if you wish to see this branch of the industry at its full height, you must be on the spot between eleven at night and six in the morning. It is then that Smithfield begins to make its wants felt, to the tune, say, of five or six thousand sheep.

The temperature on this floor, so perfect is the system of insulation, gives you not the slightest idea of the rigors of the climate beneath. A preliminary taste of it may, however, be obtained by a visit to the inspecting room on the same level. Through this room every carcass has to pass before it is allowed to leave the warehouse. As the door slides back and you step in, you instinctively pull up your coat collar and feel for your gloves. The pipes which run round the room are covered three inches deep with hoar-frost and the ceiling is encrusted with it. Everything sparkles with ice crystals in the electric light, and the frozen carcasses of sheep and sides of beef which hang from the roof are as hard as a nether millstone. The bones are if anything harder still; a frozen bone with the weight of a quarter of beef behind it would go through a five-inch board. There are solid blocks of ice standing about, five or six huge cubes of it, with bunches of flowers and fruit frozen inside, to give the visitor a further taste. of the marvellous. One of them has imprisoned a miniature model of a lamb, which, to the keen enjoyment of Nelson's Wharf, a journalistic wag set down on his departure as "the smallest the smallest lamb ever imported from New Zealand." It is, however, merely sharp, bracing weather here as compared with the floor beneath. There the temperature stands at twenty degrees Fahrenheit; yet another dip down and it is four degrees less. For there are no less than five of these floors, each divided into three fireproof sections. In these the sheep lie piled on either side of you, one above the other, in "bays" twentythree feet wide. A flock of a thousand sheep would take up some room on a country road, and be rather an unusual spectacle; there are one hundred and fifty such flocks stored in this one building, and it will hold two hundred

NEW SERIES-OL. LXVIII., No. 3.

and fifty thousand sheep at a pinch. The elevators will deal with two thousand sheep an hour, the chains moving at the rate of 120 feet a minute; and from six thousand to eight thousand sheep come and go from the wharf each day in the week. The yearly average is about one million five hundred thousand sheep and lambs, one hundred thousand quarters of beef, thousands of legs and shoulders of mutton, and numberless cases of frozen kidneys, ox-tails, ox-tongues and sweetbreads.

A natural inquiry enough is where the supply of cold weather comes from, and a visit to the engine-house explains the difficulty. At the first blush it is not easy to understand how you can get frost and snow from so torrid a region. There are three or four roaring furnaces at work, served by mechanical stokers; the atmosphere would be unbearable but for the thick coats of insulating material with which the pipes are covered. And then, in the centre of the engine-room, you come across a small pipe thickly crusted with rime. Farther on, and there is the faintest possible smell of ammonia, and the secret is out. There are, roughly speaking, ten tons of ammonia circulating through twelve miles of pipes. The intense cold which reigns in the refrigerating chambers is produced by the alternate compression and expansion of this ammonia. Compressed and driven through the pipes, it passes through an aperture no larger than a pin's point, and is then allowed to expand again, withdrawing the heat. from the atmosphere as it does so. The capacity of the two compressors used, expressed in terms of ice manufactured in the twenty-four hours, is no less than forty tons. All this cold would of course be soon lost and dissipated but for the system of insulation. has been carried to so high a pitch of perfection that the refrigerating machinery has been stopped for thirtyeight hours and the temperature has risen no more than three-and-a-half degrees on the lower floors.

This

Most of the meat leaves Nelson's Wharf in the frozen state, and takes its chance of thawing on the journey, or

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when it reaches its destination. But for those who are willing to pay a farthing more per pound there are what are known as the "defrosting chambers." It takes just about as long to thaw a sheep or a quarter of beef as it does to freeze it-that is, four days for the beef and two days for the mutton. The temperature is gradually raised, and kept dry by pipes of expanded ammonia running along the walls, to which all moisture is attracted and deposited as snow. Rapid thawing makes the meat unsightly and does not improve its flavor. It is impossible, as the meat passes from the defrosting chamber, to distinguish between it and home killed; experts confess that, cooked and placed upon the table, even they could not tell the difference.

In Australia to-day there are seventeen freezing works in existence, while in New Zealand there are twenty-two. They could freeze about seven millions of sheep between them annually. Queensland in 1893 had the forethought to start freezing stores going at Gibraltar, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, and other points of call. After all charges have been met, the Australasian farmer gets about twopence a pound. for his sheep, excluding his receipts from the skin and fat.

The cost of getting the animal slaughtered, frozen, and put on board is scarcely a halfpenny a pound; the cost of transit averages three-halfpence a pound. The farmer, however, does not necessarily undertake the risk and responsibility of making his own consignments. There are generally speculators to be found. who will save him the trouble and pay him twopence a pound on the farm.

The possible developments of the frozen food trade do not stop at beef and mutton. Hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, butter and fish have

all been imported into this country in a frozen state during recent years. Rabbits, though only naturalized in Australia a few years ago, have multiplied so quickly that they have become a pest to the agriculturist. Still, they have given rise to a new occupation, that of catching them and killing them for exportation. Large numbers of them arrived here in the spring of last year, and were stored till September. Put on the market then, they were eagerly bought up by the "gutter butchers," or costermongers, and found so much favor with their customers that they seriously interfered with the sale of the cheaper qualities of mutton coming from the River Plate and Australia. Victoria sent us, between January and October of last year, 114,977 cwts. of frozen butter, and New Zealand 62,456 cwts. The amount coming from the other Australian colonies was inconsiderable. During last year the question of shipping Australian butter back again was actually canvassed. The drought there was so severe that it was an open question whether larger profits could not be made by reselling it to the colonists than by putting it on the home market. It is interesting to notice that the consumption of butter and butter substitutes per head of the population of the United Kingdom is continually rising.

The principal source of our foreign. poultry supply for some years past has been Russia, but Australia and New Zealand now intend to make a bid for popular favor. Large consignments may be expected in the spring, when English and Irish stocks are exhausted. There is talk in the colonies of sending to China for Langshan fowls, to France for Houdins, and to England for some of the native stock.-Good Words.

As a drama, the career of Napoleon is marked by a simplicity worthy of the Greek stage. There is no mystery, no elaborate plot of wheels within wheels. The ambition of one man in whom supreme ability is seconded by equally supreme contempt, down to the smallest details, for all those restraints to which under the names of honor and morality civilized mankind has agreed to submit, runs a triumphant course for some twenty years; the catastrophe is immediate and complete almost in a moment of time; and the downfall is accomplished in little more than a tenth of the period occupied by the rise. The succession of hubris, atè, nemesis is as regular as Eschylus himself could have imagined. When will the dramatist arise who shall be capable of dealing with it?

Meantime material is pouring in for a hundred lesser works. The writer of play or novel has to do little but transcribe; all the rest is done for him by the facts, set forth as they have been by half a hundred hands, all endowed with the French gift for telling narration. We had occasion about a year ago to draw the attention of our readers to the modest memoirs of an obscure general of brigade., That simple narrative, as we showed, was as full of hairbreadth escapes and plucky actions as the most jaded reader of adventurous fiction could demand, and had the merit, not always possessed by more elaborate works, of entire self-unconsciousness. One had just the everyday life of one of Napoleon's officers. Even an officer's experiences, however, hardly tell us what war means to the "dim, unconsidered population" upon whom the real brunt of it falls; the units who compose the battalions, which in their turn are the pieces in the game, and, like the pieces, have little or no share in the stakes.

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as yet been brought to light to tell the personal experiences of any of the ultimate atoms (which we take to be the privates in the line regiments) composing the great army that entered Russia on June 25th, 1812, and never, as an army, left that country again, unless the Prussian Dragoon," quoted by Mitchell, comes under that head. Recent research has, however, gone a long way in this direction. In 1867 there died at Valenciennes a veteran of eightytwo, named Bourgogne, who, as a private and sergeant in the Imperial Guard, had taken part in fifteen battles, beginning with Jena and ending with Bautzen. Being a man of some education -his father was a tradesman of Condé on the extreme northeast frontier of France-he had kept journals and put together reminiscences, it would seem, to a considerable extent. Portions of these, dealing with the retreat from Moscow, were published in a more or less "edited" form during his lifetime -some forty years ago-in an obscure local paper, but attracted no particular attention. The paper died a natural death, and only one file of it seems to exist. Of the tirage à part only two copies are known. The manuscript, however, is preserved in the library of Valenciennes, where it was discovered by M. Paul Cottin, editor of the Nouvelle Revue Rétrospective, who has now made the authentic text of Sergeant Bourgogne's memoirs accessible to all the French-reading world. We understand that an English translation of the book is in preparation; and it may safely be said that in all the vast mass of Napoleonic literature which the last decade has produced, there has been no work which ought better to repay the translator's labor.

When in March, 1812, the order to start for Russia reached Bourgogne's regiment, it was on its way toward Almeida in Portugal, a fortress from which the French had been expelled in the previous year. Forty-eight hours were all the rest that was allowed them in Paris, and on June 25th, as has been

said, they crossed the Niemen. The march to Moscow is related very briefly. The Imperial Guard took very little part in the severe fighting at Smolensk, Valoutina, Borodino, which cost the French army some 50,000 men before the goal was attained. At Borodino especially, for some reason which has never been clearly explained, and in spite of repeated requests from Murat, who was at one time very hard pressed, Napoleon refused to send the Guard forward, or let a man of that fine corps come into action. In the rest of the army the carnage was tremendous. During the march up, Bourgogne had received one evening an invitation from a number of young men, drummers in the 61st Regiment, all belonging to his native town of Condé, to join them in a carouse, the materials of which were obtained from a Russian general's stores, which they had been lucky enough to capture. A few days after Borodino he came across one of the party with his arm in a sling.

"I went up to him, asking how our friends were. 'Very well,' he replied, tapping the ground with the butt of his musket.

They

are all dead, on the field of honor, as the saying is, and buried in the great redoubt. They were all killed by grape, while beating the charge.' Ah, sergeant, I shall not for get that battle! What a slaughter it was! But let us sit down and talk about our poor comrades, and that Spanish girl, our cantinière.'"

The Spanish cantinière had been under the protection of the drum-major, "en tout bien, tout honneur," as that worthy had remarked, with his hand on his rapier. When introducing Bourgogne on the occasion of the festivity, the narrator continued that, having got a bullet in his arm, he was going to the field-hospital to have it extracted, but had not gone a hundred steps when he met the Spanish girl in tears. Some wounded men had told her of the fate of the drummers, and the brave girl was going to see if she could be of any help.

"When we had got near the great redoubt, and she saw the field of slaughter, she began to shriek dismally. But it was another thing when she saw the smashed drums. She was like a woman beside herself. Here, here, friend; here they are,' she screamed. And there they were lying, sure enough; limbs smashed, bodies torn by the grapeshot. Like

a mad woman she went from one to another, speaking tenderly to them. But none heard, though a few still showed signs of life; among them being the drum-major-her father as she called him.

She stopped by him, and dropping on her knees raised his head, to pour a few drops Just then the of brandy into his mouth. Russians made a movement to recapture the redoubt, and the firing recommenced. Suddenly the Spanish girl gave a cry of pain. She had been struck by a bullet, which had smashed her left thumb and entered the shoulder of the dying man whom she was supporting. She sank down in a faint; I tried to raise her, to carry her back to safety, but having only one available arm, I had not the strength to do it. Luckily a dismounted cuirassier came by. Without waiting to be asked, and only saying, 'Come along quick, for it is not good here -and in truth, the cannon-balls were whistling round our ears -he picked up the girl, and carried her off like a child, still unconscious. M. Lar

rey, the Emperor's surgeon, amputated her thumb, and extracted my bullet very neatly." "That (adds Burgogne) was what I heard from Dumont, the Condé lad, corporal in the light company of the 61st. I never heard any more of him. And this was the end of twelve young men from Condé."

Is not the conclusion quite Herodotean in its simplicity? And indeed, the whole tale, the girl going into the fire to help her friends, the wounded corporal turning back to look after her, the cuirassier stopping among the cannon-balls to see them both safe out of the place, is as pretty a little tale of unpretentious heroism as one often meets with.

The five weeks which some infatuation led Napoleon to waste in Moscow, passed agreeably enough for the Imperial Guard. The fire which broke out an hour after their entrance does not seem to have incommoded them very seriously; nor does Bourgogne attach so much importance as most historians have done to its effect on the ultimate issue of the enterprise.

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Many people (he says) who were not in this campaign, say that the burning of Moscow meant the loss of the army. I and many others thought the contrary; for the Russians might very well have abstained from setting the town on fire, but have carried off all the provisions, or thrown them into the Moskwa, and ravaged the country for ten leagues all round-not a difficult thing to do, for part of it is desert-and by the end of a fortnight we must have gone. After the fire there were still dwellings enough to quarter the whole of the army; and even if they had been burnt, there were the cellars."