OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.
Since it first lifted its tall head, "like a bully," as Pope rudely put it, the London Monument has been much looked at. If it is not to be superseded amid the sights of London, it is time it began to look out for itself. A rival has been creeping up year after year in the bulky volume known as Burdett's Official Intelligence. The volume just out bears the record Fourteenth Year—a mere child in point of age, but a prodigy of colossal size and almost, supernatural knowledge. It is perhaps quite an accident that the pages run up to 1899. But the fact is fresh testimony to the fin de siècle character of the work. Persons about to marry would, my Baronite says, find it a nice start in the way of furnishing a library. In emergency, it would serve as a dining-table, a footstool, a four-post bedstead, or (if the pages were cut out and distributed as tracts in the City) the binding might be rebuilt to form a spare bedroom. Just the book to take down with you to Brighton, or up the river on some of those sunny days we hope are coming. Crammed full of information from cover to cover. What Burdett's Intelligence does not know about financial affairs and Stock Exchange business would make a very small book.
The Baron de B.-W.
"The Niger Company."—Christy Minstrels.