for five years. The holy father was good
enough to connive at his escape, and to confer
all his confiscated estates on a Dominican
convent. No one knows what the politique,
which has been his ruin, exactly was; nor, I am
inclined to think, does the good man know
very clearly himself. "We got away from
Rome," he tells you mildly,  "with a few
hundred scudi, and our plate and a picture or
two, and went to Marseilles; but when we
had 'eaten' (avevamo mangiati) what we had
brought with us, we came to England. It
was very hard at first; for we had no friends,
and could speak nothing but French and
Italian, and the English are a suspicious
people, whose first impulse, when they see a
foreigner for the first time, is to button up
their pockets as if he must necessarily be a
thief." But the marquis went to work manfully,
forgot his coronet, and is now doing a
very good fancy commission business. He
has an invention (nearly all refugees have
inventions) for curing smoky chimneys, which,
when he has money enough to patent it, he
expects will bring him a fortune. In the
days of his utterest and most dire distress, he
always managed to pay three shillings every
Sunday for the sittings of himself, his wife,
and daughter at a foreign Catholic chapel,
and to wear every day the cleanest of white
neckcloths, fastened no man knows how, for
no man ever saw the tie thereof.

Within these sorry streets—these dingy
slums—are swept together the dead leaves,
the rotten branches, the withered fruits from
the tree of European liberty. The autumn
blast of despotism has eddied them about
from the remotest corners of Europe, has
chased them from land to land, has wafted
them at last into this perfidious Patmos,
where there is liberty to act, and think, and
breathe, but also, alas! liberty to starve.

O England, happily unconscious of the
oppressions and exasperations that have
driven these men here, try sometimes to
spare some little modicum of substantial
relief, some crumbs of comfort, some fragile
straws of assistance to the poor drowning
exiles! Their miseries are appalling. They
cannot dig (for few, if any, Englishmen will
call a foreigner's spade into requisition), to
beg they are nobly ashamed. They do not
beg, nor rob, nor extort. They starve in
silence. The French and Hungarian refugees
suffer more, perhaps, than those of other
nations. The former have by no means an
aptitude for acquiring the English language,
and are, besides, men mostly belonging to the
professional classes of society—classes wofully
overstocked in England; the latter seldom
know any language but their own—a language
about as useful and appreciated here as Cochin-
Chinese. Only those who have wandered
through Patmos, who have watched the gates
of the London Docks at early morning when
the chance labourers apply for work, who
have sat in night coffee-houses, and explored
dark arches, can know what awful shifts
some of these poor refugees, friendless, foodless,
houseless, are often put to.

INDIA-RUBBER.

SOME few months ago, when our peers and
right honorable members were pushing each
other off their official stools, and discussing the
relative merits of "ins" and "outs," two
among their number had to submit to a
battery of jokes concerning the mottoes
in their armorial bearings. "Flecti non
Frangi"—"Frangas non Flectes;" whether
better to bend than to break, or to break
utterly sooner than bend, is a knotty moral
question which philosophers may fittingly
discuss. But it has occurred to us that if an
India-rubber manufacturer were to set up his
carriage, or emblazon his arms, there ought
to be no doubt as to which motto he would
prefer. To be elastic, to bend rather than
break, is a good old Anglo-Saxon quality for
India-rubber, and for India-rubber users to
possess. We certainly live in an elastic age.
If we cannot break that which opposes us,
we bounce away from it with great agility,
and feel not much the worse for the encounter.
There is a fair amount of caoutchouc in the
human mind—a useful quality; else we
should never bear the knockings and thumpings
which the struggle through life brings
to us. Look at this little India-rubber gentleman,
just purchased bran-new from a toy-
shop: you may open his jaws to any extent
you please; you can make him laugh, cry,
yawn, grin, frown, simper, stare, doze—it is
all one to him: he returns into himself again
and to the original expression of his countenance,
when the pressure from without is
removed. He is a self-contained man; a man
sufficient unto himself.

Whatever amount of moral caoutchouc we
have amongst us, our dealings with vegetable
caoutchouc are becoming more curious and
more varied every day. These dealings may
all or nearly all be grouped under two
headings—either we wish to yield (without
breaking) to mechanical pressure, or we have
a determination not to yield at all to watery
pressure. In either case caoutchouc is at
hand to befriend us. Let us see how this
ready aid manifests itself.

The Indians of South America knew some-
thing of the mechanico-yielding properties
of that singular gum, long before we knew
whence the gum itself was obtained. We
only knew it as a strange blackish substance
which would rub out pencil-markings. This,
combined with the indefinite nationality of
the region from which the gum was imported,
led to the name "India-rubber" a stupid
name as things now are, almost as bad as the
names green copperas and white copperas,
for two substances which neither contain
copper, nor are they produced from copper;
but it is not easy to get rid of old names.