story of the London Mansion House. If you
enter by the little door under the grand portico,
you will discern a nest of offices, filled with
ledgers, account-books, and deed-boxes. Clerks
are busy at the desks preparing a large number of
documents, every one of which the Lord Mayor
must sign with his own hand. One of these
departments is called the Cocket Office. There,
a record is kept of those imports of corn, coals,
fruit, &c., which pay toll to the City. It is the
Lord Mayor's duty to give receipts for those
dues, and every morning after breakfast he
signs, on an average, two hundred and fifty
receipts. It is calculated that in the course of
his year of office, the Lord Mayor signs his
name to official documents fifty thousand times.
While he is signing away at lightning speed,
"parties" are waiting to see him in his business
parlour, previous to the opening of the court.
Here, he gives audience to attorneys and barristers
making applications, grants warrants, and
presides over what are called "private hearings."
While his lordship is being badgered in his own
parlour by a pertinacious "junior," let us
occupy ourselves more pleasantly with an inspection
of the department of pleasure.

Mark this. As you must pass through the
Cocket Office to arrive at the kitchen, so the
Lord Mayor has to pass through many arduous
duties before he can sit down quietly to enjoy
his dinner.

The kitchen is a large hall, provided with
ranges, each of them large enough to roast an
entire ox. The long, broad, solid tables might
have been constructed by Gog and Magog for
company of their own size. The vessels for
boiling meat and vegetables are not pots, but
tanks. The stewing range is a long broad iron
pavement laid down over a series of furnaces;
the spits are huge cages formed of iron bars, and
turned by machinery. Everything is on the
scale of Brobdingnag. An army of cooks is
manoeuvring with the batterie de cuisine, to
produce an infinite variety of rich viands for a
detachment of the four thousand and odd persons
whom it is the Lord Mayor's duty—his duty,
observe—to entertain during his year of office.
The City expects that every man who accepts
the office will do his duty to the extent of
spending four thousand pounds on dinners.
Even here, in the kitchen, we are in the presence
of the cares which weigh upon the Lord Mayor
of London.

Step into the next room and see a score of
cupboards crammed full of skeletons. There are three
proper and tall young men in powdered wigs in
readiness to show them to us. At a word of
command they produce blood-stained keys and
open the cupboard doors. At first we see
nothing but aprons of green baize; but when
these are removed, the skeletons are revealed in
glittering rows. One by one they are brought
out until the room is full of them. Silver
tureens and cups, silver plates by the hundred,
silver trays and salvers, spoons, forks, teapots,
punch-bowls, candelabra, tazze, the silver mace
which I can scarcely lift, the sword whose scabbard
is embroidered with hundreds of pearls,
the snuff-chest (box is not the word) of gold,
the Lord Mayor's S.S. collar sparkling with
brilliants of the purest water. Aladdin's cave
was nothing to this. Yet these gorgeous things
which give such an air of splendour and
magnificence to the Egyptian Hall on feast nights,
and excite so much envy in blessedly ignorant
breasts, are but so many skeletons in the Lord
Mayor's cupboards. They are not his own.
They belong to the City. He has to give a
bond for them. If they are lost or stolen, he
must pay for them. They are worth very
many thousands of pounds. Stock is taken of
them every day. A man sleeps in the haunted
chamber every night. The police never leave
the neighbourhood of the grated window, night
or day. Within and without, there is always a
watchful eye upon that chamber—to a nervous
Lord Mayor—of horrors.

Let us peep into the servants' hall in passing.
Read the inscription over the mantelpiece, and
mind your manners.

Swear not, lie not, neither repeat old grievances.
Whosoever eats or drinks in this hall with his hat
on, shall forfeit sixpence or ride the wooden horse.

The wooden horse is a stout pole bearing the
above inscription, and painted like a constable's
staff. The offender is mounted upon it, and two
servants seizing the ends, make him ride the
stang. I was informed that the last person who
offended against the rules of the hall, and was
compelled to ride the wooden horse, was—I
blush to write it—a "gentleman of the press."

It is now twelve o'clock, and the justice-room
is open. A throng of ragged mouldy
forlorn-looking men and women, marked by Misfortune
for her own, are scampering up the steps of the
grand portico to witness the proceedings and
see justice done upon their friends. In the
morning, the Lord Mayor opens his house to
burglars and paupers; in the evening, to Cabinet
Ministers and bishops. But he gives
precedence to burglars and paupers. As the
hour of noon strikes, the mace appears at the
little side-door of the court, and the bearer
announces the Lord Mayor. His lordship,
arrayed in his gown of office, immediately takes
his seat on the bench, and business begins. The
prisoners are brought into the court through
a trap in the floor covered by a sort of wooden
box with a lid. The officer in charge lifts the
lid, puts in his hand and pulls out a prisoner,
saying, "A very bad boy is he." The first puppet
of Misfortune pulled from the box this
morning, is a wretched barefoot man, scantily
covered with a suit of canvas, stamped all over
with the word " Union," in letters of blood-red
shame. He has nothing on this frosty morning
but a sackcloth jacket and trousers, and,
shrinking at all points from the cold, he has
doubled himself up like a hedgehog. A more
pitiful sight it has never been my fate to
see. He is a strong tall well-built man,
who, if he had been so directed, might have
carried his face "towards the stars" with the