suddenly on Mr. Pendril's arm. "Not on Michael
Vanstone!"

"Yes: on Michael Vanstone."

A SOUTH KENSINGTON LEGEND.

ONCE upon a time, in a great hardware city
which shall be nameless, a great hardware
capitalist formed a pious wish. He had made money
of the hardest kind from the hardest materials,
and he wished to display his gratitude in some
striking manner.

After many days and nights of anxious
deliberation, assisted by the advice of many art
fanciers and teachers, the happy idea was hit
upon of erecting a hardware cathedral. From
the days of St. Augustine to those of Cardinal
Wiseman many religious temples had been
raised in stone and brick, but no one had ever
dedicated an iron cathedral to the presiding
saint of hardware. A contract was accordingly
given to a leading ironmaster, accompanied by
a plan prepared by a true hardware architect,
and in due time a long building was raised,
which was half way between a factory and a
cathedral. Great care had been taken to put in
clerestory windows, as much like the windows
of gunmakers' workshops as possible, and the
iron columns were carefully moulded in that
shape which hardware people thought was the
only proper Gothic. The roof was made as
bare and simple as the roof of a barn, and no
labour or ingenuity was spared which could
make the building look hard, practical, and
unattractive. £ s. d. was marked in ornamental
metal-work whenever it was thought necessary
to employ a little decoration; maxims from
Poor Richard's Almanack, Harrison's System of
Book-keeping by Double Entry, the Counting-
house Monitor, and the Complete Tradesman,
were put up as "legends;" screens were
erected in various parts, formed of dustpans,
fish-kettles, and a variety of hardware productions;
an organ was built in the centre of the
nave, side by side with a lighthouse, a
monument made of stomach-pumps, and an iron
water-butt; and, finally, the whole structure
was dedicated to St. Bilston the Black: a saint
who made roasting-jacks in the fourth century
at a place called Wolverhampton.

When this singular place was duly
consecrated and opened for public worship, the
hardware people—a peculiar race of beings—were in
ecstasies. They thought nothing so perfect had
ever been seen before, in the whole range of
Oriental, classic, Gothic, and romantic architecture.
Some even went the length of pooh-poohing
Bramanti, Michael Angelo, and Wren,
as men whose reputation was the growth of the
dark ages.

St. Bilston the Black (before alluded to) was a
very worthy and important saint in his way, but
he was not the only member of his family who felt
an interest in cathedrals. Several elder brothers
were in existence, whose virtues had been
embalmed in the best of stone, and they were not
very tolerant of this new temple of iron. With
every disposition to respect the nineteenth
century for what it really could do well, they
thought it ought not to meddle with cathedral
architecture. The canons of that art had been
fixed by the great unknown, with the materials,
proportions, and sites, of the world's cherished
temples; and they thought that while thousands
were daily making pilgrimages to the grand old
shrines, no parody in iron should be allowed to
stand in mocking magnificence.

As these discontented saints were as powerful
as they were dissatisfied, not many hours were
allowed to pass without something being done
to relieve the world of this eyesore.

Being, like all saints, strictly conservative,
they objected to destroy even such a thing as
the hardware cathedral, and they therefore
looked out for some appropriate spot in England
to which they could at once remove it. After
a very wide survey they selected a place called
South Kensington, where a celebrated government
engineer was trying his hand at a railway
station. In the dead of the night the hardware
cathedral was torn up by the roots; was carried
to the great nursery-ground of science and art,
where Shakespeare, taste, and the musical
glasses, are forced in government hotbeds; and
was dropped neatly into the middle of the
unfinished railway station.

When the government engineer came out on
the following morning to look at his work, he
was startled by the change which a few hours
had made in it. He rubbed his eyes, and looked
at the building, and then he ran into his
office, rubbed his eyes again, and looked
at his plans, and after this he ran out into the
muddy road, rubbed his eyes once more, and
again stared at the building. A well-meaning,
but injudicious friend, who was coming by at
the time, congratulated him on the artistic effect
of the structure; and this caused him to come
to a hasty and unwise determination. Without
wasting his time in trying to fathom a mystery
that he felt was beyond his reach, he at once
accepted the new hardware-ecclesiastical-railway-
factory-Gothic building as his own design.

A new difficulty now arose which the
unfortunate engineer had never anticipated. The
place was spoilt as a railway station, and spoilt
as a cathedral. The railway company for whom
it was being built on speculation, refused to
have anything to do with it, because it was not
practical enough for their purpose; the
Mormons, to whom it was offered as a temple, at
a very moderate price, refused to buy it because
it was too practical. The government engineer
was thus left with this huge building on his
hands, unable to find a tenant, and with every
inducement to let it out piecemeal. One trader
made him an offer for a part as a carriage
repository; a philanthropic society wished to take
the offices attached, to fit up as almshouses; the
celebrated society for teaching grandmothers to
suck eggs were half inclined to secure a large
portion for their schools; and offers were made
(much to the disgust of the South Kensington
aristocracy) to rent the annexes as rope-walks