increase of salary will ruin not him who refuses, but him who asks.
A case starts to our recollection of a man who had an excellent
appointment in the City. He was drawing one thousand pounds a year for
work which required some talent, but was pretty easy and pleasant;
moreover, he was on the fair way to better things. But he was too
impatient. His employers bore with him for a while, and in fact raised
his salary four times within three years, for they fully appreciated
his services. A day came, however, when they had to tell him plainly
that his demands were unreasonable; upon which he stood on his dignity
and resigned. He quite expected that he would instantly find in the
City another situation as good as that which he had left; but he was
not able to get an appointment at so much as half of his former salary.
Everywhere his presumption in asking for twelve hundred pounds a year
was laughed at; and he soon had to acknowledge to himself that in
the former situation which he had so foolishly thrown up he had been
most generously overpaid. Deeply mortified, too proud to return to
his old employers, who would have been willing to take him back, the
misguided man became a City loafer; he tried to set up in business for
himself without sufficient capital, and, after a series of luckless
speculations, took to drinking, and was no more heard of. This story
points a moral, which ambitious young men do not always sufficiently
lay to heart—namely, that to resign a good berth before making sure of
a better is to run the risk of being left out in the cold. It is by no
means a recommendation to a man out of place to have formerly received
a high salary and to have served under first-rate employers. All the
persons to whom he applies will naturally conclude that he must have
left his good appointment for unavowable reasons; and even the best
certificates of character from his old masters will not serve to dispel
this notion. We knew an unwise young man, who, leaving a good place out
of pure caprice, was earnestly advised by his employer to think twice
of what he was doing. ‘You will find it a positive disadvantage to have
served in our House,’ said his employer; ‘for we are known to be just
masters, and nobody will believe that you left us of your own accord.’
The young man would not heed the warning; and the upshot was that he
had to emigrate, having failed in all his endeavours to get another
situation.
The ruin which is produced by business competition does not come
within the scope of this paper. Everybody must sympathise with the
snug old-fashioned inn which is suddenly brought to nought by the big
Railway Hotel, and with the petty tradesmen who are impoverished
by the establishment in their midst of some colossal ‘universal
provider;’ but these are unavoidable incidents in the battle of life.
An interesting class of sufferers remains to be specified in persons
who own house-property, and find the value of their houses suddenly
depreciated by causes beyond their control. Let a sensational murder
be committed in a respectable street, and the rents of the houses in
that street will probably fall twenty-five per cent.; while the house
in which the deed was done will in all likelihood remain untenanted for
years. A murder, the perpetrator of which escaped detection, naturally
marks a house with almost indelible disrepute; people do not like to
inhabit such a place; and the landlord is often reduced to giving up
the house at a mere nominal rent to be the abode of some charity. An
epidemic, again, will play havoc with the value of houses, by getting a
whole locality noted as unhealthy; and this it may be said is the fault
of the landlords; but it is not always so. We were acquainted with a
gentleman who became possessed by inheritance of a row of houses, as
to the antecedents of which he knew nothing. Soon after he had got
this property, typhoid fever broke out in one of the houses and spread
down the row. The drains were examined, and found in good order; but
under one of the houses was discovered a vast cesspool, caused by the
drains of two large houses which had formerly stood near the site.
The emptying of this pool, the building of new foundations to several
of the houses, the laying down of new water-pipes, &c., proved a very
costly piece of work, and brought little profit when it was finished;
for the row of houses had got a bad name, and years elapsed before the
landlord could find good tenants for them even at much reduced rents.
This was really a hard case; and the harder because the landlord, being
a high-principled man, felt bound to pay substantial indemnities to
those who had suffered through the bad condition of his property.
BACK FROM ‘ELDORADO.’
It was a scorching afternoon in October, when, with much clatter and
racket, cracking of long whips, and a volley of eccentric profanity
from the Dutch conductor and his sable satellites, the mule-train of
that eminent Cape patriot Adrian de Vos scrambled headlong, as it were,
out of the market-place of Kimberley in ‘the land of diamonds,’ jolted
and swung through the ‘city of iron dust-bins,’ finally disappearing in
a cloud of dust adown the Dutoitspan Road.
I may state that I was awaiting the arrival of the ‘veldt express’
at the little oasis in the desert, dear to all acquainted with the
‘Eldorado’ of the Cape Colony, by the name of Alexandersfontein.
Distant only a few miles from the hot fever-stricken ‘camp,’ it is
blessed with a spacious hotel and—luxury of luxuries—a veritable
open-air swimming-bath, together with a meandering brook, which
gladdens the eye of the parched, home-sick, and, most likely,
disappointed searcher after diamondiferous wealth. I had spent the most
part of the day with an Irish surgeon stationed there, who had been
doing his best to persuade me to travel to Cape Town in the orthodox
manner, by stage-coach, and not by the ‘heavy goods,’ as it is termed;
but during the last year or so I had roughed it too much to care for
a little additional hardship, and I wanted to complete the tale of my
experiences in South Africa by personal contact with those unfortunates
who from time to time abandoning their last dream of success, cast down
and forsaken, broken in health, wealth, and estate, set forth gloomily
on the journey back from Eldorado.
We were not altogether without amusement at Alexandersfontein, for, in
addition to the attractions of the swimming-bath, there was the mild
excitement of vaccinating ‘niggers,’ brought in at intervals by an
Africander scout, the smallpox scare being at the time at its height,
and my friend a government officer. Nevertheless, I confess I was
glad when a pillar of dust, rising up from the arid road far away to
the deep-blue sky overhead, announced that the mule-train was fairly
_en route_ for us. I am glad now that it was dark when they arrived,
because, if I had seen the accommodation provided by that philanthropic
conveyer of broken hearts and shattered fortunes to the coast, I think
it very likely that I might have declined to obey the order shouted at
me through the still, sub-tropical night, to ‘get aboard.’ As it was,
clutching my rifle with one hand, and grasping a leathern portmanteau,
destined for a pillow, in the other, I struggled upward over the
disselboom, thrust my head underneath a flapping canvas covering
stretched over the whole length and breadth of the wagon, and receiving
a friendly but rather violent impetus from my friend the surgeon,
shot forward into the midst of a conglomeration of human forms, tin
cases, deal boxes, ropes, and sacking. I was welcomed with anathemas,
apparently proceeding from the internal economy of a ‘mealy’ bag in
the corner. I could hear my Irish friend shouting a last adieu, which
mingled strangely with the vociferations of the half-caste driver to
his mules; and then, as the whole machine lurched heavily but rapidly
forward, I collapsed against the corner of a huge tin case, slid thence
into a hollow caused by the merchandise, and thus cramped up in a hole
about two feet in width, prepared to pass the night. A dismal lantern,
swinging and jolting overhead, threw a sickly gleam around; the keen
wind of the karroo whistled past as we pushed onward in the darkness,
and forward into the wilderness, leaving behind us the land of untold
riches, the wonderful camp with its mines assessed at millions, its
busy streets, its citizens with but one aim, the greed of gold—and
its quiet burial-place, where hundreds of brave young Englishmen lie,
wrapped in that deep sleep to which no dreams of avarice may come.
Our route lay over wide-stretching plains of fine sand, studded with
stunted thorn; flanked on either side by lone mountain ranges, whose
lofty heads assume fantastic shape of cone, table-land, or pyramid;
here and there a miserable watercourse threading its way to the
babbling Modder or stately Orange River. A solitary, silent land, where
the glad song of birds is unheard, but the ever-watchful vulture
circles overhead; where the sweet scent of flowers is unknown, but the
gaunt mimosa stretches out its bare branches, and seems to plead with
the brazen skies for a cloud of moisture. Far distant from each other
are the white, flat-roofed Boer farmhouses; while midway to the railway
centre of Beaufort West lies the quaint Dutch village of Hopetown with
its ‘nightmare’ church; and farther on, Victoria, nestling at the foot
of a great brown hill.
Monotonous? Well, truly I tired of the all-pervading sand, of the glare
of the fierce sun, of the jolting and bumping of the springless wagon;
but there was the abiding excitement of the commissariat question, the
occasional sight of a flock of wild ostriches, the rough incidents of
the nightly outspan, and, as the cumbrous machine rolled onward over
the starlit plain, the exchange of confidences, or the singing of songs
to the accompaniment of a wheezy accordion, which one of the party—a
miserable little Israelite from Houndsditch—had provided.
I think the most remarkable amongst the ‘voyagers’ was a tall gaunt
man, whose snow-white beard and sunken cheeks bore evidence to the fact
that time had not dealt gently with him. He reminded me irresistibly
of King Lear; and when camping for the night, he crouched over his
solitary pannikin with his hands stretched out, to prevent any disaster
to the blazing structure of sticks and ‘peat,’ his white locks blowing
in the wind, and his keen, hard, glittering eye eagerly watching for
the right moment at which to insert his pinch of hoarded tea, he
presented a mournful embodiment of hopeless failure. He was a lonely,
morose man; defeat and disaster had occurred to him so often, that he
sought for no sympathy, and expressed no hopes for the future. When the
lighter spirits in this storm-beaten company were essaying to laugh
at dull care, and even making jests at the bitterness of the divers
fates which had overtaken them, he would sit apart with folded arms,
now and again muttering to himself, and once surprising me with an apt
quotation from a Latin author in the original. I am afraid we were
all inclined to laugh at him for his queer ways and solitary habits;
but I never did so after one night, when I found him, some distance
from our camp, kneeling on the bare sands, his arms tossed aloft to
the stars, that shone like lamps in the dark-blue dome of the midnight
sky, and his lips babbling incoherently of the wife and children, home
and kindred, he had left long, long ago, never to see again in this
world, in his thirst for the gold which had lured him from continent to
continent.
We had another victim of the gold-mania with us in the person of a
bald-headed Irish bookbinder. Of all the gentle enthusiasts I have
ever met, he was the most extraordinary. He had just returned from
a particularly disastrous prospecting trip to the newly discovered
gold-field euphoniously termed ‘the Demon’s Kantoor;’ and previous to
that, he had made equally unsatisfactory migrations into Swazieland,
the Delagoa Bay, and other regions, returning from each of them ragged,
penniless, but happy, to recruit his finances with a spell of work at
his trade in the towns, whilst devising some fresh scheme of martyrdom
for the cause of the glittering metal that had bewitched him. He was
a devout Protestant, and would gravely rebuke any who gave way to the
very common colonial vice of hard swearing; and during our halts by the
wayside, generally stole away to any available shade, and taking forth
from the bosom of his ragged red shirt a book of devotion, would read
therein, heedless of the shouts and laughter of the drivers and the
screams of the mules; though, to be sure, I have reason to believe that
the precious volume contained a good deal about ‘the gold of Ophir’ and
‘the land of Midian.’ He admitted, with a genial smile, that he had
dug a grave for the fruits of six months’ self-denying labour amid the
hillocks and boulders of the Demon’s Kantoor; but he hoped by about a
year’s industry in Cape Town to realise sufficient to enable him to
penetrate into the Kalahari Desert, where, if he escaped the poisoned
arrow of the Bushman, or the slow death from starvation or thirst, he
was perfectly certain of finding nuggets of wondrous size, and ‘rotten
reef’ worth fabulous amounts. Indeed, so happy was he at the prospect
of his good fortune, that in the fullness of his heart, he sought to
raise the spirits of a dark, melancholy young man, by offering to share
it with him. But the latter only shook his head and buried his face
in his hands, being engaged just then in a retrospect of his fallen
fortunes, from which nothing but an occasional fit of assumed reckless
levity could rouse him. Poor fellow! He was leaving every farthing
he had in the world—the remnant of a noble patrimony—in a worthless
diamond mine in the vicinity of Kimberley; and he was haunted with the
memory of a golden-haired wife and two blue-eyed children on whom the
‘camp-fever’ had laid its deadly hand.
As for the light-hearted actor, who, by some strange mischance, had
found himself left on ‘the Fields’ with the theatre closed and the
company gone, and had just raised enough by the sale of his wardrobe to
‘catch a storm,’ as he expressed it, to waft him to Cape Town—he could
not understand what despair or earnestness meant. His delight was to
astonish the Kaffirs and half-breeds, as they crouched around the fires
at night, with extravagant selections from the transpontine drama. He
would make their eyes roll and their teeth chatter by holding converse,
in sepulchral tones, with the incorporeal air, and then set them all
grinning with glee at some fanciful imitation of domestic animals.
He was never tired of telling stories of his wanderings, and joined
heartily in the laughter at some ludicrous blunder which had for the
nonce involved him in ruin. I am afraid he was not very particular as
to his method of getting out of scrapes, for he related with great glee
how, being deserted by a manager in Japan, he and a brother _artist_
got up an acrobatic performance for the benefit of the natives. As
neither of them knew anything about the business, the grumbling was
excessive; and the climax was reached when, having attained to some
‘spread-eagle’ position on the framework they had erected on the
stage, and being quite unable to get down gracefully, he let go, and
fell with a crash. ‘We then,’ he said, ‘announced an interval of
ten minutes, secured the receipts from the innocent heathen at the
“Pay-here” box, and—fled the city!’ He had gone to the Diamond Fields,
because he had been told he could make ‘kegs of dollars’ there; and he
trusted in chance or good fortune to convey him to Australia.
Despite the coarse food and its coarser preparation, the nights spent
upon the ground beneath the wagons, the awful shaking over the mountain
tracks, the dust, the thirst, the intolerable heat, there are many
pleasant recollections of that memorable excursion. But when I see
the young, the hearty, the strong, setting off, in the pride of their
manhood, in search of that prize which flattering Hope assures them
waits in distant lands for enterprise and courage to secure, I wonder
how many will escape the dangers of ‘flood and field,’ to undertake,
broken in spirit, bankrupt in health and wealth, the journey back from
Eldorado.
STEEL.
Steel, we are frequently and emphatically reminded, is the material of
the future. Passing from assertions respecting the time to come, let
us concern ourselves with the present and the past of the material,
and inquire why and wherefore steel should be held up so prominently
as destined to make its mark in the future. Every age has stamped for
its own not only a certain style of architecture or a peculiar class
of construction, but it has also impressed into its service different
materials, by means of which it has carried out those designs to which
it has given birth. As formerly wood gave place to iron, so now, slowly
yet surely, is the use of iron waning before the enhanced advantages
accruing from steel in large constructive works. As ductile as iron,
and possessed in a superior degree of tenacity, more uniform and
compact, it is not a matter of surprise that steel should have largely
usurped the position formerly occupied by iron in the engineering and
constructive world, or that engineers and architects should gladly
avail themselves of such a material in their designs, more especially
when they desire to combine the maximum of strength and security
with the minimum of weight and mass. So slight is the difference in
appearance between rolled iron and rolled steel, that the casual
observer will be unable to distinguish between the two substances. A
certain amount of experience and skill is requisite before the eye
becomes sufficiently educated to appreciate the appearance presented by
each material. Nor should we omit to notice a method both simple and
expeditious by which all doubts may be set at rest. A drop of diluted
nitric acid placed on a piece of steel will at once separate the carbon
in the steel, producing a black stain on its surface. On iron, no such
effect will result.
The extensive works for manufacturing steel in England, Wales,
Scotland, and on the continent, amply testify to the growth and vigour
of the industry; and if further proof is wanted, it is supplied by
the fact of the conversion of their plant by existing ironworks, to
enable them to turn out steel. Such steps—though frequently producing
financial distress, happy if only temporary—show the direction in which
the commerce of the present day is moving.
That steel should so speedily overcome the initial difficulties
incident to the introduction of every new material, adduces important
evidence in its favour. In shipbuilding, for example, the inconvenience
and delay occasioned by employing steel side by side with iron
presented a formidable barrier to its use, the alternate demand
for iron and steel built vessels causing no small confusion in the
yards. The gradual and, before long, probable abandonment of iron in
this class of constructions, is rapidly enabling shipbuilders to lay
themselves out for steel, and steel only. We should not omit to notice
the employment of steel plates, one-sixteenth of an inch in thickness,
for the ‘skin’ of torpedo launches, a use to which the lightness and
tenacity of such plates eminently adapt them.
The effective and systematic manner in which it is now customary in
large works to test all steel previous to its despatch, has aided in
no small degree to remove the feeling of doubt and uncertainty which
was attached to the material on its introduction. There hung around
steel an insecurity and a novelty, which, until dissipated, caused a
feeling of distrust that might have proved fatal to its extended use,
had not precautions been taken by its manufacturers to demonstrate the
consistency and reliability of the article they sought to bring into
the market. For the purpose of making these tests, a special machine is
provided, usually driven by steam. A strip from the plate to be tested
is placed in ‘jaws’ at each end; the machine is then set in motion, the
strain on the test-piece being gradually increased until its ultimate
tensile strength is reached, and it breaks—a travelling pointer
indicating the pressure exerted by the machine on the steel test-piece
at the moment of fracture. Thus the ultimate tensile strength per
square inch and also the elasticity of the plate under manipulation are
ascertained.
In order to check these and similar tests, one or more inspectors are
stationed at the manufacturers’ works by the government, the company,
or the engineer in whose designs the steel is to be employed. The
Admiralty employ a number of men to watch the tests of all the steel
destined for the royal dockyards; a similar class of inspectors perform
a like task, under Lloyd’s rules, for the private yards and the vessels
of our merchant service; whilst every engineer under whose directions
steel is being made places his assistants—their number varying with
the importance and extent of the work—to see that these tests are
faithfully carried out, that they duly fulfil the conditions he has
laid down, and to report to him the quality, quantity, and progress of
the material under their charge.
Accurate records are made of every test to which the steel has
been subjected, and the results of the behaviour of the material
are carefully noted. Hence, should any event occur to call special
attention to any particular bar, its history can be traced from the
very first to the moment it took up its position in the finished
structure for which it was destined.
So rigid and well checked a system of testing cannot fail to command
the favour of all engaged in the design of vessels, roofs, or bridges,
and to inspire the general public with confidence in and reliance
on this comparatively young member of the material world, daily
increasingly impressed into its service, and tending to promote the
general well-being and comfort of the civilised world.
THE STRAY BLOSSOM.
Under a ruined abbey wall,
Whose fallen stones, with moss o’ergrown,
About the smooth fresh turf were strown,
And piled around the roots—and tall,
Green-ivied trunks, and branching arms
Of beeches, sheltering from the storms,
Within its empty, roofless hall—
There, in a broken sill, I spied
A little blossom, purple-eyed.
I took it thence, and carried far
The plant into a greenhouse, where
I tended it, with blossoms rare,
Until it brightened, like a star
Delivered from a passing cloud,
That hides it ’neath a silver shroud,
Yet fails its loveliness to mar;
Until it ceased to be a wild
And common thing—and then I smiled.
It grew, and thrived; new buds put forth,
And more, and more, and still became
More fruitful, till, no more the same
Meek, lowly child of the far north,
It reared its lordly stem on high,
Climbing towards the distant sky,
As though it deemed its greater worth
Deserved a higher place, and kept
Still reaching onwards—then I wept.
I wept, because I thought the weed
Showed strange ingratitude to me,
And had forgot how lovingly
I nourished it when in its need.
And then the flower bent down its head,
Touched me caressingly, and said:
‘Think not that I forget thy deed,
The tender care and constant thought
That in my life this change have wrought.
‘Now to the far-off skies I climb,
Because I fain would show thee, there
Is something higher than the care
Of a mere plant, to fill the time
God giveth thee. How, then, my love
For thee more truly can I prove
Than by thus pointing to a clime
Where Hope’s fulfilment thou shalt find,
And earthly love to heaven’s, bind?’
* * * * *
So, from a tiny seedling, grows
Sweet Friendship’s root from year to year,
Nourished alike by smile and tear,
By sun and storm, and winter snows
Of jealousy and blind mistrust;
Through which the deathless plant shall thrust
Its growing flower, until it blows
At last, within that land on high
Where virtues bloom eternally.
F. E. S.
* * * * *
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and 339 High Street, EDINBURGH.
* * * * *
_All Rights Reserved._