unwittingly injure either themselves or us in their ignorant fearlessness, so are we bound to take reasonable precautions, and insist on such precautions being carried out, in favour of these classes of our fellow-subjects. We owe them much; for without their aid our stores of coal, on which we pride ourselves, and which supply us with so many necessaries and luxuries, would remain buried uselessly in the earth. Coal-mining is not work to be done by every labourer; it requires à lifelong education, and a class adapted to it to carry it on with advantage, and few are aware of the ingenuity exercised in overcoming natural obstacles by some of these rough and uneducated sons of the soil. Their occupation is far from healthy, and they are, as a class, short-lived. They pass half their lives underground, in an atmosphere always close, warm, and impure, loaded with coaldust, and occasionally mixed with a considerable percentage of inflammable air. The roof of the mine in which they work is not unfrequently dropping water upon them, and heavy stones fall down and crush them. Is it not too much that, in addition to these causes of discomfort, which perhaps cannot be avoided, the light given them to work with should be such that it occasionally causes an explosion which another kind of light would have prevented; and that, when from any cause an explosion has taken place at a distance from them, they should be caught as in a trap, and be unable to escape for want of sufficient communication with the outer world? It seems to us that, whenever a great loss of human life might have been prevented by any reasonable precaution or system of precautions, and especially when such destruction is constantly recurring, as we know by sad experience to be the case with colliery accidents, a duty is incumbent on society; and all who are able to offer suggestions are bound to raise their voices, and use their utmost exertions to attract attention to what they believe to be required. Our coal must be obtained. We cannot do without it; and all necessary risks and losses must be incurred in getting it. But surely, for the very reason that it is so valuable, and that our need for it is so great, we are bound to see that no other risks and losses are incurred by the working collier than those which cannot be avoided; and that, if we must pay for our coals with shortened life and occasional accidents to individuals, we ought the more to exert ourselves to avoid the wholesale slaughter that occurs from time to time, and which we believe to involve a mere waste of precious material instead of a necessary price for the article required. Christmas. I. WHIRLS the wild wind through the leafless forest, Ah, those days are past, And the bitter blast From the skeleton branches shakes the rime. II. Amy, darling, how we loved to linger Ere the merry brook In our favourite nook Felt ice-fetters curb its murmuring flow! III. Yet we love thee, old and hoary Winter, When from spire and tower At the matin hour Of immortal Peace their chorus tells. MORTIMER COLLINS. The Seven Sons of Mammon. A STORY. BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. CHAPTER I. WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. "GOLD is a chimera," I heard a man sing in the opera of "Robert le Diable." L'or est une chimère. Gold a chimera! Is it? Ask Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. He was the richest man on 'Change. The richest man in the Bank Parlour. The richest man in the East India Directory. The richest man at innumerable Boards, whose members sat and coined money out of green baize. He was the richest man in that Square full of palaces, near to where stood an ugly monument that poor rogues used to be suspended from, hard by the Edgeware Road. He was the richest man in the county where he had his estate and his "place," and of which he was High Sheriff. When he went down for a week to Brighton, his riches awed the wealthiest stockbrokers and the grandest members of the fast-decreasing class of nabobs. And Rothschild? and Baring? and the Amsterdam Hopes? and the Hamburg Heynes? Pshaw! Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was deemed to be richer than all these, for he was alone on his throne of gold. He had no partners. Mammon would not even let one of his sons come into the firm. No shares were to be purchased in the house of Goldthorpe and Co. The Co. was a myth. Sir Jasper was the Co.-himself and company. He had no fears that the Antwerp house would warn him against undue speculations; that the Leghorn branch would remonstrate if he drew too largely on them, or the Frankfort firm give cause for remonstrance by drawing too heavily on him. He stood alone. His agents and correspondents were his obedient and trembling slaves, and he the most generous but the most exacting of taskmasters. There was no trifling with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. How could one jest with a man who had so much money? He had had rivals. Now and then some gorged Hebrew capitalist of Paris or Madrid would strive to shoulder his way past him with bank-notes and bonds; but Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, with icy English politeness, would drop a couple of heavy golden ingots on the capitalist's toes, and force him to retreat, howling and discomfited. Once or twice some lucky speculator in Australian wool, some enriched digger, some auriferous bubble-monger of railwayshares and mining-schemes, would make a dead set at Sir Jasper's supremacy,—would strive to outvie him by taking a bigger house, giving grander parties, purchasing more acres of park-land, subscribing to more charities and packs of hounds. Then Sir Jasper would smile his frigid smile, step down to a little shooting-box, if it were in autumn, or to the sea-side if in spring; pop away at the pheasants, or stroll about in a jacket and a slouched hat, as though he were some miserable wretch of eight hundred pounds a year; and then, coming quietly back to town, would manage somehow to crush his rivals. He always crushed them. The Australian wool-speculator would spend some thousands in a contested election-lose it; or gaining it, be unseated for bribery, and be forced to retrench. The digger's agents would fail, or he drink himself into a cerebral congestion. The bubble-monger would burst and turn out a common cheat. Alone, triumphant, and immovable, without a wrinkle in his brow or a crease in his waistcoat, would stand Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. At last people gave up contending with him, and were content to agree that he was a wonderful man. His beginnings had been small enough. It was rumoured that his father was but a small tradesman in a country-town. There were found even those bold enough to whisper, "Bankrupt in 'twenty-five; didn't pay twopence in the pound,"-alluding to the paternal Goldthorpe. Sir Jasper always spoke of his sire as "my excellent and worthy father;" and you may be sure that no word of detraction against his progenitor was ever audible in his presence, or within a good distance thereof. He had himself first made an appearance in public with a company which certainly did not succeed after he left it, but which realised tremendous profits while he was on the direction. He had gone largely into government contracts, and had been the special object of several commissions of inquiry; but it always turned out that it was somebody else, and not he, who was to be blamed for shoes that wouldn't go on, and muskets that wouldn't go off; and commissioners, witnesses, and accountants were all loud in their praises of Mr. Goldthorpe's-he was Mr. Goldthorpe then— public spirit, and unimpeachable integrity. He had always been a prosperous man, with that wondrous Midas faculty for turning every thing which he touched into gold; but the termination of a particularly searching committee, which had been moved for in a series of vehement speeches by two Radical members, and had very nearly been the means of ejecting the Government of the day from office, seemed the turning-point in his greater fortune. How the man's riches swelled and swelled after his contract rum had been denounced as a fiery poison, and his contract rice sneered at as the sweepings of the dock-warehouses! He thenceforward devoted himself to politics: one of the Radical members was regularly coughed down for several sessions, and the other, at the next general election, lost his seat, and, more than suspected of debt, was compelled to fly to Brussels in Brabant. Mr. Hemp of the Sheriff's Court makes proclamation of outlawry against him with admirable regularity. After this, naturally Mr. Goldthorpe gave up contracts altogether. It was about this time that he made such immense sums in the shipping line of business. He had a fleet which sailed to the East Indies, and a fleet which sailed to the West; and his Australian bullion dealings and speculations in wool, copper, and tallow were prodigious. With great meekness and condescension he consented to serve the office of Sheriff. He might have been Alderman and Lord Mayor, of course, had he so chosen; but these latter dignities he declined. He got into Parliament; his constituents, touched with gratitude and reverence, it is to be supposed, for the immense wealth he possessed, insisting on paying his election expenses to the uttermost farthing. When he was supposed to be worth about a million of money, a committee of merchants and bankers met at the London Tavern, and boldly put down their hundreds and their fifties for a testimonial, which,-a chef-d'œuvre of Hunt and Roskell, and forming a pleasing pyramidal composition in burnished and frosted gold, including dolphins, the Three Graces, emblematic figures of Peace and Commerce, a nautilus-shell, an Egyptian pyra mid, and an Arab steed,-the malicious described it as three race-cups hammered into one-was presented to him at a grand banquet held at the "Albion," Aldersgate Street. He was master of the Mystery of Battleaxe-makers, and gracefully presided over the patronage in the gift of that wealthy company, in the shape of fat livings in the Church, and presentations to the Company's schools. He was great at Goldsmiths' Hall; for if he didn't make actual plate and jewellery, he made the raw material, gold, by heaps:-which is far better. Soon after he entered Parliament he was made a Baronet;-'twas the least tribute that could be paid to his transcendent merits and riches. He was received with immense respect in the House of Commons, and his opinions on financial questions, although he scarcely ever spoke, were looked upon as incontrovertible. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was generally thought to be sure of another six months' tenure of office if he could only be seen walking with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe on the river-terrace. He was usually lucky enough to get excused from committees; it was known how rich a man he was, and how much he had to do. Had he not been so useful to the Government, there is little doubt that, ere this history opens, he would have been made a Peer. The year 1847, and the succeeding year of revolution and political turmoils, shook, as you will remember, the commerce of the Continent to its very centre, and some shocks of the universal earthquake were felt even in the sound and stable city of London. Many brave and ancient firms utterly vanished. It was then, so the gossips said, that Sir Jasper Goldthorpe made his famous coup of purchasing, at about a third of their value, the diamonds and other regalia of the distressed and fugitive sovereigns of Europe. When confidence was restored, and the reign of legitimacy recommenced, diamonds were at a premium again, and Sir Jasper Goldthorpe realised. He had done with all his mercantile speculations now,-had no longer large ventures on the sea, or trains of obsequious shipping, and colonial brokers at his heels. He dealt in Money, and money alone. He turned money over, and in the summersault it made itself into more money. He crumpled a piece of paper and it distilled drops of gold into his coffers. The more bankrupt was a European state, or a South-American |