FISHMONGER'S HALL FISHMONGERS' HALL. ARMS OF THE COMPANY. These Cuts may be welcome illustrations of the olden magnificence of the City of London. The first represents the river or back front of the Hall of the Fishmongers' Company: the second cut, the arms of the Company, is added by way of an illustrative pendent. These insignia are placed over the entrance to the Hall in Lower... more...

OUR NATIONAL FINANCES. Our national finances are involved in extreme peril. Our public debt exceeds $720,000,000, and is estimated by the Secretary of the Treasury, on the 1st of July next, at $1,122,297,403, and on the 1st of July, 1864, at $1,744,685,586. When we reflect that this is nearly one half the debt of England, and bearing almost double the rate of interest, it is clear that we are... more...

AMERICAN AËRONAUTS.BALLOON ENTANGLED IN A TREE.Scattered here and there in this matter-of-fact, utilitarian age of Business one finds instances of that love of daring for its own sake, with an insatiable longing for new scenes and novel sensations, which in the days of chivalry moved the mass of men to put saddle to horse and ride off Somewhere seeking Something—just as occasional trilobites, lonely... more...

WASHINGTON IRVING, ESQ. AND HIS WORKS. Washington Irving was born, in the State of New York, in the year 1782, and is, consequently, in his fifty-first year. His early life cannot better be told than in his own graceful language, prefixed to the most celebrated of his writings as "the author's account of himself." "I was always fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange... more...

Salem, June 15, 1835.—A walk down to the Juniper. The shore of the coves strewn with bunches of sea-weed, driven in by recent winds. Eel-grass, rolled and bundled up, and entangled with it,—large marine vegetables, of an olive color, with round, slender, snake-like stalks, four or five feet long, and nearly two feet broad: these are the herbage of the deep sea. Shoals of fishes, at a little... more...

ON A NEW YEARLING. (Second Week.)Second Week. Little 1892 grows rapidly, and begins to look about him.My fire was low; my bills were high; My sip of punch was in its ladle; The clarion chimes were in the sky; The nascent year was in its cradle. In sober prose to tell my tale, 'Twas New Year's E'en, when, blind to danger, All older-fashioned nurses hail With joy "another little... more...

A DAY AT THE BEACH. HERE are few of the little readers of "The Nursery" who could not tell of pleasant days spent among green fields and woods, or on the seashore. But in almost every large city, there are many children who have never been out of sight of brick walls.Their homes are in close rooms in narrow streets, and there they live from one year's end to the other. In winter they are... more...

VOCES POPULI. BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW. SCENE—A Village School-room. A Juvenile Treat is in progress, and a Magic Lantern, hired for the occasion, "with set of slides complete—to last one hour" is about to be exhibited. The Vicar's Daughter (suddenly recognising the New Curate, who is blinking unsuspectingly in the lantern rays). Oh, Mr. TOOTLER, you've just come in time to help us!... more...

THE TIPTOES. A SKETCH. "The Wrongheads have been a considerable family ever since England was England." VANBRUGH. Morning and evening, from every village within three or four miles of the metropolis, may be remarked a tide of young men wending diurnal way to and from their respective desks and counters in the city, preceded by a ripple of errand-boys, and light porters, and followed by an ebb... more...

MARLBOROUGH. No. I. Alexander the Great said, when he approached the tomb of Achilles, "Oh! fortunate youth, who had a Homer to be the herald of your fame!" "And well did he say so," says the Roman historian: "for, unless the Iliad had been written, the same earth which covered his body would have buried his name." Never was the truth of these words more clearly evinced than in... more...