crown? Let the palm-trees spread their tents,
and the great fern-trees from New Holland arch
their branches; Nature has no charms to offer
us like the chance of seeing a foolish brave man's
death for half-a-crown.

In the centre of the great avenue I find a
walled-in red-baize counter for the sale of tickets.
A careworn man of fashion next me is anxious
to know how near the rope the ten-shilling ticket
will bring him; a still more careworn man of
pleasure in the background wants to be informed
where he can go for five shillings; while a dozen
other eager, immovable, but anxious fashionable
men, with ladies on their arms, are proffering
their half-crowns for front-seats in the lower
balcony.

I climb the stairs, with a moment's glance on
the far reach of misty horizon, and take my
place in the lofty gallery. I am at the
jutting-out point of the gallery, looking down
on the great central transept which the rope
traverses; the rope, thick as my wrist, is
composed of two stout strands, and which I saw
wound all the way round the great central iron
pillar of the corkscrew staircase leading to the
gallery where I now am.

The cross ropes reaching from the rope to
keep it perfectly and surely steady, are bound
round the blue and white bars that I lean my
arms on, looking at the fluttering Vanity fair
below me. A rough hearty workman, who is
tightening it, and halloaing, regardless of
consequences, to a man opposite, who looks like a
black, has much to say about Blondin. So has
the stolid smiling policeman, B 434, whom
several "swells," with trellises of auburn whisker,
are "working" for oracles.

"I tell you what, sir," says he, addressing
an imaginary ringleader, "there's not half of the
ladies as likes it; and take my word for it, if he
(Blondin) doesn't come down with a run one of
these fine days."

Further, oracle P.C. B 434 cannot be
induced to vouchsafe.

To him enters the workman, who volunteers
much more information, and takes a less hortatory
and warning point of sight.

"These here ropes," says he, "are to keep
the rope as Blondin walks on perfectly steady,
which is——"

"Five hundred feet high?" suggests a lounger
at the club.

"No; exactly one hundred feet from the floor
of the, building, and three hundred and twenty
feet from end to end; which is, as I may say, from
fore and aft. Those weights you see every twenty
feet or so, weigh thirty pounds each; Mr. Blondin
thinks that is a better way of keeping it all
perfectly steady, than splicing more rope to the
galleries.

I ask how long Blondin took crossing the
rope?

"He ran down it, sir, the other day in less
than two minutes, as fast as a man could run
on dry land."

This was an exaggeration of my friend, I
afterwards found.

At this moment, a short thickset man wearing
a French hat, passed. I saw by the gold medals
which he bore "as bold as brass" on his left
breast, that it was Monsieur Blondin; I knew him
by his heavy gold-headed American cane, and by
the frank brave acrobatic face I had often seen
in illustrated papers.

"It do make 'em (the ladies) shiver a bit,
but there's no harm in it," said the workman;
who then, giving a suspicious pull to a rope, and
pronouncing his opinion that it was altogether
"a rum start," went on his way: wherever, below
or above, that might be.

Now the band, all scarlet and gold lace, begins
to be jubilant, and alternately drummy and
brassy, or now and then lulls to silence, while a
solo flute tells us of its sorrows. That conductor
in black, with his back steadily turned to the
audience, is the only person who will not see
Blondin venture his life. How I pity that
conductor at this moment!

Below, the crowd is divided into two opposite
parties seated on either side of the transept,
which is left bare, for fear Blondin, or his pole,
or anything which is his, should fall and hurt
anybody.

"Exactly like the House of Commons!" says
the wife of the member for Rottenborough, who
is sitting next to me.

The people are strewn over the floor like
clippings of black cloth about a tailor's shop, only
that here and there scraps of scarlet and shreds
of green and lilac look as if sweepings of a
milliner's shop have got intermingled with the
tailor's snippings. Overhead, the summer dresses
of the ladies show through the open work
balconies, like rows of azaleas in full bloom, arranged
for a flower-show. The pretty thoughtless
creatures, always encouraging men to risk their
lives in reckless and romantic ways, are everywhere.
There are flower borders of them on the
steps of the great orchestra, and spots of them
like morsels of tapestry patterns, only sketched
in, under the organ, and up even in the topmost
galleries.

I beguile a moment or two by looking at a
mendacious lithograph, representing Blondin
crossing over the Horse-shoe Fall at Niagara on
a rope; though I very well know he did not
cross the Niagara river within a quarter of a
mile of the Falls, and that, to cross the Falls
through boiling mist and on a slippery rope
would be impossible to any human being. Of
course, too, as might be expected, the interval
traversed by the rope is made three times as
high, and ten times as wide, as it really is; nor
does the lithograph contain any notice of Blondin's
rival, who also daily crossed the same river
on a rope.

"But the most dreadfullest thing, sir," said
the workman, again appearing, to do something
or other to a rope, which got loose and hung
over the transept, "is to see him go over
in a sack; now there's no deception, sir, for
I've put it on myself, and you can see nothing
in it but the rope just where your feet go. Oh,
its hawful! he must have a deal of nerve or