together, can get up a tremendous vibration in firmer institutions than bridges. Don't stop in the cradle, SIGNAL-MAN AT STATION. either, as you pass through. It would be pleasant to scramble out and have a chat with the flagman, but he wants all his wits for his wire; his faculties, with his work, are on the stretch, and neither he nor the towersignalist would give us a second look, except to order us off. Remember what a rebuff we met when we tried to get down into the cable-groove in the tower just now, with the surly hint that a parting tackle or wire might slice us in two, or whisk us into the river as you would whip a trout out of a pool. The head-man on the New York tower is more complaisant; but while he chats, he civilly declines our proffered cigarette, and stows a wad of Vanity-Fair" into his cheek instead. Smoking is forbidden up here, though it is rather hard to see what there is to burn. But the workmen obey orders; they are, as the overseer tells us, a staid, skillful, orderly set of picked men, largely seafaring men and riggers, for it needs cool heads and firm nerves to work on a basis of spider-web. They labor quietly up here, almost in silence, with the steady reserve and dignity of men who appreciate their high footing in society and mean to keep it; the little episode of the tin pail is the only faint approach we have noticed to anything like "larkiness." From this side the picture is naturally different from that which we caught on the eastern tower: the topographical map beneath us is New York, not Brooklyn; and the swarming life at our feet, the brisk commerce and small trading of Fulton Market, Peck and Burling Slips, and the whole river-front, are much livelier than the ponderous warehouses on the other side. Precisely, too, from this multifarious toand-fro of individual life, the endless swarm of human mites teeming in the narrow veins and arteries of the great ant-hill below, does the impressive feeling of collective human existence grow upon us. A million men and women! each with his separate joys, sorrows, hopes, and fears, his separate existence to keep up and his individual soul to save!-each, too, of quite as much consequence to himself as you or I, CARRIER-WHEEL. IN THE CRADLE. and perhaps of equal moment in the plans of a Higher Wisdom! The thought is not original or freshfar from it; but it is very realizing, and fraught with instructive meaning. In all the turmoil of the busiest street or crowd, seen from level ground, I have never felt it greaten and deepen on my apprehension as just here and now; the grand lesson of personal humility and human brotherhood needs frequent enforcement, and it is fully worth while to climb up here to get it. A visit to the tower gives a chance for a study of marine architecture from a new point of view. Pretty sight-isn't it?-to look down on those long rows of ships, each in its narrow slip, like sea-horses in their stalls, panting for their wild career over the pastures of ocean! How clearly you can pick out, by their shape, the different classes-the good, heavy-bowed, squarecountered "tea-wagons," as the sailors call them, meant for cumbrous freight, heavy stowage, and long passages, side by side with the long, grey-houndlike, sharp-stemmed clipper, with her hasty race for a shifting market and her perilous habit of running her nose under in a high sea and handing in her manifest to Davy Jones in person! Sooth to say, these sea-coquettes are getting few and far between, for the line between slow and swift transit is getting every day more sharply drawn. What must go fast goes by steam; while the solid every-day wares jog along slow and sure as before. The clipper-builders must soon turn their talents to yachts and pleasure-boats; and the famous race from China with the first chest of tea for the Liverpool market promises soon to be as mythical as Turpin's ride to York. But, clippers or tubs, a glance down our river-front shows a melancholy low water ble cannot yield, indeed, without drawing with it the whole formidable pile of masonry into which the links are buried. Sitting on one of these key-boards, we chat with a friendly, intelligent overseer, who has been about the work in one capacity or other from the start. "Doesn't the cable vary greatly in length with heat and cold?" Of course it does. He can't say in figures precisely how much, but on any summer day he has noticed that the carrier-wheel comes in at morning and night two or three feet above the level of the anchorage; while at noon the cable, expanded by the heat, "sags" so that the wheel grazes the masonry. Of course, the mare'snest, invented by some wiseacre, about the strain pulling the towers out of perpendicular, is all clear bosh. For, first it will lie over the top on the iron saddle we saw just now, which will play freely on its rollers and yield to any varying strain. Secondly, the two slant lines of traction, being nearly at the same angle, have a nearly or quite perpendicular resultant, which would settle the tower more firmly on its base but not pull it over. If you don't understand this or don't believe it, set up the fire-screen in the middle of the parlor, draw a clothes-line tight over it, carrying the ends to opposite corners of the room-you and your wife, say— and then, equalizing your pull, see how firm the slight bit of furniture will stand under it. SHOE, PART OF CABLE, AND LINKS USED IN ANCHORAGE, in all forms of commercial activity. Shall we ever get to that higher level of common-sense and economic intelligence, in both people and governors, which shall bring back the old days of cheerful, equable prosperity and activity? But we have moralized enough on our tower, and it is getting near dinner-time. So, like a new sort of Deus ex machina, we come down from our wire machine to the lower level of the New York anchorage. Here matters are quieter than on the opposite side. No shed, no engine, no provision of wire, and only a few workmen fitting the incoming "bight" around the "shoe." For the daughter is feeding the mother; we are entering into the kingdom and inheriting de bonis non distributis, as it were, from the busy people beyond the river, and have only to sit still and be fed. We have here a better chance to observe how the great iron horseshoes, which are to hold the separate strands, are to be riveted into the system of links or sockets, which lie in parallel rows and separate banks, like the key-board of an organ, the whole, deeply mortised as it is into the granite masonry of the anchorage, giving an impression of immense strength and durability. The ca Accidents? Well, yes, there have been some: perhaps ten or a dozen fatal cases by parting of defective iron-work, slipping off stagings, and the like. One, which looked frightful at first sight, had rather a comic ending. Beneath the slender arches of the towers, from the floor of the bridge downward, the masonry seems solid, OUTLINE OF ANCHORAGE. but it is in reality hollow, and at the foundation had collected some three or four feet of water. One of the workmen managed to blunder through an opening in the roadway and went sheer down, more than a hundred feet-willing, probably, if he lightful experience not soon to be forgotten. It will thought of such things in his flight, to discount his be good fun to cross the finished bridge, at so much a chances of existence at a large percentage. Luck- head, with ordinary mortals, but we never shall pass ily, there lay floating in the puddle an empty nail-it without a longing glance upward, and the wish keg, on which he precisely landed. The keg received serious damage, but the man was about his work shortly after. Just here, thinking that the salt air from the bay is beginning to mingle a grain or two in our informant's stories, we propose a homeward move. So, with a sigh to think that all this fairy tracery, foot-bridge and all, must come away when the cables are laid, and a wish that the commissioners could manage to leave the tower-tops accessible as a pleasant breathing or lounging spot forever, we set our faces downward. Grumbling, we come down upon the squalid tenements of Front Street, and catch involuntary glimpses of the dirt and misery which exude from its attic windows and alleys. In the leatherembalmed atmosphere of Gold and Pearl Streets (poetry versus commerce), we find poor substitute for the pure | that some glorified commissioner, calmly astride on oxygen of the upper regions as we plod home- the topmost cable, would gently bid us come up ward. It has been an afternoon of varied and de hither! IN BY WALTER BESANT AND JAMES RICE, AUTHORS OF READY-MONEY MORTIBOY," CHAPTER XIV. ON THE SEA-SHORE. those days the new suburb, which is now a large town, had hardly yet been begun; there was no sea-wall along the beach outside the harbor, and half a mile beyond the rampart you might reach a place perfectly lonely and deserted. There was a common, a strip of waste land where the troops drilled and exercised, and beyond the common an old castle, a square and rather ugly pile built by Henry VIII., when he set up the fortresses of Sandown, Walmer, and Deal. It was surrounded by a star-fort, and stood on the very edge of the sea, with a sloping face of stone which ran down to the edge of the water at low tide and into the waves at high, protecting the moat which surrounded the town. As a boy I regarded this fortress with reverence. There had been a siege there at the time of the Civil War. It was held for the king, but the governor, after a 66 THE GOLDEN BUTTERFLY," ETC. little fighting with his Roundhead besiegers, surrendered the castle, and then the town itself capitulated. One pictured the townsmen on the wall, looking out to see the fortunes of the battle, the men for Church and king side by side with their sour-faced brethren who were for God and country, the discomfiture of the former when the royal standard was hauled down, and the joy of the Puritans when their party marched in at the town-gates. Of course in my young imagination I supposed that the town-walls were just the same then as now, with their bastions, curtains, ravelins, and glacis. It was a lonely place in those days, fit for a dreamy boy, or a moody man. Beyond the castle the beach stretched far, far away under a low cliff of red earth, curving round in a graceful line; behind the beach was a narrow strip of ground covered with patches of furze, whose yellow and sickly-sweet blossoms seemed to flourish independently of all seasons; on its scanty edge grew sea-poppies; and here, amid the marshy ground which lay about, we used to hunt as boys for long and ugly arms lying powerless for mischief on the shingle; their backbone was good for rubbing out ink, and we had stores enough to rub out all the ink of the Alexandrian Library. There were ropes of sea-weed thicker than the stoutest cables; if you untwisted the coils you found in them strange creatures dead and alive-the sea-mouse, with its iridescent tufts of hair; little crabs with soft shells, killed by the rolling of the pebbles; shells inhabited by scaly intruders, cuckoos among crabs, which poked out hard, spiky legs, and were ready to do battle for their stolen house; starfish, ugly and poisonous; sea-nettles and all kinds of sea-beetles. And lying outside the weeds were bits of things from ships; candles, always plenty of tallow-candles; broken biscuits, which like so many of Robinson Crusoe's stores were spoiled by the sea-water; empty bottles; bits of wood; and once we came upon a dead man rolling up and down. Leonard rushed into the water and we pulled him up between two waves. He was dressed in sailor's clothing, and wore great sea-boots; his face was bruised by the stones, and his black hair was cut short. Also he wore a mustache, so that he could not possibly be an English sailor. When we had got him beyond the reach of the waves, we ran to tell the coast-guard, who was on the cliff half a mile away, telescope in hand. vipers, adders, and the little est, the alligator of Great Britain, who is as long as a finger and as venomous as a lamb. Sometimes, too, we would find gypsy encampments planted among the furze, with their gaudily-painted carts, their black tents-every real Rommany has a black tent like the modern Bedouin or the ancient dweller in the tents of Kedar. While we looked at the bright-eyed children and the marvelous old women crouching over the fire of sticks and the great black pot, there would come out of the tents one or two girls with olive skins and almond-eyes-not the almond-eyes of Syria, but bolder, darker, and brighter. They would come smiling in Leonard's face, asking him to cross his hand with silver. When he told them he had no silver they would tell him his fortune for nothing, reading the lines of his palm with a glibness which showed their knowledge of the art. But it was always a beautiful fortune, with love, fighting, wife, and children, in it. Behind this acre or two of furze stood, all by itself, a mill, and there was a story about this mill because its centre pillar, on which the vanes revolved, had once been part of the mainmast of a French frigate taken in action. And higher up the beach again—because this was a place full of historic associations-stood two old earthwork forts at intervals of half a mile. The ramparts were green with turf, the grass all blown inland, and lying on the days of each summer in long swaths upon the slopes, beaten down by the seabreeze; the moats were dry, and these, too, were grown over with grass; there was an open place at the back where once had been a gate and a drawbridge; there was a stone-work well in the open part of the inclosure, only some inclined to the belief that it was only a sham well, and masked, prætexto sub nomine, a subterranean passage to the castle; the fronts of those forts were all destroyed and dragged down by the advancing tide. No ruined city in Central America, no temple of the Upper Nile, no Tell of Kouyounjik could be more desolate, more lonely, more full of imaginative associations, than these forts standing upon the unpeopled beach in a solitude broken only by the footstep of the coast-guard. Before Leonard went away, and when we were boys together, this place was to us as the uttermost part of the world, a retreat accessible on a holiday morning, where one could sit under the cliff or on the grassy slopes of the fort; where I, at least, could dream away the hours. Before us the "Now, lads," he said, at last, "what you've got waves ran along the shingle with a murmurous sh- to do is this: You've got to go straight away to the sh-sh, or, if the day was rough, rolled up their parish," which I suppose he took for a police-office, hollow, threatening crests like the upper teeth of a "and tell the parish to come here and look after that hungry monster's jaw, and then dashed in rage upon I'm not stationed here to look after dead the stones, dragging them down with a crash and I'm for live smugglers, I am. You tell the roar which rolled unceasingly along the beach. In parish that. Not but what it's proper for you to tell the summer months it was Leonard's delight at such the coast-guard everything that goes on along the times to strip and swim over and to plunge through coast. And next time you fish up a drownded man the great waves, riding to meet them, battling and you come straight to me first. No manner o' use to wrestling till he grew tired, and came out red all look in their pockets, because they've never got nothover, and glowing with the exercise. After a storming in 'em. Them nasty fishes, you see, they gets the beach was strewed with odds and ends; there into the pockets and pulls out the purses." His bewere dead cuttle-fish-Victor Hugo's prieuve—their | lief in the emptiness of drowned men's pockets did First he swore at us personally and individually for troubling him at all with the matter. Then, because Leonard "up and spake" in answer, he changed the object of his swearing, and began to swear at large, addressing the much-enduring ocean, which made no reply, but went on with its business of rolling along the beach. Then he swore at himself for being a coast-guardsman. This took altogether some quarter of an hour of good, hard swearing, the excellent solitary finding greater freedom as he went on. And he would have continued swearing, I believe, for many weeks, if necessary, only that a thought struck him suddenly, like unto a fist going home in the wind, and he pulled up and gasped : "Did you, did you," he asked, "look in that dead man's pockets?" We said, "No." Then he became thoughtful, and swore quite to himself between the teeth, as if he was firing volleys of oaths down his own throat. man. men. |