and you have to begin that allegory over again. That is what I call "reading"--hard reading--sensible reading. I like a thing you can never make head or tail of--the brain fattens on such provender. I am going to write out several dozen "Dreams" by and by--some of the queer ones I have had after a bout of champagne, for example--and I shall give them _gratis_ to the _Pall Mall_ with my fondest blessing. If there is "one bright particular star" in the sphere of journalism I worship more than another it is the _Pall Mall_, and I feel I can never do too much for it. And it likes "dreams" and little innocent religious allegories, because it is so good itself, and, like the boy Washington, has "never told a lie." I have always considered that the _Pall Mall_ and the German Kaiser are the only two earthly institutions "God" can favour, seeing that, according to the lady from South Africa, He has taken to "laughing" at most things. It is a pleasant picture, that of God laughing--one, too, not to be found in all the Bible. There the Deity has been represented as angry, jealous, reproachful, or benignant, but it has been left to South African literary skill to show us how He "laughed." And as the _Pall Mall_ thinks it all right that He _should_ laugh, why then we ought to coincide unanimously in the _Pall Mall's_ opinion. Because just imagine what London would be without the _Pall Mall_! Can mind conceive a more hideous desert?--a more wildly howling desolation? We should be left friendless and all unguided without our angel of reform; our clean, white-winged, heavenly, truthful Apostle of Northumberland Street, who is always able to tell us what is good and what is bad; who can inform us all, statesmen, clerics, authors, artists, and day-labourers, exactly what we ought and what we ought not to do. In the event of another Deluge (and some of the scientists assure us we shall have it soon) I know of a way in which some few of us might be saved; that is, some few with whom "God" is delighted, such as myself and the German Kaiser. We should simply require to make friends with the _Pall Mall_ staff, (several of the members are ladies, and how charming to have their society!), and build an ark out of planks from the _Pall Mall_ office floors. We should then paste it all over with _Pall Mall_ placards of the latest accounts of the Flood up to date of sailing, for the fishes to read, and then we should get into it; we who were the elected ones (including the Kaiser of course), and off we would go in smiling safety, secure from winds and waves, being the only "just people" left on a corrupted earth. And if in the end we found another Mount Ararat, and it were left to the governing body, _i.e._, the _Pall Mall_ staff and the German Kaiser, to begin a new world ... O ye gods and little fishes! What a world it would be! XII. QUESTIONETH CONCERNING THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND.