instance the poultry fatting establishments, at Heathfield, in Sussex, are said to be highly remunerative, the proprietors buying their stock of the higglers who scour the country for at least twenty miles round, and pur. chasing the chickens from those who hatch and rear. So large a business is the fatting of chickens at Heathfield, that it is not infrequent that as much as ten to twenty tons are relegated to the London markets in one week. And yet the experienced eye would not find a hundredweight of really fine first-class table fowls among the whole consignment. One has only to look at the poultry exposed for sale at our best poultry shops, and compare them with the splendid Dorking, Surrey, and Sussex fowls of thirty years ago, and then ask himself, How is this? Why is this? Or take for instance the wretched "apologies" for fowls that are placed on the tables at our clubs, hotels, and restaurants of to day, mere collections of tough skin and big bones. It is the public who are at fault, for they either do not know the good from the bad, or are so indifferent that they do not make a stand and demand better things both in flavour and quality. In the way of beef and mutton they seem to have some sort of opinion, but in poultry, as I have said, to them "a fowl is a fowl, or a duck a duck." I have acted as judge many years, and I am sorry to say that at some of the smaller poultry shows, I have found the birds shown of such inferior character, and so deteriorated, that I have refused to award the prizes offered. This may be said more especially of table fowls-in many instances they could not well be worse, and this too in localities that were once celebrated for poultry both good and of reasonable price. What is to be done? Have local shows in farming districts, where there is good dry land, plenty of shelter, woods,

and pastures, and so offer inducements for the best article. I would have the shows at Christmas, with three classes for table fowls. One for two cockerels, one for two pullets, and one for cockerel and pullet. They might be any breed, so long as they fulfilled the following conditions, which are those of Earl Spencer's show of "sixty years since," conditions which, if the modern judges had insisted on during the last twenty-five years, we should not now have our poultry markets deluged with the very low-class "poultry," which now passes muster with the consumer.

"The fowls should be plump, deep, long, and capacious in body, with short white legs, of small sized bones, of very white, juicy, fine-grain flesh, the fat and skin equally white, and of delicate flavour."

"All bred in the neighbourhood and shown alive. No person to have more than one prize; and no one to have a prize who is guilty of excessive feeding to increase the weight of his poultry on the morning of the show."

Below I give a drawing of a Dorking cockerel ready for cooking; this is from a bird of my own breeding, and which I take to be a type of excellence, and was sketched about five years since, at a time when I kept a large number of fowls. I have none at the present time, having distributed my entire stock, so that the breed is now lost.

Let the English farmer, the poultry keeper, and the cottager, breed fowls to these points of excellence, and then he will not only get a profitable return for his capital, his time, and attention, but he will also have the satisfaction of serving his country at the same time by providing home produce of the highest class, and by such good and lawful means drive off foreign competition and imports, and so keep "English gold in English pockets."

HARRISON WEIR.

THE Portsmouth Road has been described to me by one having authority as the Royal Road; and certainly kings and queens have passed up and down it, eaten and drunken in the royal rooms, still to be seen in some of the old inns; snored in the royal beds (also in places to be seen, but not slept in), and dreamed of ruts and bogs, and blasted heaths and impassable morasses, and all the sundry and other mild discomforts which our ancestors, whether kings or cobblers, had to put up with; or those among them at all events who travelled when the weather was rainy, and there were no real roads to travel upon. To me however the Portsmouth Roadso-called Royal-presents itself in a less august guise, so much so that if I were asked to give it a name whereby it might be especially distinguished, I should be inclined, I think, to call it the Road of Assassination. And it will be found to have claim to the title. Apart from Felton's successful operation on the Duke of Buckingham at Portsmouth in 1628, which marks the terminus with a red letter; and the barbarous doing away of the unknown sailor on September 4th, 1786, which has made the weird

tract of Hindhead haunted; the beautiful country between Rowlands Castle and Rake Hill yields an especially prime horror. For here was enacted at the latter end of the last century that protracted piece of fiendish brutality known as the "Murder by the Smugglers," Smugglers," an atrocity which was spun out over eleven miles of ground, which outNewgates anything of the kind to be found in the Newgate Calendar, and of which I shall have more to say when I get to the scene of its commission. Here meanwhile we have three good juicy murders in seventyone miles, seven furlongs,-the distance from the Stone's End, Borough, Surrey, to Portsmouth; and that is a fair average of crime for mileage, as I think most people will admit.

The old Portsmouth Road, as appears above, is measured from the Surrey side of the water; and it was from the Surrey side that old-fashioned visitors to Portsmouth started. Pepys, in 1668, having received orders to go down to Portsmouth in his official capacity, and having gone through the usual formalities of going to bed, waking betimes, &c., &c., discovered suddenly that

his wife (who no doubt suspected junketings on the part of the susceptible Samuel) had resolved at an hour's warning to go too. So Samuel first of all sent her mentally to the deuce, and then to Lambeth, where she embarked in a coach. Samuel, after having adjourned to St. James's and remarked "God be with you" to a Mr. Wren (who surely ought to have remarked it to Samuel, considering the state of the Portsmouth Road), went over the water to what he calls Fox Hall, where he ingeniously intercepted the coach containing his wife; and in due course lost his way for three or four miles about

Most of us connect Putney in our minds with the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, and attempts more or less successful to see it; but the place has a history other than an aquatic one-was indeed the birthplace of two very celebrated men, and the scene of a third one's death. At Putney was born Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith first of all, and afterwards, according to Mr. Froude, the most despotic minister who ever governed England. "Fierce laws," writes the same picturesque historian, "fiercely executedan unflinching resolution which neither danger could daunt, nor saintly virtue

Cobham, at the very moment when he was hoping to be seated at dinner at Guildford.

In 1668 the Portsmouth Machine left London as the South-Western Railway leaves it now, but not quite so quick, by Vauxhall, Battersea, Wandsworth, and so on to Putney Heath; and so the route is marked in Carey's Itinerary. In more modern times however the Portsmouth coaches felt it incumbent upon them to appear (like everything else that was fashionable) in Piccadilly, and, starting from the White Bear, made the best of their way to Putney, without troubling to cross the Thames till they got there.

move to mercy-a long list of solemn tragedies weigh upon his memory. Be this as it will, his aim was noble." He certainly made it hot for the monks, having no doubt learned the lesson in very early days at his father's forge, the site of which is still somewhat apochryphally pointed out, south of the Wandsworth Road.

At Putney also was born, "April 7th, O.S., in the year one thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven "-as he writes it in that delightful autobiography which will always be read, I fear, in spite of Mr. Ruskin's thunders-Edward Gibbon, whom we have

From a Drawing by HERBERT RAILTON.

met already down the Exeter Road at Blandford, carousing and masquerading as a militiaman. The house in which the future author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was born was bought by his grandfather, who used to exercise a decent hospitality in its spacious gardens on summer evenings. It lies between the Wandsworth and Wimbledon Roads, and since the days of the Gibbons has been successively inhabited by Mr. Wood, Sir John Shelley, and the Duke of Norfolk. These be good tenants, but I prefer the Gibbons myself. I like to

think of Edward in his young days at Putney, a fat, heavy, and hugeheaded boy, voted by his neighbours uncommonly slow, but with his precocious brain already working-not on consuls and legions, and emperors and bishops, and all the rest of the gorgeous paraphernalia with which he was one day to make his name immortal --but on that large appreciation of creature comforts, of the good things of this good earth which his dawning intelligence felt about his father's house, and which he has thus in his autobiography so whimsically described :

"My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of Nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune. From my birth I have enjoyed the rights of primogeni