! I see her now in the shabby grey alpaca, with the
inkstains on it. Perhaps a day at "Glorious Goodwood," or anywhere else
in the fresh air, might have put some colour into her cheeks.

Our proprietor--one of the most unashamedly ignorant men I ever met--I
remember his gravely informing a correspondent once that Ben Jonson had
written _Rabelais_ to pay for his mother's funeral, and only laughing
good-naturedly when his mistakes were pointed out to him--wrote with the
aid of a cheap encyclopedia the pages devoted to "General Information,"
and did them on the whole remarkably well; while our office boy, with an
excellent pair of scissors for his assistant, was responsible for our
supply of "Wit and Humour."

It was hard work, and the pay was poor, what sustained us was the
consciousness that we were instructing and improving our fellow men and
women. Of all games in the world, the one most universally and eternally
popular is the game of school. You collect six children, and put them on
a doorstep, while you walk up and down with the book and cane. We play
it when babies, we play it when boys and girls, we play it when men and
women, we play it as, lean and slippered, we totter towards the grave. It
never palls upon, it never wearies us. Only one thing mars it: the
tendency of one and all of the other six children to clamour for their
turn with the book and the cane. The reason, I am sure, that journalism
is so popular a calling, in spite of its many drawbacks, is this: each
journalist feels he is the boy walking up and down with the cane. The
Government, the Classes, and the Masses, Society, Art, and Literature,
are the other children sitting on the doorstep. He instructs and
improves them.

But I digress. It was to excuse my present permanent disinclination to
be the vehicle of useful information that I recalled these matters. Let
us now return.

Somebody, signing himself "Balloonist," had written to ask concerning the
manufacture of hydrogen gas. It is an easy thing to manufacture--at
least, so I gathered after reading up the subject at the British Museum;
yet I did warn "Balloonist," whoever he might be, to take all necessary
precaution against accident. What more could I have done? Ten days
afterwards a florid-faced lady called at the office, leading by the hand
what, she explained, was her son, aged twelve. The boy's face was
unimpressive to a degree positively remarkable. His mother pushed him