"The natural growth of the age of sixty-mile-an-hour locomotives," rejoined the placid Sigismund. "Do you forget that man is an imitative animal, and that the rate at which we travel has become the rate at which we live? Steam is the ruling principle of our age, and the pervading influence of our lives. Depend upon it, that ever since mankind began to exist, every succeeding age has lived faster than its predecessor. 'Time _was_ that when the brains were out the man would die,' says Macbeth; 'but _now_,' &c. &c. He isn't a bit surprised at Banquo's appearance, you see. A ghost more or less is nothing extraordinary in a fast-going age. And we've been accelerating the pace ever since Macbeth's day. It used to take a man a week to go from London to Lyme Regis, and the best part of a lifetime to earn the few thousands which in his simple notions constituted a fortune. Nowadays a man goes from London to New York in less than a fortnight; and he expects to make his half-million or so while the purple bloom is on his locks, and the light of youth in his eyes. Steam is every where and in every thing. We educate our children by steam; and our men and women want to grow rich at the rate of sixty miles an hour. Every man has the same tastes, the same aspirations. There is no such person nowadays as the Sir Balaam who thought it a grand thing to have two puddings for his Sunday dinner. Sir Visto is not the exception, but the rule; and the poor man ruins himself by blindly following the rich. Sir Balaam has a man cook, and dines _à la Russe_. Sir Balaam's cashier has his dinners from the confectioner, and dines _à la Russe_ too. Sir Visto, the Manchester cotton-spinner, is a patron of the arts, and buys largely at Christie's. His clerks follow in his wake, and cover the walls of their little suburban dining-rooms with impossible Cuyps and sham Backhuysens, bought in Wardour Street. Before we die we may see Sir Balaam and Sir Visto in the _Gazette_, with all their followers at their heels. Look at the dresses and carriages passing by us. I know most of the people, more or less; and I can see the wives and daughters of hard-working professional men vying with the peerage and the autocracy of the money market. Don't rail against the women, my dear Philip; the women are--what the men make them. You must have _Lui_ before you can have _Elle_. Aspasia is impossible without Pericles. You could never have had a Cleopatra unless you had first your Cæsar; or your Marian de Lorme without Cinq Mars. The lives of the women of the present day are like this drive which they call the Lady's Mile. They go as far as they can, and then go back again. See how mechanically the horses wheel when they reach the prescribed turning-point. If they went any farther, I suppose they would be lost in some impenetrable forest depth in Kensington Gardens. In the drive the rule has no exception; because, you see, the barrier that divides the park from the gardens is