the linendraper and hosier's daughter of Soupemaigre-street, to be united in the bonds of matrimony to Stanislas Ladislas Czswjzkowski, so long a respected lodger in the top attic of her papa's house, where he earned an honest living by carving fan-mounts. And, in most cases, a very good husband does Stanislas Ladislas make to the fair English maiden of Soho.

The Italian exiles, with the exception of some inveterate Mazzinians, or Garibaldians, too patriotic to live under the constitutional government of Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, have happily disappeared; and of German and Spanish exiles there are none at all. Still Soupemaigre-street and its surroundings contain a dense swarm of resident foreigners of almost every race under the sun, Jews excepted. The Israelites shun Soupemaigre-street: there is nothing to be got out of it. Nobody wants to sell old clothes. They wear them. There is no use in establishing a ghetto within a ghetto, and the resident strangers are in the aggregate as sharp as Petticoatlane and Holywell-street rolled into one. It is poverty-it is the long necessity for clutching at every morsel of bread which comes their way that has made their wits so keen. When they cannot obtain sustenance from work done outside the limits of Soho, I fancy that, like the rats behind a well-stopped skirting-board, they must live upon one another. But they do live somehow, and prosper-sometimes.

THE IRISH COURT

HAVING an occasion of business with a country cousin, who had placed his family in lodgings near Merrion-square, I called at the street-door one morning, at an hour too early for ceremony. My knock was promptly answered by a rustic servant, who was also an importation from home, and who knowing my intimacy with the household - ushered me, abruptly and without notice, into the drawing-room.

The sight which there met my eyes was striking and uncommon. Materfamilias, a portly dame, stood erect in a majestic attitude under the gas-lustre, curtseying and smiling graciously but gravely at one of her daughters. The stately condescension of her manner seemed a little exaggerated towards her own child, who on her part, however, seemed in no degree less ceremonious, but swept across the carpet, salaaming at every stride, and keeping her full front assiduously turned to the matron, just as the young May moon may be observed to envisage the full-blown orb of day. The evolution was one of some difficulty, for the fair damsel's waist was encircled in an enormous counterpane, which trailed at great length along the floor. I would have fancied that she had been making an unwelcome visit to the kitchen, and that the cook, according to ancient usage, had surreptitiously fastened a dishclout to her tail;' but the size and weight of this appendage forbade such a surmise; and, moreover, it was evident that she was not unconscious of the encumbrance, for whilst she moved, with her eyes still fixed deferentially upon the mistress of the ceremonies in the middle of the room, her right heel, insidiously aside,' employed itself in kicking the quilt away to a respectful distance, lest, being twisted about her limbs, it might impede the freedom of their course.

Another blooming creature, similarly equipped with what seemed an under-blanket, stood at the opposite end of the room near a window, waiting apparently for her turn to take up the same ground; and the younger olive-plants, raised upon chairs by the wall in mute admiration, contemplated the whole proceeding through mouths and eyes opened to the widest stretch of both. Having heard in my younger days of Catalani and her shawl-dance, it occurred to me that this might be a modern adaptation of that movement to an envelope of another and more familiar denomination. Who knows,' quoth I wittily to myself, but they may be doing Sir Roger de Coverley in a new figure ?'

So profoundly were the party absorbed in the ceremonial, that I was able to take in the whole of it before the charming Dorabella (we called her Dolly in Tipperary), finding her retreat cut short by a sudden collision with my shins, uttered a little shriek, and then, bursting into a wild fit of laughter, appealed by an eloquent glance to her mother to explain the situation.

The matron did not accept the intrusion quite as pleasantly as her daughter.

'Didn't I tell you, Mick Rafferty,' she said, turning wrathfully upon the page, that I wasn't at home to gentlemen any day before three o'clock, and never to ladies, till you got orders to put on your button-jacket and wash your face?'

The state of Mick's complexion was certainly primâ-facie evidence that he had not been authorised to admit a lady that morning; and I am bound to record that it wanted a good hour and a half of the time appointed for the other sex. He pleaded, however, that there was a differ between a gintleman and a neighbour; and he thought Mr. Connor' (that's me) was free of the house and welcome to run in and out at all hours,' as he knew me to do at Castle Brody.

It was my fault, my dear Mrs. Brody,' I exclaimed, willing to excuse the stammering youth, notwithstanding the invidious distinction he had drawn between me and a gentleman proper; 'I rushed past my old friend Mike, after my thoughtless fashion, without taking time to recollect that you are a town lady now. But as

I am here, allow me to ask, what new kind of drill is this at which I find you employed?'

Mrs. Brody was (and is, I am happy to say) a cheerful, goodtempered woman, with no light perception of the ridiculous; and her brow being quickly smoothed of the angry wrinkle which had contracted it, she too broke into a hearty laugh.

'Why then, Rody Connor,' she said, 'since you must know, I may as well tell you that the girls and myself are laid out to be presented at the Drawing-room to-morrow evening, and I am just putting them through their facings. This drill, as you say, is called kicking out the train.'

'Kicking out the train!' I cried in my ignorance; what, in the name of whatever is courtly, is that, Mrs. Brody?'

'You must understand,' explained the matron, that a lady has to appear in Dublin Castle the same as at the Queen's Court, in full-dress, with as good as two yards of a tail dragging after her over the carpet, into the room where the Lady Lift'nant stands to receive her company. But, my dear, that's not the worst of it. There is a circle, as they call it, in that room, only it is in the shape of a half-moon, drawn up on each side of her Ex-sellency, composed of the Lord Chancellor and his wife, the Primate and his

lady, Judges and judgesses to no end, my Lord Bishop this and my Lady Bishop that, with the Dean of St. Patrick's, all the grandees and little-ees who have the privilege of the ongthree. There they stand one and all, winking and tittering among themselves, and staring at every young woman who passes in at one door and out of the other.'

'A most trying ordeal,' I remarked. 'I wish my young friends here safely over it.'

And what should hinder them, I'd like to know?' replied the lady, bridling. They can do it as well as another, I suppose. What did they learn dancing and deportment for, if they'd be afraid to walk across the floor of the biggest room in Ireland ?'

My life on Miss Dorabella, at all events,' said I. 'After the stone wall she rode over at Coolairy, show me the bishop, or the bishop's wife either, that can stop her.'

Ah, but this is another pace altogether, Mr. Connor,' interjected the subject of my praise. I'd sooner face the Pound at Ballinasloe on Mad Bess than carry the two yards of muslin ma was telling you of out of that room.'

Ay, that is the rub,' pursued the matron; 'for when the gentleman at the door has spread out your train for you at the end of his stick, making it as wide as a peacock's tail, anybody might walk up to her Ex-sellency, or for that matter to her Majesty, with dignity and composure; but to get out of that and vanish through the opposite door without once showing your back to the presence, or your profile to the circle, and at the same time not to tear off your skirt bodily, or else trip up your own heels-that is what I call the rub. It is not natural, but it must be done; like many other unnatural things that people must do, who are determined to take a lead in this world.'

'I now understand,' said I, 'why young ladies preparing for that presence must be instructed how to kick out their trains; and such was the exercise at which you were engaged when I so unseasonably broke in upon you.'

'Yes, that was our manœuvre,' said the stirring dame; and now, with your leave, we will finish the lesson. You'll find Mr. Brody, if you want him, going through his sword-exercise in some of the passages below.'

Miss Leonora (vernacularly Nelly), whose turn had come, was tightening the blanket round her slender waist, when I was thus politely dismissed. Before my departure, however, it was gently signified that knowledge acquired by surprise, as I had obtained it, was not fairly current in society, and I had no difficulty in promising an honourable reticence. From that day to this I have not made the affair a subject of private tattle or gossip. If I now relate it, it is in the performance of a public duty, to which considerations

of mere personal obligation must, of course, give way. In our new and improved morality, family secrets are not to stand in the way, when they can be brought out to the aid of a great policy; nor can Mrs. Brody complain of broken faith, if after an interval of a dozen years her daughter's pas en arrière is drawn into the light to ' adorn a tale.'

The reader will not be sorry to hear that I have very lately seen the same young lady, nothing the worse for her Castle experience, but much more becomingly girdled with a neat white apron, out of which she and her two little girls were dispensing oats, with no sparing hands, to the poultry in the farmyard attached to her husband's parsonage. When I hinted that I had once seen her differently accoutred, she laughed, and said: What a goose I was then, to be sure, to think that I was going to be a fine lady all at once, because nothing would satisfy poor dear mamma but that I must be brought out at Court !'

It was some time before I made out my friend Brody in an area beyond the kitchen. He was hastily unbuckling himself from a sword nearly four feet in length, with which he had been strutting and fretting his hour, to acquire the art of carrying such an appendage, so that it should not come between his legs before the viceregal nobility. He also was rehearsing for the Drawing-room, and being a short fat man, and scant of breath, the exertion had brought a more than usual amount of redness into his face. His speech also was hurried and stammering, whilst he tried to laugh at himself a most unsuccessful haw-haw, I must add-for playing the fool at his time of life.

But you know, my friend,' said he, when the ladies take a thing into their heads there is no resisting them; and the mistress here will have it that the girls are nothing till they "come out." So we must leave our comfortable home, and pack ourselves into expensive lodgings in Dublin, that the world, seeing that they appear at the Cassle, may understand they are something.'

And what do you expect them to gain by going to the Castle?' I took the liberty of asking.

A bill for feathers and guippure, if you know what that is-I don't that would clothe the whole family decently for a twelvemonth.'

'What!-no more than that?' 'O, yes, a great deal more. There is the chance of making the acquaintance of half-a-dozen young swells, who will lounge all the morning on your sofas, eat your dinners and drink your wine ad libitum every evening if you ask them, and accompany the young ladies to theatres and concerts as often as you accommodate them with free tickets. In the rear of these advantages halts the forlorn hope of an astonishing or impossible marriage with a scion (the