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Lady Brassey's last voyage was made in the yacht she loved: the Sunbeam. Three or four years before, her health had received a serious shock through an attack of typhoid fever, and it was hoped that travel would restore her. A trip was made in 1887 to Ceylon, Rangoon, North Borneo and Australia, in company with Lord Brassey, a son, and three daughters.
In the military age he might have been a great soldier, a Turenne or a Marlborough, if he could have broken through the aristocratic barrier which confined high command to the privileged few; in the industrial age he found a more beneficent road to distinction, and one not limited to the members of a caste. Mr. Brassey's family is stated by his biographer to have come over with the Conqueror.
Brassey's contracts is remembered, as well as the early period from which they date, to find that they were invariably completed within the specified time. Personal Reminiscences of Barham, Harness and Hodder. (Bric-
In constructing the Great Northern Railway the difficulties of the Fen Country were met and surmounted. Mr. Brassey's chief agent in this was Mr. Ballard, a man self raised from the ranks of labour but indebted for the eminence which he ultimately attained to Mr. Brassey's discrimination in selecting him for the arduous undertaking.
This was when he supposed himself to have lost a million. The duty of religious inquiry, which he could not perform himself, he would no doubt have recognised in those to whose lot it falls to give their fellow-men assurance of religious truth. Mr. Brassey's wife said of him that "he was a most unworldly man." This may seem a strange thing to say of a great contractor and a millionaire.
This "Voyage Round the World," from which we must now turn aside, does not sum up Lady Brassey's achievements as a traveller. She accompanied her husband, in 1874, on a cruise to the Arctic Circle, but has published no record of this enterprise.
Brassey's character as "a man of business;" so that we get at the substance of the book by a process like that which in a well-conducted household precedes the carving and distribution of a Christmas cake, any eagerness we might feel to "put in a thumb and pull out a plum" being kept in check by a proper amount of ceremony and tissue-paper.
The moral to be drawn therefore is not that of civil service extension, but that of the necessity of guarding against Parliamentary rings in legislation concerning public works. Of all Mr. Brassey's undertakings not one was superior in importance to that with which Canadians are best acquainted the Grand Trunk Railway, with the Victoria Bridge.
Lady Brassey made, of course, an excursion to the great volcano of Kilauea, of which Miss Bird has furnished a singularly fine description. Lady Brassey's sketch is not so elaborate or powerful or fully coloured, but it has a charm of its own in its unassuming simplicity. Let us go with her on a visit to the two craters, the old and the new.
Our manufacturers will read with interest the compliments recorded as paid by their customers, actual and possible, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to the superior merit of their fabrics as compared with those of Manchester. Altogether, should Mrs. Brassey's yacht be ready for another circumnavigation before ours, we do not know that we should refuse the offer of a spare berth. Art-Education.
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