Mummy wheat and all—would make Time
smile with pity, if the mouth of Time were
not immovable like himself.

One thousand eight hundred and fifty-two
years, only, have been numbered with the
dead since the Shepherds saw the Star in the
East. The lives of thirty-eight  men, each
living an average life of fifty years, would
take us back to Solomon's temple in all its
glory—to the pool of Bethesda, the feast by
the mountain, and the Sunday corn-field.
More; each century can boast of some
patriarch, some centenarian, some old Parr,
in some quarter or other of the globe. Acting
on this calculation, we should want but the
lives of eighteen men and three quarters, to
reach to more than the time of Herod of
Galilee, and Caiaphas the high priest.

Talk not to my man then, of your antiquity.
The lives of four fifty years' men, place within
our grasp Oliver Cromwell in semi-sovereignty
at Whitehall, Blake scouring the seas for
Dutchmen, Prince Rupert buccaneering, the
"young man " Charles Stuart " hard up " at
the Hague, entreating the Queen of Hungary
to prick him down corantos and send him a
fiddler. Seven men of the like age, flaunt Peter
the Hermit's cross in our eyes; pour the refuse
of Europe on the hot shores of Syria; pit the
crafty Greeks of Byzantium against the rude
half-bandit Latins; chorus in our ears the
Crusaders' war-cry, "Hierosolyma est perdita!"
Not quite twenty half-century men, and we
shall be at Hastings, where, in years yet to
come, the Abbey of Battle is to be built—by
the side of Harold the last Saxon king—of
Guillaume Taillefer—of William of Normandy,
erst called the Bastard, but soon to bear the
prouder soubriquet of Conqueror.

Antiquity! I might have had a grandfather (if
I ever had one, which is doubtful to Your Highness)
who might have fought at Preston Pans.
My great-grandfather might have beheaded
Charles the First. My great-great-grandfather
might have talked scandal about Queen
Elizabeth, when Queen Elizabeth was alive
to cut his head off for daring to talk it—or
for daring to have such a thing as a head
about him, if so her Royal humour ran.

Still, man, be thankful. The fourteen years,
ten months, and odd, allowed you to work and
learn in are sufficient. Who shall gainsay it!
Wisdom and Mercy have struck the great
average of compulsory idleness in man's life.
I take one moral of my man to be that an
Injustice or a Wrong, which seems in his
slight vision eternal, is but a passing shadow
that Heaven, for its great purposes, permits
to fall upon this earth. What has been, may
be, shall be, must be, cry the unjust stewards
and wrong-doers. No, my good friends, not
so. Not even though your families " came
over " with the Conqueror, or trace back
in a straight line to the wolf that suckled
Romulus and his brother. Be in the right,
keep moving and improving, stand not too
much on that small footing of antiquity,
or a very few generations of My Man shall
trip you up, and your ancient places shall
know you no more.

SILK FROM THE PUNJAUB.

SINCE it is not very widely known in India,,
of course it must be scarcely known at all
in England, that there is a considerable germ
of a silk trade at Umritser, Lahore, and
other towns in the Punjaub. There are
growing in the Punjaub mulberry trees with
no silk-worms upon them, and very little sunshine
from without falls on the germ of a
trade. A brief account of the silk manufacturers
of Lahore, read in that town about
three months ago before the agri-horticultural
society of the Punjaub, by its secretary, has
just found its way into our hands, and though
we have been terribly perplexed therein
among Khutree, Putpheras, and Taneewalas,
we have fought our way through a
shower of such whizzing terms as khora,
oora, vana, kuchur, guz, peta, chooree, sujee,
zubz, khe, poombee, and others, and have
taken by storm, in the teeth of the battery,
one or two safe positions. It is true that we
have been obliged totally to abandon our
attempt to master this parenthesis (jub
slmhur bur-bad hogeea), but when we say
that we have not been baffled by the information
that " the stock-in-trade of the putphera
consists of two oorees, costing six pies
each," that we were only for a moment led
to remark upon the unsuitability of pies,
especially those of a fruity and a juicy kind,
for transfer from hand to pocket in the
character of money, that we did not go more
deeply into any question of the merits or
demerits of a pie currency, or inquire how
many hours any youth under such a monetary
system could be supposed able to avoid
breaking into his pocket-money, it is evident
that we have not been altogether mowed
down by the hostile regiments of Chowdrees,
Churkhs, and Kuchurs. We have enjoyed the
pleasure of a little Indian conquest, and after
all our battles with the Churkhs and Chowdrees,
this information following is what
remains to us as masters of the field.

Ruiijeet Singh, as became the first gentleman
in the Punjaub, kept a well-dressed
court; he and his sirdars, and many of their
military retainers, wore a great deal of silk,
and their patronage gave full employment
to the local weavers. There were oppressive
imposts which checked any display of mercantile
enterprise, or growth of trade by
foreign intercourse; therefore it happened
that before, and in the time of Runjeet Singh,
the silk made in the Sikh dominions rarely
crossed the Sutlej, and was almost unknown
among the English. The patronage of
Runjeet Singh being now lost, and the
trammels of trade being now loosened, the
silk trade of Umritser, Lahore, and other
towns in their position, must get a little name