The Sun.
London, England, 1867-08-28 00:00:00

your pockets. I send you back your pocket-book
and papers, which are quite useless to me, as well
as your watch. I might have made a profit of the
latter, but I should be desperately grieved to deprive
you of it, for I see by the inscription on the case
that it was given to you as a reward, which I have
no doubt was well merited. I, therefore, think it a
duty to restore it to you. You see there are honest
people everywhere. Your servant, a French pick-
pocket."

Yesterday was the thirtieth anniversary of the
opening of the first railway in Paris, that from Paris
to Pecq on the line to St. Germain, having been
opened for traffic on the 26th of August, 1837.
The following are the dates of the opening of the
principal railways in France : —Paris to Orleans,
May 5, 1843 ; to Rouen, May 9, 1813 ; to Lille,
July 7, 1846 ; to Havre, March 22, 1847 ; to Bor-
deaux, September 20, 1832 ; to Strasbourg, July 25,
1852; to Lyons, July 10, 1854.

There is now in course of demolition in the Fau-
bourg Montmartre the house where Vestris, the
most celebrated dancer of the eighteenth century,
died on the 27th of September, 1808. Vestris
reigned like a sovereign at the opera for half a
century, and was familiarly called handsome Vestris.
There were no bounds to his pride and vanity. lle
called himself the " god of the dance." Ile often
said seriously, " There have been only three men in
Europe—myself, Voltaire, and Frederick the Great."
This Vestris was, I believe, the father of the late
Madame Vestris.

The Lords of tile Admiralty at Portsmouth

- ili- -

Mr. Corry and his colleagues resumed their in-
spection of this establishment yesterday morning
with a muster of the officers and men of the Steam
Reserve at the port, borne on the books of the old
sailing line-of-battle-ship Asia. The muster was
held on the ground between the office of the Admiral
Superintendent and the main line of storehouses.
rho force mustered on the ground was under the
command of Capt. W. C. Chamberlain, and com-
prised Commander Wells, chief inspector of machi-
nery afloat, George Murdoch, and 19 other non-
commissioned officers, with 107 engineer officers of
all grades. The remaining numbers consisted of
154 warrant-officers, 261 stokers, 460 pensioners,
and 354 seamen, marines,, and servants, &c. These
numbers include all men lent on board ships in the
harbour—such, for instance, as the Osborne—and
only 26 leading stokers are really available for ser-
vice, while the majority of stokers have never been
to sea. After the reserve officers and men had
passed inspection a brief examination of some pre-
servative cements for coating the bottoms of iron
ships, and other little matters in the office of the
Admiral-Superintendent, brought their lordships'
morning labours to a close.
After luncheon the turret-ship Royal Sovereign
was visited, where it is to be hoped their lordships
gained a true measure of the value of the system of
working ordnance at exceptional weight afloat.
From the Royal Sovereign the Board went on
board the boys' training ship St. Vincent, and thence
to Haslar, where they went over the Naval Hospi-
tal and the " Deserted Village" of the navy—the
gunboat yard and shipway. The hospital contains
at present 484 patients, but has beds for 1,200.
It has an admirable organisation under its
medical staff, but its government by a post-cap-
tain of the Royal Navy is as great an absurdity as
ever existed in the worst days of the great naval
hospital at Greenwich. If it is necessary to provide
some adequate rewards for naval captains or other
officers of the military branch who have done good
service in their professional career, this should be
done by any other means than by thus placing them
in command of purely medical establishments. What
can possibly be more ridiculous than to submit a
document drawn up by such men as Sir David Dens
on important medical questions to the inspection of
a captain of the navy, and for his signature, before
such document can be sent on to the chief medical
authorities at the Admiralty for submission to the
Board ? • Nor does the ridicule of the whole affair
end even here, for in the absence of the Captain
Superintendent, the Inspector-General of Hospitals'
document must be laid before some old—and, no
doubt, very worthy—lieutenant, who represents
temporarily his immediate chief.

The gunboat yard and shipway at Haslar, with
its 45 covered building-sheds, and its costly parallel
lines of railway and launching stages, has at pre-
sent the following number of men employed there :
—Master - Shipwright's Department —2O ship-
wrights, 40 labourers, 2 smiths. Engineers of
Steam Reserve Department —4 engineers, 14 stokers
(mechanics), 4 seamen, 1 warrant-officer. In the
yard there are six wood-built screw gunboats, nine
mortar floats (iron), and a numbe' of ships' boats
and remnants of machinery boilers stored away
under cover.

Three of the gunboats—the Wave, the Cherokee,
and the Peacock—are in frame, after rebuilding,
and have been in frame seven years. They are,
therefore, well seasoned in all their timbers, and
now it is supposed they will be planked and fitted
with their machinery again. The remaining three
it is proposed to convert to coal depot vessels to
convey fuel to ships at Spithead. They will cost
upwards of £3,000 each to make them fit for this
purpose, but it is the only duty they are now fit for,
and it would be as well to utilize them even in this
manner. Two of the mortar floats have been con-
verted into dockyard lighters ; on 2 has been con-
verted into a receiving vessel for coastguard duty ;
one for a mud-clearing barge for Cowes' harbour
off Trinity pier; and one for fitting at Malta as a
mooring lighter. Four remain at present unappro-
priated.

What the Board may eventually decide upon
doing with this yard would be as yet premature to
hazard any opinion upon. What it appears to be
suitable for 43 any adaptation of its space and capa-
bilities generally is a general boat-building-yard for
the Navy, and especially for steam launches, the
machinery of the latter being fitted and afterwards
kept in repair in the yard by the engineers
in the port belonging to the Steam Re-
serves. In addition to this kind of work there
might also be built at liaslar such small twin-
screw gunboats as would be serviceable for duty
between harbours and roadsteads, as Portsmouth
harbour and Spithead, or llamoaze and Plymouth
Sound, and which must sooner or later supersede
the present decrepit and expensive small paddle
steamers. Machinery for such vessels can be picked
up in plenty out of the surplus stock in the several
yards.

One thing prepared for their lordships' inspection
at Ilaslar Yard deserves special notice. This was
a composition for cleaning the bottoms of iron ves-
sels when placed in dock. The present method of
cleaning the bottom of an iron vessel is by the use
of metal scrapers, with one of which a man may
clean about eight square feet per day (working
hours). With the composition he would be enabled
to clean off nearly 1,000 feet, and with this advan-
tage—all paint or composition on the face of the
iron plates would be effectually removed without
affecting the surface of the plates by scratching, as
with the scraper, and out of inequalities where the
scraper would be unable to act.

The Duke of Wellington, seamen's training ship,
Capt. C. Fellowes, has been visited by their lord-
ships during their stay at Portsmouth, and the
" Grant's" cooking (roasting, boiling, and bread-
baking) apparatus, with other novelties under trial
experimentally on board duly ex-unined. The Vic-
tory and other vessels have also received brief visits.
This morning the Board of Admiralty were to
leave Portsmouth
Port-
land, Dartmouth, and Devonport in their yacht En-
chantress, as early as five o'clock for Port-
accompanied by the Black Eagle, and
their official visit to Portsmouth of 1867 will be
happily ended—happily ended because such formal
visits, previously announced and prepared for, are
matter of dissatisfaction to all concerned. They
are unsatisfactory to the majority of the officials be-
longing to a yard by reason of their knowledge of
the hollowness of the affair for any permanently
useful end, and they must be unsatisfactory to the
Lords themselves from a well understood feeling
that they have neither seen matters iu their normal
working condition, nor have they had time to under-
stand one-hundredth part of what they have Seen...