el of our childhood,
the mother's right hand, and often so much more real than the mother
herself. I would lay special emphasis on the nurse who, beginning as a
young retainer, develops into a friend and to the end of her days moves
on parallel lines with the family, even if she is not still of it. These
old nurses, the nurses of whom the older we grow the more tenderly and
gratefully we think--will no one give them a book of praise? I should
love to read it. And there should not be any lack of material--with
Stevenson's Alison Cunningham by no means last on the list.

But if on examination the material proved too scanty, then the other
devoted servants might come in too, such as Sir Walter Scott's Tom
Purdie, who should have a proud place, and that wonderful gardener of
the great Dumas, whose devotion extended to confederacy.

Without Dumas' gardener, indeed, no book in honour of the fidelity of
man to man could be complete. For just think of it! The only approach to
the house of the divine Alexandre being by way of a wooden bridge, this
immortal tender of flowers and vegetables so arranged the planks that
any undesired caller bearing a writ or long-overdue account would fall,
all naturally and probably through his own confused carelessness, into
the river; and, on being pulled out and restored to happy life, would
not only abandon the horrid purpose of his visit, but, gratitude
prompting, be generous enough to go at least part of the way towards
paying the gardener's wages, which otherwise that resourceful benefactor
might never obtain.

On a place in the volume for this exemplary character, I insist. But, as
I say, nurses first.

No. 344260

Coming, the other day, after every kind of struggle, at last into
possession of one of the new pound notes, I was interested in placing it
quickly under the microscope, so to speak, in order that, in case I
never saw another, I should be able to describe it to my grandchildren.
How indigent I have been may be gathered from the circumstance that this
note, being numbered 344260, had three hundred and forty-four thousand
two hundred and fifty-nine predecessors which had eluded me.

As a work of art it is remarkable--almost, indeed, a gallery in itself,
comprising as it does portraiture, design, topography, and the
delineation of one of the most spirited episodes in religious history.
After the magic words "One Pound," it is, of course, to St. George and
the Dragon th