up by the night train. Lucky fellow! You will
have a comfortable bed here, and a comfortable
sleep. A capital house. I know it of old. Think
of the poor traveller tumbling on the cushions,
as you turn round on your side to go off into a
comfortable snooze. You are not angry with me?
Advice from a man of the world, and from an
old man of the world, is always useful. Good-
by."

INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITORS.

The unexpected success of the recent North
London Working Men's Industrial Exhibition
will, in all probability, prove to be an incentive
to other similar enterprises. Indeed, the good
services of many persons are already enlisted in
the organisation of a South London Exhibition,
planned for somewhere about the month of
February next; and of another for Marylebone.
Nearly all classes of society will wish
them success. Their good wishes will go
further; they will wish that such exhibitions were
more fully associated than they are with the
acknowledged tact and skill of working men. The
recent exhibition at the Agricultural Hall was
good enough to make us desire something
better. A commencement has been made which,
if artisans are true to themselves, may become
gradually very important.

In one sense we may say that the soldiers
began these exhibitions. Last winter, the men
of the Twelfth Regiment of Foot got up, in their
barracks at Dublin, a small exhibition of articles
made or collected by themselves; and very well
pleased were they and their visitors with it.
Last March, "The South London Working
Classes' Industrial Exhibition" was held in a
very comical place—a swimming-bath. Last
June, the troops encamped at Aldershot provided
the materials for an exhibition which gave great
delight to nearly all the men in the camp. And
now, in the recent month of November, there
has been held the exhibition at the Agricultural
Hall, got up chiefly by the residents in Clerkenwell,
Islington, St. Pancras, and the neighbouring
parishes. The newspapers have told all
that need be told concerning the building, the
arrangements, the opening ceremony, the
classifying of the articles exhibited, the prices of
admission, the closing ceremonial, and the financial
results; but we desire to offer some friendly
suggestions to the promoters of any future
exhibitions of similar character, and to the working
men who may contribute to them.

First, it may be well to draw the attention of
workmen to the fact that they might make
such an exhibition more valuable without any
increase of trouble, cost, or time to themselves,
by each man doing his best with the trade which
he understands best. It was impossible to walk
through the avenues between the rows of
counters and stalls on which the exhibited articles
were placed at the Agricultural Hall, without
recognising a certain amount of oddity in them.
Men produced articles precisely of a kind which
we should have expected them not to produce.
Blacking and furniture polish, by a postman; cases
of stuffed birds, by a Rotherhithe boat-builder;
a leather-work picture-frame, by a letter-
sorter; an oil-colour Death of Rufus, by another
letter-sorter; pieces of Berlin-work, by a letter-
stamper; a saucepan to strain off broth and
keep off the fat, by a bootmaker; a button-hole
cutting-machine, by a chemist's porter; a model
of a life-boat, by a paper-hanger; a chain of
sixty-three links, all cut from a solid piece of
wood with a penknife, bradawl, and tin saw, by
a varnish maker; a banjo, by a hammerman; a
model of Thomas Moore's cottage, by a
warehouseman; crayon drawings, by a hide splitter;
stuffed weasel and hawk, by a hairdresser; an
arm-chair made of bits of firewood, by a railway
navvy; a railway signal, by a tooth-brush maker;
a written pedigree of William of Wykeham, by
an operative chemist; a bead model of the
Great Eastern, by a shoemaker; a design for a
Shakespeare monument, by a bell-founder; a
model of Tickner's cottage, by Tickner the
leather-cutter (whether the cottage already
possessed by Tickner, or the cottage which Tickner
wishes he may get, we are not told); a doll's
house, bedroom, furniture and all, by a copper-
plate printer; models of cabs and carriages, one
of them consisting of fifteen hundred little bits
of different woods, by a dyer; a pen-and-ink
Raffaelle's Madonna, by a labourer; a
cardboard model of a new congregational church,
by a female domestic servant; several models
of castles and monasteries, by a costermonger;
water-colour paintings on glass, by an umbrella
minder at the British Museum; a red waistcoat,
with three or four hundred white buttons, by a
barometer maker; a motley-coloured meerschaum
pipe, by a solicitor's clerk; a patchwork picture
of Daniel in the Lions' Den, by a tailor; poetical
and literary compositions, by an advertising
agent, a glass painter, a letter-carrier, a compositor,
a watch jeweller, a clerk, and a bookbinder;
a needlework bed rug, by a bandsman
of the Seventy-third Foot; a counterpane and
pincushion, by a bandsman of the Fifth Fusiliers;
a table-cover made of more than six thousand
little pieces of cloth, by a Coldstream Guardsman.
Of all these exhibited articles some were
new and useful, some new but not useful, some
useful but not new, some neither new nor useful,
some mentally clever, some mechanically
clever; but all were alike in standing apart
from the customary trades or avocations of the
producers. The managing committee noticed
this peculiarity in many of the articles sent in.
They explained and justified it in the following
terms: " An artisan seldom chooses as a recreation
that branch of industry in which his daily
occupation consists. If actively or laboriously
employed during the day, drawing, painting, or
model-making is generally practised to occupy
his leisure hours; while he who follows a sedentary
occupation almost invariably resorts to some
more active method of utilising his spare time."
This is true, and it would be unreasonable to
pin a working man down too closely in his