Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 155, vol. III, December 18, 1886

"Chambers''s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no.…" by R. Chambers (Secundus) is a Victorian-era general-interest periodical issue published in the late 19th century. It offers a miscellany of nature writing, serialized fiction, travel reportage, colonial development, legal advice, short stories, and verse, broadly focused on everyday life, current progress, and popular instruction. This issue opens with Richard Jefferies’s luminous autumn essay on English forests, hedgerows, and gypsy life, contrasting roaming Romany camps with rooted farm labourers. Its serial, By Order of the League (ch. XIX), stages a dramatic unmasking: Hector le Gautier is exposed in Sir Geoffrey Charteris’s house by Lucrece Visci and Isodore—revealed as Genevieve—then condemned by the League when “Marie St Jean” turns out to be Isodore herself; finally, Valerie frees him from his bonds. A genial travel sketch, Christmas in a Dâk Bungalow, recounts a solitary Anglo-Indian Christmas of duck-shooting, a children’s service, and wry talk with the servant Zacharias. Two short tales follow: A Novel Adventure, where a traveller subdues a knife-wielding roommate only to find him rehearsing a murder scene; and Was It Murder?, a stoker who pushes a deranged driver off a speeding engine to save a packed train and later seeks moral absolution. A substantial survey, Some Aspects of Canadian Progress, charts the Canadian Pacific Railway’s route, branch schemes, trade (notably tea via Vancouver), prairie settlement, and the rise of towns from Winnipeg to Vancouver. Popular Legal Fallacies gives plain advice on making wills—attestation, revocation by marriage, and testamentary capacity—while Occasional Notes consider Atlantic “greyhounds” and curious army panics; a closing poem, The Two Seas, meditates on trust in sleep and death.