The Sun.
London, England, 1857-09-15 00:00:00

all about it. They want to overhaul the samples,
to weigh them in the balance, to test them by all
the rapid and refined tests of their mercantile

experience.

SDr. LIVINGSTON is, therefore, at once, good
humouredly but searchingly catechised. Mr.
CHEETHAM, M.P., stands before him on the plat-
form like an embodied note of interrogation. The
travelled missionary is called upon to evidence
before an attentive audience of merchants and
manufacturers, powers of memory in some respects
more extraordinary than those formerly displayed
by GEORGE BIDDER, or those now-a-days exhibited
by poor purblind JACQUES WINCKLEE, the Swiss
calculator. Dr. LIVINGSTON has recollections,
however, to fall back upon vouchsafed to not one
other man among all the millions of his contem-
poraries. He can laugh to scorn every system of
Mnemonics, however ingenious. He can snap
his fingers in the face of Major BENIOWSKI and
his competitors. He has witnessed sights with
his own eyes that to behold once is to remember
ever afterwards. Recalling some of the more
curious among his many strange remembrances,
he begins his recital.

It is the country traversed by the great Zambesi
River that he is describing—the fruitful African
regions traversed by that Silent Highway and
irrigated on either hand by the waters of its
numerous tributaries.

He talks of pasturage there, the grass of which
flourishes to such an astounding height that when
he rode through it, seated upon the back of an
ox, he had to hold his hands above his head to
keep it out of his eyes ! He tells of wheat grow-
ing there the ears of which extended from his
waist to the tips of his fingers ! The soil where
these Brobdignagian blades of grass and corn
abound, he describes as fertile almost beyond the
limits of credulity. All it requires, he declares to
be simply this—that a slave woman with a little
hoe should make a little hole in the ground, drop
a few seeds in and push back the soil with her
foot. As a consequence of which, he says, there
is a crop of wheat four months afterwards ready ,
for the sickle I This simple operation of the hoe
and the toe of the slave woman answering all the
purposes of subsoiling, ploughing, draining, lim-
ing, and manuring ! It is for all the world the
realization of the land of plenty once wittily de-
scribed by DOUGLAS JERROLD as a region so rich and
so sympathetic to the toil of the husbandman
that you had only to tickle it with a hoe and it
laughed into harvests ! So it really is with Africa
all along the verdurous course enriched by the
fattening current of the Zambesi. There—Dr.
LIVINGSTON tells us, not upon hearsay but from
his own personal knowledge—abound twenty or
thirty different kinds of fruits altogether strange
to the palates of European epicures ; fibrous pro-
ducts finer and stronger than flax ; elephant-ceme-
teries of ivory I countless apiaries full of beeswax!
iron ore, copper ore, even malachite Mr.
CHEETHAM asks him a pertinent question very
much like the humourously impertinent one
CHARLES LAMB put to a correspondent of his, to
whom he was writing all the way to the then re-
gion of the penal settlements in Australia—" Do
you grow your own hemp ?" Well, replies Dr.
LIVINGSTON to his Querist—lf the Africans don't
grow hemp they grow a number of fibrous•-plants,
and among them buaze, the fibie of which is
worth from 501. to 601. a ton. Above all says
the great African Traveller they grow cotton—
And from cotton Commerce ! And from
Commerce—Civilisation and Christianity. A
magnificent prospect opens before our ima-
gination at those suggestive words —a pros-
pect glorious for Africa, for England, for the
whole Eastern Hemisphere. In talking thus
we are not simply dreaming dreams, we are talking
of what is actually practicable, of what we believe
to be at this moment to be within reach of our
grasp, within the limits of realization. May the
project be indeed and very spedily. realized !
Then will the noblest earthly recompense have
fallen to the lot of an earnest and true philan-
thropist.

ROYAL VISIT TO. NVENTWORTEI-HOUSE —The Sheffield
independent of Saturday last states authoritatively that
the Queen and the Prince Consort will honour the Earl
of Fitz Nilliam with a visit at Went worth-hour?, near
Rotherham, on their return from Scotland, on Thurs-
day, the 15th of October next. Her Ma.;esty, when Prin-
cess Victoria, visited Wentworth-house, with the Duchess
01 Kent, in September, 1835, on their return from the
grand musical festival at York.
His Excellency toe Ambassador of France a^d the
Countess de Persigny will leave the residence of the em-
bassy on Thursday, for Paris, en cong6 for a short per iod.
His Excellency the Count Chreptowitch, Russian
Minister at this Court, has returned to Chesham House
from a tour of visits in Scotland. The Countess Chrep-
towitch is will sojourning at Wiesbaden.

The Duke of Beaufort arrived in town 'on Saturday
last, from Badminton. The noble duke, accompanied
by Sir W. C. Codrington, Bart., M.P., left yesterday, to
attend the race meeting at Doncaster.
The Duke and Duchess of Sutherland are at Dunrobin
Castle, surrounded by a select circle of friends.

The Duchess Dowager of Norfolk and Lord and Lady
Edward Fitzalan Howard have left town, on a visit to
the Duke and Duchess-of Sutherland, at Dunrobin
Castle.

The Marquis de Noailles has arrived at Claridge's
Hotel, from Ryde, Lie of Wight.
The Earl of Wilton arrived yesterday at Heaton atll,
near Manchester, where the countess and family are
.staying, from a cruise in his lordship's yacht. The nada
earl goes to Doncaster to-day.
The Earl Fitzwilliarn and the Ladies Wentworth Fif z-
william have arrived at Wentworth House, Yorkshire,
from Milton Park, near Peterborough. Viscount and
Viscountess Milton have joined the family party from
his lordship's seal, in Ireland.
The Earl and Countess of Macclesfield returned on
Friday from a Continental tour, and have since gone to
Sherborne Castle, Oxfordshire, for the autumn.

Bar,:n Ebury (Lord Robert Grosvenor) is staying at
Ardgovran, in Scotland.
Viso nnt and Viscountess Pabners':on entertaned his
Excellency the French Ambassador and the Cou,tess de
Peraigny, and a small party, at dinner, last evening, at
Cambridge House.

Lord Panmure and Lord Stanley of Alderley were
expected in town list night, from Scotland. The noble
lords have been 'called to town expressly to be present
at the meeting of the Cabinet, appointed to meet at
Viscount Palmerston's official residence, in Downing-
street to-day.
Tee Counts Bethlen and Kornes (attzches to his
Majesty the Emperor of Austria) have arrived at the
Brunswick Hotel, Jermyn-street, from Vienna.
Dr. Rae's schooner, the Iceberg, with which he in•
tended next spring to go in search of Sir John Franklin's
remains, is suppoael to have been lost on Lake Ontario
with all on board.

CLOSE OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY.—On Friday the
National Gallery, Trafalgar-square, and the Vern"n and
Turner Collection of Paintings at Marlborough House,
Pall-Mall, were closed to the public until Monday, tile
26th of Oct., when they will be re-opened.

ANECDOTE OF THE iliascrate TELEGBAPH.—I think
the most curious fact, taken altogether, that I ever heard
of the electric telegraph was told me by a cashier of the
B ink of England. " Oace upon a time, then, on a eel..
tain Saturday night, the folks at the Bank could not
make the balance onme right by just 1001. This is a seri-
ous matter in that little establishment : I do not mean
the cash, but the mistake in arithmetic ' • for it ecTasione
a world of scrutiny. An error in balancing has Leen
known, lam told, to keep a delegation of clerks frJur
each office at work sometimes through the whole nig'it.
A hue and cry was of course made after this 1001., as it
the old lady in Threadneedle-street would be in Vie
gazette for want of it. Luckily on the Sunday morning
a clerk (in the middle of the sermon, I dare say, if the
truth were known) felt a suspicion of the truth dart
through his mind quicker than any flash of the telegrail
itself. He told the chief cashier on Monday moning
that perhaps the mistake might have occurred in pack
ing some boxes of specie for the West Indies, which
bad been sent to Sau..harnpton for shipment. The sug-
gestion was immediately acted upon. Here was a race
—lightnilig against steam ! and steam with 43 hour.'
start given. Instantly the wires risked whether such a
vessel had left the harbour ?" Just weighing anchor,'
was the an,wer. 'Stop Ler,' frantically shouted the elec-
tric telegraph. It was done. Have up on deck cer-
tain boxes marked so and so ; weigh them carefully.'
They were weighed ; and one—the delinquent--,sae
fliioouootiknl.rdi:avier by jest one -packet of a hundred soy. rcigtA
-than it ought to be. Let her go,' said the mys.eious
telegraph. The West India folks were debited wita just
mg;oirnwet,
othaatnthd
is
thewbKa
t,esruriroa,
rry
tc
be call3~ dhtoeeitni
vgwob3i
enn
business.'
ever
.
1,
"-Later," of E, H, Greyson.