!
Instead of plants growing here, bricks will be planted.
Instead of girlhood, boyhood playing here, cash will be counted, stamps
will be affixed (savagely) by the public, and letters weighed when
the young women have time, and also inclination, to do so.
I, from the wild Western Continent, wilder myself, weep for this Park
soon to be devoured.
I am like a buck-jumper: I buck at it.
I am like the Giant Cowboy: only I am not gigantic, and I am cowed by it.
Oh, Northerly end of Farringdon Street! Oh, Coldbath Fields Square!
Oh, dwellers in all the adjacent slums and rookeries, redolent of
old clothes' shops, swarthy Italian organ-grinders, and the
superannuated herring,
Are you going to see another House of Correction--a Postal one--built
where the old one stood?
If so, it is _I_ who correct you: I, who am so correct myself!

[Illustration: A Salt and Battery.]

And you, too, Clerkenwell Gaol!
What are the dodrotted Authorities going to do with _you_?
Eh? Clear you away, and build a Board School there?
But why build anything?
Clerkenwell is mine: I am _a propos_ of Clerkenwell: Clerkenwell is
_a propos_ of me.
Morally, if not legally, it is mine; morally it is yours as well, you
wizened, pallid, blue-nosed, dunderheaded Metropolitan Citizen!
In this jungle of houses, what is wanted is fresh air.
Everyone of you toilers should be given the real "Freedom of the City,"
by having free spaces bestowed on you.
It is better to learn how to expand the limbs, and play rounders, and
leap over the frog, and fly kites,
Than to acquire in a school-room elementary education, consisting of
algebra and Assyrian hieroglyphics, spelling, Greek, Italian, and
advanced trigonometry.
_Allons_, then! _Esperanza!_ Also _cui bono!_ Go to your Home
Secretary, your Postmaster in General, and tell them that no
Post Office or School shall be built on this spot,
Because I, WALT, hailing hoarsely from Manhattan, have spotted it,
And _Punch_, the lustrous _camerado_, the ineffable dispensator, will
spot it too!

* * * * *

[Illustration: COMPENSATION.

_Effie._ "BUT, DEAR MAMMA, HOW CAN WE _HELP_ BEING SELFISH, MAUD AND
I? YOU AND PAPA HAVE ALWAYS GIVEN WAY TO US IN EVERYTHING! UNSELFISH
PARENTS ALWAYS MAKE SELFISH CHILDREN, YOU KNOW--AND _VICE VERSA!_"

_Maud._ "YES; AND, A