luncheon-bar. The building is 218 feet in length and 76 feet high, but the pavilion roofs rise to a further height of 32 feet. A tower at the south-east angle, containing a ventilating shaft and the kitchen flue, rises still higher. The ground-floor is mainly occupied by the entrances to the railway station. The next floor above it presents, as its chief feature, the great hall or ball-room, 114 feet long, 41 feet wide, and 36 high-one of the grandest rooms recently built in the city of London. The principal room on the next floor is the room for public meetings, 80 feet long. Another hotel, typical of those which do not belong to railway companies, nor adjoin railway stations, is the Langham Hotel, Portland Place. There is a vast cubical mass of building in this edifice. On the ground-floor there is a central courtyard, adorned with fountains and flowers; and around this are the salle à manger, a noble dining-room 150 feet long, coffee-room, ladies' coffee-room, library, reading-room, audience and meeting rooms, drawing-rooms, post-office and telegraphoffice; while up-stairs, besides the smoking-room and the billiardroom, there are ranges of private apartments and sleeping-rooms soaring to a greater height than any other hotel in England. The kitchen, a room 50 feet by 40, is quite a distinguishing feature; so replete is it with all the best appliances for the practical exercise of the culinary art: the roasting-grate alone is 8 feet wide by 7 feet high.

Paris contains two hotels which have no parallels in England for magnitude. One is called the Grand Hôtel, and the other the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, and each has between 600 and 700 bed-rooms. America has gone beyond even Paris in the magnitude of its hotels, especially in the instance of the Irving House, the Astor, and the St Nicholas Hotels at New York, and the Mount Vernon Hotel at New Jersey. As specimens of architecture, these immense buildings hardly call for detailed description, they being little else externally than windowed stories rising one above another to a great height; but some of the curiosities and marvels of one of the hotels have been summarised in the following brief way: 'Eight hundred bedrooms under one roof; three hundred servants; a steam laundry that will wash four thousand articles in a day (a shirt washed, dried, ironed, and delivered in fifteen minutes!); the beef of one thousand oxen cooked and served up in a year; bell-telegraphs to every room; a mile and a half of verandahs and balconies in front of the several ranges of rooms; hot and cold water baths to every bed-room; and a bridal-chamber so gorgeously furnished as to be charged at ten guineas a day.'

Clubs are to so remarkable an extent an English institution, that we need not go out of our own country to seek examples of them. So far as regards architectural character, we may select one clubhouse (the Reform) as an illustration of the whole.

The Reform Club-house, on the south side of Pall Mall, built by

the late Sir Charles Barry, is 140 feet wide by 110 deep. There are two façades which have nine windows on a floor, and one which has eight. The style is of that Italian palazzo kind which does not depend upon porticoes, colonnades, arches, towers, pinnacles, or domes, but upon a bold mass of decorated windowed surface; and the general effect has met with marked approval. There is a beautiful cortile or covered court in the centre of the building, 56 feet long, 50 wide, and 54 high. The coffee-room, on the gardenfront, is a grand apartment, 112 feet by 28. The news-room, dining-room, drawing-room, library, card-rooms, are all handsome portions of the building. It was in the kitchen of the Reform Club-house that M. Soyer established his renown as a chef de cuisine.

THEATRES AND OPERA-HOUSES.

Instead of describing, in our limited space, any one of the numerous opera-houses and theatres of Europe, we will give in a condensed form some comparative figures, from Fergusson's History of Modern Architecture.

La Scala, at Milan, is the greatest in depth of audience part, and the Vienna the least; the Madrid opera-house is the greatest in width, and the Berlin and Vienna the least; the Madrid is the greatest in width of curtain, and Berlin the least; the Turin is the greatest in depth of stage, and our own opera-house in the Haymarket decidedly the least; the height over the pit varies from 84 feet in San Carlo at Naples, to 51 at Darmstadt.

Here we must close. It would be easy, if space allowed, to notice many other classes or groups of buildings which have something about them either of the wonderful or the curious. As a single room, of which the outside is scarcely visible at all, perhaps one of the most remarkable and original in Europe, and the most admirably adapted to the purpose for which it was constructed, is the new Reading-room at the British Museum. Circular in plan, and with a domed ceiling, it admits of being lighted both from the sides and from the top; it secures an effective interior; it affords unexampled accommodation to readers, with wall and press space for 100,000 volumes. The room is about 140 feet in diameter, and the height to the central skylight 108 feet. The dimensions nearly equal those of the Pantheon at Rome. Tables for about 300 readers are placed radially, like the spokes of a wheel, with an ample supply of room, light, chairs, pens, ink, paper, knives, &c. It is one of the few modern English buildings which every one praises. A beautiful new reading-room was opened at Paris in 1868, in the Imperial Library. It consists of a central square room, surrounded by semicircular arcades. The roof consists of nine cupolas of enamelled porcelain, resting on sixteen columns; the centre of each cupola having a circular skylight. There are 345 chairs, desks, and tables, for an equal number of readers. About 40,000 volumes are ranged round the room, in three balconies or galleries; and a large doorway gives access to a number of rooms in which the rest of the books are kept.

NE of the most amusing and acute persons I remember -and in my very early days I knew him well-was a white-headed lame old man, known in the neighbourhood of Kilbaggin by the name of BURNT EAGLE, or, as the Irish peasants called him, 'Burnt Aigle.' His accent proclaimed him an Irishman, but some of his habits were not characteristic of the country, for he understood the value of money, and that which makes money-TIME. He certainly was not of the neighbourhood in which he resided, for he had no 'people,' no uncles, aunts, or cousins. What his real name was I never heard; but I remember him since I was a very little girl, just old enough to be placed by my nurse on the back of Burnt Eagle's donkey. At that time he lived in a neat pretty little cottage, about a mile from our house it contained two rooms; they were not only clean, but well furnished; that is to say, well furnished for an Irish cottage. During the latter years of his life, these rooms were kept in order by two sisters; what relationship they bore to my old friend, I will tell at the conclusion of my tale. They, too, always called him Burnt No. 64.

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Aigle; all his neighbours knew about them—and the old man would not be questioned-was, that he once left home suddenly, and, after a prolonged absence, returned, sitting as usual between the panniers on a gray pony, which was young then, and, instead of his usual merchandise, the panniers contained these two little girls, one of whom could walk, the other could not: he called them Bess and Bell; and till they were in a great degree able to take care of themselves, Burnt Eagle remained entirely at home, paying great attention to his young charges, and exciting a great deal of astonishment as to 'how he managed to keep so comfortable, and rear the children :' his neighbours had no idea what a valuable freehold the old man possessed-in his time. When Burnt Eagle first came to Kilbaggin, he came with a load of fresh heather-brooms, in a little cart drawn by a donkey; but besides the brooms, he carried a store of sally switches, a good many short planks of wood, hoops large and small, bee-hives, and the tools which are used by coopers__and carpenters these were few, and of the commonest kind, yet Burnt Eagle would sit on a sort of driving-box, which raised him a great deal above the level of the car, into which he elevated himself by the aid of a long crutch that always rested on his knees: there he would sit; and as the donkey jogged quietly, as donkeys always do, through the wild and picturesque scenery of hill and dale, the old man's hands were busily employed either in weaving kishes or baskets, or forming noggins, or little tubs, and his voice would at times break into snatches of songs, half-English, half-Irish; for though sharpmannered, and of a sallow complexion that tells of melancholy, he was cheerful-hearted; and his voice, strong and clear, woke the echoes of the hills, though his melodies were generally sad or serious.

I never heard what attached him to our particular neighbourhood, but I have since thought he chose it for its seclusion. He took a fancy to a cottage, which, seated between two sand-hills covered by soft green grass and moss, was well sheltered from the sea-breeze that swept along the cockle-strand, and had been the habitation of Corney the crab-catcher, who, poor fellow, was overtaken by a spring-tide one windy evening in March, and drowned. For a long timeCrab Hall,' as it was jestingly called, was untenanted, and when Burnt Eagle fell in love with it, it was nearly in ruins. Some said it was not safe to live in it; but my old friend entered the dwelling, together with the donkey and a gray cat, and certainly were never disturbed by anything worse than their neighbours, or a high storm. It did not, however, suit Burnt Eagle's ideas of propriety to suffer the donkey to inhabit any portion of his cottage dwelling; and accordingly, after repairing it, he built him a stable, and wove a door for it out of the sally switches. His neighbours looked upon this as a work of supererogation, and wondered what Burnt Eagle could be thinking of, to go on slaving himself for