PALACE LIGHTS, CLUB CARDS, AND

BANK PENS.

A CAPITAL article might be written on Things one can't make out." How many enigmas stare one in the face every day in the ordinary routine matters of life? Among other things that I can't make out, is her Majesty's dreadful extravagance in the matter of wax-candles. Not a chandler's can one pass in London without seeing piles of spermaceties ticketed "Palace Candles;" their wicks just singed to give them a second-handish look. One naturally asks, what can be the meaning of this? Is Prince Albert practising Herr Dobler's trick of blowing out a couple of hundred lights at a time with a percussioncap; or has the Master of the Household the perquisite of the grease-pot? The number of ships her Majesty has at sea, doubtless, justifies a pretty liberal illumination at the palace; but how comes it that so many of them find their way to Mr. Sperm's and others in the chandlery line?

Another thing that I can't make out is, where all the Club Cards come from? Order as many hundred dozen as you like, and the supply never appears to get lower.

It is insinuated that they are the rejected packs of club gamblers, never having been used but once for fear of fraud; but all the hells in London, if they were to try for it, could not supply as many as you could obtain in the next street. The cardmakers, I suspect, must have a workshop for their manufacture in some concealed den, where the artizans, dressed as gentlemen of fashion, play furiously away for enormous imaginary stakes, until they sit up to their knees in rejected packs, which are then taken away, after having undergone the due ordeal previous to sale. I have heard people of imaginative turns of minds, sometimes when they have been gently gliding out the deals, with one of these packs, paint a picture of the estate that has been lost, perhaps, by its very pips, and of the ruined man rushing from the hell with frenzy to Waterloo-bridge, and a great deal more of the like fancywork, that the maker would have smiled to have heard.

Bank Pens, again, are called upon to explain themselves. Where do they come from in such quantities? Are we to believe, as the stationers would have us, that they are the discarded quills of Threadneedle or Lombard Street? It certainly gives us a vast idea of the profuseness of Bank stationery. Merciful clerks, no doubt, like not to exhaust the willing pen, by "carrying forward " such heavy sums from page to page, and so have many relays for the work. Be that as it may, Bank Pens always seem to have been oppressed with too much calculating, for they manage to split right up in the head by themselves, after the slightest exertion. Inspecting a bundle of them that now lies before me, I find that they are all dipped into the ink exactly the same depth, so that the

clerk who last used them must, in some momentary frenzy, have gone to work with the whole quarter of a hundred.

These three things are a puzzle to me as great as the Chinese nest of balls. I have turned them over and over in my mind without even hitting upon their rationale, and so I shall go on perplexed, I fear, to my grave.

THE GREAT MILITARY-CLOTHING ESTABLISHMENT AT PIMLICO.

IN that dreary part of Pimlico which abuts upon the river Thames, close to Messrs. Cubitt's great building establishment, the government have lately dropped a little acorn, which, in time to come, will, without doubt, develop, as government acorns so well know how to do, into a gigantic oak. We allude to the new MilitaryClothing Establishment which seems to have sprung up here in a night, vice Weedon, retired. A great quadrangle is already completed, and we suspect that, ere long, a large portion of Messrs. Cubitt's dominions will be annexed.

We hear so much about England's little army, that the reader may wonder why the country requires these acres of buildings to contain its very moderate wardrobe; but if we have few fighting-men at home, we forget the growing boys we have to provide for all over the world, and especially in India.

Taking the royal troops, the militia, and our Indian armies, our entire force does not fall far short of 400,000 fighting men, the clothing and necessaries for the whole

of whom have to be issued from this establishment. We were prepared, therefore, to meet with a wholesale display within these walls; but the reality far exceeded our expectations. For instance, in the fine room we first entered, -100 feet long by 40 broad,-our eye fell upon a solid wall running down its entire length, some 14 feet high and 12 feet thick, substantial enough to withstand a heavy battery. This black-brown-looking mass, on a narrower inspection, we found to be built up in a very workman-like manner of Bluchers and shoes. Some people tell you that a million is a number of which we have no conception from merely looking at the figures or signs expressive of that quantity; but here we have more than a third of that impossible "sum-tottle" before our very eyes. There are 380,000 boots and shoes, of all sizes, built into the brownlooking bastion, that first greeted our eyes in this Brobdignagian establishment, and these were not all. At regular intervals, all down this long room, rose what we may perhaps be allowed to call haycocks of boots-Wellingtons for the cavalry, so disposed with their feet in the centre, and their long upper-leathers hung outward, as to form huge cones of leather.

"But," said we to the commissariat-officer who obligingly conducted us round the establishment, "how are soldiers fitted ?"

"Oh," he replied, "we make half a dozen sizes, and they are sure some of them to fit."

It was a simple question, we confess, but it never struck us at the moment that soldiers' feet never dare to be so far out of regulation as to require fitting. And where, thought we, a twelvemonth hence may all these shoes be? Pos