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"sweating"; these do their shopping late, on Saturday nights. especially late; and shops, if they closed early in poor districts, would for this reason lose the greater part of their custom.

The shop-girl in a really good West End establishment is in very different case. She is often more or less gently bred, such breeding being an important factor in her engagement. Very often, indeed, her superior manners contrast, oddly enough, with the rudeness of the "lady" whom she happens to be serving.

Shop-girls and shop-men are always popular elements of London life. There was, quite lately, a comic opera written in the shop-girl's honour. And, so far as shop-men are concerned, it is an eloquent fact that in the recent revival of the Gilbertand-Sullivan opera Patience, the only noteworthy alterations in the text were the substitution of the "Twopenny Tube young man" for the " Threepenny 'Bus young man," and of the words "Tottenham House" for the departed "Waterloo House." For a London audience must, above all things, be kept up to date, and a small anachronism of the latter kind, a mistake about the shops, would be noticed by them much sooner than a more important one.

Everything can be got in London, if (and the "if" is a comprehensive one) you know where to go for it. Old timber, for instance, can be bought not only at the Westminster wharves, but also in the Euston Road (where Messrs. Maple's vast timber-yards are in themselves an insight into the "highways and byways" of London); old silver may be had in the now spoiled Hanway Street, and Holborn; old furniture and antiques in Wardour Street and its neighbourhood; new furniture in Tottenham Court Road; live-stock in and about Seven Dials; artists' materials in Soho, and so on. . . . The best stationers' shops are in the City; the City shops, however, make a "speciality" of solid worth rather than of outside attractiveness, a quality in which the Regent Street and Oxford Street marts bear the palm. It is not really of much importance

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where you shop; it is, however, important to remember that, unless your money happens to be more valuable than your time, you had better not frequent cheap marts or crowded stores.

The Dog Fancier !!! Book-shops are very inadequate in London; so few are they indeed, that one is tempted to wonder what the "five millions,

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in the richest city in the world" read? In most foreign towns book-shops are to be found, in twos and threes, in every important street; in English provincial towns, if you want a book, you are usually directed to "a stationer's"; and even in London, book-shops must diligently be sought for, though, when found, they are, it must be confessed, usually very good.

Second-hand book-shops are more plentiful than new bookshops; and these are mostly strangely dark, dingy, and rambling places, where the depressed proprietor rarely seems to wish to part with any of his dusty stock-in-trade, but sits apart in dusky recesses, moody and abstracted like Eugene Aram, annotating a catalogue. He is the unique tradesman who does not appear to want to sell his goods. After he has got over his annoyance at being disturbed,—and if you do happen to come to terms with him,—he will, as likely as not, heave a deep sigh as he turns to search for some very second-hand sheets of brown paper to enwrap the second-hand treasure. These old book-shops, with their outlying "twopenny" and "fourpenny" boxes, are generally to be found on busy city thoroughfares, as if by intent to entrap the unwary and impecunious scholar on his way home from his office desk to his little suburban home. In such spiders' webs of temptation he has been known to spend, in one fatal half-hour, all the money destined for the butcher's bill, or for the gas rate!

But, while impoverished scholars have a weakness for secondhand literature, the big circulating libraries, on the other hand, are the great weakness of their wives and daughters, cousins and aunts. About these vast emporiums ladies of all ages flit all day like bees around a hive. Ladies would appear but seldom to buy books; they always hire. A morning spent at Smith's or Mudie's is curiously instructive as to the methods pursued by them in the search for light literature. The library counters then usually exhibit a double or treble row of women, with a very faint sprinkling of elderly men, all waiting, in varying

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degrees of patience, for their turn. Several of the ladies have considerately brought pet dogs, which they hold by the chain, the dear little animals being meanwhile thoughtfully engaged in entangling themselves round all the other customers' legs.

"Have you some nice, new, good novels?" asks a plaintive materfamilias, with a stolid-faced bevy of half-grown up daughters behind her, just out of the schoolroom. "Something, you know, that is quite fit for young girls; no problems, or pasts, or anything of that kind.”

The young man looks nonplussed. "We have Miss Yonge's latest," he suggests; "or Maeterlinck's Life of the Bee, just

out-"

"Oh! Maeterlinck is so very Maeterlincky, you know. And do you think that he's always quite safe?"

"I assure you, madam, you will find him so in this instance," urges the young man.

"Well, bees are, of course, interesting; and very nice and proper too, I'm sure; but I myself prefer the lives of celebrated people. Mr. Gladstone's Life, for instance? Oh, it's not written yet, is it? What a bore! Well, I suppose it's no use our waiting. . . .And Miss Yonge, no, thank you. . . .You see, she died last year, and then she's so very Early-Victorian!"

The man, seeing that it is to be a long business, gives up the problem for the moment, and moves in despair to the next

customer.

Now it is the turn of a little old lady, with a deprecating manner: "I want something nice, and not too clever," she murmured: "something I can knit over, you know, after breakfast. No, not religious, I somehow find that's too depressing. How would this do ?" as she picked up a volume that was flaunting itself on the counter, Sir Richard Calmady. I think I'd like that,-if it's at all like Sir George Tressady." "No, madam, not at all the sort of thing for you," the young man hastened to say with an air of authority. "Allow me: Try this; this is a very safe book, Miss Edna Lyall's latest,