could reasonably be expected. At Bristol it was
found that there were exactly half as many
bakehouses as persons employed in them, or two men
and youths to each bakehouse—a proportion
which shows that the establishments are mostly
very small. All seemed going on pretty well in
a course of gradual improvement.

Last autumn, however, the Operative Bakers'
Vigilance Association hit out right and left,
giving their masters a heavy blow and severe
discouragement. They memorialised the Home
Secretary, asserting that the act was nearly
in abeyance; that in the majority of parishes
in the metropolis its provisions had been
totally unheeded; that in hundreds of
bakehouses in the metropolis youths under eighteen
years of age were still employed by night;
that in all parts of London and its environs
sleeping in the bakehouses continued to be
a common practice; and that "a vast number
of bakehouses are still in that filthy
condition as to be totally unfit places in which to
manufacture the staple food of the public."
The authorities were taken aback at this;
they did not know whether black is white,
or white black, or either, or neither, or both.
Sir George Grey, who had succeeded Sir George
Lewis at the Home Office, could not examine two
thousand bakehouses and ascertain for himself;
he therefore requested Mr. Tremenheere to dive
into the matter, and to get at the truth. Quite
recently (in the month of March), Mr. Tremenheere
reported that he had caused the parish
officers and the health officers to inquire into
every one of these cases in detail. Some were
found not to be in any wise correct, some
exaggerated, and others in course of amendment; so
that the balance on the whole of the evidence
tends to the probability that the Bakehouses
Regulation Act bids fair to be honestly carried
out by degrees. The other facts, however,
remain pretty nearly unaltered. The journeymen
bakers still work very long hours, still work at
night, still lead a strange undomesticated life.
And many of them feel it sensitively.

When Lord Palmerston was Home Secretary,
a few years ago, a journeyman baker sent
him a MS. poem of considerable length, called A
Voice from the Oven; his lordship transmitted it
to Mr. Tremenheere, and some of the stanzas now
have the honour of living in a parliamentary
blue book. The poet thinks that, if councils
of conciliation were appointed, to regulate all
matters between masters and men, it might
happily come to pass that

Truth, Reason, and Justice conducting the trade,
Which all would rejoice in, no one could evade
Fair prices, fair hours; fair treatment as men
We may rest assured we all should have then;
When every master his own time should choose,
Confined to fair hours; and none will refuse,
On needful occasions, just a little over,
So it's not systematic——

After adding

——In truth I must own I am

Averse to live longer in this Pandemonium——

he breaks forth into a glow of hope:

So far as I can see,
Such a glorious thing 'twill be
When bakers shall no longer work like slaves,
But enjoy their fair rest then,
Like other working men,
Nor sink into their early pauper graves.

The poetry may not be such as would earn
the crown of the laureate; but it expresses a
real thought, and a real feeling.

RED JIM.

FIVE-AND-TWENTY years ago it was such a
summer, here in Victoria, as it now is in the end
of February, 1865; that is to say, the bush grass
lay long and dead amid moveless trees, or upon
the level tiresome plains; the heated air quivered
against the low horizon, and danced above the
withered verdure like the surroundings of a
furnace. There had been a long season of
drought. Nothing but dry water-beds,
distressed flocks, and wandering cattle, were to be
seen anywhere; sometimes the black heavy
masses of smoke would roll along the distant
sky, and cloud the glaring sun to crimson.
Sometimes in the close night a flush, far and faint,
told that the conflagrations which had not yet
reached us were sweeping many an acre of brush
or pasture land. That was a summer I shall
never forget! Day after day the same bright
dazzling sky, the scorched hills and plains,
the weary irritating sense of prostration. I
watched the poor half-maddened sheep, weeks
upon weeks, with a painful sense of duty which
is present to me even now. There was little
feed they could eat, and still less of filthy
stagnant water in the sole muddy pool on which
they depended as their last resource. Listlessly
they coiled in the shade, and listlessly I watched
them, until I began to experience a fierce irritable
longing for rain that haunted me day and night
like a coming mania. Some nights, I threw
myself down outside the hut and tried to sleep,
but could find no rest; the still hot atmosphere
kept up the fever that was coming upon me, and
my slumber was ever broken. I used to envy
the old station horse they had left for my use,
when I heard him nibbling among the grass in
the darkness of the night, and snorting satisfaction
that the sun had passed the hazy hills.
After a time I began to loathe the weary walk
home, and, taking with me an extra supply of
tea and damper, made a practice of camping
where the sheep camped; visiting my hut only
as the vagaries of the flock led me to its
vicinity; then I replenished my stock, and left
with the sheep again. I am sure I had fever,
and would soon have become delirious, for I had
nothing to relieve the frightful monotony—
always the same brazen sky, the dead sweltering
heat, the motionless forest, the strange
murmurings of the wilderness, like the faint
whisperings of a sea-shell.

One night I was lying tossing about in the
long grass of a box-swamp, not a mile from my
hut. I chose the place, because the ground was
cooler there than on the unsheltered plain; and