up; and with the Sunday comes another phase of gratuitous recreation, not altogether pleasant to contemplate. People without money are not, as we all know, overmuch given to attending church and chapel. Unfortunately they find no recreation in that quarter, and they seek it elsewhere. If the weather be fine, the dark and squalid slums of the City vomit forth myriads of them into the fields and suburbs. For these there is a class of missionaries deputed to meet them in their favourite haunts, and collect them, if possible, within the sound of Wisdom's voice and the words of instruction; but the missionaries are met on this neutral ground by propagandists of another kind-by Netheists, Theists, Setheists, and Pantheists-by Reasoners and Secularists-by Southcotites and Mormonites; and from this it has followed, that some of the suburban parks and commons have become the scene of a species of amusement not always edifying, arising out of the discussions and disputes consequent upon the clashing of theological elements of so opposite a description. In winter, the ice, and not the fields and commons, is the resort of this numerous class; and there, in company with their superiors in the social scale, you shall find from thirty to three hundred thousand in the course of the day, enjoying a gratification all the more welcome that it is flavoured with the probability of peril.

There are shadows in the motley picture of gratuitous amusements in London, upon which we are not disposed to dwell. We have said nothing of the degraded and morbid taste which urges masses of the populace to be present at miserable, cruel, and harrowing spectacles-which drives crowds to the criminal courts, when wife-beaters and murderers are on their trial-which sets them yelling, like mongrel curs, on the trail of an unpopular candidate for public favourwhich sends multitudes tramping over the swamps of Surrey, after the steam-boat laden with a couple of prize-fighters and their backers, bound for the borders of Kent, which they

must reach ere they can try conclusions-which drives a tenfold greater multitude to all the avenues leading to the scaffold, long before the hour of an execution draws near, and goads them, in the presence of a murderous and disgusting ceremony, to the display of loathsome wit and brutal jocularity. We must leave these things to time and a better day; we would ignore them if possible, and shut them from the light.

We can pretend to have afforded the reader no more than a glance at the many-sided subject we have taken up. We have passed over unnoticed many things which we are perfectly aware are equally entitled to remark with those we have selected; but we are not the wizard described above, and cannot cram into the limits of an article more than it will hold. We have shown, in some rude sort, how penniless London may be amused by the spectacle of London itself. That it is so amused, is a fact beyond question. The close association of large masses of mankind as certainly gives rise to the elements of mirth and entertainment as it does to those of misery and necessity; that the former are sometimes born of the latter, a philosopher might tell us, is no valid bar to their acceptance; and, in truth, it never is a bar to those who are in search of gratuitous enjoyment; they are the last persons upon earth to look the gift-horse in the mouth, and maunder over his teeth. We may do well to learn a lesson even from Penniless Jack, though it is possible we may not sympathise in the vagabond recreations he snatches for nothing. But, sings the poet already quoted

They dance not for me,

Yet mine is their glee;"

and in the same spirit, though we may decline Jack's pleasures, we may make a pleasure out of Jack, and be all the wiser and better for the manufacture.

VIEWS OF LIFE FROM A FIXED STAND-POINT.

I AM not a philosopher. I know nothing of logic and metaphysics, and abstract sciences and speculations; I wasn't brought up to it, or else I might, perhaps. But I see a good deal of human life and human nature, and other nature too, without being a philosopher; and there is many a story I could tell that is well worth the telling, if I knew how to tell a story to purpose. I am an Omnibus Conductor, and the stand-point—I can't be very far wrong in calling it that, for I stand on it sixteen hours a day, and no sitting allowed— the stand-point from which I contemplate men and things is the "monkey-board," as it is called in the profession, at the tail of my 'bus. consider that that's not by any means a disadvantageous position from which to regard my fellowcreatures if not a very elevated one, it is sufficiently so to exalt me above the general level, and enables me to look over the heads as well as into the faces of all that section of mankind that comes in my way. I travel through six miles of city and suburbs, and I do it, there and back again, six times a day. If there is a great sameness in leading this sort of life-doing the same journey, one way and the other, four thousand times and more a year-there is also a great variety, taking into account the times and seasons, and changes in the aspect of the weather. Seven years' experience in the position I occupy, have enabled me to make some observations upon that portion of man and womankind that rides in omnibuses; and a very respectable class they are, upon the whole, though I say it that get my living by them. But it is a class

that comprises a good many classes-an omnibus is everybody's coach-and-pair, and everybody gets into it that's tired of walking, or afraid of the wet, and has threepence or sixpence to spare; but notwithstanding that it belongs to everybody, it is curious to note how regularly it is monopolised by certain people at certain hours of the day, days of the week, and weeks and months of the year. Thus, the first journey to town of a morning, all the year through, winter and summer, wet or dry, is the quickest journey of the whole day, because the 'bus carries a cargo of office-clerks, the old gentlemen inside pushing about their silver snuff-boxes and exchanging the news, and the young ones outside smoking cigars. The second journey is pretty much the same, with a mixture of masters and merchants, bankers, and so on, who are as regular as time itself; so that I see the same faces inside, and mostly sitting in the same places, about three hundred times in the course of the year, at these morningtrips.

Now, I dare say, any one of the gentlemen that gets out every morning at ten o'clock, or thereabouts, at the Bank, or within a quarter of a mile of it, would be taken aback a little if he knew how much I know of him-though it would do him no harm, for the matter of that. Only just look at one gentleman-for instance, Mr. Philpotts—and mark what I know about him, though neither he nor anybody else ever told me a word of it intentionally. Mr. Philpotts was born at Truro, in Cornwall; his father saved money in the pilchardfishery, and articled his son to a drysalter in Thames Street, with whom he did business forty years ago. Young Philpotts turned ship-broker when he attained his majority. The old man died, and left him his money, and he lost every penny of it in unwise speculations before he was thirty; and had to begin the world again, with a wife and two daughters -and nothing else. His wife's father, who was a wealthy cotton-spinner, got him a Manchester agency, and he had to

put the screw on pretty tight to make both ends meet: he worked the screw so long that he couldn't leave off working it when there was no longer any occasion for it; and he works it now as tight as ever-living in a two-storied cottage in a second-rate street, when he might live in a mansion, and riding in a 'bus when he might keep his own carriage. His two daughters are in danger of growing old maids, because he won't come down with a portion as long as he lives; and he has kept them in seclusion until their juvenile charms are vanishing. Philpotts has more money than he knows what to do with, and is deep in every well-paying speculation of the day; he is verging on sixty, and is rather fond of good living when it costs him nothing or not much-and is as likely to live ten or fifteen years longer as not. All this I learned concerning Mr. Philpotts from the conversation of his companions, chiefly during his own absence. Now, I never wanted to learn a word of it; and it doesn't concern me a morsel, though I do feel sorry for the young ladies that ought to have been married years ago. I could tell a tale almost equally particular with regard to nearly every one of the twelve gentlemen whom I pick up and drop down every morning, though they little think of it; and I have a notion there is not a single one of them who knows as much of the private history of either of the others as I do of the whole twelve.

After the purposes of business are served in the morning, come those of pleasure. I have a suspicion that more people ride for play than for work, judging from the fact, that during summer and fine weather my family is always larger than it is in the wet and wintry days. Towards mid-day, the ladies begin to honour me with their company; if the sun shines fair, they are abroad shopping in multitudes, and I am continually taking up and setting down at the most splendid shops on my route the wives and daughters of the identical clerks, merchants, and gentlemen, who make up the