the house, she answers, " Missus "—Mrs.
Smith or Brown as the case may be; and
should any enquiry be made as to whether
Mrs. Smith has a husband, it is resented as a
piece of impertinence—very probably with
the dreadful words, " Get along with your
imperence."

More than four times the amount of labour
is requisite for correcting private names in
the suburbs than for the same task in the city.

The vast increase in the size of the Post-
office Directory may be attributed to two
causes, one is the continual demolition of piles
of inferior buildings, among which no name
was fit to appear in the Directory, and the
substitution of streets of superior houses,
many of which are sublet into chambers—the
occupiers of all of which have to be chronicled:
but the increase is principally owing to the
extent to which the business portion of the
inhabitants of London have become non-
resident. It is a matter of constant observation
and mention, that the city merchants and
tradesmen are non-resident; but the extent
to which clerks and small tradesmen reside at
a distance from their place of business is by
no means so well known.

Twenty years ago, the inhabitants of the
suburbs were principally retired tradesmen,
who only visited the city at intervals—their
means of communication being limited to
three or four coaches a day, for which they
had to pay a fare of two shillings or eighteen-
pence. Now, railways, omnibuses, and
steamboats convey every evening multitudes to
and from, their shops or counting-houses, at
charges varying from threepence to a shilling.
These multitudes necessarily draw their
supplies from the shops in their immediate
neighbourhood. Hence, the houses adjoining
the main-roads are generally converted into
shops, the front garden is either built over,
or used as a standing-place for goods. The
old road-side public-house with its horse-
trough, its bench in front for weary travellers,
and its swinging sign—the calling place for
the one carrier of the vicinity—has expanded
into a huge building, all stucco, gas, and
glitter, combining the London gin palace with
the country inn, the assembly-room with
the Masonic hall, or club-room of the
Benevolent Brotherhood of antediluvian buffaloes.
The newsvender's shop, where literature was
not so long ago mixed with kites, hoopsticks,
marbles, Abernethy biscuits, and bleary
bullseyes in bottles, has grown into a
circulating library and fancy stationers; the old
chandler's shop has become a grocer's and
Italian warehouse, and armies of coloured
bottles start from the plate-glass windows of
chemists and druggists. It is necessary for
the wholesale houses to communicate with
these shops, as much as with those of the
same description in town; and they must all
therefore be included in the Directory.

In this general scattering of the inhabitants
of London into the suburbs the choice of a
locality is determined by various incidents.
The man whose business habitually ends at
four p.m., prefers a railway; while he whose
avocations are of uncertain duration prefers
a district to which there is an omnibus every
five minutes. It thus happens that intimate
friends and relations are found residing in
widely different suburbs; and as visiting is
thus rendered more troublesome, they would
gradually lose sight of each other, and the
dweller in Clapham would be afraid to leave
home to call upon a friend who, when last
heard of, was residing in St. John's Wood,
and who might in the interval have moved
to Dalston, Kensington, or the Old Kent
Road, but that scarlet guide, philosopher
and friend, the Great Red Book, comes to our
assistance in this conjuncture, by giving us
an accurate Directory of the residents of the
suburbs.

An accurate Directory of almost every
London subject indeed. The age of the moon;
the Princess Helena's birthday; the
commencement of grouse-shooting; information
relative to sauce manufacturers, commissioners
for taking affidavits, adhesive postage
stamps, Archidiaconal Courts, provincial
hotels, post-office receiving-houses, waxwork
exhibitions, bankrupts' letters, Foreign-office
passports, Newgate, bottles containing liquid
not to be sent by post, clubs, the Court of
Peculiars, steam-packets, peeresses in their
own right, obliterating stamps, the Bloomsbury
County-courts, workhouses, London
bankers, droits of the Admiralty, money-
orders, sworn brokers, Queen Anne's bounty,
the first fruits office, Primitive Methodists,
her Majesty's ministers, and the Gutta Percha
Company, with at least fifty thousand other
subjects as widely dissimilar, will all be found
treated of in this really wonderful volume.

But I must make an end of it. Tedious as
I may have appeared, I am still fearful that I
have been far from giving in these half dozen
columns even a tithe of the marrow scattered
through this great scarlet rnarrow-bone of
two thousand pages. More fearful still when
I remember that the bone itself is but a little
phalange in the immense corpus of London,
whose giant heart beats with two millions
and a half pulsations of busy life in this day
and hour that I write.

On Thursday, the Fourteenth of December, will be published, price
Threepence, or Stamped for Post, Fourpence,
THE
SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS,
Being the
CHRISTMAS NUMBER
of HOUSEHOLD WORDS, and containing the amount
of One Regular Number and a Half.

Next Week will be Published the SIXTEENTH PART of
NORTH AND SOUTH.
By the AUTHOR OF MARY BARTON.