us with comforts and luxuries and reasons
for not ''silting at home at ease." Nevertheless,
a comical example of Queen
Charlotte's principles is yet extant.  Squire
Raven owns the parish of Ravensburne,
a fine estatein the most rural part of
Lancashire.  Having failed in making the
social and political world around him stand
still, he is obliged to be content with ruling
over his own parish.  In the squire's
servants'-pew on Sundays is ranged a row of
serving-maids in the old Lancashire costume—a
calico jacket or Lancashire bedgown, and
a striped lindsey-wolsey petticoat.  A very
pretty costume no doubt; and a costly one;
for the old-fashioned chintz, in the good old
days, would have cost five shillings instead
of five pence a yard.  No servant-maid is
engaged at Raven Hall, no family allowed
to live in the sqire's cottages, that does
not conform in costume as well as in
politics, to the immutable Ravensburne
principles.

If Squire Raven's ukase had been as
powerful in parliament as in his own parish;
if he could have settled the costumes of the
lower classes and excluded all the produce of
foreigners, the long line of manufacturing
towns and villages, which, beginning a few
miles from that green oasis of squiredom,
Ravensburne, stretches into Yorkshire and
across the border—clothing the naked and
feeding the hungry, placing clean linen within
the reach of every labouring family—would
have remained stagnant under the dominion
of the spinning-wheel, in the midst of the
moorland deserts, over which manufacturing
power has spread turnips and corn, sheep
and shorthorns.

Single examples best show what machinery
and enterprise have done towards clothing
the world. An accident has given us the
opportunity of describing what machinery
and enterprise can do to clothe womankind
and babykind. The accident was a hunt-
breakfast, given by Mr. Julius Lincoln (the
celebrated paper-stainer), to Lord Drainland's
Hunt,—a breakfast which, for admirable profusion
and confusion of everything; from
plain chops to Yorkshire pies; from cherry
cordial to champagne—will long be a green
spot in the memory of the two hundred
guests. We had the good fortune to make the
acquaintance of a stout, fresh-complexioned,
broad-shouldered, broad-brim-hatted, scarlet-
coated stranger. Later in the day, a cramped
stile, unjumpable for fifteen stone, gave us the
opportunity of turning aside, and jogging on
leisurely together; and so, during the rest
of the day, we talked of horses and farming
aloud, silently reckoning each other up.
For my part, I thought my new friend could
not be a parson—parsons don't ride in pink
inLancashire; nor a farmer, although very
like a thousand-acre Lincoln Wolds man.
Speculation came to an end when we parted,
and the stout stranger presented me with
his card—Mr. George Ahrab—and invited
me to come and lunch with him any day
(except two hunting days), "at number ten
thousand, Cheapside, where his firm, Ashstock
and Ahrab, did a little business with all
parts of the world."

Wanting, lately, to show a foreign friend
the showy side of England, which does not lie
in palaces or public places, I remembered my
adventure, and fished out the fox-hunter's
card. And this was how I found my way,
one fine morning, to a great warehouse—a
barrack and storehouse of commercial warfare
on human nakedness—which modestly
obtrudes a narrow architectural front on Cheapside,
and stretches many a rood into the length
and breadth of the back regions of that
mysterious thoroughfare.

We found Mr. Ahrab, in his brown coat
and commercial den, deep in his correspondence,
—a very different style of man from
Ahrab mounted, top-booted, scarlet-coated,
with no anxiety except about killing the fox;
after a few cordial words of welcome, an
intimation that his dinner and my luncheon
would be ready at one o'clock "sharp," he put
us under the care of a Mentor able to guide
us on our voyage of discovery.

We began our investigations at a counter
of pocket-handkerchiefs. A pocket-handkerchief
is one of the most solid signs of civilisation
—a standard waving in advance of civilised
wants. Here were to be found handkerchiefs
fitted for all classes; from duchesses
to dairymaids; from royalty to the Lilliputian
tenants of infants' schools, arranged in dozens,
— an exceptional number being worth ten
pounds each without lace. Thirty pounds the
dozen seemed the apex of ordinary transactions;
thence descending, the importance of the sales
generally increasing with the descent, were
the cheapest description of French at eight
shillings and sixpence, Irish cambric at one
shilling and ninepence, and Scotch cambric
at ninepence-halfpenny the dozen. The price
per dozen, in all the cheaper qualities being
considerably less than the price charged for
a single handkerchief before steam superseded
hand-spinning.

French embroidered handkerchiefs, even
of a very cheap kind, undergo a strange
round of voyages and travels before they
appear at evening parties. The cambric is
imported into London in the piece, thence
forwarded to the branch manufactory in
Glasgow; there divided into proper lengths for
handkerchiefs; and, with a due quantity of
cotton-thread, are distributed among the
peasant girls of Scotland and Ireland, to be
embroidered. By this new trade of
embroidering handkerchiefs, petticoat borders,
muslin dresses, and under-garments, many
a comely lass is able to exchange the digging-
fork for the needle. When embroidered,
the cambric, no longer white as driven snow,
is collected and returned to Glasgow to be