IT has been said that England built New York. Nothing this to be proud of, perhaps ; for New York is not quite a model city, and differs widely from Athens or Rome, or even Babylon; wherefore the builders of cities like Westminster and Winchester have no need to claim this New York as their own. It may, however, be admitted in return, that the United States built Liverpool. That town has never been a favourite of mine, though it is a place where you meet pleasant company.

The Liverpool

It is a monotonous place. folk are very proud of themselves; and there is a cosmopolitan air about them, brought in by the sea breeze, which comes refreshingly up the Mersey; and they are singularly enterprising in their own special groove. But they have one groove only. Some English cities have had a literature of their own: Liverpool has not yet reached this level, notwithstanding what has been done for it by Roscoe and the Broughs.

The time seems to have altogether departed when towns like York, Bath, Bristol, were centres of country influence, of local culture, of literary and dramatic success. London has magnetised all the clever fellows. This is regretable. Country towns of reasonable magnitude give a brilliant man or a charming woman better chances than they can find in what De Quincey aptly called "the Nation of London." Immense cities are self-destructive. Their west end is frivolous; their east end is squalid; their north and south are dreary and slow. All cities follow the great geographic law of movement westward, leaving behind them on the north and south the dull dwellings

of crass citizens.

You can tell the man from his abode the woman also. Wide is the difference between Kensington and Stepney, between Holloway and Herne Hill, though all four are within four miles of the village where Queen Eleanor's Cross stood of old. As the overgrown city pushes its horns westward, Greenford, and Hayes, and Hillington will be fashionable parts; indeed, it will not surprise me if, in days to come, Stoke Pogis should be looked upon as East London, and a house at Knowl Hill, now letting for fifty pounds a year, should be thought cheap at a thousand.

What the Troglodyte predicted was very much what occurred to the Mighty Metropolis. The sudden rise of the tide floated her off. Grainger, an experienced navigator, with some knowledge of Azore eccentricities, got his people on board the moment he saw the sea rising. The ship, all teak and iron, did her duty well; and the voyage to Liverpool was accomplished without difficulty. Clipped as she had been by the rocks-driven fiercely into a via by the wind-driven hammer of the wave-she bore the strain.

The run from the Azores to England. was in all respects fortunate and favourable. Grainger, loyal to his passengers, and a good king to his subjects, could not help regretting the inexorable necessity which had caused him to leave Harold Tachbrook and his daughter and Tom Jones behind. He determined to despatch a small steamer in search of them the moment he reached Liverpool. His only consolation was that both Tachbrook and Tom Jones were not easily alarmed, and would probably find their way home whatever happened.

As to the passengers, their opinions as to their missing fellow-travellers varied. The future Sir Edward Wilson was, on the whole, well pleased those benighted people had never treated with enough reverence the illustrious gentleman who was going home to be knighted. Nor were his wife and daughter very sad Miranda's beauty and grace had effaced their aristocratic air of the Antipodes, and had even lured from their side the elegant hope and heir of the house of Wilson. That same hope and heir is believed to have torn his dishevelled locks in the privacy of

his own cabin. He had just begun to persuade himself that he had made a sort of a kind of an impression on Miranda's virgin heart.

Captain Stuart, though rather a humbug, showed real feeling on the occasion. Below the outer crust of this reckless adventurer there was a vein of chivalry; and though he took chloroform when he thought of being drowned like a rat, he would have fought like a Bayard for a lady of Miranda's type. Cincinnatus Meunier rushed into verse, of course, and recited it with such redoubtable fluency, that the sailors sent a round robin to the captain protesting that it was unlucky.

The two little Mansard girls, whom Miranda had always treated with a kindness born of pity, yet with no pity perceptible in it, managed to make themselves miserable' all the way home; but Leary the irrepressible, and Harry Loraine the immovable, did their utmost to console them, each in his different way. Leary made fun of the whole business.

Faith," he said, "it will be Robinson

VOL. I

M