after you have paid - and a few dull candles are lighted - wind
permitting - and the performer and the scanty audience play out a
short match which shall make the other most low-spirited - which is
usually a drawn game. After that, the performer instantly departs
with maledictory expressions, and is never heard of more.

But the most wonderful feature of our Assembly Rooms, is, that an
annual sale of 'Fancy and other China,' is announced here with
mysterious constancy and perseverance. Where the china comes from,
where it goes to, why it is annually put up to auction when nobody
ever thinks of bidding for it, how it comes to pass that it is
always the same china, whether it would not have been cheaper, with
the sea at hand, to have thrown it away, say in eighteen hundred
and thirty, are standing enigmas. Every year the bills come out,
every year the Master of the Rooms gets into a little pulpit on a
table, and offers it for sale, every year nobody buys it, every
year it is put away somewhere till next year, when it appears again
as if the whole thing were a new idea. We have a faint remembrance
of an unearthly collection of clocks, purporting to be the work of
Parisian and Genevese artists - chiefly bilious-faced clocks,
supported on sickly white crutches, with their pendulums dangling
like lame legs - to which a similar course of events occurred for
several years, until they seemed to lapse away, of mere imbecility.

Attached to our Assembly Rooms is a library. There is a wheel of
fortune in it, but it is rusty and dusty, and never turns. A large
doll, with moveable eyes, was put up to be raffled for, by five-
and-twenty members at two shillings, seven years ago this autumn,
and the list is not full yet. We are rather sanguine, now, that
the raffle will come off next year. We think so, because we only