like the cowl of a chimney, which is hoisted into the rigging and set so as to promote the ingress of the breeze. When the wind was not a following one, and so neutralised by the vessel's progress, and when the wind sails were set correctly, they supplied a considerable volume of fresh air; but, inasmuch as this was all discharged directly under the hatchway, it immediately escaped again, benefiting only the steers in the immediate vicinity, while the bulk of the unfortunates sweated and panted in a hot, sickly stench impossible to describe; the consequence was that one animal died within a few hours of our getting under way, and that during the voyage we lost forty on the lower deck. It is true that of these some died from losing their foothold and being mangled to death by their mates, but most of them died of suffocation.

I went down and helped to attend the cattle between decks on our first day out; but after one day's experience in that awful air I elected during the rest of the voyage to undertake, with the help of three men from the West, two of whom had been with me on the train journey, the care of the range cattle on the forward half of the upper deck.

Inasmuch as we encountered no gales, we were fortunate in the fact of my making this arrangement; yet, even so, the structure of the pens at times so gaped and groaned with the motion of the vessel that we were warned that it was unsafe to remain among the cattle in view of the possibility of the pens breaking up bodily in the event of an extra bad roll, and, now that one is safe ashore, it is interesting to speculate on what would have happened in really bad weather.

Besides myself and two other foremen there were in charge of the cattle a headman and fifteen helpers. The headman and the other two foremen were experienced in the business, having made many voyages in charge of cattle; the helpers were mostly 'dead beats,' and they gave the headman much trouble. His hold over them was of the slightest; there was no money coming to them at the end of the voyage, whether they did their duty or not. They were simply working their passage. If they struck work altogether they could not have been more vilely fed or worse treated than they were already. The headman told me his difficulty in dealing with them lay in his liability to be summoned for assault on our arrival in England in case he laid violent hands on any of them-that, therefore, he had to exercise great self-restraint and never inflict a marking blow; he had made many voyages, and had never been fined except on the external evidence of some mark of violence. He was a passionate man, and it was curious to see him spring savagely on some mutinous satellite and hurl him to the deck, and then pause, evidently paralysed by the thought of the impending fine, and methodically plant his blow, not where it would be most effective, but where it would be least in evidence.

The life of these poor fellows, mere lads most of them, was certainly one of concentrated wretchedness. I have seen, in recently published correspondence on the cattle traffic, the suggestion made that, if the drovers did their duty, the cattle would do well enough; but a man can hardly be expected to display zeal, nerve, agility, and patience in such plight as were most of those on board this vessel. They were sea-sick; they were wet through from morning till night; they were bullied by each other and knocked about by their 'boss ;' and most of them had to spend their day between decks in an atmosphere so vile that the hot swirl of it up the hatchway would make the passer-by on the upper deck reel with nausea; their food was slopped by the dirty hands of a coloured cook's mate into a large pan, over which they had to scramble for their meals, and was such that my mates who came from the West, and were well used to coarse living, found themselves forced to bribe the cook to give them decent food. in a separate mess. The sleeping accommodation for the drovers was of a piece with their food supply, and was deserted by all but three or four of them in favour of the bales of hay piled on various parts of the deck. A few of them obtained the precious privilege of sleeping in the steerage among a number of turkeys and ducks which had the run of the place. Few of these men possessed any bedding or change of clothing; their practice was to dry themselves and their clothes together by standing over the stoke-hole gratings after their day's work was over.

By desire of the owners of the vessel the captain on three evenings during the voyage held religious services, which all the cattlemen were desired to attend. Here, after spending the whole day in torturing God's creatures, or at least in witnessing their agonies, it was a beautiful thing to hear a glowing sermon on the almightiness of love, heavenly love, which, if we could only see it, was the one allpervading influence in the universe; and with one's ears ringing with the perpetual chorus of obscene blasphemy, which flows unconsciously from the undisciplined under strong excitement, to listen to our excellent commander's denunciation of profanity. The cant of pity seemed here well exemplified.

The drinking water for the cattle was carried in iron tanks lying between the two skins which formed the vessel's double bottom. It was pumped from these by means of hose pipe into puncheons which were lashed at intervals along the deck. The water was red and thick with rust, the lower contents of the puncheons as thick as peasoup. These puncheons were intended to be filled each evening, ready for watering in the early morning, and to be then filled again in time for watering in the afternoon. On three days during the voyage the cattle got no water at all. The rolling of the vessel spilt all the water out of the puncheons in the course of the night, and they were, reasonably enough, not filled again till the sea went down. VOL. XXIX.-No. 170. Ꮓ Ꮓ

In any case, it would on these three days have been impossible to water the cattle to any purpose, as they were falling about in all directions, and quite unable to steady themselves enough to drink out of a bucket.

We were provided with wooden pails, containing each two gallons; and, as no water troughs were fitted in the pens, we had to enact the crowning absurdity of watering these wild range cattle by holding our buckets to them one by one. Now, most of them had been at least forty-eight hours on the ship before they were offered any water, and I shall fail to describe the pathetic behaviour of the poor brutes on being presented, for the first time in their lives by human. hands, with an unknown object-to wit, a bucket-which yet contained at least the smell of the veritable elixir of life. Here is one : his eye red and fevered, his muzzle dry and hard as a board, his coat staring and defiled with dirt and sweat, his flanks going like a bellows; the enrapturing smell of the water, for which he has been longing these many hours, reaches him from afar; rusty as it is, he makes an eager dive at it, but the hand that holds it to him is too awful to be faced, it smells of man; he jumps back with a snort, and then prods viciously at the bucket and the bucket-holder. After this has been repeated several times he will perhaps get confidence enough to lick the outside of the bucket, and by much patience you will at last get his nose into the water, while his neighbours, excited almost to frenzy by the smell of it, push and hook and struggle to get a share. One of them, with a quick flourish of his horns, sends the pail flying, perhaps breaking his head rope at the same time, and giving half an hour's work to two men to secure him. When a steer could be persuaded to put his nose in the pail and drink, his neighbours would at once be encouraged to do likewise, and three heads would be competing for one little pailful at once-all this while the situation of the pail-holder was itself interesting, steadying the pail with one hand in position below the head board, with the other hand hauling on the head rope of the next steer on one side, to keep him from attacking the pail, at the same time standing off the enemy on the opposite flank by vigorous kicks on the muzzle. If the process was going on in the narrow parts of the alley, the situation was made more lively yet by the horns of the steers on the opposite side, which rattled about between one's legs and everywhere.

After one heavy night's rolling the after-between decks contained piles of steers thrown together in such confusion that the foreman hauled them out on to the upper deck with the steam winch, alive and dead as they came to hand. Those that were alive were hoisted by a rope passed round their horns; in two or three cases the horns gave way while the steer was in mid air, and he fell back down the hatchway only to be hoisted again a mangled corpse and dropped over

the side. Those that were successfully hoisted alive were tied up in the alley-ways, and increased the incredible confusion on the upper deck.

My object is to call attention to the cruelty and wastefulness of the cattle traffic, as I experienced it, rather than to describe my trip from a subjective point of view. Yet I cannot but mention the sense of guilty oppression that weighed on one in the midst of this mass of suffering animals of whom one was put in responsible charge, but under conditions which made their well-being impossible.

The hideous business came to an end at last; we reached the port of destination, and with the mooring of the vessel to the wharf my connection with the cattle ceased.

A gang of men boarded the ship, knocked away the pens, and let the steers escape on to the wharf. Stiff, bruised, and spectre-like as they were, one of them yet had enough of the old rollicking spirit left in him to deliver a tottering charge, and overturn a drover on the quay who ventured to approach him as if he had been a stall-fed beast. Good old steer! After bowling over his man, he stood there, a gaunt but still imposing skeleton, looked around with an air of pained surprise at the ribald crowd on the ship and on the surrounding fences, then turned, cocked his tail in the air, and galloped as gaily as might be after his companions into the abattoirs. There the wicked cease from troubling.

It is found impracticable to fatten up range cattle on their arrival in England, and, after a few days' rest to allow them to recover from their fevered condition, all these cattle were sold for immediate slaughter. They were fat when they left the range; at the end of their month's journey they were not only reduced to mere frames, gaunt and narrow beyond belief of people who have seen cattle only in the fields and farmyards of England, but with their sterns rubbed raw and swollen out of all natural shape, their legs also swollen, and in many cases raw round the fetlocks, and with their hides scored with horn marks. When one considers the amount of bruising which these external marks represent, and the way in which the steers had been thrown about in the pens by the motion of the vessel, it is difficult to suppose that any of the little beef that is on them can be healthy human food. I can only suppose it is made into sausages.

NELE LORING.

TALLEYRAND'S MEMOIRS.

THE reality of History is so unlike the report, that we continue, in spite of much disappointment, to look for revelations as often as an important personage leaves us his reminiscences. The famous book which has been so eagerly expected and so long withheld will not satisfy those who, like the first Queen of Prussia, demand to know le pourquoi du pourquoi. The most experienced and sagacious of men discourses about certain selected events that concerned him, and passes sentence on two generations of contemporaries; but he betrays few secrets and prepares no surprises. Nothing could increase the lustre of the talents which he is known, by the malevolent testimony of Vitrolles, to have displayed at the first restoration, or which are proved by his own correspondence from Vienna. But we are made to know him better; and all that he says and much that he conceals brings out into vivid light one of the wonders of modern politics.

Three months after the fall of Napoleon, Talleyrand went out of office, opposed by Russia, disliked by the King, hated by the triumphant royalists. Under that constellation, mainly in the year 1816, he wrote these Memoirs. The undercurrent of motive is to explain, or to explain away, the earlier part of his career; to expose his incomparable services to the crown, the country, and the dominant party; to show that nothing in the various past disqualifies him for the first place in the councils of the Monarchy he had restored. It is not the plea of a vulgar competitor; for, with all his sleepless ambition, he writes with studied moderation and reserve. He has not the tone of a man contemplating from aloft his own achievements, his immense renown, his assured place in the central history of the world. Talleyrand is dissatisfied, satirical, and almost always bitter in his judgment of men. The better to dissociate himself from evil communications, he interpolates a laboured attack on the Duke of Orleans, which would be a blot on the composition but for the redeeming paragraph on Sieyès, the best of all the characters he has drawn. He slurs over his own share in the work of the National Assembly, justifies his attitude under Napoleon by the pressing need for monarchy, and by his breach with him on the affairs of Spain,