prevailed throughout the month of January, after which the river was considered safe for foot-passengers. The watermen made rough paths strewn with ashes, direct and diagonal, from bank to bank, for which they charged toll, making a considerable revenue—amounting to as much as £6 a-day—during the short time the fair lasted. A street of tents, called the “City Road,” afforded the usual recreations to visitors; printing presses were more numerous than ever, but the novelty was worn out, and the supply exceeded the demand; a sheep was roasted, and slices of the mutton were sold at a shilling a pound; and itinerant vendors of pies and gingerbread filled the air with their shrill cries. The vast quantities of snow that had fallen gave a peculiar character to the scene. Gathering into a species of glaciers against the shores, buildings, and bridges, sometimes broken off by the action of the tide and forming islands of ice crowned with pinnacles of fleecy drift, and sometimes carried away with perilous rapidity, the surface presented an appearance of a wild sea of ice and snow tossed by tempests, and never level or secure. The dislocation and dispersion of these frozen rifts was attended with great peril. A thaw set in all at once, with torrents of rain, and in a single night the Thames was strewn with the fragments of the merry fair. Some roysterers were carousing in a booth about two o’clock in the morning, when the tide rose, and, bursting the ice, carried off the booth with terrific velocity. The unfortunate bacchanalians, in their terror, set fire to the tent, which exposed them, without the possibility of human aid, to two modes of death. Dashed about from iceberg to iceberg, they leaped into a lighter, which soon afterwards struck against one of the piers of Blackfriars Bridge, where some of them escaped, the others flinging themselves into a barge that happened to pass. The incident is characteristic of the closing scene of the frost of 1814.
That winter was considered at the time the most severe ever experienced in London. There had been twelve weeks of incessant north and north-east winds. The cold was unexampled; masses of snow choked up the streets and roads; travelling was nearly impossible; the people shut themselves up in their houses, and the town looked as if it were deserted. Yet, it was in the depth of that winter, just two days after Christmas Day, Lord Castlereagh set out for Harwich, on his way to the head quarters of the allies at Chatillon-sur-Seine. Nothing but an overwhelming sense of public duty could induce a man to set forth on such a journey at such a season: but these are items of which history takes no account. The day was so dangerous and impracticable, that the Prince Regent, who had left London in the morning to pay a visit to the Marquis of Salisbury in Hertfordshire, was obliged to return to Carlton House, being warned of the perils of the journey by the fact of one of his out-riders having ridden into a ditch at Kentish Town, then a suburban village.
But Lord Castlereagh was not to be deterred by roadside disasters. He started at seven o’clock in the evening in so dense a fog that, notwithstanding the blaze of a troop of flambeaux, his coach could hardly make its way through the streets. His route lay across marshy Essex, where, long after he had got safely beyond the range of the London atmosphere, he was still enveloped in thick vapour. The state of the weather was even more exceptional than the hurricane that swept the coast on the death of Cromwell; and if there had been any augurs abroad they might have predicted the worst conclusion to the mission in which the minister was engaged. But his lordship made his way safely, notwithstanding, to the allied camp, and so far as he was personally concerned, accomplished successfully the task he had undertaken.
And so ends the Chronicle of London Frosts.
A GENERAL PRACTITIONER IN CALIFORNIA.
I am a surgeon. Finding the old country too thickly stocked with resident practitioners to afford a new comer like myself a chance, and being too poor to buy a practice, I resolved to emigrate. I went to California. There, too, I discovered that the chief cities contained quite as many doctors as could possibly make a living out of them; and when my purse was low, I was thankful to settle at Placerville, in Mariposa County. Placerville is a little town in the heart of the diggings, and depends entirely on the gold miners for its support. It has some large wooden buildings—namely, two chapels, six taverns, five stores for groceries and dry goods, a gambling house, and a printing office. All the rest of the dwellings are huts or tents—mostly tents. I had no skill in hut-building, and therefore established myself under canvas. I bought a second-hand tent for twenty-nine dollars, and purchasing a large piece of sail-cloth, contrived to rig up a partition, which divided the tent into two unequal parts. The largest of these compartments was my dwelling, and there I fixed my brass bed, my scanty baggage, and my few other requisites. The smaller compartment I rather grandiloquently styled the “Surgery,” and there I spread out, on rough pine shelves and an unplaned table made by a Yankee lumberer, my small store of medicaments, surgical instruments, and general scientific apparatus. The latter I arranged so as to make as brave a show as possible. My stock-in-trade consisted merely of such drugs as were indispensably needful, a case or two of well-worn but carefully kept steel instruments, some splints, and other things likely to be in demand, a great jar of leeches, a microscope, a stethoscope, the implements of dentistry, a few chemical retorts and alembics, and several bottles containing preparations preserved in spirit. The lint and the leeches, the instruments and the drugs, I knew I should find absolutely necessary. As for the anatomical preparations in the spirit bottles, I must own that they were for mere show; I had bought them at San Francisco on the recommendation of a good-natured surveyor, who told me that the miners stood in great awe of such matters, and considered no doctor worth his salt who had not something curious wherewith to astonish them. The purchase of these articles, and of my camp furniture, had
