watcher was yielding to me, and that the
curse was upon me that I must send him to
sleep.

"'Get up and walk, Dick!' cried the
leader. Try!'

"It was in vain to go behind the
slumberer's chair and shake him. One o'clock
sounded, and I was present to the elder man,
and he stood transfixed before me.

"To him alone, I was obliged to relate my
story, without hope of benefit. To him alone,
I was an awful phantom making a quite
useless confession. I foresee it will ever be
the same. The two living men together will
never come to release me. When I appear,
the senses of one of the two will be locked
in sleep; he will neither see nor hear me; my
communication will ever be made to a solitary
listener, and will ever be unserviceable. Woe!
Woe! Woe!"

As the Two old men, with these words,
wrung their hands, it shot into Mr.
Goodchild's mind that he was in the terrible
situation of being virtually alone with the
spectre, and that Mr. Idle's immoveability
was explained by his having been charmed
asleep at One o'clock. In the terror of this
sudden discovery which produced an
indescribable dread, he struggled so hard to get
free from the four fiery threads, that he
snapped them, after he had pulled them out to
a great width. Being then out of bonds, he
caught up Mr. Idle from the sofa and rushed
down stairs with him.

"What are you about, Francis?" demanded
Mr. Idle. "My bedroom is not down here.
What the deuce are you carrying me at all
for? I can walk with a stick now. I don't
want to be carried. Put me down."

Mr. Goodchild put him down in the old
hall, and looked about him wildly.

"What are you doing? Idiotically plunging
at your own sex, and rescuing them or
perishing in the attempt?" asked Mr. Idle,
in a highly petulant state.

"The One old man!" cried Mr. Goodchild,
distractedly,—"and the Two old men!"

Mr. Idle deigned no other reply than "The
One old woman, I think you mean," as he
began hobbling his way back up the staircase,
with the assistance of its broad
balustrade.

"I assure you, Tom," began Mr. Goodchild,
attending at his side, "that since you fell
asleep—"

"Come, I like that!" said Thomas Idle,
"I haven't closed an eye!"

With the peculiar sensitiveness on the
subject of the disgraceful action of going to
sleep out of bed, which is the lot of all
mankind, Mr. Idle persisted in this declaration.
The same peculiar sensitiveness impelled
Mr. Goodchild, on being taxed with the same
crime, to repudiate it with honourable
resentment. The settlement of the question of
The One old man and The Two old men was
thus presently complicated, and soon made
quite impracticable. Mr. Idle said it was all
Bride-cake, and fragments, newly arranged, of
things seen and thought about in the day.
Mr. Goodchild said how could that be, when
he hadn't been asleep, and what right
could Mr. Idle have to say so, who had
been asleep? Mr. Idle said he had never
been asleep, and never did go to sleep,
and that Mr. Goodchild, as a general rule,
was always asleep. They consequently parted
for the rest of the night, at their bedroom
doors, a little ruffled. Mr. Goodchild's last
words were, that he had had, in that real and
tangible old sitting-room of that real and
tangible old Inn (he supposed Mr. Idle
denied its existence?), every sensation and
experience, the present record of which is
now within a line or two of completion; and
that he would write it out and print it every
word. Mr. Idle returned that he might if
he liked—and he did like, and has now
done it.

CALCUTTA.

A HUNDRED years ago by the almanac,
there stood on the left bank of the river
Hooghly, ninety miles from its entrance into
the Bay of Bengal—a fort, a ditch, a palace,
and a stifling crowd of Hindoo huts. To-day
the fort, the ditch, the palace, still remain,
and so, too, the mud dwellings, more numerous,
but no cleaner, than of old. Nevertheless,
the change has been marked—that is to
say, for an eastern country, though to western
minds, which have contemplated the progress
of Australian colonies, of English cities, and
of American states, the hundred years might
as well have been ten or a dozen.

Calcutta—or, as it is boastfully designated,
the City of Palaces—is, a huge compound of
the grand, the filthy, the inconvenient, and the
luxurious. It is a whitened hybrid of the
East and the West; of barbarism and civilisation.
It unites within it some of the best
and worst characteristics of London, Paris,
Cairo, and of a certain Western Babylon,
which I choose to designate Timbuctoo. The
Black Hole, once famed for its atrocities,
is no more. Its dingy stones are levelled
with the ground; but we need not wander
far in the metropolis of British India, to
find many other Black Holes, not quite so
small, perhaps, nor so very notorious, though,
nearly as noxious, and wherein things as foul
are perpetrated. The Ditch of eighteen
hundred and fifty-seven, is doubtless a far
more cleanly sewer than that which existed
in seventeen hundred and fifty-seven; but
there is a huge social ditch encircling this
City of Palaces,—fouler, more replete with
deleterious and hurtful exhalations, than any
physical swamp in any Timbuctoo, African
or European.

Steam up the Hooghly in the River Bird,
or the Dwarkanouth, or the Megna and her