ured alive by
ants,--insects which in Africa correspond in several respects to editors
and critics, particularly the stinging kind. "_Und ist man bei der
Prophezeiung angestellt_," as Heine says; "when a man has a situation in
a prophecy-office," a great part of his business is to explain to the
customers why it is that so many of them draw blanks, or why the trains
of fate are never on time.

V. HAMPTON RACES.

On a summer day, when waking dreams softly wave before the fancy, it is
pleasant to walk in the noon-stillness along the Thames, for then we pass
a series of pictures forming a gallery which I would not exchange for
that of the Louvre, could I impress them as indelibly upon the eye-memory
as its works are fixed on canvas. There exists in all of us a spiritual
photographic apparatus, by means of which we might retain accurately all
we have ever seen, and bring out, at will, the pictures from the
pigeon-holes of the memory, or make new ones as vivid as aught we see in
dreams, but the faculty must be developed in childhood. So surely as I
am now writing this will become, at some future day, a branch of
education, to be developed into results of which the wildest imagination
can form no conception, and I put the prediction on record. As it is, I
am sorry that I was never trained to this half-thinking, half-painting
art, since, if I had been, I should have left for distant days to come
some charming views of Surrey as it appears in this decade.

The reedy eyots and the rising hills; the level meadows and the little
villes, with their antique perpendicular Gothic churches, which form the
points around which they have clustered for centuries, even as groups of
boats in the river are tied around their mooring-posts; the bridges and
trim cottages or elegant mansions with their flower-bordered grounds
sweeping down to the water's edge, looking like rich carpets with new
baize over the centre, make the pictures of which I speak, varying with
every turn of the Thames; while the river itself is, at this season, like
a continual regatta, with many kinds of boats, propelled by stalwart
young Englishmen or healthy, handsome damsels, of every rank, the better
class by far predominating. There is a disposition among the English to
don quaint holiday attire, to put on the picturesque, and go to the very
limits which custom permits, which would astonish an American. Of late
years this is becoming the case, too, in Tr