older in the two long, weary, solemn days that Lottie had been dead. She could look at the death-sleep, and the little hands crossed on the bosom, and the closed lids over those dark, expressive eyes, and place fresh roses, and geraniums, and heliotrope, about the calm, life-like corpse, without weeping now; but there was a deep, fixed, almost stern expression of grief on her pale, classic face, which seemed to ask no sympathy, and was feeding on the springs of her own life. She could not pray yet. Often had she fallen on her knees since the little one's last faint "Mother!" but no utterance followed, for her heart only asked in agony, "Why, oh, why had He taken away her Lottie?" And thoughts high and deep passed through her mind, of time and space and Heaven and immortality, until imagination had wandered and lost itself in the dim confines which separate thought from the impenetrable mysteries which surround us, until all consciousness of time and space in her present life were lost; and then the question would recur, did He take her away, or was she sent, uncalled from the earth, by unholy errors, by poisoning drugs; and she shrank from the question shuddering.

mother which was her corner. Poor child! she little thought how soon she would take possession; indeed, she always said it with as happy a smile as if she had been immortal, and would never need an earthly resting-place. Mrs. May remained in the carriage, and when they took the coffin towards the grave, there was again that fixed and glassy look, those tearless eyes. How she longed to keep even the corpse for ever near her!

They lowered the little coffin into the grave, and, as the earth fell on the lid, said, "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes!" and a little mound marked the place where, down, down in the earth, the fair-haired girl awaited the final reckoning.

They came to Mrs. May as they passed out, but she waved them away, and one after another left, until she was quite alone. Then she descended from the carriage, and went to the grave; and the servant brought a basket of flowers, and wept as he retired, for they all loved Lottie; and Mrs. May bent over the grave, and scattered flowers about it, she felt so wholly desolate, now that they had taken away the last link, the body of her poor child. The sun went down, and the night came on, Carriage after carriage drove up to the door, as she knelt there, and tree and leaf and inthe rooms were filled with friends and acquaint- sect, all were hushed as still as the grave beances of the mourner and the mourned, and a neath her; and she looked up to the heavens, solemn-looking man opened the Bible, and and saw the stars, like tapers on the pall of read, "Suffer little children to come unto me, darkness which shrouded her, and she gazed and forbid them not, for of such is the king- and gazed, and her heart longed for a reveladom of Heaven!" Then he said many beau- tion of her child's fate and her own in that tiful things about the child, which he had mysterious sphere, and her heart was softened known from its birth; but Mrs. May could not as she gazed. Then she bent over the grave listen, and, sobbing out her anguish, left the again, and took a little flower and put it in room for why had He taken away her Lot- her bosom, and thought of her child and its tie? After the ceremony was over, she re- last faint "Mother!" and the tears came to turned, and stood by the coffin, and looked at her eyes, her bursting heart found vent, and her child for the last time. She thought of all she wept, oh, how long and passionately, as if her grace and repose, even amongst her little existence itself were welling from her eyelids! play-mates, and all her arch and winning ways, Then she looked up again, and the sky seemed and hot tears fell on the cold form. Then to have lost its darkness; and the stars dilated, they closed the coffin, and placed it in the car- and seemed to fill the heavens with glory; riage with Mrs. May alone; she would have and her spirit became more rapt and exalted, it so. They drove slowly down Broadway, as if spiritual influences were about her with and Mrs. May was startled by the noise of which she could commune; and her lips were carts and omnibuses. It seemed strange that opened at last. She prayed long and earnestly they drove on so furiously while Lottie was to the Father who had taken her idol. She carried by; and crowds of people lined the felt now too truly that it had been an idol, and streets, all gay and unheeding. Mrs. May she blessed His holy name, and knew why he drew down the curtains, and hid them from her had taken her Lottie. Her mind became more sight. They passed over the South Ferry, and exalted; a transcendent exaltation took posso on to Greenwood; and between the beau- session of her soul, and it seemed to expand tiful sculptures and white monuments (stand-super-sensually, until it lost sight of earth and ing over buried hopes, like the rainbow over its earthly tenement, and rose to the feeling, the abyss of the cataract, or the fair face over the consciousness, of the INFINITE. She seemed a crushed heart), until they came to Lottie's to have a dual existence, a being separate from grave. It was a sweet spot, on the southern her being: and looked down on herself, as she side of a gentle rise that overlooked the Bay knelt at the grave, with an infinite pity. and Narrows, and caught the first smile of (Whether under the direct influence of the Day, as he rose from the horizon and bathed "inspiration of heaven," or the native powers himself in light; and the last rays of the sun of her soul drawn from their slumbers by surrested on its bosom, while the twilight linger-rounding circumstances, who shall tell?) And ed there when darkness had hidden all below. her soul expanded in its exaltation, until she Lottie had often played on it, and told her felt herself a link between the Infinite of Ho

marshals, and his much redoubted invasion
were here, there, and everywhere.
We had a slight invasion panic in the year

liness and the great Soul of Humanity; and while a feeling of infinite love and pity for mankind took possession of her soul, their errors and weaknesses shrank into the back-'40 (when Commodore Napier beat the ground: even her own sorrows became vague, undefined, distant, almost little.

This consciousness, this exaltation, vouchsafed to the best of us so rarely, from the low or grovelling for ever barred, may come sometimes perhaps to mothers at the birth of their first-born, oftener at its death. A revelation to great minds at the moment of their best conceptions; to others, at the moment of death, or when death suddenly becomes imminent and near, and fear does not paralyse the soul. Sometimes it comes with the fervid devotion of the worshipper, filled with a holy and living faith; seldom, if ever, in mere religious ecstacy; this, the flash of the torch, soon out and lost; that, like the June sunshine, lighting all things, and drawing them from the earth to warmth and life. But it comes to none without leaving him better, wiser, stronger to endure and bear, and with deeper sympathies for the sufferings and errors of his kind.

Egyptians with their famous instrument of torture a stick). Our "Boney" then was an astute old gentleman, with a pear-shaped head, who, assuming the patronymic of Smith, abdicated sovereignty in a hack-cab. He was to invade us in the twinkling of a bed-post-he, Monsieur Thiers, Marshal Bugeaud, and the Chasseurs d'Afrique; all about some Eastern question, the merits of which, if anybody understood, or understands, I am sure I don't. The year '43 came, and that terrible pamphlet by the good-natured Prince Admiral, who so kindly stood godfather to our Joinville cravats. He was to blow us to pieces with steam-frigates; to bombard Brighton; to demolish Dover; to lay Lowestoff low; to turn Great Grimsby into a Golgotha, and Harwich into a howling desert. '45 came; Pritchard, Tahiti, Queen Pomare, and the grim Guizot. War! war! war! cried the bogey-fearers. Lamoricière, Pélissier, Changarnier were to land the day Mrs. May knelt there, wrapped in her new after to-morrow. '48 came, and a few thouexistence, hour after hour, far into the night, sand National Guards, who, despite the fears until her servants were alarmed, and they came of the alarmists, were provided with railway and accosted her; but she answered them return tickets in lieu of mortars and howitcalmly, and left the grave with a blessed peace zers. '51 came, and another foreign inin her heart; and they drove over the lonely vasion, the results of which, it appears road, and through the quiet and deserted to us, we have already described in this streets, towards her desolate home, a sad, but journal. a wiser and better being; for her soul had known the divine depth, her heart had become the sanctuary of sorrow. God had taken away her loved ones for a time, but he had given his own love in their place, and she wept no more.

[Knickerbocker Mag.

THE GREAT INVASION.

THE English Nation have always been distinguished by a strong predilection for a "bogey"- -a dreadful bugbear, hated, feared, talked about by everybody. For a bogey of bogeys-a bugbear about whom there can be no mistake, a thorough, right-down, sanguinary, man-eating, woman-murdering, childroasting, raw-head-and-cross-bones bogey, give me Bonaparte.

In the time of the original "Boney" the cry was very strong. The French were continually landing (in imagination) somewhere or other. Not a smuggler attempted a peaceable run of brandy on a moonlight night, but the hated Corsican-jack-boots, cocked hat and all-was presumed to be in full march on the Metropolis; not a little boy sent up his harmless rocket, or discharged his innocuous squib, but fearful reports were circulated of a French-kindled conflagration, or at best of the simultaneous illumining of the beacon fires. Boney, his

And now the trumpet-cry sounds louder than ever. Now that the shores of England and France are united by the electric wire, by the iron hand-shaking of railroads, by a hundred thousand bonds of friendship and interest besides, we are to have a real invasion -a dreadful invasion-an invasion in earnest. It is all up with London, England, Great Britain, and the Colonies! Our soldiers can't fight, and our ships can't sail; our guns won't fire, nor will our bayonets pierce. Tilbury Fort is of no use, and the Guards must march out of London at one end as the French. enter it by the other. We haven't got a decent fortification, or a serviceable gun, or an efficient soldier. As for "Veritas," "Civilian," "Q in the corner," the "Constant Readers," and the "Occasional Correspondents," they give up all hope. It is all over with us. Let us put sackcloth and ashes on our heads.

But what is the use, my friends, of crying "Wolf!" when the foe has already entered our sheepfolds-when he has already carried away the most succulent of our young lambs from their bleating mothers, and thirsts now, with his ravening jaws all dripping with gore, for our lives?

Shall we be invaded?

We are invaded; root and branch, body and bones, horse and foot, neck and heel, outfang and infang. The invasion has been going on for years, and we recked nothing of it. The insidious enemy, burrowing like a mole under

ground, has sapped our foundations; has un- driving, into a constantly diminishing circle, dermined our institutions. An unscrupulous all sorts of old abuses, old nuisances, old army of mercenaries (principally Irish) have vested interests, old "time-honoured insticarried out his iniquitous behests. We are tutions," towards the shrivelled old kernel, compassed round about, hemmed in, sur- which, though she knows (excuse the gender) rounded by his fortalices-not masked bat- she might be rid of them by the aërial teries or stockaded forts-but defiant, brazen-locomotive of progress, seeks rather (hapfaced strongholds. Great, and getting greater pily impotently) to cause them to permeate day by day, is the invasion of London. We through sewers into healthier streams, poisonare beleaguered by Brigadier Bricks and ing them meanwhile; or she would strenuField-Marshal Mortar. Their weapons of ously seek (always impotently) to cast them, offence have been scaffold-poles and bricklayers' hods; their munitions of defence, hoarding and wheelbarrows. This is what I call the "real invasion."

as so much guano, on to the invader's fields. around her, where they would produce a nice rich crop of gingerbread coaches, men in brass, prejudice, dirt, water-bailiffs, overTake up this map of the Metropolis, driven bullocks, choked sewers, reeking published last year, and glance at that little slaughter-houses, and coal and corn commitkernel, coloured scarlet, called the City, and tees. What will the nutshell do? Will its then at the prodigious extent of Nutshell invasion, hugging, in boa-constrictor fashion, surrounding it, all loudly demanding, (and the old, musty, shrivelled, yet wealthy kernel, meriting) to be included in the general title hug it into better shape? or will it crush it "London." Yet this little scarlet kernel, and cause it to collapse entirely; forcing it, with some scattered streets about Westmo- by some hidden phoenix process of its own, nasterian marshes, was the whole of London to reproduction in another guise to entire once. It was big enough to give laws to all rejuvenescence? England, and to great part of France, for hundreds of years. It was big enough to hold a Lombard Street; which, even then, stood in no unfavourable degree of comparison with a China orange. It was big enough to have Lord Mayors who bearded Kings; to be a constant source of anxiety and uneasiness to the Sovereign; to be the philosopher's stone of Jack Cade's ambition; to be, as it always has been, a monarch among cities. But the nutshell? How small the kernel looks, with his rubicund boundary! Throw in Westminster and Southwark, as the three appear in Hollar's print: how diminutive they are with the big nutshell around! Take a map of London, hydrographed even within the memory of man-within thirty years let us say-the nutshell has still the best of it, and the kernel shrinks wofully, even amidst its layers upon layers of cuticle.

It is natural for large cities to grow larger. Pine-apples grow; so do little boys, and lawyers' bills of costs-why not capitals? The little island of St. Louis once held all there was of Paris. Vienna has outgrown its glacis; Madrid, Naples, Venice, have all grown; and Constantinople-no; for Constantinople will be to me always a mystery, even as Smyrna is. They are always being burnt down, yet never seem to get smaller or larger. But London has not grown in any natural, reasonable, understandable way. It hasn't grown bigger consistently. It hasn't increased by degrees, like the pine-apple or the little boy. The lawyer's bill may be a little more like it; for, like that dreadful document, it has swollen with frightful, alarming, supernatural rapidity. It has taken you unawares; it has dropped upon you without warning; it has started up without notice; it has grown with stealthy rapidity, from a mouse into a mastodon.

The prodigious enlargement of London seems more to me in the act of the country closing round the town, than of the town ad- Thirty years ago!-Boney the first had vancing on the country-more as a giant just finished eating his heart on a rock. hand gradually closes up its Titanic fingers Thistlewood and others had been decapion a shrivelled dwarf, than as the dwarf tated. A grave judicial discussion had not growing into the giant, and throwing up earth-long before been closed as to whether a murheaps in its struggle for emancipation from derer and ravisher had a right to the the parent monster. The fat has grown "appeal by battle." The Old Bailey Monday round the heart, and the heart has grown morning performances yet took place before torpid and sluggish in the midst. Do you crowded and unfashionable audiences. Samuel think it is that scarlet kernel-once the whole Hayward had just been hanged for burglary, City of London-that has pushed out man- and Fauntleroy was yet to suffer for forgery; dibles, crab-like feelers, on every side, and, women were yet whipped for larceny; and cancer-like, has spread over the green fields George, the gentleman of gentlemen, was and shady lanes? Do you think the kernel king. There were no railroads, and no is the spider, and Westminster and South-police, save the red-coated Bow Street runwark the web? It may be so; but I rather ners and the purblind old watchmen. There incline to the theory that the advancement were no coffee-shops, no reading-rooms; and is towards, and not from, the kernel. That the coffee-houses were taverns resorted to is why I call it an invasion: and the in- (in the paucity of clubs) by the nobility and vasion seems to me gradually but surely gentry. It was considered aristocratic to

beat the watch; it was esteemed "Corin- | Walworth, Camberwell, Brixton, in the year thian" to get drunk in the purlieus of Drury 1822? What sort of road was the Old Lane; it was very "tip-top" to patronise a Kent Road in those days? And were not prize-fighter. We have been invaded by Deptford and Greenwich separated from manners and customs somewhat different London by miles of green fields? Bersince the gentleman of gentlemen was king.

mondsey and the Borough were always, within my recollection, integral London; but Concerning the brick-and-mortar invasion: how about Rotherhithe? How about Blue There was no Regent's Park, no Victoria Anchor Road, Spa Road, the neighbourhood Park, no Belgravia, and no Tyburnia. Ty- of the Commercial Docks, Millpond Fields, burn Gate, indeed, yet stood where Tyburn the Salpetre Works, the Halfpenny Hatch, Gallows not so many years before had stood the

has simply outgrown herself? It is an

and beneath which mouldered the bones of I am out of breath! Here is the real Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. Paddington invasion! Don't tell me that the old was, but it was countryfied; and the Edge- London, the grim old kernel, far away ware Road was simply a rural road leading over the water yonder, has done all this to Edgeware, as formerly Oxford Street was but the high-road to Oxford. Portland, invasion, I tell you-stalwart provincials Somers, Camden, and Kentish Towns were marching upon a devoted metropolis. Brighton, no more integral portions of London, as they I know, will be bursting into the station at now are, than is Footscray in Kent, or Pat- London Bridge very shortly; Greenwich is cham in Sussex. The New Road was dan- London already; so is Brentford; so are gerous to walk in at night, and the open Clapham, Wandsworth, and Brixton: so are fields about St. Pancras Church (catch any Kilburn, Cricklewood, and Crouch End. I open fields about there now) a favourite ren- am looking out for the arrival of Liverpool dezvous for body-snatchers and burkers to daily; and I should not be in the least surhide their "shots" (so the bodies they had prised to meet, at no very distant period, rifled from graves, were called). Clerkenwell, Manchester, all clad in cotton, smoking an it is true, was thickly populated; but Pen- enormous chimney, arm-in-arm with Salford, tonville, about where the Model Prison is marching gravely along the Great North now (and there was no Model Prison then), Road, to make a juncture with London at was quite rural. Islington, as far as concerns Highgate. the High Street and the neighbourhood of the "Angel," was suburbanly Londonified, but Holloway was still a journey. As to Highgate and Hornsey, they were nowhere-terra incognita, almost, or as best at difficult of access as Windsor or Reading. Touching the irregular cube, bounded at the base by the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, on the east and west by Hackney and by the Dalston and Kingsland Roads, and on the north by the London and North-Western branch line (from Camden Town to Blackwall)-which irregular cube comprises within its limits, Hackney, Globe Town, Bethnal Green, Dalston, Kingsland, and the crowded districts known as the Tower Hamlets-I have no hesitation in saying, that swarming with houses and inhabitants as it is now, it was in 1822 very little better than a waste. Goodman's Fields and the entourage of the London Docks had even then their tens of thousands; but where the Commercial Road stretches now, through Stepney, Bow, and down towards Limehouse, it stretches through strongholds of the real invaders of London -the brick-and-mortar warriors, who are compassing the city round about.

To have a complete and comprehensive view of the progress of the invaders and the plight of the invaded; to form anything like a just view of the astonishing growth of London since the year '22; to see it as it is, monstrous, magnificent, the largest city in the world, and its capital, you should, properly, be a bird: say an eagle, or at least the gentle lark. Soaring on high, you should pause a moment on the wing, and drink in at a glance the wonders that lie beneath you. You can't be a bird, you say. Professors of metempsychosis are not so plentiful as those of mesmerism, clairvoyance, or the discernment of character from handwriting. Besides, you don't believe in the transmigration of souls. Very well! You believe in balloons! Here is one, just ready to ascend from the Royal Gardens, no matter where. The "aërostat " is inflated; the last bottle of champagne imbibed; the amateur aëronauts try to look easy and unembarrassed, and fail dismally in the attempt; the signal gun is fired; the aëronaut vociferates "Let go!" A cheer! Two cheers! Some ridiculously inappropriate music is played by a brass band. More cheers! fainter and fainter, as the earth, in In '22, where was Chelsea? Rurally aqua- a most uncalled for and inconsistent manner, tic. Chiswick, Hammersmith, Kew? All appears to sink from beneath you. You do plainly and distinguishably separated from rise; for anon is silence, stillness, in the calm London; but where are they now? Millbank air, through which the occasional remarks of was far off; Pimlico was in the country; no your companions ring sharp and clear like man had yet heard of Belgrave Square. rifle cracks. There; never mind the neck of Crossing Vauxhall Bridge, what were the balloon; that is the aëronaut's business, Newington, Kennington, Vauxhall, Lambeth, not yours. Take a firm grip of the side of

the car, and look down. Look down with wonder, admiration, gratitude.

The City is all burnished gold; for the setting sun of a September day has put it into a warm bath-a "bath of beauty," as pantomime poets say. The river is all silver; save what are spangles and diamonds, It winds, and twists, and writhes, likes a beautiful serpent, as it is magnificently beautiful without, and foully poisonous (bless the scarlet kernel!) within. Those black lines crossing the river are the bridges. That fleeting, evanescent darkness, tarnishing the gold on the houses and the silver on the river, is the shadow of a cloud. That transparent blue haze hanging quite over the City, like a gauze drapery to the golden houses, cut exactly to the shape of the City, thinner, and almost ragged where parks, or squares, or open places are, is the smoke the smoke of London, hanging over it, shrouding it, blackening its edifices, poisoning its inhabitants.

outline of every street, square, and alley of the world City; stretching out less thickly towards where the brick invasion had relaxed its vigour, dotting long lines of suburban roads, where the metropolitan constabulary drops off, and the horse patrol begin to be visible, getting small by degrees and beautifully less till they end in the blue blackness of the far-off country, twenty or thirty miles away on either side of you.

In no part of London is the invasion of bricks and mortar so perceptible as on the line of railways which, commencing at Camden Town (they are about to extend it to Kilburn, I think), runs through Islington, Hackney, Bow, Stratford, Old Ford, Stepney, and Limehouse to Blackwall. It extends nearly half round the Middlesex side of London. It is an eccentric railway, for I have measured the distance (on the map) from Camden Town to Blackwall, and my friend the railway goes miles out of its road to take you to the lastKeep looking down and look towards where named locality; though, curiously enough, it my finger points. That thing, like a golden rattles you thither in quicker time than the pine-apple much foreshortened (the sun is omnibus would do. I have seen irascible old strong upon it,) is St. Paul's. Those crowds gentlemen clench their umbrellas, muttering of small black ants toiling through that fiercely that they didn't understand being narrow lane, are men, women, and children, taken to Hackney on their way to Fenchurch in carriages, on horses, on foot; driving, Street; and middle-aged females reduced to riding, or walking, eastward or westward. a piteous state of mental imbecility by The Monument is a Christmas Candle- Islington being near Limehouse; afterwards stick; the Tower is a Doll's House. There is not a man in London as large as Shem, Ham, or Japhet, in the toy Noah's Ark. Where is the roar of London, and the rattle of wheels; the speechifying, the bargain-driving, the laughing and the weeping? Faster and faster we rise into space. And the silence is more intense, and the City below us is no bigger than a man's hand.

piteously demanding which was Bow (which they were given to understand was in Cheapside), and inextricably confounding Stratford with the birth-place of the Swan of Avon. The last time I patronised this cheerful line, there was no glass to the window of the carriage in which I sat. Complaining mildly to four separate porters at four separate stations, and pleading rheumatism, I received conNow if you had ascended with MM. Gar- secutive answers of "Dear me!" "Oh, ah! nerin, Blanchard, or Pilatre de Rosier; had "So it is!" and "Can't help it;" which you taken a flight with old Mr. Sadler, the (taking them to be somewhat evasive and unaëronaut in 1822, when George the Gentle- satisfactory in their construction) prompted man was King, you would be sore astonished me to give vent to vague threats of menow, gazing at London, under the auspices morialising the public journals. I should of a "gallant and intrepid aëronaut" in 1852. like to become better acquainted with that Where all was green before, you would find philosopher (he must have been a philosopher) long lines of compact masses of houses. The who, seeing me irate, administered cold crowds of black ants would have increased comfort to me by telling me that the last an hundred-fold; the blue, gauzy, ragged time he travelled by the line in question, his smoke blanket would have stretched mar- carriage had no door. "And it was night, vellously; you would have appreciated and sir! acknowledged the effects of the Bricklayers' Invasion.

As this iron and not immaculate railroad (it has its good points, notwithstanding) On ascending at night (which, by-the-bye, pursues its circuitous route, you may-if you cautious old Mr. Sadler never did), you would don't mind looking out of the window, and be struck with pleasurable astonishment at running all the adverse chances of easterly the aspect of London by night, as compared winds, and ashes from the engine-see many with London as it was thirty. years ago. In curious and edifying things. Anon, the train the place of a Cimmerian darkness through rushes through mangy, brown-turfed fields, which vainly endeavored to pierce a few where the invasion has just begun; where blinking, sputtering, feeble-minded lamps-rubbish may be shot; where poles, with playou would have an elaborate and exquisitely cards affixed to them, denote the various beautiful network of gas spangles- a delicate" lots" which are "To be Sold or Let, on tracery of glow-worm lights, of brilliant pin- Building Leases." Melancholy-looking cows, holes, sparkling dots, clearly defining the misanthropic donkeys, pigs convinced of the