cargoes of the morning. That younger Miss Philpotts, by the way, let me say, is not an old maid yet, if I'm anything of a judge: I set her down at the new bonnet-shop yesterday afternoon, and she don't look as if she had seen sevenand-twenty yet.

The ladies, when they are mammas, are fond of taking the children a ride in the 'bus. Sometimes I get a whole family of children; the other night I had eleven young mothers, each with a baby in arms, and only one gentleman-twentythree altogether, though we're only licensed to carry twelve. Summer afternoons and evenings are the children's holidays;. not a week passes but I take out a dozen or two to the fields, and bring them back again at sundown, loaded with buttercups, cowslips, daisies, or May-blossom, which makes me feel like a nosegay all the way to the Strand. My 'bus is always pretty full as business-hours draw to a close. There are people going out in the suburbs to spend the evening; there are more going home to dinner, or it may be an early tea; there are people going into the City to theatre or concertso that, travel which way I will, I mostly travel full of an evening. If I'm not full before I get so far as the railway· station, I'm sure to fill there, especially in excursion-times, when the train is just come in. If you was to look into my 'bus then, you wouldn't know it for the same-twelve people up to their chins in egg-baskets, boxes, carpet-bags, and packages, look so different from twelve city gentlemen, with nothing bigger than a snuff-box apiece. Poor Mr. Philpotts hailed me the other night when I was full of excursioners, and would have had to ride outside if a civil young fellow hadn't offered to turn on to the roof, to make room for him. It was odd, I thought, that after old P. had got out, and turned up the lane to his cottage, the young fellow got down and joined the younger Miss P. not a hundred yards further on-but, of course, that was no business of mine.

People talk, and write, too, sometimes, about the influence of the weather and the state of the atmosphere upon people's nervous systems. I don't profess to understand nervous systems myself, but I know, from pretty good experience, that wet weather is very trying to the temper, not to mention the rheumatism. It's mostly gentlemen that ride in rainy seasons; and the few ladies that get into my 'bus, do so because they can't help themselves, and must go the distance.. Politeness, I have observed, like many other things that are more for ornament than use, is very much damaged by moisture civility, which is all we conductors pretend to, is a much tougher article, and more waterproof, though it won't keep out the rain any more than the other. Rain is a wonderful damper to sociability as well as to broadcloth: when the water is dropping from people's clothes, conversation drops too; and as for a joke, it isn't always safe to venture upon one in the wet, because when folks are dripping they won't stand roasting-which, of course, is natural enough. There's a prodigious rush sometimes of a splashy night to catch the last 'bus; and then it is that your model-gentleman stands at one side, and lets others be accommodated before he takes thought for himself-though I've never had the pleasure of being introduced to that gentleman yet.

It came down dismally this morning, more like a waterspout than a storm of rain. We pulled up as usual at Grinder Lane for Mr. Philpotts, but he never came. I thought it was the foul weather kept him at home. It wasn't though, as I found out before we'd gone a mile further. It's a fact that the young fellow that was so civil to him the other night, has bolted off with the younger Miss Philpotts, and married her clean out. He's a lawyer, they say, and in doing business for the father, has found out that the Misses P. have each fortunes in their own right, inherited from their mother's father, of which the old gentleman has the manage

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ment.

Young Circuit has taken his choice of the two; and now the thing has got wind, it is thought the other will go by hook or by crook, in spite of all the unwilling father can do to prevent it—and very proper too. I shall look out for the old gentleman when he has got over the surprise, and see how he bears it.

THE FORTUNATE SHOP.

MANY years ago—it must be more than forty by this time —there stood, at the corner of a lane in the heart of the city of London, a dim, dusty-looking house of some thirty feet frontage, upon which the sun rarely shone save for a few hours in the afternoon, and which you might pass a hundred times, so unpretentious was its aspect, without noticing its existence. It had two windows, with a broad space of brown brick wall between them, on the ground-floor; and when the scaled and blistered shutters, which were once green, were thrown open, as they were every morning about eight o'clock, you might have seen an elderly maiden personage sitting at the smaller one behind a white muslin blind, hemming the frill of a cap, stitching the wristband of a shirt, or darning woollen hose. At the other and larger window the blind was of green gauze, very faded and worn, and did not half conceal the figure of a lean invalid-looking man, of about fifty, who stood behind a sort of counter covered with padded felt, polishing now a silver salver, now a soup-tureen of the same metal, by the friction of his bare palm. Sometimes two or three pale lads wrought with him at the same silent labour; and if you had entered at the private door-whose knocker was half confined with a staple driven into the panel to prevent your alarming the nerves of the proprietor by indulging in a thundering rap—and had ascended to the floor above, you might have found a party of young girls, preparing with their soft hands more work of the same kind for the finishing-touches of the master. The

lane in which the house of the plate-polisher stood had been once a solitary cul-de-sac, leading to nowhere, and compelling all explorers after a north-west passage to retrace their steps; but a few years before the time of which we speak, the pulling down of some old houses at the end of it had converted the cul-de-sac into a "short cut" and much-used thoroughfare between two or more of the most busy and populous haunts of commerce. In consequence, the lane began to assume an appearance of more liveliness and importance; there was scrubbing and washing, and painting of fronts, pointing of bricks, enlarging of front-windows, and the conversion of dingy front-parlours and neglected warehouses into sprightly-looking shops. But the plate-polisher made no alteration-did not even renew the old green blind, pumice-stone his blistered shutters, or bestow a little of his craft on the rusty knocker of his door. Rusty as it was, however, Death did not disdain to lift it with his skeleton fingers; he sounded his summons in the middle of the night, and the next morning the shutters were not thrown open, but the blinds of the upper windows were drawn down, and there was no more "plate-polishing done here" from that day forth. For a few weeks the old maiden-lady, shrouded in bombazine and crape, might be seen occasionally flitting about the premises, and then she vanished from the neighbourhood.

She was no sooner gone, than up rose a hoarding of lofty planks in front of the old house, begirt with a planked footway for passengers, and, in less time than you could imagine, stuck all over with posters of lottery-bills in all the colours of the rainbow, and with announcements of a hundred different kinds, laid on so thick, that you might as well think of looking through a millstone as of obtaining by a furtive peep any hint of what was going on within. However, the lane didn't care much about it, and manifested no remarkable curiosity. Old gentlemen, who dropped into the little tavern three