windows looking on the river, is a quaint
charge room: with nothing worse in it usually
than a stuffed cat in a glass case, and a
portrait, pleasant to behold, of a rare old
Thames Police officer, Mr. Superintendent
Evans, now succeeded by his son. We looked
over the charge books, admirably kept, and
found the prevention so good, that there were
not five hundred entries (including drunken
and disorderly) in a whole year. Then, we
looked into the store-room; where there was
au oakhum smell, and a nautical seasoning of
dreadnought clothing, rope yarn, boat hooks,
sculls and oars, spare stretchers, rudders,
pistols, cutlasses, and the like. Then, into the
cell, aired high up in the wooden wall through
an opening like a kitchen plate-rack: wherein
there was a drunken man, not at all warm,
and very wishful to know if it were morning
yet. Then, into a better sort of watch and
ward room, where there was a squadron of
stone bottles drawn up, ready to be filled
with hot water and applied to any unfortunate
creature who might be brought in
apparently drowned. Finally we shook hands
with our worthy friend Pea, and ran all the
way to Tower Hill, under strong Police
suspicion occasionally, before we got warm.

MY SHADOWY PASSION.

I AM stating nothing but a simple truth,
when I declare that, without any previous
acquaintance with its owner, I fell in love
with a shadow.  Who that has seen
Mademoiselle Cerito, in the beautiful vision of
"Ondine," dancing in simulated moonlight,
has not felt that if some capricious power
had made the dancer invisible and left
the shadow, he might easily have fallen in
love with the graceful, flitting shade upon
the ground? But mine was simply a shadow
on a blind. To worship a symbol, without
any correct idea of the attributes of that
which it symbolises, is idolatry; and into
this idolatry I fell. I knew my danger. If
disappointed, I should not be able to console
myself by saying, "Ah, well! it was of Julia
or Louisa that I was thinking after all." I
had begun with a shadow; and let the
substance turn out what it might, I must be
content.

I admit that it was my own fault. While
those who fall in love with a substance, do so
unsuspectingly—entrapped by over confidence
in themselves, or led into it, like Benedict,
lay the schemes of others—I deliberately
resolved to cultivate my passion in the teeth
of much discouragement. "Surely," I thought,
(or something else within me thought without
deigning, till long afterwards, to apprise me
of its conclusions), "in loving a shadow, all
else must be shadowy, even to the common
dangers of love." An argument of which
I might have found a hundred analogies to
demonstrate the fallacy. But my mind was
obstinately made up. I sat at the window
of my solitary room, as soon as the oil-lamps
hung across the narrow straggling street
were lighted, and watched the window nearly
opposite—sitting in the dark that I might
not be observed. There was the shadow to
be seen every evening, and just above it, the
complete outline of a sleeping bird in a cage,
hanging by a cord. Whether this object,
whose form I watched so intently, was old
or young, ugly or pretty, sour or good-
tempered, I did not know. I saw only that
it was a woman, and that it did not wear
spectacles. My feeling for some time might
have been one of mere curiosity; for never
in the day-time, when the blind was up, could
I see there the slightest trace of woman
or birdcage. Soon after dusk the curtain
would drop suddenly, the light came, and
there was the bird and my shadow, working
or sometimes (as I fancied) reading. At first
I thought that I could smoke very well in the
dark, and that I would sit and watch from
sheer lack of a more definite purpose. My
first intimation that curiosity was changing
into love, was my readiness to construe all
indications to the advantage of the shadow.
Blind to its defects—as when men are
enamoured of a substance—I persisted, when the
outline was altered from some cause, in
believing that the very fairest form that it ever
assumed was its true one—an unreasonable
belief; since, according to the position of the
light, the ugliest features may be made to
show well in shadow—while the prettiest
may become hideously distorted. But who
but a man wilfully blinded would not have
felt serious doubts when that face—sometimes
of ordinary dimensions—became ridiculously
elongated, when that bosom suddenly grew
to matronly breadth; when a nose would
sometimes flatten like a negro's, and again
grow out to unusual length—only once in a
whole evening becoming an ordinary nose—
at which time alone I capriciously believed
that she was standing with mathematical
exactness between the lamp and the blind.
To see (when I indulgently supposed that she
had taken the lamp in her hand, and stooped
to pick up something) her form suddenly
shoot up, till I could not see her head, and she
stood there, looking like a decapitated giraffe;
and sometimes to behold her, from some
cause, as suddenly crushed down into a dowdy
likeness of a caravan dwarf—was enough to
provoke the laugh that is fatal to a wavering
passion. But no; I might have been
impatient at these distortions, but I was too
far advanced for laughing.

I forgot to mention that the narrow, straggling
street, of which I have spoken, was the
Rue d'Aimette, in the City of Rouen—since
pulled down for the approaches to the great
square of St. Ouen, and re-built with houses
very different from those old, overhanging,
low-doored, and small-windowed tenements
of beams and stone-grey plaster, in which we
lived. I was a stranger, without a friend in