of their canes, and looking very much as if
they considered themselves as flies in amber,
neither rich nor rare, and wondering how the
deuce they got there. As useless as chimneys
in summer, seemingly, are these poor strongmen
done up in scarlet blanketing, with three halfpence
a day spending money, and nobody to kill,
and severely punished by illogical magistrates if
they take to jumping upon policemen, or breaking
civilians' heads with the buckles of their
belts, through their weariness. Aggravated
assaults, says the magistrate, as he signs their
mittimus, are not to be tolerated.

Anything else in Hyde Park at this high tide
of the season? Much: only a score of pages
would be required to describe the scene. All is
here—the prologue, the drama, the epilogue; for
here is Life. Life from the highest to the
lowest rung of the ladder: not only in earliest
youth and extreme old age, in comely virtue and
ruddled vice, in wisdom and folly, complacency
and discontent; but—look yonder, far beyond
the outer fringe—in utter want and misery.
There, under the trees, the ragged woman opens
her bundle, and distributes among her callous
brood the foul scraps she has begged at area
gates, or picked from gutters. There, on the
sunny sward the shoeless tramp sprawls on his
brawny back, grinning in impudent muscularity
from the windows of his tatters in the very face of
well-dressed Respectability passing shuddering
by. And the whole "huge foolish whirligig where
kings and beggars, angels and demons, and stars
and street-sweepings chaotically whirled," the
Spirit of Earth surveys and plies his eternal task.
Where is my Faustus? There—I cannot read
the German. Here is Monsieur Henri Blaze's
French interpretation of the mystic utterances
of the Esprit de la Terre, "Dans Ies flots de la
vie, dans l'orage de l'action, je monte et descends,
flotte ici et là: naissance, tombeau, mer éternelle,
tissu changeant, vie ardente: c'est ainsi je
travaille sur le bruyant métier du temps, et tisse
le manteau vivant de la Divinité." Sufficiently
weak, limp, and wishy-washy, is this French
Faustus of Monsieur Henri Blaze, I wot. It
savours of absinthe, and an estaminet where they
charge nothing for stationery. Turn I now to
another, and immeasurably greater translator:

In Being's flood, in Action's storm
I walk and work, above beneath
Work and weave in endless motion.
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of living
'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by.

"Of twenty millions," asks the author of Sartor
Resartus, "that have read and spouted this
thunderspeech of the Erd Geist, are there yet
twenty of us that have learned the meaning
thereof?" But, Sage, is not the Spirit of Earth
the Spirit of Nature? Is not Life the warp
and Humanity the woof over which, spread on
the "Roaring Loom of Time," the shuttle of
production is always plying, and what is
Nature: a field, a flower, a shell, a seaweed, a bird's
feather, but the woven garment that we see
GOD by?

When Humanity begins to fade out of Hyde
Park, and goes home to dinner, or to brood by
the ingle nook, dinnerless, or betakes itself to
other holes and corners where it may languish,
panting, until bread or death come; when only
a few idlers are to be met in the Ring, or
Rotten Row, or on the Knightsbridge road, you
sometimes see a solitary horsewoman. She is
QUITE ALONE. No groom follows: no passing
dandy ventures to bow, much less to accost, or
condescends to grin as she passes. A spare
slight little woman enough, not in her first
youth—not in her second yet; but, just entre
chien et loup, between the lights of beauty at
blind man's holiday time, she might be Venus.
She wears a very plain cloth habit, and a man's
hat. I mean the chimney-pot. She has a veil
often down. Great masses of brown hair are
neatly screwed under her hat. She rides easily,
quietly, undemonstratively. If her habit blow
aside you may see a neat boot and a faultless ankle,
wreathed in white drapery, but no sign of the
cloth and chamois leather riding trouser affectation.
She carries a light switch with an ivory
handle, which she never uses. That tall lustrous
black mare never came out of a livery stable you
may be sure. She pats and pets, and makes much
of her, and very placidly she paces beneath her
light weight. The groom keeps his distance;
she is always alone: quite alone.

"Who the doose is that woman on the black
mare, one sees when everybody else has left the
Row?" asks Fainéant number one of Fainéant
number two at the Club.

"Sure I don't know. Seen her hundreds of
times. Ask Tom Fibbs. He knows everybody."

Tom Fibbs is asked, and takes a "sensation
header" at a guess.

“That's the Princess Ogurzi, who was knouted
at the office of the Secret Police, by Count Orloff's
private secretary and two sergeants of the
Innailoffsky guards, for sending soundings of the
harbour of Helsingfors to Sir Charles Napier."

"Won't do, Fibbs. Try again. The Princess
Ogurzi died at Spa the year before last, and the
whole story about the knout turned out to be a
hoax."

"Then I am sure I don't know," answers Tom
Fibbs (who is never disconcerted when detected
in a fiction); "I give her up in despair. I've
been trying to find out who she is, for months.
She is always alone; quite alone. A Brougham
meets her at Apsley House, and the groom takes
her mare away. I asked him one day who she
was, and he called me Paul Pry, and threatened
to knock me down. She dines, sometimes,
quite alone, at the Castlemaine Hotel in Bond-
street. The waiters think, either that she's a
duchess, or that she's mad. She's the only woman
who ever dined alone in the coffee-room at the