nguine,--it was during the terrors of the French
Directory, when the

"Streets ran so red with the blood of the dead,
That they blush'd like the waves of hell,"

that Paris became a city of dancers, and that the art reached a climax
unknown before or since.

BOXING NIGHT.

I am rather out of conceit with Christmas boxes. I have been wished the
compliments of the season by no less than six individuals this very
morning, and for those good wishes I, poor man though I be, with family
of my own to work for, have had to pay half-a-crown each. I grow
suspicious of every smiling face I meet. I walk with my hands in my
pocket, and my eyes cast down. I wonder how it fares with my
strong-minded wife at home. I know she will have had a rare battle to
fight. She will have had the Postman--and the Dustman--and the
Waits--and the Sweep--and the Turncock--and the Lamplighter--and the
Grocer's lad--and the Butcher's boy; and if she compounds with them at
the rate of a shilling a-piece, she may bless her stars. I feel that I
cannot stand much of this kind of work, and that for a merry Christmas
and a happy New Year I shall have to pay rather handsomely. Stop at
home--tie up your knockers--say you are sick or dead, or a shareholder in
the Royal British Bank, still you cannot escape the tender mercies of a
London Boxing day. Mind, I have not one word to say of the various good
wishes and gifts offered by friends and relatives to each other as
pledges of esteem and goodwill. I would be the last to find fault with
the customs originating in the warm heart of love, and honoured by the
sanction of the whole civilized world. By all means let us reverence
them ten-fold. But I have a right to complain that I am compelled to pay
for mercenary goodwill, and that on me, or such as me, a tax is levied
which does no good in most cases, and frequently does an immense amount
of harm. When I read, as I am sure to do, in the police reports of the
next day, that, "yesterday, being the day after Boxing day, the time of
the magistrates was chiefly occupied with cases of drunkenness," am I not
right in wishing that I had kept the money in my own pocket? Some of my
friends would do that, but then for the next twelve months they are
hampered and inconvenienced in a thousand ways. As a wise man, I choose
the least of two evils, but I am an unwilling victim nevertheless. But a
truce to my meditations; let us look at London on