house for an instant, and take a glass
of excellent Barclay-Perkins. The offer was
accepted, and while the porter was being
prepared, Monsieur looked al the bookcase,
and discovered a complete collection
of Scott's works. "Charming Cross!" he
cried—that being an oath made by him for
his own use in England. ''Charming Cross,
sir! you possess a Walter Scott!"

Every man who possesses two hundred
thousand a year, il was explained, must have
all the new works bought for him by the
steward, who causes them to be bound, and
locks them behind glass. Over such and
other explanations the new friends finished
two pints of Barclay-Perkins.

This Indian gentleman, it afterwards
appears, was an escaped slave, and once had
been in the power of a Sir Archibald Murphy,
who lived near the caves of Elora, and by
whom he was offered to Sir Wales, an F.R.S.,
renowned in West Kent for his learning, as
a victim to the cause of science. Sir Archibald
had on his estate an upas tree, and
upon the power of the upas, Sir Wales was
instructed to experiment by Lord Cornwallis,
the commander at Madras. This particular
upas Sir Archibald had wished to destroy,
because it was noxious to surrounding
vegetation. It could not be cut down, as when
cut it would pour out a fluid of which the
vapour is immediately poisonous. He had
begged a cannon, with which to shoot it down,
from the distance of half a mile, but no
cannon could be had without the consent of
the House of Commons, and the special
authority of the Lord of the Admiralty. Sir
Wales asked for a useless slave, who could
be tied under the tree for a night, with a
view to an investigation of its properties.
The body of the slave would, he said, be
embalmed for exhibition at the National Gallery,
Pall Mall.

From these plotters, the slave Bondha-Var
escaped to acquire freedom and a fortune.
Chance brought him to reside at Old
Woodstock, in the neighbourhood of his old master,
Sir Archibald, and his chief amusement, as a
retired gentleman, was to terrify the same
Archibald, by getting upon his roof, and
shouting his misdeeds of a night down his
chimneys, with a ghostly voice. Sir Archibald,
who was in England a leading
philanthropist, had beaten a slave to death to obtain
his daughter, had tortured to death four
slaves for the robbery of an ounce of indigo,
had traded in slaves on the coast of Zanguebar,
and committed other such Anglo-Indian
enormities, for which he could be brought
before no tribunal at Delhi, because as agent
of the West India Company, he was responsible
for his actions only to the Council of the
Admiralty.

Here I will stop. As an Englishman, ignorant
of the phenomena of my own land, I
feel much obliged to Monsieur Méry for his
edifying sketches; I have turned to him as a
stranger for the light that is not vouchsafed
to ourselves. Some beams of this light have
already been shed upon this country through
the medium of Household Words, gathered
from dramatic and other pictures of the
English drawn by foreigners. I add another
ray towards the dissipation of our darkness.
We are not obstinate; we do take pains to
subdue our ignorance about ourselves, and
to obtain enlightenment from strangers.
We are ready to receive and to diffuse hints
vouchsafed to us from abroad. Hearty and
perhaps eternal alliance now binds France
and England, and we shall not love our
neighbours any the less for the keen insight they
evidently have into the English character;
while, as for them, if they can embrace us,
being what they think we are, how fondly
they will hug us, if it ever should become
manifest to them that we are a little more
like what we think ourselves to be! By all
means let us all get at all truth; for, in great
things as in small things, the more intimately
people know each other, the less ready will
they always be to exchange hard words, not
to say hard blows.

WASTE.

THANKS to science and commercial
competition, there is a constant tendency in
manufacturing countries to economise residuary and
waste products. Science has shown how the
mere parings of daily industry may be
transformed into important elements of utility; how
the refuse of the smithy, the foundry, the stall,
the farm-yard, the slaughter-house, the gas-
factory, has in itself, a value before undreamt of.

But, whilst the waste of the civilised world
has been arrested and economised for man's
advantage, there is still a prodigious waste
going on in half reclaimed and savage regions.
Only to limit our attention to articles which
are greatly affected by the present wars of
China and Russia—tea, tallow, flax and
hemp, we are prepared to prove that
there are countries—remote it is true,
but not so distant that our ships cannot easily
get to them—wherein thousands and tens of
thousands of tons of those articles, or of
excellent substitutes for them, are lost to the
world; not merely lightly valued, but, left
to perish absolutely. Much of this enormous
waste goes on in countries belonging to the
British crown.

The imports of tallow, from Russia,
amount to three-fourths of the entire
consumption of this kingdom; or, in value, to about
three hundred and fifty thousand pounds
sterling per annum. Our yearly importations of
Russian flax, above three-fifths of the entire
foreign supply, are valued at one million
three hundred thousand pounds sterling.
Now, if we were simply about to demonstrate
that there are tracts of our own
possessions abroad that are suitable for the
production of articles which a Russian war