LONDON: JOHN CAMDEN HOTTEN, 74 & 75, PICCADILLY. [ All Rights Reserved. ]...

The story of the Cockaynes was written some years ago,—in the days when Paris was at her best and brightest; and the English quarter was crowded; and the Emperor was at St. Cloud; and France appeared destined to become the wealthiest and strongest country in the world. Where the Cockaynes carried their guide-books and opera-glasses, and fell into raptures at every footstep, there are dismal ruins now. The Vendôme Column is a stump, wreathed with a gigantic immortelle , and capped with the tri-co

The story I have to tell is disjointed. I throw it out as I picked it up. My duties, the nature of which is neither here nor there, have borne me to various parts of Europe. I am a man, not with an establishment—but with two portmanteaus. I have two hats in Paris and two in London always. I have seen everything in both cities, and like Paris, on the whole, best. There are many reasons, it seems to me, why an Englishman who has the tastes of a duke and the means of a half-pay major, should prefer

"He has but stumbled in the path Thou hast in weakness trod."— A. A. Procter "He's here again, Mum." He was there at the servant's entrance to the highly respectable boarding-house in the Rue Millevoye. It was five in the morning—a winter's morning. Mrs. Rowe hastened from her room, behind the business parlour, in her dressing-gown, her teeth chattering, and her eyes flashing the fire of hate. The boarders sleeping upstairs would not have known the godly landlady, who glided about the house by d

I must be permitted to tell the rambling stories that ran parallel during my experiences of Mrs. Rowe's establishment in my own manner—filling up with what I guessed, all I heard from Lucy, or saw for myself. Mr. Charles was a visitor at intervals who always arrived when the house was quiet; and after whose visits Mrs. Rowe regularly took to her room for the day, leaving the accounts and the keys wholly to Lucy, and the kitchen to Jane—with strict injunctions to look after the Reverend Horace Mo

The morning after a bevy of "the blonde daughters of Albion" have arrived in Paris, Pater—over the coffee (why is it impossible to get such coffee in England?), the delicious bread, and the exquisite butter—proceeds to expound his views of the manner in which the time of the party should be spent. So was it with the Cockaynes, an intensely British party. "My dears," said Mr. Cockayne, "we must husband our time. To-day I propose we go, at eleven o'clock, to see the parade of the Guard in the Rue

The Cockaynes deserve a few words of formal introduction to the reader, since he is destined to make their better acquaintance. We have ventured hitherto only to take a few discreet and distant glimpses at them, as we found them loitering about the Boulevards on the morrow of their appearance in Paris. Mr. Cockayne—having been very successful for many years in the soap-boiling business, to the great discomfort and vexation of the noses of his neighbours, and having amassed fortune enough to keep

"Well, these Paris tradespeople are the most extraordinary persons in the world," cried Sophonisba's mamma, and the absolute ruler of Mr. Cockayne. "I confess I can't make them out. They beat me. My dear, they are the most independent set I ever came across. They don't seem to care whether you buy or you don't; and they ask double what they intend to take." "What is the matter now, my dear?" Mr. Cockayne ventured, in an unguarded moment, to ask, putting aside for a moment Mr. Bayle St. John's sc

I Introduce at this point—its proper date—Miss Carrie Cockayne's letter to Miss Sharp:— "Grand Hôtel, Paris. " Dearest Emmy —They are all out shopping, so here's a long letter. I haven't patience with the men. I am sure we have had enough abuse in our own country, without travelling all the way to Paris for it; and yet the first paper I take up in the reading saloon of the hotel, contains a paragraph headed Le Beau Sexe en Angleterre . The paragraph is violent. The writer wants to know what demo

Lucy was privileged to read the following:— Miss Carrie Cockayne to Miss Emily Sharp. "Rue Millevoye, Paris. " My Dearest Emmy ,—I should certainly not venture to offer any remarks on taste to you, my love, under ordinary circumstances. But I am provoked. I have passed a severe round of soirées of every description. Jaded with the fantastic activities of a fancy-dress genteel riot, I have been compelled to respond to the intimation of the Vicomtesse de Bois de Rose, that " on sautera ." I have j

Miss Carrie Cockayne to Miss Sharp. "Rue Millevoye. " My dearest Emmy ,—No answer from you? How unkind! But still I continue to give you my ideas of the moment from this. What do we want? A writer in one of the frivolous sheets which are called newspapers on this side of the Channel, has been giving himself great airs; looking out of his window, with two or three touches of his pen he dismisses the poor women who pass under his balcony, and closes the casement with the conviction that woman's ri

Lucy Rowe would have been fast friends with Carrie Cockayne during their stay in her aunt's house, had Mrs. Cockayne, on the one hand, permitted her daughter to become intimate with anything so low as "the people of the house," and had Mrs. Rowe, on the other, suffered her niece to "forget her place." But they did approach each other, by an irresistible affinity, and by the easy companionship of common tastes. While Sophonisba engaged ardently in all the doings of the house, and was a patient re

Poor girl! she was timid, frightened. I saw at once that the man with whom she was, and who packed her feet up so carefully in the travelling rug in her state cabin, was not of her class. She could not have been daintier in mien and shape than she appeared. Hands round and white as pearls, feet as pretty as ever stole from a man's hand to the stirrup; a sweet wee face, that had innocence and heart in it. Country bred, I thought: nested in some Kentish village: a childhood amid the hops: familiar

"You must come, my dear fellow. You know, when I promise you a pleasant evening I don't disappoint you. You'll meet everybody. You dine with me. Sole Joinville , at Philippe's—best to be had, I think—and a bird. In the cool, the Madrid for our coffee, and so gently back. I'll drop you at your door—leave you for an hour to paint the lily, and then fetch and take you. You shall not say me nay." I protested a little, but I was won. I had a couple of days to spend in Paris, and, like a man on the wi

I had an unfortunate friend at Boulogne in the year 1865—then and many years before. He lived on the ramparts in the upper town; had put on that shabby military air, capped with a naval couvre-chef (to use a Paris street word that is expressive, as street words often are), which distinguishes the British inhabitant of Boulogne-sur-mer; and was the companion of a group of majors and skippers, sprinkled with commercial men of erratic book-keeping tendencies. He had lost tone. He took me to his clu

Cosmo Bertram was at a very low ebb. No horse. Had moved off to Batignolles. Had not been asked to the Embassy for a twelvemonth. When he ventured into the Tuileries gardens in the afternoon, it somehow happened that the backs of the ladies' chairs were mostly turned towards him. He was still dapper in appearance; but a close observer could see a difference. Management was perceptible in his dress. He had no watch; but the diamond remained on his finger—for the present; and yet society had nothi

It will happen so—and here is our moral—the bonnets of Sophonisba and Theodosia, bewitching as they were, and archly as these young ladies wore them, paling every toilette of the Common, were not put aside for bridal veils. Carrie, who was content with silver-grey, it was who returned to Paris first, sitting at the side of the writer of the following letters, sent, it is presumed, to his bachelor friend:— "Paris, 'The Leafy Month of June.' " My dear Mac ,—I will be true to my promise. I will giv

Is there a more melancholy place than the street in which you have lived; than the house, now curtainless and weather-stained, you knew prim, and full of happy human creatures; than the "banquet-hall deserted:" than the empty chair; than the bed where Death found the friend you loved? The Rue Millevoye is all this to me. I avoid it. If any cabman wants to make a short cut that way I stop him. Mrs. Rowe rests at last, in the same churchyard with the Whytes of Battersea: her faults forgiven; that