It's an idle wicked habit. Now, kneel down,
and be very quiet.''

Happily, Lily needed but slender instruction
in this last particular. She had been taught to
pray. She plumped down on her little knees,
and, folding her hands with edifying decorum,
bent her fair head, and began to murmur God
knows what. Emphatically, He knew what.

There was a shuffling, rustling noise as the
girls, at a signal, rose from their desks to kneel
upon the forms. Then Mrs. Bunnycastlc read
prayers in a mild bleating voice, taking care to
pronounce. "knowledge" with an omega. After
the orthodox orisons, she read a lengthy homily
from a thin dog's-eared book, which, according
to a tradition among the girls, had been written
by a dean, who was Mrs. Bunnycastle's grandpapa.
The homily was full of very hard words,
and, consequently, most wholesome and
improving; but its arguments seemed to have a
directer reference to some bygone theological
controversies than to the immediate spiritual
wants of the five-aud-thirty boarders. However,
there was a beautiful passage about the idolatries
of Rome—which Mrs. Bunnycastle, according to
diaconal precedent, scrupulously pronounced
Room — and the homily was accompanied by at
least one gratifying circumstance, that everybody
seemed very glad when it was over. The girls,
who had joined in the responses to the prayers
with great zeal and apparent zest, and in divers
degrees of shrillness, now rustled and shuffled
into their places again, and Mrs. Bunnycastle
proceeded to promulgate divers bills of pains
and penalties, in the shape of lessons and bad
marks for offences committed between the setting
of the sun on the previous evening, and the
rising of the same that morning; and then, when
one young lady had broken into a dismal howl
at being condemned to learn by heart a whole
page of Télémaque, and another had been
relegated to the penal study of a cheerful genealogy
in Genesis, and a third had seen the prospect
of the after-dinner play-hour dashed from her
lips by the stern behest to copy out thrice the
verb Se Désobéir, and when all the inculpated
young ladies had vehemently denied the sins of
omission and commission imputed to them, and
when the governesses appealed to had emitted
lava floods of crimination and recrimination, and
when Mrs. Bunnycastle had rapped her desk
several times in a minatory manner, with the
dean's volume of homilies, and somebody's ears
had been boxed for the law of kindness did not
exclude some occasional commentaries and
marginal references of a sterner character—the cook
of Rhododendron House who, to all appearance,
had been lying in wait below till the climax of
shrill outcry and uproar should be reached,
suddenly burst upon the assembly, not in person,
but vicariously, by ringing the bell for breakfast.
A very hot person was the cook. She
would bend over her saucepans in the kitchen
till she attained, as it seemed, a red heat, and
would then rush up stairs into the playground,
and tug at the bell till she was cool: thus
triumphantly vindicating the principle of counter-
irritation.

THE RUPEE TO THE RESCUE.

THERE is an awful state of things in India
just now. People are making more money than
there is money to make, and payment is becoming
impossible. This, I believe, is the real
meaning of the " commercial crisis " which has
for some time past been threatened in the three
presidencies. Trade never was in such a
flourishing condition. Given, a pretext of any
kind of plausibility, and a capitalist is at hand.
You need not go for him to business haunts.
He may be found anywhere—in clubs or hotels,
encountered at street corners, or picked up at
the band. Opium, tea, cotton, castor oil—
native produce of all kinds, even to unfortunate
indigo—nothing comes amiss to him. "Europe
goods," for whose numbers legion is no name,
find speculators equally abundant. And such
has been the high pressure of transactions for
many months past, that an explosion would have
been inevitable long since, but for the safety-
valve of that glorious invention—limited
liability. During the past year limited liability
has been quinine, cooling diet, and ice to the
head of the commercial fever. Companies
accordingly have been formed for every conceivable
purpose— to develop resources or to
create them: to supply existing requirements or
to make wants nobody ever thought of by
providing means for their gratification. Old worlds
of speculation, in fact, have been exhausted,
and new ones imagined, simply because men
must find something to do with their money.
As a last resort, the private business of
individuals has been turned into " fields," wherein
hundreds could find space for kicking up their
superfluous heels. Your tailor, whom you have
hitherto treated as an individual, sends you in
your new bill, and your old one too, it may be,
not to mention your middle-aged one, as " The
Asiatic Clothing Company, limited," and instead
of one creditor you find you have five hundred,
with a collective capacity to be paid which
there is no resisting. Your bootmaker—in
whose small account are some trifling items
for saddles and silver-mounted harnesses—
develops in a similar manner, and " The Cape
Comorin and Himalaya Leather Company,
limited," reminds you of your past liability and
solicits future favours. The livery-stable where
buggies and horses are let out to the vehicleless
and studless ensign, expands in a similar manner;
and the other day there were in Calcutta
companies to supply every possible want of the
public, even to the cutting of your hair and the
shaving of your chin.

Everybody said that it could not last. But
while it did, they made their fortunes, and after
them the deluge, of course. Well, the deluge
has not quite come, but a sufficient amount of
cold water has been cast upon the market to