CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Queer Things of the Service : illustrated in the Correspondence between Mr. .7oseph Meanwell, at the Antipodes, and Sir John Shortbill,
Knt., of London. Edited by James Dyehard, Captain, unattached. (Sampson Low and Co.)—This is a very smart hit at the economies of Government, as they are at present carried out. Mr. Joseph Meanwell
is "Constrictor" at the settlement of Antipodes, and puts the screw on with considerable energy. He cuts off the allowance for mules to carry
a regiment's bedding, and makes the men carry it themselves, the thermometer standing at 100'; requires a priest who has to conduct a funeral to ride on the hearse ; refuses drying-poles to the washerwomen of a regiment ; cuts off the allowance of sixpence a day to the guardian of the cemetery (a true bill,—witness the Sebastopol scandal), &c., (tc.
Finally, a revolt is reported in the North-West Province. Requisitions for all sorts of things crowd in upon the wretched man, and the whole system utterly collapses. The bullocks are shipped on board the transports instead of the mules, and the men are forced by hunger to eat the mules at .£65 apiece. The artillery are provided with tins of meat instead of case-shot, and with tea instead of gunpowder ; the sappers, instead of blankets, find themselves supplied with unfilled flannel cartridges for smooth-bore guns. The satire, like all satire, is unjust, but it is not without some truth.
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