voluminous music scores are produced,
and the veterans plunge into a Saturnalia,
of which. Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn,
Mozart, are the pontitices maxinii. Scrape
away, ye valiant old men. Scrape, ye stout
and kind old hearts! There are resonant
echoes to your harmony, far away; in drowsy
little country towns, in remote villages, in
German Schlossen, in Italian villas, in hot
Indian bungalows, where Lieutenant-Colonel
Chutnee, Major Pepperpot, and Mango the
surgeon, may be even now scraping tunefully
for pure love of art, while dissolute Lieutenant
Potts is mugging himself with brandy pawnee,
and Ensigns Pockett and Cue are quarrelling
over billiards.

Sir Peddler Fugue lived very long abroad,
I believe, before he succeeded to the
baronetcy. While in Milan, he composed an opera,
of course: the libretto of which was founded
on the story of Hector and Andromache,
Cephalus and Aurora, or some equally dreary
and equally classical subject. It is said to have
been produced at Cività Vecchia with
considerable success as the work of the Cavaliere
Maestro Pedlero Fugio, Principe Inglese.
In Italy, the baronet acquired a habit
of speaking his native language with such a
foreign accent and manner that you are
puzzled sometimes to determine his English or
Italian extraction. " Beautiful " is his
favourite expression. "I have seen the Coggi,"
he says; " she is B-e-a-u-ti-ful! Your opera,
my dear Tromp, is b-e-a-u-ti-ful. I shall
nevare forget the b-e-a-u-tiful cabaletto in the
third act. No! " Whereupon he lifts his
hat in true foreign style, and rides away on
his ambling pony, to stop or be stopped by, a
dozen more professionals, with whom he is
on terms of intimacy, in his course down
Regent Street.

Still up and down the paving stones the
celebrities of the Musical World pass; and,
like the fashionable lady of Banbury who
rode the white horse, and had rings on her
fingers and bells on her toes, a man, if he be
so minded, can have music wherever he goes.

GOING A LITTLE FARTHER:

IN a shop that shall be nameless, standing in
a street that need not be mentioned, and kept
by a person whose name is no matter, we have
met with the Patent Diaphragm Smoking Pipe.
This pipe has set us thinking about the
inconceivably numerous enticements offered to
those who have money to spend, and who
choose to spend it. Every imaginary comfort
and luxury for mind and body is spread before
us with a prodigal hand. For instance,
who can doubt that the diaphragm pipe is
"constructed on scientific principles "? The
inventor says it is, and he ought to know. The
tube and the bowl being separate, or
rather separable, the tobacco-oil is caught
in a reservoir, whence it can be removed at
leisure without soiling the tube; whereby,
the contriver asserts, " the strongest tobacco
may be smoked in these pipes, without any of
the usually unpleasant consequences to the
smoker."

We went a little farther (as the people
always do who search for adventures in
story-books), and we met with a fire-engine—
not a common but an uncommon fire-engine
"Every man his own fireman." "Take my little
portable force-pump," says the inventor, "and
dip the lower end into a pail, tub, or cistern
of water; work the pump—easily managed,
even by females —and you can direct a jet
of water to a distance of thirty or forty feet,
at the rate of eight or nine gallons per
minute; you can make it assume the form of
a continuous stream, or, by pressing the
thumb on a small lever, the jet may be
instantly divided, and scattered in the form of
a heavy shower; you can direct the condensed
jet or the spreading jet, upon or into a workshop,
or. a stable, or a bed-room, when on fire."
Whether it be or be not quite correct that
"no fire can live under the action of the
spreader," it does certainly appear a very
sensible thing to have some such small
contrivance of this kind at hand, to render aid
before all the world has had time to run and
fetch the engines. And this is not all. We
are assured that the fire-extinguisher is
also a capital garden-engine; that the jet-
spreader enables the water to be thrown over
the trees and shrubs in a genial shower, washing
off the insects and dust without injuring
the plants or giving discomfort to the user.

As one inventor shows us how every
man may be his own fireman, so does
another provide his fire-extinguishing
appliances in all the elegance of modern furniture.
Witness the cabinet fire-engine, with
its chest-like exterior, its French-polished
surfaces, its lever-handle that folds within
the cover, its pump-work cunningly concealed
in the interior, and its provision of hose, and jet,
and spreader. This cabinet on castors, will
contain half a hogshead of water; it may be
wheeled from a corridor to any room on the
same level; it may be worked by two persons
—men, women, boys, girls; it will, say
the inventors, throw a stream as high as a
moderate-sized house; and it might, as they
also say, have been the means of lessening the
sad calamities at Hatfield House, Luton Hoo,
and other mansions distant from large towns.

We went a little farther, and found some
chairs and sofas that offer every possible
premium for laziness. There is the suspensory
chair which forms a couch or camp-bed,
adapting itself to every movement of the
body; and the portable expanding chair,
with a thumb-screw which raises it to any
desired height; and the incomprehensible table,
which converts itself into a bedstead, a wardrobe,
a chest of drawers, and a sponge-bath;
and the geometrical ottoman-couch, which
will assume all possible shapes to suit all
possible rooms; and the invalid-couch, with