ssing off glasses of cognac at the CAFE. The unfortunate
creature has a child still every year, and her constant hypocrisy is to
try and make her girls believe that their father is a respectable man,
and to huddle him out of the way when the brute comes home drunk.

Those poor ruined souls get together and have a society of their own,
the which it is very affecting to watch--those tawdry pretences at
gentility, those flimsy attempts at gaiety: those woful sallies: that
jingling old piano; oh, it makes the heart sick to see and hear them. As
Mrs. Raff, with her company of pale daughters, gives a penny tea to Mrs.
Diddler, they talk about bygone times and the fine society they kept;
and they sing feeble songs out of tattered old music-books; and while
engaged in this sort of entertainment, in comes Captain Raff with his
greasy hat on one side, and straightway the whole of the dismal room
reeks with a mingled odour of smoke and spirits.

Has not everybody who has lived abroad met Captain Raff? His name is
proclaimed, every now and then, by Mr. Sheriff's Officer Hemp; and about
Boulogne, and Paris, and Brussels, there are so many of his sort that
I will lay a wager that I shall be accused of gross personality for
showing him up. Many a less irreclaimable villain is transported; many a
more honourable man is at present at the treadmill; and although we
are the noblest, greatest, most religious, and most moral people in the
world, I would still like to know where, except in the United Kingdom,
debts are a matter of joke, and making tradesmen 'suffer' a sport that
gentlemen own to? It is dishonourable to owe money in France. You never
hear people in other parts of Europe brag of their swindling; or see
a prison in a large Continental town which is not more or less peopled
with English rogues.

A still more loathsome and dangerous Snob than the above transparent and
passive scamp, is frequent on the continent of Europe, and my young Snob
friends who are travelling thither should be especially warned against
him. Captain Legg is a gentleman, like Raff, though perhaps of a better
degree. He has robbed his family too, but of a great deal more, and has
boldly dishonoured bills for thousands, where Raff has been boggling
over the clumsy conveyance of a ten-pound note. Legg is always at the
best inn, with the finest waistcoats and moustaches, or tearing about
in the flashest of britzkas, while poor Raff is tipsifying himself with
s