ALCOY — ALDERSHOT An Old Fashioned Girl, Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag (6 volumes), Rose in Bloom, &c., followed in the line of Little Women, of which the author’s large and loyal public never wearied. Her natural love of labour, her widereaching generosity, her quick perception, and her fondness for sharing with her many readers that cheery humour which radiated from her personality and her books, led her to produce stories of a diminishing value, and at length she succumbed to overwork, dying in Boston 6th March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott’s early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled “ Transcendental Wild Oats,” afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers, she narrated, with a delicate humour, which shows what her literary powers might have been if freed from drudgery, the experiences of her family during an experiment towards communistic “ plain living and high thinking ” in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843. The story of her career has been fully and frankly told in Mrs Ednah D. Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889), one of the most noteworthy of American biographies, considered as an unconsciously pathetic record of a cheery woman’s life-sacrifice for the support and comfort of her relatives. (c. F. R.) AI COy y a town of the province of Alicante, Spain. It has much grown in importance owing to its manufactures, in which that of linen must be included. New private and public schools, a chamber of commerce, town hall, barracks, hospital, institute, and casinos have been built and the churches repaired. It has been frequently the scene of strikes and popular disturbances. Population (1897), 30,118. Alcyonaria. See Anthozoa. Aldan, a river of Asiatic Russia, East Siberia, a right bank tributary of the Lena, rises in the southern parts of the high plateau of East Siberia, flows mostly over desert highlands for 1160 miles N.E., N., and N.W., and joins the Lena 120 miles below Yakutsk. There are a few settlements in its lower course. The Aldan Range is the name given to the part of the Stanovoi border range which faces the Sea of Okhotsk. Aldeburgh, or Aldborough, a municipal borough (1885), market-town, and railway station in the Woodbridge parliamentary division of Suffolk, England, on the coast, 24 miles E.N.E. of Ipswich. A small 16th-century moot-hall, restored in 1855, is used for corporation meetings. The church of St Peter and St Paul was restored in 1882 and 1891. A jubilee hall has been erected. There is an excellent golf course. Area, 1972 acres. Population (1881), 2106; (1891), 2159; (1901), 2405. Aldershot, a town and parish of England, 35 miles S.W. of London by rail, in the Basingstoke parliamentary division of Hampshire, situated one mile from the Basingstoke Canal. A mere village till 1855, when Aldershot Camp was established, the town was in 1857 erected into a local government district, and in 1894 was created an urban district. The ancient parish church was restored in 1891. There are a theatre and a cottage hospital (1897). Area of urban district, 4178 acres. Population (1881), 20,155; (1891),25,595; (1901),30,974. Military Depot.—“ Camp ” is no longer a suitable name for the military buildings at Aldershot. The wooden huts erected in 1855, which formed the North and South Camps, were not calculated to last many years, and it became necessary to replace them with permanent build-
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ings. A commencement was made in 1881, and under the Barracks Act, 1890, and the Military Works Acts of 1897 and 1899, large sums were provided for completing the work. Although a few wooden buildings remain for a time, the expenditure of nearly £1,800,000 thus provided has made Aldershot, at the commencement of the 20th century, by far the largest assemblage of permanent barracks, as well as the greatest training station for troops, in the British Empire. The Old North Camp is now named Marlborough Lines, with a three-battery field artillery barrack and five infantry battalion barracks called after Marlborough’s victories — Blenheim, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, Rarnillies, and Tournay. South Camp is now named Stanhope Lines, after Mr. Stanhope, secretary of state for war when the Barracks Act, 1890, was passed and the reconstruction commenced in earnest. They contain barracks for the Royal Engineers and Army Service Corps north of the General Parade, which stretches east and wTest, and four infantry battalion barracks south of it, with a fifth at the east, called Albuera, Barossa, Corunna, Maida (Sicily), and Mandora (Egypt), after battles of the wars with France, 1793-1815, in which Wellington did not command. There are also barracks for the Royal Army Medical Corps. The old permanent barracks have been renamed Wellington Lines, with barracks for three cavalry regiments, west, east, and south ; for three batteries of horse and three batteries of field artillery ; and for three infantry battalions called Badajos, Salamanca, and Talavera, after Wellington’s victories in the Peninsula. For the sick there are the Connaught Hospital in Marlborough Lines, the Cambridge Hospital in Stanhope Lines, and the Union Hospital in Wellington Lines, besides the Louise Margaret Hospital for women and children alongside Cambridge Hospital, and the infection hospital on the isolated Thornhill, half for men and half for women and children. The buildings in Wellington Lines, for the most part completed about 1857, are in some respects not up to the modern standard, but those in Stanhope and Marlborough Lines may be regarded as typical examples of modern barracks and hospitals. The drainage of the station is all modern and of the best description, and the sewage is disposed of on a sewage farm worked by an expert, under the direction of the War Department, with the primary object of meeting all sanitary requirements, not of making a profit. The water-supply is partly from the Aldershot Water Company, and partly from springs and reservoirs collecting water from a reserved area of War Department property. The lighting of Wellington L nes is by gas, and Stanhope and Marlborough Lines are lighted by electricity. Most of the barracks are large enough to accommodate not only the units they are constructed for, but also detachments of soldiers from other stations •who are going through courses of instruction. Including these detachments and the large number of soldiers’ wives and children for whom quarters are provided, the population of the station may at times reach a total of 24,000, with 4000 or more horses. Besides the regimental buildings there are a large number of buildings for garrison purposes, in addition to the hospitals already mentioned ; such as quarters and offices for general, staff, and departmental officers, with the warrant and non-commissioned officers employed under them; the supply depot with abattoir and bakery, whence the garrison is supplied with rations both of food and forage ; the ordnance stores, where are kept all kinds of military stores and mobilization equipment, barrack stores for furniture and bedding, engineer shops and stores for services performed by the Royal Engineers, the balloon establishment for the manufacture of military balloons, the vaccine establishment for the production of calf-lymph for the army, the military prison, fire brigade stations, five churches, recreation grounds for officers and men, schools for the literary instruction of adults and children, and especially those military technical schools which form one of the chief features of Aldershot as a training station. These technical schools are as follows : army cookery school, for training cooks who shall not only cook for soldiers, but also teach them to cook for themselves ; army gymnastic school, for the gymnastic instruction of the troops at Aldershot, and especially for training instructors for other stations ; Army Service Corps school, for instruction of Army Service Corps officers in their duties; army signalling school, for training signallers; army veterinary school, for training of officers and men, the latter as farriers ; ballooning school, for instruction and training of officers and men in the management of balloons ; mounted infantry school, for instruction of officers and men in the duties of mounted infantry, the whole training of which force is carried out at Aldershot; training school for Royal Army Medical Corps, for training officers and men for their duties in hospital and field. The work of these schools is, however, only a small part of the
