successful in pleasing each other in the drawing-
room; and, in short, that it is a flat failure.

Or, it may be, that your efforts to bring Arker
and Booms together, are productive of a result
still more startling.  This dear object of your
heart, the union of these good people, is successfully
brought about.  They meet at your house,
they take to each other.  They exchange calls.
Meetings are arranged, and parties made up, in
which you are, at first, of course, included.  At
first but not at last.  For lo and behold! a
day comes when the Arkers and the Boomses find
their friendship is strong enough to stand alone,
and no longer demand your fostering care, and at
length the meetings and the junketings come
off without your being present, and then it begins
to be dimly borne in upon you that the Arkers
have cut you out with the Boomses, or that the
Boomses have cut you out with the Arkers, and
that you have only your own delirious anxiety
to make these people acquainted with each other,
to thank for it.

And what is the upshot of all this?  Are you
never to recommend anybody under any circumstances,
never to try to do a good turn to a
friend who wants a little pushing, never to bring
any of your neighbours, who are strangers to
each other, together?  These—cries the reader
—are the principles of a cynic, a curmudgeon, a
churl.  They are and must be taken, like every-
thing else, in moderation.

Extravagant pushing and touting, which are
ordinarily thought to indicate friendly feeling and
good nature, indicate sometimes one or two other
things of a less noble nature. Very often there
is something of egotism and vanity at the bottom
of all this violent partizanship. We have taken
up such and such a doctor, such and such an
artist, and because we have done so, he must
be pushed, though half our friends be poisoned,
and the other half handed down to posterity as
so many scarecrows. So and so, again, is our
friend, therefore he must be worshipped. What!
are we not discerning and clever beyond other
men?  If we have taken up these people, shall
not others follow us? Then we most of us like
popularity; and the approval and belief, even of
our shoemakers and tailors, and their conviction
that we have a large circle of affluent friends, is
something worth trying for.

Nor must we forget that our amateur touting
often brings harm instead of good on the person
touted for. Wherever our poor friend Pukey
goes, he denounces Bacon as the most ignorant
and pretentious of all medical practitioners.
Our friend, dissatisfied with that; portrait which
he has paid for, but which he cannot hang up—
is he likely to sing the praises of Pigment, or
will he not rather warn his friends against him,
and that in the strongest phraseology?

Perhaps the safest rule to be observed in recommending,
is, to wait till you are asked; or,
at any rate, to behave—as has not been the case
in any of the supposititious instances given
above—with modesty and temperance.  "Dr.
Flook has done me a great deal of good: for so
much I can vouch; Mr. Pigment has made a
most excellent likeness of my wife; Gripper's
shoes fit me with extraordinary comfort:" these
are statements which you may make with great
security—nay, to make them is probably one of
the duties which you owe to that alarming
Institution, Society.

      ON THE PUBLIC SERVICE.

So Earl Russell called it in my passport—travelling
"on the public service," nothing definite,
nothing more.  I had my instructions, of course,
but they were, as they will remain, private.  I
had no uniform, like a courier, no sheepskin bag
of documents, no despatch-box, nothing distinctive
and immediately recognisable, like a Queen's
messenger.  On the public service I was to
travel as one of the public, quietly making such
inquiries as had been suggested to me, and
quietly noting down the replies; but I was in no
wise to give clue to my business, was not to
produce my passport until it was asked for,
and was to enter into no particulars as to the
public service on which I was accredited. I had
one consolation—that I afforded subject for an
enormous amount of jesting on the part of those
friends who knew that my mission lay in Hamburg,
at that time the head-quarters of the
German army marching on to Schleswig-
Holstein. It was a part of the admirable humour
of those wags to assume a belief in the premature
closing of my earthly career, to take longing
lingering farewells of me under the assumption
that I should be taken for a spy, and either
shot on the spot, after a drum-head court-martial,
or immured for life in a Prussian fortress.  I
was christened "Major André." I was begged
to read an account of the captivity at Verdun.
One would gravely affirm that he had heard
hanging was not really painful; another would
advise me not to submit to the degradation of a
handkerchief over my eyes, but to glare defiantly
at the shooting-party; a third hoped I had a
strong pocket-knife, because "people always
bought those queer little things that the prisoners
carved out of wood."  I bore their sallies
like a hero, and started by the night mail to
Dover "on the public service."

Although the South-Eastern Railway has done
its best to whirl me to that never-somnolent
town, and although the Belgian mail-packet,
advantaged by a splendid night, a favouring
breeze, and a placid sea, has conveyed me thence
to Ostend in very little more than four hours,
I find, on disembarking at half-past three A.M.,
that our haste has been in vain, for the train
does not start until after seven, and I have
nearly four hours to get through.  I am not prepared
to say at what town in Europe I should
prefer spending these four hours on a winter's
night, but I am prepared to declare that certainly
Ostend should not have my suffrages.
Had it been summer I could have had some supper
at one of the numerous quay-side restaurants,
and then strolled round the town; or I could
have walked on the Digue, or examined the