sumptuous court; it has a numerous train of their mission of brigandage from Rome; but partisans, clients, and devotees, mixed up with who really governs Rome is a question about every class of society; it holds in trust innu- which the learned differ. The Holy Father merable charitable institutions, endowments, reigns, some say, but the reverend Jesuits subsidies, hospitals, orphan asylums, and other govern. When the court of Rome replies to means of benevolence, the list of which fills the powers who counsel reform, "Non possuthree big volumes; it possesses the all-powerful mus! No compromise!" it is not poor Pius ministry of the Word, of religious societies, of the Ninth who speaks; still less is it Cardinal the pulpit and the confessional, every mode of Antonelli, who, in that case at least, is only a directing the will, the passions, and the con- docile instrument; it is the General of the science of the people: and yet, with all these Jesuits proclaiming through the Pope's mouth elements of authority and power, with such the infallibility of Ignatius Loyola. irresistible baits and bribes, you will hear, if you listen closely, from one end of Rome to the other, the whispered watchword, "Down with the priesthood!"

All which may be mere scandal, like Liverani's appreciation of the Sacred College. As to learning, he says, they have one famous celebrity, Cardinal Wiseman, who covers all the rest with his mantle; there are also men of remarkable scientific merit, such as Gousset, Morichini, and Baluffi, but they are either foreigners or are kept as far away from Rome as possible. Even practical qualities excite suspicious jealousy. Cardinal Brunelli was sequestered at Osimo, and Cardinal Marini incurred the same danger; because, to experience, honesty, and delicacy (very rare in the climate of Rome), he unites a piety which is worthy of better times. The rest of the heap is composed of mediocrity, shabbiness, incompetence, crass ignorance, want of merit, galvanised piety and intelligence; ephemeral reputations, fabricated and trumped up as a means of rising; elastic consciences, whether for good or for evil; borrowed information, with talents just sufficient to satisfy nuns, in whose company they waste great part of their time; and ambition filtered into the very bone.

LONDON WATER.

IN FOUR CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.

The reason of so strong an aversion may be, that Human Nature has its Non possumus as well as the Pope; there are inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and iniquities which, through long suffering, it cannot put up with. A time comes when it says with the not very thin-skinned statesman, "This is too bad!" With a few more facts like the judicial murder of the innocent Locatelli, even Roman patience will at last tire out. Some people may wonder that a cardinal, an ecclesiastic, does not meet with some check within the Church itself. But Liverani informs us that Antonelli's confessor is a Jesuit; he professes a great respect for the order, which he styles a society of virtuous and learned men; but he is obliged to admit that, at every great criminal's elbow you will always find a virtuous Jesuit. Beside the name of La Pompadour you find that of a virtuous Jesuit. Of late years, Father Mignardi, a Jesuit, is Cardinal Antonelli's spiritual director, although the Roman people, starved by the monopoly of the brothers and friends of the secretary of state, entertain serious doubts whether he have any soul at all FEW of us who have fed in youth upon stories to direct. And the Jesuits cannot profess ig- of adventure and discovery have been without norance; for their charities and the exercise of an early ambition to distinguish ourselves as their ministry take them every day among the travellers. Not knowing that Bruce was looked people, and they know what sufferings are in- upon as a dangerous romancer, and forgetting flicted by a tyranny now nearly three lustres old. that Mungo Park perished in the desert, we The Jesuits entertain their own views re- have most of us laid down the well-thumbed specting history and politics. One of their records of their wanderings with a youthful great historians states: "The holy king (Louis yearning which nothing but a good tramp the Ninth) in person, assisted by sixty bishops, could satisfy. In this half-gipsy, sea-going, harinaugurated the Holy Inquisition by the execu-ness-breaking frame of mind, we have regarded tion, in the Place de Grève, of ninety-five here- every muddy fishpond as an undiscovered tics, who were burnt alive. This good work was mysterious lake, and every slow-creeping rivulet so agreeable to God, that he vouchsafed to France as an untraced Nile. Then, as each summer's a superabundant harvest." The facts them- Saturday came round-the blessed Saturdays on selves are perfectly true; their connexion, as cause and effect, are perfectly jesuitical. In respect to policy, the brigand system possesses an efficacy peculiarly its own. "You Neapolitans, foolish folk, who banish your rightful king and accept an usurper, see what you get by the change! Your throats shall be cut, your houses burned, your women outraged, when you are least prepared to offer resistance, until you take back again your beloved Bourbon and his suite of saintly counsellors. Barbarism and cruelty is it? May be; the end justifies the means."

The spoilers of unarmed peasantry receive

which the school-doors had no power to hem us in, and even the stern schoolmaster looked and spoke like some other man-we have sallied forth with a bundle of cold meat and bread; a top-string, leaded at the end, to use as a plummet; a faithful, blinking, idiotic-looking dog, whose red tongue lolled out, to the horror of passing old gentlemen; and a sixpenny compass bought at a toyshop, which shook about like a mountain of calves'-foot jelly. Turning our backs upon the spreading claws of bricks and mortar, we have sought for wonders, and have met them more than half way. We have magni

Young gentlemen," he said, with an air of melancholy, "I think you would treat that rivulet with a little more respect, if some one told you its history,"

"We were only hunting a rat, sir," we replied, somewhat abashed, and thinking that, perhaps, he might be the owner of the property.

"You are now standing," he continued, speaking at us rather than to us, "in the famous Tyburn Brook, which once flowed from Hampstead, by many channels, into the Thames, and which was one of the earliest principal fountains that supplied your City ancestors with water."

"Indeed, sir," we said, respectfully but incredulously, was it older than the New River ?"

We asked this question, because we knew something about the New River, and had heard much about its extreme age.

fied the roadside rat-hole, into a grotto of Anti- by a pleasant middle-aged gentleman in clerical paros; we have seen in the sunburnt haymaker costume. a friendly but untutored savage; and having devoured our bread and meat before we got a mile upon our journey, we have cheerfully cast our selves on the world with a belief in the bounty of nature. Glancing occasionally at our tremulous compass, out of respect to our book-knowledge, we have yet guided our steps by the rules of eye, of fancy, and of touch. We have struggled through prickly hedges, staggered over ploughed fields, trespassed upon private property in defiance of surly bulls, printed notices, and all the terrors of horse-whips and law, and by the time that the sun was high in the heavens we have begun to feel the pangs of thirst. From that point of our wanderings everything became coloured by the hope of finding water. If we turned to the right or left, it was with the desire to discover a brook; if we went to the top of a hillock and took a sweeping view of the country, it was with a desire to sight some barn or village where we could beg a cup of drink. In these straits our dog was an intelligent and useful companion, and when our mouth began to feel as if it were full of paste, and we had tried the plan of sucking a pebble, to find it a mockery and a snare, this faithful animal led us down into a valley, where a clear stream, running over a gravelly bed and half filled with islands of green water- "It supplied it for nothing," he replied, "as cresses, was waiting for our refreshment. With-all streams and wells do, up to a certain point. out stopping for a benediction, we were instantly Nature is bountiful, but uncertain: art is exactdown on our face, with our mouth sucking ing, but reliable. Some people left money to in the water, our hands scooping it up, and establish conduit-pipes, and maintain them as a even our cap employed as a water-pouch. We charity; others erected these structures, and were not checked by any fear of chilling our paid themselves by a recognised toll." young blood, or by any theory that enough is This unexpected lesson in the fields carried as good as a feast. We drank our three times us back, in imagination, to our hateful school, three, in that reclining position, and were loth and sounded very much like the Rev. Mr. Blair's to leave the fountain that had comforted us in instructions in English composition. It was our need. By proposing to trace the friendly accepted in all politeness, and forgotten imme stream to its final outlet in some river, we ap-diately by my arithmetical companion, but it peared to repay the favour we had received, while we turned our wandering tastes into something like a useful direction.

In our gipsy-like journeys of this kind-and they were doubtless many and frequent- we often reversed this process, and starting on the banks of a river, a streamlet, or even a canal, we found a delight in following it upwards to its source. Then the top-string plummet came into repeated, but not very clearly defined, usage; and the dog was sent into the water so often after pieces of wood, that he came out at last like a sleek seal, and almost shook himself to pieces. If he stood for a moment on any spot, he made it look like a puddly street on a wet day, and we avoided him as an overcharged living sponge, ready to give off a shower at any instant.

"It supplied conduits," he returned, "centuries before the New River was thought of, and deserves better treatment than it now gets as the King's Scholars' Pond' main sewer.'

"Did it give the water for nothing?" asked one of my companions, who had a natural aptitude for figures.

made a lasting impression upon me. I dreamed of strange figures pouring out water day and night into the tankards of water-carriers; some, like venerable giants with inverted pitchers under their arms; others, like accommodating lions worked as pumps, with their tails for handles, and their mouths for spouts. I was not easy until I had searched the history of our London water supply in my school over-time; and I found the study-like all studies which we select for ourselves-far more agreeable than otherwise.

CHAPTER II.

"ANCIENTLY, until the Conqueror's time," says old Stow, the best of all London historiaus, "and for two hundred years after, the Citie of London was watered (beside the famous river of the Thames on the south part) with the river of In one of these boyish water-course journeys, Wels, as it was then called, on the west; with undertaken in direct imitation of Mr. Bruce, water called Walbrooke, running through the the Abyssinian traveller, I remember dabbling, midst of the Citie into the river Thames-serv wading, and raking with some companions in a ing the heart thereof; and with a fourth water small shallow streamlet, like a ditch, some few or Boorne, which ran within the Citie through miles out of London, when we were addressed | Langbourne Ward, watering that part in the

east. In the west was also another great water, called Oldborne." *

citizens, to lay down a leaden pipe from six fountains or wells at Tybourne. It is doubtful how far the pipe extended towards the City. Stow says, "In 1432 Tybourne water was laid into the Standard, Cheapside, at the expense of Sir John Wells, mayor; and likewise in 1438, by another lord mayor, Sir William Eastfield, from Tybourne to Fleet-street and Alderman

Langbourne Ward has taken its name from a long bourne of sweet water, which formerly broke out in the fens about Fenchurch-street, ran down that street along Lombard-street to the west end of St. Mary Woolnoth's Church, where, turning south, and breaking into small shares, rills, or streams, it left the name of Share-bury." borne-lane implanted in the City.

The Tybourne brook, which had a large share in furnishing these town water supplies, is now, as my teacher in the fields told me, the King's Scholars' Pond sewer, which we have lately been surveying.

This sewer, according to Mr. Cunningham, takes its name from a pond which once stood on the borders of the river a little below Chelsea. Before it became a main sewer, it was a brook or bourne, called Tybourne, also Ay-brook, and Eve-brook, and famous for giving a title to the

"There were three principal fountains or wels," continues Stow, "in the other suburbs: to wit, Holywell, Clement's Well, and Clerke's Well. Neare unto this last fountaine were divers others wells: to wit, Skinner's Well, Fag's Well, Tode Well, Loder's Well, and Radwell." The Clerk's Well, as we stated in our Sewer papers, has been dry for many years-an unsightly ruin of bricks and mud; and now even the iron tablet which marked its site has been taken away by the authorities of Clerken-village of Tyburn. The brook had its source at well. It stood in Ray-street, near the Sessions' House, and near where the Underground Railway is now passing. If the waters of this well had been in existence, there is every prospect that this new undertaking would have drawn them off, as a clause in the act of parliament provides that the railway company shall compensate all parishes for the destruction of any wells which they may pass through.

West-end, Hampstead; and, after receiving many tributary streamlets, it ran due south across Oxford-street, near Stratford-place, by Lower Brook-street and Hay-hill, through Lansdowne Gardens, down Half-Moon-street, and through the hollow of Piccadilly into the Green Park. There it expanded into a large pond, from whence it ran past the present Buckingham Palace in three distinct branches In West Smithfield, in the old days, there was into the Thames. Rosamond's Pond in St. a pool called Horsepool, and another near to the James's Park, filled up in 1770, was partly supparish church of St. Giles's, Cripplegate, be-plied by its waters. When Tyburn Church was sides many smaller springs and wells throughout the City.

When the streams and wells became partially dried up or exhausted in course of time, and the number of citizens, as our historian phrases it, "mightily increased," they were forced to seek for waters at some little distance.

rebuilt, it was dedicated to the Virgin, by the name of St. Mary-le-bourne, because it stood on the borders of the stream; and hence we get the present corrupted names of Marylebone, Marrowbone, and Marie-la-bonne.

Though the conduits were supplied freely by these country brooks, the public had not free access to all the conduits. One citizen, a waxchandler in Fleet-street, who had secretly pierced a conduit within the ground in 1479, and so conveyed the water into his cellar, was tried and convicted, and condemned to ride through the City with a conduit upon his head.

"The first cisterne of lead," continues Stow, "castellated with stone in the city of London, was called the great conduit, in Westcheap, which was begun to be builded in the yeare 1235." The water was brought from Paddington, and according to Mr. Matthews, in his Hydraulia, it is the first known attempt to supply London The rules and regulations concerning the conwith water by means of leaden pipes. Though duits, with the prices of water, are preserved for the execution of the Westcheap conduit scheme us in some old Ludgate parochial documents, was commenced in 1235, the following year quoted by Malcolm: January, 1585, it was another transaction took place, which displays agreed in vestry that there shall be three waterthe great attention bestowed upon the supply of bearers and no more, and they all to be men, water at that period. It was recorded that some and not any of their wives nor servants; and merchants of Amiens, Nele, and Corby, being they shall deliver seven tankards of water, winter solicitous to obtain the privilege of landing and and summer (so that the tankards be six gallons housing wood, &c., actually purchased it from apiece), for twopence [our water now costs the lord mayor and citizens for the considera- about a farthing for the same quantity]; and tion of a yearly payment of fifty marks, and the that they shall carry no water to any person donation of one hundred pounds towards the ex-dwelling out of the parish; and also that if any pense of the operations then going on for conveying water from "Tyborne" to the City. This important undertaking originated in a grant from Gilbert de Sandford to the corporation, enabling them, with the assistance of the

See "Underground London," All the Year Round, vol. v. page 114.

of them set out any tub or tubs (as heretofore
they have done) to the annoyance of the street,
every such person shall be disabled and debarred
to carry any water from the conduit.”.
"Also, it is ordered and agreed by a vestry
holden the 12th day of January, in the thirtieth
year of our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth, that
no manner of servant, nor no water-bearer, shall

larly as not one branch line has been formed in connexion with the main line.

:

grand dining saloon, to the number of four hundred from each train. Officers of all grades When the line was finished, it was found that emerge in dashing uniforms; fine ladies in silks there would not be full work for it as a military and brocades; lacqueys and attendants on the road, so there was granted, as a great favour to same in parti-coloured liveries; fat greasy the inhabitants of the two extreme cities, liberty long-bearded Russian merchants, their wives to travel up and down it. After this they built and daughters sparkling with rings and pins, magnificent refreshment stations and engine chains, bracelets, and all manner of jewellery; depôts at convenient distances, and now this is German stewards, Turks and Greeks, Tartars, Cirone of the finest, safest, best arranged, and cassians, Armenians, Jews, French, German, and most comfortable travelling line in the world. English travellers for pleasure or for business; The speed of travelling is limited to twenty English and American engineers and mechanics miles an hour. The shortest stoppage is for ten Russians, of divers provinces, with beards and minutes, allowing plenty of time to drink a cup without, in long caftans, long boots, long hair, of tea and smoke a cigarette; but at each of with long faces and short purses; Russian women the principal stations the train stops for half an without hats or bonnets, their heads bound in hour. Hot well-cooked dinners, breakfasts, and handkerchiefs; and a host of nondescript creasuppers, served by clean well-dressed waiters, are tures which appear to belong to nothing known always ready. There is plenty of time to eat, on earth or under the earth. They dine in twenty and the price is not very high. Again, in tra- minutes; and then fall to smoking, and to drinkvelling, a first or second class passenger can ing beer, tea, spirits, wine-champagne among walk from one end of the train to the other. The the rest-until the second bell sounds. There are carriages are excellent, and built on the Ame- three bells, with an interval of five minutes berican plan with a passage up the centre, seats tween each ringing; the Russians cross themat right angles to the passage, doors in the ends selves at the second bell, take the last puff, throw of the cars, and no division anywhere. The the rest of the cigar away, and then leisurely guard has an assistant at the door of every car- saunter, each to his carriage. The last bell riage. The Russian third-class carriages are su- having sounded, gently and slowly the trains perior to the English second; and the second-class take their departure. One to Moscow and are quite equal to our first. Smoking is universal the other to Petersburg. There is no hurry, at all the railway stations: even the ladies accept no crushing, squeezing, running, or losing offers of cigars. The fares are, between Moscow seats. Yet sometimes a stranger will get out and Petersburg (four hundred and eleven miles), at the wrong side, get into the wrong train, and third class, ten roubles (thirty shillings); be fairly on the way back to his starting-point second, thirteen roubles (thirty-nine shillings); before he finds out his mistake. first, seventeen roubles (fifty-one shillings). As a night has always to be passed in the carriages, each passenger brings two pillows: the firstclass pillows are encased in silk, the second in calico, the third in anything. These pillows add cushions to the seats and support the back by day, and form by night excellent extem-large hooked nose, calm and wondering eyes, porised beds. The Russians make a journey to and from Moscow an affair of pleasure, sleep and eat alternately, gormandising at all stations where refreshments can be had; not crowding them, that is impossible, the rooms being so large as to accommodate from six hundred to eight hundred persons at once. The passengers do strict justice to the good things on the tables, find fault freely, and order what they require as if they were at home in a good hotel. After the gutta percha pork pies, mahogany cakes, and sawdust sandwiches, bolted standing in the English refreshment-rooms, it is pleasant to sit down comfortably when one is tired and hungrynapkin on knee-to a half-hour's quiet discussion of a well-cooked meal. Beef, lamb, mutton, vegetables, fowl, game, potatoes, fish, cutlets, cheese, and dessert, are served by civil waiters, in black clothes and white cravats, at the small charge of one rouble (three shillings) each. One can also dine very well for half this sum at the side-table.

A place called Bullagonie is the centre station. There, the up and down trains meet on opposite lines, and pour out their motley freights into the

A rather curious case of this kind happened on one of my journeys to Moscow. An old lavishnick, or shopkeeper of the peasant class, was my vis-à-vis in a second-class carriage. He might be sixty years of age, and, with his long white beard and hair, broad face and forehead,

loose caftan, broad belt, and long wide boots, he
looked quite Abrahamic. Evidently he had never
been on rails before. When we started from
Petersburg he reverently crossed himself three
times, and then gave himself up to what-
ever might come, with patient faith. As we
proceeded, he became astonished at the awful
speed of twenty miles an hour, and I had to
undergo a deal of cross questioning:
"Was I
Nemitz ?" "No." "An Americansky ?" "No."
"Then you are an Anglichan ?"
"Yes."
"Have you iron roads in England ?"
'Yes-many."

"How many!
y?"

'One, almost, to every town and village." A long pause ensued after this answer: took time to get it down.

"And do they go as fast as we are going now ?"

"Some three times faster."

"Oh, sir, you are joking with an old man!" Of course he did not believe me. When we got to Bullagonie, he got out like the rest, and in the dining saloon I saw him meet a friend who belonged to the Moscow train; they kissed