At half-past ten, a "crystal," as those cabs were then called, came to the corner of Fernando Street and Church Alley, and so we drove to the station. I left the key of the office, directed to the Spaniard, in the hands of the baggage-master. When I took leave of my castle, as I called it, I carried with me for relics the great straw hat I had made, my umbrella, and one of my parrots; also I forgot not to take the money I formerly mentioned, which had lain by me so long useless that it was grown rusty and tarnished, and could scarcely pass for money till it had been a little rubbed and handled. With these relics, and with my wife's and mother's baggage and my own chest, we arrived at our new home. ALIF-LAILA. THE ORIGIN OF THE "SERIAL." The monthly magazine, as known to our Western civilization, dates, of course, from a period this side of the re-invention of printing in Europe, or of what Bishop Whately wisely calls the introduction of paper in the West. Our sets of monthlies, bi-monthlies, and semi-monthlies only run back a hundred or two years, therefore--to the joy of librarians, to whom, be it confessed, they bring misery untold. But in the East, where printing has existed so long that the memory of man goes not to the contrary, it is almost impossible to say how far back was the introduction of the monthly literary magazine. This publication was accompanied with certain advantages and certain disadvantages, which sprang from the peculiarities of the Eastern calendar. The Eastern month being lunar, the magazine, if accuracy were consulted, had to be issued once in twenty-nine days, twelve hours, and forty-four minutes. On the other hand, the people of the East are less exacting or precise than we are in their estimates of time; and in the long run, if they had thirteen monthlies in one year, and twelve in each of the next two years, it generally proved that subscribers were satisfied. There is a story of two of these early magazines--universally known through the East, where, indeed, it is told in many exaggerated and impossible forms--which is worth repeating for Western readers not yet familiar with it. It gives both instruction and warning in an age in which every boy in college, and every girl in a "female seminary," regards magazine-writing as the chief end of man and of woman,--an age in which editors are feeling round, somewhat blindly, to know what their rights may be, or whether, in fact, they have any rights, which is doubtful. The story simply told, without any of the absurd adornments which are put upon it in the East, teaches all men how some of the most difficult editorial questions were decided there, and what are the delicate relations between contributors and the public.