There are rich old ladies in this vast throng of people, doubtless?--dear Christian souls who hate their younger relatives, and who are therefore willing to spend spare cash in order to prove their love of God. From these gather your harvest while you may, all ye ordained "disciples of the Lord," but excuse a poor wandering Nobody from No-land from the uncongenial task of helping to provide a new organ for parish yokels, and from sending out cheap Bibles to the "heathen Chinee," who frequently disdains to read them. Let me pass on--I am not worth buttonholing--and I want to take a passing glance at things in general. I shall whisper, mutter, or talk loudly about anything I see, just as the humour takes me. Only I will not promise any polite lying. Not because I object to it, but simply because it has become commonplace. Everybody does it, and thus it has ceased to be original, or even diplomatic. To openly declare the Truth--the truth of what we are now, and what, in the course of our present down-hill "progress," we are likely to become; the truth that is incessantly and relentlessly gnawing away at the foundations of all our social sophistries--to do this, I say, and stand by it when done, would be the only possible novelty that could really startle the indolent and exhausted age. But nobody will undertake it. It would be too troublesome. One would run so many risks. One would offend so many "nice" people! True--very true. All the same, neither for convenience nor amiability do I personally consider myself bound to tell lies for the mere sake of lying. So, while elbowing a passage through the crowd, I shall give expression to whatever thoughts occur to me, inconsequentially or rationally, as my varying moods suggest; moreover, I shall be very content to glide out of the "hurly-burly," and enter it no more, when once I have said my say. II. SOLILOQUISETH ON LITTLE MANNERS.