ia31.] Affairs in General. 551 



ship's attentions have been directed to the lovely and amiable daughter of an 

 old brother officer, formerly in the 10th Hussars. Morning Paper. The 

 nobleman alluded to is Lord Harrington.]] Evening Paper" 



Before the town had recovered from this shock, a revival of its spirits 

 was proposed by a rumour : 



"It is rumoured that though some difficulties may have slightly retarded an 

 alliance in a certain quarter; yet those obstructions are now done away with, 

 and all will proceed on the flowery road of Hymen forthwith/' 



The rumour was doubted, disputed, denied, and the town was at the 

 freezing-point again. But a paragraph in a country paper came full 

 wing to whisper peace ; and, as Johnson says, the announcement of the 

 fact " hushed the flutter of innumerable bosoms." 



That John Bull will bear a great deal in the way of tax-paying, and 

 do a great deal in the way of grumbling while he pays, is a maxim 

 established by ten centuries of tax-paying and grumbling. But his food 

 and drink might have been conceived matters on which John would 

 scorn to suffer ill treatment ; and yet in the affair of the water-supply 

 of London, John has been going on for a hundred and fifty years drink- 

 ing a compound too horrible to be looked on by the eyes of chemistry, 

 and too frightful to the fancy, to be endured even among the recol- 

 lections of a surgeon of a city hospital. 



Formerly this might have been ignorance, and in his simplicity he 

 drank legitimate horse-pond ; but ignorance exists no longer on the sub- 

 ject. The evidence before the House of Commons a few years ago, has 

 compelled every man to know the exact quantity of abomination which 

 he swallows in. every pint of water ; with the precise proportions of gas- 

 washing, solution of dead dogs and blind kittens, fetid mud, and the 

 more nameless, though scarcely more horrible, contributions poured into 

 Father Thames by three miles of sewers along his venerable and puru- 

 lent sides. How much of this dreadful abuse has been corrected by the 

 investigation we cannot possibly tell, though " to the best of our belief," 

 as the country witness says, " we believe that nothing has been done ;" 

 at least, all that we have heard of, is of reservoirs built here, and gravel- 

 beds laid there, but to the naked eye with no change whatever upon the 

 dinginess of the water. Another scheme is now proposed. 



" The members of the corporation have now before them several plans for 

 supplying the metropolis with pure water. It is calculated that the deposit of 

 mud on the sides of the Thames not reaching below the low water mark, and 

 the bed of the river throughout being generally a clean, porous gravel, the 

 mud will puddle in, and close the pores of the gravelly bed on which it lies, 

 above the low water mark, so that the filtration into neighbouring wells must 

 take place below low water mark. A filtering chamber is therefore proposed 

 to be constructed below the bed of the river, through which a main pipe or 

 tunnel will conduct the filtered water into a well on the river side, which may 

 be taken from thence by the present steam power on shore, and delivered out 

 by the mains and branches now laid down by the water companies." 



We hope that all this will be intelligible to our readers, but if it be, 

 they have infinitely the advantage of us, for we cannot comprehend a 

 syllable of it. However, something may be done, if any body will give 

 the projectors a hundred thousand pounds to begin with. But why, let 

 us ask, must those people be always dabbling in the Thames ? Or how, 

 in the name of common stomachs, can they propose to any living being 



