five minutes' duration, Alice, who had been walking with some difficulty, stopped in front of a garden-seat.

I am afraid I must ask you to wait here for a minute or so,' she said, seating herself; 'my foot is rather painful.'

As the seat was shaded by glorious trees, just the place for a tête-à-tête, I hailed the proposition with delight. When I expressed my sympathy at her accident she laughed and replied

'Oh! it's nothing very serious-it was my own fault.'

Your own fault?"

'I must tell you I was once-when I was very little-a confirmed somnambulist. In fact, they used to lock me in my room at school every night to keep me from wandering about the house. I thought I had broken myself of the habit, but find that I have not. Last night I left my room in my sleep and was called back to wakefulness by treading upon a coalscuttle. Wasn't it absurd?

I started back and stared at her. 'Well, you don't pity me;' and then,

as she met my ardent gaze, she blushed and turned away her head.

A light began to dawn upon me. Alice a somnambulist! The resemblance between herself and the veiled portrait! I jumped up triumphantly. At last I had solved the mystery of Byron Abbey! She was the phantom!

In telling you my story just now, Alice, I left out one thing, something that filled me with joy and hope. It was what the ghost said to me.'

'And that was?" she asked, timidly. That you returned my love. Was the ghost right?'

'I congratulate you, my boy,' said Arthur, shaking me warmly by the hand. There is not a man on earth I would sooner have for a brother-in-law. But tell me all about it. How did it come about?'

'Don't laugh, Arthur, but I give you my word, old man, that the matchmaker on this occasion was a ghostthe White Lady of Byron Abbey !'

ARTHUR A'BECKETT.

Christmas, the state of the shop windows invariably does. We may or we may not have what is known as seasonable Christmas weather. Ah, that seasonable weather! what a host of different experiences does it bring to us: warm fires and glad merriment for some, shivering and anguish for, alas! too many. But the shop windows never fail to bedeck themselves in undeniably seasonable costume. Look at the grocers! Did you ever see such extraordinary piles of preserved fruits, citrons glistening like diamonds in the gas light, and figs reposing beneath artificial leaves, whose emerald green positively laughs at you from its bed? And the poulterers: were there ever such turkeys as those? And the butchers: I should like to know at how many shows the deceased ox, a portion of whose carcase yon sirloin represents, has not gained the prize for his potential beefiness. The well-to-do tradesman grins at the monstrous coils of lean and fat. Poverty, in the person of a thin gentleman scantily clothed, and with very pointed features, shrugs his shoulders, buttons his coat, feels in his pocket for money, and finding that he has enough to buy half a quartern of gin, but not enough to purchase half a pound of honest meat, passes hurriedly on to the immediately adjacent publichouse. Manifold and strange, in truth, are the human sights just now to be met with outside the divers shop-windows of London. Penury elbows opulence, and starvation touches the hem of sleek prosperity's garment. There are sermons, so they say, in stones; there are sermons enough just now in the contrast presented between the shop windows and the manifold in-gazers from without.

Still we linger in the streets, strolling on till we find ourselves immediately confronted by a huge sheet of glass, behind which are carefully imprisoned what would have seemed to our juvenile imagination very much like the contents of Fairyland. It is the toyshop, that magical depository of everything which excites the thirst of infantile avarice. Was there ever such a world of curiously-wrought wealth? And how anxiously puzzling do the little eyes peer into its midst! But it is not for them. Not for the Arab children

of the streets is that wealth of wonderland displayed. And the little ones know it, and think, with a vague sense of admiring and awe-stricken envy, how curiously blessed must be the lot of their well-furred and warmly-clad co-equals in age, but not in station, for whom the treasures of the toy-shop are reserved. Nor is the toy-shop merely a source of delight to those who are destined to be the recipients of its opulence. Is it nothing that the donor of its bounties witnesses the juvenile delight which the bestowal of the toygift awakes-nothing that the parent watches the various ways in which the grateful pleasure of the young ones makes itself manifest-nothing that that parent is able to purchase, with so small an expenditure, such a world of enjoyment for the darlings at home, and through them for himself?

Not in all cases 'so small an expenditure' by any means. On the contrary, modern toys are strangely expensive, as any person can testify who has been tempted into purchasing a doll in the Burlington Arcade for little daughter or small niece. A doll is nothing in these days if not fashionable, and your young friend, ætat. five would scarcely accept any of these burlesque effigies of infantile human nature if it was not bedecked according to the latest mode. The present is a period of surprising and not altogether, to our minds, grateful showiness in the matter of children's costume. Does the increased attention which is paid to the external that our young people of the present day present betoken a corresponding increase in the attention which their real welfare receives? Every person must have been struck, within the last two years, at the manner in which children seem to have taken recognised positions as pets-a position which they share with favourite poodles and fortunate cats. Last season in London a lady's pedestrian equipage was not considered complete unless she carried in her arms a lilliputian terrier, or was accompanied by a gorgeously arrayed little boy or little girl-often enough she had both. What is the meaning of this freak of fashion; what does it indicate? We suggest the question; we might also suggest an answer: which answer, however, we leave it to the ingenuity of our readers to discover for themselves.