pital authorities. Well,
what connexion, you ask, is there with this girl's sad fate and the
jollity of the Cyder Cellars? Only this, that her father made the Cyder
Cellars so popular a place of resort. If I go there again I shall think
of Louisa Regan, who began life as the daughter of a successful publican,
who had been a governess in a nobleman's family, at the early age of
twenty-five rescued from the streets by policemen, and dependent on
charity for a bed on which to die. In the foaming cup, in the glitter of
the gas, while the comic singer was most comical, or the sentimental
singer most sentimental, I could not be oblivious of her fate. Is there
not poison in the bowl? Is there not madness in the merriment? To the
night so bright does there not come a dolorous morrow? You may sing and
laugh the hours away in the Cyder Cellars for a while, but you must pay
your reckoning, and then, I imagine, you will doubt whether the amusement
was worth the price. Youth generally pays too dear for its whistle.
Youth is finding this out; at any rate the days of the Cyder Cellars are
numbered, and now, with its Judge and Jury and _Poses Plastiques_, it
collects comparatively few.

Let me ask, need the amusements of our leisure hours be thus based on
false principles? Cambridge, in one of the pleasantest papers in the
"World," says, "Among the numbers who have changed a sober plan of living
for one of riot and excess, the greatest part have been converted by the
arguments in a drinking song." Life is real, life is earnest. It is a
battle-ground which requires heart and muscle, and where only the brave
can conquer; but if I drop for half-an-hour into a music hall, I learn
that pleasure is the great aim of life, and that gin can make me jolly
and a genius.

LEICESTER-SQUARE.

One of the peculiar institutions of the country is the square. Charles
Knight says:--"The Piazza, Place, Platz, of Italy, France, or Germany,
have little in common with it. Its elements are simple enough--an open
space of a square figure, houses on each of the four sides, and an
enclosed centre with turf, a few trees, and, it may be, flowers; and
there is a square." There are fashionable squares, all alive with the
sound of carriage-wheels and the chaste accents of a thousand flunkeys;
there are city squares, dull, dark places, with old red-brick houses, and
a stunted, smoke-dried shrub or two in the middle. Then there are
respectable