WHERE ARE THEY?
WE have not the slightest desire of trenching on the province or interfering with e circulation on the numerous compendious little works, the authors of which are so desirous to know Who’s Who? What’s What? or Which is Which? in eighteen hundred and fifty three, four our five. We hope that the result of their inquiries will be eminently satisfactory to them; and what they will allow us to confine ourselves to the speculative query, “Where are they?”
Yes; where are they? “Whom?” you may ask. To which we answer – People – people who do and are doing the most extraordinary things around us daily and hourly; but with whom, in our whole life long, we seem forbidden to come in contact, and regarding whose whereabout we must needs be perpetually perplexed. They must be somewhere, these people, yet we never saw them, never shall see them, perhaps; we may have sate next to them at dinner yesterday, ridden in the same omnibus, occupied the next seat in the pit, the same pew at church, jostled against them in the city, five minutes ago, yet we are no wiser, and must ramble up and down the world till our span is accomplished, and our ramblings are ended, still bootlessly repeating the question, “Where are they?”
A chief cause for our distressing uncertainty as to where the people we are in search of are to be found, lies in the disagreeable uniformity of costume prevalent in the present day. We are worse off than were we places as observers in some savage country where the inhabitants wore no clothes at all; for there, at least, the chief might be recognized by the extra quantity of paint he adorned himself with; and we might in time become sufficiently initiated in the mysteries of tattoo to tell the medicine man from the peon, the young warrior from the old brave. But may I ask how are we to tell any one man from another (our own immediate acquaintances excepted) by his dress alone. The millionaire may be wailing past us in an intense state of seediness, and the spendthrift my hustle us half into the gutter in all the bravery of “heavy-swelldom,” cane and jewelry. There is a judge, I have heard, who dresses like the frequenter of race-courses; I have had pointed out to me a Peer of the Realm whom I should have taken for a waiter at a city chop-house; and I myself know an actor – a very humorous and jocular comedian indeed – who looks like a professed member of the Society of Jesuits. Really, with the moustache movement, the detective police, the cheap clothing establishments, the shirt-collar mania, the introduction and wearing, by peaceable business every-day men, of the wildest and most incongruously picturesque garments – such as ponchos, togas, vicunas, siphonias, &c. – nobody knows who or what anybody else is; and the father may go searching for his children, and the child for his parent, and the wife for her husband, all echoing and reechoing, like Montaigne with his “Que-sais-je?” – the frivolous and vexatious, yet recondite interrogation, “Where are they?”
Of course the public enunciation of this demand will lead to the reception of some thousands of letters by the conductors of this journal from parties anxious to give full information of where they are. They will be astonished that we have been so long ignorant of their whereabouts; and our “Where are they?” will be quite swamped and put to shame by a chorus of “We are here; we are there, we are everywhere.” None will abstain from communicating their local habitations and names to us; save those who have some strong private and personal reasons for keeping it a dead secret where they are at all. Meanwhile, pending the communicativeness of the one class, and the reticence of the other, where are they all, nevertheless?
Where, for instance, are the vast majority of the advertisers and the people that are advertised for? and more than that, what sort of people can they be? The Times is full of such subjects for speculation; and I dare say the clerks who receive the advertisements themselves, and the compositors who set them up, and the press-readers who revise them, often pause in the midst of their task to wonder where the seekers and the sought be. Where is the “gentleman who witnessed the brutal assault” on the other gentleman getting gout a Chelsea omnibus on Tuesday the twenty-second instant, and who would confer and inestimable favor if he would look in at No. 3 Muggleston Street, Pimlico? Will he ever confer this inestimable favor, this gentleman? Alas, we may search the reports of the police courts and the Middlesex Sessions for months, years, and find no sign of him! The assaulter and the assaulted, the lawyers and the witnesses, may all have settled their little business long since. Lawyers may have been instructed, and they in their turn may have instructed counsel, costs may have been incurred, charged, taxed, paid, not paid, sued for; the aggrieved party may at this very moment be expiating his rash desire to obtain justice, in Whitecross Street or the Queen’s Bench; the villain who committed the gross assault may be coolly puffing his cigar on the deck of the Lively Dolphin bound for Melbourne; the gentleman who witnessed the affray may be (without the slightest cognizance of his propinquity) sailing with him on the salt sea, or in another ship on the same sea, or lying near him at the bottom of the sea itself; the lawyers may be dead, their daughters dowered with, or their some spending the costs; the Pimlico omnibus may be broken to pieces or burnt, or we may be hailing at this very moment. The affair may have taken all, or any or none of these turns. How do we know? what do we know?
Where is the party who called on Messrs. Ruggles and Fuggles in the course of last September, and who is requested to call again? What did he call for? Was it to tell Ruggles that he was his long-lost son, supposed to have gone down with all hands on board the Chowder-Ally, outward-bound East Indiaman, twenty years ago? Was it to ask Ruggles and Fuggles if they had heard anything of his (whose?) long lost daughter, supposed to have gone down with all hands in the Mango, homeward-bound West Indiaman, ten years ago? Was it merely to pull Ruggles’s nose or to call Fuggles a liar; and do Ruggles and Fuggles desire to see him again in order to serve him with a notice of action, or to confess that they were in the wrong, and tender him the hand of reconciliation? Where is he finally? Reading the Times at this very moment perhaps, and in his anxiety to learn the latest news from the East, deliberately skipping the advertisements; troubled with a short memory may be, and with the paragraph beneath his eyes, quite forgetting Ruggles and Fuggles’s names, and that he ever call on them at all; or, very probably, fully mindful of his September visit, but determined to see Ruggles and friend at Jericho before he trusts himself within twenty miles of their house again. Perhaps, my dear reader, you may be the party who called, and when this meets your eye, will rush off to Ruggles’s incontinent, or to Peele’s Coffeehouse, to consult the files of the Times for the date of the advertisement – or without a moment’s delay will proceed to put the breadth of the British Channel between Ruggles, Fuggles, and yourself.
Where are the “descendants (if any) of Jean Baptiste Pierre Jouvin, who was supposed to have been a French Huguenot refugee in London, about the year sixteen hundred and eighty?” Wherever can the individual be, who seeks to find out descendants from so remote a stock? Is he Methuseleh, the wandering Jew, Isaac Laquedem, or the laborious historian of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes seeking to verify some document, to elicit some fact, to authenticate some date? Or is there perchance some Jouvin yet alive, a Protestant and a Frenchman, anxious to learn tidings of his old Huguenot ancestor – a rich Jouvin, a pious Jouvin, a kindly Jouvin, yearning to share his riches and his love with some one bearing his name, and descended from the race that suffered for the faith in the bad days of old? Or dies the advertisement emanate – dreadful thought! – from some wily Jesuit or fierce Inquisitor’s great grandson cherishing ancestral bigotry and ancestral hatred – actuated by fanatical hostility towards Huguenotism in general and Jouvin in particular, and thirsting to decoy him into some private Inquisition, there to torture him on a private rack or burn him at a private stake. Where are the descendants (if any) of J. P. B. Jouvin? Have they kept their father’s name, and faith, and trade, and do they yet ply the shuttle and weave the rich silks in gloomy Spitalfields. Miserable uncertainty! There may be Jouvins yet, but they may have re-emigrated – degenerated – their very name may have become corrupted. One may be by this time an Irishman – say Father O’Jowler, consigning (in oratory) Protestants to torment and on the little steps of his little altar fiercely denouncing the British Government, the Saxon race, and the theory of the earth’s movement. One Jouvin may have emigrated to America, and in process of time transmuted himself into Colonel Gracchus Juvvins, that fierce pro-slavery Senator and (prior to his bankruptcy and “absquatulation” from the state of New York) ardent Free Soiler. There may be descendants of Jouvin in England, debased, degenerated into Joggins, and all unconscious that their ancestors were silk-weavers in Spitalfields, be keeping coal and potatoes sheds in Whitechapel.
Where on earth are the people who send conscience-money to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? Absence of income and conscience (at least towards such a vague mentor as the government financier) would of course prevent my ever sending him halves of notes for unpaid income tax. Did you ever know anyone who did? Can you point out to me one single gentleman with a white waistcoat, a broad-brimmed hat and a watch and seals, and say – “There goes T.J., or L. B., who sent the Chancellor of the Exchequer fifty pounds yesterday on account of taxes unpaid.” Yet these conscientious men must be somewhere or other. What are they like? I have a fanciful theory – founded on what basis, I am, I confess, quite at a loss to tell – that the majority of these men of conscience are men with white waistcoats, wide-brimmed hats, watches and seals; furthermore, that they all wear low shoes, and take snuff from massive golden boxes. They are all immensely rich, of course; and the conscience-dockets in their cheque-books are mingled with numerous others relating to donations to charitable institutions, police-court poor-boxes, and cases of real distress. I can fancy the entries in their diaries running somewhat thus: “Attended board-meeting of orphan sympathizers at twelve; relieved the destitute at half-past twelve; gave away soup-tickets at one; flannels and coals at two; drew check for fifty pounds and enclosed it to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as conscience money at three.” I wonder how long after they have defrauded the revenue to any considerable extent their conscience begins to prick them, and how long they battle with conscience, and hocus him, and smother him, and refuse to listen to his still small voice. I wonder when it is they are at last persuaded to make restitution, and how they do it – whether with the ineffable felicity of well-doing, or with the uneasy satisfaction of atoning by a partial disgorgement for a grievous roguery, or with the tremor of detection, or the sullenness of self-reproach, or the horror of despair. Are the conscience-money senders, after all, not the white waist-coated, low shoed men I have figured to myself, but hard, stern, gaunt, grisly lawyers, bill discounters, bailiffs to great landlords, speculators, guardians, committee men, trustees, and the like? Are the suddenly overtaken with such a sharp and quick remorse for the injuries they have inflicted on those over whom they have power, or who have trusted in them, for the widows they have been hard upon, and the orphans whose nose they have ground, that with their trembling hands adjust the salves of gold and plasters of banknotes to the hidden sores of their hearts, and in a desperate hurry send tens and twenties and fifties all over the country; this to the widows’ almshouse and this to the orphan’s asylum; this to the water company for unpaid water-rate; this to the gas company for the falsifies meter; this to the railway company for having traveled in first-class carriages with second-class tickets, or exceeded the allowed quantity of luggage, or smoked in defiance of the by-laws; this to the Exchequer in part compensation of the abused commissioners and defrauded collectors of income tax? Whether I am at all right or all wrong in these surmisings, I imagine the payments of conscience-money are generally payments on account – on very small account – of the sums due to individuals or to government. I think if I had ten thousand a-year and a great many shares in a great many mines and railways, all purchased at a considerable discount, and all quoted, now, at a considerable premium; if I had a large house and many servants, and my aunt in Somersetshire had disinherited my disreputable brother Bob in my favor; if my brother Ned’s children (he failed poor fellow shortly after I retired from the firm) were in a charity school, and Ned’s widow (her dowry started us in business) taking in needle-work – if my last little ventures in salves in Cuba, and Brummagem guns Caffraria, and bowie-knives in Arkansas, and rum and brandy on the Guinea coast had all been very successful, - I think, now and then, when I had begun to think I was getting old, and that I had been a hard man, or that I had the gout, or a fit of indigestion, or the blues, - that I could send the halves of a few notes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as conscience-money: - reading the announcement of the enclosure in the next morning’s Times would help down my tea and toast a little. I think, too, that I should like to see my name in a few subscribers’ lists, and committee lists, and stewards for public dinner lists.
Where are the people who advertise children’s cauls for sale? And where, more difficult to find still, are the people who buy them – ay, and give ten guineas for them? It has occurred to me sometimes, wandering through London, to lose my way, and in some unknown street in some little known neighborhood come suddenly upon a dingy shop, in the window of which was the announcement: “A child’s caul to be sold here.” But I never had the courage to ask to inspect the weird article, possessing, according to popular superstition, more occultly nautical powers than the famed egg-shells in which, unless broken by the cautious egg-spoon at the morning breakfast-table, the unholy witches sail about in yachting expeditions on their hideous sabbbath. I had never the courage to wait till the unknown customer with the ten guineas arrived. He does arrive, I believe, to this day; but where he is I know not, neither where are the cauls or the children that are born with them. The places where they are on sale are sure published in the advertisement, but don’t believe that the original proprieters of the cauls come from or live there. The only place where I could imagine a child’s caul to be indigenous, would be at the herbalist’s, than which, with the solitary exception of a ladies’ second-hand warehouse, I do not know of a more mysterious and cloudy establishment.
There are two classes of people who, though their whereabouts is wrapped in much mystery I am not very curious about. These are the writers of the cipher or puzzle advertisements, commencing in somewhat this style:-
“Fxm5obtlmzyivk6oZitbhho8tmqgllpTT55gglolYi9.”
And secondly, the monoverbal advertisers: - the Pickackifaxes, Boot-jacks, No hearth-rug, How about X? and gentlemen of that style of literature. I don’t think that much good would result to us or to anybody if we knew where those worthies were. Besides, they, and the makers of appointments, and the sayers of soft sayings and the talkers of driveling nonsense in a newspaper, with forty thousand subscribers and goodness knows how many million readers, enter into the category I mean to descant upon some of these days when I ask, Where are the Ninnies?
Where are all the “perpetual commissioners for witnessing the deeds to the executed by married women?” The Lord Chancellor is perpetually appointing them; they have all curious names and addresses; but where are they? I never saw a perpetual commissioner; I never knew a married woman who was doomed to go through the awful ordeal of executing a deed and having it witnessed by one of these dread beings. Are they perpetually sitting, these commissioners? Do they never leave off witnessing the deeds I never saw? There is one Hugh harmer Hollowpenny, dwelling at Bettwys-y-boyd, to witness the execution of the deeds never, under any circumstances whatever, executed by the married women of that ilk!
Where are three-fourths of the barristers who are called to the bar? Do they practice, do they earn anything, does anybody ever see anything of them?
The gentlemen who have commissions signed by the Lord-Lieutenant, where are they? Where is the Court of Lieutenancy of London, and who belongs to it? I have seen a deputy lieutenant at a levee, but I want to know where he is when he is at home; what he is lieutenant over, and why, and all about it?
I don’t care where the dissolute Initials are. My private opinion is, that if they are foolish enough to run away from home, their parents are well rid of them. I have a little curiosity to know where the people are who call in Bedford Row or Southampton Buildings, or Lincoln’s Inn, in order that they may hear something to their advantage. I wonder what it is! My curiosity is checked by the knowledge that it will not be by any means to my advantage to find out; yet I can’t give up reading this portion of the Times every morning, lest there should be by chance a stray notice hinting that a call of mine somewhere in the neighborhood of the inns of court would be advantageous to me, or that there are some odd thousands of unclaimed stock or hundreds of unclaimed dividends standing in my name in the books of the Bank of England.
Where are the cases of real distress – the people who write the appeals to the benevolent, - the daughters of beneficed clergymen, - the widows of distinguished officers? I should like to know how many of these cases are indeed in real distress, and how many are as near as the first cousins to the honorable society of begging letter writers.
Where are the “Lord Mayor’s swordbearer’s young man” and the “Lord Mayor’s trumpeter’s young man,” and the “waterbailiffs young man,” when not officially engaged, and what are they like when not officially clothed? I wonder whether I ever dined at Greenwich with the waterbailiff’s young man. Where are the yeomen of the guard, and the marshalmen, and the sergeant trumpeters, and the persuivants-at-arms, when there are no coronation or marriage processions, no openings of the House, no state visits to the Opera. Do they wear in private life those resplendent crimson and gold doublets, those symmetrical trunk hose, those historical but hideous little hats with the red and white roses? Where are they? Where are the innumerable mourning coaches in long clothed that followed the Duke of Wellington’s funeral the year before last? If there were another state funeral, would they come out again? Where are all the thousands of Ladies of Glasgow, Abstainers of Lambeth and Members of the Primitive Church of Bermondsey, who sigh their so many thousand names to petitions for the redress of almost every imaginable worldly grievance, laid on the tables of the Houses of Parliament almost every night in the session? Where are the people who get up on those petitions and the people who write them? And tell me, O tell me more than all, where are those petitions themselves at this present time?
Where are they? And who answers where? And where, by the by, are all the echoes that have been perpetually answering where, ever since people began making frothy speeches? Where, where again, are the people who read frothy speeches when they are made and reported? Where are the “perhaps too partial friends” who have persuaded so many authors to publish? Did they know what they were are then they took those courses? Where are nine-tenths of the books so persuaded into existence? Do the friends read them until they are all imbecile together? Where is the Blank, this _____ who has been the subject of all those verses? What does Blank think of them? Is he as tired of then as I am, or as you are of me?
Still, where are they? Where are, or is, that noun of multitude signifying many, the Public? What sort of a public is it? Is it the “enlightened British,” the “impatient-of-taxation,” the “generous,” the “impartial,” the “discriminating,” the “indignant,” the “exacting,” the “ungrateful?” Have these publics any consanguinity with the “many headed monster,” the “mob,” the “swinish multitude,” the “masses,” the “populace,” the “million?” Has this public anything to do with the Republic, and how much? Is this the public which has so loud a Voice, and so strong an Opinion upon public topics, and a Public Service for the advantage of which all our statesmen are so particularly anxious? Where is this highly-favoured, highly-privileged, much-cared-for, much belauded, much abused, always talked of, never present when it is the subject of a joke at the theatre; which is always perceived to be a hit at some other public richly deserving it, and not present. Is the public composed of the two or three thousand weak-minded individuals who take Billierson’s Liver Pills, and Muley Moloch’s Treasures of the Oasis, and Timour the Tartar’s Medicated Cream? Are the people who read the Reverend Boanerges Blunderbuss’s Wickedness of Washing proved by Prophecy the public? Is it the public that believes in the Mission, the Divinity, and Angelic Nature of Thomas Towser, ex-shoemaker and prophet, who renounces cleanliness and predicts the speedy, destruction of the world and the advent of the Millennium every Thursday and every Sunday throughout the year, at the east end of London?
I should like to be informed, if you have no objection, where are the rogues who put red lead into my cayenne pepper, Venetian red, fuller’s earth and bad starch into my cocoa; chicory, burnt beans and chopped hay into my coffee; Prussian blue, gummed and varnished sloe-leaves, emerald green, and bits of birch brooms in my tea; chalk, water, calves’ and horses’ brains into my milk; alum, gypsum, and dead men’s bones into my bread; sand and clay into my sugar; cabbage leaves, lettuce leaves, hay and brown paper into my tobacco and cigars; glass into my snuff; devil’s dust, rotten thread, and evil odours into my clothes; cotton into my silk handkerchiefs; cast iron into my razors; charcoal into my lead pencils; bad brandy, sloe juice, and logwood into my port wine; turpentine, mastic, and water into my gin; pyroligneous and oxalic acids into my pickle jar; ground sealing wax and pounded sprats into my anchovy sauce; treacle, salt, coculus indicus, and laudanum into my porter; dogs, cats, and horses into my sausages; and drowned puppies and kittens into my mutton pies? Where are they, the great tribe of Adulterators? – the scoundrels who put villainous nastiness into wholesome food. Mr. Accum may have warned us that there is “death in the pot;” the Lancet may have sent forth its commissioners to analyse samples of teas and sugars; a miscreant may be detected once in four years or so, filling up cases of preserved meat with the vilest offal, and neatly packing the interior of forage trusses of hay with shavings, stones, and dead lambs; these hang-dogs – who have in their murderous frauds endeavoured to send out death and disease with the fleets and armies of England – may have their names gibbeted (in a quiet, gentlemanly manner) once or twice in a session during a languid debate in the golden House of Lords; - by where are they? There is another public whose whereabout I am exceedingly anxious to find out, - the virtuously “indignant” public, - the public that applauds so vehemently in the galleries of criminal courts, - that “with difficulty are restrained from tearing to pieces” notorious criminals, on their emerging from Bow Street after their examination and committal for trial. Now, nothing would please me so much as to introduce this public, the virtuous and indignant public, to the villainous and adulterating public; and ‘gin a public meet a public putting red lead into pepper, or sloe-leaves into tea, or offal into hay – and ‘gin a public beat a public, and kick a public, and pelt a public, it seems to me that the two publics would be very appropriately brought together.
Where are the people who “go about saying things?” I never go about saying things about other people; yet other people are always going about saying things about me. They say (I merely adduce myself as an embodiment of anybody), that I have a wife alive in Bermuda, that I ill-treat the Mrs. Present Writer, alive and resident with me in England, dreadfully. They say I don’t pay my rent, and that I have invested fifty-five thousand pounds in the French funds. They say that my plate is all pawned, and that bailiffs in livery wait at my table. They say that I am about to invade England with ninety thousand men next week; and that I was here, disguised as a Lascar crossing-sweeper, last Tuesday, reconnoitering. They say I have taken to drinking; that I have written myself out; that I lost four thousand pounds on the last Chester Cup; that I have exercised a sinister over the foreign policy of the country, opened dispatch-boxes, and tampered with dispatches. They say I eat an ounce-and-a-half of opium every day, and that Blims wrote my last pamphlet on Electoral Reform. They say I am going to become lessee of Her Majesty’s Theatre; that I set my house on fire ten years ago; that I am the “Septimus Brown” who was taken into custody in the last gambling house razzia; that I have a share in the French loan; that I have presented a gold snuff-box to the ex-beadle of St. Clements Danes; that I murdered my aunt, my cousin, and my brother-in-law years before the commission of the crime for which I am now condemned to death; that I am an atheist; that I am a Jesuit, that my father was hanged; that I am illicitly related to royalty; that I am to be the new governor of Fellow Jack Island; and that I cut Thistlewood’s head off. Now, where are the people who say all these things about me, about you, about kings, queens, princes, and chandlers’ shop keepers? You don’t “go about” saying such things; I don’t go about saying them. Where is your somebody and my somebody? Where are they?
Where are the Parties in the City to whom your money-lender is always obliged to apply to obtain the money he lends you? Where is the party who does not like the last name on the bill, and would prefer and additional name? Where is the Other Party, the only implacable party, who won’t hear of any delay in your being sued, sold up, and arrested? Where is the Third Party, who is always obliged to be consulted, “squared,” spoken to; who always holds the bill, and won’t give it up; who was so unfortunately present when your friend wished to mention that little matter privately to the other party, and who consequently prevented its satisfactory adjustment? Where is he? I ask again, where is he?
Where is the “gentleman” who has called for us during our absence from home; but who returns no more than the hat, umbrella, and thermometer which he is supposed to have taken from the entrance hall? Where is the gentleman for whom the silk-lined overcoat, or the patent leather boots were made, but whom they did not fit; which is the sole reason of their being offered to us at so reduced a rate? Where is that unflinching friend of the auctioneer, a gentleman who has such a number and such a variety of articles on property – from ready-furnished freehold shooting boxes, to copies of Luther’s Bible – and who is always going abroad, or is lately deceased? Where is the lady who is always relinquishing housekeeping, and is so strenuously anxious to recommend her late cook or housekeeper? Whereabouts, I wonder, are the two pounds per week which can with facility be realized by painting on papier mache, or by ornamental leather work? Where is the fortune that is so liberally offered for five shillings? Where are the smart young men that want a hat? Where are all the bad writers whom the professors of penmanship in six lessons are so anxious to improve? Where are the fifty thousand cures warranted to have been effected by De Pompadour’s Flour of Haricoes? Where are all the wonderfully afflicted people who suffered such excruciating agonies for several years, and were at last relieved and cured by two boxes of the pills, or two bottles of the mixture; and who order, in a postscript, four dozen of each to be sent to them immediately, for which they enclose postage stamps? Where are they gentlemen of the good education, who offer five hundred thanks for government appointments, legally transferable? Where are the other gentlemen who have the government appointments, and do transfer them legally, and accept the thanks, and keep the inviolable secrecy which is always to be observed, and where, WHERE, I say, are the government appointments which are “legally transferable?”
Where are the First-rate Men, the Rich city Men, the Twenty Thousand Pound Men, who are sure to “come into” every new project the moment it is fairly launched? Where are the buyers of all those eligible investments – the partakers (for five hundred pounds down) in fortune-making patents for articles in universal demand? Whereabouts in the daily, evening, or weekly papers, am I to find the enthusiastically laudatory criticisms of new novels (such as “A delightful work.” – Times. “The best novel of the day.” – Chronicle. “An admirable book.” – Examiner. “Worthy of Fielding.” – Globe) appended to the booksellers’ advertisements? Where are the purchasers of cerulean neck-ties with crimson and gold bars, the death’s-head shirts, the pea-green gloves that we see displayed in certain hosiers’ shops? Where are the libraries which would be incomplete without nearly all the new books criticized in the weekly papers? – and which, of course, have got them? Where are those hereditary bondsmen, who to free themselves must strike the blow; where is the blow to be struck; and how are the bondsmen to strike it?
One question more, and I have done. Where are all the people whom we are to know some of these days! Where is the dear friend to whom, ten years hence, we shall recount what an atrocious villain our dear friend of to-day turned out to be? Where are they all hidden – the new connections we shall form, quite forgetting our present ties of blood and friendship? Where are the wives unknown, uncourted yet; the children unborn, unthought of, who are to delight or grieve us? Where are the after years that may come, and where is all that may, and all that we already know they must, bring?