And here is one I used to call with high-falutin foolishness, But how much pride! and how much love! the Muse! And O! the blank distress That ashes o'er her faded face, like powder on a harlot's cheek! I know what she will say, I know 'twill be the same damned cruel creak: "I cannot find you rhymes for Faith, or Love, or Hope, or Trust, or Truth; But here's a hundred good to mate with Hunger, Death, and Wasted Youth." .. So, one by one, they creak and cheep-then, all together, all night long!... The church bells sound the passing hour; the Parcels porter bangs his gong; E.R.I.'s vans with flaring lights and thund'rous wheels go rocking by; The sweat-drenched air is loud with snores! O God! how sweet, how sweet to die! I fling me from the narrow bed that's just a roomy coffin's size; I fling me down the stairs, and past where Chawles is rubbing sleep-sore eyes; I flee with flying feet, I spurn the red-brick hygienic hellI bless the streets, the morn, the out-all-night, white, London morn! All's well, For Joe is shutting up his stall; the scaffie leans upon his broom; The bobbie watches from the kerb, a drowsy bulk of sulky gloom; A shameless spent grey cat slinks home; the sparrows hunt their morning meal; Mount Pleasant flickers out, and up from Phoenix Place the organs wheel; The Union's brass-bound door's flung wide; a waiting soaker scuttles in, The horrors shuddering in his rags, to lay his ghosts with three of gin. And my ghosts, my ghosts? Are they gone? I cannot see their faces. No; Forever at my ear they creak! Howe'er I fly, where'er I go, Ever and ever, day and night, toil I for bread or sigh for sleep, They're with me, and they are not dumb, they are not dumb, they creak, they cheep, Like the cicadas long ago, when high above Las Palmas town, Amid the gold of cactus-bloom, and runnel-song, I laid me down. PANIS ET CIRCENSES. In mighty Rome, when Nero ruled, To-day, in Britain, Demos rules; I hear a rumour thunder-low; IN PERILS OF WATERS. I. would have been extremely glad if such an escape had been in existence for the waters of the Seine, and the French engineers, who in the domain of hydraulics have always held a foremost place, are even now considering how such a work can possibly be contrived. IN a lecture delivered before ants of Paris this last winter the Royal Geographical Society lately, that distinguished engineer, Sir W. Willcocks, in treating on the irrigation of Mesopotamia and many subjects connected therewith, from the site of the Garden of Eden to the latest proposals for railway enterprise in Turkish Arabia, stated that if Noah had been a hydraulic engineer he would have built the Pison Escape rather than the Ark, and thereby would not only have benefited his own family, but would have conferred a lasting boon upon the country. To dispute matters of water engineering with the illustrious designer of the Assouan dam would of course be presumptuous. If, according to the monk of Melrose Abbey in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," to bridle the Tweed with a curb of stone was a work requiring supernatural power, what, indeed, must have been the skill and energy required to curb the mighty Nile, and that not in one part only? Yet, in all humility, it may be questioned how an escape for the flood waters of the great Euphrates could have been designed by any man when that flood submerged even the higher portions of the Mesopotamian plain by 16 cubits. However this may be, it is at least certain that the inhabit To most of us a river in flood has always a fascination, an appearance of life and personality, an embodiment of power. After a few days of rain in a country house it seems a natural thing to take one's first walk towards the nearest river and see it coming down in spate, tossing its tawny mane, as Macaulay says of the Tiber, and as one looks at it from the safe vantage-ground of bridge or riverside walk, to mark the difference between its present state and its wonted and familiar ordinary placid flow. But it is a very different matter when a flood comes, irresistible, unexpected, in places where no flood has ever been known in the memory of man, and when there is no escape from its fury. Then the horror is unspeakable. In England our rivers are so small, relatively speaking, and our climate so humid, that the sudden and abnormal floods of other lands are hardly known, and thus our rainy seasons are not as a rule followed by greater inconvenience than Probably the worst of these was the bursting of the Dale Dike Reservoir, some seven miles from Sheffield, on the 11th March 1864. It occurred at 11.30 P.M. In the valley below the reservoir there were many houses, farms, mills, and cottages, in which the inmates had retired to rest that night with the calm assurance of waking up to usual life and activity next morning. And at midnight, suddenly, the flood came. It swept away some thirty mills and fifteen bridges, besides innumerable houses, of which not a vestige was left, the very foundations being scooped out and torn away. Between 200 and 300 human beings were swept into eternity that night. Some of the surviving women woke to find themselves widows, children were orphaned. Many who had lain down to rest with the prospect of a happy home and fair livelihood derived from the industry of the mills, woke up in the morning to find themselves beggared. Others who had VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXXXVII. invested their all in the waterworks company, deeming it no speculative concern but safe as the Bank of England, found all their money gone. A fearful night truly! The causes of it were not very far to seek. Without going into minute technicalities, it may be mentioned that it is usual in English practice for such earthen dams to be made with a core of puddle-i.e., clay worked into a paste impervious to water, - which is usually taken in a trench below the embankment, so as to prevent water from leaking out below. The overflow waters of the reservoir-the "escape," to use the expression for surplus flow which we have alluded to above are discharged in a masonry channel at the side of the embankment, which channel is termed the "bywash." And the water-pipes leading from the reservoir to the place where they are required are generally taken under the embankment, encased in some masonry culvert, and controlled by valves and other means of regulation. In the case of Dale Dike, it appeared from the investigation subsequently held by the Government that the "bywash was much too small for the escape of surplus water in time of heavy rain, that the site of the embankment itself was on ground fissured and full of springs, that the bank had been formed, not in carefully rammed layers of homogeneous material but in cartloads of loosely-deposited earth H and rocks, and that-probably ing of the "by wash" was worst of all-the pipes had enlarged, and to do this as been taken through the bank, speedily as possible, he ordered not in a masonry culvert but a portion of the masonry to be laid through the earthen mass removed by blasting. A hole in such a way that they could was speedily made and a small not be examined, and with the amount of explosives fired, possibility, even probability, of without any very great effect. water creeping along the out- Then he descended to the side of them, to cause in the bottom of the embankment, heart of the embankment disin- at the place where the pipes tegration, insidious and unseen. emerged, to see if the valves The weather report for the were properly open; but some day, as published by Admiral of the workmen, fearing danger, Fitzroy, the meteorological ex- persuaded him to go to the top pert, was that there would be again. He was just in time. rain and gales. There had While groping about with his been much rain recently, and lantern in the darkness and the resident engineer on the the storm, news was brought works, somewhat apprehensive that suddenly a mighty breach of the work which had re- had taken place, unheard apcently been finished, spent some parently above the roaring of hours of the afternoon at the the gale. The pent-up waters reservoir watching the surplus went rushing madly on their water pouring over the by- career of death and destrucwash. There seemed to him tion. Masses of masonry weighto be no excessive amount of ing as much as thirty tons were surplus, probably because, un- whirled down the valley like known to him, much water was pebbles, and no work of human really escaping under the em- construction could withstand bankment, undermining its the mighty force thus set in stability. A violent gale was motion. blowing clouds of spray over the top of the embankment from the surface of the water. There appeared, however, to be no cause for alarm, and towards evening the engineer left the place. Later in the evening one of the workmen, crossing the embankment, noticed a crack in the earthwork, which seemed to him ominous, so he went and reported it. The engineer returned, taking with him some workmen and lanterns. He thought that, possibly, matters would be improved if the open This, of course, was only known when day broke. Nothing but a general sense of ruin was manifest to the unfortunate engineer as he stood trying to peer through the darkness and the storm with his lantern, a fit representative of feeble man in the presence of the incalculable and irresistible. In Eastern France, near Epinal, in the beautiful region of the Moselle Valley, there occurred on occurred on the 27th April 1895 a somewhat similar disaster. The network of navigation canals, which |