childhood used to stare with astonishment-plain everyday matters of fact. Feasts hidden for years leap up at a moment's notice, and the plenty of the past is ever ready to subserve to the wants of the present.

We were the other day at a house not a hundred miles from Burlington-gardens, where wits are wont to congregate, the host himself the keenest-thoughted of them all. The feast of reason and the flow of soul, vulgar as the truth may appear, has a wonderful tendency to promote the flow of the gastric secretions; at least, on this occasion there was a general call for anything but ethereal viands, and so the banquet spread before us as we spoke. Fish, flesh, and game; and fruit delicious sent a fragrant odour through the room. Now fell we to.

"This pheasant is delicious."

"I am delighted to hear it," said the host; "he gave up the ghost just ten years ago."

"Nonsense: but this wild duck?"

"Tumbled over with a broken wing, I see by the fracture, in the same year."

"I suppose," said a doubting guest, "you will say next this milk is not foaming fresh from the cow?"

"Milked," replied our imperturbable host, "when my little godson was born, that now struts about in breeches."

"Come, now, what is the most juvenile dish on the table?" was demanded, with a general voice.

"These apples; taste them."

"I could swear they swung on the branch this morning," said a sceptic, tasting a slice critically.

Well, I will give you my word that a flourishing

neighbourhood up Paddington way now stands over the field where they were grown."

"Let us have a look at the water-mark," said a doubting lawyer, inspecting a canister as he would a forged bill. There was the date upon it of-what for provisions seemeda far remote age.

"I shall expect next a fresh olive grown by Horace, to draw on his Sabine wine," chimed in a poet.

"What a pity we can't bottle up all the surplus brats," said the father of a family.

'Yes, the day may come when one might order up his grandfather, like a fine old bottle of the vintage of 1790."

"God forbid !" shuddered the inheritor of an entailed estate.

And so the badinage went on. But we have given enough sterling proof of the value of the intention to excuse a joke or two, and conclude, ere we leave our reader like one of the canisters-an exhausted receiver.

LONDON STOUT.

ONE of the earliest things to strike the attention of our country-cousins is the universal appearance of the names of certain firms, painted in the largest letters upon the most florid backgrounds of the numerous public-house signs of the metropolis. "What does Reid's Entire' mean?" asked a fair friend of ours the other day, looking up with her brown eyes, as though she had asked something very foolish, and pointing to the puzzling inscription upon a neighbouring signboard. And, no doubt, a similar question arises in the minds of more worldly-wise people, and passes out again unanswered. Henceforth then, good people all, know that the word "entire" arose in the following manner :- Prior to the year 1730, publicans were in the habit of selling ale, beer, and twopenny, and the "thirsty souls" of that day were accustomed to combine either of these in a drink called half-and-half. From this they proceeded to spin "three threads" as they called it, or to have their glasses filled from each of the three taps. In the year 1730, however, a certain publican named Horwood, to save himself the trouble of making this triune mixture, brewed a liquor intended to imitate

the taste of the "three threads," and to this he applied the term "entire." This concoction was approved, and being puffed as good porters' drink, it speedily came to be called porter itself. The universal diffusion of this mild stimulant is indicated by other means, however, than the signs; you cannot go along a quiet street but you either see the potman, with his little rack of quart mugs brimmed with the frothy liquid, or rattling the shiny pots against the rails by their suspending strap; you cannot pass in between the ever-opening doors of the public without seeing the dilated eyes of some "thirsty soul" as he drinks, peering over the rim of the nigh-exhausted pewter. Great is the demand thereof; whence comes the supply? From what porterian springs issue these dark and foamcrowned floods?

To find one of these, our attention was the other day directed into that neighbourhood of the metropolis where, through the large glazed attic-windows, we see the glowing silks and satins just issuing new-born from the loom. In the very midst of Spitalfields stands the enormous brewery of the Messrs. Truman, Hanbury, Buxton, and Co., which covers nearly six acres of ground, and which, looked at from above, has more the appearance of a town itself than of a private manufacturing establishment.

Let us then enter this great establishment, and witness the Brobdignagian brew which is perpetually going on there. The first thing that strikes the spectator's attention is, the total revolution which takes place in his own mind as regards his own proper dimensions, and of those of his kind who are moving about. A stalwart six-foot drayman, with a pair of shoulders worthy of Atlas, shrinks down in the

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great brewhouse to the size of a pigmy. All familiar ideas of the relative proportion of things give way at once to a confused sort of thought that the kingdom of Brobdignag is come again, and that the little mites we see about are so many Gullivers. What other feeling can a man entertain who travels round the beer barrels of the establishment, by means of iron staircases, and, after an exhausting climb, peeps fearfully into the interior with the same sort of giddy sensation with which he looks down the shaft of the Thames Tunnel? The largest of these vessels are termed the mash-tuns; of these there are two, each containing 800 barrels of the ordinary dimensions. In these the malt and hops are boiled, after being mashed up with hot water, the process of mashing being performed by a revolving spindle, with huge arms, exactly like a chocolate mill. Steam is, of course, the great arm which works incessantly the Titanic implements. Steam, in fact, does everything; it lifts the malt up from the waggons into the lofts by means of a Jacob's ladder, or collection of little boxes working upon an endless gutta percha chain; it removes it from one granary to another by means of an Archimedian screw, working in a long cylinder; it lifts the barrels up an inclined plane; it cleans the dirty ones in a very singular manner, as we shall show by-and-by; it attends to the fires, and thus keeps up its own constitution; it stirs with a great spoon the malt and the hops; and pumps, day and night, floods of liquor from one brewhouse to another.

After the process of mashing, the wort is pumped up into a large copper, of which there are five, containing from 300 to 400 barrels each, where the wort is boiled