usual official cruelty is visible in this case, for all that is given her between her admission and her death is a simple cup of tea; and the coroner’s verdict very properly censures the hospital authorities. Well, what connexion, you ask, is there with this girl’s sad fate and the jollity of the Cyder Cellars? Only this, that her father made the Cyder Cellars so popular a place of resort. If I go there again I shall think of Louisa Regan, who began life as the daughter of a successful publican, who had been a governess in a nobleman’s family, at the early age of twenty-five rescued from the streets by policemen, and dependent on charity for a bed on which to die. In the foaming cup, in the glitter of the gas, while the comic singer was most comical, or the sentimental singer most sentimental, I could not be oblivious of her fate. Is there not poison in the bowl? Is there not madness in the merriment? To the night so bright does there not come a dolorous morrow? You may sing and laugh the hours away in the Cyder Cellars for a while, but you must pay your reckoning, and then, I imagine, you will doubt whether the amusement was worth the price. Youth generally pays too dear for its whistle. Youth is finding this out; at any rate the days of the Cyder Cellars are numbered, and now, with its Judge and Jury and _Poses Plastiques_, it collects comparatively few. Let me ask, need the amusements of our leisure hours be thus based on false principles? Cambridge, in one of the pleasantest papers in the “World,” says, “Among the numbers who have changed a sober plan of living for one of riot and excess, the greatest part have been converted by the arguments in a drinking song.” Life is real, life is earnest. It is a battle-ground which requires heart and muscle, and where only the brave can conquer; but if I drop for half-an-hour into a music hall, I learn that pleasure is the great aim of life, and that gin can make me jolly and a genius. LEICESTER-SQUARE.