_Dull Old Gentleman (evidently getting irritable.)_ "All I've got to say
is this, that I don't know which is the worse, she or the play. What is
the stage coming to? In my day we used to have something like acting at
the old Park. Ah, there was PLACIDE, and ELLEN TREE, and--"

The old gentleman goes slowly out, muttering reminiscences from ancient
history. A tall, intellectual-looking man is seen to withdraw into the
grass-plat in the court-yard, and is there heard to appeal to the
chimney-pots and stars to note the surpassing beauty of the vocal velvet
of the fair MARKHAM. And the undersigned wends his way homeward with the
conviction that _Hamlet_, with the part of HAMLET omitted, would be
intelligible and attractive in comparison with LYDIA THOMPSON and
PAULINE MARKHAM with their legs banished from public view. MATADOR.

* * * * *

PUNCHINELLO IN WALL STREET.

The great art of Doing others as they would like to Do you has always
commended itself to PUNCHINELLO as a very happy rendering of a certain
fusty old rule which, in its original shape, did very well some nineteen
hundred years ago, but is altogether out of date in these brisk times.
Hence the gambols of the merry bulls in that Broad Street which leadeth
to DIVES palace are just now highly entertaining. In that illustrious
quarter of this amazing metropolis there is a beautiful game going on
which is vastly more interesting to watch than to join in, and this
little game is much as follows:

A number of the members of that worthy family of undoubted ancestry and