the breaking of cables or chains,
or the tumbling of stones from the pit mouth
upon men as they went up or down, such
incidents causing habitually the loss of a good
many lives and limbs. What did I know as
a stranger in the place? Did not they who
had been bred to the work know how to work
mines better than a meddlesome Londoner?
Did the men ever complain? Far from it.
They took the usages they found and would
have resented innovation quite as stoutly as
their masters. I tried at an inquest or two
to point out that the cause of death had been
preventible. The coroner seemed to be pitying
me for my rawness. Of course I could
not afford to offend the great man of the
place, and gentlemen of the jury would as
soon have thought of committing high treason
as of concocting a special verdict, that would
be offensive to him. Of course they had
nothing to say but Accidental Death, and as
I cannot afford to scrape the butter off my
bread (for truly it is not laid on very thick),
I take good care now that my new-broom
days are over to let things take their course.
If our great local king builds cottages for his
men with a canal under the back windows,
and some thousand tons of coal burning to
coke and pouring products of combustion into
the air before the front windows, with pig-
sties between every pair of cottages, and
stables and dungheaps in the middle of the
row, what have I to do as a surgeon but go
and attend the sick people I find there? The
whole row is illuminated of a night with the
lights in the sick rooms. Well, that is no
business of mine: our little king of these
times, like the giant kings of old times, can
do no wrong.

I am a captain. When I got my first
command, I told the owners that I had not
the right complement of men, that I wanted
the ship better armed, that the stores sent on
board for the crew were not at all to my
satisfaction, and that I should like to carry
out some ideas of a reform in the construction
of the forecastle, because I thought that good
sailors well cared for, and not overtasked,
were the true strength of a ship, the brain
and bone and muscle that would carry it
safely through any amount of peril. I was
asked whether I had not as many men as the
law demanded that I should carry, was told
that my ship was like other ships, and that if
I wanted to make way in the world I had
better not be fussy.

As a soldier poisoned in an Indian barrack
I reverence the memory of Sir Charles Napier;
who struggled hard to procure for us
accommodation equal to the exigencies of the
climate. But what a troublesome man Sir
Charles is known to have been. He was
incessantly crying out at errors and abuses
in the faultless system of our Indian Government;
—and how unpopular he was in India
through being a meddler with what could not
possibly concern him!

I am going to close this article in a whisper.
It seems to me that nine accidental deaths
out of a dozen arise from culpable carelessness
and negligence. It seems to me that
the regard for human life ought to become
more tender with the growth of civilisation,
and that we are now sufficiently civilised to
deal with the huge mass of Accidental Deaths
which occur every year as serious cases,
instead of massing them together as so many
ugly incidents of course, which it is of no
use in the world trying to provide against.
There was a time when nobody thought of
doing anything for the suppression of
preventible diseases, and it then scarcely occurred
to anybody to reflect that a very large
proportion of those ills of the flesh really were
preventible. It is just so with these other
ills of the flesh, accidents. Those whose
reckless conduct, or whose wicked economy,
occasions preventible accidents, must be
punished for the wrong they do, and the
suffering they cause. In a word, the law
must, sooner or later, in all such instances,

                                      "make
Mischance almost as heavy as a crime."

MY FOLLY.

I WAS an only child, and lost my parents
in early youth. My principal guardian was a
neighbouring squire—a friend of the family
—a "good sort of man," who never did any
harm, and who was much too indolent to do
any good. He thought that he would be
perfectly fulfilling his duty if he turned me off
his hands when I arrived at the age of twenty-
one, sound in wind and limb, and with the
same amount of rental to receive as I had
on the day when my father died. During
my pupilage. I shaped my own course pretty
nearly as I liked. From the public school I
went to Cambridge, and was entered as a
fellow commoner; but having no need of a
profession to support me, I only remained
there two or three terms, and did not wait
long enough to take any degree. It struck
me that the modern languages and modern
politics would be more serviceable in after
life than a superabundant knowledge of
Latin, Greek, and the differential calculus.
The conversations which I often had in our
Combination-room with those fellows of our
college who had travelled on the continent,
confirmed me in the idea. I threw aside
my tasseled cap, and my gold-laced gown,
communicated the project to my guardian,
who consented to it because it gave him no
trouble, arranged the mode of receiving my
allowance, and soon was steaming across the
Channel to France.

After an excursive trip of discovery, I
determined to settle for a year or two in one of
the northern departments, in a town which
possessed a good public library, and the
means of easy communication with England.