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ROUNDABOUT PAPERS 
by William Makepeace Thackeray 
 
CONTENTS 
ROUNDABOUT PAPERS 
On a Lazy Idle Boy 
On Two Children in Black 
On Ribbons 
On some late Great Victories 
Thorns in the Cushion 
On Screens in Dining-Rooms 
Tunbridge Toys 
De Juventute 
On a Joke I once heard from the late Thomas Hood 
Round about the Christmas Tree 
On a Chalk-Mark on the Door 
On being Found Out 
On a Hundred Years Hence 
Small-Beer Chronicle 
Ogres 
On Two Roundabout Papers which I intended to Write 
A Mississippi Bubble 
On Letts's Diary 
Notes of a Week's Holiday 
Nil Nisi Bonum 
On Half a Loaf--A Letter to Messrs. Broadway, Battery and Co., of
New York, Bankers 
The Notch on the Axe.--A Story a la Mode. 
Part I 
Part II 
Part III 
De Finibus 
On a Peal of Bells 
On a Pear-Tree 
Dessein's 
On some Carp at Sans Souci 
Autour de mon Chapeau 
On Alexandrines--A Letter to some Country Cousins 
On a Medal of George the Fourth 
"Strange to say, on Club Paper" 
The Last Sketch 
 
ROUNDABOUT PAPERS. 
ON A LAZY IDLE BOY. 
I had occasion to pass a week in the autumn in the little old town of 
Coire or Chur, in the Grisons, where lies buried that very ancient 
British king, saint, and martyr, Lucius,* who founded the Church of St. 
Peter, on Cornhill. Few people note the church now-a- days, and fewer 
ever heard of the saint. In the cathedral at Chur, his statue appears 
surrounded by other sainted persons of his family. With tight red 
breeches, a Roman habit, a curly brown beard, and a neat little gilt 
crown and sceptre, he stands, a very comely and cheerful image: and, 
from what I may call his peculiar position with regard to Cornhill, I 
beheld this figure of St. Lucius with more interest than I should have 
bestowed upon personages who, hierarchically, are, I dare say, his 
superiors. 
* Stow quotes the inscription, still extant, from the table fast chained in 
St. Peter's Church, Cornhill; and says, "he was after some chronicle
buried at London, and after some chronicle buried at Glowcester"--but, 
oh! these incorrect chroniclers! when Alban Butler, in the "Lives of the 
Saints," v. xii., and Murray's "Handbook," and the Sacristan at Chur, all 
say Lucius was killed there, and I saw his tomb with my own eyes! 
The pretty little city stands, so to speak, at the end of the world--of the 
world of to-day, the world of rapid motion, and rushing