urt, where Mr. D'Eyncourt is
dispensing summary justice to the accumulations of the last two days.
These are the people who have been spending Christmas-eve,
Christmas-day, and some portion of Boxing-day already in the
police-cells. Let us take one as a typical case. Let that poor little
eight-year-old Arab step down from the dock and go off with his mother,
who, we hope, will take the magistrate's excellent advice, and keep the
child from begging--that is why he has spent Christmas in the
cells--lest he be sent to a school for eight years, and she have to pay
for him--God help her! she does not look as though she could afford very
high terms. A bruised and bleeding woman, not young or good-looking,
enters the box with her head bound up. Her lord and master confronts her
in the dock. It is the "old, old story." A drop of drink yesterday--the
day of the Great Nativity, never forget--series of "drops of drink" all
day long; and, at five o'clock, just when gentility was beginning to
think of dinner, the kitchen poker was used with frightful effect. A
triangular cut over the right eye, and another in the dangerous
neighbourhood of the left ear, administered with that symbol of domestic
bliss, the kitchen poker, sends the wife doubled up into a corner, with
an infant of two years old in her arms. The head of the family goes out
for a walk after his exertions. The woman lies there bleeding until the
neighbours hear her "mourning," as she terms it--the result being that
the lord and master's "constitutional" is cut short by a policeman, and
the happy pair are this morning separated for six months, at the
expiration of which period Paterfamilias is to find surety for another
six months' good behaviour. Such, starred round with endless episodes of
"drunk and disorderly," "foul language," and so on, is our first tableau
this Boxing-day. It is not a pleasant one. Let us pass on.

Along Oxford Street, despite the Bank Holidays Act, many shops are open,
chiefly those devoted to the sale of articles eatable, drinkable, and
avoidable; these last being in the shape of chemists' shops, and shops
for Christmas presents--to be shunned by miserly old bachelors. Let us
turn into the British Museum and see sensible, decorous Boxing-day
there. At the corner of Museum Street there is a lively itinerant
musician, evidently French, who plays the fiddle until his bow tumbles
all to pieces, but he goes on playing with the stick as though nothing
h