of her, during which time he has never seen
the other side of the Rock, and has never slept
a single night on shore.

LIFE IN DEATH.
LOVE me in life, darling,
Love me in death;
E'en when my breath
Ceases to warm thee,
And my cold face
Ceases to charm thee,
Think of the days
When I was thine, darling,
When thou wert mine, darling.
Or if the gay light
Of the glad daylight
Make thee forget me,
Still, darling, let me
Come with the night hours,
Give them to me,
Make them my bright hours—
Then shalt thou be
All the day free.
Day shall be night to me
Banish'd from thee,
Dark shall be light to me
Present with thee.

EMPTY BOXES.

THIS will be, I know, but a beggarly account.
There are few things in the world so hopelessly
dreary to look upon, as are empty boxes. It
is a truism to say that you can get nothing
out of them. A full box may be picturesque,
poetical. It may be Pandora's box, or one of
Portia's caskets. It may be the Iron Chest, or
Somebody's Luggage. It may be that notable
trunk in which the mysterious Spanish Hidalgo,
to whom Gil Blas was valet, kept his pistoles.
It may be the coffer gorged of millions, of the
Wandering Jew. It may be Antolycus's box,
crammed with "ribbons, chains, and ouches," or
it may be the chest with the spring lock
immortalised in the story of Ginevra and
the ballad of the Mistletoe Bough, or it may
be the cowskin trunk in which Richard Cromwell
kept the "lives and fortunes of the people
of England"—in the shape of the addresses
presented to him by the English municipalities
when he was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth
—or it may be the inscrutable sea-chest
astride which Washington Irving' s Dutchman
went to sea in a storm. In short, a box with
anything in it will furnish a plot for a
melodrama or a novel, inspire poets and painters,
awaken cupidity, excite ambition, fan the flame
of love. With what wistful eyes have I
scanned the great iron safe in a City counting-
house! With what rapture have I gazed
on a lady's jewel-box—the tiny casket with
a patent lock, steel beneath, russia leather
above—and pictured the dainty gems within,
their lustre prisoned in coffins of morocco lined
with white satin! Nor without a pleasant
trembling—a hope not unmingled with fear—
have I beheld the cash-box which Mr. Elzevir, of
Ludgate-hill, has produced from his drawer,
when, my account being audited, he has been
persuaded to draw a cheque in my favour.
Sweet cash-box, full of cheques, crisp bank-
notes, gold and silver, and sometimes of
acceptances at three months and I O U's!—I say
that I have trembled, for it has been just
within the bounds of possibility that Mr. Elzevir,
a sudden spasm of hardness coming over his
heart, might push his cash-box back into the
drawer, double-lock it, and suddenly remembering
that my account was overdrawn, button up his
pantaloons, and dismiss me chequeless. Or, how
would it be if, opening the cash-box, Mr.
Elzevir discovered that his cheque-book was
worn to the last stump, and begged me to call the
day after to-morrow?

If this paper were to be devoted to the topic of
boxes that were full, you should see that I had
plenty to say, and to spare. The work-box of a
woman would fill a page at least. I could
expatiate till you were tired on a schoolboy's
play-trunk, with its hidden hoard of slate-pencil,
and its inevitable substratum of contraband
goods—say gunpowder, cayenne pepper, or a
forbidden book;—and I am sure I could pen
several columns on the subject of a box to me
the most curious of all: the key box; the locked-
up receptacle for things which lock up others,
the wheel without the wheel, the keeper of the
keepers. It is on empty boxes, however, that I
am at present intent.

Empty boxes! Take that symmetrical
sarcophagus of cedar which, a month since, held one
hundred choice Havanas. They, the flavour of
Colorado Claros, are all smoked out; you have
not even preserved their ashes, which, mingled
with camphorated chalk, are said to make an
excellent tooth-powder, or, ground with poppy
oil, will afford, for the use of the painter, a
varied series of delicate greys. Old Isaac Ostade
so utilised the ashes of his pipe; but, had he
been aware of Havanas, would have given us
pictures even more pearly in tone than those
which he has left for the astonishment and
delight of mankind.*
* Much has been talked in modern times about
the "lost secrets" of the Venetian painters, and
Messrs. Winsor and Newton have been worried to
death by artists to produce new blues, new crimsons,
and new yellows, by means of which the gorgeous
hues of Titian and Giorgione might be rivalled.
But the tints most thoroughly lost or mislaid, are to
my mind the pearly grey tones of the Dutchmen.
Very few modern painters seem to be aware that
grey may be, and should be, a cunning compound
of all colours, and not mere black and white,
with a seasoning of lake, or indigo, or ochre, to
make it cold or warm. The finest greys, perhaps,
in modern art are those of M. Abel de Pujol, in the
imitation of bas-reliefs on the coved roof of the
Paris Bourse. Those who have closely examined
them may have noticed that in the shadows there
are great splashes of positive colour, bright vermilion,
chrome, and cobalt, which, at the distance of the
ordinary spectator from the picture, give pearliness
and transparency to the whole.