helped to destroy. Neither could it now call
out the love in that young heart, which had
lain like a sleeping child that would have
smiled back love for love to the one who had
awakened it. All too late! too late!
Happiness, love, and life all gone, and the hand
that might have stayed them now stretched
out imploringly in vain.

When Percy left that death-room, he
looked a shrunken, grey, withered old man;
as if years, not hours, had passed over him
since his young wife died. From that day
no one ever saw him smile, and no one ever
saw him lift his eyes frankly to theirs. He
kept them fixed on the ground, or turned
away like a man who has committed a
crime; and so dragged on a life which had
no need to ask of another the mystery and
iniquity of torture. Even his mother cried a
little when the baby died a month after its
mother.

BEHIND THE SCENES.

I LIKE to tliink of the domestic pleasure,
The homely fancies and the human cares,
The joys and griefs of heart the mummer treasures
Beneath the tinsel of the garb he wears.

The piebald clown upon the sawdust tumbling,
With mouth elastic and lash-tickled calves;
The Master of the Ring, with aiguillette fumbling,
While with the jokes of Motley going halves;

The flitting fairy in her gossamer jacket,
With silver sash, and loosely flowing hair,
And dandy whip— she well knows when to crack it,
While leaping garters from her flying mare;

Tlio sole-chalked acrobat on padded saddle.
Who turns the sommersault at wildest speed,
Or spans four chargers with portentous straddle,
While deftly guiding onward steed on steed:

These, I delight to know, are men and brothers,
Arc sprightly sisters with a touch of grace,
With filial tenderness, some nurturing mothers,
Some, with paternal love, a toddling race.

Thus, yonder, winking through vermilion sockets,
His tongue grotesquely thrust in whiten'd cheek,
With sausages purloined crammed into pockets
That were a paradise to area sneak—

May be but one who midst the peals of laughter
Has secret cause in truth for saddest tears,
Perhaps beneath whose squalid garret rafter
There droops the partner of his hopes and fears.

Yet again, that more preposterous fellow
In lacquered boots with monstrous jingling spurs,
His coat all frogs, his swell-gloves dainty yellow,
Who always struts whene'er a step he stirs—

He perchance may have a chubby rabble,
Among whose gambols he unbends with ease,—
His dearest joy to hear their infant babble,
Their chief delight but then to climb his knees.

Thus, yonder flippant elf in spangled raiment,
With sauciest air, who holds the sinewy reins,
Perhaps but hardly earns the niggard payment
That some crippled elder's life sustains.

Even yon rider, bounding like a cricket
Above the crupper of his snorting horse,
Who skims a five-barr'd hurdle like a wicket,
Wheeling clattering hoofs around the whirling
course—

Nay, ev'n this agile Indian-rubber antic—
Quite independent, seemingly, of feet—
He but ties himself in knots, and twirls half-frantic,
With the homeliest view to make the two ends
meet!

It lends a dignity to humblest labour,
That reverent tending of the household hearth;
It draws sweet music from the pipe and tabour,
To which th' itinerant player tunes his mirth.

And hence the sympathy I love to squander
Among all mimes I note, no matter where,
Feeling sure these golden threads oft wander
Thro' the tawdry warp and woof they wear.

BRITANNIA'S FIGURES.

LAST week we began, according to the
fashion of the coming season, an examination
of the British Housekeeping Accounts, and by
help of Mr. Fonblanque's blue-book of
Miscellaneous Statistics, measured progress by
comparison of the year eighteen hundred and
fifty-seven with the two years that preceded
it. Eighteen hundred and fifty-eight is the
year now due for examination in the households
of the country, but the national housekeeping
accounts, or Britannia's figures, are
not to be dealt with easily until they have
gone through a few months of official
calculation aud arrangement.

The memoranda we have noted down
already, were those that related to public
health and education; now, we reckon up
our expense in poverty and crime, and a
few other items in the great profit and loss
account.

As to poverty, we first note generally, that
there are, in England and Wales more than
three-quarters of a million of people in
receipt of out-door relief, as paupers, and
more than a hundred and twenty thousand
more sustained in workhouses. Of the whole
number of the people, four or five in every
hundred always are receiving workhouse
help. Poverty has not followed the increase
of population. There was a slight reduction
in the gross number of paupers for the year
eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, and a
corresponding reduction of about three-halfpence
a-head in the average poor rate,charged
per individual, in the population; that average
rate being in England about six and
three-pence: in Scotland about two shillings
less; in Ireland about four shillings less.
The figures yield no brilliant result. They
simply show that the number of the destitute
last year was not increasing in this
country. Within the workhouses there
was, last year, a marked increase in the
number of lunatics and idiots taken care
of, and in the quantity of occasional house-relief