the Victoria station being so near to Soane-street,
quite handy.

But what crowding, and pushing, and fighting,
and scrambling, to get places there was; my
best clothes were almost torn off my back. Then
me and Charley got separated, and both pulled
different ways, and the boy so delicate and easy
frightened — it's along of being too much with
me, no doubt, for the blessed sergeant was as
bold as a lion — and there was I kept away from
him tight jammed up in the crowd, for I don't
know what length of time, not able to get a
ticket or move one way or another, and it did
seem to me uncommonly ill-managed to be
sure, and as if the Railway Company didn't
consider what crowds they would have to provide
for. They might know how things are
altered now to what they used to be, how everybody's
always rushing here, there, and everywhere,
and they might have provided more
than one pay place, and not kept you waiting there
ever so long before you got jour ticket. Why
not have given us our tickets first, and then
found us some place to wait in, while the trains
that were already full got off? But lor! they
don't care, they get the money. The public
can't strike, and refuse to travel till their convenience
is better consulted — they can't do that,
and nothing else is any use.

But if there was pushing and fighting as we
went, what was there as we came back? The
passengers were tearing and clawing at one
another like wild beasts, some jumping into the
third-class carriages over the doors which weren't
yet opened, and some were thrown down on the
floors of the carriages and trampled upon; and
one train me and Charley were fairly pushed
away from, and saw it go off without us, because
we were not strong enough to hold our own.
The fairest way would be surely to let down so
many at a time as would fill a train, aud no more;
but lor! they don't care, as I said before.

But I'm getting on too fast, talking about returning
home almost before , we've got well
there. "There," says Mr. Broadhead, "where?"
Why, the Crystal Palace, to be sure. You see
Mr. B. is trying to teach me to write grammatically,
and he says that when you allude to a
place as " there," you ought to have mentioned
the name of the place first in the course of the
paragraph. Mr. B. says its the more important
that I should learn to express myself rightly,
because his head is so full of his own work that
he often writes down what I say quite mechanically.
Well, I mean to take pains and profit by
his instructions, for I do like literary pursuits,
and so I tell you.

But I must go back to my Frenchman, for if
I am going to correct my style it won't do for
me to wander. That man — his name is Borgne
— that M. Borgne goes to the Handel Festival
and hears it, and comes back again, and it really
doesn't seem to have touched or moved his
heart — if he has one — a morsel. I wonder if all
Frenchmen are so hard-hearted as he seems to
be, and so (as it appears to me) matter-of-fact.
A great greenhouse is not a good place for a
concert, he says- and this, by-the-by, is a nice
thing for him to say, for I'm sure I have heard
him speak before now of a Conservatory at Paris
which is the principal place they have for music.
Well, be that as it may, he calls our lovely
Crystal Palace a greenhouse, and then he says
that no people but the English would think of
giving a concert — a concert, indeed, why it's
heavenly — in a greenhouse. " Let it be one
thing," he says, "or the other, a concert-room
or a garden." And then he complains that in
trying to make their concert-room they have
spoilt the place as a conservatory. " What a
thing," he grumbles out, "is that gigantic half-umbrella
of a sounding-board spread out over
the singers; it is decorated with alcoves, too,
just like the side-walks of a tea-garden.* Solos,
too," he says, " in that enormous place! You
might as well sing them in Hyde Park. But
you English admire only things that can be tested
by measurement and figures. ' Hark,' you say,
' it is a single voice and the building is so many
yards long, and so many high, and so many broad,
and yet I can hear it. I am so many hundred
feet away and yet I can hear — can I hear? yes,
yes, I can hear; oh, wonderful! How many
performers did you say? Four thousand — really,
four thousand — wonderful!' and then you go
home and you say how large the building was
and yet you heard your Sneeves Rims, or whatever
is his name — and there were four thousand

* Without falling into the critical vein ascribed
by my worthy landlady to M. Borgne, I must take
this opportunity of confessing that I am myself half-disposed
to regret the alteration in the transept of
the Crystal Palace during the late Handel Festival.
I cannot help thinking that the spectacle which used
to be furnished by the orchestra was one of the
greatest features of the celebration. The appeal
made to the mind through the eye was as grand as
that made through the ear. I remember well the
festival of 1859, and, as a spectacle, that of 1862
was surely very inferior to it. For some time I
could not conceive why it was that on this recent
occasion I felt as I looked such a keen sense of disappointment
at the scene before me. I remembered
the look of that assembled multitude on the former
occasion, as the blazing light poured down upon
it from above. Had I, I asked myself, exaggerated
to myself the beauty of the former
spectacle? "Was it really not so wonderful as I
used to think it? The thousands of faces — the light
clothing, the brilliant colour, the suggestion of some
ancient picture of the last judgment — were all these
seen and thought of by me under some strange hallucination?
Was the chorus not so large a chorus
now? Were the members of it differently dressed?
All these questions I asked myself before arriving at
the final conclusion that the change in the scene before
me was attributable to the new sounding-board
which had been erected over the orchestra, and which
cast a heavy and unsightly shadow over all its occupants.
To me, I own, the gain in volume of sound
was a poor compensation for the loss of that extraordinary
and beautiful sight, and I even went so far
as to think that there was a certain airy delicacy
about the tone of the voices floating in that vast
space, which I missed as much as the coup-d'Å“il of
which I had been disappointed. — J. B.