summot.—You 'avn't got the price of a pot of
beer, sir, about you, have ye?"

The workman's story ends as workmen's
stories often do. I give him largesse.

Suddenly all the sea of black hats below turns
white. But hush! there is a slight tremble of the
rope above our heads and all the faces change
whiter again, just as a row of aspen trees do,
when the wind passes through them. And now
the twenty thousand hands of the ten thousand
people, clap, and produce a secondary ripple and
flutter of white foaming along the edges of those
waves of black.

It is Blondin, who has emerged from his red-
covered dressing-room, and passed from the
little red sideboard upon the white twisted rope.
I feel a slight qualm as of incipient sea-sickness
when I see the reckless adventurer appear in
an Indian dress, with a huge crown of black and
white ostrich feathers nodding on his head, and
run nimbly on the rope (higher than those
wires that cross the Strand near Somerset House),
with an enormous balancing pole quivering
in his hands. His feet, wrapped in Indian
mocassins of deer-skin or wash leather, lap round
the rope as he walks and runs, in time to the
cadenced music. The ladies near me, turn away
their eyes; for, to look at Blondin, brings on
that sort of vertigo one feels when looking down
from a high tower.

"What a pity," says an enthusiast in the
voluptuousness of cruelty, "he does not carry
a glass tumbler with him, and drop it when
half way across; it would convey such a sense
of danger, and I dare say it would make a lady
or two faint."

"Or why not detonating balls, and make
them scream?" says a second old epicure, who
has just let his heavy silver-headed cane fall on
the heads of the unoffending people below.

Now standing on one leg, now sitting on the
rope like a sailor, now throwing a somersault,
now standing on his head on the rope, Blondin
starts on his "little tour;" and the more terribly
near he seems to death—whose great black hand
I almost seem to see clutching at him—the more
the ladies clap their little white hands, and the
more fashion's thousand heads gape, stare, "wonder
with a foolish face of praise," and languidly
applaud. More smelling of salts, more half-
faintness, more brazen-staring indifference to
risk or death, but no more faint excitement or
pale phantoms of pleasure than that can be
produced. And from the opposite little platform
above the flags and escutcheons steps out Blondin
again; this time not in dainty white, this time
with no gold badge swinging from his neck, but
in a ghastly striped hood like an Italian
penitent or a guilty monk. Now the pleasure
assumes a still more painful and hideous form.
The ladies scarcely dare to look up at the
puppet-like figure moving uneasily on its feet.
His eyes are blinded, he advances stooping and
swerving with the affected timidity of a beginner,
or of a man condemned to some horrible
and refined torture. It reminds me of that
dreadful bridge, El Araf, finer than a hair, and
sharper than a sabre blade, on which the
Mahomedans say all true believers are at the last
day to be passed over from hell to heaven.
Below, all is fire. The good pass over with
ease, uttering prayers; the bad lose their
balance, and fall, quick and screaming, into
Gehenna.

I see the lady faces below shudder as the
daring man slips—now one inquiring foot, now
another—down the edge of the rope, as if
blindly feeling for safety. Now, this man with
the brain of a chamois, lies down on the rope
and crosses his feet, then rises and passes on,
with a certainty that seems miraculous.

But the excited people below, want to see
still more daring feats. They have paid their
money, and Blondin has not yet been half enough
near death. He is now to attempt a still more
dangerous feat, and even this is nothing to what
he will do if the gentle ladies who scream "at
the smallest little mouse that runs on floor"
will only patronise him sufficiently.

The intervals of suspense are relieved by an
attendant (wonderfully like a real live footman)
passing round for inspection the hooded sack
that Blondin has just worn and thrown down.
It is perceived "that the sack is really quite
wet with perspiration," as an M.P. near me says,
with an exultation, not unmingled with surprise.

The band beats out fresh music as the third
and most horrible of the phases of the "amusement"
commences, and still the imperturbable
conductor keeps his black back stolidly turned
to us and to Blondin. The ladies' ribbons move
like wind-tossed flower-beds; for every one
expects to see something "delightfully frightful,"
less brutal than a prize fight, but, oh far more
tantalising and dangerous. The ladies who have
half fainted have now recovered, and are on the
alert. A few of the younger ladies clench their
eyebrows with an expression of pain, but they
all look up;—for you know that what ten
thousand people come to see, cannot be wrong.

This time, M. Blondin of the flaxen beard
and frank brave immovable eyes, is dressed
as a French cook—white flat cap, white
apron, white breeches, and white shoes. He
does not chalk his feet, nor hesitate a moment.
He quietly straps on his back, a portable stove,
which, funnel and all, weighs some fifty pounds,
and from which hang pots, pans, bellows, and
broom. With this load, he steps boldly on to
the rope; this time it makes the heart beat
ten times harder than before, to see the stove
bob about on his back and all but destroy his
balance. Now, he is safe half way across the
rope, and here he has to set down the unwieldy
stove and begin cooking. With extreme and
painful care he gets on one knee, and from
thence across the rope; he then ties his balancing
pole firmly to the rope, slowly lowers the
stove, now unstrapped, backward to the rope,
then turns, and, sitting on the pole, addresses
himself to cook at the toppling stove; which, I
suppose, he has hooked in some way to the pole.

The suspense is agonising as he lights the fire.
The smoke circles out of the funnel. He blows