who adds fifty per centum to the goading,
and shouts it down the pipe. The storm
increases; the call for food becomes louder:
the varieties are not distinctly marked.
Names of meat and vegetables, fish, flesh,
and fowl, pastry and salad, are mixed up
together in hopeless confusion. The machinery
is going wrong. Once the shelves come up
with nothing on them, to be hurled down
indignantly by stern proprietor. Again they
rise to the surface with everything out
of order—potatoes standing in the midst of
raspberry tart, and gooseberry pudding put
in a butter-boat. A barman is ordered to
take charge of the position, while the bursting
proprietor rushes round to the kitchen to
see what is the matter. Once more the
shelves go down; once more they come up,
containing a scrubbing-brush, and one pickled
onion! The storm of indignation from
hungry customers is overwhelming. Again
the stentorian landlord nearly splits the pipe
with reiterated orders, sent down in a whirlwind
of rage. A sound of faint, weak,
imbecile singing is heard below.

The proprietor goes down. He finds the
kitchen a wreck. The dancing maniac at
the gridiron has fled with two scullions to
enlist in the army.

     Mon Dieu! the very cook is fast asleep,
     And all that bullock's heart is baking still!

The artist of the establishment is lying
supinely on his back at an open window.
The boy—the stout, active lad—has given
way under the pressure; his mind is a blank;
he sits at his post, but he is an idiot!

City men are eccentric, and very exacting
where labour is concerned; but they are
kind, humane, and generous, notwithstanding.
They felt that they were responsible for this
sad state of things underground. A subscription
was raised. The boy wanted repose
(the cook had already taken it). He was
removed to a lonely fisherman's hut on the
Essex coast, far from the sound of everything,
except the sailor's song upon the river, and
the washing of the water in amongst the
sedges on the bank. His mind sometimes
wanders, and his tongue babbles of strange
and unknown dishes;  but he is progressing
favourably.

BARDANA HILL.

IMPOSTORS are almost always—for a while,
at least—successful. Their popularity surpasses
the measure of any triumph yet
recorded to have been won by a veritable
benefactor of his species. Thus, while John Hunter,
footsore and dust-begrimed is trudging all
the way from Scotland up to London, with a
single change of linen tied up in a darned
cotton handkerchief, John Law is giving
audience in his gilded saloon at Paris, under
the shadow of the old palatial Tuileries, to a
cringing mob of princes of the blood, and of
the ancien noblesse, representatives of that
haughtiest of all the proud European
aristocracies. And so, too, while that dearest
friend of us all, Doctor Oliver Goldsmith,
then of Southwark, stands bowing before his
poor Bankside patient, politest of all threadbare
physicians, his second-hand three-cornered
hat held pertinaciously over the patch
in the rusty velvet, Cagliostro, the Knave of
Trumps, the very trump of all the knaves in
the ever-shuffling human pack, is making his
tour of the great capitals of the continent
with as many kings grouped before his
chariot wheels as were ever harnessed,
according to the old classic story-book, to the
triumphal car of the Emperor Sesostris.
Intolerable though all contrasts of this
disheartening kind undoubtedly are in
themselves, I nevertheless do frankly acknowledge
at once, that I have a certain weakness
for these same delightfully mendacious
charlatans. I think it is only, indeed, in obedience
to a common weakness of our nature, a
weakness, by reason of which we all of us
love to be deluded sometimes.

Supposing, for example that a curious pang
has seized upon a pet molar or a favourite
incisor—cherished tooth of all, like the
weakliest bantling in a family, or, what is pretty
much the same, with the maternal preference,
the veriest scapegrace and the most incorrigible
ne'er-do-weel,—supposing the demon
ache in that agreeable little bony core of throbs
to have reached the very climax of pulsation,
and the old preposterous nostrum in the little
finnikin bottle with the big cork, the panacea
you have tried so often, and never yet with
any avail whatever, is brought forth again
for the ninety-ninth time for the purpose of
that purely imaginary alleviation! Don't
you, even then, look with an inflamed eye of
unbelief over the top of your handkerchief,
still with a secret, sanguine, spectral credulity
in your heart, as the snowy atom of
cotton is being pinkly moistened—though
you know perfectly well in your heart of
hearts, what must, after all, by necessity, be
the one inevitable consequence? Namely,
that in a few minutes afterwards you will be
closeted in the back-parlour of your diabolical
neighbour round the corner, Forceps the
dentist, reposing in the cruel luxury of that
ridiculously easy chair, taking an open-
mouthed contemplation of the ceiling: while
the catfooted manipulator, with his delicate
instrument of torture secreted, like a
conjuring trick, up his wristband, comes to you
with his hand behind his back and, with that
monstrous affectation of merely looking, that
you feel, even then, as an insult to your
common sense. Yet, next year, next month,
with the toothache rampant, perhaps, in
another section of the jaw, I dare say that
absurd little anodyne will be out again, as
though the futility of all its exhilarating, but
utterly illusive, pretensions had never once
been detected.