ladies' dress, like dolls' pillows in convulsions, the display of which has always struck us as being a profane revelation of the arcana pertaining to the toilet of a beauty. Covent Garden Theatre, as we know it, was not opened till May, 1858. Of its predecessors on the same site two were destroyed by fire, one in 1808, and the next in May, 1856, after a somewhat orgiastic _bal masqué_ organized by Anderson, "the Wizard of the North," Gye's tenant at the time. This, by the way, was the third theatre burned down during Anderson's engagements, and the disaster led to a picture in _Punch_ representing Mario, the famous tenor, mourning amid the ruins of the scenes of his many triumphs--an ingenious adaptation of the episode of Marius sitting as a refugee amid the ruins of Carthage. _Punch_ was no lover of _bals masqués_, reckoning them among the things which they manage better abroad. Nor was he a friendly critic of Madame Tussaud, modestly housed at the Bazaar in Baker Street until the erection of the present building in 1884. _Punch_ owned that admission to her show was a test of popularity, but he condemned the Chamber of Horrors as ministering to the cult of monstrosity, and compared Madame Tussaud in 1849--the year before her death--to the witches who made wax models of those whom they wished to injure. [Illustration: THE HAPPY FAMILY] Chelsea buns are still with us, though it is declared in _London Past and Present_ that the tradition of making them is lost; the "Original Bun House," at the bottom of Jews' Row, was taken down in 1839, but its memories linger in the early volumes of _Punch_. There is a good series entitled "The Gratuitous Exhibitions of London," one of which, "The Happy Family," lasted for forty years later. The present writer well remembers in his schoolboy days the wire safe on wheels, stationed at the corner of Trafalgar Square, near Hampton's shop, containing cats, mice, pigeons, rabbits, and small birds, very much as in _Punch's_ picture. The nearest survival is the cage of fortune-telling birds one sees now and again. A charge of twopence was made for admission to St. Paul's Churchyard, and this was a non-gratuitous exhibition which _Punch_ bitterly resented, even to the extent of comparing it with Wombwell's Menagerie. The occasional raids of the aristocracy on Cremorne Gardens--which stood a little west of Battersea Bridge--have been described elsewhere. The gardens, which competed with Vauxhall as a scene for dancing, fireworks and various exhibitions--"The Siege of Gibraltar" was pyrotechnically reproduced in 1851--were not closed till 1877, soon after which date the house, built by the Earl of Huntingdon, and occupied as a private house by Lord Cremorne in the Regency, was pulled down and the grounds built over. [Sidenote: _The Dominion of Din_]