enough. So 'ere's good-day to yer.

_Mr. W._ (_alone_). I shall have to change my rooms--and I _was_ so
comfortable! Well, well,--another sacrifice to the Cause!

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

[Illustration]

There was a bronze group by POLLET among the specimens of sculpture in
the French _Salon_, some twenty years ago,--"It may be more or less
an hour or so," as the poet sings,--representing a female form being
carried upwards in the embrace of a rather evil-looking Angel. It
illustrated a poem by the Vicomte ALFRED DE VIGNY, which I remember
reading, in consequence of this very statue having come into my
possession (it was afterwards sold at Messrs. CHRISTIE, MANSON &
WOODS, under the style and title of "Lot 121, _Elsa_"), and it
occurs to me that it was on precisely the same theme as the other
ALFRED's--not the _Vicomte_ but _Mister_ ALFRED AUSTIN's--"_The Tower
of Babel_," which I have just read with much pleasure, and, with some
profit; the moral, as I take it, being favourable to the Temperance
cause, as a warning against all spirits, good, bad, or indifferent.
_Afrael_, the inhabitant of a distant star, falls in love with
_Noema_, the wife of the atheistical Babelite _Aran_, to whom she has
borne a son, aged in the poem, as far as I can make out, about eight
years, and a fine boy for that. Anyhow, it makes _Noema_ at least
twenty-five, supposing she married at sweet seventeen, and, indeed,
she alludes to herself in the poem as no longer in her first youth.