that had been made for shelter by weary travellers, while cabs, piled up with luggage, were waiting at the door. It spoke of many bewildering inquiries that had been made after people with strange names, who had either assassinated an unpopular king, or had left a little account unsettled at a tailor's. It spoke of many mistaken knocks and rings, which had brought down a sulky maid-servant from a fourth floor (the houses run lofty in that neighbourhood), and had caused her to "give notice" to her master or her mistress. It spoke plainly enough to those who could understand English, but not so plainly to most foreigners. Mr. Fergusson, seeking for bed and board, was warned off the door-step; but Monsieur Ferguson, and Herr Feurgeisonn, and Signor Fergusoni may still have pestered "Brown." It showed, however, what lodgers may blight a whole district, especially for those sturdy housekeepers who desire to live without them.

There is no fate more melancholy, in my opinion, than that of people who plant their homes in a neighbourhood which fades almost as soon as it is born. I know many such neighbourhoods in the outskirts of London, that started badly some thirty or forty years ago, and have now lost themselves beyond redemption. The back streets of small houses, in a district like this, seldom show much change, except in the decay brought on by bad building, rough usage, and a carelessness about repairs. The field, or market-garden, which formed their termination when they started, may have been planned out in new streets a little broader, and with houses a little larger; or, it may be, filled up with those most dreary objects, the black, can-shaped gas-holders of a gas-factory. A short street that is blocked up at one end with several of these dark store-houses of light, is not a cheerful sight to look upon; but even that is less depressing than the more ambitious parts of the district. The weakest and most depressing part is generally a terrace, which is evidently a local misfit-a builder's mistake. It will possess size, and a hopelessly shabby air of pretence, and that will be all. Some few respectable householders will live in it, induced to do so, perhaps, by low rents, or business that ties them to the locality. These are the persons whose fate is to be commiserated, who will suffer by neighbours over whom they have no control. The first sign of decay will be the sprouting out of a loan office; the next a parlour turned into the work-room of an artificial flower-maker, the next a front garden converted into the timber-yard of a small piano-forte maker, and another garden half filled with samples of "superfine" tombstones, and the "latest fashion" in monumental urns. Perhaps a gilded arm and mallet will be thrust out of the wall between two first-floor windows, to show that gold-beating has obtained a footing on the terrace; and before many months have passed, the lower rooms and garden of the same house may be occupied by a cheap and obtrusive photographer. From this point an alacrity in sinking may be fully expected.

The photographer will get cheaper still, and more obtrusive; his operations will spread from the house and garden to the public pathway,

where he will stand with an inky specimen of his art, and stop the passersby; an adjoining house will put out a few shaky chairs, a washing-tub, a fender, and a four-post bedstead, and call itself a broker's; another house will bud out boldly in the bird and dog fancying line; and the largest house at the corner will be started as a "Terpsichorean Hall," where the Schottische, Gitani, Varsoviana, and Gorlitza dances, with German, Spanish, and French waltzing, and Parisian quadrilles, will be taught at sixpence a lesson. The terrace will be lucky if it gets through the winter season without falling into the hands of travelling showmen.

It was only the other day, as I passed a place of this description, which has sat to me as a model, that I saw a rifle-gallery in full demand at a penny a shot, which was nothing more than a broad tube carried through an open window of a front parlour right across the apartment to a target in the yard beyond. I had known the house in better days, and I shuddered at such a desecration of the domestic hearth.

Few men are so rich and powerful that they can live in the metropolis, and yet surround themselves with such armour that they can afford to despise their neighbours. A neighbour is a man who will always make his presence felt through one or other of the senses. He may attack you through the ear, through the nose, or through the eye; but attack you he assuredly will, and when you least expect it. The only comfort is, that these attacks, these disturbers of home, are passed on, and while you are annoyed by one neighbour, you may probably be annoying another. On one side of me is a man who is always altering his house, who has offended my taste by covering his red bricks with a coating of stucco, although the whole row in which we live was built in 1768. His scaffolding is even now before my window, and his bricklayer's labourer is staring at me as I write, little thinking that I am handing him down to posterity. On the other side is a quiet neighbour who is often annoyed by my children and my piano. Again, I have been shocked by the outside of a ducal residence in Cavendish Square, which seems to me to boast that penal style of architecture peculiar to houses of correction. The noble owner has, doubtless, in his turn, been shocked by many house monsters of plebeian taste; and so, in the great clearinghouse of the world, such accounts are fairly balanced. The English home is good; the French want of home is good; and neither country should be blamed for not being the same as the other. The home-the "poem of a life"-may have its pleasures, but it may also have its pains; and there is much philosophy in the French mode of living out of doors, and sleeping quite contentedly in the fraction of a dwelling.

A Roundabout Journey.

NOTES OF A WEEK'S HOLIDAY.

EDITATIONS.-We most

of us tell old stories in our families. The wife and children laugh for the hundredth time at the joke. The old servants (though old servants are fewer every day) nod and smile a recognition at the well-known anecdote. "Don't tell that story of Grouse in the gunroom," says Diggory to Mr. Hardcastle in the play, 66 or I must laugh." As we twad

dle, and grow old and forgetful, we may tell an old story; or, out of mere benevolence, and a wish to amuse a friend when conversation is flagging, disinter a Joe Miller now and then; but the practice is not quite honest, and entails a certain necessity of hypocrisy on story hearers and tellers. It is a sad thing, to think that a man with what you call a fund of anecdote is a humbug, more or less amiable and pleasant. What right have I to tell my "Grouse and the gunroom over and over in the presence of my wife, mother, mother-in-law, sons, daughters, old footman or parlour-maid, confidential clerk, curate, or what not? I smirk and go through the history, giving my admirable imitations of the characters introduced: I mimic Jones's grin, Hobbs's squint, Brown's stammer, Grady's brogue, Sandy's Scotch accent, to the best of my power: and the family part of my audience laughs good-humouredly. Perhaps the stranger, for whose amusement the performance is given, is amused by it, and laughs too. But this practice continued is not moral. This self-indulgence on your part, my dear Paterfamilias, is weak, vain-not to say culpable. I can imagine many a worthy man, who begins unguardedly to read this page, and comes to the present sentence, lying back in his chair, thinking of that story which he has told innocently for fifty years, and rather piteously owning to himself, "Well, well, it is wrong; I have no right to call on my poor wife to laugh, my daughters to affect to be amused, by that old, old jest of mine.

And