton poets, there is no doubt that the local politicians were up to the subtleties of their trade. A few days before, Mr. Morley, a benefactor of the London workingmen and a Liberal, had written a letter opposing Bradlaugh's reelection. This was printed and placarded. Then the Bradlaugh men dug up an old letter of Morley favoring the election of Bradlaugh, and, leaving out the date, pasted it over the placard of their foes. A call for a Bradlaugh meeting at the hall of the Northampton Corn Exchange, on the eve before the elec- tion, gave the writer an opportunity to witness an English mass-meeting. The hall, one hundred and fifty feet long by sixty feet wide, was jammed with a seething crowd of Bradlaugh men, all standing, for in the body of the house there are no seats. On a platform at one side, flanked by a body of well-dressed supporters, the candidate harangued the surging mass of human beings in front of him. Bradlaugh is a powerful speaker, and on that night, when he dealt in declamation and epithet, rather than argument, he appeared at his best. He is a stout man, some five feet eight inches high, with a moon face, re- lieved by a high and massive forehead. His voice, which A BRITISH ELECTION-DA Y. 29 is his greatest gift, is clear, resonant, and penetrating ; he delivers his words fluently, and his whole appearance and rhetoric constantly suggest Mr. Beecher. As to the pop- ular element in the gathering, it was far more boisterous and demonstrative than our American mass-meetings. Every appeal of the orator for a show of hands brought up a vast upraising of soiled digits, followed by rousing cheers. The meeting, otherwise impressive, was marred by one discreditable episode. A well-dressed man who had held up his hand in opposition to the speaker was in- vited by Bradlaugh to come to the platform and be heard. Bradlaugh called for silence, which lasted only till the new-comer began his speech, which was drowned instantly amid a tempest of hoots and yells. After speaking a few words in dumb pantomime, the visitor took his seat, and then Bradlaugh had the effrontery to cite this case to the crowd as a praiseworthy bit of Radical toleration for free speech, and as a piece of liberality which his opponents never yet had conceded. It was, on the other hand, really a fair type of the treatment the Northampton Rad- icals give the Conservatives even at their own meetings. Not a single public Conservative gathering had been held that week but had been broken up by the rabble. If a Conservative, on the contrary, attended a meeting of Radicals and disclosed his political views, he was almost certain of rough treatment, and before he emerged his ordinary coat was pretty sure to be changed to one of the dress pattern bi-furcated at the top. 30 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. On election-day from early morning up to four o'clock in the afternoon, the voting was in progress at twenty-one polling places. The streets were thronged with partisans of both sides decked in the party colors — the Radicals wearing the so-called " Republican " cockade of mauve, green, and white, the Liberals red and white, the Con- servatives orange and blue. It was noteworthy that during the day scarcely a Liberal cockade appeared, and that the rival tints were really Radical and Conservative. This display of vivid hues, which, besides ribbons and cock- ades, appears in the decoration of hats, in the banners on some of the houses, and in the hangings of the many car- riages bringing the voters to the polls, lends a back- ground of brilliancy to an English election in marked contrast with an American voting day. Order was guaranteed by four hundred soldiers from neighboring cities — some of them much the worse for a night's royster- ing — and a body of several hundred imported policemen and constables. But the crowd, as a rule, though boisterous, was good-tempered, and was immensely tickled by the spectacle of a prominent Radical and worker for Bradlaugh, who wore unconsciously all day on his back a Conservative cockade which an opponent had slyly pinned there. Considering the amount of drunkenness, the good behavior of the lower classes was remarkable, and could hardly have been equalled by an American rabble under like conditions. The riotous balloting of the old Eatanswill order has A BRITISH ELECTION-DAY. 3I passed out of British politics forever. The nominations at the hustings, the speeches of the candidates to an accompaniment of rotten eggs, brickbats, and opposition brass bands, the balloting which could continue for days provided only a ballot was polled every legal hour, sur- vive now only in the literature of the past. The nomina- tion nowadays is a tame affair, only the candidate and three friends besides the legal officers being allowed to be present. The actual voting is even more prosaic. Each legal voter, after securing registration, is given a registra- tion number. This, when he goes to vote, he tells to one of the poll-clerks, or if he forgets his number he gives his name, and his number is ascertained from the poll-books. Then he receives a ballot bearing, besides the names of the candidates, the voter's registered number, which is also entered on the stub from which the ballot is torn, like a bank check. The ballot is stamped on the back with a general mark to certify its genuineness, the voter steps aside to a screen, marks with a pencil or pen a cross opposite the name of his candidate, goes back to the box, shows the back of the ballot with the affixed stamp to the clerk, and drops the paper in the box. Through the good offices of an acquaintance I got admission to one of the Northampton polling halls. Nothing could be more com- monplace than the rough set of board tables, the stout wooden ballot-box mounted in a chair, and the mechanical routine of voting. But it is well worth considering whether this English system, with its checks on fraud, has not feat- 32 BY-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. ures worth adopting in our own country. While it neces- sarily discloses some votes to the polling officers who chance to know an elector's registered number, the obsta- cles to " split " tickets, the certainty of detecting any " stuffing " of boxes, and the heavy penalties attached to any betrayal of trust on the part of the poll officers, make the scheme well-nigh perfect as an electoral device. At four o'clock in the afternoon the ballot-boxes were sealed up and taken under police escort to the City Hall, where the count began. As the time drew on for a declara- tion of the vote the excitement deepened. Among the Conservatives gathered at " The George " hotel the first reports, telling of several hundred majority for Corbett, created general good-humor and enthusiasm. Then came a dismal rumor of two hundred majority for Bradlaugh, and as this sank to the actual figures and was partly con- firmed, cheerfulness gave way to universal gloom. It was curious to see how the mood, the sentiments, even the phrases of the people present reproduced what one hears in the camp of the defeated on an American election night. Fears about the prosperity of the community, threats never to cast another vote, charges of treachery and broken pledges, all attested that three thousand miles of blue water make small difference with human nature under political reverses. Meanwhile, outside, the cries of the victors began to be heard. Ten thousand men, women, and children gathered around the City Hall, waiting the official return. Finally appeared the Mayor with a sheet of paper A BRITISH ELECTION-DA Y. 33 in his hand. A crier, resplendent in red and gold uniform, rang a bell, the vote was read with its majority of one hundred and eight for Bradlaugh, the crowd shouted, and the successful candidate offered his thanks and congratu- lations. He had indeed won a most signal and unlooked- for victory over a powerful combination of elements. The Irish vote of Northampton went against him bodily for his record on the Coercion Act ; his rank atheism and loose social notions had alienated the Dissenters ; moderate Liberals repudiated him as an annoyance to Mr. Gladstone ; and the Conservatives polled their last man against him. He conquered by the sheer strength of his personal fol- lowing of Radicals, slightly reinforced by a few ultra Lib- erals, by a small body of voters who believe he has been badly treated, and by the still smaller body of erratic men to be found in every community who are fond of political sensations and who will vote for any thing " just to see the fur fly." ENGLAND'S GUN FOUNDRY. A LITTLE city a few miles down the Thames from London holds in the military and naval affairs of England a position akin to that of the great London itself in the larger sphere of British trade. No foreign foe can threaten England's peace, no warlike plan be devised, no scheme of colonial defence be meditated, but that they are quickly betrayed in the huge gun factories and barracks of Woolwich. The city and its arsenal are a kind of martial thermometer, with a gun-mould for a tube, in which the rise and fall of molten metal registers the foreign policy of that empire whose drum-beat traditionally circles the world. The Government gun-works in Woolwich, which give a national and even an international fame to the city, cover an area of about a hundred acres, fronting the Thames. In size, in amount of war material produced, and in the perfection of the plant, they are rivalled by no existing works of the kind except those of Herr Krupp, at Essen, in Germany. In time of peace the Woolwich gun factories give work to about five thousand men, who labor only for a few hours a day. But at the signal of war every depart- ment is fully manned, the number of workmen rises to fifteen or twenty thousand, all the machinery is set 34 ENGLAND'S GUN FOUNDRY. 35 in motion night and day, visitors are rigidly excluded, and the whole martial city bustles with new life and vigor. Even in peace, however, access to the works by visitors not British subjects is exceedingly difficult. The shilling or half-crown so potent elsewhere in England avails little at the Woolwich Arsenal. The American visitor who wants to see the factories has to make application to his Minister at London, who, in turn, must apply to a member of the British Cabinet, and tedious delays and endless snarls of red-tape obstruct the entry of a foreigner if he cannot, with the good fortune of the writer, secure the good-will of one of the mana- gers of the works, and go in by the back door. British subjects can visit the works on a stated day each week, but many of the factories are closed to them, and the guide to whom they are entrusted seems chosen with a special view either to reticence or stupidity. One of the first and most interesting of the structures seen by the visitor, on the left, immediately after entering the arsenal grounds, is the projectile house. Here' are stored for exhibition specimens of most of the shot and shell used for field and naval ordnance. They include not merely the missiles now in use, but what may be called an historic series, beginning with the stone balls of medi- aeval times, and coming down to the perfected Palliser of the present day. The eye wanders amazed amid the medley of chain-shot, percussion shells, grape, canister, and single bullets of numberless shapes and sizes. The $6 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. monarch of them all is the conical Palliser shot used for the hundred-ton guns on the British iron-clads. The shot is about four and a half feet high, as it stands upright on its blunt base. It is twenty inches in diameter at the place where the conical slope begins, and it weighs nine- teen hundred and twenty pounds. To make one of these huge missiles is alone a task of vast labor, using up days of work by hand in the various processes of shaping, polishing, and chilling the point. This method of chill- ing, now applied to all the large projectiles of the British Navy, is curious and instructive. The point of the cone is heated, then masses of cold iron are set against it. The effect of the contact, for some cause yet, I believe, unknown to science, is to extract the sulphur from the metal, leaving its fibre solid, hard, and tough. When fractured the chilled part of the big bullet shows a clear, bright, and firm rearrangement of the particles — a kind of recrystallization of them — in vivid contrast with the duller hue and rougher particles of the unchilled iron in the body of the missile. In the projectile house is pre- served also every device in the shape of bullets or cannon- balls which has been suggested even to the most eccen- tric fancy of the British inventor. Among these whimsi- cal missiles is one in the shape of a ball covered with spikes, and another is made by stringing grape-shot on a rope, the inventor asserting stoutly that his cord and bul- lets combined would cut in twain whole battalions and revolutionize warfare. His invention, like many others, ENGLAND'S GUN FOUNDRY. yj has been consigned to the limbo of mere curiosities. The many inventions for exploding the various shells with precision and at an exact instant of time scarcely attract notice. But on this point, at first sight so unimportant, the whole efficiency of the shell depends. On it there has been spent more of care and thought than on any other secondary branch of British gunnery, until now the ex- plosion of the shell is timed down to the smallest fraction of a second after leaving the gun. In a structure next to the Museum of Projectiles bullets are made, and some old-fashioned notions of bullet-making roughly dispelled by modern machinery. A large cylinder filled with two or three tons of molten lead is fitted with a plunger, reminding one of a huge perpendicular syringe. In the top are two semicircular pipes, through which the molten metal is forced, partly cooling on its way. The two half-circular strips of lead suddenly emerge at a point of junction of the pipes in contact with each other. Just here comes one of the most wonderful mechanical pro- cesses of the whole arsenal. Instead of keeping on as two separate pieces, the straight edges of the lead strips cohere firmly at the line of contact. It is explained, some- what vaguely, that the pipes are made absolutely true, and that the particles of lead are brought to so close contact that they cohere under the same law which holds together the particles of any ordinary mass of cold metal. What- ever the cause, it is certain that the semicircular strips finally emerge in one solid round bar of gleaming lead. 38 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. The keenest eye cannot detect the central line where the strips were united, and the lead itself, under the hard pressure, is made more heavy and compact. Then an in- tricate machine, almost human in intelligence, seizes one end of the long coil, cuts it to small sections, and, quick as lightning, punches each piece into the shape of a bullet, round or conical, as may be needed. The bullets are in- spected, counted, and packed away by the million for future wars. But the manufacture of the great guns for naval war- fare forms the really impressive feature of Woolwich Arsenal. Insular England, dependent on her navy, has, for the last twenty years, almost concentrated the mechani- cal talent of her Woolwich factories on this branch of her armament. How to make guns which shall perforate the iron-clads of other nations, how to make iron walls which the guns of other nations cannot perforate, is the twofold problem which constantly spurs her forward. A single sight inside the Woolwich Arsenal grounds shows how steadily the fight goes on between the iron-clad and the projectile. One sees hundreds of great guns in line side by side, made a few years ago, which have never been fired since they were tested, and are as new and fresh as when first turned out from the factory. Yet all these guns are to be broken up and recast into improved ordnance. Within a few years — almost months — they have become obsolete, and all the vast labor and expense they repre- sent goes for nothing save the experience gained. To the ENGLAND'S GUN FOUNDRY. 39 cost as well as the progress of wars these long lines of cannon, condemned without trial, bear mute but impres- sive testimony. For the most part they are recast into the heavier guns, weighing from forty to one hundred tons, which equip the modern Devastations and Inflexibles of England's navy. Two thirds of all the structures of the Woolwich Arse- nal appear to be given up to the manufacture of these colossal cannon. At the first stage of their construction there is made a long core of cast steel. Then strips of wrought steel as long and large as the beams of a house are wrapped around the breech end. The strips are laid on hot, one after another, in coils, and, contracting as they cool, form a breech of prodigious strength. Next the gun is placed on a lathe, turned smooth, the centre bored out and the inside polished until one can see his face reflected from its curves. The rifling is an operation needing pecul- iar delicacy and skill. It is done with a long stiff rod, upon the end of which is fixed a cutting tool of the hard- est steel, grooving as it must the steel core of the gun. So slowly does the massive cylinder revolve that, even at the breech where it has largest diameter, it scarcely seems to move at all. The rifling rod as well as the rate of revo- lution is regulated by a beautiful piece of mechanism, covered with numbered arcs and figures, and described as a marvel of mathematical skill applied to a mechanical process. When the huge hundred-ton creature is done, it is a wonder indeed. Its weight is twice that of a large 40 B V. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. railroad locomotive ; it is forty feet long from breech to muzzle, and laid across Broadway it would reach just about from curb to curb ; it is seven feet in diameter at the breech and two feet eight inches from inner bore to outer surface. With an efficient range of several miles, it carries a conical shot, twenty inches through, weighing almost a ton, and needing several hundred pounds of powder to project it. A shot of this size now penetrates the thickest naval armor plating, and cuts through twenty inches of solid iron backed with oak as cleanly as a bullet through cheese. It has, after much experiment, been found that the most effective rifling for these cannon is a groove starting as a straight line at the breech. Half way to the muzzle the groove begins to turn, and at the muzzle the curve is greatest, sending the ball out with a kind of circular " snap," which — so say the engineers — gives the greatest range and precision to the projectile. The massive machinery, which handles these big pieces of ordnance as readily as a child's toy, excites scarcely more wonder by its strength than by its unerring accuracy. It includes a horizontal revolving bed, used for cutting the bed-plates for the guns, and probably not less than forty feet square ; a crane which lifts easily two hundred tons, and can readily swing in air six American locomotives ; and the famous trip-hammer, weighing forty tons, and said to be the largest in the world, yet which can be so gently adjusted as to force a watch-crystal into its place without breaking it. How excellent are both the material and ENGLAND'S GUN FOUNDRY. 4I workmanship turned out by these splendid machines at Woolwich is proved by accident as well as by design. In a small building is shown an eighty-ton gun which was tested intentionally until it burst. By its side lies the big gun of the " Thunderer," iron-clad, which was burst by ac- cidental double loading a few years ago, with the deadly result which many readers will recall. In both these great pieces the fractures are almost perfectly symmet- rical, forming cubes forward of the breech, and proving alike how flawless was the material and how evenly distributed was the strength of the gun. In the centre of the works rises a chimney some two hundred feet high, the tallest in the arsenal grounds, and said to be one of the loftiest in England. When this or any of the other chimneys are to be mended, the ser- vices of a bold chimney climber connected with the works are called for. With a kite he throws a string over the top, then pulls down the kite with a second cord after the first is properly adjusted. The string draws up a stronger string, then a rope, then a corded ladder by which the chimney is climbed. A few years since the man had thus scaled the top of the tallest chimney, built a wooden scaffolding for repairing it, and then come down for dinner, when the woodwork took fire from a flying spark ; and it is related, as a specimen of the fellow's hardened recklessness, that after the fire burned out he ascended once again on the blackened and half-burned rope-ladder, not even waiting to have it tested. A long list of similar 42 BY.fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFK incidents fill out the annals of Woolwich, to which could be added details of institutions at the arsenal which the limitations of this chapter must exclude — the torpedo factory, where secrets are so carefully guarded that not even a British general can get admitted, and the workmen are chosen specially for their high character and secretive- ness ; the great turf-covered magazines, where men, for fear of explosion, must wear list shoes and discard every thing metallic from their clothing ; and the vast system of blast furnaces, placed underground, where the workmen who draw out the molten metal above must wear thick, wooden-soled shoes to protect their feet from the heated iron floor. Yet, when all the martial wonders of Woolwich, with their triumphs of gigantic mechanism, have been seen, the visitor leaves it with the feeling that, after all, the humblest factory in England stands for a larger idea in human progress than the great gun-shop, where science brings her supreme gifts only to aid man to kill his fellow. LONDON IN A FOG. THE visitor who sojourned in London during the months of February and March of 1882 had rare occasions to study that phenomenon so curious to the American eye, a London fog. The oldest residents of the city agreed that the winter then closing had been attended by the most dense and depressing mists that had ever visited the British metropolis. The affliction, more- over, had been deepened by two features of dismal portent ; for several of the fogs had been attended by frightful railroad accidents, and the frequency and persist- ency of the mists during the whole winter went far to con- firm the prevalent belief that they grow worse in London year by year. Slowly but steadily these noxious fogs of the great city are reaching the bad eminence of an epidemic disease ; and though some optimists aver that their smoky vapors purify the slums, the theory stands for little against a recorded increase of the local death rate during fog time from twenty-two to more than thirty-five for each thousand of population. Londoners with weak throats and lungs nowadays, with all their local preju- dice, concede the fatal quality of their mists ; they mi- grate by thousands every winter to the gentler climes of Pau, Nice, or Italy ; and business men afflicted merely 43 44 BV-IVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. with hard colds break a^vay, when they can, from the thrall of trade, to Paris, or the sunnier regions of rural England. How these terrible fogs shall be avoided, how mitigated, how endured, are questions as staple in London common talk as the doings of Parliament, the Irish Question, or the newest sensation in society or at the theatres. The London fog has been given many a picturesque place in modern British literature ; but not even the graphic prose of Dickens has paid it more vivid tribute than the swift verses of Henry Luttrel : " First at the dawn of lingering day, It rises with an ashen gray ; Then deepening with a sordid stain Of yellow, like a lion's mane, Vapor importunate and dense. It wars at once with every sense. The ears escape not ; all around Returns a dull, unwonted sound. Loath to stand still, afraid to stir. The chilled and puzzled passenger. Oft blundering from the pavement, faik To feel his way along the rails ; Or, at the crossings, in the roll Of every carriage dreads the pole. Scarce an eclipse with pall so dun Blots from the face of heaven the sun. But soon a thicker, darker cloak Wrapping the town, behold, in smoke. Which steam-compelling trade disgorges From all her furnaces and forges In pitchy clouds too dense to rise. Descends rejected from the skies ; Till struggling day, extinguished quite, At noon gives place to candle-light. LONDON IN A FOG. 45- Oh, Chemistry, attractive maid. Descend in pity to our aid ; Come with thy all-pervading gases. Thy crucibles, retorts, and glasses. Thy fearful energies and wonders. Thy dazzling lights and mimic thunders : Let Carbon in thy train be seen. Dark Azote and fair Oxygen, And Wollaston and Davy guide The car that bears them at thy side ; If any power can, anyhow. Abate these nuisances 't is thou ; And see, to aid thee in the blow. The bill of Michael Angelo. Oh ! join (success a thing of course is) Thy heavenly to his mortal forces ; Make all the chimneys chew the cud. Like hungry cows, as chimneys should. And, since 't is only smoke we draw Within our lungs at common law. Into their thirsty tubes be sent Fresh air, by Act of Parliament." Science has at last come to certain fixed conclusions as to the nature and origin of these Cimmerian mists. As is well known, bituminous coal is burned almost universally in London grates. More than a million chimneys pour from their sooty throats the unconsumed elements which we call smoke. It hangs around the house-tops, lurks through the streets, begrimes the out-door and in-door work of immortal artist or architect, and makes the clear- est of London days only a shade brighter than our In- dian summers at home. He is a fortunate sight-seer who from the top of St. Paul's has ever, even on a sunny day of June, scanned a horizon more than a mile away. This 46 B y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. all-pervading smoke rather than the watery atom is, as science avers, the source of the terrible London fogs. The mist left to itself would dissipate in the sun or be forced away by the winds. But the smoke charged with an oily ingredient derived from the bitumen of the coal has a peculiar affinity for the moisture. It surrounds each tiny spheroid of water with a film of oil, and, as we may say, greases the skin of the mist, making it proof against the ordinary action of the air, wind, or sun. The result is a strange compound of soot, oil, and mist combined in minute particles, hanging heavily in the atmosphere, and while it lasts making the life of the Londoner a burden and a sorrow. Incidental causes add to the intensity of the phenomenon. Sometimes a change of wind drives back the slow-drifting fog in an accumulated mass. Reaching the narrow and sinuous streets of the city it sinks by its own weight and gorges the thoroughfares, spite of the breezes which, in places more open, would bear it away. To study by night a London fog in its deepest pitch one must during its prevalence visit the neighborhood of the parks of the city where large bodies of water add their exhalation to the ordinary mist. Half a mile from Regent's or Hyde Park it may be that the fog is com- paratively thin. The eye can perhaps penetrate it for fifty feet, and one can descry moving objects and avoid them. But the moment one steps into the denser fog area the ghastly change begins. The foot-passenger first LONDON IN A FOG. 47 notices that, as he moves on, objects seem to fade without new ones coming into view. Then the city lamps, though perhaps only a hundred feet apart, die out one by one. There is no real black darkness, but, if I may use the paradox, a darkness of impenetrable light, a darkness made visible. One seems to be immersed in a luminous cloud so solid that it can be handled, cut, and shaped. The fog seems also to deaden all sounds. A human figure —man, woman, orboy— suddenly materializes on the pave- ment a few feet away. It glides by noiselessly like a phantom, and is gone. You feel like a human apparition among fellow-ghosts. Every thing puts on the same un- earthly aspect. The gas-jets become little spurts of blue flame hanging in the air and barely perceptible thirty feet away. The solid pavement is felt below the feet, but is unseen. The hand held close to the face is descried, but, moved to arm's length, the digits become spectral, then dissolve. The stillness of the streets, the general hush of sounds of traffic, and a peculiar sense of isolation and helplessness keep up the illusion that one has for the moment passed from the world of mortals into a region of disembodied spirits. Apart from its supernatural aspect a dense London iog brings out some queer phases of human life. The street boys hold high revel during the mists. Buying for small sums long pieces of hemp, stiffened with tar, they light the ends, and a party of them earn a good stock of sixpences by escorting lost wayfarers home. At the sta- 48 BY-WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. tions of the underground railroads, and at centres of cab traffic, gather dense crowds unable to get their bear- ings and utterly helpless without aid. The cabmen, who in ordinary times know all the ins and outs of London streets, are as helpless as the rest. If they take passen- gers at all, it is for short trips and big prices, and even then they venture only at a walk, leading their horses by the bridles. On the occasion of one of these fogs I re- member almost tumbling over a prostrate horse which had fallen across the foot-pavement on which his careless master had led him. As a rule, passengers caught in the deeper mists leave cabs and omnibuses, preferring foot travel as equally fast and as a safer style of locomotion. The absolute helplessness of almost everybody, the blind leading the blind, the lost seeking their bearings from the lost, and the universal confusion and chaos fill in the details of a curious picture out-of-doors. In-doors there are scenes well-nigh as grotesque. The smoky mist has a singular penetrating quality, and only needs a key- hole to get in. At the hazy theatres the actors all coun- terfeit in appearance the ghost in Hamlet ; at large in-door places, like the reading-room of the British Museum, half the interior is entirely obscured, and, even in the smaller rooms of dwellings, objects appear dim and phantom-like. The fog is usually accompanied by a chill in the air that cuts to the marrow, and the smoke breathed in by sleepers is thrown off from the lungs in the morning as a black secretion of phlegm. Another LONDON IN A FOG. 49 quality of the London smoke-fog is disclosed by the singular fact that the electric light makes less impression on it than a gas-flame of the same candle-power. During a London fog some months ago, which several residents said was the densest they had ever known, the writer was at some pains to test the thickness of the mist on Baker Street, a thoroughfare, from curb to curb, about as wide as Broadway, and opening on Regent's Park. From the middle of the roadway the bright lights of the shop windows were quite imperceptible. Standing under a gas-lamp one could barely see a foot passenger fifteen feet away or a passing cab in the middle of the street. At ten feet distant the gas-jet became com- pletely isolated from its surroundings. The lamp with the supporting iron post disappeared, and the flame, changed to a sulphurous blue tongue of vapor, was pro- jected in the air and hung in space. Once outside the light of the street lamps the range of vision became much more circumscribed. Large vehicles passed ten feet away unseen and scarcely heard. Passers-by could be discerned at a distance of perhaps six feet, and then only the upper parts of their bodies could be made out, the legs and feet being hidden by a still denser stratum of fog which seemed to wrap the pavement. All distinction of color was gone, and even opposite a street lamp dark buildings, as well as those of light hue, took on the universal dull tint of the smoky mist. This is the London fog in the night-time. By day 50 B V- WA YS OF NA TURK AND LIFE. it presents phenomena less weird, but more varied and curious. Sometimes, indeed very often, it becomes what is known locally as the "yellow fog." Dame Nature, for the time being, seems to have an acute attack of jaundice. The atmosphere, owing to some occult combination of sunlight and mist, changes to deep yellow. The tawny and depressing color suffuses all objects, just as if a thick yellow glass had been thrown across the face of the sun to produce on this earthly stage the solemn effects of certain tints on the boards of a theatre. Anon, perhaps, this yellow changes to a soft pink as the stratum of fog grows thin. The sun now reappears in the likeness of a stage moon, and its disk is as clearly defined as though seen through smoked glass. This pink fog throws out a peculiarly pleasing color, not unlike the glow of sunset, making the dull streets long vistas of rosy haze. The " high fog " of London is even more remarkable. The mist forms a thick, dark stratum with its lower surface — so say the men of science — about one hundred and fifty feet above the streets. Below the air is free from mist, but a darkness like that of dusk prevails. At noon during one of these high fogs, when standing in the open air, it is just possible to read the clear type of the London " Times." Sometimes, on the contrary, the mist hangs low in a dense but thin stratum. From the top of a high building, or from the elevated parts of London, the sun is seen undimmed in the clear blue sky. But the lower parts of the city LONDON IN A FOG. 5 1 are plunged in a dense sea of fog whence the chimney- pots, steeples, and rough tops of buildings project like wrecks from an ocean. Now and then a moving fog of this kind can be seen sweeping like a river six feet deep down the streets adjacent to the parks, while all above is blue ether and bright sunshine. The inconveniences of the worst fogs by night are repeated by day. Traffic is often stopped, the street and shop lights blaze at noon- tide, and out-door life is tedious and dismal to the last degree. Thieves and pickpockets have a rare chance to get in their work at these times, and a few months ago, during one of the fogs, a bold rascal smashed a jewel- ler's show window with a stone and escaped easily with rich booty. With the increased and increasing prevalence of the mists have come, of course, plenty of schemes for doing away with the noxious smoke which is conceded to be the chief cause of the evil. Prescriptions for building fires without vapor are as common in London as pan- aceas for sea-sickness. But Smoke Abatement Exhibi- tions, the skill of inventors, and the suggestions of science have all thus far ended where they have begun — in fog; and misty winters of disease and discontent remain as a dismal certainty of the future. Looking for- ward to the distant period when London's population, chimneys, and smoke-fogs shall be multiplied, the pro- phetic eye may see a germ of reality in the well-worn figure of Macaulay's barbarian looking down on a desolated city. WATERLOO TO-DAY. ABOUT twelve miles south of Brussels the traveller from London to the Rhine passes by rail through the little Belgian village of Braine V Alleud. It is a mere clump of lowly but neat dwellings, whence each morning come forth troops of wooden-shoed Belgian women to till the adjacent fields. On three sides of the village, north, south, and west, are gently rolling fields which stretch away far as one can see with the eye. But on the east the graceful curves of land rise to bolder proportions, and three miles distant they swell into two ridges with a long sweeping dip between. From crest to crest the ridges are, perhaps, three quarters of a mile apart, with a direction nearly north and south, and a length of three or four miles. But the westerly ridge at the southern end makes a sudden turn and bends backward in a blunt angle toward the village of Braine 1* Alleud. Upon these twin ridges and the intermediate space was fought the battle of Waterloo : the angular ridge marked the British posi- tion ; the straighter ridge was Napoleon's line of battle ; and at the apex of the angle, just within the converging British lines, is the farm-house of Hougomont. A homely outline may sometimes give a clearer idea of a battle than the most elaborate map with prolix and 52 WATERLOO TO-DAY. 53 confusing 'explanations. In the appended diagram the reader can see the battle of Waterloo reduced to its simplest terms. The lines of battle of the rival armies, as depicted, corresponded closely with the two ridges ; and between the lines lay the long, gently curving hollow, across which the columns of Napoleon so persistently and so vainly marched to the attack. \ EwGLisa LitJj: OT Battle French Linx ot Battle This is no place or time to rehearse the details of a fight over which the military critics have battled almost as fiercely as did the combatants themselves on that fatal Sunday in June, sixty-eight years ago. But I may ven- ture to say that two prominent features of the battle must impress even the most cursory visitor to the field. The first is the general simplicity of the plan of the contest, which, without tedious narrative, may be described as the attempt of an army posted on one long ridge to oust their adversaries posted on another. The second and more sig- nificant point is the immense strategic value of Hougo- mont in the fight. The bunch of buildings bearing that name are in some accounts of the battle called a chateau, 54 BY-IVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. in others a farm-house. They are in reality neither, but something between the two. They consist of a solid, plain structure of brick and stone, shaped like an elongated New England barn ; a smaller but similar building set at right angles to the longer one ; a little brick chapel placed in a triangular court, and once used for devotions by the owners; and a connected orchard, planted thickly with pear- and cherry-trees. The structures, with their court-yard and orchard, cover perhaps the area of one of our down-town city blocks in New York. The strategic strength of the position is largely due to the solid outer walls of the buildings, the massive gates lead- ing to the court, and most of all to the brick wall, a foot thick and six feet high, which, starting from the outer corner of the smaller building, runs around the orchard on two sides. On the day of the great battle the open rear of the orchard was covered by the British cannon posted on the rising ground farther back; the buildings were pierced thickly with loop-holes and filled with British veterans from the Spanish Peninsula, hardy warriors, whose backs the best of Napoleon's marshals never saw ; and a line of British soldiers rested on a long platform set half way up the orchard wall, and fired over it at the enemy, while another line, lying beneath, shot through loop-holes. Hougomont thus was changed in one night from a peaceful dwelling into a fortress, all the more power- ful because the most far-seeing foe could not forecast its strength. A thick wood, now cut away, stood between it WATERLOO TO-DAY. 55 and Napoleon's cannon ; and, indeed, the inferior artillery of those days could, in better position, hardly have made any quick impression on its walls. It projected like the prow of an iron clad from the point of the British angle, and for hours the surges of battle beat against it in vain. In later years Wellington called Hougomont the key of the fight, and it seems strange that the historic victory should have received its name from a little village, miles away from the field, where the Iron Duke sent off his first despatches, rather than from the stronghold that saved the day. The Hougomont of the present time has relapsed into one of the dullest of Belgian farm-houses. A few staid fowls pick a scant living in the court-yard, three or four gaunt cows are stabled in the smaller of the structures, and a squalid dairy-woman talks in broken English to the visitor, or proffers him for five cents a glass of fresh milk. But the buildings and walls, though mouldy and weather- beaten with time, are still well preserved. The outer walls, pock-marked with French bullets, the British loop- holes in the brickwork around the orchard, and the chapel with its interior burned out by the French shells, remain just as they were. There is shown, too, an old well which, tradition says, was filled up with dead bodies after the fight, and in the blackened chapel devout visitors are moved to awe by a large wooden crucifix whose scorched feet the flames just touched and then died away. The famous orchard, though filled with the buried dead $6 BY- WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. below, bears no outward trace of the conflict, unless it is the grave of a British soldier of rank, who, dying in Eng- land, was at his own wish brought back to be laid under the soil on which he and his comrades had fought so bravely. Following northward the rectangular ridge on which the British were posted, and travelling along its longer arm away from Hougomont, one sees in succession the places on which were enacted the most dramatic scenes of the battle. First comes a little embankment, so low that the guide must point it out before it is noticed. It is perhaps three hundred feet long and a foot and a half high, evidently the remains of the ridge of dirt thrown out from some old sunken road. Just before this ridge, and almost in the centre of the British line, the fortunes of the day were decided. Across the dip of land in front, and up the rising slope. Napoleon, descrying the approach- ing Prussians, sent his Imperial Guard. The little embank- ment was low, but it sufficed to hide the rows of the British Guards lying behind in the wheat, whose sudden rise, fatal volley, and quick charge closed the fight. A few steps in front and one comes to the spot where the Old Guard was annihilated, and where Cambronne, accord- ing to the popular legend, bequeathed to posterity his immortal phrase, " The Guard dies, but never surrenders." The upper end of this humble embankment marks also the spot where Wellington viewed his final stroke of victory, and closed a military career that was unbroken by defeat. WATERLOO TO-DAY, 57 Still farther up the ridge, and precisely in the centre of the British position, stands the most ambitious token of the battle. It is a conical mound, turfed over, and rising perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the crest of the ridge below. Hundreds of Belgian workmen were em- ployed for months in raising it, at a cost of almost two hundred thousand dollars. On its summit is reared a stone pedestal, surmounted by a colossal bronze lion, which, fronting the east defiantly, seems to symbolize the courage with which the British lion faced the foe on the opposite ridge. The lower part of the stone base, shat- tered and black, records the attempt which some Gallic vandals made, a few years ago, to blow up the memorial with gunpowder. Wellington persistently opposed the rearing of the mound, because the removal of the earth used for it partly changed the crest of the ridge and ob- scured some of the landmarks of the fray. But from the tourist's point of view the mound is an immense advan- tage. From its top every point in the long battle-field is clearly outlined. The height shortens the distance to Hougomont, and brings it and the other places of interest almost to one's feet. The long twin ridges, and the slope between, change as by magic into a level checker-board of grain fields, on which women and men toil in the sun. As is the case with land all over Belgium, the area of Waterloo is cultivated almost to the last square inch. In the budding spring season, the young wheat, rye, and barley are green, but a little later in the year they are $8 B y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. mottled by red patches of poppy — a fresh suggestion of the battle. Sentiment, standing on this height and feed- ing on heroic thoughts, finds her wings sadly clipped by the reflection that these Waterloo acres are worth eight hundred dollars each, and will lease, every one of them, for thirty dollars a year. Stretching northward from the monument, the ridge sinks almost to a plateau, while the dip in front, between the positions of the two armies, rises. It was on this plateau that the brunt of the battle was borne by the squares of British infantry. The heavy cavalry of Napo- leon swept, time and again, across the plain, passing between the human craters belching their volleys of mus- ketry. The remnant of sunken road a little behind the level area is pointed out as the place where some hun- dreds of French cuirassiers, charging beyond the squares, were precipitated, and lost their lives. So far as the bat- tle-field shows, this is the only germ for that colossal fic- tion of Victor Hugo — the story of the loss of a large part of the French army in a chasm. Just in front of the plateau, and half way between the two ridges, is the farm- house of La Haye Saints. During the fight it was bat- tled for fiercely, and, standing midway between the main lines of the two armies, it was taken and retaken many times. Now it is a pacific little structure of brick, partly walled in, and a model of rustic neatness. It faces a road running east and west, which divided the left centre from the left wing of the British forces. On the north side of WATERLOO TO-DAY. 59 the road, and along the British left wing, the fighting was bloody, desperate, and undecisive. But the only spots of present interest are a long slope where Ponsonby's cavalry made their famous charge against the French cannon; and a slightly depressed basin, in which some of Napo- leon's heavy guns stuck fast in the mud and were disabled. The farm-house of La Belle Alliance, farther along the road to the eastward, where Napoleon fixed his head- quarters, where Blucher and Wellington met, and where Napoleon's travelling carriage was captured ; the distant monument toward the northeast marking the field where the vanguard of the Prussian army was first engaged ; the memorial to the dead of the German legion, — all these, though deserving of the traveller's visit, merit no detail here. Military critics, including Wellington himself, have de- scribed Waterloo as an unscientific battle, and a poor one to illustrate the art of war by. The fight is authorita- tively called an attempt of Napoleon to crush the British by main force before Blucher came up, and to do it on a field where deep mud and the simple contour of the two parallel ridges opposed either quick or complex strategy. All this may be true, yet the famous field will always be visited, and always deserve to be. The genius of the two rival commanders who first met there, the fateful result of the contest to Europe, and, above all, the dramatic and familiar incidents of the fight, will never cease to attract the tourist. In visiting the field he should, if possible, 60 B y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. traverse it on foot; he should secure a good English- speaking guide, under an iron-clad bargain ; and before taking a step on the field he should put to rout the " Old Guard " of dirty youngsters who otherwise will dog him all day to sell their "relics " from the Belgian junk-shops. It is one of the most humorous sights of Waterloo to see an Englishman trying to pump up heroic memories in the midst of one of these swarms of human gnats plying him with spurious bullets and old bones. But at Waterloo, as at every other historic spot in Europe, the meanest swin- dies of the present jostle the great deeds of the past. THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY. EVERY school-boy has read in his geography a few words about those tides of marvellous sweep and rise which have made the Bay of Fundy world-famous. The body of water where these tides occur is of a singu- larly curious and fantastic shape. It will be pretty nearly represented by the back of the human hand if the thumb and all but the middle and forefingers be folded, and the two latter extended in the shape of a prong. The back of the hand proper will then depict roughly the main body of water in the bay, while the two fingers will show the two upper bays or estuaries where the tide rises highest. If the bottom of one of the fingers were to be tightly con- stricted by a cord, we should have a crude counterpart of the narrow entrance of one of the upper bays and a still closer general likeness. From the broad sea-mouth of the Bay of Fundy to each of its two heads is about one hundred and fifty miles ; at its broadest point it is some fifty miles wide ; and the whole body of water has a little more than twice the area of Long Island Sound. Without affecting scientific exactness we may briefly speak of the familiar tidal rise and fall which we see on the sea-shore as due to the attractive force or gravity ex- erted on the fluent water by the moon and the sun— the 6i 62 B y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. fonner, owing to its nearness to the earth, exerting about twice the tidal energy of the greater luminary. But the height of the tides at various times differs, from a number of causes, such as the relative positions of the sun and moon, the union or division of their attractive powers, the shapes of the bodies of water attracted, and so on. Some strange phenomena are produced by these variations. A tidal wave, which in deep water may travel one thousand miles an hour, may have its velocity reduced by shallows to fifteen or twenty miles, and its direction reversed. So, too, just as superimposed waves of sound are made in the experiments of Professor Tyndall either to strengthen the sound or to destroy it entirely, two tidal waves may make higher tides or neutralize each other, preventing any tide at all, as happens at certain places on the Pacific coast. For like reasons, in some regions there is but one tide a day, in others four, while headlands, bays, and sounds modify the rise so decidedly that the immense upheavals of water in the Bay of Fundy are attended with a rise of only eighteen feet at its mouth. By way of more direct illustration of the cause of the Fundy tides, let us suppose a boat to be rocked gently at the mouth of a shallow ditch, wide at its outlet, but converging somewhat sharply to a point. The little wave, at first perhaps almost imperceptible, will quickly increase in height until it rushes in a narrowing but higher breaker to the ditch's end. This essentially explains the huge tidal waves of the Bay of Fundy. The THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY, 63 estuary is simply an extensive ditch in which a prodigious volume of water rushing from the Atlantic pours along the converging shores, steadily swelling upward. One or two other remoter influences may, however, affect the tides of the bay. A straight line drawn from Cape Sable on the eastern side of the bay to the hook of Cape Cod cuts off a great ocean bay some two hundred and fifty miles long coastwise and one hundred deep, with the Bay of Fundy at its upper extremity. The regular tidal current of the Atlantic is deflected northward from Cape Cod, so that the Bay of Fundy, with its two con- verging prongs, acts as a kind of tidal funnel to a much larger funnel, and the immense mass of Atlantic water must heap up until its equilibrium is reached. The two remoter funnels, or prongs, as we have described them, called the Bay of Chignecto and the Basin of Minas, of course receive relatively an even larger proportion of the flood. They are the last of a triple series of sea-funnels, at whose upper ends the steadily converging tidal waves attain their greatest height. The crude diagram on the next page may serve to show the exceptional configura- tion of coast-line that produces these wonderful tidal con- vergences. At Windsor, on the River Avon, and a dozen miles from its mouth, is one of the most eligible places to ob- serve the grander phenomena of the Fundy tides. The Avon at that point is a wide estuary varying from a quarter of a mile to a mile in width, fronted on one side 64 B V. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. by the dikes of the farmers, on the other by the Windsor wharves. Stand on one of the piers and see the flood at its highest. It is a bay of wide expanse, and deep enough to float an ocean steam-ship. A strong wind beats the surface almost into ocean breakers, and the dark-red waters dash angrily over the piers and against the oppos- ing dikes. Two long bridges span the ruddy stream, which swells roughly to the planks and seems as though it would dash the structure away. Through smaller streams the flood penetrates far inland, and looking northward the whole country seems afloat, as during a Western freshet. The water opposite Windsor at full of the moon, when its attraction unites with that of the sun, rises some thirty- five feet from the river bottom. This, then, is the spectacle at high-water. Go now and see the estuary when the tide is out. The river is no longer a river at all. A great chasm, half a mile wide, and so long that its extremities are invisible, yawns at one's feet. In the centre is a little rivulet a few feet broad, which a THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY, 65 child could wade. At the edge of the gulf is a precipice of red mud. Then comes a steep slope; then another precipice, slanting finally to the stony bottom of the channel. The vast gulch appears as though suddenly opened by an earthquake, and its rents and reaches of dark-red soil give a secondary semblance to a half-cooled Inferno. There is, too, a droll and incongruous side to the spectacle. Every thing of human build is so absurdly disproportionate to the meagre streamlet that it seems as though man had lost his reason and was making ludicrously toilsome preparation against a remote and impalpable foe. The two long bridges are spiders on stilts, with no water below. The dikes, reared with so much labor, are far in- land, and have no wave ,to resist. Ships at the wharves rest on the edge of a muddy cliff, and are seemingly as remote from navigation as the Ark on Ararat. Presently, as the tide turns and the rise of the water begins, there comes a magical change. The sluggish drift of the small rivulet is stilled. A moment later its current turns backward from the sea, swelling in a few minutes to a creek twenty yards wide. Turn away and look again after a quarter of an hour. The creek has grown to a navigable river — restless, turbulent, foam-streaked, and half as broad as the East River at Fulton Ferry. Now for the next hour is the time to watch the rise of the waters in all their strength and fury. The current, gain- ing velocity every instant, rises into huge undulating waves. Surges of water, half an acre in extent at places, 66 B y. WA YS OF NA TURK AND LIFE. swell from below and seem to impose themselves on each other. At the boiling edges of the stream is a stone or log; a moment later and it is gone from view. The waters burst through the piers of the bridges as if at the mouth of a flume, and streaks of foam, hundreds of yards long, trending down-stream, mark where the currents have intersected. The whole effect is that of a compound of Niagara rapids with a Maelstrom, only here is dark blood in place of water. Once, on a sandy slope of the Avon, I tested the rate of rise. On an incline of sand which might be called steep I placed a mark two feet from the edge of the flood. The water reached it in forty seconds by the watch. Up a slope of two-hundred- feet face these gigantic tides of the Bay of Fundy will climb at the average rate of more than a foot a minute, and sometimes much more rapidly. A curious phenome- non attends this in-coming tide at Windsor. During the second hour of its flood it seemingly rises far higher and faster than during all the rest of the period of its upward flow, intensifying vastly the grandeur and impressiveness of the spectacle. One of the most interesting effects of the first approach of the tide to its lower level appears when it reaches the crest of a long sand-bank with a large basin behind it. The waters creep up steadily until a little rill begins to pour over in a miniature rapid. Almost before one can say it the rill has grown to a rapid brook, and in a few moments more to a swift dashing river, spreading rapidly THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY. 6/ at its lower end until the wide basin is covered. Erelong, too, the whole sand-spit is under water, only signalling its presence by breakers on the surface of the now deepening flood. On some of these more level spaces, but still with a perceptible slope, I have seen the waters climb twenty- five feet in sixty seconds. By far the most sublime of the tidal spectacles of Fundy is the sudden rise of the waters in a bore or tidal breaker. At Monckton, New Brunswick, twenty-five miles from the Bay of Chignecto, and on a river with name as big as its tides, the writer had once an oppor- tunity to see the bore by bright moonlight. On the wharves, at half-past nine in the evening, had gathered a large crowd, drawn thither partly by the coming bore, partly by the seductive rays of the full moon. The tide in the river — at Monckton a stream about a quarter of a mile wide — was still running out sluggishly, more than thirty feet below the level of the wharf. All at once far down-stream came a distant rumbling like the sound of a railroad train. A few minutes, and a dark line crossed the river in the distance. The line gradually materialized in the moonlight until it became a foamy wall three feet high, swept up the naked flats, and, in a wild reach of white billows preceded by a breaker, passed us up-stream. The waters behind the advancing crest rose six feet instantly, and where before had been a lazy downward current was a raging sweep of muddy water rushing up- stream. At many places, particularly on the flats below 68 B Y. WA YS OF NA TURK AND LIFE. Truro, Nova Scotia, on the Basin of Minas, the bore is much grander than at Monckton. Sometimes it is eight feet high, and travels fifteen miles an hour. Large fish — cod, shad, and even the strong salmon — are occasionally dashed up by it lifeless on the shores. It has been known to drown cattle, to wreck a large, laden schooner, and to toss a craft as heavy as a pilot boat high on the banks, upside down. Hogs rooting for food on the sand-slopes have an instinctive inkling of its far-distant coming, and run grunting to high land. Not uncommonly the bore is followed up by flocks of sea-birds, seeking small fish, and one bold species of the curlew variety has been seen caught in the boiling comb, then rising from behind the breaker, to seek again its prey in front. Scientific light on the origin of the bore, or " eigre," as it is more technically called, is rather dim. Maury and Ansted describe bores without explanation. Herschel and Somerville explain them, the one as the rush of a swift tide against a river current, the other as the result- ant of a tide rising rapidly at a spot where the restraining friction of the bottom is excessive. Perhaps we can at once harmonize and illustrate both explanations by imag- ining a pail of water dashed suddenly on a smooth floor and the little breaker created in front of the tiny tide by friction on the floor as analogous to the bore which sweeps over the upper flats of Fundy. Bores, however, are rare tidal curiosities, apparently only possible where the fiercest tides meet peculiar conformations of coast. THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY. 69 More famous than those of Fundy are the bores in the Chinese river, Tsientang, the East Indian river, Hoogly, and the Amazon, some of which attain a height of thirty feet and a speed of twenty-five miles an hour. The speed of the Monckton bore was about that of a fast runner. At times the bores of the Bay of Fundy are followed quickly by second and third tidal breakers of lesser height. The figures subjoined, copied from an English tide- table, give the average height in feet of the Fundy tides at three places, compared with three of the highest of the North Atlantic tides on European shores. The figures for Sackville and Parrsborough are, however, much ex- aggerated. ng Tide. Neap Tide. 50 24 32 18 Al% 25 42 16 i93< WA 44 22 Sackville . Quaco Parrsborough . St. Germain (France) Thames River (England) Bristol (England) It ought perhaps to be explained further that when the sun and moon pull together — that is to say, when the moon is full or new — the highest or spring tides are pro- duced ; and that the neap or low tides occur when the moon is in quadrature and pulls at right angles, or nearly so, to the line of the sun's attraction. As a general truth, it is safe to say that the real height of the Fundy tides is much overrated. The phenomena are so vast and im- 70 B y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. pressive that human nature finds exaggeration even easier than usual. Probably a forty-feet tide either in the Basin of Minas or the Bay of Chignecto is very uncommon ; one of fifty feet very rare indeed. The latter may, however, occasionally happen when the spring tides are naturally highest, and when united with them is an excess of water driven into the Bay of Fundy by a protracted and strong south wind. The figures for the range of tides, I presume, refer to the rise from the bottom at the place where the measurements are taken. If allowance is made for the ascent of bottom, from the mouth of the Bay of Fundy to its heads, higher figures would be reached. It will readily be seen that the varying elements of the problem, and particularly the uncommon coincidence of extreme spring tides with a southerly storm, make authentic data as to the very highest Fundy tides all but impossible to obtain. Local opinion is utterly untrustworthy. There is hot rivalry between half-a-dozen towns on the upper waters of the bay to prove title to the " highest tides in the world." One example will show the deceptiveness of local asser- tion : At Monckton everybody, talking of high tides, re- fers back to what is called the " Saxby tide " of a dozen years ago. Commander Saxby, of the British Navy, an authority on tidal movements, predicted for a certain date a great rise of water in the Bay of Fundy, Fortunately for his prophecy, there was a terrible southern gale on the day named, and the tide swelled to most devastating pro- portions. At a wharf in Monckton, which descends straight THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY. "J I to the low waters, I have measured carefully the distance with string, plummet, and yard-stick, then added the al- titude to the Saxby high-tide mark, as recorded on an adjacent building. By this test the whole rise from low- water to the top of the Saxby tide was forty-two feet and eight inches. Yet every good Moncktonite, with one hand on the Bible and the other on his heart, will assert his conviction that his tides often rise at least sixty feet. Still, with all allowance for local error, the titanic Fundy tides remain terribly grand and impressive sights. Many queer incidents attend their rise and fall. It is related that years ago a stranger vessel struck solidly on a rock in the bay during a high night tide. Next morning, to the bewilderment of the crew, they found their craft over- hanging a precipice. The immense flats left bare by the receding waters favor the fishermen, who, using very deep nets of the seine or gill sort, can shut off many acres of water ; and when the nets are left high and dry during the spring fisheries, near St. John, New Brunswick, fish are seen hanging high in air. Boys then climb the meshes as a ladder to bring down the cod or salmon from their airy perch. By no means the least of low-tide curiosities are the beds of the creeks cut by the currents through the lowlands at the upper waters of the bay. These tidal creeks are not, as with us, a steep bank of three or four feet, then a loose sand bottom, but deep gashes cut down to an acute angle at the bottom twenty feet below. The 72 By.tVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. creeks are usually about as deep as they are wide, and it seems as if some giant surgeon had slashed triangular sec- tions from the blood-red soil, leaving the wounded earth bleeding and ghastly. All these lowlands, extending over hundreds of thousands of acres, are diked in many direc- tions against the flood ; but once in a few years the muddy streams are let in to refresh the soil with their deposit. The diked lands fetch, some of them, two hundred dollars an acre, and the density and height of the hay crops raised on them almost pass belief. At St. John, a handsome city fronting a fair harbor at the mouth of a river of the same name, the Fundy tides make their first contact with intense civilization, and man- ifest themselves in singularly curious and interesting spectacles. The waters rise and fall through a range of some thirty feet — at full of tide, lifting the long lines of ships until their taffrails rise far above the wharves ; then dropping the hulks on a dry, hard bottom, so deep below that the sailors must climb down to their craft by ladders. The slips run dry, and where before were thirty feet of turbid tide the drays drive out loading and unloading by the bulwarks of the stranded ships. More amazing is the phenomenon in the harbor itself. The great tides at flood pour up the St. John River through a gorge form- ing a mighty stretch of roaring rapids, spanned by a suspension-bridge a hundred feet aloft. Twenty miles up-stream the fresh and salt fluids mix in a brackish cur- rent, which at ebb tide pours back through the chasm in THE GIANT TIDES OF FUNDY. 73 a foam-flecked bedlam of waters. The traveller, at first wondering at the vastness and speed of the swift flood, scarcely believes his own vision when a few hours later he sees the roaring tide tumbling between the beetling cliffs in an opposite direction. It is as if one, on occasion, should discover the rapids above Niagara rushing back with inverted current toward Lake Erie. Churned into great masses of foam which, as steam-boat engineers will tell us, brackish waters when agitated readily generate, the river pours into the harbor. There the floating nebu- lae of foam cohere until they form beds of whiteness so like cakes of ice that the harbor in mid-summer puts on a wintry guise, and the stranger must rub his eyes to dispel the unseasonable illusion. Just below Parrsborough on the western shore of the Basin of Minas, the Fundy tides reach some of their lowest levels, and disclose one of the finest sights on the coast. The slope is stony, covered with small pebbles of slate, and the tide leaves a symmetrical curve descending like the quadrant of a great amphitheatre. Though the slope is so steep that it is difficult to climb, it takes a muscular and trained arm to throw a stone three quarters of the way down from high- to low-water mark. The slope, measured in paces, showed on one occasion about three hundred feet of distance, and afterward the waters receded half as far again. The wharf, built in two stories, looms up like the side of a tall building, yet a high spring tide sweeps its summit. Half way down the 74 jBY-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. wharf, standing in the mud, the steamer Hiawatha, of more than two hundred tons burthen, can reach with the sum- mit of her smoke-stack only the topmost mark left by the tide on the wharf. Around the point, a few miles from Parrsborough Wharf, the tide passes by Cape Split, through a channel a few miles wide, to fill up the great Basin of Minas. In the channel off the cape the current boils by at the rate of eleven miles an hour. The strongest vessel can scarcely make headway there in a gale against the rush of water, and the seamen say no craft can hold anchorage in the channel for a moment when the swift tide is running. Along the Basin of Minas is Acadia, the land of Evan- geline, immortalized by the plaintive hexameters of Long- fellow. Poetry is one thing, realism another. The modern Anglo-Acadians quote Nova Scotia history to prove that their evicted French predecessors were stalwart rogues of vindictive temper, who aided the Indians in their cruel warfare against the English ; and they aver stoutly that any Briton whom the strong tide left stranded among the poetry-haloed Basils, Gabriels, and Evangelines was rea- sonably sure to get his throat cut. NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. THE traveller to Newfoundland from New York will have at least one illusion rudely dispelled before he reaches the island. We in the United States constantly think of Newfoundland as a country close to Canada and readily accessible. Geographically the idea is correct. The island, one of the largest on the globe, does, indeed, project to within sixty miles of Cape Breton, which is substantially the eastern point of Nova Scotia. But the Newfoundland we voyage to is another land. It is reached by way of the seaport oi St. John's, and is eleven hundred miles and five days' journey from New York. The fast ocean steamer, on her way to Liverpool, must consume three or four days to reach the island's southern shore at Cape Race. Then comes a country so isolated, so abun- dant in insular peculiarities, and, withal, so unknown to the outer world, that Greenland or Ethiopia can scarcely be called more remote. If a strong-armed ball-player were to take a rotten apple and with all his force hurl it against a wall, the result would be a crude but graphic likeness of the map of Newfoundland. The ragged outline of the island, its rough coast line, its infinite succession of deep bays, jut- ting headlands, and wild ravines of water, would be 75 76 BY-IVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. depicted with a generalized but realistic fidelity. Two long bays at one point almost cut in twain this island, with its area of a little less than New York State. North- ward other bays, cutting sharply the land, expand into inland seas. Northward still a peninsula runs up almost to Labrador, like the arm of a huge frying-pan. To say that the coast, almost two thousand miles long, is rocky, describes it tamely. It is not rocky merely, but one great rock, now shooting up into peaks, now breaking into wild fissures, but always precipitous, bold, bare, and inacces- sible. Against the fierce wall of cliff four hundred feet high, running sheer into the ocean, the wild waves of the Atlantic break, the storm winds whistle, and the dreary fogs drift in dark encircling folds. Back of this dismal coast come mountains one thousand feet high, covered with cold, low firs, scant bushes, or absolutely bare. The in- terior of the island is almost an undescribed region. Tracts of land with ten thousand square miles are marked on the maps " unknown " or " unexplored." If one were to go ashore almost anywhere along the centre of that southern coast which is often distantly seen from the decks of the ocean steamers, he would, by a walk of ten miles inland reach a region where the white man has never set his foot ; and this in a country peopled by Great Britain three hun- dred years ago, and the oldest of her North American colonies. In picturesqueness of site no city on our continent equals St. John's, the capital and chief seaport of the country, NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 77 with a population of some thirty thousaud. Sailing up the savage eastern coast, the steam-ship suddenly turns shoreward. It seems for a while as if the vessel was about to dash herself against the solid fringe of rock. But all at once there comes in sight a little crack in the rocky wall. Behind the cleft is a group of houses, perched on a hill which is almost a precipice. The vessel takes her pilot, and is steered for half a mile through the crack. The cliffs loom up for several hundred feet on either side, and it seems as though one could cast a stone between their beetling faces. A single short chain and a few heavy guns would bar the entrance against the navies of the world. Within, a sudden turn presently brings to view a placid haven, a mile long and half as wide. It is girded with the warehouses or factories of the fishing firms, by busy wharves and shipping. On the west the city slopes to the top of the hill, while on the eastern cliff the fisher- men have built their platforms for drying the cod. These platforms, technically called " flakes," give a most curious effect. They are stages set on poles stuck in every fissure and projection where the rock gives lodgment. The stages, or, as we may call them, the roofs of the flakes, are thatched with brushwood, on which the fish are laid in the sun. In one place these " flakes " rise in five great tiers, slanting backward in terraces like the pictures of the hanging gardens of Babylon. At spots one can walk for an eighth of 'a mile under these roofs of codfish, shutting out the sun and filling the air with odors too pungent for 78 B y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. verbal description. A single sniff of St. John's air near the flakes is the equivalent of a whole lenten season of codfish diet. St. John's is one of the few cities of the world which have no local taxes. If her codfish smell, her local admin- istration does not. Even her schools are supported by a grant of the Newfoundland Government, which has no public debt and raises all its revenue from customs, the tariff averaging about fourteen per centum ad valorem. The isolation of the city may be inferred from the fact that it receives its mails from England and the United States but once a fortnight. The coming of the Allan Line steamer is an event that crowds the wharf and makes the city bustle with excitement. The climate of St. John's and of Newfoundland has the singular quality of improving wines, whole cargoes of which are shipped to the city to be kept a few years and reshipped to Europe. The people of Newfoundland may be separated into three divisions — the well-to-do residents of St. John's, the fishing class, and the French, who live on the far north- west coast. Many of the people of St. John's have wealth, accumulated from the seal and cod trade. They are cultivated people, of good manners, and hospitable to a point almost onerous to the recipient of their kindly courtesies. Their leading social amusement is card-play- ing, in which the seductive draw-poker takes the lead of other games. Even the best ladies play poker, with stakes adapted to the feminine standard. The prevailing NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 79 type of nationality is English or Irish, modified by insular surroundings. Three quarters, at least, of the population of 180,000 in the whole island is made up of the poor fishermen. They are a hardy, rough race, familiar with every phase of ocean life, ignorant, narrow, and insular,* but kindly disposed. Some of their linguistic oddities, at the remoter fishing stations particularly, are worth noting. Like the Southern negro, who so often uses " him " for " it," so these islanders twist the word " he " into absurd combinations. " Will the trout be cooked soon ? " was asked the waiter girl at one of the coast inns. " Maybe he will be," was the reply. " The wagon has lost he's wheel," or" I don't know where the spade he is," illustrate further these peculiarities. The name of the island is almost universally pronounced New-fun-land, with strong accent on the final syllable. The marine habitude of the people crops out in the term " skipper," always employed by a subordinate in addressing a superior, or by a street boy accosting a gentleman. Northward is in Newfound- land " down " in direction, the phrase " down north " cor- responding pretty closely to the " down east " of our Middle and Western States. For the Newfoundlander's phrase " up south," we have no equivalent, excepting the " up to South End," of Boston. There is also a strange broadening of vowels in colloquial speech. Thus ridge be- comes in Newfoundlandese " rudge," and fire " fur." Many of them would say, " The forest has been ' furred,' " — /. e., burned over. The wives of the lower order of 80 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. islanders, who stay at home, till the soil, and do all the manual labor of the household, while their lords are at sea, become a brawny set of Amazons, terrible in domestic war- fare, and ruling their consorts in most imperative fashion. ^ A party of thirty railroad surveyors who recently entered a little hamlet were put to flight by a few of these muscu- lar dames and forced to appeal to the police before they could continue their work. The lower classes, particularly the Irish, are intensely ignorant and superstitious. Not long ago, in one of the smaller towns, certain shrewd spirits wanted to change the local cemetery for a better burial-place, the old one being occasionally overflowed by the waters of Conception Bay. They carried their point easily by asserting that on winter nights they had seen the ghosts troop out to dance on the ice of the bay and pro- test against their moist treatment. The man who thinks that Newfoundland dogs of noble mien and build troop in droves through the country is, in our Yankee phrase, a good deal "off." The Newfoundland dog is not only, like the traditional prophet, without honor in his own country, but there are very few of him at all. The pure breed is almost extinct. We find any day in a New England town bet- ter dogs of the Newfoundland type than I have seen during a week's stay in the city of St. John's. The streets are filled with mongrels, big dogs, small dogs, spaniels, esquimaux, and mastiffs, but almost all low curs of vile breed and pattern. Well-informed Newfoundland- NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 8 1 ers smile satirically when you extol their famous dogs, and go so far as to deny that the animal originated in the island at all. As a rule, the big black Newfoundland dog is a much-abused beast. He is sought out more for strength than for beauty, kept on low diet, used in winter to draw heavy sledges of wood, and is made any thing but a household divinity. His temper is good up to five years old, when he is apt to become snappish. The water is his natural home, and he will steal away at night and travel long distances for his bath. The tests of his purity of breed and general merits are a thick-webbed foot, large bushy tail, the comely shape and poise of the head, and deep black color on the roof of the mouth. His degen- eration is charged to the abuse of him as a beast of bur- den, and to one of the island's old laws to protect sheep, which has allowed policemen a fee of fifty cents each for shooting dogs found at large — a statute under which many fine dogs have been ruthlessly slaughtered. The earliest records of the island show that the aborigi- nal dog of the country was a good-tempered creature of great size, and so strong that he could draw from the water seals weighing hundreds of pounds. He had a pas- sionate fondness for the sea, lived on raw fish, and was a skilful fisher, swimming rapidly under water and catching his prey in his mouth. A case is cited where one of these dogs was seen catching fish for sheer sport, heaping them up on shore and then plunging in for others. The same records prove, however, that this dog was of an ex- 82 BV-JVAVS OF NATURE AND LIFE. tinct species very different from the present Newfoundland animal, though the latter, in this latitude, is very fond of raw fish. Next to its dogs, Newfoundland's fame rests on its fogs. The Arctic current, driving southward and along the coast, meets the Gulf Stream and condenses the warmer vapors, just as a glass of ice-water gathers drops. The mists comparatively seldom penetrate inland, but in one direction or another they hang around the island with a weird darkness like that of smoke, and closing in — a " sea turn " the islanders call it — make navigation on the cruel coast as dangerous as on any waters of the globe. Hundreds of stout ships have steered to wreck in the mists on the rock-ribbed shores, and a winter journey to St. John's is more perilous than a trip to Europe, the Allan steam-ships sometimes using eleven days for the five hun- dred and forty miles from Halifax to St. John's. A spot traditional for disaster is "Mistaken Point," a little west of Cape Race, so called because of the difficulty of distinguish- ing it in the fog from the cape itself. Here, within a few days of each other, the steam-ships Washington and Crom- well, in 1877, ran ashore and were lost, with some seventy lives, not a man escaping. From the heights above the fish- ermen saw corpses and wreckage churning against the lower chffs, but only two bodies were secured by an adventurous seaman, who went down the face of the rocks by a rope. Internally and as a whole — except, perhaps, in one tract yet to be penetrated by the railroad — Newfoundland is NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 83 an unpromising region — a land of continuous rock, here and there covered with boggy wastes, and with vast areas where old fires, killing the low firs, have left wastes of dead trees that tire the eye with their monotony and ex- panse. The summers are brief and moderately warm, the springs marked by a marvellously sudden burst of vegeta- tion, the winters about as cold as those of New England, and attended by deep snow-falls. Along some of the roads are seen long lines of stakes as tall as small tele- graph poles, placed at short intervals, to mark out the winter path. The Vermont toll-house keeper who, after the big snow-fall, put out the notice, " Toll taken at the second-story window ; after the next storm please drop the change down the chimney," would have found a rare field for his drollery on these semi-Arctic winter roads. Newfoundland has lakes without number, some of them sixty miles long, and teeming with trout. She has wilder- nesses where game are abundant ; she raises fine vegeta- bles, and she produces, as late as August, fine crops of strawberries. But as yet she yields to commerce little except copper ore, seals, and codfish. Her people, as a rule, are so backward as almost to be archaic, and in St. John's the watchmen from ten o'clock to daylight call the hours. Excluding the wealthier classes, and decidedly including the alleged hotels of St. John's, the country still lacks essentially those prime elements of civilization, a clean bed and square meal. If the natives of Newfoundland are ever perverted 84 B V- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. to heathenism, their chief god will surely be the codfish. Already the cod almost touches divinity, or at least is the emblem of all things material. The Newfoundlanders recognize the dignity of their fish-god by stamping him on their local currency, and but for the manifest incon- venience would no doubt make him legal-tender for payment of debts. So ubiquitous is the fish, and so familiar does he become, that when one passes a fifty- cent piece at St. John's he half expects to find a ten- pound codfish among the small change. On official docu- ments, on postage stamps, on bank-notes, the cod and his familiar dewlap meet the eye. Spread on platforms, and broiling in the sun, he forms a fishy fringe around the island — a wall of defence, if not against invading armies, at least against the fiercer foes, poverty and starvation. The allegorical importance of the codfish is sustained by the facts and figures. The islanders catch probably not less than $7,000,000 worth a year, and more than half their annual exports of $8,000,000 are made up of their staple fishy commodity. Every part of the cod is useful : the head fried is an esculent dainty — a kind of compound of sweetbread and calves'-foot jelly ; the tongue cut out and nicely browned in the frying-pan is an improved imitation of the fried oyster; the skin is used for fine glue, the sounds are eaten or made into the isinglass of the cook-book, the Norwegians grind up the bones for cattle-feed, and the French buy the spawn for baiting their sardine fishing grounds- NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 85 Stretching for hundreds of miles southward and south- eastward of the island, and sixty miles from shore at the nearest edge, is the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, that mystic table-land of the sea, whose limits and nature are still undefined. A little way oceanward from its slopes the sea reaches some of its greatest depths, and within its boundaries are depressions where the fisherman's anchor never touches bottom. Old cod-fishers say that the Grand Bank is steadily rising, and that a few centuries will find it jutting above the surface. The Grand Bank, with its adjuncts, is some six hundred miles long and from two to three hundred miles wide. The shallows over it vary from ninety to four hundred feet in depth. The Grand Bank is, beyond comparison, the finest fishing ground in the world. For centuries the fishermen have visited it, and milHons on millions of tons of codfish have been taken there, but still the yield is undiminished. Sometimes for two or three years the fish will be scarce, and the report will spread that the bank is " fished out," when suddenly a year of unprecedented catches will dissipate the theory. For about six months in the year, beginning with May, the codfish swarm, not only over the Grand Bank, but, in lesser size and numbers, along the whole North American shore from the latitude of New York to an unknown distance northward. They are found from the eastern waters of Long Island to the farthest extremes of Labrador, and even up to the regions of eternal ice. What lures the cod from the 86 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. ocean depths to which he goes in winter is not certainly known, but it is surmised that he either follows up the small shore fish or seeks the sea cherry — a small red berry that often grows on the weedy bottoms where the cod is found. It is also pretty well established that during the summer visit shoreward the female fish spawns. The im- mense race of cod, far outnumbering all the other large fish of the sea, is accounted for by its fecundity. Nine millions of eggs have been computed in the roe of a large specimen, and all the codfish caught by man are a mere cipher compared with the billions, large and small, swallowed by sharks and other fish of prey. One of the greatest curiosities among the inhabitants of the deep is the squid, in Newfoundland the orthodox bait for killing the codfish. The squid is a smaller spe' cies of the huge devil-fish, or octopus, wonderful speci- mens of which have of late years been found on the Newfoundland coast. The squid, take him concretely, is a revolting-looking creature. Cut a section, say ten inches long, from a common eel, transform its flesh into a tough jelly, give it a cruciform tail at one end and eight short sucker-armed feelers at the other ; conceive the suckers, each armed with a circle of small teeth, and the feelers converging to a cruel hawk-like beak — then we shall have a weak likeness of the squid. The creature's mode of progression is original. It has within its body an elastic suction-tube holding almost a pint of water. Filling the tube by drawing water through holes NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 87 in its mantle, the squid, by a sudden squirt, drives itself backward as fast as a fish can swim, and by inverting its tube can move with equal velocity in the opposite direction. Jigging for these squids is a rare spectacle. The " jigger " is a red stick of wood circled with sharp but barbless hooks. The hook is let down, the squid, which enters the Newfoundland bays by myriads for food, is attracted by the red color, clasps its arms over the hooks, and is drawn up to its death. But as it reaches the surface the novice must be on guard, for the squid shoots straight at its captor his charge of water, followed by another squirt of an inky fluid, which on light garments is almost indeHble. The fishermen know the creature's trick, and by a skilful movement induce the squid to deliver his charges upon one side, then by a quick inversion of the hook drop the squid in the boat. A squid-fishing fleet of boats, closely grouped, so as to keep the schools of lively octopi collected, is an ani- mated sight. Each man tends three or four lines, and has all he can do when squid are around. The bustle of the fishers, the thumping of the squid in the boats, and the incessant squirts of water to a height of several feet in all directions through the fleet, make up a most picturesque sea spectacle. The flesh of the squid has some poisonous quality that makes even the tough skins of the fishermen sore by long handling. On the codfish hook its flesh grows white and tough, making very allur- ing bait. 88 £ y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. Closely allied to the squid as cod bait is the caplin. The caplin is a small fish, of the salmon species, about the size of the smelt, and very like it in appearance. It never varies more than two or three days in the time of its coming to the Newfoundland shores, where, late in June, it suddenly throngs all the bays in prodigious numbers. A single boy with a small dip-net can catch several tons a day, and a few men can readily secure a schooner load. The waves dash the caplin on the shores in great numbers, and the residents often cart them away for manure. Al- though a delicious fish, much like the trout in flavor, the caplin is rarely eaten. Indeed, for a fishing people, the Newfoundlanders are amazingly backward in the use of their food fish. Few of them even know how to cook the cod so as to be eatable ; they rarely eat the trout with which their inland waters are filled ; and though they raise the best potatoes in the world, they seem profoundly ignorant of that delicious product of Yankee-land, the codfish-ball. After the caplin go away, in July, the squid come in, and after them the herring, so that Providence has provided a triple series of cod baits, without any one of which a third of the season would be lost. His bait once assured, the fisherman begins his toilsome season on the fishing grounds, seeking the Grand Bank, heretofore referred to, the inshore fisheries, or the coast of Labrador. The fish off Labrador, or on the Grand Bank, are always largest and most valuable, but the fish- erman there must incur vexatious delays in securing fresh NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS, 89 bait or in going shoreward to dry his product. His is an arduous and perilous calling. The cod usually bite best at sunset or sunrise, and often tug at the lines all night. So by darkness and day the fisher is at his post, save when a storm forces him to heave-to on the Banks, or, nearer shore, drives him to port. The rasping line, drawn up often from a depth of two hundred feet, cuts his fingers ; the poisonous squid and salt used in canning the fish wear the skin to the blood ; hunger, exposure, dan- ger, are all his lot. Moreover, in Newfoundland, he fishes for a hard master, the wholesale dealer, who furnishes the equipment, taking as security a chattel mortgage, thus bringing the poor, ignorant fisherman in debt at the open- ing of the season. It is reckoned a fair season's catch if the fisherman comes out with profits of one hundred and twenty dollars, on which he must weather through with wife and children the piercing winter months. During his absence the wife tills the ground, rears the children, and even cures the fish which her lord brings home. On his return from the remoter banks, often after an absence of five months, the fisherman relapses into sulky idleness for the rest of the year. He sits by the fireside with his pipe, leaving his wife to do the household work, and becoming by comparison with his decidedly better half a most inconsequential and good- for-nothing creature. He may be captain on the water, but his wife is full commander on shore, and the subjec- tion to which these imperious fish-wives reduce their 90 BY- WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. nominal lords and masters is a funny side of social phen- omena in the queer island. The cod is any thing but a gamesome fish, A few- initial struggles way down in the depths, and he comes up with a dead pull, like a log. Unless very large and hungry, he bites daintily ; and out of ten that bite prob- ably but one is hooked. In " trawling," the fisherman sinks a long rope fitted with short snoods and hooks. The rope is ingeniously buoyed to logs, to which is attached a staff and flag in such a way that each wave throws the flag in air and sig- nals its spot. Two men in a boat, often several times a day, " underrun " the trawl — the man in front drawing up and taking off the fish, while his companion baits. The " seine," so called locally, is a net of great length and depth, so arranged as to " purse " at the bottom by a drawn cord, and secure the fish in the same manner that menhaden are caught on our coasts. The local title of " trap " is applied to a contrivance much like our fish- pounds, but made entirely of nets. The seine and trap are both used effectively when the cod is gorged with caplin or squid and refuses to bite. To cure a codfish well requires care and experience, and unless done well all the fisher's toil may go for little. The cod is usually passed to a gang of four men. One rips up the fish, a second takes out the entrails and cuts off the head, a third — usually the best man of the gang — by a deft movement cuts out the backbone, a fourth NEWFOUNDLAND AND THE COD-FISHERS. 9 1 spreads on the salt and lays the fish in a pile. Then the heaps of cod are distributed on the flakes, or fir-strewn platforms, reared along the shores. Everywhere in the neighborhood of the unnumbered fishing villages these broad platforms appear, now perched in a cleft of the rocks, now rising in tiers, but always placed near the sea, in which the offal is dropped. During the curing, which lasts two or three weeks, the fish must be watched care- fully. If left too long on one side, they become " over- salted." The sun in that case draws the salt to one side, leaving the other soft or rank, and the fish is almost un- salable. Then they must be heaped up at night, covered with canvas or oil-cloth against rain, and tended almost as sedulously as babes. When ready for market they are sold to the wholesale dealers, bringing at St. John's, dur- ing a scarce season, only five cents a pound. Newfound- land finds her chief market in Roman Catholic countries, where the fish are consumed during Lent. Lately, how- ever, the Norwegians have become hot rivals of the Newfoundlanders in the European markets. American housewives may be glad to know that the local tests of a good salt codfish are a surface hard and well dried on both sides, white flesh, and an absence of salty crystal- lizations. Efforts, thus far, to utilize as compost the thousands of tons of offal annually wasted have failed, and the same is substantially true of attempts to preserve the delicate caplin in some permanent edible form. Taken as a whole, the life of the poor fisherman of 92 B Y- IVA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. Newfoundland is far from enviable. Half-starved at home, cheated by the merchant, sunk in squalor, filth, and misery, he drifts easily into dull routine and a kind of mental stupor. He somehow — partly, it would seem, by his very lack of aspiration — preserves his good temper; he becomes a marvellous seaman, and he can dress fish with the precision and speed of a machine. But his whole horizon, like his island, is bounded by a circle of cod, and even Paradise, to his vision, resolves itself into an Eden whose seas teem with codfish, and whose markets the Yankee and Norwegian never can invade. SEAL-HUNTING ON THE ICE-FIELDS. AMONG the many strange industries of the world that exact from men hardihood, persistence, and daring, scarcely one compares with the pursuit of the oil seal, a calling substantially monopolized by the New- foundlanders. The seal here referred to must, at the out- set, be distinguished from the fur seal of Alaska, whose soft coat makes warm the heart of the city belle in exact proportion as the face of paterfamilias grows blue and his pocket-book thin. The creature sought by the Newfound- lander yields only oil and a coarse-grained but expensive leather ; he comes down on the ice from the far Arctic every spring, and soon after the breeding period, which begins about the middle of March, the fierce hunt for him opens, lasting until about the end of April. How important this industry is to Newfoundland may be conceived of from the fact that about six thousand men engage in it each season at St. John's alone, while the annual exports of seal products reach a value of more than $1,000,000. Next to the omnipresent codfish, the seal is the com- mercial staple of Newfoundland, and deprived of the animal the islanders would be forced to bridge a terrible gap of semi-starvation and poverty. The life of the seal, or " swoil," as the Newfoundland- 93 94 BV-WAVS OF NATURE AND LIFE. ers call him, is a most curious career of variety and change. Little can be said of the mysteries of his winter life, which is passed far up on the edges of the lower Arctic zone of ice, which, breaking away in early spring, floats southward on the Labrador sea-current. Their gregarious habit then brings the seals together in immense numbers, and old sealers tell of having seen dozens of acres of ice so thickly covered that the creatures could scarcely move. As the ice drifts into melting latitudes the troops of seals disperse. Where they go is uncertain, except that a few scattered wanderers swim southward along the coast of the United States as far as the Delaware River. The majority, no doubt, return to the Arctic ice-fringes, where, though warm-blooded creatures, they find their most congenial home. The food of the full-grown seal is another of the mysteries of its existence. In the shallows it is fish, but the seal is often found fat and rotund on the Atlantic ice, sailing for long distances over depths where small fish either never live at all or live a mile or two below the sur- face. The breeding period begins about the middle of March, after the ice has floated to a point some six hundred miles north of St. John's, the female seal bring- ing forth her single young on the hummocks. Then occurs a most extraordinary freak of growth. The young at birth weigh about five pounds. In fifteen days they weigh forty or fifty, gaining sometimes as much as five pounds in twenty-four hours. Nature furnishes the " white- coat," as the baby seal is called, an oily coating of blub- SEAL-HUNTING ON THE ICE-FIELDS. 95 ber just beneath the skin, which in ten days thickens from half an inch to three inches, or even four. The young seal during this period of astonishing development lives on its mother's milk and on animalculae which it sucks from the pores of the thin drift-ice. The seal fisher- men have half-a-dozen names for the seals at various stages of growth. They are, " white-coats," " harps " (from a dark harp-shaped mark upon the back), " bedlamers," " hoods," and " doghoods," according to age. The dog- hood is the old male seal, which is equipped with a thick skin on the head and neck. When attacked, the doghood resists fiercely, and the hardest blow makes no impression on the tough integument which the animal draws up in folds so as to completely .cover the forehead and nose. The sailing of the seal fleet from St. John's early in March is the momentous event of the year. All through the long winter, shut in by deep snows, living in utter idleness and depressed by chill poverty, the fisherman has eked out an existence most miserable and monotonous. With March and the sealing season his fetters are broken, and there comes an abrupt transition. Ontnis longo solvit se Teucria luctu. The fishermen, hardy, muscular fellows, inured to the sea, crowd the streets. The great sealing firms are fitting out their craft ; there is a hum of life on the wharves; business everywhere in the town awakes, and the whole city feels new life and impulse. On the first of March the sailing vessels leave for the northward " to meet the ice," as the local phrase goes. They are 96 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURK AND LIFE. allowed twelve days' start of the sealing steamers, which go on the 12th of March every year. These steamers are staunch craft, some of them so large as to be of eight hundred tons register. Their bows are iron-plated against the thick ice which they must often encounter to reach the breeding-grounds of the seal. They are crowded with sealers, not unfrequently carrying as many as two hundred and fifty men, "sardined" three in a bunk scarcely the same number of feet wide. Altogether some twenty of these steam-vessels, with three thousand hands, leave the harbor almost simultaneously. The wharves are crowded, flags flutter in the breeze, and saluting cannon roar their sonorous farewells. But, lively as is the day of departure in these times, it is tame compared to the going of the sailing ships thirty years ago, before steamers had well nigh monopolized the trade. In those days there sailed each year almost four hundred vessels, manned by thirteen thousand men, and old residents of St. John's dilate with pride when they picture the magnificent sight on the day when the great fleet put to sea. Now the four or five days' voyage to meet the south- ward-moving ice begins. Keen watchmen on the masts keep watch for the first sign of a seal herd. The super- stitious sealers greet as a happy omen the finding of a solitary baby " white-coat " on a strip of ice. Some of them kill the creature, and, like the ancient augurs, ex- amine the entrails, professing to know occult signs show- ing the direction in which the seal herd must be sought. SEAL-HUNTING ON THE ICE-FIELDS. 9/ Others say that the direction of the baby seal's nose when first seen proves where the herd is, and still others take on board the baby and keep it ahve " for luck." Erelong, if good fortune follows the craft, the seals are sighted. The steamer runs into the broad ice-fields, the deck cov- ered with excited men waiting the signal to disembark. The ice, perhaps, is covered for half a square mile with the young seals, fifteen days old, incapable of taking to the water, and watched by father and mother seals, who never desert their young in extremity. Another moment, and two hundred frenzied men, armed with long staves, are over the sides, and the slaughter opens. A scene follows which even hardened sealers describe as piteous. A blow on the nose stuns the young seal. Then, drawing a sharp knife, the sealer, with wonderful celerity, rips open the skin and blubber, pulls out the gory carcass, and leaves both on the ice to take another victim. The seals have a cry almost exactly like a human being, and tears like those of mortals fall from their eyes. Their wild wailings, the piteous attempts of the mothers to shield their young, the bloody ice, the quivering carcasses crawling often some distance before life is extinct, and the shouts of the butchers, make a sight that beggars all description. The massacre done, the " pelts," as the hides with the attached blubber are technically called, are put on board the steamer, which, if not loaded, begins search for a new herd and fresh butchery. Only the young seals are killed on this first voyage, as their pelts are proportionately more 98 BV.fVAVS OF NATURE AND LIFE. valuable, and the old seals can be left for a second ven- ture later in the season. These sealing voyages are either immense successes or most costly failures. Tens of thousands of dollars are needed to equip the vessels, which sometimes return with- out a solitary pelt. But the profits of one good voyage compensate for several bad ones. The pelts fetch in some years as much as four dollars each, and instances are re- corded where more than forty thousand have been brought ■in by a single steamer. One of the largest catches on record is that of the steamer Resolute, which, some years ago, after a short voyage, returned with forty-two thou- sand pelts, worth one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Seal pelts had to be loaded into the berths, even the boats were filled, and the vessel steamed but three and a half knots an hour during her return to St. John's. In the city excitement runs high during the absence of the steamers. Bets are made on their takes, the respective merits of their captains are can- vassed, every arrival is noted with eager interest, and trembling owners await the news that heralds great profits or a heavy loss for the year. At best the business is a huge "gamble," needing large capital and persistent struggle. One firm, for instance, which a few years ago made a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in one season, has, in the year of this writing, lost eighty thousand dollars. The captains of the craft are paid a royalty of ten cents a seal. Of the cargo, after the roy- SEAL-HUNTING ON THE ICE-FIELDS. 99 alty is deducted, one third goes to the crew and two thirds to the ship-owners, who find vessel, supplies, and equip- ment. A motley and curious lot are the men who for a few weeks in the year hunt the seal. Stalwart in frame, used to the sea until they have absolute contempt of its ter- rors, bold in adventures on the treacherous ice-floes, and marvellously skilled in seal lore, they make up a body of men in some respects not to be matched on the globe. Crowded like pigs on a sealing steamer, they cultivate a positive affection for dirt, and regard it as a kind of hon- orable badge of their adventurous calling. During a voy- age of several weeks they never take off their clothes, even to sleep. The oil from seal blubber fairly drips from their garments, dirt, soot, and tar adhere to their faces in steadily thickening strata, and when they finally enter port to strut the streets in unwashed glory they are in- carnate emblems of filth and odor. A night in St. John's after the arrival of two or three lucky seal crews means bedlam for the city. Honest burghers fly the streets and look well to the doors and shutters o' nights. On the ice the endurance, surefootedness, and daring of the seal- hunters are well-nigh incredible. They leap from cake to cake where it seems even a child could not be sustained, drag their heavy boats long distances through the hum- mocks, and think nothing of passing a night on the ice far from the steamer, provided only seal are near. Their cold hands they warm by thrusting them in gashes cut in lOO £ y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. the still palpitating carcass of the seal, and one instance is recorded where a freezing sealer saved his life by heap- ing up the gory carcasses for a night over his own body. When hunting, the sealers go by twos so that one can aid his companion should he fall in the water between the floes. Though the finding of the seal herds is largely a matter of luck, considerable depends on the sagacity of the captain, who, if up to his business, watches carefully all the winds of late February and early March so as to know where and when the ice can best be met. Curious and isolated facts gathered from sealing ex- periences are retailed without number. Some years ago, during an otherwise bad season, the seals " struck in " on the ice near the Newfoundland coast while the steamers were away. Women and children, leaving the shore, engaged in the slaughter, and during a few days sixty-four thousand head were killed within a few miles of St. John's. At about the same time a cyclops among seals was found with only a single perfectly-developed eye exactly in the centre of the forehead. In another case a large shapely animal had eight flippers instead of four, the usual number. The flippers of the novel creature, all of full size, were arranged symmetrically by fours on the up- per and lower parts of the body. Whether these speci- mens were freaks of nature or represented separate species, is a question for zoologists. The flippers of the seal, by the way, when fried are reckoned a rare dainty by the islanders, and are often brought back from the ice in long SEAL-HUNTING ON THE ICE-FIELDS, lOI strings to be kept for food. When, as rarely happens, more seals are found than a single steamer can load, the surplus are killed and the pelts heaped on the ice, to be marked with the steamer's flag. In that case an unloaded vessel can bring in the pelts and demand a certain large percentage of their value. On their second voyage out the steamers seek the full-grown animals, which weigh some two hundred pounds. They are fierce fellows, who force their way to the water and have to be shot, making the process of collecting pelts slow and unprofitable as compared with the capture of a new-born herd. When the steamers arrive the pelts are unloaded and transferred to the oil factories which line the eastern border of St. John's harbor. The blubber is separated from the pelt to be tried into oil, which is used for lubri- cating, for fine soaps, and a dozen other purposes. The skins are salted, then sent to Europe, where they are tanned into coarse but handsome leather, particularly beautiful for its graining, and worked up for purses, costly book-binding, and like uses. As stated, the sealing busi- ness of the North Atlantic is almost monopolized by the Newfoundlanders. A fleet of steamers, belonging to a firm at Dundee, Scotland, sails every year to the ice-fields, but they take their crews at St. John's, and there also is the factory of the owners. The monopoly is now, and promises to be for all time, a natural one, founded solidly on proximity to the ice and still firmer on the long tradi- tions, the trained experience, and the almost reckless en- terprise of the bold island sealers. HEART'S CONTENT AND THE OCEAN CABLES. A LITTLE more than a quarter of a century has gone by since the laying of the first ocean cable and the transmission of a message woke the country to wild enthusiasm and demonstrated the possibility of wedding two continents in electric bonds. The union was but a momentary and sentimental one. Almost on the day that the first message passed, the grim news spread that the cable had broken. In those days there were not wanting men of repute in the scientific world who predicted that the obstacles to ocean cable-laying were insuperable. The attrition of rocks and sand, the corrosion by the ocean brine, the necessary flaws in so long a span of cable, were urged stoutly as bars to an enterprise which might stir international sentiment, but would never, as was asserted, be a practical reality. At this distance, and in the vivid light of things done, it is curious to recall the delusive fears of that sceptical day — to find five years afterward a new cable laid, the old one repaired, and success not exciting a tithe of the enthusi- asm created by the earlier failure ; to be brought face to face, as a familiar and every-day fact, with the daily trans- mission of hundreds of sub-ocean messages ; to know that I02 HEART'S CONTENT AND OCEAN CABLES. IO3 cables are laid and repaired with as much precision and certainty as the prosaic land-wire, and that stockholders look to them for dividends with as much confidence as to the railroad, the factory, or the bank; and, finally, remembering the later marvels of electrical discovery, to look onward to an era when even the telegraph and cable may perhaps become obsolete. On the rugged shores of Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, is Heart's Content, the great station of the Anglo-Ameri- can Company, where three of their cables land. The bay, now famous in the annals of ocean telegraphy, is a body of water about as large as Long Island Sound, cutting straight into the bleak shores of Newfoundland, and, like all those shores, rocky, sheer, and fatal to the mariner whose craft strikes them during high seas. In each of the little harbors of the bay is a small group of fishing huts, and Heart's Content itself scarcely deserves the title of a village. During the winter the large bay is fairly buried in drift ice, on which teams can drive across ; in the spring towering icebergs, loosed from their Arctic moorings, drift in, and, but for the vast depth of water they draw, would dash against the shore. As it is, they strike the bottom in deep water, making a mighty stir as they roll in the turbid tide, until, unbalanced by the heat of the sun, which melts them above, they fall over with a crash. During the month of August, I have seen in the bay one of these stately visitors, the survivor of a great company of bergs that entered the waters the preceding 104 BV-PFAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. spring. The telegraphers at their station in Heart's Con- tent have isolation with a vengeance. On the barren road to Carbonear, the nearest settlement of any size for twelve miles, one finds only a single house, and that the dwelling of a telegraph repairer. In the winter the road is almost closed by deep snow, and poles nearly as high as those of the telegraph have to be set up to mark out the path. To St. John's, forty miles farther on, is also a rough journey, and altogether the telegraphers, surrounded only by fishing huts and hemmed in by their rocky walls, have a dreary life of routine that almost makes the name Heart's Content one of derision. In all, the cable station gives employment to about thirty persons. The opera- tors, picked men in their calling, are most courteous and intelligent gentlemen. The Anglo-American Company has to pay them well, as it should, for their life of seclusion. They each receive fifteen hundred dollars a year besides a handsome dormitory, and their annual vacation of a month each year can, at the option of the operators, be exchanged for three months every three years, so as to enable them to revisit their English homes. Many of them have families, and one of them has been in the service of the company at Heart's Content for sixteen years. But at best, shut out from the world and environed during the winter by deep ice and snows, existence must be terribly dreary in that remote corner where science and civilization touch one of nature's roughest outposts. A spacious building, looming up like a Colossus over HEART'S CONTENT AND OCEAN CABLES. I05 the low dwellings of the fishermen, contains the apparatus by which the cable messages are sent or received. Within is a glittering medley of brasswork, keys and key-boards, wheels, jars, wires, and general telegraphic paraphernalia. The air hums with the click of instruments, and the room on a working day is a hive of industry. First to attract the eye, and foremost as to interest, is the " recorder," the instrument that receives the message after its instant journey under seventeen hundred miles of water. The recorder is a horseshoe magnet, electrified by the usual circles of fine wire, and attracting a small metallic coil. The coil is hung between the magnetic poles, and by a light lever and a thread almost as fine as the strand of a cobweb, is connected with a delicate syphon hung in a little reservoir of ink. The ink is electrified, so as to pro- duce a repulsion of the particles, making it flow more readily through the syphon, which outside is about the size of a darning-needle, and the interior tube scarcely larger than a hair. The lower end of the syphon rests against a paper tape playing perpendicularly through rollers. The whole machine is of gossamer fineness and flexibility, so as to minimize the electric strain necessary for working the cable. Let us imagine now that a coming message has been signalled from far across the ocean at Valencia. The op- erator at first opens the simple machinery that works the brass rollers. On the centre of the tape, as it passes be- tween the rollers, the syphon at first marks only a straight io6 B Y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. line. Suddenly the line swerves to the right or left. The message has started, and the end of the syphon has begun its record. Worked by two keys, and positively or nega- tively electrified, the coil swings the syphon point now to one side, now to the other, along the tape. Responsive to the trained hand of the operator, the filament of ink marks out one notch, two notches, three notches ; then suddenly, it may be, a high elevation or depression until the delicate line traced on the tape looks like the tiny out- line of a mountain range. But it is a range whose every hill-top, peak, and valley means an alphabetical symbol to the telegrapher's eye. The diagram annexed shows two sections of the tape and the curves corresponding with several letters and numerals. The recorder is the invention of the famous electrician Sir William Thompson. How delicate an interpreter it is HEART'S CONTENT AND OCEAN CABLES. 10/ may be inferred from the fact that ten jars work eighteen hundred miles of cable between Valentia and Heart's Con- tent, while twenty-five jars of the same electric power would be needed to work three hundred and fifty miles of land-wire ; in other terms, the recorder is more than twelve times as efficient for its purpose as the ordinary Morse instrument. The recorder traces its characters on the tape about as fast as a slow penman copies a letter. Besides its delicacy of work, the recorder, as its name im- ports, has the merit of leaving the record of the message — a point which in a lawsuit involving an alleged mistake of a word might save the company thousands of dollars. Superseded by the recorder, but an instrument still used as a substitute in emergencies, is the reflector. It is an electric adaptation of reflected light, not much unlike the process by which a child amuses itself when darting round a room the ray from a hand-mirror. As the slight- est turn of the glass will throw the reflection through a great arc, so in the telegraphic instrument a wide move- ment of a ray follows from a little vibration of a mirror, and there is corresponding economy of electric strain. The mirror is set in a metallic case, which when electrified gives a double motion. A bright lamp shining through a slit makes an upright bar of light, which is reflected into a dark box a yard away and plays to one side or the other of a line in the centre. Looking into the box the lay- man sees only a flash darting to right and left. But these double flashes give the dot and dash which in various I08 B Y. WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. combinations are all the telegrapher needs to construct his alphabet. The reflector is less intricate than the recorder, but as it could not register the message it was discarded. The motive of lessening the strain on the cable, which prompts the use of both the recorder and re- flector with their gossamer devices, is also the underlying cause of the establishment of the station at Heart's Con- tent. To pass the current directly to the land-wires seemed an undue risk. Hence Heart's Content is made the resting-place of the messages over three cables, and there they are transferred to land-wires and forwarded to their destination in the usual telegraphic way. In addi- tion to the three cables landed at Heart's Content, the Anglo-American Company operate the French cable run- ning from Brest, France, to the island of St. Pierre, south of Newfoundland, and thence to the coast of the United States. The work of locating a break or flaw in the cable — a process seemingly so abstruse — is, with the present im- proved instruments, comparatively quick and easy. Dis- carding technicalities, we may say simply that the whole electric potency of the cable when fully charged is known, and the same can be quickly ascertained of the two parts created by a break. A dehcate machine adjusted to the nicest fractions discloses the electric units or " ohms " in each part, and as the number of ohms to the mile is known, the miles and fractions of miles in both parts can be found out at each end of the cable. In the case of a HEART'S CON-TENT AND OCEAN CABLES. IO9 clean break the locating of it takes about fifteen minutes. But a very angular break, or a flaw, makes perturbations of the measurement which it, now and then, takes some hours to rectify. The usual cause of breaks or flaws is attri- tion on rocks or sand ; and sometimes a break in very deep water indicates that sea-currents of considerable force prevail there, contrary to the generally accepted theory that deep-sea waters are always placid. Most of the fractures, however, take place in shallows, and many of them are due to the dragging anchors of the fisher craft. In two or three instances the cables have evidently been snapped by enraged or hungry fish. The cable steamer Minia lies constantly in the harbor of Halifax, fully equipped and awaiting her calls to ser- vice. She is a staunch craft of some three thousand tons burthen, and with unusual beam for a vessel of her length. Her work consists entirely of repairing, the laying of full- length cables being relegated to large steamers like the Great Eastern, the Hooper, or the Faraday. Occasionally, however, the Minia is required to relay considerable parts, and she carries regularly in her tanks about six hundred miles of fresh cable. The tanks, some twenty -five feet in diameter, reach far down into her capacious hold, and the cables are coiled in a deep layer around a central core. The larger the core the less the capacity of the tank, and, on the other hand, the smaller the core the greater the danger that the paying-out cable will kink and foul when it reaches the smaller central coils. To partly avoid 1 10 BV-fVAVS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. this difficulty, a large force of men — sometimes as many as thirty — are placed in a circle around the interior of the tank, and each man as the cable lifts before him holds down the adjacent coils and sees that the cable is free. It not uncommonly happens that one of these watchers grows careless and is knocked by one of the ascending coils heels over head among his fellows, for the modern cable steamers often pay out the coils with a speed reach- ing seven or eight miles an hour. After running from the tanks the cable passes over a series of wheels, fitted with a powerful system of brakes, which can be applied in- stantly. Then it goes over a wheel, at the stem, and is dropped into the ocean. In picking up the cable the coils pass over a large wheel, thence to the tanks, where they are carefully relaid. The modern first-class Atlantic cable is made of (i) seven central strands of fine copper wire twisted together ; (2) a tightly fitting tube of solid gutta-percha ; (3) a wrapping of jute ; (4) a cover- ing of thick wires, and (5) a final wrapping of thick tarred tape several inches wide. The deep-water cable of these days, when finished, is about an inch in diameter, the shore cable often an inch and a half. In paying out as well as taking in cable the utmost care must be used, and even then at times an unexpected kink may not only break the cable but tear to pieces the wheels, brakes, and other valuable machinery. The machinery used for picking up a cable in both deep and shallow water is of the most simple description. It HEART'S CONTENT AND OCEAN CABLES. Ill consists of a rope about an inch and a quarter in diameter, made from twisted strands of the strongest hemp, with interwoven wires of fine steel. The grapnel at the end is merely a solid shaft of iron some two feet long, weighing about a hundred pounds, and prolonged into six blunt hooks which very much resemble the partly closed fingers of the human hand. In picking up the cable in deep water the Minia, after reaching the waters near the break, lets out her rope and grapnel, then takes a course at right angles to the cable and at some distance from the fracture, so that the broken end may not slip through the grapnel. The grapnel rope is attached to a dynamometer which ex- actly measures the strain on the rope, and shows unerr- ingly when the cable has been caught. If the grapnel fouls a rock the strain rises very suddenly and to a high point ; but as the exact weight of the cable is known, the dynamometer signals by the steady ratio of increase its hold on the cable far below. The ease and certainty with which the cables are picked up in these days are amazing. Awhile ago one of the lines of the Anglo-American Com- pany was caught without trouble at a depth of two and a quarter miles near the middle of the Atlantic. Captain Trott, of the Minia, who has won great fame for his skill and ingenuity in cable matters, recently picked up the French cable one hundred and eighty miles off St. Pierre, and in four hours from the time the grapnel was let go had the cable spliced and in working condition. The spKcmg is a work of great delicacy and skill, and when 112 BY-iVAYS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. accomplished by trained fingers the spliced part can scarcely be distinguished from the main cord. So rapid has been the improvement in perfecting the modern cable, that the resistance to the electric current has been re- duced to one quarter what it was twenty years ago, while the duplex system of sending and receiving messages doubles the capacity of every new cable that is laid. The working life of the modern cable is about thirteen years. The work in the operating-room at Heart's Content has brought out a number of curious facts about cables and cable-operating. For instance, New York City sends and receives about two thirds of all the cable business of the United States. Philadelphia comes next, then Chi- cago ; while some of the smaller Southern cities, with their messages relating to cotton sales, outrank large Northern cities like Boston, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Cin- cinnati. It amazes the telegraphers at the cable station to tell them of the importance of places like New Haven, Albany, Troy, or Buffalo, from which the cable business is so small that at Heart's Content they are supposed to be little towns. The regular price of a message at the time of this writing is fifty cents a word. Yet, a few years ago, when competition reduced the rate to twelve cents, the increase in the number of cable messages was relatively very small. As the competition was compara- tively brief, however, the test of cheap rates could scarce- ly be called a fair one. As proving the importance of HEART'S CONTENT AND OCEAN CABLES. 1 13 choosing steady men in cable work, the example is cited of a subordinate at Valentia charged with the duty of making certain complex connections with the wires there. One day he became intoxicated, and, as no one knew the intricate connections, communication between two conti- nents was well-nigh stopped for a large part of a day until a drunkard could recover from his spree. There is a side half romantic, half weird to the life of the telegraphers shut in their workroom at Heart's Con- tent. Day and night the messages of two continents pass thither, make their brief stay, then flash again their mean- ing to souls far distant on the old or new hemisphere. In storm and tempest, 'mid winter snows and summer blos- soms, these men, working often almost within earshot of the crash of Arctic bergs, interpret the gossamer charac- ters traced in rise and fall along the mystic tape. The knell of death, the wail of sorrow, the story of fortunes made or lost, the tale of wreck by land or sea, the crises of statesmen, the record of crime, the cry of battle, are all registered in the tiny line which, passing the sun in his course, makes two continents one in their knowledge of things done and to be. DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. NOTHING excites more the wonder and delight of the winter tourist to the Bahamas than the pellucid clearness of the local ocean waters. A few hours after leaving the Gulf Stream on the southward voyage the change begins. The blacker depths of the ocean are there left behind and the soundings of the Bahama chan- nels are entered. Around in all directions, though for the most part too far away to be descried, are the islands of the Bahama group, land-locking the waters and stilling the waves. But it is not this softening of the temper of the sea — albeit agreeable to many voyagers — that attracts so much attention, as the beautiful alteration of sea-color. The ocean now takes on the hue of a clear spring sky. It is not like the dirty green of our Northern marine waters, but a dark translucent blue. Near the shore this color brightens suddenly into an opalescent tint, quickly, per- haps, shifting to black where the bright coral reefs slope off to dark weeds. Dipped up in a glass the sharpest eye de- tects no speck in this tropical fluid, colorless as the purest air. We talk of pure sea-water at Newport, Long Branch, or Cape May. But the term becomes a far-fetched metaphor after seeing what ocean water is in regions like the Baha- mas, where no alluvial sands discolor it, where the coral 114 DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. 11$ debris seems always to sink, and where the sea when calm appears to be only a sort of lower stratum of the luminous ether above. Where the water is, say, ten feet deep, it seems as if one could touch bottom with a cane. The steamers, of almost two thousand tons burthen, which enter Nassau harbor appear by some magical potency to be floating on the sand ; and in the profounder depths of sixty or seventy feet the naked eye, discerning the reefs apparently some fifteen feet down, is even worse deceived. When bathing in this fluid, never even in winter so cold as the warmest summer seas of Long Branch, one is surprised to find himself over his head in water that seems only waist-deep, while the body of a big man is shortened by the optical illusion into the proportions of a dwarf. Dame Nature, in accomplishing her work in tropical climes, always seems to have made the sad mistake of doing every thing for the eye. She gives pure air, but it Is full of lassitude. She creates a vast range of most lux- uriant vegetation, but her trees are small and their fibre tender. She begets a huge variety of fruits beautiful to look upon, but if we except the orange, lemon, pineapple, and banana, they are for the most part insipid and of spe- cies which decay so quickly that they are rarely or never seen in our Northern markets. In tropical seas her work is of the same kind. Her fish seem made to feast the esthetic eye rather than the craving stomach. In those crystalline waters, where clean living is the necessary habit of the finny races, one might expect every fish to at Il6 BY. WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. least rival the flavor of the shad, trout, and other dainty dwellers of Northern streams. But, instead, every thing seems to run to color. The supremest tints of beauty — gold, orange, blue, green, and red — are lavished v^rantonly on the tropical tribes of the sea. Even fish of Northern species when found in the tropics have some added line of beauty in gold or crimson. The porgy, for example, is one of the fish most abundant in Bahama waters. But in the tropics, unlike his Northern kin, he has a scarlet mouth and deep lines of gold on his scales. Something in the clear water seems to generate these vivid tints, and by the same occult power extract all fishy esculence. For tropical fish, with one or two exceptions, taste just alike. They have a negative, insipid flavor when cooked — something half way between fish and cheap beefsteak, — and when first caught they smell more like fresh meat than fish. Nay, many of these fish are really poisonous. There is one well-authenticated local case, that records how some passengers on a Bahama-bound schooner caught a tropical fish, called the barracuda, a fierce creature, often growing to great size, and much resembling in structure and habits the fresh-water pickerel. The fish was cooked, and every man who ate was seriously poisoned, while one of the victims became almost a confirmed invalid in con- sequence of that terrible repast. Nevertheless the barra- cuda at certain seasons and under particular conditions is eaten freely by the Bahama negroes; and it may be seen, when sun-dried, for sale in the Nassau markets. Other fish, DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. H/ however, some of them most beautiful specimens, are eschewed, and as to some of them most absurd notions as to their poisonous qualities prevail among the negro race. The squirrel fish, for instance, must never be touched be- tween the eyes, for yellow fever is supposed to be certain to ensue. For fifteen miles along the northern shore of New Providence Island, the formation of the sea bottom is most singular and interesting. The first mile from the shore slopes gently outward until a depth of eighty or one hundred feet is reached. Then comes a submarine precipice. The coral reef suddenly drops down like a cliff, edged with rough rocks and cut by deep fissures, in which many an anchor of the poor fisherman has been caught and lost. To fish successfully, therefore, a shore wind is almost essential, so that the anchor may be cast in soundings while the boat " tails " off over the subnia- riiie cliff, in whose cracks the fish find refuge from sharks and other enemies. To get his sail-boat in exact position over this cliff is the Nassau fisherman's highest art. Long he scans the water as his craft nears the " edge of the ocean," as the dip is locally named. By the change in the water-tints he knows every shifting of depth, but in addi- tion he must note carefully the direction of wind, the water currents, and the probable drag of his four- toothed anchor. Then at last comes the order to " drop." The rusty flukes go over with a splash ; the long rope runs out ten, twenty, thirty fathoms, until the welcome 1 1 8 BY.JVAYS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. strain shows that the teeth have caught the rock. The sails are furled, the little vessel swings to the wind, one of the colored crew breaks a big " conch " for bait, dropping the bright fragments of shell overboard to attract the fish. Then the long double-hooked fish-lines, as large as small ropes and furnished with a sinker like a plummet, are dropped over, and the sport begins. Fishing in the tropics, as in every spot where the writer has ever cast his lines, is vested with most acute uncer- tainties. Not only most wise in their generation, but decidedly whimsical and capricious are these scaly races of hot zones. I have cast my baited hook in a school of them so thick that it gave dark color to the white coral bottom, yet without a suggestion of a nibble. At other times, it is said, every fish rushes madly for the bait as though at the point of starvation, and they are hauled up two at a time, until the fisherman's rasped fingers can en- dure the pain no longer. In some respects, too, this is the merest mockery of sport. To pull up hand over hand a hundred and fifty feet of mimic rope ; to barely feel the struggles of a four-pound fish at the other end, so tense is the strain of the line with its huge sinker ; to find the captive when he reaches the surface so exhausted by his upward trip that he is scarcely as gamesome as so many pounds of floating wood ; and to wait several minutes before even the heavy lead can take the line to the needed depth, — all this has its smack of the ridiculous for the sportsman who has pulled in a ten-pound bluefish off DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. II9 Barnegat, or played an Adirondack trout on his eight- ounce rod. But, on the other hand, tropical fishing has special charms and novelties of its own. The immense variety and wonderful shapes and colors of the fish make one watch with eager excitement for each new specimen hauled over the rail. It may be the tropical turbot, with blue-and-gold markings, and his dorsal fin six inches long ; or the pine, scarlet-red, dotted with black spots ; the rockfish, variegated as the rainbow ; the hog-fish, with teeth counterfeiting tusks, and a snout opening like a telescope ; the crimson snapper, the silvery margate, the red-mottled grouper, and twenty other species might be named to fill out a list, none of which would lack strange attributes of color or form. I have known a friend, after a few hours' sport, bring in no less than nineteen different varieties of fish, which fairly transfigured the interior of the boat with their mass of radiant hues. The " water- glass," so-called, also adds a unique attraction to this deep- water fishing. It is simply a window-pane set into a box which is fitted with handles. Placed on the waves, it makes a smooth-water surface in contact with the glass, through which the trained eye of the negro mariner looks down to incredible depths. Often his " Look out dere, massa, dere 's a big porgy at yer hook ! " will signal a bite, and be followed presently by the coming of the identical fish over the rail. It smacks of the strange and supernat- ural, this prediction of fishy doings a hundred feet down in the brine. I20 BY.H^AYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. Or take the glass yourself, if momentarily tired of the sport, and a little practice will show you a fresh realm of wonders — the deep bottom, with its rocks, weeds, and sands ; the fish moving here and there ; the graceful curve of the long fiish-llnes, as they taper away to nothingness far below ; and every now and then an upward gleam of white- ness as a companion draws up a new victim, whose struggles can be marked fully a minute before it is dropped, gasping on the boards. A volume could be written about the habits and traits of the tropical sharks. In the teeming fish-life of these tepid waters they find abundant food, all the more easily captured because of the transparency of the sea. It fol- lows that there is an enormous development of shark-life, both as to number and species, as compared with more temperate ocean climes. In his relations with the fisher- man the shark is a vile marplot. You may be gleefully hauling in fish after fish, and congratulating yourself on an hour or two of sport. Suddenly, just as you have started a four-pounder upward, you see a gleaming white flash. Pull rapidly as you will, but you will pull in vain. Thirty feet more of line, it may be, are drawn in, when the hook seems to strike a rock. Perhaps the check is but momentary ; then on drawing in you find only the head of a handsome fish whose body has gone into Mr. Shark's maw. But more likely you have put too much strain upon the line, and in that case the shark, fearing the escape of the prey, has bolted hook, fish, and sinker, so that only the DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. 121 severed line comes back. The negro fishermen, with the aid of their water-glasses, have been able to make a thorough study of the habits of these pirates of the deep, and give the shark a high character for cunning. As these negroes aver, a shark will sometimes follow a boat for a mile until it comes to anchor. Then, lying in the shadow of some subaqueous rock, so as not to frighten the fish from biting, the shrewd fellow will dart out the instant a hooked victim begins his ascent. With a hungry shark around, not more than one out of three hooked fish ever reaches the rail; and there is proportionate and vexatious loss of hooks and sinkers. After his novel fishing is ended the shark rids himself of these impedimenta by rubbing his nose and lips against projecting rocks. Sharks of the moderate size of ten or twelve feet may sometimes be caught with a rope and huge hook hung to a chain. But even then they have a clever way of following up the line, turning on the back, and by a side snap of the teeth cut- ting the cord as cleanly as with a knife. The larger and fiercer species of tropical shark, from twenty-five to thirty feet long, have never been caught at Nassau by line, and the negroes tell wondrous tales as to the chain hooks and huge cords broken in tackling the big fellows. We had lately an illustration of their voracity: A negro sailor had caught one day an ordinary shark ten feet in length and weighing some two hundred and fifty pounds. He left the creature over night on a line attached to his boat. The next morning only the head was found. It 122 BV-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. had been severed from the body by a single clean cut just behind the gills. As a rule, when once the sharks get actively at work around the lines the legitimate sport ends for that anchorage in fifteen or twenty minutes, as the edible fish fly to the rocks for protection. But some- times the fishermen, tying together a bottle and piece of iron, drop it down on a cord attached to the boat. The rise and fall of the craft on the waves keeps up a constant tinkling below, and, as water is a good sound-conductor, the sharks flee in terror. A ray of sunlight cast down- ward through the water-glass often has a similar effect. Manifold are the curious things disclosed in the fish- craft of these clear deep waters. A few moments after a fish has lain on the boat's bottom you will see its abdomen enormously distended. Examine it more closely, and you will find the wind bladder so swollen that it protrudes far into the mouth. The simple explanation is that the bladder has expanded from the relaxing of the pressure to which it was adjusted by nature at thirty fathoms of depth. Place this fish while still alive on the water, and it will scarcely stir, much less swim downward. But prick the abdomen with a large pin and the air rushes out, the internal mechanism readjusts itself, and the fish darts away. In several species of fish this distension ensues in- stantly, after they are pulled within thirty or forty feet of the surface. Then, if they become unhooked, they struggle vainly to go downward, and at last float to the surface to die. Among the unique local methods of DEEP FISHING IN TROPIC SEAS. 1 23 fishing is that used by the negroes to take the Jewfish, a handsome many-colored species often growing to a length of several feet, and with a fatal habit of lying sluggishly on shallow bottoms as if asleep. The negro divers, who rival the fish in their swimming powers under water, take down a hook hung to a cord, approach the Jewfish from behind, and slip the hook under its nose. A sudden jerk from the confederate fisherman using his water-glass above does the rest, and the Jewfish goes to his death. Apocryphal as the story sounds it is but a second-rate marvel amid the genuine fishy wonders to be found with- out number in the bright waters of the tropic zone. SHADOWS IN CUBA. CUBA is a Spanish Ireland," is a sentence by which, after a very brief trip through the island, its po- litical, social, and economic conditions can be summarized. Of course some flaws may be detected in the analogy, but in essential points it holds good. Within the bounds of the " Gem of the Antilles," is a fierce war of races of a genuine Hibernian type. There, too, among the lower classes, are the squalor, misery, and destitution that im- press the eye so painfully in Mayo or Tipperary. With a little more mud and a little less thatch-work the likeness between the hut of the Cuban freedman and the cabin of the Irish peasant would be complete. Finally and most solemn of all is the terrible disparity to be seen in . Cuba between the natural resources of the island and the physical condition of the people. The beauty of its landscapes, the fertility of its soils, its vast productiveness, its fine harbors, its clear rivers, are a perfect revelation to the American visitor. Nature seems to have done every thing to make the island, man every thing to unmake it. The Gem of the Antilles is literally an Irish emerald with a tropical setting. Before you even reach Cuba you are confronted by those evidences of backwardness and semi-barbarism that 124 SHADOWS IN CUBA. 1 2$ increase by a huge ratio after landing. You are bound, we will suppose, to Matanzas, a city of some thirty thousand inhabitants, with a deep capacious harbor open- ing directly on the ocean, and for that reason dangerous to approach by night. Yet this harbor, in which not very long ago I counted fifty sail of anchored vessels, has no light-house. There is a harbor light at Havana, and one at another Cuban port ; but these two lights are all that can be found on the Cuban coast-line of two thou- sand miles. Once within the harbor the ordeal of Custom- house vexations begins. The steamer that bears you has entered port at eight o'clock in the morning, and must wait the coming of the surly Custom-house officers. One hour, two hours, three hours pass. The impatient pas- sengers stamp the deck with maledictions deep and pointed. At last, in the far distance, the Custom-house barge, a lazy craft of the gondola species is sighted. Her officers know that the steamer's voyagers are waiting ; but before the mediaeval craft heads to the steamer she must visit half a dozen sloops and schooners, with fifteen or twenty min- utes' stay at each. Then your passport must be surren- dered, to be sought out with fresh bother on shore. You land in a cranky row-boat — there are no ship wharves at Matanzas — and must wait once again the examination of baggage , and finally, after having undergone treatment that could not have been much worse if you were a filli- buster conspiring against the peace of his Spanish Maj- esty's Cuban dominions, you reach your hotel. These 126 BY-WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. abominable Custom-house practices at Matanzas have been officially brought to the notice of the higher Cuban authorities by the steam-ship companies, but thus far with- out the slightest efifect. Matanzas itself is a fair specimen of that dry-rot which, under Spanish rule, seems to have fallen on the whole island. The city, evidently old — for decay only comes with age, — is probably as dilapidated a place as can be found on the continent. The Custom-house wharf, with its rot- ted floors, broken timbers, and tottering foundations, sat- irizes the really important commerce of the port. The ordinary buildings of the city, outside of a few of the better class of residences and mercantile houses, are musty, battered, and forlorn. Business drifts rather than moves through its streets, and the old esplanade, weed- grown, rough, and decorated with shattered remnants of statuary, mocks its ancient splendor. Take a volante and drive through the valley that trends from inland down to the city. Within a pistol-shot of the suburbs the chief road becomes a chaos of rocks, deep ruts, and mud holes. An unworn drive through a New England cow-pasture would be a boulevard in comparison with this pathway, which they call a " good " road in Matanzas. But proceed a little farther on. The valley now opens into a beautiful expanse of fertile land. There is a square mile of this level country within a rifle-shot of a city of thirty thou- sand people, yet not a square rod is improved or under cul- tivation. That land at twice the distance from a Yankee SHADOWS IN- CUBA. 12/ city would fetch its thousands an acre ; at Matanzas it can be bought for a song. An inquiry as to the causes of this backwardness always brings out the reply : " Taxation," " Do you know," said a prominent Cuban citizen of Matanzas in conversa- tion recently, " why that plot of land to which you refer is not improved ? It is because, if any one improved it, the increased taxes would eat it up." All through Cuba this grievous taxation is the burden of complaint. The whole island groans under its load of direct and indirect imposts. They take so many forms that, after considera- ble effort, it is impossible to reach any just estimate of the total tax under which the ordinary property- owner labors. There are taxes on imports and taxes on exports — for instance, five dollars on every cask of sugar that leaves the country, — taxes on sales, taxes on legacies, taxes on rents. To enumerate the petty fees and per- quisites which hang on the system, like fungi on a rotten log, would take a volume. But let an instance speak for all. A young Cuban friend was to be married during the writer's visit to the island, and was enduring the tedious civic and ecclesiastical formalities preliminary to the cere- mony. He asserted that the essential legal fees — for cer- tificate, notice of marriage, and so on — would amount to one hundred dollars in paper money, the equivalent of fifty dollars in our American currency. The legal fee of the priest alone was fifty dollars, and it was sure to be rigidly exacted. 128 BV-IVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. The nature and spirit of this wretched scheme of extor- tionate public fees may be inferred from the passport sys- tem, which is still in full force at the Cuban ports. Every American who goes to Cuba must get a passport at a total cost of eleven dollars in our country. But at Nassau, an English port, the Spanish Consul sells them for four dollars, and asks no questions of the applicant, except one or two purely formal ones. There is an American Consul at Nassau, but, curiously enough, the American visitor goes to the Spanish ofificial for his passport, and that functionary eagerly questions the pursers of incoming American steamers as to the number of Cuba-bound visitors needing the documents. Practically, of course, this passport system is a mere farce regarded as an inter- national precaution. But it serves to tax strangers who go to Cuba to spend money, and therefore the extortion is kept up. A curious contact it is with New-World bar- barism when the visitor in a country close to our shores finds that he must get a passport, must have it vised at the Cuban port of entry, vis^d again at the port of departure before he can leave the island, and have to pay a fee every time the document is scrutinized. Ofificial corruption is apparently rampant all through the Cuban civil service. Said a Cuban tax-payer to the writer recently : " It would be bad enough to have to pay the awful taxes we do, but it is doubly sickening to have to pay those taxes and know that an immense pro- portion is coolly pocketed by the Spanish officials." SHADOWS IN CUBA. 1 29 This same gentleman showed me a local tax bill for his house fully paid and receipted. He then pulled out two later unreceipted bills covering exactly the same period, but with "penalty" taxes— for delay— added. The conclusion was irresistible that the first tax had been stolen without entering it on the books at the Tax-office. There was the best authority for a case where a planter who had gone up to pay taxes on a plantation sold for three hundred thousand dollars had been invited by the officer to fix the amount at half the sum and " divide " the tax on the balance. Indeed, it is perfectly amazing to find how universally accepted is the notion of deep-seated and general official swindling. Some little incidents throw a side-light on the' evil. For instance, the regular fee is twenty-five cents for getting a passport vised at Havana before leaving the island. Visit the Government office in the city and try the experiment of not offering an extra fee. You may wait one, two, three days before the passport is handed back. But offer a dollar, and " presto," the little instant of work is done and the document re- turned. If people who ought to know — American resi- dents and respectable Cubans— can be half believed, the degree of public swindling would be positively ludi- crous, could crime ever be made funny. They aver that Cuban offices are regularly bartered in Spain to men who come over as civic pirates to prey on the island. I have heard of the case of one Customs officer who came from Spain after paying there ten thousand dollars for his 1 30 BV- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. place. In two months, as the story goes, he was removed, that his position might be sold over again. " Never mind," said he, " in those two months I made twenty- thousand dollars." No doubt many of these stories are exaggerated or fictitious ; but if every one of them were a lie, the undoubted and palpable fact that every one be- lieves them seems enough to sap the confidence and energies of a sturdier race than is found in Cuba. The vices of the Spanish ofifice-holding class are reflected deeply on those lower orders with whom the stranger has to deal. Of all the places in the world prolific in petty swindles Havana takes the palm. The hucksters, money- changers, hotel interpreters, and everybody of the genus, cheat with a coolness and a hardihood that smack of genius, and, when detected, calmly lower their price, smiling as at a joke. They have easy scope for fraud in the currencies of the island, which are enough to puzzle more experienced brains than the tourist's. Paper money (depreciated in gold at this time fifty per centum and not a full legal-tender), Spanish gold, Mexican and American coins, greenbacks, all circulate in most puzzling relations of value. Many of the paper bills and shinplasters are so faded, torn, and dirty that the wildest stretch of fancy is required to attribute to them value ; while the com- plexities of foreign exchange caused by this hodge-podge of hybrid currencies are most absurd and whimsical. Between the Cubans proper or Creoles, who are the old residents of the island, and the Spaniards there is undying SHADOWS IN CUBA. I3I hatred. All the public offices of trust and profit are filled by these imported Spaniards, who constitute a ruling class and bureaucracy of the most pernicious type ; while the planter class and most of the property-owners are Cubans. Property interests on the one side are thus arrayed against a predatory oligarchy of petty official tyrants on the other. The bitter feud between the two Spain apparently makes no attempt to heal. The Cubans pray for independence, for annexation to the United States, for any thing which will free them from Spanish dominion ; while the Span- iards preserve a disdainful air of authority that is peculiar- ly galling to the subject class. The Spaniards, however, are in constant fear of an outbreak, and Spain has even now twenty thousand troops on the island. Some of the local views on the recently closed rebellion give one fresh hints on its real character. Said a planter — who was as fierce as the rest of his class against Spanish rule — to me some time ago : " That rebellion was really little better than a series of forays by bandits. Why, half the time the rebels and the Spanish troops were in collusion with each other to rob the Cuban planters. When a planter happened to be beyond reach of one of the hostile parties, it would send word to the other that he ' had got something left/ and a descent on his property would soon follow. The Spaniards robbed and plundered as freely as the rebels, and without regard to the political opinions of the victim. A favorite Spanish trick was to impress a planter's oxen, on the plea that they were needed to haul 132 BV-^VAVS OF NATURE AND LIFE. supplies. The next day that planter would find his ani- mals on sale in some neighboring town." Nevertheless, that rebellion cost Spain at least one hundred million dol- lars in hard money and the lives of more than a hundred thousand men, most of them victims of yellow fever. To have mastered even the rebel guerillas they must have been better types of fighters than the thin-legged regi- ments of volunteers to be seen in Havana. These mimic toy soldiers, with their mincing quick-step and short stature, recall a drill of Amazons in a stage spectacle. It seems as though a Yankee housewife could spit a whole platoon with a bodkin, and one German or British regiment annihilate an army. The natural and exotic evils in Cuba, serious enough of themselves, are further complicated by the reorganization of labor systems following the emancipation of the slaves. After the year 1884 ^ slaves more than forty years old will be free, and by 1890, under the sliding scale of eman- cipation adopted, there will be no more slavery on the island. Ten years — emancipation began three years ago — is a pretty short time for revolutionizing the labor sys- tem of a country so languid and inflexible as Cuba, and the planters fear most disastrous results. Most of them defend the old slave regime, asserting that its evils were greatly modified by the legal checks on whipping, while any slave with ambition could, by working extra hours, purchase his freedom. They look forward with well- founded apprehension to the time when a most degraded SHADOWS IN- CUBA. I33 class of negro laborers will be set loose on an island where a tropical sun and abundant fruits give the wherewithal of subsistence almost without toil. On the subject of Chinese laborers, of whom an amazing number are seen on the island, the opinions of planters are divided. Some planters praise the thrift and industry of the coolies ; others declare them slow, weak, and inefficient. The truth seems to be that while the Chinaman in Cuba is a steady toiler, he is so physically feeble as to be no match for the negro slave. As for white labor, it is out of the ques- tion under the torrid sun beating down for eight months in the year like a celestial trip-hammer. Even now, at the ^.ater edge of winter, the tourist feels that strange morbid languor which seems the necessary curse of tropical races. Was it not Emerson who said that the goddess of civic liberty had been carved out of snow and ice ? The mind, at any rate, constantly reverts to that metaphor when it contemplates the long category of civic and economic evils which infest Cuba in common with so many other countries of the hot zone. The climate or some remoter cause inflicts its spell on both Cuban physique and character. There are some fine specimens of manhood among the planter and professional classes, and not a few, who have been educated abroad, are most courteous, hospitable, and cultivated men, with something of the old Castilian sense of honor. But they are physical and mental exceptions to the ordinary Cuban, who is thin-flanked, low of stature, hungry-faced, and 134 BY.fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. seemingly the victim of perpetual jaundice. How far his inveterate smoking breeds his low physique is a pertinent question. The speculative passion is most inordinately developed among all Cuban classes, and the ticket of the Havana lottery is one of the most obvious of its signs. These tickets, subdivided into twentieths, worth two dollars each, so as to be within reach of the poor, are ubiquitous throughout Cuba. Every small dealer, huckster, and boot-black has them on sale for a small commission, and everybody buys them. The Government, with its fortnightly drawings, makes, it is said, twenty per centum on all sales ; but the baleful effects of the institution on the character of the people seem never to have fallen within the governmental purview. If one may risk a slight variation of an old figure of speech, a visit to Cuba without seeing sugar and sugar- cane would be like a trip to Newcastle without finding coals. But there is one important difference. The busy city on the Tyne is the outlet of a coal region which an enterprising race are straining to its utmost capacity of pro- duction, while in Cuba it seemed at every step as though the soil had hardly been scratched and the vast capacities of the island had been almost ignored. The hundred million dollars that represents the value of Cuba's annual sugar crop in Cuba may seem a great sum, as, in fact, abso- lutely it is, and the country may be regarded as the saccha- rine centre of the world's trade. But at the best Cuba's annual sugar crop is a record of wasted opportunity. No SHADOWS IN CUBA. 135 visitor can see her fertile lands, with only small areas under cultivation, her tumble-down plantation dwellings, her ruined sugar-mills, without being impressed far more deeply with the sense of loss than of gain. Nevertheless, seen at a little distance, a Cuban sugar farm is a pretty and picturesque sight. It is placed usually on some broad stretch of land, rising and drop- ping in graceful curves. Pleasant groves of trees, glades of woodland, and far mountains, suffused in poetic blue haze, lend a lovely general effect to the picture. On one of the central curves rises the planter's home. It is often a Chinese puzzle of architecture, with no end of project- ing points and piazza work, covered with lattices so as to let in the breeze while it keeps out the heat, and so lined with high colors of red or blue that in the distance it looks like a great toy box. A little way from, this dwelling is a solid beam, set firmly in masonry and supporting the plan- tation bell. Farther away still is the vast mass of mixed- up buildings that make up the sugar works, flanked by the heaps of crushed dry cane which is used as fuel for the boiler. Then grouped at various distances from this plan- tation centre are the rough mud and lath houses of the negro hands in all stages of architectural decrepitude. Beyond, the eye lights on the cane fields, if one may use that term for what is rather a vast prairie of cane. It is peculiarly hard to do justice to the beauty of one of these sugar-cane oceans, its surface breaking into green waves under the wind, its solid mass of verdure still further 136 BY. WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. keeping up the watery effect, and its remoter bounds reaching far away until they almost touch the horizon. Dot this scene with stately palms lifting their tufted heads sixty feet high, with moving figures of horsemen and toil- ing negroes, with frameworks of loaded cane drawn by four yoked cattle, and the spectacle, seen from a distance where detail is lost, charms the eye with its pastoral loveliness. But with nearer vision, when the outline vanishes and details are brought to clearer view, one finds grim realities ofJ:hriftlessness. Every thing seems battered, and worn, and weather-stained. There is a prevailing air of unthrift and carelessness pervading the place. The trim orchards, the clean yards, and neat gardens that go with wealth in more temperate zones have no place here. The sugar-mill is rough and unpainted, its machinery rusty, and the broken cane trodden underfoot gives it a barn-yard semblance. Even the planter's own dwelling, with its once fiery paint, has a washed-out and dilapidated look, which its interior often confirms. Worst of all are the half-wrecked homes of the negro hands, with the mud falling from yawning cracks, the timbers decayed or broken, and their outward and inward aspect rivalling the mud huts of squalid Ire- land. Among these poor dwellings wander frowsy and fierce dogs, half-naked black women, and entirely naked black children of both sexes. It seems, looking at one of these dusky communities of the Cuban plantation, as though some degraded tribe of Central Africa had been SHADOWS IN CUBA. 137 taken up and dumped bodily into one of the dirty Irish villages of County Mayo or Galway. Of course there are plantations and plantations in Cuba ; and to many of the better class, no doubt, this description does injustice. But in the large majority of those I have seen most of its salient points will be recognized. The sugar-cane, which supplies the great Cuban staple of export, produces no natural seed, but is propagated from cuttings placed in shallow trenches through the fields, two or three feet apart. The young plants spring from the joints of the buried cane, and continue thus to grow for several years without new plantings, somewhat after the manner of the asparagus of our Northern climes. But each year the growth becomes inferior, until the planting has at last to be renewed. Though at first having to be weeded, while the stalk is tender, the cane is soon left to itself when once it begins to shade the soil so as to prevent the growth of obstructive plants. Most curious of all is the change that ensues as soon as the cane begins to ripen at its lower joints. Then the long, sword-like leaves that surround the lower part of the stalk loosen one by one. Finally they drop ofT, and as joint after joint soft- ens the dry leaves make a tangled thick mattress on the ground, covering thousands of acres and highly inflamma- ble. Readers of this volume will many of them recall the common reports telegraphed during the late Cuban rebell- ion of the immense destruction caused by firing the sugar plantations. The explanation is to be found in the ease 138 BV-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. with which a whole sugar crop can be set in flames by a touch of the match to this jungle of dry leaves that under- lies and penetrates the standing cane. Fire is the Cuban planter's nightmare. A careless toss of a half-burned cigarette, a spark from a negro's cabin, an ignited match, may signify the loss of a year's crop and absolute ruin. Most dangerous of all, a revengeful negro has it in his power often to inflict a loss of tens of thousands of dol- lars on his employer. There is one clever device which the negro uses to fire plantations, and at the same time prove an alibi. He takes a light box, with a candle set within it. Equipped with this and a bunch of matches, he crawls to the centre of a sugar-cane tract. He then so fixes the candle that it must burn through the box before the flame can reach the matted cane leaves. A touch of the match does the rest, and the fugitive has time to escape and appear among the working hands long before the distant smoke and spreading flames warn the planter of the impending calamity. "A sugar crop has to be watched like a baby," said a Cuban planter recently, speaking of cane culture. If danger is apprehended, the watchers guard it at every point, and short shrift is given the black man once caught in the incendiary act. If he reaches the courts, his chances are far better than those given him by the quick bullet of the guard. Outside of this peril of fire, sugar culture is not more precarious than other agricultural industries. But it ex- hausts the soil rapidly, so that its fertility needs constant SHADOWS IN CUBA. 139 renewal by manures ; and a plantation of three or four thousand acres, with its one or two hundred hands, its scores of ox-teams, its costly machinery, sugar-house, casks, cultivators, and various appurtenances, calls for a vast amount of working capital. On one of these sugar farms a few miles from Matanzas, the sugar-mill alone, with its improved machinery, cost two hundred thousand dollars. Some of the largest planters even go to the ex- pense of ramifying the cane tract with narrow-guage rail- roads, two or three miles long, to bring the cane economi- cally to the crushing mills. To explain fully the process of sugar-making would re- quire too technical and prosy a narrative to recite here. But the methods, for all practical purposes, may be divided into two : one, the improved process, producing the better grade of " centrifugal " sugar ; the other producing the old- process, or " Muscovado," article of commerce. The cane- stalks, from four to eight feet long, cut and stripped of their leaves, are brought to the mill. Then, strewn on a broad belt, working on the principle of an endless chain, they are passed between three great rollers laid very close together and worked by steam. Thence the thin watery fluid, very sweet to the taste and yellowish in hue, passes to a succession of boiling-pans or round caldrons, where it is boiled down by slow degrees, until the crystallization point is reached, much the same as is done with the maple sap of our own country. When the last boiling is ended the product is a mass of crystallized sugar soaking in molasses. I40 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. To get rid of the molasses, the old plan, and the one still adopted on unimproved Cuban estates, is to pour the mix- ture into hogsheads and let the syrup drain off for several weeks through the cracks. This produces the Muscovado sugar, an article inferior in saccharine strength to the '* centrifugal " product. To make the latter the sugar and molasses mixture is placed in a huge perforated cylin- der, which may be likened to a great sieve. This cylinder revolves on an upright axis in another larger cylindrical vessel. Whirled then with an enormous number of revo- lutions a minute, the liquid is thrown out, leaving the sugar crystals dry, and doing in a few minutes, and far more effectively, the work of weeks by the Muscovado method. The crystals left behind vary in size from a mere speck to a small pea. This crude sugar has a burnt-brown tint, and tastes much like the rock candy of the confec- tioner. The scum that rises during the various boilings, the refuse juice and fermented molasses, are treated by dis- tillation to make rum. So brief a description as this of . sugar-making does not, however, even hint at the skill and experience exacted in the process. The sugar-maker has to treat the raw juice chemically to prevent fermentation, must know to a nicety all the variations of heat in boiling, must be able to detect and measure the degrees of crystal- lization, and must be versed in a dozen other points only acquired by years of experience and acute observation. The grains, or, more correctly speaking, crystals of crude sugar still remain colored externally by the mo- SHADOWS IN CUBA. I4I lasses. One of the local methods of whitening them, pro- ducing a " refined " article, is to place the sugar in inverted conical moulds, with a hole at the lower extrem- ity. Then the inverted base of the cone is plastered over with a wet mixture of clay and bullock's blood. The moisture, percolating through the mass, drips out below, and washes the grains clean. When the clay is quite dry the sugar is taken from the mould, and is of a cloudy-white color, not very attractive to the eye, but with a saccharine strength that far surpasses that of the more sightly pure- white crystals turned out by our great refineries. These fairer products of the northern refinery are partly the result of a chemical process of bleaching, and Cubans always refer to their milk-white hue with laughing con- tempt. Their home-made article, they boast, is not only much sweeter, but dissolves completely in both cold and hot fluids, while the English and American factory product leaves a residuum. Americans who have lived in Cuba all agree as to the ordinary character of the Cuban sugar-planter. He is kindly, hospitable, courteous, and very often an educated and refined gentleman. But he is dreadfully improvident and wasteful. The fifty thousand dollars or more which he may make in a good sugar year is often dissipated in Havana before the next year begins. His plantation is apt to be loaded with debt, and this, with the stupendous taxes that he pays and his persistency in never looking ahead, explains the miserable plight in which so many of 142 B Y- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. the rich Cuban sugar farms are found at the present time. The planter, with his mixture of good and bad traits, is an incarnate type of the island as a whole ; for, allow what we will for the influence of cHmate on human character, it yet remains that Cuba is a natural garden-spot which man has made an artificial desert. Misrule and civic vices in a hundred monstrous forms have thwarted the gifts which Providence has heaped so abundantly on the island. Here are thousands of square miles of fertile soil prolific in sugar, tobacco, and corn, yet left untilled ; mineral regions which might produce precious metals abundantly but for the fears of the Spaniards that dis- covery would invite American adventurers ; splendid forests, where the axe is never heard ; the coast unim- proved for commerce, with even the magnificent harbor of Havana entirely destitute of wharves ; and every thing everywhere under the universal paralysis of taxation. A country almost as large as England, and with much vaster agricultural gifts, seems relegated to a condition that borders close on ruin ; yet the very size of her commerce under fearful disadvantage attests what the prosperity of the ill-starred country might be under happier rule and peopled by a race more sagacious and alert. THE BAHAMA SPONGE-FISHERS. ON the narrow strait between New Providence and Hog Island, forming the harbor of Nassau, can always be seen a large fleet of sailing boats, each of about eight tons burthen. They are odd, stubby speci- mens of water-craft, broad of beam, rising several feet from the water-line, and impressing one both with their large capacity and sea-worthy quality. On the centre of their decks is a low box, half filled with dirt, which serves as a marine hearth on which the colored crew cook their food ; and the crew themselves may usually be seen on deck,' lying around in lazy, picturesque groups. These odd craft are the sponge-boats, representing a local industry which gives steady employment to five hundred sailing vessels and four thousand men. They are owned by ten local firms, which export sponges worth three hundred thousand dollars every year to all parts of the world. Nassau, indeed, is asserted to be at this time the leading sponge port of the globe, and without that trade she would quickly lapse into what she is not so very far re- moved from now— absolute mercantile nothingness. Naturalists have wrestled long and bitterly over the nature and origin of the sponge. Up to not many years ago most of them agreed on classifying it simply as one 143 144 BY-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE, of the infinite series of submarine vegetables. Later scientific opinion, however, sets down the sponge as an animal, or rather a bunch of minute animals, of low organ- ism, cell-shaped, equipped with a stomach and digestive vessels, throwing off from their bodies masses of fecun- dated eggs, and developing in combination with each other that fibrous mass which ultimately reaches our mar- kets as the sponge of commerce. Take one of these masses which we call a sponge and examine it more critically. It will be found to be a group of small fibrous cells which, after ramifying more or less, connect with large round apertures penetrating far into the sponge mass. By suction, or some more occult process, the sea-water is drawn through the smaller cells and their partitions. The living organism then takes up from the passing fluid and devours the minute algcz, on which it is supposed to feed. The water, then, loaded with excrement, pours outward in a constant current through the larger orifices. A big sponge has therefore been aptly likened to a subaqueous city, whose inhabitants take up food from the water that passes their doors and discharge the residuum into the large round channels which represent the sewers. Take the world over, sponges appear in so many species, and with so great a diversity of living organisms, that the dis- cussion of the whole subject would take us too far into hazy battle-fields of science. Suffice it only to say here that Haeckel, the famous German naturalist, contends that the sponge is one of the early " missing links " and THE BAHAMA SPONGE-FISHERS. 1 45 sheds most luminous scientific light on the remoter methods of evolution. So that contemplating one of these inert masses of fibre hanging prosaically in the drug store, evolutionists may regard it with something of the reverential regard due to a protoplasmic ancestor. The living sponge, when first taken from the waters of the Bahamas, differs almost as much from the commercial article as a human body from its own skeleton — for practi- cally what reaches the market is partly the skeleton, partly the dwelling, of a bunch of sea-organisms. When first pulled from the rocks where it grows, the sponge looks like a corrugated mass of putty. It is drab in color, ex- ceedingly heavy, has a sickening odor, and is suffused by stringy mucus which drops from it in long viscous Hnes. The external pores are partly closed by a sort of sea-bug which finds refuge in them, and must be an annoying in- terloper to the sponge-builder ; while often a red sea-worm an inch or two in length is found far within the spongy fibres, whither it has worked its way. What is the exact function of the mucous fluid does not yet appear to be clearly settled. But it is certain that when taken from the sponge and placed on still bottoms, new sponges are propagated from it ; and if two pieces of the same living sponge, or of different sponges of the same species, are laid side by side on the sea bottom they soon grow to- gether. The vitality of the sponge, in fact, coupled with the decrease of the supply, suggests that ere many years artificial propagation may have to be used. 146 BY-fVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. The negro sponge-fishers who ply their trade among the Bahamas are a race of seamen not too regular in habits or morals, and living a sadly monotonous life of exposure and privation. Their voyages to the sponge fisheries last each for six weeks, during which they live crowded on board their craft under conditions of hard- ship which in a clime less salubrious would be fatal to health and life. The sponge firms " find " for them the boats, supplies, and equipment which they use on their six weeks' trip. The sponge bottoms most sought at this time are on the coral beds at the south side of Eleuthera Island, fifty miles east of Nassau. With a good wind the fisheries are reached in eight or ten hours from that port. Then the real toil begins. Lying on his chest along the boat's deck, the fisher with his water-glass — a pane set in a box fitted with handles — looks down forty feet into the clear depths. With one hand he grasps and sinks a slender pole, sometimes forty feet in length, fitted at the end with a double hook. The sponge, once discovered, the hook is deftly inserted at the rocky base, and by a sud- den jerk the sponge is detached to be brought up on deck. This curt description of what seems the simple work of sponge-fishing gives no idea of the real skill and exertion needed. The eye of the fisher has to be trained by long experience to peer into the sea and tell the com- mercially valuable sponges from those that are worthless. He must have a deft hand to control the swaying hook forty feet down so as to detach the sponge without a tear. THE BAHAMA SPONGE-FISHERS. 1 47 Above all, while doing this with one hand, he must ma- nipulate with the other the water-glass as the waves sway it sideways and up or down. The strain on eye and body is most severe, to say nothing of the cramped position and exposure to wind and wet which first and last make almost every sponge-fisher a victim of acute rheumatism. Yet with all his arduous toil, a faithful sponge-fisher earns not more than fifteen dollars a month besides his living on the boat, which barely deserves the name of existence. All the Bahama waters abound in sponges of great variety, but many of them worthless for the market. Those that are good for nothing else are often most beau- tiful for curiosities. They take most wondrous and strik- ing shapes — now a cup, now an old-fashioned drinking- horn, anon a great bunch of mossy, cup-shaped growths, and frequently foliated, like the tree-coral. A cup-shaped sponge, found some years ago in Bahama waters, and said to be the second largest in the world, measured seven feet in circumference, and its walls from four to six Inches in thickness. Up to two or three years ago the Bahama fisheries showed signs of exhaustion, but the discovery of the Eleuthera bottoms has proved a godsend to the fish- ermen, and is likely to supply the markets for some years to come at least. Next comes the process of preparing the sponges for export. First they are either placed on deck under the tropical sun or hung in long festoons from the little ves- sel's mast. In either case the heat of the sun in a few 148 BY- WA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. days kills all the living organisms within the fibre and loosens them for the next process. Then the sponges are dumped into a sort of water-cage made by driving a circle of small piles a few inches apart from each other in the sand. Through these piles the tide plays violently back and forth, washing away from the sponge after a few hours the sand, dead animalculse, and other impurities with which the mass is clogged. During these operations the sponges emit a most fetid and revolting odor, but a final washing leaves them with that not unpleasant flavor of the sea with which they reach our marts. Usually at Nassau, where the bulk of the Bahama sponges seeks a market, they undergo no process of purification other than has just been described. But sometimes they are immersed in a bath of diluted hydrochloric acid, which not only bleaches them but dissolves what few impurities have been left. After the final drying sponges are as- sorted, baled, and then are ready for market. The grades and qualities are numberless. There are, besides others, the " sheep wool," selling for about one dollar and sev- enty-five cents a pound ; the Abaco velvet (so-called from its velvety fibre), worth about one dollar and ten cents a pound; and the "glove," "yellow," and " grassy " varie- ties, all selling as low as fifty cents. Before being baled, it should be added, the rougher kinds of sponge are trimmed with shears and the big sponges cut in sections, each about as large as a cocoa-nut. The test of the best sponges is their soft woolly surface under the touch, and THE BAHAMA SPONGE-FISHERS. 149 above all the toughness of the fibres, which can readily be ascertained by tearing one or two of them apart. The Bahamas, though prolific in sponges, produce few of those high qualities, which are used for surgery and other delicate work. These come from the Mediterranean Sea, where divers bring them up, and some of the finest grades have been sold as high as from fifty to one hundred dol- lars a pound. In some of its broader phases its sponge industry gives Nassau some local features of rare novelty. The little boats thronging its harbor, the chattering crews, the warehouses lining the strand, the " Sponge Exchange," where sponges of every grade and shape and size may be seen by the thousand, are specialties of the port's com- merce not to be found elsewhere in the West Indies, or, perhaps, in the world. Sponges cover the wharves, their broken and tattered masses float over the harbor, great heaps of clippings line the sands, and, cast up by the waves, cover the beach far below and above the city. The negro driver, at command, will plunge from your pleas- ure-boat into the clear waters of the harbor to bring up a fresh sponge specimen, and on shore the negro hucksters pester the traveller's life with offerings of the staple commodity. Everywhere the sponge is as ubiquitous to the eye as it is potent in the local mart. Side by side with the sponge industry, though of far less commercial moment, is the gathering of the conch. In the Bahama waters, at a depth of some fifteen feet, this ISO BV.PVAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. shell-fish, of old represented as the trumpet of the god Triton, breeds in great numbers, and, gathered by the colored divers, is sold regularly in the Nassau market for two cents each. The creature which inhabits the big- fluted shell, lined with its brilliant red enamel, is used for fish-bait, and more often for human food in the shape of very edible fritters. The shells, moreover, are ex- ported for ornamenting garden plots, while the tinted lin- ing is made into cameos. But most remarkable of all, per- haps one conch in a thousand carries within its soft body a pearl of great beauty, which commands an immense price. These conch pearls are round or oblong in shape, some of them as large as a pea and suffused with a wavy liquid color of pinkish hue, which changes beautifully as the light touches it at different angles. They have sold in Nassau for as much as two hundred dollars each, and in London have been known to bring a thousand dollars. So rare are they, and so well covered in the creature's body, that the search for them does not repay the labor ; consequently many a pearl of great price has been thrown away, many broken in crushing the shell of the creature for bait, and not a few never discovered until they reach the table completely ruined by the heat of cooking. They tell at Nassau of an enterprising but unsuccessful Yankee who once tried the experiment of manufacturing these pearls, then inserting them in the flesh of the conch, and palming them off as genuine in the local market. To find one of these splendid gems is the hope and prayer of THE BAHAMA SPONGE-FISHERS. 151 the poor negro's life, as the discovery is not merely un- wonted cash in pocket, but is a mighty symbol of good- luck. For, like his race everywhere, the Bahama negro is superstitious. He sees signs of portent in the markings of fish, in the colors of the waters, in the mutterings of the wind through the trees. A brackish and at night very phosphorescent pond not far from Nassau is his peculiar terror, and it is rarely after dark that one of the race can be found who will approach what he calls " de preposterous [phosphorescent] lake." DOWN IN A COAL-MINE. TO the traveller through Berks, Lancaster, and the adjacent farming counties of Eastern Pennslyvania no change can be more abrupt than that which brings him to the great anthracite coal region. At first come broad areas of beautiful farms cleared and tilled, until one can almost believe himself to be in the most highly-favored farming lands of England. Neat houses, so small, how- ever, that the great Dutch barns seem to dwarf them to pigmies ; rich orchards, filled with trees set in geometrical lines ; velvety meadows, and furrowed planting grounds, all make up a pastoral picture to be rivalled probably by no other part of our country. Suddenly, as he travels northward, there comes a rude mutation. Mountains and steep cliffs, overhung with the chestnut or oak, succeed. The streams run black, and touch with their inky stain adja- cent rock and tree. The sky is dim with smoke, the very air seems surcharged with soot, and the mountains, with their bright autumnal tints, or summer verdure, are scar- red with dark rents or spotted with the great heaps of coal- dirt which commerce has left behind, a grim monument of her endless toil and aspiration for gain. Of all the many and varied aspects of the coal industry and its home, none compares in picturesque quality with 152 DOWN IN A COAL-MINE. 153 these mountains of coal-dirt left by the army of miners as their long decades of subterranean toil proceed. For every ton of coal that has been extracted probably at least a ton and a half of slate or blackened dirt or rocky debris of some sort has been mined and discarded, A short distance away the heaps look exactly like the coal itself, and it is hard to disabuse one's self of the illusion that here has been wanton waste and loss. The heaps rise, sometimes far as the eye can scan, in every conceivable shape and dimension short of lofty mountains. There are long ranges, steep cliffs, valleys of black soil which the climbing dirt-cars are fast filling in. Sometimes the river which traverses a coal valley, swollen by rains, sweeps away thousands of tons of this- coal-dirt, depositing it on low lands, where it spreads like a sea of pitch. In the Panther Valley, not far from Mauch Chunk, is a spot where one of these pitchy floods covering a lowland forest has risen half way up the tree trunks. The trees, their life crushed out by the overlying mass, project in stark and weird nakedness, over their inky bed, a wild spectacle of deso- lation. Experiment is still doing her best to utilize these dirt heaps, of which a large proportion is coal-dust. The recent novelty of pressing the better grades into bricks to be burned like the ordinary anthracite is said to be substantially a failure owing to the great expense. With certain kinds of engines driving a strong blast the dirt can be burned, but practically the consumption of it seems relegated to a remote period when either coal becomes I 54 -5 F- IFA YS OF NA TURE AND LIFE. more costly or industrial processes more perfect than now. Many of these great coal heaps have taken fire by what is supposed to be spontaneous combustion. In that crisis it is hard work to extinguish them, and the fire very often extends so as to threaten the adjacent buildings and the upper woodwork of the shafts. To avert this danger, as well as to get additional room, the nucleus of a large heap is usually begun at some distance from the shaft. As the heap grows, an inclined railroad is run up its face, on which the cars of debris are pulled by steam, then run along a level and dumped, the level part of the railway being ex- tended as the heap grows. The huge heap, when on fire within, burns without smoke, and, except under certain atmospheric conditions, it is hard to realize that the out- wardly dull and opaque mass is a glowing Inferno within. A mile or two from Pottsville is the chief coal shaft of that region, owned by the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, and named the Pottsville . Shaft. Though opened only a few years ago, it is famous throughout this whole country for the completeness of its equipment, its extraordinary depth, and the knowledge it gives of the shape and direction of the coal strata below. The perpendicular depth of the shaft is 1,576 feet — the deepest coal-mine on this continent. From its vast depths, almost a third of a mile down, two hundred cars, holding about four tons each, are lifted each day. The cars are run upon a platform, and then the whole weight of six tons is hoisted at a speed that makes the head DOWN IN A COAL-MINE 155 swim. The time occupied in lifting a full car and at the same time letting down an empty one, through a distance of about one third of a mile, is a little more than a minute and a quarter. A few figures will show that the cars pass up and down at the rate of about a mile in four minutes, fifteen miles an hour, or, say, the ordinary ve- locity of a freight train on a surface track. Standing on one of the levels, eleven hundred feet down, the cars " snap " past, upward and downward, with a speed so great that the human eye scarcely sees them as they pass. The Belgian engine which does the lifting is a beautiful piece of mechanism, with its drum twenty feet in di- ameter, and its wire rope, which has a thickness of two inches, coiled around a centre of hemp that allows a nicer adjustment of the wires when stretched by use. The dramatic figure of the engine-room is the engineer, a man picked from his mates for his skill, his steadiness, and so- briety. Day after day throughout the year the fate of every miner hangs on his nerve and steadfast attention to duty. Monotony must not make him careless, the strain of responsibility must not weary him, his eye must be quick for the signals far down in the mine, his hand must be true to its cunning in " slowing up " and " starting," on each of which depends his costly machinery or, it may be, precious lives. Not often are the idea and ideal of duty more visibly incarnated than in this silent, thoughtful fellow, his hand on the lever, his restless eye on the signals or his machinery, and his whole life of 156 BY-WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. seemingly dull routine filled with care and accountability. The State of Pennsylvania has carefully regulated by law the hoisting and lowering of men in coal-mines. Only a limited number — ten, I believe — can stand on the plat- form at once during its upward and downward journey ; and a heavy fine is exacted when the law is violated. How- ever, spite of every device of man, fatal accidents are not uncommon. Only a short time ago, in the Pottsville mine, the platform, when filled with miners, stuck in the shaft, and, the wire cable parting, left it hanging across the timbers hundreds of feet from the bottom. In this case, fortunately, all the men were rescued after a bad fright. Go now to the shaft and peer over the edge. Be- low the vision may penetrate perhaps a hundred feet. The square shaft is divided into two parts, each lined with heavy beams — one half for the descending, the other for the ascending coal-cars. Only a little way down these beams begin to fade, then pass into ghosts of timber, then finally are lost to view in darkness. This dark- ness is so thick that it seems something solid and mate- rial, as though a stone dropped upon it would rebound with noise. Far down is a white speck just discernible, like a little star through a cloud. The speck is a miner's lamp, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. Presently the platform comes in sight. The coal-car upon it is run off, and with your guide you step upon it, standing upright, with no chance for a brace or rest. It goes without com- DOWN IN A COAL-MINE. 157 ment that people of lax nerves should never brave the ordeal of a descent in the Pottsville shaft. The machin- ery works as smoothly as that of the most improved of modern hotel elevators ; but the speed is so terrific that one seems falling through air. The knees after a few- seconds become weak and tremulous, the ears ring as the drums of those organs are forced inward by the air-pres- sure, and the eyelids shut involuntarily as the beams of the shaft seem to dash upward only a foot or two distant. As you leave the light of the upper day the transition to darkness is fantastic. The light does not pass into gloom in the same fashion as our day merges into night, but there is a kind of phosphorescent glow, gradually be- coming dimmer and dimmer. Half way down you pass, with a roar and sudden crash, the ascending car ; and at last, after what seems several minutes, but is only a frac- tion of that time, the platform begins to slow up, halts at a gate, and through it you step into a crowd of creatures with the outward shapes of men, but with the blackened faces, the glaring eyes, and wild physiognomies of un- earthly fiends. In a large mine like this there are often gangways for working the coal miles in length. They tell in the coal region of a single gangway running for seven miles under- ground, so that a miner can descend in the centre of one township and ascend near the centre of another. The gangways, which are always headed as nearly as possible along the coal-seams, are passages about ten feet wide and T58 BY-WAYS OF NATURE AND LIFE. eight feet high. Sometimes they are wet, sometimes quite dry. At times they are run through solid rock, but more often through loose rock or dirt, which has to be stayed by continuous joists of timber. A narrow-guage railroad takes the cars from the headings to the foot of the shaft. The motive power is the mule, an animal whose life in these mines reveals an almost human intelligence, if half the stories of the miners are to be relied on. Many of these coal-mules live for years in the deep blackness of the mine, apparently as healthy and strong as their brute brethren in the upper air. They are quick to scent the gas which betokens danger, and in case of an explosion rival the miners in seeking a point of safety. At the Pottsville shaft a story is current of one of these animals that drew with its teeth the bung from its water-cask so as to get a drink. In truth, the lot of these brutes is scarcely worse than that of the human toilers who work by their side, breathing in the vile coal-dust, half suffocated with the smoke of powder, and encountering constant peril from falling rocks and explosive gas. Bad as he looks, however, in the grime and soot of the gangway, the coal-miner is no worse than the ordinary mechanic of the upper regions. His cleanliness when not at his work is a marked trait, and, as a rule, he takes his bath as punctually as his dinner. The trip for perhaps half a mile along one of the gang- ways to a " heading " where the coal is blasted out is DOWN IN A COAL-MINE. I 59 a strange and solemn journey. The little lamp set in your miner's hat barely suffices to make the outer circle of solid darkness visible. You tramp stolidly along between the railroad tracks in the thick coal-dust, which is liT