is parted from the roadway by iron railings, inside which a half-door opens on the steps which lead down into a cellar. A young man, clad in a dirty waistcoat and a jersey bright with bars of mauve and yellow, stands at the entrance and bids you wait a moment. The performance is just over, and the audience are coming forth.

Some great, strong, bare-headed girls come first, to each of whom he puts the question, "Satisfied, my dear?" Each answers in the affirmative. Small boys are all "Tommy" to him, and are all similarly questioned. Then a stout woman in a big white apron and faded bonnet struggles up the stairs and draws in a great breath of the air, which is laden with the odour of fried fish and boiling oil. "Satisfied, mother?” says the showman. “Yes, my dear, and more than satisfied."

"Thank you, mother." And then you are at liberty to pay your penny and enter.

The cellar measures some ten feet by twelve; as for its height, one can best describe it by stating that the flaring paraffin lamp is suspended from a hook in the boards of the raftered ceiling, and the flame of it is on a level with the top button of one's waistcoat. The floor is apparently of soot. At the end of the wall opposite the entrance is a passage closed by a dirty striped curtain. Against the same wall are some boxes covered with American cloth. The atmosphere is stifling, and even tobacco is of little avail to mitigate its nastiness.

In a very few minutes the audience has entered. Most noticeable are some big strong girls in white aprons with fringed hair on their foreheads, who at once proceed to exchange chaff with certain small boys who appear to be temporarily in charge of the show. There are one or two pale-faced, under-sized men in black suits, who expectorate a good deal and exchange dubious jokes; a very respectable person who has brought his sweetheart, and begins to doubt if he did wisely; a better class workman who expresses a certain contempt for the show, being well acquainted with the South London Palace, and Walworth's own musichall, the Montpellier; and others to the number of thirty, or thereabouts. Among these is a child of ten, very pretty in the bigeyed London fashion, who surveys the scene with infinite amusement from the doorway. And when you have begun to think that you must go or die of suffocation, the show begins.

The man whose acquaintance you have made at the entrance now appears from

behind the curtain, and explains that he will first of all exhibit the wonderful two-headed ox which was born, date and a place given. Then one of the boxes is turned round, and you behold a stuffed calf, having a second head tucked away at the side of its neck. Somehow the effect is pathetic in the extreme, the second head is so glaringly out of place. Next comes another box, containing a stuffed lamb, with two heads and an indefinite number of limbs and bodies. And then the Indian Prince enters, simply clad in a shako and petticoat of dirty sheepskin.

He makes a variety of uncouth guttural noises, stamping on the soot floor with his bare feet, and gesticulating frantically. But, as the showman says, always referring to him as "this human being:" "It ain't to hear him pray nor to see him dance, but for talent that's in him." He hands some knuckle-bones to the man, who puts them into his mouth one after the other until it holds five, and is horribly distended; he makes grimaces. Now," says the showman, "put your hands together and give him a clap." Which done, the "human being" ejects the knuckle-bones from his mouth with horrible grimaces until at last only one remains. This he gets between his teeth and his lower lip, showing what the proprietor terms "A nice mouth to kiss a girl with." The exhibition is not a little disgusting.

But greater things are to come. The proprietor takes up another box; in it, behind glass, is vaguely discerned what what looks like the image of a small monkey in brown clay. This, we are told, is a strange creature, "half fish and half female," caught by "this human being” in unknown seas, and by him brought to Walworth Road. The showman waxes pathetic as he tell how wealthy he would be if the thing were but his own. "But it aint, ladies and gentlemen. It belongs to this human being."

Then a red-hot poker is brought in, and the Prince licks it, and, having carefully licked his palms, grasps it. "Put your hands together!" cries the showman, and then he announces that "the human being " is to take up a collection on his own account. And now his cry is, "Put your hands in your pockets." The man goes about the cellar making horrible noises and uncouth gestures. When he has received a donation he seems upon the point of apoplexy, and insists on your shaking the hand he has just

a

Such a solitude was George Brandon's as he sat over the fire in his luxuriously furnished flat in South Kensington. The flat and the furniture were alike new as well as costly. A year ago he had been very differently housed, struggling young journalist in dingy rooms in Camden Town. Those poverty-stricken days were over, when he hardly knew where his next dinner was to come from. The death of an old cousin who left no will, and from whom he had no expectations, had given him comparative wealth, and he was rising into repute as a clever writer.

But as he sat now, musing, with the unopened magazine on his knee, he did not look much happier for his change of fortune. He was dreaming of the past which chance, or Providence, had oddly recalled with extraordinary vividness to a memory which had never quite let it go. His eyes had fallen, at one of the station bookstalls, on the coloured print sold with one of the Christmas annuals that shower about our ears now with the autumn leaves-almost as thickly. A likeness which attracted him to it had surprised him more and more; almost against himself he had returned to the stall, with a cynical half-smile at his own fatuity, and had bought the pretty, worthless thing, because it reminded him of that village near the Thames, that little humble cottage, overgrown with virginia creeper, that summer three years ago, and of the very spirit and presence that made the place, the cottage, the summer, lovely.

The picture represented a young girl, slender, but round, whose curly hair surrounded an innocent and happy face. Perhaps the likeness was only superficial, yet it did remind him of Molly Ellis-poor, pretty, merry little Molly, the daughter of his landlady, a faded melancholy lady, widow of an unlucky curate. He had never been able to

understand how such a parentage could have given birth to Molly, whose apple-blossom face, dark blue eyes, and sweet young mouth were made for joy, and not sorrow.

"It's like-yet it's not like," he mused. "Molly was prettier, and less pretty. There was more irregularity in her face, but more character, more charm. That girl hasn't Molly's enchanting dimple nor her russetred hair. Her eyes were larger; they had a wistful look in them sometimes, though she was so merry, so full of life. They turned away from me with tears in them, I remember, when I said good-bye. How could I say good-bye and nothing more? I don't know; it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her what I felt that I loved the dear little thing as I had never loved any girl, that if only she would wait-wait-but I dared not ask her. I thought then it meant endless and hopeless years. How could I tell that to-day I should be rich, and dull, and lonely. Was it my fault? Yet I felt a beast as I went away and left her standing there and looking after me, so sadly, in the porch, with the red creeper hanging round her pretty head, which the sunbeam just caught. Oh! haven't I seen her a hundred times standing so and looking after me? Haven't I heard that sweet, young, round voice a hundred times, as I used to hear it before I was quite awake in that little white attic room, singing her innocent love songs? I used to say, 'That voice has no passion in it, though the child uses passionate songs.' But how sweet it was! They were desperately sentimental those songs of hers, full of nightingales and golden days, and all the delicious despairs of young love!

"There was one she always sang, 'Love is a dream.' Poor Molly! I hope she woke from her dream soon, and found a happy, common-place, waking reality of life! I seem to blame myself, but I was not to blame. I did not forget her. No, God knows I never did. Compared with her I know I am a worldling and a cynic, but I honoured her as much as I loved her. I wrote when I got this money. It was like a stab at my heart when that letter came back from the Dead Letter Office, with its cold official scrawl, 'Gone away---no address.' I daresay she's all right-married to some lucky fellow by now. She was sure to marry. There was the doctor's assistant, hat red-handed, sallow-faced bounder, who was so desperately jealous of me, and scowled over the pews all service time when I sat by Molly and held the hymn-book with her. Bless her little heart, how sweet her voice sounded in my ears! He may very likely be a full-fledged apothecary by now, and she may be Mrs. Gallipot somewhere. It's odd I can't forget the child. Sometimes I think I have. The memory of that halcyon month sleeps, and I go jogging along all right, and fancy romance is quite dead and gone, but it's only hypnotised. It wakes, and I know it is alive. A thing like that"-he glanced up at the coloured print which was pinned above his mantelshelf" sets all my philosophy at naught, and I am spooning and mooning again as if I were the drudging, poverty-stricken, unlucky, lucky, poor devil I used to be three years ago, before my fortunes mended and my heart hardened."

He sat and let his pipe go out. His melancholy, dark eyes dwelt on the smiling face, but he saw something else through and behind it. He looked into deeper, tenderer eyes, that used to falter and shift under his when they grew too ardent; he saw the flitting rose that a deepened inflection or a half-caressing word would make blossom on her cheek; he heard in the silence, that was only broken by the rumble and the cries of the street down below, the echo of a fresh, gay, and yet somehow pathetic voice singing in the orchard where the blackbirds sang. The foolish sentimental words came back that did not seem foolish then. "Love is a dream-love is a dream-and sad is the awakening." Yes, a dream! he was dreaming it all over again; and he did not want to wake. If only he need not-if he could annihilate time and space and bring Mollyhis own Molly-pretty and warm and sweet -to his lonely arms-his empty hearth.

*

He had sat thus, lost in the mists of memory, he did not know how long, without moving, without any consciousness of material things, of every sensation but that strange and passionate longing for what was lost and gone. Suddenly it seemed to him that this very desire of his produced a miracle.

A voice from that past he had evoked, an echo from those happy bygone days was it a living voice or did it come from nothing of flesh and blood but from a spirit that called

his spirit, telling him that his lost love, his unwooed sweetheart, had passed beyond these voices?

He thought so. He sat rigid, listening to that wild, sad, wandering voice, believing it came from no mortal woman.

And the voice sang, "Love is a dream-love is a dream-and sad is the awakening!"

It was Molly's song, it was Molly's voice --ah, no, that could not be! It was a delusion, born of the thoughts that had overpowered him; or else Molly was dead, was a disembodied spirit, and had come back to visit the glimpses of the moon for his dear sake, for he knew well enough the child had loved him, silently, with the fervour of an untried heart that hardly knew how much it could love.

So he sat on, like a frozen image of a man, and listened to that voice from the distance. He might have let it go by thus --it was getting fainter as if it passed, when a strong shudder passed over him and shook him, as it were, into ordinary life and consciousness. His common sense asserted itself; he found himself on his feet and awake. "It is not a delusion! It is no spirit!" He uttered the words aloud; it seemed to him as if someone else spoke them. All that he was now conscious of was a horrible fear lest that wandering voice should go by and leave him aloneshould be lost in the darkness of the vast and cruel streets, and pass once more out of his life for ever.

Before he realised entirely what he was doing, what overwhelming influence coerced him, he found himself, hatless, panting, in the quiet street, and the voice was silent. Despair clutched him. He had lost heragain. Which way should he turn? But farther off, some hundred yards distant, he heard it again, but faint and faltering. This time it sang the dear old ballad which he made her learn to please him, "Kathleen Mavourneen "- " It may be for years, and it may be for ever "He turned and darted towards the sound. He moved and acted like a somnambulist. The slender, trembling, shabby figure in black was close to him. A sad pale, pathetic little face, whose dark blue eyes spoke of heart-break, was raised, and the dim light of the street lamp faintly illumined it.

:

Oh, Molly! Molly! pretty, smiling, happy little Molly! have you come to this to this? He took her arm gently, tenderly, but even that gentle touch made