water-steps to cry: "What Ferry, ho! Gadzooks, gramercy."
Many of the old houses, round about, speak very plainly of those days

when Kingston was a royal borough, and nobles and courtiers lived there,
near their King, and the long road to the palace gates was gay all day

with clanking steel and prancing palfreys, and rustling silks and
velvets, and fair faces. The large and spacious houses, with their

oriel, latticed windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs,
breathe of the days of hose and doublet, of pearl-embroidered stomachers,

and complicated oaths. They were upraised in the days "when men knew how
to build." The hard red bricks have only grown more firmly set with

time, and their oak stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down
them quietly.

Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved
oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston. It is a shop now, in the

market-place, but it was evidently once the mansion of some great
personage. A friend of mine, who lives at Kingston, went in there to buy

a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in his pocket
and paid for it then and there.

The shopman (he knows my friend) was naturally a little staggered at
first; but, quickly recovering himself, and feeling that something ought

to be done to encourage this sort of thing, asked our hero if he would
like to see some fine old carved oak. My friend said he would, and the

shopman, thereupon, took him through the shop, and up the staircase of
the house. The balusters were a superb piece of workmanship, and the

wall all the way up was oak-panelled, with carving that would have done
credit to a palace.

From the stairs, they went into the drawing-room, which was a large,
bright room, decorated with a somewhat startling though cheerful paper of

a blue ground. There was nothing, however, remarkable about the
apartment, and my friend wondered why he had been brought there. The

proprietor went up to the paper, and tapped it. It gave forth a wooden
sound.

"Oak," he explained. "All carved oak, right up to the ceiling, just the
same as you saw on the staircase."

"But, great Caesar! man," expostulated my friend; "you don't mean to say
you have covered over carved oak with blue wall-paper?"

"Yes," was the reply: "it was expensive work. Had to match-board it all
over first, of course. But the room looks cheerful now. It was awful

gloomy before."
I can't say I altogether blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief

to his mind). From his point of view, which would be that of the average
householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, and not that

of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved
oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no

doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does not lie
that way. It would be like living in a church.

No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't care for carved oak,
should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care

for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of
this world. Each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have

what he does want.
Married men have wives, and don't seem to want them; and young single

fellows cry out that they can't get them. Poor people who can hardly
keep themselves have eight hearty children. Rich old couples, with no

one to leave their money to, die childless.
Then there are girls with lovers. The girls that have lovers never want

them. They say they would rather be without them, that they bother them,
and why don't they go and make love to Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are

plain and elderly, and haven't got any lovers? They themselves don't
want lovers. They never mean to marry.

It does not do to dwell on these things; it makes one so sad.
There was a boy at our school, we used to call him Sandford and Merton.

His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever
came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful

rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular
verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of

weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an
honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a

clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew
such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.

Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn't go
to school. There never was such a boy to get ill as that Sandford and

Merton. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he
had it, and had it badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and

have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six weeks' period of drought, he
would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a

November fog and come home with a sunstroke.
They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his

teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with
toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never

without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever;
and he always had chilblains. During the great cholera scare of 1871,

our neighbourhood was singularly free from it. There was only one
reputed case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings.

He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and
hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn't

let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school-life

for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give
our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn't catch so

much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good,
and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us

fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make
us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught

colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till
the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to

the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the

oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair

notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of

three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic
beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we

prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that
gives them their charms in our eyes. The "old blue" that we hang about

our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a
few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses

that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they
understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the

eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day

always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-
pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in

the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the
beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now

break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and
stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?

That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It
is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots.

Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to
verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of

art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even
my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by

the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug

up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and