name and that of the Empress
Eugenie being perfect marvels of artistic and intricate workmanship.
Every process, from mixing the colours up to burnishing the gold, was
gone through in detail by this practical lady and her intelligent pupils
for my special edification, and I passed out a much wiser and certainly
not a sadder man than I entered this veritable hive of human bees.

No expense was spared in the education of these girls, low as are the
terms they pay. I saw quite a ruinous heap of spoilt envelopes and
fashionable sheets of thick cream-laid; for they have to make their
experiments on the best material, and the slightest alteration in the
position of a pin where the stamping process has to be several times
repeated spoils the whole result. Mrs. Fernando has also introduced
envelope and circular addressing by women, as a department of female
industrial work in the Technical Industrial School for Women, where a
number of females are employed between the hours of ten and four
o'clock, receiving satisfactory remuneration. She provides the females
employed in this department evening classes free of charge, to improve
themselves in general education.

I am an intense admirer of the female sex in general, and young ladies
in particular, but really when I came away, leaving my pretty
book-keepers and embossers to resume their normal work, and saw the
numbers of young ladies sitting listlessly over misnamed "work" at the
window, or walking languidly nowhither in the streets, I thought that,
without losing any of their attractions, nay, adding a new claim to the
many existing ones on our regard, they might with great advantage take a
turn at Mrs. Fernando's sixpenny lessons in technical education.

CHAPTER XV.

FAIRLOP FRIDAY.

Amongst those customs "more honoured in the breach than the observance"
which are rapidly being stamped out by the advancing steps of
civilization, are the institutions which we can yet remember as so
popular in the days of our childhood, called pleasure fairs. Like that
social dodo in a higher section of society, the "three-bottle man," with
the stupid Bacchanalian usages of which he was the embodiment, these
fairs are slowly but surely disappearing as education spreads among the
masses of the people. In the country a fair is a simple and a necessary
thing enough. At certain seasons of the year, according to the staple
commodities for the sale of which the assemblage was originally