Mr. W. (alone).  I shall have to change my rooms—­and I was so comfortable!  Well, well,—­another sacrifice to the Cause!

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

[Illustration]

There was a bronze group by POLLET among the specimens of sculpture in the French Salon, some twenty years ago,—­“It may be more or less an hour or so,” as the poet sings,—­representing a female form being carried upwards in the embrace of a rather evil-looking Angel.  It illustrated a poem by the Vicomte ALFRED DE VIGNY, which I remember reading, in consequence of this very statue having come into my possession (it was afterwards sold at Messrs. CHRISTIE, MANSON & WOODS, under the style and title of “Lot 121, Elsa"), and it occurs to me that it was on precisely the same theme as the other ALFRED’s—­not the Vicomte but Mister ALFRED AUSTIN’s—­“The Tower of Babel,” which I have just read with much pleasure, and, with some profit; the moral, as I take it, being favourable to the Temperance cause, as a warning against all spirits, good, bad, or indifferent. Afrael, the inhabitant of a distant star, falls in love with Noema, the wife of the atheistical Babelite Aran, to whom she has borne a son, aged in the poem, as far as I can make out, about eight years, and a fine boy for that.  Anyhow, it makes Noema at least twenty-five, supposing she married at sweet seventeen, and, indeed, she alludes to herself in the poem as no longer in her first youth.

Well, Aran, who is very far from being a domestic character, is struck down by avenging lightning at the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and Noema is left a widow, with her child, who has been protected in the melee by the Spirit Afrael’s taking him out of it, and restoring him to his mother’s arms.  When, after this, the infatuated spirit-lover Afrael requests Noema to say the word which shall make a man of him, and a husband of him too at the same time, she modestly refuses, until she has had a decent time to order her widow’s weeds at her milliner’s and wear them for about a month or so, at the expiration of which interval Afrael may, if he be still of the same mind, call in again, and pop the question.

Afrael bids good-bye to the Upper House, and, his heart being ever true to Poll—­meaning Noema—­he returns, makes an evening call upon her, and asks her, in effect, “Is it to be ‘Yes-ema,’ or ’No-ema’?” The bashful widow chooses the former, and the Spirit-lover Afrael, renouncing his immortality, i.e., giving up spirits, becomes plain Mr. Afrael, and an ordinary, as far as anybody can judge, a very ordinary mortal, showing what a change a drop of spirits can effect in a constitution.  Now I should like the poem “continued in our next.”  I should like to hear how they got on together: