which would presently withdraw the bolt, polluting him with the mimic grasp of good-will and friendship; another minute only, and he would be struggling in the death-throes. But in that minute what a world of thoughts passed through his brain! what years of his by-gone life were acted over again in that little speck of time! how inexpressibly dear to him became on the sudden the shop where he had almost starved, and had foolishly imagined that human wretchedness could scarcely go beyond his! how gladly, how more than gladly, would he have exchanged lots with the poorest beggar in the streets, ay, even with the wretched convict, who earned a scanty meal of bread and water, with gyved limbs, and gradually-wasting strength, till he sank into the grave hopeless and unlamented.

Oh, that I could but call back the last two days!' he exclaimed in agony of heart, only the last two days!-and that this was no more than a frightful dream!'

Scarcely had the last words syllabled themselves upon his trembling lips, when he awoke; and found himself sitting in his little parlour, before the expiring embers of the neglected fire. The dream, however, had made an impression as deep as it was salutary. From that time forth the barber was an altered man, the change in his inward self being as wonderful as the outward change he had just been dreaming of in his person. He no longer hunted after executions, but grew sick at the sight, or even the talk, of blood; so that when at length he died, in the fulness of years, the whole village followed him to the grave. Even to this hour, when a child is seen prone to cruelty, the villageelders will send the young delinquent to the spot, where rest the remains of The Barber of Beaulieu.

THE FAIRIES' RING.*

BY WILLIAM JONES.

IN the glowing light of a summer sky,
When the fields are clad with green,
Oft in their midst, with a sunnier dye,
May the Fairies' Ring be seen!

'Tis a circle form'd by the tiny feet
Of the elves, as they dance around:

When the moon rides high it is there they meet,
And merrily tread the ground!

The Fairies' Ring! 'tis a hallowing spot,
That the plough itself doth spare;

And verdant still is the fadeless plot,

Though Nature around is bare!

Woe, woe to him, who shall scornful tread,

For many a curse 'twill bring,

But a blessing rests on the good man's head

Who loveth the Fairies' Ring.

* In allusion to the superstition prevalent in country-places, that the rings often observed in fields are the work of elves, and are respected accordingly.

A VISIT TO THE BANK OF FRANCE.

BY FRANCIS LLOYD.

My friend, M. Delamane-Martin Didier, a regent (as the directors are called) of the Bank of France, having offered to conduct me over that noble establishment, I gladly embraced his offer; and to-day spent two hours there, in company with my very polite and obliging escort;* who, unlike Frenchmen in general, seemed most anxious to afford me information on every branch of the bank's affairs, without the slightest attempt at mystification or concealment. French men of business,' who really are men of business, practically as well as theoretically, are, in my opinion, by far the most agreeable of any throughout Europe. In finance, and all matters bearing upon accounts and figures, the French and Germans are systematisers to an extent difficult to conceive by persons unacquainted with their habits. But, though the book-keeping of the former is perfect, their stock-keeping is quite contemptible. They have, however, this advantage over us, a uniformity of system is not only adopted, but enforced upon all by the syndicate of the Tribunal of Commerce at Paris, and by the Chamber of Commerce in all the larger towns. Every tradesman is obliged to keep a cash-book, journal, day-book, and ledger, under penalties, or what are equivalent to penalties, and very severe ones too. Even the books of small shopkeepers are numbered in printed figures by the authorities of the Chamber of Commerce. No interleaving or abstraction of pages can pass in France, should a tradesman become insolvent. The enactments relative to bankruptcy are almost penal, and anything like a delusion would inevitably cause the imprisonment and ruin of the bankrupt. I know several men, who, under the indulgent laws of England have practised the grossest frauds in all their commercial transactions; have raised money by bills of exchange for which no bona fide consideration was ever given; have borrowed large sums from their bankers under representations utterly false; and have, after becoming bankrupts for enormous liabilities, persuaded their creditors to sign their certificates of release before a dividend was paid, started afresh, and unblushingly figured away in the world as if nothing of the sort had happened. Some of these flagrant examples of our imperfect system, which rather incites than discourages fraud, may be seen driving blood-horses in handsome equipages about the streets of Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester, as I know to my cost; whilst the duped tradesmen their rascality has ruined are obliged to walk through the dirt. Whatever may be the laxity of morals, which it is our wont to attribute to the French (and how fond we are, too, of talking about English morality!) certain it is, that the assurance with which a bankrupt in England claims reinstation in society, before he has paid one quarter of his debts, avowing his intention openly never to pay the other three-quarters at all, is unparalleled in any other country except the United States.

The accuracy and redundancy of cheques in French book-keeping,

*This gentleman is a banker in Paris (Delamane Martin Didier & Co.); in London, bankers are ineligible for the direction of the Bank of England.

is shown to perfection in the Bank of France. I do love to see a set of well-kept books. Those of the Bank of England are well and neatly kept. No erasure is on any account allowed, under pain of dismissal; but even its noted hyper-correctness, which often becomes a subject of joke amongst the clerks of the private bankers against those of the Old Lady of Threadneedle-Street,' sinks into slatternliness when tested by the double-double entry and duplicate-posting, rough waste-books, fair waste-books, cash-books, and ledgers, nomen illis legio, through which every entry must run the gauntlet before it become a debit or a credit with the Bank of France. Mark the superfluity of entries in the initiatory step, before the sum becomes, as it were, adopted into the great books of the concern. I take a cheque-say for 2000f. (807.)drawn by A. B., to the counter of the bank. I drop it through an aperture similar to that of a post-office letter-box. A clerk sitting below this receptacle takes the cheque, turns to the account of A. B. in a rough balance-book, a fresh one, posted up to every day, under a letterpress heading, being placed on his desk every morning. There being sufficient in the account to cover this cheque, he marks it, and hands it to a second clerk, who fills up a warrant for its payment, and enters it in the fair waste-book, which warrant is handed to a third clerk. Clerk No. 3 enters it in form in the cash-book; then files it, and notifies in a loud voice to a fourth clerk in the 'caisse,' or money-counter, (fortified all round, up to the ceiling, with strong iron wire,) thus:-'Deux mille francs, A. B.' I move round to a little aperture in the caisse,' and say whether I will have it in four bills of the Bank of France, or in gold or silver; if in gold, five francs are deducted.

During the time that this formality is solemnly and silently proceeding, the cashier at my bankers in London would pay twenty cheques to twenty different persons. At the Bank of England a cheque passes through two hands before it be posted in the cash-book; but the same clerk who notes the cheque at the counter, pays it. What would be thought in London if the bankers were gravely to inform the public some fine morning that a small premium would be expected if sovereigns were required for cashing a cheque over the counter? The Bank of England had better take the hint-it would thereby be spared the humiliating necessity of going a begging, as of late, for gold to the Bank of France; a circumstance I never think of without a blush of shame. I would remark, that the Bank of France neither borrows from Government, nor lends to Government-a wise plan. Another feature which I think our Bank of England might borrow from it with advantage, is the tenure of the Governor's office. He is appointed for life by Government, and is generally the ablest and best-fitted individual that can be found to fill a post of such high responsibility. Our Government borrowed at one time thirteen millions from the Bank of England, which was repaid in sums of about six hundred thousand pounds annually; and I question whether not less than nine millions and a half be not still unpaid.

The Bank of France transacts more business-essentially banking business-than the Bank of England, independently of the transactions of the latter with Government; with no part of which operations has the Bank of France anything to do. This complete isolation from the administration of the country places the Bank of France in the same position, in that respect, as that of any other bank in the Metropolis. But, at the same time, the Bank of France discharges functions which

the Bank of England does not, nor probably ever will. The Parisian bankers perform little more than the functions of credit merchants, such as Barings, Rothschilds, Haldimand and Co., and many others, upon whom drafts are drawn from abroad and from the country, for credits lodged for them to honour. The Paris bankers are in the habit of paying into the Bank of France their bills of exchange for collection in the Metropolis; and as there is no 'clearing house,' as in London, and acceptors make their bills payable at their own residences, a special labour is attached to the collection of each bill. These collecting clerks, who have each a district of Paris allotted to them, are sixty-five in number; their desks are partitioned off apart from each other, and the doors and windows wired over in the usual French precautionary fashion. One long room contains them all-an apartment resembling the Long Room' at the London Custom House, or more nearly, perhaps, those corridors of Greenwich Hospital, where the veterans are boxed up right and left in their berths, and you have seen how snug and busy the old fellows are in that haven which is henceforward all the world to them after their long and perilous career. The chief of this department very politely drew my attention to all the leading features of that important portion of the business of the Bank. I inspected the books, questioned the clerks, and, in fact, made myself acquainted with every point upon which I desired information, or wherein I perceived a deviation from the system of bill-collection as practised in London.

It was three o'clock when I entered the Collecting Room:' I found that the gross number of bills presented to-day in Paris by the bank was 41,174, amounting to 40,221,000 francs (averaging 401. each bill, out of an amount of 1,600,000l. sterling,) and of these 6,000 were unpaid; but the Chief Bill-Comptroller told me he had no doubt but that all these will be, as no grace is allowed; and, if taken up before twelve o'clock to-morrow no expense will be incurred. These sixty-five clerks had to-day called at 17,420 houses. On the thirty-first day of every month a greater number falls due than on any other. In the average

of the last four months, on the last day of each of these months, each clerk called at three hundred houses per diem; and in seven out of eight instances received sums of silver and copper, with a few notes of the Bank of France, and signed and gave receipt for the bills he thus left. I found to-day that upwards of 121,000,000 francs were received by the bank in Paris from different sources, and that last year about 700,000 bills were discounted, amounting to 850,000,000 francs. The clerks are obliged to return from their beat to the Bank of France many times in the course of the day, owing to the accumulation of specie that weighs them down; while those of the Bank of England traverse Pimlico and Marylebone, collect bills, and return at one journey with their proceeds within the leaves of their pocket-books; bank-notes and cheques performing the parts of napoleons and five-france pieces, and the pocket-book conveniently performing the part of clumsy coarse bagging, of which their money-sacks are made.

I explained to the regents of the bank the operation of the London Clearing-House; that system so economic of time and trouble, and without which concentration and rapid settlement, the enormous balances between the banking houses in the great emporium of the commercial world could not be so promptly struck, or the wheels of our complicated monetary system could not revolve so evenly and

VOL. X.

7

quickly. I have always thought that the system of making bills, drawn from whatever quarter of the world, or from whatever town or village in Great Britain, upon all parts of Great Britain, payable in one place, i. e. as effected daily by one hour's adjustment of the clearing-housethat such united regulation and acceleration of finance is to the complex machinery of banking what the fly-wheel and governor is to the steam engine. You may imagine the regent's surprise when I told him that in the London Clearing House, (a plain room, on part of the site of the old post-office in Lombard Street,) a clerk from each private bank in London attended twice a day for but half an hour; and commercial obligations were collectively discharged to the amount of three millions sterling every day in the year; with not more than a fifteenth of this sum in bank-notes. That, as to using coin, silver and copper, I could readily picture to myself the contemptuous and derisive expression of face which the most juvenile of these clearing-clerks would assume at the bare suggestion. A thousand millions of pounds sterling, I told him, were paid last year in this room by these clerks, not more than forty in number,- a sum larger than the national debt; and that all the money used for the operation-this balancing of a year's commercial enterprise in all quarters of the globe-was effected without a single error, a moment's delay, and with bits of paper only -the promissory notes of the Bank of England.

The annual circulation of money through all the branches of the Bank of France is about eight millions. When I had explained the clearing system in all its bearings to the regents and the great facility it conferred on banking operations, they unanimously expressed their admiration, and one said,

"Ah! sir, would to God that we could concentrate the energies of this country upon objects conducive to its wealth and prosperity, as you English are doing. We have energy enough and to spare in France, but, unhappily, that energy is, for the most part, misdirected by those who ought to know better.'

This was the candid avowal of a wealthy and intelligent man, emulous of the true glory of his country; and the sentiments it contained appeared to coincide with those of the other regents who did me the honour to receive me to-day.

To return for a moment to the book-keeping system. In the ledger department is a feature I could wish to see adopted in all great bankinghouses. Daily, after the bank closes for receipts and payments, sheets are filled in with the balance of every man's account. The Bank of France may have several thousands, and the titles of each are printed on the sheets, with sufficient space between for the entry of the diurnal transactions in each account. These form a folio volume, placed before the clerk who first receives the cheques through the aperture already described to you, and the sum of his entries at the close of the day ought to agree with the sum of the clerk of the cash-bookin fact, be a duplicate of the ledger. Here I remarked how decimal divisions of value shortened labour, and lessened error. A specific return is also invariably made up, under printed forms of great minuteness; affording at one view the exact state of the Bank every evening.

With two regents, and one of the censors, I then passed through the entire establishment-from the gold vaults to the splendid apartments of Count d'Argout, the governor, who resides within the walls. The