With that the lantern threw upon the wall another picture. It was an African desert, and an Arab on horseback was hunting down the swift ostrich, which with outspread wings sailed along the burning sand. At length, worn out by the greater power of endurance of his pursuer, he was taken and slain, and his captor rewarded himself for his trouble by plucking from the yet bleeding bird his waving plumage. In the distance, a caravan comes winding along towards some distant mart, to which the Arab attaches himself-the wells fail the moving multitude, and one by one, man and beast, fall and leave their whitened bones as a track-mark for future travellers across the wastes; but the merchandise is borne home, though human life is lost.

"You would not think, to see with what negligent elegance this feather falls," said the stranger, holding up its white sweep, "that man had given even life in the struggle to bring it to this perfection. But there, what's to be done?-we always thought more of matter than of man. We have not quite finished yet," said he, taking up the cane framework of the bonnet; "we must go to the New World for our next picture."

As he spoke, he adjusted a new slide, and showed a Brazilian plantation, in which the slaves laboured under fear of the cow-hide of the overseer. "The bees who make the honey," said he, with his cold sneer, "how grateful man is to them! I suppose you think we have no such slaves. I have two or three choice slides here," said he, holding up the transparent glasses—“a figure or so of an exhausted milliner, and a Spitalfields weaver in his little garret, weaving inch by inch glossy satin, whilst his own

poor family have only rags to cover them; but I have shown you enough of the misery that has gone towards making this little trifle. The pretty little miss, when she puts it on, and carries it so lightly on her head, will little think how it has been delved, and forged, and weaved, and built up into such a becoming fashion-but it is worth a thought about." With that he blew lightly on the scattered materials, and they rushed together again as speedily as they had before fallen to pieces.

"And now," said he, in the rising tone of one coming to his peroration, "I am not altogether such a bad sort of a spirit as you might have taken me to be. So I will give you a sentiment of much importance to the working bees in the busy human hive, and that is

A HAPPIER PRODUCTION AND A BETTER DISTRIBUTION OF

WEALTH."

And clapping his magic lantern under his arm, he wished me a good evening and disappeared.

"Why, Tom," said a sweet voice close to my ear, at the same time a soft little fist thumped me on the back—“why, Tom," said Anne, "you have been talking such strange things in your sleep this last half-hour. I told you how 'twould be, eating so many nuts." And truly I had gone fast asleep with my feet on the fender, and saw this vision.

And now, gentle reader, do not be angry with me if, imitating the tactics of the newspaper puffs, which begin with some alluring title and gradually lead on to the "Mart of Moses," or the as inevitable "Macassar," I have struck in your heart upon an universal sympathy,

and thus beguiled you into the less interesting channels of social economy. But for once the puff, like the foam of the tankard, is all on the top, and it will be seen, perhaps, that there is more substance in the matter below than the title warrants. Considering how important a portion of the community are the productive classes, it is no slight matter that we endeavour to rid their daily occupation as much as possible of the needless repulsiveness and danger that in too many cases at present attaches to them. As for the proposition of "A better distribution of wealth," it has occupied the attention of all the most enlightened economists, but they have looked upon it as a thing rather to be desired than capable of accomplishment. In the various joint-stock associations, however, and mutual benefit societies which have spread lately so widely among the middle and working classes, by which profits are diffused through the masses instead of centring in large capitalists, one of the methods by which the problem is to be worked is perhaps hit upon.

AERATED BREAD.

Ir certainly is not pleasant, in biting a thick hunch of bread, to find that you have made a section of a cockroach; nevertheless, however unpleasant, the discovery is instructive. The geologist, from a much meaner fragment of pre-Adamite life, bisected in a railway cutting, will tell you the exact condition under which the globe existed in some very early stage of its formation, and that muchabused cockroach is equally capable of telling a tale respecting one condition under which the bread which formed its matrix was produced. Everybody knows, or should know, at least, in these days of physical science, what the globe is like at that particular slice which is filled with saurians like the plums in a cake. But how few know anything of that substratum of urban life, the whereabouts of which is discovered to us in frosty weather only by a patch of thaw upon the pavement. That the staff of life somehow or other emerges from these underground caverns we may possibly be cognisant of, but how many of us have ever troubled ourselves to have ocular demonstration of what daily and nightly goes on in these sunless dungeons? The evidence of the cockroach in the bread, like the presence of the saurians in the blue lias,

indicates, it is true, the presence of a very high temperature in those regions, but we feel satisfied that there is a charming ignorance abroad respecting a manufacture which comes home directly to our breakfast-tables. The arrangement of a metropolitan bakehouse, then, literally described, is pretty much as follows. The oven is in the cellar, under the roadway, the mixing-troughs and kneading boards are in the basement. The heat ranges from 80 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. There is generally a privy under the stairs in some corner of the den, all the impure gases from which are sucked, as a matter of course, towards the furnace-mouth, ventilating the dough in the course of its progress over it. It is scarcely necessary to remark, that a temperature of the nature we have indicated cannot be without effect upon the skin of the workman; nevertheless, the machinery of these establishments consists simply of the baker's hands and arms, and, in some cases, of their feet! With these they knead the dough much as they did at the earliest times of which we have any knowledge. The result, with respect to the bread, we leave to our reader's imagination, but we wish particularly to draw attention to the condition of the workers. According to the report of Dr. Guy, the journeyman baker habitually works in the polluted atmosphere we have described from eighteen to twenty hours a day, and, towards the end of the week, nearly two entire days in succession! Is it to be wondered at that, under these circumstances, the trade of the baker is one of the most unhealthy in the metropolis? Compositors who work in a heated atmosphere, we are told by Dr. Guy, are peculiarly subject to chest diseases of a severe character; they spit