Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/800

770 other ways, and spirits were emptied into the water; but up to the year 1859 all other condemned goods helped to swell the mass of fire that was fed day and night. On one occasion 2,000 Australian mutton hams were burned: on another 45,000 pairs of French gloves, and on a third an invoice of Thibet shawls, valued at £30,000. The almost irresistible temptation for the stokers to secrete and convey away articles of merchandise, and to unite with the inspectors in plans for abstracting parts of the more valuable goods, led to various systems of precaution, very few of which perfectly answered the end in view. Goods were so sure to be stolen when it was certain they would never be missed, that a third cordon of inspectors through which no workman passed in or out without an entire change of clothing, was thought to have been ineffectual.

The ashes of the furnace, contracted for by the Jews, were carefully sifted for the residuum of metal they might contain, the iron bearing a high value for its toughness in making gun-barrels, and the remains of plated ware, buttons, watch movements, and other metallic articles, for their intrinsic value. The ashes themselves were prized by the manufacturers of manures and soaps for the supposed chemical virtues they possessed.

The number of rats that infest all the docks is very great, and the size some of them attain monstrous. To get rid of them more than 300 cats are kept distributed through the various warehouses, at an annual cost of £200. But even this is insufficient, so that night-raids with terriers have often to be made for the purpose of driving them within their lines, extermination being given up as impossible. A water rat was captured in 1858, weighing six pounds and four ounces.

That the five docks of London, of which we saw but one, are the focus of the wealth of the great metropolis, our day's observation left no doubt. The cranes creak with the mass of riches they contain. The merchandise stored in their vaults and warehouses represents ingots of untold gold. The eye cannot compass the piles of treasure, and the brain aches in the attempt to comprehend wealth almost as boundless as the sea it has traversed.

E were sitting in the old frame house that I call mine; and, as the boy walked across the room to fill his pipe, he said, "The floors are a little shaky, Nicholas."

"I know it, my boy," I answered. "They roll like the face of the ocean. It makes a stranger almost sea-sick to walk over them. The windows rattle; not more than half the doors will shut; the rats, I think, hold a stock exchange in the garret. Sitting here on a stormy night you would think you were inside of a kaleidoscope. In fact, it is a rickety, crazy old house that had reached its maturity before the Revolution. Yet, for all its palsy and insanity, I have a liking for it, and a stout affection for these stony acres, too.