THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE.

WE take this opportunity of announcing a
design, closely associated with our Household
Words, which we have now matured,
and which we hope will be acceptable to our
readers.

We purpose publishing, at the end of each
month as a supplementary number to the
monthly part of Household Words, a
comprehensive Abstract or History of all the
occurrences of that month, native and foreign,
under the title of THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE
OF CURRENT EVENTS.

The size and price of each of these numbers
will be the same as the size and price of
the present number of Household Words.
Twelve numbers will necessarily be published
in the course of the year—one for each month
—and on the completion of the Annual
Volume, a copious Index will appear, and a
title-page for the volume; which will then be
called THE HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE of such a
year. It will form a complete Chronicle of
all that year's events, carefully compiled,
thoroughly digested, and systematically
arranged for easy reference; presenting a vast
mass of information that must be interesting
to all, at a price that will render it accessible
to the humblest purchasers of books, and at
which only our existing machinery in
connexion with this Work would enable us to
produce it.

The first number of THE HOUSEHOLD
NARRATIVE will appear as a supplement to the
first monthly part of Household Words,
published at the end of the present month of
APRIL. As the Volume for 1850 would be
incomplete (in consequence of our not having
commenced this publication at the beginning
of a year) without a backward reference to
the three months of JANUARY, FEBRUARY,
and MARCH, a similar number of THE
HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE for each of those
months will be published before the year
is out.

It is scarcely necessary to explain that it is
not proposed to render the purchase of THE
HOUSEHOLD NARRATIVE compulsory on the
purchasers of Household Words; and that
the supplementary number, though always
published at the same time as our monthly
part, will therefore be detached from it, and
published separately.

Nor is it necessary for us, we believe, to
expatiate on our leading reasons for adding
this new undertaking to our present enterprise.
The intimate connexion between the
facts and realities of the time, and the means
by which we aim, in Household Words, to
soften what is hard in them, to exalt what is
held in little consideration, and to show the
latent hope there is in what may seem
unpromising, needs not to be pointed out. All
that we sought to express in our Preliminary
Word, in reference to this work, applies, we
think, to its proposed companion. As another
humble means of enabling those who accept
us for their friend, to bear the world's rough-
cast events to the anvil of courageous duty,
and there beat them into shape, we enter
on the project, and confide in its success.

THE TROUBLED WATER QUESTION.

MY excellent and eloquent friend, Lyttleton,
of Pump Court, Temple, barrister-at-law,
disturbed me on a damp morning at the end of
last month, to bespeak my company to a meeting
at which he intended to hold forth. ' It
is,' he said, 'the Great Water Supply
Congress, which assembles to-morrow.'

' Do you know anything of the subject? '

' A vast deal both practically and theoretically.
Practically, I pay for my little box in
the Regent's Park, twice the price for water
our friend Fielding is charged, and both
supplies are derived from the same Company.
Yet his is a mansion, mine is a cottage; his
rent more than doubles mine in amount, and
his family trebles mine in number. So much
for the consistency and exactions of an
irresponsible monopoly. Practically, again, there
are occasions when my cisterns are without
water. So much for deficient supply.'

' Is your water bad?'

' Not absolutely unwholesome; but I have
drunk better.'

' Now then, Theoretically.'

' Theoretically, I learn from piles of blue
books—a regular blue mountain of
parliamentary inquiry instituted in the years 1810,
1821, 1827, 1828, 1834, 1840, and 1845—from
a cloud of prospectuses issued by embryo