without seeing, every reader, who has been to
the Royal Academy Exhibition, can enlarge on
this branch of the subject from his own
experience, without help from me. Every reader
knows that when he gets home again, and wearily
reviews his well-thumbed Catalogue, the first
picture that attracts his attention is sure to be
one among many other pictures which he
especially wanted to see, and which he has accurately
contrived to miss without suspecting it in the
crowd. In the same way, the one favourite
work which our enthusiastic friends will
infallibly ask us if we admire is, in the vast
majority of cases, provokingly certain to be also the
one work which we have unconsciously omitted
to notice. My own experience inclines me to
predict, therefore, that when I come back from
my first visit to the Academy, I shall find I have
passed over in a general sense one full half of
the whole exhibition, and in a particular sense,
something not far short of one-third of the
pictures that I expressly intended to see. I shall
go again and again and diminish these arrears,
if the doors only keep open long enough; but I
shall still have missed some especially interesting
things when the show has closed and there is no
further chance for me. The Academy is not to
blame for that; it is only our mortal lot. In
the greater Exhibition-room of Human Life, how
often, in spite of all our care and trouble, we
miss the one precious picture that we most
wanted to see! Excuse a sick man's moral.
When he has closed his Catalogue, what has he
left to do but to turn round in bed, and take his
mental composing-draught in the form of sober
reflection?

TRADE SONGS. THE COBBLER.

ONCE there was a cobbler bold,
Ever was he cobbling, mending;
Of his work there was no ending—
Shoes were always to be soled;
Yet upon his stool he sung
Always with a merry tongue,
As he sewed his scraps of leather
With waxen threads together.

He had neither beer nor wine;
Now and then (and that was harder)
Not a morsel in the larder;
Yet he did not weep or whine,
But upon his stool he sung, &c.

Torments had he—girls and boys,
And a wife, who was a pattern
Of a scold and drunken slattern,
And his house was full of noise;
Yet upon his stool he sung, &c.

On a day, a king (his neighbour)
Wandered there from out his palace,
Where were discontent and malice,
And beheld the cheerful labour.
Quoth he, " Have you always sung,
Just as now, with a merry tongue?"

"Yea!" returned the labouring sage,
"I make of all the best I can."
Said the other, " Wisest man,
Comfort will I give thine age;
So thou mayst not cease to sing
For thyself, and for thy king."

THE SCHOOLMASTER.

HERE dwells the Schoolmaster;
His days are filled with toil;
With learning deep, and endless care,
He tills a rugged soil.

His boys they cope with decimals;
From histories, grammars learn;
He stoopeth down to all who come,
And helpeth each in turn.

If you would know the Schoolmaster,
He wears a suit of black,
The cuffs and button-holes are worn,
And it shines adown his back.

Bent is he now, and tall, and thin;
His bushy brows are grey:
The light that once had place within
His eyes has shrunk away.

He sleeps upon a truckle bed;
He dines upon a crust;
All Euclid lies within his head;
His hopes are—in the dust.

He hath no money, hath no wife
To cheer his lonely hours;
No patron ever saw in him
The scholar's noblest powers.

Grim Patience is his heritage,
And Poverty his lot;
And so he is outstripped by all,
And is by all forgot!

AN EMPIRE SAVED.

HE is an economist, indeed, who may be
allowed to reckon a great empire among his
savings. Sir John Lawrence is entitled to set
such an item down in his account-book. And,
in the account-book of the British nation, that
stands as a debt half paid. It is worth while to
know how a man who saves an empire does his
work.

There has been just issued the " General
Report of the Administration of the Punjab," during
the period of the great struggle against Indian
Revolt. From this we may learn how it was
that, of all our countrymen, Sir John Lawrence
was the man upon whose discretion the fate of
Great Britain in India chiefly turned. But we
learn also that, according to all human calculation,
the most prudent counsel would have been
of no avail, had we been, as we were in the old
days of Indian strife, without help from the
steam-engine or the electric telegraph.

The might that is in a wire railroad for electric
trains was understood so little by our Asiatic
enemy, that little was done—of all that might so
easily have been done—for its destruction.
Unseen despatches sped along its lines through
districts crowded with the enemy, shot past the
marching hosts to warn imperiled districts of their
coming, and gave the English leaders something
like omniscience as to the external aspects of
the danger they were called upon to meet. By
the Punjab Government, even with Sir John
Lawrence for its head, India could not have
been saved as it was had there not been those
telegraphs through which, for months, the