On arriving in London I found a case going on in the House of Lords, which was costing, as I was informed, some hundreds a day in fees, about the Tartar Peerage, which was supposed to be extinct. I settled the question by taking my seat, accompanied by the Duke of Bijou and His Royal Highness * * *; and as there was no estate out of which to pay the expenses (for the estate was mine and I was alive), all the claimants, whose liabilities were enormous, went through the Bankruptcy Court, and the lawyers were never paid at all.
The Don was never tried for stealing the spoons. There was something high-minded about the man which made him shudder at the thought of standing in the dock of the Old Bailey on such a charge.
“I could,” he said, “have well borne being an interesting criminal, with half Mayfair and Belgravia for spectators, on the charge of piracy and murder—but for stealing spoons!—bah! the idea chokes me.”
During the voyage home, he became low and desponding, and we took all precaution to prevent his making away with himself, but in vain. He had contrived to secrete about him an extra large box of “Professor Allaway’s Pills as prepared for the Colonies,” and one morning he was found dead in his bed with the empty box by his side.
The niggers took possession of the island, and established the slave trade with all its horrors, repaying the ill-treatment which they received on the unfortunate pirates.
The Princess makes me an excellent wife. Her relations tried hard to penetrate into Belgravian society without much success. I am happy and contented; our eldest child, a girl, was christened “Swanka,” and we don’t quite forget old times, as at a grand state ball at B P, Kitty appeared in her pirate dress. We procured the release of Kitty’s aunt, who married a black missionary.
So ends the story of Tom Bluejacket, late second lieutenant on board H.M. ship “Cat-o'nine-Tails,” now The Right Hon. the Lord Tartar, who bids you farewell!
THE REFUSE OF TOWNS AND CITIES.
In every town and city throughout the world, which has not become a desert, a constant elevation of surface is imperceptibly going on. This arises from the fact that more materials are constantly brought in than are carried out. Building materials, fuel, and food, constitute the aggregate aids in this elevation after undergoing the various processes of utilisation. Some of the detritus, such as broken bricks and mortar, are not noxious. Others, as refuse food, human and animal remains, and excretal and many kinds of waste materials from workshops and factories, are deleterious chiefly because they are not removed, or destroyed chemically, so as to remove them in an innoxious gaseous form, or so to fix them as to prevent them forming noxious gases.
From day to day we “grin and bear” our nuisances, complaining of the neglect of the authorities, and wishing for their removal. It rarely occurs to us to consider how much of this lies in our own power, and that the evil might be reduced into a small compass, if we brought common sense to bear upon it. It is a practical fact, that we pray, or profess to pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” and that year after year we daily bring into our towns, upon the average, all the food and fuel we consume in the day. Our food we carefully stow away in safes and pantries, light, airy, and accessible; our fuel we put into accessible places; but for the greatly decreased bulk of our food and fuel in excreta and cinders we provide only dust-holes, almost inaccessible without great difficulty. Inasmuch as the bulk is so much reduced, it is clear that the means of transport which brings in the original amount in one day, could with greater ease take away the decreased bulk in one day, and this, whether from a single dwelling, or a great city.
Time was, that every dwelling was provided with what was called a cesspool, i.e. a gathering pool, in which ignorant people deposited every kind of refuse, solid or liquid, but in which more sagacious people deposited only solid matter, keeping as far as possible liquid matter from entering, or at least remaining in it. In many towns the ashes of the fuel were used or thrown into this pit, mixing with the night-soil or fæcal matter, and partly deodorising it, and the pit was emptied once a week or month. But in the great majority of houses the term cesspool is a misnomer. The term cess signifies a collection: but the ordinary cesspool, built of the worst possible bricks, uncemented and placed in a porous soil, is not a collecting but a distributing pit, filling the porous soil with fæcal matter by percolation. In a clay soil the pit is really a cesspool, the clay being non-porous.
Time was, that—in London—these pits or cesspools, were prohibited from all communication with the sewers under heavy penalties, and in some districts hand pumps were used to draw off the liquid contents into the open side drains in the streets, and the solid matter was collected, sometimes for years, because the operation of emptying, for want of convenience, was loathsome, and a nuisance prohibited at all times except at night, hence the term night-soil. This gave rise to the invention of the water-closet communicating with the house drain, and so with the sewers, and the river. An admirable contrivance was the closet—for the rich man living on the upper ground. He could, by merely laying on water, get a cheap transference of all filthy matters. The drains were out of sight, the sewers out of sight; but he was rich enough to pay people for digging them up without suffering the foulness to enter his dwelling. The mere possession of one of these closets was an indication of wealth; and tracing the course of the Stygian stream to its final ending, a foul Serbonian bog, did not enter into the thoughts of the wealthy man.
But time rolled on, and the luxury of the wealthy man grew to be the common practice of the middle-class man. Finally, the owners of all dwellings were required to wash away their excreta into the sewer. Not half London has complied with the enjoinder, and already the Thames