order, with comic masks sculptured on the
pediment,—flower-grown tombs, sacred to
private theatricals. This pen shall be a key,
and open one of them.

There was "Yellowknights." Yellowknights
was the commodious family mansion
of Hipkins Hawes, Esquire, a man of
the richest, but of the merriest and the best.
He had a prodigious number of daughters, all
pretty; and envious people said that his private
theatricals were only baits to lure young
men on to matrimonial destruction. He
must have been very indiscriminate in his
luring, be it as it may, for he was visited by a
whole colony of sexagenarian gentlemen living
in the vicinity, who cared, I think, much more
about his rare old port than his performances,
and by a host of children, among whom I can
mention one youth, aged eight, who was
decidedly not lured by any matrimonial snares
with reference to the Miss Haweses, but by a
juvenile predilection for plum-cake, orange
wine, trifle, a glorious grapery, an unrivalled
nectarine wall, and a whole Tower armoury
of toys, rocking-horses, cricket bats, electric
ducks, regiments of soldiers, and India-rubber
balls like balloons. Of course I fell in love
with all the Miss Haweses afterwards; but
somehow they all married somebody else.
Perhaps my hair didn't curl, so I could not
come into wedlock with them. Hipkins
Hawes took the young men exactly as they
came, and as he found them. "If the fellows,"
he was wont to say, (he was a plain-spoken
man), "come after my gals, let 'em. If Loo
or Bell are sweet upon Jack or Dick, let them
come to Hipkins Hawes and tell him what
they mean, and he'll see what to do. Hipkins
Hawes knows how many blue beans
make five."  Hipkins Hawes did. Though
he lived in that grand and commodious mansion
Yellowknights, and kept horses, carriages,
and footmen, he had formerly pursued
no more elevated a calling than that
of a coachbuilder; and many and many a
holiday afternoon have I spent in gazing at
and admiring the wonderful lord mayors' and
sheriffs' coaches that Hipkins Hawes built at
his grand repository in Orchard Street,
Portman Square. To be lifted into one of
these carriages, and to sit for a moment on one
of those imperial squabs, was to me then the
summum bonum of human felicity. What
would I give to be able to feel such a pleasure
now!

We, the family of your informant, were
humble neighbours of the wealthy
Yellowknights people; dwelling, indeed, in a
detached cottage, where an attempt at gentility
was made by the existence of a coach-
house and a two-stall stable, but the vehicular
accommodation of the first of which was
only called into requisition for a child's chaise,
and in the second of which trunks, lumber,
and odds and ends cumbered the manger,
and refused not to abide by the crib. The
great mansion and our genteel cottage were
both in a small village some five miles from
London, with which communication was kept
up by a bi-daily stage-coach. I went down
to the village the other day by rail. Our
genteel habitat had been pulled down bodily,
and our two-stall stable occupied perhaps a
hundredth part of the ground on which a
mighty circular stable for roaring locomotives
had been built. Yellowknights—where was
that commodious mansion? It had been
converted into a ladies' school—no: the
South-Southern Branch College for Ladies.
Lecturer on physical astronomy, Professor
Charles S. Wain! Hipkins Hawes is Sir
Hipkins Hawes, Bart., now, and dwells in a
mansion at Tyburnia as big as a barrack.

But in the old days Hipkins Hawes, the
retired coach-builder, was the merriest, most
hospitable, charitable soul on the whole
suburban country side. He was always giving
balls, suppers, fêtes champêtres, archery
meetings, charades, fancy-dress soirées, and
especially private theatricals. The Miss
Haweses used to drive to London in
carriages and four (it was not considered
extravagant to drive four horses then, and
I have seen a great duchess, dead and gone,
riding in a coach and six), convulse Holywell
Street, and throw Vinegar Yard into an
uproar, in voyages of discovery after theatrical
costumes. They were quite costume-books
themselves. I think I must have seen
the eldest Miss Hawes as a Bayadère,
Lady Macbeth, Columbine (in Turkish trousers),
the Fair One with the Golden Locks,
Zuleika, Clari the maid of Milan, Ophelia (a
very cheap costume, consisting in the last
part merely of a bedgown and back hair),
Mrs. Haller, and Flora Macdonald. As to
the youngest Miss Hawes, she was so
incessantly playing fairies, sylphs, and Ariels, that
at this day I can't help picturing her to myself
with wings, a silver-foil wand, and a short
muslin skirt; though I know her to be married
to Mr. Bearskin (of Bull and Bearskin,
stockbrokers) and the mother of six children.
Then the young Haweses (males), of whom
there was a swarm, all six feet high, in the
army, the navy, the church, Cambridge
University, Guy's Hospital, and the Charter
House, were continually busy with private
theatricals; painting scenes on the lawn,
modelling comic masks in clay, putting the
footboy to hard-labour in whitewashing, pulling
up the dining-room flooring for traps,
purloining the sheets and table-cloths for
ghosts, blowing up the green-house with
badly-made fireworks, stifling the servants
with premature red-fire, and, in fact, as Mrs.
Hipkins Hawes said (the only person at
Yellowknights who did not approve of private
theatricals), "turning the house out of
windows."  She was a weak lady, subject to
headaches, and with an expressive but
somewhat monotonous formula of reply to every
remark, namely, "stuff and nonsense." Said
the doctor to her, when at last she lay