along: and there is generally an air of
tranquil endurance about our nautical friends:
they look upon illness as a certain work
that they are engaged for— destiny being a
skipper net to be mutinied against— and so
wait.

One youth, with something between a grin
and a blush, hints that milk diet is scarcely
substantial enough for the existing state of
his constitution, and receives an accession
accordingly. Then we come to a brown fellow,
who looks quite like an Englishman, but who
is a Norwegian, and whose language is
unintelligible. However, surgical tact joined to
experience soon understands his case. The
next patient is very, very far gone with
consumption— he, poor fellow, asks for lime-juice;
one is glad to think that there is still
anything which can promise him pleasure here.
We pass on, silent and thoughtful. Even
severe illness does not damp the handsome
Prussian in the neighbourhood; who seems
comically excited at the bluff fat nurse, and
grunts actively while that remarkable old
woman tucks him up.

The darkness grows deeper; the breezes
shiver on the night tide, and it is time to
leave this huge hull, which looms so loftily
through the dusk. One feels the emotion of
relief at parting from this scene of pain
and weariness— and feels it to be a
somewhat ungrateful emotion— thinks how anxious
everybody ought to be to aid an institution
so valuable and so peculiar— an institution
which appeals to what is best in the heart,
and by so much that is attractive to the
imagination.

THE CATALOGUE'S ACCOUNT OF ITSELF.

I am the Catalogue of the Great Exhibition.
You are the Public. I intend to have some
private talk with you, and pour into your ear
the story of my early life.

Of a class of celebrated men there is a
common saying, that

"They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

I, as a celebrated Catalogue, had much to go
through with ere I learnt that which I teach
now in the Illustrated edition, the official
edition, the French edition, the German
edition, and the twopenny edition. I call
myself a celebrated Catalogue, and I consider
myself a work of great importance. My
father, the Exhibition, certainly begot in
me an illustrious son, who shall hand down
his name for the refreshment of posterity.
My mother, the Committee, by whom I was
brought forth, has, I think, been abundantly
rewarded for her pains. There would have
been a visible blank in the world's history if I
had not been born.

On matters of business it is well known that
my manner of speaking is extremely terse;
I'm none of your diffuse Catalogues that
quote poetry out of unpublished manuscripts,
or out of Scott, and have as many explanations
to make as Ministers when Parliament is
sitting, or as turtle-doves who have wounded
one another's feelings, and desire to
re-establish peace. I say a great deal, to be
sure, but then there is a great deal in what I
do say. This being my business habit, and
which, as you know, fits me uncommonly
tight, I feel it a relief now to throw off
restraint, and wear something a little easier;
something more flowing. In fact, I mean to
flow out now into a tide of gossip; to pour
into your ear, confidentially, a stream of
information on the subject of my early life, and
to unbend; if I may say so, to un-catalogue
myself; to loosen myself from the accustomed
bondage by which I am compelled to travel
only on a certain path. Still it is possible
that a confirmed business character, like
mine, may slip into the old train. Fond
of arithmetic by nature, Walkingame is
Byron to me, and my Wordsworth is De
Morgan. Should these facts peep out, and
should my figures be Arabic, with less
entertainment in them than some other
Arabian things that might be mentioned,
you must shrug your shoulders, and say,
It's his way; for, after all, what is he but a
Catalogue?

What but a Catalogue? No, don't say
that, because it sounds a little like
depreciation. Now, I cannot afford to be
depreciated, because, as it is, my greatness is not
fairly understood. Mr. Dando's appetite for
oysters was large; but what would you say
about Mr. Dando when you reached home
after dining with that Major Cartwright,
whose own notion of a dinner you will find
put down in one of Southey's common-place
books? Said he to the young poet, "I make
only two cuts at a leg of mutton. The first,
takes all that is on one side; the second,
all that is on the other. After that, I
put the bone across my knife to get the
marrow."

The epic grandeur of Major Cartwright's
dinner, with its two sublime cuts, would put
out of your mind the lesser lyric of a Dando,
though nineteen dozen of natives should give
éclat to his performance. The clatter going on
about that horrid Exhibition building keeps
me, I fancy, too much unobserved. If I were
to draw another parallel (the term is
mathematical, but I am not yet in a state of
De-Morganisation)— were I to draw another
parallel, I should allude to the great mountain,
Chimborazo, which is said in its first aspect
to disappoint all travellers. The enormous
magnitude of all surrounding features, dwarfs
the chief feature to the mind; there are no
Brighton Downs or Salisbury Plains at hand,
as objects of comparison. Now, you have
made a Chimborazo of the Exhibition, and it
towers in Hyde Park, and you are astounded,
and you do not look at the surrounding