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individuals. To this enumeration has to be added about 1000 "bucks," or men who have been, for bad conduct, deprived of their licences, and who are continually loitering about the cab-stands, watching for casual employment by the regular drivers. These men are notoriously addicted to drunkenness, extortion, and even theft, and, from being associated with more worthy and honourable men, have brought indiscriminate odium upon the entire corps. The great majority of "bucks" have been in prison. Very few of them are married men; their days are generally spent in the tap-room, while they mostly sleep in cabs at night. As these depraved men, therefore, are not recognised members of the body, although for convenience occasionally employed, it is not just to visit their irregularities upon the reputation of the licensed drivers. This fact, if generally known, may tend to assuage that bitterness which is so often displayed in speaking of these severely censured individuals.

Upon the extortion so generally complained of in cabmen, Mr. Garwood has some kind and slightly extenuating remarks. In condemning these persons, too little allowance is made for the rigorous and inexorable exactions of the system to which they are subjected. In Mr. Garwood's opinion, the present fares are not such as to leave a large profit to the proprietors. It is reckoned in the trade, that less than 14s. brought home daily by the driver in the season, and about 9s. out of the season, will not be remunerative. For this sum the driver is required by the proprietor to "sign," as it is termed, and he is held responsible for the amount whether he earns it or not; while his only remuneration is any excess over the stipulated sum which he may be able to secure no wages being paid. Some of the less respectable proprietors, or "contractors," compel the men to sign for 16s. and 12s. a week, according to the season. Now this principle, we do not hesitate to say, must produce, in many cases, the fruits which the system is found to yield. As a body, they find it extremely difficult to make a living after handing over the sum for which they are bounda default in the payment of which exposes them to loss of place, as well as to fine and imprison

ment.

The men employed in connexion with omnibuses considerably exceed cabmen in number. Embracing drivers, conductors, ostlers, stable-keepers, time-keepers, etc., and reckoning seven persons to every two 'buses, we have a total of 10,500 persons thus engaged, who, with their families, probably make an aggregate of at least 40,000 individuals.

One of the most fruitful causes of the demoralization of both these bodies of public servants consists in their almost universal employment on the sabbath. They are compelled either to sacrifice their situations or violate the sanctity of that day. Few of their employers will concede to them the privilege of even an occasional freedom from toil. To ask for it, in many cases, would insure dismissal. They generally feel it to be not only a cruel privation, but also a deep degradation, to be robbed of their seventh-day rest; while it embitters their prejudices against religion and religious people, that they are often employed by them on that day without any apparent urgent necessity. "Persons

who have not mixed intimately with these unhappy outcasts," says Mr. Garwood, "can scarcely imagine the stumbling-block which this presents to their favourable regard of the claims of the gospel. They entertain the idea that, if it were not for religious people, they would have their Sundays, as they believe that it would not otherwise be worth their masters' while to send them out on that day, except under special circumstances. It is related in a recent pamphlet, that a cabman-in answer to a lady whom he was driving, and who had said to him, 'I hope you attend some place of worship'-replied thus cuttingly, 'No, ma'am; we drives about such as you.' The strong feeling of London cabmen, with reference to Sunday-work, is shown in the fact that between 2000 and 3000 of them recently signed a petition against the opening of the Crystal Palace on the Lord's day." Most of the foregoing remarks are equally applicable to the omnibus men; indeed, in some respects, the case of the latter is the worse; for the running of omnibuses on the Sunday is more general than the use of cabs, because it is more profitable, while the labour of the men is usually more severe and oppressive.

As regards the exhaustive and protracted character of their general labour, we are told that some omnibus servants work fourteen, some sixteen, and some nearly twenty hours a day. The latter are railway omnibus drivers and conductors, who commence at four in the morning, and continue, with the exception of about an hour and half, until twelve o'clock at night. The average is about fifteen hours, out of which they have from seven to ten minutes allowed for meals. So unremitting is their toil, that the meetings of a society, recently formed by themselves to improve their moral and social condition, have to be held after midnight-that being the only time which they can command to attend! That a large body of Englishmen should be in the state indicated so significantly by this fact is a scandal to our country, and the crying evil ought speedily to be swept away.

FISH ALIVE, O!

BRIGHT and warm shines the May sun on this Saturday morning, the 21st of the month; the sweet breath of the country blows over dusty London; and we are tempted forth by the fragrant breeze, and by the promise of novelty in a quarter by no means new to us, from the little back-room where, chin-deep in books, we have sat for the past week. A short ride, in the rear of the steam-steed that runs snorting twenty times a day round the northern boundary of the metropolis, lands us at the Camden Town station, from which a walk of a quarter of an hour brings us to Gloucester Gate, a few minutes only distant from the entrance of the Zoological Gardens. Hither we are come to make a morning call upon our old friends, the brutes, the birds, and the amphibia, and to strike up an acquaintance, if we can, with the new importationsthe fishes and molluscs of the river and the seawhich on this sunshiny morning are first open to the honours of a public levee.

We find the garden gay with flowers, and toler

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such a long bill as they are? See what a charge it is to them, and what pains they are at to settle it comfortably, ere they can rest at peace-poor fellows! they can't stick it on a file, as poor debtors do with their bills sometimes, and think no more about it for a season: well may they hang their heads with such a memorandum as that huge unsettled balance perpetually before them. What a contrast to the pelican is this stately ostrich, with his small angular head and human-looking eye! what a pile of rare feathers he carries on his bunch of a back, and how he buries his head beneath them as he prunes himself as though for a scamper of a hundred miles across the waste of sand! Has he forgotten yet his old African home in the wilderness, where he snuffed of an evening the far-off caravan, or the solitary Bedouin galloping alone in the desert? What a deafening din this whole parrot-tribe are making! Order! ladies and gentleman, if you please! Have you no sense of the decorum of a public meeting? "Tweet! twote! Quick, queek, quack, quock-a-rook-a-rook-a-roo!" We must run away and take refuge in this neighbouring building among the mice! How like a entered smells, with a dash too of the rabbit-hutch flavour in it, and something else suggestive, not exactly of toasted cheese, but awakening the recollection of baiting an old trap in which we once caught a burglar rat, who had eaten in one night the heads off a brace of tame pet pheasants.

ably shady already with the bright green spring foliage, and all our old friends, bipeds, quadrupeds, and no-peds, enjoying themselves at their ease, without a care upon their shoulders, all domestic troubles being taken off their hands by a numerous retinue of human attendants, who provide for their every want, and never ask them for wages, or present a bill of charges for bed and board. There are those old sages the owls, standing as if for their portraits by some drowsy artist, just as they stood this time last year: that grim vulture on the top of his rock seems never to have moved off since we saw him last: the royal eagle spreads his huge wings as royally as ever: the seal in the water rests his chin as usual on the warm stone on the edge of his tank: the rhinoceros keeps himself as much to himself as ever he did: those living sections of the side of a hill, the giraffes, carry their heads as near to the clouds as formerly: the snakes are just as lazy, and just as venomous too, as they have always been known to be; the lizards just as sleepy and as timorous; and the fearful pythons as fond of stealing out of sight and making themselves comfortable as in the days of yore. That black shaggy bear has no more mo-mouse-trap this place into which we have now deration in the matter of cakes than he had a twelvemonth back, but would climb any number of poles any number of times for any number of buns that you might offer him. Some difference is discernible in some of our favourites too. Madame Elephant's baby is growing a bouncing girl, being a match for an average ox, in size at least, already; and having been brought up to the trade of a beggar, excels in it just as much as her mother; in fact, she surpasses the old lady in activity and pertinacity, being the first to project her snout through the rails when anything is to be had for the asking, and the last to withdraw it. Master Hippopotamus, too, is almost, if not quite, grown into Mister Hippopotamus; he has just been having a bath, and then a meal of grass, just a bushel or two by way of a "snack"-and here he lies prone on the warm stones in the grateful sunshine, resting his parallelogrammic mountain of a head on the ground, and snorting in a manner which would not be tolerated in well-bred company, and blinking with his bright eyes at every passer-by, with a self-satisfied look which says, "I'm very well off, and I know it." When we come to the lions, we find his desert majesty in a fit of wrath, with his tail erect, and growling at his keeper, who has been talking to him in a way not quite agreeable to the ears of a monarch. Now and then he looks at his mate, evidently inquiring whether she thinks such treatment is to be borne. She, it is plain, is for peaceful measures, and so, putting up with the grievance, and soothed by her expostulatory looks and quiet demeanour, he at length pockets the affront and lies down by her side. Those impudent monkeys the monkeys are as impudent as ever, cracking the same never-stale jokes, and taking the same liberties with one another's tails, and (pardon us, shade of Chesterfield! for the allusion) doing the same neighbourly office, without the aid of a small-tooth comb, for one another's heads, as made us laugh years ago, and make us laugh still in spite of the many motives for seriousness which are but too apt at times to creep upon us. Then those pelicans! was ever a merchant plagued with

But we can linger no longer among our old acquaintances. There are a company of strangers arrived from the bottoms of ponds, the beds of rivers, and the shallows and the depths of the sea, to take up their abode in the metropolis of the world-and to them we must pay court. They are all ready to give a reception in yonder neat erection covered with a sheet awning, which has been fitted up for their accommodation. The building in which they are congregated is admirably adapted, as well for their own convenience as for that of visitors, who can see them in their own element, and study their peculiar conformation and habits with the least possible trouble. A capacious oblong chamber, about the size of a handsome dining-room, is thus fitted up: two large open tanks are placed one at either end, standing with their upper edges about a yard from the ground; these are filled, provisionally, with fresh water. Fragments of rock, pebbles, and moss-grown stones, mingled with water-weeds, are scattered at the bottom of these tanks, in one of which swim a company of water-tortoises of various sizes, from that of fifteen or eighteen inches to no more than three in width. When in the water these creatures are lively enough, paddling about at the bottom with considerable activity; but they appear to come out for the sole purpose of going to sleep

the smaller ones plainly preferring the back of a large one for a couch. Among these swims, or rather floats like a log, what seems the eidolon of a crocodile starved to death in his infancy. His ridgy back and part of his tail are buoyed up out of the water; he neither winks an eye nor wags a foot, nor sweeps his long tail, but lies as if dead. A small tortoise has effected a lodgment on his back, whence he looks sleepily round, turning his head about as fast as the minute-hand of a town

clock, upon his brethren in the flood below. In the tank at the opposite end of the room are a brace of small pike, a number of carp, perch, and the small fry of English rivers, along with a colony of crawfish such as abound in the brooks and small streams of our inland counties. Wherever the pike choose to swim, they create a comparative solitude around them, none but the larger fish daring to remain in their presence.

The sides of the room, which are about double the length of the ends, are fitted up with large cisterns, some six feet in length by less than two in width, the walls of which are composed of plateglass, and the water being perfectly clear, the smallest object they contain is distinctly visible: they are further placed at a convenient height for examination, either by the naked eye or by means of lenses. Among the prisoners in these cisterns, the first we happen to remark is a grim-looking pike, with whom are shut in a swarm of small fry which appear to be a species of minnows: these poor fellows are worse off than Ulysses and his crew in the cave of Polyphemus, and will be every one devoured alive as soon as the hungry fit moves master pike to a meal. Happily for them, they have no apprehension of their fate, though a natural instinct makes them keep together in a body, and aloof from the big gentleman whose larder they constitute. In another cistern are two larger pike alone, who if they be kept too long without their natural prey may chance to try the experiment of devouring one another; at least, such a thing has been known to take place. From the conformation of the pike's mouth, he affords us a good opportunity of observing the delicate breathing apparatus of the fish. The horny outer jaw is never entirely closed, but after every inhalation the filmy red gums within shut hermetically, when the water inhaled is expelled from the gills: air, though in quantities very minute, is as necessary to fish as to land animals, and were they deprived of it, like animals they would be suffocated.

But it is to the salt-water cisterns that we must turn for the greatest marvels and novelties. Some of these have been prepared and stocked with much taste and judgment, and present appearances of great beauty even to the casual spectator. The floor of the cistern represents the bottom of the sea strown with shingle, among which choice specimens of sea-weed in brilliant colours appear to have taken root and to be thriving vigorously. Marine plants of a mossy-green hue shoot up in columns to the surface of the water, and here and there projecting rocks rise above the level of the flood, their summits showing like islands in the deep. In these real marine stores we observe a number of periwinkles adhering to the upright walls of glass, or emerged from the water and congregated in groups upon the island rocks. A periwinkle is no great curiosity to a Londoner, even alive, and we might wonder why such a prodigious number of them find a place in those collections, did we not know that they are brought hither in their capacity as scavengers, and that by devouring the confervæ (minute hairweeds that grow very fast) they keep the water clear from its overgrowth. Shrimps, too, are not wanting; and it is worth while observing that their principal means of locomotion are the tail, by the impulse of which

they shoot up rapidly in the water, and the short legs beneath the hinder part of the body, which are properly speaking a set of paddles kept moving with inconceivable rapidity, propelling them in any direction. It is the fate of shrimps, however, to come to London to be eaten, whether in the shape of raw material, as these are, or boiled red for the human market as a relish with bread and butter. How they succumb to their doom here is plain from one or two examples before our eyes. Here, for instance, close to the front glass, is a sea anemone in the act of engulphing a shrimp, which, judging from the deliberate nature of the process, he must have caught at least six or seven hours ago. The head of the victim has disappeared in the central stomach of the devourer, and his back and tail only are visible: in the course of two or three hours another half inch of the green-grey body of the shrimp will be drawn in, and before night the whole, to the last tip of his tail, will probably have disappeared, and then the anemone, satisfied for a time, will most likely shut himself up in repose till the return of appetite urges him again to unfold his snares.

It is no easy matter to describe this exquisitely beautiful and wonderful inhabitant of the deep. The name he bears he derives from his resemblance, in certain states, to the well-known garden and greenhouse flower; but he is often as unlike to that as anything can well be, and resembles more a red limpet clinging to the rock. His powers of locomotion are next to none, and the slowest snail would distance him in the race. He must move, when he moves at all, by the expansion and contraction of his one broad foot, which may be aptly compared to a section of a preserved neat's tongue, only more brilliant in colour. One of them having taken up a footing upon the upright wall of plate glass, presents an admirable opportunity for observing this part of his structure. Others have fastened themselves to the sides of rocks; and others again have settled down among the pebbles at the bottom. Some are closed up in their particoloured night-caps, as though intending a nap after a meal; others are partially open, their long tentacula peeping forth from their tops; but most of them are open in full bloom, displayed in all their magnificence and excelling richness of colour. In this state they would be taken at first sight for gorgeous marine flowers in full bloom, with a hundred or more of delicately-tinted petals displayed in luxuriant profusion: but each transparent wormlike petal is a vital finger, stretched forth to signal the approach of prey; and in the centre of that brilliant assemblage of apparent blossoms yawns the mouth, or the stomach, for they appear to be identical, which is to be the tomb of the unthinking explorer. It is by no means plain that the anemone always seizes its prey with its numerous petal-like claws or fingers: it may be that it has the power of exuding something attractive to the small creatures upon which it feeds, and that these meet their destruction in seeking for food. There are here several varieties of this protean creature.

The star-fishes, many of which are familiar to us on our own coasts, next claim attention. They are seen grasping the rough rock in their long arms, or clinging against the glass, where we have the

opportunity of observing the thousands of rapidly expanding and contracting tentacula, which appear as if each were busily employed on its own account in feeling and foraging about for nourishment for the general head: these numberless transparent feelers are not unlike the horns of a garden snail, which they resemble in size, while they project and contract as readily. Of these, also, there are several varieties. One beautiful specimen, as though courting observation, adheres to the centre of the glass, with his star-shaped foot of a rich cream colour spotted with vermilion, where he shows at a distance not unlike a full-blown camellia, the glory of the conservatory.

Of all the spectacles in this curious exhibition the most grotesque is that presented by the hermit-crab. This marine proprietor, though he has a house, or at least a shell of his own, chooses to pass his days in the deserted habitations of other people. When Mr. Whelk is dead, and has of course no further occasion for a family residence, Hermit Crab steps in and administers to his effects. He does it on a principle not altogether unknown in human affairs, taking especial care of the interests of the said H. C., and bestowing not a single thought upon any other claimant whatever. In short, he takes summary possession of the property in his own right, or might-the two being identical in coral courts of justice-and retains it just as long as it is of any use to him, after which he generously abandons it for the good of the public. Here he is before our eyes, sitting comfortably at the door of the comfortable tenement demised to him by Slimy Whelk of that Ilk, and enjoying himself with the air of a fat proprietor well-to-do in the world. He has a fine red suit of regimentals of his own, and is particularly fussy and active, now in making his toilet, now in attending to the care of his appetite. He carries a machine something like a couple of folding-doors before his mouth, which seems never in want of occupation, and to which he is constantly carrying something by means of those neat little nippers at the end of his claws. We are apt to imagine, when we see crabs or lobsters lying dead on the fishmonger's shop-board, that those ponderous claws of theirs must be very unmanageable implements for marine gentlemen at their meals. But this is quite a mistake. They are the very thing, Come and look at this gentleman at dinner, and see how he manages it. We forget that the huge lobster-claw which in the dealer's shop may weigh half a pound or more, at the bottom of the sea weighs just nothing at all, and may be used by its proprietor as advantageously as our own hands by us. Our hermit has no notion that he is a heavy-fisted fellow his long arms are flourishing vivaciously about, and bringing grist to that mill of a mouth which never stops grinding. We foresee that if he goes on long at this rate, he will have to go in search of another mansion, he being already almost too big for his present hermitage. He has several brethren of a smaller size around him, one or other of whom will be perfectly ready to take possession of his domain when he has vacated it. The appearance of these gentry squatters as they are in the deserted abodes of a different race-is not a little comic. They will all have to move out as they grow bigger, and though

they are strangers to the anxieties of quarter-day, those of house-moving must press upon them with double weight when their friends the whelks, with an inconvenient love of life, refuse to die out in their favour.

Another curious species of crab is the spider-crab, doubtless so called from his resemblance in shape to the garden-spider. He is as busy with his mouth as the hermit, but not nearly so agile in his movements; his long thin legs seem to have nothing to do, and he makes a vain attempt with them to grapple with the plate-glass, on which he has no hold. Beneath him hangs against the polished surface a long ghost-like looking specimen of the sea-slug, clad in white with a hairy back, and reminding one, except in colour, of the great fieldslug that sometimes crosses our path on a summer evening's walk. Below him again is the sea-mouse, lying motionless among the pebbles, whether dead or alive this deponent sayeth not. Standing upright among the sea-weeds at the bottom are certain white-looking objects, something like the hollow trunks of trees denuded of their bark, and which we are assured are living creatures, though no signs of animation are visible after the closest and longest scrutiny. Here and there on the bottom lie some thriving bivalves of various sorts, their shells slowly disparting and closing again, and revealing bright metallic-looking points visible between the hairy fringe and scolloped edges of the shell.

Swimming about in some of the cisterns are the little long arrow-shaped nest-building fishes, whose scientific name we forget-graceful creatures about four or five inches in length, and not more than half an inch in breadth, and which would be perfectly beautiful were it not for a very pugnaciouslooking pair of jaws telling of rapine and plunder. Whether they will choose to build nests before the eyes of the public, where all their domestic operations will be overlooked by visitors, remains to be seen. Among them, though he affects the bottom of the cistern, only taking an occasional excursion aloft, is a beautiful little creature about the size of an English gudgeon, who might be taken in a state of quiescence for a fragment of a time-worn ruin or a portion of a branch of a lichen-covered ash. He is furnished with voluminous gauze-like fins, which flutter about him, when he is in rapid motion, like summer drapery upon a dancing maiden. If one could suppose a fish to be subject to vanity, we might attribute that weakness to him, he seems so fond of exhibiting his singular attire. Many other strangers are seen emerging occasionally from the interstices between the rocks or the recesses among the weeds. Here comes one bashful little fellow, whose body is a stone-grey, but whose head is striped with emerald green, with a circlet of the same vivid colour around his eyes: his fins-whiz! his fins have taken him off before we could see what they were like, and compelled us to leave the completion of his description to a future opportunity. Here comes an ugly little fellow, with the head almost of a bull-frog, and a body like the flat tail of a large eel; he is no beauty, nor no rarity either, as we have caught his like on the coast often enough when fishing for something much better worth catching. There he goes clean through the sprawling fortifications of a

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