d donkeys--a market much patronised by costermongers. Let us
add, in conclusion, that the New Cattle-market bids fair to be as much of
a nuisance as the old, and that, sooner or later, there must be a
dead-meat market for London, and that alone; otherwise we shall have a
repetition of the sad tragedy to which the poet refers, when he writes of
"the cow with the crumpled horn, who tossed the maiden all forlorn."

THE GOVERNMENT OFFICE

Is in the Strand--or in Westminster--and the contrast between its silence
and stillness and the bustle of the streets is something wonderful. You
feel as you enter as if you were in a charmed land. With Tennyson's
lotus-eaters you exclaim, "There is no joy but calm. Why should we only
toil, the roof and crown of things?" Charles Lamb's description of the
South Sea House might have been penned for a Government Office. The
place seems to belong not to the living present. The windows, double
glazed, keep out the roar of the outside world. The chairs and tables,
of massive mahogany, seem as if of the time of the ancients. The Turkey
carpet has a smack of the primitive political Eden, ere man sinned, and
Lord John Russell introduced his Reform Bill. This may be a railroad
age, but it is not in a Government Office that that truth is recognised.
The young men are generally reading the papers, or eating lunch; the
seniors are doing the same, but in a more dignified manner. In an office
where there are several, to find a couple at real hard work from ten till
four is, I fear, a rarity.

According to Mr. Knight, when Henry VIII. had stripped Wolsey of
Whitehall, and other possessions, he constructed there, for the amusement
of his leisure, a tennis-court, a bowling-green, and a cock-pit. The
tennis-court and the bowling-green have left no traces. The cockpit went
through a variety of transmutations, till it settled down into a
treasury. In the reign of Anne, the lord high treasurer Godolphin sat
three or four times a week at the cock-pit, "to determine and settle
matters relating to the public treasure and revenues." This was the old
building fronting the banqueting house, which Mr. Barry has recently
metamorphosed into a magnificent wing of his uniform edifice. The old
office of Godolphin, however, is but a small part of the modern treasury.
The offices of the more important functionaries are in the large building
behind, which fronts the esplanade in St. James's Park. Sev