then it often happens—chiefly in the
underselling shops—that from eleven o'clock on
Thursday night, work has to be maintained
continuously until late on Saturday afternoon. That
is to say, there is an almost incredible demand
on men already overweary, for no less than forty
hours of labour at a stretch! On many there
is a still further demand for four hours' work on
Sunday, to see to the "dinner bakings." A
large number of the journeyman bakers are thus
at work for one hundred and twelve hours in
the week of six days; their portion being
eighteen hours of daily labour to but six of rest.
Not in all shops, but in many, matters are as bad
as this, and in some they are worse. The weekly
wages for such work range from twelve to
eighteen shillings, with the daily allowance of
a half-quartern loaf to every man.

But overwork is not the whole cause of
unhealthiness among the men who work in
bakehouses. Let any one consider the cost of space
in London and large towns, remember that the
bakehouses are almost always underground, and
usually—since the baker's trade is not a thriving
one—at the basement of small houses. Of most
of the London bakehouses it is not too much
to say that they are pestiferous underground
dungeons, hot, unventilated, and undrained,
lighted with gas, fouled by contaminations near
at hand, and by the exhalations of the weary
men who work in them, and lie down on their
boards for snatches of unwholesome rest.

Of the bread eaten in London a large proportion
comes handled very often, also trodden
with bare feet after long fermentation, in such
dens as these. Of bakers' men only about
fourteen in a hundred have a look of health,
while of carpenters, who also work in-doors,
seventy-two in a hundred are robust. Among
bakers' journeymen no less than seventy in a
hundred are found to complain of positive
disease. "I have met," says a Manchester
surgeon, "with more than twice as many cases of
disease among the bakers as among all other
artisans put together, the number of men in
each case being equal." Of a visit from a
deputation of journeymen the same witness says:

They came to me in a body late in the evening,
and on entering the waiting-room the effect was
startling—so many shrunken, pale, anxious
countenances, combined with the ghastly looks of some of
them, and their dusty habiliments, it seemed more
like a visit from the tenants of the tomb, than from
what ought to have been hearty, sound constitutioned
men.

A journeyman baker is considered to be used
up at the age of forty.

Finally, let it be remembered that these
results follow not upon the cruelty of grasping
masters, who enrich themselves at the cost of
other men's lives; but upon the necessity of
poor men following a trade that yields them
little profit. All these things being true, we
surely may be thankful enough for an advance
made in our understanding of the art of bread-
making, which has changed the rising of the
dough into an instantaneous act, and produces
in an hour and a half out of a sack of flour,
baked loaves whereinto there have been no
men's lives kneaded.

CURLY-HEADED FRANCE.

ON the 24th of December, 1492, Christopher
Columbus, sailing through the great Atlantic
Ocean, got entangled in the islands of the
Caribbean Sea, and came to an anchor in the Bay
of Caracol. There, by some mischance, he lost
one of his ships, and was fain to make a home
for his crew on the hilly island before him,
which the Carib Indians, running down to the
rocky edge to see the strangers, called in their
own tongue Haïti, or the mountainous country.
Taking possession in the names, and for the
crown, of Ferdinand and Isabella, Columbus
rebaptised the island, calling it now Hispaniola,
or Little Spain, in honour of them and of his
adopted country; though later it grew to be
known as Saint Domingo, from the city which
he and his brother built. But Fort Navidad
was the name of the first building made there,
for this was the shelter wherein he left his ship-
wrecked crew to the protection of the saints
and the tender mercies of the Caribs. Fort
Navidad was, in fact, the first European settlement
actually effected in the New World. The
mountainous country was destined to be rich
in aliases. When the French got possession of
the west coast they called the island the Queen
of the Antilles: Cuba was the King: and in our
own day certain wits have stamped it as "Curly-
headed France," in pleasant allusion to its origin
and adoption, its race and administration.

The Indians were not disposed to fraternise
very intimately with Columbus's crew. When
they had learnt to know them as they really
were, the poor savages thought the less they had
to do with them the better, so they took the
most effectual mode of separation known to
them; attacked Fort Navidad, and quietly killed
every man of the little garrison entrenched
there; and, when Columbus returned with aid
and reinforcements from home, he found only
slaughtered men and painful memories standing
between him and the past. He immediately
gave battle to the Indians, and, though he had
but a comparative handful of armed Spaniards,
defeated a hundred thousand of them without
great loss on his own side. So, at least, say the
old chroniclers; but, their accounts are not
to be taken without the traditional grain
of salt of which critics and historians cannot
eat too freely. He then levied a tribute of three
hawks'-bills of gold every three months from
each Indian above fourteen years of age, with
a larger payment for the chief or cacique. Spain
would have sold anything for gold, and even the
blood of her bravest was well redeemed by
sundry hawks'-bills of that burning, yellow metal,
for which every Spanish man and woman lusted
almost to sickness. While the tribute was
coming in slowly and painfully, Columbus
founded, first, the city of La Isabella, and then