It is usual with small tradesmen to increase the weight of coals by sprinkling cold water upon them; but in the City the reason why coals come so heavy is owing to the City dews falling upon them for twenty miles round London. When these dews are collected, it is found that the difference, which, of course, weighs upon the price, amounts, in the course of the year, to many hundred thousands of pounds!
WHERE ARE THE RUSSIANS?
WHAT has become of the Russians, of whom 80,000 were said to have passed the Pruth, while 24,000 is the greatest number that has been yet accounted for. People are beginning to suspect that the Russian Army in the Principalities is like the Russian Army at Astley's having a considerable force behind some imaginary hills, and running round and round by the back of the stage to give an appearance of numbers. We all know that theatrical population progresses more rapidly than any other kind of population; and if our census shows that we double ourselves in fourteen years, a dramatic census will show that a theatrical population—if well marshalled by the stage manager—will double itself in less than five minutes. These considerations, however, do not help us in our difficulty, when we ask what has become of some 40,000 or 50,000 Russians that are wholly unaccounted for? We may be told in the usual loose phraseology of the chronology of war that they have been "cut to pieces." But before we can believe this dreadful assertion, we have a right to demand the production of at least the "bits" into which the Russians have either been smashed, chopped or beaten. Perhaps the most plausible way of accounting for the slaughter of the thousands of Russians whose remains are nowhere to be found is by the very natural supposition that they were but giants of the imagination, manufactured before they were slain by some literary Tom Thumb, who is "doing the foreign correspondence" of some London journal in his lodgings at Lambeth.
A Cup Too Much.
We understand that Prince Albert has nothing whatever to do with the movement got up by the (late) Lord Mayor, and indeed His Royal Highness has as much distaste for the baneful cup of adulation as he has for "the poisoned Challis."