the cats, should be made to mend their speech, and not emulate the midnight utterances of the animals to whose appetites they administer. In gentlemen's houses, conducted as they should be, and in West-end clubs of the first class, the servants tread noiselessly as though they were walking upon velvet, and do your behests most peacefully, but in private houses of inferior" ton," and in the generality of taverns and coffee houses, the servants knock about the china and glass as though they were skittles, and appear to think that work is inseparable from row. Nor is it domestics only who offend against the peace which should prevail in good society. What can be more unbecoming than the strife of tongues at a dinner table, as though each guest were seeking to talk down the other. Table-talk should run in a bright, smooth, silvery current, not in a foaming, boisterous tide. Then, again, there are people who, whether in public or in private, appear to regard their noses as trumpets, and play upon them accordingly. This is intolerable. How dare any man to pull out his pocket-handkerchief like a banner, and use it with such uproar that I start affrighted from my seat, and fancy that Prince Bismarck has landed with an invading army, and is summoning me to surrender? How dare any man, I repeat, thus to terrify and torture me? I was reading a day or two ago in the British Museum. You might have heard a feather drop, so profound was the silence, when sudden ly the man next me played a solo upon his nose, which rang through the dome for all the world like the flourish of a bugle. "Sir," said I to the performer, "you appear to be a military man. Is that the Assembly?' Or is it the 'Retreat?' What are we to do?" "Thunder and turf, sir," quoth he "I suppose a man may blow his

nose without asking your permission." "Of a certainty," I replied, "but no one has a right to make his nose an instrument of torture to his fellow-creatures." He seemed to be of a different opinion, so there the conversation dropped, for I hate to argue with any man. Only I thought to myself how very wise those Spanish innkeepers were who in the olden time used to make "ruido" an item in their bills, charging their guests for the noise they made. How welcome, how blessedly welcome is night when, to quote the words of a sublime poet,

1

"Silence like a poultice comes

To heal the wounds of sound."

Revolving the matter in the innermost recesses of my mind, and bringing to the consideration of it all the thought and research at my command, I have arrived at the conclusion that mothers are answerable for not a little of the unnecessary noises which so fatally disturb the repose and impair the dignity of human life. Long before a child reaches that mysterious age when it begins to "take notice," it is supplied with artificial and altogether superfluous appliances for kicking up a row. It has first a rattle, then a squeaking little trumpet, then a drum, as though to teach it from the earliest dawn of life that the end and aim of human existence is the making a noise in the world. "I have seen a monkey," says Dean Swift, "overthrow all the dishes and plates in a kitchen, merely for the pleasure of seeing them tumble, and hearing the clatter they made in their fall." That is all well enough for a monkey; but, surely, man born of woman should know better. I protest that if I were a mother I would as soon think of giving my baby a loaded revolver as a coral and bells. When the streets

are paved with wood, when no other than anthracite coal, consuming its own smoke, is burnt in the grates, when nose-trumpets are forbidden by law, when whistling boys are birched, when the Thames is embanked with silent highways from Chelsea to Millwall, and from Battersea to Greenwich, and when mothers perceive the wisdom of inculcating in their offspring the grand lesson of making as little noise as they possibly can in the course of their earthly career, then, and not till then, will the London Row disappear, and London become a pleasant place to live in.

POST YULE-TIDE MEDITATIONS.

WELL, Christmas is over; the year is no longer

very new; the yule-log is fairly burnt out; the sounds of festivity have died away; we are tossed no more upon a sea of revelry; we have got at last into quiet waters. It is a pleasant thought. Christmas comes

but once a year; and "a good job too." Life is at best a sad experiment, clouded with care and full of trouble, even under the most favorable conditions of fortune; but only fancy what it would be if Christmas were to come once a week! To live in a perpetual whirl of dissipation; to be doomed to the perennial consumption of roast turkeys and plum pudding; to be compelled all the year round to eat and drink three times as much as is good for you; to be trotted out from one theatre to another; to wear a cast-iron smile, it matters not what sorrow may be rankling at your heart; to kiss

and be kissed everlastingly under the mistletoe; and to have to wish everybody you meet "the compliments of the season," whatever on earth that may mean, to have to do and suffer all these and many other things of kindred absurdity without intermission, from one end of the year to the other, were such a destiny that life would not be. worth having upon the terms. It maddens one to think of it. It is as though a man should be married anew regularly every morning. For my own poor part I would rather be Othello's toad, living upon the vapor of a dungeon, where at all events there is peace, than a man dwelling in perpetual commotion under a Yule-tide, which, like the great Pontic sea, should know no retiring ebb. Indeed, dear reader mine, I will take thee into my confidence, and, borrowing a favorite phrase of Lord Clarendon in his much be-praised and very heavy book "The History of the Great Rebellion," I will "let myself loose to say" that, viewed only in its social aspects, and without reference to its purely religious signification, which, though undoubtedly most consolatory, is too often eclipsed by the carnalities of the celebration, Christmas is but a melancholy time for people who have any faculty of thought, and have passed the age of five-and-twenty. Truly for them its mirth is very tragical. It is all very well for children who know not what care means, to whom 66 to-morrow" is a Canaan flowing with milk and honey; whose spirits are unclouded by the shadows of coming sorrows; whose palates are unpalled ; and whose digestion is unimpaired. Let them gather the rose-buds while they may, which is not for long; let them laugh and gambol, be glad and rejoice. If they are not happy now, when may they hope to be so! Ah! when indeed. Who could find it in his heart to quell their delight, or

"to stop their tide of laughter with a sigh?" Leave them at the high top-gallant of their mirth, and say not a word to damp the ardor of their joy. But really when we are arrived at that most irrational of all epochs, "years of discretion:" when we have lived to know what life truly is, how mournful, how precarious; when our hearts are full of sad memories, and dark forebodings, how dismal then is the very thought of jollity, and with what a mocking echo do the sounds of conventional merriment fall upon the ear! Christmas comes round again, and we are told to be jolly. The streets swarm with elated citizens, laboriously intent on pleasure; the shops are decked out in finery; the bells are ringing, and the busy note of preparation resounds through the land; everywhere people are preparing to put on happiness like clothes: but another year is gone, gone past recall, and we sigh to think what havoc death has committed since this time twelvemonth; what gaps he has made in the circle of our friends; what loved ones he has slain; what homes he has destroyed; what hearts he has made cold and desolate. How many were there among us bright and joyous last Christmas, whom we shall never see again?

"When I remember all

The friends so linked together,

I've seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,

I feel like one who treads alone

Some banquet hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled, whose garlands dead,

And all save me departed."

Trite lines, but how true! We are reminded of that ghastly German story about the band of students who