The unity of the toy being gone, destruction
now attacked it in detail. At last nothing
was left but the queen's gallery, which,
preserved by the nursemaid, became a
chimney-ornament over the nursery fire-place, and
lingered for months a conspicuous but
unheeded monument of grandpapa's
munificence on New Year's Day.

In the afternoon of the first of February,
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight, Matilda sat
on the floor of the drawing-room nursing the
old wooden doll; Augustus was close by her
side, wheeling the old decapitated horse, the
head whereof once more furnished a recreation
to Arthur. Presently a thick mist filled the
apartment, and when it had dispersed, the
children saw before them a great Dutch-
looking female, with a face like a cheap
mask, surrounded by a large vertical ring,
composed of the most costly and elegant
toys. Her lap, by way of contrast, was filled
with playthings of the commonest description:
peg-tops, marbles, rudely fashioned
dolls and horses, rough-hewn battledores and
shuttlecocks, and ill-stitched balls of hard
and soft quality, while her left-hand rested
on a hoop of considerable diameter. In the
right-hand she held a hoopstick, which she
no sooner waved than the ring, by which it
was surrounded, began to revolve, the toys of
which it was composed being constantly
broken up into fragments, and re-combined
into new forms in the course of the movement.
While there was thus a perpetual variation in
the ring, no change took place in the toys that
filled the lap of the mysterious female, but
they remained fixed, in all their ugly
solidity.

"Children," said the apparition, "I am the
Fairy Joujou, and I am here to explain to
you the nature of toys. There are common
cheap toys made to play with, and quite
good enough for brats like you. There are
uncommon expensive toys, which serve for
no diversion at all, but are merely made to
cajole soft-headed old gentlemen like your
grandpapa out of his money. The common
toy is the real toy; and, whether we
consider it as an individual thing, or whether
we apprehend the entire species to which it
belongs, we shall find that its very essence is
to be permanent. The hoop and top which
children play with now are the trochus and
the turbo which amused the boys of ancient
Rome. Those toys which you now hold in
your little dirty hands, and which are
disfigured in a manner that ought to draw
down the severest chastisement upon you,
still afford you recreation, while that fine
flimsy New Year's Gift is resolved into its
constituent atoms, after an existence that
merely occasioned unpleasurable surprise.
Schiller has observed that man is most in
earnest when he plays, and perhaps on this
account there is a certain earnestness in the
plaything proper that defies the vagaries of
fashion, as a sound moral principle resists
the corruptions of a vicious age. Peg-tops,
marbles, and such toys as you see in my lap
change not, perish not—durability is their
intrinsic nature; but those costly playthings
that are made to sell at Christmas—those, I
say, melt away like winter frosts—vanish as
I vanish now."

The fairy Joujou, with all her paraphernalia,
was gone, and the three children,
after looking at each other with a fixed
expression for several seconds, burst into a
simultaneous roar.

"Gracious! what is the matter?" said
mama, suddenly entering.

"O—O—O!'" sobbed Matilda. "We have
seen Bogie, and it HAS been scolding us so
without our understanding a single word."

A NEW BABY.

HAVING been during the greater part of
my life addicted to the study of the abstruse,
it will not appear incredible that a single
hour's careful perusal of the page of the
philosophic Bradshaw led me to the conclusion
that it was possible to proceed from
the Paddington Station of the Great Western
Railway, to that of Pwglrr-y-Gwllcrwddloes,
South Wales, within the compass of an
autumn day.

I rose early, and I did it.

The distance actually traversed was literally
nothing—a poor hundred and seventy
miles or so. But the immense number of
branches and of lesser sprays resulting therefrom
—combined with the elaborate and
artistic non-correspondence of trains—spun
out the journey to an affair of some thirteen
hours. Why, in the name of common sense,
the G train should be made to arrive
punctually at fifty minutes past two, and the R
and H depart from the same station five
minutes earlier; or wherefore the latter
should, with equal precision, reach its
destination only to see the W V depart, shrieking
spitefully, "Too late! Just too la-a-ate!"
or lastly, for what reason a certain railway I
could easily name (but I won't) should consume
two hours, and forty and five minutes of man's
brief existence in going twenty miles; these
are questions perhaps only to be resolved
when some belated bishop or speculative
solicitor shall demand the public ear.

So stealthy had our pace become before
reaching Pwglrr-y-Gwllcrwddloes, that it
ended in our being totally unconscious of
standing still. We had arrived, and didn't
know it. It was, in truth, only by the guard
dashing open the door, and uttering something
that sounded like a violent clearing of
the throat, that we were apprised of the
welcome fact.

A walk of a mile, along a valley
intersected by innumerable tramways, and lit up
with mighty furnaces in full blast, brought
me to my destination; the house of a friend
who had medical charge of sixteen thousand