the deadlier design was masked beneath the
appearance of consummate favour.

Neither is the kingdom of Siam, nor that of
Persia, mentioned in a recent number, the only
place where one receives white elephants, to
the destruction of happiness and life; and
that intelligent pachiderm, with his waving
trunk and flapping ears, his caution, his
cunning, and his "fidgetiness," is not the only
form in which favours are received. Friends and
fortune often play the part of Siamese royalty,
and offer us gifts of honour quite as ruinous and
inconvenient. What is it but a white elephant
gift, when your brother abroad sends you a huge
case full of foreign rarities, which you are by no
means to part with to dealers or discriminating
friends, but must house with reverence—first
paying the cost of transit and custom-house dues?
You are a poor man, with narrow boundary lines
set against your orchard; your life's acre grows
only just enough potatoes for your pigs and
children, leaving no surplus borders for green-house
flowers; nevertheless, you are obliged to
root up half a dozen rows of that useful, if
vulgar esculent, to plant in their place
geraniums and fuchsias, which give neither swill for
the swine nor bread for the children. You have
to go without essentials for the next six
months, that you may load your chimney-pieces
with carved ivory baskets holding nothing, and
squat deities in filigree silver, not always
impeccable with regard to delicacy, and utterly
wrong-sided with regard to beauty. And not one
of which you would value a farthing, or would
regret to see consigned to the dust-heap this very
day. But your friends congratulate you on the
generosity of your brother abroad: and the
virtuosi among them envy you, or tempt you
with fiendish offers of fabulous wealth, if you
will part with your book of Japanese costumes,
or your Ganesa in jade-stone, with Confucius in
Chinese silver, or Isis in verdigrised bronze:
offers of fabulous wealth impossible to be
accepted, yet for the half of which you would transfer
to them the whole consignment, satisfied if
you could get back your original outlay at the
custom-house, not to speak of the running
account at the framemaker's and the decorator's,
not yet brought to a stand-still. Your brother
abroad did not think of all this. He meant only
to do you honour, and to give you a white
elephant that would exalt your fame far above that
of your friends and neighbours.

Your father-in-law did the same when he
presented you with a new carpet for your drawing-
room, on the tenth anniversary of your wedding-day.
It was a bran-new Brussels, all red and
green and white and yellow; a gorgeous Brussels,
worth four times as much as that modest
moss-coloured Kidderminster, which you were ogling
at Shoolbred's. It killed all the shabby furniture
of ten years' standing, and reduced to instant
and unutterable ruin what had formerly been
nothing more than permissible decadence. It
made your curtains and your furniture, your
paint and your paper, your frames and your
chandeliers, simply impossible; and you found
yourself some eighty pounds the worse—your
experience of a white elephant.

My dear wife had a white elephant given her,
when her mother presented her with that magnificent
brocaded silk, which was as stiff as a board
and as bright as the sunlight. She could not
forbear having it "made up," you know; that was
absolutely necessary; but, of course, she would
not have it "made up" by little Miss Twopenny,
who did her common things well enough, but who
was by no means equal to brocaded silk that
would "stand by itself." She must go to Madame
Grandechose, who had such a "fit" and such
taste, and do dear mamma's present justice. So
she went to Madame Grandechose; and Madame
Grandechose undertook her brocade, and furthermore
enlightened her on the contingent necessities
of the situation—on the lace and the
flowers and the feathers and the thousand-and-
one costly trimmings which must be added to
do dear mamma's handsome present justice. My
wife found, or rather I did for her, when the
bill came in, that the trappings of her white
elephant had cost more than our whole year's
clothes of ordinary wear—that mamma's one
brocade came to as much as her entire ward-
robe, summer and winter included. Besides, as
she very acutely argued, what was the good of a
brocade like that, if no one saw it? It was a
pity to have spent so much money, only to lay the
brocade by in cedar shavings. As she had a white
elephant, it was as well to parade it through the
streets; as she had a brocaded silk dress with
Madame Grandechose's taste superadded, it was
a social duty to wear it. So we gave a few
dinners and a few evening parties, and went out
as often as we were asked that season; and by
the end of it, I had overdrawn my banker's
account several hundred pounds, and Johnny
was taken from school and put to business a
year and a half too soon. His mother's brocaded
silk stunted my boy's career for life; which was
paying rather dearly for a white elephant.

I once knew a man who had set his heart
on a certain very personable white elephant of
his acquaintance; an elephant of power and
presence, on whose majestic back he thought he
could rear a howdah of surpassing grandeur
which would shelter his life from the fierce heats
of summer and the chill blasts of winter alike,
and carry him safely and nobly to his goal. He
was a poor man, a man without friends or
fortune, who aspired to be the husband of a
nobleman's dowerless daughter; by whose grand
connexions he expected to rise to eminence in
his profession, and whose powerful influence he
thought would pull him through any difficulties
that might beset him. That was his chart of
calculation, his Mercator's Projection of the
Universe of the future. Hers was the natural
desire of the female elephant, whether white or
black, for a home paddock and a gallant mate,
for a troop of little baby elephants with their
trunks in the air and their knees deep in sweet
vernal grass, and for the broad roof-tree, broad
enough to shelter love and happiness and
grandeur all together; so she responded to the