custom in Italy, even in the army, is to stuff
horses with hay, and stint them in corn: so that
even the best teams, when compared with like
animals in England, have always a languid,
shuffling gait, and a hang-dog, lackadaisical look.
The waste of whipcord is prodigious, and the
handle is almost invariably laid upon the poor
brutes' backs before the journey is over; so that
a few miles' drive with a Piedmontese coachman
would fill a member of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with indignation.
Luckily the tempest of blows is relieved by an
occasional oath; and it would be impossible to
describe the awe these wretched four-legged
creatures stand in, of the Madonna and the saints.
A Swiss-Italian postilion, in the Canton Ticino,
had recourse to a still more formidable name.
It was in eighteen hundred and forty-nine, and
the country was full of the exploits of that
stout-hearted condottiero whose defence of Rome
in that year will rank amongst the greatest
military deeds of modern Italy. Whenever the
man's cattle flagged in their exertions, down
came the whip, and with it a roaring, rattling
shout of " Gar-r-r-ribaldi!" Away the poor
fagged jades would tug and strain and pull as if
the arch enemy of man himself were at their heels.

INEXHAUSTIBLE HATS.

MOST persons are familiar with a trick that
conjurors perform, in which a truck-load of
feathers, a few score of tin cups, and a clothes-
basket full of flowers, are brought from an
apparently empty hat. They must recollect how the
mysterious fountain seemed never tired of
welling up, and how, when it had ceased for a
few seconds, it was again set flowing at the
request of a lady or a child. This trick is
popularly known by the title of the " inexhaustible
hat," and has many imitations in the
legerdemain of trade.

A "calamitous fire" at some large wholesale
City warehouse, especially if it be in the clothing
trade, is an inexhaustible hat, from which there is
an almost ceaseless flow of "salvage stock."
Almost before the damp hose has ceased playing
on the smoking sky-roofed building in
Wadding-street, or Fustianbury, there is scarcely a
retail slapperdasher from Blackwall to
Hammersmith, and from Highgate to Norwood,
whose shop has not broken out in a dreadful
rash of placards, notes of admiration, and
damaged goods. As in the antiquarian market
you will always find the supply of Oliver Cromwell's
skulls to be equal to the demand; as in
the superstitious market you can get the holy
coats, and blood, and teeth of saints in any
quantity, sent any distance (on the receipt of
a post-office order), carriage free; so in the
pushing, cutting, puffing slapperdashers' market,
where we are compelled to go for the adornment
of our bodies, there is no limit to the
material that has been liberally bought, after it has
been providentially saved. Dingy old nightmare
patterns, belonging to an age before the
existence of schools of design, are dragged, once
more, in fearful quantities, before the light of
day. Like Othello, they cannot be loved for
any beauty of colour or form, and only for the
dangers they are supposed to have passed
through, while the devouring element was
striving to secure them as its prey. The rolls
of calico that (according to advertisement) have
been damaged by water at a single fire are only
equalled by one of those cities that have been
suddenly swallowed up by the sea. The miles
of gaudy ribbon that (according to advertisement)
are unrolled from the mouth of the
charred and blackened ruin, are as endless in
reality as that other ribbon seems to be which
comes from the mouth of the mountebank at a
fair.

An important bankruptcy is another inexhaustible
hat, as bountiful in its yield of bargains
and sacrificial goods as any calamitous City fire.
The Anglo-Saxon energy—the keenness and
activity that make commercial capital out of
these commercial disasters— are still chiefly
confined to the clothing trade. A glance at the
slapperdashing shops in any thoroughfare or
principal by-street of the metropolis and
suburbs, will show what a number of
enterprising traders have speculated in the bankrupt
stock of Messrs. Strawboy and Rag. Though
the muslins may be rotten—the colours fast to
go, not fast to stay—and the prints of the same
barbarous outline and colour as the stock that
was foolishly saved from destruction by fire—
yet each enterprising slapperdasher has not
only bought them all, but, more wonderful
still, has got them all, as the ready-money
purchasers of London are invited to see and judge
for themselves. Our wives and daughters are
first clothed in salvage stock, that has been
desperately torn from the embraces of the flames;
and then they are invited to adorn their lovely
persons in garments of miraculous cheapness,
that have been bought in a hundred places at
once by the sanction of the official assignee.
The inexhaustible hat of bankruptcy will overflow
with every kind of textile fabric (except
those for which the manufacturer is supposed
to have been honestly paid) as long as the
performance seems agreeable to the public
taste.

A sale by auction, where the household gods of
the bankrupt are brought to the hammer, is an
inexhaustible hat of an equally marvellous and deceptive
kind. A few passes of the auctioneer's magic
pen, and the old motto is proved to be wrong,
for out of nothing comes almost everything.
The home of insolvency is transformed into a
horn of plenty, and the bankrupt, in the hour
of his adversity, finds himself the apparent
possessor of a variety of luxuries, each one of
which is sufficient to prove that his private
expenditure must have been of the most reckless
kind.

The bill that announces the forthcoming bonâ
fide sale has long been recognised as a work
of literary art. It begins with the legal heading
of "In re Richard Jones, a bankrupt,"
though it omits to state that Richard Jones was