where the inhabitants wore no clothes at all;
for there, at least, the chief might be
recognised by extra quantity of paint he
adorned himself with; and we might in time
become sufficiently initiated in the mysteries
of tattoo to tell the medicine man from the
peon, the young warrior from the old brave.
But may I ask how are we to tell any
one man from another (our own immediate
acquaintances excepted) by his dress alone.
The millionnaire may be walking past us in
an intense state of seediness, and the
spendthrift may hustle us half into the gutter in all
the bravery of "heavy-swelldom," cane, and
jewellery. There is a judge, I have heard, who
dresses like the frequenter of race-courses;
I have had pointed out to me a Peer of the
Realm whom I should have taken for a waiter
at a city chop-house; and I myself know an
actor—a very humorous and jocular comedian
indeed—who looks like a professed member
of the Society of Jesuits. Really, what
with the moustache movement, the detective
police, the cheap clothing establishments,
the shirt-collar mania, the
introduction and wearing, by peaceable business
every-day men, of the wildest and most
incongruously picturesque garments—such
as ponchos, togas, vicunas, siphonias, &c.—
nobody knows who or what anybody else
is; and the father may go searching for his
children, and the child for his parent, and the
wife for her husband, all echoing and re-
echoing, like Montaigne with his "Que-sais-
je?"—the one frivolous and vexatious, yet
recondite interrogation, "Where are they?"

Of course the public enunciation of this
demand will lead to the reception of some
thousands of letters by the conductors of this
journal from parties anxious to give full
information of where they are. They will be
astonished that we have been so long ignorant
of their whereabouts; and our "Where are
they?" will be quite swamped and put to
shame by a chorus of "We are here; we are
there; we are everywhere." None will abstain
from communicating their local habitations
and names to us; save those who have some
strong private and personal reasons for keeping
it a dead secret, where they are at all.
Meanwhile, pending the communicativeness of
the one class, and the reticence of the other,
where are they all, nevertheless?

Where, for instance, are the vast majority
of the advertisers and the people that are
advertised for? and, more than that, what
sort of people can they be? The Times is
full of such subjects for speculation; and I
dare say the clerks who receive the advertisements
themselves, and the compositors who
set them up, and the press-readers who revise
them, often pause in the midst of their task
to wonder where the seekers and the sought
be. Where is the "gentleman who
witnessed the brutal assault" on the other
gentleman getting out of a Chelsea omnibus
on Tuesday the twenty-second instant, and
who would confer an inestimable favour if he
would look in at No. 3, Muggleston Street,
Pimlico? Will he ever confer this inestimable
favour, this gentleman? Alas, we
may search the reports of the police
courts and the Middlesex Sessions for
months, years, and find no sign of him!
The assaulter and the assaulted, the lawyers
and the witnesses, may all have settled their
little business long since. Lawyers may have
been instructed, and they in their turn may
have instructed counsel, costs may have been
incurred, charged, taxed, paid, not paid, sued
for; the aggrieved party may at this very
moment be expiating his rash desire to obtain
justice, in Whitecross Street or the Queen's
Bench; the villian who committed the gross
assault may be coolly puffing his cigar on the
deck of the Lively Dolphin, bound for
Melbourne; the gentleman who witnessed the
affray may be (without the slightest
cognisance of his propinquity) sailing with
him on the salt sea, or in another ship
on the same sea, or lying near him at the
bottom of the sea itself; the lawyers may be
dead, their daughters dowered with, or their
sons spending, the costs; the Pimlico omnibus
may be broken to pieces or burnt, or we may
be hailing it at this very moment. The affair
may have taken all, or any, or none of these
turns. How do we know? What do we
know?

Where is the party who called on Messrs.
Ruggles and Fuggles in the course of last
September, and who is requested to call again?
What did he call for? Was it to tell Ruggles
that he was his long-lost son, supposed to
have gone down with all hands on board the
Chowder-Ally, outward-bound East Indiaman,
twenty years ago? Was it to ask
Ruggles and Fuggles if they had heard anything
of his (whose?) long-lost daughter, supposed
to have gone down with all hands in the
Mango, homeward-bound West Indiaman,
ten years ago? Was it merely to pull
Ruggles's nose or to call Fuggles a liar; and do
Ruggles and Fuggles desire to see him again
in order to serve him with a notice of action,
or to confess that they were in the wrong,
and tender him the hand of reconciliation?
Where is he, finally? Reading the Times at
this very moment perhaps, and in his
anxiety to learn the latest news from the
East, deliberately skipping the advertisements;
troubled with a short memory maybe, and
with the paragraph beneath his eyes, quite
forgetting Ruggles and Fuggles's names, and
that he ever called on them at all; or, very
probably, fully mindful of his September visit,
but determined to see Ruggles and friend at
Jericho before he trusts himself within twenty
miles of their house again. Perhaps, my dear
reader, you may be the party who called, and
when this meets your eye, will rush off to
Ruggles's incontinent, or to Peele's Coffee-
house, to consult the files of the Times for
the date of the advertisement—or without