The pantomimes, owing to the enormous number of people they employ, as well as to the great fillip they give to certain trades and occupations, play no inconsiderable part in the vast web of London life. That the Pantomime, as a yearly pageant, has so much increased in glory of recent times, is due mainly to the efforts of the late Sir Augustus Harris, who may, indeed, be said to have reached the high-water-mark of splendour in the Christmas show. Many hundreds of girls and women, often married and supporting families, are employed in the vast choruses of the Drury-Lane Theatre,--"the Lane" as it is called in local parlance; many hundreds of men, scene-shifters, carpenters, mechanics, and the like, are required for the production of its stupendous effects. Pantomime-land is, indeed, to those who know it, a country and a life in itself. From autumn to spring its rigors last; from October to March its workers labour. A few weeks before Christmas, the annual fever is at its height. Not only grown people, but children too, are pressed into the service; hence, no doubt, the pretty "steps" daily practised, throughout the year, by Cockney girl children before street-organs. Yet, the class whence these children are drawn is generally a more or less superior one; superior, at any rate, to that which one would naturally imagine. Once, in walking down Museum Street, I chanced to get just behind three nice little girls and their mother. It was a foggy, murky evening, and they were evidently taking the direct route for Drury Lane. They were pretty children, red-cloaked, rosy-cheeked, and neatly shod, and they tripped along demurely, holding each other's hands; their mother, neat also, if a little threadbare, walking behind them, keeping a careful and approving eye on her little flock. "Yes, they're all engaged for the winter at the 'Lane,'" she told me, in response to my sympathetic inquiry. "And it's a great help to me, it is, indeed; for my husband's ill, and he doesn't ever expect to get much better.... They're in the 'Flower Ballet'; the eldest, Lina, she's a Pansy; and the two younger ones, they're both Daisies.... Quite a short scene; they're off in twenty minutes.... Interfere with their schooling? nothing to speak of, and they enjoy it. Yes, I take 'em there, and fetch 'em back, twice every day; I can make shift to leave my husband for that time ... and I don't like 'em to run the streets alone.... But here we are...." a sudden lifting of the fog, a sudden glare of light, and then the Pansy, the Daisies, and their maternal attendant, were swallowed by the big jaws of the devouring "Lane."