It is one of our Insularities, if we have a royal or titled visitor among us, to use expressions of slavish adulation in our public addresses that have no response in the heart of any breathing creature, and to encourage the diffusion of details respecting such visitor’s devout behaviour at church, courtly behaviour in reception-rooms, decent behaviour at dinner-tables, implying previous acquaintance with the uses of knife, fork, spoon, and wine-glass,--which would really seem to denote that we had expected Orson. These doubtful compliments are paid nowhere else, and would not be paid by us if we had a little more self-respect. Through our intercourse with other nations, we cannot too soon import some. And when we have left off representing, fifty times a day, to the King of Brentford and the Chief Tailor of Tooley Street, that their smiles are necessary to our existence, those two magnificent persons will begin to doubt whether they really are so, and we shall have begun to get rid of another Insularity. BEN SERRAQ. The French-Algerian magistrate’s chaouch or sheriff’s-officer, Djilali by name, was recovering a little from the out-of-countenance condition into which he had been thrown by his failure in giving a miraculous turn to the embezzlement of a couple of sacks of wheat from the backs of a pair of donkeys: he straightened his back, stood stiff on his legs, and abruptly entered with ineffable zeal on the discharge of his functions as chief-constable and crier-of-the-court. He felt himself in one of those happy moments when, after having well deserved a good beating, he was ready to transfer the favour to the first person he met. He was an eight-day clock wound up again, when just at the point of running down and coming to a stop. As he opened and shut the police-room doors with the loudest bangings and clappings--shouting for the plaintiffs to appear, and hustling everybody who stood in his way as he swaggered about the antechamber--the assembly present, still impressed with the sack-and-donkey scene they had witnessed, whispered from mouth to mouth and from ear to ear that, in the memory of mekrazeni, so accomplished a chaouch had never been seen.