but sadly loutish. If there be a crooked wrong
end to your message, as there will be to most
messages, he is pretty sure to tender it with
that wrong end uppermost.

About the familiar domestics there is a
waggish stupidity almost diverting. At a
crowded soirée not so long since, the Bishop of
X——, then abroad from his English diocese,
presents himself in his proper magnificence of
apron and stockings, together with Mrs. X——,
and the Misses X——. Wondering open-
mouthed domestic receives the full style and
titles of the dignitaries and those of the
accompanying ladies, gasps, rubs his eyes, and has
styles and titles repeated to him many times.
Finally, in utter despair, he proceeds to his
duty, and chants aloud to the astonished
company the advent of II Vescovo Secolare! (the
secular bishop). He was mystified with Mrs.
Bishop. Another gentleman of Irish extraction
—softening down the consonants of his
patronymic to fit the Italian mouth—
unconsciously scatters terror and consternation among
an inoffensive family party by being heralded
as II Vice Re, or the Viceroy. The names of
these familiars are sometimes quaintly
barbarous, and curiously pagan. Scipio comes to
take down your boots; Julius Cæsar will rise
drowsily from his seat in the hall, where he
sleeps through the day and receive your key.
The baked meats which do so furnish forth
the elegant table of a friend of mine, were once
dressed by a skilful "chief," known awfully as
Alcides Hercules!

Here is that mysterious perambulator again,
which I have encountered so many times before,
making triumphant progress through the city,
with an admiring company of the great
unemployed waiting on it. The perambulator will be
drawn in lottery—open-air lottery—and Romulus
and Remus, and their scrubby brethren (what
concern, in the name of Jupiter Capitoline, can they
have with such a vehicle?), are busy taking
tickets. I have a dim suspicion that the child's
perambulator will never be "drawn," for I meet
it again and again, and always doing a brisk
business.

It were well, indeed, if Romulus and Remus
did not go beyond this harmless dissipation. But
have we not remarked in our walks strange
significant little temples, sown thickly in every
street: at first a mystery, but presently, from
their frequency, mere things of course? The
temples are covered from top to bottom with large
numbers, have little frames standing out in
the street with special figures of their own.
Dark spirits are seen inside, pen in hand,
entering unholy contracts; and here again are
Romulus, Remus, and Company, in their torn
shabby suits, entering in a stream. Figures,
frames, familiars, all are at the sign of the
Lotteria Pontificie. Plebs Romanus spends
much of his disengaged hours at these unholy
sanctuaries. The business done is surprising
indeed, though the local establishments are
scarcely equal to the run, and room is found
for agencies from Leghorn and Naples and other
places. See into what a model figure all these
teachings are combining to fashion our Common
Roman!

WET WEATHER.

UMBRELLAS from the East, wet weather from
the West, and, in this year one thousand eight
hundred and sixty, see the jubilee they keep
together in Great Britain! It is hardly fair that
the Monster Festival should have been held in
our part of the world. The attractive example
of the Crystal Palace may, indeed, have helped
in bringing it about; but although this may
be, very possibly, the thousandth, or three
thousandth anniversary of the umbrella in India
or China, that would be the anniversary of it as
a sun-shade, and it is but eighty years—still a
score short of the centenary—since it has been
used to protect Englishmen from rain. Our
girls, indeed, took to it earlier, for they were
using it a century and a half ago, when Gay,
with manly British scorn of sun and rain,
exclaimed,

Let Persian dames th' umbrella's ribs display,
To guard their beauties from the sunny ray;
Britain in winter only knows its aid
To guard from chilly show'rs the walking maid.

All very well for seventeen twelve; but had
this poet been singing—if it were in man to
sing—under the summer drip and chill of
eighteen sixty, would his note have been the
same? By what right the umbrellas have
appointed to hold during a whole winter, spring,
and summer this great festival among us,
putting themselves over everybody's head, and
sticking out their ribs so ostentatiously, we
shall make bold to ask. They could not, of
course, meet in Morocco, if it be true that,
there, the emperor's umbrella is the only one
permitted in the land. In this showery land
everybody must have an umbrella, whatever the
fatigue of holding it. If it be true, as most
people think, while this is being written, that a
cycle of rain having set in, there will be no
more fine weather until the year nineteen sixty,
we accept the rain we cannot stop, as a
condition of life; but the umbrella, let it be
warned, we do not accept. We cannot give
the labour of our right arms to its support for
ever.

Our chief rains come from the condensing
touch of a chill current of air on the warm
moist winds flowing from the southern seas.
Rain, says an early pundit, is water that drops
down on us out of the sky. The sorts of rain
are natural (as cat-and-dog rains, showers and
mizzle) and unnatural; the unnatural being
divided into hard, as of stones and iron; soft, as
of frogs; and fluid, as of blood or milk. Having
thus treated of the matter scientifically, we will
take it practically. Let it be understood that
a fall of an inch in twenty-four hours represents
what we in this country consider four-and-twenty
hours of heavy rain. Now the regular average
allowance of London or Edinburgh is but
twenty-five inches a year. The average fall, if