The coolies put their heads between the ends of the poles, so that the cross bar shall rest between their shoulders, and so they carry you to church, among other places.

On arriving at the Cathedral, you will see coolies posted all round it pulling strings, which run through little holes in the walls of the building. These are not so much to play the organ or to keep the congregation awake, as to swing the punkahs. The whole church is-is-what shall I say ?-Punkahed! And there you may sit on a cool rattan seat, lean against a cool rattan back, put your feet on a cushion, and your elbows on the arms of your seat, while the benighted heathen in the broiling sun outside, fan you into that state of mental and physical repose which appears to be so necessary to the due observance of the ordinances of the Christian religion.

There are two or three things which you must not fail to do while you are at church. Your first duty after you have contemplated the lining of your hat for a few seconds, just to keep up appearances, will be, to observe carefully what ladies have new bonnets, and make a mental note of the peculiarities of each. This done, try to discover whether any of the singers in the Choir make any funny mistakes. If they do, it will lead to "great larks" in talking about them afterwards. Observe carefully the conduct of the Butts of Hongkong —there are two or three people about whom you may say anything, no matter how foolish, weak, or in bad taste, and be quite sure of raising a laugh and so, in time, becoming a reputed Wit. Above all, you must be sure to "time the parson." The moment he announces the text, take out your watch, and make a note in your prayer book of the exact moment at which he commences. Every one will think that you are writing down the text, which looks well again. When the sermon is finished, you must glance at your watch once more so that you may be able to tell everyone how long the sermon lasted. If that should be a second more than sixteen minutes it will be your duty, in the state or Colony in which you live, to express your disapproval of "the parson," wherever you go. All these things you must do-unless, of course, you have some little respect for the ordinances in which you pretend to join. In that case you will know what to do without my assistance.

We must take one more look at the landscape! To the right of the Cathedral are three long buildings, which have been celebrated in their time. They are the Murray Barracks, where disease so terribly ravaged the troops not long since. Now turn round to the left and look down upon the Town. There are very few commercial cities in the world wherein are buildings so uniformly handsome as in this city of Victoria, Hongkong. There is the Clock Tower placed right in the middle of the road, then the New Hotel, that large building on the right of the Clock Tower. Behind the Hotel are three large buildings, the central one of which is surmounted by a Cupola― Messrs. Dent & Co.'s houses, and all round about are the houses of other firms, of Banks and Public Companies.

And now we have had quite enough of our bird's eye view. Let us go down and see what is to be seen below. I am beginning to feel chilly,perhaps you are too. The March wind blows cold from the North, clouds are gathering overhead, and we shall soon have rain-rain that will last while hours grow into days, and days into weeks,-rain that will make the hills smoke like an overdriven horse and cover their sides with stripes of foam. Then these huge heaps of boulders will be hidden by roaring cataracts, which now and then will leave their old channels and cut new gashes in the earth, as they rush down towards the sea, carrying with them tons upon tons of red soil which will discolor the waters of the harbor half way to Kowloon.

A FRIEND OF HER BROTHER.

A NOVELETTE.

CHAPTER I.

It was in the month of June and in the County of Sussex, 'at a farmhouse not very far from Tunbridge, that Mr. Arthur Penridge of Uplands returned thanks for the Bride and Bridegroom. As he was in the highest spirits, his speech would no doubt have been spirited, and as he was inclined to laugh generally at all the jokes round the table, it would no doubt have been brilliant and sparkling, if it had not been that he discovered, for the first time, a provoking tendency in the words of the English language, to twist themselves into complicated knots, from which it was wholly impossible to extricate the lively and agreeable meaning they were intended to convey. Thrilled as he was with gratitude towards the guests assembled for having each, a moment before, drunk, or at any rate, tasted a glass of Champagne, he would have been able, he felt, to address them in rounded and graceful periods, full of sweetness and pathos, if it had not been for the offensive irregularities of English Grammar. For the first time in his life he conceived a contempt and dislike for that language which he had hitherto been accustomed to regard as ranking first among all the tongues of Europe. He felt, for the moment, inclined to admit that people who admired foreign languages might perhaps be honest in their admiration, and not merely be affecting their opinion for the sake of impertinently parading their linguistic acquirements.

Arthur Penridge however, though he was debarred by these characteristics of his native tongue from delighting the company by a witty speech, nevertheless 'assured his friends, and his wife's friends, that he was really very much obliged to them, and re-iterated this assurance so often, that the most sceptical

among the ladies and gentlemen who heard him could not fail to be convinced, and they were even led to imagine that they had, somehow, displayed a great deal of magnanimity in forgiving Mr. Penridge for what he had done that morning, for he expressed a hope, at the end of his speech, that he had not given any body any offence. Before it was possible, however, for the guests to decide whether or not he alluded to any aspirant for the hand of the bride, who had been put aside in deference to his claim, it became obvious that the expression of this hope was merely a rhetorical device by means of which he was enabled to say that, at any rate, he would never offend anybody in the same way again. This assurance was so gratifying to all who heard it, that the speech concluded amidst unanimous applause, and was generally voted a complete success.

When we have said the house in which the wedding breakfast took place was a farm-house, it may have been that we conveyed, to some minds, the impression that the guests assembled there were people who would, under ordinary circumstances, have been engaged in selling wheat, poking the sides of fat cattle with their fingers, or churning butter. But in truth, although Milton Farm was unquestionably a farm-house, and although Mr. Mander, its owner, would not have been in the least degree insulted, but on the contrary rather pleased than otherwise at being called a farmer, he was not a man whose personal appearance would suggest to the mind the rough top boots, and enormous neutral tinted coats, to be seen in country towns on market day. He was a quiet, spare, elderly man, with thin grey hair, blue eyes, and no particular complexion, who had spent thirty-five years at a desk in a Lombard Street bank, and, having through prolonged habits of economy, amassed a sum which rendered it unnecessary for him to keep any accounts except his own any longer, he gratified, at sixty years of age, a longing that had quietly slumbered in his system since his youth, and bought a farm in Sussex. As the prudent habits of his life prevented him from embarking all his capital in one basket, he bought an annuity for himself and his wife, with what was left after the purchase, and thus rendered him-self independent, to some extent, of the weather, the last war on the Continent, the nefarious operations of speculators, and the other causes which tend, as agriculturists complain, to defeat their best calculations, and deprive them of bread for their children.

It was Mr. Mander who sat at the head of the wedding breakfast table, and proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom.

"Really!" said an old lady half way down the table, to a gentleman at her side, "Really Louisa bore up uncommonly well!"

The remark happening to fall in the silence that succeeded the applause called forth by Mr. Penridge's speech, was taken up by the company generally, as a means of poking fun at that gentleman, but it was obvious, from the very gentle nature of the shafts directed against him, that he was a highly popular man, and not by any means one whom people were eager to annoy.

It was only Fred. Mander, the bride's brother, who went so far as to wonder

if it was difficult to bear up against Penridge for a bridegroom, how difficult it would be to bear up against him for a husband! But the bride indicated by the temporary gravity of her beautiful features, and by the casting down of the black lashes which shaded her dark brown eyes,-the nearest approach to a frown allowed to a bride, on her wedding morning,-that she considered her younger brother impertinent.

The dining room and chief sitting room at Melton Farm, which was the scene of the wedding breakfast, was a good sized room extending completely through the house, with a window at each end. There was plenty of room, therefore, for the little party of twelve guests. Mrs. Mander, a subdued, not to say washed out little woman, whose parental relation to the brilliant, dark haired beauty who had just been made Mrs. Penridge, was a small mystery in its way, sat at the end of the table opposite to that at which the town-bred farmer, her husband, presided over the festivities. Mrs. Mander was not, in reality, inclined to make the worst of things, but she was one of those women who habitually speak in a complaining, resigned tone, calculated to impress hearers with the belief that they are very much "put upon," and generally ill-used by fate, as a means of rendering them the better fitted for the purity of a future state.

"It's a very gratifying scene for you Ma'am, this! said a florid gentleman on her right hand, when general conversation had revived, "very gratifying for you to know that your daughter is so well established."

"Yes Mr. Kell!" replied the lady, "I am truly thankful for Louisa's sake, and of course, we must not complain at being left alone!"

"Yes indeed," put in an old lady on Mrs. Mander's left, who was plainly dressed in a brown silk, but who made up for all deficiencies by wearing her gloves of a dark purple color, "Yes indeed, we must not forget that poor Mrs. Mander loses what Mr. Penridge has been so happy as to obtain to-day."

"Thank you dear Mrs. Drumore!" said Mrs. Mander, "it is very kind of you to think of me but it is a mother's duty to be resigned to the loss of her children. Those that are spared to us by death are taken from us in other ways. You too, Mr. Kell, will have to part some day with your Lucy, dear girl!"

Mr. Kell replied more or less inarticulately, being in fact irritated at finding Mrs. Mander unwilling to express any satisfaction at the marriage of her daughter to Mr. Penridge. He himself might possibly have been willing that the wedding breakfast should have been given that morning at his own expense, with one or two changes in the cast. So he remained silent for a while, and drank a glass of wine, but he soon rallied and entered into a jocular conversation across the table with a bald gentleman of otherwise rather juvenile appearance, whom he addressed as Doctor.

"Now tell us Doctor," he asked, "how many couples you've seen started?" "How many?" answered the Doctor cheerily, "bless your soul I could'nt count 'em! I've been used to weddings ever since I was a boy-in the year

of the French revolution Lucy," he added, in an audible aside, to Lucy Kell his neighbour; for it was a standing joke to regard the Doctor, who might perhaps have been fifty in reality, as a very young man, in consequence of the lightness of his spirits, and his brilliancy in society, while he himself claimed the honors paid to venerable age.

"Oh Dr. Granton!" said the young lady.

"I hear," whispered Mrs. Drumore to her hostess, "that Mr. Penridge gave the Vicar a ten-pound note after the ceremony. Is that so? Indeed!" in answer to Mrs. Mander's inclination, "very liberal indeed!"

"Ah, you don't know half my adventures Lucy! Tell you them all some day. I'm a very particular authority on all matters connected with love and marriage, and prepared to give you or any other young lady who consults me, the most valuable advice about the heart."

"Advice gratis from ten to twelve," said Mr. Kell.

"Mr. Bracebridge!" said Mr. Mander, leaning forward and speaking in a distinct voice, which drew general attention, to a gentleman seated on the other side of Lucy Kell, "May I call on you to give the health of the ladies?”

"Really!" replied the gentleman addressed, a tall and rather handsome man, with a large dark moustache and beard, who spoke good-humouredly, in a voice, the refinement of which would have been particularly noticed just then, by a delicate ear, as contrasted with the rougher tones of the Doctor and Mr. Kell"Really! I was totally unprepared for the honor you pay me, but," he added, rising, and gliding at once into his task with, at any rate, every appearance of readiness, the only way of avoiding a serious embarrassment when you are asked, in the face of a room full of people, to be funny on a stale or commonplace subject, "but as I, in common no doubt with the rest of the gentlemen present, have been brought into a state of mind this morning which makes me very anxious to drink the health of the ladies, and conciliate them in every possible way, so that I may one day he fortunate enough to occupy such a position as is now filled by Mr. Penridge, I am very glad of this opportunity of laying my homage at the ladies' feet." After running on for a few minutes in an easy strain of conventional banter, Mr. Bracebridge finished his task with an apt quotation from Moore, and called upon the Doctor for a reply. Of course that gentleman was on his feet in a moment, for he enjoyed nothing on earth so much as making little speeches in which he could display his gallantry and wit.

The meanest things have their uses, and no doubt the ceremonies of a wedding breakfast are wisely ordained for the purpose of giving a newly married couple a keen zest for that first month of their joint career, during which they can completely escape from such annoyances. But everything must have an end, so that at last the bride retired to put on her travelling dress, and the party broke up, and went out to the front of the house, where there was a lawn