built to one architectural formula, and all pinchbeck, ostentatious, and unlovely. No person of judgment, nobody possessed of a ray of the philosophic spirit, can gaze upon them without concluding at once that the English do not know how to live. Take a street of these villas, big or little, and what do you find? You note, first, that nearly every house, be it occupied by clerk, Jew financier, or professional man, has got a highfalutin name of its own. The County Council or local authority has already bestowed upon it a number. But this is not enough for your suburbanist, who must needs appropriate for his house a name which will look swagger on his letter-paper. Hence No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, is not No. 2, Sandringham Road, Tooting, at all; but The Laurels, if you please. No. 4--not to be outdone--is Holmwood; No. 6 is Hazledene; No. 8, The Pines; No. 10, Sutherland House; and so forth. Then, again, if you walk down a street and keep your eye on the front windows of this thoroughfare of mansions, you will note that every one of those windows has cheap lace curtains to it, and that immediately behind the centre of the window there is a little table, upon which loving hands have placed a green high-art vase, containing a plant of sorts. And right back in the dimness of the parlour there is a sideboard with a high mirrored back. If you made acquaintance with half a dozen of the occupiers of these houses, and were invited into the half dozen front rooms, you would find in each, in addition to the sideboard before mentioned, a piano of questionable manufacture, a brass music-stool with a red velvet cushion, an over-mantel with mirrored panels, a "saddle-bag suite," consisting of lady's and gent's and six ordinary chairs and a couch; a centre-table with a velvet-pile cloth upon it, a bamboo bookcase containing a Corelli and a Hall Caine or so, together with some sixpenny Dickenses picked up at drapers' bargain-sales, Nuttall's _Dictionary_, _Mrs. Beeton's House Book_, a Bible, a Prayer Book, some hymn-books, a work-basketful of socks waiting to be darned, and a little pile of music, chiefly pirated. At night, when Spriggs comes home to The Laurels, he has an apology for late dinner, gets into his slippers, and retires with Mrs. Spriggs, and perhaps his elder daughter, into that parlour. There he reads a halfpenny newspaper till there is nothing left in it to read; then he talks to Mrs. Spriggs about that beast So-and-so, his employer; and Mrs. Spriggs tells him not to grumble so much, and asks the elder daughter why she doesn't play a chune to 'liven us up a bit. "Yes," says Spriggs, "what is the good of having a piano, and me buying you music every Saturday, if you never play?" Whereupon the elder daughter rattles through _Dolly Gray_, _The Honeysuckle and the Bee_, and _Everybody's Loved by Some One_; and Spriggs beats time with his foot till he grows weary, and thinks we had better have supper and get off to bed.