takes the form of expression habitual to all
my friends. My mother advises me. "I have
no means of helping the poor boy in his many
difficulties," she deplores, "except by giving
him advice if he would only take that!" Heaven
knows, I do take it, most submissively, in
enormous doses; but I cannot say that I always
find it agree with me. My mother's favourite
formula is a prescription to the effect that I
should make myself master of my own house.
But, I can't. I am the most contemptible
person on the premises. All that belongs to me of
the establishment is a small obscure room, where
I endeavour to write, but where I am in a
perpetual state of siege from the real lords of the
soil. I am at the mercy of my youngest son,
Jubbins (a nickname, of course), who makes
inroads upon me at discretion, giving me stern
orders for pencils, paper, books, and even
compelling me to perform menial offices of toilet
for his comfort and accommodation. He, too,
is one of my advisers, though he can scarcely yet
articulate the English language. No later than
yesterday, he strongly recommended the policy of
my putting down my pen, and taking him, Jubbins,
to see a Punch and Judy reported to be then
performing in the neighbourhood. My mother
advises me to be a little more strict with the
servants. Why doesn't she advise the servants to
be a little less strict with me? I am hopelessly
at their mercy, and they are pitiless. They hide
my slippers, light fires with my manuscripts,
keep important letters unposted on the kitchen
dresser for days together; they burn my mutton-
chops, they neglect to put salt into my soup.
My mother advises me to discharge them. She
does so, frequently; but I never find myself any
the better for it. As a crowning impossibility,
my mother advises me to make my wife exert
herself, and show a little spirit. My wife is an
invalid. She can't exert herself, and has no
spirit to show. "If you would take my advice,"
says my mother, "as, surely, you might, with
your vast abilities, you would find your affairs
in a very different position." I am tired of
repeating to her again and again that I do take
her advice. Only I don't seem to know what
to do with it when I have taken it.

The editor of the Hair-on-End Magazine
advises me to give up prose fiction, for which he
declares I have no real aptitude, and confine
myself exclusively to poetry. "You can do these
things, you know," he writes, "if you only
choose to apply yourself. Send us one of your
appalling verse stories every week, and there is
a comfortable income at your feet" It takes me
a month to write a verse story.

Sloat, the manager, who really has a great
esteem for me, refuses my farces one after
another, and says, "Take my advice, my dear
fellow: don't fritter away your really great
talents in writing this kind of stuff. We can get
blockheads by the dozen to do this, as well as we
want it done. Tuck up your sleeves at once,
set to work, and give us a comedy: something
that will live." But how am I to live in the
mean time?

I painted portraits for a livelihood when I
was a boy. I still amuse myself, with oils and
brushes from time to time. My friend
McCorquhodale, the landscape painter, bullies me
fearfully for wasting my abilities on literature.
"Take my advice," he says: "throw up the
pen-and-ink bosh, go into the country and work
for three or four months at elm-trees, and your
fortune's made. However, if you will be a fool,
it isn't my fault." (Nobody ever said it was; it
is simply my misfortune!) Blotman, the
parliamentary reporter, on the other hand, looks
coldly on my unfinished canvases, and observes,
"How the deuce can you expect to support
your family in comfort, when you neglect your
legitimate occupation for this kind of trifling?
A good fire in the house to burn all these easels,
brushes, and canvases, would be the best thing
that could happen to you. Go in for political
leaders. That's your line."

A strange vision occurred to me the other night
as I lay sleeping (rather uncomfortably, in
consequence of my having yielded to somebody's
advice to sup upon pickled salmon). I dreamed
that I saw a jury of my advisers sitting in judgment
upon a Leopard and an Ethiopian.

The debate was angry and protracted; but, a
resolution was finally carried, nem. con., to the
effect that the Leopard should be forthwith
ordered to change his spots, and the Ethiopian
commanded to become a white man.

                DRIFT

"DRIFT"—from the Conquest down to the
execution of Charles the First, over a period of
pretty nearly six centuries, during the reigns
of twenty-five sovereigns of England, when
"absolute monarchy," "ecclesiastical supremacy,"
"military despotism," "feudal oligarchy,"
"popular parliaments," had all been
tried and found wanting, from their inherent
selfishness, and after mistakes innumerable
had been hustled into a decent respect for
each other, and the three estates of the realm
had begun, glimmeringly, to understand how
far each might go, and no further. "Drift"
from the stormy, wide, ever-changing, restless,
awful ocean of time which washes the
boundaries of the continents of ten hundred and
sixty-six, and sixteen hundred and forty-nine.
"Drift"—débris, disjecta membra, or salvage,
significant, symbolical, speaking unmistakably
of the race, clime, and circumstance whence the
scattered morsels came, and whose value and
native worth, cleansed from the rude treatment
of tempest-tossing, from the scum, the foam, the
barnacles, or bilge-water, or from their own
indigenous impurities, it will be the aim of me,
Mathew Mole, to set before my friends of to-day
and to-morrow, as tokens of yesterday, which
none can dispute or disdain.

I shall not mind whence I get my memorabilia:
from Libraries, Museums, or Record
Repositories—from old books, manuscripts, rolls,
deeds, or documents—from state papers, or
family or personal correspondence, which, alone