flies from my Lord’s good-natured countenance.  Happy fellows were they, and, like well-stuffed mules, only wanted the long soft ears to make them marketable.  Everybody said it was a big day in London.  To have suggested that his Worship might be making an ass of himself in this common-sense nineteenth century would have been to render yourself a victim of hasty contempt.  Smooth was just taking a contemplative view of these things,—­asking himself how many poor wretches would lose a day’s work over the nonsense; how many would get drunk on the hallucination of the show; how many poor mechanics would make a blue week to his Lordship’s honor; and how many would find themselves in the House of Correction to his disgrace—­how many employers would be annoyed,—­how many customers would be disappointed—­and how many wives would get broken heads; when suddenly a crowd of filthy, dejected, and ruthless beings swept along in mass, heedless of whatever came in their way, and threatening life and limb in the onset.  Then there came such a smashing of maids’ bonnets, squeezing of milliners, and frightening of old maids, as never was seen before; indeed, this, added to the many well-jammed ribs and jostled beavers, seemed the most expensive part of my Lord’s show.  Summing the whole thing up in a logical sort of way, Smooth made it amount to this:—­that the Lord Mayor, just mounting into greatness, could by no means make that greatness impressive by any knowledge of philosophy he possessed; so, to be sure that his importance had its force upon all vulgar minds, he suffered himself made to play the part of a monkey in a cake-shop.  To this his Worship added the greater gratification of having given amusement to nine-tenths of the city costermongers, made idle seven-tenths of the working people, kept busy two thousand gin-shops, filled eleven hundred chop-houses, given hard work to five hundred policemen, who never like to be worked hard, and made lackeydom tumultuous.  And then Beadledom seemed crazed, and, joined with the many ale-bibbers, were turned out to do good service in the show.  But, to make my Lord’s train complete, there was no knowing how many men he had to ride on horseback, how many more so inebriated they couldn’t ride, how many of a character nobody would desire to know out of his show, and how many ballet girls who ride in circuses and so forth,—­all of which latter material had faces made deep of moonshine modesty, to suit the solemn occasion.  Then my Lord topped off the little end of his show with the soup and great Ministers of State.  And, that nothing should be left undone, the Times must have a go in at it, which it did with one of Doctor Moseley’s most spicy articles, putting the whole thing into a very comical nutshell.  Quoth Sam, without the thunderer’s dissecting knife a London Lord Mayor would be the most beautiful of nobodys—­that is, so far as sense goes.  Smooth, on the nicest observation, was decidedly of the opinion that only one thing more was wanted to make the Lord Mayor’s Show complete—­a pair of long soft ears emblazoned on the Corporation coach.  The reader will excuse Smooth for dwelling thus long on little things.