the broomers. To each broom there were
allotted a certain number of shops, and
pavement in front of each was kept clean for
the payment of one penny a day. The benefit
of this revolution in the streets became
palpable, and its expense was really so slight
that it very soon spread from the Quadrant
to the Circus in Oxford Street. The Strand
however, has not yet pronounced; and no
attempt has yet been made for the establishment
of broomerism in the city. Which we
all understand to be the last place to adopt
anything good—except to eat, or to drink.

Success, in the meantime, stimulates the
authors of the movement to propound fresh
inventions, and to widen still farther the means
of livelihood for poor boys rescued from the
gaol. The public certainly is ready to assist.

To every six broomers there will hereafter
be attached a message boy, who will be known
by his name of "Mercury" legibly inscribed
upon a label. This little republican will be at
the call of any shopkeeper within his district,
for the purpose of running errands, at the rate
of threepence a mile, or sixpence an hour.
The Society will aid this movement, by
rendering itself responsible for .all parcels
entrusted to the Mercuries, under the value of
five pounds. By promoting to such office
only those capitalists who have as much as
five pounds in their bank, it will in fact make
the boy himself pay for the value of the
property, in case of theft.

Then there will arise among us "Brassers,"
and their offer to the public will be for a
penny from each house, to keep door-plates,
shop-plates, knockers, and bell-pulls in a state
of tremendous brilliancy.

The Ragged Schools take thousands of boys
yearly from the streets; which they pollute,
and where they are polluted. The public
will cordially rejoice, we know, to find—as
the plan goes on, and prospers—that such boys
by hundreds are returned upon the streets as
useful members of society. The public, we
are sure, will benevolently assist in the creation
of these little convenient trades, which,
while they give us a good pennyworth for our
penny, interfere with no man's livelihood, and
create honest callings for the children who
are struggling to live out of gaol. It is by
practical schemes like these that the best
fairy-transformations of our own day are
effected. Little Red Working-Coat can tell
a story quite as interesting to our hearts as
any pleasant legend of the nursery.

THE GERMAN EXILE'S NEW YEAR'S
EVE.

A MURKY, frosty night, the air chill and
charged with rain, and the dirty red lamps
flaring through the sepulchral gloom of the
streets! But, with all that, the people are
merry. Crowds throng the pavement; and
the shops are bright with enormous gas-flames
and merry faces. This is like the one night
I read of in the "Christmas Carol in Prose,"
which I translated into German prose, when
I served my apprenticeship to literature
in the back-room of a newspaper office at
Barmen. There, as I bent over my labour
of love, or dictated to Ernest, a clownish
country boy from Holzminden, who grinned
with delight, I did not by any means dream,
either sleeping or waking, that one of my
New Year Eves would pass in London,
amidst the very scenes that book describes;
amidst all the noise, bustle, fog and jollity of
the British Yule-feast, and its series of
merry-making to the last day of the year. But, two
short years ago——

I intended to see the year out with some
countrymen, in a three-pair back-room, in
Percy-street. We had punch, tobacco, guitars;
and we had, moreover, several copies of the old
"Leipzig Commersbuch,"—old copies well
thumbed, and all but broken, by the violence
with which they had been knocked on
Kneipen tables in the days of "auld lang
syne." We had made up our minds to sing,
smoke, and be excessively merry in our old
sweet German songs; but we began with

"Es zogeii drei Rigameuter wohl über den Rhein,"
"Three regiments bold marched across the Rhine,"

which made us sad; and, by a strange fatality,
we sang another parting song, which made us
sadder. But when we came to those wild
low notes of—-

"Da steh ich, ach! mit der Liebe mein,
Mit den Rosen und mit den Gelb veigelein;
Dem ich alles gäbe so gerne,
Der ist nur in der Ferne!"

"And now I am left my love to rue,
Midst my roses and my violets blue;
He is gone whom my heart loved only,
And I 'm here all sad and lonely!"

we got very sad indeed, and my friends sought
relief in a political controversy. As for me,
I am weary of politics. I left them in the
very midst of their quarrel, and, creeping
down stairs, turned into Oxford Street, and
into that maze of streets and lanes which lies
between that great thoroughfare and the
Regent's Circus, Piccadilly. For, after all, this
is New Year's Eve; and the treasures of
London are laid out and arranged in the most
tempting fashion. What prevents me from
looking in at the shops? I will pick and
choose whatever I like best, and then go home
and dream that it has been laid on my table.

I had turned a corner, and found what I
sought. Fir-trees which have been left on
hand from Christmas! And here are plenty
of them; ranged on mahogany tables, behind
plate-glass windows, overloaded with precious
sweetmeats and exotic fruit, and literally
bending under a load of prim tapers. These,
however, are not the heavenly trees the
Christkindchen used to bring to our village in the
Eifel! I cannot even smell them. They
want the spicy perfume of our small dwarfish