we haven’t an order of admission; and there is one place especially, O rubicund-headed traveller, where we will be exceedingly cautious not to show our faces. That place is the interior of the Stock Exchange. I am not a “lame duck;” I never, to my knowledge, “waddled;” I never attempted to pry into the secrets of the “bulls” and the “bears;” my knowledge of stockjobbing is confined to the fact that I once became possessed, I scarcely know how, only that I paid for them, of fifty shares in a phantom gold-mining company; that I sold them, half an hour afterwards, at half-a-crown premium to a mysterious man in a dark room, up a court off Cornhill, who to every human being who entered his lair handed a long list covered with cabalistic figures, with the remark that it was “very warm,” and which—the list, not the weather—I believe contained the current prices of stocks, though it might have related to the market value of elephants, for aught I knew; that I pocketed the fifty half-crowns, and that I have never heard anything of the phantom company from that day to this. Vice-Chancellor somebody will be down upon me some day as a “contributory,” I suppose, and I shall be delivered over to the tormentors; but, meanwhile, I will tell you why I won’t take my red-whiskered friend into the Stock Exchange—why I should like mine enemy to go there as soon as convenient. I have heard such horrible stories of the tortures inflicted by the members of the “House,” upon unwary strangers who have strayed within its precincts; of the savage cries of “two hundred and one,” the shrieks, the yells, the whistles, and the groans; the dancing round the captive, the covering him with flour, the treading on his miserable toes, the buffeting of his wretched ears, the upripping of his unhappy coat-collar, and chalking of his luckless back; the “bonneting,” the “ballooning,” and the generally fiendish cruelties which intruders upon the speculators for the “account” have to suffer, that I would sooner venture without permission behind the scenes of a well-regulated theatre, or attempt to beard the lion in his den, or walk up, unannounced, into the sanctum of the editor of the “Times” newspaper, or pay a morning call in a Choctaw wigwam, myself being a Pawnee or a Sioux, at war with my friends the C.’s, or pass through Portugal Street, Cursitor Street, or Chancery Lane, at any hour of the day or night, if my affairs should happen to embarrassed, than trust myself to the tender mercies of the members of the Stock Exchange. They are the staunchest and most consistent of Conservatives.