you ever see a cork worth drawing that you couldn't draw, and wouldn't feel it a pleasure so to do, with the good old implement ? or, at the very worst, can't we knock the head off the bottle? You may take it from me, as the judges say, that there are very few corks drawn in that house-if it be a lady's establishment it is quite proper it should be so where the host proceeds by such a very circumbendibus route to the operation. A man must be uncommonly fond of his corks who is so delicate about extracting them. Nor did I ever invest in a patented convenience which some readers may remember, called a Reversible Coat, which was to be a portable wardrobe in itself; one side waterproof, to be worn when it rained, and the other of excellent broadcloth, in which the wearer was to make his appearance, upon his arrival at his journey's end, as spruce as if he had just walked out of his dressing-room. That garment did not meet with any large share of public patronage. It was understood that the only unfortunate individual who tried it, having reversed the wetted side, and sat through a very long morning call, looking perfectly dry and comfortable, has paid the penalty of that one false appearance as a rheumatic cripple ever since.

One class of inventors there is, unhappily fast increasing upon us, which would have justified any amount of persecution which could have been brought to bear upon them in the ages which we call barbarous, and which do seem to come direct from the fountain of evil. It is those which profess to give you all the good things under the sun without trouble, and at no expense worth mentioning-asking you to believe that certain clever impostors have reduced the essence of nature into powders, and can sell them, out of pure love to mankind, at a mere trifle per box. Does your linen wear out at a very unaccountable rate? Depend upon it, your washerwoman has got a miraculous

powder, which contains in itself, extracted and compressed (perhaps from the dust of departed washerwomen), all the virtues of good honest scrubbing at a tithe of the cost. Are you staying for a few days with some hospitable friend in the country, over whose farm you have been content to march with him, propitiated by the usual excellence of his butter; and do you find put upon your plate at breakfast, upon this last visit, something which at the first glance you take for some unknown foreign preparation? It is butter, nevertheless. You stumble on in great confusion with your usual panegyric upon the excellence of the dairy arrangements, which has hitherto burst from your lips in all honesty, and the recitation of which you had already begun; and the excellent lady who is making tea accepts the compliment, with the explanation, that the product which you are now hesitating how to dispose of with any decency, was "made in two minutes" that very morning: "you put a powder into the churn," &c., &c., and it is "such a saving of labour to the dairy woman." You don't like to quote Scripture loosely, yet it would seem to you scarcely irreverent to observe, that if the rule of the great economy was that man should "eat bread in the sweat of his brow," much more would it probably apply to butter; and that this simplification of nature's processes is likely, even from a priori reasoning, to prove a very questionable success; while you have a strong argument on the same side from facts in the nasty mess before you. Taking advantage of an unobserved moment, you offer a large lump on a bit of toast to Floss, who sits up begging at your side; but Floss, a spaniel of great taste and discernment, has given up butter since the patent manufacture was introduced; so there it lies on your plate all breakfast-time in dreadful evidence of your hypocrisy. There is another of these miraculous powders, which, unless some timely

amendment is made in the Poisons Act, and a clause inserted to embrace it specially, threatens, if I may so express it for indignation makes us poetical, says the Roman satirist to turn the staff of life into a broken reed, piercing the hand (it should be the stomach, but that spoils the metaphor) that leans on it. To the adulterations of bread we are all pretty well accustomed. Heaven only knows, (though, in truth, such knowledge comes rather from the other quarter) what we eat, or what we do not eat, in the baker's loaf. To the unfortunate man who has just made a London breakfast, Dr Hassall's revelations must almost serve as an emetic. Bones, beans, alum, plaster of Paris, with a miserable modicum of flour of wheat! Well may the London boys call the small newmade loaf a "twopenny buster." A sensitive person would burst sometimes if he knew what he was eating. But of all these, it may be said that they are in a certain sense bond fide adulterations. The perpetrators have the grace to deny them flatly; and no baker who has any sense of professional decency advertises alum as an attractive speciality of his establishment. But there is an invention called Baking Powder.. It is to supersede yeast, and remove all those difficulties complained of by inefficient housekeepers. It is a very painful subject, for it has destroyed my faith in home-made bread. I know ladies who boast of it, openly and shamelessly. In how many families it is used secretly I am afraid to think. It is impossible, in practice, to ask every mistress of a family on whom you depend for the time for wholesome food, in the searching formula of Mrs Wedlake before named, "Do you use Baking Powder yet?" and it poisons all one's innocent enjoyment to fancy you detect it in the delusive hot rolls and buttered cakes of which you thought you knew the whole manufacture to be above suspicion. Fortunately it has an aroma which

is seldom mistaken. The same inventor has also a preparation which he declares is Instantaneous Destruction to Insect Life." It is merely the Baking Powder, of course, under another name. That would kill anything, if they could be induced to take enough of it. There is another patent compound, also in powder, of which I would not even write the name (if I could remember it), lest I should contribute to spread the knowledge of such an abomination. Enough that every ounce of it professes to contain "the virtues of twelve eggs" (addled). I have never eaten custard since I saw the advertisement. But it is sad to think that the hospitable matrons whom you have known so long, otherwise wellmeaning women, should be thus at the mercy of improvements where everything was so good before. One lady drove me from her house long ago, to her eternal loss, by the use of gelatine; another by the patent brandy. When a woman even deliberates upon these things she is lost-so far as my society is concerned―irreclaimably.

These are some few of the reasons why it seems to me, there being no immediate prospect of a new infusion of the barbarian element into European society, that a "Society for the better prevention of Inventions and Discoveries" might put in a fair claim for public support. Even some of the greatest discoveries seem to have been strong in the elements of evil. What a world of unpleasantness would have been saved to us here in England if Columbus had never discovered America! It is a great question whether cotton (or even tobacco) has been anything like an equivalent. It is only very impatient people, like Alexander, who want new worlds. The worst of the inventive principle is, that it never knows when to stop. Archimedes, not satisfied with puzzling schoolboys with his forty-seventh proposition, would have coolly pitched the whole creation into a vacuum (if

he could only have found a place to stand on, which fortunately he did not) just to show his power of leverage. Does any one wonder, after that, to find the world fighting very shy of natural philosophers? There is a great deal of good, as was before observed, in the instinct which shows itself originally in all nations, to consider such people as knowing more than they ought; and it deserves to be encouraged, in a modified form, in our own generation. I am not an advocate for any sudden reaction, but shall be content for the present with a pause in this mad race after

inconveniences, confident that when society has a little time to think, it will come to the conclusion, that in our preparations to make this journey of life as easily and as pleasantly as we can, there are two ways in which it is possible to proceedone is, to cram your portmanteaus and imperials with every article that can and cannot be wanted, and take with you as many useless servants as you can afford, and find yourself hampered by these aids to travelling at every stage; and the other, to shoulder your knapsack, packed on homœopathic principles, and go where you will, a free man.

AFTER long delay, doubtless very trying to the patience of all concerned, but not greater than any one knowing the magnitude of the work to be done and of the difficulties to be encountered might have reasonably anticipated, the orders for the "amalgamation" of the old local armies of India with the Line have been officially notified in the Gazette. And we have now before us, in those orders issued by the Governor-General of India, and in the correspondence of the Secretary of State for India in Council, sufficient information to guide us to a right understanding of the general scope and tendency of the measure. Some details of the scheme are, as we write, still subjects of reference between the two Governments; but even these reserved questions will probably have undergone final solution before this number of Maga is in the hands of our readers.

We make no premature announcement, therefore, when we say that the Indian army is now dead. It lives only in the traditions of the service and the history of the nation. A little while ago, when arguments and apologies were sought to justify the destruction of an insti

tution but recently so lusty and full of life-so honourable, and so honoured-it was the fashion with speakers and writers of a certain class to traduce the character of the Indian army, and to declare that not only had the "faithful sepoy" become a rebel and a murderer, but that the European soldier had developed into a rioter and a mutineer, and that the European officers of the whole Indian army had shown themselves to be wanting in discipline and in the power of command. But this cry, having served its purpose, is now, it seems, permitted to die away into occasional indistinct mutterings not of a very complimentary character, but still not broadly condemnatory of the whole service. The justificatory plea has subsided into a vague expression of compassion, indicating that the old local army may have had its uses, and may have been not wholly without merit, but that its day had gone by, and that its death was only a necessary consequence of the extinction of the Government which had called it into existence. But it is not after this fashion that such an institution as the old local army of India ought to

be suffered to go out like a candle that has burnt down to the socket. We all deplore the great madness of 1857, than which, so far as it went, nothing could have been worse. It was assuredly a terrible blot upon the fair fame of the Indian army; but, at worst, it was only the rebellion of a part of that army. It is common to write and to speak of the outbreak as if the whole army had violently thrown off its allegiance, and given itself up to the wild delights of rapine and murder. But considering the infectious character of this disease of mutiny-how the evil influence runs, as it were, like a fine electric fluid, from link to link of the great chain-it is subject of admiration that so large a portion of the Indian army remained, throughout all that troubled period, true to its alien masters. Nor should it be forgotten that even some of those rebellious regiments, which died at last in such fiery convulsions, had years and years, perhaps nearly a century, of good and faithful service written down to their credit in the military annals of our Indian empire. Let us not forget this. Dear old Jack Sepoy has become in men's minds only an accursed Pandy. But is this reproach to last for ever? In the history of many civilised nations there is to be found an exceptional period of delirium-a reign of terror-when the worst atrocities were committed under the influence of irrepressible excitement, and men for a time became brute beasts, delighting in the savage slaughter of their kind. But these excesses, which have not fallen short, in their cruelty and their wickedness, of the horrors with which the memory of the last days of the regular native army of India is burdened, have not stamped an abiding disgrace on the nations which perpetrated them. They have been regarded as brief paroxysms of insanity, entirely of an abnormal or exceptional kind; and the nation itself, returning to

its former amenities, has been suffered to resume its old place among the recognised civilisations of the world. Is the sepoy, then, never to have absolution? Is his "previous good character" to go for nothing? Take him for all and all, he has been a good soldier and a faithful servant. The sepoy army of the East India Company won its laurels upon many a hard-fought field. Even in the days of its fidelity there were writers who declared that all our victories in India had been gained by the royal army; but we have not so read history. Not only are our old sepoy regiments ever to be found, in the annals of Eastern warfare, fighting side by side with our English troops, bearing like privations and encountering like dangers, but many great military exploits, which have contributed largely to the progress of our empire, have been achieved by the unaided gallantry of the Company's native troops. From the days of Arcot and Clive to those of Meeanee and Napier, they may be seen doing and suffering with and for their European comrades, dying with them as faithfully and as resolutely as if they had served a master of the same colour and the same creed. Wherever English troops have gone in India and the adjacent countries, they too have gone; and there are pages of history in which it is recorded that they have gone beyond them, and done what they could not do. Why, then, should we now revile them? Truly, they were good soldiers in their day. We may sneer at the faithful sepoy as at one of the delusions of the past. But it was not a delusion; Jack Sepoy was not an impostor. there be anything to be sneered at, it is the preposterous notion that he has been for a century or so veiling his hatred and biding his time; that he assumed a mask of fidelity only for the purpose of rendering the coming vengeance more terrible and more crushing; that

If

his only object was that we should "lay our sleeping lives up in his arms," and that we should perish thus naked and defenceless. We have somewhere seen the case of the sepoy likened to that of the young tiger, which, trained and disciplined and fed regularly on mild unexciting food, couched by the fireside of its English master, had licked the hand that cherished it as tamely as any domestic animal, until it chanced that the beast's rough tongue broke the tender skin, and then it growled as it had never growled before, and sprang upon the man, for it had tasted blood. There is much that is pertinent in this similitude, for it is as much the nature of the Indian army to mutiny, as it is the nature of a tiger to delight in blood. But the tiger was not an impostor. It kissed the hand that fed it in unfeigned gratitude and fidelity, for its natural propensities had for a time been kept in abeyance by gentle treatment, and by mild food given at regular intervals, so that the animal never knew hunger. And thus for a century we kept in abeyance the natural propensities of the Indian soldier by kindly treatment and regular pay, until in an unhappy moment he tasted blood, and then he fell upon his master. But every English officer who has served with the native sepoy knows right well that he had many good and noble traits of character, that he was faithful to his employers, that he did, when well treated, love his English captain; and there are few who do not believe that, if trusted again, he would be true again, and that the wickedness of the last few years was but a passing madness, which it may take another century to excite again into the same terrible activity. There are old sepoy officers, who, having left India before the mutiny with strong feelings of attachment towards their old followers, can scarcely believe that all this sad history is anything but a fearful dream.

But whilst we thus deprecate the practice of suffering the evil done by the sepoys to live after them, and of interring their good deeds with their bones, we admit that the events of 1857-58 clearly indicated the expediency of diminishing the native army's power for evil by the juxtaposition of a larger proportion of European troops. To hold India with European troops alone was not to be thought of, for, if feasible, the country would not have been worth holding upon such terms. But that there should be, after such a terrible warning, at all times in the country a larger permanent body of European troops, was only a necessary deduction from the great fact of the mutiny. The most obvious remedy, in such a case, was the extension of the local European army. The Company had maintained, in each of the Presidencies of India, some regiments of European infantry, and, after the breaking-out of the mutiny, some regiments of European cavalry had been raised. A permanent addition to the strength of the force in India being needed, the most natural suggestion was that the local European army should be increased, not that more general-service regiments should be sent to India, to be recalled at the will and pleasure of the Imperial authorities. Indeed, it was owing to the pressing requirements of the Imperial Government that, in the early part of 1857, India was so denuded of European troops; and not the least pregnant lesson taught by the mutiny, was that which inculcated the danger of placing the military resources of India in any way, directly or indirectly, at the disposal of the Horse Guards and the War Office. nothing is plainer now than that the local Indian army was doomed, from the very first, in high places, and that all inquiry was a mere pretence. At first we used to hear of the "Reorganisation" of the Indian army, then the word "Amalgamation" became one of general accept

But