with the recovery of penalties. Its coercive
power was therefore at an end. This oversight
has yet to be remedied.

The same act provided that none but qualified
medical practitioners should be appointed by the
parishes as public vaccinators. This was a
gain. But the extension of the system of
gratuitous vaccination has, of course, reduced very
much the number of applicants for free
vaccination to the National Vaccine Establishment;
and, while the demand on that institution for
supplies of lymph has greatly increased, the
source of its lymph has been drying up, and its
power of selection has been, of course,
proportionately restricted. The vaccination stations
in the great towns are now, therefore, beginning
to contribute supplies to the central establishment,
of which lymph is to be obtained by every
proper applicant.

Most important of all, is a new use made of
the large vaccine stations that have been
formed. By a notification from the privy
council, public vaccinators in the towns which
contain medical schools are authorised to
instruct students and give certificates of their
proficiency. After the first day of the present
year, except in certain stated cases, no person
was to be contracted with for vaccination of the
public, without evidence that he had been
taught and examined by some public vaccinator
authorised by the privy council for that purpose.

Our present wants, therefore, are but two:
firstly, some measure for the renewal of the
vaccine matter: secondly, a system of compulsory
vaccination that will include provision for the
actual enforcement of its penalties.

THE UNFINISHED POEM.

           TAKE it, reader—idly passing
              This, like hundred other lines;
           Take it, critic, great at classing
               Subtle genius' well-known sign.
           But, O reader! be thou dumb;
           Critic, let no keen wit come;
           For the hand that wrote or blurr'd
           Will not write another word,
           And the soul you scorn or pnize
           Now than angels is more wise.

           Take it, heart of man or woman,
               This unfinished, broken strain,
           Whether it be poor and common,
               Or the noblest work of brain;
           Let that reverent heart sole sit
           Here in judgment over it,
           Tenderly, as you would read
           (Any one, of any creed,
            Any churchyard walking by)
           "Sacred to the memory."
          

           Wholly sacred: even as lingers
               Final word, or light glance cast,
           Or last clasp of life-warm fingers
               That we knew not was the last;
           Wholly sacred—as we lay,
           The day after funeral day,
           Their dear relics, great or small,
           Who need nothing, yet have all—
           All the best of us, that lies
           Hid with them in Paradise;
          

           All our highest aspirations,
               And our closest love of loves:
           Our most silent resignations,
               Our best work that man approves;
           Yet which jealously we keep
           In our mute soul's deepest deep.
           So of this imperfect song
           Let no echoes here prolong;
           For the singer's voice is known
           In the heaven of heavens alone.

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

IT lately happened that I found myself
rambling about the scenes among which my
earliest days were passed; scenes from which I
departed when I was a child, and which I did
not revisit until I was a man. This is no
uncommon chance, but one that befals some of us
any day; perhaps it may not be quite
uninteresting to compare notes with the reader
respecting an experience so familiar and a journey
so uncommercial.

I will call my boyhood's home (and I feel
like a Tenor in an English Opera when I
mention it) Dullborough. Most of us come from
Dullborough who come from a country town.
As I left Dullborough in the days when there
were no railroads in the land, I left it in a
stagecoach. Through all the years that have
since passed, have I ever lost the smell of the
damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and
forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys,
Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was
no other inside passenger, and I consumed my
sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it
rained hard all the way, and I thought life
sloppier than I had expected to find it.

With this tender remembrance upon me,
I was cavalierly shunted back into
Dullborough the other day, by train. My ticket
had been previously collected, like my taxes,
and my shining new portmanteau had had a
great plaster stuck upon it, and I had been
defied by Act of Parliament to offer an
objection to anything that was done to it, or me,
under a penalty of not less than forty shillings
or more than five pounds, compoundable for a
term of imprisonment. When I had sent my
disfigured property on to the hotel, I began to
look about me; and the first discovery I made,
was that the Station had swallowed up the
playing-field.

It was gone. The two beautiful hawthorn-trees,
the hedge, the turf, and all those buttercups
and daisies, had given place to the stoniest
of jolting roads; while, beyond the Station, an
ugly dark monster of a tunnel kept its jaws open,
as if it had swallowed them and was ravenous for
more destruction. The coach that had carried
me away, was melodiously called Timpson's
Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at
the coach-office up-street; the locomotive
engine that had brought me back, was called
severely No. 97, and belonged to S.E.R.,
and was spitting ashes and hot-water over the
blighted ground.

When I had been let out at the platform-door,