62; bad company and inebriety, 53; destitution,
39; gaiety, love of dress and liberty, 24;
depravity of employers, 19; various causes, 29."
The Industrial School in Mansell-street,
Whitechapel, established for the purpose of affording
employment to homeless and destitute poor
boys, has provided for no less than three
thousand street Arabs. One home for the training
and maintenance of destitute boys not convicted
of crimes, has a farm at East Barnet, where the
boys are profitably employed in the operations
of husbandry. I saw specimens of their butter,
pork, and home-made bread. Altogether there
were represented in this Exhibition about one
hundred and seventy (British and Foreign) of
these benevolent institutions, entirely supported
by voluntary contributions of the public.

Moving about among the stalls—mostly
attended by Phillis of the neat hand, and her
sisters—I pass in review a great variety of
articles of use and ornament contributed by
charitable and humane institutions, whose objects
are almost as various as the products they
exhibit. It is an epitome of the all-embracing
charity of the Christian world. There is no
calamity either of the mind or body, no
misfortune or disadvantage to which humanity is
subject, which has not found a Good Samaritan
to extend the helping hand, to bind up the
wounds, to cheer with words of comfort and
hope. It is most affecting to witness these
results, and no less so to think how many large-
hearted, good, kind, devoted people there are in
the world, for ever going about imitating the
example of Him who forgave the fallen, who
was patient with little children, who made the
blind to see, the dumb to speak, and the lame
to walk—who was the Exemplar to mankind of
all that is merciful and good. And there are
people who say that this is a wicked world!

A FAT LITTLE BOOK.

AMONG the friends I have picked up in the
world is a fat little book five inches high, and
two inches broad, which carries about in its
body the social soul of an old German professor
and doctor in both faculties, whose name,
unknown to biographical dictionaries, was, I
suppose, Otto Schwartzmann, or, as we should
say, Blackman, for he translated himself into
Greek literary style as Otho Melander. Perhaps
my fat little friend cannot be said to carry
about Melander's soul, for I found him neglected
and in rags, one of the last of his race, reduced
to a shopboard in a dirty lane, gave him a new
coat and a home in a little colony of well-to-do
books where he soon took up a respectable
position, from which he has no present thought
of setting out upon a fresh course of knocking
up and down the world, as he had done for the
last two hundred and sixty years. For the fat
little book was born at Frankfort in the year of
the death of Queen Elizabeth, and the Melander
whose soul then went into it was dead. But
he had not long been dead. Four years before
that date he had been seeing a strong little
Scotchman, who exhibited at Marburg feats of
astonishing agility after three blacksmiths had
made horse-shoes on an anvil laid upon his
stomach. The fat little book's printer had been
an old chum of the doctor's at the university of
Marburg in Hesse Cassel, a university that
had numbered among its students Patrick
Hamilton, the first of the Scotch Reformers, and
our Bible translator, William Tyndale.
Moreover, the collection printed by a genial friend is
heartily dedicated to another chum of the same
printer, a learned citizen of Antwerp, with
whom he had talked often of the pleasant stories
yielded by their common studies. So there is
a comfortable little glow of friendship among
learned gossips, warming us as we cross the
threshold of Melander's book. As for the work
itself, what we find in it is the life of a dead and
forgotten German professor, who some two
hundred and seventy years ago fastened with
special relish upon touches of life and humour
that flashed on him from the books he read,
often books that are now read no more, or upon
touches of the life about him, or the current
stories of his day that gave home truth to dramas
then being acted, or that had been lately acted in
the playhouse of the world.

I choose to think that the Herr Doctor, with
no sourness in him, was short, and fat, and
cheery as his book, a ripe scholar, grown on the
sunny side of the wall of knowledge. He put
some of the warmth at his heart, no doubt, into
his teaching of the students. He relieved
certainly the dulness of discourse among his
brother doctors over the thin wine and the dear
tobacco—tobacco had only found its way
to Europe in Melander's lifetime—he relieved
their solid talk with frequent chirp of pleasant
stories derived from his intercourse with books
and men. Pleasant walks and talk by the
banks of the Lahn, the well-read professor's
well-timed anecdote in common hall, studies
enjoyed and a life enjoyed are the essences that
make the perfume of Melander's commonplace
book of the jest and earnest he had
read or heard. Bond-street can bottle nothing
so delicious and so lasting as the
perfumery of those books into which have been
poured any of the better essences of life. Their
living fragrance is as of the flowers, and a
well-stocked library is sweeter than the richest
garden to those who have paid for the key of
the gate, and are free to gather for themselves
among its blossoms. That garden has its roses,
and queen lilies, and its stately trees, its
sunny walks with fruit on either hand, its
fountains, and cool glades. The little Melander,
though a scarce plant in it, is but of the family
of its weeds, but a weed whereof, if we rub a
little at its leaves, we shall soon find the
fragrance.

It exhales in stories of all sorts. From one
book that he had been reading, Simler's
account of the death of Bullinger (and nearly all
his authorities are as remote as that from
modern use), our merry little friend picked up