HOW OUR CARGO IS CARRIED.

By Edith Searls Grossman'n, M.A,

It is a far cry from the days of Lord Bacon and his fowl, stuffed with snow, to the great cargo phips of to-day, carrying their thousands of frozen sheep to the markets of ths Old World. New Zealanders should certainly erect a monument to the great, philosopher's memory. The Stella Australia carries the largest refrigerator afloat, and we took on board nearly 90,000 carcases from Auckland, Gisborne, Napier, Wellington, and the Bluff. They are lowered into the hold, each stiff and rigid as a board, and swathed in gauzecorered shrouds, which, by the way. I Lave heard are occasionally used later on as covering by the natives of the East. ■who have been seen wandering about serenaly. labelled "Prime Canterbury." Blasts of greyish snowy air are driven across the floor of the hold where the men are working, with their feet muffled in canvas to keep them from freezing. To view the process I descended into the bowels of the ship. At one end are the pumps and the wheel that diive the machinery, all worked from the chip's furnaces. Long piston-rods woikin^ backwards and forwards are connected with four condensers — big iron chests, into which the air is driven and compressed by means of the movements of pistons and of valves alternately opening and shutting. The air from the hold enters the refrigeratin£ machines through a large funnel-shaped che3t ; thence it passes into the condenser, ■where it is compressed by the movements of the pistons and rods. From (he condensers (or compressors) it passes on into the four exroanders, which look outside exactly like large chests of drawers. In these the compressed air is expanded again, the prdcess robbing it of heat, so that when the outside wooden door is open, the exterior will be se«n covered with hard frost. This frozen air passes from the expander into a kind of wooden pit, which is the entrance to the tunnel leading into the hold. When the door of the pit or well is removed blasts of frozen air, grey as steam, rush out, blinding the bystandei". The refrigerating engineer took the temperature while I was there, and found it 90deg below zero. By the tunnel the frozen air enters the hold, keeping the carcases perpetually cold. It was these blasts driven from the refrigerating room that we saw while tha men were packing the carcases. As the air in the hold thaws it ascends, and returns again to the refrigerating room through an overhead tunnel, and is again chilled, and passes in turn into the well, the tunnel, and the hold. The men are sometimes obliged to traverse the tunnel, and for this purpose they wear a special suit with leather hood. The nose, however, cannot be well protected, and is liable to get frozen. Yet the officers say that rats persist in getting down, and that on their last voyage they took a rat from inside the frozen carcase of a sheep. The animals are supposed to grow an extra thick coat of fur some inches high. In an opening in the wall of the refrigerating room is a large safe where the ship's provision.? are kept. An enormously thick iron door was moved back, and the steward groped his way through ! the snowy blasts, candle in' hand, and brought out a fowl, some flounders, and butter, frozen t.o hard and so firm you might bang them on the wall and make no impression on them. He showed us> a piece of beef, remarking that it would la.vt for a year if necessary. The vefrigator woikh for only a certain number of Hours a day. or. rather, at certain intervals: one or two hours every four hours all the way from the Bluff to the j Horn, but, nearly half the day in the j tropics and the sweltering heat of a London midsummer.