Punch (59.1870)

October 1, 1870.] PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

139

" we have come all the way from England to Holland, have endured
much, and have travelled night and day in order t,o see a broken
weather-cock in the shape of a diminutive mermaid ! "

The crone shows us two mechanical figures which do move on beuig
wound up. The children follow us, and are delighted. It is a melan-
choly performance, and ouly the model children of Broek could find
pleasure in such an entertainment.

The two mechanical figures look as if they'd been rejected by
Madame Tussaud's Committee of Selection for the Chamber of
Horrors.

Finally, there is a cuckoo-clock, which the old woman is very proud of.
In fact, imagine our Golden Square in autumn unswept, and strewn

with toys of children as at the seaside, Cremorne on a wet Sunday in
October, Shoreham Gardens (including its lake) without tea and
shrimps, waiters or visitors, people the place with a few old battered
ships' figure-heads from the works by Vauxhall Bridge, throw in a
tenth-hand rustic arbour or two from some suburban villa to be sold
a bargain, and you will have some faint idea of the appalling desolation
of the Pleasure Gardens of Broek.

Broek, to be true to itself, and to save travellers time and money,
should be spelt and pronounced " Broke."

The immortal advice once given by Mr. Punch to mankind with
regard to those about to marry, may be well repeated here :—

Advice to those about to visit Broek:—Don't !

EXTRACTS FROM MY COMMON-PLACE BOOK.

{N.B. The Authorities will be kept till called for.)

he was entertaining

the young Princesses with Banbury cakes and Guinness's stout in the Tower, while
Burke amused the Prince of Wales and his brothers by allowing them to
ride round the room on his back; if his digestion was the least out of order,
Lobd Stowell invariably imagined himself to be a porter, loading a railway
carriage at Newcastle-upon-Tyne with heavy luggage in a snow-storm; once,
when Petrarch was staying with the Machiavellis from Saturday to Monday, he
awoke the whole house, including the children, with a loud "Tally-ho!"—he
fancied he was hunting with Leo the Tenth's beagles in theCampagna ; regularly
as quarter-day came round, Luther used to dream he was a journeyman baker
in the Victualling Yard, making French rolls for Madame de Maintenon wear-
ing a white satin apron fringed with silver bells; and, if Cardinal Wolsey
took more than ihree glasses of sack negus before going to bed, he paid for his

On the other hand, it ought to be noticed that although,
the potato disease followed the Great Plague, there was
no similar epidemic in the vegetable districts of Ireland
after the Municipal Corporations Bill received the Royal
Assent.

Those were the palmy days of the British Drama, when
every hand in the theatre was raised to applaud good actors
and good acting.

The evening was calm and collected. The artisans had
ceased their labours at the Breakwater. The last belated
puffin had flown home to his nest on the Mew Stone.
The boom of the gun from " Drake's Island " was corro-
borating the local Almanack in its assertion that the
sun set at 6'40 p.m. The green sward of the Hoe at
Plymouth was crowded with all the rank and file of the
West, when tidings of the Spanish Armada having been
sighted by the coastguard on the Cheviots were suddenly
brought by a mounted horseman, in breathless haste, in
a sealed packet, from the Warden of the Stannaries to
Drake, and Raleigh, and Hawkins, and Humphrey
Gilbert, and stout old Frobisher, and John Knox, all
intent on a game of bowls with the Corporation and
resident Clergy. Without a quarter of an hour's hesitation,
they flung down the implements of amusement, snatched
up their rapiers, left the .Port Admiral to pay the reckoning,
hurried down the steps waving their pocket handkerchiefs,
and crying " St. George for old England ! " took to their
galleons and their grog, and sailed away, amid tokens
of universal respect, to achieve one of the most glorious
enterprises enshrined in the glowing pages of Hume and
Smollett.

What a subject for a painter !

AN ANGLICAN APERY.

The friends of "Father Ignatius" have surely aban-
doned him again. According to the Times•—

"The monastery founded by the Kev. Mr Lyne (Father
Ignatius) is now in course of erection, and the exterior walls
are already raised many feet in height. It is situated in a most
remote spot at the top of the secluded vale of Ewilas, among spurs
of the Brecknockshire 'Black Mountains,' at a place called
indiscretion by dreaming he was selling Anne Boleyn a pound of Oxford j Capel-y-fin—the ' Chapel of the Boundary ' of three counties,
sausages on the Capstone at Ilfracombe, and that she got out of the shop before
he found she had given him a bad half-crown.

The Lacedaemonians had no dreams, except in boisterous weather and at the
Equinox, and the Albigenses only indulged in them every other year. Amongst
the ancient Carthaginians it was considered lucky to dream of a gingham umbrella
with a horn-handle in the spare bed-room ; but most unfortunate, if a black setter
ran down the gravel walk and met an old woman in a red cloak returning from the
dentist's.

Dreams weie not known earlier than the old red sandstone period, and to this
day there is no mention of them in the cheap editions of Domesday Book.

" History repeats itself"—so writes Cardinal Richelieu in a letter to Calvin,
and no one has thought it necessary to contradict him—indeed the extraordinary
coincidence of a lunar rainbow having been seen on board ship, both after the
Battle of the Frogs and Mice and the glorious Victory of "the First of June,"
appears to strengthen this axiom of the wily Minister of Peter the Great.
Again, the milkman went his rounds as usual the morning after the Battle of
Waterloo, and the same phenomenon was observed by the reviewers, before the
news of the fall of the Byzantine Empire had been circulated twenty-four hours in
the coffee-houses of Stamboul. We know, too, by the testimony of intelligent
bystanders, that, it was a beautiful evening the night of the passing of the
first Reform Bill, people walking about in Parliament Street without their hats, and
the Milky Way unusually brilliant: the weather was equally auspicious when
Montgomery, accompanied by his black servant, made his first balloon ascent
from the terraces at Versailles, in the presence of the King and the entire Corps
diplomatique.

Brecon, Hereford, and Monmouth."

The monk-house of Father Ignatius and his monks
will not be within easy reach of visitors. It is not, how-
ever, nor would it, or any other such simious institution
be, too far off if it were at Jericho. That consideration pre-
vents us from complaining that the distance from Fleet
Street to " the secluded vale of Ewilas " will be a long way
to go and see " our poor relations."

Musical and Melancholy.

May a conductor who beats time to an " Op." of Bach
or Beethoven be reasonably regarded by the audience as
an Op-timeist ?__

rhymes pok the "record."

Has a vial been poured on the Seat of the Beast ?
We know not. Things look very like it at least.

a pilial remark.

" Time hangs heavy on my hands," as the son said, when
he became the possessor of his father's large old-fashioned
silver watch.