The empty cigar-box makes you sad. You
must have injured your constitution to an
appreciable degree by smoking, say fifty out of
that century of Colorado Claros. You have lately
discovered that your cousin Tom, on whom you
pressed a handful of your choicest cigars when
you left him at Gravesend, on his way to Bombay,
is a humbug. It was owing to your cruel
and brutal persistence in smoking the last of
your cigars in the Blue Boudoir, thereby
disturbing the afternoon nap of the Italian
greyhound, and causing that intolerable little beast
to sneeze thrice, that you had last Thursday a
few words with the partner of your joys and
woes, and afterwards looked out in the Court
Directory the private address of the judge who
sits in divorce and matrimonial causes, and has
power to loose and to bind. Worse than all, you
have a running account with Messrs. Lope de
Vega and Co., cigar merchants, of Bond-street,
W., and the hundred Colorado Claros, all smoked
out, remain to be paid for.

If empty boxes yield anything, the harvest
is but one of regrets. The scholar who bade
Albertus Magnus raise the devil for him, found,
dashed in his face, an empty purse; and if you
would conjure up the ghosts of dead hopes, and
the phantom of the love that is no more, and the
skeleton ribs, black and rotten, of the Ship of
Ambition, aboard which you vowed to ride into
the Port of Fame, and seize the Golden Fleece—
if you would lift the veil, and recal the agony,
and survey the wilderness of desolation and the
valley of dry bones, I would advise you to plunge
into the contemplation of empty boxes. "The
late Miss Craggs's Estate." Such an inscription
on a japanned tin box, in a lawyer's office near
Cavendish-square, once meant to me a thousand
pounds. The box was full. I saw a will, trust
deeds, dividend warrants, through its tin sides.
I walked round the house that held the box in
my dreams, and woke up in terror, thinking that
thieves had stolen it, and longed for the day for
me to be twenty-one, and find a swift stock-
broker, and sell my money out. It never did
anybody any good. It is lost in the fastnesses
of the Neilgherry Hills; it is at the bottom of
the river Rhine; it is in Kensal-green. I shudder
now to think that I may meet some day in
Shipyard or Brokers'-row, an empty box, the
japanning half worn off the tin, and the late Miss
Craggs's Estate grinning out of the shadows
made by piles of second-hand office furniture. I
do not think I could bear that sight. I should
buy the box, and scrape out all remembrance
of Miss Craggs, and melt up the japanned
tin to an unrecognisable lump. Saddest of
empty boxes; and O the vanity of youth
untoward, ever spleeny, ever froward! What a school
might be built, what a house bought, what a
little purse made against the laying of
the first stone of the Asylum for Decayed Turncocks
by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, what a
capital venture made to the Spanish Main, with
a thousand pounds! Depend upon it, the
Prodigal Son had an empty box, and sat upon it
the while he tended swine and fed on draff and
husks.

Saddest of empty boxes? No, not the saddest.
There are boxes whose aspect is even more
melancholy. Kicked about in yards, despised as
the vilest rubbish, are the boxes which once held
the sparkling chefs-d'oeuvre of Mumm and
Roederer, and Jacquesson, and the Widow Cliquot.
Who cares for an empty champagne-box? An
empty egg-box is stouter. The empty box which
has contained bottles of Warren's blacking will
afford a firmer rostrum from which stump orator
may address his dupes. It is not generally
known that the haut pas of the thrones from
which theatrical kings and queens issue their
decrees, and witness the evolutions of the
occasional ballet, are often built up from egg-boxes.
Champagne-boxes would be too fragile. This
is the end, then, of all your frothing, and
popping, and spuming forth effervescent delight.
A bottle, if it be not cracked, may serve again.
Shot, or a wire besom, may cleanse its interior.
It may be degraded to serve as a candlestick for
a tallow dip, but it may be washed and purified,
re-filled, re-corked, re-wired, re-wrapped in pink
paper, re-exported, to make the name of the
Widow Cliquot famous to the ends of the earth.
But its empty box will never serve again. Rough
deals are cheap, and can be easily nailed together,
and daubed with mystic trades-marks and legends,
as "Fragile," "With care," "This side upward,"
and a portrait of a full (not empty) bottle.

Writers who set up for cynics are very apt to
talk of the skeleton closet which is said—
although I do not believe anything of the sort—
to form part of the architectural arrangements
of every modern house. At least, I do not
believe in the solitary skeleton, the one bony
osteological bogey, hanging to a nail in one
particular cupboard, of which only the master—if
it be not the mistress—of the establishment
keeps the key. But if you will mount to an
apartment at the top of the house—an apartment
which is open to all, cook, butler, and
housemaid, and whither the children often repair
for the purpose of playing at wild beasts, or at
shops—you may find, not one, but twenty skeletons,
in the shape of empty boxes. There
are the portmanteaus, long since bulged into
uselessness; the bullock-trunks of the lieutenant
who died in India; the bonnet-boxes of
the girl who bloomed into a woman and is
now a widow; the carpet-bag you used to take
with you on those rare fishing excursions to
Walton-on-Thames; the little, fat, black valise
which was your companion during that notable
week you stayed at the country-house of the
Lord Viscount Toombsley—the only lord you
ever knew—and he cut you dead in the Burlington
Arcade last Wednesday was a week. Pleasant
journeys, joyous outings, trips to Paris,
runs to the Rhine, wedding tours, jolly friends,
pretty girls, merry meetings: the spectres of all
these linger about the empty boxes. Look at
the luggage-labels. You can hear the pat of
the paste-brush, and see the red-faced porter