Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/134

126 close at high tides to keep out the sea-water, and open at low tides to let out the land water. Either from insufficient workmanship or bad locality, or unusual pressure, or from burrowing animals, the land water, or sea water, or both, made a flank movement, and burst up the whole sluice, so that the tide, instead of being confined to the river, obtained free way up the drain also. The drain apparently had not been constructed sufficiently strong for this contingency, and a breach was made in a weak part of the bank, and six thousand acres of Marshland was overflowed, the tide running through the breach at eight miles an hour. The lower part of the bank was of clay, the upper part of silt. When the water rose high enough, the silt washed away, and then the stream rapidly cut a channel through the clay.

How to stop this breach, was the problem not to be solved by a miscellaneous throwing in of clay-bags, or other material, nor by hampers of stones, with a rush of water at eight miles speed per hour; and the engineer, Mr. Hawkshaw, took the right method. He drove sheet or close piles along the banks, on either side the level in a double row, and in the water-way of the breach he drove the piles with openings between them. These openings were fitted with sliding-doors, or sluice-gates of timber, weighted. Some of the openings being closed, the rush of water through the others became more violent, tearing up the bed. A scaffold was then erected, and at the turn of the tide, the whole of the sluices were closed together, in both rows of piles, and clay-bags were rapidly thrown into the space between, and the water found its master.

But how is the drowned land to be laid dry without any sluice gate to open? Very simply! A number of cast-iron pipes, three feet six inches in diameter, are laid with their ends in the water at a low level, and sloped up the bank at an inclination of one in two, then pass horizontally over the bank, and with another slope of one in two, down the outer bank. These pipes are syphons, into which the water is first raised by an engine, and will continue to flow through by the action of gravity, so long as the head is higher at one end of the pipes than it is at the other. The outflow is received on an apron, or bed of stonework, and thus a solid bank is retained without any sluice. The result of this will probably be to dispense with a good many scoop wheels and pumps, and if so, good will grow out of evil.

And, now, about the amount of evil. The engineering cost will probably be some 30,000l. The loss of crops, at ten pounds per acre, will be 60,000l., say altogether some 100,000l. But what will be the result in the year to come? The water is brackish, not salt, and it may result in a general manuring of the land, like an inundation of the Nile, which will be some compensation for the homesteads damaged.

Apart from this, there will be much money changing, between landowners, and farmers, and lawyers. The Marshland folk did not want the drain, which did not drain their land, but that of their neighbours, and they will naturally ask for compensation, and a very pretty quarrel it will be.

Years past there was a breach in the bank of the Thames, at Dagenham, which swamped a thousand acres of land, leaving a small lake behind it to this day. It was a troublesome affair to close that bank, ruining many sets of contractors and speculators, and occupying the term of eight years ere it was closed.

The Marshland breach, swamping six thousand acres, has been stopped in two months, and now a company are about to convert Dagenham Lake into a dock. We do things now that were formerly impracticable, because in addition to ample capital, we have got tools, and machines, and plans of a more effective kind. We circumvent the wild operations of Nature, by following the laws of Nature in the processes of art, and the engineer hails every overthrow of his works as a basis whereon to accomplish still greater things. And we are yet very far from having exhausted the resources of mechanical art, whilst we are only just entering on the domain of chemistry, in the pursuit of sea-changes round our island home. Our sea-waifs shall become more and greater, and our sea-strays shall be tethered, even as the coral-insects raise up islands in the deep. 2em

the sunset through the pane,

Glitter the drops of summer-rain,

That, soothing, fall in sparkling shower

Upon the couching Passion-flower.

And round the sill the roses peep,

Their heavy petals ripe for sleep;

And through the half-drawn blind I see

The white clematis spy at me.

As pensive, but not sad, I muse

Upon—a tiny pair of shoes!

A tiny white-laced frock. Ah! well,

I love the pretty “bagatelle!”

A cradle-couch beside my knee,

A tiny home of mystery;

The little fingers in their clasp

The coverlid unconscious grasp.

As yet unwaked, the soul within

Her Chrysalis lies slumbering.

The first-blush of that opening rose—

Who dreams what in the casket grows?

A solemn trust!—and yet how dear!

Ah! but for children blooming here,

This earth a joyless earth would be,

And life itself a vacancy!

Tis little fingers mould us all,

Tis little voices heavenward call,

Tis little hearts that Heaven prepare,

And little angels lead us there! .