tomatoes with his chop, or stuffing with his veal if you gave him a hundred pounds. Like an anteater, he lives by his Tongue, and must therefore keep that little member in a state of perfect purity.

My third and as I have dwelt at such length on the foregoing—my last introduction is Gimper, the furniture tester. He is to bedsteads what Shablee is to 'tents.' He is great on woods. He tests the 'sincerity' of a piece of furniture at a glance. Nay, I have seen him punch a featherbed, clap his ear down as if to hear an audible 'tick,' and pronounce on its contents at once. 'Too slow for goose feathers,' he says; 'it's mixed; and was filled about last Christmas.' He tells the material with which a chair is stuffed in the

same way. Horse-hair (he assures me) gives a sharp sustained vibration; wool is echoless; and flocks are 'husky.'

There are many other Queer Callings that it would be worth having a word upon. The indigo-taster is alone worth a column. His earnings are large, his position is good, his blood, I was almost about to add, is 'blue.' There are only seven indigo-tasters in the metropolis, and they all keep their suburban villas. At all events

so my friend Jones-Indigo Jones we call him— gives me to understand, and as he is one of the seven, of course he ought to know. No wonder poor old Colonel Newcome's Indigo Company was ruined with expenses, and that from his very horror of the colour the old warrior wandered. away to the Grey Friars to die!

VI.

F

'GUY FAUX, GUY.'

ATHER CULLEN notwithstanding, I

love the Fifth of November.

As a

young girl dotes on her first doll, or a young mother adores her first baby, I love a Guy. My passion for Signor Faux was of early growth -so early, that my oldest distinct recollection of anything, is of 'assisting' at the burning of an effigy of the Catesbyan conspirator (he was wonderfully like Lord John Russell!), in the backgarden of our house, and of ruddling a fleecy wintry sky with rockets. Ah! those rockets. Fireworks are different now from what they were when I was young! The rockets don't go (or don't seem to go, and it's all the same) half so high as they did when I saved up my 'tip' at Brambles' to buy them. Look at the fizgigs again. Why, your fizgig now is a sham. It spits

and sparks and sputters for about two moments; then it suddenly breaks off and has to have its head powdered; then it puffs up for about two seconds more, knocks off again and has to be re-sprinkled; then it begins to jet in earnest; and then, in less than a second more, it goes out with a stench. Very different were our fizgigs at Brambles'. Neither powder nor pepper (you know) was adulterated in those days, and if you made a fizgig, why it blossomed and starred like a golden thistle, flashed into a myriad sparklets like a tiny fountain for Queen Mab and her troupe

to dance round.

You may tell me-some one will, I am sure— that it is I who have changed and not the fizgigs. I have changed: it were better for me, perhaps, that my fingers were grimed with powder, as they perennially were at Brambles', than blackened with ink, as is their unchanging condition now! But don't tell me please don't-that while. I have been changing, the ancient institution of Guy Faux, with its inflammatory surroundings, has remained unaltered. I know different. Excepting the civic guys who make their appearance four days after date, we have only the ghost of the old thing left.

The whole exhibition has been villanously modernized. We have taken away Guy's matches and tinder-box and given him lucifers. We have blacked his mask and turned him into a nigger. We have refrained from burning him at night, and, with a vile spirit of economy, have 'saved him up' for the following year. We have thrown away the old chair and broomsticks (we shall be throwing away the woolsack soon), and have set him on a truck, and allowed a jackass to drag him through the streets. We have altered his country -his name his religion-everything. We have clapped a turban on him, smeared his hands with bullock's-blood, and dubbed him Nana Sahib. We have draped him in a green stole in front and a red hood behind, and called him Bryan King. We have given him a sugar-loaf cap, with tintinnabular appendages, and christened him Sir Peter Laurie. The force of degradation could no further go.

Couldn't it? It has. We have even changed the burden of the old Fifth of November song. We no longer see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot. Every schoolboy makes verses of his own now; and even the plot of the story—or, rather, the story of the plot—