it the choicest work of a Nugee or a
Buckmaster—is to her an abomination, unless
something can be made of it. She regardeth
not a frock-coat, unless there is enough good
cloth left in the skirts to make boys' caps of;
a military stripe down a pair of trousers
have no charms in her eyes; she is deaf to
the voice of the embroidered vest, unless that
vest be in good condition.

There are three orders of " Old Clothes," as
regards the uses to which they may be
applied: First class, Clothes good enough to be
revivered, tricked, polished, teased, re-napped,
and sold, either as superior second-hand
garments, in second-hand-shop streets, or pawned
for as much as they will fetch, and more than
they are worth. Second class, Old Clothes,
which are good enough to be exported to
Ireland, to Australia, and the Colonies
generally. Great quantities are sent to the
South American Republics; and a
considerably brisk trade in left-off wearing
apparel is driven with that Great Northern
Republic which asserts itself capable of
inflicting corporal punishment on the whole
of the universe. Wearing apparel is
unconscionably dear in the land of freedom, and the
cheap " bucks " of the model republic cannot
always afford bran-new broadcloth. Third
class, or very Old Clothes, include those
that are so miserably dilapidated, so utterly
tattered and torn, that they would have been,
I am sure, despised and rejected even by the
indifferently-dressed man who married "the
maiden all forlorn." These tatters—" haillons"
the French call them—have a glorious
destiny before them. Like the phœnix, they
rise again from their ashes. Torn to pieces
by a machine, aptly called a " devil," in grim,
brick factories, northwards, they are ground,
pounded, tortured into " devil's dust," or
"shoddy; " by a magic process, and the
admixture of a little fresh wool, they burst
into broadcloth again. I need say no more.
When I speak of broadcloth and "devil's
dust," my acute readers will know as much
about it as I do: plate-glass-shops, middlemen,
sweaters, dungs, cheap clothes, and nasty.
Who shall say that the Marquis of Camberwell's
footmen—those cocked-hatted,
bouquetted, silk-stockinged Titans—may not
have, in their gorgeous costume, a considerable
spice of Patrick the bog-trotter's ragged
breeches, and Luke the Labourer's fustian
jacket?

We have traditions and superstitions about
almost everything in life, from the hogs in the
Hampstead sewers to the ghosts in a shut-up
house. There are traditions and superstitions
about old clothes. Fables of marvellous
sums found in the pockets of left-off
garments are current, especially among the lower
orders. There was the Irish gentleman who
found his waistcoat lined throughout with
bank-notes; and the youth who discovered
that all the buttons on a coat he had bought
in Petticoat Lane, were sovereigns covered
with cloth. Then there was Mary Jenkins,
who, in the words of the Public Advertiser
of February 14th, 1756, "deals in old clothes
in Rag Fair, and sold a pair of breeches
to a poor woman for sevenpence and a pint
of beer. While they were drinking it in a
public-house, the purchaser, in unripping the
breeches, found, quilted in the waistband,
eleven guineas in gold—Queen Anne's coin,
and a thirty pound bank-note, dated in 1729;
which last she did not know the value of, till
she had sold it for a gallon of twopenny purl."
There are so many stories of this sort about, in
old newspapers and in old gossips' mouths, that
a man, however credulous, is apt to suspect
that a fair majority of them may be apocryphal.
There is a tinge of superstition in the
connection of money or fortune with clothes.
Don't they put sixpence into a little boy's
pocket, when he is first indued with braccœ
bifurcatœ, the toga virilis of youthful Britons?
Don't we say that a halfpenny with a cross
on it will keep the deuce out of our pockets?
Don't we throw old shoes after a person for
luck ? and what is luck but money?

A CLOUDED SKYE.

IT is a long way from London to the north
of Scotland; and, for many of us, a short
sentence would sum up our geographical
impression on the subject of our northern,
district:

Skye—an island in the Hebrides, celebrated
for its terriers.

There are many things which it is said are
likely to take place " when the sky rains
potatoes; " but it is since potatoes have ceased
to appear with any regularity up in the
northern Skye, that it has become requisite
for us to extend our knowledge of the
Hebrides. When, in the following remarks,
we speak of Skye especially—that Skye
which has for so long a time been raining
little dogs over the kingdom—what we may
have to say applies with nearly equal force to
other islands of the Hebrides, excepting one
or two which have rather a Scandinavian
than a Celtic race of tenants. Of Skye
itself, as an island, we have not much to say.
It is a hilly, rocky, misty, barren sort of
place, with pasture-grounds and potato-
fields. You cannot grow wheat in the sky,
whether celestial or Scottish. There is no
telling whether, with good husbandry, there
might not come six grains to the ear of
wheat or barley; but, as the case now stands,
a grain of wheat sown yields about two or
three grains on the top of a stalk.
Sometimes it simply reproduces itself, and is
worth to the husbandman just a straw in
the way of profit. The Gaelic inhabitants,
like all good mountaineers, are very fond of
their own rocks and mists; they are, by
ancestry and predilection, shepherds, prefer
rude to civilised agriculture, and no
agriculture at all they like the best. It is manly