Dr. Busby was pompously enunciating verses,
which in bis time, he said, were considered
witty, and might still be aids to a schoolboy's
memory:

    Qui, quæ, quod,
    Fetch me the rod!
    Hic, hæc, hoc,
    Lay him on the block.

When Lady Fleedle, just making out that there
was metre afloat, lifted up her hands and eyes,
drew out her pocket-handkerchief, and with a
well-executed tear, exclaimed, "How affecting!
It reminds me of Lord Lyttleton's epitaph on his
wife, 'Speak, dead Maria!'" On the other
side of me, I was edified by Toady's alternations
between abject flattery to a lord next him, and
snapping replies towards myself, who am
nobody. "Yes, my lord, indeed, as you say, all the
writers of the Essays and Reviews should be
turned out of the Church, and their works burnt
by the hands of the common hangman. Your
lordship's erudition and profound piety entitle you
to decide on the subject, if any one may." Then
to me (we had only been discussing a pudding):
"No! It wants more lemon!" Then to the
lord: "My lord, I perfectly agree with you!
You are profoundly right. A glass of
champagne is quite the true thing after gooseberry
fool."

Come out of the drawing-rooms and dining-
halls "of dazzling light," to take your ease at
your inn, or to dawdle into shops to make
purchases. Exchange those whom you try to please,
for those whose business is to please you, are
you in a more agreeable atmosphere, or rather,
are you not still haunted by the poco-piu, and
the poco-meno of life? Where is the perfect
Waiter? He is a myth! Seek him not abroad,
neither at home. Have you yet discovered—I
never have—which is worse: the fulsome and
familiar, or the uncivil and the stiff-necked?
The officious foreign waiter, or the native cold
flabby commodity of our best of isles? Look
at him of the Rhine, with his pomaded hair,
glaring eye-glass, and stupendous watch-chain,
who will "spike Inglis" (as he phrases it),
who announces the name of each dish as he sets
it before you, calling cauliflower, "coal-floors,"
and roast mutton, "sheep's brat;" who suffocates
you with his overwhelming attentions.
Is he not nauseous? But, may he not possibly,
in virtue of his good intent, be a shade less
provoking than the British waiter in a clerical
choker, known to an "Uncommercial
Traveller," whose whole pale demeanour declares
your coming to his hotel to be a piece of
impertinence, and who, at one o'clock, tells your
Hungriness there will be a "Tabble Dot" at
five, and he can serve you nothing before?

Then, as to shops. The other day I entered
Mr. Ragman's, the stationer's, to make rather a
considerable purchase of writing-paper and
envelopes. A dark solemn-visaged man stood
behind the counter, who eyed me steadily, but did
not even ask me what my business was. The
steady eyes had a mesmeric effect on me, and
the silence confused my thoughts, until I really
did not know why I had entered that shop. I
moved uneasily. Then, the steady eyes began
to move, and to watch me, and to say, "Are
you come here to steal something?" At last,
with a snap, like machinery, the great Ragman
uttered the awful words, "Your business,
sir?" My stammering tongue hardly faltered
out—for, like the electro-biologised, I had by
that time almost forgotten my own name—
"Cream-laid, wire-wove—who-is-it's—patent
envelopes. That man Thing-um-me's-in-th-Strand's
magnum-bonum pens." "How many?" asks
Ragman, in an awful voice: this time omitting
the sir. "How many of each?" I could not
bring out how many! "Thomas, serve this
gentleman" (the last word unutterably toned),
said the embodied firm of Ragman; and, having
consigned me to the young man (to my great
relief), turned his eyes once more on vacancy
instead of my face.

More awful is the female of this class, who
folds her fat arms upon the prominence below her
waist, won't help you to get number seven and a
half when you buy your gloves, but stands
resolutely quiet, magnificently indifferent, with a
look (probably out of window) which means,
being interpreted, "I don't care whether you
buy or not." Should you happen to buy, her
"Thank you!" is a dose of coloquintida to the
ear. Is there no medium between these
underloaders and the overloading tenth of a man (for
be must be less than a tailor), who, when I go
with my daughter to Dasher's, keeps talking on,
"What shall I show you? What is the next
article? No trouble at all! Nothing more this
morning?" and, all the time, busy with hands
as with tongue, unfolds a dozen bales of goods
when Emma would rather see only one, and, in
spite of her meek protestations, climbs to the
lighest shelf, dives to the lowest cellarage,
makes drawers fly open with a magic touch,
and deluges my dear astounded girl in a flood of
ribands, which he seems to bring out of nothing,
as if he were a conjuror. Then, as we stumble
out into the street, his voice pursues us with
as many notes of obligation as though Emma's
pennyworth of tape had saved him from utter
ruin.

Yet, after all, since nothing is perfect on
earth, my heart is with the overloaders, because
my youthful memory is. A female overloader,
especially if pretty, is a pleasant being. Can
I forget thee, Jane Perry, deftest of
seamstresses, pearl of hosieresses, cream most miraculous
of gloveresses? Well did the gownsmen
of Trinity College know thy shop, the emporium
of news, where others' tongues were set a-going
by the ready prattle of thine own! Well did
they appreciate thy comfortable comforters,
overlapping the chinks in the throat of a
Dreadnought, when a day at Newmarket was in view,
and tandems dared the chilling blast—thy gloves,
such a capital fit at the race-ball—thy shirts,
moulded well to the brave broad chest of youth!
Ah, what a blessed thing it was in thee, Jane
Perry, that thou wouldest never send in a bill,
but, at the bare mention of such a thing, didst