always lost on Lady Humphrey. Yet in spite
of her discouragement, the little man kept up a
high flow of spirits; and the company went
laughing and jesting into London.

AUSTRALIAN MUTTON.

THREE legs for a shilling, half a sheep for two-
and-sixpence. These were the prices of mutton
in the Ballaarat Market in the middle of the
mouth of June in this present year, 1868.

Ballaarat, on a Saturday night, is worth seeing.
Some thousands of prosperous looking
miners and other workmen; hundreds of clerks
or storemen and their wives; young lads and
lasses, all well dressed, and seldom with a
drunken man among them; these look for their
provender among rows of fat sheep, magnificent
joints of beef, poultry, and rabbits, and, in the
season, the various sorts of wild ducks in
abundance; a brace of teal for eighteenpence, and,
for those who like it, the black swan for half-a-
crown.

Three legs for a shilling! Suppose we jump
into a buggy and trot along a well kept
macadamised road for about ten miles out of this
city of gold. Here are hundreds of glossy
black-coated crows, at first sight just like their
English cousins; but the eyes are white—a
condition of the iris not uncommon in Australian
birds. Rows after rows of sheepskins hang on
fences, near a number of low wooden buildings,
and a steam waste-pipe: from which the pretty
white vapour is rising into the clear blue cloudless
sky—this is a boiling-down establishment.
Here are sheep pens filled with fine wooled
merinos: the ewes weighing from forty to fifty
pounds: the wethers, say some ten pounds more.
Nearly all Australian sheep are merinos. Their
coats are at present worth about three shillings
each, and, when woven by English looms into
wondrous fabrics, they may help to dress a
duchess. Their carcases, worth about as much,
are doomed to go to pot. A couple of men
enter the pen and knock a few hundred
sheep on the head. They are then immediately
seized and dragged into the butchery—which
place we also enter, trying at first to pick our
way on the gory floor—but soon content to
stand anywhere in the blood, which is everywhere.
The head of each stunned animal is
laid over a brick drain to carry away the
blood; a butcher with a keen knife lifts each
head up and cuts the throat; another follows
and cuts out the tongues; the bodies are
then thrown in heaps ready for skinning. The
skinner's duty is to skin the beast, disembowel
it, and cut off its head. For this he is paid
twelve shillings and sixpence a hundred, and
will do his hundred and ten a day. The carcases
skinned and cleaned, are carried into
a cutting-up room, where they are quickly cut
into quarters; the fore quarters piled up in one
place, the hinds tossed into hampers are then
taken into another room where the tails and
outside fat are cut from them. "When trimmed,
they are sent to market and sold according to
size for ninepence, sixpence, or fourpence, or
are salted and smoked for eighteenpence.
Following the process of trade with the rest of the
sheep, we come to the boiling-down room; there
we find three iron cylinders about eight feet
long by three in diameter; into these the foreparts
with the fat trimmed from the hind is
put; each cylinder can hold three hundred
sheep, so we have cooking apparatus for nine
hundred.

Each boiler is furnished with perforated
false bottoms. When the sheep are packed in,
the tops are securely screwed down, steam is
forced in at a pressure of from forty to forty-
five pounds to the inch, and they are left to cook.
In about seven hours they are done. The fat
and oil, i.e. the tallow, is run off by means of a
stop-cock near the top. A fat ewe of forty
pounds' weight will give about twelve pounds
of tallow, so that from the three boilers we
should get about ten thousand eight hundred
pounds of tallow. This is run into casks holding
about eight hundredweight each. A stopcock
is also opened near the bottom from which
the gravy runs out, smelling deliciously, and one
would think making good soup. But it all
runs to waste, emptying itself into a swamp.
From an iron door at the bottom, the meat and
bones are taken; this refuse is pressed, to
squeeze out the remaining fat, and is then
shovelled out for manure and sold at five shillings
a load. So completely is the stuff cooked, that
I can crush up the bones in my fingers.

We have yet to follow the heads. These are
skinned, boiled, and then given to the pigs, of
which there are three hundred. Nothing is done
with the blood. Our farmers are not yet
enlightened enough to use it, though it may be
had for the carting away.

The sheep then is thus disposed of: you
English get the wool and tallow; we
Ballaaratians get the legs and tongue; the pigs get
the head; the ground gets the refuse, to come
to use again, it may be, in golden drop wheat,
and which possibly may go to feed your
English mouths.

In an adjoining building, Swiss coopers are at
work making casks from the silver wattle of
Tasmania.

But though this is what we are doing with
thousands of our sheep, every week, we do not
want to do it. We had far rather it should
feed our brothers in the grand old fatherland.
You want mutton and beef. We want to send
it to you. How can this be done? Meat may
be preserved, and in many ways. It may be
done up in tins. For this, there are several
processes, the most common of which is boiling
the meat, and at the right moment, when all
the air is excluded, hermetically sealing the top
of the tin. Or the meat may be tinned fresh,
in joints, and certain preserving gases introduced.
Some meats thus preserved were placed
on board her majesty's ship Galatea, and his
royal highness her captain reported very
favourably of them. But meat sold in tins is not