ships in the harbor are the greatest sufferers; while, on the other hand, the negro population of the city seem to be secure from attack. The shipping would suffer much less severely if the authorities were to distribute the vessels widely apart over the whole area of the harbor, and were to prohibit their being moored near the quays, through which the sewers are emptied into the sea. The sewers might be purified by means of powerful pumping machinery, applied to raise sea-water and force it through the drains. This resource, at any rate, would merit consideration, should a sufficient supply of fresh water from the mountains be unobtainable.

The overcrowding of the dwellings is an admitted evil. A certain proprietor, having been charged with receiving 800 lodgers into a house of very moderate dimensions, replied in a tone of injured innocence: Eight hundred! I have never had more than six hundred people in my house.' The yellow fever having once broken out, all classes are exposed to the infection, and the only means of securing immunity from attack is to remove to the mountain suburbs, such as Tijuca, which are at some distance from the city, and are not very convenient, therefore, for men of business.

I must not conclude these extracts from my note-book at Rio without some allusion to the condition and duties of the British naval force maintained on the south-east coast of America. The British sailor on this station, in spite of the relaxing climate, is kept thoroughly up to the mark. During our stay here we have been anchored under the guns of H.M.S. 'Volage,' and it has been a constant delight to us to witness the seamanlike smartness with which the exercises aloft have been carried on.

With regard to desertion, however, no inconsiderable anxiety has been experienced by officers on this station, especially by those in command of small vessels in the River Plate.

A recent return gives the following numbers of deserters from the navy :Blue jackets. Others.

1872-3

Total.

1873-4 1874-5 In 1874-5, 282 of the deserters were recovered. Previous to that year returns

of the number recovered had not been kept.

How to put an end to desertion is a grave problem. Every seaman in the navy has cost the country at least 300l. for the expenses of his training; and when, as it recently happened, six firstclass boys are sent out on board a storeship to join a gunboat stationed in the River Plate, and four desert on the day after their arrival, it is plain that the service does not present all the attractions that might be desired. The man-ofwar's man of the present day is surrounded by comforts never dreamed of in olden times, and the amount of labor devolving upon the numerous crews of our ships of war is never excessive; while the care and attention bestowed upon their health, food, and clothing, and the cleanliness and commodiousness of their quarters, leave nothing to be desired.

In this respect the condition of the merchant seaman contrasts most unfavorably with that of the man-of-war's man. In regard, however, to wages, the latter is in a position of regrettable inferiority. It is idle to expend large sums of money in other ways, however beneficial to the sailor, in the belief that compensation may thereby be made for insufficiency of pay. The seaman would appreciate far more the expenditure of equal sums in the more direct and tangible form of higher wages. After a short period of service in the navy as able seaman, an addition of sixpence a day to the present scale of pay-which addition might perhaps be limited to those who were in the first class for conduct-would be highly desirable. The diminution in the number of desertions would amply repay the increased outlay.

In consequence of the comparative smallness of the numbers who re-engage, the proportion of experienced men in the crews of our ships is sometimes scarcely sufficient. A further advance of pay, therefore, to seamen engaging for a second period of service, would be highly advantageous to the navy. By the pres ent system of entering boys, a body of admirable seamen is raised up for the navy; but it is eminently unsatisfactory to know that the country is deprived of the proper return for the large expenditure incurred in training seamen, both

profession. This is an astonishing sequence, embracing as it does a period of quite two hundred years, and has probably no parallel.

Ward was a strolling manager when Roger Kemble, who united hair-dressing with acting, eloped with his daughter. The young couple started in management upon their own account and strolled from town to town and village to village after the manner and under the difficulties and disadvantages of the time; at some places received with gracious favor, at others treated like lepers and threatened with the stocks and whipping at the cart's tail, according as the great people were liberal-minded or puritanical. Their first child, born June 13th, 1755, at Brecon, was christened Sarah; their second, a boy, christened John Philip, was born at Prescott in Lancashire in 1757. The old farm-house in which the latter event took place is, it is said, still standing. There came a Stephen in the following year, and other sons and daughters with whom we have nothing to do followed in due succession. All these were put upon the stage as soon as they were old enough to speak a few lines, and as the years advanced Mr. Roger Kemble's company, like that of Mr. Vincent Crummles, was almost entirely included under one patronymic. At thirteen we find Sarah playing Ariel in the great room of the King's Head at Worcester, which boasted no other theatre, and four years later sustaining all the principal parts at Wolverhampton. She had now grown to be a very beautiful girl, and made great havoc among the hearts of susceptible squires, and even included an earl among the list of her adorers. But in her father's company there was a handsome young fellow from Birmingham named Henry Siddons, whom she preferred to all her rich admirers. As Mr. and Mrs. Kemble had married against parental consent it followed as a matter of course that they would not allow their daughter to choose for herself; besides, they had their pride and their ambition, and

strongly objected to an alliance with a poor player. So Henry Siddons was told the manager's daughter was not for him. But on his benefit night he revenged himself by reciting a poem of his own composition, in which he detailed to the audience the story of his hapless love, and thereby greatly won their sympathies and a box on the ear from his inamorata's mother, who was listening at the side-scene in a very great passion.

This brought about a disturbance. Siddons left the company, and Sarah went away in a huff, and hired herself as lady's maid to Mrs. Greathead, of Guy's Cliff, Warwickshire. There she did not remain long, for Roger and his wife, finding her determined, and probably moved by the solicitations of their patrons, gave a reluctant consent to the marriage, and on the 6th of November, 1773, Sarah Kemble became Mrs. Siddons, and from that time so appeared in the playbills. Soon afterwards she and her husband joined the company of Crump and Chamberlain, well-known strolling managers in their day, at Cheltenham; and there for the first time we hear of her being accredited with superior powers as an actress. As Belvidera, in Otway's 'Venice Preserved,' she achieved a great success, and became a protégée of all the fashionable play-goers, especially of the Honorable Miss Boyle, who assisted her scanty wardrobe by the loan of dresses, and helped her with her own hands to make new ones. fame reached London, and Garrick sent his stage manager, King, down to the Gloucestershire watering-place to take stock of her abilities. He reported very favorably, and soon afterwards Parson Bates, of the Morning Post,' pugilist, duellist, and critic, a well-known man of the day, took the same journey for a similar purpose, and brought back a warm eulogy upon her acting as Rosalind. Thereupon Roscius engaged her for Drury Lane at £5 a week. Her first appearance was on the 29th of December 1775, and here is a copy of a portion of the playbill for that evening:

Her

The début was a failure. The part was not suited to her, and she was so overpowered by nervousness that a naturally weak voice sank almost to a whisper; her movements were awkward, her dress old, faded—and in bad taste, as it always was even in her great days; there was nothing but her delicate, fragile figure and beautiful face to recommend her. After this she appeared as Venus in the Shakespeare Jubilee, as Mrs. Strickland in 'The Suspicious Husband,' and in several other pieces,-in all she was coldly received both by the press and public. Finally she appeared as Lady Anne to Garrick's Richard; here, again, nervousness paralysed all her powers, she forgot certain stage directions he had given at rehearsal, and was reproved for her forgetfulness by a glance from those terrible eyes that nearly made her faint with terror. One of the newspapers the next morning pronounced the performance "lamentable." Five nights afterwards Garrick took leave of the stage, and the season closed. He promised to recommend her to Sheridan for the next. Sheridan used afterwards to declare that he took an opposite course, and depreciated her, but the great manager's word was not always to be relied upon. Mrs. Siddons ever after nursed a grudge against Garrick; he had used her as a catspaw against the overweening arrogance of Mesdames Abington, Crawford, and Young;-he was jealous of her, she said. There may have been some truth in the first part of the accusation, but the second is ridiculous: it is probable that he really believed her talents to be only mediocre, and in this

he was joined by all his company, except Mrs. Abington, who called them all "fools" in their judgment.

66

"It was a stunning and cruel blow," she says, overwhelming all my ambitions, and involving peril even to the subsistence of my helpless babes. It was very near destroying me. My blighted prospects, indeed, produced a state of mind that preyed upon my health, and for a year and a half I was supposed to be hastening to a decline." Her next engagement was at Manchester, and thence she went to York to Tate Wilkinson. There "all lifted up their eyes in astonishment that such a voice and such a judgment should have been neglected by a London audience." In 1778 John Palmer, on the recommendation of Henderson, engaged her for Bath, then the first English theatre out of London, at £3 a week. In her first parts, Lady Townley and Mrs. Candour -the latter appears a strange character for a young lady-she was only coldly received, and seemed to be on the threshold of new disappointments and mortifications.

But I must now go back to detail the fortunes of another member of the Kemble family. John Philip acted as a child like all the rest of his brothers and sis ters, but by and by his father resolved to make a priest of him. Roger was a Catholic and brought up the boys to that faith, the girls following the Protestant religion of their mother. So at ten years old the boy was sent away to Sedgely Park College, Wolverhampton. There he remained four years, and in 1771 proceeded to Douai, where he was famous as a