upon, and the dogs that eat it, are facts-and yonder happy person, whose the horse was, till its knees were broken over the hurdles; who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death-eyes fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at the stones-this happy person shall have no stripesshall have only the horse's fate of annihilation; or, if other things are indeed reserved for him, Heaven's kindness or omnipotence is to be doubted therefore.

We cannot reason of these things. But this I know-and this may by all men be known-that no good or lovely thing exists in this world without its corresponding darkness; and that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left, and in this mountain gloom, which weighs so strongly upon the human heart that in all time hitherto, as we have seen, the hill defiles have been either avoided in terror or inhabited in penance, there is but the fulfilment of the universal law, that where the beauty and wisdom of the Divine working are most manifested, there also are manifested most clearly the terror of God's wrath, and inevitableness of His power. Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it bears witness to the error of human choice, even when the nature of good and evil is most definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise were fair; but our first parents hid themselves from God “in medio ligni Paradisi," in the midst of the trees of the garden. The hills were ordained for the help of man: but, instead of raising his eyes to the hills, from whence cometh his help, he does his idol sacrifice upon every high hill and under every green tree." The mountain of the Lord's house is established above the hills; but Nadab and Abihu shall see under His feet the body of heaven in his clearness, yet go down to kindle the censer against their own souls. And so to the end of time it will be; to the end, that cry will still be heard along the Alpine winds, "Hear, O ye mountains, the Lord's controversy!" Still their gulfs of thawless ice, and unretarded roar of tormented waves, and deathful falls of fruitless waste, and unredeemed decay, must be the image of the souls of those who have chosen the darkness, and whose cry shall be to the mountains to fall on them, and to the hills to cover them; and still, to the end of time, the clear waters of the unfailing springs, and the white pasture-lilies in their clothed multitude, and the abiding of the burning peaks in their nearness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, and the blessings, of those who have chosen light, and of whom it is written, "The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills righteousness."

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(From "Modern Painters." By permission of Messrs. Smith and Elder.]

MY HOLIDAY AT WRETCHEDVILLE.

GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

[Mr. Sala is universally recognised as the King of Journalists. He was originally an engraver, but, under the encouragement of the late Charles Dickens, adopted a journalistic career. He has worked in all the various departments of literature; and has been connected with the" Daily Telegraph" from its earliest days. As a special correspondent he has penetrated to nearly every quarter of the globe. He was the first editor of "Temple Bar," and the author of the characteristic "Hogarth Papers" in the early numbers of the "The Cornhill Magazine." His essays have been collected under the titles of "Breakfast in Bed," "After Breakfast," and "Under the Sun." In fiction he is represented by "The Two Prima Donnas," "Captain Dangerous," and "The Seven Sons of Mammon." Two exhaustive books, "Daylight and Gaslight," and "Twice Round the Clock," reflect his observations upon London life and labour. Other important works comprise, “Rome and Venice," "America Revisited," "Paris Herself Again,' ""Dutch Pictures," "A Journey due North," "A Journey due South," "From Waterloo to the Peninsula," "A Trip to Barbary," and, most recently, "The Land of the Golden Fleece," the result of his travels in Australia and New Zealand in 1886. Born 1826.]

How I came to be acquainted with Wretchedville was in this wise. I was in quest last autumn of a nice quiet place within a convenient distance of town where J could finish an epic poem-or stay, was it a five-act drama?-on which I had been long engaged, and where I could be secure from the annoyance of organ-grinders and of reverend gentlemen leaving little subscription-books one day and calling for them the next. I pined for a place where one could be very snug, and where one's friends didn't drop in "just to look you up, old fellow;" and where the post didn't come in too often. So I picked up a bag of needments, and availing myself of a mid-day train on the Great Domdaniel Railway, alighted haphazard at a station.

It turned out to be Sobbington. I saw at a glance that Sobbington was too fashionable, not to say stuck-up, for me. The Waltz from "Faust" was pianofortetically audible from at least half-a-dozen semi-detached windows; and this, combined with some painful variations on "Take, then, the Sabre," and a cursory glance into a stationer's shop and fancy warehouse where two stern mammas of low-church aspect were purchasing the back numbers of "The New Pugwell Square Pulpit," and three young ladies were telegraphically inquiring, behind their parents' backs, of the young person at the counter whether any letters had been left for them, sufficed to accelerate my departure from Sobbington. The next station on the road, I was told, was Doleful Hill, and then came Deadwood Junction. I thought I would take a little walk, and see what the open and what the covert yielded.

I left my bag with a moody porter at the Sobbington station, and trudged along the road which had been indicated to me as leading to Doleful Hill. It happened to be a very splendid afternoon. There were patches of golden and of purple gorse skirting those parts of the road in which the semi-detached villa eruption had

not yet broken out; the distant hills were delicately blue, and the mellow sun was distilling his rays into diamonds and rubies on the roof of a wondrous Palace of Glass, which does duty in these parts, as Vesuvius does duty in Naples, as a pervading presence. At Portici and at Torre del Greco, at Sobbington or at Doleful Hill, turn whithersoever you will, the mountains seem close upon you always.

It is true that I was a little dashed when I encountered an organgrinder lugubriously winding "Slap, bang, here we are again! off his brazen reel, and looking anything but a jolly dog. Organgrinding was contrary to the code I had laid down to govern my retirement. But the autumnal sun shone very genially on this child of the sunny South-who had possibly come from the bleakest part of Piedmont; his smile was of the sunniest likewise, and there was a roguish twinkle in his black eyes; and though his cheeks were brown, his teeth were of the whitest. So, as I gave him pence, I determined inwardly that I would tolerate at least one organ-grinder if he came near where I lived. It is true that I had not the remotest idea of where I was going to live.

I walked onwards and onwards, admiring the pied cows in the far-off pastures-cows the white specks on whose hides occurred so artistically that one might have thought that the scenic arrangement of the landscape had been intrusted to Mr. Birket Foster.

Anon I saw coming towards me a butcher-boy in his cart, drawn by a fast-trotting pony. It was a light high spring-cart, very natty and shiny, with the names and addresses of the proprietors, Messrs. Hock, Butchers to the Royal Family, West Deadwoodwhich of the princes or princesses resided at West Deadwood, I wonder?-emblazoned on the panels. The butcher-boy shone, too, with a suety sheen. The joints which formed his cargo were of the hue of which an English girl's cheeks should be-pure red and white. And the good sun shone upon all. The equipage came rattling along at a high trot, the butcher squaring his arms and whistling-I could see him whistle from afar off. I asked him, when he neared me, how far it might be to Doleful Hill. "Good two mile," quoth the butcher-boy, pulling up. you warmint!" This was to the trotting pony. continued, "you'll have to pass Wretchedville first. 'ole a little to the left, arf a mile on."

"Wretchedville," thought I; what an odd name! of a place is it?" I inquired.

"Steady, "But," he Lays in a

"What sort

"Well," replied the butcher-boy; "it's a lively place, a werry lively place. I should say it was lively enough to make a cricket burst himself for spite: it's so uncommon lively." And with this enigmatical deliverance the butcher-boy relapsed into a whistle of the utmost shrillness, and rattled away towards Sobbington.

I wish that it had not been quite so golden an afternoon. A little dulness, a few clouds in the sky, might have acted as a caveat against Wretchedville. But I plodded on and on, finding all things looking beautiful in that autumn glow. I came positively on a

gipsy encampment; blanket tent; donkey tethered to a cartwheel; brown man in a wide-awake hammering at a tin pot; brown woman with a yellow kerchief, sitting cross-legged, mending brown man's pantaloons; brown little brats of Egypt swarming across the road and holding out their burnt-sienna hands for largesse, and the regular gipsy's kettle swinging from the crossed sticks over a fire of stolen furze. Farmer Somebody's poultry simmering in the pot, no doubt. Family linen-somebody else's linen yesterday— drying on an adjacent bush. Who says that the picturesque is dead? The days of Sir Roger de Coverley had come again. So I went on and on admiring, and down the declivitous road into Wretchedville and to destruction.

Were there any apartments "to let "? Of course there were. The very first house I came to was as regards the parlour-window nearly blocked up by a placard treating of "Apartments Furnished." Am I right in describing it as the parlour-window? I scarcely know; for the front door, with which it was on a level, was approached by such a very steep flight of steps that when you stood on the topmost grade it seemed as though, with a very slight effort, you could have peeped in at the bedroom window, or touched one of the chimney-pots; while as concerns the basement, the front kitchen-I beg pardon, the breakfast parlour-appeared to be a good way above the level of the street.

The space in the first-floor window not occupied by the placard was filled by a monstrous group of wax fruit, the lemons as big as pumpkins and the leaves of an unnaturally vivid green. The window below-it was a single-windowed front-served merely as a frame for the half-length portrait of a lady in a cap, ringlets, and a colossal cameo brooch. The eyes of this portrait were fixed upon me; and before almost I had lifted a very small light knocker, decorated, so far as I could make out, with the cast-iron effigy of a desponding ape, and had struck this against a door which, to judge from the amount of percussion produced, was composed of bristolboard highly varnished, the portal itself flew open and the portrait of the basement appeared in the flesh. Indeed, it was the same portrait. Downstairs it had been Mrs. Primpris looking out into the Wretchedville Road for lodgers. Upstairs it was Mrs. Primpris letting her lodgings and glorying in the act.

She didn't ask for any references. She didn't hasten to inform me that there were no children or any other lodgers. She didn't look doubtful when I told her that the whole of my luggage consisted of a black bag which I had left at the Sobbington station. She seemed rather pleased than otherwise at the idea of the bag, and said that her Alfred should step round for it. She didn't object to smoking; and she at once invested me with the Order of the Latch-key-a latch-key at Wretchedville, ha! ha! She further held me with her glittering eye, and I listened like a twoyears child while she let me the lodgings for a fortnight certain. Perhaps it was less her eye that dazed me than her cameo, on which there was, in high relief and on a ground the hue of a pig's

F

liver, the effigy of a young woman with a straight nose and a round chin and a quantity of snakes in her hair. I don't think that cameo came from Rome. I think it came from Tottenham Court Road.

She had converted me into a single gentleman lodger of quiet and retired habits-or was I a widower of independent means seeking a home in a cheerful family?-so suddenly that I beheld all things as in a dream. Thinking, perchance, that the first stone of that monumental edifice, the bill, could not be laid too quickly, she immediately provided me with tea. There was a little cottageloaf, so hard, round, shiny, and compact, that I experienced a wellnigh uncontrollable desire to fling it up to the ceiling to ascertain whether it would chip off any portion of a preposterous rosette in stucco in the centre, representing a sunflower, surrounded by cabbage-leaves. This terrible ornament was, by the way, one of the chief sources of my misery at Wretchedville. I was continually apprehensive that it would tumble down bodily on the table. In addition to the cottage-loaf there was a pretentious teapot, which, had it been of sterling silver, would have been worth fifty guineas, but which, in its ghastly gleaming, said plainly "Sheffield" and "imposture." There was a piece of butter in a "shape" like a diminutive haystack, and with a cow sprawling on the top in unctuous plasticity. It was a pallid kind of butter, from which with difficulty you shaved off adipocerous scales, which would not be persuaded to adhere to the bread, but flew off at tangents and went rolling about an intolerably large tea-tray, on whose papiermâché surface was depicted the death of Captain Hedley Vicars. The Crimean sky was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the gallant captain's face was highly enriched with blue-and-crimson foil-paper.

As for the tea, I don't think I ever tasted such a peculiar mixture. Did you ever sip warm catsup sweetened with borax? That might have been something like it. And what was that sediment, strongly resembling the sand at Great Yarmouth, at the bottom of the cup? I sat down to my meal, however, and made as much play with the cottage-loaf as I could. Had the loaf been varnished? It smelt and looked as though it had undergone that process. Everything in the house smelt of varnish. I was uncomfortably conscious, too, during my repast-one side of the room being all window-that I was performing the part of a 'Portrait of the Gentleman in the first floor," and that as such I was sitting" to Mrs. Lucknow at Number Twelve opposite-I know her name was Lucknow, for a brass plate on the door said s—whose own half-length effigy was visible in her breakfastparlour window, glowering at me reproachfully because I had not Taken her first floor, in the window of which was, not a group of wax fruit, but a sham alabaster vase full of artificial flowers. Every window in Wretchedville exhibited one or other of these ornaments, and it was from their contemplation that I began to understand how it was that the " 'fancy goods" trade in the

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