there are no official instructions as to money
or clothing,—but charity dictates what routine
and precedent must deny. As a charity,—
bear in mind, Mr. Emamiel Milkyway, as a
charity,—you can be provided with a coarse
suit of convict clothing, and a few shillings
to convey you to the coast, where you will do
your best to find a ship, and work your way
back before the mast of some homeward
bound ship to your forgiving country.

Search for your deserted family in graveyards
and workhouses; search for your forgetful
friends, whose memories will fail
them; search for your little store of hard
earned wealth, and find it scattered to the legal
winds; search for your lost position in the
social scale, and find it never—never—never.

Go to " the department "—the turkey-carpeted
rooms; the office; the section of Government
that represents the society that has
injured you—and ask for compensation.
Your first application shall be treated with
respectful condolence; your second with ill-
concealed impatience; your third with open
dissatisfaction and contempt; your fourth
with a curt refusal of admittance from the
hall-porter of "the department."

Take to drinking, Mr. Milkyway, and
become an object to be preached to by virtuous
teetotallers who have never suffered temptation
or grievous wrong; take to the comforting
delusions of madness, Mr. Milkyway, and
become an inmate of a pauper lunatic asylum.
While every placeman is provided with ample
comfort, in the shape of an annual pension or
a commuted grant, when the scythe of reform
can no longer be prevented from cutting him
down, the victim of mistaken identity on
part of the State must suffer in heart-broken
silence.

The case, of Mr. Milkyway, is not an imaginary
creation of fancy, nor an individual
instance of hardship occurring once in a
hundred years. I have the spoken authority of
Mr Waddington, backed by the tacit
acquiescence of the Honourable Mr. Walpole,
for stating that scarcely a day passes that
the Home Office does not become cognisant
of some fresh case of mistaken identity similar
to your own.

THE BOILED BEEF OF OLD ENGLAND.

The art of cooking is so essential and so
universal a characteristic of our race, that it
has been held to establish a boundary between
man and the lower animals. It has been declared
sufficient to establish a difference between
a man and a monkey, to say that the one is
and the other is not a cooking animal. For,
as the philosophers argue, cooking is not a
mere instinct, it is an act of reason, involving
intellectual effort, and the accomplishment of
complicated and intelligent acts which are
above the capacity of any other than human
creatures. These culinary processes are in
vogue wherever man is found, and they are
complicated in proportion as he is civilised
and refined.

This art is a faithful mirror of national
character, and affords a fair index to the
degree of civilisation. In the lowest state of
barbarity, the art reflects the rudeness of the
people by the coarseness and crudity of its
products. In the most advanced states it
has a character of healthy and substantial
moderation. In the corrupt and luxurious
phases of national decadence, it tells of the
jaded stomach and palled appetite by its
profusion of needless stimulants, and its
shameless waste of expensive accessories. It has
its own physiognomy, which the wise may
decipher. Every local or national peculiarity
is translated by a corresponding culinary
variation. The ethnology of the art has,
perhaps, never yet been sufficiently studied
from this philosophical point of view; he
that would enter upon the task, must needs
possess a catholic taste, and a good digestion.
He must be prepared to partake, with
Southey, of squab-pie in Devonshire; sheep's-
head with the hair on, in Scotland, and
potatoes roasted on the hearth in Ireland;
frogs with the French, pickled herrings with
the Dutch, sour krout with the Germans,
maccaroni with the Italians, horse-flesh with
the Tartars, ass-flesh with the Persians, dogs
with the North-Western American Indians,
curry with the Asiatic East Indians, birds'-
nests with the Chinese, mutton roasted with
honey with the Turks, pismire-cakes on the
Orinoco, and turtle and venison with the
Lord Mayor. All these are national and
characteristic, and therefore to be appreciated.
Certainly, if anything were ever thoroughly
characteristic of Old England it is her world
famous roast beef. We have feasted on it at
home, and boasted of it abroad, until rosbif
has become a sound familiar to continental
ears. A sort of synonym for Briton,
and something on which the splenetic Gaul
delights to vent his wrath, as upon an object
very near to our heart. A cherished tradition
dependent, in no small measure, upon
the fiction of the regimental bandmaster's,
had taught us to trace a special connection
between our favourite soldier and our favourite
food: the British grenadier has been
fondly looked upon as, in some sort, an
incarnation of the roast beef of Old England.

Insular vanity has willingly connected
our military supremacy with the supposed
superiority of our national diet; and, when
Hogarth exhibited the stalwart grenadier
making a hearty meal off a baron of beef
done to a turn, in the presence of several
half-starved juicy-mouthed cuirassiers, who
looked pitifully at their bouilli, this was
accepted as a witty and pleasing illustration
of one of the circumstances which mainly
contributed to turn the scale in our favour
at Waterloo. We have only recently been
awakened from this delusion by the revelations
of the Army Sanitary Commission.