236 



KNO^A^LEDGE ♦ 



[Sept. 19, 1884. 



supposed that the lime " had been left in that six foot 

 space by Durdles's men," and that the man he had rescued 

 from it was one of them. Or Grewgious, disturbed from 

 his rest at the Crozier, may have been by when the body 

 was taken out, and liave seen to its removal to the 

 Travellers' Eest, thei-e first finding who it was, and taking 

 due measures to keep the matter hidden — possibly at the 

 suggestion of Drood himself — until a scheme for the 

 punishment of Jasper had been devised. Durdles 

 and the Deputy would be easily bribed to 

 secresy. Note in passing, as a rather striking 

 piece of evidence respecting Drood's whereabouts on 

 Christmas morning, that Datchery alone of all the charac- 

 ters of the story, knows the nickname by which the 

 Deputy is called at the Traveller's Rest. " Halloa, 

 Winks," he says ; and Deputy seems surprised. " I say," 

 he remonstrates, " don't yer go a-making my name public," 

 explaining how the name was given to him, and what it 

 means. It is certainly suggestive that Datchery should 

 know of a name which the Deputy says " the travellers 

 give me " (" give " being here in the past tense). It may 

 be pointed out as entirely inconsistent with this that when 

 Mr. Datchery first meets, or seems first to meet, the 

 Deputy, Datchery asks his name, and the Deputy says 

 "I don't owe yer nothing; I never seen yer." For clearly 

 Drood's question is quite consistent with his having seen 

 the Deputy before (apart from which his disguise has to 

 be considered), and of course the Deputy would not 

 recognise him in his entirely changed aspect. 



Now let us consider what follows the disappearance of 

 Edwin Drood. 



In the first place, we find that after the impeachment (I 

 use Dickens's own word) of Neville Landless, Jasper em- 

 ploys Christmas Day in preparing measures for making 

 !t> widely known as possible how much he himself is 

 troubled about Drood's death, and how grievously he sus- 

 pects Neville. Doubtless the whole of that da}' Jasper 

 took care to be in the sight of men as much as possible. 

 He had not got rid of the watch and pin then, for, when 

 found, the watch had run down, and it was wound at two 

 on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, so that it would run 

 till late on the evening of Christmas Day. Jasper, then, 

 cast the watch and breast pin into the water on the night 

 of the 26th or 27th, for during the daytime on the 26th 

 and 27th he was with the river-searchers. As the watch 

 was bright enough to catch Crisparkle's eye in the running 

 water on the morning of the 28th, I take it that it was 

 probably flung into the weir, or rather carefully placed 

 where it might be seen, not earlier than the night of the 

 27th, on which point we shall presently note further 

 evidence. That stress was to be laid on this point is 

 shown by the way in which attention is directed to the 

 winding of the watch at two, and in which the jeweller's 

 opinion is probed. He is made to say that he is positive 

 it had never been rewound, a strange thing to say, seeing 

 that no man, jeweller or otherwise, could be positive on such 

 a point, though Dickens (who had some rather strange ideas 

 as to what an expert might infer) may very well have sup- 

 posed that such a matter might be determined. It is clear 

 we are to take it as provable that the watch was put in 

 the weir after the evening of the 25th. 



It seems to me probable that immediately on learning of ' 

 the attack on Drood, Mr. Grewgious sent for Buzzard, to 

 keep watch on Jasper's movements, and that Jasper was 

 followed when he went to the weir to place Drood's watch, j 

 chain, and breast-pin there. We shall see that there is 

 other reason for supposing that Buzzard was early employed 

 to keep Jasper in view. 



(To le continued.) 



EMIGRANTS' PROSPECTS IN 

 AMERICA. 



FROM AX ENGINEER'S POINT OF VIEW.* 

 By W. R. Browne, M.A. 



THE first thing which strikes an engineer in approaching 

 Canada is the overwhelming abundance and cheapness 

 of timber. It is not merely that, as the steamer sweeps up 

 the magnificent reaches of the St. Lawrence, the eye takes 

 in mile after mile of virgin forest which nobody has 

 touched or seems to think worth touching ; where the only 

 sign of man's presence, beyond fishermen's huts scattered 

 thinly along the shore, is that here and there a few thousand 

 acres have been devastated by bush-fires, leaving a rich 

 carpet of scrub a perfect "fireweed," with white skeletons 

 of dead firs standing out of it by thousands. It is still 

 more of a shock to find in Quebec that the " side-walks ^ 

 are composed of nothing but 3-in. planks, cut to length, and 

 roughly spiked together on beams, side by side ; and that 

 the new " Dufferin Promenade," and even some of the 

 streets, ai-e roughly paved with the same material. 

 Whenever there is a job to be done of any kind, it would 

 seem that a Canadian's first idea is to cut down a tree to 

 do it with. It does not need the large rafts of logs 

 anchored ofi" Point Lewis — the suburb on the opposite 

 shore of the St. Lawrence to Quebec — to impress on the 

 mind the immense extent of the lumber trade in Canada. 

 Down a single river — the beautiful St. Francis, along which 

 the Grand Trunk Railway is carried from Richmond to 

 Sherbrooke — I was told that some forty million logs are 

 floated every season. And the warfare goes on unremit- 

 tingly, wdthout any thought, or as yet apparently any need 

 of thinking, whether it may at last be carried too far. 

 True, things are not as they were in the early days, when 

 fences were made of walnut wood, and valuable timber, in 

 itself worth many times the fee simple of the land it stood 

 on, was felled and left to rot, or burnt for firewood. Now 

 every stick got within manageable distance of a railroad 

 has a definite value, and is worth saving. But still there 

 is no thought of replacing what has been taken away. The 

 ground whence the trees have been removed is either 

 brought into cultivation, or nature is left to repair her 

 damages as best she may. 



It does not take long to form a conviction that Canada, 

 from the engineer's point of view, is a very unpromising 

 field. Agriculture, in which the timber track may be 

 included — since trees are, after all, only one form of 

 produce — is the one great stafTof the country, and Canadian 

 agriculture needs very little help from the English engi- 

 neer. To begin at the beginning. Take the process of 

 reducing a tract of forest land to culture, as explained to 

 me by a veteran in the art, and let us see how far English 

 machinery comes, or can come, into the operation. A 

 Canadian bush in summer is almost an inland forest car- 

 peted with weeds and flowers and grasses, rich with abun- 

 dant but not impenetrable underwood, and thickly studded 

 with fair-sized trees, yielding more or less valuable timber. 

 These trees have mostly English names — elm, beech, ash, 

 poplar, cherry, &c. ; but though probably cognate species, 

 are very seldom identical. When such a bush as this is to 

 be cleared, the first requisite is obviously to fell the trees. 

 Here it might appear that the tree-cutting machine 



* From the Engineer. This article, says our contemporary, 

 possesses a melancholy interest. It was intended to be the first of 

 a series of papers to be written by Hr. Browne, as our special 

 correspondent with the British Association. It is the last he ever 

 ■wrote, and the announcement of his death reached us by telegraph, 

 while his manuscript was still on the Atlantic. 



