Exhibition, there is a black silk-lace shawl,
manufactured for the empress of the French,
from an original design, by the well-known
house of Lefebuvre, price six hundred
pounds; and the manufacturers have more
than once received orders of nearly equal
cost.

At lace ended our tour through the long
avenues and towering storeys of the great
house, the first of some half-dozen engaged in
the same operations, presenting in the vastness,
completeness, and machine-like order of
its operations, a sample of British commercial
enterprise. Although a half-way house
of distribution between the manufacturers
and the retailer, nearly four hundred persons,
male and female, are employed under
one roof to serve, note down, correspond,
pack up, and deliver the supplies required
from every point of the compass—five
pounds' worth to the little milliner at
Penzance, a thousand pounds' worth to
Madame Lafleur at Havannah, and Madame
Sriggs, from Paris, at Melbourne—which
amount in a year to more than a million
sterling. We were glad to find that Ashstock
and Ahrab—more wise than certain railway
companies lately noticed in Household
Words—do not disperse their staff among the
chop-houses of Cheapside, but provide at a
great economy of time, money, and digestion,
a series of meals of roast and boiled joints,
cooked by gas, which, as our luncheon told
us, left nothing to be desired.

Among the elements of the progress of this
many-armed establishment, penny postage
had no mean share in selling, freighting, and
setting in motion the railway van, the ocean
steamer, and the clipper ship. The average
number of letters received and answered
weekly, amount to some four thousand.
The electric telegraph, too, gives its help,
and often saves twenty-four hours of time in
the execution of an order.

What we may call outposts of attack on
women's wants have been established by
Ashstock and Ahrab in branches in the great
cities of Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh,
Birmingham, Plymouth, and Dublin; besides
a muslin manufactory at Glasgow and a lace
factory at Nottingham. In New York and
Calcutta, independent colonies—consuming
nothing but the produce of the Cheapside
empire—have been established; and, in the
great Australian cities, like plantations have
been founded. As for home consumption,
Great Britain is mapped out into districts,
which are periodically traversed by
commercial ambassadors, travelling by road and
rail. In the hilly territories of the north you
may sometimes meet a neat, capacious, dark-
green fourgon, driven four-in-hand. It does
not contain the bed or batterie de cuisine of
a foreign prince, nor any of the hounds or
racehorses of a sporting peer: it is a moving
warehouse of our friends Ashstock and
Ahrab: one of the means by which they
push their sales and afford to pay wages,
directly or indirectly, to some ten thousand
people, including peasant girls, in English,
Scotch, and Irish counties, in France and
in Belgium.

And this firm, with its princely revenues,
army of assistants, thousands of dependents
—its several branch establishments, and still
more numerous agents, all working with a
clockwork regularity incomprehensible to
the muddling proceedings of Ordnance and
Horseguards, Admiralty, Woods, Forests,
and Public Works—is but one sample of
hundreds of firms which organise the labour
of the staple trades of England. Neither are
the principals mere money-grabbing drudges.
They can afford time, as we have seen, for
healthful recreation. Neither do any of their
dependents appear to be overworked.

THE POST-MISTEESS.

THE post-mistress at Moorbeck is retained
by government at a liberal salary of five
annual pounds. She has held her office, as
she casually informed me, during four reigns,
and has seen three great wars: the American,
which she remembers hearing tell of when
she was a child, because her mother's brother
was killed in it; Bonaparte's wars; and now
this war with the Russians,—not to mention
the battles in India, where one of the old
colonel's sons was badly wounded, and
another was made captain for slaying a
fabulous number of the enemy with his own
hand.

I like a gossip about times gone by, and
Ailie Jarvis likes a gossip too; perhaps that
is the reason why I am so often to be found
at the little rose-covered cottage, at the
bottom of the hill, when it is half-holiday.

My introduction to Ailie was on this wise;—
I wanted stamps, and walked down to the
post-office to purchase them with a shilling
in my hand—I mention this because we
do not carry purses usually; the only article
of investment at Moorbeck being pipes and
ale. I was accompanied by my amiable
pupils, who formally named me to the post-
mistress as their new governess. She was
a little, well-made woman, verging on eighty,
with a fine forehead and traces of a
beauty which neither hard work, hard fare,
nor a full meed of troubles had sufficed to
obliterate. She received me with easy dignity,
asked what country woman I was, and
hoped I liked Wensleydale. Having replied
to these question's, I preferred a mild request
for stamps.

"How many do you want, miss ?"

"Twelve."

"Then I'm sure I can't let you have them;
I've only two left."

"Oh! indeed. Well, never mind; one
will do for the present. Perhaps you will
ask the mail-cart man to bring some; " and
I gave up the shilling, at the same time