"Pan" is Greek for "all," thought I; and "technicon" is appertaining to art. It means an exhibition of all the arts; that is, a Gypsy wagon with bric-à-brac, or one of these peep-shows, which exhibits to admiring youngsters Napoleon crossing the Alps, or Marius sitting on the ruins of Carthage. I let the curtain fall, and went back to my books; but in a moment I heard the caravan stopping just a few doors below, and I heard my bedroom window raised; and I knew that Hannah was half way between heaven and earth. I have not a particle of curiosity in my composition, but I drew back the curtain again, and looked down the street. The van had stopped at Father Letheby's new house, and a vast crowd surged around it. The girls kept at a respectful distance, whilst the men unyoked their horses; but the boys stood near, in the attitude of runners at a tournament, ready to make off the moment the first ominous growl was heard. The adults were less excited, though quite as curious, and I could hear the questionings over the silence of expectation that had fallen on the village. "Yerra, what is it?" "How do I know? It's the place where the circus people live." "O--yeh! what a quare place to live in? And where do they sleep?" "In the wagon." "An' ate?" "In the wagon." "Yerra, they're not Christians at all, at all." Then the men slowly opened the door of the wagon, and took out, from a mass of canvas and straw, a dainty satin-covered chair. A tidy, well dressed servant, with a lace cap perched on the top of her head, and what the village folk called "sthramers" flying behind, came out of Father Letheby's cottage, and helped to take the furniture within. As each pretty article appeared, there was a chorus of "oh-h-hs" from the children. But the climax of delight was reached when a gilt mirror appeared. Then for the first time sundry boys and girls saw their own dear smutty faces; and huge was their delight. But I am wrong. The climax came when the heaviest article appeared. Great was the curiosity. "What is it? what is it?" "A bed?" "No." "A dresser?" "No." "A thing for books?" "No." But one enlightened individual, who had been up to the great house at a spring cleaning, astonished the natives by declaring that it was a piano. "A pianney? Yeh, for what? A priest with a pianney! Yerra, his niece is going to live wid him. Yerra, no! He'll play it himself." Which last interpretation was received with shouts of incredulous laughter. What a versatile people we are! And how adoration and laughter, and reverence and sarcasm, move side by side in our character, apparently on good terms with each other. Will the time come when the laughter and the wit, grown rampant, will rudely jostle aside all the reverential elements in our nature, and mount upwards to those fatal heights which other nations have scaled like Satan,--and thence have been flung into the abyss?