to the sprats, who then come up the river, to the great joy of the poor, who have it thus in tradition.  Well, Smooth thought he would keep Lord Mayor’s day, and to that end harnessed up his team of donkeys, merely by way of contrasting it with some duke’s turn-out.  Imagine, Sam, my chagrin, when one of the donkeys took it into his head to keep Lord Mayor’s day in his own obstinate way.  Not a step would he go.  However, I got another donkey, and proceeded to where the Lord Mayor was, just in time to hear him make a funny speech, throughout which he made a sad slaughter of all the h’s and a’s of the King’s good English.  Then he seated himself in the barge, and had a sail on the Thames, followed by innumerable beggars, sycophants, and costermongers.  Succeeding this he marshalled his show-folks into a string (such a string!), and with them caused his august self to be moved to the Mansion House.  Swarms of frightened turtles were seen hurrying away in front of the cavalcade.

“Such a set of white-washed heads—­heads with all outside—­heads with little inside—­and heads nobody knew what they had been made for, never before were seen displayed in one string.  Strangely attractive was the glare of tinsel—­it fascinated the little souls of corpulent men, and made small men more becomingly great.  Fact was, Uncle Sam, His Worship the Lord Mayor, whose year of greatness was death to turtle and terrapin, so outshone Her Most Gracious Majesty (a good little body) in confusion of brilliant brass, that the little woman thought it incumbent to call a Cabinet Council, before which she laid the grievance of his stealing her thunder.  At this privy council Prince Albert was permitted to be present without anything being said by the Daily News and Morning Advertiser.  His Worship had indeed usurped all the modern appliances of flunkeydom.  But the cabinet, it was acknowledged, was very thick-headed, and her Majesty, good body, must bear the consequences.

“Well, after the most curious caravan eyes ever rested upon, there followed his jolly worship the Lord Mayor; he largely sat in a coach of gingerbread, the tea-things spread outside, and the glows of Souchong impregnating the air.  They said his jolly Lordship sold real and mixed Twankey.  In this sense, however, was his Lordship more fortunate than his predecessor, who, having ascended from the soap business, and himself used a large amount of that article for the purpose of washing down the wares of Threadneedle street, found his greatest difficulty that of getting rid of the foetid scent.  And then, my Lord’s h’s were the things most violently handled; for otherwise he wasn’t a bad fellow, and when he rode in his coach of the olden time, which might, by the green in mythology, have been taken for the lost chariot of Elijah, it was a serious question whether himself or the things that held on behind were greatest.  Then these latter gents of flunkeydom in frills had big sticks in their hands, with which they kept the