FEBRUARY.
Parliament will meet at the usual time, when the Refuge for the Destitute in Playhouse Yard will be turned into an asylum for the houseless peers; the unroofed rooms and heavy rains and floods turning the intended House of Lords into a Peerless Pool. The enclosure of the Commons will be at the same time a great question of doubt.
The following events will be found this month, without fail, in the papers:—A dreadful fire in America, and another at Smyrna; a steam-boat explosion on the Mississippi; an abortive poor-law inquiry in a Midland county; a terrible inundation somewhere abroad; and the discovery of a railway swindle in London; which will give rise to a grand battue of "stags," directed by the Siva, or destroying engine of the "Times."
A new line of railway, direct to Windsor, will be sanctioned the earliest in the Session; in consequence, those who make a pilgrim's progress to the old station will find it literally the Slough of Despond.
A bold member, moving that the statues for the new Senate of the sovereigns of England shall go up by order of merit rather than succession, will secure a tolerably good perch for Oliver Cromwell; and it is not unlikely that Byron's statue will take its place in Poet's Corner at the same time.
Two new steamers, the Emmet and the Earwig, will run between London Bridge and Chelsea six times for a penny. They will be greatly crowded in consequence.
Serious Railway Accident.—A train will get off the line and run down an embankment into a farm-yard.