In the small houses and the country towns the candles linger still. And such candles! For the most part they are tallow: they need constant snuffing: they drop their detestable grease everywhere—on the tablecloth, on your clothes, on the butter and on the bread. You, Eighty-seven, will be saying hard things of gas, but you do not know from what darkness, and misery of darkness, it saved your ancestors.

As for the churches, they are not yet generally provided with gas. There is some strange prejudice against it in the minds of the clergy. Yet it is not Papistical, or even freethinking. In most of them, where they have evening service, the pews are provided with two candles apiece, stuck in tin candlesticks, with four candles for the pulpit and four for the reading-desk. The effect is not unpleasing, but the candles continually require snuffing, and the operation is constantly attended with accidents, so that the church is always filled with the fragrance of smouldering tallow wicks. The repugnance to gas is so great, indeed, in some quarters, that one clergyman, the Rector of Holy Trinity, Marylebone, is going to commit all his vestrymen to the Ecclesiastical Courts because they have attempted to light the church with gas.

Here is a City funeral in one of the burial-grounds close to the crowded street; the clergyman reads the Service, and the mourners in their long black cloaks stand round the open grave, and the coffin is lowered into it, and outside there is no cessation at all to the bustle and the noise; the wagoner cracks his whip, the drover swears at his cattle, the busy men run to and fro as if the last rites were not being performed for one who has heard the call of the Messenger, and, perforce, obeyed it. And look—the mould in which the grave is dug is nothing but bits of bones and splinters of coffins. The churchyard is no longer a field of clay: it is a field of dead citizens. You, friend Eighty-seven, will manage these things better.

Here goes one of the long stages. Saw you ever a finer coach, more splendidly appointed, with better cattle? Ten miles an hour that coachman reckons upon as soon as he is clear of London. They say that in a year or two, when all the railways are opened, the stage coaches will be ruined, the horses all sold, and the English breed of horses ruined. We shall travel twenty miles an hour without stopping to change horses; the accidents will be frightful, but those who meet with none will get from London to Edinburgh in less than twenty-four hours. Next year they promise to open the London and Birmingham Railway.

3rd REGIMENT OF BUFFS

Here comes a soldier. You find his dress absurd? To be sure, his tight black stock makes his red cheeks seem swollen; his queer tall hat, with the neat red ball at the top, might be more artistic; the red shoulder roll, not the least like an epaulette, would hardly ward off a sword-cut; the coat with its swallow tail is no protection to the body or the legs; the whitened belt must cost an infinite amount of trouble to keep it fit for inspection, and a working-man’s breeches and stockings would be more serviceable than those long trousers. There are always brave fellows, however, ready to enlist; the soldier’s life is attractive, though the discipline is hard and the floggings are truly awful.

DOUGLAS JERROLD

(From the Bust by the late E. H. Bailey, R.A.)