The landlady informed us that they were a family of the highest respectability. They never paid any rent, and owed money to all the tradesmen in the neighbourhood; but they always went to church on Sundays and were most respectable people. My mother asked why the son didn't go to work. "Work?" said the landlady, with a pitying smile. "None of the Ropers were ever known to work. The family is too respectable." There was another thing I saw for the first time in that house, and that was a drunken woman. The landlady, robbed of rent and food by the Ropers, who were too respectable to be turned out, had grown poor and dismal, and had taken to pawn her belongings for gin. I had never heard of gin before, nor ever seen a gin-palace. It was our landlady who bribed me for the first time to enter a London public-house--a flaring, reeking, typical London gin-palace. The sight and smell of the place filled me with a loathing which I have never forgotten. But "here's a penny for yourself," said she, "and it's a most respectable house." And that was my first introduction to English respectability. No wonder that I preferred Parisian wickedness! PARIS REVISITED Other days come back on me With recollected music, though the tone Is changed and solemn, like the cloudy groan Of dying thunder on the distant wind. BYRON. The stock-in-trade of the ten-a-penny poets includes a serviceable allusion to the pleasure derivable from a re-visit, after a prolonged absence to a familiar scene of earlier years. The wanderer, returning in a snowstorm, sees the dear old gables from afar, bathed in tender memories and moonshine. The snow lies in crystal heaps on the well-remembered window-sill; and the apple-trees in the backyard are loaded with frequent blossom. The boats are darting o'er the curly bay, the nightingales are singing blythe and free, the little lambs on the icy peaks skip up and down the flowering willow, and the wanderer's aged parents are standing on their heads under the ancestral fig-tree. And as the ten-a-penny poet gazes, enraptured, upon this pleasing spectacle from a conveniently adjacent mountain summit, his bosom heaves with many a joy, he flings his pack upon the grassy sward, and he too dances a festal hornpipe upon his head. If admirers of ten-a-penny poetry had anything to think with, they would resent this crude and humiliating imposition.