but the chimneys and the subsidiary shafts
are other ways out for the used air.

The last topic of this comprehensive sanitary
budget is violent interference with life or health,
and that is discussed this year in certain forms
of Accidental and Criminal Poisoning, which
have been investigated and reported on by
Doctor Alfred Taylor. Doctor Taylor points out
that, as to criminal poisoning, there is virtually
no check upon the purchase of poison enough
to kill two adults, by anybody who is in the
possession of threepence; while, as to accidental
poisoning, incompetent druggists' lads again and
again give oxalic acid for Epsom salts, arsenic
for calomel, or even for magnesia. Even small
village shopkeepers, who know nothing at all of
drugs, sell deadly poisons, and keep them so
loosely in store that thirty pounds of sugar of
lead have been sent instead of alum for a miller
to mix with his flour, and twelve pounds of
arsenic have been sold to a lozenge maker in
mistake for twelve pounds of plaster of Paris.
Surely the law should make men heavily responsible
who commit such mistakes. They are
accidents that would not often happen if they were
treated according to their true characters as
serious offences.

QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE SECOND: WOMANHOOD.

CHAPTER LI. PRESENTIMENT.

THE countess and Lily were speedily installed
in the Cottage.

The dwelling placed at the countess's disposal
by Mr. McVariety might, with, almost equal
propriety, have been dubbed the Barn, or the
Mansion House, or the Log Cabin, for it
partook, in pretty well-balanced degrees, of each
and every one of the characteristics of the
edifices just mentioned. Perhaps, when Ranelagh
was the country-house of some great
seventeenth-century nobleman, it had been a Mansion
—indeed, it yet boasted a fine old carved porch,
and some latticed windows with deep embrasures
of stone, which had a Mansion House look; but
it had been half burned down, and patched up
again with bricks and boards in a most
heterogeneous fashion. What kind of roof it had
originally possessed, was uncertain. The existing
one was certainly of thatch. Its career had
been an eminently varied one; and successive
lessees of Ranelagh had put it to all kinds of
uses. Mrs. Snuffburn, the housekeeper, who
had lived through many managements, and
whose memory was prodigious, was ready to
take her affidavit that she had known the
Cottage when it was converted into a cow-house.
Manager Wobbell, who rented the gardens in
'36, the Great Balloon year, was of an agricultural
turn of mind, and kept pigs in the garden
attached to the Cottage. His famous trotting
pony, Hydrocephalous, was put out to grass in
the adjoining paddock, and in the great hall he
kept the Indian corn which he had grown after
an approved recipe of the late Mr. Cobbett.
The corn came up beautifully; only the rats
devoured the greater portion of the crop when
it was garnered in, and the residue turned bad,
so as to excite, the rather, ridicule than
competition when exhibited on a stall in Mark-lane as
the Royal Ranelagh Corn.

Monsieur Folliculaire, from Paris, who took
the Gardens in the Coronation year (you remember:
Folliculaire of Tivoli and the Montagnes
Russes, who used to give promenade concerts
long before Jullien was heard of), "remounted,"
to use his own expression, and redecorated the
Cottage in the Louis Quinze style, covering the
ceilings with flying personages out of Lemprière's
Dictionary, and very scantily attired, and the
walls with mirrors, gaseliers, and festooned
draperies of pink and white glazed calico.
Folliculaire was an imaginative man, mad as a
March hare. His endeavours, nevertheless,
were commendable. At the clapping of hands,
tables laden with the choicest viands and
the rarest wines were to rise through
trapdoors; you had only to lift a corner of the tablecloth
to find the keys of a harpsichord; and the
ice-creams were always sent up in shapes
representing the Vénus de Médicis or the Belle
Chocolatière. But the machinery of the supper-
tables wouldn't work, and the choice viands and
rare wines were apt either to stick, in medio,
between supper-room and cellar, after the
manner of Mahomet's coffin, or else to shoot up
suddenly, with alarming crash of crockeryware,
scattering dismay and gravy among the assembled
guests. Compelled to have recourse to
manual aid in lieu of mechanical appliances,
Folliculaire engaged waitresses who wore high
powdered toupees, hoops, short skirts, and high-
heeled shoes, according to the pattern of the
shepherdesses of Watteau and Lancret. These
young ladies, however, complained that the high-
heeled shoes, in addition to being painful to
walk upon, conduced to corns, and that the
powder spoilt their hair. Folliculaire suggested
wigs; but the perruques were continually
tumbling into plates of lobster salad, and, besides,
made the young ladies' heads ache. In despair,
he replaced the shepherdesses by a corps of
graceful nymphs attired as vivandières of the
French army; and, for a while, the blue tunics,
white aprons, and scarlet pantaloons, proved
very attractive; but, as a rule, the British
aristocracy were languid in availing themselves of
the delights of the Trianon Pompadour; and
the sudden bankruptcy and flight of Folliculaire
(he now keeps a coffee-house at Malta) nipped
in the bud his ingenious project for converting
the Trianon into an Oriental Kiosque, with
divans for smokers, and a bevy of houris,
dressed like Gulbeyaz in Don Juan, to hand
chibouques, narghilés, and coffee to the visitors,
and execute Bayadère dances in the centre of
the saloon.

By turns property-room, scene-shed, firework
repository, and general repository for odds and
ends, the Cottage had fallen into a curious state
of dilapidation. The night watchman lived