napless hat was lifted up, and the brow wiped. At length he bent his way towards the two great theatres, paused before the play-bills, as if deliberating seriously on the chances of entertainment they severally proffered, wandered slowly through the small streets that surround those temples of the muse, and finally emerged into the Strand. There he rested himself for an hour at a small cook-shop; and, as I passed the window, and glanced within, I could see him seated before the simple dinner, which he scarcely touched, and poring over the advertisement columns of the Times. The Times finished, and a few morsels distastefully swallowed, the Captain put down his shilling in silence, received his pence in exchange, and I had just time to slip aside as he reappeared at the threshold. He looked round as he lingered, but I took care he should not detect me; and then struck off towards the more fashionable quarters of the town. It was now the afternoon, and, though not yet the season, the streets swarmed with life. As he came into Waterloo Place, a slight figure buttoned up across the breast, like his own, cantered by on a handsome bay horse-every eye was on that figure. Uncle Roland stopped short, and lifted his hand to his hat; the rider touched his own with his fore-finger, and cantered on,-Uncle Roland turned round and gazed.

"Who," I asked, of a shop-boy just before me, who was also staring with all his eyes-" who is that gentleman on horseback?"

"Why, the Duke, to be sure," said the boy, contemptuously.

"The Duke?"

"Wellington-stu-pid!"

"Thank you," said I meekly. Uncle Roland had moved on into Regent Street, but with a brisker step: the sight of the old chief had done the old soldier good. Here again he paced to and fro; till I, watching him from the other side the way, was ready to drop with fatigue, stout walker though I was. But the Captain's day was not half done. He took out his watch, put it to his ear, and then, replacing it, passed into Bond Street, and thence into Hyde Park. There, evidently wearied out, he leant against the rails, near the bronze

statue, in an attitude that spoke despondency. I seated myself on the grass near the statue and gazed at him: the park was empty compared with the streets, but still there were some equestrian idlers and many footloungers. My uncle's eye turned wistfully on each: once or twice, some gentleman of a military aspect (which I had already learned to detect) stopped, looked at him, approached and spoke; but the Captain seemed as if ashamed of such greetings. He answered shortly, and turned again. The day waned-evening came onthe Captain again looked at his watch -shook his head, and made his way to a bench, where he sat perfectly motionless; his hat over his brows, his arms folded; till uprose the moon. I had tasted nothing since breakfast; I was famished, but I still kept my post like an old Roman sentinel.

At length the Captain rose, and reentered Piccadilly; but how different his mien and bearing! languid, stooping, his chest sunk-his head inclinedhis limbs dragging one after the other, his lameness painfully perceptible. What a contrast in the broken invalid at night, from the stalwart veteran of the morning!

How I longed to spring forward to offer my arm! but I did not dare.

The Captain stopped near a cabstand. He put his hand in his pockethe drew out his purse-he passed his fingers over the net-work; the purse slipped again into the pocket, and as if with a heroic effort, my uncle drew up his head, and walked on sturdily.

"Where next?' thought I. 'Surely home! No, he is pitiless.'

The Captain stopped not till he arrived at one of the small theatres in the Strand; then he read the bill, and asked if half-price was begun. "Just begun," was the answer, and the Captain entered. I also took a ticket and followed. Passing by the open doors of a refreshment room, I fortified myself with some biscuits and soda water. And in another minute, for the first time in my life I beheld a play. But the play did not fascinate me. It was the middle of some jocular after-piece, roars of laughter resounded round me. I could detect nothing to laugh at, and sending my keen eyes into every corner, I perceived at last,

in the uppermost tier, one face as saturnine as my own. Eureka! It was the Captain's! Why should he go to a play if he enjoys it so little?' thought I better have spent a shilling on a cab, poor old fellow!'

But soon came smart-looking men, and stillsmarter-looking ladies, around the solitary corner of the poor Captain. He grew fidgety-he rose-he vanished. I left my place, and stood without the box to watch for him. Down stairs he stumped-I recoiled into the shade; and after standing a moment or two, as in doubt, he entered boldly the refreshment room, or saloon.

Now, since I had left that saloon, it had become crowded, and I slipped in unobserved. Strange was it, grotesque, yet pathetic, to mark the old soldier in the midst of that gay swarm. He towered above all like a Homeric hero, a head taller than the tallest ; and his appearance was so remarkable, that it invited the instant attention of the fair. I, in my simplicity, thought it was the natural tenderness of that amiable and penetrating sex, ever quick to detect trouble, and anxious to relieve it, that induced three ladies, in silk attire-one having a hat and plume, the other two with a profusion of ringlets-to leave a little knot of gentlemen with whom they were conversing, and to plant themselves before my uncle. I advanced through the press to hear what passed.

"You are looking for some one, I'm sure," quoth one familiarly, tapping his arm with her fan.

The Captain started. "Ma'am, you are not wrong," said he.

"Can I do as well?" said one of those compassionate angels, with heavenly sweetness.

"You are very kind, I thank you : no, no, Ma'am," said the Captain, with his best bow.

"Do take a glass of negus," said another, as her friend gave way to her. "You seem tired, and so am I. Here, this way;" and she took hold of his arm to lead him to the table. The Captain shook his head mournfully; and then, as if become suddenly aware of the nature of the attention so lavished on him, he looked down upon these fair Armidas with a look of such mild reproach-such sweet compassion-not shaking off

the hand in his chivalrous devotion to the sex, which extended even to all its outcasts-that each bold eye fell abashed. The hand was timidly and involuntarily withdrawn from the arm, and my uncle passed his way.

He threaded the crowd, passed out at the farther door, and I, guessing his intention, was in waiting for his steps in the street.

"Now home at last, thank heaven!" thought I. Mistaken still! My uncle went first towards that popular haunt, which I have since discovered is called "the Shades;" but he soon re-emerged, and finally he knocked at the door of a private house, in one of the streets out of St James's. It was opened jealously, and closed as he entered, leaving me without. What could this house be? As I stood and watched, some other men approached,

again the low single knock,—again the jealous opening, and the stealthy entrance.

A policeman passed and repassed me. "Don't be tempted, young man," said he, looking hard at me : "take my advice, and go home."

"What is that house, then ?" said I, with a sort of shudder at this ominous warning.

"Oh, you know."

"Not I. I am new to London." "It is a hell," said the policemansatisfied, by my frank manner, that I spoke the truth.

"God bless me,-a what! I could not have heard you rightly?"

"A hell; a gambling-house!" "Oh!" and I moved on. Could Captain Roland, the rigid, the thrifty, the penurious, be a gambler? The light broke on me at once; the unhappy father sought his son! I leant against the post, and tried hard not to sob.

By-and-by, I heard the door open: the Captain came out and took the way homeward. Iran on before, and got in first, to the inexpressible relief both of father and mother, who had not seen me since breakfast, and who were in equal consternation at my absence. I submitted to be scolded with a good grace. "I had been sightseeing, and lost my way;" begged for some supper, and slunk to bed; and five minutes afterwards the Captain's jaded step came wearily up the stairs.

THE merits of the railroad and the steam-boat have been prodigiously vaunted, and we have no desire to depreciate the advantages of either. No doubt they carry us from town to town with greater rapidity than our fathers ever dreamt of; and instead of the "High-flyer coach, averaging ten miles an hour," whirl us over fifty. No doubt they are convenient for the viator who desires to reach America in a fortnight, or for the Queen's messenger who must be in Paris within the next twelve hours. No doubt they are first-rate inventions for an elopement, a fugitive debtor, or a banished king. But, they have afflicted our generation with one desperate evil; they have covered Europe with Tourists, all pen in hand, all determined not to let a henroost remain undescribed, all portfolioed, all handbooked, all "getting up a Journal," and all pouring their busy nothings on the "reading public," without compassion or conscience, at the beginning of the "season."

That the ignorant should write ignorantly, that professional sighthunters should go sight-hunting to the ends of the earth, that minds born for nothing but scribbling should scribble to their last drop of ink or blood, can neither surprise nor irritate; but that they should publish, is the crime.

If we are told that this is but a harmless impertinence after all, we reply-No, it does general mischief; it spoils all rational travel; it disgusts all intelligent curiosity; it repels the student, the philosopher, and the manly investigator, from subjects which have been thus trampled into mire by the hoofs of a whole tribe of travelling bipeds, who might rejoice to exchange brains with the animals which they ride.

No sooner does the year shake off its robe of snow, and the sun begin to glimmer again, than the whole tribe are in motion; no matter where, all places are alike to their pens-the North Pole or the Antarctic. One of them thinks America an unex

hausted subject, and we find her instantly on board the good ship Columbia, flying in the teeth of wind and tide, to caricature New York. Another puts on her wings for that unknown spot called Vienna; sends in her card to nobles and ministers; caricatures them too; talks of faces which she had never seen, describes fêtes to which she would never have been admitted, and quotes conversations which she never heard. Another takes a sweep of the French coast, and showers us with worn-out romance and modern vapidity, till we are sick of the art of printing, and long for the return of that happy period when the chief occupations of the fair sex were cookery and samplers. To all this, however, there are exceptions; some of the sex, modest, well-informed, and capable of informing others, indulge the world, from time to time, with works which "it would not willingly let die." But our horror is the professional tourist; the woman who runs abroad to forage for publication; reimports her baggage, bursting with a periodical gathering of nonsense; and with a freight of folly, at once empty as air and heavy as lead, discharges the whole at the heads of a suffering people.

Miss Martineau, however, deserves to stand in another category. She is a lively writer; if she seldom enlightens the reader of her pages, she seldom sends him to sleep; she prattles amusingly; and by the help of Wilkinson and Lane for the antique, and her own ear-trumpet and spectacles for the modern, she makes out of an Egyptian ramble a very readable book. And this book is by no means a superfluity; for, excepting Palestine, there is no country on earth which possesses so strong an interest for the Biblical student; or will, within a few years, possess so strong an interest for the whole political world. France, Russia, and Italy, are probably at this moment alike speculating on the changes which threaten Egypt. The death of Mehemet Ali

cannot be far off. Ibrahim is sickly. The succession of eastern dynasties is the reverse of regular; and if by any chance war were lighted up at one end of the Mediterranean, it would be sure to burst out at the other. Egypt would be the prize of battle. To England the possession would be of little value; she has colonies enough, and she certainly will not be guilty of the crime of usurpation; but it will be of first-rate importance to her that Egypt shall not fall into the hands of a hostile power; for she cannot suffer her road to India to be barred up. Her natural policy would be to see it restored to the Ottoman. But how long will the Ottoman himself last? A Russian fleet at the mouth of the Bosphorus, with a Russian army encamped on the plains of Adrianople, would settle the occupancy in a week. In the mean time, France keeps up a powerful army in Algeria; and the question is, which would be first in the race for Alexandria? We observe that Ibrahim is building fortifications, and concentrating his strength on the sea-side; and the sagacity of this gallant son of a gallant father must often look to the sands of the Libyan desert, and listen for the sounds of the trumpet from the shores of Cyreniaca.

Miss Martineau is lady-president of the gossip school; and it is one of the especial characters of that school, to think that every trivial occurrence of their lives merits the attention of mankind. She thus informs us of the first idea of her journey.

"In the autumn of 1846, I left home for, as I supposed, a few weeks, to visit some of my family and friends. At Liverpool, I was invited by my friends, Mr and Mrs Richard V. Yates, to accompany them in their proposed travels in the East. At Malta, we fell in with Mr Joseph C. Ewart, who presently joined our party, and remained with us till we reached Malta on our return. There is nothing that I do not owe to my companions for their unceasing care. They permitted me to read to them my Egyptian Journal. There was not time for the others." All this is in the purest style of gossipry. Her first views of Africa belong to the same style. On a "lurid evening in November," she saw a something,

which, however, was not the African shore, but an island. At last, however she saw a headland, a sandy shore, a tower; but even this was not Egypt. So she steamed on, until certain signs gave the presumption that Alexandria lay in the distance. She "expected" to have arrived at noon, but was detained until twilight! All those things might have happened to her if she had been sitting in a bathing machine any where between Brighton and Dover,-the Martello supplying the place of the Arab tower, to considerable advantage. She then followed the route of the million, the Cairan canal, Cairo, and the Nile, up to the Cataracts.

She has a picturesque pen, and describes well; her art being to strike off the first impression on her mind, with the first impression on her eye. One of her fellow-travellers had asked her whether she would wish to have the first glimpse of the Pyramids; she made her way through the passengers to the bows of the boat, and there indulged herself with her triumph over the "careless talkers."

"In a minute, I saw them, emerging from behind a sandhill. They were very small, for we were still twenty-five miles from Cairo. But there could be no doubt about them for a moment, so sharp and clear were the light and shadow on the two sides which we saw. I had been assured that I should be disappointed in the first sight of the Pyramids. And I had maintained that I could not be disappointed, as of all the wonders of the world this is the most literal, and to a dweller among mountains, like myself, the least imposing. I now found both my informant and myself mistaken. So far from being disappointed, I was filled with surprise and awe; and so far from having anticipated what I saw, I felt as if I had never before looked on any thing so new, as those clear, vivid masses, with their sharp blue shadows, standing firm and alone in their expanse of sand. In a few minutes they appeared to grow wonderfully larger, and they looked lustrous and most imposing in the evening light. This impression of the Pyramids was never fully renewed. I admired them every evening from

my window at Cairo, and I took the surest means of convincing myself of their vastness, by going to the top of the largest; but this first view of them was the most moving, and I cannot think of it now without emotion."

It is remarkable that, after some thousand years of ancient inquiry, and at least a century of keen and even of toilsome research, by modern scholarship, the world knows little more of the Pyramids than it knew, when the priesthood kept all the secrets of Egypt. By whom they were built, for what, or when, have given birth to volumes of researches; but to those questions no answers have been given worth the paper they cost in answering. Whether they were built by Israelite slaves or by Asiatic invaders, for sacrifice or for sepulture, or for both, or for the glory of individual kings, or for the memory of dynasties, or for treasure-houses, or for astronomical purposes, or for the mere employment of the multitude-workhouses having probably found their origin in Egypt-or for the rough ostentation of royal power: all'are points undetermined since the travels of Herodotus. But that they must have cost stupendous toil, there is full evidence the great Pyramid covering thirteen acres; exhibiting a mass of stone equal to six Plymouth breakwaters, and rising to a height of 479 feet, or 15 feet higher than St Peter's spire, and 119 higher than St Paul's.

But this style of monstrous building perplexes as much by its general diffusion, as by the magnitude of its several instances. We find it not only in Egypt, where the Pyramids spread for seventy miles along the western shore of the Nile, and once evidently clustered like Arab tents, but in Upper Egypt and Nubia: they are to be found also in Mesopotamia. The Birs Nimrod, (the temple of Belus,) and the Mujelibè, near Babylon, were evidently built on the pyramidal plan, if not actual pyramids. They have been found in India. They have been found even on the other side of the Atlantic; and the largest in the world is the pyramid of Cholula, in Mexico, covering an area of more than forty-seven acres, or above three times the base of the greatest Egyptian pyramid. All the

pyramids, in both Asia, Africa, and America, have the sides facing the cardinal points, excepting those of Nubia,-an exception probably arising from the rudeness of the people. In many of those pyramids, remnants of the dead, and bones of the lower animals, have been found; but both may have been placed there for purposes of superstition. The resistance of the pyramidal form to the effects of climate has been surmised as the origin of the choice; but the equatorial countries of the East know little of the weather which, among us, destroys public constructions. It is at least possible, that a form so little adapted to dwelling, or to any of the common uses of life, or even to the direct purposes of sepulture, may have been chosen, from its resemblance to the shape of flame kindled on a large scale. The Egyptians chiefly buried their dead in catacombs. The pyramid was undoubtedly borrowed from the East; and, like the obelisk-also an Eastern memorial, whose general uselessness still perplexes inquirymay have been an emblem of that worship of fire, which ascends to so remote an antiquity, was the worship of the early East, and was, we are strongly inclined to believe, the general worship of the apostate antediluvian world.

There is no country on earth which more curiously substantiates the saying of the wisest of kings, that "there is nothing new under the sun," than Egypt. Every art of European life, and even of European luxury, finds its delineation among the tombs; every incident of society, whether serious or trifling, has its record on those subterranean walls; we find every occupation, every enjoyment, every national festivity, and every sport, from the nursery up to the assemblage of the wrestler, the runner, and the dancer. in short, the whole course of public and private existence, three thousand years ago, is revealed and revived for the intelligence and admiration of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. Why those miscellanies of life should be in tombs, where they must have been shut up from the living eye-why such labour of delineation, why such incongruity of subject to the place, why such cost lavished on designs in the grave, are all problems,