no hope of her ever riding in a public
vehicle, since that fatal day when the evil
genius of an omnibus-conductor prompted
him to overcharge her sixpence sterling.

Sometimes, flitting across Leicester Square
and suddenly disappearing in one of the
murky streets of Soho, I fancy I have seen
the purple pickled-cabbage coloured parapluie
of the French grisette; and I know that
I have seen the light, bright blue umbrella of
a boulevard exquisite, temporarily exiled from
his native land. Sometimes I fancy when I
see a gentlemanly man entering a cab with a
very shabby umbrella, that he must have
borrowed it at night to go home from a party
when no conveyance was to be had; and that
it proved to be such a disgraceful spectacle
when exposed to the light of day, that he is
compelled to hire a carriage to return it to
the owner. I have suffered—oh, how I have
suffered!—from the joke about the best
umbrellas always going first. Whether I
am destined to be more unfortunate than my
fellow-creatures I cannot tell; but I never
venture out, either in public or private circles,
without having that mouldy pleasantry dinned
into my ear. I have sometimes weakly taken
the Vicar of Wakefield's advice, and
endeavoured to rid myself of troublesome
acquaintances, by lending them umbrellas,
bought for the purpose in Tottenham Court
Road on a Saturday night, and warranted
sound at a shilling a-piece. I have, in all
such experiments been miserably deceived;
the umbrellas, it is true, do not return, but
the acquaintances invariably do.

In my wanderings about town, my eyes
have been once, and once only, regaled with
the sight of a real drover picking his way
gingerly through the mud, as he guided
his sheep to their destined slaughter-house,
and holding an umbrella over his head to
protect him from the rain. He must have
been a gentleman who had seen better days,
or a descendant of the Gentle Shepherd.

Long have I watched for, but never have I
seen, a real salt-water sailor with an
umbrella. Many things that pertain solely to
the earth he buys, but never an umbrella. I
have seen naval men occasionally with such
things, but they have been stout, respectable,
retired skippers, who have saved money,
and gone into the ship-chandler line.

Sometimes as I watch the clerks wending
homewards from the city, I fancy that I can
tell from their umbrellas more than anything
else—which are the married men and which
the single ones; which the free, unfettered
young loungers about town, and which the
struggling fathers of families. Sometimes on
a wet night, after being dazzled with the
gorgeous pageantry of a theatrical spectacle, I
have a strange fancy for wandering round to
that dingy back street, where the stage-door
is always situated, and under the dilapidated
umbrella of some thin, meek, shivering,
hurrying man trying to trace the proud
lineaments of that stern monarch who, a few
minutes before, had lorded it magnificently
over his fellow-creatures.

Sometimes when I pay a morning visit at
the family mansion of Mr. Midas (late of the
Stock Exchange), I find an old rotten pair of
goloshes, and a frail handleless umbrella standing
in the hall. They belong to a poor widow
who walks miles in the wet to teach the
young ladies music. Once she was waited
upon herself, before her husband (Mr. Midas's
late partner) failed, and shot himself one
morning in his bedroom. I have never
seen her face; but I have often seen her
umbrella's, and it tells her story.

ANGLO-SAXON BOOKMEN.

WE sketched lately the substance of the
Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, the oldest
national epic of Germanic Europe extant.
That picture of old times has been preserved
by chance in but a single copy, mutilated by
a fire which consumed part of the library in
which it was contained. Had the fire spread
a little further, we should have known little
indeed of the war-poetry of Anglo-Saxons.
Except an occasional gleeman's song,
included in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there
would have come down nothing more than
what is called the fragment on the Fight at
Finnesburg. That is a leaf from a larger
Anglo-Saxon poem, which an antiquary found
in the cover of a manuscript of homilies in
the archbishop's library at Lambeth. Quick-
witted antiquaries always keep their eyes
upon the scraps of paper that have writing
on them, which they find in ancient bindings.
Strange fitful gleams of light upon past
history and manners now and then shoot
from these snips of crabbed manuscripts;
commonly, because of their fragmentary
nature, they suggest something that they do
not tell. An antiquary who, as to the
recovering of all ancient volumes, is—as he
ought to be—his own bookbinder, may find
his bookbinding a work full of excitement
and mystery. Of many an old legal parchment
upon which historical names figure, he
finds here and there a bewildering inch. He
generally knows at sight, by the character
of the handwriting, in what century the ink
of any scrap was wet and fresh, its subject
matter full of living interest or passion. In
very old times there was no literature produced
with a direct view to the butter-shops;
penmen and books were scarce, and they
produced nothing that was openly to be
considered trivial. Therefore old manuscripts
are always likely to have a more direct and
intimate relation to the story of their time
than will be the case in the twenty-ninth
century with manuscripts and books of the
nineteenth. In the cover of an old book,
then, there was found a snatch of Anglo-
Saxon verse, which told how Hengest and
his men attacked by night and fired Fin's