black, save for a broad, dark crimson sash which they wear across the shoulder and chest, and for a very slight hint of gold lace upon their small, round, short-visored caps. They are furthermore adorned with a small quantity of broad black braid discreetly applied to their tight, long-skirted surtouts. There is a kind of severe gentlemanliness about this costume which, when it is worn by a tall, slim, neat-waisted young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow moustache, is of quite irresistible effect. There is no such triumph of taste as to look rich without high colors and picturesque without accessories. The imagination is always struck by the figure of a soberly-dressed gentleman with a sword. The little riflemen, the Hussars, the Life Guards, the Foot Guards, the artillerymen (whose garments always look stiffer and more awkwardly fitted than those of their _confreres_) have all, however, one quality in common--the appearance of extreme, of even excessive, youth. It is hardly too much to say that the British army, as a stranger observes it now-a-days, is an army of boys. All the regiments are boyish: they are made up of lads who range from seventeen to five-and-twenty. You look almost in vain for the old-fashioned specimen of the British soldier--the large, well-seasoned man of thirty, bronzed and whiskered beneath his terrible bearskin and with shoulders fashioned for the heaviest knapsack. This was the ancient English grenadier. But the modern grenadier, as he perambulates the London pavement, is for the most part a fresh-colored lad of moderate stature, who hardly strikes one as offering the elements of a very solid national defence. He enlists, as a general thing, for six years, and if he leave the army at the end of this term his service in the ranks will have been hardly more than a juvenile escapade. I often wonder, however, that the unemployed Englishman of humble origin should not be more often disposed to take up his residence in Her Majesty's barracks. There is a certain street-corner at Westminster where the recruiting-sergeants stand all day at the receipt of custom. The place is well chosen, and I suppose they drive a tolerably lively business: all London sooner or later passes that way, and whenever I have passed I have always observed one of these smart apostles of military glory trying to catch the ear of one of the dingy London _lazzaroni_. Occasionally, if the hook has been skilfully baited, they appear to be conscious of a bite, but as a general thing the unfashionable object of their blandishments turns away, after an unillumined stare at the brilliant fancy dress of his interlocutor, with a more or less concise declaration of incredulity. In front of him stretches, across the misty Thames, the large commotion of Westminster Bridge, crowned by the huge, towered mass of the Houses of Parliament. To the right of this, a little _effaced_, as the French