evenings at the theatres are permitted to
see but one side of this tableau. The curtain lifts upon the group of
smiling ballet-girls, but it never unveils their private life. The
theatre is intended to amuse, not to excite commiseration for the
realities of every-day life around us. Why should anything disagreeable
be allowed? If it sought to make people unhappy, it would soon become an
obsolete institution.

With all these impositions, actresses and ballet-girls are proverbially
more tractable than actors, less exacting, more uncomplaining, more
unfailingly prompt in their attendance and in the discharge of their
arduous duties. Why, then, are they subjected to such grinding
injustice, except because of their weakness? And who will wonder, that,
thus kept constantly poor, they should sometimes fall away from virtue?
Their profession surrounds them with temptations sufficiently numerous
and insidious; and when to these is added the crowning one of promised
relief from hopeless penury, shall Pity refuse a tear to the unhappy
victims?

CASTLES.

There is a picture in my brain
That only fades to come again:
The sunlight, through a veil of rain
To leeward, gilding
A narrow stretch of brown sea-sand;
A light-house half a league from land;
And two young lovers hand in hand
A-castle-building.

Upon the budded apple-trees
The robins sing by twos and threes,
And even at the faintest breeze
Down drops a blossom;
And ever would that lover be
The wind that robs the bourgeoned tree,
And lifts the soft tress daintily
On Beauty's bosom.

Ah, graybeard, what a happy thing
It was, when life was in its spring,
To peep through Love's betrothal ring
At Fields Elysian,
To move and breathe in magic air,
To think that all that seems is fair!--
Ah, ripe young mouth and golden hair,
Thou pretty vision!

Well, well,--I think not on these two,
But the old wound breaks out anew,
And the old dream, as if 't were true,
In my heart nestles;
Then tears come welling to my eyes,
For yonder, all in saintly guise,
As 't were, a sweet dead woman lies
Upon the trestles!

FAIR PLAY THE BEST POLICY.

It is said that Lord Eldon, the typical conservative of his day, shed
tears of sincere regret on the abolition of the death-penalty for
five-shillin