shops to uncountable atoms. It was the grandest chaussures, from the white satin ball-shoe to the shop for its size (and that was of the most dimi- bronzed kid walking-boot, was complete. Connutive) that could be pictured. I met a wag- cerning the supply of dolls' under-linen I am gon before the door one day, and two large somewhat chary of speaking-it looked so porters carried in a bale of dry goods, circled absurdly real; but I may delicately hint that the with iron bands, and, I have no doubt, packed collerettes, chemisettes, sleeves, and cuffs, were by hydraulic pressure. Imagine a couple of all of the finest linen and the rarest lace, and hundred-weight of dolls' clothes, and a so- that with respect to those sub-skirt appendages, lemn invoice being made out for those airy whose use Mrs. Amelia Bloomer vainly endea futilities! Futilities? I retract. They couldn't voured to supersede by the introduction of baggy be futile, they couldn't be puerile, for the Caliph garments of divers hues, of the fashion formerly -a fat Frenchman, in a huge beard, a stamped worn in the hareem of the good Caliph, and velvet cap with a long tassel, and always shod called, I am given to understand, trousers, I with carpet slippers-handled and set out the may in strict confidence remark that three tucks dry little goods with an impenetrable gravity, round the extremities were generally worn, and morning after morning, and the Caliphina, the that the preponderance of fashion wavered beCaliph's wife, who was a smart little matron, tween embroidered vandyking, scroll applicawith a wasp waist and a laced fichu tied under on work, and an edging of the finest point her chin, à la Mrs. Siddons, who wore a gold de Malte. watch at her little stomacher, and the tightest of fitting kid gloves, winter and summer, was always at her desk, immersed in the most abstruse calculations relative to these Lilliputian dry goods. The two handsome demoiselles of the counter, Eulalie and Aménaïde-I am sure those were their names-one, dark, stately, tall, and Dudu-eyed: the second, fair, florid, and freckled -never hazarded so much as a smile as they turned over the dolls' wardrobes. To them these microscopic fal-lals were a serious business, the business of their lives. In our country exists there not a laborious class who earn painful bread by fashioning dolls' eyes? Avert, kind Fate, a strike, a lock-out, and a "document," from the dolls'-eye trade!

Dolls' fans, scent-bottles, ivory tablets, and châtelaines, had not been forgotten by the good Caliph. He had been, somehow, remiss in the matter of opera-glasses, but he came out strongly in pocketmirrors. Dolls' jewellery he did not touch at all, and there were no diamond splinters or ruby sparks set in specks of gold for bracelets or for brooches. Probably bijouterie was not the Caliph's branch, and the precious stone department was carried on by MM. Mustardseed and Peasblossom, successors to Messrs. Hunt and Roskell, under a glass-case, somewhere in the Palais Royal. But the Caliph was fertile in dolls' toys, joujoux for the young dolls not out of the nursery, playthings in playthings, atomic rattles, corals, hoops, skipping-ropes and humSo, on the counters and in the windows, there ming-tops, and baby or doll-dolls for the dolls were skilfully displayed all the ingredients and themselves to dandle, and small perambulators for accessories of this mighty matter of a doll's the weakly dolls to be trundled in. Bless us all, trousseau. Let me strive to remember. There what a mine of ingenuity there was in this World were dresses, and mantles, and robes, and tunics, seen through the small end of a race-glass! The and flounced skirts, and jackets for adult dolls. most wondrous thing to me in the Caliph's estaThere were frocks, pelisses, and spencers for blishment, and one displaying the soundest policy young dolls; pinafores for them to wear whilst in fostering the fantastic and the unreal real, they ate their bread and jam; morning wrappers was, that, with the exception of the baby-dolls, for them to don while M. Anatole, the coiffeur, there were no Dolls proper in the Caliph's ward"did" their back hair. There were long robe-shop. There were none of those inane, flaxenclothes and short coats, capes, hoods, and man-haired, blue stony-eyed, flaxen tow-haired, simtelettes, for infantine dolls, not yet out of the nursery; combs and brushes, tweezers and nailscissors, all on the doll scale; muffs, and boas, and victorines, and furred capes for wintry weather; nightgowns, nightcaps, and jackets; grandes toilettes of gauze, ribbon, and other flummery for the receptions of Dollius Cæsar and Lucius Dolabella, and the puppet-balls of the Hôtel de Ville. In the event of dolls going on their travels, there were trunks, bandboxes, portmanteaus, carpet-bags, medicine-chests, and couriers' pouches for them. I dare say, in the back shop, a marionette clerk stamped and viséd passports for Madame de la Poupée, travelling à l'étranger. There were dolls' dressing-cases, reticules, and pocketbooks. Upon my word, there was a dolls' prayerbook: a fat little volume, with embossed gilt edges, and a large red cross on the covers, and a mite of a golden clasp! The display of dolls'

pering abnormalities with the creasy waxen limbs, puffed out raiment, preposterous sashes and blue kid shoes that stare and grin at you in London shop windows; or, worse still, those limp enormities of dolldom with their pink wooden legs and painted shoes, their leathern arms and hands, the fingers all turned the wrong way in the Guy Fauxian style, and shamefully exposing their bran-stuffed torsos. The ingenious Caliph dexterously conveyed to you the idea that the dolls for whom this wardrobe was laid out, were alive; that they were dolls in good society; dolls occupying elevated positions; dolls marriageable or married, and who would come presently in carriages of their own to choose their trousseaux and their ball toilettes. With such a naïve skill was this idea insinuated, implied, and made substantial, that when I found, one morning, an ample display of dolls' crinoline vetticoats in the window, I acquiesced in the

fancy, to my coarser sense invisible, that she would have discovered at a glance!

innovation as an inevitable concession to the kindred emporiums of the West-end. She is a mode; I ceased to think the dolls' prayer- tender-hearted young person, and frequently book very irreverent; and, one day, when some- sheds tears when she mentions the shops where body had died at the great milliner's next door, children's things are sold: expatiating in a very and the portals were hung with black, with soft and womanish manner on the tiny boots and the escutcheon of the deceased's initials, and shoes, the miniature socks and gloves, the dainty the bier was at the door with the tapers and little shirts and caps and hoods, that are by the holy water, I turned to the window of the women regarded as the apples of their eyes, good Caliph of Bagdad, and looked long and but which we ruder men-folk pass by in indifanxiously for symptoms of a doll's coffin or a dolls' ference or in unconsciousness. I only wish that winding-sheet, or for some notification that young person had been with me, in the days funereal pomps were performed under the aus- when I first became acquainted with the good pices of the Caliph for the dolls who died. I found, Caliph of Bagdad. Ah! the smiles she would indeed, not these; but there were, really, several have smiled, the happy tears she would have complete suits of dolls' mourning-morsels of shed, beholding that potentate in his golden millinery furnished forth with crape, and bom-prime! The many little odds and ends of pretty bazine, and black bugles; and the sight of these little sable vanities made me laugh a bitter laugh, and think there might be often quite as I took the Caliph's childishnesses, I hope, in much, or as little, genuine grief in a doll's mourn- my time, kindly, and regarded them in no morose ing, as in the black weeds we wear for grown up or cynical spirit. I tried to banish from my mind men and women. Ladies in black came often to the notion that the Caliph was a profound and buy mourning dolls for their children. The Machiavellic politician, and that, bearing Béchildren themselves came in great state to select ranger's immortal song of the "Infinitely Little" articles for their dolls' toilettes. It used to be in his mind, he intended his wardrobe-shop to a rare sight, to see little misses of eight or ten, be a satirical microcosm of Petty France, of the gravely turning over the multifarious trifles, now Human Smallnesses of Bagdad, and of the discarding this as out of the fashion, or cen-world: a foreshadowing of the time when the suring that as inimical to the laws of harmony, Infinitely Little was to reign on earth; when or the prismatic fitnesses of contrast. I need little regiments beating little drums, and scarcely say that the Caliph's customers were dragging little cannon, were to wage little almost exclusively of the wealthiest and most wars on little frontiers for little quarrels' aristocratic classes. The good Caliph did not sakes; and when little priests would brandish make for poor lolls. He was man-milliner to little crucifixes and mutter little curses from the Brahmins and the rich Baboos, not to the their little lips, till at last a great man came Pariahs and sweepers. I remember seeing, one and put priests and people-all the Lilliputians fine afternoon, a miniature princess, by herself |--into his pocket. I say I banished the theory; (the meek governess counted for nothing), in a I tried, instead, to think how happy we should grand barouche drawn by magnificent black all be, if the world were a nursery, and dolls and horses with silvered harness, and two footmen little children had the best of it; how blest sitting behind with folded arms: their furred would be the age in which the greatest repelisses-it was semi-wintertime-arranged sym-ward were a toy or a sweetmeat, and the metrically over the reredos of the dickey, drive greatest sorrow a good cry;" and the direst up to the Caliph's establishment. The barouche effect of a revolution the deposition of a was all over heraldic quarterings; and I have nurse, and the enactment of a solemn edict no doubt that the little girl in the frock and abolishing the capital punishments of whipping the fringed sombrero, with a pheasant's-wing and the corner. Then I awoke to the Actualifeather in it, was a princess in good earnest. She ties, and found no four-leaved shamrock in the was too high and mighty to alight, and the good Caliph's shop; but, after many moons, I weaned Caliph himself came out to her with his wares myself from the doll-world, and went forth into in a pasteboard box, and she fingered and flirted the real one of men and women, walking back with them daintily and mincingly, to the immense streets no more. So I came to forget my grief, and amusement of your humble servant, and the laboured and prospered; and though idle this pleased astonishment of an honest negro servant theme and shallow this philosophy, I gleaned a -attached, I believe, to the suite of Mrs. General store of good human things-albeit the fat Zebedee Colepepper, U.S., then staying at the Frenchman and the wasp-waisted matron recked Hôtel du Louvre, and who had come to the little of them-from the toy-wardrobe of the Caliph's to buy a muff and a bandbox for his good Caliph of Bagdad. little piccaninny missee.

There is a young person in England to whom I am partial, who has a particular penchant for going into the City: not with the view of seeing parties" there, of getting bills discounted any there, of speculating on the Stock Exchange or in the Share Market, but to look at the shop windows, whose stores she declares to be much wealthier and more interesting than in the

I

66

CLASSIC GROUND.

GAVE the reins to Fancy, as the day

Withdrew its golden presence from my room,
Had glimpses of old grandeurs passed away.
And, noble in their glory and their gloom,
And there was Greece, with all her greatness, gone-
A sounding pageant on the track of time;
And Athens, rising from her sleep sublime,
Set on her queenly brow the Parthenon.

And Wisdom sought again his ancient height,
And Music revelled in her wonted isles,
And Beauty gave once more divinest smiles
To scenes rejoicing in her early light.

And then uprose proud Venice from her waves,
Dipped in a golden sheen of sea and sky,
And visions of old splendours glimmered by,
And regal phantoms, called from grandest graves;
With thoughts of Tasso, and the gondoliers

Who filled each moonlit vista with his lays;
The pity and the pride of olden days,
Othello's wrong and Belvidera's tears.
Until there came a tumult, and the cry

Of rushing peoples, maddened with their fame,
Led like one living ocean by a name
To touch the purple robe of Victory;
When mightier still swept past the awful shade
Of world-commanding and imperial Rome,
Rich in triumphal arch and heaving dome,
Proud soaring pillar, and long colonnade.
Till in her later ruin, sadly grand,

She raised, from desolation darkly spread,
The semblance of a hoary, crownless head,
That leant upon a cold, unsceptred hand.
Then, mist-like, faded Athens, Venice, Rome;
And Fancy, from her dream of power and art
Returned to dearer places, found the heart
Still lingering in the quiet paths of home!

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

I TRAVEL Constantly, up and down a certain line of railway that has a terminus in London. It is the railway for a large military depôt, and for other large barracks. To the best of my serious belief, I have never been on that railway by daylight, without seeing some handcuffed deserters in the train.

soldier's. Not disputed. But, let us at least do our duty towards him.

I had got back again to that rich and beautiful port where I had looked after Mercantile Jack, and I was walking up a hill there, on a wild March morning. My conversation with my official friend Pangloss, by whom I was accidentally accompanied, took this direction as we took the up-hill direction, because the object of my uncommercial journey was to see some discharged soldiers who had recently come home from India. There were men of HAVELOCK's among them; there were men who had been in many of the great battles of the great Indian campaign, among them; and I was curious to note what our discharged soldiers looked like, when they were done with.

I was not the less interested (as I mentioned to my official friend Pangloss) because these men had claimed to be discharged, when their right to be discharged was not admitted. They had behaved with unblemished fidelity and bravery; but a change of circumstances had arisen, which, as they considered, put an end to their compact and entitled them to enter on a new one. Their demand had been blunderingly resisted by the authorities in India; but, it is to be presumed that the men were not far wrong, inasmuch as the bungle had ended in their being sent home discharged, in pursuance of orders from home. (There was an immense waste of money, of course.)

Under these circumstances thought I, as I walked up the hill, on which I accidentally encountered my official friend-under these circumstances of the men having successfully opposed themselves to the Pagoda Department of that great Circumlocution Office, on which the sun in-never sets and the light of reason never rises, the Pagoda Department will have been particularly careful of the national honour. It will have shown these men, in the scrupulous good faith, not to say the generosity, of its dealing with them, that great national authorities can have no small retaliations and revenges. It will have made every provision for their health on the passage home, and will have landed them, restored from their campaigning fatigues by a sea-voyage, pure air, sound food, and good medicines. And I pleased myself with dwelling beforehand, on the great accounts of their personal treatment which these men would carry into their various towns and villages, and on the increasing popularity of the service that would insensibly follow. 1 almost began to hope that the hitherto-neverfailing deserters on my railroad, would by-and-by become a phenomenon.

It is in the nature of things that such an stitution as our English army should have many bad and troublesome characters in it. But, this is a reason for, and not against, its being made as acceptable as possible to well-disposed men of decent behaviour. Such men are assuredly not tempted into the ranks, by the beastly inversion of natural laws, and the compulsion to live in worse than swinish foulness. Accordingly, when any such Circumlocutional embellishments of the soldier's condition have of late been brought to notice, we civilians, seated in outer darkness cheerfully meditating on an Income Tax, have considered the matter as being our business, and have shown a tendency to declare that we would rather not have it misregulated, if such declaration may, without violence to the Church Catechism, be hinted to those who are put in authority over us.

Any animated description of a modern battle, any private soldier's letter published in the newspapers, any page of the records of the Victoria Cross, will show that in the ranks of the army, there exists under all disadvantages as fine a sense of duty as is to be found in any station on earth. Who doubts that if we all did our duty as faithfully as the soldier does his, this world would be a better place? There may be greater difficulties in our way than in the

In this agreeable frame of mind I entered the workhouse of Liverpool.-For, the cultivation of laurels in a sandy soil, had brought the soldiers in question to that abode of Glory.

Before going into their wards to visit them, I inquired how they had made their triumphant entry there? They had been brought through the rain in carts, it seemed, from the landingplace to the gate, and had then been carried up-stairs on the backs of paupers.

Their

cheeks, the awful brightness of the deep-set eyes, the lips of lead, the hands of ivory, the recumbent human images lying in the shadow of death with a kind of solemn twilight on them, like the sixty who had died aboard the ship and were lying at the bottom of the sea, O Pangloss, GOD forgive you!

nounced him, alone, to be a young man aged by famine and sickness. As we were standing by the Irish soldier's bed, I mentioned my perplexity to the Doctor. He took a board with an inscription on it from the head of the Irishman's bed, and asked me what age I supposed that man to be? I had observed him with In one bed, lay a man whose life had been attention while talking to him, and answered, saved (as it was hoped) by deep incisions in the confidently, "Fifty." The doctor, with a pityfeet and legs. While I was speaking to him, a ing glance at the patient, who had dropped into nurse came up to change the poultices which a stupor again, put the board back, and said, this operation had rendered necessary, and I"Twenty-Four." had an instinctive feeling that it was not well to All the arrangements of the wards were exturn away, merely to spare myself. He was cellent. They could not have been more husorely wasted and keenly susceptible, but the mane, sympathising, gentle, attentive, or wholeefforts he made to subdue any expression of some. The owners of the ship, too, had done impatience or suffering, were quite heroic. It all they could, liberally. There were bright was casy to see, in the shrinking of the figure, fires in every room, and the convalescent men and the drawing of the bed-clothes over the were sitting round them, reading various papers head, how acute the endurance was, and it made and periodicals. I took the liberty of inviting me shrink too, as if I were in pain; but, when my official friend Pangloss to look at those conthe new bandages were on, and the poor feet valescent men, and to tell me whether their were composed again, he made an apology for faces and bearing were or were not, generally, himself (though he had not uttered a word), and the faces and bearing of steady, respectable said plaintively, "I am so tender and weak, you soldiers? The master of the workhouse, oversee, sir!" Neither from him nor from any one hearing me, said that he had had a pretty large sufferer of the whole ghastly number, did I hear a experience of troops, and that better conducted complaint. Of thankfulness for present solicitude men than these, he had. never had to do and care, I heard much; of complaint, not a word. with. They were always (he added) as we I think I could have recognised in the dis-saw them. And of us visitors (I add) they malest skeleton there, the ghost of a soldier. knew nothing whatever, except that we were Something of the old air was still latent in the there. palest shadow of life that I talked to. One It was audacious in me, but I took another emaciated creature, in the strictest literality worn to the bone, lay stretched on his back, looking so like death that I asked one of the doctors if he were not dying, or dead? A few kind words from the doctor, in his ear, and he opened his eyes, and smiled-looked, in a moment, as if he would have made a salute, if he could. "We shall pull him through, please God," said the Doctor. Plase God, surr, and thankye," said the patient. You are much better to-day; are you not ?" said the Doctor. "Plase God, surr; 'tis the slape I want, surr; 'tis my breathin' makes the nights so long." "He is a careful fellow this, you must know," said the Doctor, cheerfully; "it was raining hard when they put him in the open cart to bring him here, and he had the presence of mind to ask-to have a sovereign taken out of his pocket that he had there, and a cab engaged. Probably it saved his life." The patient rattled out the skeleton of a laugh, and said, proud of the story, ''Deed, surr, an open cairt was a comical means o' bringin' a dyin' man here, and a clever way to kill him." You might have sworn to him for a soldier when he said it.

liberty with Pangloss. Prefacing it with the observation that, of course, I knew beforehand that there was not the faintest desire, anywhere, to hush up any part of this dreadful business, and that the Inquest was the fairest of all possible Inquests, I besought four things of Pangloss. Firstly, to observe that the Inquest was not held in that place, but at some distance off. Secondly, to look round upon those helpless spectres in their beds. Thirdly, to remember that the witnesses produced from among them before that Inquest, could not have been selected because they were the men who had the most to tell it, but because they happened to be in a state admitting of their safe removal. Fourthly, to say whether the Coroner and Jury could have come there, to those pillows, and taken a little evidence? My official friend declined to commit himself to a reply.

There was a sergeant, reading, in one of the fireside groups; as he was a man of a very intelligent countenance, and as I have a great respect for non-commissioned officers as a class, I sat down on the nearest bed, to have some talk with him. (It was the bed of one of the grisliest of the poor skeletons, and he died soon afterwards.)

"I was glad to see, in the evidence of an officer at the Inquest, sergeant, that he never saw men behave better on board ship than these men."

One thing had perplexed me very much in going from bed to bed. A very significant and cruel thing. I could find no young man, but one. He had attracted my notice, by having got up and dressed himself in his soldier's jacket and trousers, with the intention of sitting by the fire; but he had found himself too weak, and had crept back to his bed and laid himself I was glad to see, too, that every man had down on the outside of it. I could have pro- a hammock."

They did behave very well, sir."