previous to abandonment, than the old gloves.
We see them, indeed, if we look about us, in
use as long as fragments of leather will hold
together, and, even after that grievous hour,
when they will hold together no longer, when
patching and sewing and nailing are alike
ineffective, we still see shreds and patches
of them lying about on dunghills and cinder-
heaps, decaying until they become at last
unrecognisable, and are old boots and shoes
no longer.

What becomes of a great proportion of the
produce with which nature supplies us so
liberally? What, to take an entirely
maddening instance, becomes of cabbages? The
number of cabbages which the earth brings
forth, in comparison to the number of which
man is able to take cognisance in a cooked
state, is disproportionate in the extreme. Go
where you will (except in the paved streets of
our towns), you find cabbages growing. In the
country, in the suburbs, in the dingy back
regions where the town melts into the suburbs,
there are cabbages. The market gardens of
Fulham, Chelsea, Battersea, Dulwich, Clapham,
of the whole neighbourhood round about
London, seem to contain nothing but cabbages.
In amateur gardens, walled-in acres or half
acres lying outside the pleasure-garden, I
observe the fruits of the earth to be cabbages;
the markets seem to be organised almost
exclusively for the development of the cabbage
trade; the stalls round Covent Garden are
piled up with cabbages; the great carts which
pursue an eastward course through Piccadilly,
rolling along that thoroughfare all the night,
are piled up to the height of the second-floor
windows with cabbages.

But what becomes of the cabbages? How
rarely does one see a cabbage either on one's
own table, or on the tables of friends! Once
or twice in the course of the spring, a cabbage
may appear as an item in the bill of fare, but
no oftener. It is said that cabbages are largely
consumed in the poorer neighbourhoods; but
to account for the number of cabbages
produced, it would be necessary for the inhabitants
of all kinds of neighbourhoods, rich and
poor, not only to consume cabbages largely,
but to live upon cabbages.

What a mass of matter must be furnished
by the uneatable portions of the shell-fish
which appear on our tables! What legions
of oyster-shells must accumulate during the
long period when there is an R in the
month. The grottoes do not account for
many; and, besides—what becomes of the
grottoes? At all times of the year, both
when there is an R in the month and when
there is not, there is a steady consumption of
lobsters and crabs; yet the roads are not
crimson with their uneatable remains. They
do not the "multitudinous" fields "incarnadine,
making the green one red." May I ask what
becomes of the shells of the peas, of the
eggshells, of the potato parings, of the asparagus—
of every head of which so little is eaten and so
much is left?  Send away your plate, after
eating an artichoke. Not to ask what becomes
of the plate (though I should like to know), I
entreat you to consider the leaves.

Seriously speaking, and all exaggeration
apart, it seems as if the bulk of matter which
all this accumulation of objects suggests, must
be something so enormous as sensibly to
increase the mass of the earth. One would
expect to find great hillocks of all sorts of
heterogeneously formed material obstructing
our road-ways, rising up to the first-floors of
our houses, impeding our progress when we
would move, obliging us to force our way
through with steam rams. Yet it is not
so. I do not suppose that there is any
material difference in the elevation of the
soil, caused by this accumulation of things,
even in the now thickly populated neighbourhoods.
Yet I would expect to find, added on
to the earth's crust, a new modern stratum
of the conglomerate sort, made up of pins,
penny newspapers, old gloves, cabbage-stalks,
orange-peel, old tooth-brushes, worn-out
boots, steel pens, used lucifer-matches, and
all the other produce which goes on for ever
accumulating around and about us, and of the
ultimate fate of which we know little or nothing.
It is possible that such a stratum exists, but
one hears nothing about it. It is not reported
on by learned societies, nor recorded in
scientific journals, nor, when cuttings are made
through metropolitan soil, in order to the
construction of district railroads, do we see streaks
of soil made up of these objects, exhibited in
section.

There certainly would appear to be some
process in nature, causing things to disappear.
At all events, they do disappear. I have
seen a road mended in the country, and
that in some district where there has been
very little traffic, with such extraordinary
and anomalous materials as broken bottles,
brickbats, old saucepans, battered hats,
hobnailed shoes, and the like; and I have seen
many of these objects lying for weeks and
months without becoming incorporated with
the main substance of which the road was
made. And yet at last they have disappeared!
For half a year at least, the old boot or the
battered saucepan has been there, drifting
from place to place, occupying now the centre
of the lane, now the side, and by-and-by
lurking in a secret place under the hedge; still
there the thing has been, and I have seen
no cause or just reason why it should not
remain there in its integrity a hundred years.
But I have left, for a time, the part of the
country in which the saucepan-mended road
was; and when I came back a year
afterwards, that battered vessel was gone. It
is so, again, with indoor rubbish, or with
things not exactly coming under that
denomination which you never use and never
want. The things disappear. You do not
consign them to the dust-hole, or put them in
the fire; you merely cease to use them, or to
take note of their existence; and in the course
of time, longer or shorter, as the case