their samples, swallow a chop, rush off to their respective termini, and in two or three hours are perhaps more than a hundred miles away. Mark-lane for the rest of the week is a dull, dirty lane, with but few passengers, and very dark and dull indeed. Yet Mark-lane has its romances. Look around you; not a man perhaps but can tell you of enormous profits and enormous losses. The trade carried on here is of so speculative a character that but few realise money by it after all. Come to this stand. It was calculated the other day that the firm carrying on business here were losing at the rate of a thousand pounds per hour. Hear this factor: “I once bought some Windsor beans at an early hour in the morning at 32s. a quarter, and sold them the same day at 64s.” Yet our informant has been compelled to settle with his creditors. You may point to me a man who has not been reduced to this, but he is a _rara avis_, and he can tell you how, perhaps, another day or another hour would have made him a bankrupt. The rule is a crisis and a crash; not a disgraceful one—for the unlucky ones, many of them, manage to pay twenty shillings in the pound eventually—but a crisis and a temporary suspension. In some cases where a man has been in trade many years, and has accumulated a handsome fortune, one unlucky speculation scatters it all, and compels him—old, and destitute of the energy of youth—to begin business again. This is hard, but it cannot be helped. Men who have been on the Exchange long can tell you funny stories of how they came at seven in the morning and cleared handsome sums of money before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our ancestors had devised—in order that bread, the staff of life, might not be high in price—on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see if the flour is hidden there—an amiable weakness to which the mob was much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts of the old world and the new. PREACHING AT ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL.