Along Oxford Street, despite the Bank Holidays Act, many shops are open, chiefly those devoted to the sale of articles eatable, drinkable, and avoidable; these last being in the shape of chemists' shops, and shops for Christmas presents—to be shunned by miserly old bachelors. Let us turn into the British Museum and see sensible, decorous Boxing-day there. At the corner of Museum Street there is a lively itinerant musician, evidently French, who plays the fiddle until his bow tumbles all to pieces, but he goes on playing with the stick as though nothing had happened. When his instrument has come entirely to grief he turns to a clarionet, which he carries under his arm, and plays "Mourir pour la Patrie" with extraordinary vocal effect and irreverent gestures. Punch-and-Judy is largely attended at the other end; Punch is kitchen-pokering his wife, too, like the gentleman we have just left; but we pass in with the crowds to the Museum itself. Halting a moment in the reading-room, to jot down there a few notes, one is struck with the scanty show of students. They are spending Boxing-day somewhere else. Passing through the little knot of people who are permitted by special order to come as far as the door of the reading-room, and who evidently regard the readers as some curious sort of animal exhibited for their special delectation—perhaps the book-"worm" of which they have heard so much—we go up the stairs, now thronged with crowds in unwonted broadcloth and fragrant with the odour of the inevitable orange. Next to the drinking fountain, which is decidedly the chief attraction, comes the gorilla, and then the extinct animals. One stout old lady, contemplating the megatherium and mastodon, inquires in what parts "them creeturs" are to be found, and seems considerably damped by being informed that Nature has been "out" of such articles for several aeons. The mummies, with the bones of their toes sticking out, also come in for a large share of admiration. There is a good deal of rough flirtation going on; but, on the whole, the pleasure is rather of a placid order, though still contrasting favourably with the settled gloom visible on the faces of the attendants in the various galleries. How well we can understand such gloom! How utterly hateful must that giant elk and overgrown extinct armadillo be to a man condemned to spend a lifetime in their close contemplation!

But let us pass on to the artistic Boxing-day keepers at the National Gallery. The walk will take us through the Seven Dials, and can scarcely fail to be suggestive. It is now one o'clock, the traditional hour of dinner; and in Broad Street, St. Giles's, I see, for the first time to-day, the human barometer evidently standing at "much wet." A gentleman in a grey coat and red comforter, who bears palpable signs of having been more than once on his back, has just reached that perplexing point of inebriety when he can walk quickly or run, but cannot stand still or walk steadily. He is pursued by small children, mostly girls, after whom, every now and then, he runs hopelessly, to their intense gratification. The poultry and bird shops in the Seven Dials are objects of some attraction, though they savour too much of "business" to be in very great force. The National Gallery is crowded with unaccustomed art students. There is about the visitors a quiet air of doing their duty, and being determined to go through with it at any price. One brazen-faced quean speculates audibly—in fact, very audibly—as to which "picter" she should choose if she had her "pick," and decent matrons pass the particularly High Art of the old masters with half-averted gaze, as though they were not quite sure of doing right in countenancing such exhibitions. Hogarth's evergreen "Marriage a la Mode" is a great centre of attraction, and the youngsters never tire of listening, as "with weeping and with laughter still is the story told" over and over again by their elders. Gainsborough's likeness of Mrs. Siddons is also a great favourite; but perhaps the picture that attracts most attention is Van Eyck's "John Arnolfini, of Lucca, and his Wife." The gentleman wears a portentous hat, which tickled the fancy of the Boxing-day people immensely. There were great speculations too among them as to whether the curious Tuscan pictures at the top of the stairs were "needlework" or not. Still, who shall say that these visitors were not the better for their visit, surrounded as they were by forms of beauty on every side, even if they did not examine them with the eyes of connoisseurs?

Boxing-day on the river: The silent street is almost deserted. There is no rush for the Express boat to-day. It is literally the streets—muddier and sloppier than the Thames itself—that are the attraction. Some little boys are making the trip from Westminster to London Bridge as a treat; and it is an intense joke with them to pretend to be dreadfully seasick. Boxing-day in the City is synonymous with stagnation. It is a howling wilderness, with nobody to howl. On the Metropolitan Railway I verily believe travellers were tripping it like the little boys on board the penny boat. And so theatre time draws on, and the interest of Boxing-day grows to a climax. Soon after five o'clock groups furtively collect outside the playhouses, half-ashamed of being so early, but gathering courage from numbers to form the disorderly queue, so unlike that of a Parisian theatre. Boxing-night in the theatres others will describe. It is too much to expect of one whose mission has been the whole day long on the streets.



CHAPTER XVIII.

THE VIGIL OF THE DERBY.

In those days—happily now gone by—when public strangulation was the mode in Merry England, there was always an evident fascination appertaining to the spot where, on the morrow, some guilty wretch was to expiate his crimes on the gallows. Long before the erection of that elegant apparatus commenced, and generally on a Sunday evening, when decent citizens had newly come from houses of God, where they had heard the message of life, crowds began to collect on that central spot in the heart of the great City dedicated to sudden and violent death. The coming event seemed to cast its shadow before; and throughout the night the roisterer or belated traveller made a detour to visit the human shambles. I confess to having felt the attraction. I could not then bring myself to be present at the strangulation proper; so, as the nearest approach to a "sensation," sometimes visited Newgate on the eve of the victim elect's last morrow. In the same way, being unfortunate enough to be London-bound on the day of our great annual holiday, and having heard graphic accounts of the Downs on the eve of the Derby, I determined that year, as I could not go to the race by day, to visit the racecourse by night. Let me own the soft impeachment: I am not a racing man—not in any degree "horsey." When I do go to the Derby it is to see the bipeds rather than the quadrupeds; to empty the hamper from Fortnum and Mason's, rather than to study the "names, weights, and colours of the riders" on the "c'rect card." If you prefer to have the sentiment in Latin—and there is no doubt Latin does go much farther than English—I am not one of those "quos pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat," except in so far that "homo sum; nihil humanum alienum a me puto." It was to see humanity under a new aspect, I took the last train to Epsom on the eve of the Derby.

In order to combine business with pleasure, and economy with both, I took a third-class ticket at Victoria, and was fortunate enough to find a compartment already partially occupied by a nigger troupe. In this, which under ordinary circumstances I should have avoided, I took my seat, and was regaled all the way down with choice morceaux from the repertoire of my musical friends. The "talking man" of the party, too, enlivened the proceedings by anxiously inquiring of the porters at the different stations what they would take in the way of refreshment, and issuing unlimited orders to imaginary waiters on their behoof. It was a strange sensation, being whirled away from home and bed down to a wild heath towards midnight; and as we neared our destination, the air began to "bite shrewdly," and the sky to look uncommonly like rain—a contretemps which would have been fatal to my proposed experience. We had to change carriages at Sutton, and here a sociable Aunt-Sally-man, struggling under the implements of his craft, sought to beguile me from my African friends by offers of a shake-down in his tent, with which he proposed to walk across from Ewell and erect, instead of journeying on to Epsom. My Ethiopian friends jumped at the proposal, and forthwith fraternized with Aunt Sally. I determined to follow out my previous plans; so having drunk to our next merry meeting, we parted, ostensibly until to-morrow, but, I fear, for ever.

I had been led to expect "high jinks" at Epsom—a sort of Carnival in the quiet town. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The town, so far as outward semblance went, was almost as quiet as ever. A few sporting men thronged the bar of the principal hotel, and stragglers hung about the low beer-shops; but there was nothing at all to indicate the imminence of the great event. So I fell back on my usual expedient of applying to the executive, and found not only an active and intelligent but exceedingly civil sergeant of police, to whom I told my errand. He was pleased with the novelty of the idea, and as he happened to be then going the round of the town previously to visiting the course, I cast in my lot with him for the night. We first visited what he termed the "German Opera," on Epsom Common. This is an encampment of organ-grinders, hurdy-gurdy-players, German bands, &c., who pitch their tents here instead of going to the Downs. It was, however, rather late when we reached the spot where these artists were bivouacking, and they had retired for the night, so we could not form much idea of them beyond their numbers, which seemed considerable, and their odour, which was unfragrant. Thence we passed down a short alley to a railway arch, which was aglow with many fires, and rang with the sounds of many voices. Bidding me make no observation, whatever might be said, and requesting me to try and look like an officer in plain clothes, my cicerone led me into the strange arcade, which I certainly could not have entered without his protection. Hundreds of men, women, and boys were gathered in groups round coke fires, some partaking of coffee, others singing, the majority sleeping. After satisfying himself that the fires were legitimate ones, and not composed of broken fences, my guide left this teeming hive unmolested. We then steered for the course, not by the high road, but skirting it along the fields. The policeman, like myself, carried a stout stick, which really seemed to be endowed with creative powers that night. Wherever he poked that staff—and he did poke it everywhere—a human being growled, or snored, or cursed. Every bush along the hedgerow bore its occupant—often its group of four or five, sometimes a party of a dozen or a score. One shed filled with carts yielded at least a hundred, though the sergeant informed me it must have been already cleared several times that evening, as he had a file of men along the road, besides a cordon inside the Park palings, which border a great portion of it. It is with these palings the tramps chiefly do mischief, pulling them down to make fires along their route. Wherever my guide found these, he trampled the fires remorselessly out, and kicked the burning embers over the sleepers in a manner that must have been uncomfortable. The men submitted in comparative silence; but the ladies—where there happened to be any—exerted the privilege of their sex, and treated us to some choice specimens of the vernacular. In one case, a female cried out that he was kicking the fire over the "childer;" and, sure enough, we found half-a-dozen little ones huddled up asleep. The policeman remonstrated with her for bringing them to such a place; but she informed us it was to "make their living." In what way, she did not add. To us, it seemed very much like reversing the process, and causing their death. Fancy young children camping out on the road to the Downs at midnight! Boys of thirteen and fourteen abounded, sleeping in large groups along the hedgerows, and sometimes out in the open fields, where the dew lay thick.

At length, after many windings, we reached the Downs. The white booths, following the direction of the course in their sinuous lines, looked like stately white marble streets and crescents in the dim, uncertain light of that hour which, between May 31 and June 1, is neither day nor night. Under the stands and around the booths, tabernacling beneath costermongers' barrows, and even lying out openly sub dio, were still the hundreds of human beings. In one small drinking booth was a sight the policeman said he had never seen equalled in his twenty years' experience. A long, narrow table ran down the centre, with benches on each side. The table itself was occupied with recumbent figures; on the benches the sleepers sat, bending forward over it, and under the benches sleepers sprawled upon the grass. The whole of the front of the booth was open, and exposed to the biting wind; but there they snored as calmly as though on eider-down. We climbed the steps of the stand above the ring, and waited for the day, which slowly broke to the song of the lark and nightingale over that strange scene. With the first suspicion of dawn the sleepers awoke and got up; what for I cannot imagine. It was barely two o'clock, and how they were going to kill the next twelve hours I could not guess. Rise they did however, and an itinerant vendor of coffee, who was literally up with the lark, straightway began to drive a roaring trade. I saw no stronger drink than this consumed; nor did I witness a single case of drunkenness during the whole night. But this was before the Derby! At this juncture we were all surprised by the apparition of a hansom-lamp toiling up the hill. Two adventurous gentlemen from Liverpool, it appeared, had arrived at the Euston Station, and insisted upon being driven at once to an hotel on Epsom Downs. The Jehu, secure of a fabulous fare, drove them accordingly; and, of course, had to drive them back again to Epsom—the hotels on the Downs quietly but firmly declining to be knocked up at that untimely hour even by gentlemen from Liverpool. As the sun showed his first up-slanting rays above the horizon, with the morning star hanging impertinently near, the two gipsy encampments began to exhibit signs of life. The Zingari encamp exclusively by themselves, and some picturesque specimens of the male sex, looking remarkably like the lively photograph of the Greek brigands, showed themselves on the outskirts. The ladies reserved themselves for later in the day. My guide cautioned me not to attempt to enter the encampment, as the men are dangerous, and their position on the Downs a privileged one. It was only when the tramps were trespassing, or evidently bent on mischief, that they were disturbed. On the Downs they were monarchs of all they surveyed.

When the sun was fairly up, and the morning mists rolled away from those glorious Downs, I felt my mission accomplished. I had seen the sun rise on Epsom course. As it was many hours before a train would return, and I still felt fresh, I resolved to give the coup de grace to my night's adventure by walking home—at least, walking to the radius of workmen's trains. The vanguard of the Derby procession now began to show strongly in the shape of the great unwashed climbing the ridge of the hill by the paddock; and I felt I should see some characteristic sights along the road. Bidding good-bye, therefore, to my guide at Epsom, I set out on foot along the now-populous road, mine being the only face turned London-wards. Carts laden with trestles and boards for stands now began to be in force. By-and-by the well-known paper bouquets and outrageous head-gear showed themselves as forming the cargo of costermongers' carts. The travellers were all chatty, many of them chaffy. Frequent were the inquiries I had to answer as to the hour and the distance to the course. Occasionally a facetious gentleman anxiously inquired whether it was all over, as I was returning? I believe the majority looked upon me as a harmless lunatic, since I was travelling away from Epsom on the Derby morning, and pitied me accordingly. An Irishman aptly illustrated the genial character of Hibernian chaff as compared with English. "Good day to your honner!" he said. "It does me good to see your honner's happy face again;" though, of course, he had never seen it before. As I passed on with a brief salutation, he took the trouble to run after me, and slapping me on the shoulder, added, in a beautiful brogue: "Wait a minnit; I don't want to ax you for anything, but only to tell you how glad I am to see yer honner's happy face agin. Good mornin'!"

So through Ewell, Cheam, and Morden, up to Tooting; the throng increasing at every mile. At Balham, finding no train for an hour, I footed it again. I found preparations for endless Aunt Sally already being made on Clapham Common. Soon after six, I jumped into a train on the London, Chatham, and Dover, and came home "with the milk;" having not only had a healthy night's exercise—for the weather had all along been splendid—but having added to my experiences of London life one new "wrinkle" at least: I had seen the life of St. Giles's kitchen and Bethnal Green lodging-house a la campagne. What I had already seen under the garish candlelight of the Seven Dials and Commercial Road I saw gilded into picturesqueness by that glorious and never-to-be-forgotten sunrise on Epsom Downs which ushered in the Derby Day.



CHAPTER XIX.

THE WIFESLAYER'S "HOME."

There is something very weird and strange in that exceptional avocation which takes one to-day to a Lord Mayor's feast or a croquet tournament, to-morrow to a Ritualistic service, next day to the home of a homicide. I am free to confess that each has its special attractions for me. I am very much disposed to "magnify my office" in this respect, not from any foolish idea that I am "seeing life," as it is termed, but still from a feeling that the proper study of mankind is man in all his varied aspects.

It need not always be a morbid feeling that takes one to the scene of a murder or other horrible event, though, as we well know, the majority of those who visit such localities do go out of mere idle curiosity. It may be worth while, however, for some who look a little below the surface of things, to gauge, as it were, the genius loci, and see whether, in the influences surrounding the spot and its inhabitants there be anything to afford a clue as to the causes of the crime.

In summing up the evidence concerning a certain tragedy at Greenwich, where a man killed his wife by throwing a knife, the coroner "referred to the horrible abode—a coal cellar—in which the family, nine in number, had resided, which was unfit for human habitation, and ought to have been condemned by the parish authorities." Having seen and described in these pages something of how the poor are housed in the cellars of St. Giles's and Bethnal Green, and traced the probable influences of herding together the criminal and innocent in the low lodging-houses, it occurred to me to visit the scene of this awful occurrence, and see how far the account given before the coroner's jury was correct.

With this view I took the train to Greenwich, and, consulting the first policeman I met, was by him directed to Roan Street as the scene of the tragedy. Roan Street I found to be a somewhat squalid by-street, running out of Skelton Street, close—it seemed significantly close—to the old parish church. One could not help thinking of the familiar proverb, "The nearer the church, the farther from God." The actual locality is called Munyard's Row, being some dozen moderate-sized houses in Roan Street, let out in lodgings, the particular house in question being again, with a horrible grotesqueness, next door but one to a beer-shop called the "Hit or Miss!" I expected to find Roan Street the observed of all observers, but the nine days' wonder was over since what Dickens called the "ink-widge." Indeed, a homicide has ceased to be a nine days' wonder now. This only happened on Saturday; and when I was there, on the following Wednesday, Roan Street had settled down into its wonted repose. A woman with a child was standing on the door-step, and, on my inquiring if I could see the kitchen, referred me to Mrs. Bristow at the chandler's shop, who farms the rent of these populous tenements; for Munyard's Row is peopled "from garret to basement," and a good way underground too.

Mrs. Bristow, a civil, full-flavoured Irishwoman, readily consented to act cicerone, and we went through the passage into the back garden, where all the poor household furniture of the homicide's late "home" was stacked. It did not occupy a large space, consisting only of the bedstead on which the poor woman sat when the fatal deed was done, two rickety tables, and two chairs. These were all the movables of a family of nine. The mattress was left inside—too horrible a sight, after what had taken place, to be exposed to the light of day.

We passed—Honora Bristow and myself—with a "gossip" or two, who had come to see what I was after, into the back kitchen, for the wifeslayer had two rooms en suite, though the family elected to occupy only one. The floor of this apartment was either mother earth, or, if flagged, so grimed with filth as to be a very fair resemblance of the soil. Here stood only that terrible memento, the drenched mattress. In the front kitchen—which, let me state, would have been palatial in comparison with the Seven Dials or Spitalfields, had it been only clean—there was very little light, for the window, which was well down below the surface of the pavement, had not a whole pane in it, and the broken ones had been stuffed up with old rags which were very protuberant indeed. That window alone would show that the menage had not been a judicious one.

"He was a quiet man," said Honora, "and gave trouble to no one. He and his wife never had a word." The gossips all believed that the story of the throwing the knife was true, notwithstanding the medical evidence went against it. The boy of twelve, who provoked the father to throw the knife, was evidently the incubus of the wretched home. "Almost before the breath was out of his mother, that boy was searching about the bed to see if he could find any ha'pence," said Honora. That boy was evidently not satisfactory. His evidence was refused by the Coroner, because he could not read or write. But then what had been the child's surroundings? They have been described above. The man himself had a patriarchal family of seven, from a girl of seventeen down to a baby of two, and all, as we have seen, slept in one room, though there were two, and though a bucket of whitewash would have made the pair habitable, besides giving the lad some useful employment.

The father was of no particular occupation, picking up odd jobs, and leaning largely to the shrimp trade. He stood high in Honora Bristow's regards as having regularly paid his 1s. 9d. a week for five years, or, at least, being some 5s. behind now; a sum which will probably be covered by the chattels in the back garden. The poor home was silent then. The mother lay calmly in the dead-house, after the post-mortem examination, "terrible cut and hacked about," said the one gossip who had ventured to go and see her quondam friend. The father was in Maidstone Gaol. The little children were being taken care of by the grandmother until such time as the mother should have been buried, when they would gravitate to the workhouse.

In the meantime the boy, aet. twelve, the cause of all the mischief, disports himself in Munyard's Row as though nothing had happened. Perhaps he is the most difficult part of the problem; but the whole question of the home is a puzzling one. The boy is evidently the product of the home. It very much concerns the community that such produce should become extinct; and therefore the sooner some improvements can be introduced into such homes the better. In the first place, there is decidedly too little light. Sunshine, under any circumstances, would have been impossible there. The advisability of human beings burrowing underground may be questioned, whether in cellars or genteel underground kitchens.

Then again, one bedroom—nay, one bedstead—for father, mother, and seven children ranging from seventeen to two is decidedly deficient. This sounds almost too horrible to be true; but I was careful to ascertain that the eldest girl, though in domestic service in Greenwich, slept at the "home." More horrible still is the fact disclosed, that they had a second room, yet had not the decency to use it. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum." They lived according to their light; but they had very little light, literally or figuratively. Surely we want to teach our poor the simple rules of hygiene. One of the gossips, a clean, healthy little woman, with a fine baby at her breast, referred with pride to her poor kitchen, identical in all respects, save dirt, with the home.

Then, again, there was one thing that struck me forcibly, and that was the sort of qualified reprobation with which these good gossips—really decent people in their way—spoke of the habit of throwing knives. Honora had once thrown one at her daughter of eighteen, but never meant to do so again. And all this under the bells of the old parish church of Greenwich in the year of grace 1870!

Clearly, however, the first question is what to do with the boy, aet. twelve. Comporting himself as he did in the face of the awful tragedy he had caused, this young gentleman must clearly not be lost sight of, or it will be the worse for himself and those with whom he is brought into contact. Nay, in a few years, he will become a centre of influence, and radiate around him another such "home," worse, perhaps, than the first.

Let our Social Science so far break through the programme it may have laid down as to touch on this very appropriate subject of squalid homes, and its next sitting may be a very useful one indeed.



CHAPTER XX.

BATHING IN THE FAR EAST.

Visions of Oriental splendour and magnificence float across the imagination at the mere mention of the storied East. Soaring above all the routine of ordinary existence and the commonplaces of history, that creative faculty within us pictures Pactolus with its golden sands; or recalls from the legendary records of childhood the pomp of Aladdin's Princess going to her luxurious bath; or brings back to mind the almost prosaic minuteness with which the Greek poet describes the bath of Ulysses when he returned from his wanderings. In the East the bath has ever been an institution—not merely a luxury, but a necessity; and it is a proof of the eclectic tendencies of our generation that we have domesticated here in the West that great institution, the Hammam, or Turkish bath, which the Romans were wise enough to adopt, after their Eastern experience, more than two thousand years ago. Of none of these Oriental splendours, however, has the present narrative to tell. I ask those interested in social questions to take a very early Sunday expedition to the East End of London, and catch a glimpse of those whom, after what I have to relate, it would be libel to call the "Great Unwashed." We will look at East London engaged in the interesting process of performing its ablutions.

Very enjoyable is a Saturday afternoon stroll in Victoria Park. Those gentlemen of London who sit at home at ease are apt to think of the East End as a collection of slums, with about as much breathing space for its congregated thousands as that supplied to the mites in a superannuated Cheshire cheese. Let us pass through Bethnal Green Road, and, leaving behind the new Museum, go under a magic portal into the stately acres which bear the name of our Sovereign. On our right is the Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, of which the foundation-stone was laid by the Prince Consort, and the new wing of which our Orientals hope one day to see opened by her Majesty in person. Most convincing test of all is the situation of this Consumptive Hospital—showing the salubrity of the Eastern breezes. Inside the imposing gate the visitor will find extensive cricket-grounds interspersed with broad pastures, whose flocks are the reverse of Arcadian in hue. Cricket-balls whiz about us like shells at Inkermann; and the suggestive "Thank you" of the scouts forces the passer-by into unwonted activity as he shies the ball to the bowler. Then there are roundabouts uncountable, and gymnasia abundant. There are bosquets for the love-makers, and glassy pools, studded with islands innumerable, over which many a Lady of the Lake steers her shallop, while Oriental sailor-boys canoe wildly along. There are flower-beds which need not blush to be compared with Kew or the Crystal Palace. But it is not with such that we are now concerned. On one of those same lakes over which, on Saturday evening, sailors in embryo float their mimic craft—and one young gentleman, slightly in advance of the rest, directs a very miniature steamship—we see boards suggesting that daily, from four to eight A.M., the Orientals may immerse themselves in the limpid and most tempting waters. The depth, they are paternally informed, increases towards the centre, buoys marking where it is six feet; so that our Eastern friends have no excuse for suicide by drowning.

East London birds are early birds, and to catch them at their bath you must be literally up with the lark. Towards six o'clock is the most fashionable hour for our metropolitan Pactolus; and, as it is some miles distant from what can, by any stretch of courtesy, be called the West End, and as there are no workmen's trains on a Sunday morning, a long walk or cab drive is inevitable for all who would witness the disporting of our amphibious Orientals. Rising thus betimes on a recent "Sunday morning before the bells did ring," I sped me to the bathing pond, judiciously screened off by shrubs from the main path. It was between the appointed hours that I arrived; and, long before I saw anything, the ringing laughter of the young East reached me through the shrubs. Threading the path which led to the lake, I found the water literally alive with men, boys, and hobbledehoys, revelling in the water like young hippopotami on the Nile. Boys were largely in the ascendant—boys from ten to fifteen years of age swam like young Leanders, and sunned themselves on the bank, in the absence of towels, as the preparative to dressing, or smoked their pipes in a state of nature. It is only just to say that while I remained, I heard little if any language that could be called "foul." Very free and easy, of course, were the remarks, and largely illustrative of the vulgar tongue; not without a share of light chaff directed against myself, whose presence by the lake-side puzzled my young friends. I received numerous invitations to "peel" and have a dip; and one young urchin assured me in the most patronizing way possible that he "wouldn't laugh at me" if I could not get on. The language may not have been quite so refined as that which I heard a few days before from the young gentlemen with tall hats and blue ties at Lord's; but I do say advisedly that it would more than bear comparison with that of the bathers in the Serpentine, where my ears have often been assailed with something far worse than anything I heard in East London. In the matter of clothes, too, the apparel of our young friends was indeed Eastern in its simplicity; yet they left it unprotected on the bank with a confidence that did honour to our common humanity in general, and to the regulations of Victoria Park in particular. Swimming in some sort was almost universal among the bathers, showing that their visit to the water was not an isolated event in their existence, but a constant as it is a wholesome habit. The Oriental population were for the most part apparently well fed; and one saw there lithe and active frames, either careering gracefully along in the old style of swimming, or adopting the new and scientific method which causes the human form divine to approach very nearly to the resemblance of a rather excited grampus.

But inexorable Time warns the youthful bathers that they must sacrifice to the Graces; and some amusing incidents occur during the process. Generally speaking, though the amount of attire is not excessive, considerable effort in the way of pinning and hitching is required to get things in their proper places. A young gentleman was reduced to inexpressible grief, and held up to the scorn of his fellow-bathers, by the fact that, in the course of his al fresco toilette, one of his feet went through his inexpressibles in an honourable quarter, instead of proceeding by the proper route; the error interested his friends vastly—for they are as critical as the most fastidious could be of any singularity in attire, and they held the unfortunate juvenile in his embarrassing position for a long time, to his intense despair, until he was rescued from his ignoble position by some grown-up friend. Then, the young East is prone to the pleasures of tobacco. It was, I presume, before breakfast with most of the bathers, and smoking under those conditions is a trial even to the experienced. Some, pale from their long immersion—for theirs was no transient dip—grew paler still after they had discussed the pipe or cigar demanded of them by rigorous custom. Fashion reigns supreme among the gamins of the East as well as among the ladies of the West. Off they went, however, cleaner and fresher than before—tacitly endorsing by their matutinal amusement the motto that has come down from the philosopher of old, and even now reigns supreme from Bermondsey to Belgravia, that "water is a most excellent thing."

The day may arrive perhaps when, having embanked the Thames, we shall follow suit to the Seine and the Rhine, by tenanting it with cheap baths for the many. Until we do so, the stale joke of the "Great Unwashed" recoils upon ourselves, and is no less symptomatic of defective sanitary arrangements than the possibility of a drought in Bermondsey. But we are forgetting our bathers. They have gone, leaving the place to solitude—some, I hope, home to breakfast, others out among the flower-walks or on the greensward. It is a gloomy, overcast, muggy, unseasonable July morning; and the civil attendant by the lake-side tells me that the gathering has not been so large as usual. The young Orientals—as is the custom of their race—love sunshine. They get little enough of it, Heaven knows. The next bright Sunday morning, any one who happens to be awake between the hours mentioned, and who would like to add to his experiences of metropolitan existence, may do a worse thing, and see many a less pleasant sight, than if he hailed a hansom and drove by the principal entrance of Victoria Park to our Eastern Bath.



CHAPTER XXI.

AMONG THE QUAKERS.

There is no more engaging or solemn subject of contemplation than the decay of a religious belief. Right or wrong, by that faith men have lived and died, perhaps for centuries; and one cannot see it pass out from the consciousness of humanity without something more than a cursory thought as to the reasons of its decadence. Being led by exceptional causes to take a more than common interest in those forms of belief which lie beyond the pale of the Church of England, I was attracted by a notice in the public journals that on the following morning the Society of Friends would assemble from all parts of England and open a Conference to inquire into the causes which had brought about the impending decay of their body. So, then, the fact of such decay stood confessed. In most cases the very last persons to realize the unwelcome truth are those who hold the doctrines that are becoming effete. Quakerism must, I felt, be in a very bad condition indeed when its own disciples called together a conference to account for its passing away. Neither men nor communities, as a rule, act crowner's 'quest on their own decease. That faith, it was clear, must be almost past praying for which, disbelieving, as our modern Quietism does, the efficacy of assemblies, and trusting all to the inward illumination of individuals, should yet summon a sort of Quaker Oecumenical Council. I thought I should like to probe this personal light myself, and by inquiring of one or two of the members of the body, learn what they thought of the matter. I was half inclined to array myself in drab, and tutoyer the first of the body I chanced to encounter in my walks abroad. But then it occurred to me how very seldom one did meet a Quaker nowadays except in the "month of Maying." I actually had to cast about for some time before I could select from a tolerably wide and heterogeneous circle of acquaintance two names of individuals belonging to the Society of Friends; though I could readily remember half a dozen of every other culte, from Ultramontanes down to Jumpers. These two, at all events, I would "interview," and so forestall the Conference with a little select synod of my own.

It was possible, of course, to find a ludicrous side to the question; but, as I said, I approached it seriously. Sydney Smith, with his incorrigible habit of joking, questioned the existence of Quaker babies—a position which, if proven, would, of course, at once account for the diminution of adult members of the sect. It was true I had never seen a Quaker infant; but I did not therefore question their existence, any more than I believed postboys and certain humble quadrupeds to be immortal because I had never seen a dead specimen of either. The question I acknowledged at once to be a social and religious, not a physiological one. Why is Quakerism, which has lived over two hundred years, from the days of George Fox, and stood as much persecution as any system of similar age, beginning to succumb to the influences of peace and prosperity? Is it the old story of Capua and Cannae over again? Perhaps it is not quite correct to say that it is now beginning to decline; nor, as a fact, is this Conference the first inquiry which the body itself has made into its own incipient decay. It is even said that symptoms of such an issue showed themselves as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century; and prize essays have been from time to time written as to the causes, before the Society so far fell in with the customs of the times as to call a council for the present very difficult and delicate inquiry. The first prize essay by William Rountree attributes the falling off to the fact that the early Friends, having magnified a previously slighted truth—that of the Indwelling Word—fell into the natural error of giving it an undue place, so depriving their representations of Christian doctrine of the symmetry they would otherwise have possessed, and influencing their own practices in such a way as to contract the basis on which Christian fellowship rests. A second prize essay, called "The Peculium," takes a still more practical view, and points out in the most unflattering way that the Friends, by eliminating from their system all attention to the arts, music, poetry, the drama, &c., left nothing for the exercise of their faculties save eating, drinking, and making money. "The growth of Quakerism," says Mr. T. Hancock, the author of this outspoken essay, "lies in its enthusiastic tendency. The submission of Quakers to the commercial tendency is signing away the life of their own schism. Pure enthusiasm and the pursuit of money (which is an enthusiasm) can never coexist, never co-operate; but," he adds, "the greatest loss of power reserved for Quakerism is the reassumption by the Catholic Church of those Catholic truths which Quakerism was separated to witness and to vindicate."

I confess myself, however, so far Quaker too that I care little for the written testimony of friends or foes. I have, in all my religious wanderings and inquiries, adopted the method of oral examination; so I found myself on a recent November morning speeding off by rail to the outskirts of London to visit an ancient Quaker lady whom I knew very slenderly, but who I had heard was sometimes moved by the spirit to enlighten a little suburban congregation, and was, therefore, I felt the very person to enlighten me too, should she be thereunto moved. She was a venerable, silver-haired old lady, clad in the traditional dress of her sect, and looking very much like a living representation of Elizabeth Fry. She received me very cordially; though I felt as if I were a fussy innovation of the nineteenth century breaking in upon the sacred, old-fashioned quiet of her neat parlour. She "thee'd and thou'd" me to my heart's content: and—to summarize the conversation I held with her—it was to the disuse of the old phraseology and the discarding of the peculiar dress that she attributed most of the falling off which she was much too shrewd a woman of the world to shut her eyes to. These were, of course, only the outward and visible signs of a corresponding change within; but this was why the Friends fell off, and gravitated, as she confessed they were doing, to steeple-houses, water-dipping, and bread-and-wine-worship. She seemed to me like a quiet old Prophetess Anna chanting a "Nunc Dimittis" of her own on the passing away of her faith. She would be glad to depart before the glory had quite died out. She said she did not hope much from the Conference, and, to my amazement, rather gloried in the old irreverent title given by the Independents to her forefathers from their "quaking and trembling" when they heard the Word of God, though she preferred still more the older title of "Children of the Light." She was, in fact, a rigid old Conservative follower of George Fox, from the top of her close-bordered cap to the skirts of her grey silk gown. I am afraid my countenance expressed incredulity as to her rationale of the decay; for, as I rose to go, she said, "Thou dost not agree, friend, with what I have said to thee—nay, never shake thy head; it would be wonderful if thou didst, when our own people don't. Stay; I'll give thee a note to my son in London, though he will gainsay much of what I have told thee." She gave me the letter, which was just what I wanted, for I felt I had gained little beyond a pleasant experience of old-world life from my morning's jaunt. I partook of her kindly hospitality, was shown over her particularly cosy house, gardens, and hothouses, and meditated, on my return journey, upon many particulars I learnt for the first time as to the early history of Fox; realizing what a consensus there was between the experiences of all illuminati. I smiled once and again over the quaint title of one of Fox's books which my venerable friend had quoted to me—viz., "A Battle-door for Teachers and Professors to learn Plural and Singular. You to Many, and Thou to One; Singular, One, Thou; Plural, Many, You." While so meditating, my cab deposited me at the door of a decidedly "downy" house, at the West End, where my prospective friend was practising in I will not mention which of the learned professions. Both the suburban cottage of the mother and the London menage of the son assured me that they had thriven on Quakerism; and it was only then I recollected that a poor Quaker was as rare a personage as an infantile member of the Society.

The young man—who neither in dress, discourse, nor manner differed from an ordinary English gentleman—smiled as he read his mother's lines, and, with a decorous apology for disturbing the impressions which her discourse might have left upon me, took precisely the view which had been latent in my own mind as to the cause of the Society's decay. Thoroughly at one with them still on the doctrine of the illuminating power of the Spirit in the individual conscience, he treated the archaic dress, the obsolete phraseology, the obstinate opposition to many innocent customs of the age, simply as anachronisms. He pointed with pride to the fact that our greatest living orator was a member of the Society; and claimed for the underlying principle of Quakerism—namely, the superiority of a conscience void of offence over written scripture or formal ceremony—the character of being in essence the broadest creed of Christendom. Injudicious retention of customs which had grown meaningless had, he felt sure, brought down upon the body that most fatal of all influences—contempt. "You see it in your own Church," he said. "There is a school which, by reviving obsolete doctrines and practices, will end in getting the Church of England disestablished as it is already disintegrated. You see it even in the oldest religion of all—Judaism. You see, I mean, a school growing into prominence and power which discards all the accumulations of ages, and by going back to real antiquity, at once brings the system more into unison with the century, and prevents that contempt attaching to it which will accrue wherever a system sets its face violently against the tone of current society." He thought the Conference quite unnecessary. "There needs no ghost come from the dead to tell us that, Horatio," he said, cheerily. "They will find out that Quakerism is not a proselytizing religion," he added; "which, of course, we knew before. They will point to the fashionable attire, the gold rings, and lofty chignons of our younger sisters as direct defiance of primitive custom. I am unorthodox enough"—and he smiled as he used that word—"to think that the attire is more becoming to my younger sisters, just as the Society's dress is to my dear mother." That young man, and the youthful sisters he told me of, stood as embodied answers to the question I had proposed to myself. They were outward and visible evidences of the doctrine of Quaker "development." The idea is not dead. The spirit is living still. It is the spirit that underlies all real religion—namely, the personal relation of the human soul to God as the source of illumination. That young man was as good a Quaker at heart as George Fox or William Penn themselves; and the "apology" he offered for his transformed faith was a better one than Barclay's own. I am wondering whether the Conference will come to anything like so sensible a conclusion as to why Quakerism is declining.



CHAPTER XXII.

PENNY READINGS.

Who has ever penetrated beneath the surface of clerical society—meaning thereby the sphere of divinities (mostly female) that doth hedge a curate of a parish—without being sensible of the eligibility of Penny Readings for a place in Mystic London? When the Silly Season is at its very bathos; when the monster gooseberries have gone to seed and the showers of frogs ceased to fall; after the matrimonial efforts of Margate or Scarborough, and before the more decided business of the Christmas Decorations, then there is deep mystery in the penetralia of every parish. The great scheme of Penny Readings is being concocted, and all the available talent of the district—all such as is "orthodox" and "correct"—is laid under contribution.

It is true to a proverb that we English people have a knack of doing the best possible things in the worst possible way; and that not unfrequently when we do once begin doing them we do them to death. It takes some time to convince us that the particular thing is worth doing at all; but, once persuaded, we go in for it with all our British might and main. The beard-and-moustache movement was a case in point. Some years ago a moustache was looked upon by serious English people as decidedly reckless and dissipated. A beard was fit only for a bandit. Nowadays, the mildest youth in the Young Men's Christian Association may wear a moustache without being denounced as "carnal," and paterfamilias revels in the beard of a sapeur, no misopogon daring to say him nay. To no "movement," however, does the adage "Vires acquirit eundo" apply more thoroughly than to that connected with "Penny Readings." Originally cropping up timidly in rustic and suburban parishes, it has of late taken gigantic strides, and made every parish where it does not exist, rural or metropolitan, very exceptional indeed. There was a sound principle lying at the bottom of the movement, in so far as it was designed to bring about a fusion of classes; though, perhaps, it involved too much of an assumption that the "working man" had to be lectured to, or read to, by his brother in purple and fine linen. Still the theory was so far sound. Broad cloth was to impart to fustian the advantages it possessed in the way of reading, singing, fiddling, or what not; and that not gratuitously, which would have offended the working man's dignity, but for the modest sum of one penny, which, whilst Lazarus was not too poor to afford, Dives condescended to accept, and apply to charitable purposes.

Such being, in brief, the theory of the Penny Reading movement, it may be interesting to see how it is carried out in practice. Now, in order to ascertain this, I availed myself of several opportunities afforded by the commencement of the Penny Reading season, which may be said to synchronize very nearly with the advent of London fogs, and attended the opening of the series in several widely different localities. In describing my experiences it would perhaps be invidious to specify the exact locality where they were gathered. I prefer to collate those experiences which range from Campden Hill to Camden Town inclusive. Amid many distinguishing traits there are common elements traceable in all, which may enable us to form some estimate of the working of the scheme, and possibly to offer a few words of advice to those interested therein.

In most cases the Penny Readings are organized by the parochial clergy. We will be orthodox, and consider them so to be on the present occasion. In that case, the series would probably be opened by the incumbent in person. Some ecclesiastical ladies, young and middle-aged, who, rightly or wrongly, believe their mission is music, and to whom the curate is very probably an attraction, aid his efforts. Serious young men read, and others of a more mundane turn of mind sing doleful "comic" songs, culled from the more presentable of the music-hall repertoire. In many cases skilled amateurs or professionals lend their valuable assistance; and it is not too much to say that many a programme is presented to the audience—ay, and faithfully carried out too—which would do credit to a high-priced concert-room. But, then, who make up the audience? Gradually the "penny" people have been retiring into the background, as slowly but as surely as the old-fashioned pits at our theatres are coyly withdrawing under the boxes to make way for the stalls. The Penny Readings have been found to "draw" a higher class of audience than those for whom they were originally intended. The curate himself, if unmarried, secures the whole spinsterhood of the parish. His rendering of the lines, "On the receipt of my mother's picture out of Norfolk," is universally acknowledged to be "delightful;" and so, in course of time, the Penny Readings have been found to supply a good parochial income; and the incumbent, applying the proceeds to some local charity, naturally wishes to augment that income as much as possible. The consequence is that the penny people are as completely nowhere at the Penny Readings as they are in the free seats at their parish church. The whole of the body of the room is "stalled off," so to say, for sixpenny people, and the penny folk are stowed away anywhere. Then, again, in several programmes I have been at the pains to analyse, it is palpable that, whilst the bulk of the extracts fire over the heads of the poor people, one or two are inserted which are as studiously aimed at them as the parson's remarks in last Sunday's sermon against public-house loafing. Still "naming no names," I attended some readings where one of the clergy read a long extract from Bailey's "Festus," whilst he was succeeded by a vulgar fellow, evidently put in for "the gods," who delivered himself of a parody on Ingoldsby, full of the coarsest slang—nay, worse than that, abounding in immoralities which, I hope, made the parochial clergy sit on thorns, and place the reader on their "Index Expurgatorius" from henceforth.

Excellent in its original design, the movement is obviously degenerating into something widely different. First, I would say, Let your Penny Readings be really Penny Readings, and not the egregious lucus a non they now are. If there is any distinction, the penny people should have the stalls, and then, if there were room, the "swells" (I must use an offensive term) could come in for sixpence, and stand at the back. But there should be no difference at all. Dives and Lazarus should sit together, or Dives stop away if he were afraid his fine linen may get soiled. Lazarus, at all events, must not be lost sight of, or treated to second best. The experiment of thus mingling them has been tried, I know, and succeeds admirably. Dives and Lazarus do hobnob; and though the former occasionally tenders a silver coin for his entree, he does not feel that he is thereby entitled to a better seat. The committee gets the benefit of his liberality; and when the accounts are audited in the spring, Lazarus is immensely pleased at the figure his pence make. Then, again, as to the quality of the entertainment. Let us remember Lazarus comes there to be elevated. That was the theory we set out with—that we, by our reading, or our singing, or fiddling, or tootle-tooing on the cornet, could civilize our friend in fustian. Do not let us fall into the mistake, then, of descending to his standard. We want to level him up to ours. Give him the music we play in our own drawing-rooms; read the choice bits of fiction or poetry to his wife and daughters which we should select for our own. Amuse his poor little children with the same innocent nonsense with which we treat our young people. Above all, don't bore him. I do not say, never be serious, because it is a great mistake to think Lazarus can only guffaw. Read "The Death of Little Nell" or of Paul Dombey, and look at Mrs. Lazarus's eyes. Read Tom Hood's "Song of the Shirt," and see whether the poor seamstress out in the draughty penny seats at the back appreciates it or not. I did hear of one parish at the West End—the very same, by the way, I just now commended for sticking to the "penny" system—where Hood's "Nelly Gray," proposed to be read by the son of one of our best known actors, was tabooed as "unedifying." Lazarus does not come to be "edified," but to be amused. If he can be at the same time instructed, so much the better; but the bitter pill must be highly gilded, or he will pocket his penny and spend it in muddy beer at the public-house. If the Penny Reading can prevent this—and we see no reason why it should not—it will have had a mission indeed. Finally, I feel sure that there is in this movement, and lying only a very little way from the surface, a wholesome lesson for Dives too; and that is, how little difference there is, after all, between himself and Lazarus. I have been surprised to see how some of the more recherche "bits" of our genuine humorists have told upon the penny people, and won applause which the stalest burlesque pun or the nastiest music-hall inanity would have failed to elicit. Lazarus must be represented on the platform then, as well as comfortably located in the audience. He must be asked to read, or sing, or fiddle, or do whatever he can. If not, he will feel he is being read at, or sung to, or fiddled for, and will go off to the Magpie and Stump, instead of bringing missus and the little ones to the "pa'son's readings." Let the Penny Reading teach us the truth—and how true it is—that we are all "working men." What matters it whether we work with head or with hand—with brain or muscle?



CHAPTER XXIII.

DARWINISM ON THE DEVIL.

It has been said—perhaps more satirically than seriously—that theology could not get on without its devil. Certain it is that wherever there has been a vivid realization of the Spirit of Light, there, as if by way of antithesis, there has been an equally clear recognition of the Power of Darkness. Ormuzd—under whatever name recognised—generally supposes his opponent Ahriman; and there have even been times, as in the prevalence of the Manichean heresy, when the Evil Spirit has been affected in preference to the good—probably only another way of saying that morals have been held subordinate to intellect. But I am growing at once prosy and digressive.

The announcement that the "Liberal Social Union" would devote one of their sweetly heretical evenings at the Beethoven Rooms, Harley Street, to an examination of the Darwinian development of the Evil Spirit, was one not to be scorned by an inquirer into the more eccentric and erratic phases of theology. Literary engagements stood in the way—for the social heretics gather on a Friday—but come what might, I would hear them discuss diabolism. Leaving my printer's devil to indulge in typographical errors according to his own sweet will (and I must confess he did wander), I presented myself, as I thought in good time, at the portals of the Harley Street room, where his Satanic Majesty was to be heretically anatomized. But, alas! I had not calculated aright the power of that particular potentate to "draw." No sooner had I arrived at the cloak-room than the very hats and umbrellas warned me of the number of his votaries. Evening Dress was "optional;" and I frankly confess, at whatever risk of his displeasure, that I had not deemed Mephistopheles worthy of a swallow-tailed coat. I came in the garb of ordinary life; and at once felt uncomfortable when, mounting the stairs, I was received by a portly gentleman and an affable lady in violent tenue de soir. The room was full to the very doors; and as soon as I squeezed into earshot of the lecturer (who had already commenced his discourse) I was greeted by a heterodox acquaintance in elaborate dress-coat and rose-pink gloves. Experience in such matters had already told me—and thereupon I proved it by renewed personal agony—that an Englishman never feels so uncomfortable as when dressed differently from his compeers at any kind of social gathering. Mrs. T—— asks you to dinner, and you go clad in the correct costume in deference to the prandial meal, but find all the rest in morning dress. Mrs. G——, on the contrary, sends you a rollicking note to feed with a few friends—no party; and you go straight from office to find a dozen heavily-got-up people sniggering at your frock coat and black tie. However, as I said, on this occasion the lecturer, Dr. Zerffi, was in the thick of what proved to be a very attractive lecture; so I was not the observed of all observers for more than two or three minutes, and was able to give him my whole attention as soon as I had recovered from my confusion. Dr. Zerffi said:—

Dr. Darwin's theory of evolution and selection has changed our modern mode of studying the inorganic and organic phenomena of nature, and investigating the realities of truth. His theory is not altogether new, having been first proclaimed by Leibnitz, and followed up with regard to history by Giovanni Battista Vico. Oken and Goethe amplified it towards the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present century. Darwin, however, has systematized the theory of evolution, and now the branches of human knowledge can only be advantageously pursued if we trace in all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, a beginning and a gradual development. One fact has prominently been established, that there is order in the eternal change, that this order is engendered by law, and that law and order are the criterions of an all-wise ruling Spirit pervading the Universe. To this positive spirit of law a spirit of negation, an element of rebellion and mischief, of mockery and selfishness, commonly called the Devil, has been opposed from the beginning.

It appeared, till very lately, as though God had created the world only for the purpose of amusing the Devil, and giving him an abundance of work, all directed to destroying the happiness of God's finest creation—man. Treating the Devil from a Darwinian point of view, we may assert that he developed himself from the protoplasm of ignorance, and in the gloomy fog of fear and superstition grew by degrees into a formidable monster, being changed by the overheated imaginations of dogmatists into a reptile, an owl, a raven, a dog, a wolf, a lion, a centaur, a being half monkey, half man, till, finally, he became a polite and refined human being.

Man once having attained a certain state of consciousness, saw sickness, evil, and death around him, and as it was usual to assign to every effect some tangible cause, man developed the abstract notion of evil into a concrete form, which changed with the varying impressions of climate, food, and the state of intellectual progress. To the white man the Devil was black, and to the black man white. Originally, then, the Devil was merely a personification of the apparently destructive forces of nature. Fire was his element. The Indians had their Rakshas and Uragas, the Egyptians their Typhon, and the Persians their Devas. The Israelites may claim the honour of having brought the theory of evil into a coarse and sensual form, and the Christians took up this conception, and developed it with the help of the Gnostics, Plato, and the Fathers dogmatically into an entity.

I shall not enter on a minute inquiry into the origin of this formidable antagonist of common sense and real piety; I intend to take up the three principal phases of the Devil's development, at a period when he already appears to us as a good Christian Devil, and always bearing in mind Mr. Darwin's theory of evolution, I shall endeavour to trace spiritually the changes in the conceptions of evil from the Devil of Luther to that of Milton, and at last to that of Goethe.

The old Jewish Rabbis and theological doctors were undoubtedly the first to trace, genealogically, the pedigree of the Christian Devil in its since general form. If we take the trouble to compare chap. i. v. 27 of Genesis with chap. ii. v. 21, we will find that two distinct creations of man are given. The one is different from the other. In the first instance we have the clear, indisputable statement, "So God created man in his own image:" and to give greater force to this statement the text goes on, "in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Both man and woman were then created. Nothing could be plainer. But as though no creation of man had taken place at all, we find, chap. ii. v. 7: "And the Lord formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." This was evidently a second man, differently created from the first, who is stated to have been made "in the image of God himself." This second creature was entrusted with the nomination and classification of all created things; that is, with the formation of language, and the laying down of the first principles of botany and zoology. After he had performed this arduous task it happened that "for Adam there was not found an help meet for him" (verse 20), and chap. ii. v. 21 tells us, "The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof;" and verse 22, "And of the rib which the Lord God had taken from man made He a woman, and brought her unto man." Adam then joyfully exclaims (verse 23), "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." This cannot but lead to the conclusion that this woman was an altogether different creature from the first. The contradiction was most ingeniously explained by the learned Jewish Rabbis, who considered the first woman the organic germ from which the special Hebrew-Christian devils were evolved. The Rabbis discovered that the name of the first woman was "Lilith"[1] (the nightly); they knew positively—and who can disprove their assertion?—that she was the most perfect beauty, more beautiful than Eve; she had long waving hair, bright eyes, red lips and cheeks, and a charmingly finished form and complexion; but having been created at the same moment as the first man, and like him, in the image of God, she refused to become man's wife; she objected to being subordinate to the male part of creation—she was, in fact, the first strong-minded woman, claiming the same rights as man, though a woman in body and form. Under these circumstances the existence of the human race was deemed to be an impossibility, and therefore the Lord had to make good his error, and He created Eve as the completing part of man. The first woman left her co-equally created male, and was changed into an enormous, most beautiful, and seducing "She Devil," and her very thoughts brought forth daily a legion of devils—incarnations of pride, vanity, conceit, and unnaturalness. Happily these devils were so constituted that they devoured one another. But in their rage they could take possession of others, and more especially entered little children—boys under three days old, girls under twenty days—and devoured them. This myth, by means of evolution and the law of action and re-action, engendered the further legend about the existence of three special angels who acted as powerful antidotes to these devils, and whose names, "Senoi, Sansenoi, and Sanmangeloph," if written on a piece of parchment suspended round the neck of children afforded certain protection against them.

The origin of the Devil may thus be traced to the first vain contempt for the eternal laws of nature. The woman, refusing to be a woman, engenders devils; the man, trying to be a God, loses paradise and his innocence, for the element of the supernatural intruded upon him and abstracted his thoughts from this earth. These were the half idealistic and half realistic elements from which the three greatest spiritual incarnations of the Evil Spirit sprung up. Luther took the Evil Spirit as a bodily entity, with big horns, fiery eyes, a reddish, protruding tongue, a long tail, and the hoof of a horse. In this latter attribute we trace at once the Kentaur element of ancient times. Through nearly one thousand three hundred years from Tertullian and Thaumaturgus down to Luther, every one was accustomed to look upon life as one great battle with tens of thousands of devils, assaulting, harassing, annoying, and seducing humanity. All fought, quarrelled, talked, and wrestled with the Devil. He was more spoken of in the pulpits of the Christian Churches, written about in theological and scientific books, than God or Christ. All misfortunes were attributed to him. Thunder and lightning, hailstorms and the rinderpest, the hooping cough and epileptic fits were all the Devil's work. A man who suffered from madness was said to be possessed by a legion of Evil Spirits. The Devil settled himself in the gentle dimples of a pretty girl with the same ease and comfort as in the wrinkles of an old woman. Everything that was inexplicable was evil. Throughout the Middle Ages the masses and the majority of their learned theological teachers believed the Greek and Latin classics were inspired by Evil Spirits; that sculptures or paintings, if beautiful, were of evil; that all cleverness in Mathematics, Chemistry, or Medicine proved the presence of the corrupting Evil Spirit working in man. Any bridge over a chasm or a rapid river was the work of the Devil; even the most beautiful Gothic cathedrals, like those of Cologne and St. Stephen at Vienna were constructed by architects who served their apprenticeship in the infernal regions. The Devil sat grinning on the inkstands of poets and learned men, dictating to the poor deluded mortals, as the price for their souls, charming love-songs or deep theological and philosophical essays. It was extremely dangerous during this period of man's historical evolution to be better or wiser than the ignorant masses. Learning, talent, a superior power of reasoning, love for truth, a spirit of inquiry, the capacity of making money by clever trading, an artistic turn of mind, success in life, even in the Church, were only so many proofs that the soul had been sold to some dwarfish or giant messenger from Lucifer, who could appear in a thousand different forms. Man was, since his assumed Fall, the exclusive property of the coarse and vulgar conception of the Evil Spirit. Luther was full of these ideas, he was brought up in this belief, and though he unconsciously felt that the Devil ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced to delude mankind. The Devil had his Romish prayers, his processions, his worship of relics, his remission of sins, his confessional, his infernal synods; he was to Luther an active, rough, and material incarnation of the roaring lion of the Scriptures in the shape of the Romish Church, walking about visibly, tangibly, bodily amongst men, devouring all who believed in the Pope, and who disbelieved in this stupid phantom of a dogmatically blinded imagination.

The Evolution-theory may be clearly traced in the two next conceptions: Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles. They differ as strongly as the periods and the poems in which they appear. Milton's Satan loses the vulgar flesh and bone, horn and hoof nature—he is an epic character; whilst Goethe's Devil is an active dramatic entity of modern times. Milton's representative of evil is a very powerful conception—it is evil in abstracto; whilst Mephistopheles is evil in concreto—the intelligible, tangible Devil, evolved by the power of selection from an antediluvian monster, and transformed through a civilizing process of at least six thousand years into its present form. Milton's Satan is a debased intellect who in his boundless ambition is still a supernatural being. Mephistopheles is the incarnation of our complicated modern social evils, full of petty tricks and learned quotations; he piously turns up his eyes, he lies, doubts, calumniates, seduces, philosophizes, sneers, but all in a polite and highly educated way; he is a scholar, a divine, a politician, a diplomatist. Satan is capable of wild enthusiasm, he sometimes remembers his bright sinless past; "from the lowest deep," he yearns, "once more to lift himself up, in spite of fate, nearer to his ancient seat;"—he hopes to re-enter heaven, "to purge off his gloom;" some remnant of heavenly innocence still clings to him, for, though fallen, he is still an angel! Mephistopheles in his real nature is without any higher aspirations, he argues with a sarcastic smile on his lips, he is ironical with sophisticated sharpness. Satan has unconsciously gigantic ideas, he is ready to wrestle with God for the dominion of heaven. Mephistopheles is perfectly conscious of his littleness as opposed to our better intellectual nature, and does evil for evil's sake. Satan is sublime through the grandeur of his primitive elements, pride and ambition. Mephistopheles is only grave in his pettiness; he does not refuse an orgie with drunken students, indulges in jokes with monkeys, works miracles in the witch's kitchen, delights in the witch's "one-time-one;" distributes little tracts "to stir up the witch's heart with special fire." Satan has nothing vulgar in him: he is capable of melancholy feelings, he can be pathetic and eloquent. Mephistopheles laughs at the stupidity of the world, and at his own. Satan believes in God and in himself, whilst Mephistopheles is the "Spirit that denies;" he believes neither in God nor in heaven nor in hell; he does not believe in his own entity—he is no supernatural, fantastic being, but man incarnate: he is the evil part of a good whole, which loses its entity when once seen and recognised in its real nature; for Mephistopheles in reality is our own ignorant, besotted, animal nature, cultivated and developed at the expense of our intellectual part.

Luther's devil is the outgrowth of humanity in long-clothes. Man, ignorant of the forces of the Cosmos, blinded by theological dialectics and metaphysical subtleties, incapable of understanding the real essence of our moral and intellectual nature, philosophically untrained to observe that evil is but a sequence of the disturbed balance between our double nature—spirit and matter—attributed all mischief in the intellectual as well as in our social spheres to an absolute powerful being who continually tormented him.

Milton's Satan is the poetical conception of man developed from an infant in long-clothes into a boisterous but dreamy youth, ascribing to every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and artificially and dogmatically distorted nature.

Goethe in destroying the Devil as such, consigned him to the primeval myths and legends of ignorance and fear, and has shown us the real nature of the evil.

What then is the Devil?

The Devil took, as I said in the beginning, his origin in our blinded senses, in an undue preponderance of that which is material in us over that which is intellectual. The moment we look the Evil Spirit in the face, he vanishes as an absolute being and becomes—

A portion of that power Which wills the bad and works the good at every hour.

After having been exposed during several periods of generations to new conditions, thus rendering a great amount of variation possible, the Devil has developed from a monster into a monkey, and from a monkey into a man endowed with the nature of a monkey and the propensities of a monster. In the State and in the Church, in Arts and Sciences, the Devil is the principle of injustice, hypocrisy, ugliness, and ignorance. Goethe has annihilated the ideal poetical grandeur of Milton's Satan; he has stripped Luther's Devil of his vulgar realism; Goethe has driven Satan from an imaginary hell, where he preferred to rule instead of worshipping and serving in heaven, and with the sponge of common sense he wiped the horned monster, drawn by the imagination of dogmatists, from the black board of ignorance. In banishing the Evil Spirit into the dominion of myths, Goethe showed him in his real nature. Darwin displaced man from the exalted pedestal of a special creation, and endeavoured to trace him as the development of cosmical elements. Darwin enabled us to look upon man as the completing link in the great chain of the gradual evolution of the life-giving forces of the Universe, and he rendered thus our position more comprehensible and natural. Goethe, in proving that the Evil Spirit of ancient and Hebrew-Christian times was a mere phantom of an ill-regulated fantasy, taught us to look for the real origin of evil. What was a metaphysical incomprehensibility became an intelligible reality. The Demon can be seen in "Faust" as in a mirror, and in glancing into it we behold our Darwinian progenitor, the animal, face to face. Before the times of Goethe, with very few exceptions, the Evil Spirit was an entity with whom any one might become familiar—in fact, the "spiritus familiaris" of old. The Devil spoke, roared, whispered, could sign contracts. We were able to yield our soul to him; and he could bodily enter our body. The Devil was a corporeal entity. The rack, water, and fire were used to expel him from sorcerers and witches, and to send him into all sorts of unclean animals. Goethe, in unmasking this phantom, introduced him not as something without, but as an element within us. The service rendered to humanity in showing us the true nature of evil is as grand as the service rendered by Mr. Darwin in assigning to man his place in nature, and not above nature. It is curious that those who have most of the incorrigible and immovable animal nature in them should protest with the greatest vehemence and clamour against this theory. They think by asserting their superiority, based on a special creation, to become at once special and superior beings, and prefer this position to trying, through a progressive development in science and knowledge, in virtue and honesty, to prove the existence of the higher faculties with which man has been endowed through his gradual development from the lowest phases of living creatures to the highest. In assuming the Devil to be something absolute and positive, and not something relative and negative, man hoped to be better able to grapple with him. Mephistopheles is nothing personal; he can, like the Creator himself, be only traced in his works. The Devil lurks beneath the venerable broadcloth of an intolerant and ignorant priest; he uses the seducing smiles of a wicked beauty; he stirs the blood of the covetous and grasping; he strides through the gilded halls of ambitious emperors and ministers, who go with "light hearts" to kill thousands of human beings with newly-invented infernal machines; he works havoc in the brains of the vain. The Devil shuffles the cards for the gambler, and destroys our peace whether he makes us win or lose on the turf; he sits joyfully grinning on the tops of bottles and tankards filled with alcoholic drinks; he entices us on Sundays to shut our museums and open our gin-palaces; to neglect the education of the masses; and then prompts us to accuse them with hypocritical respectability of drunkenness and stupidity. It is the Devil who turns us into friends of lapdogs and makes us enemies of the homeless. The Devil is the greatest master in dogmatism; he creates sects who, in the name of love and humility, foster hatred and pride; the Devil encloses men in a magic circle on the barren heath of useless speculation; drives them round and round like blinded horses in a mill, starting from one point, and after miles and miles of travel and fatigue, leading us to the point, sadder but not wiser, from which we set out. The Devil makes us quarrel whether we ought to have schools with or without bigoted religious teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality, and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet realizing the divine, because so entirely humane command—"Do unto others as you wish that they should do unto you." Selfishness is the only essence of evil. Selfishness has divided men into different nations, and fosters in them pride, envy, jealousy, and hatred. Mr. Darwin has shown that one animal preys on the other, that the weaker species has to yield to the stronger. Goethe again has shown us how the Evil Spirit drags us through life's wild scenes and its flat unmeaningness, to seek mere sensual pleasures and to neglect altogether our higher and better nature, which is the outgrowth of our more complicated, more highly developed organization. Were we only to recognise this, our real nature, we should leave less to chance and prejudices; were we to study man from a physiological, psychological, and honestly historical point of view, we should soon eliminate selfishness from among us, and be able to appreciate what is really the essence of evil. The more nearly we approach Darwin's primitive man, the ape, the nearer do we draw to the Mephistopheles who shows us his exact nature with impudent sincerity in Goethe's "Faust."

That which changes our Psyche, that is our intellectual faculty with its airy wings of imagination, its yearnings for truth, into an ugly, submissive, crawling worm, is heartless selfishness. Not without reason is poor guileless Margaret horrified at Mephistopheles. She shudders, hides herself on the bosom of Faust, like a dove under the wings of an eagle, and complains that the Evil Spirit—

... Always wears such mocking grin, Half cold, half grim, One sees that nought has interest for him; 'Tis writ on his brow, and can't be mistaken, No soul in him can love awaken.

When all goes wrong, when religious, social, and political animosities and hatred disturb the peace; when unintelligible controversies on the inherited sin, the origin of evil, justification, and transubstantiation, "grace and free will," the creative and the created, mystic incantations, real and unreal presences, the like but not equal, the affirmative and the negative natures of God and man confuse the finite brains of infinite talkers and repeaters of the same things; when they quarrel about the wickedness of the hen who dared to lay an egg on the Sabbath; when the glaring torch of warfare is kindled by the fire of petty animosities, then the Evil Spirit of egotism celebrates its most glorious festivals.

What can banish this monster, this second and worse part of our nature? To look upon it from a Darwinian point of view. Goethe saves his fallen Faust through useful "occupation," through honest hard work for the benefit of mankind. The more we make ourselves acquainted with evil, the last remnant of our animal nature, in a rational and not mystic dogmatical sense, the less we exalt ourselves as exceptional creatures above nature, the easier it must be for us to dry up the source of superstition and ignorance which serves to nourish this social monster.

Let our relations to each other be based on "mutual love," for God is love, and selfishness as the antagonist of love, and the Devil as the antagonist of God, will both vanish.

Let us strive to vanquish our unnatural social organization by a natural, social, but at the same time, liberal union of all into one common brotherhood, and the roaring lion will be silenced for ever.

Let us purify society of all its social, or rather unsocial, iniquities and falsehoods, of all ingratitude and envy, in striving for an honest regeneration of ourselves, and through ourselves of humanity at large, convincing one another that man has developed by degrees into earth's fairest creature, destined for good and happiness, and not for evil and wretchedness, and there will be an end of the Devil and all his devilries.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The word is found in Isaiah xxxiv. 14. Translated in the Vulgate as "Lamia;" in Luther's translation as "Kobold;" in the English version as "screech-owl;" and in others as "an ugly night-bird."



CHAPTER XXIV.

PECULIAR PEOPLE.

In this title, be it distinctly understood, no reference is intended to those anti-AEsculapian persons who, from time to time, sacrifice to Moloch among the Essex marshes. It is not necessary to journey even as far as Plumstead in search of peculiarity, since the most manifold and ever-varying types of it lie at one's very doors. And here, at the outset, without quite endorsing the maxim that genius is always eccentric, let it be confessed that a slight deviation from the beaten track is generally apt to be interesting. When we see the photograph of some distinguished artist, musician, or poet, and find the features very like those of the pork butcher in the next street, or the footman over the way, we are conscious of a feeling of disappointment almost amounting to a personal grievance. Mr. Carlyle and Algernon Swinburne satisfy us. They look as we feel graphic writers and erotic poets ought to look. Not so the literary females who affect the compartment labelled "For ladies only," in the reading room of the British Museum or on the Metropolitan Railway. They are mostly like one's maiden aunts, and savour far less of the authoress than some of the charming girls who studiously avoid their exclusive locale, and evidently use their reading ticket only to cover with an appearance of propriety a most unmistakable flirtation. This they carry on sotto voce with ardent admirers of the male sex, who, though regular frequenters of the reading room, are no more literary than themselves. One might pick out a good many peculiar people from that learned retreat—that poor scholar's club room; but let us rather avoid any such byways of life, and select our peculiars from the broad highway. Hunting there, Diogenes-wise, with one's modest lantern, in search—not of honest—but eccentric individuals.

And first of all, having duly attended to the ladies at the outset, let there be "Place for the Clergy." There is my dear friend the Rev. Gray Kidds, the best fellow breathing, but, from a Diogenes point of view, decidedly eccentric. Gray Kidds is one of those individuals whose peculiarity it is never to have been a boy. Kidds at fifteen had whiskers as voluminous as he now has at six-and-twenty, and as he gambolled heavily amongst his more puerile schoolfellows, visitors to the playground used to ask the assistant masters who that man was playing with the boys. They evidently had an uneasy notion that a private lunatic asylum formed a branch of the educational establishment, and that Gray Kidds was a harmless patient allowed to join the boys in their sports. Gray Kidds was and is literally harmless. He grew up through school and college, innocently avoiding all those evils which proved the ruin of many who were deemed far wiser than himself. He warbled feebly on the flute, and was adored as a curate, not only for his tootle-tooings, but for his diligent presence at mothers' meetings, and conscientious labours among the poor. A preacher Kidds never pretended to be; but he had the singular merit of brevity, and crowded more harmless heresies into ten minutes' pulpit oratory than Colenso or Voysey could have done in double the time. The young ladies made a dead set at him, of course, for Kidds was in every respect eligible; and he let them stroke him like a big pet lamb, but there matters ended. Kidds never committed himself. He is now the incumbent of a pretty church in the suburbs, built for him by his aunt, and, strange to say, the church fills. Whether it is that his brevity is attractive, or his transparent goodness compensates for his other peculiarities, certainly he has a congregation; and if you polled that congregation, the one point on which all would agree, in addition to his eligibility or innocence, would be that the Rev. Gray Kidds was "so funny."

And now, for our second type of peculiarity, let us beat back for one moment to the fair sex again. Mrs. Ghoul is the reverse of spirituelle; but she is something more—she is spiritualistic. She devoutly believes that the spirits of deceased ancestors come at her bidding, and tilt the table, move furniture insanely about, or write idiotic messages automatically. She is perfectly serious. She does "devoutly" believe this. It is her creed. It is a comfort to her. It is extremely difficult to reconcile such a source of comfort with any respect for one's departed relatives, but that is Mrs. Ghoul's peculiarity and qualification for a niche amongst our originals.

Miss Deedy, on the other hand, is ecclesiastical to the backbone. Miss Deedy ruins her already feeble health with early mattins (she insists on the double t) and frequent fasts. Beyond an innocuous flirtation with the curate at decorations, or a choral meeting, Miss Deedy has as few sins as most of us to answer for; but, from her frequent penances, she might be a monster of iniquity. She is known to confess, and is suspected of wearing sackcloth. Balls and theatres she eschews as "worldly," and yet she is only just out of her teens. She would like to be a nun, she says, if the habits were prettier, and they allowed long curls down the back, and Gainsboroughs above the brow. As it is, Miss Deedy occupies a somewhat abnormal position, dangling, like Mahomet's coffin, between the Church and the world. That, again, is Miss Deedy's peculiarity.

Miss Wiggles is a "sensitive." That is a new vocation struck out by the prolific ingenuity of the female mind. Commonplace doctors would simply call her "hysterical;" but she calls herself magnetic. She is stout and inclined to a large appetite, particularly affecting roast pork with plenty of seasoning; but she passes readily into "the superior condition" under the manipulations of a male operator. She makes nothing, save notoriety, by her clairvoyance and other peculiarities; but she is very peculiar, though the type of a larger class than is perhaps imagined in this highly sensational age of ours.

Peculiar boys, too—what lots of them there are! What is called affectation in a girl prevails to quite as large an extent in the shape of endless peculiarities among boys. A certain Dick (his name is Adolphus, but he is universally, and for no assignable reason, known as Dick) rejoices in endorsing Darwinism by looking and acting like a human gorilla. Dick is no fool, but assumes that virtue though he has it not. To see him mumbling his food at meals, or making mops and mows at the wall, you would think him qualified for Earlswood; but if it comes to polishing off a lesson briskly or being mulct of his pudding or pocket-money, Master Dick accomplishes the polishing process with a rapidity that gives the lie to his Darwinian assumption.

Well, they are a source of infinite fun, these eccentrics—the comets of our social system. They have, no doubt, an object in their eccentricity, a method in their madness, which we prosaic planetary folks cannot fathom. At all events, they amuse us and don't harm themselves. They are uniformly happy and contented with themselves. Of them assuredly is true, and without the limitation he appends, Horace's affirmation, Dulce est desipere, which Mr. Theodore Martin translates, "'Tis pleasing at times to be slightly insane."



CHAPTER XXV.

INTERVIEWING AN ASTROLOGER.

For several years—in fact ever since my first acquaintance with these "occult" matters whereinto I am now such a veteran investigator—my great wish has been to become practically acquainted with some Professor of Astral Science. One friend, indeed, I had who had devoted a long lifetime to this and kindred subjects, and of whom I shall have to speak anon; but he had never utilized his knowledge so as to become the guide, philosopher, and friend of amorous housemaids on the subject of their matrimonial alliances, or set himself to discover petty larcenies for a fee of half-a-crown. He assured me, however, that the practice of astrology was as rife as ever in London at this moment, and that businesses in that line were bought and sold for sterling coin of the realm, just as though they had been "corner" publics, or "snug concerns" in the cheesemongery line. All this whetted my appetite for inquiry, and seeing one Professor Wilson advertise persistently in the Medium to the effect that "the celebrated Astrologer may be consulted on the events of life" from two to nine P.M., I wrote to Professor Wilson asking for an interview; but the celebrated astrologer did not favour me with a reply.

Foiled in my first attempt I waited patiently for about a year, and then broke ground again—I will not say whether with Professor Wilson, or some other practitioner of astral science. I will call my Archimago Professor Smith, of Newington Causeway, principally for the reason that this is neither the real name nor the correct address. I have no wish to advertise any wizard gratuitously; nor would it be fair to him, since, as will be seen from the sequel, his reception of me was such as to make it probable that he would have an inconvenient number of applicants on the conditions observed at my visit.

Availing myself, then, of the services of my friend above-mentioned, I arranged that we should together pay a visit to Professor Smith, of Newington Causeway, quite "permiscuous," as Mrs. Gamp would say. My companion would go with his own horoscope already constructed, as he happened to know the exact hour and minute of his birth—particulars as to which I only possessed the vaguest information, which is all I fancy most of us have; though there was one circumstance connected with my own natal day which went a long way towards "fixing" it.

It was on a Monday evening that I visited this modern Delphic oracle; and, strangely enough, as is often the case, other events seemed to lead up to this one. The very lesson on Sunday evening was full of astrology. It was, I may mention, the story of the handwriting on the wall and the triumph of Daniel over the magicians. Then I took up my Chaucer on Monday morning; and instead of the "Canterbury Tales," opened it at the "Treatise on the Astrolabe," which I had never read before, but devoured then as greedily as no doubt did "Little Lowis," to whom it is addressed. All this tended to put me in a proper frame of mind for my visit to Newington; so, after an early tea, we took my friend's figure of his nativity with us, and went.

Professor Smith, we found, lived in a cosy house in the main road, the parlours whereof he devoted to the purposes of a medical magnetist, which was his calling, as inscribed upon the wire blinds of the ground floor front. We were ushered at once into the professor's presence by a woman who, I presume, was his wife—a quiet respectable body with nothing uncanny about her. The front parlour was comfortably furnished and scrupulously clean, and the celebrated Professor himself, a pleasant elderly gentleman, was sitting over a manuscript which he read by the light of a Queen's reading lamp. There was not, on the one hand, any charlatan assumption in his get-up, nor, on the other, was there that squalor and neglect of the decencies of life which I have heard sometimes attaches to the practitioners in occult science. Clad in a light over-coat, with spectacles on nose, and bending over his MS., Professor Smith might have been a dissenting parson en deshabille "getting off" his Sunday discourse, or a village schoolmaster correcting the "themes" of his pupils. He was neither; he was a nineteenth century astrologer, calculating the probabilities of success for a commercial scheme, the draft prospectus of which was the document over which he pored. As he rose to receive us I was almost disappointed to find that he held no wand, wore no robe, and had no volume of mystic lore by his side. The very cat that emerged from underneath his table, and rubbed itself against my legs was not of the orthodox sable hue, but simple tabby and white.

My friend opened the proceedings by producing the figure of his nativity, and saying he had come to ask a question in horary astrology relative to a certain scheme about which he was anxious, such anxiety constituting what he termed a "birth of the mind." Of course this was Dutch to me, and I watched to see whether the Professor would be taken off his guard by finding he was in presence of one thoroughly posted up in astral science. Not in the least; he greeted him as a brother chip, and straightway the two fell to discussing the figure. The Professor worked a new one, which he found to differ in some slight particulars from the one my friend had brought. Each, however, had worked it by logarithms, and there was much talk of "trines" and "squares" and "houses," which I could not understand; but eventually the coveted advice was given by the Professor and accepted by my friend as devoutly as though it had been a response of the Delphic oracle itself. The business would succeed, but not without trouble, and possibly litigation on my friend's part. He was to make a call on a certain day and "push the matter" a month afterwards; all of which he booked in a business-like manner. This took a long time, for the Professor was perpetually making pencil signs on the figure he had constructed, and the two also discussed Zadkiel, Raphael, and other astrologers they had mutually known. Continual reference had to be made to the "Nautical Almanack;" but by-and-by my friend's innings was over and mine commenced. I have said that I did not know the exact hour and minute of my birth, and when, with appropriate hesitation, I named the 1st of April as the eventful day, the Professor looked at me for a moment with a roguish twinkle of the eye as though to ascertain that I was not poking fun at him. I assured him, however, that such was the inauspicious era of my nativity, and moreover that I was born so closely on the confines of March 31—I do not feel it necessary to specify the year—as to make it almost dubious whether I could claim the honours of April-Fooldom. This seemed enough for him—though he warned me that the absence of the exact time might lead to some vagueness in his communications—and he proceeded forthwith to erect my figure; which, by the way, looked to me very much like making a "figure" in Euclid; and I peered anxiously to see whether mine bore any resemblance to the Pons Asinorum!

I feared I had led my philosopher astray altogether when the first item of information he gave me was that, at about the age of twenty-one, I had met with some accident to my arm, a circumstance which I could not recall to memory. Several years later I broke my leg, but I did not tell him that. Going further back, he informed me that about the age of fourteen, if I happened to be apprenticed, or in any way placed under authority, I kicked violently over the traces, which was quite true, inasmuch as I ran away from school twice at that precise age, so that my astrologer scored one. At twenty-eight I married (true), and at thirty-two things were particularly prosperous with me—a fact which I was also constrained to acknowledge correct. Then came a dreadful mistake. If ever I had anything to do with building or minerals, I should be very successful. I never had to do with building save once in my life, and then Mr. Briggs's loose tile was nothing to the difficulties in which I became involved. Minerals I had never dabbled in beyond the necessary consumption of coals for domestic purposes. I had an uncle who interested himself in my welfare some years ago—this was correct—and something was going to happen to my father's sister at Midsummer, 1876. This, of course, I cannot check; but I trust, for the sake of my venerable relation, it may be nothing prejudicial. I was also to suffer from a slight cold about the period of my birthday in that same year, and was especially to beware of damp feet. My eldest brother, if I had one, he said, had probably died, which was again correct; and if my wife caught cold she suffered in her throat, which piece of information, if not very startling, I am also constrained to confess is quite true. Then followed a most delicate piece of information which I blush as I commit to paper. I wished to marry when I was twenty-one, but circumstances prevented. Then it was that memories of a certain golden-haired first love came back through the vista of memory. I was then a Fellow of my College, impecunious except as regarded my academical stipend, so the young lady took advice and paired off with a well-to-do cousin. Sic transit gloria mundi! We are each of us stout, unromantic family people now; but the reminiscence made me feel quite romantic for the moment in that ground floor front in Newington Causeway; and I was inclined to say, "A Daniel come to judgment!" but I checked myself and remarked, sotto voce, in the vernacular, "Right again, Mr. Smith!"