India, in India; we impoverish ourselves
(domestically) to pay for the Indian servants who
fan our sons who are slowly dying in India, and
of India. They come back sick, with ruined
constitutions, from India. They contract
tremendously expensive habits in India, and cannot
shake them off when they return to the
comparatively unimportant mother country. It is no
matter, all must be borne, all must be done, for
India.

Now, one of the mysteries which I do not ask
to have explained to me, and to which I am
wholly resigned, lies in this belief in India. I
cannot understand it. I can comprehend that a
certain number of valuable and desirable articles
come to us from India, but they do not seem
worth all this fuss. One can get through a day
mngnificently, without India. One can eat,
drink, and be clothed luxuriously, without India:
one can be amused without India. It seems to
me that we go through all I have spoken of
above, and a great deal more, for the sake of a
few jewels, a lot of Cashmere shawls which
nobody can afford to buy, and for those everlasting
species concerning the importation of which we
used to learn so much at school. These things
are very important, no doubt, but are they
important enough to produce the sensation they
do? We keep up armies and expend millions for
the sake of some drugs, for wonderful things
called jute, and turmeric, and for Indigo. This
Indigo, by-the-by, is another mystery. What
inconceivable importance seems to attach to
this blue dye! If we supported nature by
dying ourselves blue, if everything we wore were
of a dark-blue tinge, if the whole nation were
dressed after the fashion of the Metropolitan
Police force—if all these things were so, we
could hardly make more fuss than we do about
Indigo. The City of London seems altogether
devoted to Indigo, and if you go into the docks
and ask what all the bales of goods contain, the
answer is Indigo, Indigo, Indigo. American
cotton, tea from China, sugar from the West
Indies,—these are things the importance of
which one understands, but the degree of sacrifice
that is cheerfully made for India remains
still a great and terrible mystery.

It is one, however, which I am content to
leave unapproached, and to abandon as one does
parliamentary and pecuniary mysteries, prices of
stocks, the English funds, and other hopeless
matters. But there are some secrets which one
is less resigned about, some riddles which one
is more impatient to solve, some " Mysteries
of London" which it really disturbs one's peace
of mind to have to abandon as inexplicable.

The perfumers' shops! How are they kept
up? In one street in London (it is called
Bond-street), I myself have counted seven large
perfumers' shops, and six more which I do
not take into account because they are
hair-cutting temples as well. Seven enormous
old-established shops, in one street, for the sale of
perfumery! What can this mean? Would not
any one in the world have thought that one
single shop on the scale of a Bond-street
Emporium would alone have proved enough, not
only for all England, but for all the world?
How few people we know, are perfumed. How
many there are in good circumstances who never
buy a bottle of scent from one year's end to
another, unless it is a bottle of eau-de-Cologne
or lavender-water. Think of these shops, of
Rimmel's in the Strand, of Hendrie's and many
more in Regent-street and elsewhere, is it not
wonderful how they are all maintained?

But if the perfumers are a mystery of an
unfathomable nature, what shall we say of the
silversmiths and jewellers in Oxford-street?
How seldom people want the wares sold by
these gentry; and when they do want such
matters, do they employ a small and unknown
tradesman? Surely not. When any of our
friends require a silver teapot or half a dozen
spoons, do they not go to Messrs. Hunt and
Roskell, or Mr. Hancock, and buy them there?
What, then, is the secret of those silversmiths'
shops in Oxford-street, with their windows
full of what appears to represent thousands
of pounds' worth of property? Perhaps, if you
wanted a sixpenny watch-key in a great hurry,
you might go to one of these glittering
warehouses; but their proprietors will hardly get
rich upon such dealings. You give these
desperate tradesmen a job, only when some
emergency obliges you, when that knob on the teapot
lid comes off for the hundredth time, or when
you want a glass to your watch. But who buys
the hundreds of gilt clocks with inaccuracy written
in legible characters on their faces? Who
purchases the cheap gold watches, and abandons
his appointments thenceforth for ever? Who
is in a hurry to possess himself of one of those
silver butter-knives, warranted to cut always
too much butter or too little, warranted also to
swerve wildly away in the winter season when
the butter is hard, and to come out of the
mother-of-pearl handle once every calendar
month without fail?

These are awful questions, but still more
terrible questions remain. Is it possible that
one of these incomprehensible dealers ever uses
his shop as a blind, and is really engaged in
some nefarious business by which he makes his
living? Does he steal out in the dead of night
and engage in body-snatching? Does he sing
comic songs at a music hall? Does he lend money
in the back shop on the usual terms—" fifty
poundsh down, my dear, and fifty poundsh in
peautiful gilt clocksh, and plated putter-knives"
—a loan to be repaid, by the " brisk minor"
who contracts it, with his very life-blood?

At the back of that suburban terrace, in
which it is my fortune to reside when in
London, is a row of shops which supply the
neighbourhood with all the things they want, and in
some cases with a few articles, as it would
appear, which they do not want. In that small
row there are two (and used to be three)
enormous medical halls or chemists' shops. Next
to the luxury of a club-house, or of the abode
of a stockbroker on the eve of ruin, comes
the gorgceousuess of those two temples of