bad enough. I don't envy the man, commoner or peer, whom I see in his carriage-and-four, when I think how a score or two families of his fellow-creatures upon his property are living in places where he would not put his horses or his dogs. I am conservatively enough inclined; but I sometimes think I could join in a Chartist rising.

Experience has shown that healthy, cheerful, airy cottages for the poor, in which something like decency is possible, entail no pecuniary loss upon the philanthropic proprietor who builds them. But even if they did, it is his bounden duty to provide such dwellings. If he do not, he is disloyal to his country, an enemy to his race, a traitor to the God who entrusted him with so much. And surely, in the judgment of all whose opinion is worth a rush, it is a finer thing to have the cottages on a man's estate places fit for human habitation, with the climbing-roses covering them, the little gravelwalk to the door, the little potato-plot cultivated at afterhours, with windows that can open and doors that can shut ; with little children not pallid and lean, but plump and rosy (and fresh air has as much to do with that as abundant food has), - surely, I say, it is better a thousand times to have one's estate dotted with scenes such as that, than to have a dozen more paintings on one's walls, or a score of additional horses in one's stables.

And now, having said so much in praise of tidiness, let me conclude by remarking that it is possible to carry even this virtue to excess. It is foolish to keep houses merely to be cleaned, as some Dutch housewives are said to do. Nor is it fit to clip the graceful forms of Nature into unnatural trimness and formality, as Dutch

gardeners do. Among ourselves, however, I am not aware that there exists any tendency to either error: so it is needless to argue against either. The perfection of Dutch tidiness is to be found, I have said, at Broek, a few miles from Amsterdam. Here is some account of it from Washington Irving's ever-pleasing pen :

What renders Broek so perfect an Elysium in the eyes of all true Hollanders, is the matchless height to which the spirit of cleanliness is carried there. It amounts almost to a religion among the inhabitants, who pass the greater part of their time rubbing and scrubbing, and painting and varnishing: each housewife vies with her neighbour in devotion to the scrubbing-brush, as zealous Catholics do in their devotion to the Cross.

I alighted outside the village, for no horse or vehicle is permitted to enter its precincts, lest it should cause defilement of the wellscoured pavements. Shaking the dust off my feet, then, I prepared to enter, with due reverence and circumspection, this sanctum sanctorum of Dutch cleanliness. I entered by a narrow street, paved with yellow bricks, laid edgewise, and so clean that one might eat from them. Indeed, they were actually worn deep, not by the tread of feet, but by the friction of the scrubbing-brush.

The houses were built of wood, and all appeared to have been freshly painted, of green, yellow, and other bright colours. They were separated from each other by gardens and orchards, and stood at some little distance from the street, with wide areas or courtyards, paved in mosaic with variegated stones, polished by frequent rubbing. The areas were divided from the streets by curiously wrought railings or balustrades of iron, surmounted with brass and copper balls, scoured into dazzling effulgence. The very trunks of the trees in front of the houses were by the same process made to look as if they had been varnished. The porches, doors, and window-frames of the houses were of exotic woods, curiously carved, and polished like costly furniture. The front doors are never opened, except on christenings, marriages, and funerals; on all ordinary occasions, visitors enter by the back-doors. In former times, persons when admitted had to put on slippers, but this Oriental ceremony is no longer insisted on.

We e are assured by the same authority, that such is the love of tidiness which prevails at Broek, that the

good people there can imagine no greater felicity than to be ever surrounded by the very perfection of it. And it seems that the prediger, or preacher of the place, accommodates his doctrine to the views of his hearers; and in his weekly discourses, when he would describe that Happy Place where, as I trust, my readers and I will one day meet the quiet burghers of Broek, he strongly insists that it is the very tidiest place in the universe: a place where all things (I trust he says within as well as around), are spotlessly pure and clean; and where all disorder, confusion, and dirt are done with for ever!

CHAPTER VII.

HOW I MUSED IN THE RAILWAY TRAIN:

BEING THOUGHTS ON RISING BY CANDLELIGHT; ON NERVOUS FEARS; AND ON VAPOURING.

N

OT entirely awake, I am standing on the platform of a large railway terminus in a certain great city, at 7.20 A.M., on a foggy morning early in January. I am about to set out on a journey of a hundred miles by the 7.30 train, which is a slow one, stopping at all the stations. I am alone; for more than human would that friendship be which would bring out mortal man to see one off at such an hour in winter. It is a dreamy sort of scene; I can hardly feel that it substantially exists. Who has not sometimes, on a still autumn afternoon, suddenly stopped on a path winding through sere, motionless woods, and felt within himself, Now, I can hardly believe in all this? You talk of the difficulty of realizing the unseen and spiritual is it not sometimes, in certain mental moods, and in certain aspects of external nature, quite as difficult to feel the substantial existence of things which we can see and touch? Extreme stillness and loneliness, perhaps, are the usual conditions of this peculiar feeling. Sometimes most men have thought to themselves that it would be well for them if they could but have the evidence of sense to assure them of certain great realities

which while we live in this world we never can touch or see; but I think that many readers will agree with me when I say, that very often the evidence of sense comes no nearer to producing the solid conviction of reality than does that widely different evidence on which we believe the existence of all that is not material. You have climbed, alone, on an autumn day, to the top of a great hill; a river runs at its base unheard; a champaign country spreads beyond the river; cornfields swept and bare; hedge-rows dusky green against the yellow ground; a little farmhouse here and there, over which the smoke stagnates in the breezeless air. It is heather that you are standing on. And as you stand there alone, and look away over that scene, you have felt as though sense, and the convictions of sense, were partially paralysed: you have been aware that you could not feel that the landscape before you was solid reality. I am not talking to blockheads, who never thought or felt anything particularly; of course they could not understand my meaning. But as for you, thoughtful reader, have you not sometimes, in such a scene, thought to yourself, not without a certain startled pleasure, — Now, I realize it no more substantially that there spreads a landscape beyond that river, than that there spreads a country beyond the grave!

There are many curious moods of mind, of which you will find no mention in books of metaphysics. The writers of works of mental philosophy keep by the bread and butter of the world of mind. And every one who knows by personal experience how great a part of the actual phases of thought and feeling lies beyond the reach of logical explanation, and can hardly be fixed and represented by any words, will rejoice when he meets