absent, there could scarcely have been less
heed paid to the empty space than to the
space now so gloriously filled. Two of those
preternaturally sharp London boys, whose
eyes take everything in, glanced up at a join
in the cast and cried, "I say, he's got a
plaister on his back," and that was all the
notice David got.

Yet, there's taste enough for figures, too, when
they are coloured. All honour to the memory
of Mr. Sheepshanks, whose collection of the
cabinet works of modern painters, delights
and refines the people. The collection
consists mainly of those works which an
untrained public can enjoy before it
understands their highest claims upon attention.
The crowds are all before pictures made
up of figures that tell some story to the
eye. Those that touch the domestic feeling
are the most attractive. I think that among
the landscapes, those which contain sea
were most sought and dwelt upon. I know
that I couldn't tear my Catherine away
from that picture of fresh sea in the bay,
looked at from the cliffs at Seaford—William
Collins painted it—and I know well that
my wife stuck to it, because she had found
over it a road for her heart to our son
Jack away upon the waters.  I pull her
along. She looks at me, and points to an
old woman in a corner, an old woman in
black, who is rooted before one of Cope's
pictures; a very simple little thing, only a
mother hushing a child off to sleep upon
her shoulder. To please Catherine we stand
and look at the woman, a very poor old
woman—poorer, her dress tells us, than
she was a year ago.  She is rooted
permanently down before the picture and looks
at it fixedly through her spectacles. Five
or ten minutes pass, and then others who
come press against her, she moves aside a
few steps to make room for others, and
again stands looking at the picture from
afar.

"She has lost a daughter and a grand-
child, too," Catherine whispered. "She will
look at nothing else, she will go home
when she leaves that picture.''

So she did, but how my wife could know
she would do that, I can't imagine.

Kitty and Albert as we had not been
moving, were gone from us.  We found
Kitty looking at a desperately romantic
scene, called Disappointed Love—a white girl
among greens—no doubt because I had
forbidden the house to a green-grocer's young
man, who has no prospect of getting into
independent business. Albert was in a
corner eating his aunt Starks's shrimps,
which he swallowed with heads, legs, and
tails attached, in order to avoid collision
with authorities.

Let me remark that for a long time,
nobody looked at Turner's picture of the
Yacht Sqnadron at East Cowes. Between a
crowd, before the pictures to the right and
left of it, it shot out its rays clearly, as the
moon does through a rift in the clouds.  In all
the shiftings of the throng about the room,
no sign of any interest in that picture
appeared until a well-dressed gentleman and
lady stood some time before it, and a crowd
then gathered to enjoy what they enjoyed.

"Where's mother?"

Mrs. Boroo was lost. After a wild hunt in
which Albert led, we found her among the
Animal Products—she is herself an animal
product of considerable magnitude—before
a pair of cavalry boots of the present period,
the legs made from solid leather of oxhide.
I quote from the catalogue compiled
by Mr. P. L. Simmonds—what a pleasant
catalogue! Mrs. Boroo took to the Animal
Products. As there's a museum of useful
stones in Jermyn Street, a collection of plants
at Kew, and there was a collection of animal
products nowhere, that is one of the things
they have begun establishing at Kensington,
where you see carefully arranged all sorts of
woven goods in wool, alpaca, and mohair;
manufactures of all manners of hair, bristles,
and whalebone; domestic articles of bone
and ivory, horn and hoofs, tortoise-shell, any
shell; the oils and fats of commerce (Mrs.
B. greatly interested in the same), animal
paints and dyes, animal physic and perfumes,
and animal's waste, used in men's business,
even down to a selection of prepared
manures. I gave but sixpence for the catalogue
of this department of the Kensington
Museum, and Albert has been reading it to his
grandmother ever since, between tea-time
and supper-time. I know all about sheep-
washing, about cloths, and different kinds of
carpets. I know all about silkworms and
we are now buried in furs, as we have been
for some time, thanks to the liberal
contributions to the museum made by Mr. E. B.
Roberts and Mr. Nicholay. The catalogue
will send me to South Kensington again,
because it has made all of us curious about
some things we didn't see at all, and some we
didn't understand when we first saw them.
So will Mr. Redgrave's sixpenny guide to
the pictures, which tells interesting facts
about each painter, and shows ways of enjoying
all the pictures that we missed on our
first visit. There's a penny guide to them,
too, and there's a penny guide to the entire
museum, which tells the chief facts relating
to history and mystery. These guides are
wonderfully cheap, but any one who doesn't
choose to pay a penny, gets a handbill with
a plan of the building, and particulars of
classes held in it—for there are classes and
lectures, too—for nothing. The classes are
not for nothing, but the handbill is. Classes
are cheap. There are some meetings on two
evenings a week for schoolmasters, school-
mistresses, and pupil teachers, which cost
only five shillings for the session.

Passing by the library of books, and the
edcuational models—over which I saw two or