addicted to the treacle-pot, I would slily fill
it one day with a French sample, and leave
the warning to do its work.

Overhead is the sugar granary. Cartloads
were sent away last week, cartloads lie there
now, and cartloads will soon be dispatched to
the refineries at Lille. But it is a costly
product, and you will not be surprised that
sugar in France is one-third dearer than in
England, setting aside the difference of flavour
between beet-root and cane. We have now
glanced at the whole establishment. Not to
be sensible of the attention we have received
would be most ungracious; not to admire the
ingenuity displayed would be idiotic. But
still, above all, one feeling prevails; how
vexing it is, and how it illustrates the
perversity of human nature, to see a great and
intellectual nation compelled to waste its
resources on an enterprise which, however
successful we may acknowledge it to be, is
neither more nor less than a scheme for
buying in the dearest and selling in the
cheapest market, all the while that a cheap
market to buy in, and a dear market to sell
in, is open at their very doors.

BLACK MONDAY.

DEGENERATE boys are, I believe, now to be
found, who leave home willingly for school.
People at home have prejudices about carpets,
and will not suffer rings to be chalked on them
for marbles, or arenas on a larger scale for
hopscotch. Hockey cannot be played in a
hall or in a garden; if it could, holiday
friends, in their clean shirt-collars, never
would get into the heat of the game
properly, or if they did they would be called
away by their mammas. Clean collars, hair-
brushes, and dancing shoes are the real ills of
a holiday life. As for the gay world and the
charms of pastry, they yield very transitory
pleasures, as schoolboys commonly find out
before they have been three weeks at home.
Cases do now, I believe, frequently occur, in
which the pains of school are more than
counterbalanced by its pleasures; in such
cases degenerate boys fly in the face of the
poet, and go willingly to school, abolishing
the due observance of the 'ancient institution
of Black Monday. I am for due observance
of all fasts and festivals, and feel quite sure
that there is no better reason why Gunpowder
treason should be celebrated than why Black
Monday should never be forgot.

Under these circumstances, it is my wish,
if possible, to set on foot an agitation with
a view to the eventual petitioning of the
Government to bring in a bill for the better
observance of Black Monday. The spread of
liberal views among teachers has led to a
culpable laxity among children with respect
to the proper feeling that should animate — or
rather deaden—them upon this day of penance.
It has shocked me much of late to see boys
going to school with smiles upon their faces,
laughing and chattering as though they were
going to a theatre. They go to the school-
room to be edified and not amused. If I can
meet with so many people of my way of
thinking as will make it possible to rent
Exeter Hall for an occasion or two, I think
we shall then be in a fair way for getting a
Black Monday Bill.

There may be many who keep the day dull
now, I don't deny that I believe there are
many; but in my young days the proper
celebration of it was a rule absolute, and there
were no exceptions. The eve of Black Monday
used to be kept on Saturday, when the
school box was packed. We then used to get out
our books with solemn faces. The geography
book thumbed and inked, covered newly by
an indefatigable sister, but not disguised under
its new cover of clean brown paper; we knew
it by its size and shape, by ink-blots on the
edges of the leaves, and by the general
aspect of the cluster of dogs' ears at one
corner. As we put it in its place within the
box we murmured over it edifying sentences
remembered out of its contents,, such as, " Leinster
contains twelve counties, namely, Dublin,
Louth, Meath, Westmeath, Longford, King's
County, Queen's County, Kildare, Wicklow,
Wexford, Carlo w, and Kilkenny. Munster
contains six counties, viz., Cork, Kerry, Clare,
Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford. Connaught
has five counties, viz., Galway, Mayo,
Sligo, Leitrim, and Roscommon. Ulster is
subdivided into nine counties, viz. — " this, that,
and the other; and so on dolefully murmuring
reminiscences, excited by the sight of the
dismal old book, as pleasantly as men remember
cash accounts when they are looking at
a bankrupt debtor. Then the Tutor's Assistant
was let down over the geography, dust to
dust, dryness to dryness. Over that book we
murmured a desperately wild legend that had
been begotten of its mysteries, and was well
known to all of us, showing how a boy might
be haunted by the figures in his sums, and
cry in his affright, " the Rule of Three does
puzzle me, and Practice makes me mad."
Then we brought to the box, perhaps, the
English dictionary, out of which we had once
learned day after day the spelling and
signification of words, thirty at a time, beginning
at the top of the first column of it, and finishing
at the end of the last column of Zeds.
We buried Virgil in our box, and dropped a
tear over him asover a man whom we had never
understood; whom no boy ever could understand,
we felt convinced. We piled upon our
slates Xenoph on, Eland's Exercises (Bland had
ruffled us incessantly), the Gradus, Lempriere,
Ainsworth's Dictionary, Goldsmith's History
of Rome, a sponge and copy book; then threw
all, like the contents of a plague cart, into
the pit that had been dug for them among
our linen. They were not done with yet, we
felt; ere long they would give plague to us,
and the first day of plague would be the day
most fitly called, on the same principle that