raging suns, what blustering hurricanes,
what soaking deluges of rain, what legions of
winged locusts and mosquitoes, must have
shone, and blown, and battered against those
crazy old staves, since they first held palm-oil!
Coopered, too, by slaves; worked at to
the music of cowhide whips, or paid for in
drams of rum, or lacquered buttons and scraps
of red cloth.  And yet, consoling thought!
how many thousand pounds of candles and
bars of soap have been made from the yellow
grease these casks have held, and how little
we reck, seeing them kicking about on this
Liverpool Quay, of what the Kroomens'
cooperage and the greasy sap of the African
tree have done for civilisation and for Christianity.
As I muse, come a flying horde of
ragged wretches to scrape with oyster-shells
and long nails what portions of coagulated
oil yet adhere to the insides of the casks.
But a stern dock policeman falls upon them,
and smites them.

If you think to cross that bridge leading
from one dock to the other, my friend
in the bombazine dress, the black triangular
bonnet, and the big, flat, checquered basket
like a wicker draught-board, you will be
disappointed, as I have been. For, while I
was lingering on the Palm Oil Quay, underground
machinery was at work, strange
noises were heard, some cog-wheels moved,
and the bridge, gravely parting in the
middle, disappeared into the dock walls
like a trick in a pantomine.  A bold baker
made a flying leap on one half, just as the
water-parted operation took place; and he
gained the opposite side, somehow, but how
I know not, and now stands there exulting,
though confessing that it was a "close shave."
A dreary gulf flows between him and me ;
but a big ship is coming out of dock, they tell
me, and I must make the best of it, and wait
till she has passed, and the bridge is drawn
to again.

A disappointment! No big ship is here,
but a little leg-of-mutton-sailed, squat, grubby
barge, full of—mercy on us!—chairs and
tables. The Saucy Sally of Lancaster, Flachey,
master. There are chests of drawers for'ard,
and four-post bedsteads aft; and the captain
(five feet of tarpaulin, with a yellow oilskin
hat, in the midst of which his brown face
glows like a gigantic blister) commands
his crew from a Pembroke table. The
Saucy Sally is not too proud to remove
goods in town and country, and to enact the
part of a spring van on the salt seas. Some
Hegira from Liverpool to Lancaster is she
favouring now, though I cannot, in connexion
with the railway and this Pickford and
Chaplin and Horne era, discover the advantage
of the long sea for so short a period
of transit.  I am reminded of that dear but
old-fashioned friend of mine who, to this day,
insists on coming from Margate by the Hoy!
A hoy from Margate in 1852; shade of
Charles Lamb!

The Saucy Sally has dropped down into
the river, the captain bearing with phlegmatic
composure some jocose criticisms on his
singular cargo. But now, following her, comes
the big ship in good earnest: the Zephaniah
W. Caucus, of New York, fifteen hundred
tons, bound for Port Philip. It may appear
strange to you that an American vessel should
carry British emigrants to a British colony,
but stranger still will it seem, when I inform
you (as I am informed by a politician with an
umbrella and a shockingly bad tongue in the
way of statistics, behind me) that British
vessels can in no wise attempt the carrying
trade in the American sea-ports, and would
convey emigrants from New York to San
Francisco at their peril. At which the
statistical umbrella-carrier gets quite purple
and inflamed with indignation against free-trade
without reciprocity; so much so, that I
move out of the way, being of the free-trade
way of thinking.

The Zephaniah W. Caucus, was a large
cotton ship once; but, no sooner did the
exodus to Australia commence than she
became suddenly, and without any prior
training, one of the Blue Peter line of packet
ships, which, as the whole world knows, are
all A 1's at Lloyd's, are all copper-bottomed
and copper-fastened, all carry experienced
surgeons, and all offer peculiar and unrivalled
accommodation for cabin and steerage
passengers. The three-quarter statuette of
Z. W. Caucus—probably a great transatlantic
ship-owner, or law-giver, or speculator in
town lots, or orator, or wild-beast tamer, or
something famous—stands proudly, in wood
and whitewash, at the head of the ship,
surveying the hawse-holes with the eye of a
monarch, and defying the bowsprit as he
would an enemy. Looking at him I am fain
to confess the very great family likeness
between figure-heads, generally. They all
seem to have been chiselled from the same
models, designed in the same train of thought.
Caucus, now, with the addition of a cocked
hat and epaulettes, and minus an eye and an
arm, would be twin brother to Admiral
Nelson, bound to Singapore, close by; with
a complete coat of gold leaf, a fiercely
curled wig and a spikey crown, he would do
excellently well for King Odin, screw steamer
for Odessa; with an extra leer notched into
his face, his whiskers shaved off, and in his
hand a cornucopia resembling a horse's nosebag,
twisted and filled with turnips, he would
pass muster for Peace or Plenty; while with
a black face, a golden crown and bust, and a
trebly gilt kitchen poker or sceptre, he would
be the very spit and fetch of Queen Cleopatra.
Distressingly alike are they, these figure-heads,
with the same perpetual unmeaning
grin in their wooden faces, the same eyes,
coats, hair, and noses in salient angles; the
same presumptuous attitudes, as though the
forecastle, save the mark, were not good
enough for them, and carrying, all, the same